Chapter Text
All at once, Berthold Hawkeye begun to teach his apprentice flame alchemy. He was frantic when teaching and forced him to have absolute attention on the matters at hand -- not a moment can be wasted, the chemistry and math is too important for his seventeen-year-old pupil to be distracted.
Roy almost drowns in all the knowledge being shoved into his brain all at once. If he had been given time to properly learn it he is sure it would be far easier for him to understand the new, almost forbidden alchemy his teacher was bestowing on him. He tries his hardest, though, to absorb all the information, and at the end of each day he thinks his hand will fall off from the furious writing he has to deal with.
He does find solace, though. The daughter of his teacher brings him tea every night, they had become close friends over the course of the past few months since he’s been here. She has never really had a true friend before, so she treasures his company, and he enjoys talking to her because he has someone here who is closer to his age, which is a welcome thing. Riza feels sorry for him, and tries to make up for the way that her father is working him to the bone. Really, their daily tea break is the only break the either of them get. Roy studies even after her father lets him go, and his head is constantly swimming with alchemic equations and chemical compounds. Riza stays up late at night, unable to sleep because of flame alchemy as well.
Roy is constantly learning and working until the day Berthold dies. He coughs up blood furiously -- he had been for weeks and months before, into his handkerchief while in the middle of teaching a lesson -- in his bed and Roy hears him and immediately runs to his master’s room. He holds him as he begins to topple out of his bed, struggling to keep him upright and from knocking him over. He hopes Riza can’t hear the commotion just as he hears her voice from the doorway.
“Roy…?”
He glances behind him and sees her holding onto the doorframe, staring with widened eyes at him holding her dead father in his arms, blood covering his shirt.
Roy doesn’t know what to say.
Berthold dies a week before Riza turns sixteen, on a hot and sticky night in the summer. They bury him and spend as little money as possible on it, after all only the two of them are in attendance. He realizes, while they’re standing at his grave, that he should ask her what’s to become of her life -- and when he does, she goes pale.
“I certainly can’t live alone,” she exhales. Her hands grip the edge of her coat. “I guess I’ll have to make do. He at least made sure I was educated, I could become a teacher or something like that in the future.”
She looks forlorn, and Roy hates to see her like this. Riza really is his closest friend; they share inside jokes that went over Berthold’s head, he knows about what happened to her mother and she knows about his parents, they spend their alone time together when they can. He starts to think furiously about how to fix it and give her a stable life, when finally he realizes what he can do.
“Well, I won’t need to be his apprentice anymore. You can come home with me.”
Riza looks at him in shock. “What?”
“My aunt wouldn’t mind at all. She doesn’t really care who you are or where you came from as long as you get along with her,” he says. “At the worst, she’d probably make you do chores to make up for living there, but my sisters are fun to do them with, and…”
Roy realizes that he’s blabbering on, so he stops himself to give Riza a chance to think. She’s looked away from him, down at the grave. “I’d hate to make her look after me. She must be a busy woman.” She hesitates for a moment, before exhaling a deep breath. “But...I don’t really have any other choice.”
When they finally leave the cemetery, he calls Madame Christmas and informs her on everything that’s going on, and she tells him that he didn’t even have to ask, that she would let Riza live with them so long as she earns her keep. He looks over at Riza, who seems skittish even if she smiles when he tells her the news. He thanks his aunt again and again and hangs up. Before Roy can say anything, Riza lets out a deep exhale.
“My father’s research...even if he’s dead, it isn’t all gone.”
Roy furrows his eyebrows. He knows she doesn’t know much about alchemy, so surely she couldn’t know what his research meant. However, though, she stands, and the absolute last thing he expects is her to unbutton her blouse and wrap it around her waist.
Roy can’t believe his eyes.
There is a fascinating alchemic array tattoo in red ink on her back. He recognizes the middle symbol instantly -- the two triangles and the serpents are a sign of this being flame alchemy. Suddenly, it all comes together, that she was so tired in the mornings because she stayed up late letting her father tattoo his secrets on her back. He had heard of alchemists cleverly encrypting information in the form of cookbooks or using acronyms for their equations, but he had never seen something like this -- but this makes his blood boil.
“Riza…”
“He told me to give you the information if he died before he could. It’s all here, you just have to decipher it,” she tells him. She turns, she’s moved the shirt up to cover her chest. She can see how his hands are clenched, and she knows that if Berthold were alive now Roy would have already attacked him. She has to smooth things over. “I wanted to do it. I knew you were going to learn it, so I was okay with it.”
She doesn’t look scared or timid. Her resolve is incredible, Roy almost can’t handle everything he’s realizing all at once. Riza is more than just the first flame alchemist’s shy daughter; she is strength embodied, selfless and intelligent, because even with how estranged they were, Riza knew her father would want to immortalize his alchemy forever. However, his alchemy is dangerous, so Riza asks Roy for a favor.
“Flame alchemy is risky. I don’t want anyone but you using it. Promise me you’ll use it for good, and when you’ve finished…” she swallows now, closing her eyes tight. “Please burn the tattoo off of my back.”
Roy can feel his heart drop, but after his hesitation he agrees. Riza smiles, bittersweetly, and opens her eyes, looking straight at him. “Thank you.”
A month and a half later, they take a train to the capital. Riza has never left her little town before so the experience is exciting. Roy, though, even if he’s learned the alchemy he had always been striving for, feels a pang in his chest every time he glances at her. They leave for Central either way, him gifted with flame alchemy and her granted freedom from her father’s burden with a burnt back.
---
Riza doesn’t fit in with his family right away, but it doesn’t take her long to. His sisters all adore her, especially Vanessa, who dotes over her and often offers to take her out to eat or suggests she would look nice with longer hair. Madame Christmas has never been one to be upfront with her feelings, but it’s undeniable that she sees Riza like one of her own, that she loves her like the other sisters.
Riza insists on doing more chores than necessary to make up for living with them rent-free. Chris had said that she would have to in order to stay with them, but hadn’t told her to do as much as she was doing -- Riza claims, though, that she’s already well trained in doing household chores because of her father. Chris doesn’t complain, in fact she jokes that Riza is her favorite girl now, much to the other’s faux disdain.
Her and Roy grow closer because of her living with them. The two of them spend most of their time together, when Riza isn’t doing her chores and when Roy is home from running errands. He makes sure that she is safe and comfortable -- he feels almost constant aches of grief because of what he did to her back, he wants to make up for it in whatever way he can. Really, though, he isn’t sure how.
It doesn’t develop into more than just a close relationship, not yet. Despite that, Roy can’t deny that he looks forward to seeing her face every morning, and Riza spends her time while cooking wondering what he's up to when he’s out of the bar at another job. They won’t admit it to each other, but both teens feel their hearts swell and stomach flutter when they see the other -- it’s like the world stops when they’re together, and all they have to worry about are themselves, even if it’s just a normal conversation about what Riza is making for dinner. Neither know how to define it.
All of his sisters make fun of them, say that they’ll get married when they grow old enough to realize that how they feel about each other is more than a platonic feeling. Riza always rolls her eyes, but Roy always falls victim to the teasing and blushes a deep crimson while his sisters laugh.
Riza, though, is confronted with the realization far before he is. Although Roy knew that he felt something deeper than friendship for her, he never identified what it was, mostly because he was too nervous to acknowledge it. Riza, however, realizes that she is in love with him on a winter day a few weeks after his eighteenth birthday. They were out running errands for Christmas, doing the grocery shopping for her, because she couldn’t be damned to step foot out in the cold. Roy is chatting with the florist whose shop they had decided to visit when it hits her.
He only has a few more weeks until he goes off to the military academy. He had decided to join because, as he had told all his sisters and Riza and Christmas, he wants to help his country however he could, in whatever way he can. There is a nasty war brewing in the East, and he wants to help by becoming a soldier, to help defend against threats. It was ambitious for someone young like him, but they all supported him, and he had even saved up money to help pay for the academy. It didn’t take as much convincing as he had thought it would for his aunt to agree to send him off -- she jokes, dryly, that military school would finally get him out of her hair. His sisters all made up fantastic stories about Roy in the future, when he is the best general in Amestris, and tell him that he needs to remember to call and even write them while he’s away. Riza, though, gets a sickly feeling in her stomach when he announces his decision, but still plasters on a smile all the same. She isn’t against him going, but part of her is worried; she doesn’t realize this until now, when he is talking to the kindly florist, because she suddenly remembers that their daily life will change in a few weeks because of his decision to go and become a soldier.
The world feels like it’s closing in on her. She has to look at the ground to regain her thoughts, until finally she reaches forward to tug lightly on the sleeve of his shirt. “We need to go home. It looks like it’s going to snow badly.”
The sky outside is clear and blue. However, after an apprehensive look, Roy buys the flowers that Christmas had asked for and follows Riza outside -- no, he rushes after her, because she is striding in front of him like she wants nothing more than to be rid of him.
“Riza, wait!” he calls out, politely pushing through the crowd of people on the streets, and when she ends up stopping for him, he jogs up the street to catch up with her. She doesn’t turn around to look at him just yet, but she knows he’s looking at her like he does when he knows something’s up. She can see the face now, eyebrows furrowed and eyes full of concern. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
No, she wants to say. No, I’m not okay, because you’re going to leave and nothing’s going to be the same, and most of all I’m going to miss you, and --
“I’m fine,” she says, but it sounds colder than she means it to. She stuffs her hands into her coat pockets and stares at the ground.
“No, you aren’t,” he counters. You’ve been acting weird lately. Less like yourself.”
The mere fact that he had been perceptive enough to make that connection could be enough to make her teenage self sigh and swoon, but she remembers that he’s grown up with women his whole life, so he is more in touch than other men are. She exhales raggedly, hesitates before she actually answers. “I’m worried about you.”
“Why? I’m fine.”
Riza sighs more aggressively now, slightly irritated. “Not about that kind of thing. But...” She turns finally to look him in the eye when she asks him her question. “Do you have to go?”
Her hair is windswept and her eyes are a deep brown that become even more endless when they’re filled with anxiety. Roy finds himself breathless for a moment while he looks at her. “What do you mean?”
“You know,” Riza says, not sounding annoyed but more like a bittersweet sort of somber, “Why do you want to join the military?”
Roy gives her a perplexed look, like the answer is obvious and she just can’t see it. “Because I want to help the country. You know that.”
Riza gives him a look, like she knows better than that. “That’s why everyone joins. You have to have another reason, right?”
Roy pauses, his face turning slightly red from nervousness or the biting cold wind, or both. Riza waits patiently for an answer. At last, he gives in, exhaling deeply. “You really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know if it will satisfy you.”
“Just tell me, Roy.”
He lets out a puff and she can see the air in the cold. “I want to protect you, and do good with my alchemy. And I don’t know how to do the second one by just being a normal citizen.”
Riza is left speechless. She understands the second part -- there isn’t much flame alchemy can do to help everyday people, and it’s a skill he should take to the national level. The first point, however, is debatable, and she feels taken aback when she finally puts it all together. “You don’t need to protect me. I can do it myself.”
“I know, but…” He places a hand to his forehead, closing his eyes tightly, probably so he doesn’t have to look at her as he says it. “I want to, because you’ve been through too much. You deserve a normal life and if I’m in the military, then I can get rid of threats that could hurt you and my family and people like you.”
Riza is struck with her revelation again. He is ever selfless and idealistic, he really has yet to be jaded by the world. She starts to think about their time together; when he brought her flowers just because he “had extra cash”, but she knows he wouldn’t have just wasted money on that; when he couldn’t finish burning her tattoo because he couldn’t bear to see her in pain; when he helped her with her chores so she wouldn’t feel overwhelmed; when he first saw her shoot a gun (she hunted when she lived with her father, because it was cheaper) and hit each animal she shot with perfect aim; when his eyes seemed to widen of their own volition and his mouth went agape when he first saw her in a fancy dress that his sisters had bought for her and insisted she try on. There are so many reasons, more than she can count, and she realizes all of this again and realizes at the same time that he must love her too, in his own way.
She waits for him to open his eyes again and a soft smile has twitched across her face.
“That’s very honorable,” she tells him. He flushes from embarrassment briefly before wiping it off with a smile. Her voice still sounds bittersweet, but he ignores it for now.
“Do you think so?” He asks, and she nods. He blushes again. Unsure of what to say, Roy changes the subject. “We should probably get home, now. I don’t want her to wonder what is taking us so long.”
Riza agrees, and she joins him again by his side, deciding that she will enjoy the time she has with him now and worry about his being gone later, when it matters. For now, they make their way home, with a comfortable silence falling between them. For just a moment, though, she decides to break it.
“Just be safe, okay? Don’t die.”
“I’ll try my best.”
---
Whenever Roy feels down in the Academy, like he got more than he bargained for, he gets a letter from Riza. It’s almost like she can read his mind, even from so far away.
In her letters (which are easier to write than for him to call, because if she isn’t home when he calls then she can’t call him back), she reveals that she decided to learn more about the espionage his sisters were so well trained in. She figured that, even if her father had made sure she was educated well when he was alive, there’s was nothing she really wanted to do involving education, or history, or language arts. She wants to help people, and she reasons that being a spy like the sisters would be her best option. They had supported her fully, even Madame Christmas chiming in with a, “It’d be a shame to let that aim of yours go to waste.”
Riza tells Roy that she is a natural at it. She’s only seventeen at this point so she hasn’t really gone on a mission, but all of their training is something she finds herself using in everyday life. If she does do a mission, it’s a joint one where she plays up the fact that she’s a teenage girl to convince men to meet the older sister, who takes it from there -- not surprisingly, she writes, the men in their twenties and thirties easily fall for the trick. She practices her shooting every day, improving with each shot she makes, and Christmas gives her a small but proud smirk when she hits the target each time with ease.
At the Academy, Roy is undergoing his own training. The military is much more harrowing and difficult than he had bargained for, even if he knew that it wouldn’t be a cake walk. He writes Riza every day when he has downtime, and calls home when he’s allowed. He finds himself missing her more than he thought he would; he knew he would be homesick but when he thinks of home, his mind first floats over to her. Plenty of the men at the Academy brag to others about their girlfriends or even fianceés back home, and he wishes he could boast about Riza, about her intelligence and kindness and cleverness, about her brilliant golden hair and deep brown eyes. He realized too late that he loves her, and now he is paying the price.
One of the men who brags about his girl is Maes Hughes -- a man who doesn’t even have a girlfriend to begin with. He informs Roy that he’s in the military to fight for the women he’ll have in the future and that this is the first step. Roy laughs at his ridiculousness, and the two of them laugh together while putting their rifles back into their lockers.
Maes asks Roy one day during lunch if he has any one back home. Roy knows right away that he means any girlfriends. For some reason, plenty of the men here seem obsessed with other men’s love lives -- probably to make them feel inferior for not having one, or for not being with as many women as they should be. Roy finds it all ridiculous, but he knows Maes is genuinely curious, so Roy answers truthfully. At least, as truthfully as he can, because he knows Riza wouldn’t want him to call them something they’re not without her permission.
“Actually, my friend back home. Her name is Riza. We’re not really dating, but…”
“What do you mean, ‘we’re not really dating”?” Maes asks, incredulous. “I don’t mean to be a snoop, but I’ve seen that she writes you letters. Long ones too. You aren’t fooling me.”
He takes Roy by surprise, with his knowing look and smirk on his face. “Since when did you become an expert on her?”
“I’m not. Just stating the obvious.”
The rest of the day, and for weeks after, the small conversation haunts Roy. He is almost glad he didn’t tell her he loves her, not when he could be sent into war at any moment and die soon thereafter. It was the life of soldiers, at least those who were weak-willed; Roy decides not to be, for Riza and his family’s sake.
There’s a war brewing in the East. The government took over Ishval and now the citizens of the small nation are trying to push back, protesting against the sudden invasion only to have their voices silenced. Riza hears about it from one of the military officials who frequents the bar, who never notices her so he talks openly to Christmas.
“There’s a war coming any day now,” he tells her, and Riza listens while she dries the dishes. “Word is that Bradley already waged it. The Ishvalans don’t stand a chance. You should pray that your nephew doesn’t get sent in. I’ve heard that he probably will, though; he’s at the top of his class.”
Riza hears this and she worries her lip, then suddenly sets the plate she had been drying down with a clatter to run upstairs to her room. She immediately sits at her desk and pulls out stationery, and begins writing furiously. She tells Roy what she’s heard, that he needs to be careful and prepared for anything that happens to him. She feels a twisting knot in the pit of her stomach, and she tries to brush it away but to no avail. She doesn’t want to imagine him coming home in a casket with the Amestrian flag draped over him. Even if he had told her he was willing to die for their country, she doesn’t want him to. She wants Roy to come home safe and sound.
When she seals the envelope, she ignores the tear that drops on the thick paper.
The four years that he’s in the Academy pass unbearably slowly. He comes to visit when he has leave, but the few days to weeks he’s home don’t suffice, not for the two of them. Riza is finally an adult and is busy on her own small espionage missions, often not coming home until late at night or early that morning. Roy spends time out and about with Maes, or studying for the academy. They don’t get many moments alone and when they do, they’re fleeting; nothing more than a passing glance, a brush against each other, a few words exchanged here or there. They feel farther away than before, but in their letters they feel closer than ever. Roy never finds the right time to confess how he feels, and it bothers him every day he doesn’t tell her that he loves her.
He finally decides that he’s done dancing around her when he graduates from the Academy. It isn’t fair to her and when he sees her sitting in the crowd at his graduation day, more reserved than the sisters surrounding her, he smiles at her and she returns the look on a smaller scale. When he gets to come home, after a victory dinner for actually staying with his goals, he wanders upstairs and to her room. She’s brushing her hair out of her bun and she’s changed into more comfortable pajamas, and he takes a moment to marvel at her, at the simple domesticity. Riza glances at him when she finally notices him, and while she doesn’t say anything he closes the door behind him so they can have privacy.
“Is something up?” she asks, setting her hair brush down. He steps closer to her. He hasn’t undressed himself and is still stuck in the clothes he’d been wearing all day, his new military blues. Riza notices that he fills out the uniform nicely; that when he went to hug her after graduation, she found herself staring at him a little too long. He looks like a man now, and the entire idea thrills her. However, he is still as awkward with women as any other boy. His hands are sweaty and suddenly he’s incredibly nervous.
Riza isn’t just a teenage girl anymore. Her birthday is two weeks away -- she has the disadvantage of being born in the summer, so for now she’s still only nineteen compared to his twenty-one. She’s a woman now, her body has changed and he can see it through her pajamas, the button up cotton shirt and pants don’t hide her hips or her chest. This is much more daunting that before. He’s never really flirted or even been with a woman, and he wonders, even though he’s grown up around nothing but women, if they’re different from girls. But then, it’s Riza, and she hasn’t changed, but he feels like he’s missed so much. Finally, he finds it in him to speak.
“I wanted to tell you something. Something I’ve meant to tell you for the past four years.” It comes out sounding confident, even if he didn’t mean for it to. Riza still isn’t used to the new deep, rich quality of his voice since it’s dropped. She finds that she likes it.
“What is it?” she asks, her fingers absentmindedly twining into a lock of hair at her chest. She twirls the strands and he swallows deeply, he still isn’t used to her longer hair. She looks at him with curious eyes, and he gets a feeling that she knows what he’s going to say.
It’s almost amazing how they don’t have to be poetic with each other, because just a few words say it all.
Even so, Roy says more than he needs to.
“I’m in love with you. I love you. I think I have been, ever since we met. But I was too stupid to realize it, and I feel awful for making you wonder, but now you know, and I…”
Riza presses a finger to his lips, the one she had been using to play with her hair. He looks down at her owlishly, and a small smile graces her lips. “You don’t have to say all that. I know.”
Roy is still gathering himself when she leans up to kiss him.
Her lips are warm and plush, and he wonders idly if she had prepared herself for this or if she was always this soft. He kisses her back after a moment, and she takes it upon herself to deepen the kiss, pressing her hands against his chest, pulling at his jacket. He matches her ferocity, moving to wrap his arms around her to pull her closer to him. When his hand begins to slip lower from her back, she stops, pulling back from him. Her face is different shades of pink and red, she is breathless and beautiful. She quirks an eyebrow at him and that’s all he needs. He lifts her up by her rear, eliciting a sharp gasp and then giggle from her, and sets her down on the bed as they begin to make up for four years.