Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It wasn’t loneliness; it was… curiosity.  Yeah.  It was a perfectly natural scientific interest in an experience he hadn’t investigated firsthand before.

It was Al’s fault, at least sort of.  There was a case to be made for it, if it came to that, because any time Ed asked a scientifically curious question, Al would sigh beatifically and say things like “It’s probably closer than you think,” as if everyone was like him, and every day people were just falling for their childhood best friends and turning into one conglomerated lovey-dovey, ooey-gooey mess.

Ed was slightly looking forward to the probably inevitable day when Al and Winry produced lovey-dovey, ooey-gooey, mucus machine offspring, and Ed got to say I told you this was a terrible, phlegmy mistake!

In the meantime, though, he had a problem.  And the problem took the form of a quiet little bar that was one of Central’s better-kept secrets, at least amongst the people who went there.

It was a bar for guys who were interested—that was, interested—in other guys.  Al was actually the one who had recommended it to him, which had been one of the single most surreal conversations in Ed’s life, despite the fact that he’d had more than a few each with the Homunculus, the Truth, and a staggeringly drunk Greed/Ling.

Al didn’t seem to think it was especially weird, though, since he just sort of calmly dropped a “Brother, you should try the Six Points sometime” into the middle of an otherwise ordinary afternoon study session.  When Ed had asked if that was some sort of self-help instruction series and taken a deep breath to launch into the long version of his rant against the whole industry, though, Al had said, “No, it’s a gay bar,” and Ed had very nearly choked to death on his own spit.

Once he’d narrowly evaded the world’s most anticlimactic demise, and Al had pounded him on the back a couple dozen times for good measure, he wheezed out, “Why do you even think I would want—”

Al sighed.  Loudly.

“I’m not trying to push you or anything,” Al said before Ed could even work up to a proper pout.  “I just think it might be… nice.”

“I don’t need a…” The word boyfriend had stuck in Ed’s throat like a fishhook, and it wouldn’t come loose.  “I don’t need—someone else—to be happy.  Other’n you, anyway.”

“It’s not about need,” Al said.  “It’s about you deserving to have things that you want, or want to try, or are curious about, regardless of whether or not they’re… you know.  Useful.  Productive.  Not everything you attempt has to have a goal.”

“Right now,” Ed said, “my goal is to make this conversation be over.  You wanna help?”

Al rolled his eyes.  “Just promise me you’ll think about it.  And if you’re in the area, just… check it out.  Just to see.  Okay?”

Ed knew he was fucked at that point, because he hadn’t been able to refuse Alphonse Elric a single damn thing since he was three.

“Whatever,” he said, like they didn’t both know that that meant Fine.

The worst thing was that he hadn’t learned his lesson with Mustang, but apparently Al had learned the lesson for him, and then played it forward specifically to screw him over—it was the technicality in the agreement that got him.

Al had made him promise to scope out the Six Points if he was ever in the area.

The place was two blocks south of the university, setting it squarely at the start of his regular route home from class.

He’d never noticed it before because he’d never been looking for it—or for much of anything else, except occasionally a coffee shop or a little café where he could hunker down with his textbooks and tease out a train of thought.  Walking home brought cool ideas out sometimes, but they only tended to float around his head for a couple more blocks if he didn’t snatch them out of the air and pin them down.  Al was used to it, and Ed’s classes tended to run later than his anyway, because Al was a ‘morning person’ these days, which… eew.  Ed couldn’t make head or damn tail of that one; if he’d spent several years at a stretch compelled to sit awake all night, every night, he was pretty sure the last thing he’d want to do when the had the opportunity to sleep again was get up early like some sort of sun-worshipping weirdo.

It worked out all right, though, because they had a few subjects in common, but they also had a bunch of classes each that were completely separate, which gave them a lot to collude about but also a lot to share.  Plus the slightly different timetables meant that when Winry visited, all of the feverish, borderline-cannibalistic making-out-and-worse had concluded by the time Ed made it home, and there was usually only enough energy left for some sleepy-cutesy cuddling on the couch.  Ed was frequently invited to join.

Maybe Al had a point, even if he hadn’t belabored that part of it—maybe it was strange and co-dependent and sort of pathetic to crash your younger brother’s cuddling sessions instead of having your own.

Ed gazed up at the painted sign that had caught his eye this time, because in the back of his mind he’d been hoping for it.  It was unassuming enough—black, old-style letters with all the unnecessary little curly serifs that made them cool; a simplified logo of a stag’s head with antlers.  Nothing overt about it.  Ed supposed that, as someone who had lived as loud a life as possible in the desperate hope of being remembered if it all went wrong, it was possible that he was overdue for some subtlety.

He had more reasons to go in than to stand out here on the sidewalk, staring up at the sign and clutching the strap on his school bag.

And he’d promised Al.  Vaguely, but it counted.  All he had to do was go in, right?  If he didn’t like it, he could leave.

By and large, Ed didn’t really like bars.  They were always too noisy and usually too warm, crowded with people who had deliberately sacrificed full control of their intellect and inhibitions.  It tended to make his hackles rise, and the duration of whatever time he spent there involved battling his extremely advanced fight-or-flight response.

When he sidled in through the door of this one, though, he found… practically nothing.

What a relief.

It was a relief tinged with a substantial quantity of awkwardness, because now he was standing two steps inside of a bar that currently housed one dude sitting in the far corner engrossed in a newspaper, and a bartender who looked a maximum of a year older than he was.

He probably should have expected that—it was a Thursday at around five, after all; not exactly prime time for getting smashed regardless of one’s romantic and/or sexual proclivities—but it left him with no choice but to make eye contact with the barkeep immediately.

“Hi, there!” the guy said, which Ed supposed was a better start than it could have been.

“Hi,” Ed said, and it would’ve been rude as hell to the guy trying to read to stand there in the doorway and shout the rest of a conversation across the room, so he made hastening over to the bar look as natural as he could.  The bar was nice, anyway—all of the furniture was.  The whole place was pretty nondescript, and it looked like almost every bar Ed had ever had the mixed fortune to be in, other than the fact that he was pretty sure it was slightly cleaner.  “Would it be okay if I bought something to drink and stayed here to study for a while?”

The bartender had a ring through the cartilage of his right ear with a tiny silver skull charm dangling from it.  Maybe Ed was, somehow, unprecedentedly, in exactly the right place.  “’Course it would!  What can I get for you?”

“Um,” Ed said, hoping against hope that the solitary other person in this establishment was ignoring him instead of eavesdropping out of a combination of boredom and necessity, “I have to do some pretty wild math, so—do you have anything… well, do you serve anything nonalcoholic?”

The barkeep frowned for a second as he thought about it, and then he brightened up again.  He reminded Ed of sort of a punk-styled version of Al, which was another huge mark in this place’s favor, and he said: “I could do a lemonade for you!  Usually we spike it, but I can’t handle domesticated math even when I’m sober, so…”

Three good marks was definitely enough right now.

The positives continued to stack up: once he’d paid and settled at a booth in the corner with his pretty solid and not especially overpriced drink, it was easy to sink into the Science Zone.  The cushions on the seat were comfortable, and the table was clean enough to be safe for books, and the whole place stayed quiet and sedate for… a while.  A long time, as far as Ed could tell when a bit of commotion finally stirred him back into the land of the less-intently-focused.

He reached for his pocket-watch, remembered that he’d turned it in three years ago, and glanced around for a wall clock instead: it was creeping close to seven.  He’d blazed through a lot of the homework he had to get done today, and the place was gradually filling up a bit, so it looked like it was high time for the ex-Fullmetal Alchemist to make a not-particularly-dashing escape.

He packed up quickly and brought his empty glass back up to the counter, catching the barkeep’s eye and waiting for the smile and the nod before he left it on a corner that wasn’t occupied by any patrons yet, and he thought that was going to be that.

It almost was—except that in trying to avoid getting in the way of a very broad-shouldered man with a mustache, who had just entered and looked like he really needed a drink, Ed side-stepped, and his gaze caught on a cork board on the wall next to the door.

Most of the items tacked up were small flyers—ads for businesses or services, primarily, and one for a cabaret show that had recently finished its run.

Along the bottom quarter of the board, though, hung a series of little notes, most of them penned out by hand.  One just said Call me for a good time and listed a local number; the next listed a different number and the rather more direct Call me for a good fuck.

Ed had to steel himself against a shiver.  It would, obviously, be a terrible idea, but that was part of the appeal of it; there was something entrancing about the sordidness on a fundamental level, and…

And there was another one, with lots of inkblots—like it had been written haltingly.

Need someone to talk to who understands.  North Central Park, May 15th, 6pm.  Please.

Ed’s stomach lurched despite his efforts this time.  That had been Monday, and he couldn’t help hoping hard that someone had gone out there, and they’d listened, and it had worked.

Thinking about that distracted him enough that he skimmed the next scrap of paper; but then the last one, in the far corner—

Skewered with a little silver pin was a typewritten note:

Seeking someone 20-45 who’s looking for a little bit of adventure.  Meet me at Délicia on Saturday, May 20th at 7.  Wear red.

Ed’s heart stumbled.

He wasn’t sure how much adventure a ‘little bit’ amounted to.  He wasn’t sure how much adventure you were legally allowed to get up to in the middle of a nice restaurant that had recently opened on the fringes of downtown Central.  He wasn’t sure he owned anything red.  He wasn’t sure anybody worth meeting would leave a note like that in a place like this.

He was sure that he didn’t have plans for this Saturday.  He was sure that it had been a long, long time now since he’d tasted any real adrenaline.  And he was moderately sure that he could pass for twenty if he put his hair up.

The Six Points had helpfully arranged an end table underneath the board and furnished it with a small stack of cocktail napkins and a pen.

Ed tried to swallow enough times to shove his heart down out of his throat and back into his chest where it belonged.  Carefully—mindful of the fact that the nerves in his right hand were still so hypersensitive that holding objects sometimes hurt; mindful of the fact that writing left-handed for so long had left his brain confused as hell about which side did what—he spelled three words out on the back of a napkin:

I’ll be there.

He pinned it on top of the note as quickly as he could without stabbing himself with one of the tacks, and then he ducked out the door with his head down and started for home.

Al was going to be way too damn smug about all of this.

As it turned out, when one tried to creep around the house and search one’s brother’s closet for red clothes to borrow, there were far worse fates in the universe than said brother being smug.

When he’d coaxed the whole stupid story out of Ed, the first thing Al said was, “That’s so wonderful!”, which was… weird, but… fine.

The second thing Al said was, “I hope I don’t have to give you the spiel about going home with strangers,” with was much less fine.

The third thing Al said, while hooking an arm through his and starting to haul him away from the closet, was, “I don’t have anything red that’ll fit you!  Guess we have to go shopping!”, which was not fine at all.

It had always seemed to Ed like a hereditary improbability that two human beings with such similar genetics could foster such drastically different opinions on a single activity, but… the mind boggled.  Or Al boggled Ed’s mind, at least.  He wasn’t too clear on status of the relative boggleosity quotient from Al’s perspective.

“Here,” Ed said, pulling a jacket off the rack at the first store they walked into.  “This is red.  Done.”

“It’s maroon,” Al said.

“Is that even a real word?” Ed said.  “You just made it up.”

Al snatched the hanger out of his hands and returned it to the empty space before Ed’s reflexes were even aware that he’d moved.  “It is, and I did not, and you can’t wear something like that to Délicia anyway.”

“Why not?” Ed said.  “It’s clothes.  I always wear clothes in public.  Or, like, ninety-eight percent of the time, and the other two percent is never my fault.”

“I’m not even going to dignify that with a response,” Al said.  “This is an unusual and unprecedented set of circumstances, and we’re only going to get one shot at a first impression.  You need to look good.”

“Ouch,” Ed said.

“Oh, shush,” Al said.  “Not that—you always look good; I mean you have to look… date-good.”

Ed worked the spit around in his mouth for a second before he gave in and stated the obvious: “Fuckable, you mean.”

It helped a tiny bit to defray the awkwardness that Al blushed to the roots of his hair.  “Well—I mean—not—exactly, but—sort of.  I guess.  I mean—you’ve facilitated what could turn out to be an amazing opportunity.  We should make the most of it.”

“‘We’?” Ed said.  “What, are you planning to come with me and hide under the table and whisper to me what I should say to make sure I get a second date?”

“No,” Al said.  “We don’t even know if he’s second-date material yet, so there’s no point going to that much effort.  And I’m pretty sure a fancy restaurant like Délicia would frown on that sort of thing.  Plus there’s no way you’d share your food, so I’d be hungry.”

“Shut up,” Ed said.  “You know damn well I’d share my food.  It’s you, Al.”

“I love you,” Al said, linking their elbows again and starting to drag Ed deeper into the store.  “Which is why you need to look date-good so that anyone who’s second-date material will realize that they should, too.”

“Look,” Ed said, pointing at a very vibrant pair of jeans.  “That’s red.”

“You’re not allowed to buy those,” Al said.  “You don’t need any help drawing attention to your butt.”

At least when Ed spent significant portions of the shopping trip gaping soundlessly and questioning both his hearing and the fabric of reality, the whole damn ordeal went a little bit faster.

Since apparently Ed wasn’t done systematically destroying his own life yet, he made another critical error over breakfast Saturday morning, during which time he was trying to caffeinate, eat cereal, and study simultaneously.  Al was trying to caffeinate, eat cereal, and iron the shirt they’d bought, but he was smart enough to alternate.  Upon further reflection, the item that Al had picked was so tight that Ed wasn’t completely sure it was, in fact, a shirt, rather than a fashionable straight jacket, but it was the only thing that Al had deemed suitable, so here they were.

Al was humming.  Ed hadn’t even known that they owned an iron.

“Hey, question,” Ed said.  “Why are you more excited about this than I am?”

“Because I’m unreservedly invested in your happiness,” Al said, “whereas you have this complex where you think you don’t deserve it, so you’re always waiting for things to go wrong.”

Ed dropped his spoon, which fell into his cereal bowl and splashed nightmare-juice all over his textbook.

“Oh,” Al said.  “You know what?  I think I’m going to have some more coffee.”

“Uh,” Ed said, mopping at the book.  “Yeah.  Sounds good.  Wait, what?”

“Never mind,” Al said.

Al hugged him tighter than was necessary that night as he was trying to put his shoes on and escape out the door.

“You look so nice!” Al said, carefully patting the shirt-or-was-it back into place, as if the tiny hug-induced wrinkles were some sort of crime against humanity.

“I feel like a sausage,” Ed said.  “Are you sure it’s supposed to be tucked in?  And like—shit, if I try to lift anything up, the sleeves’re gonna pop open.  This was expensive.”

“You’ve never been a sausage,” Al said.  “How would you know?  And yes; and then don’t try to lift anything.  What would you be trying to lift, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” Ed said.  “Maybe the dinner table.  Y’know, to flip it over if he turns out to be some kind of creep.”

“Stop catastrophizing before you even get there,” Al said.  “Just go.  And have fun.  And don’t stay out too late.  And call me if anything happens.  But nothing’s going to happen, because it’s going to be lovely, and you’re going to have a great time.”

“Mixed messages, Al,” Ed said.

“Sorry,” Al said.  “I wish I could go with you just so that I don’t have to wait until later to find out how it goes.”  He paused.  “That came out sounding weirder than I expected it to.”  He paused again, and then grabbed Ed’s right hand, wrung it, and beamed.  “You’re going to have so much fun!  Are you ready?  You should leave!  You want to be sure you get there on time!”

“All right,” Ed said, squeezing Al’s hand right back.  “All right, all right.”

He figured that if it went okay, Al would be excited; and if it was kind of crap, at least they could have a really good laugh about it; and if it went sort of bad… well, he could handle that, and Al would still be on his side.  So, really, he didn’t have a whole lot to lose.

That was a nice feeling, for a change, whether or not he was ninety percent sure that he was going to destroy at least one of the seams on this fancy-ass torture device masquerading as a shirt.

Unfortunately, his endocrine system apparently hadn’t gotten the memo that he intended to be calm and unflappable about this whole thing: Ed’s heart-rate picked up gradually the closer he drew to the restaurant, and by the time he laid eyes on the doors, it was impossible to deny that he was fucking nervous.

It wasn’t his fault.  People made things that weren’t a big deal into a big deal anyway, and half the time there was no way of knowing what seemingly normal thing they’d choose to blow up.  Those were terrible odds, and he had terrible luck, and anyone in Central might be waiting in the restaurant lobby.  Or no one might.  It was possible that he original poster had meant it as a joke; or never seen his response; or had, but disliked the look of his handwriting and decided not to show.  Or it could be some sixty-year-old perv who lured in younger guys.  Or it could be somebody who hated science or thought automail was gross or was only attracted to unreasonably tall super-buff guys like Armstrong, or—

Or the lights in the restaurant’s little foyer area could be so atmospherically low that it took Ed a long second of standing there squinting like an idiot to be able to make out a glass-topped table with a big orchid settled on top, and a bench seat all made out of rich dark wood, with cushions in wine-colored velvet.

On its own, the time spent in like-an-idiot fashion did nothing for his jangly nerves, but that wasn’t the worst of it.

There was only one person sitting on the bench seat next to the podium stand where the maître’d was fussing around with menus.

That person was Roy fucking Mustang—General Roy fucking Mustang, Ed was sure he’d say.

Worse still, Roy was wearing that same gray waistcoat and narrow black tie that Ed had seen him in several years ago, which firstly looked killer on him; and secondly implied that he might only have one date outfit, which was sort of pathetic in a dangerously relatable way.

He was, of course, the last person in the entire world, with the possible but not certain exception of Winry’s grandmother, that Ed wanted to have to explain this to.

Shit.  Ed’s stomach dropped, flipped, and started churning.  He’d been pretty sure he was running late, but apparently whoever was supposed to meet him hadn’t made it yet.  Or maybe he was so late that they’d just given up and left?  Or maybe—

“Edward,” Roy said, blinking, so at least it wasn’t just Ed who thought that the lights in this place were so dim that it was borderline irresponsible.  He had enough trouble not tripping over his own feet in broad daylight.  “Good evening.  I don’t… I don’t suppose—” His gaze darted to Ed’s shirt.  Yeah, Ed was definitely going to have a word with Al about this whole fitted shirt thing.  Maybe several words.  Maybe a book full.  “Might I ask what brings you here?”

Ed planted his feet so that he wouldn’t shift his weight and look awkward.  Feeling awkward and looking awkward were two different things, and the latter lost you a lot more power.  He’d learned that one the hard way.  “I’m supposed to be meeting someone.  At seven, actually, but I think I’m a little late.”

It was then that he noticed Roy’s pocketwatch set out on his knee, chain trailing along his thigh in a way that drew Ed’s gaze in directions he really couldn’t afford to be looking.

And it was after that that it occurred to him that the narrative voice of the note he’d read sounded a little… familiar.

“Oh,” he said, at the precise same second Roy said, “Ah.”

“Well, shit,” Ed said.  Helpless went the same way as awkward, so he squared his shoulders, folded his arms, and tossed his head to flick his ponytail back over his shoulder.  “Why the hell did you describe yourself as an ‘adventure’?  You’re not an adventure.  You’re a person.”

Roy smiled thinly.  “And you’re not twenty.”

“I rounded up,” Ed said.  “I figured that was part of the adventure.  All the best adventures involve math.”

Roy’s smile didn’t widen, but it tilted.  “Of course.  I was… trying to be… enticingly figurative.  If I’d had the slightest notion that you were going to be reading it, I would have phrased it rather differently.”  He stood, fluidly, and turned to the maître’d with a much broader and more gracious smile.  “So sorry about the wait.  Feel free to release that reservation.”

Figured.  It was a good thing that Ed hadn’t gotten around to articulating his next question, because now he had the answer: the bastard really would’ve rather gone hungry than break bread with the likes of him.

Ed resettled his weight to hold his ground.  It didn’t really fix anything, but it made him feel like he had a stronger position even when his stomach kept roiling with—what?  Disappointment?  Regret that he’d been stupid enough to think that one thing, anything, might go his way?  “What in the hell were you doing putting up some anonymous ad in the Six Points anyway?”

Roy slipped his watch back into his pocket and left his hand there.  It looked artificially casual, but the surge of disdain in Ed’s chest was much gentler than it should’ve been.  “Did you walk here?”

“Nah,” Ed said.  “Built a pair of wings and flew.  ’Course I walked.  Answer the question.”

Roy held the door for him, and a flash of an image of Mom in his head compelled him to say “Thank you,” and then they were outside on the sidewalk, standing slightly too far apart and looking at each other in the light of the streetlamps.

“You came a long way,” Roy said, slowly.

Ed eyed him.  “Yeah?  So what?”

“Equivalent exchange,” Roy said.  He looked up—at the restaurant, or the streetlamp, or the sky.  “The only time I’ve ever really been in love, it was with a man.  Thought I might as well play the odds with fewer variables, if I was planning to gamble.”

“Gambling’s shit,” Ed said.  He wasn’t going to let that dig its claws into him; wasn’t going to turn it over and run his fingertips across the surface and think about it until the individual syllables came to life.  He was past that.  He was over it, over that, over stupid fucking Roy.  “All the games are designed on purpose to make you lose.”

The funny little wry smile was back, and much too damn soon.  “Isn’t that what makes it fun?”

“Maybe if you’re a masochist,” Ed said.  “Well—whatever.  Good luck.”  He drew a breath, held it, and turned towards the sidewalk.  Easier to do this looking away, even if maybe that was the cheap way out.  “G’night, Mustang.”

“Wait,” Roy said.

Ed was still just so damn used to orders that he stopped on instinct, but Mustang couldn’t make him turn around.  “What?”

“If you’d like to go,” Roy said, as if any of this had been Ed’s damn idea, “at least let me drive you home.  I put you to a lot of trouble.”

Ed bit the inside of his lip and forced himself to breathe before he answered.  He’d gotten better at it.  “You didn’t know it was me.  And it’s fine.  It’s not that far.  It’s a nice night.”

“Since it’s my fault you haven’t eaten,” Roy said, “at least let me help you get home faster.”

Ed tried for a withering look even though Al had told him more than once that he usually just looked like he was sucking a lemon.  “With the way you drive, I’m much more likely to die in your car than I am to starve to death on the way home.”

“Please,” Roy said.  “Well—how about I sweeten the deal?  What’s your favorite takeaway place?  We can stop by there on the way.”

“I can’t believe you jumped to bribes two sentences into trying to persuade me,” Ed said.  “Actually, yeah, I can.  Guess this is why you got promoted again.”

“Obviously,” Roy said, arching an eyebrow, and the fucker just always looked so— “They brought me in to the Führer’s office and said ‘Would you offer one of your ex-subordinates food when you’ve inconvenienced them?’, and I said ‘Mm, I suppose, if he wasn’t being a twerp about it,’ and they said, ‘You’re just the man we’re looking for.  Congratulations, General.’”

It took everything Ed had in him not to laugh.  Fuck Roy for all kinds of reasons, and now this one too.  “Excuse me?  Twerp?  I’m gonna give you a three-second head-start on running for the car before I kick your sorry ass.”

“Generous,” Roy said.  He was not running, so apparently his good old selective hearing was every bit as intact as his asshole tendencies.  “I feel ‘twerp’ was rather fair.  I didn’t add any adjectives about the relative size of the twerp in question.  I think that was very restrained.”

“You would,” Ed said.  “This is ridiculous.  I finally dare to dream that I’m free of all your bullshit, and then when I least expect it, you turn up and drop it right back in my lap.”  He made a second attempt at the withering look, not that it was likely to be any more successful than the first.  “You’re not going to follow me home if I try to walk, are you?”

Roy smiled enigmatically.

The bastard.

“How do you even know it was a long way, anyway?” Ed asked, perhaps a smidgeon way the hell too late.  “How do you know where I live?  Have you been keeping tabs on me?”

Roy winced, somewhat less enigmatically.

“Forgive me,” he said.  “Force of habit.”

“Shit,” Ed said.

“They were incidental tabs,” Roy said.  “Just… casually asking Sergeant Fuery where he met you for coffee, asking how you were settling in.  I let him fill in most of the details.  It’s not his fault.”

“I know,” Ed said.  “It’s always your fault if it’s anybody’s.  And—okay.  Fine.  If it’ll let me get rid of you sooner, where the hell’s your car?”

Roy gestured in the opposite direction from the way Ed had come, more towards the main downtown drag, so Ed hunched his shoulders up and started walking.

Just a few angry steps in, Roy asked how Al was doing—which was extremely annoying, because on the one hand, it was an obvious ploy to distract Ed from being pissed off at him; but on the other, Roy was one of fairly few people on the planet who fully understood how amazing Al was.

Damn and double damn.

Ed supposed—from a purely logical perspective—that it wasn’t Roy’s fault that this theoretical date thing had gotten fucked up for both of them.  Roy was probably disappointed about it, too, and he was handling it relatively gracefully, other than the ‘twerp’ thing.  In the spirit of an ongoing equivalent exchange, Ed could try to be civil for a while.

So he talked about Al—about how much Al loved school, how well he was doing, how many friends he’d made, how he kept coming up with more and better and brighter plans for the future.  About how cute Al and Winry were together; about how Al kept talking with super-blatant wistfulness about getting cats, and Ed was having none of it, because cats were mangy flea-balls.  And also because he was worried that either the cats would hate him, or Al would love the cats more than him, or both.

Roy said, “You could always tell him you’re worried about allergies.  His, or yours, or Winry’s; you can take your pick.”

“You’re diabolical,” Ed said, but it came out sounding more admiring than he’d originally intended.  Glancing over to see how it was received diverted his attention for a second, which was why it took him so long to notice the increasing volume of music and quantity of lights out ahead of them.  “Wait—is that—is the fair on?  Seriously?”

“Ah,” Roy said, grimacing.  “Yes.  But we won’t need to pass through; if we take a right just before—”

“You mind if we do?” Ed asked.  “Pass through, I mean.  I’ve lived here for years, and I’ve just never been.  I’m always out of town, or I forget, or whatever.  Kind of always meant to.”

Roy’s grimace deepened, which was… interesting.  “I… have only gone once.  A very long time ago, with some school friends.  I got so sick on that spinning ride that I threw up, and the humiliation was so excruciating that I haven’t been able to bring myself to go back.”

Perfect.  It wasn’t exactly vengeance, but it looked a little tiny bit like it if you squinted and tilted your head a bit.

“Now’s your chance,” Ed said.  “Can you smell that?  Shit, I want a corn dog.”

The grimace was starting to look like a permanent feature of Roy’s face.  “You… really?  Are you sure?  Have you seen how those are made?”

“No,” Ed said.  “You ever seen a cow give birth?”

“Lord,” Roy said, very nearly—but not quite—under his breath.  “All right; if you must have a corn dog, then… lead on.”

“Awesome,” Ed said.

Naturally—naturally—they’d only made it three more steps before Roy said, “Wait.”

Ed made a point of taking one more stride before turning around and giving him an expectant look that hopefully telegraphed much better than the withering ones.

“May I ask you something?” Roy said.

“I learned a long time ago,” Ed said, “that I sure can’t stop you from asking.  What?”

Roy smiled slightly.  “Why did you respond to my note?”

“I didn’t know it was yours,” Ed said.

“I’m… quite aware of that,” Roy said.  “But something about it must have caught your attention.”

Ed shoved both hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels for a second, trying to roll the words around inside his head so that they’d fall into a more appealing order.  He didn’t have much luck—usually he didn’t, with that sort of thing—so he ended up with a pretty unaltered version of the truth.

“Almost all of the ads up on that board sounded really fucking lonely,” he said.  “I just… I dunno.  I felt like somebody should do something about it.  By the time I got to the last one, I figured maybe that person should be me.”

Roy’s smile widened just a fraction, and twisted just a bit.  “Most people don’t tend to make the leap from ‘someone should’ to ‘I’m someone.’”

“I’m not most people,” Ed said.

“I’m quite aware of that, too,” Roy said.  He paused, and Ed didn’t like the character of this one at all.  “Are you?”

“Am I what?” Ed said.

“Lonely,” Roy said.

And Ed—

Drew in a deep breath to spit some vituperation—but filling his chest turned his torso just a bit, and he caught a glimpse of the multicolored lights of the midway reflected in the glass of a storefront, and a wave of the smells of the popcorn and the funnel cake and the thousand other fried indulgences washed over him, and… 

Why ruin his own night when it would probably ruin itself for him later and save him the trouble?

“I don’t know,” he said.  “Only when Al’s out doing something, and I think about it too much.  He doesn’t… he doesn’t need me the same way I need him.  And that’s good—that’s great.  He’s independent, and that’s what I always wanted for him.  But I guess I’m… not.”

“Overall,” Roy said, surprisingly softly, “that sounded like a ‘yes’.”

“Whatever,” Ed said.  “I also learned a long time ago that you’re gonna interpret a sequence of events whichever way you want, and neither I nor the facts can stop you.”

Roy was smiling again, albeit grimly.  The guy looked pretty damn happy for someone who’d just had date night ruined for him by an unfortunate coincidence.  “That’s how history is written, I’m afraid.”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “Hence me getting the hell out of the dogfighting pit the second I had a chance.  Speaking of dogs—are we gonna go get my corn dog or not?”

“Yes,” Roy said.  “Of course.”

It wasn’t the weirdest conversation they’d ever had—which was really saying something, come to think of it—but if Ed didn’t cut it off now, there was always a danger that it would become much weirder later, and he really didn’t have time for that tonight.

There was a fair in need of exploration, after all.

Chapter Text

“All right, c’mon,” Ed said, starting towards the impending overwhelming crush of carnivality.  “You sure you don’t want to take another crack at that ride that made you throw up the first time?  Teach it who’s boss?”

“It’s the boss,” Roy said.  “I’ve accepted that.  I’ve had many years to work on reaching that understanding of the universal hierarchy.”

“Have you ever had fun in your life?” Ed asked.  “Do you even know what ‘fun’ is?”

“I had fun once,” Roy said calmly, gazing up at a bowing line of red and white flags overhead.  “I think it was in 1903.  Summer?  August, perhaps.”

“I don’t believe you,” Ed said.  “What were you doing?”

“Hughes and I pranked a cadet that everybody hated,” Roy said.  “We got him good.  And then we ran.  Very fast.”

Ed had to stop walking so that he could recalibrate his brain for a second.  He tried to pass it off as hesitating to assess their choices and plot out the likeliest course towards corn dogs.  “What’d you do?”

“We built a machine with five steps,” Roy said, “each of which triggered the next.  The first part was activated when he banged the door open the way he always did.  The final step dumped a bucket of vegetable oil on him.  Cold vegetable oil.”

Ed gave up faking interest in other things and stared at Roy.  “Wait—what?”

“We had to watch through the window to see if it worked,” Roy said.  “We weren’t sure it would, but it did, and it was one of the most satisfying experiences of my life.  Hence the fun.  And the running.”

Ed eyed him.  “I don’t think I believe you.  You just made that up.  You’ve never been that cool.”

Roy shrugged and started walking again.  “I decided that I wouldn’t lie tonight.”

Ed applied the heel of his left hand to his forehead.  He was pretty sure that he wouldn’t be the only person to testify that a good, solid facepalm was frequently the only sane reaction to Roy Mustang.  “So… you were that cool.  But only just the once.  In August of 1903.”

“Humorous hyperbole doesn’t count as a lie,” Roy said.

“Bullshit,” Ed said.

“It’s in the rules,” Roy said.

“That’s another lie,” Ed said.

“It will be in the rules,” Roy said, “as soon as I write them up.  It’s not a lie; it’s just a temporary temporal miscommunication.”

“When you get to the top in our shitty-ass government,” Ed said, “I am gonna register to vote and get up real early and walk into a polling place specifically so that I can not vote for you.”

Despite the cutting implications of that witticism, Roy just sort of smiled a little more, and then he turned and pointed at one of the game stalls on their left—the one where you were supposed to throw baseballs at little weighted targets to knock them down.

“Do you suppose that they’d let me provide photographs of myself for them to pin to those?” he asked.  “Then you could work out some of your resentment right now instead of having to wait for democracy.”

“Eh,” Ed said, heading directly towards it, “I’ve got a pretty vivid imagination.”

The unsuspecting booth operator gave him his four allotted baseballs, and he hefted one in his right hand and tried to acclimate his fingers to the shape and the weight of it.

“This is one of those things that Winry keeps telling me to do as physical therapy,” he said, “but I always put it off until I remember that she’s coming to visit, and then I try to cram it all in at once.”  He fixed Roy with a glower.  “Procrastination’s a nasty habit.  Wonder where I picked that up.”

Roy grinned so broadly that it put a literal fucking sparkle in his eye.  “Why in the world are you looking at me?”

“That’s—” Ed hesitated, and then glared at him again.  The clever bastard had, perhaps unsurprisingly, found a way to invoke the spirit of a lie without actually lying.  “You’re so full of it.  All right, watch and learn, city boy.”

He hadn’t meant for that to come out quite so… flirty?

Well, too fucking late now.  It was Roy’s fault for almost taking him out on a dinner date on accident.  Or at least that was what he intended to tell the judge, if it came to that.

His first throw veered just a hair too wide to tip the target, but at least that gave him a metric for the amount of force required.  He tightened his grip on the second ball, lined up the shot, nailed it, and then repeated that twice more.

The booth operator applauded semi-sincerely and then grabbed a little plush bunny off of a hook on the wall and to hand over to him as his prize.  Al was going to love it.  Ed turned a challenging look on Roy.

“I think Winry would be proud of you,” Roy said—quietly, thoughtfully, while looking at the targets that Ed had tackled, rather than at him.  Like it was an afterthought.

Which was awful, actually, because it made Ed’s chest go all tight and his skin go all hot and his brain slam all of the alarm buttons it could reach.

The one upshot was that Roy didn’t seem to notice Ed’s reaction, on account of having leaned in to fork over the rather questionably high fee required to play another round.  Ed figured that if Roy had been prepared to pay for a dinner for two at Déilcia—hopefully he’d been prepared to pay for two, anyway, whether or not the other person had taken him up on it; otherwise he was a lousy goddamn date, and it was a good thing that Ed hadn’t ended up at a table with him after all—he could probably afford to stand here and throw baseballs all damn night on the same budget, but it was the principle of the thing.  Sure, fairs had to make money to sustain themselves, but there were transactions, and then there was racketeering, and this was riding the line.

“I don’t suppose,” Roy was saying, “that you have a city boy discount?”

The operator looked at him like he was a weirdo—which was, obviously, more than justified, even if in this case it was arguably a tiny bit Ed’s fault that Roy had weirdo-outed himself like that.

Roy then proceeded to wrap his fingers around the first of his baseballs, turning it slowly in his hands.  The bastard had some of the most beautiful hands that Ed had ever seen—not that Ed had some sort of hand fetish, or something; not like he paid attention, or whatever; he’d just… happened to notice.  In a way that was natural and reasonable and unsurprising given that he’d had a metal hand for several years; and given that Roy spent so much time with those damn gloves on, and any deviation from that was remarkable.

Roy’s were just—nice.  Was all.  It was an objective observation foregrounded by the way he was caressing the stupid ball right now.

Ed tried valiantly to retroactively rephrase that in his head before it was too late and spectacularly failed.

Fortunately, moments before he had flushed his way to the verge of spontaneous combustion, Roy stepped back, tilted his dangerously appealing waistcoat-flattered torso, drew his arm back, and threw.

One of the targets snapped back so fast that Ed thought for a second that it had broken.

“Holy shit,” he said.  “Whose face was that?”

“I’m afraid that’s a state secret,” Roy said, hefting the next ball.  The curve of the corner of his grin flipped Ed’s stomach again.  “It’s more to do with the many, many years spent playing wall-ball with Riza at her father’s old place.”

“You’re lying again,” Ed said.  “That had to have been fun.”

“Not really,” Roy said.  “She wiped the floor with me every single time.”  He pitched again, and another target bit the dust hard.  “We did play competitively against the kids from down the street once, and trouncing them was fun, but we did it so thoroughly that they never wanted to play again.”

Ed had to lean against the railing keeping them from rushing the targets for a couple of seconds.  “Did you—you did.   You just said ‘trounce’ in a sentence.  In a conversation.”

Roy threw again, killed it again, and turned to blink at him.  “What’s wrong with ‘trounce’?”

“I mean,” Ed said, scrabbling desperately for something like a silver lining, “I guess if Envy had ever pretended to be you, none of us would’ve believed it, because the vocabulary just wouldn’t’ve been right.”

Roy smiled faintly as he hurled the last ball, summarily flattening the final target.  “I’m… not sure if that was a compliment.”

“Me neither,” Ed said.

“Here you are, sir,” the operator said, handing Roy an impractically enormous stuffed giraffe.

“Thank you,” Roy said.  He had to use both hands to accept it, at which point he stared at it for a second and then tucked it underneath his arm.  “We should see about that corn dog before we end up with a whole menagerie.”

As they moved deeper into the crowd, however, Roy started to look sort of… pained.  Ed had just opened his mouth to ask if the illustrious General Mustang really was traumatized by the Teacup Ride Incident or something, and he needed to leave.  There had to be other places that would sell a man a corn dog at eight o’clock on a Saturday night.

Before he could articulate the words, though, Roy licked his lips, which stole the words in question right out of Ed’s throat and stomped them into the dust.

“We are,” Roy said, in that deliberately delicate way he had—the one that had used to make Ed’s blood boil, but this time just set it simmering right beneath his skin; “a touch overdressed.”

“Did you forget who you’re talking to?” Ed asked.  “I’m the master of underdressing.”

There was a split-second where he saw Roy consider leveraging the innuendo.

Ed blinked, and every trace of temptation was gone.

“Hold this,” Ed said, shoving the stuffed bunny at him.

Then—maybe-possibly the slightest bit hastily—Ed ducked his head and focused on untucking and then unbuttoning his shirt.  He had a black tank on underneath it—tighter than the kind he liked most of the time; Al had bought him six of these and insisted they were better for ‘real person clothes’ because they wouldn’t bunch up underneath.  Al had just laughed in his face when Ed asked his precious baby brother if, by that standard, his existing wardrobe invalidated him as a ‘real person’.

When he looked up, Roy had plastered on that unflappable perfect neutral face again.

Ed had hated that look since he was twelve.  It was the mark of someone so controlled that he could keep his own feelings unerringly under wraps and play as many games as he wanted with the people around him—it was the calling card of the most terrifying talent that Roy had.  Ed had known from the start that he’d never be able to keep up in that game—known that he’d get the rulebook thrown back in his face if he ever even tried.

It still stirred something small and hot and envious and angry in him, three long years after he’d escaped it.  How about that?

“You’re next,” Ed said.  He steamrolled his own impulse to hesitate, reached up, ignored the way that Roy’s shoulders tilted away from him—not a flinch; not quite; but part of the extended family, living in the neighborhood, and well-acquainted—and coaxed the tail of Roy’s tie free of that stupid-awful waistcoat he was wearing.  When he had a better grip on it, and his fingers were slightly further away from Roy’s gorgeous throat, he started undoing the knot.

Damn thing had to be silk.  Felt like water under his fingertips; felt smooth and slithery and fucking seductive as he stepped backwards and drew the thing loose of Roy’s collar.

“There,” he said, rolling it up in both hands.  “Ten percent less stuffy and obnoxious.”

“I’d quite like to see whatever formula you’re using for that,” Roy said.  “With you, I know there is one.”

“Can’t tell you all my damn secrets,” Ed said.  He had no idea what the hell to do with Roy’s tie, so he shoved it into his pocket and then held both hands out to get his bunny back.  “You dig up ninety percent of them on your own.  Oughta be a little bit of mystery left in the world.”

“I suppose that’s fair,” Roy said.

He was probably planning to say something else, because Roy was always planning to say something else, but Ed had spotted the booth with the operator who would take your payment, guess your weight, and then put you on a scale, and he couldn’t stop himself from grabbing Roy’s sleeve.  “Hey!  Stand up real straight, okay?”

Even at a single glance, he could see from the gleam in Roy’s eyes that the bastard just… got it.  Understood him.

That was one of the worst things about Roy, when it came right down to it.  The asshole was smart—in a logic way, in a science way, in a strategy way, in a people way.  Too many angles; too much power.  Ed had tried for years to be so loud in the face of it that he wouldn’t feel afraid.

Ed slouched a little, bowing his shoulders and planting his feet slightly wide, as he sauntered over and offered up his change.  He made sure to walk very evenly, so that no one who didn’t know him ever would have guessed at automail.

Roy assessed the giant stuffed alligator that Ed had earned himself with the performance, raking a critical eye over it before half-nodding what seemed to be approval.  “I take it that you’re still made almost exclusively of pure muscle and spite?”

“Not as much,” Ed said.  “Al really likes butter in… everything.  And cream.  But he also likes kicking my ass in the backyard after we both get out of class, so that helps.”

“How is it?” Roy asked as they wandered on.  Infuriatingly, it was hard to stop looking at Roy long enough to appreciate the ambience.  “Class, I mean.  School.  University life.”

“I like some parts of it more than others,” Ed said.  “There’s not enough math and way too many essays.  And don’t you dare say whatever you were about to say about grammar or whatever shit.  Al helps me proofread stuff.”

“Your professors don’t have the slightest idea how blessed they are,” Roy said.  “I’d say that I’m wounded to learn that I wasn’t important enough to merit proofreading, but I frequently wasn’t important enough to merit reports in the first place, so that’s a bit redundant.”

“Shut up,” Ed said.  “You know damn well ‘important’ didn’t have shit to do with it.”  He eyed Roy suspiciously, which was almost as satisfying as looking at him, but slightly less dangerous.  “Hey, since you’re on this whole honesty kick—I’ve always been meaning to ask if you had to pull any strings to get our applications accepted.”

The soft, almost ethereal little smile was playing across Roy’s face again.  How did he do that?  Where did it come from?

“I can assure you,” Roy said, “in all truthfulness, that I pulled no strings whatsoever.  I did have one single, solitary little meeting with the university’s president—”

“I knew it,” Ed said, though three words couldn’t even begin to encapsulate the way his heart had just plummeted in his chest.

“—during which,” Roy went on, “there were no bribes, no threats, and no untoward intimations of any kind, I will have you know.  I simply explained to him that a hard-and-fast requirement for educational documentation indicated an extremely reductive conceptualization of intelligence, gently reminded him of your immense popularity among the demographic most likely to pay tuition at his institution, and remarked upon my utter conviction that the two of you will accomplish incredible things in alchemy and science and change the course of history whether his university’s name is associated with your achievements or not.”

Ed tried to frown hard enough to discern on a gut level whether that felt authentic or not.

Roy raised both eyebrows, and the smile tilted again.

“On my life,” he said.  “And yours.  No favors; no deals.  No strings pulled—only strings played.  Just music.”

That was another thing that was a pain in the ass, and no mistake—Roy was a maestro at the art of manipulation.  He made it look simple, and smooth, and beautiful, and easy when it was none of those things; he’d mastered convincing other people that the thing he wanted was also what they wanted, because it would help them more than it could possibly benefit him.  Didn’t they believe him?  Didn’t they just tumble right into his bright smile and his starlight eyes, never to be seen again?  Didn’t they trust him?  Everyone else did.  Surely that was for a reason.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Ed said.

Roy shrugged.  It looked so much more fluid without the boxy shoulders of the uniform in the way.  “The rules were unreasonable, and it was high time you and Alphonse caught a break.”

Ed swallowed, keeping his eyes on the bustle of excited humanity around them.  “Well—thank you.”

“No need,” Roy said.  “I didn’t do it for that.  And I won’t ever call it in as a debt.”

Maybe Roy had thought it was the right thing to do—and maybe it was, if you looked at it a certain way.  But everyone’s perspective on that was different, and the both of them had learned the hard way—the hardest way, in blood and dust and agony—that electing yourself arbiter of the ‘right thing’ only ever ended in suffering.

Was it possible that they were past that?  Was it possible that the universe had finally relented on the longstanding tradition of kicking Ed’s ass at every single turn to punish him for the old as well as the ongoing mistakes?

Maybe they were.  Maybe they weren’t, but Roy believed it.  Maybe if Roy believed it forcefully enough, he could drag the laws of cruelty and coincidence behind him until they got in line.

It wasn’t like he hadn’t done that sort of shit before.

“You’d better not,” Ed said.  “You still owe me more than that, anyway.  How’s that going?  Guess the promotion must be a step in the right direction, but sometimes the steps really fucking hurt.”

“You say that as if the painful part has ever stopped you in the past,” Roy said.

“You say that as if anybody in their right mind would use me as a good example of a life plan,” Ed said.

Roy opened his mouth again—that could be the tagline for Roy Mustang’s entire life, honestly—but Ed wasn’t sure that he wanted to know what was about to come out of it.  Roy knew that he was right; Roy knew him better than was safe for either of them; and, tonight at least, Roy wasn’t willing to lie.

“Oh, look,” Ed said.  “Somewhere else I can throw away my money and beat a rigged game.”

He had to shift the alligator and the bunny into one arm together to free up a hand for pointing, which violated some fundamental laws of nature and the food chain.  Roy followed the direction of his arm and raised both eyebrows upon seeing Ed’s latest victim.

“Ah,” Roy said.  “Would you like me to hold the accumulated animals while you knock ’em dead?”

“Yes,” Ed said, shoving the pile of plush at him blindly, already eyeing the prizes tied up above the next booth, surrounded by a bunch of colorful paper flowers.

This game—the one where you had to hit a metal disc on the ground with a big wooden mallet, and the amount of force that you applied drove a marker up on a vertical pole, which rang a bell if you reached the top—also fell victim to Ed’s fairly unique combination of strength, strategy, and absolutely uncompromising stubbornness.  The operator of this one looked vaguely disappointed as he handed over a big plush horse in a shade of blue that was entirely unrealistic, albeit sort of cute.  It wasn’t Ed’s fault that he’d trained under Izumi Curtis and then spent almost a decade learning how to use his size and his weight to his advantage.

“Hey,” Ed said as they proceeded onward.  He was running out of room in the circle of his arms for animals.  “You any good at darts?”

“It would be unfair of me to enter,” Roy said, although his eyes definitely tracked over the wall of vulnerable balloons.  “I grew up in a bar.  Besides, Riza’s already going to be furious when she discovers one colossally useless plush animal on her doorstep tomorrow morning.  If I include others, there might be violence.”

“Ah, shit,” Ed blurted out.  “There’s cats as the prizes at this one.  I can’t come all this way and not get Al a damn cat.”

Roy could have said a lot of things.  Roy could have drawn himself up to his full height—which really wasn’t, demographically speaking, all that impressive, which Ed wanted the record to show in large block letters with a red underline—and said Haven’t we already wasted enough money buying these mediocre prizes for the privilege of playing stupid games?  He could have said We’re just here to get you a corn dog and then leave.  He could have said I see that you haven’t actually grown up at all in the past three years, and that one would have explained just about everything.

Instead Roy said, immediately, “I’m on it.”

Ed’s head spun, but he didn’t have time to baby it before he had to run a couple steps to catch up with Roy.  “I’ll trade you.  This horse has pretty much got your name on it, anyway—mustang in blue?  C’mon.”

“It’s destiny,” Roy said.

Ed didn’t like the way that prickled the hairs at the back of his neck.  “It’s somethin’, anyway.”

It was something.

And Roy was something.

He stepped up to the booth, discussed the finer points of the regulations with a very bored-looking operator, handed Ed the giraffe to hold, and then decimated the balloons with a series of impeccably-aimed, impossibly swift dart throws.

Not before rolling his sleeves up to the elbows, though, which put his extremely well-shaped forearms and equally appealing wrists openly on display.  Not before relaxing into it, shoulders slanted, body loose and tilted and utterly at east, like he really was in a bar, and this was just for fun.

Ed would have bought the attitude ruse hook, line, and sinker if he hadn’t seen the keenness of Roy’s eyes.  Roy was a man with a familiar weapon in his capable hands, no matter how casual he looked carrying it.

Ed had to wonder if the game booth operators were somehow communicating with each other faster than he and Roy could walk, because this one looked extremely resigned while passing a giant stuffed cat over the barrier.

“Thank you,” Roy said anyway.  “Have a nice night.”

There might have been an unenthusiastic You too, sir, but Ed was preoccupied imagining the way that Al’s eyes would light up when this fluffy monstrosity appeared in their apartment.

“Damn,” he said.  The guy behind it was sort of cute, too, if you didn’t think about it too much.  “That’s awesome.  Um—thanks.”

“Not at all,” Roy said.  “Would you like me to hold it for now?  We seem to have acquired a significant volume between the two of us.”

“Sure,” Ed said.  “As long as you understand what a solemn and all-important task that is.  Shit, I guess I’d better go find a corn dog so we can get out of here while we can still walk.”

They made it a grand total of about twenty-five steps before Ed spotted another brightly-colored sign and immediately forgot the purpose of their mission.  “Hey!  The Hall of Mirrors is free!”

They’d conscripted a local storefront for it, too, by the looks of it, in order to create a contained space that they could darken and fill with reflective surfaces.

“Are you sure it’s a good idea to let the pair of us loose on a few rooms full of glass?” Roy asked.  He held up his giraffe in one arm and Al’s cat in the other.  “Perhaps we should take a vote.  There are three of us here who hold the opinion that—”

“Perhaps you should get bent,” Ed said, but he almost choked on the laugh in his throat, and Roy could probably hear it.  “Come on already.”

For all of the initial sass, when Ed headed on in through the marked door, Roy followed.

Ed didn’t usually like mirrors very much.  He’d never been especially fond of his reflection; the automail sure hadn’t helped; and lately, every time he caught sight of himself, he saw shades of Hohenheim in his jaw and his hair and his shoulders.  He’d tried to get into the habit of just avoiding any opportunity to notice his own image, and when he slipped up, he could usually defray the worst of it by pulling his hair out of the ponytail to braid it instead, then bulk-ordering a ton of razors so that he’d never find any more than a whisper of a threat of stubble on his cheeks.

The only problem was that he tended to forget the frequency of these encounters, and he bought razors every time, so he and Al had ended up with a treasure trove of them underneath the sink.  Al had found that out on accident after about the first year of it, when he opened the cabinet door, and some eighty or ninety of them poured out all over his house slippers and the little rug they’d put on the floor.  All of them had little safety caps on them, fortunately, so none of them had had the audacity to nick his precious feet and make Ed boycott that brand forever, but it did prompt him to look up at Ed in the doorway and ask whether he was trying to get a limited-edition color or hoarding them for resale during some heretofore unimagined razor shortage.

The point was, Ed had done smarter things in his life than waltzing into an entire hall full of objects he knew he wasn’t fond of, but he’d been hoping that the intention of this exercise would come through, and that the mirrors would be weird.  Weird mirrors he could handle.  Weird mirrors were an optics puzzle, not a stabbing reminder of every time that someone had said Well, you know, eventually we all turn into our parents like that wasn’t a horror story squeezed into the shape of a sentence.

Plus there was one right at the start that contorted your body to look super, super stretched in the middle, next to which he could stand with his hands on his hips and say, “See?  I keep telling you I’m tall as shit,” and that made Roy laugh in such a genuinely delighted sort of way that it warmed up the pit of Ed’s stomach a bit.

He figured out the trick three more mirrors down: he could tell at a glance too quick to differentiate his own features whether a mirror was likely to display his face or not, and if it was, he could focus on Roy’s reflection in it to distract himself from that part.  He would probably have managed to push through this whole thing without that advantage—he was the one who had dragged them and their growing collection of cotton-stuffed fauna here, after all; he knew a thing or two about making a bed and lying in it no matter what—but it sure as hell made it easier, and it sure as hell let him relax.

There was, however, a minor issue related to that stopgap maneuver, which was that looking at Roy in mirrors—or directly, or at all—was dangerous in and of itself.  Looking at Roy made it impossible not to think about how gorgeous he was, and a room draped with lots of black cloth, rife with strategic lighting and reflective glass, quadrupled the difficulty of not letting one’s gaze linger on his eyes, or his mouth, or his throat.  He’d also undone the two top buttons of his shirt after Ed stole his tie, because apparently he wanted a manslaughter charge added to his record.  Bastard’s collarbones were a work of fucking art, and he probably knew it.

“Aha,” Roy said as they approached a mirror that broadened your shoulders ridiculously and shrunk your waist.  Roy raised both arms—each still burdened by a stuffed animal, of course—and curled them to flex his biceps.  “At long last, I understand how Alex feels.”

“No, you don’t,” Ed said.  “Your shirt’s still on.”

Focusing on Roy when he was grinning was quite a lot like standing out in hammering rain with both arms upraised and daring the lightning.  “I suppose you’re right.  I also seem to be lacking the requisite quantity of roses.”

Ed had to turn away and march on into the next room of this place before he did something stupid.  “Work on that.”

The next room contained a series of concentric rings of narrow mirrors—which disoriented you the instant you set foot inside the perimeter, and worsened as you moved, but Ed had pretty much never met a circle that he couldn’t sort out.  That was the shape that the universe spoke in.  He could handle those.

The important thing was pinpointing the exit, which meant deliberately looking past the intentional vortex of endless reflections to find the square of darker dark against the far wall.  Doorway.  Done.

He did enjoy the wildness of the infinitely-redoubled images for a few seconds as he sauntered through—he waved at one mirror and watched some countless number of versions of himself wave back.

The collection of slight distortions of the mirrors in the next room weren’t enough to disguise the too-familiar angles of his face, but he managed to preoccupy himself with examining their physical structures.  He had to squint pretty mightily in the dimness, but with most of them, he could just make out the places that the glass was thicker or thinner or tilted or concave, and then he could extrapolate back to the effect it had on incoming light, and then he could step around to the front and test it.  That was kind of fun.  But he was starting to wonder about—

“Ed?” Roy called—distantly, from the previous room, but there was something in his voice that sounded… strained.

“What’s up?” Ed called back.  An instinct shivered in him, and it was slippery—he tried to grasp it and contain it, but it slithered free, and the words leapt out of him: “Are you okay?”

There was a long, long pause.

And then Roy’s voice again, modulated by that same odd tightness as before: “Where’s the exit?  I… I’m—a bit—dizzy.  It’s…”

Ed’s brain darted instantaneously back to a conversation they’d had with Fuery over catch-up-how-are-you donuts one time.  Fuery had mentioned, in passing, that he was pretty sure that Roy’s restored eyesight wasn’t nearly as good as it’d used to be, but he was trying to hide it from all of them, because he felt guilty about having it in the first place.

Fuery was really smart when you could get him to stop talking about radios for three seconds at a stretch.  Well—he was really smart about the radios, too, but there was only so many rambling equipment factoids that you could absorb before you needed a break.

“Hang on,” Ed said, and his feet were already moving, and the stutter of his heart in his chest was weird.  “Don’t move.  That’ll make it worse.”

“Should I be concerned that you’re an expert on vertigo?” Roy asked.

“Stop pretending like you’re surprised,” Ed said, marching back in to the other room to find Roy standing just to the side of the center of it, looking slightly pale and very stranded.  “How are you supposed to know how much abuse your body can handle unless you push it right to the edge of the limit?”

He could just see Roy grimacing in this dim light.  “It pains me when your tortured logic kind of makes sense.”

“Good,” Ed said.  “Pain’ll distract you from the dizziness.  Here—close your eyes, and put your hand on my shoulder.”

Roy drew a deep breath and then obliged.

As Ed had predicted—he wasn’t going to think the word feared—Roy’s hand was really strong, and really warm, and really pleasant in a way that he couldn’t quite describe.

He probably should have given the instructions in the opposite order, but Roy was so damn used to estimating distances that it hadn’t mattered, so Ed supposed that he was off the hook just this once.

Or he would be, if they got the hell out of here before he said anything stupid.

“When we escape this lousy maze,” he said, guiding them through the doorway, struggling against the urge to lay his hand over Roy’s, “do you want cotton candy?”

…back on the hook it was.

“I could probably be persuaded to have a bite of yours,” Roy said, “but I’m not allowed to have that much sugar this late.”

They were progressing through the final room of the place—or at least, Ed hoped to hell it was the final room—but he had to pause at that one.  “…you’re… like, thirty… thirty-whatever years old, Mustang.”

Roy was either having an asthma attack or trying not to laugh.  “You monster.  And—I never said that the embargo was being set by someone else.  Perhaps I said I wasn’t allowed to—”

“Don’t bullshit me,” Ed said, towing him towards the door again.  “You and I both know it was Captain Hawkeye, and there’s no damn way you’re gonna convince me different.”

Roy sighed loudly, which was as good as a concession.

“How about funnel cake?” Ed asked.  “Is that too much sugar?  What’s the specific ratio of sugar to other components that’s permissible past a certain hour?  And what’s the time cutoff, exactly?”

“I’m… not sure,” Roy said.  “All I know is that if I violate the tenets, she’ll know, and there will be hell to pay.”

“I mean,” Ed said, “I want to tell you that’s absurd, but I’m pretty sure Al’s eighty percent of the way to laying the law down on me like that, so…”

“So perhaps we’d better tread carefully,” Roy said, “just in case.”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “Okay, you can open your eyes.”

It occurred to him that he hadn’t suggested that Roy should withdraw the hand, too.

Was that why it lingered for several more long seconds even after Roy said, “Ah, thank you”?

Ed hoped his fucking face wasn’t on fire, but it sure felt like it was.

He opened the door, stepped out, adjusted the plush animals still jammed under his arm, and looked around to try to orient himself amongst all of the ambient noise.

They’d shortcut a bit of the chaos by going through the mirrors, and Ed was fairly sure that the ambient noise in question was slightly louder now.  There was some sort of music from up ahead of them, past a series of smaller booths where you could guess the quantities of various objects, at which he could not afford to slow down.  They’d be here all damn night if he let himself start doing estimation math.

“Are they hiding all the food at the far end, or what?” he asked.  “It’d make sense as an incentivization strategy to make you walk past all the stuff where you’re likely to lose money, but they probably have an entrance on that side, too, so then that wouldn’t work.  Strategically speaking, they should have it right in the middle.”

Roy looked back the way they’d come, and then ahead, and then nodded sagely.  “At the very least, they should make it extremely self-evident where the food is, since I’m sure it makes for a significant portion of their revenue.  I wonder if perhaps they’re relegating it to a distant corner in the hopes of reducing the likelihood of people like me being fool enough to eat first, only then to throw up all over their teacup ride.”

Ed gave him a look, but Roy had his most decidedly neutral face on, so it was impossible to tell whether he was legitimately bothered about the teacup ride thing or not.

“Interesting proposition,” Ed said, since ‘interesting’ was safe in ninety-eight percent of situations.  “Are we operating under the assumption that whoever organized this thing has a brain in their head, then?”

“Always assume that your enemy is smart,” Roy said, “until they have definitively proven otherwise even when they don’t know you’re watching.”

Maybe still a little miffed about the teacup ride.

The ambient noise was increasing both in volume and in melodiousness as they continued—moments later, Ed spotted the reason: a large wooden stage, upon which a band was playing, in front of which a number of people were dancing.

There was, however, something very, very wrong.

“I can’t believe this,” Ed said.  “Okay, I can, because Central has been pretentious as shit since the day it was founded, but—jazz?  Really?  This is where you’re supposed to have square-dancing.  It’s a fair.  C’mon.”

Roy’s expression was a fascinating combination of slyness and amusement.  Which shouldn’t have been interesting at all, because it was classic Roy, and classic Roy—like all Roys—was a pain in the ass.  The last thing Ed wanted was to find him fascinating.  That was the most dangerous prospect he could think of right now.

“Let me guess,” he said, trying to head this bullshit off at the pass before the terrifying tide rose any higher.  “You hate square-dancing.  You find it plebeian or some word like that.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Roy said, and the amusement was winning out now.  Why did the bastard have to look so good?  “I’ve never tried it.  I did see several… instances… when I was stationed at Eastern Command, and I hope that I may be lucky enough to die before the day that I’m forced to give it an attempt.”

“It’s actually kinda fun once you get started,” Ed said, in defense of his heritage, or the rest of humanity, or just to give Roy a hard time, or… something.  “Y’know.  If there’s a critical mass of people who are really into it, it’s not so bad.”

Roy blinked at him, and this smile was slightly different—slightly disarmed.  Like someone had punched a hole in one of his favorite masks while he wasn’t looking, and now he had no idea what to wear or who to be today.

“What?” Ed said.

“Nothing,” Roy said.  “Just trying to decide on a suitable name for the demon that’s possessed you.”

“It already has a name,” Ed said.  “It’s called ‘hunger for a corn dog’, and it’s vicious, and I don’t know how long I’ve got left before it takes over my entire being, so c’mon, yeah?”

“Ah, yes,” Roy said, but he was following as Ed made a valiant attempt to double their pace and stride right past all of the incongruous musical nonsense.  Trust Central City to ruin a fair in the weirdest way possible.  “Those corn dog-related demons are notoriously ferocious.  I just hope we make it without any bloodshed.”

“As long as I get Al’s cat home okay,” Ed said, “I’m not too worried about that part.  A little bit of bloodshed’d liven this place up a bit.  Wouldn’t have to be a lot.  Nothing serious.  Just… y’know.  A smidge.”

Before he could elaborate further and specify that he only wanted to draw blood from somebody who had been taking a turn for the worse in their personal behavior and deserved it in a scare-’em-straight sort of way—and that it was only a smidge; and that he stipulated that any and all vulnerable children be out of the vicinity before any smidge-of-bloodletting occurred—three children whose vulnerability status was unknown went careening past him, laughing and shoving at each other so much that he had to step back to stay out of their way.  Instinctively, he turned as they blew on by him, watching them disappear back into the crowd, wondering idly where their parents were.  He probably spent more than a demographically average amount of time wondering about kids’ parents.  He supposed that there wasn’t much to be done for that.

By the time he looked up again, though, Roy had looked ahead.

Ahead was the greatest bane of Roy’s existence since the invention of paperwork: the fearsome legend; the momentous, towering, indescribable concentration of pure, undiluted evil.

The teacup ride.

Ed paused for a second and studied Roy’s expression as carefully as he could.  The downturn of Roy’s mouth curved more towards petulance than distress.

“We could always go up real close like we’re interested in buying tickets,” Ed offered, “and then spit on it and run away.”

Roy glanced at him, blinking rapidly.

And then Roy laughed.

Ed knew, of course, that Roy was a maestro of masks, and a weaver of lies, and a professional misleader—which didn’t bode especially well for Amestris, come to think of it; hopefully he’d drop the whole mis- prefix once he got closer to the top.

But it was different to know something at a logical level and to have it shoved up in your face in the form of Roy fucking Mustang, possibly the single most physically attractive human being Ed had ever met, laughing genuinely and somewhat uproariously smack dab in the middle of the shitty Central City interpretation of a county fair.

Ed had thought that it couldn’t get worse than the way that Roy’s eyes sharpened and deepened when he was thinking, or calculating, or focusing so intently on something that he forgot to pretend to be flighty and cute.  Ed had thought that it couldn’t get worse than the rare but excruciating occasions when he slicked his hair back, and his jawline took on an entirely new life that had diabolical designs on Ed’s.  Ed had thought that it couldn’t get any worse than the way Roy’s smile went so absolutely gentle and disarmed when Hayate licked his fingers; or how utterly deft and confident his hands were when he sent torrents of flame from his fingertips; or how maddeningly hot he’d been when he’d swaggered around the office like he owned the whole of headquarters, just because he could.

Ed had been wrong.

This was worse.

There was a tinge of sweetness to this Roy, to the real Roy—the unguarded one; the one only just now recovering from the bout of helpless laughter, grin still gleaming bright.  And there was a sadness to it, too—a dark note; a wistfulness.  Like he didn’t get to indulge this part of himself very often, and he missed it, and a part of him was scared that it would wilt and wither and die.  Like Roy worried, sometimes, possibly at a lot of times, that he was losing himself.

Like maybe that was why he’d promised not to lie—because he was desperately trying to remember how to tell the truth.

Roy had noticed that Ed was staring at him, which meant that it was high time to say something brilliant.

Not that Ed would, but it would have been a golden opportunity, in a theoretical sort of way.

“Hell,” he said.  “If I’d known your sense of humor was this bad, I would’ve performed all my reports as a comedy routine and then fucked off to the library way faster.”

“You fucked off to the library extremely quickly as it was,” Roy said, and hearing him iterate the word made Ed’s spine tingle in a supremely discomfiting way.  “I think it might have defied the laws of physics if you’d gone any faster.”

“Whatever,” Ed said.  “Passively obeying the laws of physics is for chumps.”

“Despite the nearly inconceivable length of the list of things you’ve said over the years that are terrifying,” Roy said, “that may be near the top.”

“Great,” Ed said.  “How about if I follow it up with—” He pointed for good measure.  “‘Let’s go on the Ferris wheel’.”

Roy grimaced up at the flashing lights.  “Do you know the statistics for people dying gruesomely on these sorts of things?”

“No,” Ed said.  “But if you try to tell me what they are, I’ll make sure they have to add you to the list.”

That turned the grimace to a grin, which Roy then tried to suppress.  He was unsuccessful.  Why did that taste like triumph?

“And here I thought you were a scientist,” Roy said.  “A seeker of facts; a learner of logical truths; a devotee of discove—”

Ed started for the queue to buy tickets and get on the thing.  “Are you coming or not?”

Roy was.  He followed.  That was the really weird thing.

Ed dared to think that maybe it would be the weirdest thing, but then they paid for their tickets, and the ride operator opened the bar for them to climb into the next swinging bench seat on the wheel, and…

And Roy gestured for him to sit down first, and then very gently set the stuffed cat down to Ed’s right, and settled himself on Ed’s left.

The operator shut the bar down over them, and it locked into place with an extremely final clank, which would have been decent evidence to counter Roy’s declaration about the statistics if Ed’s heart hadn’t taken up a very uncomfortable, very heavily-throbbing residence in his throat.

“Um,” Ed said.  “Does—does your giraffe need a seat, too?”

“Only if there’s space,” Roy said.

There was not.

But if Roy was right about the grisly death thing, Ed didn’t want to die with a stuffed alligator and a horse and a bunny clutched in his arms, so he crammed the whole cadre of mismatched animals into the little gap between him and the side of their swinging car.  He shifted just a little bit so that they’d have slightly more room, to prevent any of them from tipping out and plummeting down to some child whose opinion of religion might warp substantially if stuffed animals started falling from the sky.

Then he turned and—unsurprisingly, probably—discovered that he had unequivocally entered too-close-holy-shit-mayday range as it pertained to Roy.

“Oh,” he said.  “Uh—”

“I’ve figured it out,” Roy said as the car jerked forward, and then the wheel started rising, and they rocked gently back and forth with the remnants of their own momentum— “Your insistence on the Ferris wheel is so that you can see the tops of people’s heads for a change, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “Sure is.  Because I’ve never been in a fucking two-story building before.  No wonder they pay you so much for your brains over at HQ.”

Roy laughed again, which was actually terrible, because that hadn’t even been funny.

Wait—Havoc had said something insipid once about people laughing at unfunny lines.  Specifically, he’d said it about women that he liked laughing at Roy’s jokes, but—

Wasn’t that supposed to be a dead giveaway that you wanted to get with somebody, or something?

Or that you felt societally obligated.  Or, in this case, if you were in moderate danger of being pushed out of a Ferris wheel car if you didn’t cooperate.

Yeah, probably that one.

“Why do I have to have an ulterior motive?” Ed asked.  “Maybe I’m just trying to force you to have fun for the second time in your life.”

The wheel shuddered to a stop as the operator let someone else on, leaving them suspended about halfway up.  The car rocked again.  Ed was wondering about those statistics now, but like hell was he going to ask.

Roy’s eyes tracked across the sprawl of lights out and below them, and then over the rooftops, and then up higher, to the wisps of cloud reaching silvery fingertips across the moon.

“Quite in spite of how aggressively that was phrased,” Roy said, “I think you’re succeeding.”

“Good,” Ed said, and then realized he’d said it, and then bit the inside of his lip far, far too late.

Roy turned to smile at him again, which was unsettling in the extreme.  Safer to look at… anything else.

That settled that: Ed looked out at the fairgrounds, and then at the metal bar hypothetically preserving them from the worst-case scenarios, and then at the distance between his boots and the pavement, and then at the distance between his hip and Roy’s.

Regular Roy he knew how to deal with.  Regular Roy was a panther who made a point of lazing obviously in a tree all day so that no one would realize just how deadly he could be when night fell, and he set out to hunt.

But real Roy?  Ed didn’t even know what type of animal the real Roy was.  And now they were caged together in a swinging carriage, suspended several dozen feet above the ground.

“I’m sorry,” Roy said, which didn’t actually give Ed much to go on, species-wise.  “This probably wasn’t how you expected to spend your night.”

“Guess not,” Ed said.  He swung his feet a little.  His legs couldn’t quite reach to put them down flat on the flooring of the carriage, because of course they couldn’t, because the world was designed by other people, without the slightest regard for people like him.  “But what I was figuring on was… I mean, I thought I’d be sitting there trying to eat real slow so that I’d look polite or something.  And trying to dole out parts of myself a little bit at a time to test the waters or whatever and see which pieces of me it was safe to be, and which ones might be a dealbreaker, and I’d spend the whole time analyzing reactions to try to decide if whoever it was seemed likely to be worth the trouble anyway.  Thought I was going to have to be a fake version of myself all night long, you know?  You definitely know.  So it’s… kind of nice, honestly.  Don’t have to censor myself with you.”

He made the mistake of glancing over at Roy to gauge the response.  It was really hard to keep track of his own thoughts when Roy was gazing at him with the big, deep, dark, staggeringly beautiful sincere eyes like that.

“Still,” Roy said.  “You were promised a date, and I imagine that—perhaps in spite of yourself—you were looking forward to it.”

“Are we talkin’ about me or you?” Ed asked.  “Besides, it’s… I mean, this was practically a date, the way it worked out.  Right?  We went around together and paid for stuff and laughed about shit.  Doesn’t that check off most of the material criteria for a date?  I don’t know.  I’ve never been on a date before.”

Roy was no longer gazing now: he was staring.  Ed’s brain was no longer running: it was fritzing, casting sparks everywhere like it didn’t know how fires started, and it couldn’t see the smoke.

“You… haven’t?” Roy said.

“Shit, like I’ve had the time?” Ed said.  “Until today, anyway, I guess.  Whatever.  It’s fine.  Like I said, this was a pretty similar social experience, except that we haven’t made out.  Is the making out part a prerequisite, or is it optional?  I could never figure that out.”

Roy swallowed.  Not that Ed’s eyes were magnetically drawn to his throat, or anything; and not that it was really kind of gorgeous.

“It’s optional,” Roy said.  “But we could… pencil that part in, if you like.”

Ed’s blood had been running so hot that having it freeze like this felt like having a bucket of cold water upended over his head.  Winry had had a phase where she’d really liked doing that, though she hadn’t enjoyed it quite as much when Al returned the favor.

“Fuck off,” Ed said, wrangling it out around a sudden stickiness.  “I wasn’t trying to invite you to a pity party or something.  I was just stating some facts.  Isn’t that your thing tonight?”

“Ed,” Roy said, and then he was unfurling his arm and laying it across the back of their little carriage, which opened his whole body right to Ed— “It wouldn’t have anything to do with pity.”

Somehow he’d managed to make his eyes start smoldering without sacrificing any of the sincerity.

Somehow he’d managed to flip Ed’s whole universe upside-down and inside-out with just a single movement of his arm.

Ed flung his thoughts backwards before his wits abandoned him entirely.  If he reexamined some of the events of tonight through the lens of the remote possibility that Roy might be some fraction as attracted to Ed as Ed was to him—

Well.

“Shit,” Ed said.  “Well—just—why the hell didn’t you say something?”

“There’s a difference between telling the truth and oversharing,” Roy said.

Ed eyed him.  “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Roy said.  “Are you?”

“Only thing I’m ever sure about,” Ed said, “is that I’m never sure about anything.  I just don’t let that stop me.”

“I may have observed that about you once or twice,” Roy said.

“I’ll bet,” Ed said.

Roy glanced out, and then ahead, and then upward.  It elongated his neck even more.  He looked like a million fucking cens and change, although Ed had absolutely no intentions of letting him pay off his longstanding debt by waltzing around looking like a sex machine, no matter how staggering it was.

“Hmm,” Roy said.  “Is it too clichéd to kiss you at the top of the Ferris Wheel?”

Ed listened to his heart thundering in his ears for a second, trying to gather enough spit in his mouth to say, “Yeah.  Way too clichéd.  That’s so lame they’d probably ban us from the whole place, and I still haven’t gotten my damn corn dog yet.”

He’d been pretending to stare at the mechanisms of the wheel out in front of them, but he could see out of the corner of his eye that Roy was watching him closely.

Roy smiled—just slightly.  Faintly.  It wasn’t quite bitter; it definitely looked…

Disappointed.  But not surprised.

“Holy hell,” Ed said, turning to glare at him, which also made it easier to cling on to the safety bar for dear life.  “Why would you choose now to start listening to me, you idiot?”

Roy looked at him for a long second, and the sincerity was drowning the embers again.  “Because now you’re not… obligated.  It’s like you said—you were finally free of my bullshit.  The last thing I want to do is to drag you right back into it out of some sort of misguided notion of…”

There were a couple of problems with the fact that Roy talked so much.  One of them was that it was about all that you could do to get a word in edgewise a lot of the time.  Another was that after you’d sort of started tuning out the words, it drew your attention to his mouth.

Roy had a really, really pretty mouth.

Ed attempted to consider his situation in as rational and objective a fashion as possible.  He was stuck on a Ferris wheel seat—stuck very close on a Ferris wheel seat, as a result of some imprudent stuffed-animal-related decisions—with the guy he’d had a crush on for most, if not the entirety, of his adolescence.

And… hell.  With the guy he was feeling like he had a crush on now—all over again, but different.  This Roy was worlds apart from the one in the office, the one in the halls, the one on the battlefields; and that one had been bad enough.  That one had dragged all-new heights of rage and longing and despair out of Ed’s tortured childhood psyche.

This one… 

This one felt weirdly sort of… safe.

They’d seen the worst of each other a long time ago.  They’d both settled down a lot since then.  Times had changed.  They’d changed.  Tonight, they’d had half a million little bits of conversations, and only a scattering of the ones at the start had been the slightest bit hostile.

Tonight, Ed really fucking felt like this could work.

That had never been on the table when he’d been a kid—it had never been in the dining room; it probably hadn’t even entered the house.  Roy had been incomprehensible, unreachable, and untouchable in equal proportions, and that was part of what had made him so tantalizing.

Tonight, though—

Tonight Ed could touch him.

Tonight Ed would barely have to move.

Tonight Roy had offered it—like he wanted to.  Like he really rather liked the thought.

Like he was being honest about it, the same way he was being honest about everything—just this once.

Roy was still talking, which wasn’t much of a surprise.  He’d moved on to some sort of treatise about the impact of the military hierarchy on your ability to build healthy relationships in other aspects of your life, which was probably actually really interesting, but he was going to have to recite the thing from the beginning another time.

Ed leaned closer, grabbed Roy’s collar in his tinglingly sensitive right hand, and hauled the bastard in to kiss him.

Ed understood kissing in a conceptual way—you mashed your mouth against another person’s mouth, and supposedly it felt so good that you just kept on doing it until you got fined for public indecency or something—but as far as the details went, he didn’t have a damn clue.

Which was fine.  He was used to learning on the fly.

But Roy froze in the first instant that their mouths mashed together, and that signal he recognized as a no.

Which was—also fine.  Totally fine; totally reasonable.  That gave him another lens to reanalyze the clues that he thought he’d spotted; he just had to extract himself from the excruciating awkwardness of the current situation, find a place to hide, and then reexamine the evidence now that he had this critical detail.  It would probably all make sense eventually.

He drew back, fighting the overwhelming urge to wince until his jaw ached.  He wasn’t going to give Roy the satisfaction—not that he thought Roy was going to revel in his abject failure to decipher social cues after all this time, or anything; but he just… it would be better for both of them if he played it cool and didn’t let on that it felt like his chest cavity was collapsing.

The thing was—

The thing was that Roy was the only one being honest with Ed tonight: Ed sure as hell wasn’t being honest with himself.

Apparently it was time to start.

He wasn’t over Roy.  He was never going to be over Roy.  He was starting to think it wasn’t possible; he was starting to think Roy was just a fact in your life—like a lighthouse on the coastline, and no matter how much you swore up and down that you didn’t want to live there, you always had to come back.  Roy was magnetic north.  You could run as far away as you wanted, but you’d still turn towards him.  That part didn’t change.

Ed had always thought it had to be a stupid, childish crush, and the only reason that the tendrils of it had lingered was that it had been the first one that had knocked him off his feet back when he’d been twelve years old and significantly more impressionable than warm wax.  Roy had seemed so tall and so suave and so self-assured that Ed had fucking worshipped the bastard against his will.  He’d hated it—hated hanging off of Roy’s every word; watching every gesture; memorizing every single line and cataloguing their convergence as the epitome of attractiveness.  Every man he’d ever met had had to measure up to Roy, and caring so much—relying on him, on anyone, in some way, like a dog begging at the table for some scrap of validation—had infuriated him so deeply that he’d never determined any way to sublimate it other than taking it right back out on Roy.

Roy, of course, had eaten up the antagonism with such devilish delight that it had just shored up the whole terrible roguish persona that was making Ed’s guts molten in the first place; and it had contributed the added benefit that Ed couldn’t get any of the validation he was secretly groveling for, because he was constantly slapping Roy’s hands away long before they ever made it anywhere near him.

Come to think of it, a psychologist would likely say that that specific cycle was probably what had put him off of dating for so damn long.  Physical attraction and bone-shaking frustration were inextricably tangled in all his recollections.

It had, unimaginably, actually gotten worse when he’d learned more about Roy—when he’d discovered, one ripped-off bandage at a time, that Roy was a person, not a paragon.  That Roy was a person who had followed convictions, tried, and failed so badly that his world had very nearly ended; that Roy was a person who had dragged himself one centimeter at a time back onto a course towards something like redemption.  That Roy was a person far too much like Ed.

It wasn’t a crush anymore.

It hadn’t been for a long, long time.

And Ed had made himself believe that absence made the heart forget; that pointedly ignoring the way that Roy came to mind too often to qualify as an acquaintance might discourage his brain from calling up the image over and over again; that a plant shoved into a corner would dry out and die, and he’d be free.

It had bloomed in spite of him.

But none of that made any damn difference, did it?

Because Roy had said one thing, and done another—just like in the not-so-good old days.

Roy had changed his mind.  He’d dipped his toes into the water and found it colder than he’d expected; he’d made an offer and then retracted it when he realized what it meant.  That wasn’t a crime.  He probably hadn’t even meant it to be hurtful.  Ed couldn’t blame him for revisiting a hypothesis when an experiment had presented unanticipated results.

That was good, actually.  Good science.

Ed winched his eyes open and bit his tongue and didn’t cringe.  No need to make it worse.

Roy was staring at him.

Ed wasn’t sure he could deal with that.  Like, sure, it wasn’t like he wanted to go around kissing people who didn’t enjoy it—he actually felt really shitty about that—but it wasn’t like he’d thrown a baby off a bridge or something, and Roy’s expression—

He looked down at his hand curled into Roy’s collar—the right one.  Damn thing still didn’t know what was good for it; it had fixed his fingers so tightly that he was struggling to unbend them enough to withdraw his hand, and…

Just as he watched his ornery fingers finally start to unclench, Roy’s hand laid itself over his.

Roy’s hand wrapped itself around his and pinned his fingers back down right where they’d been.

And then Roy leaned in, eyelashes dipping, head tilted, free hand extended to slide the fingertips into the wispy little hairs at Ed’s hairline low on the side of his neck—

And then they kissed.

And Roy was the fucking opposite of cold this time.

The way that Roy had angled his head made their mouths fit together like fucking puzzle pieces—this wasn’t mashing; this was nothing like mashing; this was a fucking miracle.

Roy’s mouth was very soft and very wet and very warm; his fingernails grazed the skin just behind Ed’s ear, and goosebumps flooded down Ed’s arms, and his pulse turned into a semi-rhythmic ricocheting of his heart around his chest.

Roy was just sort of—moving.  Opening his mouth and closing it again, shifting back and forth, sliding their lips against each other in a way that probably should’ve been stupid, but it felt so fucking nice—

Ed usually approached unfamiliar activities with a combination of curiosity and trepidation.  If he was being honest—which was, he was fast discovering, an extremely dangerous prospect all around—he’d thought about this many more times than once or twice.  It was just that he’d tended to focus on the parts of the little fantasies that he understood concretely, like the little soft touches and the lingering eye contact; those were pretty straightforward.  He’d always skimmed over the kissing stuff because he couldn’t really hope to conceptualize any of the specifics anyway.

Apparently that had been a tactical error on his part, because kissing Roy was a fucking revelation, and he had been missing the goddamn hell out all this time.

Roy’s fingers threaded into his hair, and the faint tug against his scalp shot a delicious shiver up his spine; that part he’d thought about pretty extensively, but it was so much better in real life than it ever had been in his head.  Human nerves were fucking made for this.  How had he never figured it out?  He’d burnt his tongue about a billion times; he’d made his own lips sting with food so spicy that he’d almost considered doing something drastic like pouring milk onto the problem, but he’d just never made the connection that all of those extremely acute sensory inputs would apply in a situation like… this.

Like Roy Mustang sucking very gently on his bottom lip.

He’d just made a noise.  Fuck.  That was embarrassing—right?  He was pretty sure that you weren’t supposed to do that; or at least he was pretty sure that it betrayed the fact that he was way more into this than he should’ve been this early in a game that he’d claimed that he didn’t particularly want to be playing.

Except that that made Roy’s breath come really fast, and he could feel it; they were sharing oxygen; and there wasn’t anywhere near enough; and everywhere Roy’s mouth slid against his, it felt like his heart had taken up thundering residence immediately behind his skin, which was on fire.

He had a significantly better understanding of the whole mashing impulse now, because he wanted more.  He wanted more contact, more heat, more spit—how weird was that?  He wanted to press harder against Roy; wanted to taste the back of his fucking throat; wanted to get intimately acquainted with the full extent of the inside of Roy’s mouth; wanted to memorize the contours of his tongue and the cadence of his breath and the precise way that smirk tasted when it was curving against his lips—

He twisted his fingers even more firmly into Roy’s collar, and Roy’s grip on his hand tightened in response, and then there was tongue—definitely tongue—lots of tongue—and that was weird, but it was a great sort of weird; it was slippery and slightly bizarre and definitely would have been silly if it hadn’t ignited something furiously hot in the center of Ed’s guts.

So apparently making out was definitely a major perk to the date thing.  He hadn’t anticipated that.

He could vaguely feel the fact that they were moving again as the wheel turned; distantly he noticed their car swinging back and forth a bit, but with his eyes closed and his fistful of Roy’s shirt and his mouthful of Roy’s tongue, he didn’t really give a shit what else was happening.  Roy was amazing.  Roy was amazing, and was amazing with his mouth, and was doing things that Ed hadn’t realized you could do with a tongue, or your lip, and every now and again he’d catch Ed’s lip with his teeth again, and holy fucking hell—

After a while—time didn’t seem especially relevant right now—it did feel like everything had gone very still around them, and the night was deeper, and the sounds of the music and the games and the children shouting were so far away that they might as well have been a dream.  This—Roy’s mouth; Roy’s hands; Roy’s breath; their heartbeats slamming hard in perfect time—was all that really existed.  This was all that mattered.  This—

Someone cleared their throat so loudly that it sounded like it probably hurt, and it was impossible to ignore.

Reluctantly, to say the least, Ed surfaced from the kissing and tried to get his bearings again.

The Ferris wheel had stopped turning because they were at the bottom again, and the ride operator was standing there staring at them, one hand extended to reach for the fastening mechanism on the metal bar and let them out.

Ed stared at the guy, and then at Roy.  Roy’s mouth was red and so wet and so gorgeous that it was really not helping him to zero in on the all-too-necessary task of clearing his head and deciding how to handle this fantastically awkward situation, but prying his eyes off of it sounded pretty much impossible just now.

Roy, who had also been staring at the ride operator, glanced at Ed again—with, if Ed was not mistaken, more than just a hint of a pink flush.  That was fucking adorable, which did not help Ed to succeed in the arduous quest to look at anything other than him.

Roy squeezed Ed’s right hand where it was still fixed on his collar, then released it and sat back, gesturing meaninglessly towards the guy trying to run the ride, who was obviously not getting paid nearly enough for this kind of shit.  “Ah—terribly sorry.  We’ll just be out of your way.  Ed—”

“Yup,” Ed said, gathering all of the stuffed animals into his arms as swiftly as he could.  At least he had two arms that sustained a reasonable amount of friction now.  The automail had always been iffy for that.

They scuttled off of the Ferris wheel and down the metal ramp that released them back into the fair proper again.  Roy looked ever so slightly chagrined, but mostly…

It wasn’t amusement—not quite.  It was much more… buoyant than that.

He looked delighted.

Ed’s head had really not gotten the memo that they were no longer spinning through the air, and in fact seemed to think that they had picked up a significant amount of speed.

“Well,” Roy said brightly.  “You’re right.  That was… nice.”

“Uh,” Ed said.  He was pretty sure he had never once had this much plush on his person at once, and it was a little difficult to see things over the giraffe’s protruding head.  “Yeah.  Um.”

The kiss itself had thrown his logic for a loop—they’d been definitely not-dating; and then they’d discussed the fact that they were almost-dating by default, according to most of the items on the standard dating checklist as Ed understood it; and then they had very, very thoroughly checked off the biggest missing item.

Did that mean they were dating now?  Surely it had to involve some intention—presumably from the beginning.  You probably couldn’t change the nature of a not-date into a date three-quarters of the way through.  Alchemy was the only well-accepted method for altering the fundamentals of a thing after the fact, and you couldn’t exactly alchemize a date.

…could you?

Well, that was an unrelated question, even if it was a supremely interesting one.

The more pertinent inquiry was: “So where do you figure they’re hiding the damn corn dogs?”

“Evidently,” Roy said, “in a semi-mythical land far, far away.  To reach it, I imagine we’ll have to slay a few dragons and answer some riddles dealt by trolls under bridges or something along those lines.  Would you like some help carrying our… charges?”

“I’m good at riddles,” Ed said.  “Sometimes you can crack ’em just by being really literal.  Or by going to the opposite extreme.  And—uh—yeah, probably.  Um.”

They divided up the spoils again, and this time Roy took custody of his horse, and Ed tucked the cat Roy had won for Al underneath his arm.  The last thing he wanted to do was to get corn dog oil on it or something.

“I don’t suppose another supremely unhealthy treat might do,” Roy said, gazing up at the nearest stall, which advertised the gustatory siren known as funnel cakes.

“Tempted,” Ed said.  “But like I said—I think if I go home, and I’m just hopped up on sugar without even having tried to eat any real dinner, Al’s gonna kill me in cold blood, giant squishy cat or no.”

“Mm,” Roy said.  “We could always come back after the corn dogs so that you’ve at least had something like dinner.  Would that exempt you on a technicality?”

“Gives me so much faith in our government when you talk like that,” Ed said.  “Well, hell.  Guess it’s worth a shot, if I’m still hungry.”

“I have never known you to be anything else,” Roy said.

Ed made a face at him, but—extremely unfortunately—he had a point.

After several more minutes of concentrated searching, Ed was beginning to doubt the integrity of his olfactory recognition, because it was starting to look like this failure of a fair didn’t even have corn dogs.  Maybe he’d just been so invested in the prospect that he’d vividly imagined the smell; maybe he’d been so desperate to have an end goal after having the prospect of the original date swept out from underneath him that he’d projected it all along.

“Hey,” Roy said.  “Giving up isn’t like you.”

“I didn’t,” Ed said.  “And haven’t.  And won’t.  I just—am—trying to be fucking realistic here, since one of us should be, and how did you even get that idea, anyway?”

“You have always been extraordinarily expressive,” Roy said.  “You have a better handle on it now, but I learned your tells very early, don’t forget.”

“Like I fucking could if I wanted to,” Ed said.  “You know that the more you bring that up, the weirder this gets, right?”

Roy blinked at him.  Yeah.  Nothing weird about Roy in plainclothes, without the tie that had been keeping his throat and his collarbones demurely off display, blinking down at Ed flanked on one side by the blue horse in his right arm and on the left by a stuffed giraffe.

“Ex-coworkers reconnect all the time,” Roy said.  “Why is it weird?”

“How the hell would you know?” Ed asked.  “Everyone who works for you now has been working for you since—I don’t know.  Ever.”  Roy smiled slightly, but there was an unsettling bitterness to it.  A part of Ed really didn’t want to leave him time to put that into words; and another part of Ed completely failed to batten down the blundering rant impulse that had gotten him into hot water so many millions of times before.  “Everyone except for me, anyway, so I’m probably your first ever ex-coworker, and obviously I’m not statistically average in pretty much any measurement of coworkers, so you don’t have any logical basis to decide if it’s weird or not.”

Roy blinked a little more.

Then he said, “I suppose we weren’t technically coworkers in any case, given that that would imply that we were working directly together, rather than that you were working for me, so linguistically speaking, the whole thing is moot.”

Ed stared.

Roy blinked again.

“Could you just not talk about the fact that I used to be at your fucking beck and call while we’re trying to get along?” Ed said.

“We’re succeeding at getting along,” Roy said.  “And forgive me if my memory is giving out in my advanced age, but—Ed, when in your life were you ever at anyone’s beck and call, least of all mine?”

“That’s beside the point,” Ed said.

Roy, the horse, and the giraffe all looked moderately distressed.  “What is the point?”

“I don’t know anymore,” Ed said, “but I’m a hundred percent sure that that’s not it.”

Roy looked at him.

Ed looked back.

Roy looked off into the middle distance, sighed heavily, very slowly started to shake his head, and then paused.

“Oh,” he said.  He gestured with the elbow currently hooked around the giraffe.  “There they are.”

Ed turned, trying to ignore the way his heart was banging in his throat like he’d just dodged out of a firefight, and laid eyes on a little booth with a sign reading CORN DOGS.

“I guess it’s not that it’s weird,” he said.  “It’s just—if we’re going to try to do something different, then… maybe we can let go of what we were to each other a long time ago.  You know?”

“I get the sense that both of us,” Roy said, slowly, looking up at the long-awaited sign without moving a single centimeter towards it; “have… improved, substantially, over the years, at allowing the past to influence our choices without letting it define us.”

“Crap,” Ed said.  It came out a little strangled, which wasn’t too surprising given that his heart had shimmied up into his throat and stuck there while his stomach dropped.  “Here we go.  I can’t even tell if you just agreed with me or not.”

He hadn’t yet started to work his way up to a full-fledged pout about it before Roy stepped forward—close enough to make Ed’s heart start throbbing where it had fixed in his throat; close enough that Ed had to tilt his head back ever so slightly to maintain the irritated eye contact.

“I agree with your impulse,” Roy said, and that word had never once been sexy before in Ed’s life, and he hated Roy Mustang with his entire being for ruining perfectly normal words forever; “but I think that in our particular case, it’s important not to lose sight of our personal history altogether.”

“Still don’t know what the hell you just said,” Ed said.  It was the truth, although this time it was more because Roy was gazing down at him with the impossibly deep-dark eyes and less because the words themselves were quite as convoluted.

“Mm,” Roy said.  He took one step closer, and then there were so precious few inches separating them that Ed couldn’t take the deep breath he desperately needed for fear of knocking their chests together, and he had to fist his hands at his sides to keep them from sliding up the front of Roy’s twice-damned waistcoat, whether or not there would be stuffed animals impeding his movement as he did.  “Let me phrase it a different way.”

Ed swallowed.  He’d never met a challenge he’d backed down from.  “Shoot.”

Roy shuffled the stuffed animals into one arm to free up his right hand, which made Ed’s spine tighten in anticipation all on its own; and then he raised his arm and grazed just the tips of his fingers underneath Ed’s chin.

There was still definitely, absolutely a fucking fair going on around them, but Ed could only hear the ambient chaos of it distantly—like a thick glass wall had imposed itself between him and Roy and the whole rest of the damn universe.  Like they were ensconced here, surrounded by crystal, isolated in safety and almost-silence as the world flittered on without them.  Like whatever it was they said in those stupid books that Al liked, which had no factual content and no diagrams—like fucking time stood still.

Ed never wanted to think those words again, but it was too late to take them back now.

Roy curled his fingers and extended his hand just a fraction—so that his knuckles brushed at the soft skin of Ed’s throat, and holy shit—

The bastard leaned down painstakingly slowly, and his eyes only left Ed’s for a half a second—only for long enough to flick downward and fix on Ed’s mouth for one long, smoldering moment before he looked back up.

He drew in, and in; and Ed’s skin caught fire; and Ed’s heart hammered against the back of his sternum so hard that he couldn’t imagine any damn scenario where his ribcage didn’t crack in half under the strain—

Roy stopped still with his lips about an inch away from Ed’s—close enough to feel his breath; close enough that the faintest whiff of fancy-ass cologne drifted off of him; close enough that if he hadn’t angled his head, their noses would’ve crashed together; close enough that Ed could enumerate individual eyelashes, and the way the corners of Roy’s eyes crinkled as he smirked was utterly unmistakable.

“So,” Roy said.  “Is this ‘weird’?”

Ed swallowed hard, which was twice as awkward because Roy probably felt it, given how close his fingers were to Ed’s esophagus.

“I mean,” Ed forced out.  “It—I mean—maybe ‘weird’ isn’t… isn’t necessarily bad.”

“Ah,” Roy said.  “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

Ed—because he was, still and always, Edward Elric, the world’s premiere piece of shit—stuck his tongue out.

Instead of jerking back like he’d been burned, though, which would have been the rational response, Roy just… laughed.  And then glanced down at Ed’s mouth again, and then raised his gaze agonizingly slowly, and then arched an eyebrow, and then said—

“May I?”

“Shit,” Ed said.  “You’d better.  You’d better.  I don’t know how you can walk around here looking like you fucking do without the cops arresting you for public indecency or over-the-top attractiveness or disturbing the peace or all of the goddamn abo—”

Roy kissed him again, which was ninety percent blessing and ten percent cataclysm, if Ed could trust his math.

He usually could.

Despite the fact that Roy used a lot less tongue this time, the intensity hadn’t faded a fucking whit—he was just so present; just so attentive and wholehearted and raw and real and there—

Ed hadn’t seen Roy stripped down and sincere too many times.  Roy was smart and driven and dangerous, which meant he was careful all the time.  Putting his emotions out there at any given moment could make him vulnerable, and he had way too much to lose to risk being seen in public for who and what he really was.

Except tonight.

Tonight, he was the Flame Alchemist only insofar as he was setting Ed on fire from the inside.

He’d probably used that line on a ton of people over the years—ordinarily Ed would’ve thought a ton of girls by default, but the man who was kissing him had displayed nothing that remotely resembled hesitation about putting up an invitation note in a gay bar and then following through.  And obviously Ed’s experience in the department was limited to the recent revelations on the Ferris wheel, so he didn’t know if there were significant differences in technique required depending on the gender identity of the person you were making out with, but one thing he knew for sure was that the man who was kissing him was goddamn good at it.

Roy kissed like he had nothing to lose tonight—or nothing he wasn’t ready to sacrifice.  He kissed like the past couldn’t catch them, couldn’t pen them in and pin them down—just for now.  Just this once.

He kissed like he really, really wanted to remember how it felt.

Which was convenient, in a way, since Ed did, too.

It was a softer thing—gentler.  Expansive instead of just exploratory.

And it felt so damn nice that Ed could barely remember what they’d been talking about; could hardly understand why he’d wanted anything other than… this, really.  More or less all the time.

When Roy drew back, the bastard was smiling.  It looked like—but wasn’t quite—the one with the hint of mischief; there was a bit of something… else.  Something slightly more tentative than amusement.

“What’s that face for?” Ed asked.

Roy wiped the smile away in an instant, the better to blink at him innocently.  “I’m sorry.  It’s the only face I have.”

“Get bent,” Ed said.  “You know what I mean.  Have you ever gone more than two hours in your whole life without feeling smug about something?”

“This isn’t smugness,” Roy said, which did not, in fact, answer the question.  “Or—don’t look at me like that.  It’s not only smugness.  I’m… glad.  That it wasn’t so weird as to put you off.  I very much enjoyed it, and I’d quite like to do it again, so it’s a relief to know that you might not be opposed to that idea.”

Ed stared at him.  Ed could feel the heat of the blood creeping up into his cheeks, likely hellbent on suffusing his entire face, and the knowledge that he was powerless to stop it fired it faster and hotter and worse.

“‘Opposed’?” he said.  “Holy shit, Mustang.  Do people who are opposed to kissing you usually wring the life out of your damn collar like that?”

“You have always been an anomaly,” Roy said.  “I try not to assume.”

“Fuck you,” Ed said.  “That sounds like a pet name.”

Roy looked scandalized, which at least was progress.  “What?  No, it doesn’t.”  Before Ed could protest that any linguist in the world would totally have his back just this once, Roy went on, waving both hands around the stuffed animals as he went.  “I would call you far better pet names than ‘anomaly’.  How could you even think that?  It’s an insult to my—”

He stopped.

He blinked.

He breathed.

And then he said, “Ah… never mind,” which was Roy-speak for I just fucked up so bad.

“To your what?” Ed said.  “Your intelligence?  Your thesaurus?  Your undying devotion to the sound of your own voice?”

“My…” Roy managed to raise one hand around the plush horse so that he could cough delicately into his fist, and then he muttered something that sounded suspiciously like inner romantic.

Ed’s first thought was that this honesty policy was utterly magnificent.  His second thought was that it was a fucking nightmare.

“Uh,” he said.

“Well,” Roy said, much too brightly.  “Corn dog?”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “Let’s do it.”

That sounded… kind of way more like something else than it should have—as a direct result of the context, though, which meant that it was Roy’s fault, which meant that Ed’s face shouldn’t have been firing bright red again, because it wasn’t like he’d alluded to anything on purpose.

He turned on his heel as swiftly as he could without unbalancing the automail and face-planting on the pavement, and then he made a beeline for the long-awaited booth.

It was really hard to hear a specific set of footsteps behind him over the immense amount of sounds around them, but he could almost sort of sense that Roy was following, and a glance out of the corner of his eye confirmed it.

A second glance out of the corner of his eye confirmed that Roy had gathered both stuffed animals in one arm again in order to free a hand for fishing out his wallet.

“Hey,” Ed said.  “You—nah.  Don’t.  This whole stupid thing was my fault, and I already made you blow a lot of money on the games and stuff.”

“The original agreement,” Roy said, “was for me to buy you dinner.  We got a bit tangled up in the particulars, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t finish the job.”

Ed could think of about a hundred-thousand reasons, but all of them were starting to disintegrate like wet paper as he managed to get lost in Roy’s impossibly appealing eyes for the umpteenth time this evening.

“Fine,” Ed said.  “But don’t you dare say I owe you one.”

If Ed hadn’t been focusing so hard on Roy’s face, he probably wouldn’t have noticed the flicker of an unidentifiable expression that passed across it before Roy fixed the perfectly neutral smile back in place.  “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Good,” Ed said, which was better than hazarding a guess as to what he’d be dreaming about, tonight and for the foreseeable future.

As they inched towards the head of the line, the smell of delicious, deadly, miserably unhealthy fried goodness washed over Ed even more thoroughly than before, and he glanced at Roy again.

“Those smell real good,” he said, because a nice dose of statement of the obvious had never hurt anyone.  “Do you want one?  C’mon.  Just this once.  Life is short.”

There was something about Roy’s smile that cued Ed in to the fact that he’d won even before Roy said, “And sometimes wonderful.  I… just this once.  All right.”

The corn dogs were, unsurprisingly, totally overpriced, although at least Ed’s tasted exactly like it should have—too-hot, colossally greasy, and utterly delicious.

Besides, watching Roy trying to lean his torso forward and eat a corn dog slathered in ketchup without spilling any of it on his nice clothes—and trying to walk at the same time—was fucking priceless.

Fortunately for Roy’s solitary set of fancy clothes, their wearer was also extremely adept at dodging running children and sidling clear of jabbing elbows, and he managed to make it through his entire corndog with his outfit unscathed.

Ed didn’t.  But that was what alchemy was for.  He was damn good at removing ketchup stains by now.

“Hey,” he said, sizing up a very prominent one he’d just graced his shirtfront with.  “Cover me with the toys for a second, so that I don’t freak out any children.”

“They’d probably love it,” Roy said, but he’d instantly stepped in and shifted both arms to hold the stuffed animals in a way that mostly shielded Ed’s hands from the public view.  “I think it’s the parents you’d have to worry about.”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “Usually is.”

He clapped his hands together gently—not that anyone would probably be able to distinguish the sound from any of the rest of the commotion—and then touched his fingertips to his shirt.  Extracting all of the ketchup from the fibers of his shirt left him with an amorphous blob, so he realigned the array in his head to change its state of matter, too.

Alchemy with two feeling hands had been seriously weird at first—it resonated differently; and the surge of it had circulated through the metal in a way that felt faster somehow—but Ed Elric was nothing if not adaptable, and he’d made his peace.

He’d also made a small ball of crystalline ketchup, which was currently resting in the palm of his left hand.

He crossed over to the nearest trash bin and dumped it before it could change its mind about its structural integrity and send him unceremoniously back to square one.

“You could charge money to let people to watch you perform alchemy,” Roy said.

It had been a hell of a night, and Ed’s brain was still pinwheeling through the chemical components of ketchup, and alchemy just always felt so damn right that he forgot to reinstall his filter.  “I dunno, I think that’s a niche fetish.”

He choked on his next breath as he realized what he’d just fucking said to his ex-C.O. and current-maybe-something.

But Roy—backlit by the flashing bulbs around another game that would’ve tried and failed to scam them, with the shifting crowd of people blurring just behind him—clutched the plush animals a tiny bit closer and laughed from deep within the center of his chest.

Bastard.  He must’ve known that would make Ed’s throat tighten up and exacerbate the whole choking problem even more.

“I’d bet it would have a broader audience than you think,” Roy said, so apparently at least Ed was successfully downplaying the fact that he’d very nearly just suffered the most pathetically disappointing death in the history books again.  “You’re… it’s so… natural to you.  You make it look like an art form that no one’s ever experienced before.”

Ed eyed him.  “I just pulled ketchup out of my fancy clothes.”

“I know,” Roy said.  “And it was breathtaking.”

This time, Ed just barely managed to swallow the No, that was you.  “I—whatever.  Are we gonna blow this joint, or what?”

When he got home, he was going to make a list of the words he needed to excise from his vocabulary when he was talking to Roy, for fear that they’d send his brain in a vast variety of unfortunate directions if he spoke them while he was looking at that stupid bastard’s perfect face.  ‘Blow’ was going near the top of that list.

“I will confess that I’m curious,” Roy said, but he’d started to direct that fake-lazy stroll of his towards an archway that looked like an exit, “as to precisely what the ‘or what’ would constitute if we stayed.”

“Teacup ride,” Ed said.

Roy grimaced.  “Isn’t it fascinating that a combination of such otherwise harmless words can be such an effective threat?”

“I dunno if I’d say that was a threat,” Ed said.  “Maybe just a… really meaningful suggestion.”

They both paused.

They looked at each other.

Neither of them had to point out that what Ed had said bore an impression of Roy’s semi-intentional training like a warm wax seal.

“Well,” Roy said eventually, “if the mechanical diversion from hell is the alternative, I am very much in favor of leaving.”

Despite the fact that Ed had, in fact, been the one who had brought up departure, a part of him recoiled from the prospect.

After a second’s consideration, he figured out why—he didn’t want this night to end.  More specifically still, the fair had unfolded around them into some sort of alternate, altered version of the universe where the two of them could not just coexist, but genuinely enjoy each other’s company.  This was a place where they could shoot the shit and laugh together and make out on the fucking Ferris wheel in front of a bunch of Central City’s wide-eyed children, but what happened after they walked out of that archway and returned to their regular world?

It didn’t really matter, though, did it?  They were going to have to leave at some point, and Ed was going to have to find out.  Might as well be now.

Ed took a breath, squared his shoulders, and slapped on a smile.  Sometimes that was all you had.

“Yeah,” he said.  “I don’t think I want to understand what tea feels like tonight.  There’s some stuff it’s better not to empathize with.”

Roy was looking over at the archway, and—as Ed had come to expect over the years—his face was completely unrevealing.  Ed watched the eyebrows—usually it was the eyes or the eyebrows where the clues were, if you looked close enough.

Except that then Roy turned directly towards him and caught him staring, and his face caught fire again, and then the eyebrows were arching in an unfairly wicked sort of delight, and that wasn’t the same thing at all.

“Shall we?” Roy said.

“Better’n standing around and talking about it like we’ve been doing,” Ed said, and that was that.

Nothing cosmic shifted as they stepped out through the arch and onto the unadorned street again, ushered back out into reality by a spill of popcorn kernels and the slowly-fading noise.

It took Ed’s senses half a block to adjust to how quiet the rest of Central was in comparison, and how dimly-lit, and how not-full-of-raucous-shouting and stuff.

“Wow,” he said.  “It’s weird when all of a sudden you can hear yourself think again.”

“Extremely,” Roy said.  “We’ll need to take a right up here, but we’re nearly there.  In retrospect, it’s pretty remarkable that I found parking anywhere at all, given that half of Central City seems to have a very different opinion of the teacup ride than I do.”

It took Ed’s brain several more steps to remember why Roy had had to park near here in the first place, and that neither of them had ever actually intended to go to this thing.

Casting back for an image of the way that Roy had looked settled down on the cushions in the foyer of the fancy restaurant, watch on his knee and eyes impossibly magnetic in the low light, reminded Ed of something else.

“Oh,” he said.  “Shit.  Here, before I forget.”  He hauled Roy’s tie out of his pocket and tried to smooth out some of the wrinkles with his hands.  “Sorry, it got kinda… bunched.”

“Perfectly all right,” Roy said, which was bullshit; and then, “Give it here?”, which at least was straightforward enough to invoke Ed’s automatic obedience response.

He expected Roy to just drape it back around his own neck and call it a day or something.  Instead, Roy contemplated the alligator whose head protruded just above Ed’s shoulder, reached out, slung the tie around its neck, and gracefully wrapped the thing up into that fancy little knot again, tugging on the thinner tail to adjust it until the alligator looked like it was just about ready to head off to an upscale dinner party.

“There,” Roy said.  “A dignified gentleman who would bite one’s face off at the first opportunity.  Reminds me of work.”

“It looks better on you anyway,” Ed said, and then he mentally smacked himself across the face so hard that it existentially bruised.  “Um—”

“Thank you,” Roy said calmly.

Roy reached out, loosened the knot of the tie, lifted it up, and looped it around his own neck so that it hung slightly askew.  It made him look rumpled and casual and maybe like he’d just finished something and hastily thrown his clothes back on, and Ed was extremely grateful for the dim streetlamps that probably masked the fact that he was flushing hot again at nothing more than the thought.

“It’s not too much further,” Roy said, and the part of Ed that never wanted this night to end was increasingly outweighing the part that was relieved.

Inevitably, of course, they turned the corner, and Roy’s gaze settled on one of the half-dozen seemingly-identical black cars parked against the curb, and Ed’s heart sunk until it had settled near his pancreas.

Maybe if it stayed there and set up shop lower down in his torso, it would stop leaping into his throat and strangling the breath right out of him at the most inconvenient possible times.  Maybe this was a good thing.  Maybe if he just stopped letting it rule him, stopped letting it pull him, stopped letting it lead—

All of the rest of him knew his brain was smarter, but the damn heart won out every single time.

Roy leaned into his stride advantage right at the last second so that he’d reach the car first, and then he unlocked it, opened the passenger side door, and gestured.  “After you.”

Ed eyed him thoroughly to make sure that Roy knew that he wasn’t getting away with anything, but then Ed got in the car anyway, because he wasn’t a cretin or a bumpkin or any of the other things that people probably said just because he thought social niceties and small talk were pointlessly illogical and a colossal waste of time.

Roy closed his door, sauntered around the hood of the car, settled into the driver’s seat, deposited his stuffed animals in the backseat, and then… didn’t put his keys anywhere near the ignition.

“That was,” Roy said, “without a doubt, the most fun I have ever had walking back to my car.”

“You sure you’re going to be okay driving?” Ed asked.  “This is only the second time in your life that you’ve had fun, right?  Might be overwhelming.”

“I’ll do my best,” Roy said.  Then he paused.  “Would you… I don’t suppose you’d… like to do this again sometime.”

“What?” Ed said.  “Walk to your car?”

“Yes,” Roy said.  He looked completely serious for a long second before the corners of his mouth twitched.  “Although if you’re not… violently opposed to the idea, I was thinking that perhaps next time, we could actually have the dinner first.”

So much for Ed’s heart keeping itself safely clear of his respiratory system: he was choking on it again.

“Um,” he forced out.  “I—” The barricade of stuffed alligator and cat and bunny that he had imposed between himself and Roy wasn’t helping as much as he’d hoped.  “I mean—if you—want to.  If you’re sure you want to.  If you’re not just being nice.”

“I’m never nice,” Roy said.  “Just ask Lieutenant Havoc.”

“I thought we were bein’ honest tonight,” Ed said.

Roy’s face did a very strange almost-crumple thing that resolved itself into a slightly fragile-looking smile.  “You… really think—”

“Shut up,” Ed said before this could spiral any further and become the kind of natural disaster where you had to call in firefighters and hazmat crews and who the hell knew who else.  “Just—okay.  Yes.  Sure.  Love to.  Tell me when.  But we’re splitting the fucking bill.”

“All right,” Roy said, and this smile looked much more familiar, because it was being slowly devoured by a stupid smirk.

“All right,” Ed said.  “Are you gonna sit here and gloat, or are you gonna drive?”

Under significant duress, Ed might have admitted that the smirk was more palatable when it was, in turn, being subverted by the beginnings of a laugh.  “Can’t I do a bit of each?”

“No,” Ed said.  “You know where our place is because you not-so-accidentally kept tabs on us, right?”

“Ah,” Roy said, but at least he was turning the damn keys, now, and the motor rumbled in answer; “yes.”

“Dandy,” Ed said.  “Let’s go.”

Ed wasn’t sure whether to be unsettled or not by the fact that Roy had continued stalking him and Al after Ed had left his employ and all that.  On the one hand, it seemed counterproductive to what should have been everyone’s ultimate goal, i.e. the Elric brothers finally getting to live something remotely like a normal life.  On the other hand, it was currently really damn useful.  And on a third hand—which Ed was imagining as one of the spare automail ones back on a shelf in Winry’s workshop in Resembool that she hadn’t yet convinced herself to send to the scrapyard—it sort of vaguely sideways-implied that maybe Roy had been thinking about Ed more than he probably should’ve been all this goddamn time.

Despite himself, Ed kind of liked that thought.  Felt pretty equivalent, all told.

“Well,” Roy said as they both looked out the window at the apartment building for an awkward second, “thank you for an evening that was extremely enjoyable in none of the ways that I originally expected.”

“Right back at you,” Ed said.

Ed looked up at the street-facing window of their kitchen—yellow light poured out.  It couldn’t have been all that much later than nine, but it felt like he’d lived a geologic age between setting out for the restaurant and now.

He swallowed, ran his tongue across his lip, and said, “Is this my last chance to ask you stuff while you’re being completely honest?”

A glance confirmed that Roy was grimacing, which would have been answer enough even before he said, “I… hope not, but from a purely realistic perspective—”

“That’s what I thought,” Ed said.  He knew a thing or two about coping mechanisms, and staying busy, and building walls.  He knew how long it took to tear them down.  “So—hey.  You ever get tired of being clever all the time?”

Roy smiled.  Broken brick.  “Often.”

“You don’t have to be,” Ed said.  “Clever, I mean.  Not with me.”

“I know,” Roy said, very softly.

Roy had one hand on the steering wheel even though he’d killed the engine.  Ed had two arms full of oversized stuffed animals, and it had just gotten real quiet.

Ed’s heart had taken up residence in his throat again, and it was flinging words out into the ether without even pretending to ask his brain’s permission.

“Are you happy?” he asked.

“No,” Roy said.  He drew a breath, and it shook a little, and Ed felt terrified and thrilled and fucking powerful, but in the way that was too much to carry.  “But I think it’s my own fault.”

“You asked me if I was lonely,” Ed said.  “Because I answered your note.  But you’re the one who left it in the first place.  Are you?”

Roy laughed dryly and ran the hand that wasn’t gripping the steering wheel up over his face.  “I thought that much was obvious.”

“Doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear you say it,” Ed said.  “You know how I feel about empirical evidence.”

“Let’s put it this way,” Roy said.  “It has been a humiliatingly long time since I have felt as definitively not-lonely as I felt tonight.”

With Ed’s heart jammed up in his esophagus again, the way it heated at comments like that was utterly unmistakable.

“Fuck you,” he said.  A geologic age apparently had not changed him in the least, which was slightly disappointing.  “You know—I mean, you know everything; you always know everything, so you—know—”

This smile was gentler, and Ed’s heart continued to warm until he was pretty sure it was going to set him on fire in another minute.

“Last question,” he got out.  “Do—do you want to kiss me again?”

The glint in Roy’s eyes seared some of the gentleness away, but Ed still liked this one.  Probably too much for his own good.  “Yes.  Definitely.”

“Cool,” Ed said.  “Um—”

Roy’s hand lifted off of the steering wheel and extended towards Ed, and Ed just couldn’t help it—couldn’t help leaning in towards him, tilting his body across the gap between the seats, close enough for Roy’s fingertips to graze up over his cheek and toy with the tiny hairs above his ear—

“Is now all right?” Roy murmured, like there could possibly be any fucking doubt in this universe or any other.

“Asshole,” Ed said, and he shifted, but then his stupid traitor of a heart shuddered again, and he thought—

Wild things.  Stupid things.  The kinds of things that always squirmed up and out of him before he could bite them back.

“I’m not gonna make you happy,” he said.  “I just—that’s not how it works, and I’m a pain in the ass at the best of times anyway, and I don’t know how to do any of this shit, and if you… if we go into this with you thinking I’m somehow going to fix everything—”

“I won’t ask that of you,” Roy said.  His eyelashes were so low, and really thick, but his eyes were flicking back and forth like there was newsprint on the back side of Ed’s.  “You… have a way of fixing things without trying—and without noticing, fairly frequently—but I won’t… You don’t owe me anything.  And I don’t expect anything.  I won’t ask you for anything except to give it a chance.”

Ed tried one last time to swallow his heart down.  Fucker didn’t budge.

“I think we’re past that part,” he said.

“Oh,” Roy said—a breath against Ed’s lips, and his eyes flickered up, and the corners of his mouth quirked, and he was just so— “I’d hoped.”

Ed darted his right hand out into the dwindling space between them and wrapped his fingers around the knot of Roy’s tie, which felt every bit as forbidden and forward and delectable as he’d wanted it to.

He tugged, and Roy got the memo in a tearing hurry, and then they’d both angled their heads this time to facilitate an ideal mouth-mashing scenario, and Ed just really liked kissing, as he was finding out.  Or at least he really liked kissing Roy.

Did every kiss have a different character?  Ed felt suddenly like he’d been skipping lessons his whole life, and now he’d landed himself in the exam room without any goddamn clue what to try to write against Roy’s mouth with his; like he was fumbling blind and just fervently hoping that luck and logic would drag him through.

It felt good, though—it was lighting up nerve endings that he hadn’t realized he had, that had hardly ever existed, that had hung out under the radar for so long that they were glowing now that it was finally their time to shine.  Mouths were hyper-fucking-sensitive, and Roy was testing and touching and tantalizing every last centimeter of his—

But slowly, this time.  Softly.  This was a different thing than the last two—a different experience; a different message; a different meaning.  This one was careful, and unhurried, and tender or something, and Roy’s mouth just kept sliding against his, light and leisurely, like they had all the time in the damn world, like there was nothing else out there.  Like none of the rest of it mattered, now or ever; like this was it.

Like Roy didn’t care if Ed still didn’t know what the hell he was doing.  Like Roy didn’t even care if there was a tomorrow on the horizon, because they had this right now, and that was the only thing in the universe he wanted.

Had humanity been communicating like this since the dawn of their species, and Ed had just never noticed because he’d never tried it?  It was like a code—like semaphore with your mouth, and he’d just never learned, and people had been keeping secrets from him all this time—

Upon further reflection, maybe semaphore wasn’t the best comparison.  Ed wasn’t a semaphore expert, but he’d studied all of the methods of military communication back when he was twelve and idealistic and sometimes thought that being a good and educated and prepared soldier might be the clearest route to his goals and desperately wanted to impress certain people whom he wouldn’t name but who might currently have had their tongues in his mouth.  The point was—he was almost positive that you couldn’t make somebody’s guts boil with a quick twist of a flag the way that Roy had just done by threading his fingers deeper into Ed’s hair and curling them tighter until his scalp tingled.

The sensation would have fired his blood all on its own, but the intention of it—the implication that Roy wanted him closer when they were already pressed together like this; that Roy couldn’t keep his hands off of Ed if he tried; that Roy just couldn’t fucking get enough—

Ed forgot to breathe, which he figured was a forgivable offense when it was only the third kiss of your damn life.  It ended with him choking, though, and then pulling back, and then gasping a little, and then flushing to the roots of his hair—which Roy had to be able to feel, because his hand was still buried in it.

“Sorry,” Ed coughed out.  “Mechanics of it are… I’m working on it.”

Roy was attempting to extract his fingers, which was probably a good thing overall, since Ed eventually needed to get out of the car and go home, but which nonetheless struck a chord of thrumming disappointment in the pit of his stomach.  The way that Roy’s fingertips brushed against his cheek as Roy withdrew his hand helped a little.  “I… wouldn’t worry about it.  You’re doing brilliantly so far.”

“Like hell,” Ed said.  “Do you practice this stuff?  Is that it?”

“Not lately,” Roy said, “but in a manner of speaking, I suppose so?  It’s… well, like any technical skill, the more you do it, the better it gets.”

“So where’s the rulebook?” Ed said.  “Or the—instruction manual.  Or—somebody’s gotta have something.”

Roy raised his eyebrows, and the smirk-grin was back.  There was something utterly and unfairly charming about the way that the genuine delight of the grin undermined the smug bastardliness.  They tempered each other until the whole effect was just sort of… cute.

Fuck.

“Nothing worth reading,” Roy said.  “At least that I’ve found.  A lot of it is just interpreting cues and improvising—like a fight.  You’re doing fine.”

“A second ago I was brilliant,” Ed said, “and now I’m just ‘fine’.  I see how it is.”

The grin was winning out over the smirk now.  “You know very well that that wasn’t how I meant in the least.”

“Whatever,” Ed said.  “Don’t think I believe you anyway.”

All grin.  Roy looked so much younger with it lighting up his eyes.  “I’m telling the truth today, remember?”

“Better be ready to prove it,” Ed said.  It felt like the kitchen window was burning a hole in the back of his head—was Al watching the car?  He wouldn’t be able to tell whose it was from here, but Al was making very good use of his recently-recovered eyes, and he’d be eagle-eyeing them as much as he could so that he could glean as much information as possible without having to pry it out of Ed.  “Um—next time.  Y’know.”

The grin softened.  So did Ed’s stupid, stupid heart.  “Next time.”

“Okay,” Ed said, running his hand across the car door behind him in search of the handle.  It probably looked ridiculous, but he couldn’t take his idiot eyes off of idiot Roy.  “I’d better go give Al our spoils of war here.  I’ll, um—see you later.  G’night.”

“Goodnight, Ed,” Roy said.

Ed cracked the door open and took off before he could talk himself into staying in that car and necking with Roy until they both passed out or something.

When he worked their ornery lock open with his keys and peeked in, Al was sitting on the couch in such a calculatedly relaxed-looking way—with a cup of tea that wasn’t steaming in one hand and a notebook in the other, a stack of textbooks next to him on the couch—that Ed knew for a fact that he’d been waiting up.  There was an extremely high probability that he’d been pacing for the last half-hour, and then staring out the window once the car pulled up, trying to pinpoint any and all possible details about Ed’s stupid date.

Al made a point of looking up slowly and smiling broadly, which completely confirmed it.  He hadn’t quite figured out how to fake surprise yet.

“Hi, Brother!” he said.  “You look… what are those?”

“They’re for you,” Ed said, tossing the cat at him first and then crossing over to set the alligator and the bunny down where they could lean against the textbook towers and chill out.  Those guys had gone on a pretty long marathon with him, after all.  “What do I look like?”

“Happy,” Al said, taking the cat up in both hands and bouncing it on his knee with such absolute and unrepentant glee that Ed’s heart just about exploded.  “Thank you!”

Ed kicked off his shoes and then tried to shepherd them into the corner so that Al wouldn’t trip on them tomorrow.  “You bet.”

“Wow,” Al said, contemplating the cat in his arms.  “Délicia has really changed their business model from what they originally advertised.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Ed said, starting down the hall towards his bedroom so that he could take this stupid too-tight shirt off once and for all.  “Never got past the foyer.  But the fair’s on—you and I can go back tomorrow if you want, but the cat’s from the darts game.  Roy had to get it.”

There was a long pause.  Ed stared at his closet and regretted… well, not quite everything.  But a lot of stuff.

“Back up,” Al said.  “How did you going out on a blind date at a nice restaurant turn into you winning prizes at the fair with Roy?”

There was another pause.  Ed grimaced at the closet, which did not appear to be particularly sympathetic tonight.

“Oh, my gosh,” Al said.  His voice was coming closer as he strode down their narrow little hall to poke his head into Ed’s bedroom.  “No way.  No way.  You mean he left that note, and you replied to it not knowing that it was him, and he showed up not knowing that it was you, and you ended up going on a date with Roy?”

“It wasn’t a date,” Ed said.  He wanted to ball the shirt up and hurl it into the closet to divert some of the nervous energy, but Al would be scandalized, so he just had to stand there holding it like some sort of clothes-obsessed statue.  “Or—it wasn’t at the start, and then it… sort of was, and—I mean, if I’d had any idea I was gonna end up on a date with Mustang—not that it was a—”

“Well, it’s about time,” Al said.

Ed stared at him.

Al stared back.

“What?” Al said.  “Have you seen the way you two talk to each other?  Not literally, obviously, since you can’t see yourself, and also you can’t technically see people talking, although the body language is actually a whole second volume of evidence to—”

It took all of Ed’s remaining strength to say, very softly, “What the fuck?”

“Never mind,” Al said.  “So are you guys dating now?  Are you going to go out again?”

Ed had to resist the urge to clutch the stupid shirt to his chest as protection this time.  “Um… I… guess so.  It sort of sounded like…”

“Finally,” Al said.  He hugged the stuffed cat to his chest with his elbows to free his hands, which he pressed together like some sort of benediction aimed at the indifferent sky.  “I’m going to write the Six Points a thank-you note.”

“Are you feeling okay?” Ed asked.

“So much better than okay,” Al said.  “Are you?”

Ed looked down at the shirt, reached out to grab a hanger for it, wrangled it on, and stuck it back in the closet.

“You know,” he said, “I think… yeah.  I think I am.”

Al squeezed the giant stuffed cat and beamed.

Mr. Edward Elric
41 Hyacinth Street, Apt. 3A
Central City, Amestris

May 25th, 1918
Office of Brigadier General Roy Mustang

Dear Edward,

It has come to my attention that you may be responsible for the rather sizable blue stuffed horse that has appeared in the General’s office.  It bears a significant resemblance in quality and size to the giraffe that mysteriously materialized on my doorstep very late on Saturday night.  More importantly, however, Brigadier General Mustang has spent a truly remarkable amount of time gazing at it this week instead of working.  He thinks I haven’t noticed.  (I hope that will amuse you.)

Since I suspect that repossession of the item would result in a disproportionate amount of whining instead of the desired outcome of renewed productivity, I think there may only be one logical solution that will restore his concentration and permit us to proceed in our ultimate goal of improving the government and this country:

Please take him out to dinner sometime soon.  The fate of Amestris may depend upon it.

I hope you find this amusing as well.  I’m sure I will as soon as he gets his act together.

Well, I hope.

All my best,
Capt. Riza Hawkeye