A/N: poetry by Emily Dickenson

My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—

In Corners—till a Day

She is frozen, a tree in the moonlight afraid of its shadow, limbs rigid with a fear that is all-consuming. Red and orange flickers, dances against her skin, bruises his face. (It's a grotesque mask, full of violence and seething rage, waiting for you to blink, to turn away, and then it will swallow you whole.)

"Come closer, Riza." he cajoles, and the words are dim in her ears, a lifeline too far away to seize as the waves crash resoundingly into her skull, empty of everything but terror. Her bangs sweep into her eyes as she shakes her head in fear. "It won't hurt you." The lie slips smoothly from his tongue; he believes it himself—has believed it for years, and will continue to until the day he dies, drowning in his own blood. (It will hurt and scream and bite and devour and burrow into your skin and into your bones.)

"No." Her limbs tremble, fragile in the coming winds, and the step backward is only partially involuntary. The panicked cry in her mind dies before it reaches her lips; she would run if it didn't mean turning her back on the flickering flame that has appeared cupped in her father's outstretched palm, dancing in the swirling, bruised shadows of its own creation. (Her hollow bones will betray her—she cannot change the course of the river and neither can she fly free of it.)

"Don't be afraid." His voice jolts through her and the words drop to the dry earth and try to ground her. (You are a cloud, a bird, a beam of light high above the cracked desert, but you will not be caught.)

A hiccoughing sob escapes her throat. "No, Papa, please don't make me."

It's not her name when he says it; it belongs to someone else, someone much braver than she will ever be. "Riza. You are six years old. A little fire is nothing to be afraid of." (He's said it a thousand times and still you don't believe him. You've seen the great tree limbs reduced to ashes in the fireplace.)

"Put it away, please, Papa, put it away." (There is a stone on your chest and iron bands around your lungs and gravel in your throat.)

"Look, Papa's got in under control." (He doesn't. He never did. It is already consuming him. His edges are already blurred, the lines fading faster than he can redraw them.)

There are tears in her eyes, and she chokes on her own breath as it squeezes through the cracks of her stone lips, her voice dead in her throat. He sighs, gives in, and closes his hand around the flame, reduced to an eye-blink in the palm of his hand. He reaches for her, evidencing his smooth, unburnt hand, but she flinches away before he can touch her. The dreaded dancing flame is gone, but the flicker in her eyes is more than a mere echo of the extinguished flame. She stares up at him, dark eyes filled with a primal terror he hasn't seen since a failed hunting trip many years past. (It was a doe, then, you remember, its wide-eyed innocence leaking from its eyes in a flood that couldn't quite match the life-blood spilling from its severed flesh.)

He knows that look, and for once he allows himself to feel the pang of guilt that lances like the selfsame bullet into some forgotten part of his being, some organ that has long since shriveled up with use and wear.

His baby girl is looking at him like he is a monster. (She stands stock-still in the corner, an empty weapon waiting to be filled.)

The Owner passed—identified—

And carried Me away—

The door opens with a crack that startles her, no matter how many times she has heard it before, and she is staring at sloped eyes with the intensity that belongs to the smoldering coals of the kitchen-fire. Their heat ripples past her cheeks and down her throat, passing warmly into her empty soul that has been so starved of human companionship. She doesn't know it, but a faint smile touches her lips when the boy stutters out a greeting, blinking into the shadows of the house that reach out to embrace him. (It is a smile like starlight—small and subtle, swallowed at once by greater lights and deeper shadows.)

She utters not a word, but stands aside to allow the newcomer passage to the dingy, whitewashed, tomb-like walls beyond. Hardly taller than herself, he is at least five winters her senior, spine-stuff with a confidence that borders on arrogance, belying his small height and double-patched clothing. His hands are thin, bony, but proportionally too large for his equally slight frame. His voice has changed too early—or maybe it's his body changing too late, leaving a man's voice in a boy's body. It's low, resonating pleasantly in a chest cavity too small for it to reach its full potential, except for the occasional break in pitch that says the change is still recent. Her eyes are caught the hands that he wrings in silence, but she cannot speak—it has been so long, she thinks perhaps she has forgotten how. There is no call for it here after all—who is there to speak too? (The hollow concrete of her soul is its own sort of brokenness.)

The boy greets her, and she opens her mouth to reply, but her disused voice dies in its rebirth. A frigid coolness has seeped along the walls; it invades the small spot of warmth from the window created by the new soul in the grave-house. "Riza," comes a cool, metallic voice, smoothing over the choppy winds of first-meeting. "Fetch the tea, there's a good girl," but there is something inherently indifferent in the non praise. (Winter has descended on the spring of youth, and even combined they do not stand a chance—she is a wilted flower already bitten by the frost, he is a bluejay, driven soon away by the cold.)

She replies in a whisper more felt than heard and fades into the woodwork, like a ghost that has never been, and the boy blinks in the sudden twilight. He stares at the imposing man before him, and every thought in his head becomes a feather borne away on the chill wind. "Roy Mustang, I presume." Hawkeye intones in a voice made of gravel and steel, and the boy nods his numb assent, the vocal form of the affirmative lost somewhere in the recesses of his sinking stomach. He feels himself measured in the man's immeasurable gaze, as he stands immobile, afraid more than anything of being found wanting before he has even begun. His heart is a drum in his ears, and he is almost deaf with its throbbing when the sun-haired ghost returns, a tea tray balanced precariously before her. Still silent, the man turns and walks back the way he came, turning sharply into the doorway of his cavern, whatever verdict he sees in the boy's charcoal eyes left hanging in the air, unsaid and unheard. Both children hover uncertainly for a moment. (The air around his absence collapses in on itself like the vacuum of a dying star.)

The boy steels his spine and walks, head erect, into the study, and she follows him, the hollow places inside her beginning to fill with something she cannot name as she falls into his gravity. (She's not the only one burning now.)

And now We roam in Sovereign Woods—

And now We hunt the Doe—

She is crying, burning drops of glass carving canyons in her icy skin. He wants to comfort her, but there are mountains between them, carved by time and her father and alchemy and her nakedness and his shame and most of all by the monster on her back, its claws embedded in her shoulders, its tentacles around her spine, it tail weaving about her slender waist. It has sunk its jaws into her skin (her father's burden carved forever into his daughters back) and for a moment Roy is drawn in by its beauty, the elegant curves and seductive eyes. (He doesn't see tentacles creeping around where he can't see them, waiting for him to blink, to misstep.)

It is a thing of tremendous power; he can see that at a glance. It is the culmination of everything his master refused to teach him. Now she trusts him with everything, gives it to him for nothing, except maybe the spark of idealism in her eyes that may be even greater than the gleam of ambition in his. (In only a few short years that spark will be like shards of a broken mirror scattered across the landscape of her earth-eyes and that gleam will be a firestorm that devours his sight.)

He forces himself to study it with the eye of a scholar: memorizing the script, identifying the array, taking in the seeming superfluous lines and symbols, analyzing the mathematical relationships of the pieces of the whole. It is a work of science, a work of art—interpretation of facts that lead to the conclusion of an alchemy that will change the world. (You don't think about the needles and the blood and the pain; the cold eye of a man so dead inside he could bind his daughter in a prison of her own skin.)

It's not until she inhales sharply and shudders that Roy even realizes he has reached out to touch the sweeping curve of a serpent's tail. Her skin is ice cold, but he withdraws as if burned. She glances at him with a cutting emotion he can't quite identify—but it gives him a sour taste in his mouth. She reaches for her coat—shirt still clutched against her breasts in a vain attempt to maintain modesty—and begins to put in on. She knows now—it will take him the way it has taken her father. (When the violence begins and the blood pours, the man will be indistinguishable from the weapon used to commit it.)

"No!" Roy is startled by the harshness of his voice, but he can hardly help it—he must see more, he must solve this, the last lesson set to him by his dead master. He takes a breath and forces his voice to soften. "Please. Just a little longer." Riza is looking at him with trepidation and—is that fear in her eyes?—but he meets her gaze steadily and at last she relents. (The sun will burn itself to ash before his flaming eyes have satisfied themselves of their riddle.)

She shivers silently for an hour more, every aching minute of it filled with gnawing doubt that fills her hollow bones. This terrible secret on her back is the source of her father's madness—how can she expect Roy to withstand what her father could not? With every passing moment, they are binding themselves together, with bonds more unbreakable and inevitable than those of blood, more intimate and permanent than those of love. They are bound, heart and soul, mind and body, time and space, each to the fate, the future of the other. The prison written into her flesh is the prison he will carry in his hands, and it will be destroyed together or not at all. (Her wings will carry him to the sun and they will be burned by it.)

And every time I speak for Him—

The Mountains straight reply—

The sun is beating down its terrible judgment on their crimes, stealing every speck of moisture in the air until their sweat dries before it is formed and their lips are cracked and white. They are all the same here, walking dead, waiting to kill or be killed as their masters require them. Blackened corpses cobblestone the streets and choke the air with decay. Blue coats wait in the bruised shadows; metal barrels and guilt soak in the sunlight, taking its heat for their own. (The sun is a harsh judge, and it will never forgive what it has witnessed in this blood-soaked land.)

Her lips have an incongruous twist upwards in the corner—not a smile, but a grim expression of bitter irony. The stone wall is cold against her back, soaking up the heat and rage in the hollow space under her skin, siphoning it away into the void. It is an extension of her own arm—violence she deals out in his name, for his sake, channeling his wrath, his heat, into their enemies. (The shadows wrap her in their dark blanket, and the barrel of her rifle sits cold and heavy in her hands, a familiar and profane comfort.)

The report of the rifle shouldn't echo—it should be swallowed by the sand and bodies and corruption that surround her, but it does anyway, vibrating in the space between her skull and scalp, inside her teeth and behind her eyes, in the hollow spaces of her bones, rewriting the rhythm of her heart. The body that crumples isn't faceless—he is so close she can see the lines of his face and the fury in his eyes, followed by that instant of shock as metal penetrates flesh, sinew, bone. She can almost feel his last breath on her face; the shadow of his soul passes through hers. It's not until after the body crumples to the rubble, and the blue-coat startles like a deer that she even sees him. She recognizes the sharp profile, the glossy hair that he never could keep quite short of his eyes. For a moment she holds him there in her scope, his face so close that she opens her mouth to speak to him, and he turns his gaze towards her tower. She can almost swear he can see her every bit as clearly as she can see him. The bark of the rifle speaks out again, and the voice is hers, keeping him safe, as safe as any of them can be here. (The thunder of the report is the loudest voice she's ever possessed.)

There is sand under her nails, down her back, in her hair. It scratches the soles of her feet and speckles her lips, no matter how many times she tries to brush it away. There is nothing to mark the grave but a bit of charred stone. (It seems a paltry gift, but it is all you have to give.) Whatever he has done, she has given him the power to do it, and followed the same path of destruction. (Burning charcoal meets carmine oak and your shared burden weighs on you with a force neither of you understood until now.)

They are standing over the small mound of earth that conceals their sin in its shadow, so he knows he cannot deny her this request. The demon on her back has done more than change her—it has overtaken her until she can no longer exist without it. She will not be made a weapon, not unless she herself so chooses. She will carry her own corpses. She will keep his back the way he keeps hers. (It will be their solemn vow—their violent oath carved in flesh and signed in fire.)

The familiar ripple of shame and longing comes over him as he sees it again, after all this time. He cannot do this—and not just because it will cause her pain. The beast within him cannot allow it—such a thing of beauty and power. He forces his eyes upward, to her sloping neck and tendrils of sunlight hair—soft, spring sunlight, not the blazing desert judge that beats overhead now. He looks at her bowed head and imagines her face, wide-dark eyes almost closed, but not quite, teeth clenched and jaw trembling. He says her name, softly, just a breath and nothing more, and it leaks into her soul and fills her lungs with air she didn't know they lacked. It is familiar to his lips but not to her ears—sometimes she forgets that she has a name at all. (You cast it off long ago, like an ill-fitting coat, too worn out with use to keep even a dog warm.)

He inhales deeply, the stench of murder and hate and cowardice filling his lungs. All semblance of control abandons him and the beast erupts from his hands. (They both howl with the agony of it.)

And when at Night—Our good Day done—

I guard My Master's Head—

The fires of Ishval have long ago dissolved into ash and smoke, but their oath still rides her skin, the scars of his name still distort the fabric of her blues. The sharp tang of metal burns on the tip of her tongue and the familiar grip of her weapon steals what little warmth is left in her already chilled fingertips. She snaps her hair clip into place with a brisk efficiency that takes no note of the slight pull at the base of her neck by a strand pulled just a bit too tight. (Everything about her is stretched to the breaking point—she can feel the frayed edges of her mind unraveling day by day.)

"These are either the gates to glory, or the entranceway to hell." He mutters, as if she can't hear him. "Wait here." The casual steel in his voice and spine, slap her face like the ghost of her father's hand. Only this time she stays standing. Her flat denial sends him reeling, and to her slight shock and intense pleasure, he relents. "Will you stay here if I promise to come back?" (You both know it's a futile oath, but you allow him to make it anyway. You even accept it.)

She paces the pavement before the bestial walls, pounding her rhythm into the unyielding stone as though the sound of drums will recall her superior from its iron maw. The concrete has long since given up the day's heat and the chill night air burns her lungs with every shallow breath before she begins to doubt he will keep his promise. She spends an hour sitting in the car, trying futilely to keep warm, but anxiety and the threat of sleep drive her back to pacing before the gates, glancing far too frequently between the iron bars for a glimpse of dark hair and unbent spine. (Straight, like an oak—soon the terrible wind will turn its own strength against itself, its shattered trunk scattered across the broken horizon.)

Panic is beginning to rise in her throat—the sun is beginning to crack the iron-gray sky—he's been gone too long. She cannot see his back to protect it, and she is suddenly back in the laboratory, with its bleached-bone walls and despair clenching at her heart at the thought of him bleeding out in a dark room, alone, unreachable. It is this thought that steels her nerves and clears her head, her hollowness filling up with his strength. With it comes the memory of her colonel's harsh words and sharp reprimand—"Don't give up. Not ever." The words ring in her mind as if he had just spoken them in her ear, and her spine straightens as she pushes away the darkness and plants her feet anew. (Pretend the quicksand beneath you won't swallow you whole.)

Inside the belly of the beast, bleeding in the bear-trap in which he has been caught, Mustang chokes on his own breath and his mind's eye sees purple flowers blossom on her porcelain throat, clenched ever tighter by immortal fingers, cracks appearing with every passing moment, as he waits for it shatter. His relief upon seeing her—breathing, unbruised, unbloodied, is palpable. It sinks into his pores and the world tilts back on its axis—he can see clearly again. (You wonder when your eyes needed her to be able to see.)

He has an enemy now—someone he can see and hear and fight, and suddenly the voices in his head, the ones that whisper monster in the darkness, they have suddenly faded because he has found an enemy bigger than the apathy that has settled around him like a fog, swirling around him into a building rage. (It's the first time since Ishval you've felt human at all.)

Tis better than the Eider-Duck's

Deep Pillow—to have shared—

She is running now, in the dark, blindly, shying from shadows with a profane fear that does not belong on her ivory brow. Blood trails from her cheek and her hand is shaking, splaying carmine droplets on the cobblestone streets that stretch up every moment to trip her. The door of her tenement building is poorly lit, and she stands in the darkness a full minute before she is willing to risk her own shadow coming to life around her in that flickering bulb. (The darkness that has always been her cloak has betrayed her into terror.)

It takes every ounce of her willpower, every scrap of the courage she has hidden inside her, to walk, slowly, calmly across the threshhold. She steps onto the first stair—it creaks menacingly, and she takes a deep breath before beginning her ascent, clutching the handrail, ignoring the splinters it leaves in her hands. The six flights of stairs to her flat last for an eternity and she can't help but skip the last step and wrench open the door. The crack of the closing door thunders in her ears and she stands entombed in the darkness, with nothing but her own strained breathing undermining the mind-numbing quiet that descends. She is still at last, calm in her utter blindness and deafness. (If you cannot be seen, cannot be heard, perhaps you don't exist at all, and the terrors of the day and the years will fade away with you into nothingness.)

The telephone is shrill, piercing, shattering the silence the way the light had the shadows. She knows it's him before she even picks up the receiver—the one person she needs to tell—the one person she never can—Selim Bradley is a –(the thought is shattered like the darkness and silence, if you think on it now you will tell him because you need him—but no, you cannot think that either.)

She doesn't speak much, because she knows that every word she says will give something away. (She doesn't know that silence gives away even more.) He speaks much, but says very little. It is their way and has been as long as she can remember. He talks to hide his fear and she is silent to hide her shame. The space between their common rage is a higher wall than any created by the Fuhrer, and the hollowness of that barrier does not negate its strength. (The embers of his eyes beat themselves to ash against it and the echo of her voice is swallowed in its void.)

Only their souls beat a syncopated rhythm over the hollow of the gulf. She knows his mind like she knows how to breathe, and he's loved her as long as he can remember. She loves him back, though it goes against every aspect of her stoic and steadfast heart, because he is anything but the calmness of her emptiness. He is all her darkness, all her tears and wrath poured into one foreign body, always before her but never in reach. (If only you can reach him, touch him, perhaps you will meld into one and finally become whole.)

His words run thin and their silence is palpable. She can hear the frustration in his voice, and though her throat contracts with a plea, she stifles it with her lips. Her bones mimic the steel of his spine. Her darkness is her own, and she will share it with no one willingly.

Her place is at his back, not at his side. (His rage will consume her hollow bones utterly.)

To foe of His—I'm deadly foe-

None stir the second time—

His breath leaves his body as he watches her suddenly limp form flung to the ground, rattled like the rag doll, the empty shell Envy threatens to turn her into. The monster is leaving his hands, incinerating this enemy almost before he has registered her safety in a corridor. Hate is welling up in him, uncontrollable, filling his mind and he doesn't even think before unleashing his alchemy—again, and again, and again, with a careless gesture he hasn't used since Ishval. Envy's screams of pain fall on deaf ears—he's heard far more chilling in the deserts of his memory. (You can't hear them now, not over the rush of flame and heat.)

She's never heard his voice so low, so threatening, so choked, as if he can't breathe and hasn't yet realized it, as if he were growling, like—like a monster. (It's taking him, the way it took your father and made you into a weapon and left you with nothing.)

He made it through the military, even Ishval, still in control, however slightly. But this—this cover-up of the grandest scale, the betrayal of the military that has been his life, the murder of his best friend—this has done him in, and he is no longer in control. (The fire inside is burning in his eyes.) And for the first time in weeks, she knows what she must do. The click of her handgun grates across her eardrums like a vile thing, but for the briefest of moments, she has his attention. (It's too little, too late.)

He barely hesitates, the beast in his eyes make them no longer his own, and if she pulled the trigger now, he might never come back. The voice inside him rises, cursing, still poised to strike, immortally unafraid of the small piece of metal and gunpowder in her hand. (You have done so much, come so far, this girl, this subordinate, with a firearm that is nothing to your alchemy, cannot stop you now.)

Fullmetal is screaming at him the words she has been asking herself all along. "Is that what you want to be? Another monster?" His agitation is visible now, and she can see him struggling with himself—the realization of what, exactly, is controlling him. Her hand is shaking—she can't help it, he's trying to come back to himself, but if he can't—

"I will not let it take you." Her words. Her own. She cannot back away from them now. (In death, he will be himself again, and you will join him there.)

"What are you going to do then?" His voice has changed—but the question startles her. She's never, not once, imagined for herself a life without him to protect—so the answer emerges with clarity and a peace that surprises her. (Taking your own life will be nothing compared to taking his.)

"I can't afford to lose you." He is himself again, but her hand is shaking too badly to risk lowering her weapon. "I've hurt you, again." He reaches for her hand, guiding it away, and she lets him, because she can see into his eyes now, and they belong to him. (The hand is his hands, the voice is his voice, and her resolve has left her.)

He is slumped on the stony floor, sapped of the swirling rage that seeped from his bones and left him empty, a shell of a man deprived of everything but guilt and a throbbing ache behind his eyes that will be with him till he dies. Hers is deep in her belly, as if she'd been kicked by a booted foot and her breath has gone the way of the wind that howls in the empty corridors of her mind. Her knees buckle and she slides down to join him, the coolness of the stones seeping through her clothes and into her skin, pressing away the remaining heat of his wrath. (You are empty now, drained of everything, even the will to survive.)

He wants to reach her, to touch her, to tell her that he is here, that he hasn't left and she can't either, but the barriers between them, the alchemy, the blood, the years, they stop his hand and leave him frozen inside himself. (The monster eyes him from behind the fragile bars of his mind.)

She lifts one trembling hand and places it over his heart. (It's hard, crusted over with years of regret and sin, and you aren't sure you can penetrate the shell anymore, if you ever could.)

On whom I lay a Yellow Eye—

Or an emphatic Thumb—

She lays there so quietly, her sun-yellow hair fanned out like the filament of a demented flower, the cochineal blood pooling beneath her its macabre petals. Her name sticks somewhere in the region of his heart and even as she bleeds out on the chill stone floor, he can only cry out the formality of matching coldness. (It's like looking at a far-away star. She can only be seen by not looking at all.)

The beast is rising up in him again, clawing at his lungs; air is a foreign object that will choke him. Damn the Elric brothers and their theories, he cannot sit here and watch her die. He has brought them to this place—he has repaid her stubborn loyalty with nothing but anguish and fire and destruction. She's looking at him again, brown-sienna arrows that pierce the monster. It roars in pain, but he knows then. He knows, with a clarity that they will never share again, because she will be dead and he will follow her, exactly what must be done. (She has followed you into death already, it is only fair that you should do the same.)

He will not be a monster any more. Not even for her. She would never forgive him.

For a moment the monster is in control again and he free, free to do anything but save her, which is the one thing in the world he wishes to do,and then he is by her side as her eyes slide shut with a finality that will not take any orders, not from him. Every barricade that has ever been between them, the alchemy, the wars, the blood, the rage, the emptiness crumble away as if they have never been and he touches her. (The monster sulks back into its cavern; how can she both create and control the beast when you cannot? It seems unfair.)

Every emergency medical course he has ever taken tells him not to move her, but it doesn't matter, because she is leaving him behind and he cannot let her. He only means to cover the wound, to hold in her life, her soul, because no matter what, she cannot leave him now. So he is holding her, cradling her, clinging to her as if he can physically keep her from flying away. (She is a hawk, anyway. You never could keep her from flying, no matter how hard you tried.)

The girl-child is pulling her away from him, to a deathly circle drawn in her own blood, and for a split second he cannot let go. Reality clenches around his brain like a claw, and blue fire swallows her whole, the consuming fire that he knows is the stuff of her nightmares and his. The beast has caught them both at last and he has betrayed her to her death. (His cry is lost in the tumult that swallows them.)

Her eyes are open. Sienna-carmine-brown-red piercing the fire that he thought would consume him forever and he is holding her again, though he doesn't quite know how. He knows she is saying something, but he can't hear the words because the sound is enough and too much and he does what he has been longing to do since he first laid eyes on it and buries his face in her fire-hair. It smells like blood and sweat and fear and pain, and he has to hide the joy and relief bleeding from his eyes, because it smells like life. (He holds her, and none of it matters because she is his and he is never going to let her go again.)

Though I than He—may longer live—

He longer must than I—

The Ishvalan sun is beating its harsh judgment on her skin, setting her hair ablaze with its guilty heat. The space between flesh and bone swells as it soaks up the humid air, and her very heartbeat is rewritten with the thrum of the vibrating sand. The violent sunlight banishes all shadows in the darkest recesses of her mind as the ground soaks up her shame like blood. His hands are dry, cracked, and scarred, but the blood on them is flaking off in the heat, leaving behind only its carmine stain. Her eyes are like his hands, calm steady sienna with only the reflection of crimson violence staining the darkness of them. (In the light of their burning stakes they will find their redemption.)

The new steel of the blade throws back the burning sunlight into his eyes as he wields it towards the earth, which cracks and gives way beneath his weight with a rasp. He flings the sand and clay to a spot only a few feet off, and tries not to cringe when a smattering of applause breaks out from the front row of his audience. He looks up, blinded this time not by the sun but by the flash of the press cameras, determined to document the first moment of the rebuilding of Ishval. His gaze is stony as he takes in the crowd, the other military dogs and their masters leading the applause, as the crimson Ishvalan eyes stare at him in wide-eyed silence, a mass of people filled with a cocktail of unnamed emotion. (The invasion has begun again, no less for all that there is no blood.)

The applause dies down as he steps away, and more blue-coated politicians fill in the vacuum he leaves in the empty space behind him. The natives whose land he has invaded yet again scatter before him like leaves in the wind, pretending not to see him. The shadows twist and undulate, and spew her forth from them and she hesitates behind him only a moment before stepping up to his side and turning her clear, steady gaze upon his face. The silence between them is thick, but with companionship and understanding, binding rather than separating. Her fingertips rest feather-light on his hand, her index just brushing the ridge of the scar there, and he feels the phantom pain of metal piercing him through. He holds perfectly still, waiting and dreading the moment when her butterfly touch dissolves away, but instead she merely shifts her hand around to grip his more firmly and pulls him gently back into the shadows from whence she came. (He follows, trusting her eyes in the shadows his gaze cannot pierce.)

She leads him away from the undulating masses, until the desert swallows all noise and they are utterly alone in the hazy silence. She drops his hand and he is immobile for a moment, struck with the loss of her gentle hand on his. She is back before he has recovered, cool earth-sienna eyes searching his burning charcoal gaze, pressing something cool and rough and metallic into his hand. He looks down at the rust-covered spade, and then back at her, realization and relief dawning in his face. Of course she knew, knew before and perhaps better than he does, what exactly this moment, the one stolen by the media and the politicians, what it should be and what it needs. He kneels where he stands and plunges the spade through the sand and into the hard-baked clay, chipping away at it until there is a pit the depth and length of his forearm. She kneels beside him then, holding in her hands limp white rags, crisscrossed with black ink and stained with blood, the remains of his flame alchemy. They place them solemnly in the bottom of his pit, hands meeting, resting gently on top of them. He reaches for a fistful of clay and allows it to fall from his openhanded grip back into the pit. She follows suit, and when the rubble fills the emptiness, they smooth the sand back over roughness until no trace of it remains. (Their sins are buried together, forever beneath the crushing weight of the desert sand.)

He stands, abruptly, and she follows in his wake. Together, wordless still, they tread back to the cobblestoned streets and the judgemental gazes of those they have wronged, to face down their remaining sins and work for a redemption that may never come. He says her name softly, quietly, and she doesn't shudder, because it belongs to her now. She trusts him with her name; it is safe on his lips. (He'll spend the rest of his life proving it to her.)

She is peeling back, cracking open, and finding inside that she was never empty at all. (She is burning, exploding, and the light of it outshines the stars.)

for I have but the power to kill

Without—the power to die—