31_days | [december 24th] [fullmetal alchemist] the amateur lover

title: the amateur lover

day/theme: December 24th, "Seule en ce lieu sauvage/ Alone in this savage place"

fandom: fullmetal alchemist

pairing: Roy/Hawkeye

rating: pg-13

spoilers: none, really, though it´s directedly related to "His battlefield..."

i know it´s been a while, but something about the theme screamed Ishval screamed Roy/Hawkeye. the word "love" is repeated more times than my usual.

"Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid. It is no conservationist love. It is a big game hunter and you are the game." Jeannette Winterson

the amateur lover

In Roy´s hometown teenage girls stood barefooted on the backyard, reading paperback novels about love in times of war.

He knows all about those books, about the thin-dressed girls pouring over cheap adjetives while sunlight pours over them like a painting rather than the real thing. He has read them, too, lost between his chesmistry textbooks, lost amist all the moving out and moving in of his youth, all his runaways. He wonders how those books turned up in his house for the first time, he is sure he never bought one.

Those girls who used to read those badly written epics, some of them have become soldiers and that explains all the lovemaking going on around him, circling him, away from him, Roy ponders. The front reeks of sex as much as it does of death.

She hesitates before telling him she is a virgin. Roy says nothing, swiftly and efficently puts a towel over the bed to save the sheets -it useless, he has to turn the matress over by the morning, hide the proof, the breaking of rules he is not sure exist. He has been with a couple of girls before, and some of them virgin, he knows what to do. It gives Hawkeye confidence; she discovers, not without horror, that she trusts him. It´s unimaginable, how she wants to lean on him, everything inside her rebelling against the thought. She doesn´t trust, she has grown up untrusting and reserved, a closed book. She was taugh to be wary of passion and at first she is suspicious of his beautiful body, his hot touch upon his cold hands.

Roy doesn´t know what to expect to love. Is it like music? Hughes has told him that when you are in love you hear music, full-fleshed orchestras, complex symphonies full of lyrical, epic movements. He hears no such things when he lays her down; she is the music, silences punctuating their rhythm like each breath pierces through a puncturated lung, the space between the small noises of her sobbing and the small noises of her moaning, he dares not move, just brings his lips to her neck, trying a soothing murmur into her skin and the undertow pulls him in again, for you bedded a siren, you are embedded in a new salty warmth.

She fears he is repulsed by all the mess with the blood; he is not, he learns there is nothing about her he does not love, and maybe that´s what being in love sounds like and not Hughes´ violins and string quartets. He puts a towel between her legs and they fall asleep, his arm lazily and trustingly around her waist, as he will always do in the years to come.

In the morning they wash the sheets together. Amidst a war there is nothing suspicious about a bloodied piece of cloth, so they are careless to be seen. Roy feels unexpected joy while they are at the task. Maybe this is love, after all, enjoying doing simple things with the other. Their fingers brush under the pink water, they keep them there for a while, pressed together, and pretend they don´t look at each other.

He might be doing something illegal by allowing himself to fall in love. But does one really allow it, or rather it can´t be stopped? He worries people can tell by the look on his face. What does love look like? He´s never been told: he was born into a family of silence and inwards expressions of affection. He just knew the way his father looked at his mother, without a word, without an hug or a caress. Is it the face he sees now when he looks at the mirror? At least Roy has a fair suspiction that he does grin a bit stupidly when he sees Hawkeye qeueing in the food line at noon.

He steals an orange for her. On free days they search the last open markets (the last open to the military, that is; the subrresticious flow to the rebels never ceases) they buy fruit together, lime. Many of the youngest soldiers have fallen ill with scurvy because this is the first time they have been cut off from their mothers, they don´t know how to properly feed themselves. Roy and Hawkeye can take care, they are both obssessively independent people, it makes him lonely, her untrusting. They are both orphans, by nature if not by birth.

When Hawkeye met him Roy was bent upon a couple of pages that were teaching him two or three words of ancient Ishvarite. Ishvarites have long since forgotten their original language but Roy knows a sentence or two, can pronounce a dozen or so barbaric-sounding words (in Ishvarite every letter is pronounced) he can´t understand but he likes to carry them on his tongue anyway. Hawkeye wondered why he bothered, why he tried so hard, why he cared. She no longer wonders.

The war slowly (painfully slowly) approaching to an end and Roy´s hands are more and more covered in blood as Hawkeye´s aim sharpens and sharpens. There is no more lovemaking blood on Roy´s skin, just death.

Roy educates himself on Ishval history and Ishval rites as much as he has chance to; this way he can hate every edge of this massacre, he can hate every edge of himself.

If he could determine the exact height of love and the time of day sunlight and its shadowline intersect with it... will he be able to write it down properly, in clear, round handwriting and show it to her? Roy tries but the piece of parchment gets written and re-written and over-written, blotted palimpsest.

"I was writing you a letter."

"Why? I´m here," she says placing one knees over his knee, finding him for balance, finding him. Not without surprise or alarm she had found these days that her equilibrium lies on his body.

"Because when I tell you I love you it´s because I don´t have anything better to offer."

He makes her smile. She had never dreamnt of a beautiful boy that makes her smile.

If they go over the hill by their tent they would see a black, burning city. By dinner time they pull their chairs so close that their knees never stop touching (nobody sees this), Roy thinks she holds the fork in a funny way, he laughs (nobody hears this), she doesn´t like the mashed potatoes and lets hm steal her vegetables, Roy somehow wishes war would never end (nobody knows this). Their sanctuary, their blue evenings -he leaves the boots by the bed, she goes through his books, feeling them with her fingertips because he folds the page where he´s left the story, he leaves them open on the floor, wrinkles on the spines, he has an almost physical relationship with books. He thinks, let´s fold the page, stop the story here, in the scene where I kiss your neck, in the dialogue where I tell you how I miss you even when I´m with you, in this very frame.

One day the water deposit breaks (sabotage, they say, they whisper -more Ishvarites than usual are killed that day) and they can´t have a shower in four days. Riza kisses him on the fourth day and thinks it must be love, not as in one of the books girls from Roy´s hometown used to read, as in one of the books Roy keeps -like his other books but better hidden- under the bed, pages folded, spines wrinkled, damsels in distress, euphemistic sex scenes; she thinks it like the aftertaste of the kiss, as if she were hearing herself speak, but not really listening to it.

Sometimes it almost feels like the end of the world, when he is unshaven and she has lost some weight and the uniform itches at the ends, at the wrist and the neck.

All the books you´ve read were wrong, Roy thinks, late at night, when Hughes is drunk on stolen liquor and stolen cigarettes and chocolate, and tries to switch the radio to some music station, but in this world there is no music, no comfort, nothing of the sort of love you´ve read about just Roy´s hand on the back of Riza´s neck, rubbing it absently, sat up in bed, the static of the radio a love song, and it´s almost like they haven´t killed today, like they won´t kill tomorrow.

Like they can fold this page.