Work Text:
i. photobooth
"Did you know...?" it´s the first thing she tells to the new Fuhrer and Roy is the first one she hears using her new rank. "In Xing it never rains."
Ross feels a childish need to tell him just that, just as she sees him.
"No, colonel, you are mistaken. It rains. Once or twice every century. It rained when my mother was a child. She told me she didn´t understand what was happening."
(It´s the Xing spring, she learns later, but in a way she doesn´t remember if it was Breda or Roy who told her, and sometimes they are interchangable.)
She has to check her own shoulder to realize he is talking to her.
--
ii. we looked like giants
"The answer to this problem is cunning because it interfers with the D zone, and here in the eighth line. See? Three moves and checkmate. Did you know this problem was written in Ponte di Legno?" Roy pours, excited as a child the first day of summer, over a problem cut out from a magazine. Breda shots her a pituful look and Ross wonders how exactly she has agreed to be taught chess by her Fuhrer.
--
iii. champagne from a paper cup
Three months after coming back from Xing Ross is circling ads on the newspaper with a thick red pencil, showing the results to Brosh, crossing out the ones they don´t agree about, agreeing about the basics -two bedrooms (just in case, Brosh insinuated, wearing the stupidiest grin Ross had ever seen), kitchen and living room. It is fun, Ross discovers with a hint of surprise and a hint of hysterism, like foreplay, like the beginning of the beginning, she never thought red circles on printed paper could be this romantic.
She tries to teach him to play, and on their first night in the new house, they sit crossed-legged bare-footed on the naked floor, before they even start with the boxes, and there is a humble second-hand chessboard between them. Brosh is a disastrous player and there is no way he is ever going to learn, but it´s a lot of fun; they are drinking cheap alcohol and they don´t even have glasses and it´s drunken kisses and clumsy lovemaking until they fall asleep on the floor, Ross crooked between his arm and his chest, one hand stubbornly closed around the white king, in dreams.
--
iv. such great heights
"I´ll tell you something nobody knows," Breda says to the wind, leaning against the railing.
It´s their unspoken agreement, or rather a game without rules -tell me a secret, I´ll keep it safe, whisper it to me like you´d whisper your love to a tree. Ross uncaps the thermos bottle and the coffee fills the vast rooftop like it was part of the air composition. It smells heavy and rich and Ross feels anticipated nostalgia for these noon escapades with Breda.
"Tell me."
"He writes her letters. Every week." Then his face turns like the face of a chain-smoker who has just left his cigarettes home. "But he never sends them. The letters just pile up in a locked drawer in his office."
It´s the amount of details what strikes her -for she knows the next time Roy invites her to his office she´ll be looking everywhere for that drawer.
Breda sits by her, takes her cup of coffee without asking and sips slowly.
That night, at home, she tell Brosh she loves him for the first time since she´s back.
--
v. the passenger seat
"You play just like Breda, Colonel." (the rank still stings a bit, like new woollen clothes)
What Roy means: you are just like Breda, but somehow hopes Ross hasn´t understood.
--
vi. be still my heart
She has heard about this kind of conversations; spontaneously soulful, punctuated with unthinkable confessions almost unconciously spilled to half-strangers, meaningful silences and stuttering, doubt and expressions that cannot lie, masks that no longer protect us. Ross has heard of this kind of moments (movie-like scenes for a universe without cinema) but she has never thought of trying talk herself into one of those.
But.
"I have to ask you a question, sir," with a tone of overly calculated respect and shyness, as if rehearsed many times in front of the mirror.
Roy looks up from the board, and the gesture is of one experiencing physical pain just by tearing his eyes from the chessboard.
"But I don´t know if I will be able to come in here and play chess with you anymore," now this fuels Roy´s curiosity and his eyes become alive, shimmering.
He puts his fist under his chin, half-amuzed, half-menacing. Ross feels intimidated against her will, scratches her knee as a reminiscence of a childhood nervous tic (her father could always tell when she was lying to him because of it) that had awaked in her again in Xing.
(in Xing the sky is always full of stars, even when you can´t see them,and the air is full of ruins and Ross misses finding sand in her shoes, in her clothes, in her hair)
"Queen four to tower, I think you are underestimating my magnanimity."
And there is a faint trace of old humor in his voice she hasn´t heard in years -and it was all it takes to make her realize how much he´d changed, three words, the irony of underestimating, an almost arrogant my and softness of magnanimity. There is almost nothing of the young man with a smuggish and treacherous smile, almost too young and looking even younger, too much for how scary he was.
The man in front of her now... evokes images of sea on calm in her, even if she knows (and doesn´t know how she knows, but it probably has to do with rooftops, secrets and things that never were) that Roy Mustang has never seen the ocean.
"Why is not first lieutenant Hawkeye here?" she bursts out.
She uses the old rank because she has no idea how long she´s been absent.
The light goes out from his eyes.
(Ross doesn´t know where it´s gone, she knows no one can catch it now)
"She made a promise. She would protect me until I reached the top. I became Fuhrer, she had no reason to stay."
"You could have given her a reason."
He flashes her a smile that is not false and is not true, a smile that is patient but tired.
"Do you have any idea for how long she put herself on the line for me?" He shakes his head. "No, I didn´t think I had the right to give her a reason."
Still, Ross thinks, rubbing absently her thumb against the bishop, and she can´t stop thinking about Breda´s words and the rooftop and the letters hidden somewhere in this room.
"But if you do move that piece," he cuts in, "then I´ll have to stop playing chess with you."
Again that smile, that is a bit false but now it´s truer than the previous.
--
vii. technicolor girls
She grabs Breda by the wrist -pulse throbbing under fingertips.
"I´ll tell you something nobody knows."
It´s not even noon, he seems to tell her with pitiless eyes. They are surrounded by lower officers and she has to whisper.
"I miss Xing," and the words make it more painful. What you don´t say you can pretend it doesn´t exist.
She increases the preassure on his arm. That´s when Breda finally looks -really looks- up at her.
"I knew that."
--
viii. we will become silhouettes
Five months of living together and she marries Brosh.
(he once asked why they did everything backwards and she couldn´t tell him that she was just thinking about a chess problem she had found in an old newspaper, where they used to draw red circles, when there was still sand in her hair)
At some point of the afterwards party (that is one person short but in the end she didn´t have the courage to mail the invitation) Roy takes her aside, by the elbow and whispers into her ear...
"Remember, even in Xing it rains. Sometimes."
Sometimes.
Roy gave her a new chessboard as a wedding present.
Breda gave her the pieces.