Title: Befores and Afters
Author: The Girl
Timeline: "Brotherhood" anime ep. 19; manga ch. 40 (I think) with some manga spoilers for Hawkeye and Mustang's past connection
Characters: Royai-ish
Genre: what do we call this? Confessional essay? Single character POV musings? Fluffyfluffy ficlet?
Archive: If you want
Disclaimer: These characters and their universe are not my property. This is written for fun, and I make no profit.
Summary: It's those big moments that divide your life into the time "before" and the time "after". Sometimes these moments are more obvious than others. Roy's POV on the nature of "before", "after", and the age old quandary: "What's in a name?"
Roy Mustang understood his life as something parceled out in sections by discreet dividing lines. Momentous events drew lines that dichotomously defined all other events as "before" or "after". Did it happen before Ishval, or after? Before Maes died, or after? And so on.
Lieutenant Hawkeye had crossed a lot of those lines with him, and in each "after" she was closer, dearer. He hesitated to call it love, not because he didn't feel it, but because it sounded so damn trite, or maybe it was just too simple. In any case, when he thought about the word "love" in relation to Hawkeye, he dismissed it and was instead certain that the appropriate word did not yet exist.
"Before"s and "After"s. Before Ishval she had used his last name. "Mr. Mustang." And, before her father had died, she had used his first. Her father called her "Lizzie" and Roy had used it, as well. As natural as everything always felt between them, Roy did, during certain quiet, lonely times, find himself thinking it was odd as hell that two people growing closer and closer should take to naming each other in increasingly formal terms. And then, very privately and hypothetically, he wondered if maybe he might someday, quietly, call her "Lizzie" again, and if (and this was a very big 'if') he might someday hear "Roy" in the form of her breath against his neck.
Roy Mustang could never tell when one of these dividing lines was about to be drawn. As he held the gaze of the dying homunculus, Lust, it wasn't until the ground was rushing up to meet him that he realized he'd been holding out against collapsing. And there she was, in that instant, on her knees beside him. Blood loss, pain: they do funny things to your brain, and he was grateful she seemed unharmed, and worried about Havoc, and considering absently if he might be about to pass out again. He almost told her that the last time he'd seen her face all tear-streaked and snotty, she'd been ten or eleven, and had thought she was alone, and was horrified when she realized her father's new student was watching her. And what was she been crying about, and did she remember that time, that time she'd refused his shoulder and threw a rock at him instead?
"Colonel!" Hawkeye called to him, he could focus again, and just like that, another line between "before" and "after" was drawn.
"Colonel." She said it like a proper noun, and it had the ring of his true name. He felt that anything else he'd ever been called before, by anyone else, had never been so familiar, so intimate. It didn't matter how many people used his rank when speaking to him. The word for what lay between them was not "love", did not yet exist, was made up of something just out of frame, until his first lieutenant spilled it into his official title at the moment it fell from her lips. "Colonel," she pleaded (for what, he wasn't sure, only knowing it was a plea) and he would have kissed her out of fear and relief and anger and something sweeter and more painful, if he hadn't found it offensive to her lovely subtlety.
In the "after" he never again hoped to hear her call him "Roy." His stomach clenched in humiliation when he considered that he had ever dreamed of calling her by some nickname she'd once had in childhood. "First Lieutenant" took on a special reverence each time he said it. He started to listen for shadows and undulations of meaning in her "Colonel"s and "sir"s. And every so often (and, damn her, but that little smile said she knew what she was doing), she'd toss a "Colonel Mustang, sir" his way, and it was as if she'd stepped up behind him and traced her fingertip around the shell of his ear.
No, he never wanted to hear her say "Roy" again, not if she'd say it the way Lizzie had. Because Lizzie and Roy (dumb kids that they were) didn't have a thing on Colonel Mustang and First Lieutenant Hawkeye. There'd be no more looking backward. If anything, when the next dividing line came, they'd have to invent new names. As sweetly as "Lieutenant" rolled off his tongue, he looked forward to her next promotion.