This was originally part of Royai Week on Tumblr for Thursday's prompt- "Heaven and Hell". I do not own FMA, as per usual. Enjoy!
No matter how sentimental it sounds, Roy Mustang will always admit that Riza Hawkeye is to him like Heaven is to most people.
He looks forward to the day when he can finally be with her the same way some people look forward to Heaven, to the day when they can leave a world filled with strife and enter a plane of peaceful existence. He wants to be able to tell her how he feels, how he had fallen in love with her as a teenager and how those feelings have never changed, despite all the hell and turmoil they have both been put through throughout the years. It's a confession that, like getting to Heaven, is going to take some patience to fulfill. He can't be hasty and do it now, unless he wants them to face a heavy castigation for doing so.
Like some people take comfort in the promise of Heaven, Roy takes comfort in who Riza is. To him, she is the embodiment of the ultimate achievement of his goals, of all the promises he made about the country and its people. She is his hope when there is none, the promise that things will change one day and that he will be the one to change them. He refuses to think about the possibility that he may have to achieve the things he wants without her because he truly believes that he can't without her. To lose her would mean losing the only allotment of heaven he will ever have, for he knows that the only thing that awaits him in the afterlife is the torment and anguish that comes with descending into Hell. She has to be there the day everything comes full circle for them and he succeeds.
If anything were to happen to her that would change these plans, the consequences would be, to say the least, detrimental.
So it's when he sees her fall to the ground on the Promised Day, blood pouring from her neck and her eyes void of anything safe for a sliver of pain, that he's terrified, shaken to his very core. His heaven, the only heaven he's ever known, is dying right in front of him, and the only way to stop him from losing her would be to damn them both. It's a choice that would be too easy to make, a choice he knows he can't make. This thought is only confirmed by the look she gives him, the one that tells him to give her up and not commit the taboo that she must know he wants desperately to do. Before he makes his decision known to the doctor, the monster that started all of this pre-Hell torment, her voice echoes through his mind, the audio of a memory that now seemed so far away.
'I'd follow you into Hell if you asked me to.'
It's then that he realizes that she was wrong when she made that promise.
It wouldn't be her following him into Hell.
It would be him following her.
I didn't plan on posting this today, actually, but I've been having a bit of a bad day so I decided "why not" since it cheers me up a bit. Hopefully this cheers someone up, too, who may not be having a good day. Expect chapter 25 to be out pretty soon! ;D. Have a nice evening and I'll hopefully see you guys later!~