Our secret moments in a crowded room

They got no idea about me and you

There is an indentation in the shape of you

Made your mark on me, a golden tattoo

- Taylor Swift "Dress"

Colonel Roy Anthony Mustang

Born: 1885 (Central City, Amestris)

Parents: Lili Mustang (nee Cheng) (deceased) & Anthony Mustang (decreased)

Soul-mark description: "Please, don't stop" written in cursive on the inside of his left forearm

First Lieutenant Teriza Elizabeth Hawkeye

Born: 1889 ( Dalisay, West Amestris)

Parents: Elizabeth Hawkeye ( nee Grumman) (decrease) & Berthold Hawkeye (decreased)

Soul-mark description: no data

The issue is not in simply having a soulmate; everyone does. Every single baby is born into this world equal in this sense – they are all red and covered in blood, and with a line of a foreign handwriting tattooed permanently somewhere on their little bodies.

The real struggle is to find them.

Because what do you have for a guide, what do you have as a compass? Not the first words that they will tell you, not their name or the place of their birth. Just a phrase that remains random and meaningless until somebody utters it to you and then you're just supposed to know they belong to you. At least that's what Aunt Chris told him, blowing right into his face clouds of nicotine smoke; God Roy, stop whining. They will tell you this and you just know, okay? You'll feel it in your bones. Now, enough slacking off, go and finish polishing those glasses.

But he was always skeptical about the whole idea of soulmates in the first place and half of him was convinced that Aunt told him that just to shut him up and stop all of his questions. He has spent half of his childhood listening to his sisters chattering about their soulmates and wondering what their soulmarks meant and sometime around when he was thirteen he was done with this subject altogether. There were just so much way more exciting things, like alchemy. And alchemy. And flame alchemy, how cool was that?

Even after he was eighteen and he saw his Master's daughter after summer holiday, no longer a girl but not yet a woman, wearing this worn-out blue dress a bit too small for her and so achingly pretty, smiling at the sight of him and his heart did a somersault in his chest, the thought of soulmates did not even cross his mind.

Even after he saw with his own two eyes how his older sister Lilian gasped when her new husband said I do at the altar and how she burst into tears, hiding her pretty face and her wet cheeks in her hands; he just shook his head and blushed, a bit overwhelmed with the whole scene.

Even after all of the Maes' excited babble about how Gracia bumped into him on the street and she breathlessly apologized:" I am so sorry, I hope you're fine?" and he felt the whole world shift underneath his feet and he was all like it's her, I cannot believe it's her; even after Roy had to listen to hours of starstruck gushing… even then Roy didn't quite believe him.

All it took for him to believe was Ishval and blood and gore and ashes and war.

He doesn't quite believe any of the talks about soulmates, until he is twenty-three and kneeling on the dry dirt on his tent's floor, Riza Hawkeye stripped to the waist and turning her back to him with "I can't do this" in his own, loop scrawl high on her left shoulder blade.

He's seen this line before when she first showed him her tattoo. But back then he wrote in a much neater font, the words were not that important compared to the alchemical circle covering them and besides, this phrase didn't really seem like something he could ever say to her. Not to the girl he wanted to impress so badly he almost crawled out of his own skin in desperate attempts to do so.

And yet.

Here they are.

He lowers his hands down on the ground; his palms burning, his head spinning. He fixes his gaze on the loose pebbles laying near his knees and he says:

" Riza, I can't do this."

She shivers so violently that he snaps his head back.

"No, no, no." she half-cries, half-whispers, wrapping her arms around her frame. "Oh, Roy."

Part of her back is already raw and burned, but the letters catch the light as if they were written with a golden ink on her skin. He takes a breath and forgets to let it out, and before he can do anything, say anything, her voice, sharp and clear and cold cuts the air.

"Please, don't stop."

And it is just as Maes said, just as Aunt Chris said, as all of them said and he could never wrap his mind around; he just knows, deep, deep, in the deepest part of him, in the very core of who he is.

He wants to laugh, he wants to cry because of course, it's her, it has to be her, how can it be anybody else but her? Riza Hawkeye's life is tied to his, woven together to form a tight cord that cannot be separated anymore. For some time he thought they were parallel lines, running along to one another but at that moment he realizes they had been just one line from the very beginning.

Where you go, I follow.

He leans his forehead on the small of her back, feeling her body going tense underneath his touch. He wraps his arms around her waist and sobs openly, unashamed.

All this time his soulmark made him an object of jokes and dirty-talk and "Well Roy, you will be really good at those things if you know what I mean.". He took pride in those words. He would never, in a million years envision those circumstances.

Because how could he imagine his soulmate begging him to don't stop hurting her?

What kind of person could even think of something like this?

She laces her fingers with his and squeezes his hand so strong, that it goes numb.

"Burn it off, Roy. Burn it." She chokes on the words and so he raises his other hand up, hovers it above her back and replaces one mark he made on her with another.

Hiiiiiii, thanks for reading this short, quick drabble that i scribbled down on my phone during a train ride back home from university. I hope that you like it, if so, please, leave me a comment or favorite this story so i would know this. This was written for day 4 of royai week - if you like this paring, you can check out #royaiweek2018 on tumblr and find some amazing content about those two lovesick idiots.