[roy/riza; pg] Valley of the Shadow Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist Title: Valley of the Shadow Author:emilie_burns Theme: #17 - Garden Vista ; Elysium El Dorado ; Carnival (30_Romances) Pairing: Roy Mustang/Riza Hawkeye Rating: PG Word Count: 2141 Disclaimer: Fullmetal Alchemist (Hagane no Renkinjutsushi) is copyrighted by Hiromu Arakawa/Square Enix. This is a work of fanfiction for personal entertainment only. The Latin quotation is from Roman poet, Ovid, taken from the first book of Ars Amatoria. Jossed. Notes: As far as continuity goes, this could be placed sometime during the years between Edward getting his State Alchemist certification, and closer to the point of time where the regular timeline picks up. Manga!verse, since the train incident wasn't part of the past but in the regular timeline there. No spoilers. And why are my 'fics for these two so far for a romance comm the least heavy in the romance save for subtle undertones compared to my 'fics for them in two other theme challenge comms? I lose at life. Summary:But he also knew that those who didn't take risks rarely made history, that if he wanted to have a chance at making it to the top before old age caught up with them both, he needed to seize every opportunity that came his way to draw the correct sort of attention to him. Original LJ Post Date: September 14, 2005 @ 30_Romances
Valley of the Shadow
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me. - Holy Bible, Psalm 23:4, King James Version
"Incoming!" Second Lieutenant Jean Havoc shouted, and they barely had time to cover their heads before a nearby wall exploded, showering them with shrapnel and dust.
This was beginning to get annoying. Distracted by his efforts to formulate a plan, Colonel Roy Mustang barely noticed his adjutant shifting position until the First Lieutenant was already trying to fire over the wall, driven back by a spray of fragmenting concrete and brick from machine gun fire before she could get off a single shot.
"Stay down, Hawkeye!" he ordered Riza as he grabbed her arm, pulling her down. "Show some patience! Breda? Any word from the sergeant?" He looked over to the heavyset man by the radio.
"We lost contact!" his other second lieutenant shouted back over the noise. "Fuery knows we're pinned down, but I don't know if he got our location!"
"Somehow, I don't think locating us would be a problem," Roy said, twisting his lips in a smirk of wry annoyance as he glanced to the car they had abandoned, now a smoking junkheap. Another closer explosion rained dust and rubble around them.
"How the hell did the Blue Squad get their hands on mortar anyway?" Havoc snapped around the cigarette clenched between his teeth, more of a rhetoric question than anything else.
"Logic would make one assume that with their exemplary history, they found a way to help themselves to the military's stores," Roy replied, even while listening to the commotion behind him, trying to figure out everyone's location. "Of course, since there is the small likelihood that someone foolishly supplied them with off-limits presents, it would be in our better interest to try and take them alive."
"Whaddya mean, take them?" Breda asked. "We're outgunned and even if you can set them on fire from there, you can't see what you're doing to control it!"
He didn't answer as he tried to mentally map out what all he remembered seeing on the other side of the wall before the fringe group of terrorists attacked. It was a poorer, run-down outskirt district of East City, and most of the buildings were adobe, with precious little flammable material around. The oxygen in the air was useful, but the low humidity lowered its effectiveness somewhat. Then there was the matter of the civilian population. He had to get out from behind cover to where he could see where the flames were going, to better control the unpredictable gasses which fueled the fire.
"Lieutenant Havoc! How well can you see them?" he asked, looking over to the taller man where he was nearly reclined on the ground, looking through a wide crack in the wall shielding him.
"I can't! But I can get a fix on where they're firing the mortar from!" he replied. "I peg that about maybe sixty meters to your two o'clock!"
First Lieutenant Hawkeye frowned and looked at the top of the wall, considering. "They likely have people spread about ten degrees in either direction from that, judging by the angle the incoming fire."
Roy nodded. "So we have an approximate position and distance. Good." He leaned forward, looking past Breda for any possible methods he could use to circle around and flank them.
"Colonel, I would advise that we try for a reinforced position to wait until backup arrives," Hawkeye said, leaning against the wall, her pistol at the ready as always.
Roy glanced at Riza as he brushed some dust off his hair. Logically, she was right. It was the sensible, rational, sane thing to do, and he knew it. But he also knew that those who didn't take risks rarely made history, that if he wanted to have a chance at making it to the top before old age caught up with them both, he needed to seize every opportunity that came his way to draw the correct sort of attention to him. He had his reasons and goals for making it to the top, and one of them was his adjutant.
"No one ever got promoted by sitting still, Lieutenant," he pointed out, giving her his trademark, confident smirk. "After all, it is said, audentem Forsque Venusque iuvat."
"Wha--" she started to ask, raising an eyebrow, but her question was cut off by a shouted warning from Havoc, and Roy grabbed her on instinct, pulling her down and away, shielding her as the wall covering them imploded barely a meter away, the mortar leaving a gapping hole dangerously close to where Riza had been.
"Mustang!" Breda shouted from the other side of the cloud of dust.
"We're fine!" Roy called back, even as he pulled away to ascertain that his adjutant was unharmed. Her eyes met his inquisitive gaze and she nodded in confirmation. He looked around; the gap in the wall was between them and Breda. He'd just have to chance it. "Regroup with Havoc," Roy ordered, watching through the gap as the smoke and dust dissipated.
"Sir, what are you going to do?"
"What I need to do." He looked at her, and his lips curled into a lopsided grin. "What I said before was that fortune and love favors the brave." Roy gave her arm a firm squeeze as he drew back into a crouch in preparation to bolt past the gap.
"Be careful," she warned. I love you.
"I will," he replied. I know. "Now go! Give me all the cover fire you can manage, all of you!"
***
"Young man, you are reckless," Lieutenant General Graman scolded, speaking in that casual, almost gentle manner of his that made nearly everyone dismiss the old war hero as a kindly, doddering grandfatherly type more likely to give out candy than reprimands. "Reckless and foolish." He clucked his tongue, giving his head a shake as he paced in the small medical room, getting in the nurse's way for which he promptly apologized, further amplifying the grandfatherly appearance.
Roy relaxed against the chair in the military hospital's emergency room while the medics finished stitching up a gash on his arm, waiting for Graman to finish his obligatory fussing. "What should I have done?" Roy asked, his tone lazy, almost bordering on insolent. If anyone raised an eyebrow, he could always blame it on shock and drugs. "They were attempting to destroy precious military property with stolen precious military property. Was I supposed to let them get away?"
"Talented though you may be, you're hardly the only one here out East," the general pointed out, and shook his head again. "Endangering the life of a State Alchemist, not to mention my own granddaughter! I should write you up for this reckless behavior. It's unfitting for an officer of your station." He clucked his tongue again.
The nurse started bandaging Roy's arm, and Graman sighed, spreading his hands in a defeated gesture. "But Central would never listen to an old man like me. Brash and daring, that's the sort of thing they like in their soldiers these days. If you're not careful, boy, they might make you a general for that stunt, and then where would you be? Ech, you don't want all this responsibility, you like blowing off your work too much."
"But the higher I get, the more subordinates I get to do my work for me," Roy pointed out. "You just don't want me to end up outranking you, then you'd have to do my work."
"Hmph!" Graman waved his hand at the nurses. "He'll live without you two fussing over him. I need a word with the Colonel in private."
They backed out of the room quickly, and he looked at Roy for a long minute before shaking his head. "You're really all right?"
"Never been better," Roy replied easily. "Of course, the drugs may have something to do with that, but I doubt it."
"You realize that among the men who didn't get away was the leader of the Blue Squad himself? Central will be very appreciative to learn about this."
"You know, I thought he looked familiar..." He smirked. "Think they'd be appreciative enough to make me brigadier general?"
"If you caught the entire Blue Squad, then maybe. But this will definitely draw their notice." He shook his head again, and pointed his finger at Roy. "My granddaughter had better wind up as the Fuhrer's wife for all the stress you've been putting her through."
"That's another thought for another day," Roy said, checking his bandages as he stood up, and picked up his jacket. "Are we still on for chess tomorrow?"
"Provided you're not on any drugs. You're handicapped enough as it is. I like a match with a challenge!"
Roy shot him a wounded look. "I'll beat you one of these days, mark my words."
"Of course you will." Graman reached out to pat him in a grandfatherly sort of gesture, and gave a few firm slaps to the freshly stitched area. Roy gasped and crossed his eyes before glaring at the general, who merely smirked. "Go home and get some rest, Colonel."
"Yes, sir," Roy replied, still gritting his teeth a bit as he held his arm, eyeing the old general, and berating himself for not realizing what he was going to do. After all, nearly everything Roy learned of subtlety and strategy came from Riza's grandfather. Apparently he had been more lax in his studies than he'd thought.
When he followed the older man out of the room, he found his adjutant standing there, waiting, ready. He raised his hand as far as his injured arm would comfortably allow in a partial return of her salute.
"I have a car waiting if you are ready to go home, sir," Hawkeye said.
"Thank you, Lieutenant. Calling it a day does sound rather agreeable." He walked with her through the halls, both of them silent until they stepped outside into the parking lot.
"How bad are the injuries?" she asked, glancing at him out of the corner of her eye, her lips set in a thin, humorless line. Don't try lying to me.
"Hawkeye, you worry too much," he chided her. "It's just a minor cut, a few stitches. I'll be as good as new in a week's time, or less. Aside from that little incident, I'm doing much better than the majority of our opponents." Her stern gaze didn't waver. "Honest!"
She finally looked away. "You shouldn't take these risks, sir. You can't make it to the top if you're six feet under."
"Have a little more faith in me than that," he replied, waiting while she unlocked the car and opened the door for him.
"I have plenty of faith in you. It's not the bullet with your name on it that I worry about the most, it's all the other ones addressed 'to whom it concerns'." She shut the door, cutting off their conversation until she was back inside, and he remained silent while she started the engine.
"Anything worth having is worth fighting for, worth taking risks for," Roy said once she pulled out onto the street. "I won't keep us waiting forever, and that includes not dying too. I'll get us there, but I need you to trust me that I won't let either of us fall when we go out on a limb to reach it."
"I'd rather just have you like this than not have you at all." She didn't look at him as she turned a corner, driving to his house.
"I know. But I won't settle for second best. I have too many promises to keep, including the best way I know how to keep you and everyone else safe. And then there's you. Everything I do, every risk I take, it's with the future in mind."
She pulled the car over by the curb, and shifted to neutral, stepping down on the parking brake. "I don't like it when you go where you won't let me follow."
He leaned forward and reached over the seats to touch her golden hair briefly. "But you'll go where I need you the most. That's not always following me. As long as I know you're out there where I need you to be, I know I have nothing to fear. We'll make it, Riza. I promise you that. We'll both make it, alive."
She was quiet for a moment, then turned her head to look at him. "Tell me that again after your stitches are out," she said. "Tell me that after I stop remembering seeing that explosion go off far too close to you."
"And after I forget how close you came to being hit by one too," he pointed out, and drew his hand back. "Let me take my risks, Riza. Be there behind me when I do. I'll get us through this."
She closed her eyes. "Yes, sir."
"Over the Mountains Of the Moon, Down the Valley of the Shadow, Ride, boldly ride," The shade replied, -- "If you seek for El Dorado!" - Edgar Allen Poe, El Dorado