"I can't live without you," Roy breathes into her shoulder, voice muffled, and it's the night of Hughes' funeral, so he's feeling uncharacteristically vulnerable. Riza knows this, but she's feeling uncharacteristically selfish, and so she takes his face in her hands, kisses it, thumbs the narrow expanse of his cheekbones as he rests his hands on her hips and does the same, kisses slow then feverishly with breaths of want and need to accent the silence - can't live without, can't live without.
Roy has spent a lifetime tracing the slope of her shoulder blades as they arc down towards her spine, a cradle for her secret that long ago became his. The array and countless others - a book of secrets he drafted at 17 that keeps collapsing in on itself. It's the manuscript of his inner life, a how-to on just barely surviving the quiet romance of a lifetime: absence and the heart and you. The countless ways this woman has gotten under his skin and seeped into his bones.
He thinks of killing himself and then he thinks of her and the guilt eats at his insides and makes him terrified that she can read his thoughts. That she knows he's selfish, has known, will always know. She knows so much about him and yet never knows enough; their knowing of one another is cloaked in guns and violence and misunderstandings of the intimacy between two children who became fighters. They live one power structure that masquerades another - Roy as King and Riza as Queen. She's the Queen of his office, his treasonist deceit, his life, his heart. Riza in her father's kitchen, cooking Roy breakfast. Riza in the parlor helping him study. Riza at the train station waving goodbye, first to his wide eyed stare and then to her own. Riza in the desert. Riza at her father's funeral and then at Hughes'. Riza standing at attention in front of his desk and Roy's knuckles are white, he is choking, he can't breathe, and Riza hands him coffee in a stark white mug in her father's kitchen that's morphed into his office. She's staring at him with that look others interpret as hero worship, but he sees as understanding. Maybe love.
He had kissed her once. In Ishbal. He kissed her and wanted it to taste like the sunflower field behind her father's house, and it did, intermingled with the overwhelming sensation of skin against skin, peppered with sand dried from the sun. It tasted the same and it tasted different. Like years of loneliness compounded into days pressing on his soul.
He kissed her once and he's kissing her now, spanning the distance between yesterday's foolishness and today. The girl he used to know, hiding in the shadows. He misses her like he misses his mother, though they occupy different compartments in his heart.
(Riza, he knows, is the entirety of his heart.)
It's the night of Hughes' funeral and Roy thinks too much. Riza is tugging at the tufts of hair on the nape of his neck, her ministrations whispering, "come back to me. Don't go away."
He comes back to her and ghosts kisses on the side of her face. She is so goddamn beautiful that it hurts him right into his bones. Everything hurts. It always does. Riza hurts and his bones hurt and this game they're playing, the deceit of a lifetime of a government being overthrown, it all hurts. Hughes hurts. Hughes is dead and Roy doesn't want to live anymore. Hughes is dead and Riza is dying for him just like everybody else, but right now she is alive, so painfully, overwhelmingly alive, the air from her breath warming his face.
They trace patterns of escape in one another as he traces patterns on her back, those long ago memorized ties that bind.