A/N: For Alli who is promptilicious, Pip who is under the misinterpretation that I am deep and Nezz who feeds my ego. To the women in my life who don't laugh when I quote my bucket list: Thanks :)
I know, I should be working on Coup. But to be fair, I posted two chapters within four days of each other and well I have a life XD A very busy life.
This is what I can give you so far, on Friday I'll try typing up all the stuff pending in my notebook….well…the one's I deem alright enough for public consumption.
Grace Period
X
'The rare conjunction of the planets, the seasons, and Roy's tact with Riza's good mood.'
X
It is winter when the final gunshot rings its toll, startling the world from its slumber. The courtyard of the cathedral is enormous and horrific in its deathly omniscient silence. There had been no words between the adversaries, only one final life left to live and a pair of gloves worn so thin that the skin of digits peaked between swallowing mouths of white flint.
The final shot from her Bristol nine-gage is the one to end the impossible war.
A body falls and molten gold spills across the snow, eclipsing the blood that, intellectually, she knows has pooled beneath a body whose heart no longer beats, crushed indirectly by her own hand.
Gods don't bleed.
This dead man had been something less than human.
Roy's hands, which had been raised high, twitch with something not at all unlike fear but unbearably close to relief.
Riza says nothing as she looks up at the sky, cloudy with incoming snow and suddenly, she wishes it were a clear night so that perhaps breathing wouldn't be so hard. She falls to her knees and Roy runs, slipping on ice, skidding on snow. He falls to the ground beside her.
Roy cannot live in a world where Riza does not stand at full height.
Shadows eclipse her face and Roy, with his one eye and addled brain cannot fully see past the gloom. But he knows she's shaking and instinctively he moves closer.
Wisely, he does not touch her.
Instead he waits for the tremors to cease and sound to break the tension of an event he will never be able to fully recall. An event so momentous and so small, forgettable in its brevity. This is what Roy has Riza for; to remember the little things.
Soon the woman with hair as blond as the dead man's looks up with dry eyes and a bright smile so encompassing that he is briefly dazed. "Fucking hell," she says with another laugh that makes him suddenly everything but afraid.
She leaps on him, throwing her arms around his shoulders with fierce aggression and welcome enthusiasm. He laughs with her as he clutches her wrist- now wound around his neck like a collar –softly in his hand. His fingers find her pulse and he finds that he is not thinking of the science behind the iron in her blood, or the biology behind the heartbeat he feels. Roy is thinking of her life, and how much it means to him that she chooses to live it by his side.
His other arm winds around her waist and squeezes tight, trying to hold onto the moment of victory.
Amestris is free.
He tries to forget that they probably won't ever be again. The guards will come; he has still killed Bradley and she has still committed treason to the highest degree by aiding in the abolition of order in their country.
Instead he focuses on the cold sting of winter at his fingertips, her rippling, blissfully repetitive pulse, the fire he feels everywhere she touches him and the unyielding metal of the gun that ended a war, branding the skin of his neck with an imprint that only he will ever be able to see.
He is not afraid, more than anything he trusts this woman to keep him alive but…
Just in case, "The safety on that is on, right?"
Reviewage makes the heart grow fonder~