He was just a boy. A boy too old, too fast. A child in an adult's role, trying to hold his head high. Riza had always seen that in him.
How quickly he proved her wrong.
Edward had shown up on her doorstep, nearly dead and amnesiac to what had brought him back to Amestris three years after he'd disappeared. Her care brought him back to life. But even injured, even disoriented to the changes in his world, he'd taken over. He slowly took control of her life and she found herself serving him as faithfully as she'd ever served Roy.
Riza began to realize that the boy she'd known had grown up and the person who'd shown up on her doorstep was a man.
The first time he kissed her, he drove away any lingering images of the twelve-year-old boy she'd met at the train station.
It was molten fire along her nerves, melting her into his embrace. Like kissing the sun, touching a god and she felt like she might burn away completely. It was being alive, caught up in the taste and feel of him as he pulled her down into his bed.
Even when he slept, hours later, she could no longer see traces of the boy he'd been, only the man that had come into her life, scarred and worn around the edges, but strong and caring. She wondered how she'd lived before he came.