dearest emma could you bless us with some protective/arguing royai like the kind of “why would you put yourself in danger!!” “to protect you” “that’s my job!!” vibes 🥺🥺 if you would be so kind and inclined 👀
u bless me with the most stunning of prompts. i only hope i can do it justice 🩷
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summary: and i bear it willingly // for you
rated: t | words: 2274 | tags: royai, post-canon, ishval, post-ishval, guilt, survivors guilt, romance
“I will not have this argument with you again, sir.”
Her response is calm. Measured.
Professional.
Riza knows he hates it. Knows he despises how detached she sounds about her own life. In reverse circumstances, she would feel the same regarding him.
But things are different.
She lost the privilege to put her life above anyone else’s in Ishval. Whereas he has to continue on, to make it ahead of the others and usher in the change they need.
This is her burden to bear.
She watches as the frustration bubbles out of him. It manifests in a multitude of ways. Ways she’s been attuned to for years. Since they were children. Now they are alone and the team has been dismissed for the evening, he ejects from his chair. He turns his back on her and Riza watches as he runs a hand through his hair. It disrupts the strands and leaves them sticking up in all directions. Even with him facing away, Riza can picture the way his eyes tighten with strain. How his jaw tightens as he bites back words he so desperately wishes to voice but won’t – whether it is due to professional reasons, Riza is unsure. That is the only mystery hidden from her now.
She knows.
Riza understands.
They once had an eerily similar argument beneath the streets of Central. It’s almost like déjà vu as she stands here now, but there is a startling difference between them. There always has been. He is the most important piece. The valuable player which cannot be sacrificed – while she is the one who can.
(In her eyes only, it seems.)
That is irrelevant, he would insist. Because to him, she could never be something to throw away. To him, she is the most important thing.
The most precious thing.
Riza remembers the tears, the impossible promises he whispered in her ear as she lay there, dying –
She remembers how he told Havoc he’d see him at the top after he lost the use of his legs – and how that vision came true. How determined he was to see it happen.
Perhaps….
No.
Their wants and desires, no matter how burning and all consuming they can feel sometimes, were forfeited when they stepped foot on the eastern sands in Ishval. They count for nought nowadays. After everything, they are irrelevant. Just pawns in a game which he needs to be the figurehead of. To ensure no one lives through what they did. To ensure such a rise to power cannot happen again, even as they now know the truth of what was behind it.
And really, the assignment today was easy. Easy for them, as a team. There was no real threat. But things still turned slightly south. And Riza knows after almost losing her the way he did beneath Central, Roy still struggles with the concept of it, and that stray bullet today sparked a new bought of worry. A new slew of worries. Nightmares. She knows he still fears it even though they both know they have no right to.
But in the end, they’re both human at their core.
Monsters, but human beneath all of that and all they have committed.
So, Riza understands his worry. His concern. She sympathises with it, because Riza knows if their positions had been reversed, and it had been him who’d thrown himself in front of an attacker on her behalf, Riza would be just as angry. Incised.
Scared.
In the silence of the office, the feeling permeates the room.
When the Colonel turns around –
No.
When Roy turns around –
The weight of everything settles upon him. The threat of her loss. The perceived misjudgement on his end.
“Why would you put yourself in danger?!” All his feelings burst forth from him, now they are finally alone. Without abandon and without hesitation. Anger. Fear. Helplessness.
And of all the questions, that’s what he leads with.
“To protect you.” Riza answers him evenly, but on the inside, she is quaking. For she too had almost lost it all on the Promised Day. Herself… And him. When he’d passed through the gate, she’d never felt fear like it. And as she recognises his struggle, his strife, she cannot help but relate to what she’d once felt too in a similar situation.
True, debilitating fear.
“That’s my job!”
Silence fills the room.
It sucks all the air from the room.
…
As her superior, yes, it is. He has a duty of care.
But…
It is she who is the bodyguard. The expendable one.
The less important one.
They’d been through this.
“Sir –”
“I ordered you to live, Lieutenant,” he interrupts. Tone demanding. Sure. Solid. As he always is and as Riza had always admired of him.
He rarely interrupted her. In fact, Riza couldn’t remember a time he ever had before. Even as excitable as he was as a child. He was always ready to listen and let her speak – a novelty Riza had never been offered before him.
“I ordered you not to die.” His eyes are as hard as flints as he stares her down, unflinching in his resolve.
“Sir, it is my job to protect you. That has never changed,” she offers softly. “That has always been my duty to you.”
“Yet, I still gave you an order, Lieutenant.”
He was determined in this, it seems.
Riza feels…
She doesn’t know.
She understands, and yet, how can she do her job, the position she signed on to do, if he is always going to berate her every time for it? Especially now, with the added history from within those cursed tunnels on top of it?
There had to be some give somewhere.
Riza doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to see that option, but it doesn’t matter. For both their sakes, for the sake of all they forged ahead to accomplish, it has to happen. There has to be a relent, otherwise they’ll both be stuck in this office until the end of time, going back and forth with one another.
So, ever the dutiful soldier, Riza accepts his berating. His harshness (which is really his worry). She should demand better, Riza knows this, but what right does she have, really? He can’t reach his goal without her, and she can’t do it without him.
A never ending, impossible cycle.
One of them has to give eventually.
Riza has learned that over the years most of all. Otherwise, they’ll never progress.
“Of course, sir.” She dips her head low in acknowledgement and shame. Even if she can’t wholly, truly, admit her own fault to it, it is the only way forward for them. So he can achieve their goal. “Apologies, sir.”
He offers nothing further. Riza says nothing either.
She isn’t particularly finished in her work for the day, but exhausted and needing away from this office – and all the knows she inherently must sacrifice, despite it going against her deepest and most hidden, unvoiced fears – Riza acquiesces and collects her things.
And she leaves.
* * * * * * *
A knock sounds at Riza’s door late that night.
She isn’t expecting anyone. Her training over the years dictates she collect her gun and watch the shadows, but Hayate’s ears perking up, accompanied by a happy smile, his bark and a whine, indicates it’s a friend.
His best friend, actually.
Surprise laces Riza’s blood as she peers through the peephole, then opens the door.
Her Colonel smiles at her.
“Forgive me, Lieutenant,” he murmurs quietly. “I owe you an apology.”
He owes her no such thing.
Silly man.
Still, this is a conversation for private walls. Not the confines of the hallway of her apartment building.
“Come in, sir.”
As she takes his jacket Hayate jumps around him excitedly. His second favourite person in the world is here with him, so how could he not? As Riza ushers her Colonel through to her living room Hayate follows on his heels obediently, never letting him out of his sight as he gazes adoringly up at Roy.
“Would you like a drink?”
“A water would be lovely, thank you.”
Hayate is in his lap, receiving constant pets, when Riza finally hands the glass to him.
“You say you owed me an apology?” Riza ensures she inflicts enough confusion into her tone once she’s finally settled into the corner of her couch, knees tucked beneath her.
Roy nods. “I was harsh with you earlier today.”
“You were fair. It was understandable.”
“No, I was unfair. I was selfish.”
Riza shakes her head, already exasperated. They’re already jumping into their back and forth, it seems. “Sir, no.”
“Lieutenant.”
When he says her rank like that… As if it is her name. Like a caress, deep within the night. Where only sleep and warm sheets keep them company.
“I was unfair.”
Riza opts for silence, letting him speak.
“I…” Roy clears his throat. “I still struggle with you leaving me. In any kind of capacity. As you can probably imagine. As you have admitted to me you feel similarly in the past. Which is why I issued you that order. Which is why I feel like…” He laughs quietly to himself. Bitterly. “It may have saved your life. If I am so naive to think so. But sometimes it is nice to indulge.” He lifts his eyes to meet hers. And the emotion within them is stark and bare. “I cannot live on without you, Riza. That is why I was so harsh today.”
The whole room grows still.
Unfair? Perhaps.
But Riza knows fear intimately. It knows no rules, no boundaries.
“I was terrified.”
He admits it so shamelessly to her face.
It is always a hidden thought within Riza’s mind. After all she’d witnessed on the Promised Day, it sparks a thought of… something, a hope, but never something to this magnitude. It is difficult for her to reconcile those types of thoughts to her entire being… That she may hold that sort of magnitude, worth, importance, to another… And yet, this man across from her, after all they’d endured, admits it so easily to her. Shows it so easily too, in his actions within their workplace. Simply because he cannot openly voice it in public.
She was the expendable one. As a child. As an adult –
Not to him. Never to him.
“I apologise. I was unnecessarily harsh.”
“You never are. You are always kind, sir.”
Far kinder than she ever deserved.
He blinks at her, before a laugh leaves him. “Kind,” he echoes.
A hint of bitterness laced within.
“Yes, Roy,” Riza replied earnestly. “You always were. Always are.”
He appears to infer what she means behind her words. Realisation washes over him, and he nods.
“I always wished I could be more.”
…
Maybe if things were different…
“I know.”
Riza knows.
If everything was different, she would have taken matters into her own hands by now.
“I would have married you, you know.”
Riza is stunned into silence. He’s never spoken so brazenly before.
“I would have saved up every cenz I ever acquired and approached your father for permission to do so.” His face turns up towards the ceiling as his hand runs soothingly down Hayate’s back. The pup is drowsy with the attention from him. “Even if he said no, forbid it after my defection to the military, I would have found a way. I would have forsaken my path and opted for one he approved of… I think.” His smile turned wistful. “Regardless, I would have returned for you.” His eyes were burning like hot coals when he turns to face Riza. “You always were, and always are, everything to me, Riza Hawkeye.”
She is left in a stun. Her throat runs dry. Eyes pricking with heat, but nothing falling.
He has never admitted it to her so openly before.
There have been inklings, of course. Hints she could have easily picked up on, because how could not have? But…
The mention of it causes her heart to swell.
Makes it ache.
…
For what could have been.
For what they could have both had together.
…
But now…
He loves her.
As he loves him.
Quietly. Supportively. In a way that they will both endure to ensure the other lives. Survives. Sees their joint goals realised.
Together.
“Really?”
“Of course.”
His reply is instantaneous. The words barely left her mouth. It is as if he’d bottled them up for years beforehand, ready to let them loose at the earliest opportunity.
Despite the age-old fears which wage wars within her mind, how could Riza argue or doubt his quick words? The determination in his face? The resolve within his eyes?
“Forever?” Riza whispers it, despite herself. Like an uncertain child.
But Roy indulges her, as he always does. As he always understands her.
“Yes.”
“Together?”
“Until the end of time, Riza. Should the universe permit it.” His gaze meets hers, filled with absolution. “I would never leave you. Not willingly.”
Her heart soars.
Threatens to burst from her chest.
“And I too, Roy. Forever.”
His smile softens. He leans forward, closer to her on the couch. He is now hovering over Hayate.
“So, live then, Lieutenant. That’s an order. So we may live together.”
Upon her couch, in the privacy of her own home, his lips are but a breadth from her own.
It makes her breath hitch.
“Forever.”
Riza smirks at him. “It shall be my honour, sir.”
Before she kisses him.
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