Brilliancy

by Lady Norbert

A/N: I think it's high time I put everyone's fears to rest and show you what Riza (who is very much alive) has been doing. Meanwhile, Brilliancy is about to break 3,500 hits! And the reviews have been so... wow. So well-worded and long and full of compliments. Thank you all so much!

Oh, yeah, a little more headcanon in this chapter.


Chapter Eleven: Queenside

Queenside: The side of the board where the queens are at the start of a game, as opposed to the kingside.


Initially, all Riza registers is the black.

After another moment or two of consciousness, it comes to her attention that her hands are bound, and that her arms stretch upwards uncomfortably.

Her head aches from the blow she received, that's the next thing she observes.

And now it catches her notice that she is, in fact, moving. Or rather, the thing in which she finds herself is moving. A truck, maybe. She's lying on her back in a moving vehicle.

She gives herself a good proper shake, sitting up carefully. The rope which binds her wrists together seems to descend from above her, like she's tied to the roof of the vehicle. That's important to know; it accounts for the fact that her arms are still reaching upwards, and feel as though all the blood has drained from them. Furthermore, it's only rope... not cuffs or anything stronger than she is. Very important to know.

One thing she still doesn't know... what the hell happened?

She gets to her feet, unsteady in the bouncing truck, using the rope for balance. This allows her to put her arms down - to some extent at least - and she almost groans as the blood races through her veins to put the strength back into her tingling limbs. She's obviously been stripped of her guns, and after a moment's mental assessment she realizes that some other things are missing too, most particularly her shirt. Thankfully she's taken to wearing a thermal undershirt in these winter days, which is still crisply tucked into her pants (well, as crisply as it could be, under the circumstances), or she'd be very concerned that whoever kidnapped her might have seen the partial array on her back. Of course, thinking of the tattoo leads her mind instantly to...

Roy.

Damn it all, where is Roy? How long has she been... wherever she is? He'll go out of his mind with worry if she's missing for too long.

Think, Riza. How did you end up here?

She breathes deeply, calming her thudding heart. She has to think of what happened so she knows what to do.


Having waved the others off on their mission to rescue Rebecca, Riza follows Sergeant Sikorsky back into Ishval Command. He leads her to the phone, then excuses himself to give her some privacy. She picks up the receiver, fully expecting to hear the voice of any one of her grandfather's trusted subordinates or even that of Anderson, the chief of staff in the mansion.

Instead, she hears only silence. "Hello?"

There is no answer. She starts to turn in order to call out to Sikorsky, and it's just enough to allow her to catch sight of a shadow out of the corner of her eye. Then everything goes dark.

She comes to a while later, finding herself dangling upside down over somebody's shoulder. She's not fully conscious, though, and her blood pulses in her ears so it's difficult to listen to the conversation. They're in a shadowy, somewhat smelly location that she doesn't altogether recognize. But as her eyes slowly open and adjust to the inky twilight, she sees something that she desperately needs.

The person carrying her has a gun. And she can reach it.

Obeying instincts born out of years of military training, she bends one leg at the knee and kicks her beast of burden in the chest, or maybe the abdomen, she can't quite tell. It's not a powerful kick, but enough to startle him, and she uses his moment of distraction to lunge for the pistol. She shoots, grazing his calf, which sends them both tumbling to the ground. As she tastes the gravel under her lips, she realizes they're in some kind of alleyway. She's still woozy, still struggling for clarity.

"Bitch!"

She rolls into position in order to shoot him again, but the pistol jams. Damn it all. In a last-ditch attempt to subdue him, she throws the faulty weapon at his head, but he deflects the blow easily.


As near as she can tell in the here and now, he took her shirt to bandage his wound. The distinct absence of a weight around her throat suggests that her dog tags may have come off at the same time. Or perhaps they were taken to be sent back to Ishval Command, or even to Central, as proof of life.

She's not, however, entirely helpless. Willing herself to ignore the throb in her skull, she reaches up carefully. Yes, the clip is still in her hair, and she removes it gingerly, letting the tangled mass fall. The edge of the metal portion isn't the sharpest, for obvious safety reasons, but it's her best chance. She works it repeatedly over the knot at her wrists, hoping the rope is dry enough or weak enough or something enough that she can cut through the fibers.

Twice she almost drops the clip when the truck bounces unexpectedly, and only her sniper's reflexes let her keep clutching it. It's becoming slick with sweat as she works feverishly at the groove she's created, despite the frigid winter air.

As she cuts she strains her wrists, trying to weaken the rope. The burns she's going to get from this will be terrible, she knows, but anything will help at this point. A little farther. A little farther. She bites her lip to keep from crying out from the pain.

She's still woozy from what she imagines are two separate head injuries, and while she slavishly rubs the clip back and forth in the slowly deepening groove, her mind wanders. She wonders what Roy is doing, if he's all right, if they got Rebecca back safely. Are the men okay, can they get him through this? They've come this far... surely it's not going to end this way, with her abducted and taken to parts unknown to possibly die while he waits and wonders and... no, it can't.


It's after her father's funeral, after he's admitted to her his 'youthful' dream of a world in which things are different. She loves the dream like she loves him, so she offers him the only thing she has to give - the secrets encoded on her skin. It's the day after the burial that he comes to the house and sees her back, sees the full extent of her father's brilliance and also the full extent of his daughter's eagerness to earn his approval.

"How could he..."

"It was my choice."

"I know you, Riza. You didn't have much of a choice." And she can't argue with him because he does know her, and he's right.

Roy is a tolerably quick study, and though at first she hesitates to allow him to make notes, he promises to burn them once he's mastered the flame. She trusts him, on a level where she has never trusted anyone else (and, as she eventually grows to understand, a level where she never will trust anyone else). That much is absolute, and is something she has known for a while. She barely remembers her mother, and she's never been able to make her father look at her for more than a heartbeat or two. In nineteen years, the only genuine affection she has ever known has come from Roy - though carefully, cautiously, slinking around the edges of her father's unspoken disapproval. She has been greedy in her return of it, selfishly latching onto him and burdening him with the weight of her own fondness, desperate for someone to love who will not push her away.

He never does. If anything, Roy pulls.

So he studies, and makes notations, and mutters under his breath, and at some point his fingers find their way into her hair, and she's not entirely sure how the kiss happens but it does. It's slow and delicate and perhaps just slightly confused in its tenderness. It's everything she thought it would be and nothing like she expected. It doesn't stop at one, but it's not enough, not nearly enough.

But it's enough to make her decide to follow him to Ishval. By the time she finds him he's already befriended Maes Hughes, and they become something of a united trinity unto themselves. Riza likes Hughes very much; she likes the sheen in his eyes when he speaks of his sweetheart, likes his oddball personality, and particularly likes the way he's so obviously fond of Roy. Most of all, though, she likes the fact that he can sense whatever it is that lies between Roy and herself, and he evidently approves, because whenever he ribs Roy about getting himself a wife - in Ishval and after - she knows what he's not saying.

Opportunities for them to be alone together show up here and there, like unexpected fragments of stone in the rubble, but they only take advantage of two and only because they just can't pretend anymore that they don't need. They don't say anything about it; they've already reached the point where words are optional for them. It's just two people caught in a hell they don't understand, but it can be ignored for the sake of an hour in which they get to feel something that isn't despair and self-loathing. What they have is not soft and subtle, now, but frantic and demanding and it reminds them that they're still alive and that, even in the midst of this hell, they're still together. That, Roy tells her a long time afterward, keeps him sane.

The war ends but a smaller one, the one that's strictly inside of themselves, carries on and carries them away to the office where she makes her pledge. It's a dangerous assignment. Not the bodyguard duty; she can handle that. No, the danger lies in their proximity, their connection. Every day is just another battle in that smaller conflict - the fight to keep themselves apart when all they want or need is to be together. Every time one of them brushes death, the other wants to surrender, to stop waging that particular war, to just give it a name and stop pretending to everyone around them that it doesn't exist. (Because really, who are they fooling?) But neither feels that they deserve it. All they want is to get out of the mess, and the only way to get out is by going further in. Always together and always apart.

Until they're not, anymore. Suddenly the small war is over. They don't have to fight it. They can surrender.


She's happier, now, than she knows she has any right to be. What she deserves is not what she's been given. Fate has been suspiciously kind, until this point, and even though they've tasted less than a year's worth of contentment, it's so much more than she ever thought she'd get that she can't bring herself to be resentful.

If she dies, she dies happy. She dies loved and, more to the point, knowing that she is loved and knowing that she was herself finally allowed to love.

Having acknowledged that, however, she also has to acknowledge that she has absolutely no intention of dying if she has anything to say about it.

She is, after all, under orders not to die.

And as that thought crosses the threshold of her mind, another fiber snaps under the friction of her efforts, and she strains ever harder. It's yielding... it is, it is... a little more...

Her hands suddenly fly apart as the rope breaks, and she muffles a shriek of relief. She doesn't know how long she has until they reach their unknown destination, but she wants to be ready. She massages her wrists, wincing and wishing for something to protect them from the cold until they can be properly treated for the rope burns, and replaces the clip in her hair. She squints through the dark at the rope still attached to the roof of the truck, tugs to get an idea of its strength. She might be able to use this.

When the truck stops and the back opens, she may go down but she's taking at least one of them with her... whoever they are.