Early update because of the mean cliffhanger... Have another xD
Chapter 21 - Day 196
Roy wiped his shoes over and over on the doormat. They were drenched, as was his coat. He peeled it down his shoulders and arms, lifted it to hang up, when Hayate pulled him forward with the leash. Roy staggered.
"Alright already," Roy grumbled. Now his soaking shoes had stepped off the doormat, leaving water on the floor. He hadn't been looking forward to towelling down Hayate, and now he had to wipe the floorboards clean before bed too.
Hayate barked, louder and louder, tearing on the leash. His nostrils flared. Roy tugged on the leash, annoyed. But Hayate kept pulling, kept baking angrily. The ferocity caught Roy's attention. His eyes wandered up the stairs. The bedroom door was shut. Light came from the side where the nursery and bathroom were.
Without knowing why, Roy glanced left and right – kitchen, living room, both empty. Shoes forgotten and with a tight grasp on Hayate's leash, Roy took the stairs. He wanted to hark into the silence, but Hayate was still barking, still fighting his restraint, rushing towards the bedroom door with bared teeth. Something was off.
Hayate nearly hung himself when Roy held him more closely to his side, pushing down the handle with his other hand. "Riza?"
"'Riza', huh?" A voice sneered.
Roy's face drained of colour. Hers already had.
Sitting cross‑legged on the bed, she looked like a ghost. At the same time, she looked as if she wanted nothing more but to make a ghost out of Pilatus, her eyes spraying bloody murder. Pilatus' eyes held something much more dangerous.
His face was starting to sprout an ugly bruise that Riza must have given him in her struggle. Now her hands were behind her back, looking as if she couldn't move them. Even with a gun pointed to her head, her expression remained stoic, grim and fierce and frightened.
"Working overtime, Lieutenant Colonel?" Roy's voice was tight with terror. He hardly dared to breathe.
"I was, I was, like I do every damn evening." Pilatus sounded hollow. He wet his lips with a compulsive flick of his tongue. His clothes were dark from the heavy rain, dripping onto the floor with the same urgency Roy's heart was racing. "I work and work, I defend our beloved nation from the likes of you, and then you turn out not to be a traitor after all. Hurrah."
Roy frowned. He didn't recall Pilatus' involvement in the coup. Some soldier of the Central ground forces, he reckoned, but if he said so, Pilatus would snap.
"My incompetent little brother finally gets someone to like him at goddamn thirty, which his apparently worth more than my engagement to a banker's daughter. I earn a promotion for saving an officeholder's life, you are promoted by two ranks for your… heroism," Pilatus spat. "The youngest Colonel, the youngest Major General, the Hero of Ishval."
"None of which has anything to do with her, so please—"
"Oh, ho, ho," Pilatus tutted, "it has everything to do with her. This does." His eyes glinted. He moved the gun, wiggled it in the direction of Riza's belly. She tensed. "The perfect General Mustang and his perfect little dog, breaking the fraternisation law? A traitor after all?" Ambition sparked up, but the boyish dreams were gone. In their place was only madness, driven to the edge by his father, by himself. "And here I thought you were hiding a secret of success to promotion. Who would've thought you had such a mortal flaw? Knocking up a subordinate?" He laughed a crazed, shattering laughter.
He had believed in Roy. In whatever made that perfect‑seeming soldier – all of it dead and gone.
Rain pelted against the window. Lightning parted the sky, caught in Pilatus raving ice‑blue eyes.
"And then you deceive the military with illness, locking her up and having her slave away for— for a legacy of lies? What, did you want to keep the child?" The corner of his mouth jerked up, having watched Roy's expression.
Roy wanted to shout, yell that yes, of course he wanted the baby, if only so that Riza would hear and believe it. But he knew better than to answer Pilatus's taunts.
"Bang," Pilatus mocked, touching the barrel to her belly. Riza winced, her arms jerking against the restraints. Pilatus cackled, then even more when seeing the size of Roy's eyes and the sweat beading his forehead. Pilatus sighed theatrically. "After all this drudge, I could have simply gone behind my superiors' backs with no consequences whatsoever?" He stuck the gun to Riza's temple. "Don't tell me you're sharing her with Grumman to get another promotion. Are you paying him, I wonder?"
"I can talk to the Fuhrer," Roy slowly offered. His hands twitched for an appeasing gesture, but Hayate was still wrestling Roy's grip on the leash, growling and grappling.
"Now you do," Pilatus rasped a dry, malicious chuckle. "How kind. How utterly selfless of you. My hero."
"And I apologise for that. I have other things on my mind, as you can see," Roy said between his teeth. It was too late to try and draw attention away from the pregnancy. It was too late to bargain for secrecy. Too late to stay on guard as he had promised her. "We can—"
"We won't be doing anything, General Mustang," Pilatus jeered. "You will listen, and you will do exactly as I say or this woman," he interrupted himself, groping Riza by her hair. She yelped in sudden pain.
Hayate went crazy and bit through the leash. Roy barely caught him by the collar.
Spooked, Pilatus pointed his gun at Hayate.
"No!" Riza screamed. She sank her teeth into Pilatus hand hard.
Pilatus yelled, whirled around, hitting her with his gun out of reflex. She collapsed face first into the pillow.
"Riza!" Roy's heart stopped.
Pilatus's gun aimed at him. Roy swiftly yanked Hayate back and out the door, shutting it in his back. Hayate barked wildly, scratched at the door.
"What do you think you're doing?"
"Nothing," Roy held his hands up this time, "nothing, just—" He sucked in a breath when Pilatus directed the gun at Riza again. She was worth more to Roy than his own life, which Pilatus must have figured out despite his vicious remarks. Threatening her was by far more effective. "Keeping the dog safe." And his mistress' heart from breaking should anything happen to him, Roy swallowed. Pilatus knew enough as it was.
"Stay back." Pilatus hand couldn't decide where to point. Roy halted, then crept sideways. "I said stop." The gun met the back of Riza's head.
Roy raised his hands higher. "I need to go to her."
"No."
"Please, she needs to breathe. I need to reposition her so that she can breathe." And the baby, it burned in his mind. What happened to an unborn baby if the mother passed out for longer than a minute? If she was suffocated, even for a short time? If she had to be reanimated?
He feared he knew the answer to the last question.
Shivering in his dripping clothes, Roy crept on. His heart pounded in his chest, adrenaline surging through his body. His eyes flickered from Pilatus to Riza, but every time he looked at her, he saw blood. More and more blood, pooling out from her neck onto the cold stone, across the transmutation circle, a gold‑toothed man grinning, promising hell on earth. Her eyes barely obeyed, the light fading from them. The hand pressing down on her wound slackened.
Not again!
"Please, please." Roy didn't recognise his own voice. "Please, just," he shuffled his feet in slow‑motion, blinked to clear his vision of his trauma, "just— I need to check her breathing. Her pulse, she…" He swallowed thickly. Where he hadn't dared to breathe, he now couldn't. A lump clogged his throat, every laboured swallow aching, scratching. Riza!
"If you lower your hands, the girl dies."
"There's a gun," Roy hastily sputtered, "under the pillow. And one in her nightstand."
Pilatus' eyes flashed to the nightstand, then back to Roy.
"There isn't any in my nightstand, only the gloves. Somewhere. Please," he whispered.
Pilatus glared at him. Each second ticking by was like an agonising punch in the gut. Useless, Roy cursed himself. Useless, useless!
Eyes narrowed, gun pressed firmly into Riza's hair, Pilatus moved. He rummaged under the pillow, immediately finding the Desert Eagle. He chucked it into his belt, then went for the nightstand. It wasn't hard to find the second gun. Roy used what little distraction there was to edge closer, millimetre by millimetre until his shins met his side of the bed.
"Keep one hand up," Pilatus commanded. "And with the other, you give me the drawer."
Obeying, Roy took out the drawer from his nightstand as fleetly as cautiously allowed. He handed it across the bed. Pretending to need a knee on the mattress for balance, he crawled on the moment Pilatus received the drawer with the gloves.
"Sit still!"
"Her breathing, she needs to breathe," Roy pleaded. He kept moving, slowly, ever so slowly, gliding across the sheets to her unmoving body. He didn't care for a moment that Pilatus thrust the gun further against Riza's skull, not when Roy felt the warmth of her body so close, could see that she was in fact not drowning in her own blood.
He tried to limit himself to one hand, the other raised in surrender, but when he turned her onto her back and her head dangled lifelessly from his arm, he cradled it with both hands. "Riza." Roy stroked down her cheek, shook her lightly. She didn't react.
Pilatus watched with interest. The way his eyes lingered on her face – Roy was almost grateful when Pilatus' attention shifted to the ignition gloves at his feet. He ripped off the first finger with delight.
Roy could clap, it hit him. He didn't need the gloves anymore to transmute the bed, the wall, the floor, but whatever he did, he feared it wouldn't be fast enough. Pilatus might not even shoot on purpose or with good aim, but startled by the alchemy, he might fire out of reflex. And that, Roy couldn't risk.
His hands wandered. He wiped away what little blood hadn't seeped into the pillow and was drying on her forehead. Out of habit – owed to endless nightmares – his hand darted to the wound on her neck.
"The scar tissue," he excused, "it's too thick. I can't feel a pulse." His hand wandered lower, and he had to let go of her head to sneak beneath her skirt and find the main artery on the inside of her thigh. "The femoral artery," Roy narrated, "runs down the leg. For the pulse." And where Riza usually kept a gun, if Roy was lucky.
He had told her to relax. He had teased her about being armed in the house, about pulling a gun on a bird. What if she had taken it off?
Sidetracked by the way Riza's skirt hitched up with Roy's fumbling around, Pilatus didn't even question why her wrists she lied on weren't checked for her pulse. Instead, his eyes gained a different spark; a fire Roy had seen many times in the leering stares of clients at Madame Christmas'.
"Alive and well?" Pilatus asked.
Roy didn't reply. The tightness of his jaw told a good deal of how hard it was to actually find a pulse on her thigh, or rather, how difficult it was to pretend to be looking for it while unholstering an Enfield No. 2. Bless Riza and her distrust in the world; that she didn't listen to her idiot husband.
"Here's an idea: lock up the damn dog or I'll shoot it."
Roy growled. His hand trembled. It rattled the gun against a metal button for an instant. His heart stopped. But Pilatus was back to shredding Roy's gloves. The second one tore into two with a rich crunching rip.
Come on, come on. Roy had seen her take it out from there, but he had never done so himself.
"And then?" He found the securing strap.
"Then you'll put her into the car and give me the keys. What better way to have you dance for me? I'll hand in one favour after another and you're going to sign each one nice and good, because if you don't…" Pilatus planned out loud, seemingly for the first time. Everything he did was improvised on the spot – finding Riza, using her, now taking her. Roy didn't want to know what other ideas he would get with his prisoner.
He wondered then if smart people with power were in fact more dangerous than a lunatic like Pilatus.
Riza stirred. Roy almost retracted his hand, flinching, clamping down on her thigh to stay put. Her lids fluttered, a frown lacing her brows at the harsh gesture. Fighting the urge to help her up, to squeeze her hand and touch her face, Roy pretended to be frozen.
"Good morning, sunshine." Pilatus grinned. Riza jolted back to the present. Her wrists struggled against their restraints. She looked daggers at him, a roaring fire of hatred blazing against his hungry gaze. "We are going to tighten up those bonds of yours and add another few." He didn't specify where, but she caught on immediately. Disgusted, Riza scoffed.
Denying him her gaze angered him. He moved towards the bed, grabbed her chin, forcing her to face him.
The Enfield No. 2 dropped into Roy's hand with the lightest of clicks.
Three pairs of eyes flashed down.
Roy's heart thundered in his chest. He whipped out the gun, just as Pilatus aimed his own.
Bang!