In his mind they fit together perfectly.
She is exactly the right size for him to tuck her head neatly under his chin. His hands are just large enough to cover hers and just the right shape to wrap around the curve of her waist. Her flesh is soft and yielding and it melds with his so completely that he can't tell where he ends and she begins. They move as one. They say precisely the right things, whispering everything and nothing and understanding all of it. They fill all the gaps and rifts and hollows in each other's hearts until they are whole again.
In reality they fumble awkwardly with their clothes. There are no grand and beautiful declarations of undying devotion, no profound, unspoken understandings shared in the language of skin against skin; he spouts a few clumsy, incoherent words as he kisses her, needy and over-eager, drawing blood from her dry, cracked lips. Her body is rigid against him, a soldier's body, the muscles stiff with tension. She flinches and grits her teeth whenever his hands meet the raised ridges of her scars.
He cannot stop remembering the haunted look he's seen in her eyes too often for one lifetime, the way she had once twitched and convulsed in agony as the scent of seared human flesh hung heavy in the air. The images are burned into his retinas, shifting from scene to painful scene, horrifically close and real even as she squirms warmly beneath him. He growls. His attack grows more desperate. His fingers dig into her hipbones. He wants her to forget. He wants to savor the taste of his name on her lips. Most of all, he wants her to smile in his arms as if his love makes up for everything.
It doesn't. They lie unsated in the dark.
He thinks of something Hughes said once, under the blazing Ishvalan sun. He can't recall the words, but he doesn't have to. The meaning is written in his friend's eyes and his wry smile and the way he'd gripped that faded letter fiercely in his hands like a lifeline. Love can make you whole, he'd said, dripping with sentiment and entirely sincere. One day it will put all your pieces back together.
It might even be true, sometimes—maybe for people like Maes. He wants very badly to believe it. He's trying, but faith is hard to muster in the face of an abyss, and what little he has keeps leaking out of the cracks in his heart.
She extracts herself quietly. He listens to the rustling of cloth as she dresses herself and the scrape of her boots on the floor as she retreats.
Today he is tired. The rain is pouring outside and he's let his coffee go cold. The stacks of reports and transfer requests and a thousand other kinds of forms that require his signature have never seemed more meaningless. His hand aches and his head hurts and the gray cast of the light is making him melancholy. He gives up on the paperwork for now and allows his mind to drift, idly wondering how the hell his whole life has led up to him sitting in this gloomy office with ink stains on his hands.
He doesn't know what started it, exactly, what tiny spark propelled him into his destiny. He supposes that doesn't really matter. At some point he had simply decided that there was a void inside of him that needed to be filled. He wanted to matter; he wanted to be somebody important and respected, somebody who could do great things and change the world for the better. It was childish, perhaps, but he'd been a child then, and even the most foolish dreams seem perfectly reasonable to a child. He thought it would be simple, that there was some kind of magical key he could turn that would make all the pieces fall into place, if he could only find it—there was never any reason for him to believe that, but he did.
He hoped that alchemy would be that key, that the wonder of creating and changing things and understanding the dance of the atoms that made up the universe would be more than enough. The long hours he spent poring over dusty old books brought no such wonder. No amount of begging could convince his master to teach him what he wanted to know. He grew restless. His thoughts turned to other things.
He directed his ambitions to the military next, with its grand titles and its power and its solemn oath to defend the people. He was going to build something bright and beautiful, with his hands and the strength of his back if not with alchemy, because he was arrogant enough to believe that he could. He rushed into it with damnable confidence, eager and hopeful, blissfully ignorant.
Whatever deity existed seemed to give him its blessing. Doors opened left and right. His master's daughter imparted him with all the secret knowledge he had ever dreamed of and a promise of something sweet and more secret still that she kept in her soft brown eyes. His superiors began to notice him, to place approving hands on his shoulders and tell him that he was meant to do great things. His heart soared.
The void did not fill; it grew.
He stumbled on the precipice as the edges crumbled under his feet like sand. As he gazed into the fire and the growing darkness, he saw what his arrogance and his childish desires had wrought. He knew for the first time what it truly was to have your soul eaten away from within. The insecurities he had felt, the need to be someone he was not—those were nothing compared to the guilt and the horror that now roared inside him, the knowledge that he had done things that were terribly and irrevocably wrong and that he could never pay for them no matter how hard he tried.
Had he been a different man, wiser, less selfish, he might have chosen to die. As it was, he clung to the same hope that he always had: the mad, optimistic conviction that if he could just find the right piece, he would be whole. That belief had already led him to his ruin, but this time, somehow, it had to lead him to his salvation. It had to. He had nothing else to lean on.
Even now, he chases that piece, that magic key. He tells himself that one day, he's going to stand at the top, and that will make everything better. And that's why he's here, isn't it? That's why he gets up every morning to come to this godforsaken office, why he simpers in front of people he detests and salutes cold-blooded murderers in the hallways. It's all part of the plan. But today, like so many days before, the goal seems impossibly far away, and he wonders if he really believes that he'll ever reach it, or if it will even matter if he does.
Hawkeye's measured footsteps make their way towards his desk. He thinks she's going to scold him, but instead she offers him a fresh cup of coffee, still sending ribbons of steam into the air. She doesn't say anything. She doesn't need to. The quirk of her eyebrow and the light pressure of her fingers on his as he takes the offered mug are enough.
Maybe this will give you enough energy to get back to work.
But I'm tired, his eyes answer. Everything is pointless and I'm so tired.
It will be worth it. Her thumb strokes the back of his hand once, briefly. Remember why you're here.
On an impulse, he catches her wrist. She looks him steadily in the eye. For one wild moment he thinks of kissing her senseless and holding her so tightly that they finally fit together. But then he remembers that he's tried that, and it didn't work. Deep inside he has known for a very long time that it won't be enough, won't complete him the way he wants it to no matter what Hughes said all those years ago in the desert, and confirming that fact again is only going to leave him aching.
She pulls away. He lets her. And then he grits his teeth and returns to his paperwork.
All of the pieces are falling away now.
Don't, she begs. It won't be worth it. It won't be enough. Please don't.
She's right. He knows that, no matter how much it pains him. Even if he saves her, it won't really matter. The world will end—and even if it doesn't he still won't be whole, not if he does what they want him to do. But he can't think clearly. It feels like all the blood leaking out of her neck is welling up inside of his body, blinding him, flooding his lungs so that he can't breathe. It's not that he doesn't know what choice to make; he'll do as she says, because they both know the alternative is unacceptable. What's making his head spin is the horrible thought of what comes after, that no matter how far he goes, he won't be complete without her, either. There's no way to win.
It turns out that he doesn't have to choose at all. He doesn't even have the power to do that. They make the choice for him; they take the pieces they need like they're nothing, leaving ragged edges behind.
She's still there, at least. He's grateful for that, especially now that the other pieces have gone. But he doesn't know what to do, where to go from here. No matter how he might try, no matter how many books on agriculture and Ishvalan culture they read him, the military had no use for a blind soldier; he would be discharged before he left his hospital bed. And that meant he'd never go as far as he'd hoped to go, never fill the void he's been so desperately trying to fill all his life.
He's frustrated and terrified, because never before has he felt this way, never before has he known with absolute certainty that there is no panacea, no magic key. If there ever was, it's gone now.
He gropes in the dark for whatever pieces are left. He doesn't know how to put them together.
In Ishval, tents begin to dot the barren landscape.
The sand is no longer red; the wind has covered everything with the same timeless, faceless dust of the desert. There's still rubble everywhere when they return, though. In time, some of it is cleared away. Some of it isn't. A few piles of broken white stone are too familiar for comfort, and when he stumbles across charred black patches or bullet holes, he feels as if a heavy rain is falling somewhere. She always tries to soothe him when that rain falls, placing her steady hand reassuringly on his shoulder. Sometimes she will even give his fingers a gentle squeeze. Somehow, that only makes him more afraid, only makes him think about how much it's going to hurt if he finds out it still isn't enough.
Logically, he knows he shouldn't be scared; he's got her, and he's finally doing something useful with his life, finally as close as he'll ever get to paying his unpayable debt. At least he has a chance now, at least that wasn't ripped away like he thought it had been. But he can't stop thinking about what happened the last time the pieces seemed to be coming together, how they'd torn themselves out of his grasp and left open wounds in their wake.
The pale buildings begin to rise, brick by brick, piece by piece. There are people again, and he can't help but be surprised to hear music and even the sound of laughter echoing through the ruins, to see signs of life where his memory tells him there should be only death and grief and silence. It's strange and overwhelming, and it makes him feel uneasy as he trudges through the sand, like the ground is going to give way under his feet at any second.
He pauses for a moment to rest his hand on the wall of a newly-built house, observing the cracks and chinks in the recycled bricks. He thinks of all the pieces he's hoped would be the last piece, and how none of them had been quite enough. He thinks of keys that fit in the lock but do not turn. He thinks of his fear and his frantic pursuit of some kind of wholeness.
He begins to understand.
"It's not the same, is it?" he muses. There is an emotion in his voice that he can't identify.
"No, sir. It's not," she answers, and there is that familiar pressure where her hand rests against his uniform.
It will never be the same. The ghosts in the sand will never leave, the scars in the stone will never heal. They will never be quite the same, either. What they've lost can be neither regained nor replaced. They can't change that; no one can, and if they try they will find only disappointment. There is a strange peace in this realization, this surrender. All of his pieces ache where they fit together, their edges jagged, leaving cracks along the joints, but it's a good ache, sharp and sweet all at once.
He slips her hand into his and notes, dryly, that it still doesn't fit as perfectly as he'd like, especially since his digits are still stiff and difficult to fold. It doesn't matter. He grips it as firmly as he can, weaving their fingers together, and despite the spaces left in between he knows that this is as whole as they're ever going to get.
And that's more than enough.
.
.
.
A/N: Here I am doing character studies again instead of something with plot. (Or studying like a responsible adult. Whatever.)
I'm not happy with this. The only part I like is the first bit. I will probably revise/rewrite the whole thing when I figure out how, but what I really want to write is something with some semblance of an actual plot. I promise that the next thing I post will actually have events in it. Promise.
On that note, I'm hoping to collaborate with someone on a longer piece that has something to do with the Ishvalan restoration. Anyone interested? (insert cricket sounds here)