fic (fullmetal alchemist) (conographia, installment one)
title: conographia
fandom: fullmetal alchemist
character/pairing: Riza Hawkeye, Roy Mustang (Royai)
rating: K+/T
wordcount: 2,033 (installment 1)
summary: There was evidence about them of things unseen. (Vignettes from the Royai 100)
notes: Originally written from November 2004 - June 2006, Conographia was my original fumbling with the whole Roy/Riza relationship. When I left LJ in 2006, I removed links for all of the LJ copy (including 28 vignettes that were not posted anywhere else); I am now re-posting them, with a fair amount of editing-though there are a few that are never going to mesh with canon. Additionally, there are about six pieces that were lost to the sands of time and vagrancies of technology; I will note when a vignette has been rewritten.
Title from the word iconographia, which refers it a description or verbal sketch. Also from conograph, a device which is used to measure the passage of time.
97. From Yesterday
The music begins hesitantly; warbling, adolescent strains fill the room. It sounds as awkward as the young cadet feels until the moment when the players finally grasp the correct note, and then reach the first glorious crescendo, when everything falls, suddenly and with absolute precision, into place. The ball has officially begun.
For a brief instant the lovely, understated silhouettes and perfect profiles of girls with the slender necks of swans rising above their shoulders captivate him. However, his speech never falters in its even cadence and nothing betrays his rapturous amazement at the sight of a roomful of cadets in hopeful blue, and the young women accompanying them. The girls are bedecked in fine, glimmering fabrics and precious gems. They are all of them pieces of a fabulously adorned, brightly colored puzzle.
It is his first military dress function. He is so bedazzled and so determined not to show it that he turns and moves to dance first with the most plainly attired woman there-a female cadet his own age or perhaps a little younger. Like him, she is also in dress uniform, brilliantly blue and starched-although perhaps with crisper creases. She is obviously better with an iron than he.
She has a quite, precise air about her that makes her both a suitable dance partner and the prettiest girl in the room.
They dance wonderfully together. When the music stops, before he is composed enough to step back, bow, and take his leave to move about the room, they hear the gracious applause of the collected assembly. In this case, the assembly consists of the officers and their wives (some of them inappropriately young), the cadets, the women from about town. Also the spinster chaperones that sit primly to the side, smiling at the couples on the floor that are able to execute the neat, slightly scandalous patterns of a waltz.
The cadets bow to each other and part ways; he moves to socialize and she stands at the sidelines. She is respectfully attentive to the war stories of a superior officer, and even dances with him; a spirited polka that has her clinging to his hands for dear life.
She dances also with another boy near her own age; he is blond, strong-featured, and strangely awkward. Compared to her, his steps are heavy and hesitating. Unlike her first partner, his palms are sweaty. She is polite, but refuses a second dance.
The rest of the evening passes, for her, without incident. Her dark-haired partner from that first dance flirts diplomatically with the girls about him, but he leaves quietly as well. The two of them walk out together, unobtrusively, and go their separate ways at the door. The ball is over, all of it to be packaged away in large boxes with crisp paper and those fine dresses the young girls wore. The memory of the evening will be pulled out like an heirloom by a group of those dwindled, frail chaperones; they will remember each detail vividly and hungrily, coloring the events with phrases they think are romantic.
Years later they will reminisce about this party, this dance, remembering the silks in a brighter hue, the lace-edged handkerchiefs and the blue dress uniforms more neatly starched. They will talk about that dance like it’s some sort of myth, a beautiful story to tell the girls that visit them in their tiny, old homes.
Do you remember those dancing soldiers? One of them will ask, leaning her body so far forward that she is in danger of falling out of her chair. The dark-haired boy and that fair girl, the one with the pretty eyes.
The old gossips will recall the sweet, clear movements, the splendid turns about the floor.
It was amazing, another will remark. They were really the most beautiful things I will ever imagine. (She wonders to herself if it was a dream, but dismisses the idea; it is not a possibility she wishes to consider.)
Immortalized in careful, measured time, those two impossible people dance on without fumbling, into the dark of some unsolicited memory. There is a smooth, repetitious movement to it, causing the dance to loop back around itself again and again, caught up in the fragile blindness characteristic of those beloved on this earth.
(But it really wasn't like that; one of the old women tries to explain on her deathbed. It was even more wonderful than I can remember, more wonderful than that distortion time allows.)
(Oh, she whispers, falling asleep, if only you could have seen that dance, like they were the only people left in one small world, in that small place that time provides…)
Somewhere in the world, Roy and Riza are still young, and dancing.
48. Side of the Face
If you study the Colonel's face closely, you can detect the faint bristling of dark hair on his cheeks and the sharp, too-thin curve of his jaw; he has forgotten to shave.
Between his eyes are small furrows, a weary, pinched look. He is tired, uneasy, overburdened.
First Lieutenant Hawkeye is little better; though she is unaware of it, her face also betrays her exhaustion. The set of her chin, her clenched jaw, the creases across her nose and cheeks from sleeping face down, her head buried in the crook of her arm-she sleeps on her eyes because she does not trust them to stay shut. She is not certain of what she might, in dreams, catch a glimpse of.
Together, the sides of their faces are the only visible equation; the two of them are sitting together, exhausted, heads bent closely together over yet another urgent file. There is little consideration, if any, for personal space between them-and indeed, now, it would make no sense at all.
Seeing the Colonel and the First Lieutenant tired and tense like that, you can imagine that they are watching over a child's first real illness-their own child, maybe. You are tired enough that the idea of the two of them together is a plausible argument. (You’d expect it from the Colonel. Hawkeye is too beyond reproach to really consider it, and you’re almost sure she’d reprimand you for thinking it, if she were paying you any attention.)
Your own eyes are tired. Sitting here, watching them from across the room, their profiles blur together and you can almost imagine their probable, dream child's face. You think: dark hair, serious eyes, and tiny lines that will haunt the lips of their daughters and the eyes of their sons, someday, maybe, yes, if they live through all of this to one day become old.
Notes: I hate this one. I wrote it before I had any feel for or attachment to the rest of the subordinates, and I can’t see this coming from any of them. Unless Falman were on drugs, maybe. IDEK.
50. Fingertips
These are the crisp conduits of nature: knuckle, finger, nail, and the knobby recession back to the wrist.
Her nails are well groomed and short; his are the same, with barely perceptible calluses on the first three: middle, index, and thumb. Her fingers are perhaps stronger than his are-but when they hold hands in secret, they do it with all the tender harshness of poets, of realists.
They let lives fall through their finger and land in their laps, knowing far too well that what they are hoping for is unlikely to come to pass.
They hold each other's hands tightly; as if trying to leave love notes in the tiny half-moon indentations their nails leave behind in each other's skin. They don’t hold each other’s hands at all, but the desire still rings true, bright and stuttering-oh, they are lovers, they are ghosts, there is nothing yet to hold onto.
91. Kiss
At first, like butterflies, the gentle fluttering of eyelashes against the face; soft heartbeats, small and afraid, stuttering like stuck moths in lamplight.
Then, in all quietness, like tired, forgiving animals, they bump faces and become still, nose to nose, eyelash the blinking eyelash, breath and breath.
They stare at each other in that abnormal, gasping stillness, unbelieving and skeptical of this moment's true meaning, if there is any. They wait, uncomfortably, for an interruption.
5. Weapon (Heiki) & Fine (Heiki)
Manga Chapter 37
Hawkeye didn't often raise her voice, so when she began to yell at him, angrily gesturing with an empty pistol, he felt out of place and oddly guilty. He felt skittish, too, seeing the empty gun in her grasp-Hawkeye rarely was this unprofessional, and the gesture as well as the lack of ammunition was alarming.
He rationalized that he did not feel as guilty now as he would have been if Hawkeye had been killed. So he only agreed with her, sounding rather flustered: yes, he was an idiot, yes, of course she was fine, of course she could take care of herself.
He was glad to turn away from her as they walked down the fire escape to the car-it was easier to tell her that he was glad that she was all right without looking her in the eye. (It was easier to say a lot of things to her when he wasn’t looking her in the eye, as if this way he could address them to the woman she’d once been, or the woman she had since become.)
Already there were bruises forming around her neck like some cruel brand, he could see the shadows of that monster’s hands even from beneath her high collar. Her voice rasped when she spoke, so different from the lilt she’d adopted over the ‘phone; it was one more thing on his conscience.
65. The you reflected in the glass
Underneath her uniform, she’s a lot smaller than anyone ever guesses. Of course, she doesn’t consider herself as such-Riza has subtle, sustained curves, enough width the never call herself small-but her waist, her thin wrists and ankles, the long lines of her arms and legs give her an almost delicate, tidy appearance.
Looking at Riza from that angle, she seems touchable and within reach.
Roy remembers how, once, at a pointless picnic on an obscenely hot day she wore some sort of summery blouse and skirt set. All through the party he watched her out of the corner of one eye, the judicious movements of her shoulders and the repositioning of her fingers on her glass.
When the party was over and everyone was leaving, all of them tired and a little drunk. Pausing in her task of gathering up abandoned glasses of half-consumed liquor, Riza yawned and stretched, raising her arms over her head and arching her spine along with the motion. The hem of her shirt rose with her arms and Roy had caught a glimpse of her hip, the sharp edginess of her bones straining against the skin like a knife pressed to elastic.
The sight of her had broken his heart wide open.
-Despite her apparent shapelessness in uniform-he can’t tell if the military is attempting to make a man out of her-, when Riza dresses down she is unlined. Her breasts and hips are deeply curved, soft beneath her shirt and skirt, her shoulders and the bones encircling her throat are like long fingers, sharp and protruding. Riza is no swan, but she might as well dress in white, as tragically mute and lovely as she is.
Roy writes all of this in his little black book in another language, sketching arrays about the scattered text, thinking of ways to try and make her happy.
He never comes up with much, but the fact that he is trying eases a little of the heartbreak that watching her entails; she wavers subtly, like an image on a hot horizon.
It's like she's slipping away from him, ounce by ounce, fat dissolving into compact, unyielding muscle; her soft past painted over with the hard armor of the war, of Roy’s covert operations. It’s been a few years and some of her losses have crept from her face-she no longer looks so much like a murderer, but she never looks like she’s happy, or that Ishval has quite left her.
She has become all hard lines, regimented, an equation, part of his small, constricted world. She should not be here, and yet she flourishes in a way that is beautiful and deathless. This makes him, inexplicably, unhappy.
She should be incalculable, he thinks. Some sort of impossible variable in an equation that does not require a solution to prove its existence.
fandom: fullmetal alchemist
character/pairing: Riza Hawkeye, Roy Mustang (Royai)
rating: K+/T
wordcount: 2,033 (installment 1)
summary: There was evidence about them of things unseen. (Vignettes from the Royai 100)
notes: Originally written from November 2004 - June 2006, Conographia was my original fumbling with the whole Roy/Riza relationship. When I left LJ in 2006, I removed links for all of the LJ copy (including 28 vignettes that were not posted anywhere else); I am now re-posting them, with a fair amount of editing-though there are a few that are never going to mesh with canon. Additionally, there are about six pieces that were lost to the sands of time and vagrancies of technology; I will note when a vignette has been rewritten.
Title from the word iconographia, which refers it a description or verbal sketch. Also from conograph, a device which is used to measure the passage of time.
97. From Yesterday
The music begins hesitantly; warbling, adolescent strains fill the room. It sounds as awkward as the young cadet feels until the moment when the players finally grasp the correct note, and then reach the first glorious crescendo, when everything falls, suddenly and with absolute precision, into place. The ball has officially begun.
For a brief instant the lovely, understated silhouettes and perfect profiles of girls with the slender necks of swans rising above their shoulders captivate him. However, his speech never falters in its even cadence and nothing betrays his rapturous amazement at the sight of a roomful of cadets in hopeful blue, and the young women accompanying them. The girls are bedecked in fine, glimmering fabrics and precious gems. They are all of them pieces of a fabulously adorned, brightly colored puzzle.
It is his first military dress function. He is so bedazzled and so determined not to show it that he turns and moves to dance first with the most plainly attired woman there-a female cadet his own age or perhaps a little younger. Like him, she is also in dress uniform, brilliantly blue and starched-although perhaps with crisper creases. She is obviously better with an iron than he.
She has a quite, precise air about her that makes her both a suitable dance partner and the prettiest girl in the room.
They dance wonderfully together. When the music stops, before he is composed enough to step back, bow, and take his leave to move about the room, they hear the gracious applause of the collected assembly. In this case, the assembly consists of the officers and their wives (some of them inappropriately young), the cadets, the women from about town. Also the spinster chaperones that sit primly to the side, smiling at the couples on the floor that are able to execute the neat, slightly scandalous patterns of a waltz.
The cadets bow to each other and part ways; he moves to socialize and she stands at the sidelines. She is respectfully attentive to the war stories of a superior officer, and even dances with him; a spirited polka that has her clinging to his hands for dear life.
She dances also with another boy near her own age; he is blond, strong-featured, and strangely awkward. Compared to her, his steps are heavy and hesitating. Unlike her first partner, his palms are sweaty. She is polite, but refuses a second dance.
The rest of the evening passes, for her, without incident. Her dark-haired partner from that first dance flirts diplomatically with the girls about him, but he leaves quietly as well. The two of them walk out together, unobtrusively, and go their separate ways at the door. The ball is over, all of it to be packaged away in large boxes with crisp paper and those fine dresses the young girls wore. The memory of the evening will be pulled out like an heirloom by a group of those dwindled, frail chaperones; they will remember each detail vividly and hungrily, coloring the events with phrases they think are romantic.
Years later they will reminisce about this party, this dance, remembering the silks in a brighter hue, the lace-edged handkerchiefs and the blue dress uniforms more neatly starched. They will talk about that dance like it’s some sort of myth, a beautiful story to tell the girls that visit them in their tiny, old homes.
Do you remember those dancing soldiers? One of them will ask, leaning her body so far forward that she is in danger of falling out of her chair. The dark-haired boy and that fair girl, the one with the pretty eyes.
The old gossips will recall the sweet, clear movements, the splendid turns about the floor.
It was amazing, another will remark. They were really the most beautiful things I will ever imagine. (She wonders to herself if it was a dream, but dismisses the idea; it is not a possibility she wishes to consider.)
Immortalized in careful, measured time, those two impossible people dance on without fumbling, into the dark of some unsolicited memory. There is a smooth, repetitious movement to it, causing the dance to loop back around itself again and again, caught up in the fragile blindness characteristic of those beloved on this earth.
(But it really wasn't like that; one of the old women tries to explain on her deathbed. It was even more wonderful than I can remember, more wonderful than that distortion time allows.)
(Oh, she whispers, falling asleep, if only you could have seen that dance, like they were the only people left in one small world, in that small place that time provides…)
Somewhere in the world, Roy and Riza are still young, and dancing.
48. Side of the Face
If you study the Colonel's face closely, you can detect the faint bristling of dark hair on his cheeks and the sharp, too-thin curve of his jaw; he has forgotten to shave.
Between his eyes are small furrows, a weary, pinched look. He is tired, uneasy, overburdened.
First Lieutenant Hawkeye is little better; though she is unaware of it, her face also betrays her exhaustion. The set of her chin, her clenched jaw, the creases across her nose and cheeks from sleeping face down, her head buried in the crook of her arm-she sleeps on her eyes because she does not trust them to stay shut. She is not certain of what she might, in dreams, catch a glimpse of.
Together, the sides of their faces are the only visible equation; the two of them are sitting together, exhausted, heads bent closely together over yet another urgent file. There is little consideration, if any, for personal space between them-and indeed, now, it would make no sense at all.
Seeing the Colonel and the First Lieutenant tired and tense like that, you can imagine that they are watching over a child's first real illness-their own child, maybe. You are tired enough that the idea of the two of them together is a plausible argument. (You’d expect it from the Colonel. Hawkeye is too beyond reproach to really consider it, and you’re almost sure she’d reprimand you for thinking it, if she were paying you any attention.)
Your own eyes are tired. Sitting here, watching them from across the room, their profiles blur together and you can almost imagine their probable, dream child's face. You think: dark hair, serious eyes, and tiny lines that will haunt the lips of their daughters and the eyes of their sons, someday, maybe, yes, if they live through all of this to one day become old.
Notes: I hate this one. I wrote it before I had any feel for or attachment to the rest of the subordinates, and I can’t see this coming from any of them. Unless Falman were on drugs, maybe. IDEK.
50. Fingertips
These are the crisp conduits of nature: knuckle, finger, nail, and the knobby recession back to the wrist.
Her nails are well groomed and short; his are the same, with barely perceptible calluses on the first three: middle, index, and thumb. Her fingers are perhaps stronger than his are-but when they hold hands in secret, they do it with all the tender harshness of poets, of realists.
They let lives fall through their finger and land in their laps, knowing far too well that what they are hoping for is unlikely to come to pass.
They hold each other's hands tightly; as if trying to leave love notes in the tiny half-moon indentations their nails leave behind in each other's skin. They don’t hold each other’s hands at all, but the desire still rings true, bright and stuttering-oh, they are lovers, they are ghosts, there is nothing yet to hold onto.
91. Kiss
At first, like butterflies, the gentle fluttering of eyelashes against the face; soft heartbeats, small and afraid, stuttering like stuck moths in lamplight.
Then, in all quietness, like tired, forgiving animals, they bump faces and become still, nose to nose, eyelash the blinking eyelash, breath and breath.
They stare at each other in that abnormal, gasping stillness, unbelieving and skeptical of this moment's true meaning, if there is any. They wait, uncomfortably, for an interruption.
5. Weapon (Heiki) & Fine (Heiki)
Manga Chapter 37
Hawkeye didn't often raise her voice, so when she began to yell at him, angrily gesturing with an empty pistol, he felt out of place and oddly guilty. He felt skittish, too, seeing the empty gun in her grasp-Hawkeye rarely was this unprofessional, and the gesture as well as the lack of ammunition was alarming.
He rationalized that he did not feel as guilty now as he would have been if Hawkeye had been killed. So he only agreed with her, sounding rather flustered: yes, he was an idiot, yes, of course she was fine, of course she could take care of herself.
He was glad to turn away from her as they walked down the fire escape to the car-it was easier to tell her that he was glad that she was all right without looking her in the eye. (It was easier to say a lot of things to her when he wasn’t looking her in the eye, as if this way he could address them to the woman she’d once been, or the woman she had since become.)
Already there were bruises forming around her neck like some cruel brand, he could see the shadows of that monster’s hands even from beneath her high collar. Her voice rasped when she spoke, so different from the lilt she’d adopted over the ‘phone; it was one more thing on his conscience.
65. The you reflected in the glass
Underneath her uniform, she’s a lot smaller than anyone ever guesses. Of course, she doesn’t consider herself as such-Riza has subtle, sustained curves, enough width the never call herself small-but her waist, her thin wrists and ankles, the long lines of her arms and legs give her an almost delicate, tidy appearance.
Looking at Riza from that angle, she seems touchable and within reach.
Roy remembers how, once, at a pointless picnic on an obscenely hot day she wore some sort of summery blouse and skirt set. All through the party he watched her out of the corner of one eye, the judicious movements of her shoulders and the repositioning of her fingers on her glass.
When the party was over and everyone was leaving, all of them tired and a little drunk. Pausing in her task of gathering up abandoned glasses of half-consumed liquor, Riza yawned and stretched, raising her arms over her head and arching her spine along with the motion. The hem of her shirt rose with her arms and Roy had caught a glimpse of her hip, the sharp edginess of her bones straining against the skin like a knife pressed to elastic.
The sight of her had broken his heart wide open.
-Despite her apparent shapelessness in uniform-he can’t tell if the military is attempting to make a man out of her-, when Riza dresses down she is unlined. Her breasts and hips are deeply curved, soft beneath her shirt and skirt, her shoulders and the bones encircling her throat are like long fingers, sharp and protruding. Riza is no swan, but she might as well dress in white, as tragically mute and lovely as she is.
Roy writes all of this in his little black book in another language, sketching arrays about the scattered text, thinking of ways to try and make her happy.
He never comes up with much, but the fact that he is trying eases a little of the heartbreak that watching her entails; she wavers subtly, like an image on a hot horizon.
It's like she's slipping away from him, ounce by ounce, fat dissolving into compact, unyielding muscle; her soft past painted over with the hard armor of the war, of Roy’s covert operations. It’s been a few years and some of her losses have crept from her face-she no longer looks so much like a murderer, but she never looks like she’s happy, or that Ishval has quite left her.
She has become all hard lines, regimented, an equation, part of his small, constricted world. She should not be here, and yet she flourishes in a way that is beautiful and deathless. This makes him, inexplicably, unhappy.
She should be incalculable, he thinks. Some sort of impossible variable in an equation that does not require a solution to prove its existence.