Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Well,” Ed says.  He probes at his left-side molars with his tongue for a second, just in case, but nothing feels much looser than yesterday, so at least that’s a start.  “Any bright ideas?”

“Several,” Roy says.  “Of untold brilliance.  Such as: it’s possible that I should stop assuring my enemies that they’ll never take me alive in a way that apparently sounds like a challenge.”

Ed has to admit that it’s preferable to the alternative, but just once—just once in his overly eventful little life—he would have liked this whole diplomatic mission thing to go off without a hitch.

He supposes that in a weird way, it’s vaguely encouraging that other governments also lie to their citizens and their neighbors about how much of a handle they’ve got on things.

He’s not sure exactly how much of the smarmy rhetoric Roy believed, but it was enough to convince him to leave Hawkeye behind to hold down the fort during this particular expedition.  Ed hadn’t bought into all of it, obviously, but he’d stupidly assumed that the bit about overwhelming public support for the negotiations of an Aerugan-Amestrian truce had to be relatively true, because a foreign government wouldn’t risk asking the likes of General Roy Mustang to get on the road and drive their way if they weren’t confident he’d make it to the capital unscathed.

Somewhere along the course of that plan, somebody miscalculated big time.

In addition, that is, to the fact that Ed has miscalculated the trajectory of his entire flipping life, which somehow added up to throwing his lot in with Mustang even when it’s no longer a self-preservative necessity.

“Cool,” he says to the tragically persuasive employer in question.  “Any bright ideas that might be remotely useful at this point?”

Roy looks up at the chains securing their hands above their heads—complete with well-considered iron bars that separate the manacles, so that neither of them can bring their hands together.  “Aren’t wildly implausible escape plans your forte?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be some kind of brilliant strategist?” Ed asks.  The concrete floor is very hard and very cold, and his ass is starting to hurt.

“I’m also supposed to be some kind of diplomat,” Roy says, shaking the chains a little.  “You can see how well that worked out.”  He rattles them again, tugs harder, and frowns up at the crossbar.  “Does this seem a bit kinky to you?  They could have achieved this by running two separate chains through rings to keep our hands apart.  Although I suppose that wouldn’t really look much less suspect, in the long run.”

Ed swallows.  He is not going to say anything stupid.  He is not going to say anything stupid.  He is not going to—

“Guess if I was planning on kidnapping you anyway,” he says, “it’d be hard to pass up the opportunity to make you look like that.”

There is a pause.  All of Ed’s attempts to die on the spot are unsuccessful.

“Why, Edward,” Roy says.  “Are you blushing?”

Ed tries a little harder.  Still no dice.  And no death.

“Shut up,” he says.  “You know exactly what you look like.”

“I look like something slightly different to everyone,” Roy says.  “I didn’t realize—”

“Whatever,” Ed says.  “We’ve got way bigger problems right now.  They were expecting us to get in at a certain time, right?  The Aerugan government, I mean.”

“Yes,” Roy says, way too calmly for someone who’s chained to a wall at what might be the beginning of an international incident.  “Although I imagine that someone will have noticed and reported the very nice car left on the side of a rather major road, so they might hear about it that way first.  I may have left some rather indicative documents in the backseat just in case of such a contingency.”

Ed can’t believe that he is chained to a wall next to someone who says the word contingency in conversations held while chained to a wall.

He also can’t believe— “You expected us to get kidnapped?”

“‘Expected’ is a strong word,” Roy says.  “I… didn’t think it was especially unlikely.”

Ed stares at the wall opposite, which is also boring concrete that would probably make his ass hurt if he sat on it.  “Thanks for the heads up.”

“Would it have helped?” Roy asks.  “I didn’t want to stress you.  I know how you worry.”

“Oh, good,” Ed says.  “So you know that I don’t.  Ever.  At all.”

“Yes, of course,” Roy says.  “You’ve never worried in your life.  Especially not about Al, or Winry.  And you haven’t gotten into the habit of worrying about me.”

Maybe the third time is the charm for dying on command.  Ed squeezes his eyes shut and tries.

Nothing.

Damn it.

“You could have mentioned it,” he says.  “Like—when we were already in the car, or something.”

“You were talking about Al’s coursework,” Roy says.  “I didn’t want to interrupt.”

“Bullshit,” Ed says.  “The only thing you love more than knowing more than anybody else in the room is the sound of your own voice when you’re talking about how you know more than anybody else in the room.  Or anybody else in the car, in this case.”  He gets a prickly, weirdly premonitory feeling in the back of his head as the next thought emerges, louder than the last: “And Al’s coursework wouldn’t be interesting to anyone who isn’t way too invested in either or both of us, so—”

“How would you like to make our dashing escape?” Roy asks.

“If you had so much time to think about it,” Ed says, “how come you don’t have a plan?”

“You’re the plan,” Roy says.  He smiles, in a way that’s part idle and part wistful—and wholly awful, for the way it makes Ed’s stomach twist up into knots.  “Or, more specifically, bringing you was the plan.  You’re my failsafe.  You have been for a long time.”

Ed has to work the spit around in his mouth for a few seconds before he’s sure that he can speak.

“When we get out of this,” he says, “I am gonna kick your ass.”

This smile is much more defined—and just a touch delighted.

“I look forward to it,” Roy says.

“You’re the worst,” Ed says.

Then Ed kicks his right leg up and across himself to touch his toes to his left palm and form a makeshift circle.  It’s a little lopsided, sure, but the energy still runs just fine.

When it’s crackling through to the ends of his fingertips, he lays them against the manacle, and it splits into half a dozen shards of iron.

In retrospect, he should have spent an extra second adding a few more lines to the array that he’d been holding in his head—he should have thought ahead far enough to make them break dully at the edges.  He was careless, and he got his comeuppance: one of the fragments rebounded back off of his shoulder and nicked his jaw.  How fucking embarrassing.  He’s going to look like he cut himself shaving when they eventually make their way to the Aerugan mucky-mucks.

“Are you—” Roy starts, presumably at the small spatter of blood now ruining Ed’s jacket, not that their rough escort into this nice little cell didn’t make a start on it.

“Fine,” Ed says, clapping properly this time and making quick—but more precise, and therefore less dangerous—work of the second manacle.  The clatter of iron hasn’t been especially loud, and it’s certainly not any louder than Roy hauling at the chains just for the hell of it was a minute ago, but either way, these guys seem too smart to leave valuable prisoners alone for long.  There probably isn’t much time.  “Hold still.”

Roy obliges—except for his mouth, but that’s pretty par for the course.  At least all he says, for the moment, is “Thank you.”

“Sure,” Ed says, and a part of him wants to hesitate, but the rest of him wins out—he offers Roy the left hand for leverage to help him up.

That’s a mistake.

That’s the biggest one yet.

Roy’s hand around his is strong and sure and firm and tight and utterly unrepentant.  Their captors took the gloves—it’s been a long damn time since Ed saw Roy without them; he’s not sure they’ve ever touched without the fabric in the way.  He can distinctly feel the thick scar tissue in the center of Roy’s palm, the roughness of his fingertips from the ignition cloth, the sheer capability of—

Roy’s eyes don’t leave his for the duration of the time Ed spends hauling the bastard to his feet.  Then Roy’s eyes continue not to leave his.  Then they crinkle, just a little, at the corners as he smiles.

“Shall we?” Roy asks.

He hasn’t let go of Ed’s hand.

He hasn’t—

Ed steps back, more out of surprise than anything else, and then Roy’s fingers slip away, but not before they drag along the heel of his hand like they’re reluctant to go, and that—

Nope.  Not today.  Preferably not ever, but definitely not now.

“Yeah,” Ed says, despite the bewildering combination of heat and tightness and charcoaliness climbing up his throat.  Screw that.  He’s had worse; he’s not about to let it choke him.  Better mixed emotions have tried and failed to take him down.  “Let’s make it quick.  I’m hungry.”

“Me, too,” Roy says.  He folds both hands behind his back in that way he has that should make him look like he’s four and pouting, but instead makes him look like some sort of regal monarch striding along a cliff’s edge, surveying his domain.  Royalty, obviously.

On this particular occasion, however, instead of the picturesque mountainside above the castle thing, Roy strolls right up to the barred and bolted iron door locking them in here and knocks on the inside.

There’s a pause.

“Oh, come on,” Ed says.

“You’re the one that told me,” Roy says, “that the proof is in the part where you make it out alive.”

Ed wrote volumes upon volumes of wisdom into his reports— scribbling up until the ends of the train rides, he finished as many of them as he could with a pearl of pithiness, summarizing the something-like-lessons he’d appertained from all of the assholes that he’d braved and bested.  In addition, he catalogued all the best food stands in most of the major cities in this country, and rated all of the libraries on a complicated multi-category scale to account for different useful qualities.

And somehow that’s the one thing Roy Mustang took away.

Ed’s about to open his mouth for the sincerest I can’t believe you of his life, but the door opens first, and their two scowling guards stand right behind it, guns raised.

“Good evening,” Roy says, and at least the disbelief appears to be contagious, since now they’re just staring at Roy, dumbstruck, instead of opening fire.  “Do you have a doctor here?  My dear, sweet, young traveling companion—” He gestures, somewhat insistently, in a beckoning sort of way, in Ed’s direction, so presumably that was meant to refer to him, and he’s supposed to move in.  “—says the dampness in this otherwise very accommodating cell is making him woozy.  Is it possible that there’s mold?  Maybe you could transfer us to another holding area?  I hate to trouble you.”

The guards continue to stare at him.  Ed doesn’t blame them.

Then one of them gets clever enough to stare at the wall.

“Wait,” he says.  “What—what the hell happened to the chains?”

“Ah,” Roy says.  “Oh, dear.  How fascina—”

“Mustang,” Ed says.

He grabs the first gun in his right hand, shoves it towards the floor—

The guard fires instinctively, which he expected—he dives left in the hopes of avoiding any ricochet, twisting his wrist to wrench at the guard’s, hard enough to make him squeal and drop the pistol—

He plants his heavier foot between the guard’s two and shoves his shoulder in beneath the man’s tormented arm, ducking swiftly and pushing with both knees to gain some leverage, seizing the poor sap’s own forward momentum and using it to flip him over Ed’s back—

Whatever Roy was doing in the meantime, it must have worked like a charm, which is annoyingly typical: Roy’s got the second guard’s gun in his hand and has bent the guard’s arm behind his back.  He then employs the repossessed pistol to apply some moderate blunt force trauma to the back of his captive’s head.

The guy drops with all of the grace of a sack of potatoes, though none of the appetizing potential.

Ed’s victim is groaning on the ground, and Ed’s blood is soaring through him; they should really bottle adrenaline like a drug and sell it top-dollar; he’d buy them out.  He’d probably die high on this feeling, but—

But Roy is kneeling down and… sniffing at the lapel of his guard’s coat.

“Mustang,” Ed says.  “What the ever-loving hell are you doing?”

Roy probably gets that question so many times a day that he’s just immune to the judgment by now.  He stands again, steps over the unmoving form of his guard, and crouches next to Ed’s.  He sniffs again—and then he smirks.

Smirks, and starts rummaging in the felled man’s coat pockets.

“Aerugo,” Roy says, “has a rather high incidence of—” The tendons in his wrist tighten as he clasps his hand around something, and the smirk only widens as he extracts his prize and raises it for scrutiny.

It’s a silver cigarette lighter.

“Smoking,” Roy finishes.

“You are such a pain in the ass,” Ed says.

“I aspire,” Roy says, digging through the rest of the pockets, “to being a pain worthy of an ass as good as yours.”  As Ed stands speechless—again—Roy nods to the other collapsed guard.  “Can you double-check to see if he has a pen?”

“That’s rich,” Ed says, but he steels himself, leans down, and starts checking pockets one by one.  “Rest of the time, we can’t get you to hold a pen for more than five minutes to save your damn life.”

“I do so love irony,” Roy says.  “I have some spare change and a paperclip.  How are you doing?”

“Nothing good here either,” Ed says.

“Damn,” Roy says, straightening.  “I had my chalk in the coat they confiscated.  Looks like we’ll be doing this the fun way.”

He steps out into the hall, and Ed lowers his voice as he follows—but not too much.  “You know I have nightmares about you saying shit like that?”

“I’m flattered that you dream about me,” Roy says.

“That is not what I said,” Ed says.

Roy pauses long enough to grin at him, and Ed’s stomach does an extremely unhelpful hot squiggly thing.  “Yes, it is.”

“I’m gonna find a way to leave you here,” Ed says.  “What’s the plan now?”

“The plan,” Roy says, looking both ways down the hall and starting leftward at a brisk jog, “is to get out alive.”

“That’s not a plan,” Ed says.  “That’s an objective.”

“I never thought the day would come that I’d hear you arguing semantics,” Roy says.

“When semantics are the difference between us getting our asses handed to us or not,” Ed says, “I figure it’s worth a mention.”

Roy peeks around a corner.  “The plan is that we get out of here without getting our asses handed to us, or otherwise served in any particular direction.”

Someday, Ed’s going to invent a time machine so that he can go back and fling himself in through one of Pinako’s windows at the right moment to stop his dumbass twelve-year-old self from getting sucked into Mustang’s onyx eyes and silver rhetoric that very first time.

He’ll probably destroy the fabric of the time-space continuum with the paradox, of course, but… worth it.

Roy has withdrawn to the safety of their side of the corner again, so swiftly that Ed already has a pretty good idea of what he’s going to say: “About half a dozen at the end of the corridor.  Better-armed than the last few.  I’m starting to wonder if this is all some sort of elaborate hazing ritual, given how illogically it’s been organized.”

“Why the hell are you so calm about all of this?” Ed manages.  “Do you—I know you don’t get kidnapped every other week; it can’t be—”

“I’ve always suspected that you and I would compliment each other unimaginably well in a situation like this,” Roy says, and his faint smile does something unconscionable and electric to Ed’s spine.  “That as capable as we are alone, together we’d be nigh on unstoppable.  The precise circumstances aside, it’s something of a pleasure to be proving that right.”

“Mustang,” Ed says.  “Did they hit your head?”

“Possibly,” Roy says.  “I don’t remember, which is a bad sign.  And I’m starving.  Cover me?”

Ed bites his tongue on the thing he wants to say—You know I always will.

“Fine,” he says instead.  “You ready?”

The only answer Roy offers is a terrible, terrible, merciless iteration of the practiced smirk.

Ed manages to keep his more susceptible knee intact despite the jellying effect that that expression tends to have on any and all cartilage in the vicinity—which is yet another of his achievements under Roy Mustang’s command that will forever go unrewarded.  He drops to his metal knee, smacks his palms together, and flattens them on the concrete.

The rumbling may alert their quarry a bit, but that doesn’t worry him: the rolling wave he just impelled beneath the paving will send all of them staggering to catch their footing whether or not they tried to prepare.  The ones that manage to keep their balance will likely slip when the momentum reaches the far wall and cracks the concrete behind them; which will open a perfect avenue—

For Roy to sidestep smoothly out into the open hall, press his hands together, eye the situation for a fraction of a second, and then flick the sparkwheel on the lighter with his thumb.

He shouldn’t be so damn hot when he’s focused.

He shouldn’t be so damn hot any time, but in moments like this—

Ed can’t stay back behind the corner—he has to watch.

Despite the fact that Roy can’t have had more than a half a heartbeat to assess the distance, calculate the trajectories of their six stumbling adversaries, and gauge the consistency of the air despite all the dust that Ed’s distraction kicked up, the twining lines of flame sear through the open space and coalesce around every hand with a gun in it.

It is an indescribable caliber of artistry.

And it ends in screaming.

Ed brings his hands together and channels the light again; when he touches the floor, a ripple runs through it towards their opponents, and the concrete twists and writhes like water.  Gaping mouths within it swallow up the guns; tendrils slither up their owners’ ankles, spiraling up their legs and then cinching in tight.

They’re so busy clutching at their blistering hands and wailing that they don’t even notice Ed’s addition to their plight until it’s far, far too late.  He drags them apart a bit for good measure—clearing a path in between the two groups of three men, which they can’t quite reach across.

“Thank you,” Roy says, stepping back towards him and offering a hand.

Ed shouldn’t take it.  Ed shouldn’t even think about taking it.

But he does, of course.  Because he’s an idiot, and because it’s Roy.

Roy, whose grip and is so strong and so sure as he helps haul Ed’s weight upright that Ed doesn’t want to let go this time, either.

But he will.  He has to.  Because anyone he clings onto gets hurt—he knows that much by now.  Sometimes he can help to heal it, over the course of years and endless attempts at making up the difference, but it can never be undone.  He’s learned that one the hard way so many times that it’s built into the bones of him now.  Even if, for some reason, Roy sustained a long enough hallucination to want to take his chances with somebody like Ed—even if Roy inexplicably decided that that, and this, was what he wanted—Ed won’t do that to him.  Ed won’t subject him to the consequences.  No way.  Not with everything Roy has to do, and everything that he intends to be.

The second Ed has his feet beneath him, he extracts his hand from Roy’s and uses it to shove his hair back from his face instead.  It’s not necessary to say “Let’s blow this joint,” obviously, but you can’t leave a situation like this without a parting shot.  You just can’t.

“With you,” Roy says, managing to get his stupid cavalry skirt to do the dramatic twirl as he turns to follow Ed down the decimated hall, “I can never tell how literal that’s meant to be.”

There’s just enough space between the injured Aerugans that Ed attached to the floor for the two of them to slide between.  Ed knows he can’t stop and weigh his options—they’re inches from retaliation, and a pause would give them the perfect chance.  He just has to set his shoulders and stride right through.

“That’s the point,” he says as he does.  “Somebody’s gotta keep you on your toes.”

There’s a pair of double doors just beyond—the kind with a window in each one, so although the panes have seen better days, Ed peers through each in turn and then gently starts to ease the right door open to peer out through the crack.

“Must be nice,” Roy says, “not to be the one on his toes for a change.”

He picked a moment when Ed’s too preoccupied to muster much more than a discontented growl.  Of course he did.  He’s a career bastard with a spotless track record of bastardliness, the likes of which fledgling bastards look up to in awe and wonderment.

“Anything?” Roy asks.

“Can’t tell,” Ed says.  All he can make out in the darkness is a concrete yard and what looks like a warehouse across the way.  “So how are we supposed to get out of here?”

“Are there any unattended vehicles?” Roy asks.

“Supply truck or something,” Ed says.  “Why?”

“That’ll do,” Roy says, and he pushes the left-side door briskly, flinging it wide open, and strolls right out into the night.

Only the many years of practice dealing with inconsistent balance and extremely variable bodyweight keep Ed from face-planting as he scrambles to follow.  The years in question can’t stop him from hissing “What the shit, Mustang?”, however, so he makes sure it’s just loud enough that Roy won’t miss it.  The question’s important even if it’s largely ceremonial at this point.

“Hesitation gives them more time to notice that something’s wrong,” Roy says.  They’re halfway to the truck.  Roy holds his shoulders back and his head high like he’s as cool as all those vegetables that salad people like, but as Ed skips forward a few steps to keep up, he can see that Roy’s eyes are everywhere at once.  Hawkeye probably taught him that.  He’s been paranoid for ages, but channeling it into a productive sort of observational awareness is another thing, and training your brain helps a hell of a lot.

Not that Ed would know anything about it, clearly.

He also doesn’t know anything about why he still works for the kind of guy who will stride out across a probably-guarded concrete yard in their captors’ stronghold, cross directly to a modestly-sized supply truck, and casually try the door handle.

“Hmm” is all Roy says at the fact that it’s locked.

“Move,” Ed says, and a swift tap of a fingertip from each hand to one another and then to the door solves that problem—simple mechanical shit’s easy, and every time he visits Winry, he gets her to explain another object or device to him.  Usually she takes it apart as a visual aide, too, which is gravy.  She loves it, and he learns all kinds of weird shit, and all around it’s pretty great, and tonight it’s helping him break into cars in foreign countries.  Winry’s going to be so proud.

“Thank you,” Roy says, and then Ed hauls the door open, which seems to count as holding it for Roy, since he says “Thank you” again before jumping up and crawling across the center console to get into the driver’s seat, which at least is sort of hilarious.  The fact that it affords Ed a very good view of Roy’s startlingly nice ass is much less hilarious, but he’s planning to pretend that that part never happened.

Roy reaches underneath the seat and then shunts it back, which gives him more room to start prying pieces of paneling off of the steering column.  It occurs to Ed that he’d be significantly less visible inside the truck than standing right outside it and gawping, so he jumps up into the passenger seat and slams the door.  He considers locking it again, but that just sounds sort of stupid at this point.  If a vengeful force of Aerugan malcontents comes after them, the door lock isn’t exactly going to hold them back.

“So,” Ed says, as conversationally as possible even though his heart’s banging in his throat fit to bruise his trachea.  “How much time do you think we have?”

“Functionally none,” Roy says.  In the poor light, Ed can barely see what he’s doing with his far-too-clever hands down under the wheel, but there appear to be copper wires involved.  Is he twisting some of them up around each other?  Winry would probably be proud of that, too.  Roy makes a disconcertingly cute squished-up face as he concentrates, and then he tugs a few more wires free and examines them.

Ed can see a whole lot better when Roy touches the naked ends of two of his latest acquisitions together, and they spark violently.

Roy presses his lips together, glancing up, and then tries it again, and the sparks shimmer brighter this time, raining on his hands, but he doesn’t even flinch—

The engine roars.

“Why do you know how to hotwire a car?” Ed asks.  Probably he should have slipped that one into the conversation earlier, but he didn’t want to be too distracting.

“I was bored one weekend,” Roy says, carefully tucking the wires back up into the guts of the steering column.  He picks up the abandoned panels and tosses them over his shoulder, and they clatter and tumble somewhere Ed doesn’t particularly care about just now.  “It was Maes’s idea.”  He glances in the mirror.  “Ah.  We have company.”

“I can’t believe you just said that,” Ed says.  “Out loud.  For real.”  He cranes his neck around to check out the window.  It’s a pretty serious amount of company, and apparently they’re undaunted by Roy’s stupid platitudes.  “What the hell do you want me to do?”

“Ah,” Roy says yet again.  “Yes.  Your one weakness: mid-range defense when you can’t reach the ground.”

Ed’s idiot brain goes so far as to push his mouth open with his impulse to say At least it’s something underneath me that I can’t reach for a change.

“Scoot,” Roy says.

A piece of the aforementioned idiot brain ingloriously implodes.  “I—what?”

“Switch seats with me,” Roy says.  “You drive; I’ll defend.”

While that makes a lot more sense lingually, it also—

Shit.

There isn’t time to argue, and even if there was, his brain chose this moment to freeze solid straight through, and he can’t wring a single alternate solution from it.

Roy’s already moving—that’s one of the things no one ever expects from him, what with the whole lazy, loitering, strolling-the-halls playboy bullshit he puts on, but the refusal to second-guess himself is remarkably powerful.

Unfortunately, Ed’s half-smothered admiration of the sheer gumption aside, Roy is moving towards him.

This truck is bigger than Roy’s car, which is a plus; but it isn’t anywhere near big enough for them to be able to avoid… contact.  A lot of contact.

The lot of contact in question begins with some brushing, which segues into sliding, which verges on scraping—what could be termed rubbing if someone was in a slightly devilish mood and secretly wanted Ed to die of a burst blood vessel in the face.

He can’t decide if it’s better or worse that Roy’s… careful?  Is that the word?  Aware, attentive, cautious of his elbows and his knees, setting a hand gently on the small of Ed’s back to steady him even as they’re clambering past each other as fast as they can, and—

It only lasts a second.  They’re only pressed against each other, pinned by the seats on one side and the dashboard on the other, for a second before they slip free, and Ed scuttles his way into the driver’s seat and stretches down to put his foot on the brake and reach for the hand brake—

But it feels like he held his breath underwater for an age.

“Where are we headed?” he manages.

“Anywhere that looks like an exit,” Roy says, so composed still that Ed can’t help wondering if he really is just stone inside—marble bones, with chips of granite swimming in his veins.  “Or anywhere that looks like it could become an exit if you drove a truck through it.”

Ed jams his foot down on the gas, releases, and then revs the engine again, and then he flicks on the headlights, and then he curls his hand around the gearshift—

“Cool,” he says.  “Always wanted to die driving in circles.”

They’ve gotten to the part with the ever-growing mob of angry people shouting and pointing at them.  Good.  Ed’s favorite.

“We are not,” Roy says, digging in the glove compartment and coming up with a small screwdriver, “going to die.”

Ed has to focus on wheeling the car around, but out of the corner of his eye, he gleans enough of an impression to realize that Roy’s scratching a flame array into the back of his hand with the screwdriver—which is a great way to get a fucking infection, for the record—and then cranking down his window as Ed starts to drive away from the mob of people who probably have guns.

Following their abduction off the road, they were outfitted with some cute little black burlap hoods for the drive in, so all of this is new—evidently this group is relatively well-established, even if they don’t seem to understand the concept of guarding dangerous prisoners very well: this is a pretty extensive complex, with a couple different concrete buildings, and a barbed-wire-topped chain-link fence looms all the way around.

The chain-link was stupid.  It’s not Ed’s fence, and it’s not Ed’s truck, and he’s ready to get the hell out of here before the staph makes its merry way through idiot Roy’s entire idiot system.

There’s something like a little tent city composed of military castoffs over to their left, and people are starting to pour out of that area, too—which is crap, for the record; the avenues that Ed can drive without mowing someone down are swiftly disappearing while he slows, then settles his foot on the brake, trying to gauge the distance to the fence and estimate what kind of velocity he can coax out of this engine by the time he gets there.

“Down,” Roy says.

Ed starts to say “What?”, which is really just a crown jewel of extra-stupid on top of this already exceedingly stupid night.

Fortunately, Roy must have predicted that, because halfway through the syllable, his hand has snapped up and cupped itself around the back of Ed’s neck, and he’s hauled down hard enough to force them both to duck.

Bullets rake the windshield—it sounds like several punch through the glass; Ed hears at least a couple perforate the seat behind him—

Almost before the hail lets up, Roy’s released his grip on Ed and slung his right arm out the window, lighter in hand.

A sheet of flame sends all of their adversaries in that direction scurrying back, howling at one another as they go.

The spiderweb of cracks in what remains of the windshield makes it significantly harder to distinguish details, but it looks like they have a decent opening between the group that Roy just scattered with the flames and one coming up from behind.

But that’s going to require a hard left, and it’s only about a hundred yards; Ed’s not sure he’ll gain enough momentum, besides which—

Shit.  He’s got to stop hesitating.  Now’s the time.

“Hold on tight,” he says to Roy, and he hauls on the wheel and guns it.

He can’t hear the clicking of the lighter wheel or the sizzle of the flames over the raring engine, but he knows Roy well enough that both are a foregone conclusion.  Roy wouldn’t pass up a chance to subdue their enemies; wouldn’t miss an opportunity to increase their head-start; wouldn’t walk away from a firefight without making sure that the aggressors know who’s really calling the shots.  It’s not just saving their necks: he has a point to make, and he’ll carve it into the sky in singeing letters if it comes to that.  No one fucks with Roy Mustang and gets away without a scorch mark to remind them why that was a mistake.

“Goddamn,” Ed hears his traitor voice mutter even though the rest of him keeps trying to smother the lousy doubts.  He targeted the gate—smashing through a piece with a few hinged points of stabilization rather than trying to bring down an entire wall with their truck’s weight sounds marginally more feasible—but even with his foot shoving the pedal to the floor—

“Allow me,” Roy says—and before Ed can think of asking, a surge of flame engulfs the gate ahead of them, blazing a deep blue-violet at its center—

Ed’s brain whines like a lost dog.  “Melting point of galvanized steel’s over twenty-five-hundred fucking degrees, Roy; you can’t—”

“Still,” Roy says, so calmly that Ed’s heart in his throat twitches with an inexplicable impulse to roll over and lie down.  “Can’t hurt.”

“Unless the truck catches fire,” Ed says.  They have maybe twenty-five feet to go—twenty, fifteen—

“Trust me,” Roy says.

Fucker.

Ed shifts forward to put his heel on the pedal instead of the flat of his foot, in some probably-doomed hope of coaxing a tiny bit more speed out of this miserable truck—

He can see the tortured outline of the chain-link now, shimmering red-hot against the freedom of the darkness beyond, like live wires crossing against the night—

He’s about to drive a stolen supply truck into a lattice of metal wreathed in flame.

He can see the padlocks on the side of the gate starting to writhe and distort—or maybe the heat tricked his eyes; maybe Roy hasn’t brought the temperature anywhere near high enough; maybe—

The instant before their front bumper hits the chain-link, the flames go out.

Ed didn’t even blink—couldn’t bear to; he leaned back on instinct and cringed, sure, but he’s known his whole life that he wanted to see death coming and face it head-on, and he hadn’t planned to give up now.

He gets a whole split-second to drag in half a breath, and relief sparks in his brain, and a weird sort of admiration for Roy’s impeccable combination of skill and timing swirls behind it.

Then they hit the fence.

The screech of tormented metal makes all of the hair on his left arm and the back of his neck stand up, makes his teeth rattle in his skull, makes goosebumps chase his pulse towards his fingertips—

But the impact never flings him forward and smashes his head against the top of the wheel like he was bracing for, because the fence crumples—bends, twists, ripples, splits—

And they barrel through, and scraps of steel like luminescent string scatter around them and and sink to the pavement and wink out in the rearview mirror as the whole compound dwindles behind them.

Ed hears a horrifying, strangled, raspy-sounding thing leave him and realizes that it’s his own breath shuddering free.  He has to force himself to focus so that he won’t go weak all over and release his grip on the wheel—won’t just collapse as the adrenaline books it out of his system, which would probably make him take his foot off of the pedal, at which point they’d come scudding to a stop.  The adrenaline would probably pick up again in a hurry, admittedly, since he imagines they’ll definitely be followed, but…

Or Roy’s hand could settle on his steel shoulder and send another spike of of it straight through him.

“That was very neatly done,” Roy says.

Roy does not lift his hand.

Oh… boy.

“You did all the hard work,” Ed manages.

“I think,” Roy says, and he’s retracting his hand at last, and despite the fact that the automail can’t feel things, exactly, there’s a tingle circulating in Ed’s system that’s making his brain go haywire; “that keeping one’s head in a situation like that is a different sort of difficulty, and deserves quite a lot of credit in its own right.”

“Whatever,” Ed says.  Bless the goddamn day he picked that one up; it’s the perfect noncommittal conversation-ender regardless of what the conversation’s about, and it requires an absolute minimum of intellect to generate.  “Where the hell should we be going, anyway?  Do we even know what direction?”

Speaking of a minimum of intellect, that was a stupid way to phrase it—do we even know.  Like they can collectively know much of anything.  Like there’s a we here to speak of.

“If we keep on the road long enough, I’m sure we’ll stumble on something,” Roy says.  “We were only driving for about twenty minutes after they abducted us, so we can’t be more than thirty miles or so from the main road, and we were rather close to the turnoff when they stopped us.  So I imagine—”

“Okay,” Ed says.  “Got it.  Keep driving and hope we’re gonna get your luck, not mine.”

A glance out of the corner of his eye confirms that Roy is grinning, which is… not the worst possible outcome, exactly, but it’s on the list.  Ed’s stomach does another spectacularly stupid thing.

“Something like that,” Roy says.

Ed breathes in and out as slowly as he can.  He’s almost starting to feel like a regular person again, with a heartbeat that belongs to him.  With the headlights unfolding ever longer stretches of the pavement out ahead of them, maybe… Maybe they might just trip over some favorable odds after all.  Things always seem to go Roy’s way, don’t they?  Ed’s hated that since he was twelve.

Probably he should have figured out a long time ago that the best way to take advantage of it is to stick by Roy’s side and leverage his luck.

That’s all it is.  That’s the only reason.  It has nothing to do with the eyes and the smile and the rakish fall of the stupid hair, and the decidedly un-stupid mind behind them.

Nothing at all.

“Ah,” Roy says several minutes later, while Ed’s staring at the white lines on the road and wondering, less than calmly, why they haven’t seen a single other vehicle.

Before Ed can ask why he keeps using that interjection with maliciously purposeful ambiguity, Roy gestures, and then Ed sees the road sign.

Five miles to the capital.

They might just manage this stupid mission after all.

Chapter Text

“Okay,” Ed says when the outskirts thicken into buildings that begin to rise around them, and streetlights start to populate both sides of the road.  “Where should we go?”

“Are we on Main Street?” Roy asks.  “I think it’s the only one that diverges directly from the roadways, so…” He leans out the window to examine a street sign.  The state of their windshield’s making it a bit of a challenge to read stuff, as Ed will be the first to testify.  “Yes.  Perfect.  It’s going to intersect with Third Street, on which we’ll take a right.”

Ed tightens his grip on the wheel a little bit, which makes the chafed part of his left wrist hurt in a vague, reprimanding sort of way.  “You memorize the map, or what?”

Roy’s grin is back.  Ed hates everything.  “Only the part of it that I thought might come in handy.”

“I guess this is a stupid time to complain about how paranoid you are,” Ed says.

“You can complain about me any time you like,” Roy says.

“Of course I can,” Ed says.  “We’re not even in a country where you’ve got political power right now; I can do anything I want.  But it’d still be stupid.”

He can feel Roy’s eyes on him, which is… unsettling as hell.  “I think you worry more about being perceived as unintelligent than any other genius I’ve ever met, despite the fact that you’re the single most brilliant of any of them.”

“Don’t bullshit me right now,” Ed says.  “I’m tryin’ to drive.”

“You’re succeeding,” Roy says, “as far as I know.”

“All the signs are in Aerugan,” Ed says.  “I don’t know shit.”

“I believe that’s First Street,” Roy says, pointing at the next intersection Ed’s about to chug along through, attempting not to notice the stares of the occasional other drivers at their bullet-riddled truck.  “We’re nearly there.”

At Roy’s insistence that it “really ought to be the Embassy’s problem starting now and concluding never,” they park the truck directly in front of the building and just… leave it there as they climb the stairs and saunter in.

There are a few extremely stressed-looking people at the fancy marble front desk.  One, seated, is on the phone; another, behind the desk, is tracing lines on a piece of paper—a map?—with a ruler.  There’s a third man standing in front of it—tall, Ed can tell, even though he’s leaned over, not that Ed pays attention to that sort of shit; and with long pale hair drawn back in a low ponytail with a little tiny bow on the tie.  He’s the one who looks up, sharply, breathes sharper still, and then smiles—slightly softer, but in a way that makes Ed’s danger alarms go off even more than the prior two.

“I should have known,” he says.  He waves a hand towards the two people behind the desk, who startle and look up at him.  “That won’t be necessary.”  While they’re still fumbling with their office supplies, or possibly with the fact that he just spoke to them in Amestrian, he strides forward, hands folded neatly behind his back until he extends the right one to Roy.  “General Mustang.  Always an incomparable delight.”  He takes Roy’s hand—just a handshake for half a second, but then he brings his left up to clasp Roy’s hand tighter between his two.  “I suppose I should wish that I could welcome you under the circumstances we originally agreed upon, but you don’t seem to do ‘ordinary’.”

“It’s wonderful to see you, Ambassador,” Roy says.  Somehow he makes freeing his hand look casual, and then he steps forward and plants a fingertip on the map on the desktop.  “You have a small insurgent problem right here.”  He turns back to the one in charge, smiling like they’ve paused during a nice afternoon coffee to discuss the weather forecast.  “I do hope you didn’t go to too much trouble during the wait?  We left one of their trucks outside.  You might be able to determine who owns the deed to it, which wouldn’t be a bad place to start.”

The ambassador-guy’s eyes glint, and his smile in return only curls one corner of his mouth.  “As always, General, you are much too kind.”  He gestures to Ed, who has been standing here hating every fucking second of this hoity-toity diplomatic crap so much that he can feel the temperature of his blood skyrocketing.  “And—may I ask—who is this?”

All of this is like a game played in the dark, with rules that no one’s written down and pits full of sharpened stakes scattered everywhere across the terrain.  Roy just—hops right over them, like they’re nothing; like he’s got a psychic map of all of them, and he knows their dimensions without even looking at the ground.  Ed can’t do that.  He’s never had the knack for it, and the prospect of what lies ahead just makes him freeze as solid as the marble of the floor.  He can’t mess up if he doesn’t move, right?

He knows that’s an old, naïve little lie that’s never saved him at a time like this.

But Roy’s beside him again, with a hand on his right shoulder, before he has a chance to sink right into the quagmire.

“This,” Roy says, smoothly, “is Major Edward Elric—you may know him better as the Fullmetal Alchemist.  He is one of the most trustworthy and competent officers that the military has to offer, which is why I thought it prudent to enlist him as my adjutant for this particular excursion.  To which effect—I do hope it won’t be terribly inconvenient if we postpone our discussions until tomorrow?  As I’m sure you can imagine, it’s been something of a… difficult… trip.”

The way the ambassador-guy’s eyes flick up and down over Ed twice—head to toe, pausing to linger first on Roy’s hand on his shoulder, and then on Ed’s waist, and then on his hair—gives him the fucking heebie-jeebies.  It makes him feel—weird.  Colossally weird.  It makes him feel scrutinized and hamstrung and… naked.  That’s what.

“Of course,” Ambassador-Guy says.  “We have several suites right here in the embassy, and we can take up again tomorrow at—say, nine?”

“Perfect,” Roy says.

Roy keeps his hand where it is as Ambassador-Guy continues with a “Please, follow me,” and they do, and they walk through a series of dark, silent, marble-lined halls, where there are a million doors, and…

And damn, did that adrenaline rush bottom out hard, leaving Ed so high and dry and hollow that his body’s wobbly everywhere, and his head feels like a tomb.  It ought to be disconcerting that Roy’s still gripping his automail shoulder and sort of steering him as they go along, but the feeble remnants of his self-awareness that haven’t dissipated in the crash are just sort of grateful for the help.

Roy’s presence alone has made him feel steadied instead of stymied for a long, long time now.  That’s a terrifying thought.

Ambassador-Guy leads them up a set of stairs and along yet another hall before he stops in front of one of ten-thousand unmarked doors.  He turns to them, reaches into a pocket, retrieves a key, unlocks the door, and then hands the key to Roy.

“Please,” he says.  “Make yourselves at home.”

“Thank you,” Roy says.  “Goodnight, Ambassador.”

Presumably this dude has a name, but Ed just saw that what lies beyond the unlocked door is a bedroom, so he no longer gives a single fuck.

Roy ushers him inside before he can second-guess any of it, and—

And it’s been a long, long-ass fucking day.  And this is like a hotel room, with a little adjoining bathroom and fancy fixtures, and everything is really nice and really clean.

But there is one solitary, prettily-furnished queen-sized bed.

Ed stares at it.  Then he stares at Roy, who finally released him in order to close the door behind them and bolt it.  The bolting part Roy is trying to pass off as perfectly normal, even though they both know better than that.

Ed opens his mouth to say Thanks for saying that you trust me, but what comes out is, “What the hell is this?  And why was he—looking at me like that?”

Roy crosses over to the bed and sets the key down on the nightstand, and then he pushes both hands into his pockets and looks fake-idly at the wall.  Ed recognizes fake-idle by now.  He braces himself for the decidedly not-idle comment that always comes next.

“I believe he thinks we’re lovers,” Roy says.

Ed’s brain—

Quits.  Up and quits.  No letter of resignation; no preamble whatsoever—just walks the fuck out and vanishes into the night.

“He was paying a bit too much attention to me during the meetings with the generals when he visited several months ago,” Roy is saying, like it matters when Ed no longer has a brain to process words with.  “I’m not quite sure anyone else noticed—he was relatively subtle about it in front of others; I’ll give him that.  I accepted when he suggested we go get a drink afterward, in the interest of diplomatic amicability, but he was… significantly more than diplomatically amicable once we were alone.  When I explained to him that while I was very flattered, and he was very much my type, I don’t mix business and pleasure, he was respectful of my boundaries, but—”

It’s different.

It’s different than the occasional rumor that almost invariably gets shouted down.

It’s different than the deniable overtures of the stupid flirting, and the gleam of the grin that’s nestled itself deep into Ed’s memories, so that he can’t ever quite get away.

It’s different than the way that Roy’s eyes soften after a couple of drinks at the pub when somebody mentions Hughes.

It’s different than guessing, or supposing, or collecting perfectly controvertible evidence with a million other explanations.

It’s different to hear him say it.

It’s different to know.

He has no idea whether Roy finished that sentence or not; he lost the ability to hear for a long, long second—the roaring void of revelation around his ears drowned out anything and everything else.  He’s surfacing, though, in time to see Roy blinking, stepping forward, reaching towards him, and then pausing with one beautiful hand stretched out into the space.

“Are you all right?” Roy asks.

“’Course,” Ed says, and it might almost sound convincing to someone less obnoxiously perceptive than stupid Roy.  No time to worry about that, either, and maybe if he doesn’t give Roy time to dwell on it—

And—hell.  Roy’s hand.  Both of Roy’s hands.  It’s the perfect excuse, as much as it’s also awful.

Ed skirts around the extended appendage in question and heads for the bathroom.  “Get your ass over here,” he says.  “If we don’t do something about all those open wounds, they’re gonna have to chop your hands off in a couple weeks.”

Roy pauses again—which is really kind of extraordinary, even if most people who don’t spend half their waking minutes with him probably wouldn’t recognize it—before his footsteps approach the bathroom, where Ed has started digging in the cabinet underneath the sink.  “Isn’t that a bit extreme?”

“You know what’s extreme?” Ed says.  “Sepsis.  And I don’t wanna try to explain to Lieutenant Hawkeye how you got it on my watch.”  He tries the drawers, too, but this place is way too squeaky-clean.  They provided every variety of toothpaste you could possibly want, but there’s nothing really useful.  He faces Roy for a second, trying not to notice how just looking at the far-too familiar face right now is jump-starting his heartbeat.  “Hang on.  I’ve got a… just wash off with soap first, okay?”

No Who do you think you are.  No How dare you give me orders.  No snide remark; no snarky retort.

Roy merely raises an eyebrow, half-smiles, and says “All right.”

Ed tries to make edging past him look normal, and Roy sidles out of his way, and the whole thing’s a stupid, awkward mess, but at least that’s familiar ground for Ed and his crap excuse for a social life.

Doesn’t matter.  That’s not what this is about.

Upscale hotels—one or two of which he’s stayed in, usually on accident, over the years—tend to have a special supply of booze somewhere.  There’s a fancy wooden roll-top desk by the window, which has a cabinet instead of drawers on one side, so he tries that first; and then, glancing up from its emptiness, he spots what looks like a standing ice chest between the nightstand and the wall.  That’s a charming place to keep the liquor and doesn’t reek of alcoholism in the slightest, right?

He brings back the highest-proof prize and holds it out for scrutiny.  “Is this expensive?”

Roy, who has hung his jacket from the hook on the door and settled on the edge of the unreasonably shiny bathtub, barely even has to scan the label.  “Very,” he says.

“Figures,” Ed says.  He brought one of the shot glasses thoughtfully provided by the embassy, which he sets on the countertop so that he can start measuring out his makeshift antiseptic a little bit at a time.  “Roll up your sleeves.”

He’s still half-expecting Roy to give him some shit about who’s in charge here while he selects a fluffy washcloth to dip into the shot glass, but nothing comes.  Maybe the bastard’s finally worried about what nasty bacteria he’s cordially invited into his own bloodstream today.

When Ed looks up, he realizes that he grossly miscalculated—which is embarrassing, for someone of his mathematical abilities, on top of being a total fucking disaster.

Roy with his shirtsleeves rolled up and his forearms on display is a full ten percent hotter than he was before—and that was already an unsustainable level, compounded by the thing he said—

It’s fine.  It doesn’t matter.  This is Roy—just Roy.

“Don’t move,” Ed says, which is as much for his own safety as Roy’s.  Probably more for his, at this point.  This is going to go from nice gesture to unremitting shitshow real fast if he can’t keep his hands steady enough to move the fancy alcohol around.  “And just—let me know if it hurts, I guess.  Or if it hurts too much.  It’s gonna hurt.”

“So many of the finest things in life do,” Roy says blithely.

Ed chokes down the what the hell rising in his throat.  “You wanna try not moving your mouth either?”

“No,” Roy says.  He shifts further towards the end of the bathtub’s edge to make room for Ed to sit beside him.

This is a terrible idea.  It’s also the only one he’s got.

When he’s perched there, awaiting his doom with a booze-dipped towel in his hands and his eyes fixed to Roy’s stupid, stupid, stupid-gorgeous forearms—striated with pale scars, with the deep blue rivers of his veins twining underneath—Ed takes a deep breath.

This is necessary.  This is just Roy.  This is a fucking medical procedure, more or less.  There’s nothing salacious about it.  There’s nothing wrong.  There’s nothing but the two of them, here, now, and Roy’s scratched-up hand, and Roy’s bloodied wrists where the manacles bit in deep.  Nothing but the two of them, and what needs to be done.

“Hang on,” Ed says.  “My hands are filthy.”

They’re also shaking a little—probably not enough that Roy can tell, but if a second under the tap to deal with the filth problem soothes that, then all the goddamn better.

“So,” Ed says as he’s shaking the water off of his hands, though he can’t get the decidedly posh smell of the soap to stop wafting up to poison his airways, “bets on how good their hospitality is.”

“Are you looking for bandages?” Roy asks.

Ed dries his hands and starts banging drawers open again.  “What’s your wager?”

“Small ones,” Roy says.  “Nothing useful for the sort of injuries you and I have a habit of incurring on an alarmingly regular basis.”

Ed hauls the last drawer out and stares into its unhelpful depths.  “You ever get tired of being right?”

He can hear Roy’s grin, which is almost but not quite as bad as looking at it.  “Of course not.  Do you?”

Ed can’t help it: instead of answering, he just sighs.

“You think they count the towels?” he asks.

“They can put it on my tab,” Roy says.

“Swell,” Ed says.  He makes another foray under the sink, where he spotted a stack of spare ones during the earlier quest for anything that would function like hydrogen peroxide, and takes the towel from the very bottom of the pile.

Cotton’s cotton, more or less; and Al had a thing right after recovering his body where he was really interested in the weaves of different fabrics, because textures all registered so intensely, so a clap and a pat turns a folded piece of terrycloth into a couple long strips of gauze.

He re-wets the washcloth in the booze and sits down again.  “Where were we?”

“Right here,” Roy says.

“Smartass,” Ed says.  “Hold still.”

Roy obliges—he always does when it’s important, seems like; when it matters, he listens and doesn’t shoot back any sass.  He does grit his teeth a bit, though, as Ed starts to apply the alcohol, and hiss through them softly at one point, which Ed doesn’t blame him for in the least.  The cuffs those fuckers clapped on tore them both up pretty good despite the relative brevity of their stay in that stupid little cell.  There was also quite a lot of festive hauling around of the prisoners, especially at the start; and during the part where their heads had been covered, it had been nearly impossible to predict their captors’ movements in order to counter or compensate.  There’s blood all over the inside of Ed’s left jacket sleeve to show for it, and a nice ring of crusted crimson on each of the cuffs of Roy’s shirt.

“You okay?” Ed hears his stupid voice ask, as if he hasn’t said enough stupid things yet over the course of this stupid night.

It’s not his fault that even with the obvious advantage of the automail—the advantage being, in this case, that he can’t feel anything—the simple act of cradling one of Roy’s hands in his and tenderly cleaning all the injuries has made a part of Ed’s brain hurl both hands in the air and storm out of the proverbial room.  What’s left of his intellect is trying frenetically to hold all of this together and demonstrate enough competence to get Roy and both of his absurdly attractive hands through this unscathed, but it’s stretched so thin right now that he’s really not surprised it’s spouting dumb shit.

“I’ve had worse,” Roy says.  “Although I will admit I’ve also had better.”

“Tell me about it,” Ed says.  “Are these stupid diplomatic trips always like this?  It’s no wonder Lieutenant Hawkeye doesn’t want to go anymore.”

“To be fair,” Roy says, “I don’t think she ever wanted to go.”

“Neither did I,” Ed says.  “And yet here I am, moppin’ blood off of my C.O. with high-end booze in a fancy-pants embassy bathroom.”

“Life is strange,” Roy says.

“This one’s not life’s fault,” Ed says.  “This one’s on you.”

“I’m honored,” Roy says.

Ed’s hands, to their credit, feel steadier than they did when he started.  Sometimes you just have to get moving before you’re really ready to, and the rest falls in line.

“Glad to hear it,” Ed says.  “Can you be honored but not move?”

The damned smile hasn’t faded, although it’s doing the thing where it darts around and lights up every single centimeter of Roy’s face, which means he knows Ed’s not serious, which means Ed is a little bit extra-fucked.  “Terribly sorry.”

“You are not,” Ed says.  He gathers up a nice, even strip of the gauze and tries not to grip it hard enough to betray the way his heart’s still skittering around inside him like a frightened rat.  He fans with his left hand at the last few damp spots—some of them from relatively fresh oozes of blood summoned up by the ministrations; some from the attention itself—and then starts applying the bandages.  This is fine.  This is fine.

Roy, to his credit, or at least to the credit of his mercy, keeps his mouth shut while Ed buckles down and works.  He tries to get the cleanest lines he can, with even overlapping—the fewer edges and layers of this that Roy has to peel out of the half-formed scabs tomorrow, the better, probably; Ed’s been down that road a couple times.

When he reaches the end of the strip, he cheats with alchemy again to meld it to itself instead of trying to tuck it underneath or tie it off.  Izumi would probably be embarrassed to admit to knowing him, but to hell with it; he’s tired, and he doesn’t want the bandages to shift if Roy rolls around a lot during the night.

Shit.  Shit, hell, damn—

He’s about to find out exactly what Roy does while sleeping, isn’t he?  Unless he volunteers to sleep in the bathtub, which sounds even more colossally unappealing than it used to, back when he was a kid running on epinephrine and sheer spite, and he could drop like a rock and start snoring in a matter of seconds.

He seals off the second wrist bandage, and then makes quick work of the third one that he made to protect the scratch marks of the array Roy dug into the back of his hand.  Most of those weren’t as deep or as broad or as generally dangerous as any of the wounds left by the manacles, but there’s taking chances, and then there’s taking chances.  Ed prefers the kind of risks that involve calculating your own trajectory and planning a landing after you jump off of a building to the kind where you have to fight invisible shit in your bloodstream that wants to kill you dead.  He’s got a better track record with the first one so far.

“Okay,” he says, getting up.  Didn’t that used to be a hell of a lot easier on his back and both knees and… he’s never going to think that again.  Back to the drawers near the sink; they’re safer.  “At least we know they provided, like, six kinds of toothbrushes, in case you have six kinds of teeth—which I wouldn’t put past you, since I’ve never been completely sure you’re human, a—”

“Edward,” Roy says.

Shitfuck.  The full name.  Ed’s blood rushes in his ears in a way he really doesn’t like: firstly, because it makes him feel woozy and weird; second, because his instincts for this sort of thing are incredible, so if his body’s slammed the adrenaline switch back into the on position, that’s a bad sign for his odds.

He turns, slow and careful, and makes sure to scowl.  “What?”

“Sit down,” Roy says.

Ed bristles.  At least he’s still got a strain of the old wildness in him—the hackle-rising, teeth-gritting, visceral contempt for anything that looks or sounds or walks or talks too much like an order.  Even if he doesn’t ever see it except when it’s too late at night or too early in the morning for his brain to be holding the reins to the rest of him, it’s weirdly comforting to know that it’s still there.  People get transmuted by the world around them one day and one decision at a time, but it’s nice to think that the fundamental components never really disappear.

Roy smiles and raises his eyebrows, gesturing towards the empty spot on the rim of the bathtub beside him, which is worse than the command.  “Please?”

“Can’t we just go the fuck to bed already?” Ed asks.

“No,” Roy says.  “Because it’s your turn.”  Ed attempts to glare at him, but glares work better when the object of them notices that you’re doing it, and Roy’s gazing immovably at the damage on Ed’s left wrist.  “After your many condemnations of sepsis, I’m surprised you’d protest.”

“It’s fine,” Ed says.  “What the hell do I need a hand for, anyway?”

“Why, Edward,” Roy says—again, like he doesn’t remember the nickname or something, and pretty soon Ed’s just going to have to smother him with one of the decorative pillows from the other room and be done with it.  “For paperwork, of course.”

Ed takes two deep breaths to try to clear his swimming head enough to make a reasonable call.  Roy has a point—not about the paperwork, but about the problem—which means that he knows he has a point, which means that he’s given himself a huge stubbornness bonus that will lend him the edge to overcome Ed’s unnecessary refusal campaign.

Ed swallows.  He’s just going to have to get through this.  Wait it out.  Whatever.  No big deal.  He’s put his head down and pushed through a whole hell of a lot worse.

“Fine,” he says.

He picks up the booze and the washcloth again and offers them both out to Roy, who takes one in each hand—and then executes an ostentatious and utterly awesome little flip-twist-spin maneuver with the bottle, which twirls it a full three-hundred and sixty degrees without spilling a drop.

“What the hell was that?” Ed asks.

“The other reason you should keep your hands,” Roy says.  “Sometimes they’re fun.  Sit.”

“Bastard,” Ed says, for good measure, but he sits.

“Thank you,” Roy says, and Ed can’t tell whether it’s meant to be about the famous moniker or the fact that Ed finally followed the instruction.

He doesn’t get too long to wonder: Roy’s quick with the bottle again, setting it aside on the floor to free up his right hand for holding Ed’s left.

It’s an awfully good thing there’s going to be pain involved.  Pain Ed can handle.  Pain Ed can focus on.  Pain is, at this particular juncture, enormously preferable to noticing every single tiny sensation involved with Roy’s fingertips grazing his forearm to lift his wrist.

It stings kind of a lot, but after that one time when Winry was drunk, and she spent a full fifteen minutes crying about being pretty sure that she’d irrevocably fucked up Ed’s nerves, he has to admit that he may not be the best person to consult about pain thresholds and that sort of thing.

“I can’t tell which of us he was jealous of,” Roy says.

Maybe it’s because Ed’s still thinking of nerves and wires and whether you really could strip the casing off and short-circuit somebody, and about the dearth of doctors on the planet who would be able to follow that conversation, let alone help, but— “Huh?”

“Ambassador Deàphe,” Roy says, still dabbing oh-so-fucking-gently at the raw mess of Ed’s wrist.  “I’m not sure which of us it was that he was envying.”

Staring at Roy’s hands is pretty assuredly not going to get Ed out of this, but it’s marginally better than staring at Roy’s face.  “I mean—he wanted to get into your pants before.  I can’t imagine he’s changed his mind.”

“Hard to say,” Roy says.  Nothing has ever been hard for him to say in his life, the lying bastard.  “The way he was looking at you made me wonder.”

Ed doesn’t remember receiving any looks even close to the kind or caliber that could instill that sort of doubt, but to say that his brain can be fallible in social situations would be a deliberate understatement worthy of one of Roy’s sardonic newspaper interviews.

“Whatever,” he manages.  “You said he’s your type, right?  You can have him.  He’s definitely not mine.”

Roy’s cautious fingers don’t stop moving as he works a little bit of grit out of a deep part of the wound.  That smarts, so apparently Winry didn’t screw up too bad.

“Oh?” Roy asks, so calculatedly casual that Ed’s stomach flips, somersaults, and then curls itself up into a knot of pure regret.  He should know better than to play this game with the master; he should know better than to shove his hand into an open flame and expect anything other than what he knows he’ll get— “What’s your type?”

It has been a long-ass fucking day, and a long-ass fucking life, and it takes everything in Ed to bite down on his tongue before he just says You, you, you stupid, smarmy, self-aggrandizing, bastard; you secretly soft-hearted idiot nerd with your brilliant strategies and your buried compassion and your endless obnoxious wit—

“I dunno,” Ed says.  “Tall.”

Nailed it.

Wait.

Fuck.

Roy laughs, but it’s all delight and no disdain, and he has to know that this is his own fucking fault.  He has to.  He knows what he does; knows what he looks like; knows that his voice has hypnotic power, and his eyes are like the dizzying warmth of a summer night that just keeps drawing you further away from the lights.

“Do you have a minimum limit?” he asks.

“No,” Ed says.  “Fuck.  And fuck you.  And forget I said that.  That was—it’s been—I’m tired.”

“I know,” Roy says, and the smile is worse than the laugh—one part sweet and one part wistful and one part gentle and one part still mischievously amused.  “I’m sorry.  Once we’ve wrapped up here—so to speak—I think it’s time for some well-earned sleep.”  He pauses, though his hands start winding the gauze very carefully around Ed’s wrist—smoothly, evenly, not too tight.  “Just… for the record, you know… if you do have a suggested height requirement, I have it on good authority that I look excellent in a pair of heels.”

Ed’s idiot brain makes him say: “Whose?”

“The authority?” Roy asks.  “Or the heels?”

“Both,” Ed says.  “No—neither—no—I don’t—care.  It’s not—” His heartbeat in his head went from pattering to slamming, and all of the alarm systems in his body are going off.  “What do you want?”

Roy meets his eyes for a long, long second—too long.  Long enough to see things, find things, know things.  Long enough to read complicated messages in languages Ed’s never known how to translate.  Long enough to understand things he can’t describe.

“Nothing in particular,” Roy says.  He’s still holding Ed’s wrist gently in both hands, still grazing just one fingertip along the back of Ed’s forearm in a soothing sort of way, so lightly that it’s possible he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it.  “Nothing that comes at a cost to you.  You’ve paid enough.”

“That’s irrelevant,” Ed says.  It’s also factually wrong, but that’s irrelevant, too.  “And that wasn’t the question.”

Roy takes up wrapping the gauze again, very slowly and very gingerly, like he’s worried that Ed’s going to throw a fit over a little bit of minor nerve discomfort—like this has anything on the scar tissue, or the back pain, or the stress headaches, or… anything, really.  Like saving him a negligible amount of pain is worth it for its own sake.

“I know,” Roy says.  “But what I want isn’t really that important, because it’s only a fraction of this.  One of many variables in the equation that I’m looking to balance, you might say.”

“Cute,” Ed says before he can shut his fucking traitor mouth.  He has to cover that, and quick.  “If you think you can distract me with extended chemistry metaphors—”

“I learned a long time ago that I can’t distract you from anything you don’t wish to be distracted from,” Roy says.  One more loop of the gauze brings it to a nice, even end, and then he lifts both hands and presses his palms together.  “But it never hurts to try.”

“Oh, yeah?” Ed says.  “In what universe is that ever true?”

Roy smiles, and then he touches his fingertips to the bandage.  The pale blue light of it sparks, then streaks, then shimmers, then subsides.  He sealed it to itself really neatly.  He’s been working on alchemy without a circle where Ed can’t see—practicing holding complicated sigils in his head and minimizing the marks.  He’s gotten a lot better since the last time he let Ed watch him do it.

“Fair point,” Roy says.  He sits back, just a little, and there’s a part of Ed—

There’s a part of Ed that senses the seriousness from nothing more than the set of Roy’s jaw and the slant of his shoulders and the depth of his eyes.

That part of him wants to run.

“What it comes down to,” Roy says, “is that we’re good together.  Complementary.  Tonight reminded me just how true that is, and in just how many ways.  I can’t…” He draws a deep breath and lets it out slowly, and the faint smile that he directs at the wall makes Ed’s heart tumble over itself so fast that it tangles up his arteries, and his head goes light.  “I can’t help wondering how far that extends.  We’re—good at taking care of each other.  I hope I’m not only speaking for myself when I say that even in a scenario like this one, just being with you is… fun.  It feels safe.  It feels right.  There was never an iota of doubt in my mind that we’d make it back here, more or less intact, because I don’t think there’s anything that the two of us together aren’t capable of.”

They stare at each other again—for longer this time.  Like neither of them knows exactly what the next step of the dance is; like they’ve both trod on too many toes to be confident here.

Ed has been a hell of a lot of things over the years.  Roy’s molded him into a few of them, for better and worse and both at once.

But he’s never been a coward.

And hesitating now would taste a lot like defeat.

“Are you sure about this shit?” he manages.

Roy smiles.  “Are you?”  He reaches out, and his fingertips brush Ed’s hair back, and the bastard’s got to know that he just siphoned every single possible syllable out of Ed’s mouth and hurled it to the winds.  “I hope it goes without saying that I won’t be hurt or offended or hold it against you in some miserable way if you’d… rather not.  I would completely understand, and you don’t have to give a reason.  My zeppelin ego can weather it.”

Ed’s been watching Roy Mustang closely since he was a kid—the same way he used to watch rattlesnakes in the grass.  A power he couldn’t grasp for his own was a source of endless fascination.

And then it was more than that.  After a while, it was trying to figure him out; and then it was… something dangerously close to admiration.  Something dangerously… fond.  Affectionate, maybe.

Shit.

The point is that he’s picked up some of the clues on how to read Roy over the years.

It was good of Roy to say what he just said—to give Ed an emotional egress; to hand him a way out if he balks and changes his mind.  To put it into so many words that Ed’s not about to lose his job over this, and he doesn’t have to do anything if he isn’t positive that it’s what he wants.

But Ed can see it, too—the flicker of something cautious in Roy’s eyes despite the usual tilt of the usual smile.  Roy’s bracing himself.  He’s raising walls in case it turns out that it wasn’t just a courtesy after all, because Ed’s going to take him up on it.  He’s readying himself to be let down, and to let it go.

Ed’s heart continues to demonstrate unsafe gymnastic maneuvers.  It’s also multitasking: he can feel it beating fervently in the back of his throat.

“I mean,” he forces out around the strangling lump of it, “I—yeah.  I know.  I mean—I feel that way, I guess.  But—that’s been true for… ages.  You’n me working weirdly well together or whatever.  So what I mean is—what’s different about it?  What’s different now?  ’Cause something is.  You and I are both feeling it, and don’t try to tell me…” His heart swells a little more and gets stuck, and in swallowing it down, he loses the rest of that sentence.  Fuck it.  He gives it up for lost.  “Why are you—what do you want right now?”

Roy smiles, and his eyes flick up Ed’s face, then down again, and then his gaze lingers on Ed’s—

Mouth.

Oh.

Oh, shit.

“Would you like the complicated answer?” Roy asks.  “Or the very honest one?”

Ed’s question comes out in much more of a croak than a voice, but he’ll take what he can get.  “You gonna kiss me?”

Roy’s breath catches for a fraction of a second—and in that momentary silence, Ed could swear the planet stops spinning, and his heart doesn’t beat, and all of it is gone.  That this is all there is, in that instant.  That this is it.

“Only,” Roy says, and it’s not just Ed, apparently—his voice has lost half its normal speaking volume somewhere on the way to this part of the conversation; it’s still as infuriatingly silken-smooth as always, but there’s a slight hint of a quaver underneath; “if that’s what you—”

Ed grabs the front of Roy’s stupid collar with the left hand and drags him in to crush their mouths together.

It’s not the first time he’s kissed someone.  It’s not even the first time he’s kissed someone in a bathroom, actually, in a fit of something that feels shiveringly similar to desperation.

But apparently it’s the first time he’s kissed someone who really knows what they’re doing.

There was a guy, a little over a year ago—a sergeant named Devon, who was twenty-six and dark-haired with bright blue eyes and the kind of laugh that made you turn around and smile even if you didn’t know what was funny.  He’d made all of what felt like the right firecracker-endorphins light up and spit sparks in Ed’s chest and stomach and brain, and one time he’d caught Ed looking at him from two tables down in the cafeteria, and he’d winked.  The next day, he’d grazed his hand over Ed’s left shoulder-blade in the hall and asked if he wanted to go get a drink, and one thing had tumbled into another, and it was luminescent for two solid months.

The lights went out slow enough that Ed didn’t notice at first—one and two at a time, flickering and then failing, and by the time it was dark, his eyes had adjusted enough that it still felt familiar.  It wasn’t anything too dramatic, in the end: just that Devon kept insisting that he should ask for fewer missions, less-dangerous ones; that he should protest the late nights and occasional weekends; that the idealistic look wasn’t good on him, and he wasn’t going to change the world by groveling at Roy Mustang’s feet for a little bit more overtime.  Ed tried to hear him out at first—tried to believe It’s just that I care about you so much, and you’re always so tired, and I feel like I never see you, and it’s so hard to be with you but still be alone.  He tried to want the strange, fragile chain drawn out between them the way that Devon seemed to want it; tried to depend on it and take solace in it and need it.  Tried to make it matter to himself.  Tried to believe that it was more important than the other obligations in his life.

And then Devon started to say things like When Al visits, I don’t even exist anymore.  Why do you have to spend so much time with him?  I’ve never met anybody who worships their brother so much.  It’s weird.  I don’t like it.

It took a couple more weeks to finish winding it down after that, but when those words left his mouth, it was over, and Ed was gone.

Ed had missed parts of it—the parts grounded in relief instead of tension, at least, which had been fewer and further between as time went on.  He’d missed nights on the couch, and soft-voiced conversations when their heads were so close on the pillow that they barely had to speak above a whisper.  He’d missed Devon’s hands in his hair; he’d missed fingertips against his face and the warmth of another breathing body at his side.  And he’d missed kissing.

The remarkable thing is that he missed it as much as he did without ever realizing that it could be like this.

Roy knows where to lay his hands—where to drag his fingertips, exactly how lightly to run them behind Ed’s ear and then down along his jaw to make his spine tighten and his skin sing and his heart stagger.  Roy’s mouth would merit a whole book of the kind of poetry Al likes; his tongue ought to get a specific sequel; he keeps just—pressing and then retreating, exploring and then appreciating; he’s taking it so fucking slow—

Roy’s incomparable grasp of the power of suggestion has always been one of his subtlest strengths.  Fuck it: Ed can give into it knowingly, just this once.  Just for a moment.

Just long enough to follow his lead and savor this.

Just long enough to fall right into it—to forget a hundred and one rational objections; to forget the things he knows about what’s wrong with it, and wrong with him, and what’ll go wrong later if he lets anything like this happen again.  Just long enough that Roy’s mouth over his, Roy’s skin against his, Roy’s eyelashes brushing his cheek and Roy’s hair slipping across his forehead and Roy’s quick, hot breath grazing over his lips starts to feel—comfortable.  Sweet and warm and fitting; more solace now than anything overly salacious, and that—

Roy catches Ed’s bottom lip between both of his, worries it for a fraction of a second, then sucks on it, then lathes it with just the tip of his tongue—and even as Ed’s body starts tensing up to shudder, Roy’s fingertips caress his throat, and the electric impulse in him redoubles until he just writhes.

Naturally, that’s when Roy draws back.

Not very far, or anything—just a couple of inches.  His eyelashes lift so, so slow, like he’s reluctant to have to stop this long enough to raise them; but his eyes flick up to Ed’s almost instantly, like he’s…

Like he’s eager to look, or something.  Like he wants to see what’s right the hell in front of him, and has been for ages, and hasn’t changed since forty-five seconds ago when this started.

Roy swallows, and then he smiles, though it’s rather less convincing than his usual gig.  “I… I’m sorry.  Are you all right?”

Ed stares at him.  It’s always sort of a pleasant activity in an aesthetic sense, and it has a lot of other advantages, too, like conveying the perfect amount of What the fuck, Mustang? when you hit the incredulous-to-accusatory ratio just right.  “What the hell are you sorry for?”

Roy pauses.  “I was—prepared to be sorry if you hadn’t enjoyed it.”

Ed tips the ratio further towards incredulity.

“Ah,” Roy says.  And then—shit, hell, damn; here comes the smirk.  “In that case, the only thing I’m sorry for is that we waited so long.”

That—

But—

“I thought you didn’t mix business and pleasure,” Ed says, and it takes just about every tiny fragment of willpower he’s got left not to let the word pleasure make him shudder and then cringe and then… bat his eyelashes or something.  Who the hell knows?  At this rate, he’s not sure he knows who he is anymore—not sure who he’s ever been, except for someone who wants Roy, who’s always wanted Roy, who’s fought it for so long that he couldn’t deny it anymore, and he had to face the fact that he’d never win.

“When it comes to dating a diplomat,” Roy says, “a disagreement could become a matter of international politics.”  He arches an eyebrow, and that fucking smile will be the death of Edward Elric whether this impossible night develops into anything or not.  “When it comes to you and me, a disagreement means it’s likely to be a day of the week that ends in Y.”

Straightforward and relatively logical.  Ed’ll give him that.

On to the next one.  He works the spit around in his mouth for a second to try to counteract the sudden dryness that just swept through.

“Okay,” he says.  “So—why the hell didn’t you—say anything?”

“Everything you’ve done since you were eight years old has been a string of things you felt compelled to,” Roy says.  “Putting things back, making things right, hurling yourself into unknown perils in an unending quest to assuage some measure of the guilt—I know that.  And I understand that.  And the last thing I ever wanted to do was lay another weight on you after you pushed your way through the worst of it.  When you came back, after recovering Al, despite all of it—despite not needing this as a route to power anymore—I decided that the least I could do was resolve not to interfere with any of your personal choices anymore.  So when this…” He gestures, in an unilluminating sort of way, between the two of them.  “…situation… became apparent—”

“What ‘situation’?” Ed says.  “What does that mean?”

“When I realized I was attracted to you,” Roy says—calmly, like it’s nothing.  Like it’s old news.  Like he’s—

Used to it.

“I didn’t want to force your hand,” Roy says.  “Or any other part of you, as it were.  And I certainly didn’t want there to be any sort of an abuse of power involved—although given your longstanding and well-documented respect for the military hierarchy, I wasn’t quite as concerned about that.  But I knew it would influence you, in one way or another, so I did the best I could to keep it from you completely.”

Ed rummages in his brain for something to say.  Then he digs a little deeper, and shifts some of the rubble around, and… comes up utterly empty-handed.

“You should’ve—” he attempts.  “I just—I figured—fuck.  I didn’t—figure anything.  I didn’t think you’d ever even thought about it; I just—”

He’d always assumed Roy was out of his league and out of the question—off the table, off the charts, off on some other plane of possibility that never intersected with the one he lived on.  People like that didn’t look at people like him.  If they happened to glance in his direction, they sure as hell didn’t like what they saw.

It wasn’t that he thought Roy was perfect or some crap like that—it was just that he’d realized a long time ago that perfection wasn’t what he would have wanted anyway.  Someone brilliant and gracious and articulate and dignified and organized and driven and considerate and wise, all at once, all the time—someone like that would make him feel like nothing.  Someone like that would make all of his accomplishments meaningless; someone like that would outshine everything he didn’t hate about himself to the point that it was blinding.  Even if they were unerringly supportive—which they would be, in keeping with the whole perfection thing—he would doubt himself.  It would fester in him.  He would wait for them to find something better and move on.

And he’d be bored.

Roy wasn’t perfect—far fucking from it.  But he was smart and smug and dorky and devoted and loyal and staggeringly considerate and weirdly sweet when all the masks fell away.  And he was funny, sometimes even on purpose.  And he was gorgeous as all fucking get-out; always had been.  He was better than perfect: he was unique.  He was strange and sad and theatrical and sometimes so deliberately annoying that it was all Ed could do to resist the urge to throw office supplies directly at his head.  And he was clever and curious and striving every single day to be better, and Ed…

Ed had belonged to him for a long, long time.

That was part of the problem, although he’d tried to talk himself into believing that it was more of a saving grace than a problem, when you got down to it.  He’d always thought Roy would see him as a kid forever—that he’d stay twelve years old, snarling and jaded and reckless and naïve, in Roy’s head until his stupid too-yellow hair went gray, and then maybe a switch would flip or something.  And he’d eventually managed to convince himself, halfway or better some days, that that was a good thing—that it was better than the alternative, which was Roy seeing him as an adult, assessing him as a prospect, and realizing in due course that he wasn’t anywhere near good enough.  Better to circumvent the arc from hoping to hurting altogether, before you’d ever traveled it at all.

Except—

“I thought about it quite a lot,” Roy says.  “And I did vacillate for a while, but then there was Sergeant Adelson, and… that reminded me to leave well enough alone.”

Ed swallows.  “How’d you even know about that?”

Roy smiles, eyebrows arching.  “I know everything.”

“Let me guess,” Ed says.  “Lieutenant Hawkeye saw something and snitched.”

“I don’t reveal my sources,” Roy says, which is every bit as good as a yes.

Ed looks at Roy.  Then he looks down at his own knees, and the bandaged hand clenched in the fabric of his stupid blue pants, and the shiny porcelain of the bathtub beyond them.  Then he looks over at the sink, with the detritus of their scramble for first aid scattered across the countertop.

This conversation is definitely happening.

“I can’t believe she sold me out,” he says.  Better to focus on this part than—the other thing.  Any of the other things.

“She was worried about you,” Roy says.  “We checked out all his files.”

Ed glances at him, but Roy’s face is about as revealing as the chain link fence they obliterated earlier.  “You find anything?”

“Not really,” Roy says.  “But most people look good on paper.  You look good on paper.”

“Ouch,” Ed says.

“Hell,” Roy says.  “I look good on paper.”

Fucker does—newspaper, copy paper, amateur portraits by Elysia.  Maybe not as much the last one, but he’d probably look good on cardstock, in a woodcut, on hammered metal, described in semaphore—

“I wanted…” Roy smiles, runs his tongue over his upper lip.  “I wanted to tell you that I was sorry when it didn’t work out.  But I wasn’t supposed to know.”

“Oh,” Ed says as something dawns, like one of those winter sunrises that’s chilly as hell and swells the color of an egg yolk at the edges of the sky.  “Shit.  I thought it was suspicious that you were so damn nice to me that week.”

Roy blinks, attempting to look as affronted as possible.  “I beg your pardon?  I take umbrage at your implication that I’m not that damn nice all the time.”

“Whatever,” Ed says.  “It’s—fine.  I mean, it wasn’t… a big… Why did you do that, anyway?”

“I just want you to be happy,” Roy says, and the smile takes on a soft sort of shadow.  “You were, for a little while, when you were with him.  And I was happy for you.”

Something flitters and then flips in the pit of Ed’s stomach.

It’s not that he’s ever been stupid enough to think that Roy was selfish—not really.  Nobody who would lay their life down for any member of their team the way that he would, and no one who would stick his neck out for the likes of Ed and Al given the way they started, could ever be mistaken for that.  Roy plays the egoist in public, but every time Ed turns around, that guarded heart gets deeper, and every time he thinks he’s seen the bottom, it drops out, and there’s just more warmness underneath.

Nowhere’s safe when you’re standing on the edge of that, and if you tip over, you’ll just fall forever.

“I don’t know,” Ed says.  It’s hard to talk with all this weird crap in his throat.  He doesn’t want to think about the precise nature of this weird crap.  He doesn’t want to think about any of this, actually.  “It was… it doesn’t matter.  It’s over.  Everybody made it out alive.”

Roy’s smile thins into something much more like a smirk, which at least is comfortingly familiar.  “Such lofty standards we have for our experiences.”

Ed eyes him.  “You haven’t—well.  I guess you answered the question.  But then you fucking confused it and tangled it up all over again.”

Yup.  Definitely a smirk.  “About what I want, you mean?”

Ed swallows, hard.  “Yeah.  You know me and hints.  Spell it out for me.”

“All right,” Roy says.  He reaches up, tucks a lock of hair behind Ed’s ear, draws his fingertips down the side of Ed’s neck, then down his chest, and wraps his hand around Ed’s left.  “I want you to be happy.  I’d be particularly delighted if you let me try my hand at improving your success in that endeavor.”

Ed stares at him.

“Sorry,” Roy says.  “Habit.”

“Real words,” Ed says.

“Date me?” Roy says.  He pauses.  “Please.”

No hesitation; no second thoughts; no second-guessing—speak from the heart without waiting, and you end up with the truth.

“Fuck,” Ed says.  “Fine.  Yeah.  Okay.”

Roy beams at him.  “Wonderful.”

Ed bites his tongue on You’re going to regret this; you’re going to regret all of it; you don’t know what you’re asking for.

The thing is—

Roy almost does.

No one, except maybe Al, can really conceptualize all of the twisted knots of torn-up things in Ed’s head and heart and something-like-a-soul, but as far as the rest of the world goes, Roy has a damn good shot.  They’ve lived these strange little parallel lives, and their brains work terrifyingly similarly sometimes, and he’s smart, and he’s cautious, and he cares.  He’s been there through most of the worst of it.  He’s seen the lowest reaches, and he’s lit the darkness up with his own two hands when he had to.

And it helped.

“Starting tomorrow,” Ed says.  “Real-tomorrow, since it’s gotta be after midnight, and in the morning you have to do a bunch of stupid diplomatic shit.  I don’t want you getting distracted.”

Roy squeezes his hand.  Gauze and all, it feels—nice.  Good.  Promising.  “You’re much too kind.”

Ed makes sure to glower in response to the brightness of Roy’s grin.  “We’ll see about that.”

“Don’t worry,” Roy says.  “I’m very good at keeping secrets.”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “The whole mostly-bloodless coup thing sort of tipped me off to that.”  He stares down at Roy’s hand around his.  If it wasn’t for the gauze, he’d figure that this is a really vivid hallucination, but his brain wouldn’t add in itchy details, would it?  Surely not.  “So who’s gonna make sure you’re happy while you’re worrying about everybody else?”

“I’m not sure,” Roy says, starting to grin again.  “Perhaps I should hire someone.  Do you have any suggestions?”

“I always have suggestions,” Ed says.  He holds up his right hand so that he can tick them off on his fingers.  “Get fucked.  Shut up.  Kiss me again.”

Roy’s already laughing softly as he leans in, and his breath ghosts across Ed’s lips as his fingertips graze Ed’s cheek.  “Can I start from the end of that list?”

“Mustang,” Ed says, giving in to his gravity and basking in the heat, “you can do whatever the fuck you want.”