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It feels like he’s only just gone to bed when the alarm clock goes off.
Roy turns around and buries his face in Ed’s back, disregarding the potential for inhaling long, blond strands of hair. The room is cold, but Roy’s not ready to deal with that observation quite yet. Ed shifts, grunts softly and then turns around, one warm, muscled hand wrapping itself around Roy, drawing him into a sort of embrace.
“Mornin’,” Ed whispers into Roy’s neck, breathing softly against the skin. “You gonna put on coffee?”
“Yes,” Roy says, bracing himself for the inevitable chill that will set in him once he touches his bare feet to the hardwood flooring of their bedroom. He doesn’t have many words to spare in the morning, but this is what they have been doing every morning since they had made the final decision that Ed should move into his house five months ago.
He can’t help but hiss silently as he quickly makes his way over to the wardrobe where he gets both a pair of socks as well as the bathrobe someone had bought him a number of years ago and he had quickly formed a close bond with during chilly autumn mornings.
By the time he’s put on socks and managed to find his slippers that always seemed to vanish underneath either the night table or the bed throughout the night, Ed is out of bed and stumbling towards the bathroom to take a shower.
The staircase is in a good mood today and doesn’t try to trip Roy as he pads down the steps and into the kitchen where he starts with making coffee. Edward is usually the one who makes them breakfast, while Roy showers, and all together, this process of one putting on coffee, one making breakfast is working out quite well.
For a brief moment again, Roy wonders when this became so ordinary that he didn’t have to think for even a second about making breakfast because his brain had defaulted to Ed being a constant, reliable presence in his life.
“Shower’s yours,” Ed says from behind him and then Ed’s arms wrap around him, pulling him into a brief, yet tight hug before letting him go. “Go on; I’ll make food.”
“Thank you, my dear,” Roy says, pressing a kiss to the tip of Ed’s nose. The trek up the stairs goes surprisingly well, which only confirms Roy’s suspicions that today may either go above all expectations or straight to a special kind of hell not yet seen before.
He showers with military precision, not spending a second longer under the warm spray of water than strictly necessary. Their mornings are short enough; Roy wanting another moment of relief for his tense muscles isn’t worth sacrificing the opportunity to eat breakfast with the love of his life.
Getting dressed in the military uniform does something odd to Roy’s mindset; suddenly he feels just a little more awake and focused, with some feeling of hope that maybe today, something he writes his signature on can start the process of something positive for the citizens of Amestris. While he’s only a general, he still has a considerable amount of power. Besides, he’s next in the not-really-line-of-succession once Führer Grumman decides that he’s had enough.
When he’s back downstairs, the table has been wiped down with a damp cloth. Two plates, each with toast and scrambled eggs on them have been placed down along with a steaming cup of coffee and cutlery. The milk jug is standing next to Roy’s plate, while the small bowl they keep sugar in is right by Ed’s.
“What’s on your schedule today?” Roy asks as he sits down and pours milk into his coffee before stirring it thoughtfully. “Anything special?”
“I have to give two lectures, one before lunch and one after,” Ed mutters into his coffee and Roy smiles fondly at the vision in front of him. “I’ve got office hours at some point today. They’re super useless; nobody comes to talk to me at this time in the semester anyway, so ‘office hours’ is just the nice, fancy way of saying ‘paid free time’.”
“Spend it doing something worthwhile, then,” Roy says. “Perhaps call your Brother. I’m sure he’d love to hear from you. Especially about that theory you’ve been developing the past couple of days. He’d probably want to hear about it.”
"Yeah," Ed says, biting down on his toast. "Maybe I should. It'd be nice to hear from him. See how he and Winry are doing."
The rest of their breakfast is spent in silence and once their done, the dishes go in the sink to be dealt with when they're making dinner.
"We're running late," Roy calls up the stairs. "What is taking you so long?"
"I can't find my fucking glasses," Ed calls back and Roy sighs.
"They're on the bathroom counter, dear."
Thirty seconds later, Ed's half-running down the stairs and together they get dressed in heavy coats and scarves to combat the cool morning air outside.
The university is in the same direction as Central Command, and since they usually need to be at work around the same time, they walk together until the road splits in two, one leading to the university and one leading towards Central Command.
Ed's a professor at the university, teaching both introductory classes to alchemy, as well as more complex ones for students. Since his fame as the previous Fullmetal Alchemist is still known, he often gets offers to come to be a guest teacher at some of the schools in Central, and sometimes even outside. Sometimes, Ed takes these offers because he likes meeting children and teaching them the basics of something he enjoys him, while other times, he refers the school asking him to his brother since he simply just doesn't have the time within the time frame they had specified.
He doesn't like letting people down, and so he has never replied to a request for his visit with a firm 'no', but rather, 'I don't have any spare time at the moment, but here is my brother's contact information: he can do just a good a job as me', or 'is there another time that would fit better'.
Speaking of requests; when he walks into his office, there's a letter on his desk that looks like it might just be another one of those requests.
He sits down, stretches and reaches for the letter.
"I'm home," Ed calls as he slams the door shut behind him and drops the messenger back down on the floor right by the shoe rack. He toes off his shoes and pads into the kitchen, where Roy is cutting up vegetables. "What're you making?"
"Some dish Gracia told me about a couple of days ago when I picked up Elicia for her since she had a dentist appointment and couldn't make it to her school in time. It's a kind of stir-fry I haven't made before, but when I think back, I remember her making this a lot a couple of years ago."
"D'you need any help with that?" Ed asks. He likes cooking with Roy but hasn't really been all that good at it. Except for baking— both he and Al are good at that.
“If you could do the dishes from this morning and set the table, that’d be very nice of you,” Roy says and Ed reluctantly lets go to fetch the cloth to dampen it under the sink. He had very briefly run the cloth over the majority of the table after they had put away the things from their breakfast, but another wipe-down never seemed to hurt.
As Ed gets two plates out of the cupboard he wonders when this existence became so … normal to him. That he just instinctively knew where different things were, not in Roy’s house, but in their house. When he had stopped referring to the place where he resided as Roy’s place, and it had become, almost automatically ‘their place’. Where they lived together and had formed a schedule today, adjusted their lives to fit each other, despite the differences; how Roy brushed his teeth before breakfast, while Ed couldn’t ever imagine brushing before eating.
“How was your day?” Roy asks when they’re both served and seated. “Anything particularly noteworthy?”
“Got another letter,” Ed says through a mouthful of vegetables. “Some school in a town right north of Central wants me to come speak to their upper grades about how important education, and especially like university ‘n’ shit is and offer them some insight into what it would be like to study alchemy or chemistry or something like that.” He snorts. “Y’know, me, the kid that stayed in school through all the years, going to university— all the military-and-saving-the-world-shit never happened, I was always a goody-two-shoes, y’know.”
“Clearly,” Roy says drily. “So your day was nothing out of the ordinary, then.”
Ed looks at him and smiles a little. “Funny word,” he says. “Ordinary. Like this. It’s become ordinary.”
“Yes,” Roy says, reaching out a hand to take Ed’s. “And in my opinion, the best ordinary existence I could have asked for.” He laughs a little. “Not to mention the first.”