Author's Notes: So I've found that, when you're hitting a wall or struggling to write something, it's best to write something else entirely, especially when you feeling inspired for that something. It really does help get the writing juices flowing again for what you were writing originally.

Okay, so I was talking about the comparisons between FMA and the Hamilton musical, because I'm a freaking nerd. Well, this is a product of that and an incredible conversation with but-i-am-hellbound on tumblr. Basically, I'll be using songs from Hamilton as prompts for one-shots. This will be pretty sporadic and is not strictly Royai, as I plan on writing about other characters, so there will be some parental!Royed, Hughes/Gracia, Ishval, Roy's early years as a Lieutenant-Colonel in Eastern, Roy and Hughes' friendship, Team Mustang, and more. Maybe even a little Bug might make an appearance.

This one in particular was the one that started it all and was partially inspired by a comment made by rizascupcakes. You don't have to be familiar with the musical to read these ,as I just use the lyrics for inspiration.

Disclaimer: I own nothing, not FMA or Hamilton. I just cry about both, to be honest.

"I'm re-reading the letters you wrote me
I'm searching and scanning for answers
In every line for some kind of sign and when you were mine
The world seemed to burn"
- Burn

Riza didn't know what hurt more: the bold title of the newspaper article questioning, "Is Amestris' most eligible bachelor finally taken?" or the paper cut on her index finger that was bleeding freely. She swore when the blood dripped onto the black and white paper and accidentally smeared it across the picture when she went to wipe it off. Sighing to herself, she gave up on trying to clean the mess and dumped the newspaper in the trash. She wasn't going to read the article anyways. The picture and the headline had been enough to make her feel as if her heart was in the trash as well.

Washing her hand in the sink, Riza paused, letting the near scolding hot water run over her skin. No, that wasn't fair of her to think. She did not have a monopoly on Roy, just as it wasn't his job to not wound her emotionally. The fact that they had decided to work together in order to pursue his goals had canceled that out. She did not have the right to say that Roy Mustang broke her heart, not anymore at least. After all, she wasn't the silly girl left with nothing but daydreams after her father's apprentice went off to become a soldier.

After bandaging up her finger, she fished the newspaper out of the trash bin and examined the picture. Roy did look handsome, absolutely resplendent in his suit. He was terribly photogenic. Only Fuery seemed capable of being able to take pictures of Roy when he was making a face and even then he would look more boyish than unattractive. It was like he was incapable of taking a bad picture, even if it was candid.

This one was no different. He was in a nice dark suit with his typical white scarf, though not an overly fancy one, and he was wearing normal white gloves. The woman on his arm was stunning with rich and wavy dark hair and a dark dress that hugged her figure in all the right areas. She was looking up at Roy with such adoration on her face. For his part, his expression was cool as he gazed down at her, but Riza could spot the fondness in his dark eyes, try as she wanted to ignore it. Riza knew all of his "sisters" that were his pretend dates for information and some of his other informants that paraded about as his dates, but this lovely young woman was not familiar.

It was something that neither one of them talked about – outright refused to admit – but every now and then, some of his dates were the real thing. Roy would never claim to be a saint and she could not pretend to think as such. They were adults, after all. Thinking that he would remain celibate for any reason regarding her was not only absurd, but it was an outrageous demand that she had no right to make. It wasn't as if she was a nun, even if she didn't make a spectacle of her romantic life, what little she had at any rate.

No, Riza knew that this was Roy being captured on an actual date with a woman that he genuinely liked. And, even though she didn't to read the article, upon doing so, she found that he'd gone on more than a few dates with this same woman. Her heart seized at the number – five, they'd gone on five dates – and that was when she set the newspaper down again. The most he'd ever gone on with the same girl had been three. She hadn't exactly snooped to find this information; she merely had overheard it from a conversation between him and Hughes.

"You never go on more than three dates with the same girl," Hughes had scoffed. "I wonder why that is."

Roy had dismissed the other man, saying that it had nothing to do with the girls themselves, just that he got bored too easily or focused on his job too much and became distracted. Riza had not been about to fall into fanciful dreaming that it had anything to do with her. Despite his abhorrence towards paperwork, Roy did have a bad habit of putting all his focus on his job at times and neglecting everything else in his life. It was why the man couldn't have a single plant in his apartment. And yet, despite that focus, he did get bored easily and would try his best to do anything but sign a single form, absolutely wasting time and energy.

However, apparently, he had not become bored by this woman and had instead become more entranced by her. That was fine. She wanted him to be happy. She wanted to be happy. Maybe, if one of them finally took a step towards that without the other, they could move past whatever this was because the truth was that "whatever this was" that was between them was absolutely nothing, could be nothing, and would always be nothing. They had signed the rights away to those three years ago when she'd agreed to follow him into hell. She had signed them away in her own blood and he had accepted the terms.

Ready to accept it and move on, Riza went to flip through the rest of the newspaper when she caught sight of an errant name in the article – her name.

Now, there were a lot of things that Riza could remain calm about when others might have flipped out. She could only imagine Hughes dialing up Roy the second the newspaper hit the stands or the men on the team placing bets on how long this new relationship would last. Roy's status as a well-known player had become standard by now and he had reveled in it for the past few years. He had been that way when they were teenagers, though he had always laughed about it back at the house.

Having her name dragged into this article about Roy's love life, however, was not one of them. Riza gaped as she read the paragraph concerning her. The writer actually speculated on how Roy settling down might affect her, as if he knew what Riza's feelings on the matter were. He wondered about her broken heart and if she would be able to continue following Roy once his affections for another woman became public knowledge. Would she still pine after her superior officer?

Riza's blood boiled. It was a good thing that Roy was the Flame Alchemist and not her because otherwise she would have burned this newspaper into ashes and then hunted down the writer of this bloody ridiculous article. At the end of those questions was a comment from Roy, a proper one, stating, "I have no comment on this matter except that Lieutenant Hawkeye is unquestionably professional and my most loyal subordinate."

She gripped the paper so tightly that it nearly tore until finally she crumpled it up and threw it away in the trash for good this time. The statement was true and she was glad that he'd said it, even if it was the only actual word from him in the article, but for some reason, it cut her even more. She was professional. She was loyal. She was his subordinate.

And she was nothing more than that.

Stepping into her bedroom, Riza opened her closet and began to rifle through a few boxes in the back until she found a small one. The cardboard was old and flimsy, its edges worn down. Likely it wouldn't last through another move and she would have to find a different box for its contents. It held the only things remaining from her childhood home though, and she was loathe to put them in something new, even if it was just a box. After finding what she was looking for, she stood back up and then walked back until the back of her legs hit the foot of the bed and she sat down.

The letters in her hands were terribly precious to her. They were one of the few golden parts of her life before the military. The newest one was a little over four years old, the grainy feel of sand unable to be washed away even if it wasn't visible; the oldest one dated all the way back to when she was twelve. Why Riza had decided to keep all of them was still beyond her when she'd never been a nostalgic person before, but for some reason, she hadn't been able to throw away any of the correspondences between her and Roy, not even when they had been just kids. She couldn't have known how important he would be to her then, but she hadn't tossed them.

The first few letters were small and simple, Roy talking about his visits to his foster mother and his sisters back in Central while Riza was back at the Hawkeye Estate. He didn't talk about his emotions much then, being only fourteen and fifteen. The most she would get was a stray line of "I miss the quiet of the country more than I thought I would," which she later knew was a code for him missing her. Eventually, he owned up to it, actually writing the words, "I miss you," but they would be placed innocuously in between other sentences that had no correlations to it, as if he'd hoped that she would overlook it.

She never had, of course. Every time Roy went back to Central to visit his family, Riza had missed him something terrible. The house had been so lonely without him and she'd felt smothered by her father's haunting presence without Roy's hopeful aura.

As time progressed and they got older, the letters became more open and much less formal. She could see where he became excited about something from the way his handwriting became darker from pressing the pen down too hard on the paper or when he was writing in the middle of the night and was tired from how it looked even sloppier than normal.

He was more frank about his thoughts and emotions too. "You would enjoy it in Central" turned into "I wish you could come to Central with me" and "It must be weird being by yourself again" became "I hate leaving you there alone; I hate not being with you" and "You've made my apprenticeship more bearable" transformed into "You're honestly one of the brightest spots in my life and I'm so thankful for you."

Riza could not help but smile at the words. The older he got, the more poetic Roy tried to be, but then he would fall back into his informal attitude with her. He knew that she saw right through all of that and would laugh at any cheesiness from him. He didn't have to pretend around her. He could be honest, even when it hurt. It had taken him two months before he'd written to her after leaving for the Academy, something that had wounded her. She had thought that maybe he'd forgotten her and hadn't wanted to talk to her anymore. What was she to him anyways but some girl from his past?

But then his letter came out of the blue on a cold fall day. She had been so stupidly excited, smuggling the letter away before her father could see and destroy it and then walking to her favorite spot by the pond to read it. She could not say how much relief she felt as seeing his words again, reading them in his voice in her mind. It had started out so hesitant at first, like he hadn't known what to say. The first few paragraphs made her recall his first letters to her, formal and precise, talk about his day-to-day life, nothing emotional or truly important. Yet she had been comforted to just know what he was doing and that he was okay, so that she could picture it.

And then his handwriting became rushed, slanting even more to the side, and everything he'd bottled up in the beginning of the letter began to pour out. How much he missed her, how he sometimes regretted signing up for the military even if he believed that he was doing the right thing, how alone he felt at times but how it probably couldn't compare to how she felt. He wanted her to know that he was doing okay, and he implored her to tell him if anything went awry back at home, that he would come to her if need be.

Those words had made the newly etched lines on her back burn, but she'd ignored them then and she did now as she reread the letters. Roy had been astonished to find the fire alchemy notes on her back, but he had also been furious as well. "Why didn't you tell me he was doing this monstrous thing to you?" he had demanded heatedly, as if he could have stopped her father. "I would have come!"

And that was why she hadn't told him. Yes, Roy would have come to see her if she had even written to him about her father using her as a canvas for his alchemy notes, and she would have been so grateful and happy to see him, to have his arms wrapped around her protectively, but she couldn't do that. She hadn't wanted to be the reason he cut his dreams off short; she hadn't wanted to be the one to hold him back.

It was why she said and did nothing now when all these stories about Roy's affairs and dates came to light. If any one of them panned out, she didn't want to be the reason he pulled back. She made her own choices and he made his. As much as they were together, they were still two separate people with separate lives and he had to accept that as much as she had already.

Another letter, while he was still at the Academy, a few months before she had written to him about her father's illness taking a turn for the worse, had her blushing even so many years later. His handwriting was sloppier than normal, and she could practically smell the whisky on it even before he admitted to writing the letter after Hughes had dragged him out to a bar with some of the other cadets. He should have been sleeping the alcohol off, but all he had been able to think about was her. Hughes kept talking about finding the love of his life, something his new friend did a lot, and Roy said that try as he might, he could not picture anyone but her.

"I'm sappier than Hughes is when I'm drunk," Roy had written, "but I'm torn between wishing that I had kissed you sooner and that I never had. Maybe then I wouldn't know that I'm yours."

His next letter did not acknowledge the words he'd said in the previous one and had arrived before she had even managed to come up with a proper response that didn't have her blushing to the tips of her roots. She imagined that he'd sent the letter off while still feeling the effects of the alcohol and was wholly embarrassed by his honesty with his feelings, so he wrote another quick letter to pretend as if the first one hadn't happened. For some reason, while it was much like a denial, the action had made Riza smile even more.

The letters became sparse after that considering the changes in Roy's life. He wrote to her about his graduation from the Academy and his taking the State Alchemist test. They were formal again, yet speckled with bits of his raw emotion and thoughts here and there, like he could not keep them from her. He moved to Central for a time, throwing out the offer for her to visit, but by then, she had joined the military academy herself and hadn't known whether to tell him or not. Not long after, the Fuhrer had ordered State Alchemists to serve in the Ishval War of Extermination and, after a brief letter to tell her that he was being shipped off and he did not know whether he would be able to write again, his letters stopped.

He signed the last one as, "Always yours," as if afraid that he might not be able to talk with her ever again.

But would be though? Would he always be hers as he had suggested?
That had been years ago. Roy was fond of making lofty promises and holding onto powerful dreams. He liked to think that he could fulfill them all, but the truth was that, no matter how great of a man Roy Mustang was, he was just that, a man. Some promises would be broken, some dreams turned into nightmares. They found that out the hard way in Ishval when his hopes to save people became orders to kill and he betrayed her trust when she'd given him the secrets of flame alchemy, when she became a killer instead of the nurturer she'd been growing up.

Was he still hers now? Or had they burned that away along the secrets of flame alchemy on her back?

Riza closed her eyes and gripped the bundle of letters in her hands. She wanted to burn that damn newspaper for making her think of these old feelings and she wanted to burn the letters that made them reality. She wanted to destroy them in hopes that they would eradicate any last remnants of her hopes and dreams. Neither one of them had every out right said that they loved one another, not even in their letters to each other, but it had been in every other line, unspoken and unnecessary to say aloud. She would always love him, in her own way, even if it did change like the tide over the years and varied in strength as well, letters or no.

Taking a deep breath, Riza opened her eyes and stood up. She walked back to the closet and placed the letters back in the decrepit box. Closing the lid and tucking the box away again, she closed the door and stepped out of the room. A quick glance at the clock told her that she had only a minute before she would need to leave for the office if she wanted to be on time, but then a car honking outside her apartment caused her to pause.

When she looked out the window, all she could do was sigh. There was Roy, already outside of his car and leaning against the passenger door. His arms were folded across his chest and he was drumming his fingers against his arm as he looked around in agitation. To the side of him on the street was a newspaper in complete disarray, the papers floating into the street, like it had been tossed aside haphazardly. He looked up at her window and they caught eyes. Her breath halted for a second before she held up a hand to tell him to wait and he relaxed visibly, his dark eyes softening for a second.

Riza shook her head at herself as she gathered her military jacket and began to put it on. She could push him away and give him room to move on all she wanted, but he refused to be anyone else's but hers even when it seemed like he was someone else's. She should have known that, but that was the one thing that was hard for her to accept.