Three nights later, even Roy—who was quite the heavy sleeper—could not sleep through the fussing going on upstairs. Every few minutes, the floor creaked, signifying that someone was moving. He didn't see any lights turn on though he had sat up on the couch to watch, and didn't hear any voices, either. He started to wonder if it was just Gracia or maybe Elysia puttering about. The stairs creaking further intensified his reasoning for believing it was one of the two aforementioned persons; Riza had needed help up the stairs the other afternoon.
"Roy? Are you awake?"
Surprised, he started to stand, just faintly making out the figure of the woman standing at the bottom of the stairs. It was Riza, it looked like she was holding her stomach, and the hesitance in her voice was indicative of something bothering her. His mind fleetingly wondered why she hadn't gone to Gracia and dismissed the thought immediately; he was almost glad she came to him.
"Yeah, I'm up. Are you all right? I heard you moving around upstairs." Switching on one of the small lamps on the table in hopes of not waking any of the sleeping Hughes', he intercepted her at the foot of the stairs, gingerly resting a palm against her shoulder.
"Just a little jittery. I don't feel very well," Riza replied quietly, letting out a sigh that sounded more like a hiss. He could feel how tense her shoulders were, and gently guided her towards the couch. For half of a minute, he considered how to proceed from here.
Finally, "are…you having contractions?"
It was a conversation that he had had with Maes the other day after Riza had told him that the baby might be delivered early. Furthermore, he had been reading those pamphlets again that Doctor Ballard had given Riza about recognizing signs of labor starting. Regular contractions was at the top of the list, along with a small red asterisk boldly proclaiming that if the woman is having regular contractions less than fifteen minutes apart then said woman should be headed to the doctor's office to deliver her baby.
Riza tensed, gritting her teeth. Gracia had asked her the same thing when she went to bed almost five hours ago, and the answer had been yes but they were very far apart and not very consistent. Now, they were consistent and closer together. And they hurt. "Yes."
He could feel the tension radiating from her and felt himself starting to get concerned. Riza knew what to do. Roy knew that the maternal instinct of knowing how to deliver a baby would kick in when the time was right. What he did not know was why Riza sounded so scared. He folded his hands tightly in his lap to avoid alerting her to the fact that he was getting nervous himself. "Are they…well…regular and close together?"
Again, she nodded. "The last set I timed was fourteen minutes and thirty-three seconds apart," Riza mumbled. She was tugging Roy's blanket out from underneath her and resting it against her lap, hands trembling just slightly. "Should we call Doctor Ballard?"
The frightened tone of voice she had adopted was only making it more difficult for him to stay calm. "Yeah. Stay here, I'll be right back." Without another word, he smoothed her hair and got to his feet, tiptoeing to the kitchen where the telephone was. Dialing the number to Ballard's office, he received an automated message, asking him to telephone the hospital if the call was an emergency.
After waiting for three agonizingly long rings and trying to tune out the slight hisses of pain from the other room, there was an answer. The nurse sounded indecently perky for three o'clock in the morning, and a bit of confusion ensued as Roy did not immediately designate himself as a friend of the woman in labor—the nurse asked if Mrs. Mustang was experiencing regular contractions. After sorting that out, the nurse instructed him to grab Miss Hawkeye's things and please bring her to the hospital immediately, and that she would call Doctor Ballard at home to tell her that delivery was imminent.
"What did she say?"
Roy hardly made it back into the room before he nearly walked into Riza, who was waiting for him in the doorway. "The nurse in labor and delivery said it's time to go and see them."
It barely took Roy five minutes to get ready and grab Riza's coat. It took a bit longer to calm down Maes and Gracia, who were asking if they were certain they could go all right by themselves. Roy assured them, and then the two made their way to the hospital. Riza was decidedly quiet as they drove, and even more so when they arrived at the hospital. For two hours, she tried to focus on the book she had brought and deliberately kept her mouth shut. Finally, she slammed the book shut and placed it on the table. Her brows were tightly knit, her arms were crossed, and she was glowering at the wall.
"The wall hasn't done anything," Roy said quietly, leaning forward in his chair, inching closer to her. "You're sure you don't want any pain medication? You look really uncomfortable." The concern in his voice was evident, and Riza's gaze softened slightly as she looked at him.
"I don't want any medicine," she replied quietly.
It was the little things that signified her discomfort. As her contractions grew stronger, longer and closer together, her breathing would grow tense and ragged only to ease. If he managed to get her to talk at all, she would fall silent to try and breathe through each painful contraction. He wasn't surprised that she didn't curse, even less surprised that she kept her mouth otherwise closed spare the occasional hiss of pain.
"Okay. So…" he tried to think of conversation that might take her mind off of the discomfort. "Do you have any ideas? If it's a boy or a girl? I've read that mothers just have an instinct, like they just know before they have the baby."
"No," was the curt reply. She took a sip of water and focused on her feet, shifting her weight in the bed.
"You have to have an idea. You've been toting around that baby for eight months. Something has to give you a hint as to whether or not it's a girl or a boy," Roy insisted. In retrospect, irritating the blonde sharpshooter was probably a bad idea, but the thought didn't occur to him then.
Riza shrugged slightly, rubbing her hands over her face with a heavy sigh. "Not really." Through the haze of pain, she was aware of the fact that he was trying desperately to make her feel better. She also realized that she was not helping him at all. "When I really think about it…a little girl."
He was dumbfounded by the comment. Though he was making an effort to help her, he was not expecting her to so readily come up with an answer. "Any reason you say that, or just a guess?" In the back of his mind, he was pleased with the idea of a smaller, pint-sized baby Riza running around. He pushed the thought from his mind; whatever the gender of the child, they would be headed to live with proper parents, parents who didn't spend their days offering their lives to the state.
"Just a guess," she replied quietly.
The silence hung heavily over the room, almost stifling in its weight. The minutes ticked by agonizingly slow, and though Riza was clearly uncomfortable and quite awake, Roy could feel sleep creeping into his eyes. He rubbed at them tiredly, wishing he hadn't been so foolish as to try and stay awake to listen for Riza's movements at night. He was certainly regretting it then.
"You don't need to stay awake." Riza's voice came softly, audible just over the beeping of the fetal heart monitor and tense as the breathed through the discomfort.
Roy smiled, as confident a smile as he could muster, "I don't mind. If I went to sleep, I might miss something interesting. Do you want more water?" The question was foolish—her cup was three-quarters of the way full and she had been fingering the edge of it more than drinking it. Amber eyes flitted to the cup, to him, and back. She nodded.
As he bustled to empty the cup and made quite a show of cleaning it out, he tried to think of conversation to remove her mind entirely from the situation at hand. "You haven't missed much at work—except for a few pranks."
This immediately drew her attention, and she looked up from the hands that were folded tightly in her lap. "Is that so?"
"Yeah. Poor Fuery always seems to be the target for that sort of thing because he's so oblivious, and yesterday was no exception." Roy emptied the cup for the fourth time and rinsed it once again, trying to think of what prank he was referring to. The previous day in the office had been wholly uneventful spare the usual questioning from his men about Riza's current condition. He tried to think of some sort of foolishness that had happened recently and fell short.
If she sensed that he couldn't come up with a proper recollection of what happened, she did not make that clear. "What happened?"
"Well…" Roy paused, filling the cup and finally walking back over, placing it gingerly on the small nightstand. "Breda and Havoc thought it'd be a good idea to get someone locked in a closet. I'm sure you remember when they tried to get us locked—"
"Yes. I remember that," she interjected, stopping him mid-sentence. She needed no reminding of the incident where she spent a good half of her afternoon locked in the broom closet, pistols having been wrangled away from her and stored at a reasonable distance.
Roy shrugged, thinking that it may have been an unintelligent idea to bring up the incident as it seemed to irritate her further. "Well, anyway. They told Fuery that there was some equipment they needed from down the hall. The supply cabinet. The poor kid has been doing a lot of the little fetching jobs you usually do—filing papers, retrieving forms and getting different equipment from various places in headquarters. He didn't think anything of it; I suppose that makes him a great target."
She closed her eyes, gritting her teeth, but nodded to agree with him. Whether she agreed with the foolishness that went on in her office or not, Fuery always was quite the target for a harmless office prank.
"So he's off down the hall to get whatever it was Havoc wanted, and doesn't come back. A half an hour passes, then an hour, and Breda is so beside himself with laughter that he can't contain it anymore. He offers to go see what's happened…and he doesn't return for another half an hour."
Now she was drumming the fingertips of her left hand on the bed; her right hand was gingerly rubbing her temples. If she wasn't smiling just slightly, he would've thought that he was just making her more uncomfortable.
"Turns out that Breda forgot the key, so he got himself locked in too. Havoc at least had the sense to bring a key with him and the whole lot of them returned to the office, a little flustered and embarrassed but relatively uninjured otherwise. It's madness without you in the office, you know, Riza. It's like a lot of kindergarten children who have been given the afternoon to play without supervision," Roy said slowly, running a hand through his hair tiredly.
"You are not one to talk, Roy. I've seen you partake in quite a few of their pranks," she replied, tugging at the blankets slightly and shifting her weight for what seemed like the thousandth time in the past three minutes.
"You're sure you don't want medicine? I'm sure they've got something…" Roy was on his feet in an instant, half peering out the door of the room, looking for some physician or nurse to administer pain medication. He did little by means of waiting for Riza's response, almost out the door when a stern 'no' stopped him dead in his tracks.
"Really, Riza…you're positive? They've got plenty of things that aren't going to have any real impact except making you feel better."
The grumbled 'no' did little appease him, but he fussed around the room anyway. While he was quiet, Riza situated herself for some rest, the throbbing headache accompanying the contractions only leaving her exhausted. Unfortunately, his quiet did not last long as he paced around the doorway. "You know, they aren't doing much by means of checking on us. What if…what if the baby's heart stopped beating! Or if you were getting really sick?" Roy crossed his arms, glaring down the hall. "And where is Doctor Ballard? She ought to be here by now to see what's going on…Maes was right, I don't know how to handle all this. He knows how to handle fetching doctors and the like; I should've allowed him to come—"
Roy barely managed to duck out of the way of the flying cup of water that was chucked at his head. The liquid unceremoniously splashed to the floor and the cup made contact with his shoulder. Startled, he held his hands up in a sign of innocence, panic on his features. "Roy…please shut up."
Author's Notes: Ahhhh so close to the end...I'm almost kind of depressed by that...