I really should be doing work...but there's always time in life for Royai. Always.
Their first touch is a daydream. He is sixteen, and he imagines the sweet, meaningless gestures lovers share: fingertips on a bare forearm, whispers between skin and lips, hands tangled in silken hair.
He is sixteen, and he hears her shower every night from his bedroom in that creaky, old house. He listens to water caress her in places his hands will never dare touch: the smooth well between her neck and collarbone, the oblong pond in the small of her back. Steam licking at the taut skin around her ankles as she steps out into the hallway, hair dripping small puddles all the way back to her room next to his. He is sixteen, and he yearns for release from this saccharine torture. He finds it by running away to join the army, a boy pulled together and pushed into shape of a man by a uniform.
She doesn't cry when he leaves, but she doesn't say anything either. She watches him go from the living room window, a room they had stood in together a thousand times before. Their co-inhabitance in her father's house had seemed so trivial until he leaves.
Unlike the Elrics, he could not bring himself to burn down Master's house – their house. The house where they lived in the shade of youthful innocence before they learned how to spell death in sand and blood. The house where he calls her Riza for the last time.
Their second touch is agony. She is twenty, and she undresses for him in the darkness of an abandoned Ishvallan home. She is twenty, and she begs him: burn it, please. Please. If not for some greater good, then do it for me. Do it for me.
Her flesh screams beneath his gloved hands while her body trembles silently, broken and bent by the weight of their shared misery. His flames undress her with tender violence, kiss by kiss until her skin curls black like burnt paper and bursts ripe with blood. The apprentice undoing the work of the master.
Their third touch is desperation. His fingers tear at fistfuls of her hair, hair rough with sand and soot and ash. She thrashes against him when he pins her to a wall, beating his uniformed chest with clench fists not because the lesions on her back swell with pain, but because she wants him too much.
His mouth finds the well at the base of her neck, and he drinks the sweat from her skin as if it were sweet ichor. His hands bury themselves in the unsullied skin of her lower back. When his bare fingers brush over the red welts blossoming from his earlier work, her body seizes inside his embrace. Her small tremor sends shockwaves through him. What must she think of me?
He swings her around, their frenzied bodies knocking framed photographs from the wall. Plates, bowls, and knives clatter to the floor in their wake. A family of red eyes stare at their intimacy from behind shattered glass. This is not your house, they warn. This is not your house.
When a shell explodes nearby with muted thunder, the house coughs and sputters in anger, caking their intertwined bodies in dust and sand. But the two pay no mind: there is only each other. The girl with water-kissed skin he remembers from sixteen whose hair leaves puddles in the hallway, whose amber eyes never shed tears until he burned the secrets from her back. The boy who lived in her house and stole away a piece of her when he left, a piece of her she never knew was there until they met again on this battlefield, until their bodies collided in this house of ghostly strangers.
This is not your house, the eyes say again when they leave.
But one day we will build our own, they reply. But one day we will build our own.