Roy/Riza. "Anachronism"
Below is the finished product for my third prompt in the 7Stages Fanfiction Challenge, which Sutlers goaded convinced me to join.
Title: Anachronism
Pairing: Roy/Riza
Genre: Drabble
Rating:G
Anachronism
Grace is a virtue he does not meet with often, these days. There is something like it in the movement of women’s hips, which sway, and sway him. Something even closer, in the battery of wingbeats that greet his passage when he walks through the pigeons in the park. Their small, indignant protests remind him of his new lieutenant, who makes the same sounds when he doodles in the margins of important forms.
Remembering the pigeons, he sketches an alchemical array over a critical blank and drops the page on a stack of finished documents.
Grace is a virtue he does not meet with often, these days. So when he finds a fresh source, Roy Mustang makes a habit of cultivating it.
She will not notice his disobedience immediately: she is busy at her desk, mothering a cup of tea. He listens to the steam and to the muted chiming of hot water on porcelain, anticipates the huff of her irritation, and privately admits both to his collection of fragmentary graces.
Besides these, his collection contains: any uninterrupted night of sleep. Four honest men. Also, the set of eggshell-colored walls, mostly bare, that he faces every day at work. Soap that smells like soap. A phonograph a famous pianist playing an even-more-famous sonata. The version that Roy owns is distinguished only by the steadiness of its cadenzas, and the fact that it was recorded at his daughter’s wake.
To these, Roy has recently added a woman with eyes the color of tea, and now a pair of her rituals.
Roy is aware that he has an unusual definition of grace. He thinks that he must have found it in the desolation at Ishvar, when constancy seemed to have run out of the world like sand. These days he finds grace in those things that remain themselves, however shattered. He values what holds constant, even when it is scattered.
Title: Anachronism
Pairing: Roy/Riza
Genre: Drabble
Rating:G
Anachronism
Grace is a virtue he does not meet with often, these days. There is something like it in the movement of women’s hips, which sway, and sway him. Something even closer, in the battery of wingbeats that greet his passage when he walks through the pigeons in the park. Their small, indignant protests remind him of his new lieutenant, who makes the same sounds when he doodles in the margins of important forms.
Remembering the pigeons, he sketches an alchemical array over a critical blank and drops the page on a stack of finished documents.
Grace is a virtue he does not meet with often, these days. So when he finds a fresh source, Roy Mustang makes a habit of cultivating it.
She will not notice his disobedience immediately: she is busy at her desk, mothering a cup of tea. He listens to the steam and to the muted chiming of hot water on porcelain, anticipates the huff of her irritation, and privately admits both to his collection of fragmentary graces.
Besides these, his collection contains: any uninterrupted night of sleep. Four honest men. Also, the set of eggshell-colored walls, mostly bare, that he faces every day at work. Soap that smells like soap. A phonograph a famous pianist playing an even-more-famous sonata. The version that Roy owns is distinguished only by the steadiness of its cadenzas, and the fact that it was recorded at his daughter’s wake.
To these, Roy has recently added a woman with eyes the color of tea, and now a pair of her rituals.
Roy is aware that he has an unusual definition of grace. He thinks that he must have found it in the desolation at Ishvar, when constancy seemed to have run out of the world like sand. These days he finds grace in those things that remain themselves, however shattered. He values what holds constant, even when it is scattered.