Work Text:
When it rains they make love with the lights off.
(in case there´s thunder and lighting, and the room would light up, like they have, to each other)
Roy kisses her back, and her hair is wet and it sticks to his face, holding on to him, the invisible ties made visible through touch. He runs his hands over the scars and the scars under the scars, the line of ink to the line of fire; the little kisses tickle her, the sound she makes is low and small, Roy shifts his weight on her, he loves these little noises only he gets to hear.
(she is like a buried ancient ruin and he the only fit to discover her secret; under the sand, he can read history on the skin of the underside of her arms, he digs and uncovers, uncaps and discovers, the only map available his own body)
Her hair is full of water and her skin is made of sand. Riza, he calls, and he only says her first name in this darkness, this shelter, the rain calling them from outside the window, tapping on the window.
(Riza, he calls, my scars are on the inside of my skin, engraved in my bones, poisoning my blood)
Hawkeye falls asleep to the feel of his hands over her shoulders, massaging, burying the thumbs between bone and skin, skin and bone again, always, it´s all there is. She asks him to tell her stories, she likes when he reads her, she likes when he talks with himself and to the walls, she likes when he whispers things to her ear, when he is sure she is almost asleep.
“Remember when we first moved to East?” Many of his stories start that way –remember? Because this is history, the history that can´t be told, that won´t be told, history between the panels, left undrawn, in the silence of the white paper, and Roy and Hawkeye slipping through that window of possibility. Remember? We have to tell us our story each day, so we can know it happened, so we can know it can, again.
“Remember when we first moved to East? The day you got your phone line installed? You told me the number and I didn´t have anything to write it on, I didn´t have my notebook on. I wrote the number on my arm, like a lovesick schoolgirl. Then I could have written it down when I got to the office, but I liked the feeling of those numbers on my skin. Like you were tattooed into me. I didn´t call you that night, but I stared at the number for a long time. When I showered, I kept my arm out of the water.”
Roy kisses her neck, her hair smelling of rain. The rain keeps knocking at the window, like a witness unwilling to be kept out. They leave the lights off in case of lightning and when Roy bends to kiss her all he sees is the blue outline of her shoulder, diffused moonlight playing over her face, over her closed eyelids.
Hawkeye turns to her side, taking his hands with her, placing them over her breasts. His chest is against her back and her scars burn into him -i am the alchemist and yet how you burn all the way to the heart- until they don´t know whose scars they are. In that moment her hair looks so dark she could be a stranger to him, but for her smell, and the raw and familiar softness of her body, and the pattern of her breath Roy knows like one would know a favourite movement in a symphony. In moments like this Roy wants to call her “beautiful”, but he realizes he would have to invent a whole new language for that.
(he never calls her “beautiful” and Hawkeye loves him for that; she cherishes all the words he never gets to say, when other men would, she cherishes his silence like he had done with the number on his arm)
There´s so much work these days, so much danger, so much weight to carry over the shoulders, that they get used to making love in the late hours of the night, and exhaustion colours these nights like in a dream, when sex is like a 3 a.m. stream-of-consciousness prose piece and instead of calling her “beautiful” and all the words that have not yet been invented but Roy feels they should, for her, instead he runs his fingers over the bridge of her nose, his fingerprints on her lips (his fingerprints, this is who i am, here, only here).
When it rains, they make love with the lights off. In case there´s lightning, thunder.