A Theoretical Novelty

A move in the opening of chess that has not been played before.

Summary: Orphaned and penniless at sixteen, Riza Hawkeye finds her future closely intertwined with that of her father's apprentice, Roy Mustang.

Chapter One

Her father's headstone was white and austere, a fitting monument to a stern and unforgiving man. She felt numb; she wasn't sure if it was from shock, from apathy, or from the biting December cold. Staring at the words etched into the headstone, she apologized, "I'm sorry, Mister Mustang, for having to rely on you to help me with the arrangements for my father's funeral."

"It was nothing. He was my mentor; I would do anything for him." His deep voice warmed some of the icy tension in her chest. "Do you have any other family?"

She shook her head, staring down at the headstone. While he lived, her father had been silent as the grave about his or her mother's families. She doubted his headstone would yield any new information. "My mother died a long time ago," she explained. "Both my mother and father were estranged from their families. They never told me anything about my relatives."

"All right," he said, reaching into his pocket. She looked up at him as he handed her his card. His dark eyes softened as he looked at her, "But if you ever need any help – anything at all – don't hesitate to contact me at Military HQ. I'll most likely stay in the military for the rest of my life."

She accepted the card scanning it curiously. The Green Dragon of Amestris took up most of the left side of the card with the words Amestris State Military occupying two lines underneath the symbol. The right side of the card contained four lines of text with Mister Mustang's name and rank as well as an address and phone number in East City.

"For the rest of your life?" she wondered.

At his noise of agreement, she glanced up at him worriedly.

"Please don't get killed!" she exclaimed.

He paled, muttering something under his breath that sounded like Don't jinx me. When he spoke again, his dark eyes held a pensive far away look. "I can't promise that. In this profession you never know when you'll wind up dead in a ditch somewhere like a piece of garbage. But if I can help strengthen the foundation of this country and protect its people with my hands that would make me happy."

She gazed up at him feeling the icy tension in her chest continue to unravel at his kindhearted honesty.

"That's the reason I studied alchemy," he continued. "But in the end my master didn't teach me his secrets." Mister Mustang rubbed a hand behind his head and looked at her askance with an embarrassed expression. "Sorry, I must be boring you with my naïve dreams."

"Not at all," she replied with a smile. "I think it's a wonderful dream. My father didn't take his secrets to the grave. He told me that he hid them in a code that's indecipherable to the average alchemist."

Mister Mustang's eyes widened as he turned to her. "So the master wrote his secrets down after all."

She averted her eyes from his hopeful gaze and looked down at her father's headstone. When her father had come to her last year with his request, she'd been honored to be chosen to safeguard his legacy. She saw now that she'd been naïve. Her father had only ever seen her as a child, a housekeeper, a nursemaid, and finally a piece of parchment. She couldn't even see the tattoo mottling her back in black and red ink with her own eyes. Her father no doubt didn't believe her worthy of seeing his secrets, his life's work. She could only see a reflection in the mirror.

"No," she replied finally. "Not on paper anyway. He said that he couldn't risk the destruction of his life's work or have it fall into the wrong hands."

"So how did he record his legacy?" Mister Mustang wondered.

"Mister Mustang. That dream, can I trust you with my back so that I can help make it come true?"

xxx

Her fingers were clumsy on the round buttons of her blouse. She could hear Mister Mustang's sharp inhale of breath as the blouse slid off her shoulders so the flame alchemy cipher tattooed into her back could be revealed. As the blouse pooled at her feet, she unsnapped her brassiere and let it fall to the floor. She held her trembling arms in front of her bare breasts to give herself some little pretense of modesty. Her cheeks burned with shame as she stood topless in front of Mister Mustang, her father's apprentice.

She'd thought him impossibly handsome and mature when he showed up at the house all those years ago to be her father's apprentice. He'd been a worldly fourteen-year-old boy with clever dark eyes and a confident smile. She'd been a shy and tomboyish ten-year-old girl. Over the three years that he'd studied under her father Mister Mustang had only grown more handsome and self-assured. She'd been a gangly thirteen-year-old when he left to join the Military Academy.

She heard the floorboards creak behind her as he stepped closer. She heard a rustling of fabric and glanced over her shoulder as he held out his coat for her. Covering her breasts with one arm, she took his coat in shaking hands and clutched it to her chest.

"Riza," the sound of her name on his lips made her shiver. He rasped out, "When did your father…"

She was proud she was able to keep her voice steady. "This time last year."

"How could he…"

She averted her eyes to the ground. "It's ugly, but I'm no great beauty, so…"

Mister Mustang interrupted her decisively, "Riza, you've grown into a beautiful woman regardless of the alchemic cipher on your back."

Riza's cheeks burned as she glanced back to see him studying her intently. She felt like a lovesick thirteen-year-old girl again. Clearing her throat, she changed the subject to hide her embarrassment. "Can you decipher it, Mister Mustang?"

"Call me Roy," was his answer.

"Roy," she tried. His name felt foreign on her tongue.

He didn't touch her, but she could still feel the intensity of his gaze burning into her skin. "It's extremely complex, so it'll take awhile. If I copied it down on paper you wouldn't have to…"

She shook her head. "My father didn't want this transcribed on paper. You'll have to learn his secrets from my back."

xxx

The next three days passed quickly as they fell into a routine. Mister Mustang, who had become an early riser because of his military training, would go out on a run before the sun had risen. By the time he returned, Riza would have breakfast and coffee ready. The rest of the days were spent studying the tattoo.

Her father's study was the designated location for this particular task. They'd carried the green velvet settee from the front parlor for her to stretch out on while Roy decoded the tattoo on her back.

The December chill seemed to permeate every room in her father's drafty old house. Roy kept a fire going in the hearth of her father's study so that they would be comfortable while he worked to decode the cipher on her back. Setting the fire in the health had even become part of their daily routine. After she'd told Roy how she'd seen her father light the logs using flame alchemy with the candle on his desk as the catalyst, Roy had been eager to try it out himself. Thus far, it'd been an exercise in futility after which Roy resorted to tossing a match onto the kindling under the stacked logs.

Roy stood with his back to her, glaring at the fire burning merrily in the hearth like it had personally offended him. Riza grinned over at him as she pulled her cream colored knit sweater over her head.

"Don't be discouraged," she said blithely as she tugged the sleeves back up to her shoulders to cover her chest to help preserve her modesty. "It took my father ten years to develop flame alchemy. You can't expect to learn it overnight.

Roy ran his hands through his hair. "This is impossible. It's not flame alchemy; it's air alchemy. The flame is only the catalyst of the reaction. The important part is controlling the concentration of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the air to feed or smoother the flame."

"It'll take time and practice, like anything else," Riza said as she walked over to the settee in the middle of the room. She tiptoed around the towering pile of alchemy, chemistry, and physics textbooks that Roy had spread out around the couch. "Well I'm ready when you're ready."

Roy put his hands on his hips and stared at the fire. "I think I'm going to put the candle in the fireplace tomorrow. I think it's just too advanced of a maneuver for me to control the path of the flame all the way from the desk to the fireplace. Or maybe the problem is with my transmutation circle."

Riza stretched out on her belly on the settee and opened her book, absentmindedly moving the ancient Aerugian to Amestrian dictionary within reach. The green velvet felt luxurious against the bare skin of her stomach. The soft wool of her sweater was warm against her shoulders and arms and bare breasts. Sunlight spilled into the room, illuminating the cover of Valerius's poems that she'd brought to pass the time.

Roy chuckled as he walked over to the settee. "You look like a sunbather on the beaches of Aerugo, basking topless in a warm patch of sun."

Riza tried to hide her blush, quipping, "Aerugian women sunbathe topless?"

Roy shrugged as he sat down in front of her. Resting his elbow on his knee, he gazed up at her with a crooked smile. "So I've heard."

The next hours passed at a slow crawl. She had trouble concentrating on reading her book of poems – the fact they were in ancient Aerugian certainly didn't help matters. Roy's breath on her skin as he studied the words inked on her left shoulder blade or his fingers tracing over the symbols on the small of her back drove her to distraction.

She turned the page to her favorite poem. She practically knew it by heart, so it was very easy to translate.

"Let us live, my Clodia, let us love,

and all the words of the old, and so moral,

may they be worth less than nothing to us!

Suns may set, and suns may rise again:

but when our brief light has set,

night is one long everlasting sleep.

Give me a thousand kisses, a hundred more,

another thousand, and another hundred,

and, when we've counted up the many thousands,

confuse them so as not to know them all,

so that no enemy may cast an evil eye,

by knowing that there were so many kisses.

"Riza," came Roy's voice by her hip.

Blushing, she turned to look at him.

He put his elbow on the settee and rested his head on his hand. His eyes were impossibly dark as he looked up at her. She blushed and tried to ignore how his eyes flickered to her lips before moving back to her eyes. Licking his lips, he said huskily, "Your skirt is hiding the bottom of the tattoo. May I…"

"Yes," she whispered.

His hands on her skin burned like a brand as he smoothed them from her waist down to the zipper at the small of her back. The sound of the zipper was impossibly loud in the room; the only other sound was the gentle crackling of the fire in the hearth and the soft sound of their breaths.

Riza could feel her heart pounding in her ears as he folded back the top of her skirt to better study the tattoo. She closed her eyes and tried to calm her breathing. She wouldn't let him know how much he affected her.

xxx

During Roy Mustang's stay at her father's house, the library became her refuge. When she became too overcome by the interest flickering in his dark eyes, the seductive tone of his voice, or his fingers against the lines of her tattoo, she would disappear into the library. She would never interfere with his time studying her tattoo, but when they decided to take a long break in the afternoon or evening she would need a break from him as well. She needed to be alone to compose herself again.

Even in her dreams he haunted her. During the day, she lay before him on the settee with his breath on her shoulders and his fingers on her back as he studied the tattoo. In her dreams, she laid under him on the settee with his mouth moving over hers and his hands caressing every inch of her skin.

As soon as Roy was able to expertly practice her father's flame alchemy, he would be leaving again for East City. She was already too attached to him. If she let herself fall into Roy Mustang's dark eyes, broad chest, or muscular arms, she would lose herself. She'd been half in love with him since she was a girl. If she became further entangled with him the only thing that she could expect from him was heartbreak.

She was a boyish and reserved country girl. A man like him didn't fall in love with girl like her. A man like Roy Mustang would fall in love with a glamorous and vivacious city girl.

"Here you are. Dinner's almost ready if you're hungry."

She looked up at him from where she sat against one of the bookcases at the back of the library. She had a dense Drachman novel open in her lap.

"How many languages can you read?" Roy wondered as he looked down at the pages. "I've seen you reading ancient and modern Aerugian, Cretan, Xingese, and now Drachman. You're really impressive."

Riza shrugged as she creased the corner of the page and closed the book. "I enjoy languages," she explained, running her fingers over the worn cover with a small smile. "My mother studied comparative literature at the Scholar's Academy, where she received her teaching certificate. These are her books. She left little annotations and notes in the margins. When I read them, I feel closer to her. She was died when I was very young. I don't have many memories of her except for what I can imagine she was like from her books."

Roy leaned back against the bookshelf across from her with his hands in his pockets. He looked around the library and mused, "It's nice that you have something to remember her by. My parents died suddenly when I was very young child. I have keepsakes and pictures of them, but nothing that reflects their personalities like these books must for you mother."

Riza pulled her knees up to her chest and looked up at him. "The majority of the books are my father's: textbooks, treatises, studies on chemistry and physics and mathematics. I don't have much interest in those. Would you like them?"

Roy raised an eyebrow. "Didn't you say that your father's solicitor wanted you to wait until he'd notified all of the interested parties before you started distributing or selling your father's belongings?"

She shrugged. "You're correct of course. However, the only other people that need to be notified are my father's creditors. Father left all of his assets - what little there is – to me. So the books are mine to do with as I wish. I'm planning to give some to the parish library and I'd like you to have his alchemy texts."

Roy's eyes widened. "Your father had an impressive collection, there's even some first editions among his texts. You could make a fortune selling your father's alchemy texts to the state military. That could help you settle his debts."

Riza laughed out loud. "Father would roll over in his grave! I'm certain he'd come haunt me if I did something like that. It's bad enough that I've shared the secrets of his most dangerous alchemy to a soon to be dog of the military."

Roy snorted. "That assumes that I'll pass the state alchemy exam. There's a slim chance of that. The youngest man to ever pass the state alchemy exam was thirty-two. I doubt the top brass will even consider passing a twenty year old kid fresh out of the military academy."

"Then you'll just have to be so impressive that they can't say no," she grinned.

"Easier said than done."