Work Text:
[one]
Four months, five months, just about the time when town names roll and blur one into the other and on the tongue, and Roy's arms hurt from shaking so many hands. Hawkeye hands him a bottle of water when the speeches are over, his throat hoarse with words full of sunlight and future. He is happy but weary.
Towns that have strange names, towns Roy almost couldn't place on the map; there are no trains reaching them, and no roads fit for a car.
When they reach their hotel room he places one hand on the small of Hawkeye's back and by the time they are inside the whole day is washed away, miraculously, in a moment. Hawkeye turns into Riza and he is no longer future-President-Mustang, he is no longer ex-General or hero-of-the-reconstruction. He is not the speech he gave this afternoon.
He is her lover, she is his partner, his hand undoing the knots in her hand, her kisses undoing the knots in the muscles of his shoulder, his back. The weariness of the day, the months, not quite forgotten, but turned into something else. Hired rooms tremble and bedside lamps whisper. Here they are pressed against each other and the door, while years between them wait outside, looking up at their windows as if streetlights.
[two]
`These people haven't known democracy in generations. Their parents didn't have it, and their parents' parents either. It's not that the idea is novel – they know what democracy is. It's that they are not familiar with the vocabulary. It's baffling. Even for me it's baffling, after all those years under a Fuhrer, to think about expressions like representation or voting. We have to find a way to talk about things that are so new to all of us.´
Roy doesn't stop talking about politics, not even in the shower. It makes Hawkeye smile. Six, seven months on and he is still excited about this. He runs his hands through his hair, shaking off the last traces of soap, and Hawkeye tiptoes and places a small kiss on the back of his neck. That seems to stop him talking.
`You are full of energy this morning,´ she comments with a grin.
He turns around. The water running makes a nice, musical sound. They are staying on a bed and breakfast, not a proper hotel, and the place looks lived in, loved, real. Roy grabs her hip, fingers sprayed on wet skin, pulls her to him. The water, reflected, deflected on her shoulder-blade, changes angle, splashes on the tiled floor. The shower curtain rustles like feathers. They make familiar movements in unfamiliar spaces.
His pre-breakfast mouth is hungry; Hawkeye chuckles against it. Their kisses are long and open-mouthed, taking care to remember breathing under all this water.
`Rebecca is waiting for us downstairs. The picture...´ she says. She trails off when he starts sucking on the skin under her right ear.
They should get going. They both like the almost-ritual of having Roy's picture taken on each village they visit, always with the mayor or the equivalent local authority. It's like building a newspaper-clippings album, on top of building a country. Roy's obsession with recording history so that history might never be lost, tampered with, misused again. Hawkeye is always there, in Roy's official pictures, never in the foreground and sometimes out of focus, sometimes just on the edge of the photograph, but she is always there.
`The picture will have to wait a bit longer,´ he breathes into her ear. She doesn't complain.
[three]
The others come and go and help but it's rare that they are all together; most of the time Breda and Fuery stay back in their headquarters in East to organize the campaign. The meaning of the word headquarters have changed so much for him that Roy is pressed to remember the days where his life was a blue uniform and imposing official buildings. Headquarters means a humble office on a second floor, the joy of constantly-ringing phones, the tiny restaurant down the street where the waiter knows their names and the cook knows how they like their food, whole afternoons spent on lazy contemplation around home-made desserts.
`Whatever happens,´ Roy says, arms over his head, resting his cheek on Hawkeye's leg, `I'll be glad to go home.´
She puts away the newspaper she is reading. Looks around. Another tiny hotel in another unnamed town.
`But this is fun, too,´ she tells him. She bends and kisses him upside down, her teeth grazing his upper lip and she can feel him stir. Their moments like this, when the work is done –although work is never done, not really– and they are alone, rinsed out of context and they look like lovers eloping, or running away, bedcovers like shields and the joke of giving false names at reception. That's what they look like now.
`Fun, yes,´ Roy agrees, sitting up and crawling on his knees over the bed, pulling Hawkeye (who is now Riza, completely and secretly Riza, but she also still is the figure at the edge of every photograph) down, on her back.
He spreads her legs apart and she knows his hands so well it's like Morse code, open-palmed on the inside of her thighs.
`It's fun because you are with me,´ he says honestly, his voice a little more thoughtful, a little more exposed than he meant to but that is all right.
Hawkeye closes her eyes and feels the room become every room they've been in while travelling; last week's hotel room, in the village with the almond trees guarding the main street, or next week's hotel room, going further east and further north, the mill town by the river, its water tinged with dye blue and red under sunshine. Every room is this moment. Roy's tongue inside her while his hand moves, serpent-like, skimming across her navel. She knows the scars of that palm so well, she knows the pain they caused to heal, and the rough edges of his ruined skin excite her, the callous patterns of it are able to stop her breath when Roy catches her nipple under it.
`Is this fun then?´ He teases, brushing her thigh with his nose. Hawkeye grabs his hair, twisting her fingers into a fist, drawing him back between her legs, impatient.
Impatient but she doesn't care. They are too old for pretences. He puts one hand under her knee and pushes her leg up. The new angle makes her shudder. She makes sounds that join up to form words. Pedestrian terms like his name and how much she loves him, how much she wants him. Expressions that are useless to anyone but them, that sound trite to anyone outside this room. This room that is every room.
[four]
They get stuck travelling along the little villages of the frontier to the East, with Xing starting just where the desert ends, but it never ends. There's the matter of Ishval and what are they going to do with it. Ishval does not exist any longer. It's a mark of something burnt on the ground, like gunpowder on sand. They talk to a lot of Ishvarites these days, Ishvarites who people like Roy and Hawkeye have spent years trying to ease from the word refugee to citizen but that is far from enough. Miles joins them during the trip down the border and he and Roy spend mornings and afternoons and many late-into-the-nights struggling to come up with ideas, arguing over the idea of Ishval, what was and what could still be, arguing until coffee cups are empty and arguments exhausted, only for everything to be repeated come the morning.
All those people, their skin, the colour of their eyes. Roy finds it hard not to think back on the war, and sometimes he gets into a gloomy mood. Even when they finally reach their bedroom he is unusually quiet.
He sits behind Hawkeye on the bed and carefully slips her shirt off her shoulders, slow like a litany.
He kisses the scarred flesh of her back, drawing new patterns over old, unintelligible wounds.
He runs his fingers over ruined maps, where he thinks he should have never travelled.
He rests his forehead between her shoulders, breathing quietly and sadly in a borrowed room.
Until Hawkeye turns around and pushes him back, against the wall. She sits up on the bed and sits down on Roy, dropping her weight like an anchor, legs propped on the mattress, and curled around Roy's ankles. She turns off the lights and she undresses him. He is not hard and when her hand find him, flesh still locked in old guilt, she has to draw him back to her groan by groan, whimper by whimper, she has to draw her name from his lips over and over until his body is familiar to himself again.
Tonight she fucks him slow and heavy, against the headboard of the bed, covering his eyes with her hand, breathing with him as she slides up and down his length, Roy almost still. She wants to fuck the last trace of unhappiness away from him. There's a history in this. She doesn't want to fuck away the bad memories, she wants to make them mean something. She guides his hand between her legs so that she can come when he does. The reassurance that their scars make them strong.
[five]
On the train back to East her hair falls over his shoulder when she falls asleep. It's two in the morning when he wakes up, his coat folded and tucked under her cheek to make her comfortable, and when did that happen. She used to be such a light-sleeper and now this, she thinks waiting up to his smell.
`What?´ she asks, still half-asleep, when she sees Roy watching, and grinning.
`Nothing.´
`I fell asleep.´
`It's fine. It's still the middle of the night.´
She looks outside and finds darkness and her own reflection peeking back at her from the window glass. From time to time they can hear the branch of a tree brush the carriages with a swooshing sound, but mostly it's the numbing, lullaby-like noise of the wheels on the tracks. They still have until morning until the train arrives.
`I feel a bit sad this is all over,´ Roy says.
`Maybe you will lose and have to do all this again,´ she teases him.
`Ha ha.´
`But I know what you mean,´ she admits, reaching her hand to his leg, caressing him where it fell, trailing a path down to his knee.
They have been doing this for six, seven month now, and they have been doing this even longer still, years of it; the exhilaration of shared desire doesn't seem to lose its edge. Maybe they are not ready to grow old, if that's what growing old means. So Roy touches two fingers to the skin of her wrist, his thumb crouched under her pulse.
`This is our last night on the road,´ he tells her, his voice charged, dripping.
She is fully awake now: the rattling on the carriage under her, and Roy's hand over her stomach, under her coat, moving upwards until setting, immodestly, over her right breast. His body is shrinking the distance between them.
`Roy...´ Their compartment is shut from the rest of the train, the door slid closed, but that doesn't mean they are safe, anyone could knock or simply walk in at any moment.
But she can feel the tugging of a smile under her palm when she closes one hand over his mouth; he is a loud one, and they have neighbours in this wagon.
`It would be a scandal,´ she says, but she pulling at his tie, pulling him to her.
`How can I expect to be a President without a couple of scandals behind me?´
There is no arguing with his kisses. There is no arguing with her own.
The train goes through a tunnel and for a moment the faint startlight disappears and they are covered in complicit darkness, the noise of the tunnel deafening for the first five seconds until it settles into a lively silence, darkness and silenced assuming the shapes of their bodies as they move closer to each other, with Roy sitting on Hawkeye's seat or Hawkeye invading his, no one can really tell. Thumbs in mouths and knuckles struggling against layers of clothes, one name inhaled and another exhaled, one feet on the floor, other pushing against the arm of the seat, the dry sound of a button being undone, the wet sound of flesh being undone. A scandal.