He's too young to know what love really is but he sees it on her skin and hears it in her voice. She steals his breath, any chance she can get.
Feathery snowfall is the medium that their warmth first intertwines, when the cold sucks the moisture right from their lips and it mingles, there in front of them, floating between two children who are standing close enough to touch noses. It's winter, Roy's favorite time of year, when the decrepit house is creaking from the weight of watered ice and the only heat that is spared comes from dripping candles and the weight of her body against his on the couch. There is no fire place, he laments, and he thinks more than once about transmuting one but is decidedly against the idea in the end because his master, Master Hawkeye, stalks the battered house with arms intertwined behind his back, and a scowl plastered on his face.
"Mr. Mustang," she says under her breath on snowy afternoon, low enough for her father to pretend he doesn't hear as the steps to his bedroom scream with the pressure of his feet placed upon them. Roy wiggles his toes underneath her in a silent reply. "Want to go outside?"
How odd, he thinks, that the girl who loves the summer, the long days spent in trees and chasing game, would want to venture into the icy wetness of the snow. He nods to her, though, never really able to deny time to be spent with her. They head toward the front door with Master Hawkeye's eyes bearing into their backs, and Roy places the large text that was warming his thighs down on a small table nearby. He watches her hair bounce as she steps over the threshold, then watches it fly erratically with the wind, catching white flakes that are hard to see against her shade of blonde.
The Hawkeye home looks better when it's crusted with snow, Roy notices. You can't see the overgrown weeds, or the cracks in the brick, and the white soaks up the sun and makes the perpetually unlit home sparkle with a glow. Roy's lungs are icing over and his nose is burning with freezing air when her finger taps his open palm. The physical contact is unusual, and so he starts, whirling his head and tipping his chin down to look at her. She's staring out at the expanse of snow-topped land that surrounds her father's estate, and there's sadness in her eyes. She turns her hand, palm up, and fans her fingers - inviting him. He laces his fingers with hers tentatively, because she's his master's daughter and he doesn't know her - not very well. But the chill in him is craving touch, her touch, and when he's standing on her front porch, wholly unreasonably dressed for the cold, she fills him with heat.
"Is everything okay?" He asks, but doesn't look at her. He tries to focus his gaze on whatever far-off thing she's seeing, but she's beyond him. She's looking past what she can physically see.
"Yes," she says. She squeezes his hand. He thinks he hears her voice break, if only slightly, and he watches the corner of her eye, ready to catch tears, but none come. The tears never come, even though he knows she's crying. She's almost always crying. She does it best in the rain, when it drums against her face as she stares into the clouded sky and catches it in her eyes. She moves from him now, tugging her fingers from his, and stands, clad in nothing but wooly pajama bottoms and a sleeveless shirt, in the fall of the snow. Small pieces of it decorate her cheekbones and they melt, one by one, to trail down her cheeks and kiss the corners of her mouth.
"Do you think my father loves me, Mr. Mustang?" She asks him, and he doesn't know how to answer her. He furls his hands into his pockets and he wants to say something, anything, but his mouth is pressed into a fine line. She's almost his height, but she looks so small under the shade of the winter sky. Inflate, he tells her. Refill, recharge. It doesn't matter, and it will never matter.
"I don't think so, either, Mr. Mustang." She says.
"He does," Roy blurts. The words are frantic. He sees the tug of a smile on her lips brought on not by what he'd said, but by the ferocity with which he said it. "He does, Miss Riza, but he's...he's…"
"He's broken," she finishes. Her fingertips are turning purple. Her skin is burnt by the wind.
"Let's go back inside," he offers. She shuffles toward him through the snow, back to his side on the porch, in a reluctant, slow kind of way. He aches to catch her face in his hand as she brushes past him, frozen and calm, and he doesn't understand why. Her feet tap delicately on the wood, the door creaks when she turns the knob and pushes it in, and she disappears behind it. When he follows her, she's back on the couch, watching a pearl of wax as it falls into a pile at the base of its candle.
He joins her, placing his feet under her as they had been before, and gives his attention again to the massive text. He flits his eyes over pages of alchemic formulas, most of which he can't understand, and sometimes she joins him. Her temple almost touches his shoulder when she's reading. He can tell she's a quick reader, quicker than he, because she gets antsy when she finishes a page before him. Her fingers tick on the edge of the couch, and she huffs a little in his ear, probably bored. But he takes his time with the words.
"You're reading for fun and I'm reading to learn, Miss Riza," he reminds her. The winter wind screeches against the Hawkeye house.
"I'm reading to learn, Mr. Mustang," she replies. "It's only fair that I get a taste of what you and my father are so obsessed with. You spend so much time in the basement, or with your noses stuck to the pages of your books... I'm not reading to learn alchemy, but I am reading to learn, sir."
She wants to know what keeps her father from her. Where he goes all day long, what part of his mind is so taken with magic, and why it's all so important that she's neglected because it's preferred. She'll tell this to Roy one day, but after he's wrecked her, and for now he's innocent, and maybe a little too young to know that he's in love with her, so he keeps quiet. His brows pull together as his attention intensifies, and he leaves none for her. She hops away from the couch, taking his cue, and creeps up the steps the way her father had. Roy hears her bedroom door click softly as she vanishes behind it.