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He doesn’t know what moves his hand, but the ink on the paper sits in incontrovertible proof that something did, and that is the beginning of Roy Mustang’s dilemma.
Dear Lieutenant, it reads, even though the word that followed ‘dear’ was supposed to have been Major – he’s supposed to be writing to someone at Briggs, recently promoted or transferred or something like that. He can’t really remember. Neither the name nor the circumstances of the letter’s recipient have managed to stick with him – paperwork. He doesn’t think he’ll ever have the knack for it. Dear Major, he was supposed to start, and the sheet of letterhead reads Lieutenant now. Annoyed, he crumples the draft in his hand and burns it, shaking the ash off of his glove with little regard for what it might land on.
Dear Lieutenant. Why the hell would he need to be writing to Hawkeye? She’s two doors down.
**
It’s not exactly an accident the second time, even though he’s still got the rank wrong – Colonel, this time. Dear Colonel Brentman, whoever that is. Roy can’t say he’s ever met the man. But this Colonel, whoever he is, is connected to someone whose eldest child, apparently, was a civil servant who disappeared without a trace two years ago, and without the immediately family’s contact information, the best that Roy (Grumman, for whatever reason, put him in charge of these sorts of things) can do is find this Colonel and let him know so he can tell the family what happened to their son and-
Well.
It’s serious. Not the kind of thing that he should be having to restart because his traitorous hands wrote Dear Lieutenant at the top of the page for the second time in as many days. He’s wasting paper. He nearly tells Hawkeye – “quit distracting me,” he’d say, “I keep on addressing business letters to you and it’s a waste of stationery” – but she’d probably chastise him. She likes to do that. She’s liked to do that lately more than he can recall her ever having liked to do that before. She’d turn it around on him – quit being so easily distracted.
He doesn’t know why he can’t just will himself to stop, especially when he’s never even actively thinking of her when he addresses letters. So he doesn’t say anything.
Best not to make mountains out of molehills or of first drafts burnt to ash in his hand.
**
There’s never much time to be bored nowadays, but there’s always just a little – just enough to pull out a sheet of letterhead and scrawl Dear Lieutenant at the top of the page in that illegible hen-scratch Hawkeye had always told him to neaten up. If by some miracle Roy is capable of doing that, he doesn’t particularly want to, and the thought makes him smile – if she ever received this pointless letter, she’d wrinkle her nose in disgust. She always does; once Roy had pointed that out, teased her – ‘you’re cute when you’re angry’ – and she’d looked like she would’ve hit him if it wouldn’t have gotten her court-martialed. “That’s extremely inappropriate,” she’d said curtly. He’d kept on laughing.
Dear Lieutenant, he writes, lighthearted. I keep on addressing other people’s letters to you. It’s such a waste of paper.
He pauses, pen still against the page, to think – something about that opening just doesn’t click. It’s not as if he needs it to when he’s sure he’ll burn this letter as soon as he’s done with it (and it won’t be more than a couple of sentences anyways), but he’s got nothing better to think about.
He comes to a conclusion, crosses out Lieutenant next to Dear, and writes Hawkeye over top.
“Dear Hawkeye,” he reads aloud under his breath, even though – for the fifteenth time, he reminds himself – it doesn’t matter, and shakes his head. “I keep on…no. Doesn’t work.”
He never calls her Riza – he can recall having done so exactly once, and she’d given him a look that could’ve killed far stronger men than himself. But he tries it out anyway, Riza over a crossed-out Lieutenant and a crossed-out Hawkeye. Dear Riza, he reads – I keep on addressing other people’s letters to you.
Better. It’s cheeky, and that’s really all he’s aiming for. He figures that shameless cheek is the closest he’ll ever get to banter with her, which would require the kind of back-and-forth she’s far too well-trained in rank and file to engage in. She’ll never see this silly, pointless letter (it doesn’t matter) but he still imagines her reactions to each line – you’re so distracting, he writes, imagining her scowl, but that’s probably just because you’re always lurking over my shoulder. He smiles, adding I guess you’ve leased a room in my subconscious, because she’d fight tooth and nail to pretend to be offended by the familiarity that statement implied when it actually relieved her.
She can bluster all she wants, but their closeness is a comfort. He likes to think that he knows her nearly as well as she knows herself, and he’s not far from the mark in that assumption or in the assumption that it would privately reassure her to know that she occupies a place in his mind (in his heart) that time won’t wear away.
She’d told him, once, in a lapse of judgement he pretends to have forgotten about for her sake, that when he’d been blinded, she’d feared he would forget her face. He hadn’t said anything then, but he wonders if she realizes how utterly ridiculous that notion is.
Get out of my head, Lieutenant, he writes, not really smiling anymore, and he hesitates a second before he crumples the paper like every other and sparks his palm to burn it to ash.
**
Dear Lieutenant, he finds himself writing, again and again, picturing the stern shake of Riza’s head if she ever found out what he was doing with his meager free time.
Dear Lieutenant, he writes the day she comes to work with her hair in a low, severe bun at her nape instead of its usual twist, why’d you change your hair? It only takes a second or two to burn the words you look older and the paper that contains them. I like it, though, he writes, it suits you; it’s not as if he’s ever going to tell her that, so if the message is nothing but ash within seconds, it matters little to him. These pointless notes, after all, don’t matter. They’re not the types whose closeness has ever been predicated on words, who’ve ever had the privilege of saying that they value one another aloud.
Dear Lieutenant, he writes, the new office boy is skeevy. She’d probably glare at him for that. She knows enough to know that he’s not one to chase skirt for anything but information, but she’d be quick to point out how hypocritical it would sound to pass that judgement on a new hire when he’s been so careful to cultivate a reputation that –
Well. At least his eyes don’t follow the swing of Riza’s hips when she walks like someone’s do.
He shouldn’t even notice things like that, but it’s really not appropriate, and, well, she should be proud of him for that – he’s finally starting to get the hang of protocol, after all.
(Right. Protocol. That’s the word. All of that ogling – wildly inappropriate. She’s his superior. Not protocol, needs to show a little respect – yes, that’s it. Protocol.
Whatever that means.)
“Protocol,” he mutters under his breath, burning the letter to ash in his hand.
Dear Lieutenant, he writes, the candle burning low to tell him he ought to be asleep already, I’m tired of protocol.
He lets the candle burn his handiwork this time.
**
It’s a habit, now, ‘Dear-Lieutenant’-ing as if he’s keeping a diary addressed to his subordinate. He burns them dutifully, the innocently scandalous ones as well as the mundane notes about workplace happenings that he really could tell her about in person if he felt like it, and if anyone ever notices the thin layer of ashy dust coating the floor beneath his desk, no one mentions it.
There are close calls, of course. Once, Riza pokes her head through the door to inform him that he’s been asked for elsewhere in the middle of a sentence – all she’d see if she were to look at what he’s writing would be I saw passed by your target practice yesterday. No one has any right to look th – and she’d have more than a little to say about that.
Something about duty and how dare he turn a work exercise into a cause for distraction and protocol and what is and is not appropriate as if he’s not wholly, entirely aware of those things already. Her cheeks would flush – the tips of her ears, too. Riza’s a blusher. And he knows knows what she’d think, reading those words, knows she wouldn’t be scandalized so much as pleasantly shocked. She, who knows better than anyone that neither of them can afford it, wants his eyes on her; she knows, too, that she already has them.
They’re only willfully blind, at the end of the day, and never fully, Roy and Riza both. It’s comforting and maddening all at once, and when she closes the door behind her, he’s never been gladder to see her leave.
He doesn’t bother finishing the final sentence before he burns it.
**
“Go away,” Roy tells the invisible someone who’s opened his office door, bent over a sheet of letterhead. “I’m writing a contract.”
“…Sir,” a jumpy cadet who’d only just been assigned to Central manages to stammer before she turns on her heel and leaves as quickly as she can without arousing suspicion.
She probably knows that writing contracts isn’t in a General’s job description. Then again, neither is writing I miss the days when we always got the same assignments like some sort of lovelorn university student with poetic aspirations he’ll never realize.
**
Dear Lieutenant, the letter head reads. I think I’m going crazy.
Whatever the next line had been – and it had only been half of a line – is blotted out where an inkpot had tipped over. It’s a mess, the fabric of Roy’s sleeve soaking up ink like a sponge wherever the pool of ink on the desktop had touched it, staining the edges of an ivory file folder that probably contains documents whose contents are well above Riza’s security clearance. It’s just like her commanding officer to have wound up like this, asleep at his desk with ink from the well he’d knocked over without waking himself up staining his cheek.
She’s told him he needs to get more sleep more times than she can count, and she’s not cleaning this up – his doing, his responsibility, she figures – but she can’t help but find her eyes drawn to the unfinished letter, whose contents she can’t make out below the first line even when she holds it up to a light. She stands the inkwell up, sets the overfussy fountain pen he insists on using when he has to write a business letter back inside, and scans it again – Dear Lieutenant, I think I’m going crazy.
She might choose not to see when it suits her purposes, but she isn’t blind enough to believe that he’d talking about anything but the one thing she wishes he wouldn’t when he had written that.
“You are going crazy,” she mutters under her breath, folding up the unfinished letter and slipping it in amongst the logs on the fireplace – that’s what she’s certain he’d meant to do with it if he hadn’t fallen asleep. Careless, and unlike him, to leave room for the possibility of her finding even the most cryptic of notes addressed to her. He’s usually so careful not to let her know that he knows she knows. She’ll play the diplomat like she always does, play the dutiful soldier who casts the only love letter she’s ever received into the fireplace because she’d never been meant to get it at all.
She passes back by his desk, sets out a fresh sheet of paper, lets the ink soak its edges. He’ll know that the ink couldn’t possibly have stained the paper that way if it had been there when the inkpot fell, but he’ll see it there, he’ll see the letter that had been there in its place gone, and he’ll know – she’s keeping her end of a bargain they never made.
I know, she’s written on that blank, stained sheet of stationery without a single word, just by setting it there and letting him pretend that the letter he hadn’t been able to complete had never even existed. I won’t tell.
He neither feels her ruffle his hair nor hears the click of her shoes against hardwood nor starts at the sound of the door latching closed as she leaves, and those are good things. They’ve made a career out of pretending not to know and they’ll make a lifetime out of it if they have to.
“Going crazy,” she says under her breath, cheeks tinging pink. “Sounds about right.”