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When Roy Mustang first sees the Hawk’s Eye on the battlefields, he mourns that even she has been touched by the atrocities of this war. The next time he sees her he wonders how he never noticed the radiance of her skin before it became covered in sweat-stained sand and dirt. She’s already granted him access to the secrets inscribed on her back, but the tattoo is like clothing and Roy realizes he’s never had the chance to notice her before now. Now, even under layers of grime, or perhaps because of them, she is glowing. He closes his eyes and the afterimage of her light remains.
Riza Hawkeye isn’t a light person, at least, not anymore. She’s too practical for extended metaphors and symbolism, or she pretends to be, but nonetheless even Roy’s brightest flames cannot hold a candle to her. He decides to ignore his propensity for hopeless romanticism and burns another village, fills his mind with his duty to avoid insistent thoughts of his former master’s daughter.
The next thing he burns is her back. He is used to searing flesh by now but it has never felt so intimate, and he would run away from it all, like he has learned to do with all of his emotions where Hawkeye is concerned, but she has told him if he won’t deface her back she’ll scar it herself and he doesn’t want her to hurt more than she has to.
Later, several years later, he is on a balcony surveying a military party when she comes and stands next to him. She doesn’t say anything, and neither does he, but her arm rests ever so slightly against his, enough to make him wonder if it’s intentional but not enough to be a certainty, and the thrill of her touch makes his bones feel hollow.
Two days after that and she’s his first lieutenant, his bodyguard, his executioner, and his queen.
More time passes. They fall into comfortable habits, working together, a dance that brings them closer and apart again, like an orbit. There are a few days—more than a few days—when he even catches himself flirting with her. And then he remembers how many times he has wanted to reach out and brush his finger lightly against her shoulder and decides that this is a bad idea, everything is a bad idea, maybe he should go pester Havoc about his lack of a girlfriend to make himself feel better.
They never say I love you or I need you. They say don’t die.
Now Riza Hawkeye is dying. He can see her life flowing out of her in the form of blood against the incandescence of her skin, and he can’t lose her he isn’t going to lose her not her too and she’s ordering him not to save her in a heartbreakingly familiar glare.
Now she is breathing again, and in his arms, and in all of the times he’s dreamt of holding her he never thought it would come to this.
Now he does not see. He is sitting in a hospital bed in a world gone dark, and he reaches for her and he grabs her hand because he needs to know that she is here, too, that she is here with him, that the reason for this blackness isn’t her absence from his plane of existence. And then he realizes what he’s doing and he apologizes, and he can hear the smirk in her voice when she tells him she’s been wondering when he’d finally get around to doing that. She leans in and kisses his eyelids, and her skin still smells like desert sands, or maybe that’s just a memory of the first time he realized she’d saved his life.