Here is a map, he says. It will lead you to my heart.
Riza stares at him peculiarly like he's something out of a museum, a curiosity behind glass. She stares and he stares, and the tourists take pictures, glance at the placard that explains time and place - Roy Mustang, acrylic on canvas. On loan from the recesses of Riza Hawkeye's mind.
A map, she says.
Yes.
Where does it lead?
There's only one way to find out, he grins.
When Riza was six, she fell from a tree in her father's backyard. It was tall and he had warned her not to climb it, but Thomas from next door had egged her on and she had climbed it with a tenacity that she would one day recognize as her father's (as she grew, Riza was much more of her father than she would ever be of her mother, who died when she was three, and she always hated those parts of herself until she couldn't, because those parts grew together and made up everything). She set foot to branch and then one by one, scaled the impossible height until Thomas, always taller than she, appeared quite small. Until the thick branches gave way to thin, spindly things. Until gravity weighed heavier on her than it did on most days and triumph grew cracks where fear seeped in. That was the moment she fell. She watched the leaves sweep past her, felt the ground's loud thump as it drew the breath from her lungs.
She swore she would never do it again.
Roy climbs trees and then he climbs mountains, and Riza is always two steps behind him. Roy has this unbearable way of making Riza forget herself and then all at once remember; a sunrise when she was constantly looking at the sunset.
He loves her, she thinks, but she never knows if they're strong enough to do anything about it. Here is your heart. Here is my heart. This is the line between, the endless expanse.
Here is a map, he says, and she reaches out to take it.