There it is again: Riza Hawkeye in a red smear on the floor.

"Lieutenant!" He forgets that's not her title anymore.

"I'm all right." Except she isn't all right, how can she be all right, she's heaving a body off herself! Instantly he's at her side, pulling her from the floor littered with broken glass and chinaware. The blood is everywhere, on her clothes and skin, her cheeks wet and her eyes red, and he feels her tremble under his grip on her shoulders. Against any better judgment, relying only on instinct, he pulls her to his chest in a tight but careful hug. She doesn't fight him, or try to pretend this is something she doesn't need.

"You're hurt?"

"No, no." A canine whimper behind him and he releases her enough to turn and look. "He kicked Hayate," she breathes, bending to the dog, who limps toward them. She sounds horrified, devastated by this offense more than any other, blasé to the fact of the knife lying by the dead man, who had tried to—tried to—Roy's fist tightens at his side.

"He was here for me?" he growls. Hawkeye doesn't answer right away, busying examining the wound on her beloved pet.

"I assume so, sir." Fuck, his fucking fault, every time this happened—her pain always traces back to him. His stomach knots thinking of her scream tonight, and the last time he heard her scream in pain, years ago, his hands on her back burning away the secrets that had birthed their power, another ouroboros.

"Where's your weapon?" he asks, putting his finger on just what seemed odd about all this blood. She would never have invited such a messy destruction.

Hawkeye retrieves something from the floor—there it is, her gun, the barrel turned red. In a swift move, she points it at the wall and pulls the trigger—nothing. "He did something to jam it," she explains. "Alchemy, maybe, who knows how long he was hiding. I think they've been gathering information on us and knew I'd pull a firearm—if we look we might find a circle. I should have seen it before." Her voice hitches, gaze flickering across the disarray as if seeing it for the first time. "It was sloppy. I'm sorry—"

"That's enough, Captain Hawkeye." So typical of her, to take everything upon herself, he wouldn't allow it. One had to look out for ones subordinates. "I'm going to call the military police. Sit down." Taking this as an order, she lowers herself gently to the sofa, but Roy reaches out a hand. "No, not here. The bedroom." No one should have to sit with the corpse of a man she's just killed. Prying her large eyes from the body, she gives him a glazed look, then nods and lets him lead her to the darkness of the other room. He has the twisted, inappropriate thought that this is not how he'd imagined her in his bedroom tonight. Foolish of him to think things could be so easy—he is always acting foolishly when it comes to her. When he leaves her and goes for the phone in the parlor, he mutters to the dead man in the red pool, "Fuck." And grabs the telephone.

"I had intell," Riza insists. "I had intell that there would be an attack when we arrived, and I did nothing."

"That's nonsense," mutters the Brigadier General; she is half-conscious of his arm around her shoulders as they sit on the bed in his room, addressing the Chief of Police. She can hear officers moving in the hallway and the parlor, talking in hushed tones.

The Chief—who has stepped in as lead investigator, probably because it's not everyday someone attempts to assassinate the leader of their city on his first night in office—takes notes in a little book. "What kind of intell?" He doesn't look Riza in the eye when he speaks to her.

"Letters. Everyday. 'Death to Ishvala. Death to the Reformer. We know you.'" Roy's hand tightens on her upper arm. He is so close to her, and she feels slightly less hollow for it, but it's obvious from the stiffness in the Chief's pose that he's not quite comfortable watching his boss, everyone's boss, hold his adjutant in plain view with such unmistakable intimacy. She might protest for professionalism's sake, if she could get a minute alone with Roy to explain, or if she weren't so damn comforted by the reckless abandonment of her hesitancy to touch and be touched.

The Chief raises an unkempt eyebrow. "Pretty damn ominous."

"It was. But I had nothing to go on." She glances out into the corridor as a stretcher passes by, a white sheet over the assailant's remains. "I suppose now it will be all that much easier to track who did this."

"We'll get them," says Roy. The Brigadier General. Mustang. She ought to choose, already, choose a name and stick to it, but it's impossible to capture all the shades of what they've been through together in a single name. She needs to address him by two or three different sobriquets just to get at the multiplicity of what he means to her, perhaps tonight—yet another shared trauma to be filed away under protection—it's time to just accept that he's everything she could ever think to call him.

"Yeah," the Chief agrees half-heartedly, still making notes. Riza tries shoving her brain into a mode she understands—what would she do if it weren't her who'd killed a man tonight? What if she were the soldier who got the call about an assassination attempt on a high-ranking official? She lifts her chin.

"You ought to contact Major Miles immediately. He's our colleague on the Ishvalan Reform—we should advise him to delay his travel plans to East City until these people have been caught. And we," she continues, turning to a startled Roy, "ought to call Rebecca. She can take Hayate for the night. We need to go to an inn."

"An inn?"

"If you don't want to head to your apartment, Captain Hawkeye, I'm sure you're welcome to stay with any number of officers until this place is cleaned up," the Chief offers.

"No. It's harder to track us at a hotel and we don't risk making anyone else a target." Out of the corner of her eye, she spies Roy pursing his lips.

The Chief seems taken aback by the authoritative efficiency in the way she's speaking. "If you insist, Captain," he concedes, and exits into the hall with a curt nod. Perhaps he thinks she's a sociopath because she isn't a sobbing mess, but he wasn't in Ishval, he doesn't know.

"I'll call Rebecca," says Roy. When he rises from the bed his arm slides up her back, and the fear flickers in her that he'll feel the scars, before she remembers that he's the one who put them there. "Go shower and change clothes and we'll find an inn."

"Yes, sir," she replies automatically—he stirs at the formality, and she wishes she could take it back, but explaining would only aggravate the awkwardness. Riza tries to look at him in a way that says, I didn't mean it—if she can say don't perform human transmutation, this should be a small task. Catching her expression, he ducks his head, so his hair falls across his eyes.

"I'll call Rebecca," he repeats, and goes into the hall.

Some images burn themselves in a person's brain and don't fade; they become the mental photograph couching an entire memory in its specific ephemerality, like the frontispiece of a recollection. For tonight, for Riza, that image will be one of Roy Mustang standing at the window in their darkened hotel room, as he pulls back the curtain to observe the street below, the yellow light from the streetlamp haloing him, and casting dark shadows over his face. There's a furrow in his brow, he might be searching for something in particular, or generally scouting suspect behavior. He keeps absently rubbing his middle finger and thumb as if poised to snap them, a nervous thing, he does it when he's tense in the same way other people would wring their hands.

"We'll be all right here for the night. We haven't been followed," he says. With a last long look, he draws away from the window, facing her. His smile is a weak effort. "Are you all right?"

"I'm all right," Riza says, stoic, resisting the urge to hug herself. Instead she sits upright on the end of the hotel bed with her knees together, the same way she sat on the end of Roy's bed not so long ago.

Here they are, sharing a hotel room because it is not prudent to sleep alone after an assassination attempt. The day has stretched on too long, and demanded too much of her, and she can still feel the rasp in her throat from when she screamed earlier; she doesn't have the energy for squeamish discomfort at being in such close quarters with him. The blushing hesitancy, weighing on her since the Promised Day, evaporates. She thinks of the blood circling down the shower drain when she finally got to clean herself up. Roy brought her clothes, because her bags sat in the parlor and she didn't care to go back in—he'd pulled out the first piece of clothing he saw, it seemed, because she was in the plum satin wrap dress she typically reserved for cocktail parties and dates. The innkeeper had given the two of them quite the look when they'd checked in.

"Sorry," he mutters, with a loose gesture at the garment, as though he has suddenly noticed the cognitive dissonance between the circumstance and the dress. He sounds seventeen again.

"It's fine."

A moment passes in which she doesn't know what's going to happen next and doesn't know what she wants to happen next; her gun, sitting on the end table, is useless, and it makes her feel useless. She tried getting it apart to clean away the blood, but the interior has melted and hardened into nothing. It's a hunk of metal in the shape of a weapon. Roy watches her from behind the hair in his eyes, and slides his hands into his pockets.

She says, just wanting the silence to end, "Do you think we can trust the military police to catch these people, or will we have to do it ourselves? East City's not exactly known for its stellar law enforcement."

"I don't know," he says quietly. "I confess I'm not all that worried about it."

Riza's head snaps up and she can almost make out the odd glint in his eye—not a humorous one, the line of his mouth is hard and serious. "I'm worried about it. They want to kill you."

"But they won't."

"You're right, they won't—"

"Because you'll stop them," he says, anticipating her. And he's right, this is exactly what was on her tongue.

"Yes, I… I will."

"Elizabeth."

This is what he calls her when he wants to tell her something he can't tell his adjutant and coworker and subordinate. It is a code. He's signaling her this conversation will be different. Her pulse quickens—she is worried what he'll say, and she's so tired, she may have even more trouble finding her words.

His shoulders sag and he glances to the side, sighing. "Perhaps tonight isn't the night."

"The night for what?" Oh, why'd you ask? whispers a small voice in the back of her mind.

In answer, he steps toward her. She is conscious of the fact that he stands while she sits.

"Sir."

"You know, I meant it."

"Meant what?"

Roy heaves a tremendous sigh and pulls his hands from his pockets to run one through his unruly hair. "When I said I couldn't afford to lose you."

"And you won't," she replies quickly, hoping out of fear that this is it, this is all he has to say. But his mouth opens again and Riza closes her eyes.

"Tonight I saw you lying in blood. Again."

And she blinks up at him . There's enough weight in this statement to warrant eye contact—he's moved closer to her and he drops into a crouch, so she's the taller party, now. She feels the power dynamic shift. "I'm sorry you had to see that," she says, sensing how ineffective it is even as her mouth forms the sentence. Roy tips his head to the side, watching her again, very careful.

Before he speaks his gaze falls to the floor, his voice hitches, she reflexively reaches for his shoulder. "I'm a very selfish man, Hawkeye. Riza." At the sound of her first name in his affected baritone, something in her chest tightens, a peculiar sensation, uncomfortable but a relief, the stretching of a sore muscle.

"No."

"Yes. I am. Listen." His hand loops around the bare, sensitive skin of her ankle and her lips part at the unexpected sensation. His fingers are warm and her legs are cold. "I would like you to have an affair with me."

"An affair," she repeats, the words filling her mouth like cotton balls. Her ears are ringing. He has come so close to her and his hand is inching up her calf. Somehow she feels that touch in every corner of her body.

"I know what's at stake."

"Roy."

There's enough hesitation in this simple utterance of his first name that he snaps from the romantic trance. "Damn. Shit." And he's back on his feet, moving away from her, pacing the room, making Riza wince and regret it. "I'm an idiot, aren't I?" She tries to grab his hand but he's moving too fast.

"I didn't mean that, sir—Roy," she corrects, mainly to get his attention, but he laughs humorlessly. He must hear some false appeal to his overture in the change.

"It's all right, Lieutenant, no need to humor me." He did that earlier, too, called her Lieutenant by mistake.

"I'm not—"

"I should have known," Roy declares, speaking loudly but still to himself. "You're so much better at me at these things, the perfect soldier, I should've known you weren't going to—I'm a damned fool."

And she is on her feet, hand around his arm to stop him in his tracks. "I've been taught my entire life to be quiet and take orders, so forgive me if I'm not the quickest draw at self-expression, sir."

Roy stares, open-mouthed, taken by the outburst. Her grip on his arm loosens and then falls away, but she stays standing, and they look at one another. She thinks about a lot of things: his career aspirations and the effect this might have on those aspirations should they be discovered, the likelihood that she would take the brunt of the blame for whatever transpired, the long road they'd already walked together and the certainty that no affair could be simply an affair, for them, how she might revel in the intensity of such a relationship, the feeling that intensity had already affected the air between them in that very moment. The clean, white line of his jaw, begging to be traced.

Riza has not wanted very many men in her lifetime. Now, tonight, she questions whether or not she has ever really wanted a man at all up until this moment, so immense is the impulse that rises in her chest and begs her to look at his body and its possibilities. She hasn't allowed herself that speculation since she was fourteen and they would go to the lake, for Roy to swim and Riza to sit on the shore with a book and pretend she wasn't looking. In Ishval it was hard to see anyone that way, and she has always appreciated the tendency of Amestrian military uniforms to negate the specific figure of a person. But now.

"Yes," she mumbles, though it is unnecessary because Roy has already stepped into her, his lips close enough to hers her skin catches the warm breath escaping them.

"I've always…"

"I don't think we should discuss anything that's happened before now."

He smiles. "I think that's a wonderful idea." His hands catch hers and the touch makes her realize that, yes, she wants him, but she is so exhausted her limbs ache at nothing.

"I'm tired, sir," she gets out, and Roy's face opens with concern, something that might've been lust dissolves into a sincerely dopey fret over her.

"Are you all right!"

"Yes, I'm still all right." This is the third time she's had to tell him this tonight.

He takes a deep breath, fears quelled, and raises a soft palm to her cheek. "Can I at least kiss you?"

"At least?"

"I'll admit that—if you're interested—there are other things I'd like to do you."

"I'm interested," she laughs, barely able to contain the affection rising in her throat.

"Excellent," Roy breathes, squeezing her hand. "But not tonight."

"Not tonight."

"Good." This is the instant she thinks he's going to lean in, but he doesn't. She knows the strange expression that's come over his face, it's a flicker of boyish anxiety, but it's enough to stop him.

A heat crawls up her torso. Roy doesn't get boyish around his rotation of women—not that she has met very many of them, but she's seen his romantic persona, and this isn't it. Which means something for her, for them. She supposes it was silly to entertain the notion that this development might be any less than significant for him than it is for her, silly to think that when they've come through so much, together. It wouldn't make sense to fall out of sync now.

Fear has held her back for two months, fear of the future informed by the past. She fears that there will never be a day when she does not need to protect him. She fears she will have to shoot him, like she promised to do. She fears that the future just holds more hardship for them, and that to be in love would only worsen the pain should she fail or see him stray. It's a fear that nothing changes—and she realizes looking at him in the darkness of that hotel room (why haven't they turned on the light?) that everything is about to change, anyway, regardless.

There will be pain. There is always pain.

And there are things that aren't pain. There's Roy.

She slides a hand up his shoulder and steps in to kiss him. It's been a long time since she kissed anyone—dating is a luxury she can't afford and besides, there's Roy. And the weight on her lips flusters her, so she doesn't do much of anything except hold there, pressing herself against him. Thankfully he remembers himself and his hands find her hips, pulling them together, worrying the watery fabric of her dress. His hands are powerful, metaphorically and otherwise but for the time being she elects to forget what they've done or might do and enjoy the skillful trail one runs up her side. He strokes her jaw, telling her, relax, and she parts her lips beneath his; his tongue swipes the roof of her mouth and makes her shiver.

When they finally part she thinks maybe minutes have gone by and it's like she's been drugged, she feels so lightheaded and euphoric and sleepy. He must sense this, or feel her droop in his arms, because he leads her carefully to the bed and helps her to get settled. He starts to pull away but she wraps herself around his arm.

"You'll stay with me."

Roy pauses over her, his face a shadow. "I'm not going anywhere."

"Sleep here, I mean." He makes a tiny, uncertain noise. Thinking of propriety, maybe, but it's a strange reservation to have at this point. "Come." Suppressing a smile, she draws him to the other side of the bed, and watches him remove his boots. The movement results in the white shirt stretching across the broad plane of his back, though he is not much broader than her. When he lies back he turns his head to return her stare.

"Goodnight," he mutters, and she nods drowsily, the pillow mussing her hair. Her consciousness has started to slip away. Her eyes fall shut. She feels the hands pull them together again, and her body is cocooned by Roy's warmer one, the comfort nudging a sigh from her lungs.

"Goodnight," she replies. He presses a kiss to her temple. Her thought before she sleeps is that he might've picked the dress on purpose.

"My sense of the organization is that they know how to put on a show, but they're not very smart."

It's not disinterest that has Roy yawning discreetly into his hand this morning—Riza wasn't the only one exhausted by yesterday's events, and even after she'd fallen asleep in his arms, he was too thrilled to close his eyes for another hour. Instead he lay there and catalogued the aspects of their pose in the same way he catalogues elemental ingredients: satin dress, blonde hair slightly damp, itchy coverlet, body heat, pierced ears, eyelashes.

He kissed her when they woke, and apologized for having yet to brush his teeth.

Now she stands behind him at attention and listens to the police report, like the late night did nothing to her. She makes him look unprofessional—and yawns are supposed to be contagious.

"What makes you say that, Chief?" Riza asks, because Roy is incapable of contributing.

"After we identified the guy, we searched his place all night. Saw the files he had on you two and the rest of the staff—it's newspaper clippings and a couple of memos, and some maps showing home addresses and frequented businesses. We found the cardstock and typewriter, too. It's their base of operation."

"A more thoughtful organization wouldn't send the man whose apartment they're using as a base of operations to be their assassin."

"Exactly. It's sloppy." The Chief waggles his bushy eyebrows. "In fact, there was no evidence of any co-conspirators. This may have been a fluke, sir."

Roy lifts his head. It's time for him to weigh in now, both the Chief and his Captain are anticipating a judgment about the situation.

"Possibly," he gets out, if barely. It's pathetic. Behind him, Riza steps forward.

"Please continue to investigate the matter until you've confirmed this man was working on his own, or apprehended the co-conspirators." Her tone has the ring of a final order, and the Chief stands, giving them a quick salute before shuffling out of the office. Roy can hardly wait for the door to shut behind him—he lets out a tremendous sigh, slumping in his chair.

"What time is it, Captain?"

"Eleven hundred hours, sir."

"Can I go home yet?"

Out the corner of his eye, he sees her tense, and she steps around the desk to get a proper look at him. Her expression cajoles him. He missed the soft wonder, the glow that came into her face after their kiss. He thinks he'd like to leave and take her with him, to some place where he can make her glow again. "This is your first working day as head of Eastern Command, and there's been an attempt on your life."

"All the more reason to take a day off."

"We don't take days off, General."

Unfortunately, she's right. "Well," he mutters, chin on his fist. "When can I go home?"

Her gaze twitches upwards, half a second, the subtlest eye roll. "Seventeen hundred hours, sir."

There are flirtatious impulses he sometimes can't contain: "And what will you be doing at seventeen hundred hours, Captain?"

Annoyance flickers across her face, but it's the kind of annoyance half-endeared to the annoying party, and Roy finds himself grinning. "I'll probably head home," she says carefully, and moves into the corner of the office, starting to pour coffee.

"Anyone special waiting there for you?"

"Yes, I'm rather looking forward to seeing my dog again."

Roy laughs, deeply. He likes her sense of humor, the one most would claim she doesn't have. It's an honor to see that side of her. "Just the dog?"

"I might make a phone call to a friend later. If he's patient." With an inscrutable look, she sets a cup of coffee on the desk in front of him.

"Patient," Roy repeats. When she leans down with the coffee he smells the strong clean scent of his own shampoo. That's right—she was in his shower last night. So he makes the mistake of thinking about her in the shower.

"It is a virtue."

"Yeah. Great." Hawkeye in the shower. "What time can I leave, again?"

When she replies, he can hear her stifling a laugh. "Seventeen hundred hours."

Someone's cleaned up in the parlor, and they've done a decent job, even finished more unpacking—he realizes this is because some of the cardboard boxes containing his possessions got blood on them, but still, it's nice to be free of the clutter.

He and his Captain parted ways at the front gate of Command. She saluted before turning to go, and he watched her walk off until she rounded a corner. And then he came back here.

The next hour passes in silent agony. Last night might've been a dream; today they are rested, calmer, sobered up from the adrenaline. It would be easy to brush off what's been said and done as simple error made in the frenzy of a taxing night. So he sits by the phone and waits, not even taking off his boots. Tries to read and then to revise some research notes, and can't focus. At one point he doubts his understand of her message, perhaps she really does have some friend she is thinking about calling. He wishes she hadn't been so cryptic; could anyone truly have overheard them, behind the heavy oak doors of his office? He'd like to know how soundproof that room is—she would probably say this is an unprofessional inquiry.

And then, like the sun ripping through parted curtains at the peak of day, the phone rings.