Please consider this fic to have been properly disclaimed.
Unspoken
There are things they don't need to say to understand.
For example, Riza knows that Mustang wants to send her away. Despite – or rather because of her loyalty and her obedience (not blind, but by her own choice, and fully aware of where his dreams could end) he wishes to sever the ties connecting them, lift the heavy burden he placed on her shoulders when there was no one else who could bear it, and let her go.
He knows that she'll follow him wherever he goes, and he doesn't want her to follow him down the paths he fears he'll have to take. He wants to watch her walk away from him because he knows that she never will.
Riza knows that in the lower right-hand drawer of his desk Mustang keeps papers which could end her life in the military, send her back to her lonely house with a hefty retirement salary and commendations from every officer she's ever served under, and maybe a few she hasn't. She knows he's had the papers since before they were transferred to Central. Mustang's connections have always been useful; plenty of people would pay their weight in gold to have papers like them, and she doubts that the Colonel parted with so much as a counterfeit coin for them.
Mustang knows there's no point in hiding the fact that every morning, when he arrives at the office, he takes the papers out and tries to decide to sign them.
Riza knows, too, that it's not affection or sentiment that keeps him from filing the papers and sending her away into hateful security. In the game he plays she is his queen, his first follower, his most trusted subordinate. He needs her eyes and ears throughout the military grapevine, her ability to adapt to any situation, her skill with guns, her way of bringing his thin web of supporters together into something that is closer to a family than it is to an alliance, her hawk-eyed watchfulness. If he wants to win the game, he must have her – not by his side, but behind him, watching his back, and the small comfort he would gain by keeping her safe is not enough to outweigh the loss of so much else.
He knows that even if he sends her away she won't be safe.
Sometimes Riza wonders what she'll do if the colonel decides to dismiss her, despite the fact that she knows – and so does he – that there's nothing to wonder about.
She could refuse to go, but if he ever makes up his mind to send her away, nothing she can say will sway him. He never cares what his subordinates think, unless it has an adverse effect on their performance; what he cares about is the safety of his followers and the success of their missions, in that order.
She could kill herself, of course; not melodramatically, but simply to illustrate a point: If you don't have me you can't win, and if you lose I'm as good as dead anyway. He would understand – he always understands – but they would never get the stain out of the carpet.
She could obey and go away to live in her house, empty and silent for so many years, and maybe study for a degree or write a book or donate to charities. She wouldn't travel, because she hates travelling, and she would never see him again. If he dismisses her, he'll never come after her again, and she'll never go to him.
She knows that these are just silly fantasies, because if he ever sends for her to tell her that he is sending her away for good, he'll be telling her that he's no longer the kind of man who can do what he wants to do: that he's the kind of man who will sacrifice himself and his honour and his dreams and his followers and his country to set his mind at ease about one person. If he does, he'll be doing it deliberately, the outcome of his decision as clear in his mind as it is in hers, and she won't commit suicide or obey or protest. She'll draw the little handgun from the holster at her side and shoot him between the eyes.
He knows that she knows this, and yet he still keeps the papers in his desk and looks at them every morning, and then puts them away without signing them because he needs her in his game. She knows that it's a little play, perhaps to remind her of her duty, perhaps to remind himself that he's not keeping her there because he wants her there, because that would be the wrong reason to let her stay, but simply because he needs her.
They both know that they need this to remind them how precarious their situation is, how thin the line they balance on, but they keep this knowledge hidden away in some dark corner of their minds and pretend that they don't.
Some of the things they understand are much better left unsaid.
Finis
A/N: Bunnies ate my brain. That's my excuse. Sorry.