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He still couldn’t get over the ridged pink making mountain ranges over the skin of her back. Her skin puckered and shone, gleaming with the slow dribbling of pus leaking down the slopes of scars, over blackened tips and fault lines of dried blood.
She stirred and he jolted to attention as the paper on her hospital bed crackled. He winced when he remembered the harsh crackle of red leaping from his fingers, hissing through the air until it pressed against the white, clean skin of her neck.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered.
His voice was choked and weak, and even if she had been awake and conscious, he doubted that she would have heard him. He was a coward, he thought. A coward for shirking his duty to her, a coward for regretting releasing her from her fetters, and a coward from fearing her pain more than he feared her strength.
“I’m sorry, Riza,” he managed in a slightly louder voice.
The heavy pump of adrenaline still laced his blood, putting everything into garish, saccharine detail. He stared at the smears on the sides of the hospital paper that had been left by her writhing body when the doctors first laid her down while he stood paralyzed mere feet away as they tried to fix the damage he had wrought on her body. He could tell each hair apart on her head, the solid yellow glowing painfully like an over-bright beacon on the starched white pillow and on the bloodless color of her cheeks. He could only see one half of her face, her eyelashes like the thin line of a black bruise resting in a crescent beneath her closed eyelid. The skin beneath her visible eye was tender with anxiety, and painted in a purple and red mural as a testament to the sleepless nights she had spent leading up to tonight’s ordeal.
He remembered coming inside her house, having vomited twice that afternoon, hoping to see a hint of doubt in her face that he could use to change her mind. All he saw was the quiet, dignified resolve of her face, unwavering even when he broke down in shame and self-disgust before they started.
She had held him tightly as he shook, begging her to change her mind, begging her to trust that he wouldn’t let anyone exploit the secrets on her back, without him having to burn them away. She told him that the only weapon she would carry was one that she could wield herself.
Please, Roy. I don’t want to do this on my own. Please don’t make me.
He took in a shuddering breath, forcing himself back to his place at her bedside. He didn’t doubt he would spend plenty of time remembering standing at her back, listening to her smother sounds of pain and to the eventual silence of her losing consciousness. He would pay his price in due time, but he owed it to her to be present during her recovery.
She shifted again and he looked back down to the mass of streaking color on her bare back.
“Roy.”
His eyes snapped to her face and he stumbled to his feet, ready to call one of the doctors back. She gave him a thin smile, lips awfully red against white skin.
“You’re awake,” he breathed.
She blinked at him, slow and sleepy as she took in his face. He waited for the flicker of resentment or distrust, or even worse, completely rational fear. She had every right to fear him now that she had felt the extent of his abilities against her own skin.
But she just looked up at him. The silent weight of gratitude began to seep into her eyes, along with relief. He felt himself choke as his throat seized up with remorse. He had done this to her. He had painted her bloody, singed, and skinless. He opened his mouth to get out another apology, one that she would hear this time, but she interrupted him.
“Thank you.”
A wave of something nameless seared through him as she stared up at him, open and vulnerable. Her eyes held something new in them. They were bright with a quality he remembered when he had first met her, when he was naïve and nervous before he started his training with her father. Her eyes were bright with the release of her burden, with her memory of a time before she had become a walking tomb for his sins in Ishval. She was free.
He felt wetness working its way down his cheeks as he looked at her, and suddenly she was beautiful beyond belief. The crimson mass on her back filled with purples and greys and blacks was like a mirage, the gaping hole of her wound an opening that led to a place where redemption and relief existed. He looked down at her face and she smiled up at him again, knowing he was beginning to see it.
“Thank you,” she whispered again.
He couldn’t hold back a messy sob as he sank back down into his seat and reached for her hand that rested limp at her side. He pressed it into his face and let himself be young, and nervous, and hopeful again.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered against her skin, and they both knew he was apologizing for more than the ruby red treasure trove of mangled flesh on her back. He was apologizing for the weight of the tattoo that she had upheld for so long, for the heat of the sun and bloody sand that he knew they would both feel for the rest of their lives, and for his sheer helplessness as he sat in civilian clothes at her bedside, having refused to burn her in uniform. This release was theirs, and no sand could soak it up and no government could claim it for itself.
“It’s going to be all right.”
He lifted his eyes from her hand, and when they rested on her face and on her back, he saw the colors of kingdom come.