title: the ash of ishval
fandom: fullmetal alchemist: brotherhood
rating: t
pairing: roy mustang/riza hawkeye
content warning: descriptions of pseudo-surgical procedures (riza's tattoo)
summary: roy burns riza clean
note: fills the 'resolution' square on my bingo card. also, along with my works for 'ice' and 'fledgling,' this fulfills the requirement for the 'viceroy of fantasy' badge.


In Ishval, it seemed there was a new stigmata every day. Something to sear itself into the landscape of the mind, to scab and scar, indelible as blood on the hems of uniform sleeves.

Roy sat on his cot with his head in his hands and begged for it to be over. For the sun to be the sun again, no longer a furnace for the branding iron of war.

When Riza sat him down that night, after they’d taken the slow trains home, after he’d carried the few boxes of her things into her cramped East City apartment, he knew it was far from over.

“He did what to you?” The words tangled behind Roy’s teeth, had to be forced out, measured, one by one. He felt his fingers clench around the handle of his teacup.

Riza sighed, rearranged her hands in her lap. “He couldn’t... My father was not a trusting man. He would never have published his research. Before he died, he burned all his notes and... left them with me.”

“On your back. Like he owned you.”

She said nothing. Wouldn’t meet Roy’s eye, perhaps knew what she would find there.

“I need you to get rid of it,” she said, after a moment. Her rasping voice only just scraped above a whisper.

“You’re asking me to... No, I won’t.” Roy could hear the grind of his teeth.

“It isn’t a suggestion,” she said, leveling her voice. Searching for that ironclad calm timbre that had so long been her shield. “You know what Flame Alchemy can do. If you don’t destroy it, I’ll do it myself.”

Until he died he would remember the burn of the acquiescence.

xxx

It was hot that day. The crying shame of summer, the white sun overhead threatening to fall. Roy could barely open his eyes on his forced march down the street.

The bag from the pharmacist weighted down his hands. Only peroxide and bandages, but it may as well have been a corpse, a severed head.

Riza answered her door tied tight into a threadbare robe. Told him not to ask her if she was certain.

Roy wondered, not for the first time, how old she really was. Too young, for sure, to be so sure about anything. To be so grave. He wondered where they would be, the two of them, if it hadn’t been for the war. For alchemy in the first place. Apart, but better off.

It was a useless line of inquiry. He followed her inside.

Even though she faced away, Roy turned as she removed the robe. She folded it, laid it on a chair. He wondered if she was stalling--but that wasn’t it. She’d been a sniper. She was lining up the shot. Forcing her thoughts right.

He stepped closer, all the sureness, the deftness gone from him. Stood so close he could feel the heat pour off her skin. Could smell the sharp tang of sweat as it mixed with the dust in the air, the ash of Ishval.

The tattoo was massive--it was only by virtue of her uniform that Roy hadn’t seen it before. The edges of it ran and faded, but the design remained. The lettering was tiny, the symbols made inexpert only by the medium. It must have taken hours, hours of stillness. Perhaps days. Roy’s fingers curled within his gloves, fist clenched almost quick enough to spark.

“I’m ready.” Riza didn’t waver as she said it--not her body, not her mind, not her voice. Roy heard the dull knock of clenching teeth as she braced, her clipped fingernails digging into her shoulders.

She let a scream die half-formed in her throat, choking herself silent.

For years, Roy would hear her ragged breathing if he looked at her too long.

xxx

“This will sting.”

“I know,” she said, her forehead pressed to the top of her secondhand table. Roy had asked her if she’d wanted to lie down on her bed, or her tattered sofa, but she’d declined. Seated herself only after she’d seen her dishbasin filled with water, Roy’s white gloves swapped for rubber.

Roy sighed, wet a clean rag with peroxide. Pressed it to her skin, braced for a wince that never came.

“I’m sorry. I wish... I wish there was another way to do this.” He stared sober into the wound--more ruined flesh, familiar. Or, it should have been. Roy had never examined it so closely, never kept his eyes on it for longer than he absolutely had to. And that was never very long.

“Don’t be,” Riza said, her tone unshakable even as she shivered. “This was the only way. I’d have been angry if you refused.”

He couldn’t think of what it would have been like, had she been alone. Couldn’t fathom the pain of it, couldn’t fathom how.

Roy’s hands fell still, suspended above Riza’s back. A drop of blood-peroxide fell from the rag, rolled down what sweat-filmed skin was left.

There was nothing for it. He’d never hesitated in Ishval, he couldn’t start with it now. Not when she was here, not when the grim task before him would have actually helped something. Not if he ever, ever wanted to respect himself again.

She sat silently as he cleaned her wounds, found a mindless cycle of motion that could remove him, if only a little, from the hot coals in his stomach. He swallowed, finding over and over that his throat was dry.

This until he’d finished, until he’d wound her firm-gentle in white linen, gave her his best guess on when to change the dressings. He’d thought she might sit up, might face him, now the bandages covered her chest. She didn’t, just sat in the position he’d put her in, sitting stiff on the edge of the kitchen chair. She dropped her arms, folded them in her lap.

“This is only the beginning,” Riza said.

“I know.”

“I don’t know if anyone can fix it, much less you or I.”

“It?” Roy asked, laying the last rag in the basin of tainted water.

“Anything,” she clarified. “But I have to try.”

“I know. I want to...to cut out the cancer that allowed all of this to happen. I want nothing like this to happen ever again. And I--I want to make what reparations I can.”

Riza sighed. “Then it’s you and me.”

“You and me?”

“You’ll need someone to watch your back. As will I.”

“Ah. You and me.”

And Roy remembered that the clearest, standing with locked knees in that dingy apartment, staring into the back of her head. Lightheaded from the heat, both of them dripping aseptic but neither of them clean.

Clean, no. Perhaps never. But galvanized, reforged, sowing seeds into the ash.