Lascivious

Chapter Six

Roy knew that it was a bad idea. If Master Hawkeye found them like this, lying on a blanket under the stars with Riza nearly—though not quite—asleep against Roy's chest, he'd be out the next day. But when Riza had burst into his room in the middle of the night, picnic basket on one arm and a blanket slung over the other, eyes aglow with light brighter than the stars that now hung above them and excitedly telling him about a meteor shower that they had to see, he could hardly refuse.

When Roy had first come to the house, it was he who would try to initiate the midnight rendezvouses. It wasn't something new to him, even at an awkward fourteen he had been convincing the girls in Central to meet him in the back room of his aunt's bar. But his teacher's stoic daughter was not nearly as receptive to his advances.

Riza shifted in his arms a bit as silence seemed to fade into sleep and he couldn't help but pull a strand of moonlit hair away from her eyes.

Riza had always been a dreamer, but years of being pulled down by the suffocating emptiness of her surroundings had made it difficult to see the sky above the creaking, splintered ceiling of her home. But as they grew closer over the long, slow years, she had grown up, grown into the beauty and the nature that surrounded them. And he would only have that for so much longer.

"Riza," he said in a whisper, half hoping it was quiet enough that she wouldn't stir and the moment could last just a few seconds longer. But her eyelids soon fluttered open and she rolled out of his arm and over in the grass, her face inches from his.

"Yes?" she asked sleepily.

He sat up, crossing his legs and not quite letting his eyes meet hers. "I haven't told your father this yet," he admitted and she sat up too, raising her eyebrows seriously, "In a week... I'm leaving."

She frowned a little and he knew what she was thinking. "You're going to visit your aunt in Central?"

He found his fingers fiddling with the edges of the blanket beneath them. "No." His heart beat faster and faster and an aching sense guilt seemed to have replaced the oxygen in his lungs. "I mean I'm leaving... permanently. Or maybe not," he added hastily. "My alchemy training isn't complete yet and I want to learn flame alchemy once your father completes his research, but the point is, I've enrolled in a military academy."

He ventured a quick look at her face. To his surprise, Riza seemed undaunted, instead her eyes were down cast and she was outfitted with that somber look of resignation she wore too often.

"Well I can see why you waited this long to tell us." She looked up at him again and in a desperate moment brown eyes met black. "Roy, I just don't understand your need to become a soldier. You can do good in so many other places than on the battlefield—"

She was right, he couldn't deny that and for a moment, he mentally fumbled to find the words to describe the fear and the need to protect everything he loved that had torn at his chest for the years since he had seen his parents die. But the words wouldn't come; they couldn't come, he had found after too many failures to vocalize what was inside of him.

"I don't expect you to understand, Riza," he said finally. "I'd just... I'd like your support on this. Especially when I have to tell your father that I'm leaving."

She looked above him to the sky and all the stars in their multitudes and he knew that she too looked into the infinity above them to see if it contained the words she needed. After a moment, she laughed. "I don't suppose there's anything I can say to convince you otherwise?"

He had to stop the "yes" before it escaped his lips and instead shook his head resolutely.

"Well then of course I'll support you," she said with a soft smile, taking his hands into her smaller ones and leaning in to kiss him.