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He can recognise the steps approaching his room. The hospital is almost empty at this hour, and the nurses only check on him every hour, so the clinking of military boots echoes and amplifies in the dim lighted corridor. Still, Roy would know that way of walking even if it were just a faint sound.
He has not been able to sleep tonight but when he hears the reluctant hand that reaches to push the door he closes his eyes and evens his breathing, and does his best to hide the beginning of a smile in the corner of his lips.
The air in the room lifts and changes when Hawkeye enters. She reaches the side of the bed swiftly but soundlessly.
She touches his forehead, gingerly peering as if she expects to be wounds in the scalp, too. She is touching Roy with peculiar caresses, tapping him with the tips of her fingers, dabbing at the edges of his hospital clothes to brush his collar-bone, shaking lightly, as if touching glass, afraid it might break.
In the hospital air, reeking of ethanol and sickness, her smell (flowers, wildflowers that have just been picked up) stands out and Roy opens his eyes to it.
“Sorry, I didn´t mean to wake you, I just…”
She just had to make sure he was alive, listen to his heartbeat and feeling his warmth near, even if he still looks pale, so pale.
“It´s fine.”
He is still giving into her touch, craving it, its familiarity, its comfort. She grazes his temple with the side of her hand and it´s almost desperate the way they need to be touching, to be connecting even if it´s just an inch of skin. Even if it´s just fleeting.
“I´m sorry.”
“I´ve said…”
“No. Not about it.”
Of course not. He knows. But he doesn´t want to hear about it. He has more than enough dealing with his own guilt to see Hawkeye so hurt.
“Riza…”
“I couldn´t protect you.”
There was so much blood, Hawkeye remembers, and his pulse was so faint that for a moment she couldn´t find it. That was the longest moment of her life.
“I don´t blame you.”
“I swore to protect you, and when the time came I couldn´t.”
“It was me who told you to stay out of it.”
Not enough, not enough.
Hawkeye fixes her gaze on the rough material of the sheets, fidgeting with its wrinkles, unable to look up.
“I cannot protect you, it´d be better if I just-”
“Don´t say that.”
He looks at her hand on the mattress, feels the temptation to hold it, but it would be so easy, a passing moment of comfort but not what Hawkeye needs. She´s in need of something more consistent, something that tells her she has her room in Roy´s life.
“You have protected me many times over these years. It doesn´t have to be from physical danger.”
She doesn´t seem to react at first, and he wonders if his words are ever going to be good enough for this woman.
“I was scared” she says very quietly, very matter-of-factly.
He smiles, relieved, playing with a rebellious lock of her in the back of her neck and finds out that the motion comforts them both.
“I know. I was scared, too.”
“Roy… I…”
“It´s okay.”
“But…”
“We are not very expressive people. It´s fine. Even if you don´t say it. I know.”
But there are so many understatements in their lives already, she doesn´t want to risk him not knowing, risk him ever doubting.
“Yes, but if you were to walk to your death I would like you to walk with the memory of me saying it.”
“But you don´t have to say it today, if you don´t want.”
“I want but…”
Suddenly she bends to kiss him. It´s a hurried kiss, almost desperate as if Hawkeye needed to taste him to make sure he´s alive. He is gladly surprised of her initiative, her eagerness, he lets her do for a while before returning the kiss. And the he can´t get enough of her, he can´t get closer, he wants to touch and savour and own everything.
“These wounds are already healing,” he whispers to her neck, “it will be alright soon. But if you leave me…” he stops before he can say anything unpardonably sappy.
He smiles, knowing how overly romantic and pathetic that sounded, how strange of him. She looks at him in the same amazement, a light smirk on her mouth.
“Yes, I know. I overdid it.”
But then the pause is gone and Hawkeye is all over him again, like a hungry animal, and Roy responding in kind, stretching to the edge of the bed, meeting Hawkeye half-way, smiling against her teeth, breathing from her lungs, touching everywhere he can and with Hawkeye under his hands, aching to be touched everywhere.
Tasting this moment, breathing, breathing against his mouth Hawkeye puts her hand on his chest, feeling the heartbeat, delighting in it, encompassing her kisses to the wonderful music running through his veins.
Alive, alive, alive, she repeats, half-hysterically. Alive and here, here, here, and with me.
He lifts a leg and propels himself, struggling to get closer.
“Roy…”
But he is too busy unbuttoning the collar of her coat and kissing the hollow of her neck.
“We can´t, your wound…”
“I´ll be careful. We can still do… things.”
So he stops her arguing with another kiss, as she is about to say something more but he catches her open mouth and swallows the words.
In a sudden change of mind she pushes him against the bed head, carefully but unleashed, her knee threatening to climb up to bed.
She lifts Roy´s hospital gown to see his wounds. Roy has been losing weight these months, she had noticed, but now it is evident. His stomach is a bit cold to the touch, the room is not very well heated and Roy finds himself shivering under the caress.
Her fingertip brushes the scar. It´s a relatively small scar for the amount of blood she saw, and the doctors had done a good job stitching. She would have to get used to this mark, too, a new alteration to the map that is Roy´s body.
A map she knows by heart.
Then Roy runs her left hand down all her uniform, frustrated but excited by so many clothes between them, and slides it into her trousers with just enough pressure to undone the first button.
“Roy…”
He´ll have none of that “Roy” and “but”.
She clears her throat.
“We could be seen, sir.”
Roy snaps his head up, with a little twitch of amused disappointment, but he´s not about to give up yet, and while his fingers play with the pubic hair his tongue finds a sensitive spot under Hawkeye´s earlobe.
“The nurses won´t be back for half an hour or so…”
Hawkeye smiles and turns to catch Roy´s mouth, only too happy to lack anymore excuses.
And then two animals are on her. One, Roy´s mouth, devouring and feasting, and the other, Roy´s hand, swift and expert and unforgiving. Hawkeye pants inside his mouth, marvelled at the casualness with which he changes the rhythm, marvelled at how one can make love thousand times to the same man and still, after all, find his touch arousing.
She bites her lower lip, stiffing her body to give a minimum impression of control. Roy shakes his head, amused and challenged by her refuse to let go. They are both two people very concerned with not seeming weak in front of the rest, and sometimes it was a habit hard to break, even in private, but they share an unspoken agreement that the other would put a stop to that habit as soon as they are alone.
So he quickens the pace and offers no pity to Riza, and she has no escape, no other way out than the way in, to fall completely into him.
Roy smiles just like a magician about to cast his illusion.
It is as if his fingers were a completely different identity, one separated from his smirk when he bites Hawkeye´s lower lip and from his right hand leaving kisses like butterflies on the burnt skin of her neck.
“To think something like this was done to you” he said in a husky, low voice, almost dangerous, while lightly touching the bruises.
She know very well the possessive accent lurking in his words, and how it always manages to stir something inside of her.
It´s like they are connected in a cellular level. His desire fuels hers and her satisfaction tastes much like victory to him. They have been at this dance for years, until the synchronization is perfect.
“Don´t close your eyes. I want to see you. I want you to see me.”
There is an edge of arrogance to his plea that Hawkeye loves.
“Don´t close your eyes.”
“That´s easy for you to say.”
And they both laugh in the same breath.
She tries to feed the two ravenous animals that consume her. On her mouth the beast that wants to posses her very essence, all bare teeth and swollen lips, and an intruder and searching tongue, memorizing her, claiming her skin as conquered territory. And under her waist, as ferocious as the other, the one wanting to release her, to unchained her, even if it was killing her in the process. The hum of blood in her ears is threatening to make her deaf, and still sensitive to Roy´s victorious gasps and the impatient tickling of his tongue, and the dead sound of his gown against her uniform.
The fingers moving deeper, curling.
There is nothing of me you don´t own.
Having Roy so near, clinging to his clothes until her chuckles have gone completely white, breathing his smell, unshaven, unwashed and sweating, makes her realize how close she´s come to losing it all.
Roy feels her freeze on the spot. He doesn´t stop but he embraces Hawkeye with his right arm, burying himself in her hair.
“What happens?”
She´s still moving with him but now he can hear desperation and breaking behind her moans.
“You were dying” she tells, biting his lips. “Fuck, you were dying on me and there wasn´t a single thing I could do about it.”
Roy caresses the back of her neck, soothingly, shutting her with half-whispered words and kisses, and she has almost stopped sobbing when she comes.
And then she breathes, breathes, for the first time in ages because Roy is here, this is his warmth, this is his smell and these his fingers slowly pulling out of her. Now she´s the one leaning into him, burying her face in his chest, letting it go, breathing him, his scent, his warmth, the softness of his half-whispered words.
The room reeks of sex, and death and guilt, but the faint scent of lilacs Hawkeye always carries with her reminds Roy that maybe, after all, and if they are able to hold each other like this, there is hope.
They wish they could belong here with each other and just be, but they know that after the thunder and the silence, awaits the world outside.