A/N: This story was written back in 2009 for a fic contest over at livejournal. It didn't win, but it's still one of my favorites. The quote in italics ("A countenance in which...") is from a William Wordsworth poem, though I can't recall which now. The rest of the words are mine and I hope you enjoy them as much as I did while writing them.

Her breath whispered of second chances where it lingered between her lips, hesitant and full of things forbidden and unknown. The world moved fast and faster still as their limbs intertwined, faces pressed against one another in a silent dance of brushing fingertips and arched spines. Everything moved fast because the world never had the courtesy to stop it's perpetual rotation, tilting, not for them, and so her breath stayed trapped inside his mouth, teasing, the urges growing with time and never lessening in want. It grasped at his waist and fluttered in his chest with each movement, each inhalation that recalled the way her hair played delicately at her ears, tufts and wisps that escaped her careful preening.

Once upon a time they danced at the precipice of this would-be affair, pirouettes and arabesques, pas de deux, young and silly and halfway in love (like Riza imagined her parents were before she was born and Roy never imagined his parents were). She had told him when they were young that her inhibitions were compromised when it came to him and he had laughed, loud and full, running a wayward hand against her collarbone as he spouted poetry into the still night air. A countenance in which did meet, sweet records, promises as sweet...

How foolish they had been at the beginning.

When he left for the war Roy had basked in the glow of their potential; when he returned, when he returned with her (he hadn't left with her, not like this, not bleeding and bruised and hardly breathing), he tried desperately, senselessly, not to rot within its silver lined walls. He avoided her for days because he thought he didn't believe in love anymore, didn't want the promises it viewed so easily through rose colored eyes. He wanted words and science and anything that could explain away the fear, the days of sand covered in red covered in ash that bit at his face, lodged underneath his fingernails. He wanted chemical formulas and philosophical treatises, not pretty blond haired girls who whispered in the dark, smelling of childhood and gunpowder, exquisite reminders of what once was and what might never be. Riza became Hawkeye became Corporal; Riza became a phantom shadow on the wall of his apartment, forgotten yesterdays. Riza was a name spoken by Maes in passing, a name Roy tried to detach from the boy-now-turned-man who intimated it in hushed tones in the basement of her father's house when they were only skin and teeth pressed against one another, when they knew nothing of war.

It rained the third Wednesday after Ishbal. Roy was caught in the downpour, his clothing soaked to the bone with pigments and cotton draining down through his shoes and into the gutters of Eastern's dirty wind blown streets. He phoned her on a whim, because Maes had gone to Central, reassigned to a new position, a new life of wedding plans and dreams of the future that Roy no longer understood (Maes had left Roy painfully alone, alone with Riza Hawkeye no longer Corporal but Sergeant, alone with his mistakes and no other choice). When the car pulled up she wore her uniform and smelled nothing of childhood and gunpowder and Roy found himself wanting to touch her face, the hair that was beginning to grow, inviting lips. He brushed his fingertips against her hand as he exited the car, coat catching on the cuffs of her uniform, painful reminders and a promise for tomorrow. A lifetime of women and all he could ever want was her, Ishbal be damned.

The dance was different this time, hesitant, adagio and completely in love (like she never imagines her parents were and he begins to think they could be someday, uninhibited), star crossed as he speaks of third and fourth chances, of love ignored but never forgotten. They sit in the office, unfinished paperwork cast aside and he recalls the way she used to gaze at him from across the dinner table, Romeo and Juliet with only her father to disapprove. They aren't so naive anymore, but the longing is there just the same. Each time she turns he catches sight of the bars that decorate her shoulder and his heart screams, if only for a moment.

He slips poetry into her desk drawers, beautiful prose scribbled on scraps of paper, and waits for the day when he can once again recite them to her, when the only fire they play with is the one in their hearts.