March 1915
Riza slowly rose up from her bathroom floor. Black Hayate watched her with concern. She couldn't recall the last time she had gotten sick like this. She hadn't eaten yet this morning and barely anything but acid came up, yet she still felt nauseous. She grabbed a rag, ran it under cold water, and pressed it against her face. It felt good, but it didn't relieve the sick feeling in her stomach. She sighed and looked at Black Hayate. She smiled weakly and patted him on the head. "Well, boy, I've still got to go to work today."
Black Hayate whined a little but his tail still swept the air. He watched as she set to putting on her uniform and throwing her hair up in its usual style. She didn't even bother to check her reflection. She made sure her dog had his water for the day, bid him farewell, and made her way out.
Later that morning, she was serving Bradley yet another cup of tea when nausea hit her so strongly her hands began to shake. Bradley looked up at her from the corner of his eye.
"Lieutenant Hawkeye, you're looking awfully pale today." he remarked with a facade of kindness in his tone. Riza gulped down her saliva and tried to keep steady as she stood up straight.
"Just a stomach bug, sir. It will pass soon." She said solemnly. It took all she had not to puke when she spoke.
He gave her a peculiar look. "A stomach bug, hm? Those are just the worst. I certainly hope it doesn't stick around for too long." He smiled, and it made her skin crawl with fear. "Why don't you take the rest of the day to recuperate? I can't have you getting sick at meetings. Or on my person. Children are the worst when it comes to that." He chuckled good-naturedly.
Riza held her breath. That was a strange comment. "Yes, sir. I'd imagine they are. Thank you for permitting me to take the day off."
"Of course. You need your rest. At least, while you still have the time to get it." He gave her a knowing look. It was menacing as well. She wasn't sure what he meant by that, but she didn't have the luxury of sticking around to ask. She saluted, bowed, and excused herself.
When she returned home, she still felt uneasy. She took Black Hayate outside briefly, and when she came back in she passed her calendar on the wall. That was when she noticed something.
"Wait. When was my last cycle?" she muttered, looking at it closely. She usually made a red check on the day she started each month. It was late March and she hadn't checked a day. She flipped back to February, and realized there wasn't a check that month either.
Realization struck her like lightning. Was it possible? But how...? Oh, wait. She had been with Roy in February. She didn't remember the use of a condom. They'd been so caught up in each other it didn't seem to occur to them to use one. And she had been so stressed out serving the Fuhrer that she gave no thought to her menstrual cycle. She tried to keep her breathing steady.
"I don't know for sure. This really could just be a virus. I haven't seen a doctor. I don't know for sure." She started talking to herself. She took a deep breath. But she did know. There was no use denying it.
She pet her dog's head anxiously. What would she do? Having Roy's child would be wonderful, perhaps in another life where they could have been together, but now was simply the worst possible time!
She stopped in front of the mirror and stared at her reflection for a long time, her hand resting on her still flat stomach. So. Here she was. This was happening. What fools they had been to not think of the consequences! She stumbled back to sit on her couch. Her breathing was heavy and uneven. Had the Fuhrer known? He had looked at her with that evil eye and smiled. And his remark about puking children now made so much more sense. Fear tore at her stomach. If he knew, would she ever be truly safe again?
For days after, she tried to find a way to tell Roy. But no one knew of their relationship to begin with, so she couldn't relay a message through their allies. If she wrote it down, it could be discovered and read. She barely ever saw him. If they passed in the hall, she tried to make eye contact with him and somehow tell him with her face what was going on. But it was no use, he merely glanced her way and continued on. He was doing better at being apart than she was, it would seem. It broke her heart, but she knew neither of them could openly risk exposing themselves.
A week later, she sat in the cafeteria, pushing her food around her plate. The last thing she felt like doing was eating, but she had promised Roy that she would try to take care of herself. And now, she was eating for two. She begrudgingly stuck a spoon full of food in her mouth and stared into space.
On this day, Roy took a late lunch and headed to the canteen on the military campus. After getting his food, he scanned the room for a seat until he spotted a familiar head of blonde hair sitting alone at a table. His heart jumped into his throat and he walked in that direction. "Lieutenant," he greeted, doing his best not to show any sign of emotion. "This seat taken?"
Riza looked up and her heart raced. She tried to steady her breathing and smiled a little. Finally!
"Colonel. Not at all. Please." She gestured to the seat with her hand.
He took the chair across from her. "How've you been?" he asked, casually. "New job treating you alright?" Of course, he was really asking how the Fuhrer was treating her, but to an outsider it would just look like two former coworkers catching up.
"It's going as well as can be expected," she said cheerfully, though her tone didn't quite reach her eyes. She had to tell him. Now, before anyone could interrupt. "By the way, do you remember my friend Elizabeth?" Of course, this was a reference to herself. Her heart rate increased once more.
A small crease appeared between Roy's brows as he realized she had slipped into talking in code. "Of course I remember her. A girl like that is hard to forget."
"I saw her recently and she told me that she's expecting a child now. Probably close to two months along." Her eyes were slightly wide, but other than that her tone remained cheerful and her posture poised.
His eyes widened by a fraction of an inch, but otherwise he remained outwardly composed. Inside was a much different story. Riza was pregnant with his child. It was simultaneously the best and worst news she could have given him. He recalled Hughes becoming a father and how overjoyed he had been. He couldn't deny that he'd been a little envious of Hughes's family.
The brief joy at the thought of having a baby with her vanished almost instantly as reality sank in. He'd never be able to claim the child as his. It would grow up never knowing its father in a world that was already hard enough. If the truth of the child's parentage ever came out, it would have disastrous consequences for them both.
He'd also unknowingly handed Bradley a second hostage to hold against him. It further hardened his resolve to overthrow the Fuhrer's regime. If he couldn't be there to help raise the child, the least he could do was make sure the world was a safer place for him or her to grow up in.
All of this crossed his mind in a matter of seconds, but all he managed to say was "Oh. I see."
He wished he could say more, do more. He wanted to reach out and take her hand, hug her, tell her it would be okay, apologize for putting her in this situation to begin with.
But he couldn't.
She looked down at the table. "Yes. She has mixed feelings about it, but I'm sure it will work out. She'll find a way to be happy about it."
Nothing could express the complete fear she had felt upon discovering her condition. She never expected to have children, especially considering the situation of her relationship with Roy. To have a child in today's world was cruel. And there was so much happening.
When Pride had made his existence known, had moved his shadow around her limbs, she had been terrified. And now she was more so. She loved Roy more than life. A part of her was incredibly thrilled to be having his child.
The timing was terrible, though. They had been irresponsible just once-caught up in their passion and desire for one another-and now they were paying the price. Sometimes it seemed like God or the Universe hated them being together and wanted to always make it as hard as possible.
Roy nodded once to show his understanding, then dropped his eyes to the table, pushing his food around his plate with the fork. He was suddenly not very hungry anymore.
"I hear Lieutenant Catalina is coming to visit Central soon. Are you planning to see her?" he asked. To an outsider, it sounded like idle chit chat about an old friend from the East, but he knew she'd understand the real message: Was she still going to participate in the Promised Day mission given her condition?
"Of course, Colonel. I wouldn't miss it for the world." Her expression became more determined and harsh, showing this was not negotiable. Like hell she was going to abandon him now. She would do what she could to keep him safe, as well as herself, for the sake of their child.
He nodded, showing he understood. He was not about to try to talk her out of it. They needed all the sharpshooters they could get for this to work. But he also would have understood if she didn't want to be there given the level of risk they would be undertaking. "I'm sure she'll be happy to see you." As will I, he thought. He couldn't wait for this all to be over, so they could finally have a chance to talk.
She nodded. "I'll be very glad to see her as well." She was relieved that it seemed to have gone a bit better than she expected it to. But he couldn't argue with her about anything right now. Not when she had King Bradley breathing down her neck and his freaky homunculus son slithering in the shadows.
"I should get back to work." he sighed and pushed back from the table. "It was good seeing you, Lieutenant." There was so much more he wanted to say to her, but, for now, that would have to be enough.
"You, too, Colonel." she replied in a voice just above a whisper. She watched his back until it was completely gone from her sight.
A/N: Thanks for reading! Next chapter will be when we get to The Promised Day which occurs in early April. Based on our timeline, that would put Riza about 8 weeks along that day and not yet showing since that happens around 12-16 weeks which is how we're able to make this fit the canon of the show.
Now that we're getting so close to the end of our tale which goes a bit further than the Promised Day, we wanted to share the background of how this story came to be for anyone who might be interested.
We've known each other since the age of 6 and around age 13, Joanna's cousin introduced us to RPing, which at the time was us passing notebook and pen back and forth to write stories about our favorite fandoms. We'd assign ourselves characters to write for and establish a basic plot, but we could throw twists at each other and the other had to respond in character. Most of the time, we'd be sitting side by side on a couch at one of our homes doing this or passing the notebook between our classes at school with personal notes in the margins. We did this all through high school and early college and we still have most of them.
We grew apart in our early 20s because of life getting in the way, but in 2015, we reconnected and realized we were both rewatching FMA:B. As adults, we saw that there was totally something going on between Roy and Riza that we hadn't realized when we were younger, so we decided to take up RPing again. This time, we did it through e-mail since we rarely saw each other in person. Joanna wrote for Roy and Chelsey wrote for Riza while the other characters were all fair game.
This went on from July-September 2015.
In January of the following year, Joanna compiled each email into a single 150 page word document.
In 2017, we reread what we had and thought it was actually pretty good and others might be interested in it. It was originally written in the present tense, so Chelsey had the brilliant idea of using 'find and replace' to change the tense to past. So, "is" became "was," "walks" became "walked," and so on. It saved us a lot of time, but it left us with some rather humorous mistakes. For example, when "hand" as in "she hands him the…" was changed to "handed," it made the sentence "she handed him the…" which is what we wanted. Unfortunately, in cases like "he stuffed his hands in his pockets," suddenly it was "he stuffed his handeds in his pockets." We both reread through and thought we caught them all, but to this day we still find the occasional "handeds" in an already published chapter and wonder how we missed it.
Before publishing here, we went back to look in more detail at the established timeline of the series and realized we had some corrections to make and that there were entire years unaccounted for, so we went back to add in more content by creating a google doc that we could both edit simultaneously. We've added an additional 110 pages of content that way and we've still got more scenes planned that need to be written.
We're glad you've all stuck with the story this far and we hope you've enjoyed reading it as much as we've enjoyed writing it! We don't know what we'll do with ourselves once it's done, but maybe we'll try our hands at some Royai one shot ideas we've had.- J&C
