Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“So what you’re about to see here,” Ed says, “on a microscopic level, is that the structure of these molecules dictates the way that they respond to other molecules.  We’re gonna talk in just a second about what these ones look like in particular that makes them do what they do, and I’ll probably draw you a couple more real bad pictures.  So let’s just watch these guys for a sec.”

He lets the camera run as he pushes his chair back and adjusts the lighting on the unimpressive but perfectly functional pasta bowl that he’s using as a display area.  Just as he reaches up towards the camera to tilt it down, though, the viewfinder he flipped towards himself shows Roy stepping into the room and then directly into the frame.

Pertinently, Roy is humming softly.

Even more pertinently, Roy has both arms around the laundry basket, which he’s carrying over to deposit on top of the clothes hamper, which is where they usually rest it while they sort and sorta-match and sorta-fold what always seems like a truly unreasonable number of socks and stuff.

Even more pertinently than that, Roy is not currently wearing a shirt, and given how low his day-off sweatpants are clinging to his hips, Ed’s not sure if he’s currently wearing underwear either.

Ed clears his throat, albeit ever so slightly weakly.  “Roy.”

Roy glances up, blinking, and smiles at him, and says, “Yes, my d—” The blinking intensifies.  “Oh!  I’m sorry—I didn’t know you were filming.”

“Tryin’ to,” Ed says.  “We were talking about hydrophilic molecules.  Now YouTube is gonna flag this as softcore porn and ban me.”  He attempts to interpose a finger between the camera lens and Roy in the background that will cover Roy’s highly exposed hips, which look to Ed like the most obscene part of this whole picture—though it’s possible that that’s a matter of taste.  “Shoo.”

Roy laughs—richly, warmly, with his eyes squeezed shut and their corners crinkled and his shoulders shaking.  Ed’s fingertips tingle.  “Sorry!  Consider me shooed.”

He abandons the laundry and skedaddles out of the frame before Ed can generate any other comebacks.  Ed was planning to edit this bit out anyway, since it was originally intended to be a camera angle change.

“Right,” he says, successfully pointing the camera towards the bowl this time.  “So let’s take a look.”

As he’s patching the footage together that night and adding a couple of footnotes, though, he ends up watching that segment half a dozen times, flexing his right-hand fingers all the while.

It’s not like he has a whole shit-ton of followers or anything, but he has accumulated a lot more of them than he expected.  He knows by now that they don’t watch him because he’s the only person on YouTube trying to explain science stuff in a way that makes it fun, or because he’s the best at it—they watch him because he’s as straightforward as he can be, and he’s upfront with them.  He films in the kitchen sometimes; he did an episode using the bathroom sink.  He bleeps out his bad words.  He includes sped-up footage of the lousy cleanup parts under closing credits (he’s all the names in the closing credits, except for his camera operator, whose name is Tripod) and puts them to crappy elevator music.  He gets so excited sometimes that his voice goes into a higher register, which is embarrassing as shit—but the point is that he’s never tried to hide from them that he’s a real person.  He’s always suspected that that’s the part that his generous handful of viewers actually like.

Besides—he’s pretty open-minded about this whole gig, but if there’s anyone subscribed to him who would unfollow because he’s gay, then fuck them.  Better to cut that dead weight sooner rather than later.  That’s exactly what he left home to get away from.

He leaves Roy’s scandalous sweatpants in, starts it uploading, and works on the thumbnail while he waits.  Maybe he’ll lose subs; maybe he won’t.  Edward Elric doesn’t pander.  They’re going to get what they get.

Well—

“Hey,” he calls while his processing bar moves painstakingly slowly across the screen.  “Is it okay if I post your porno audition?”

“Of course,” Roy calls back.  “As long as you let me show you the full-length feature film later.”

“That’s disgusting,” Ed says—which is true of the words themselves, and much less true of their intention.

Roy laughs delightedly either way.  “You started it.”

“Did not,” Ed says, which he has to admit isn’t particularly true either.

He can’t tell whether or not it’s a good thing that he poured the coffee before he opened his computer.  On the one hand, he probably would have spilled it all over himself if he’d tried to do both of those things simultaneously; or he probably would have forgotten about it and let it sit in the pot for an hour if he’d looked at the computer first.  As it is, though, it might go cold in his Radioactive Material mug.

Roy starts swanning through the kitchen and then immediately slows, pausing behind Ed’s chair to kiss him on the top of the head.  It took Ed a few bouts of confused infuriation to realize that that gesture is actually meant to be a very, very quiet “Are you okay?”, not some kind of a slight.

“I thought I was gonna lose homophobic followers,” Ed says.

Roy squints at the screen.  He always tries to serve himself his coffee without his glasses on, because he’s an idiot, but at least he’s Ed’s idiot these days.  “Did you?”

“I can’t tell,” Ed says.  “My subscriber count doubled overnight.”

This pause is a beat or two longer.

Then Ed hears the giant, shit-eating grin.

“Well,” Roy says, breezily, as he resumes swanning over towards the coffee maker.  “Fancy that.  Who ever said that the internet doesn’t know a good thing when they see one?”

Ed gives him the finger.

“I can’t see that,” Roy says, which is bullshit; he’s definitely close enough.  “I’m just going to assume that you’re giving me a thumbs-up.”

Ed pointedly ignores him and starts scrolling through the notifications.  “I guess I could manually take down how many new subs there are and compare it to yesterday’s count to get a… People are asking about you.”

“Well, it is a channel dedicated to scientific curiosity,” Roy says.  He’s using his Smooth Voice while screwing his whole face up to squint at the mugs, and sometimes Ed loves him so much that it really fucking hurts, actually.  “And I’m extremely exothermic.”

Ed waits until Roy turns back around.  He won’t be able to see all of the nuances of Ed’s expression from there, but he’ll get the gist.

“Okay,” Ed says, as woodenly as possible.  “That’s fine.  We had a good run.  Gonna quit now.  Gonna shut the channel down forever, and also probably move to another country and change my name.  Any suggestions?”

“Theodore Sweetcheeks,” Roy says.

“Cool,” Ed says.  “You got any suggestions unrelated to my ass?”

Roy makes a big show of thinking it over, and then he says, “No.”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “That’s sorta what I expected.  Well, nice knowin’ you and all.”

Roy holds one hand over his chest and bows his head.  “It’s been an honor.”

“Sugar’s on your right,” Ed says.

Roy returns his attention to the coffee pot.  “Thanks, love.”

Ed pulls the white leather fingerless glove on, flexes his hand, and waits until the little red light has blinked twice before he takes a deep breath.  He’s made that mistake before.

“Hi, y’all,” he says.  “Welcome back to Science for People Who Hate Science, although this video is going to be a little less scientific than usual.  I’ll try to make it quick.”  He clears his throat and rests his chin on his hand.  “So I got a lot of comments on that last video that weren’t about hydrophilic molecules and their affiliations, and I figured that the easiest way to answer all of them was just to make another video.  So today’s episode is—” He holds his hands out so that he can put a title in between them.  “A Clarification on My Last Video Since People Are Asking Stuff.”  He gives it a second for readability and then drops his hands and folds them on the desktop.  “Most of you were asking who Roy is, and I guess specifically who he is to me.”

He sits back in his chair and smiles as sunnily as possible.

“Roy’s my domestic servant,” he says.  “I just make so much bank off of all this YouTube thing that I hired a hot guy to come and do all the household stuff for me—sorta like a pool boy, only for all the chores.  Pretty great, right?”

He gives that a beat, and then he leans in again.

“That was a joke,” he says.  “Firstly ’cause I don’t make anything like bank.  I don’t even make ATM.  On that note—” He points downward.  “I’ve got a Ko-Fi page going for this channel, if you want.  There’s no obligation or anything—this has always been for fun, and my content is always gonna be free for everybody—but if you wanna help me buy supplies so maybe we can do cooler stuff in the future, that’s definitely the way to go.”

He takes another deep breath and tries for a normal, neutral, not-at-all-marginally-panicky smile this time.

“Anyway,” he says, “to answer the question for real, Roy’s my boyfriend.  He’s pretty great.  And for the record, if me having a boyfriend makes you not want to hear me talk about science, then get gone, good riddance, and please make sure the door hits you on your way out.”  He sneaks a glance at his notes on his laptop screen.  “I think that was everything I wanted to say.  Um… If you’ve got other questions, I guess, as long as they’re not ignorant questions, then drop me a comment, and I’ll try to get back to you as soon as I can.  Until then, as always—” A part of him wishes that he had a better sign-off than a cheesy wink and a mock salute, but if he did, he’d be putting on airs, because cheesy and lightly mocking is sort of his thing.  “Make like a proton and stay positive.  Never stop exploring.  Thanks for watching, and see y’all soon, okay?”

He hits the button to stop the recording.  He doesn’t do too many second takes—other than when he has to repeat an experiment sixteen times because the universe hates him, at which point he cuts them into a nice montage and puts a Fail Counter up in the top right—and he thinks that if he tried it on this one, he might just chicken out.

So far, so good, anyway.  He’ll just have to see how it goes.

He gives Roy another long, searching look, which is somewhat more difficult when they’re sitting side-by-side at his one-person desk.  “Are you sure you wanna do this?”

“Yes,” Roy says, meeting his suspicion with yet another specimen from the arsenal of amused expressions.

Ed gives him one last chance, because Ed is a good person.  “Are you sure you’re sure?”

“I’m actually rather touched,” Roy says.  “It means a lot that you’d share them with me, and me with them.”

Ed is going to deal with that particular soundbyte later.  Roy has a way of unseating him at the worst possible moment, and he’s nervous enough as it is.  “Just—shit that goes on the internet lives forever.  Forever.  Anything can get taken out of context, and anything can get used against you later, and anything can get distributed to places you never would’ve expected it to, and sometimes people go digging.”

“I have nothing to hide,” Roy says.

Ed rolls his eyes about as hard as he’s capable of.

“I’m just gonna start this,” he says.  He puts his favorite black glove on.  The less that his appearance distracts from Roy, the better, probably.  “If you change your mind, we don’t have to post any of it.”

“That’s very reasonable,” Roy says mildly.  “Thank you.”

“Whatever,” Ed says, and he reaches for the button.

He can hear Roy putting the seductive face on.  What a bastard.  If Ed’s audience got to see him sitting up in bed at two in the morning because he drooled so much on the pillow that the wet spot woke him up, this episode would be a whole lot different.

Two red blips.  One deep breath.

“Hey, y’all,” Ed says.  “Welcome to Science for People Who Hate Science, or at least something like that.  When I asked for questions last time, I didn’t figure I was gonna get a truckload of ’em, but I’m a man of my word, so here we are.  I figured it’d probably be faster and easier and more accurate if I brought the source material out to help, so here’s Roy, too.”

“I’d like ‘Source Material’ on a T-shirt,” Roy says.

“Well, I’d like a pony,” Ed says.  “And a Leica.  But what we’ve got is—”

Without any prompting whatsoever, Roy beams and holds up his right hand to mirror Ed’s left, so that Ed will be able to put the title in between them.

“A Clarification on the Clarification, Featuring Roy,” Ed says.  “Let this be a lesson to all of y’all about being careful what you wish for.”

“Give the people what they want,” Roy says.  “Especially if it’s me.”

Ed looks directly into the camera.

“You asked for this,” he tells them.  “Remember that.  You asked for this.”

Roy shoots the camera a dazzling grin, because bastard.  “You have such good taste.”

Ed mouths You asked for this one more time and then picks up his notes and raps the edges of the pages on the desktop, as if they need straightening.  “All right.  Let’s get this over with.  I went through and got all the mostly-serious questions together.  When there were duplicates, I went with the person who asked first, so sorry if you don’t see yours screenshotted; it doesn’t mean I didn’t read it.  I honestly don’t know why you’re all so interested in my personal life, but… whatever.  We’re gonna go through the ones that I thought were most commonly-asked first, and then… we’ll see how long that takes.”

“Translation,” Roy says, faux-confidentially to the camera, “I talk a lot.”

Of course he’s a damn natural.

“I was trying not to say that,” Ed says.  “Do I need to script you?  Don’t make me script you.”

Roy’s eyes light up.  “Is that a euphemism for something?”

Ed elbows him.  “Hey!  Family-friendly channel!”

“I’m sorry,” Roy says, despite the relevant fact that he’s obviously not.  “I’m having too much fun.  Go ahead—let’s get started.  I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

“That’ll be the day,” Ed says.  It’s good, though—Roy being… Roy.  Roy bantering; Roy preening; Roy making moderately dirty jokes.  That’s about as normal as it gets, and it makes Ed feel a little more comfortable.  “So, full disclosure—I’ve obviously seen all of these already, but he hasn’t, but he’s a weirdo who likes being put on the spot, so it’s okay.”

“Translation,” Roy says.  “I’m an improvisational genius.”

“And a pillar of humility,” Ed says.  “Okay, so… first question—‘How long have you been together?’”

Roy gazes at him adoringly.  Barf.

“Four hundred and twenty-three days,” Ed says.  “Officially.”

Roy continues to gaze at him adoringly, but with significantly more of that awful amusement.

“Four hundred and twenty-five,” Roy says.

“No,” Ed says.

“Yes,” Roy says.  “Just because you didn’t know we were dating for two of them doesn’t mean we weren’t.”

“That’s exactly what that means,” Ed says.

“But it was obvious,” Roy says.

“Obviously not obvious enough,” Ed says.

Roy looks into the camera.

“Hey,” Ed says.  “Don’t you dare try to get them on your side.”

“We could average it,” Roy says.  “Four hundred and twenty-four?”

“That’s not how time works,” Ed says.  “I’ll do a special episode on that sometime, just for you.”

“You’re too good to me,” Roy says, batting his eyelashes.  “You have been for four hundred and twenty-fi—”

“Next question,” Ed says.  “‘How did you meet, and how did you get together?’”

“If you do the first half,” Roy says, “may I take the second?”

Ed cups a hand around his mouth to stage-whisper to the camera.  “He’s being nice because he knows he’s wrong about the time-space continuum.”

Roy folds both hands under his chin and bats his eyelashes at the camera this time.  “I’m being nice because I’m a lovely person who would never deceive you about the most rational way to account for—”

“As I’ve told y’all here and there a couple times,” Ed says loudly, “my day job is teaching science at a community college near here.  Which is good, ’cause I like teaching, as you might’ve noticed; and also I get to help a lot of people who are trying to get some credits and use ’em as a springboard to go on to someplace else, and I like doing that.  But one day I got an email from somebody asking if they could audit my physics class because they weren’t sure that they could commit to the schedule, and also they were scared of the math, but they were really interested, and they wanted to give it a shot.”

He gives that a beat to settle before he extends his thumb to point at Roy.

Roy is grinning like a jackal.

“I was interested,” Roy says.  “A friend of mine had taken one of Ed’s other classes and told me about it, and I was looking for something to take my mind off of… other things.  It just so happened that it felt like a neon sign from the universe saying You’re in the right place when I turned up on the first day, and the teacher was hot.”

Ed can feel his cheeks warming, but if he starts fanning himself, Roy will catch on faster, and he’ll be doomed.  “Right up until I put equations on the board, at which point I was Satan.”

“Satan’s very hot,” Roy says calmly.  “I can only assume that that’s how one gets to be the king of hell.”

At least that gives Ed an excuse to put both hands over his face.  “Trust the kid from the religious household, Roy; it’s really not.”

“Should be,” Roy says, blither than before.  “It’s the only thing that makes sense.  Anyway, I started coming to office hours, and sending emails—and I really was just trying to struggle my way through the material, or at least mostly, although getting to watch his face when he explained things was rapidly becoming its own reward, and… often when you spend that sort of time with someone, you end up talking about personal things, too, so…”

“One thing led to another,” Ed says.  He cringes.  “I hate it when people say that.  I’m gonna go wash my mouth out with soap after this.”

“It is what it is,” Roy says solemnly, because he’s awful, and they’re even more awful together, which is great.  “It’s true, though.  Specifically, office hours led to coffees, and coffees led to dinners, and dinners led to hanging around each other’s apartments, and that led to realizing that we were both paying far too much for the privilege of living in places with broken washing machines.  And that led to becoming roommates, which led to a heretofore unimaginable quantity of unresolved sexual tension, which led to awkwardness and confusion and at least fourteen instances on the couch watching television where I was sure we were about to kiss.”

“Fourteen is steep,” Ed says.  He says it through his fingers, because he has his hands over his face again.

“It’s not,” Roy says.  “I was counting.  With tally marks.”  He pries one of Ed’s hands away from Ed’s face, kisses the back, and then returns it to its original position.  “But before we hit fifteen, both of us had an awful day at work and came home miserable, so we started drinking before dinner and ended up resolving the tension on the living room carpet before dessert.”  He sighs happily.  “The rest is history.  Or physics.  Chemistry?  All of the above.  We’re extremely educational.”

Ed is going to die.

There are better ways to go, certainly, but he can also think of a few that would be worse, so he supposes that that’s all right.

If Al sees this, though, he’s going to die twice.

“Was that vague enough?” Roy asks.  “You can always edit it out later if it isn’t, right?”

“Can’t cut stuff out of the middle of your sentence,” Ed says without peeking.  “Then it wouldn’t make sense.”

“I’m flattered that you think that I make sense any of the time,” Roy says.

Ed makes a noise into his hands.  He’s not sure if it’s particularly affirmative, but Roy will probably interpret it that way regardless.

“Well,” Roy says, “that was a Friday night, and it was followed by a supremely surreal weekend which one of us spent thinking we were now a power couple for the ages; and which one of us apparently spent thinking that we had completely ruined a wonderful friendship and were now going to have to fling ourselves into the wilds of Craigslist to find a new place to live.  We finally had an actual conversation about it on Sunday, hence the two-day discrepancy, which I happen to think is unwarranted.”

“Your face is unwarranted,” Ed says.  He risks peeling his hands away so that he can glare better.  Roy does not seem overly affected by that cutting insult.  “I thought you were high.  I thought we’d—y’know, all that had happened while we were drunk, and then you’d been so horrified the next morning that you’d hit something stronger to cope.”

Roy is trying not to laugh at him, which at least is progress from the other times that they’ve had this conversation.  “You would have been able to smell it, my dear.”

“I had a six-hour low-grade panic attack,” Ed says.  “I wasn’t thinking about empirical evidence.”

“That must have been a first,” Roy says.

“It was,” Ed says.  “It’s not my fault you were acting so weird.”

“Ed thesaurus,” Roy says, lovingly, to the camera.  “‘Lovestruck’ is a synonym for ‘weird’.”

“Fight me,” Ed says.  “You were draping yourself over all of the furniture and staring at the walls and talking to me in a totally different voice and constantly sighing.  It was completely logical to conclude that you were so upset about the whole thing that it’d just broken your entire brain.”

“I do regret,” Roy says, “in retrospect, that I interpreted your inability to form sentences or be in a room with me for five minutes at a stretch as being coy, rather than as a significant and distressing psychological episode, but—”

“Yes,” Ed says to the camera, “he always talks like this.”

“But at least we sorted it out,” Roy says.  “And now we have had four hundred plus an unspecified number somewhere around two dozen days of unmitigated domestic bliss.”

Ed looks directly into the camera again.

“Help me,” he says.

Roy leans in to kiss his cheek, so he makes a big point of gagging without actually pulling away.

“Knock it off,” Ed says.  “People are gonna throw up and then thumbs-down.”

“Then they’re heathens,” Roy says.

“That’s not what that means,” Ed says.

“I know,” Roy says.  “But it just rolls off the tongue so well that I try to use it as much as possible.  What’s your next question?”

“It’s not my next question,” Ed says.  “It’s their next question.”  He looks down at the list.  “Ah.  ‘How does Roy stay so—’” He pauses for dramatic effect.  “—several expletives deleted—‘fit?’”

Roy fluffs up like a contented cat.

“I woke up like this,” he says.

Ed elbows him.

“And by that,” Roy says, “I mean that it’s much easier to stay in shape when it’s required for your job.”

“He’s a firefighter,” Ed says.  “And before you ask, no, there isn’t a calendar.”

“Yet,” Roy says cheerfully.  “Couldn’t we do that as a fundraiser for your channel?”

“No,” Ed says.

“Come on,” Roy says, giving him the Eyes.  “We’d have fun taking the pictures.”

Roy’s going to have to put a call in to whoever’s on-duty today in another second; Ed’s face is on fire.

“Roy,” he says.  “Family-friendly.”

“Oops,” Roy says.  He winks.  “I’ll make it up to you later.”

Ed looks at him.

Roy pauses.  “I’m… making it worse.”

“You’re so lucky you’re so cute,” Ed says.

“I know,” Roy says.  “Well—the short answer to the question is that it’s a lot of work, and it’s a pain in the neck as well as a pain in a lot of other places.  I’m also very lucky to have a wonderful, gorgeous, generous, brilliant, understanding, forgiving partner who rubs my shoulders when I need it.  And who spots me when we go to the gym.”

“It’s for your protection,” Ed says.  “People look at you like they’re going to eat you.”

Roy pauses again.  Ed can see him paging through the innuendos.  They probably have about a quarter of a second before he picks.

“No,” Ed interjects as quickly as he can.  “Don’t you say anything.”

Roy beams and mimes zipping his lips.  Somehow he does that seductively.  This was the worst idea that Ed has ever had.

“Right,” he grinds out.  “I think we answered that more than we meant to.  Next question.”  He checks.  “Um.  Shit.”  He brings his hand to his forehead.  “Sorry.  I’ll bleep that.”  He nudges Roy with his elbow again.  “You’re distracting me.  And don’t say you’re sorry, ’cause you’re not.”

He gets another incredibly smug little smile for that.

Since trying to get Roy to stop being smug is like trying to fit the ocean in a teacup, Ed clears his throat and moves on.

“Next question,” he says, trying to brace himself despite knowing that it won’t matter, “was ‘Ed, why do you always have one glove on?  Is it some kind of Michael Jackson thing?’”

Roy goes very still.  Ed can’t let himself focus on that, or he’ll lose the last few remnants of his nerve.

“I’d actually been wondering how long it’d take somebody to ask that,” he says—which is the truth, but which also hasn’t made it a whole lot easier.  “Short answer is—when I was a kid, I got my hand broken pretty bad.  Three of my metacarpals… we’re gonna do an anatomy one about bones one of these days, I promise, but those’re the ones in the back of your hand.”  He holds his left up and points to demonstrate, wiggling his fingers.  “Anyway, three of ’em got smashed up enough that they had to do a surgery and stick a bunch of metal stuff in to try to get the bones to heal back up where they were supposed to, and then they had to do another surgery to take the metal back out, and then they did another one to put more metal in because it hadn’t worked quite right the first time.  Figures that my bones are stubborn, too, since the rest of me is, right?  Point is that it looks pretty gnarly, and I don’t want it to be distracting.  Though I guess me havin’ a glove on is probably pretty distracting, too.”

“I think it’s terrifically stylish,” Roy says, in a very soft version of his normal arch-and-clever voice.

“You would,” Ed says, in precisely the same tone that he usually uses for Thank you.

Roy smiles at him.  “Are there more?  This is fun.”

“For who, exactly?” Ed asks.  “Next one, in all caps, multiple question marks: ‘ARE YOU GAY?’”  He looks up, directly into the camera again, and narrows his eyes.  “I said I was in the video you left this comment on, pal.  Listening comprehension score of zero.  Remedial lessons recommended.”  He folds his hands on top of the paper.  “Next one, also in caps—‘ARE YOU IN LOVE?’, although I think I might’ve edited that; it might’ve said ‘lurve’ in the comment.”

“YouTube is a lawless wasteland,” Roy says faintly.

“Now you’re gettin’ it,” Ed says.  “Anyway, the answer to that one is no, definitely not, he just folds the laundry real well.  Get a man who knows how to fold laundry and looks good doing it.”

“Thanks, boo,” Roy says.

“If you call me that ever again for as long as I live,” Ed says, “I’m gonna replace all the sugar in this house with salt and bring you coffee.”

Roy holds a hand to his chest.  “Egads.”

“That’s about the shape of it,” Ed says.  He drags a fingertip down the page to find his place.  “Oh.”

“I can’t tell if that’s a good ‘oh’ or an ominous ‘oh’,” Roy says.

“It’s an ‘oh’ because there’s a question for you specifically,” Ed says.  “It goes: ‘Hey, Roy, on a scale of one to one million, how much do you love the way that when Ed gets mad or excited and starts to rant about something, his accent comes out twice as strong?’”

Roy stares at him for several seconds before the smile comes out bright and bold and devastating.

“You must hate that question,” Roy says.  “But you knew I’d love it, so you kept it in.”

Ed sneaks a glance out of the corner of his eye at the viewfinder, and—precisely as he’d feared—his face is heating up so fast that there’s no way he’ll be able to color-correct it out.  “That’s not an answer.”

“Edward,” Roy says, curling his tongue on the R and dropping his voice a whole damn octave, the bastard— “That’s really quite romantic.”

“It was an accident,” Ed says.  “I meant to cross it out in red pen, but I forgot.  And I lost my pen.  And just answer the goshdarn flippin’ question, Roy.”

It’s only when Roy turns a supremely blissful smile towards the camera that Ed realizes that he just illustrated the accent thing.

Damn it all to hell.

“Well,” Roy says, sharing a conspiratorial look with the camera again, “it’s a bit difficult to answer that one, actually, because the number’s just so astronomical.”

Ed eyes him.  “They said ‘on a scale of one to a million’.”

“I know,” Roy says.  “A million is woefully insufficient.  I need more zeroes than you can fit on a calculator.”

“You have dyscalculia,” Ed says.

“It’s relatively mild,” Roy says, calmly, before Ed can even wince his way out of existence over the fact that he just said that to the entire internet.  “And, fortunately, I am immensely skilled at hyperbole, which in this case is making up the difference.”

“I have to give you that one,” Ed says.  “You’ve really honed your flair for the dramatic to a cutting edge.”

“Self-expression is a critical part of emotional stability,” Roy says.  “Weren’t we talking about how gobsmackingly adorable you are?”

Roy: one; distraction tactics: zero.  Ed can feel his face igniting again, so instead of messing around with his hands, this time he just puts his head down on the desktop.

Roy pats his shoulder.  “I’m hoping that answers the question, at least.”

“It answers the question of whether you’ve got your contacts in,” Ed says into the desk.

“You need to vary your self-deprecation lines, love,” Roy says.  “That one doesn’t work when we’re talking about auditory adorableness.”

“Your face doesn’t work,” Ed says, miserably, still into the desktop.

Roy upgrades to stroking his hair.  “Would you like me to read the next question while you recover from the excruciating humiliation that you volunteered for?”

Ed lifts his head from the desk just enough to slide the notepad out from under his forehead and push it over to Roy, and then deposits his head on the desktop again.

“On second thought,” Roy says, “would it make you feel better to tell them the bar story?”

“It always makes me feel better to tell the bar story,” Ed says, raising his weary head by force of will.  “Y’all aren’t ready for this.  Okay—so we were out this one time gettin’ drinks at this local place after class, way before we were dating or livin’ together or any of that, and we were just talking and having a good time, and this guy came up to Roy and went—”

Roy puts on his long-suffering expression to prepare.

Ed does his very well-practiced impression of the guy.  “‘Hey, are you from Tennessee?’”

Roy groans softly.

“And Roy just—looks at him,” Ed says.  “Like, total dead-eyed blank stare, completely uncomprehending, and goes, ‘No, I’m from New York originally, why?’”

Roy groans louder.

“And the guy, who I guess was committed at this point,” Ed says, “goes, ‘Are you sure?  ’Cause you’re the only ten I see.’”

Roy groans louder still.

“And Roy gets his look like he’s not even a deer in the headlights anymore,” Ed says.  “Like, he’s halfway under the car at this point, just stunned by the entire experience, and he sits there for five full seconds in total confusion before he goes, ‘What?’”

“It’s a very stupid pun,” Roy says weakly.  “I love puns.  I should say—I love good puns.  That one… is a crime.  It’s unconscionable.  It’s very, very wrong.”

“Apparently this guy did not get that memo,” Ed says, trying not to sound delighted enough to make Roy sulk for the rest of the afternoon, “or he just really wanted to get into Roy’s p… uh… good graces, ’cause he stood there and said—I’m not making this up—‘What do you mean, what?  I’m hitting on you.  I said you’re a ten.’”

Roy sighs.

“And this guy,” Ed says, patting Roy’s arm, which is sweet revenge as well as being a pleasure in its own right, “looks the dude in the eyes, completely sincere, not even trying to blow him off, just totally thrown by the use of the number and baffled as hell, and says, ‘I don’t get it.’”

“I didn’t,” Roy moans.  “Is blissful ignorance a crime?  You all have no idea how many people he’s told this to—it’s going to be in my eulogy.  I can’t believe he hasn’t written up the text and had it printed for me on an infinity scarf so that I can look at it every single day of my life.”

“Can’t wait for your birthday,” Ed says brightly.  “Anyway—so the guy starts fumbling now, right?  Because he’s starting to realize that he just threw the world’s worst pickup line at a brick wall, so he’s like, ‘It just means you’re a ten.  I don’t actually care if you’re from Tennessee or not.’  And Roy looks at him for another second and then turns to me and goes, ‘Ed’s family is from Georgia.  Maybe he can help.’”

Roy makes a big show of trying to hide underneath the table, like that will save him.

“Goodbye,” Roy says.

“Where are you going?” Ed says.  “You live here.”

“I’m going to find a nice little nook somewhere to designate as the Shame Corner,” Roy says.  “I’ll get a placard made.”

“Get out from under there,” Ed says, “you weirdo.”

“I’m not a weirdo,” Roy says.  “I found your feet.”

“I rest my case, Your Honor,” Ed says.

“What’s weird about it?” Roy asks.  “They’re exactly where one would expect feet to be.  I was making an objective scientific observation.  I thought that was the whole point of your channel.”

“Everybody’s gonna unsubscribe,” Ed says, trying to lean far enough back in the chair to figure out what the hell Roy’s doing under there without breaking his neck.  “They thought they were gonna get a video of your face, and now you’re under the table.  This is a travesty.”

“You have little drawstrings on the bottoms of these pants,” Roy says.

“They’re cargo pants,” Ed says.  “It’s a stupid but not especially uncommon design feature for some r—Roy, if you tie them together, I will end you.”

“You can’t prove it was me,” Roy says.

Ed sputters in spite of himself.  Roy definitely fucking tied them together.  “You’re right there!”

“But you can’t see me,” Roy says.  “You said so yourself.”

“Okay,” Ed says, scooting his chair back.  “Okay.  That’s enough.  No more questions.  Get out from under the goshdarn heckin’ freakin’ stupid desk while I stop the stupid camera so we don’t just get two hours of hide and—”

If he’d had enough spare brain cells to commit to things outside of Roy under the damn table and Need to kill this footage, he probably would have anticipated the fact that he was about to end up facedown on the carpet, and that he’d probably get there by way of tipping balance, windmilling arms, and an undignified wail.

On the other hand, once Roy has made sure that he’s not actually hurt, the bastard picks up the camera, zooms in on his back, and nudges him with one foot, so he cuts right to that part in the edit.

He’s pretty sure that he’s never had a funnier ending to a video, so at least there’s that.

Chapter Text

“Hi, y’all,” Ed says.  “Welcome to Science for People Who Hate Science.  Except none of y’all are gonna hate science ever again after today, ’cause we’ve got a special guest, and he’s the best person in the entire world.”  In the viewfinder, he can just see Roy in the background, preening.  “…my little brother, Al.”

In the viewfinder, he can just see Roy in the background, miming being stabbed and then pretending to sob.

It is very unfair that Ed’s own profanity standards prevent him from giving Roy the finger at a time like this.

“Hi!” Al says, undaunted by the viewfinder drama.  “I’m Al, and I’m a seismologist!  Seismology is the study of seismic activity—which really just means earthquakes.  What seismologists want to do is to study earthquakes, work to understand how they happen, work to understand what they do, try to prepare people for them, and try to predict them.”  He grins.  “The fun part is that last one.  We can’t.  Nobody’s figured it out yet.  It’s been a big, giant question mark since the beginning of time.  Isn’t that cool?”

“Too much math to be cool,” Roy says.

“Ignore the haters,” Al says.  “I think that what we don’t know is just as interesting and just as meaningful as what we do.  That’s what science is all about!  You have to figure out the right questions to ask first, and then start working on the answers.  You never really know what you’re going to find out until you get there.”

Ed has to bite his lip to stop himself from gazing into the camera and saying I love this kid.

“So!” Al says.  “The first thing we need to know about earthquakes is… what the heck is going on with the Earth?  So we’re going to talk about tectonic plates.”  Ed tosses him the dollar-store beach ball—which Al requested in a meticulously color-coded email—followed by a sharpie.  Ed then slides a piece of paper across the desktop, since throwing that would be much less effective.  “An easy way to think about it,” Al says, “is that it’s like somebody tried to make the surface of the planet out of a giant puzzle, only—either because it’s a sphere, which is a pretty tricky shape to cover; or because whoever was doing this isn’t very good at puzzles—it didn’t work out so well.”  Al demonstrates the fact that his paper is not conforming to his beach ball and follows up with a pulled face.  “So what we have is a puzzle where the pieces don’t quite match up.  If you’ve ever struggled with a puzzle, maybe you’ve tried to jam in two pieces that look like they ought to line up, but then they don’t.  Think about what happens when you do that.”

Finding one of those giant puzzles for young toddlers who are only just starting to develop spatial awareness was tougher than the beach ball, but Ed was utterly undaunted in the prop quest.  Roy despaired a bit.  Ed made fun of him.

“It’s just a good thing that I’m not in charge of the planet’s surface,” Ed says, tilting the camera down and then attempting to mash two mismatched pieces together.

“It sure is,” Al says.  “See how those edges that don’t fit are just sort of pushing up against each other as Ed moves them?  The tectonic plates—or maybe we should call them tectonic puzzle pieces—do the same thing.  They’re moving very slowly on their own, pretty much all of the time—about as fast as your fingernails grow, sometimes—but when they crush up against each other, they gradually accumulate enough energy that something has to give.  And it does.  And it goes boom.”

“That’s Ed’s favorite,” Roy says.

“Guilty as charged,” Ed says.  “Not even sorry.  I’m slightly less fond of earthquakes than I am of controlled explosions, though.”

“Mood,” Al says calmly.  “They’re a bit more complicated than explosions, too.  Which is what we’re going to talk about!  Fortunately, I have two excellent visual aides who have voluntarily abandoned all concept of personal space.”

Roy looks alarmed, and for once Ed can’t blame him.  “That’s… an… interesting way of putting it.”

“Am I wrong?” Al asks.  “Okay, so you’ve probably heard the term fault or fault line before.  A fault is just the place that two tectonic plates are trying to line up the edges of their pieces, or really any other disruption to what would otherwise be the flat surface of the Earth.  So that’s where the action happens!”

He holds both hands up directly next to each other, palms flat, and slides them slowly back and forth.

“If two plates are both moving,” he says, “they’re going to get stuck.  And when they get stuck, the energy of that movement is going to get even more stuck, and it’s going to build up and build up until one of the plates—”

He pops one hand upward at an angle and slides it over the other.

“And the energy that comes out of that,” Al says, “spreads out through the surrounding terrain, and that’s what an earthquake is.  It’s all that pent-up boom getting released.”

Ed is fairly sure by this point that when he edits this video, his face will say I love this kid in every single last frame even if his mouth never does.

“Today,” Al says, reaching over to turn the camera towards a more open area of the floor, “Ed and Roy here are going to stand in as tectonic plates to show you all the different kinds of faults that occur and cause earthquakes depending on how the plates move against each other.  Ed’s going to be the plate that moves, for obvious reasons.”

Ed loves this kid marginally less.

“My own brother,” Ed says, “victimizin’ me because I’m not quite as tall as maybe some genetic lottery winners who probably took steroids as kids or something.  Can you believe that?  Can you believe it?”

“You’re not small,” Roy says.  Ed is about to propose to him.  “You’re fun-sized.”

Ed stares at him for a long second and then directs his attention to the camera.

“Just like that,” Ed says, “I am entirely alone in the world.  Everyone I ever loved is dead to me.  In the comments, please leave your suggestions for places that I can go live in a cave and become a hermit.  Preferably ones with internet.”

“You can go be a hermit after the demonstration,” Al says.  “You have a duty to science first.  So!”  He turns to the camera again, clasping his hands.  “As you’d probably figure, when two plates crash into each other at a fault…” He turns to Ed and Roy again.  “…go on.”

Ed gives Al a look.  Roy is apparently not nearly so daunted by the sheer ridiculousness of their lives at this particular moment in time, as he shuffles forward until they’re close enough for him to nudge his chest gently against Ed’s.

Then he giggles.

“Christ,” Ed says.  He’s going to have to bleep that.  “It’s so weird being an only child.”

“Oh, hush, you drama llama,” Al says.  “Okay, so the first plate configuration we’re going to show here is a strike-slip fault.  So you’re gonna bump into each other, and then Ed, you’re going to move… laterally?  Is that a word?”

“Yes,” Roy says.

“Can’t wait to be a lateral hermit,” Ed says.

“That doesn’t even make sense,” Al says.  “Move your butt, Ed.”

“Nooooo,” Roy says, wrapping both arms around him and drawing him into a hug.  “Don’t leave.  Either to be a hermit, or just right now.”

“That’s actually perfect,” Al says.  “Part of the reason earthquakes are so forceful is because the two plates’ edges generate so much friction.  I mean, it’s because they’re more or less rock, but… this is a decent visualization, I guess.”

“‘Decent’ sounds like a challenge,” Roy says.

“Only to you,” Ed says.

“Step to your left, Ed,” Al says.  “Just—oh, dear.  I did this to myself.”

“You sure did,” Ed says, but—contrary to most people’s first guess—he’s the merciful one, so instead of making a big point of how Al just set him up for a channel-inappropriate grind joke, he slides his body across Roy’s as minimally as possible as he side-steps.  “There.”

“There,” Al says, sounding so relieved that Roy starts snickering again.  “So that’s a strike-slip fault.  More or less.  Delightful.”

That’s not exactly the word that Ed would have picked, but he’s usually on adjective probation anyway, so he keeps his mouth shut and just generally glowers.

“Okay,” Al says.  “Step back together.”  Ed attempts to glower more efficiently, but he does what he’s told without complaining, which may well be a first.  “How about what’s called a reverse fault?  That’s when the primary plate that’s moving ends up sliding upward against the other one.  So Roy, you’ll need to—”

“Say no more,” Roy says, and Ed has just enough time to bite down hard on his lip so that he won’t squeak as Roy scoops him up in both arms.

These are definitely not the circumstances under which Roy usually picks him up.  Unfortunately, he made this bed—so to speak—and now he has to lie in it, and also try with all his might not to flush at the knowing smirk on Roy’s face and give himself away.

Earthquakes.  There is nothing sexy about earthquakes.  Earthquakes are, in fact, extremely unsexy, given that the significant ones cause a shit-ton of damage, kill people, and make a lot more work for Roy.  And then Roy has to be gone for even weirder, longer, worse hours.  That’s unsexy in the extreme.

“Just like that,” Al says.  He doesn’t sound disappointed or grossed out or kinkshamey, so there’s hope that he didn’t notice Ed’s distress.  “Okay, Roy, you can put him down.”

Roy, however, is enjoying Ed’s dilemma immensely.  “Do I have to?”

“Yes,” Al says, “because we’re moving on to what’s called a normal fault.”

Ed sometimes wishes that Roy wasn’t so fucking strong, because it’s unreasonably hot at the best of times—and at times like this, when Roy is very gently and very effortlessly lowering him until his feet touch the floor, it is absolutely unbearable.

If there is a record kept of his life, Ed would like it to show that he had no idea what he was getting into at the start of this.  Roy showed up to all of the classes that his work schedule permitted wearing jeans and an oversized hoodie; Ed didn’t know what his job was until the third or fourth office hour, which was most of the way through the semester, and even then he hadn’t realized what the implications were.  One of the times that they went out for coffee after the class had ended, it was pretty warm, and Roy was wearing a T-shirt, and Ed had been able to tell at that point that he was in dangerously good shape, but even then he hadn’t really conceptualized just how fucked he was.

To this day, he has still not shown Roy the text that he sent to Al soon after they started living together, the first time that Roy stepped out of the bathroom in just a towel because he was so tired from a shift that he’d forgotten to bring clothes in when he went to shower.  That text message had read I NEED TO MOVE OUT, which unsurprisingly had prompted concern from Al about what Roy had done, to which the answer had been NOTHING EXCEPT THAT HE IS SO FUCKING BUILT AND I WANT TO LICK HIS ABS AND I CAN’T FUCKING LIVE LIKE THIS, to which Al had responded with a less-than-inspiring stream of crying-laughing emojis.

Sharing space with him after that discovery had amounted to an extremely specific kind of torture.  Ed had had to fight daily with the voice of Catholicism echoing in the back of his head, which kept trying to convince him that it was precisely the purgatory that he deserved; and nightly with the less-ingrained but more rational perspective reminding him that appreciating the image of his own roommate too much would make things exponentially more awkward.

As awkward as, for instance, said roommate asking for his permission to buy some home gym equipment and store it in their apartment when their local gym closed for repairs.  Of course Ed had agreed, knowing full well that he was signing his own death warrant with a sparkly silver gel pen; and then Roy had rather more shyly asked for his help pricing out a few pieces that he’d had his eye on, since he was having particular trouble parsing the numbers that night.  Ed had given up on the warrant and just resigned himself to unmitigated doom.  They’d ended up sitting so close together on the couch while Roy had showed Ed the choices on his laptop that their elbows had been knocking together, and their shoulders were worse, and Ed could feel the heat of him everywhere.

Somehow—nigh-on inexplicably—Roy actually owning and using the equipment was worse than buying it.  Thinking back, Ed still isn’t sure how he actually survived that part.

The point is that Roy’s too damn hot, and too damn strong, and gingerly setting him back down on the carpet so that Al can torment them with weird earthquake-related visual metaphors or whatever this is some more.

“Okay,” Al is saying as Ed stumbles free of the misty grip of nostalgia.  “So in a normal fault, the plate that move is going to move downward relative to the more stationary one.  Ed, just… sit down or something.”

Ed knows, with stark premonitory clarity, what’s going to happen.

He knows it’s going to be bad.  Very bad.

He drops to his knees directly in front of Roy’s hips anyway.

It’s every bit as excruciating as he expected, actually.

“Oh,” Al says.

“Oh,” Roy says.

“Shut up!” Ed says.  “Family-friendly channel!”

“Not anymore,” Al says.

“Just for that,” Ed manages, “I am going to do all of the titles for this entire video in Comic Sans.”

“Brother,” Al says.  “No.”

“Too late,” Ed says.

“I guess this part is the indecent visualization,” Roy says.

“Jeez,” Al says, so emphatically that Roy starts laughing—hard enough that he has to step back anyway.

Al’s already darted over to the camera and wrenched it away to focus on the desktop again, more than a bit desperately.

“It’s fine,” he says, “because it’s time to replace Roy and Ed with graham crackers anyway.”

“Permanently?” Ed asks as he accepts Roy’s hand up from the floor.

“Don’t tempt me,” Al says.  “Okay, so—we’ve seen how faults turn out to start an earthquake, but let’s take a closer look at why they exist in the first place.”  He sets two graham crackers down on the table, aligning the shorter ends, and starts pushing them against each other like the puzzle pieces.  “At some point, the pressure—” One of the crackers splits and crumples, spraying crumbs.  “Just like we saw, only messier, and more delicious.”

Ed can hear Roy restraining himself from interjecting that Ed can be both much messier and more delicious than graham crackers, under the right circumstances.

“But why do they move in the first place?” Al is sayings.  “To give you a way to think about that, I made a big parfait this morning.”  Ed knows that he isn’t exaggerating about the ‘big’ part, and Al lifts the thousand-milliliter beaker up onto the desktop to make sure that Ed’s viewers know it, too.  “I used really thin, goopy yogurt for it, too, so that Ed wouldn’t eat it, because he hates goopy yogurt.”

“I don’t even like hearing you say that,” Ed says.

“I know,” Al says.  “Goopy yogurt.”

“Eew,” Ed says.

“The goopiest,” Al says.  “Know why?”

“Because the interior of the Earth underneath the tectonic plates is made of goopy yogurt,” Ed says.  “Sort of.”

“Sort of,” Al says.

Al halfway-blended up some canned peaches to be the Earth’s mantle, because he knew that that would make Ed tempted to brave the goopy yogurt, and he enjoys Ed’s suffering in cases like that.  He eventually breaks a spoon through the graham cracker tectonic plates and then offers it out to Ed.  Roy offers to eat the goopy yogurt parts to spare Ed from their goopiness.  Ed is hungry and enraptured in equal parts.  Life is good.  Science is good.  Ed is completely serious about having all of the titles in Comic Sans.

Roy’s working the next day, but Ed specifically took it off of to spend with Al, and also for the other reason.  After an argument about what to do with the empty hours results in a brief spoon-catapult cereal war, they decide on the zoo.

The local one’s pretty nice, and they make it out of the house early enough that there aren’t any large yellow harbingers of doom outpouring busloads of kids on field trips just yet.  Hopefully they’ll have at least an hour of relative quiet to go around tranquilly observing the animals and playing the Ask the employees intelligent questions except don't interrupt them to do it and be as polite as humanly possible because they’re grossly underpaid for the amazing work they do game.

They stop in front of the bison exhibit because one of the biggest, fluffiest-looking ones is wandering around while several of the others rest in the shade and flick their tails.

“I was sort of surprised that Roy’s at work,” Al says after a few minutes of watching their new best friend explore the grass.  “Does he know?”

Ed looks as intently as possible at some little yellow flowers in the enclosure.  They’re a bit scraggly-looking, but they’re doing their best.  He sympathizes.  “Know that you came this week in particular because today’s the anniversary of Mom’s death?”

He sneaks a glance, and Al’s making a face.  “Well—yes.”

“No,” Ed says.  “I just told him you were visiting, and he was excited about it, and I left it at that.  He’s got enough to worry about without me dredgin’ up shit that happened twenty years ago that I’m still hung up on.”

“I don’t think ‘hung up’ is quite the right terminology to use for a life-defining personal tragedy,” Al says, calmly, because of course he does, “but that’s your business.  I guess he wouldn’t have been able to identify a pattern, would he?  I was in Alaska the whole week last year, and you had that nasty flu the year before that, so this is the first time we’ve been able to get together for it since you’ve been really close to him.”

Ed’s trying to count the flower petals, but his vision’s not quite that good.  “I’m not sure he’d be able to pick it out on a calendar anyway.  He struggles with dates in the abstract sometimes.”

“That’s fair,” Al says.  “I bet he remembers your anniversary, though.”

“He put a bunch of calendar events in his phone,” Ed says.  “So they make noise at him, like, a month in advance, a week in advance, and then three days, and then two days, and then on the day of.”

“That’s adorable,” Al says.  “And disgusting.”

“Not as disgusting as goopy yogurt,” Ed says.

The bison somehow manages to kick up his heels as he breaks into a trot and heads back over towards the others.  He looks like a Disney bison.  Ed half-expects him to break out into song.

“How much have you told him?” Al asks.  “I’m not trying to be nosy or anything; I’m just curious.”

“That’s the same thing,” Ed says.

“It is not,” Al says.  “Is your fascination with every single possible branch of science just a nosiness for theories?”

“No,” Ed says.  “Well—maybe.  Well—damn, aren’t houseguests supposed to be polite?  You barely waited a day before you started breakin’ my brain for sport.”

“I’m not sure it’s a sport,” Al says.  “Maybe a game—the kind that you play for your own amusement.  Like Solitaire.  Or Minesweeper.”

“You’re making it worse,” Ed says.

“I know,” Al says.  “It just seems like the two of you have a very good relationship, so it’s probably not a trust thing.”

“It’s not,” Ed says.  “It’s just…” The bison makes a circuit around the trees where all of his friends are still lying on the ground and then goes wandering off again.  The dude’s a champ.  “He’s got so much shit to deal with.  So much shit.  In real time.  He doesn’t need my past tense stuff any more often than it’s unavoidably relevant.  You know?  Besides, it’s like… you don’t just… segue into that conversation after talkin’ about grocery shopping.  How the hell are you supposed to start?  You can’t just, like, pick a day where you unpack all your baggage at once to get everybody up to speed.  That’s what you’re supposed to do with therapists, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Al says.  “The way he looks at you when you talk, I’m pretty sure he’d listen to anything.  But as long as it’s not hurting you, and you’re not withholding it, then… I mean, you do you, Brother.  Whatever’s working, keep doing that.  That’s okay, and that’s enough.”  He takes a deep breath, which is good, because Ed’s voice is stuck somewhere midway up his windpipe and won’t come loose.  “Now that you mention it, though, we should go shopping.  Last time I was over at Granny’s, I took pictures of a couple of Mom’s old recipes on my phone.  I think I got all your favorites.  Do you wanna give one or two of them a try?”

Ed didn’t really expect to spend today standing in front of a bison enclosure crying while Al pats his shoulder and apologizes a lot, but he can’t exactly say that he’s surprised, either.

Seeing Al off at the airport is always a pain in the neck, and in places slightly lower and squishier and more contractile than the neck.  Today feels especially rocky—maybe because of the reason he came; maybe because he couldn’t stay long around his job; maybe because Ed knows that he’s going to have to look at the beach ball with squiggly Sharpie tectonic plate lines all over it and miss Al a little bit extra every time that he opens up his science stash.  

Probably it’s all of those things.

“Okay,” Al says, patting Ed’s back after perhaps slightly more hugging than would be qualified as strictly necessary by the average pair of quasi-codependent brothers.  “I should go.  Security might be jealous of my cat socks and try to steal my shoes to get revenge.  Are you okay?”

“I’m always okay,” Ed says.

“I think you and I must have different definitions of ‘okay’,” Al says.

“Respect your elders,” Ed says.

Al sticks his tongue out.  Ed sticks his out back.

“Miss you already,” Al says.

“Miss you more,” Ed says.  “Get gone; I hate crying in airports.”

“Me, too,” Al says.

“Text me when you get home,” Ed says.

Al reaches out, first curled, and bumps his knuckles very gently against Ed’s shoulder, which has been their I want to hug you more but it’s not very feasible right now gesture for so long that Ed can’t remember how it started.  “I will.  Take care of yourself.  And that other guy.”

“Just to warn you,” Roy says, “I may start introducing myself as ‘That Other Guy’ from here on out.”

“Good,” Al says.

Ed bumps his fist against Al’s arm.  “Can’t believe you’re leaving me with a parting attempt to wreck my life.”

“C’mon,” Al says.  “What are little brothers for?  Love you.  I gotta go.  The TSA agents are judging me.”

“I’ll fight them all,” Ed says.

“You…” Roy clears his throat, glancing towards the kiosks where the agents in question are checking IDs.  “You may want to lower your voice just a touch, love.”

Unfortunately, Ed knows that white privilege will preserve him; and Al’s laughing brightly, which would make it worth it even if a TSA agent tackled him to the tacky carpet.

“I’m getting out of here before I get you in trouble,” Al says, turning on his heel and dragging his suitcase behind him as he starts for the end of the snaking line.

“That’s a first,” Ed calls after him.

Al shoots another grin over his shoulder.

“Let’s go to the movies,” Roy says midway through the afternoon on the next Saturday that he has off.

Ed puts a fingertip on his screen—which used to make Winry throw empty Kleenex boxes at him—to hold his place in the article he was reading.  “Why?  What’s playing?”

“I don’t know,” Roy says.  “I just want to sit in a dark room with you and hold your hand.”

“I’ve got great news for you about our lightswitches,” Ed says.  “And those are free.”

“Come on,” Roy says.  “I’ll buy you that horrible sour candy that you like, and we can get our fingers all tangled up in the popcorn, and we can share an overpriced, watered-down Coke and pretend that we’re teenagers for a few hours.”

“I never want to be a teenager again,” Ed says.  “That was the worst shit I’ve ever… okay, it wasn’t, actually, but it felt worse, because my developing brain was a fucking mess, and I knew that, but I couldn’t do anything about it.”

“Then let me make your crappy teenage years up to you,” Roy says, “by enabling you to experience all of the clichéd nonsense that you should have gotten back then.”

Ed eyes him for a few seconds.  He looks sincere.  Roy usually does, and usually is, and that’s the scary part.

“I guess,” Ed says, slowly, “we could try it.  Just this once.”  Roy beams at him.  “Hey,” Ed says.  “Don’t get too excited.  If you try to throw a replacement prom, I’m outta here.”

“That sounds like a horror movie,” Roy says.  “Prom II: A Night to Remember.”

“Is that what’s on at the movie theater?” Ed says.  “Is that why you’re so keen to go?”

“You found me out,” Roy says.

“This better be the best damn popcorn of my life,” Ed says.

“Hi, y’all,” Ed says later that night.  “Welcome to Science for People Who Hate Science, except today it’s more like Movies for People Who Hate Movies, and ‘people’ is me.  I’ve got Roy in the background here without a shirt on so that you have something to look at that isn’t me getting pissed off over stupid stuff, if you want.”

“Hi,” Roy says, offering a lazy wave from where he’s sprawled artfully all over the couch with a magazine in his hands.  “Happy to be of service.  Or of fanservice, in this case.”

“I bet you are,” Ed says.  “He knows he owes me one, because he was the one who wanted to go to the movies despite not having anything in particular that he wanted to see, which is why we ended up in the worst movie ever.”

“That might be a slight exaggeration,” Roy says.

“It is,” Ed says.  “I think I’ve probably seen worse movies once or twice, but, like—it was bad, okay?  It was bad.  But I’m not gonna talk about it that much in particular, because I don’t want to be talkin’ smack about something that one of y’all might really like for other reasons, ’cause it’s always really demoralizing when somebody’s just bashing stuff that you like.  And we don’t do demoralizing around here.  We just do educational.”

“More or less,” Roy says.

“More or less,” Ed says.  “Okay, so I’m gonna try to keep this short, but I gotta get it out so I can take off my ranty pants and sleep.  Here’s my thing.”  He sits back in the chair and folds his arms, and it’s only then that he realizes that he forgot to put a glove on.  He has a lot of practice shifting his crossed arms to cover the back of his hand, though, so at least it’s an easy fix as long as he doesn’t move too much.  “You can set a movie or a comic book franchise or a TV show or a fantasy novel or whatever it is in any universe you want.  You can.  That’s not my problem.  My problem is that any universe you set it in, including spinoffs of our existing universe where things are slightly different, has to have rules.  And once you set those rules, you have to follow them.  You don’t get to break them whenever it suits you, okay?”

Roy flips a page of the magazine.  “I wish I could turn gravity off.  Just for a little while.  Wouldn’t that be fun?”

“For us, maybe,” Ed says.  “But think about all of the birds across the entire planet that would be trying to take off at that precise moment where gravity stopped functioning, and how they’d just get slingshotted up into the atmosphere and incinerated.”

“Oh,” Roy says.  “Good point.”

“Or all of the airplanes that’d suddenly have to readjust,” Ed says.  “I need to think about that, actually—’cause, like, unless people were generating a significant amount of force against the ground, we wouldn’t go spiraling off into space right away.  But I don’t know how far we’d get just based on the amount of force that the average person exerts while walking.  Either way, though, you probably just murdered anybody who’s on a trampoline when you flip the switch, ’cause even if they don’t make it far enough to get third-degree sunburns in a matter of minutes, it’s gonna be bad news for them when you turn gravity back on again.”

Roy is making a face.  “‘Date a scientist,’ they said.  ‘It’ll be fun,’ they said.”

“Zero people said that,” Ed says.  “Or at least zero people who know me.”

“One of my friends who’d met you told me that I should date you,” Roy said.  “Right off the bat.”

“Was it Jean?” Ed says.

“Of course it was Jean,” Roy says.

“Everybody knows that you never listen to Jean,” Ed says.

“It’s true,” Roy says.  He leans back against the arm of the couch and drapes an arm over his eyes, dangling the magazine dramatically from his fingers.  “But I was young and naïve back then.  I never dreamed that it would come to you accusing me of murdering hypothetical children on trampolines by turning off the Earth’s gravity with a magic switch.”

Ed has to bite his lip so hard to stop himself from laughing that it hurts like hell.

“We got really distracted there,” he says to the camera when he mostly has himself under control.  “The point is—the point is that if you’re gonna change one or many rules of the universe in order to make your story cool or interesting, or to have people who shoot fire out of their hands, or whatever… that’s fine.  In the case of fire-hands, it’s awesome.  But you have to be consistent about the way that the rules work, and about enforcing them for your characters even when it’s inconvenient, or else my suspension of disbelief gives out at the bottom like a wet paper bag, and this whole big rant falls out, and you have to deal with it.”

“We should hand-write a strongly-worded letter of complaint,” Roy says.

“We should,” Ed says.  “Do you know how hard it is to get a car to actually do anything like blowin’ up?”

“Yes,” Roy says.

“Oh, yeah,” Ed says.  “Well—that’s a different problem.  But if you’re setting a movie in what is purportedly the real world, with the real world’s laws of physics and the real world’s restrictions, you can’t have infinite bullets; and you can’t have people fallin’ out of three-story windows and just gettin’ up and brushing the da—darn glass off and shooting more flippin’ bullets—”

“I’m going to get you a clicker,” Roy says.  “You know those little ones where you push a button, and it counts for you?  It’ll make the bullet tracking easier next time.”

“Thank you,” Ed says.  “That’s thoughtful unless you’re just saying it in the hopes that I won’t tell you what the ongoing tally is, because I’m definitely still going to do that.”

Roy grins at him, fanning the magazine idly back and forth.  “I wouldn’t take you to the movies if I wasn’t looking forward to the bullet tally, my dear.”

“Gross,” Ed says.  “Well—that’s the rant.  I guess.  Like, you don’t have to go Tolkien and make up whole languages and, like, hundreds of years of customs or anything, but—jeez.  Physics is still gonna have to work more or less the same way in most capacities, or else human life couldn’t exist.  Just pay attention.  Think about it.  Do some math.”

“Nooooooo,” Roy says.

“You’re exempt from math,” Ed says.

“Thank you,” Roy says.

“Because you’re in jail for killing the trampoline children,” Ed says.

This time, Roy makes a giant show of rolling off of the couch and crumpling to the floor in despair.

Before Ed’s even managed to try to pan the camera over to him where he’s curled up fake-crying, he jumps back up.

“Hey, look at this dog!” he says, pointing to one of the magazine pages and then bringing it over to Ed.  “Look at his little face!  This is the best ad I’ve ever seen.  Look at him!”  He holds it out to the camera next.  “This is last week’s copy of TIME if you want to get your hands on this good boy.  What a good boy.”

“Our lease won’t let us get a dog,” Ed explains despite the fact that the camera won’t be able to see any part of him around the magazine ad that Roy is working adamantly to bring into focus.  “Roy is suffering.”

“I maintain that it’s just not fair,” Roy says.  “We pay enough in rent to make up for it.  We could pay an additional pet deposit.  We’re reasonably responsible except when we get up at three in the morning and watch bad TV and eat ice cream until six and then go back to bed.”

That’s not anywhere near as irresponsible as it sounds: it really only happens when Roy has a work dream nasty enough to scare him off of sleep until the sun comes up.  They keep the volume down, and Ed’s usually too tired to commentate anyway; he tends to lean against Roy’s shoulder and doze for most of it, periodically waking up enough for Roy to feed him a bite of ice cream that’s particularly dense with chocolate chips, because those are his favorite.

“But that’s a different rant for a different video,” Ed says.

Roy sighs feelingly and lowers the magazine.

Then he perks up.

“Can we do a dog video?” he asks.

Ed pats his arm.  “If it’ll make you feel better, then… sure.”

Roy looks so delighted that Ed is going to have to follow through.

“Okay,” Ed says.  “Well… join us next time.  Hopefully for science, rather than for me getting angry about something really, really pointless.  Until then—”

Roy joins him in the sign-off, which makes it twice as cheesy but also twice as cute.  And significantly more attractive, given that Roy’s still very, very shirtless.

Chapter Text

Ed adjusts the camera, checks the framing, hits the button, waits two blinks, and takes a breath.

“Hi, y’all,” he says.  “I guess we needed another one of these videos, ’cause we got just as many new questions asked in response to the last one as we answered in it, so… yeah.  Roy’ll be here in a minute.  I made him go change his shirt, because it was distracting.”

Right on cue—which is probably not a coincidence, given Roy’s undying penchant for small-scale drama—Roy saunters into the doorway and then into the frame, doing up the buttons of the much more decent Oxford shirt that he’s added over the excruciatingly tight tank top that he was trying to get away with before.

“I’d say I’m sorry,” Roy says, “but I’m really not.”

“Color me shocked and amazed,” Ed says.

Roy pauses right behind him to kiss him on top of the head—gah—and then slides into the chair next to him.  The bastard left enough buttons of the shirt undone that he still looks like cake frosting, in that you want to keep licking until you’re sure you got everything.  As soon as Roy’s settled, he starts rolling up his sleeves, which doesn’t help at all with the too-hot problem, and in fact makes this outfit nearly as bad as the first one.

In retrospect, Ed should have known from his very first day living with this asshole that he was doomed and done for, but he supposes that it’s far too late now.

“So I decided that I’m just gonna put these videos on a separate playlist,” Ed says, attempting to wrangle this thing back on track, “which is gonna be called ‘Romance for People Who Hate Romance’.  That includes me, by the way.  I don’t know how I got roped into this, but I promise you I’m not happy about it.”

Roy, who has nearly finished putting his impeccable forearms on indecent display, beams at the camera.  “I think they’re loads of fun.”

“You think crossword puzzles are loads of fun,” Ed says.

“You think sudoku is fun,” Roy says.

“It is,” Ed says.

“I struggle to imagine a more specific personal hell than a sudoku book and a time limit,” Roy says.

Ed pats Roy’s shoulder, which is definitely not partly an excuse to touch him when he looks especially fucking delicious today.  “It’s fine.  We can divide the labor when it comes to intersecting-box-based time-passing activities.”

“Or we can just play tic-tac-toe together,” Roy says.

Ed side-eyes the camera.  “Do not ask for that video.”

Roy doing an eyebrow thing is Ed’s only warning.  “What if we did it nak—”

Ed manages to get a hand over Roy’s mouth before he finishes that.  “Family-friendly channel!  Jeez!  I can’t take you anywhere!”

Through Ed’s hand, Roy says something that sounds like Not even to our own apartment, apparently, which is exactly the problem.

“Behave,” Ed says.  “Or I’m kicking you off and answering all of your questions in a bad impression of you.”

“You do a great impression of me,” Roy says.  “I consider it a compliment, because it proves that you pay a lot of attention to my speech patterns.”

“I’d do a bad one on purpose,” Ed says.  “As punishment.”

Roy turns an extremely overstated hangdog look on the camera.

Ed rolls his eyes extravagantly and then pointedly picks up the latest printout.  “Okay, here we go.  First question is whether you’re going to be a permanent part of the show now.”

“I guess that probably depends on whether I’m well-behaved,” Roy says.

Ed turns to give the camera a look right in time to get the full brunt of Roy’s smirk from the viewfinder.

“You are,” Ed says, “singlehandedly compromising the integrity of my channel.”

“I think I’m delightfully entertaining,” Roy says.

“I know you do,” Ed says.  “My answer to that question is… probably a lot of the time, I guess?  For the videos that require some prep and stuff, I reckon I’ll let him help if he keeps his hands to himself—”

Roy does some high-quality offended scoffing, as if he’s managed to keep his hands off of Ed for more than an hour at a stretch since they started the dating thing.  Even before that, they’d tended to brush elbows in the kitchen and shoulders in the hallway an awful lot, and Roy had found an inordinate quantity of eyelashes on Ed’s face that needed to be dispensed with.

“But for the littler ones,” Ed says, “sometimes I just jump right into ’em when the mood strikes, and a lot of the time, that’s when Roy’s at work, ’cause I get bored faster when he’s not here.”

“I hope you know and appreciate,” Roy says, very slowly and deliberately, “that I am refraining from saying a lot of things right now.”

“I’m so proud of you,” Ed says.  “Baby’s first discovery of self-discipline.  But yeah—y’all are probably stuck with him for videos like this, at any rate.  Guess we’ll see how it goes.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Roy says, beaming.  “He loves it when I’m here.  He loves having to cut me off mid-sentence all the time and edit twice as much footage because I tragically never learned how to shut up.”

Ed ducks back to the paper so that it won’t be quite as obvious how intensely he’s struggling not to laugh.  “God had to nerf you somehow if he was gonna make you look like that.  Okay, next one, for both of us—‘Do you have a favorite or especially cherished memory together or of each other?’”

“That’s so cute,” Roy… coos.  No other speech verb is sufficient.  “I have one!”

“I’ll bet you flippin’ do,” Ed says, which at least will help to cover the way that he’s desperately flipping through images in his brain trying to find one that’s specific enough, and long enough, and doesn’t involve lazy morning sex followed by waffles.  He doesn’t think it’s his fault that he treasures those ones so much.  He can’t order waffles in public anymore because of the magnificent associations.

“For context,” Roy says, folding his hands on the desk, “I need to tell you about a couple things first.  So Ed hasn’t done a climate change video yet—”

“It’s too sad,” Ed says.  “I’m working on a way to get the point across without making myself give up on humanity altogether.”

“I know,” Roy says, pausing to pat his arm.  “But one of the many consequences of it has been that it’s significantly hotter and significantly drier here than it’s been in historical memory, which has resulted in what we all not-so-fondly call fire season.  You may have heard in the news about some of the recent ones, which were indescribably destructive in some of the forested areas north of us.  There were several different years where entire towns were leveled overnight.”

Ed knows where this is going.  Dealing with this shit never really gets any easier, but it’s important that maybe other people will get a chance to hear it.

“A few months after Ed and I had moved in together here,” Roy says, “one of the really bad ones broke out a ways up the state from us, about four hours away.  Our firehouse here is relatively small, but after things started to get really out of hand, and the governor had declared a state of emergency, our chief authorized several of us to go up and help while a skeleton crew stayed down here with some of our volunteers.”

He draws a deep breath.  Ed braces himself, which he knows is useless.

“It wasn’t the first big fire that any of us had dealt with,” Roy says, “but it was by far the single biggest that any of us had ever seen.  It… at that point, partway through a blaze like that—you spend some of your time helping at the camps for all of the people who have evacuated their homes, a lot of whom have lost everything; and you spend some time trying to help maintain the trucks that have been up there a while and are just caked with soot and ash; and you spend some time walking through these towns and cities that are just… obliterated.  Just gone.  And people’s houses and stores and livelihoods are ash and rubble and sometimes a little bit of jagged metal and half of a chimney, and there is… there’s nothing in the world like that.  You walk into the apocalypse, and it goes on for as far as you can see.  You go through what’s left of the buildings looking for bodies that the first responders might have missed.  Sometimes strange little things get tucked underneath something in just such a way that they survive, and you find children’s toys or a photograph frame with the picture burnt out.  Sometimes you find people’s safes still locked up with their birth certificates and their housing deed inside.  Sometimes you find things that you really didn’t want to find.”

Roy takes a deeper breath and tries to smile.  Ed gently bumps his knee under the desk.

“You spend some of your time,” Roy says, “trying to contain the fire.  That’s… I hope it’s like nothing you’ve ever dreamed of.  If there’s anything like a hell out there, it must look like that—and feel like that, and be like that.  It’s unimaginable.  It is a wall of flame that extends for what looks like forever, and the sky is black, and you’re so small.  You’re so small, and you’re so desperate, and you’re so exhausted that none of it feels real at all after a while.  You’re just moving.  One minute to the next.  We slept on the side of the road fifty feet from the forest more than once—you’re so tired that you don’t even hear the fire anymore.  You run out of the capacity to feel anything except this… distant sort of despair.  You know that you have to keep going, but you’re not sure if it matters anymore.  You just want to try to help more people make it out of this alive—including yourself, and your crew, and the crew from the stations that are centered here, that lived here, if you can.  But it just keeps growing, and it just keeps consuming, and it’ll kill you in a heartbeat if you step wrong.  It’s unreal.  You start to wonder if the rest of the world ever existed, or if this is all that there is.”

Ed puts his hand on Roy’s knee under the desk this time.  Roy talks about it pretty calmly, but Ed knows—Ed has seen what it does to him sometimes.  This and some of the car accidents, and some of the bad calls.  Some of the times they’re too late.

Roy blinks, squares his shoulders, and smiles more successfully this time.

“Anyway,” he says.  “That’s all just to set up what I was going to talk about.  Sorry.  I didn’t mean for it to get quite so dark.  The point is—the first time that my team was called up for one of those was soon after Ed and I had moved in here.  I’d been trying to let him know periodically how things were going, so that he wouldn’t be worried that he’d have to pay the rent all on his own—”

Ed snorts as loud as he dares when it’ll probably sound awful on the audio.  “Yeah, that’s what I was worried about.  I was so concerned that you were gonna leave me with the bill by dying.”

Roy grins.  “When we’d all finally gotten it close enough to under control that the local engines could mostly handle it, they started sending people home.  I texted Ed to let him know when my crew and I started the drive back down, and he told me to make sure that everybody came up to the apartment with me when we got here.  I was so exhausted by that point that I was seeing things, so I didn’t even have it in me to wonder why he would say that, or to be suspicious or anything—I just said ‘Sure’ and did what I was told on autopilot.”

“For the first and last time in your entire life,” Ed says.

Roy winks at him.  Bastard.  “I picked a good one.  I’d managed to get a tiny bit of sleep on the drive down, but we were all jittery and covered in ash, and we’d marinated in our own sweat under the protective gear for so long that we probably smelled like a campfire made from gym socks.  But we went up.  I’d mustered just enough intellect to wonder if maybe Ed had bought some food for us or something.”

Ed rolls his eyes.  “No offense to the quality of the takeout we get around here, but…”

“I had forgotten, of course,” Roy says warmly, “that Ed is a good Southern boy—”

This time Ed snorts way too loud before he can stop himself.

“—who would extend hospitality to his worst enemy,” Roy says, “although he’d probably say ‘Bless your heart’ to them a lot if that was the case.”  He sets an elbow on the desktop, leans his chin on his hand, and smiles at Ed in the way that always makes Ed’s guts curl up and shake a little bit.  It’s just a lot.  “To us, however, he extended quite a lot more than that.  He’d cooked us—all five of us—a full steak dinner with side dishes and appetizers and dessert.  And he’d made every single one of us a care package—”

“They weren’t packages,” Ed says.  “They were in grocery bags.  I suck at that tissue-paper-and-bows stuff.  Had to cut my losses.”

“He made every single one of us,” Roy says calmly, “a beautiful grocery-bagged care package, which contained an incredibly soft pillow and one of those spa kits with fancy soaps and a considerable amount of chocolate and a much-needed six-pack of beer.  And each of the bags was on top of a cooler, and each cooler had a pint of ice cream and a considerable number of frozen dinners, so that none of us would have to cook for a couple of days if we didn’t want to.  And he’d gone around town and collected an enormous amount of thank-you notes from the community, and put them together into a giant collage—”

“My friend Winry came up and helped with that,” Ed says.  “I’m the worst at arts and crafts.  It would’ve looked like a four-year-old made it if I’d done it myself.”

“—and he’d crowd-sourced funds for an extremely generous gift card to our favorite sandwich shop near the station,” Roy says.  “And he just said, ‘Hey, uh, welcome home.  I’m sorry it’s not much.’  And all five of us stood there in the tiny kitchen, covered in soot, and cried.”

“It was really awkward,” Ed says.  “I thought maybe I’d done something wrong.”

“He’d also made little gift bags for the people who had stayed at the station while we were gone,” Roy says, “because he knew that they’d been working extra hours to cover for us.”

“Well,” Ed says, helplessly, “yeah.”

“We still have the note collage up on the wall at the firehouse,” Roy says.  “But we made very short work of the gift certificate.”  He’s directing the gut-curler at Ed again.  “I was walking my crew back down to the engine—which we’d just parked on the street because we simply couldn’t care anymore at that point—and my best friend grabbed my arm in the elevator and told me that you were a keeper, and I needed to make sure that you knew it.”

Ed blinks at him.  “She—did?”

“Her exact words were ‘Don’t you dare screw this up’,” Roy says, “but that was definitely the intention.”

Ed makes a face at him.  Roy makes one right back.

“Well, that’s about enough out of me for a lifetime, I think,” Roy says.  He bats his eyelashes.  “What’s your favorite memory of us, love?”

Ed gives it a second to settle.  Roy continues batting his eyelashes.  He’s going to strain an eyelid muscle in a minute.

“I’ve been thinking,” Ed says.  “How about if I tell the bar story again?”

Roy’s face goes from cutesy-seductive to dead-inside instantaneously, which is funny enough in its own right even before he swiftly proceeds to try to disappear under the desk again.

“Hey!” Ed says.  “Come back here.  I was joking.  Maybe.  Sort of.  Probably.”

“I’m going to go get some water,” Roy says, crawling across the floor.  “Do you want some?”

Ed’s face is warmer than standard, although the mean temperature seems to be significantly higher in general when he films with Roy.  “Uh… yeah, actually.  Hang on, lemme pause.”

Hydrating proves substantially more difficult when Roy won’t stop kissing his face.

“Are you okay?” Ed manages after the third onslaught, during which he only narrowly avoided pouring half a glass of water on both of their shirts.  Roy would use that as an excuse to do the rest of the episode without any shirt at all, and then Ed would get shadowbanned, and the whole YouTube gig would go kaput.

“Yes,” Roy says, despite the growing body of evidence.  “It’s just that telling that story made me grateful for you all over again.”

Ed wrinkles his nose.  “All I did was buy some frozen ravioli and shit.  You’re the ones out there putting your lives on the line tryin’ to save people and their pets and all the little forest animals.”

“I couldn’t do any of those things alone,” Roy says.  “People need people.  And people like me need people like you.”

The combination of weird sensations in Ed’s chest and stomach area probably mean that he’s either going to barf or get teary-eyed if this goes on, and he doesn’t really fancy either of those during what was supposed to be a brief filming break.

“You’re gettin’ into Hallmark territory,” he says.

“I’m far too gay for Hallmark,” Roy says.  “It’s one of my best personality traits.”

“Being gay is not a personality trait,” Ed says.

Roy winks broadly at him.  “Not with that attitude.”

Ed hooks an elbow through his and starts hauling him back to the bedroom.  “That’s enough outta you.  C’mon, we have to go finish this damn thing whether you like it or not.”

“Oh, no,” Roy says, not even bothering with a token show of resistance.  “How terrible, to have to sit close to my catastrophically adorable boyfriend and have my gushing about how much I adore him recorded for posterity.  I’m devastated.  No, don’t make me.  How could you?  You’re so cruel.”

Ed leads Roy back to his chair and then chugs the rest of the water.

“Just born awful, I guess,” he says.  “You ready?”

Roy settles in his chair and pats the seat of Ed’s in a way that he seems to think is inviting.  “Any time you are.”

Ed turns the camera back on, sits down, and folds his arms.  He looks at Roy.  Roy looks back.

“You were going to share a nice memory,” Roy says, “that was not the bar story.”

“The question said ‘favorite’,” Ed says.  “That one is my favorite.  If that’s a crime, lock me up.”  He just offered Roy a handcuffs joke on a silver platter, and he can see it immediately in Roy’s eyes that they both know it.  “Okay!  Fine!  Um—all right.  So a while after we moved in, Al’s schedule lined up really well with mine for once, so he was plannin’ to visit.  I was pretty excited about it because I hadn’t seen him in a while—like, we text and talk on the phone a lot, but it’s not quite the same, you know?—but then I started to notice that Roy was really excited about it.  And in the last week leading up to when Al was gonna fly in, he kept asking me all these questions, like what Al’s favorite food was, and what his favorite color was, and if he had any movies that he liked, and what his pet peeves were, and…”

His face starts to heat up.  That was a nice two minutes of not flushing hotly while it lasted.

“Okay,” he says.  “So… full disclosure, I was crushin’ pretty hard on Roy by this point, for reasons that are self-evident and will only feed his ego, so I was starting to get a little… concerned… and I was like, y’know, ‘Hey, it’s really cool that you’re so invested in my brother visiting, but this is getting pretty intense.  Are you trying to date him, or what?’  And Roy sort of blinked at me for a second and then gave me that smile—”

Roy beams at him.

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “That one.  And he said ‘I just want to make sure that he has an amazing time so that he’ll come and visit you more often, because it makes you happy.’”

Roy is still giving him that smile.

“That just seemed kinda special, I guess,” Ed says.  “And it stuck with me.  Al’s favorite color is turquoise, by the way.  But it has to be, like, exactly the right shade.  No teal.  Teal isn’t good enough.”

“He is a man of discerning taste,” Roy says.  “We should throw him a very turquoise cat-themed birthday party one of these years.”

“Spoilers, Al,” Ed says.

“Does he watch these?” Roy asks.

“Sometimes,” Ed says.  “Either he saw the notification for the first one that you were in, or the string of disproportionately amused emojis that I got was a real eerie coincidence.”

“That’s a fairly sound hypothesis,” Roy says.

“Thanks,” Ed says.  “I try.  Oh, hey!  Next question is the best one.”

Roy shifts in his chair.  “Should I be concerned?  Your tone of voice makes me concerned.”

“Probably,” Ed says.  “One of my lovely commenters says ‘You never finished the bar story!  What happened to cringey-pickup-lines guy?  What did Ed do then?  The world wants to know!’”

Roy turns slowly towards the camera, the better to give it an utterly tragic mournful look.

“Why?” he asks.  “Why must you hurt me like this?”

“Hush up, you big baby,” Ed says.  “You’re right, lovely commenter!  We didn’t quite finish, ’cause somebody decided that a survey of the underside of the furniture was more important than giving you closure on such a fascinating topic.”

“I’m going to make my own channel,” Roy says faintly, gazing into the middle distance; “with blackjack and hookers.”

“Family-friendly channel!” Ed says.

“Bleep me out,” Roy says, flashing a reckless grin and leaning back in his chair far enough to swing one leg over the other at the knee for maximum devil-may-care aesthetic.  “Please.  It’ll make it sound so much worse.”

“If you’re trying to blackmail me into not telling the rest of the bar story,” Ed says, “you’re gonna have to do a whole lot better than that.”

Roy transitions seamlessly from devilish to pouting.

If that doesn’t sum him right the fuck up, Ed doesn’t know what would.

Ed folds his hands on the table and smiles at the camera as sweetly as possible.

“We left off with Roy sayin’ that while he was not from Tennessee,” Ed says, “I was from Georgia, so maybe I could help.”

Roy sighs loudly.

“Bad pickup line guy looked over at me,” Ed says, “like I was a traffic light that had just turned red on him while he was late, and he’d spilled his coffee in his lap.  I’d been about to take pity on him and try to say somethin’ to make him feel a little better, but—well.  Lost your chance, bucko.  So I changed my mind and made my eyes real wide and turned the accent up to eleven and said, ‘Yeah, mister, I’ve even been to Tennessee once or twice!  I’d be just so goshdarn glad to help you out here.  What can I do you for?’, and he looked like maybe he was going to be sick, and he turned back to Roy and was like ‘Have a nice night’ and then walked away.”

“You know something?” Roy says.  “I still don’t get it.  I don’t.  Because the word ‘Tennessee’ doesn’t—the middle part that you’re taking out doesn’t, you know, pun-translate—”

“That’s not a thing,” Ed says.

“It will be,” Roy says.  “I’ll write a book.  Bestseller.  Flying off the shelves.  It would make slightly more sense if you set it up with some other elements first—maybe.  Like if you prefaced it with a different number, or another state, or… something.”

“Next time I call you at work,” Ed says, “I’m going to ask what you’re Dela-wearing.”

He expected a big, heartfelt groan followed by some indulgent laughter.

What he gets is Roy gazing at him in fucking rapture.

“I love you,” Roy says, sounding almost surprised—like it’s breaking right out of him in spite of his better judgment.  “I love you, I love you, I love you, I—”

It surprises Ed, too, but not as much as Roy then proceeding to tackle him out of his chair to the carpet and kissing him until he can’t breathe and doesn’t mind it much.

When he manages to extract himself enough to stagger upright and over to the camera, he tries to stay mostly out of the frame.  He hasn’t technically lost any articles of clothing just yet, but the dishevelment makes it rather evident that he sure will soon.

“We’ll, um,” he says, fumbling for the button.  “We’ll… do another one later.  Stay positive.”

Roy is making the carpet look very, very appealing even though Ed knows that they’re both too old for that shit, and rug burns hurt more than they have any right to.

“Pretend that I’m making the perfect state-related dirty joke right now,” Ed says.

“Done,” Roy says, drawing an idle design on the carpet with a fingertip without ever taking his eyes off of Ed.  “All I’ve got is ‘Rhode Island’, and that only works in the past tense.”

“It’s probably for the best,” Ed says.  “I feel like we should quit while we’re ahead and can still talk about most of the country without the conversation gettin’ weird.”

“I’ll show you gettin’ weird,” Roy says.

Ed tries to swallow the grin as he settles next to Roy.  “What is it with you and the floor, anyhow?”

Roy reaches up to pull the tie out of Ed’s hair, which is one of Roy’s favorite activities in the entirety of the world, so Ed always lets him.  “It’s special.”

“It’s the floor,” Ed says.

“We started out on the floor,” Roy says.

“We should vacuum more,” Ed says.

“I can think of some other things to do first,” Roy says, curling his fingers into Ed’s hair and drawing him down to—

“Wait,” Ed says.

Roy blinks.

“You,” Ed says, triumphantly, “are my Maine squeeze.”

Fortunately, one of the few things that Roy enjoys more than taking Ed’s hair down is laughing at stupid shit until he cries.

Ed looks at Roy.  Roy looks back.

“Hey, gorgeous,” Roy says.  “You all right?”

“Just thinking,” Ed says.

Roy arches an eyebrow.

“About how weird it is that you turned into my co-host,” Ed says.  “But also how not-weird it is.”

“There was always a part of me,” Roy says—his body language shifts; he angles an arm over the back of his chair, which telegraphs that he’s being at least halfway facetious, but there’s still an undefined percentage of seriousness involved; “when watching ‘Wheel of Fortune’, that secretly wanted to be Vanna White.”

“You practically are,” Ed says.  “She doesn’t age, either.”

“I don’t think my wardrobe’s quite as good,” Roy says.

“My viewers don’t want you to have a wardrobe at all,” Ed says.

Roy starts laughing, unsurprisingly, so Ed leans forward, hits the button, and takes his two breaths.  It’ll make Roy’s opening shot smile look even more natural, not that he needs the damn help.

“Hi, y’all,” Ed says.  “Welcome to Science for People Who Hate Science.  Today we’re gonna talk a little bit of astronomy.”

“Which is wonderful,” Roy says, “because you’re my star.”

Ed stares at him.

“Sorry,” Roy says.

“You are not,” Ed says.

“I will be if you throw up,” Roy says.  “Can I say that you’re my sunshine instead?”

Ed looks directly into the camera.

“For all of you,” Ed says, “who keep saying in the comments, ‘I want my own Roy’… pay attention.  Skip back twenty seconds and watch that again.  This is what you’re getting.”

“It’s true,” Roy says, delightedly.  “Yes, I’m very hot—but at what cost?”

Ed leans on his elbow, thinks very hard as quickly as he can, and… strikes out.

Roy blinks at him.  “What’s wrong?”

“I wanted to say something witty in response to that,” Ed says, “but I try never to say anything that’s not true on this channel, so I just couldn’t argue with it.”

“I may be obnoxious,” Roy says, beaming again, “but at least I’m self-aware.”

In keeping with the true thing, Ed mutters, “You’re not obnoxious,” but he’s definitely not going to subtitle it if it’s difficult to hear.  They’ll be able to tell what he said from Roy’s expression anyway, and he’d prefer to cling to the vestiges of plausible deniability for as long as possible.

He takes a very deep breath and sits up straighter.  He needs to remember to keep doing that.  Roy does a lot of artful slouching and posing on the other chair, which makes them look closer to the same height until they stand up.

Ed remembers belatedly that he’s planning for them to stand up in a matter of minutes, so he can’t trick anybody with good posture in this one anyway.

Damn.

“Okay,” he says.  “Moving right along.  Astronomy!  Specifically, we’re going to talk about stars.  More specifically than that, we’re going to talk about binary systems, because one of our awesome commenters wanted to know how they can exist, and why they don’t just smash into each other and make a giant boom that nobody gets to hear in space.”

“That would be so anticlimactic,” Roy says.

“I know,” Ed says.  “Maybe they’re doing it to avoid disappointing us.  Or maybe it’s physics.”

“I have a suspicion about which,” Roy says.  “Based on the fact that your channel isn’t called ‘Things Not Disappointing Us for People Who Don’t Like Things Disappointing Them’.”

“Which is good,” Ed says.  “Jeez.”

“Agreed,” Roy says.  He turns on the puppy eyes.  They’ve been live for two minutes.  “But please don’t make me do math.”

“I’m working around it,” Ed says.  “So!  Let’s talk a little bit about stars.  What are they, anyway?”

Roy is gazing at him, rapturously and meaningfully.

Ed wrinkles his nose.  “Stop that, you big sap.  I am not gonna file this video in the romance channel.”

“Challenge accepted,” Roy says.

“No,” Ed says.  “Stars are giant balls of non-solid stuff!  You’re very familiar with at least one of them, which we call the sun, but our universe has so many of them that I’m not going to try to say the number, because it would scare Roy, and I need him for demonstrations.”

“I love you, too,” Roy says.

Ed’s going to put approximately 1 x 10²⁴ on the screen later for the more numerically-inclined nerds among his subscribers, but for now he holds both hands over his face for a second and counts backwards from five.  That one Roy could probably handle.

“Aren’t they mostly hydrogen and helium or something?” Roy asks.  “If you inhale a star, do you talk in a squeaky voice?”

“Yes,” Ed says, “and good luck trying.  Stars basically have life cycles the same way that we do.  Our sun is in the part of its life cycle where it’s just so hot that it can actually force atoms to merge together—that’s called nuclear fusion, because the nuclei of the atoms are fusing.  If you remember the couple times we’ve talked about atoms and stuff, and how the number of protons in an atom determines what element it is, you might be thinking—well, hey, you can’t do that!  If you combine atoms that are one element, you’ll get a different one.”  He points at the camera.  “And you’d be exactly right.  Stars like the sun are constantly mashing hydrogen atoms together and ending up with helium instead.  Our sun is mashing up, like, six hundred million metric tons of hydrogen a second.”

There’s a long pause.

“That,” Roy says, sagely, “is a lot.”

“It is,” Ed says.  “And maybe you’re remembering all those times that I’ve blown something up on accident and had to rush-dismantle a smoke detector before I had to explain to my firefighter boyfriend why the call came from our apartment—”

“You what?” Roy says.

“—and thinking ‘Hey, a huge number of powerful reactions like that must produce a lot of energy’,” Ed says.  “And you’d be right about that, too.  That’s what sunlight is—it’s the energy getting flung out by the way that the sun’s burning the everloving heck out of all those atoms.”

“Weird,” Roy says.

“Isn’t it?” Ed says.  “I love it.  So part of the reason I wanted to talk about that was to give you a sense of the size of most stars, in comparison to the size of, y’know, us.”  He folds his hands on the desktop and leans forward.  “You know how there’s all those cool planets in our solar system?  And how a lot of them are huge, even compared to the Earth, which is so big that it completely blows your mind when you try to conceptualize it, and traveling around it even with the technology we’ve got takes a real long time?”

Roy opens the folder that Ed set on the desk, extracts the sheet of paper in it, and hands it over.  Ed holds it up in front of the camera.

“This is a piece of graph paper,” he says, “with a hundred squares.  You can’t really tell, though, ’cause ninety-nine and about six-sevenths of them are shaded in yellow.  That’s because more than ninety-nine percent of the mass in our entire solar system is the sun.”

“That, too,” Roy says, “is a lot.”

“Sure is,” Ed says.  “So if our little planet, which is crammed somewhere into this tiny little corner that I colored in with blue—” He attempts to point to it without covering it with his fingertip.  “—has enough gravity to keep us all more or less stuck to the ground and functional, you can kinda imagine that something three hundred thousand times massier would have a heck of a lot more gravity than that.”

Roy sits back in his chair, looking queasy already.  “How much more?”

“Cover your ears,” Ed says.

Roy obliges.

“About twenty-eight times more,” Ed says.  “Gravity gets quantified as the rate at which stuff falls towards the thing that’s exerting the gravity, more or less.  The Earth’s gravity makes stuff fall at just about nine-point-eight meters-per-second-per-second.  The sun makes stuff fall at roughly two hundred and seventy-four meters-per-second-per-second.”

He sits up and then taps Roy’s shoulder.  Roy, lowering his hands, looks slightly overwhelmed, which is cute in its own right, but also makes Ed think that maybe he should ease up a little bit.

“I take it,” Roy says, “that most of the models we’re used to seeing of our solar system are… not depicted quite to scale.”

“Mostly not,” Ed says.  “The aesthetics of it aren’t as good when you’ve just got a giant sun-blob looming over most of it, and you can barely even see the pretty little planets.  So!”  He claps his hands and then rubs them together.  “Stars.”  He holds up two fingers.  “Specifically, multiple stars in the same system, interacting.  How does that work?”

“Tell me, you science-minded wildman,” Roy says.  “But leave out the equations.  Please.  I can only take so much.”

“I’ll try,” Ed says, meaning it.  “Anyway, the point of all that was just to get across that stars have a huge amount of gravity, and that’s why other things—even things that are pretty big in their own right, like planets—usually orbit around them.  But that brings us to the question that we’re gonna try to answer, which is what happens when you have two stars in the same place, and why they don’t just… eat each other.”

“And go silent-boom,” Roy says solemnly.

“Which would make a good indie band name,” Ed says.  “So a binary system is exactly what it sounds like—it’s a solar system that’s got two stars in it, like if we had two suns.”

“Like Tatooine in ‘Star Wars’,” Roy says.

“Look at you,” Ed says.  “We’re gonna make an astronomer out of you in no time.”

“Definitely,” Roy says.  “I’m sure they’ll all be thrilled when I just point at things in the night sky and say ‘That’s fairly far away, isn’t it?  Must be a big number.’”

“You’d charm their pants off anyway,” Ed says.

Roy arches an eyebrow and starts to smirk.  “Maybe I should practice a little b—”

“Most binary systems,” Ed says, loudly, “don’t have planets, though.  We’re not entirely sure why that is, although it could have to do with how binary systems form.  But we’re not entirely sure how binary systems form.  All of which is absolutely freakin’ awesome, because the only thing cooler than knowing something is not knowing something.”

“Wow,” Roy says.  “I’m going to make a great astronomer after all.  I don’t know anything.”

“See?” Ed says.  “Science.  All it really is, is not knowing stuff and trying to figure it out.  For instance, what I just said about how there aren’t as many planets in binary systems as there are in single-star systems?  We don’t actually know that.  We haven’t been able to detect as many planets, but these things are so unimaginably far away that it’s, like, magical math guesswork at that point anyway.  Who the heck knows?  Some of our calculations are sayin’ that having two stars probably messes up the way that planets would usually coalesce; and some of our calculations are sayin’ that they probably make it easier, and maybe they just make it harder to tell.”  He can feel himself grinning.  “Isn’t it cool not to know that?  Isn’t it cool that it’s just, like… so far out there that there are all these mysteries in the universe, and we’ve just gotta inch our way closer to as our technology and our observations and our math get better and better?”

“You had me up until math,” Roy says.

“I know,” Ed says.  “Sorry.  I promise I didn’t just bring you onto this video to torture you.”

Roy shares a conspiratorial look with the camera, which Ed has to admit that he sort of deserves at this point.

“I mean it,” Ed says.  “But I think I’ve gotten distracted from the actual question about six times now, so… binary star systems.  How the heck do they exist?”

Roy has taken up staring at the desktop, which Ed mistakes for more math-related unsettlement until Roy says, “How the heck do I exist?”

“That’s a question for a different video,” Ed says.  “And I’d have to do a lot of philosophy reading first, which is… well, we could do a soap-tasting video instead.  It’d probably be more fun.”

“Binary star systems,” Roy says.

“Binary star systems,” Ed says.  “We think that they might come about just as a result of two stars forming simultaneously.  Stars form from a molecular cloud, which is basically just a clump of hydrogen and stuff hanging around in space.  Basically, if those clouds get big enough, they start to collapse in on themselves, and then they start to be dense enough to have gravity, and then that makes them denser still.  You can also kinda startle them into collapsing if you whack ’em with something, like another molecular cloud that’s just trying to pass on by and mind its own business, or shrapnel from a supernova, or whatever.  There’s a lot more stuff we could get into here, but the point is that molecular clouds tend to fragment, and some of the big fragments turn into stars, and one of the running theories for how binary systems get started is just that two big fragments turn into stars instead of just one.”

“Like fraternal twins, sort of?” Roy says.

“Yes,” Ed says, and Roy looks unabashedly delighted for a moment before he puts his suave expression back on.  “Although they don’t have to be identical in size or in type or in life cycle or anything.  They just have to each have enough gravity to prevent the other one from eating them.  Right?”

Roy blinks.  “…r…ight.”

“Demo,” Ed says.  “This is why you’re here.”

“Goody,” Roy says, pushing his chair back.

“We get to hold hands,” Ed says.

Roy’s eyes light up.

“I told you I wasn’t trying to punish you,” Ed says.  He darts over to adjust the camera.  “Okay, so see this fancy blue tape I stuck down in a fancy X on the floor?  That’s going to be what’s called the barycenter—which is just a hoity-toity astronomy jargon way of specifying that it’s the center of mass for two things that orbit each other.  So you can think of it like the mass-average midpoint between them, which makes it the axis that they’re both orbiting around.  So we’re gonna spin around this point, okay?”

Roy is… fiddling with his phone.

“Hang on,” he says.  “I want to see if…” He does… something… and then puts the phone into the breast pocket of his shirt, so that just the end with the camera is peeking out.  “It’s an experiment.”

“I guess I have to allow that on this channel on principle,” Ed says.  “You ready?”

Roy beams at him again, holding both hands out.  “Darling, I was born ready for this one.”

“Gross,” Ed says warmly, grabbing his hands.  “Take one step closer to the X.  What we’re tryin’ to visualize here is that you have slightly more gravity, so your orbit is comparatively smaller, and you’re closer to the center of mass—but because I have enough gravity to hold up my end of the bargain, we’re both orbiting around each other.  Yeah?”

“I would follow you to the ends of the Earth,” Roy says.  “Science demonstrations that I don’t understand are a given.”

Ed lets go of both of Roy’s hands, the better to hit Roy’s arm very gently.  “You’d understand if you paid attention.”

“I can’t,” Roy says, gazing at him.  “I’m lost in your eyes.  Very lost.  Past the point where GPS can help me.”

Ed holds his hands out again.  “Well, you get to be a lost star in a binary system for a little while.”

Roy latches on to both of Ed’s hands—and then lifts each of them to his mouth in turn, kissing Ed’s knuckles.

Ed’s face catches fire yet again.  It always looks hilarious on-screen, or at least what of it that he manages to watch through his fingers while editing does.  “Stars don’t do that, Roy.”

“Don’t they?” Roy says.  “I’m terribly sorry.  How about this?”

He releases one of Ed’s hands and raises the other one, guiding Ed into a little spin.

Ed tries very, very hard not to display any of the glee, which would just encourage Roy and derail this episode right into the gooey romance pit right as they finally, finally approach the question that motivated it.

“Zero for two,” Ed says, as deadpan as possible.

“I am an extraordinarily mediocre star,” Roy says.  “I’d better keep my day job.”

“I’m pretty sure a grand total of zero people would complain about getting to look at you through telescopes,” Ed says.  “Do you remember that thing I told you a minute ago about how we’re going to orbit?”

“Barycenter,” Roy says.  “Which sounds like the name of a sports stadium.”

“I hate that that’s true,” Ed says.  He tightens his grip on Roy’s hands and takes one meaningful step to his right.  “Yeah?”

Roy squeezes Ed’s fingers in his.  The man is a living, breathing, schmoop-brained distraction.

But at least he starts moving in complement to Ed.

Courtesy of their mutual friend physics and their similar instincts, they pick up speed, turning around the tape X on the floor between them, staying at a relatively consistent distance.  After several turns, Roy says “Wait”, and when Ed pauses, he inexplicably deposits his phone into Ed’s shirt pocket instead.

“What are you doing?” Ed asks.  It’s obviously what Roy wants him to ask; unfortunately Ed’s curiosity wins ten times out of ten.

“Giving you terrible footage of us holding hands and whirling around in circles like a bad scene in a sappy movie,” Roy says.  “So that you can put a filter on it and set awful music behind it and run your credits over it and make everyone who watches very upset, if you want to.”

Ed looks at him.

And then Ed tells the truth, which is “You are a disaster,” followed by the other truth, which is “I fucking love you.”

He’s going to have to bleep that out, but it was worth it for Roy’s grin anyway.

“So,” Roy says, tugging on Ed’s hand to set them back to the task of spinning.  “Can we make an online store for your channel?  Can we sell shirts that say ‘Hey, baby, I’d like to orbit your barycenter, if you know what I mean’?”

“No,” Ed says, but he’s definitely laughing.

Chapter Text

Ed surfaces, groggily, from an off-kilter dream about grading midterms to the off-kilter reality of having fallen asleep while grading midterms.  The transition is extremely confusing for several seconds.  He grinds the heel of his left hand against his eye and tries to sit up without accidentally stabbing himself on his pen, which is currently MIA.  He knows he must have had it in his hand before he dozed off.

When he reaches for the exam booklet that he remembers having rested on top of his blanket, he doesn’t find that, either.  Gingerly shifting towards a more upright position as his vision clears illuminates both of those mysteries: the open exam, and his pen, are on the coffee table.  Roy moved them.  Either Roy also turned out the living room light, or they’re having a very room-specific power outage, since Ed can see the glowing green numbers of the clock on the microwave from here.

At times like this, Roy’s work schedule really, really sucks.  All Ed wants to do is crawl into bed with him—literally, right now; he wants to wrap his blanket into a semi-mobile cocoon and drag himself across the floor all the way to the bedroom instead of standing up and walking like a biped—and sleep off the worst of the gritty exhaustion and the nasty, lousy, remarkably poorly-timed head cold.  Roy dotes on him a little extra when he’s sick.  It’s hard to tell, given how much Roy dotes on him all the time, but he can differentiate it in the little details, and that’s what he wants right now.

He knows that that’s selfish, and probably childish too, but he didn’t get a whole hell of a lot of it as a child, so maybe he’s entitled to try to catch up.  Isn’t that a thing?  Somebody babying you when you’re sick?  He remembers some Campbell’s soup commercials along those lines, although it’s perfectly possible that those were part of a larger capitalistic lie trying to sell otherwise rational grownups precisely the fantasy that he’s craving right now.  He trusts the canned soup companies a modicum more than some of the other corporate overlords out there, but not much.

It’s just so easy to pity yourself when you feel like crap, and it makes you feel a tiny bit better if someone else pities you, too.  It makes you feel a significantly larger amount better if they coddle you and bring you tea and stroke your muzzy head and kiss your ears and bundle you up in blankets.  You still feel like crap, but you feel like crap cozily, and you also feel loved, which is a nice distraction from the crappiness.

Ed pries himself off of the couch and blearily starts searching for his phone.  He can’t read the time on the microwave from here.  Roy’s regular shifts usually start at eight in the morning and end at eight in the morning the next day, which works out decently enough with weekday shifts, since at least the two of them can get ready at the same time.  The station asked him to do a seven at night to the next seven at night this time, though, to try to put some extra hours in for an inspection, so Ed must have passed out around six—before Roy left, anyway.  Embarrassing, but Ed’s been sleeping like shit lately with this stupid cold, and his battered immune system is taking its frustration out on the rest of him.

His phone turns up on the coffee table where his mug of lemon tea had been.  The observable absence of the mug of tea heavily implies undetected motions of a Roy-like motivation.  This theory, tenable in its own right given the additional evidence of the relocation of Ed’s grading and his pen, receives further reinforcement when he picks up his phone.

It’s ten PM now, and he got a text from Roy shortly after six thirty.  That would have required Roy to steal his phone, spirit it away into another room and/or turn the sound off, text him, wait for the reminder notification to elapse, turn the sound back on, and set Ed’s phone down on the table again.  Ed can absolutely imagine him doing all of that for no reason other than to let Ed wake up to a message.

The message in question reads: Hello, love, you looked very peaceful.  You were snoring like a tiny congested cat.  I hope you don’t have a crick in your neck.  I did some of that curry mix with rice and left a tupperware in the fridge for you, so please pop it in the microwave and eat something when you get this.  Or there’s soup!  I left a can out on the counter.  I put a new pillowcase on your pillow because the old one had snot on it and I wanted you to have a clean canvas.  I love you, and also your snot.  Call me if you need anything xxx

Ed puts his phone down so that he can bury his face in his hands better.  He scrubs them up and down to try to push the blush back into his capillaries, and then he rubs his eyes while he’s there.  He still feels gross and half-conscious and phlegmy in the extreme, but he supposes that at least now he feels treasured on top of the rest of it.  Roy’s just such a sap.

He writes back I have never snored in my entire life and I refuse to hear otherwise, you liar.  I and my snot love you too.  Be safe out there.  See you soon.

Disgusting.

Equally disgusting—maybe even more disgusting by a measurable distance—is the fact that now, despite the ongoing sick-misery, he doesn’t really want to go back to sleep.

He knows where this is going.

“Hi, y’all,” he says.  Having the camera pointed at himself close-range, with the bedroom lamp on very low where he’s sitting in bed wearing a blanket as a hooded cape and looking like death warmed over will not make for the most flattering film he’s ever put in a video, but he doesn’t really give a shit.  “Welcome to Science for People Who Hate Science.  Sorry about my voice; I caught somethin’ that’s holding a grudge.  Couldn’t sleep and ended up going around on the internet learnin’ about something I’ve wanted to look up for a while but never did, which is… fungi.”

He lets that sink in for a second.

“C’mon,” he says.  “I know it’s happened to basically everybody at some point in their lives, right?  You’re sick, and you accidentally take a power nap at dinnertime and totally blow your sleep schedule, and then you’re like, ‘Dang, I’ve always wanted to know more about mushrooms’, and the next thing you know, it’s two AM, and you’re high on NyQuil and findin’ out that yeast is a fungus.  I mean—I think I’d heard that, but I never thought about it.  You think ‘fungus’, and you think ‘mushroom’, or you think ‘mold’, but then, like—what the hell?  Those two things are so different.  I mean—I guess we’re awfully different from, like, insects.  And jellyfish.  But we’re all animals.  So that makes sense, but you don’t think about it, up until you do, and then you’re like ‘Aw, fuck.’”

He stares into the camera for a second as he realizes what he just said, and then he closes his eyes.

“Sorry,” he says.  “I’m real tired.  Roy’s at work; don’t worry.  I’m not wakin’ him up ravin’ about yeast like some kinda phylogenetic prophet.  This is a really good time for a psychedelic mushrooms joke, but I’m not smart enough to put it together right now, so I hope y’all’ll do me a favor and just imagine a really good one and give me credit for it.  Feel free to let me know in the comments if you come up with somethin’ you’re proud of.”

He pushes his hair back from his face and then adjusts his blanket over his head.

“So,” he says.  “Um… fungi.”

The blinking red light on the camera does not look particularly impressed.

“They think there might be, like, four million species of fungi in the world,” Ed says.  “But we’ve only classified a hundred and twenty thousand of ’em or something.  Isn’t that wild?  There’s just—millions and millions of secret fungi out there, waitin’ for somebody to figure them out.  And partly that’s a complexity thing, and a difficulty-of-findin’-the-damn-things thing.  You’re not, like, gonna sit there takin’ tiny little samples of the mold that starts growing on your shower curtain; you’re just gonna try to get rid of it.  And when it comes to stuff like mushrooms or whatever—they’re out there in the woods half the time, right?  And a lot of ’em are really small, and some grow in the dark, and I was readin’ a couple minutes ago about just how minuscule the differences can be sometimes.  One of the features that mycologists’ll look for is the way that different mushrooms spread their spores, which… just tracking that is a whole big thing, ’cause mushrooms more or less drop this tiny bit of dust, right, and… yeah.  Point is, there are lots of mold- and mushroom-related mysteries out there that we still haven’t even come close to solving, which I think is pretty damn cool.”

He gazes into the camera for a second, rooting around in his brain for coherent thoughts.

He comes up empty-handed.

“Another thing,” he says.  Yolo and all that.  “I don’t know if y’all know this already, so forgive me if you do, but—we’re closer evolutionarily to fungi than we are to plants.  Which is makin’ me wonder, like—for vegetarians and vegans and stuff.  Where do you draw the line?  Do mushrooms have feelings?  Does yeast have feelings?  These are the things we gotta ask ourselves at two in the damn morning when we probably had half a dose more NyQuil than we shoulda done, okay?”

He pulls the blanket on both sides to secure it on top of his head, which seems like a good idea.

“Listen,” he says.  “There are aquatic fungi, too—I’d never even heard of that, and I absorb weird science stuff as much as I can.  There are some that are, like, parasites out there killin’ amphibians—which is only cool in a conceptual way, on account of the fact that I didn’t know it.  ’Cause I like amphibians a lot, and when I was a kid I really wanted to be able to breathe through my skin.  That’s a different video.  Or not.  Ever.  But there’re also fungi that live, like, near hydrothermal vents in the ocean.”

He pauses to stare into space for a second and rummage for more fungally-relevant thoughts.

“I’m also really interested in trying to get a handle on why molds make us gag and mushrooms make us hungry,” he says.  “Well—mostly, anyway.  I hated mushrooms as a kid ’cause we had ’em slivered all the time, instead of in bigger pieces, and the texture when they were cooked always just… yeah.  Like worms.  But even then, it’s different.  We get such a, y’know, visceral sense of revulsion with mold—is that hardwired in because our species learned a long damn time ago that this particular manifestation of fungus is usually bad news?  Except some mushrooms look ‘yuck’ like that, too.  But we’re cool with deliberate mold on cheese, mostly—or dairy-positive people are, anyway.  I don’t know.  It’s just so fucking interesting that we have these instinctual reactions t—”  He winces, belatedly, at the F-bomb.  “Sorry.  You know what I mean.”

He fiddles with his blanket again.  He can barely see himself in the viewfinder in this lighting, but that’s probably a good thing.

“Another thing I learned tonight,” he says, “is that some of the fungi that kill crops and stuff—they’ve got these specialized little cells they make that just stab through shit.  Sorry—through… stuff.  They stab through stuff.  Those little things are called an appressorium, and what they do is latch on, first, to the thing they’re tryin’ to infect; and then when they’re stuck on real securely, they punch through, and then they get clever with enzymes and start expanding.  We’re still talkin’, like, a cellular level, here, but these things are generating a seriously significant amount of force, and they blast their way right through the cell wall of plant cells.”

He stares at the camera again.

“This video is a fucking mess,” he says.  “I might just delete it.  I could just get some notes on the things I want to talk about when I’m sane again first.”

He clears his throat.  He does not stop the camera.  He wonders about himself sometimes.

“So there’s two more things I wanted to talk about,” he says.  “One is that there are dimorphic fungi out there that can change between being a mold and a yeast, which is just—what?  What the fuck.  That’s fucking awesome.  It’s usually because of temperature.  Which is sort of less awesome, because some of ’em are diseases, and that’s how they get into people and kill them in really nasty ways, ’cause you just inhale the mold spores, and then they convert themselves into yeast once they’re in you.”

He sighs, feelingly, and rubs his eyes again, for all the good that does.  His brain’s still spinning, but in a tilty sort of way.  Is that a sign to take more NyQuil, or to water down the shit he already took?

“The other thing,” he says, “is that there’s a colony of mushrooms in a national park in Oregon that we think is the biggest single organism in the entire world.  It’s got these little root-like things—they’re not quite roots, but they work sorta like ’em; they’re the fungus equivalent of roots, more or less, and they’re called mycelial cords or rhizomorphs—that go under the ground for what we think is about twenty-two hundred acres.  That’s three and a half square miles of living thing.  It’s this mushroom species called Armillaria ostoyae.  They think it’s, like, eight thousand years old.  Eight thousand.”

He considers.  He’s too tired to lift his hands to play with the blanket now, which may be progress, or may be delirium.

“I wonder if I can convince Roy to go on vacation and go visit the giant fungus,” he says.  “Maybe I shouldn’t say it that way, though.  Visit beautiful Oregon!  We have two-thousand-year-old fungus!  Probably not on the to-do list for the tourist registry right now, huh?”

He gazes into space for another minute, then reaches for the button to stop the camera, then pauses.

“I forgot to talk about puffballs,” he says.  “Another time.  That’s their real name.  And it’s basically what they do—they’re ball-shaped fungi, and they just puff out spores.  Fucking nature, man.”

He hits the button.

Then he turns off the camera.

Then he turns off the light.

Then he drops facedown on the bed, rolls over, buries his face in the pillow, and goes the fuck to sleep.

The next morning, he feels both hungover and measurably more human.  The bed’s always cold when Roy’s not in it; no amount of piled-up blankets ever really helps.

Ed wraps one of them around his shoulders anyway and drags himself into the kitchen, where he looks contemplatively at the coffee pot for a few moments before trudging off with the blanket trailing behind him to go take a shower first.  Sinus-clearing steam, then caffeine.

Life is suffering, but even when he feels like cat crap on a hot sidewalk that somebody just walked through in steel-toed boots, things are still pretty good.

While the coffee’s percolating, he rewraps his blanket cape and goes back into the bedroom to fetch his phone.  About half an hour ago, Roy wrote How are you feeling? with a bunch of little hearts and then one of the emojis blowing its nose.

Will be better when your fine ass is back in the house, Ed writes back, because phrasing it as when I get to see you instead would have been too sappy and too true.

He’s been thinking that maybe he’ll post the damn NyQuil-addled fungus video after all, with a nice “Watch at your own risk” in the title, and just the words “I’m sorry” in the description.  If nothing else, it’ll help weed out the weak subscribers.

And Roy will probably laugh his ass off.

Partway through the afternoon, Ed drags himself to the grocery store and back.  He doesn’t have it in him to do anything particularly fancy, but even a very ordinary homemade chicken soup stock is going to taste better for both of them, and might not have enough sodium in each spoonful to turn them into salt licks by the end of the meal.  Plus he can make enough to last a couple days.  Plus… there was another thing that he forgot.

He sits down with some more grading at the kitchen table this time, since it would be significantly harder to fall asleep in one of these chairs.  He’s probably up to it, given his questionable personal history of passing out anywhere that he can sort of rest his head, but it’s not nearly as much of a simmering temptation as the couch.

Roy straggles in a little after seven, looking gorgeous and exhausted, and kisses him, and then kisses him a lot more, and snorts when Ed says he should lay off before he cordially invites Ed’s nasty germs right into all of his mucus membranes, and kisses Ed some more after that.  They have soup, and Roy talks about how he tried to charm the inspectors so subtly that they wouldn’t notice he was doing it, which is the least surprising thing that Ed has ever heard.  Roy takes a really, really long shower, and then they pass out by eight thirty like a couple of old people.

Even with his head full of gucky phlegm, Ed wouldn’t change a fucking thing.

Ed would change the fact that he wakes them both up a little after six the next morning because his nose is running so avidly that he has to roll out of bed in search of the Kleenex box.  He knows that he left it within reach on the floor, but evidently it has taken up hide-and-seek as a hobby overnight.

When he creeps back into bed, Roy reaches both arms out for him and drags him into the cuddle vortex.  The envelopment in Roy-smell and Roy-warm and Roy-soft is transcendent enough on its own, but then Roy makes that low, low, contented Mmm noise in the center of his chest, and his breathing evens out, and Ed can’t even begrudge the Kleenex quest anymore.

Both of them have to get up to pee about an hour after that, and then they both retreat back to the bed because it’s still so nice and warm.

“Whaddyou wanna do today?” Ed mumbles into Roy’s glorious collarbones as Roy plays idly with his hair.

“You,” Roy says, which is his answer a thousand times out of a thousand regardless of where they are, what they’re talking about, or what’s already on the agenda.  “Do you have any videos lined up?  If you’re feeling up to it, I mean.  Those are fun.  But I don’t want to give you more work to do with editing.”

“Mm,” Ed manages.  “Might be good.  Get a break from all the gradin’ and shit.  I’m still soundin’ like I had a hot date with strep throat, though.”

“You’re making me jealous,” Roy says.

Ed shoves at him, deliberately ineffectively.  “How ’bout if I make you coffee instead?”

“Depends,” Roy says.  “Did you make coffee for strep throat first?”

“Get bent,” Ed says, but the way he’s obviously smothering a laugh kind of ruins it.

After some restorative coffee, a restorative shower, a dose of restorative DayQuil, and some not probably restorative but definitely delicious bacon cooked and served by Ed’s trophy boyfriend, they sit down at the filming desk.  Ed is letting Roy get away with a slightly sinful forest green T-shirt, which complements his complexion and leaves less to the imagination than Ed would ordinarily like, but today Ed is trying to distract the viewers from the fact that he himself looks like shit.  He’s pretty sure that the opportunity to watch Roy’s shoulders shift under a thin layer of cotton in 1080p will reduce the likelihood of anyone noticing Ed’s current state of fugliness to just about zero.

Ed also has a nice mug of tea to hide his face in if he starts feeling too zombie-tastic altogether, and he remembered a glove this time.  He’s set.

Lights, camera, two deep breaths, action.

“Hi, y’all,” he says.  “Welcome back to the spin-off series that y’all wanted for reasons that continue to be completely beyond me, which I guess we’re still calllin’ Romance for People Who Hate Romance.  If you didn’t watch the NyQuil and fungus video—”

“The what?” Roy says, sounding like he’s not quite sure if he should laugh or call one of his friends in the ER.

“Never mind,” Ed says.  Crap.  Now he has to post that one, because he talked about it.  Figures.  “It’s not what it sounds like.  Well—it sort of is.  Well—never mind.  The point is, I’m sick as a dog, so I’m sorry if I sound weirder than usual; and I’m gonna try not to slurp my tea here, but I can’t make any promises.”

“You have a natural talent for slurping,” Roy says, which sounds so bad out of context.  “It’s precious.”

Ed gives him a warning look.

“I mean it!” Roy says.  “Give them a good slurp.  They’ll love it.”

Ed turns the warning look on the camera—not that it’ll help—raises his mug to his mouth, and gives them a really good, long, variable slurp of tea, because that’s going to be hilarious later when he zooms in slowly on his own face and ramps up the volume before abruptly cutting back.

“Music to my ears,” Roy says.  “A masterwork.  A magnum opus.  Truly inspirational.  Do you think we could get a sponsorship from a tea company, and they’d send us free stuff?”

“I think you’re really overestimatin’ the popularity of a channel where most of the content is my face talkin’ science,” Ed says.

“I’d watch that all day,” Roy says.

Ed sighs so loudly that he ends up coughing, and Roy ends up patting his back.

“Sorry,” Ed says, sort of to the camera and sort of to Roy and sort of to the universe that has, this week, seen fit to kick him with the pointy shoes.  “You’d think I wouldn’t be doing that anymore.  I’ve had, like, three cups of tea already, and it’s not even ten in the mornin’.”

He realizes how he said that word only when Roy turns to the camera, biting his lip on an utterly charmed, adoring little smile.

“Stop that,” Ed says.  “I’m serious.  I’m so hydrated right now that I can’t believe I haven’t woken up in a bottled water commercial.”

“Please,” Roy says, “please let it be one of those ones that’s meant to be grossly metaphorical, and their brand is so refreshing that it just shows you luxuriating underneath a tropical waterfall, completely na—”

Ed clears his throat as loud as he dares when there’s still a tickle in it.

“…nice?” Roy says, fighting with a grin and losing.  “Completely nice.  Nice Southern boy.  That’s what we’re about.  Can we make me an official merchandise T-shirt that says ‘Family-friendly channel’?  I could wear a button-down over it and just tear the top layer open every time, like Superman.”

Innuendoman would be Roy’s superhero alias.  The worst part is that it actually sounds like a pretty good idea, and there’s a decent chance that a couple of other people would buy them.

“I’ll think about it,” Ed says.  “Meantime, we should think about the latest batch of questions people sent.”

“That’s sensible,” Roy says.  “Even if it’s slightly less fun than thinking about you being completely nice.”

Ed stares at him for a few seconds.  The head cold makes it hard to think, but he’s fairly confident that even on an ordinary day, Roy summarily ruining a perfectly normal and extremely common word would leave him speechless.

Roy knows exactly what he’s done and does not demonstrate a single iota of remorse: he just grins at the camera and then at Ed.

“What’s the first question?” he asks.

“It’s one for you,” Ed says.  “Which is good, because that means that I can take a nap.”

“Do you want a nap?” Roy asks.  “You can take one before we film, love.  We could just pause here, and—”

“It’s okay,” Ed says, waving both hands enough to ruffle the sheets with the printed questions and moderately endanger his tea.  “Just—y’know.  Bein’ awake is a chore when you feel like this, is all.  I want a conceptual nap.  I don’t have time for a real one.”

“But you’re sick,” Roy says.

“I’m fine,” Ed says.

“You’re damn fine,” Roy says.  “But that doesn’t change the sick part.”

Ed scrubs both hands over his face and then gulps down some tea.  Roy is too much.  Ed hasn’t actually developed a fever at any point during this particular immunological escapade, but it sure feels like he has one now.

“The question,” he says, “is which of my science videos is your favorite.”  Mustering a grin is a little easier when he knows what he gets to say next: “And you’re not allowed to pick your introduction.”

“It would be very vain of me to pick any of the ones I feature in,” Roy says, and he’s grinning right back for a second, but then it fades into a much softer smile, and Ed… doesn’t know what that means, exactly.  “None of those are my favorite anyway.”

“Let me guess,” Ed says, leaning an elbow on the desktop so that he can prop his chin on his hand.  “It’s the one where I almost singed off my eyebrows.”

“I appreciated the prescience that led you to do that out on the balcony,” Roy says, “rather than in here.  And I greatly enjoyed the notes from our neighbors afterward asking if you were okay after all of the screaming that they heard.  But—no, not quite.  My favorite by far is ‘Physics without Any Numbers’.”

Ed—

Doesn’t quite know what he’s feeling.  He just knows that there’s a lot of it—a lot of it—and it’s happening very fast.

“I need some more tea,” he says, and his body obediently switches over to autopilot, pushes his chair back, grabs up his mug, stands, and walks out of the room.

“Ed?” Roy says, and—bizarre, the things the brain does; just strange—the familiarity of the footsteps following Ed is comforting, but their imminence sets him on edge.

The robot running Ed’s muscles to let his brain devote itself to screaming carries him over to their electric tea kettle.  He gets the pitcher of filtered water out of the fridge and starts pouring.  He senses Roy hovering in the doorway from the hall more than he actually sees it.

He holds up the pitcher without looking away from the minimum fill line on the kettle.  “Do you want some?”

“No, thank you,” Roy says, slowly.  “I—”

“It’s okay,” Ed says before Roy can apologize, which will make it bigger and worse and run it through with tiny barbs of guilt.

He can feel his brain ramping up for an anxiety spiral and tries to clamp down on the edge of it, but everything’s harder to grip in his own head when it’s full of crumpled Kleenex and little bees.  He takes a very slow deep breath, holds it for a second, lets it out, and hits the tab to turn the kettle on.

“It’s okay,” he says again.  “It’s really okay.  You didn’t do anything.  It just—surprised me, I guess.  That’s, like, the second damn video I ever did.  I didn’t think you’d seen it.”

He sneaks a glance.  Roy is leaning against the doorway, arms folded across his chest—cautious body language.  Protective.  Ed learned to recognize that one a long time ago.

Roy’s smiling, though, or trying to.

“My brilliant roommate,” Roy says, “whose remarkably animated teaching style made me enjoy classroom learning for the first time in memory, mentioned in passing that he was sharing some more of that wisdom on the internet.  How could I possibly resist?”

Ed wrinkles his nose.  Facial expressions are good; that helps to ground him a little.  So does the first whine of the tea kettle as it starts to generate heat.

“Dunno if I’ve ever met anybody who wanted to listen to their roommate talk more at the end of a long day,” he says, “but I guess that’s fair.”

“I love that video,” Roy says, more softly.  “It feels—it always felt—like you made it for me.”

“I did,” Ed says, despite the way his throat tries to tighten on him.  “But I didn’t think you were gonna see it.  And—” He picks up his mug, puts it back down, glances at Roy, glances at the floor, and then stares at the floor much harder as he starts to get his brain-fingers around the shape of it.  “That’s the—thing.  I think.  Just now.  I was feelin’ such a whole big fuckin’ mess of things back when I made that video, and I never once thought that you’d watch it.  So it just… realizing that you did sort of… brought it all back for a second—all that shit I was hanging onto back then.  All that…” He waves his hand, pretty helplessly he has to admit.  “…raw… sort of… wanting.  Which I never would’ve fuckin’ dreamed that I was gonna get.”

“Funny,” Roy says, slinging himself upright to saunter over, and that still gives Ed such a mind-bending, heart-pounding fucking thrill— “At the time, I was thinking the same thing.”

Ed snorts and leans back against the counter.  It’s his turn to cross his arms in front of himself, apparently.  “Y’ever seen yourself, Mustang?  Jesus.”

“That doesn’t usually help very much,” Roy says.

“Trust me,” Ed says.  “It doesn’t hurt.”

“Fine words,” Roy says, making his leisurely way across their little kitchen, “coming from the undisputed owner of both the best bone structure I’ve ever laid eyes on and the most unreasonably beautiful hair I’ve ever seen.”

“I’m not like you,” Ed says, which is easier, faster, and better than going into the list.  Roy doesn’t like the list, and he doesn’t agree with the things that Ed puts on it even when they’re expressions of objective fact, and he gets sort of tetchy-sad when Ed disputes his arguments against it.

“Whatever I am or am not,” Roy says, and all of the sashaying has brought him very close now; “it had never gotten me anywhere that I actually wanted to be.”

They’re near enough to one another now for Ed to look up into his eyes.  That’s good, too.  Makes the world seem realer.  Changes the character of the way that Ed’s blood beats through him; changes the rush in his chest from a concentrated hurricane to a lot of little wings.

“That is,” Roy says, bumping his hips forward very gently against Ed’s, “until you.”

Ed has only dared to revisit that particular video once.  It was wholly and completely and shamelessly inspired by Roy’s difficulty dealing with equations, and the way that that had bled over into a paralyzing mistrust of variables.  Even the ones that were letters, or symbols, or stand-ins for coefficients made Roy’s skin crawl.  They’d talked about it for a long time over coffee once, and it had percolated in Ed’s head for ages, but it wasn’t until they were living together and sharing a wall calendar and sometimes a shopping list that it quite clicked how to strike back.

Ed had sat down with a blunt sharpie and a pile of copy paper and a vast assortment of weird little objects from the dollar store and Party City’s cheap-ass favor bins, and he’d demonstrated a series of equations that explained most of the fundamentals of physics, only ever using plastic toys labeled with the corresponding words.  You only needed numbers if you were trying to get a specific answer for a specific situation.  You could use any consistent representative item in the entire universe if all you wanted was to understand the concept.

It hadn’t just been inspired by Roy: it had been made for him, every last damn minute of it.  It had been staged on his turf and spoken in his language, and every single sentence that Ed had uttered had been softer and gentler and warmer than it would have been if he’d made it while thinking about anybody else.  It fucking pours off the screen; it’s unbearable.  It’s honestly a miracle that Al didn’t call him up when he posted that one and ask him if he’d gotten any action yet.

In their kitchen, in the present, Ed puts his hands on Roy’s shoulders, which is an indescribable pleasure in and of itself.

“If you’re tryin’ to get free no-numbers physics lessons,” Ed says, “you’re seducin’ the wrong guy.”

“Are you sure?” Roy asks, giving him the grin with the wealth of mischief and that little touch of heat.  “Should I go pause the camera just in case?”

“Shit,” Ed says, closing his eyes for a second.  “If I didn’t feel like such absolute crap, I’d show you a couple’a things about friction that you definitely wouldn’t need math to appreciate.”

His plan to open his eyes again is thwarted as Roy starts kissing all over his face.

“Knock it off,” Ed says.  “I’m disgusting.”

“You are no such thing and never have been,” Roy says.

At least the act of speaking necessitates a pause in the kissing, which gives Ed a chance to lean forward and bury his face in Roy’s chest instead.  He’s increasingly confident that the sound of Roy’s heartbeat has healing properties.  The incredible pecs sure don’t hurt.

“I still can’t fuckin’ believe it sometimes,” Ed says.  “Just—this.  All of it.  You’n me.  Recalibrating for a world where you saw that stupid thing just… gave me whiplash for a second, I guess.  Took me back to who I was when I made it.”

“In retrospect,” Roy says, and his arms sling around Ed’s waist, low and lazy and comfortable; and he rocks them back and forth so slowly that Ed barely notices him shifting their weight; “perhaps I should have said something.  A gambit along the lines of ‘The moment I saw you, I thought you were show-stoppingly, pants-droppingly, brain-meltingly hot; and then you opened your mouth, and I realized that you were fucking gorgeous.’”

“Shut up,” Ed mumbles.

“Make me,” Roy says, squeezing him gently.  “I fully intend to heap praise on you while you’re sick enough that it’s harder to complain.”

“You’re such a fuckin’ cheater,” Ed says.  It comes out sounding much less reprimanding than he intended, because Roy’s hugging euphoria is even more infectious than whatever Ed caught from his students.

“I know,” Roy says, delightedly.  “I’ve never played fair in my life, and I sure as hell don’t plan on starting now.”

Ed is most definitely on the verge of a cutting comeback when the water starts to boil in earnest in the kettle.

“Hold that thought,” he says.  “We’ve got a video to finish, and you gotta convince them that you’re safe for kids.”

“I am perfectly safe and encouraged for audiences of all ages,” Roy says.  “What’s ‘the NyQuil and Fungus video’?”

“Exactly what it sounds like, unfortunately,” Ed says, pouring hot water over the same teabag, because life is like that sometimes.  “You ready?”

Roy grabs his free hand—which is the right—and knits their fingers together, then swings their arms back and forth.  Inside.  Estimating the walk back to the desk at fifteen steps is generous, but here they are.

Ed also never imagined a universe where he didn’t hate sappiness of such an unprecedented scale, but… he’s tried.  He’s really tried.  And he just can’t.

“Lead the way,” Roy says.

They sit down at the desk again.  Roy folds his hands and straightens his shoulders like a morning show news announcer.  Ed should probably say Welcome back or something to match that aesthetic, but that’s not really his style.  Maybe he’ll put in a fake commercial for Coffee, the Real MVP of Existence, and beg Winry to do the voiceover.  That’d liven shit up.

He doesn’t feel particularly alive, though, so he just goes with the tried and trusted “Hey, y’all.  Sorry about that.  We were talking about Roy’s favorite video, which is ‘Physics without Any Numbers’ for obvious reasons.”

“The obvious reasons have a lot of less-obvious corollaries, though,” Roy says.  He pauses.  “It’s not… for me, at least, it’s never just been a matter of getting mixed up so easily over numbers that everyone else can understand—it’s about what that affects, and what it extends out into.  Which is basically everything.”  He keeps his smile very level, but Ed can detect that his shoulders have gone slightly tight.  “I’m actually very lucky.  Through a combination of desperate memorization and sheer stubbornness, I’ve been able to scrape by most of the times that it’s been critical—aptitude tests that I needed to get the jobs I was angling for; that sort of thing.  Let’s not talk about my SAT.  But it’s…”

He sits back in the chair.  Ed tries to stay very still.  Roy doesn’t dwell on this very often.

“It gets to you outside of all of that,” Roy says.  “Honestly, the reason that I talk the way I do is because I realized very young that I was going to have to make it extremely self-evident that I was clever by using words, because I’d never be able to do it once numbers came into play.  I figured out that I was going to need to spend just about every day of my life proving my own intelligence if I wanted anyone to believe me.  And of course there are a lot of other things to be said there—about the meaningless milestones and the stupid hoops to jump through and the arbitrary bars to clear that our society has set out as the benchmarks of intellect, as if intellect is something that anyone can hope to quantify.  As if there are any standards that can be applied even remotely unilaterally across variations in people, and in cultures, and in neuronal configurations, and so on and so forth.”  He takes a deep breath.  “But that’s what we have to work with, unfortunately; and I understood even as a child that I was going to have to play the game within the rules if I ever intended to get ahead.  So I did the best that I could to emphasize my strengths so immensely that no one could ever believe that I was unintelligent, whether or not they eventually recognized the complexity of that situation for what it was.”

He smiles a little less stably now.

“So it was,” Roy says, “that I spent my entire childhood and adolescence and—frankly—most of my adult life terrified that I’d be found out as a fake.  Just… living in constant fear that someone would see my failings and expose me, and it would be discovered that I’d just been ‘stupid’ all along.  I have been running from that word since I was old enough to compare myself to others.  And I’m… really not very young anymore.”

“Tell that to the ones beggin’ for a calendar,” Ed mutters.

Apparently that was a mistake, because Roy turns a grin like a solid sunbeam on him.  “Ed… well, Ed helped with that in a lot of ways, even from our earliest conversations, because he always talked to me like a person, rather than a learning disability.  Even some of the best teachers that I had sometimes had trouble drawing that line.  And then that video…”

Roy sighs, happily.  What a damn cliché.  Ed is going to need more tea—preferably enough to drown himself in—as soon as possible.

“That video,” Roy says, “was the first time that I’d had a mathematics-based scientific concept explained to me in a way that I could understand—ever.  That video let me learn something new and interesting and exciting in a field that I’d never had access to before, in a way that I actually enjoyed, for the first time in my entire life.  That video let me experience a joy for something that had always been closed off to me.  And it was never condescending.  It never treated me like I was in a remedial class because of my own inability to produce the right effort and get the right results.  It didn’t talk down to me.  It just shared.  Ed just shared.  And I got to share his love for science and understand it.  I can’t even describe to you how wonderful that was.”

Ed puts his hands over his face, despite the obvious fact that the gesture is woefully insufficient and does very little to contain the sudden effusion of feelings.

Feelings are such a pain in the ass.

“If you show me two items in the grocery store,” Roy says, “and show me their prices, and ask me to tell you which one is a better value, I will panic, and I will have no idea how to answer you until I can calm down and put my glasses on and look at that little line on the shelf where it calculates for you what the actual unit cost is.  If the two things that you picked aren’t measured in the same way, I’ll still be screwed.  But by the end of that video, I understood trajectories and pendulums and forces and Newton’s laws in a way that had never been accessible to me before.  I felt smart.  I felt accomplished.  I felt like a door that had been slammed in my face so long ago that I’d just gotten used to it being locked out had been opened to me, and someone had just very warmly beckoned me inside.  And I may have cried.”

“Shut up,” Ed says into the palms of his hands.

“My dearest love,” Roy says, “you know full well that I’m not capable.”

“Try,” Ed says.  “Just this once.  For me.  As a favor.”

“Well,” Roy says lightly, “it’s not the sort of favor I’d usually vol—”

“Family-friendly channel,” Ed says, lowering his hands to maximize the glare.

“I’m afraid that this may not be a situation,” Roy says, “where believing hard enough will make the wish come true.”

Ed opens his mouth to say I’m afraid we may just need to gag you until further notice, Mustang and then shuts his mouth again in the nick of time.

He clears his throat, extra pointedly this time.

“We have some more questions,” he says.  “Unless you’d rather just sit here’n be raunchy until the sun burns out.”

“Approximately when will that be?” Roy asks.

“They think we’ve got about five billion years,” Ed says.  “I’m pretty confident that you can keep producing raunchiness for that long.”

“It’s a renewable resource,” Roy says.  “But I suppose that we could take a few more questions before I try to sabotage your likes.  What’s next?”

Ed scans the paper even though he remembers what it says.  In a weird way, sometimes doing something artificial looks much more natural in a visual medium.  “We had a couple commenters ask why we chose the careers we did.  One of ’em pointed out that we both seem to like helping people, except when they’re hitting on you, in which case neither of us helps at all.”

“I’ve helped people who were hitting on me before,” Roy says.

Ed eyes him.  “Like when?”

“Well, never when you were there,” Roy says.  “That would have been extremely counterproductive.  Any time it was the two of us, the last thing I wanted was an interruption.”

Ed narrows his eyes.

“Actually,” Roy says, voice dipping into a dangerous register, “I suppose that’s not quite true—I tried to help you hit on me several times, but you didn’t seem to notice.”

“I’ve been told,” Ed croaks out, “that I do that.”

Roy grins.  “I read somewhere that flirtation is almost universally confusing, so it’s not just you.”  His face brightens further.  “You should do an episode on that sometime.”

“Or never,” Ed says.

“Never works,” Roy says.

“Good,” Ed says.  “So… firefighting.”

“Firefighting,” Roy says.  He leans back in his chair, crooks an arm over the back of it, and slings one leg over the other at the knee, which means that he’s accumulating sass.  “The fighting of fires.  The firing of fights.  The ting of firefigh, whatever that is; the refi—that’s refinancing—of—”

“If you don’t want to answer,” Ed says, “that’s okay.  You don’t have to.  I can just edit it back out.”

Roy sighs and musters a rueful smile for him.  All of Roy’s smiles are life-ruiners, but this one tends to register as a tiny fraction less cute because of the reason.

“No, no,” he says.  “I’m just procrastinating.”

“You?” Ed says.  “Unthinkable.”

“I know,” Roy says.  “It’s possible that I’ve been replaced by an extremely advanced cyborg, since I have never put off a single thing in my entire life.”  He smiles at the camera this time, more resolutely, which is the only reason that Ed doesn’t kill the video right there.  “I think I have to start by confessing that I’m always impressed by people who ‘choose’ a career.  I greatly admire the tenacity and foresight that must go into something like that.  I, for one, have only very rarely had the slightest idea what I wanted to do next week, let alone at some point in the future where I was a different person altogether from the one I am today; and that was especially true for me in the area of what I wanted to do when I ‘grew up’.”  He considers.  “That’s a separate rant, which I will spare you at the moment.  In any case, the start of the avalanche-slash-obstacle course was when my best friend in school and I both decided that we wanted to go to college, but neither of us could afford it, so we both applied for ROTC.  I barely eked in on the good graces of an extremely charming interview, because math had dragged my grades and my test scores right down to the borderline, but I squeaked by.”

“I’m going to put a really horrible squeaky sound in here for comedic effect,” Ed says.  He holds his hands up.  “Wait for it.”

Roy leans in towards him, staring into the exact same part of the middle distance that Ed picked.  “Let me set you up again.  I just barely… squeaked by.”

They both pause.

Fucking hell, Ed loves this dweeb.

“See?” Roy says after a highly emphatic silence.  “This is why we need a dog.  We could’ve just grabbed one of its squeaky toys and put the sound effect in that way, so that you wouldn’t have to do any editing.”

“Huh,” Ed says.  “So once you’re done explaining the ting of the firefigh, do you wanna tell them what inspired you to start your side job as a foley artist?”

Roy laughs brightly—which is good, insofar as it means that he’s not as unsettled by the prospect of sharing the story as Ed had begun to fear; and which is bad, insofar as it means that Ed’s cheeks are warming up again at the sheer stupid splendor of Roy’s stupid face.  This is going to be one of those embarrassing videos where it’s impossible to find a frame to use for the thumbnail where Ed isn’t gazing at Roy, obviously “too infatuated to function” (a Winry coinage).  What a pain.

“All right, all right,” Roy says.  “Back to where we left off before the disproportionate amount of squeaking.  For any of you who aren’t familiar with ROTC, essentially it’s a college scholarship granted to you by the military with some strings attached.  You simultaneously take classes at a university and some officer training courses, all of which is paid for by the Feds on the condition that you serve on active duty for a while after you graduate.  So that’s what she and I did, and we were very successful in school and then fairly successful in the military, for a while—or so I thought.  Apparently I was making enemies out of a number of people who didn’t appreciate my scintillating wit and playful personality, some of whom were bothered by the fact that my friend and I both wanted to be combat medics after completing officer training.  They were also—I suspect this may have had more to do with it—rather stung by the fact that I consistently outperformed them in everything that didn’t require calculations, despite the fact that I acted like an airhead.”

“You should’ve patented that,” Ed says.  “Your invention of the fake himbo.  You’d be rich.”

“I have everything I want,” Roy says, so perfectly calmly that Ed chokes on his next breath.  “Are you all right?”  Ed nods as vigorously as he dares.  Roy blinks.  “Are you sure?”  Ed nods harder, and Roy watches him for another second and then tentatively turns to face the camera again.  “Well… yes.  So… at the time, we were still operating under a delightful little federal regulation, which you might have heard of, called ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’.  There were a few semi-official additions to that, including ‘Don’t Pursue’ and ‘Don’t Harass’, and you can probably guess how fastidiously those were followed.  The point was, though, that if someone had sufficient grounds to suspect a fellow serviceperson of the intolerable crime of existing as a person who isn’t straight, they could file to have said soldier investigated.  And if said soldier was found to be, unconscionably, not-straight, then they’d be discharged.  And if the tribunal could demonstrate that said soldier had gotten any non-heterosexual tail while enlisted, it was going to go much worse all around.”

“Fuck them,” Ed says, and it comes out more vehemently than he meant it to, but he can’t—

He just can’t fucking help it.  He’s spent two-thirds of his life actively laying bricks on the long road away from that kind of thinking.  It matters.  It matters a lot.

“Yes,” Roy says, and it’s the soothing equanimity of his voice that drags Ed back into the present.  “Fuck them.  Only no homo.”

“What about a little homo?” Ed asks.  “As a treat.”

“No,” Roy says, face so deeply serious that a laugh tries to work its way up Ed’s throat and almost strangles him all over again.  “Not even a scrap of homo.  Not a single trace.  If even the afterimage of a hint of homo makes its way into the American military, all is lost, society collapses, and the terrorists win.”

“Obviously,” Ed says.

“Obviously,” Roy says.  He unfolds his hands on the desktop and then folds them again, and then he puts on a very bland smile for the camera.  “You can probably imagine what happened next: someone who didn’t like me fabricated ‘credible information’—” Ed can tell it still hurts; Roy doesn’t usually resort to air quotes unless he’s upset.  “—and dragged my friend into it with me.  Unfortunately for both of us, while there hadn’t been any credible evidence, there was plenty to be found back home when they went rooting through our personal lives.”  He smiles again, narrowly.  “Here’s where it gets fun.  A Navy officer had previously been discharged over DADT and sued the Navy over the fact that their investigation had hinged on his private civilian email address.  We had the makings of a lawsuit, and we knew it.  What we didn’t have was any money—not enough for a lawyer, and not enough to pay off the rest of the college bills if they dishonorably discharged us and left us in the lurch.  What ensued was the sort of high-stakes game of chicken that would make for a very dull but well-intentioned made-for-TV movie.  We got out alive, with our permanent records more or less intact, and without any debt that we hadn’t had before we enlisted.  I think both of us considered that a victory.”

Ed can’t resist the impulse to reach out and pry one of Roy’s hands loose so that he can grasp it tightly with his.  Given the way that Roy wraps the other hand gently around his, it must not be too objectionable.

“Sorry,” Ed says.  “Looks like you’re gonna get a little homo today whether you like it or not.”

“What a terrible tragedy,” Roy says.  “I simply don’t know how I’ll survive.”  Once Roy has every available finger wrapped around Ed’s, he squeezes gently.  “Your tea’s going to go cold, love.”

“Oh,” Ed says.  “Yeah.  Guess you’re right.”

He reached for Roy with his right hand—one of those things that blows his mind when he lets himself think about it is the fact that Roy has never once hesitated, even for a second, when faced with all the gnarly, maggot-white train track lines squirming up and down the back of Ed’s hand.  Today, that leaves Ed’s less-stiff hand free for picking up his tea mug in any case, which is probably a good thing.  He’s spilled more than his share of hot liquids on himself over the years, and he doesn’t have any particular desire to do it on camera.

“Well,” Roy says, “that’s probably about enough out of me, so I’ll try to make the rest of it quick.  A lot of firefighters say that you know in your heart from the very beginning that you want to be one—that it’s like a calling, and you feel it, and you know.  What my dear compatriot and I knew, upon landing in an airport without a whole lot more than the clothes on our backs, was that we needed jobs, and we needed them quickly.  The closest friend that I’d made in college had taken up firefighting in the meantime, and had proposed to his girlfriend while we were gone, so I asked him a few not especially subtle leading questions and then mentioned that our EMT certifications were still good for another year.  He said ‘There’s a test, though; I know how you feel about tests.’  I said ‘Do you know how I feel about being homeless?’, and he laughed for much longer than I thought was appropriate and then invited us to stay with him until we sorted something out.”

Ed squeezes Roy’s hand this time.

“We politely declined,” Roy says, “and moved into a studio that we couldn’t afford—although despite the fact that it was more of a glorified closet than an apartment, it was rather more comfortable than the barracks, so we were in surprisingly little danger of killing each other, as it turned out.  Which is beside the point, now that I think about it, since I was supposed to be telling you about the job.”

“You’re contextualizing,” Ed says.

“Translation,” Roy says.  “I like the sound of my own voice.”

Ed grins in spite of himself.  “It can be both.”

“I am a superlative multitasker,” Roy says.

“Okay,” Ed says.

“Translation,” Roy says, smirking this time.  “‘He’s also a compulsive liar.’”

“‘Liar’ might be a bit much,” Ed says.  “I think sometimes it’d be fair to accuse you of bein’ a compulsive exaggerator.”

“I also want that on a T-shirt,” Roy says.  “Ah… where was I?”

Ed looks directly into the camera.

“Oh,” Roy says.  “I think I was mostly done.  We miraculously—well, I miraculously; her much less miraculously—passed the test, got absorbed into the firehouse, and greatly improved our respective abilities to catch cat naps anywhere at any time.  The rest is history.”

“It’s a good thing that we have this on film,” Ed says.  “It’ll serve as immortal video evidence that you can finish telling a story if we wait long enough.”

Roy reaches towards him so calmly that Ed suspects nothing until it’s far too late—at which point the bastard is already pinching his cheek.

“Translation,” Roy says.  “‘I love him so much that I listen to him talk all the time even though I know that he can’t deliver a succinct and linear narrative to save his life.  I made this choice consciously, knowing what I was in for.  Don’t pity me.  Don’t cry for me, Argentina.  I absolutely did this to myself.’”  He extracts one hand from around Ed’s in order to clench it into a fist and raise it into the air, shaking it at the heavens.  “‘If only Roy wasn’t so damn hot…!’”

Ed looks at him, and then at the camera, and then sips his tea.  “I mean… it’s not like you’re wrong.”

“Hold on,” Roy says, very gently setting Ed’s hand down on the desk so that he can steal one of the sheets of paper and Ed’s pen.  “I need that on a shirt, too.  I’m going to make a list.”

“Christmas is gonna be interesting this year,” Ed says.

“We should do coordinated ones for you,” Roy says.  “It’d be disgusting.  Same color and design, but they all say something like ‘Can you believe that I don’t even get paid to put up with this?’”

“I don’t ‘put up with’ you,” Ed says.  “I like you.  Even when you’re weird.  Especially when you’re weird, because I’m a kind of weird that matches.  That’s the whole point.”

Roy looks up abruptly from where he’d started scribbling out shirt ideas, and then he just… keeps looking.  In the first second, there’s a combination of relief and gratitude and adoration that almost knocks Ed right the fuck out of his chair; and then the other parts of it melt and merge into a gooey lovey-dovey expression that Ed has become very familiar with, and Roy gives him the sunshine smile.

“You already knew that,” Ed says, which is easier than saying any of the other things, like Once I stopped being scared that you were going to take it away, I realized that the constant stream of affection is your way of trying to make up for the fact that I never in my life felt loved enough.

“It’s still different to hear it,” Roy says.

Ed can’t argue with that, firstly because it’s true; and secondly because he can feel his face heating up again, and the last thing that he wants to do is respond stupidly on instinct and make it worse.

Roy takes pity on him, though, sort of—the smile widens, but then he says, “Wasn’t there a second half to that question?  How did you end up with your job?”

Ed makes a face.  He’s not sure exactly what kind of a face it is, precisely, but he’ll find out when he imports the video.  “Oh.  Yeah.  Well, it’s not as good a story as yours.  Although—” He bites back the words there is a lawsuit right in time to swallow them before he iterates them to the entire internet.  “…it… has its moments, I guess.  Um…”

He’s pretty sure that this video is already so long that no one will watch to the end, which at least means that he can say whatever he wants with significantly fewer consequences.  The flipside is that he still needs to finish this shit up as fast as possible, since he’s going to have to edit the whole thing.

“Okay,” he says.  “So… me and Al went to Catholic school for a long time.  Which was… well, it sure as hell happened, I’ll tell you that.  Mostly it was all right, I guess, but about a year after my mom died, I got this teacher who… never should’ve been a teacher.  Just not ever.  Thinkin’ back on it, y’know, a long time later—I realized that I think she was just so unhappy that she didn’t know how to handle it, and she didn’t know what to do, and nobody ever should’ve let her anywhere near a bunch of nine-year-olds with a weird relationship to religion and learning and that whole big mess.  I think she’d sort of made a deal with herself, like we all do, that she was gonna follow all of the rules and live by the book to the letter and deny herself anything that ever diverged from that path, no matter how much she might’ve wanted it.  And then the universe didn’t deliver on its end of the bargain, ’cause it never does, and I think she realized that she’d spent so long refusing to let herself enjoy her life that she didn’t know how to be any different.”  He knows that this expression is a slightly deranged ironic smile.  “So she did what any sensible person would do, and she took it out on kids.”

Roy gives up on the T-shirt list altogether and goes back to gripping Ed’s hand.

“The big problem,” Ed says, “was that she had this, y’know, really specific worldview based on her beliefs, and… on top of it seemin’ like an attack on her personally if you questioned those, she didn’t like bein’ reminded of anything that she didn’t already know.  But there were a lot of things she didn’t know, ’cause she’d shut a lot of things out in the process of trying to do what she thought was the right thing.  So meanwhile, here’s me’n Al as lonely, unsupervised kids, still trying to figure out how to grieve and stuff and doing a pretty lousy job of it, and that was about the time that we realized that the librarians wouldn’t actually stop you from checking out books that were above your level or involved something that you probably weren’t supposed to know.  They’d look at you funny, but they wouldn’t take the books away, and they all knew my friend Winry’s grandmother personally, so they knew that she’d just shrug and say ‘It’s educational’ if we tried to check out War and Peace or something, so all they’d do was side-eye us a little bit.  We got side-eyed a lot anyway, so we were used to it.  Now—Al was smart enough to keep his mouth shut when he was in his class, but I… well, obviously I’ve got a problem not talkin’ about stuff I’m excited about.”

“I wouldn’t call it a ‘problem’,” Roy says, fairly softly.

“It shouldn’t’ve been,” Ed says.  “Like—I think sometimes about how when you hear really little kids playing, they’re just screamin’ all the time, or laughing so hard that it sounds like screaming.  And… y’know, where does that go?  We lose that.  It gets trained out of us or beaten out of us or just whittled away over time, and that’s the saddest damn thing I can think of.  We stop getting so excited about every little thing.  We get ashamed about wantin’ to scream about something.  And we stop being curious.  We stop saying ‘Why’ four hundred times a day, because people don’t answer, or they brush us off, or they tell us to sit down and be quiet, and we learn not to ask.”

He takes a deep breath and trots out a grin.

“That’s a tangent, though,” he says.  “Point is, I had that bad teacher who didn’t want to hear us sayin’ anything she hadn’t specifically already said, and I kept trying to ask other kids in my class if they knew about stars and planets and dinosaurs and genomes and evolution, and she… didn’t take to that real well.”

It’s a good thing that Roy’s still holding on to his right hand, which prevents him from flexing his fingers and drawing attention to it.

“That all came to a head eventually,” he says, which glosses over an enormous quantity of bumps and rips and shittiness, “and then we ended up transferrin’ over to the public school where my friend Winry had been going anyway.  They were kinda underfunded, but my first year of high school, I had just… such a good science teacher.  She was everything the other one hadn’t been—just… cool and smart and interested in stuff, and she’d listen to you, and if she didn’t know the answer to somethin’, she’d just say that, and then she’d try to help you find it.  Or try to help you look for it on your own.”

He tries to plan out the next few sentences so that he can get through this more efficiently, but he usually can’t lay out more than a couple words at a time before the ideas beyond them just turn into a tangle of intersecting thoughts without labels.  He wonders sometimes if that’s how numbers are for Roy, but he isn’t quite sure how to ask.

“So that was good,” he says.  “And it changed my understanding of, like, what a teacher could be.  I’d been tryin’ really hard to keep my grades up even when I really hated everything, because I knew that that was something my mom had really wanted, but after that, it was a lot… easier.  ’Cause I wasn’t just fighting the system every second.  It kinda clicked.  And I held on to that for a while, and I ended up studying science later on, to nobody’s surprise at all, but then I wasn’t sure what to do with it, and… eventually I realized that what I liked the best was sharing it with people, and helping them find stuff to get excited about.  And for a long time I thought, y’know, God, I’m not cut out to be a teacher; I can’t do that, but then I remembered that one from when I was a kid, and I started thinkin’, Well, I sure can’t do any worse than that.  So I guess the very, very abbreviated answer to ‘How’d you get here?’ is ‘Wanting to scream about science; and also spite’.”

“Hold on,” Roy says, releasing Ed’s hand to go for the list again.  “You need that one on a shirt.”

“Pick a totally random number,” Ed says.

Roy looks up again, with a trace of panic.  “You… know that that’s a terrible idea.”

“No pressure,” Ed says.  “Just—whatever you want.  Anything.  Your favorite number.”

“That’s like asking if I have a favorite medieval torture device,” Roy says.

“I know you have a favorite medieval torture device,” Ed says.  “It’s whichever one you think could be—” He manages to avoid saying kinkiest at the last possible second.  “—used—in—other ways.”

Roy grins, tentatively.  He looks like a hungry puppy scenting chicken.  Ed wants to kiss his stupid face.  “Does that principle apply here?”

“Whatever makes it un-stressful,” Ed says.

“You asked for it,” Roy says.  “I’m picking sixty-nine.”

Ed closes his eyes for a second.  This is his own fault.  There is no one—no one—else to blame.

“Shoot,” he says, reluctantly opening his eyes again, which forces him to recognize that the world exists.  “Okay.  If this video gets sixty-nine likes, then we’re actually gonna make the T-shirts.”

Even his really long, really boring, really bad videos get more than sixty-nine likes.

His face must make that evident even if Roy hasn’t sorted out the numerical comparison yet, because the grin is back in force.

“This,” Roy says, “is the best channel ever.”

“I’m glad that one whole person thinks that,” Ed says.

“Like and subscribe!” Roy says.  “And then log out, make a new YouTube account, come back, and like again!”

“Until then,” Ed says, trying to let the resignation weigh on his voice just the right amount for maximum comedic value, “don’t forget to… make like a proton and stay positive.”

Roy bends over the list and starts scrawling.  “We’re going to have a whole wardrobe.”

Ed’s going to cut it right there, before Roy starts laughing at Ed’s expression and then kisses him until it changes.

Chapter Text

Somehow, editing the video that will soon be titled The Drain Incident is almost worse than experiencing it was—which is even more remarkable given that the experience was, y’know, crap.

“Hi, y’all,” the Ed on screen says.  He’s sitting casually on the wall of the tub part of their bathtub-shower-stall-installment-thing.  The poor fool has no idea what awaits him.  “Welcome to Romance for People Who Hate Romance, although today it’s more like Apartment Maintenance for People Who Hate Apartment Maintenance, I guess.  Say hi, Roy.”

“Hi, Roy,” Roy says from behind the camera.

The expression of disdain is significantly more extreme than Ed remembers it feeling at the time, so at least there’s that.

“You’re fired,” Ed says.  “As soon as we’re done with this.  So… today we’re gonna try to clear out the shower drain.  Sometimes knowing that you’re going to share something that’s horrible makes it easier to laugh at it at the time, right?”

“I very much hope that this is true,” Roy says.

“Me, too,” screen-Ed says.  He holds up his secret weapon.  “So I bought these li’l plastic guys with teeth on ’em online, because people said that they’re good for getting all the you-know-what out of your drains.  But this isn’t a product review or anything, and it definitely wasn’t sponsored—this thing cost, like, five bucks.  I just wanna be able to take a darn shower without standing in an inch of water.”

Screen-Ed sits up straighter and glowers.

“However,” screen-Ed says.  “Some people refuse to help, because despite the fact that they’ve pulled people outta burning buildings and come home with ash caked into their hair so deep that we spent, like, half an hour scrubbin’ in here, they are convinced that this is my fault.”

“If I’m wrong,” Roy says, “I swear on my life that I will—”

“Family-friendly channel!” Ed says.

Roy scoffs.  “How do you know I wasn’t going to say ‘buy you all the ice cream you can eat’?”

“First off,” screen-Ed says, “because you can’t buy an infinite quantity of ice cream.  Second, ’cause you’re you.”

“I will confess,” Roy says, “that I am me.”

“At least you showed up on your day off,” Ed says.  “I’ll give you that.  All right.  You got the zoom thing figured out?”

Completely predictably, Roy speed-zooms in on screen-Ed’s face—so abruptly that present-moment-Ed instinctively leans away from the laptop to avoid crashing into his own nose—and then immediately zooms back out.

“Close enough,” Roy says.

“Okay,” Ed says.  He climbs down into the bathtub, wielding his little plastic hair-extractor like a dagger.  “No time like the present to suffer.  I should get that on a shirt.”

“Your birthday is coming up,” Roy says.

“I hate birthdays,” Ed says.

“As much as you hate the shower drain?” Roy asks.

“Jury’s out,” Ed says.

Equally predictably, as soon as screen-Ed hunkers down on his knees and bends over, Roy zooms in on his ass.  Ed has somehow owned this camera for several years now without ever discovering that it has a special setting that lets you zoom in lovingly, but here they are.

“Oh, Jesus,” screen-Ed says.  By the faint sounds of plastic clattering on porcelain, this is probably the part where Ed started shoving the tool down the drain, but he can’t be sure, since the footage still has a very different focus.  “Are you getting this?”

“The important parts,” Roy says.

“Next time I’m just gonna call a plumber,” screen-Ed says.  “I don’t care how much it costs.  We can eat ramen for a couple weeks.  Aw, that’s—aw.  I think it’s stuck.  Roy—”

Roy finally zooms out in time for Ed to watch his screen-self hauling back on the little handle attached to his tiny plastic savior.  “Have you tried turning it off and then back on again?” Roy asks.

“Har-dee-har,” Ed says.  “Hold on, maybe if I—”

Screen-Ed lowers the angle at which he’s pulling on the plastic, and—slowly and excruciatingly—begins to extract a terrible, tragic clump of goop that has stuck to the teeth on the sides.

“Holy shit,” screen-Ed says.  Ed pauses the video, jumps back, bleeps that out, and lets it run again.  “This is disgusting.  This is next-level gross.”

“They do look much nicer attached to your head,” Roy says.

“It shouldn’t be this gross,” screen-Ed says.  “It’s not logical.”

“The universe’s cruelest crime,” Roy says.

“Shut up,” screen-Ed says.  “I mean it—it’s just, like, hair and soap.  Right?  On their own, both of those things are fine.  But you cram ’em together and stick ’em down a drain—why is that exponentially worse?”

Roy makes a thoughtful noise that the camera picks up beautifully.  “I guess it’s the addition of the unidentifiable gunk.”

Screen-Ed makes a noise of agony, which the camera also picks up.  “Of all the goddamn—” Present Ed pauses the video, suppresses a sigh, drags the bleep sound file into the audio track area again, mutes that moment in the recorded audio, checks the timing, and then runs it again.  “—words in the entire English language that you coulda picked… you had to—had to—go with ‘gunk’.”

“I felt it was apt,” Roy says.

“I feel like I’m gonna hurl,” screen-Ed says.

“At least you’re close to the toilet,” Roy says.  “Just keep in mind that if you do it there in the tub, it won’t drain.”

Screen-Ed tries very hard not to laugh, but he does not succeed.  “Could you be any less fuckin’ helpful if you worked at it?”

Bleeping that one out is a bit sad, given how soulfully it was delivered, but Ed set his standards a long time ago, and he intends to maintain them, even at the cost of a really good F-bomb.

“I’m not sure if that’s a challenge that you should offer to someone like me,” Roy says, which at least is every bit as self-aware as it is obnoxious.

“Look!” screen-Ed says, extracting a clump that somehow looks even worse the second time around.  “There’s totally black hairs in here, too!”

“I and your extremely loyal followers,” Roy says, “or at least the three of them who haven’t gagged and closed the video by now, can clearly see that there are a grand total of two of them.”

He zoomed way in on the clump as he said it.  It’s hilarious.

“Two still counts,” screen-Ed says.

“I am shocked and offended,” Roy says, huffily in the extreme, “that you would besmirch the good name of statistical significance in this house.”

Roy zooms out in time to catch screen-Ed leaning against the shower wall and laughing.

Someone in the comments is probably going to ask Ed again if he’s trying to become Jenna Marbles, and then he’ll have to confess that he still doesn’t know who that is, but he can’t find out without worrying that he’s going to steal her shtick.  This whole internet business is complicated.

At least their shower drains beautifully now, though, and all it took was some advanced grossness and a couple gigs on his hard-drive.  It’s hard to complain about those kinds of results.

Ed hopes that it’s not too weird to care about an object that cost him fifteen dollars more than he’s cared about a significant number of people that he’s met in his life.  He’s pretty sure that it’s weird.  But it’s not like he can help it.

There’s also the fact that ‘caring’ is, for Ed, a nebulous concept with some underlying contradictions.  He would, for instance, do anything in his power to escape having to make elevator small-talk with the vast majority of human beings—including taking fourteen flights of stairs and then lying down on the concrete of the top landing until he’d caught his breath—but if he saw someone that he hated in pain or peril, he would want to do something.  People are irrational and messy and confusing and uncomfortable, but he still wants them to be okay.

This is all a roundabout way of justifying the fact that he’s weighing the benefits of turning his phone off permanently and only ever spending time with Roy and Al and this plasma ball for the rest of his natural life.

He has it tucked under his arm while he’s sitting on the couch editing a powerpoint for class.  If he had Roy hanging onto his other arm, this would be perfect, and he would have definitively reached Stage One of the plan.

Roy—who has always had a talent for being contrary even without realizing it—sits down on the same side as the plasma ball, which puts a crimp in Stage One.  Roy then extracts the plasma ball from Ed’s something-like-a-snuggle, switches it on, and starts playing with it.  Ed temporarily shelves the powerpoint, since there’s no way that he can focus on something for work when Roy’s incredibly gorgeous fingers are dancing over a surface that meets them with multicolored plasma filaments.

Ed wants to go back in time and give his twelve-year-old self a hug and a head-pat and tell that poor terrified, closeted, nerdy-as-all-get-out prototype of his current self that it’s all going to get better.  It’s all going to get really good.  Sometimes, the future version of that kid is going to have everything that he ever fucking wanted all at once, and he won’t be sure if he’ll make it out of any given moment of it without bruised ribs from the way that his heart keeps swelling.

“Have you named it yet?” Roy asks.

“Irving,” Ed says.  “After Langmuir, who really started characterizin’ plasma.”

Roy taps a fingertip against the surface lightly, then presses his finger down and drags it around, watching the little spire of purple light chase him doggedly.  “I guess having a plasma ball as a pet is better than no pet at all.”  He pauses.  “Marginally.”

Ed plucks the plasma ball out of Roy’s hands and cradles it to his chest, leaning away from Roy and stroking at it soothingly.  “Don’t you listen to him, Irving,” Ed says.  “He’s just jealous.”

“You caught me,” Roy says.  “I can now add ‘Strange desire to become a plasma ball’ to the list of my life’s accomplishments.”

Ed hands it back to him.  “So I had a really bad idea for how to demonstrate states of matter.”

“I’m in,” Roy says.

Ed has to pry his eyes away from Roy’s talented fingers to look at his face for that.  “You don’t know what it is yet.”

Roy shrugs and smiles at him, one eyebrow arching.  “Your ‘bad ideas’ are almost always very fun.”

Ed’s ribs are in trouble right now.

“Well,” Roy says, and the smile starts succumbing to a wince, “with the notable exception of experimentally testing all of the different flavors of Mentos with Diet Coke to see if the additives had any effect.”

“But that was cool,” Ed says.

“Maybe for you,” Roy says.  “You smelled like cola for two weeks.  Sometimes I get a whiff of it off of soda machines, and I shiver.”

“I guess those are still pretty good odds,” Ed says.  “And I didn’t think that that idea was bad.  I thought it was baller.”

“Good point,” Roy says.  “That might be the metric to consider here.”  He leans in, kisses Ed’s forehead, and deposits the plasma ball back in Ed’s lap before he stands up.  “Just let me know when you need me.”

Ed is overwhelmed enough that he has to sit there and intently watch the plasma undulate against his fingertips to keep himself from saying Always, always, always, and so fucking much.

“Hi, y’all,” Ed says to the camera once they’re rolling, and he’s accepted his fate.  “Welcome to a special episode of Science for People Who Hate Science.  I just want you all to know that you drove me to this.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Roy says.  “He loves it.  He’s just worried about his street cred.”

“That’s a lie,” Ed says.  “I’ve never had a single scrap of street cred in my entire life, and you know it.”

Roy considers.  “Are scraps the standard unit of measurement for street cred?”

“How am I supposed to know?” Ed says.

“You have some,” Roy says.  “Didn’t you live in a fairly dangerous neighborhood for a while?”

“I don’t think that’s sufficient by itself,” Ed says.  “I’m pretty sure the threshold’s higher than that.  And a lot of it is about attitude anyway.”

“You have plenty of attitude,” Roy says.  “I suspect that you have enough attitude for three people.”

“But not the right kind,” Ed says.

Roy looks conspiratorially into the camera, the bastard.  “He is very confident about the specifics of street cred for someone who claims not to have any.”

“Holy moly,” Ed says, the latter half in the nick of time.  “We’re not even here to talk about street cred.  We’re here to talk about—” He raises both palms and gives it some good jazz hands—or, really, plas hands.  “Plasma!”

Roy obediently does jazz hands with him, while wearing a neutral-but-slightly-confused expression, and Ed just… can’t.  Just can’t with him.  Can’t believe it; can’t contain it; can’t understand, most days, how he won a fucking lottery that he didn’t even quite know how to play.

“Wait,” Roy says.  “Plasma-screen TVs look nothing like your plasma ball.  Are we going to get to that?”

“Sure,” Ed says.  “In about two and a half hours, at this rate.”

“I think you should get an extra scrap of street cred for the sheer chutzpah of posting a two-and-a-half-hour-long YouTube video,” Roy says.

“This is why you’re not in charge of street cred,” Ed says.

“No,” Roy says, “I’m not in charge of street cred because I started DMing DND games at the age of fourteen.”

“I wanna hear more about that later,” Ed says.

“No, you don’t,” Roy says.

“Is that a ‘no, you don’t’ because DND was really, really uncool when you were a kid?” Ed says, propping an elbow on the desktop and allowing himself one little smirk, as a treat.  “Or a ‘no, you don’t’ because Riza remembers all your weird campaigns, and it’s gonna be another bar story?”

Roy’s expression encapsulates more than moderate horror, partially suppressed.  “How do you even know I played with her?”

“I’m a little bit psychic,” Ed says.  “Plus you once said the word ‘initiative’ when we were out at dinner with her, and she got this look.”

Roy rubs his temples.  “The greatest mistake of my life was introducing the two of you to each other.”

“Just wait ’til she meets Al,” Ed says.  “I’m scared of that one.”  He sits up straight again and claps his hands together.  “Okay!  So!  States of matter!”

“My matter,” Roy says, “is in a state of despair.”

Ed pats his shoulder.  “That’s not one of the ones we’re covering today, but maybe we can do a special episode later.”

Roy sighs feelingly and then attempts to brighten up.  “In the meantime, I was promised a bad idea.”

“You sure were,” Ed says.  “Are you still keeping that T-shirt list?  Don’t answer that.  Okay, up and at ’em.”

Roy blinks at him, hands still folded on the desktop.  “Are you not going to join me?”

“No,” Ed says.  “I’m calling the shots.  It always looks better when you tell other people what to do while you’re sittin’ on your butt, and maybe checking your nails or stroking a Persian cat at the same time.”

“Of course it does,” Roy says, swinging himself up out of his chair and sauntering over to the empty space next to the desk.  “Is this where you want me?”

Ed has to not-say a few more things that leap to the forefront of his mind regarding where he wants Roy (i.e. everywhere), and what he wants Roy to be wearing (i.e. nothing).

He gets up and shifts the camera to distract himself from his own depravity.  Depravity can wait; science can’t.

“Perfect,” he says, mostly even about where Roy’s standing, rather than just about Roy himself.  “Okay.”  He settles in his chair again, setting an elbow on the chair back to maximize the casualness of his slouch, and taps his pen against the desktop.  “So we’re going to do a quick recap on what states of matter actually mean, at a molecular level.  Roy’s going to stand in as an example molecule and show us how he’s acting at each state of matter.”

“Despair,” Roy says.

“Despair later,” Ed says.  “Chemistry now.  The thing we want to remember here is that matter and energy aren’t the same thing, but they exist on a continuum, sort of.  That’s what E = mc² means—that matter has energy, fundamentally, and you can extract it.  More or less, matter has energy because it’s storing it up in the bonds between and within atoms, so if you can find a way to break those bonds, you’re gonna get a faceful of matter-energy in a hurry.  That’s pretty much what we were talking about with the sun performing nuclear fusion and smashing atoms together into different elements, right?”

“I’m conflicted,” Roy says.  “The most famous scientific equation in the history of science is almost entirely made up of letters, but I know that they’re the type of letters that secretly correspond to numbers.”

“Variables are sneaky,” Ed says, because it’s the truth.  “And I’d go with Newton’s second law of motion as the most famous one if it was up to me, but that’s personal preference; we can get into that later.  For right now, you’re gonna be a solid.”

Roy blinks at Ed, then at the camera, and then down at himself.  He pats his chest with his hands.

“Wow,” he says.  “Science.”

“Smarty-pants,” Ed says.  “You’re mostly liquid underneath anyway.  Stop sidetracking me.  What I’m trying to get to is that when matter is in a solid state, it’s because it’s just chillin’.  Pretty literally, actually, because solidity means that there isn’t enough energy in the system to have disrupted the bonds between atoms or molecules.  They’re hangin’ out close together, because energy makes them move, but they currently only have enough energy to kinda vibrate in place a little bit.”

Roy looks at Ed.

Ed looks back.

Roy smirks.

Ed realizes that he has made a mistake.

Roy does an unconscionable little whole-body shimmy and then proceeds to maintain an incremental undulating motion in his shoulders and his hips.

Ed realizes, very, very much too late, that he has made a terrible fucking mistake.

And here he’d thought that this was a bad idea for the channel, rather than for himself personally.  How naïve.

“Uh,” he chokes out.  “Yeah.  Like—that.  Sort of.”

He clears his throat.  Science.  He has to get through this self-imposed torment for science.  Damn it all to hell.

“So,” Ed manages.  “We’re going to keep adding energy to the system until we’ve contributed enough that the molecules’re gonna start moving progressively faster, and progressively more.  Eventually they’re gonna bang up against each other and start ricocheting, and all this new energy will make them move apart and spread out.  That’s what changes a solid into a liquid—the distance between individual molecules increases as the energy compelling them to move overcomes the bonds that were holding them close together.”

Roy gets the hint and promptly proceeds to ruin Ed’s life in exactly the way that Ed anticipated, somehow without comprehending how bad it was going to be: Roy starts dancing, relatively restrainedly for now.

He’s still so fucking sexy when he moves like that that Ed’s cheeks heat, and Ed has to look down at his notes and focus extremely specifically on the word ‘gas’ in order to be able to wrangle himself under control.

The upshot is that a grand total of fucking zero of his viewers will be paying any attention to him, so it probably doesn’t matter if he starts to drool.

“One thing to keep in mind,” Ed forces out, “if you remember some of our previous conversations about atomic bonding, is that different molecules or atoms are capable of making and maintaining different types of bonds.  The bond between two atoms of iron, for instance, is a different type than the one between two molecules of water.  I’m bettin’ you can guess which type is stronger if you consider how much energy you’d have to add to a block of ice to melt it into water—” He reaches under the table, fumbling in the box that he’s almost kicked over twice, and pulls out the glass of ice cubes, which is already demonstrating his point.  “—versus how much you’d have to add to a chunk of metal, if you wanted to get that to liquefy.”  Roy has a nice bronze paperweight with the firehouse’s patch logo stamped into the front, which Ed appropriated this morning.  It obviously isn’t iron, but it makes such a nice clonk noise on the desktop that it gets the point across.

“What molecule am I?” Roy asks, and Ed tries to squint out of the corner of one eye enough to give him a look without actually seeing him very well.

“The kind that’s doing way too well at this,” Ed says.

Even with deliberately restricted vision, he can see that Roy’s delighted.  “I love a good bad idea.”

Ed has no one in the universe but himself to blame for this.

“All right,” he fights out.  “So—like you’d probably figure, if you keep adding energy to this system, you’re eventually gonna get another state change, and your liquid will become a gas.”

Even looking fixedly at the camera, he can tell that Roy has started gyrating.  Ed hasn’t read enough of Irving Langmuir’s personally-penned works to know if the guy is rolling in his grave or giving them a thumbs-up from beyond the veil.  Given that Langmuir would’ve grown up in the Victorian era, the dude was probably seriously repressed, but that doesn’t actually answer the question.

Ed grinds on.

That was a bad word to use.

He probably deserves this.

“The molecules in a gas are moving much faster,” Ed says, “and they’re much further apart from each other.  So where a liquid will, y’know, expand to fill a container and all that stuff, it’s still cohesive in a way that a gas is not.  That’s why you can’t see most gases—it’s literally just because the molecules are far enough apart from each other that they don’t make up enough stuff in one place for your eye to detect.”

“I want to make a ‘having a gas’ joke,” Roy says, “but I think that phrase is so outdated that it won’t land.”

Ed needs a complex system of angled mirrors so that he can peek at Roy from a considerable reflected distance rather than risk looking directly.  He tries to sneak just the slightest—

Fuck.

“I don’t think anybody is gonna notice what you’re saying,” Ed manages, which is the truth.

“Aw, shucks,” Roy says.  He does a thing with his hips that would have made Ed’s teenaged self pass out on the spot.  “Thanks, baby.”

Roy doesn’t call him that particularly often.  Ed is pretty sure, however, that his cheeks have designated several specific blood vessels for those occasions.  Today, those blood vessels immediately respond: his face must look like a fucking traffic light.  He attempts to shield the worst of it from the camera by bracing both hands against his forehead and focusing on his notes.

His notes present another problem.

This was without a doubt the worst idea that he has ever had.  This makes ten-year-old Ed picking a fight with that high-schooler who called Al a snot-nosed shit look like a thoughtfully-plotted feat of foresight.

“Plasma,” Ed says.  “Um.  Plasma is slightly different than the other states of matter.  For one thing, most of the time, most of the other state transitions are gonna be based on energy in the form of heat, right?  Every now and again, you’ll get a case where it’s, like, pressure or somethin’.  If you crush something hard enough and fast enough—” That was an extraordinarily poor choice of words for the circumstances, but it’s too late now.  “—you can get some wild results, but for most of our daily lives, heat energy is what you’re gonna see.  Mostly we’re boilin’ water, or meltin’ butter, or whatever else.”

He takes a very deep breath, raises his head, and looks assiduously straight ahead at the camera.

“Plasma’s a little different, though,” he says.  “It’s not just about the movement of the molecules in the matter that we’re lookin’ at.  At this point, there’s so much energy in the system that we’re affecting them differently—we’re actually startin’ to pry electrons off of them.  And that can be a function of more heat, like what we’ve been seeing so far; but it can also be a matter of electromagnetism helping the electrons get out of there and start circulating around instead.  That’s why…”

He leans down to rummage through the box for the plasma ball, switches it on, and sets it on top of the desk.

“That’s why these aren’t as much of a fire hazard as they would be if we were talkin’ about that much heat-based energy,” he says.  “It also probably would’ve nipped the plasma TV industry in the bud if they were basically a house fire waiting to happen.”

“Am I plasma now?” Roy asks.

Ed attempts to look without seeing again.  The effort is not quite as successful as he’d hoped, which he likely should have expected.

“No,” Ed says despite the way that all of the alarms in his brain have started wailing at once.  “You’re moving faster, but you still have… you still gotta lose an electron.”

Roy, who is a fucking demon in the skin of an unspeakably gorgeous man, who is dancing like all of Ed’s dirtiest dreams incarnate, who is beautiful and funny and smooth and lame and too goddamn hot to handle, blinks over at him.

Ed gestures meaninglessly.  “Y’know.  Just… shed one.  An electron.”

Ed did this to himself.

Comprehension dawns in Roy’s eyes, and then it spreads across his whole face, drawing out a wicked grin that makes Ed’s fingertips tingle.

Then Roy laughs so brightly and so deeply and so genuinely that it ripples through his whole body—first like waves of water; then like waves of light.  That’s even hotter than anything that’s come before, and Ed is so, so far beyond fucked.

He can’t help it—never could.  Never stood a chance.

Roy had struck him as devastatingly fine in the very first moment that Ed had seen him—the combination of the sunny smile and the guarded eyes roped Ed in and stopped first his heart and then his mouth; the excruciatingly perfect balance of Roy’s features and the ease of the set of his shoulders had made him tantalizing before he’d ever spoken.  And that fucking voice—and the fucking words—

Ed had met his share of people who were unreasonably good-looking, but attractive was a lot more complicated.  Ed could admire an exemplary human form from a distance and feel like he was in a museum; that was simple, and detached, and made it easy to stay uninvolved and uninvested.

Roy was not like statuary.  Roy was not cold; Roy was not still; Roy was not distant.  Roy was magnetic.  Roy was warm.  Roy made it fucking impossible not to want to move in nearer, to listen closer; Roy made you want to soak him in and hold your breath and try to cling on to that feeling.  Roy was like a fucking drug.

Ed had never even dreamed that Roy might want him back—except in the most literal sense of dreaming it; the sense which woke him with sweat caked all down his back and guilt curling in his guts.  Ed had been utterly and entirely unable to fathom a universe where Roy was interested in him like that.  He’d resigned himself to a lifetime of the best that he could get—to as many years as Roy would grant him of a really, truly, meaningfully valuable friendship that just fucking burned beneath the surface, on Ed’s side at least.  He’d tried damn hard to make his peace with it—to settle, and to let that be enough.  He’d loved Roy, like that.  He’d felt lucky.  Most days, the yearning part had barely even registered.

There were, though, more than a handful of nights where he’d thought that the yearning part might kill him.

He often can’t believe that that’s over.

He often can’t believe that this is his life.

Roy apparently has no intention of making processing that miracle any easier today: he has just unbuttoned his shirt without skipping a single beat, shrugged it off so suggestively that Ed’s heart leapt directly up into the back of his throat, and then started twirling it over his head.

“Who needs electrons?” Roy asks.  “Is that—is this ionization?  Is that what it’s called?”

“You did your homework,” Ed gets out somehow.  That’s even hotter.  This is the worst; this is really—

“I tried,” Roy says.  “There were a lot of numbers.  My eyes glazed over a couple times.”

Unsurprisingly—it would likely be even less surprising if Ed could think through the champagne haze of effervescent adulation—after a few suspiciously expert twists of the wrist, Roy flings his shirt directly at Ed’s face.  Ed’s reflexes, honed by all too many years of dodging people that he didn’t trust, ensure that he catches it neatly before a button smacks him in the eye.

Ed reminds himself, firmly, that this is not an appropriate venue either for burying his face in Roy’s shirt and breathing deep, because that specific combination of Roy and laundry detergent is his and his alone; or for leaning back in his chair, flicking his eyes up and down a couple times, and running his tongue very slowly over his upper lip.

Roy was thoughtful enough to have put an undershirt on, although whether it qualifies as decent is another question altogether, since it is, like most of his favorites, fitted rather tight and worn rather thin.

Ed figures that if anyone has stayed subscribed through all of the chemistry fails and the bad jokes and the iffy metaphors over the years, they deserve a reward.

This is a pretty good one.

Roy is, of course, enjoying every last damn second of this: his eyes are bright, and his cheeks are flushed, and his smoothly-swinging body is all of Ed’s favorite sins rolled into one.  He winks.  The bastard.

“So,” Roy says, “to be a proper plasma, how many electrons do I need to lose?”

“One is good,” Ed get out.  He is definitely not clinging to the shirt.  Absolutely not.  Not ever.  “I think they get the point.”

Roy has not stopped dancing.  Ed has not stopped dying.  “Are you sure?”

“I think if you lose any more electrons,” Ed says, “we’re gonna get fined.”

Roy stops dancing in order to laugh with every last bit of his body again; and Ed’s chest tightens up; and this was, in fact, the single greatest miscalculation of his otherwise mathematically sound existence.

“How do we turn this into plasma strip poker?” Roy asks.

“You’re making it worse,” Ed says, which is probably also going to end up on their T-shirt list.  “Get back over here and sit down; nobody’s gonna pay any attention to anything else while you’re over there, and we gotta talk science.”

Ed gets up to adjust the camera, which is most certainly not a last-ditch desperate attempt to direct attention towards anything that isn’t the way that Roy is sashaying back towards the desk.  The bastard is enjoying this too much.  The prospect of hermitude, with or without internet, is sounding better by the minute.

Roy has his feet up on Ed’s chair by the time Ed turns around, and the smuggest expression known to humankind on his impossibly appealing face.

“Do you want me to sit on your feet?” Ed asks.  “Because that’s how you get my ass parked on your ankles.”

“I’ll try anything once,” Roy purrs, and Ed—

Ed deserves this.  That’s the worst part.  He didn’t just ask for it; he invited it, with a fancy RSVP card in the mail and then an email follow-up, and then he deliberately left the door ajar and jammed an Open House Today sign into the flowerbed and laid out a cushy welcome mat.  He probably made lemonade and set it out on the porch, with the nice crystal glasses and some linen napkins.  He probably has an apron on.  If Roy gets his way, that’ll be all Ed has on for the foreseeable future.

Ed cannot afford to entertain that thought when he somehow has to scrounge up the intellectual capacity to finish an episode about plasma.

He feigns calm as he crosses back over to the desk and positions himself to sit down directly on top of Roy’s feet.  As he’d pretty much predicted, Roy whips them out of the way instants before Ed’s weight lands on them; as he’d definitely predicted, Roy makes a face.

“Perhaps another time,” Roy says.

Ed tries not to let the reluctance show through as sits down.  “We’ll see.”

Roy is, evidently, not particularly deterred: he puts an elbow on the desk, rests his chin on his hand, and levels a Cheshire grin on Ed without another moment’s hesitation.  “These videos are fun.”

Ed looks at him.

Ed looks directly at the camera.

He’ll put a funny title right over his own face when he edits—maybe I don’t know what I expected.  Is that meme still good?  Memes have the least logical half-lives of anything he’s ever seen.  People are going to be looking into the camera like they’re on The Office, literally and figuratively, until the end of time; but nobody craves that mineral anymore.  Maybe he’ll do a vitamins episode and try to bring the crave-that-mineral goat back to life by force.  If they paint the original image on Roy’s naked chest, he’s positive that viewers will pay attention.

Unfortunately, before Ed can get to that disaster-masterpiece—disasterpiece?—he has to survive this one.

“Wait,” Roy says.  “Can anything become a plasma?”  He picks up the paperweight.  “Can this be plasma?  Could I be plasma—for real, I mean?”  He pauses, but not long enough for Ed to interject.  “Blood plasma is… different.”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “It’s a totally different thing.  That’s another video.”  He barely—barely—bites back his stupid brain’s stupid instinct to say We’ll get you a pole for that one.  “As far as whether anything could make the state transition into plasma… I… dunno.  I think so?”  He tries to make the hand-waving look intelligent and authoritative instead of like he’s trying to clear the smoke of another experimental surprise.  Previous video evidence makes him unoptimistic about his prospects of success.  “I mean, theoretically, if you had enough energy to work with, you could eventually turn anything into a gas, right?  And then if you had more energy, you’d start rippin’ off electrons, and… but those conditions aren’t really gonna exist on Earth for the vast majority of stuff.”

Roy looks contemplatively down at the paperweight cupped in both hands.

“I see,” he says.  “So we’re just going to have to hurl it into the sun.”

“I thought you liked that thing,” Ed says.

“I do,” Roy says, solemnly.  “But not as much as I like science.”

“Okay,” Ed says, doing his absolute damnedest not to betray the way his heart just lit up, rolled over, and exploded in his chest.  “I’ll just call up NASA as soon as we’re done here, and they can send a shuttle.”

Roy grins at him.  “Space road trip!”

“One-way,” Ed says.

The grin takes on a shade of grimace.  “Ah.  Yes.”

Ed straightens the papers.  He has Roy’s shirt draped across his lap.  This is yet another strange and wonderful day, made stranger and more wonderful still by the fact that it’s not the first and hopefully won’t be the last.

“Another thing that our commenter wanted to know,” Ed says, “is how fire factors into this.”

“I think you’ve mentioned lightning as a plasma,” Roy says.  “But…” His eyes narrow and his lips purse as he sells the thoughtful face again.  “You haven’t said anything about fire.  I thought it was classified as plasma, though.”

“It can be,” Ed says, “at high enough temperatures.”

Roy’s eyes brighten immediately.  “So what you’re really saying is that it has to be hot enough for the fire to take its shirt off if it wants to qualify.”

Ed can feel his nose wrinkling itself even though he tries to stay calm.  “I… yes.  Oh… dang it.  I hate that that works.  What have I done?”

Roy is making a face, too, although his conveys a bit of recognizable scientific distress.  He also has his arms folded across his chest, which emphasizes all of the perfect muscles in such a mouth-watering way that no one is going to give a single shit how badly Ed bungles this explanation.

“So what is fire, then?” Roy asks.  “It’s… like lightning, or at least it seems like it—and it looks and moves a lot like…” He gestures to the plasma ball.  “In my field, we’re usually more interested in what it does than in its technical classification, so…”

“Which makes you kind of right,” Ed says.  “Because fire more or less is what it does.  It’s the manifestation of a combustion reaction.  It’s not… I mean, it’s happening around matter.  The original fuel is burning, which is creating gases that are also burning, and it’s all of that burninating going on that’s what you actually see.”

Roy blinks.  “But it has to…”

“Be something?” Ed asks.

Roy nods, arching an eyebrow and half-smiling at the fact that Ed just completed his thought, and that is disgusting and cute and aches in Ed’s chest in a weird way.  He used to have himself trained not to do that—not to guess at the ends of people’s sentences; not to try to cut them off and fill in the rest.  He’d always done it out of excitement, because knowledge should be merged and shared and made better in the place where two minds intersect, but people had yelled at him for it so many times as a kid that he’d eventually just learned to keep his mouth clamped shut.

Teaching helped, for one thing—sometimes students just can’t articulate what they want to say, because they’re wrapping their heads around new terms; and for some of them English isn’t even their first language to start with, and no matter how well they’re handling it, sometimes the right word for the job eludes them; and sometimes being on the spot, either in class or just while talking to their professor, makes them nervous.  Ed has gotten in the habit of gently offering suggestions when he can.

But Roy helped even more, because Roy has only ever responded to Ed’s delight about the weirdness of the world with joy and genuine interest.

“Precisely,” Roy says, and sometimes the love is too much, and Ed feels small and squishy and very vulnerable.

“Yeah,” he says all the same.  “So to answer the original question—most of your flame is coming from the burning of the gas.  Now, like I was gettin’ at, if that gas burns hot enough to strip off some electrons—”

Roy gives the camera a sultry look.  “If I know what you mean.”

“Which you do,” Ed says.  “But yeah—flame’s hot enough?  Surprise!  You got yourself a plasma.  But if it’s not quite at that electron-strippin’ threshold yet, what you’re seeing is the energy of that gas burning.  You’re seeing the heat and light of the combustion reaction gettin’ released.  So in a way, fire is just energy that you can see.”

Roy blinks.  “Which is… very cool.”  He pauses.  “Figuratively.”

Ed has to swallow down what would probably have been a loud, obnoxious, barking laugh.  “Right.  But let me tell you what’s cool.”  He leans forward; he can’t help it.  “What’s freakin’ cool is that those forms that you see a flame making—the tapering up, and the teardrop shapes, and all that?  Those are governed by gravity, just like the rest of us.  What’s happening there is that the gaseous part burning is hotter and becoming less dense than the rest—because heat is energy; and because the gas’s molecules spread out further the hotter they get, like we saw with Roy earlier.  Heat rises, so the burning gases are rising.  But.”

Without him even iterating a word of the request—based on his tone of voice alone—Roy gives him the drumroll that he was about to ask for.

“If you lit a match or a candle in a microgravity environment,” Ed says, “like on the space station… the flame would be round.”  He holds both hands up, cupping them, because he just can’t fucking help himself when this shit’s so cool.  “It’d be a sphere.  And it’d be a more even, mostly blue color, rather than havin’ that gradient up to yellow like we expect, because convection isn’t taking place and spreading that heat out into an upwards gradient, so there’s a more equal amount of heat dispersed throughout the whole flame.”  He sits back, well-aware that he’s starry-eyed, and that no amount of filters or edits or cutting could change it.  “God, I wanna go to space.”

He’s so prepared for a space-related pun comeback from Roy that the moment of silence that he gets instead throws him for a loop.  When he glances over, Roy looks like a puppy who’s been told that there are no more treats—not just in the house, but ever.

“Don’t people usually spend years at a time on the space station?” Roy asks.

“Well, yeah,” Ed says.  “But qualifying to be an astronaut takes years and years of specialized study and trainin’ and stuff, so there’s no way they’d ever take me anyway.”

“I don’t believe that for a second,” Roy says—calmly and without an instant’s hesitation, like it’s another state of matter that he knows much more about.  Like it’s a fact.  “You’re more than capable of doing anything that you set your mind to, and they’d be idiots not to take you once they spent five minutes with you and realized how brilliant you are.”  He pauses, and then he looks absolutely delighted with himself, and the tumult of Ed’s emotions resolves into a thread of relief.  “It’s not rocket science.”

“Ha,” Ed says.  He doesn’t even sound as helpless as he expected.  “Well, I’m not planning on jumping into that anytime soon, so I wouldn’t worry about it.  Takes long enough to upload videos to YouTube from down here.”

His guts are still squirming under the weight of what Roy just said, but as he shuffles his notes, he spots an out.  He’s not too proud to take it.

“Hey,” he says.  “While we’re on the topic of flames and stuff, we had another question from a commenter—‘How do smoke alarms work, and why do they hate showers?’”  He glowers at the camera.  “They also hate science.  And pasta.  They hate pasta and everything it stands for, which makes them my mortal enemy.”

“I actually know the answer to this one,” Roy says, thrilled all over again.  “I feel like I just got a big question right on ‘Jeopardy’.  For the record, however, they don’t hate showers or pasta.”

“Propaganda,” Ed says.  “Some of them are possessed.  We all know it.  They’ve got the Devil in them.  The Devil hates pasta, too.”

“Is the Devil gluten-free?” Roy asks.

“I don’t think we want to get into the probable gluten content of Biblical figures right now,” Ed says.  “Maybe next time.”  He’d have to dig up some scriptural support for any theories he comes up with anyway, which is less fun than most other kinds of research, and involves significantly more flashbacks to parts of his life that he’d rather forget.

“Good idea,” Roy says.  “Ah—smoke detectors.”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “Defend the pasta-hating screeching ceiling fiends a little more.”

“I think they’re gluten free,” Roy says, “for what that’s worth.  There are two primary types, though, one of which you should not be eating regardless of gluten sensitivities, because it’s a very tiny bit radioactive.”

“You have my attention,” Ed says.

It’s a crime that Roy can look so damn good even when he’s this damn smug.  “I thought that you might say that.”

Roy straightens his shoulders and launches into presentation mode—which isn’t that different from many of the other modes, so at least it’s not unsettling.

“First of all,” Roy says, “whatever the gorgeous nuisance seated at my left would have you believe—”

“Rude,” Ed says, swallowing the laugh.

“—my fairly extensively-researched opinion,” Roy goes on, “is that no amount of pasta-related false alarms can outweigh the possibility of losing everything.  I have absolutely ripped the guts out of a malfunctioning alarm that was keening at me at three in the morning when the apartment was completely still—but I replaced it as soon as I could, because that investment is worth it, and the sleep that you lost is a small price to pay for what you’re guarding against.”

“He’s right,” Ed says.  “I feel like a pasta traitor, but it’s the truth.”  He tries to ignore how much smugger Roy gets at that.  “Go on and talk about the radioactive stuff already.”

“My pleasure,” Roy says.  “But let me touch on the other kind first—both are a whole lot better than nothing, although they have slightly different advantages, so the ideal solution is to install one or several of each type in your living space to cover all of your bases.”  He extracts one of the blank sheets of paper from Ed’s stack and starts drawing with sharpie, looking so concentrated and so calm that Ed doesn’t think it’s his fault that he gets mesmerized.  “Photoelectric smoke detectors use beams of light, and wait for smoke or its particulates to interrupt the light.” 

Roy has drawn a T-shaped tube on the page, and adds in some lights in pink highlighter going straight across the top of the T.  He holds it up, so Ed scrambles over to the camera to make sure it zooms and focuses okay.

“Normally,” Roy says, “the beams you see here in pink just make their merry way across, and everything’s fine.  But if something—such as smoke, or apparently aggressive pasta steam—makes its way inside, it will refract the light, and it’ll look more like…” He swiftly draws another T, but this time there are a bunch of little red-pen scribble-dots traveling through it, and some of the highlighter lines are bouncing off of them and moving down the long central core of the T instead.  “…this.  The particles will scatter the light and send some of it down here—” He taps the very bottom of the drawing, where he’s just added what looks like a tiny spaceship at the base of the T.  “Where there’s a sensor going ‘Hey, buddy, light’s not supposed to be down here; do you have a permit?’”

“Maybe it has the same permit I have,” Ed says.  “The piece of paper that says ‘Trust me; I’m a scientist.’”

“Apparently pasta steam doesn’t usually hand out permits,” Roy says, grinning at him—and twirling the pen, like the grin alone wasn’t knee-melting enough.  “No permit from that scattered light means that the alarm goes off.  And I will certainly admit that the sensors tend to be a bit… zealous, but let’s keep in mind that that’s better than the alternative.”

“You’re so practical,” Ed says.  “I don’t even know what you’re doing on my channel sometimes.  Give me pasta water, or give me death.  When do we get to talk about radioactive stuff?”

“Now,” Roy says, flipping his latest sheet of paper over to draw some more.  “The only other thing I wanted to mention is that—as you might imagine—photoelectric smoke detectors perform better when there are a pretty good amount of particulates floating around near your ceiling, meaning they’re more effective with very smoky fires, or smoldering ones that produce smoke slowly but don’t burn very high.  The other type are called ionization alarms, and will detect and activate even if you have more flames than smoke.  And that’s because…”

Ed can’t help himself.  “Radiation!”

Roy grins at him.  “Radiation.”

Roy then holds up a sketch that will not be in the MoMA any time soon, but may foreground the gallery on their fridge: he’s drawn two ovals some distance apart, one above the other, with little plus and minus signs moving between them.  There’s a battery on the right hand side (helpfully labeled battery with an arrow), with wires protruding from each end to touch one of the plates; and a little dangerous-looking spiky scribble thing underneath the oval on the bottom.  He’s added some emanating highlighter lines around the scribble, which Ed, who is something of an expert on iffy science diagrams, interprets as indicators of radiation.

“So,” Roy says, holding up his new masterpiece.  “Our very minuscule amount of radioactive material—which is safe unless you eat it or inhale it; please do not lick your smoke alarm under any circumstances—undergoes what’s called alpha decay, which basically just means that it’s emitting particles that ionize the air in between these two plates.”  Those are the ovals.  “The battery—don’t lick your batteries, either—passes an electric current through this little ionized pocket we’ve made.  So essentially, there are a bunch of little electrons floating around in here in a fairly regulated way.  But if smoke enters this environment, the smoke particles will interact with those electrons immediately, and that will interrupt this delicate little current, and your alarm will go off in a hurry.”

It’s a good thing that Ed’s still behind the camera, trying to help it catch clear images of Roy’s drawings, because he probably has Too gay for this man in particular to function written on his goddamn forehead right now.

Roy sets the drawing down on the table—gently, like he does most things; like he learned a long time ago that his hands are stronger than he expected, and consciously decided to be careful of it—and beams at the camera.

“Long story short,” Roy says, “you can fairly safely position your smoke detectors on the far side of the room from your stovetop.  Make sure you use the fan when you’re making pasta.  You probably don’t need a detector in the bathroom, but keep an eye on anything electrical that you plug in.  They work optimally if they’re placed on the ceiling several inches away from every wall; but if you need to mount them on a wall instead, keep them relatively close to the ceiling.  A mix of ionization detectors and photoelectric ones is great if you can manage that, but of course both types are designed to work passably under any conditions, so you should be just fine even if you can’t install both.  If they’re really acting up, and you’re getting a lot of false alarms, it may be that they’re nearing the end of their battery life.  Or it may be the case that they’ve got a lot of dust in them choking up their sensors, so try to clean them out with a vacuum, or one of those compressed air cans.”

Ed has fixed the focus during this monologue, and returns to his seat at the table.  “And tip the waitstaff.”

“Always,” Roy says.  “As well as you can.  That amount often gets divvied up among the kitchen staff, too, and they’re all trying to make a living.  Ed, how do those compressed air cans work?”

“I dunno,” Ed says.  “I guess probably they threaten the air a lot, and then it sort of cowers, so they can cram a little more in, and they just keep doing that until it’s packed really tight, and then they put the top on.”

Roy blinks at him.

“I don’t know,” Ed says.  “My brain stopped working when you started talking about radioactivity.  That was so freakin’ cute.”

“Lord,” Roy says, half-under his breath; followed by a much more audible, “I wish I could go back in time to my high school self and tell him that science was what was going to snare him his dream man.”

Any second now, their own very well-maintained smoke detectors will alarm over the fire that has suddenly overtaken Ed’s entire face again.  “Shut up.”

“Make me,” Roy says brightly.

Ed manages an “Augh,” and then a “Well, I sure hope that video answered the questions that we… sorta… tried… to get to, and all that.  ’Til next time—”

“Make like a proton,” Roy says, delightedly, so that Ed can finish—

“And stay positive.”

He salutes.

“Like me, right now,” Roy says.  “Since I lost that electron with my shirt.  Will I be even more positive if I keep taking things off until I run out of—”

“Family-friendly channel,” Ed says.

“You keep saying that,” Roy says, “and then letting me participate.”

“That’s a privilege,” Ed says.  “Not a right.”

Roy makes such an incredibly overstated miserable face at the camera that Ed’s going to have to leave it in, which is a shame, because a ton of people are going to unfollow him on the spot for putting it on Roy’s face in the first place.

Roy likes cooking—that is, on his days off; and when he can sort of wing it without a recipe.  All of his food- and flavor-related instincts tend to be extremely good, but he freezes up if there are too many precise measurements involved, and that problem gets exponentially worse if he has to try to adjust the portions.  As a result, they don’t bake much, but Ed has made at least one too many jokes about Roy knowing how to handle his meat.  Probably two too many.

Ed’s gotten good at washing utensils as soon as Roy’s done with them so that they don’t have as much to clean up after the fact.  He used to think that that was yet another boring chore, but focusing on imagining the soap binding with water on one end and grease on the other at a molecular level makes it weirdly enjoyable some of the time.  Emphasis on the weirdly, but that’s sort of par for the course for Ed.

“Hey,” he says when he’s played enough Tetris with their drying rack to make room for the new stuff.  “Do you actually like doing those?”

Roy blinks at him and pauses in stirring at the pasta.  The smoke alarm never goes off when Roy makes it, which is how Ed knows that it’s a conspiracy.  Roy also knows when pasta is done just by looking at it and nudging it with a wooden spoon, which both borders on witchcraft and results in disappointingly few opportunities to throw strands of spaghetti at the walls, but the results are so delicious that Ed keeps his mouth shut.

“The videos, you mean?” Roy asks.

“Yeah,” Ed says.

He bites his tongue on They’re so lame, and they waste so much time, and you’ve barely got any time to start with.  Al has spent many, many years now slowly training Ed not to denigrate things that are important to him as a knee-jerk defense mechanism in case someone else dismisses them later.

“I love doing them,” Roy says.

The downside is that it’s kind of exhausting how often Al is right.

“They’re really fun,” Roy goes on, but he’s turned part of his attention back to the pasta, which is actually worse, because it proves that he’s not faking.  He’d have to concentrate if he wanted to lie.  “I get to be a bit creative, at least in a theatrical sort of way, which… it’s been a long time since I could say that.  And I learn new things every time—usually several things about science, and several more about you.  I love that.  I want to keep discovering things about you and your life and your thought process for… well, forever, really.”

Ed has to stand very still and clench his jaw very hard to stop his whole body from going haywire with the emotions that that provokes.

Roy’s preoccupation with the pasta gives Ed four whole seconds to attempt to compose himself before Roy looks up.  “Are you—”

“Fine, “Ed says, turning on his heel and stalking out of the room.  “Just gonna go lick a smoke alarm.”

“No,” Roy says.

“Yolo,” Ed says.

“If you’re going to give yourself radiation poisoning,” Roy calls after him, “it should at least be while doing something cool.”

Ed puts both hands over his face once he makes it into the hallway, but that doesn’t help that much.

Chapter Text

Roy was covering half a shift for Jean last night and into this morning.  Unless he stopped by the grocery store, and the overall fatigue made him extra distracted in the ice cream aisle, he’s bound to be home by the time that Ed straggles up to their apartment shortly after six.

Which is what makes it so weird that the front door is locked.

Ed tries to slow the progress of his heartbeat with the combined forces of willpower and logic, which works better some days than it does others.  Riza’s place is closer to the station, and Roy loves her dog to pieces—maybe he was so tired after the extra hours this time that he went straight to her place and crashed on the couch for a bit rather than risking the drive home.

That theory collapses when Ed lets himself in and finds Roy’s extremely muddy boots tipped over on the floor.

He stares at them for a couple of seconds, one hand curled around his keys, the other clenched around the shoulder strap of his work bag.  Those are a good sign that Roy is, in fact, physically present.  They’re a bad sign as far as just about everything else.

The only thing that Roy hates more than mud in principle is tracking it into the house and having to scrub it out of the carpet later.  He loves lining his shoes up neatly for the same reason that he volunteers to fold the laundry: it gives him some tiny measure of control over the world around him.  If he’s here, but he locked the door behind him, that means that he didn’t expect to be awake or around when Ed got back.

Ed doesn’t hear him either.  Ed doesn’t hear anything.

It’s fine—it’s got to be fine.  Maybe Roy came home and ditched his boots and immediately went back out to the corner store for an Icee just to take the edge off with a kick of concentrated sugar and a brain freeze.  Maybe he was too tired to fuss around with the mud, and he figured that his peaceful little nap would conclude before Ed came back, but he underestimated his own sleepiness.  Maybe he’s listening to some music to unwind, and he’s got headphones in, and he didn’t hear Ed opening the door.  Maybe—

Ed hates maybes.  At least the ones like this.

If Roy went out, even briefly—even just for a nice coffee to treat himself; even just downstairs to get the mail—he would have left a little heart-shaped post-it note stuck where Ed can see it.  He loves those things so much that he sometimes leaves them for Ed to find even when he’s here.

Ed straightens Roy’s boots.  That might make him smile later.  Then Ed puts his shoes beside them, and sets his bag down, and tries to step very softly as he starts looking.

He will not panic.  He will not panic, and he will not assume the worst.  There are several dozen harmless explanations; he knows there are; if he can just keep his cool for long enough, he’ll get to discover which one of them played him for a fool.  His brain likes to do that—likes to trick him; likes to turn him around in circles and fire him full of adrenaline over little nothings blown out of proportion by his own imagination.

He’s not going to let it get the better of him.  He’s going to walk very slow and breathe very deep and curl and uncurl the fingers on his right hand before they can lock up in sympathy as his system tries to freeze.

The fateful couch in their living room is empty.  He glances into the kitchen as he passes—nothing to go on; nowhere to hide.  He looks into their bedroom for a few seconds longer, but the closet door stands open, and this time Roy hasn’t passed out with his headphones on right on top of the rumpled sheets.  Ed’s about to check the room that used to be his bedroom, which is more of an office-study-library-lab these days, when he hears the splash.

If he hadn’t been walking so quietly and breathing so lightly that it makes him slightly dizzy, he doesn’t think he would have.  It was really barely a ripple.

That was going to be his next guess—or, really, his last resort—anyway.

He takes two steps towards the bathroom doorway, and his brain punches right through the particle-board barrier that he’d shoved up between himself and the mounting terror—one hit, shrapnel spraying.  Blood everywhere.  Wood chips and shards of plastic.

He makes himself keep walking.

Roy’s clothes are on the floor—each piece crumpled where it landed.  A trail of abandoned articles leads to the bathtub.

Roy sits very still at the back of it, curled up around himself, arms folded across his bare knees, face buried in them.  The still surface of the water reaches almost to his ribs.  His hair’s wet.  He’s not moving.

He’s not—

A shiver of a breath twists his shoulders, and the ghost of it chases a tiny set of ripples across the water.

This is—fine.

It is.

This is fine, because it can be fine, eventually—it can be dealt with; it can be undone.  This Ed can deal with.  This Ed can change.

He takes his phone and his wallet out of his pockets and puts them on top of the counter by the sink, and he sheds his jacket and leaves it on the floor with Roy’s forsaken clothes.

Then he crosses over to the bathtub and climbs in.

The water’s on the chilly side of tepid.  He can’t tell if Roy ran it cold to start with, or if he’s just been sitting here that long.

Ed would like the record to show that his body mass, plus the immediately-sodden clothes that he left on, raise the water level until the tub almost overflows.  He takes up a lot of space.  He’ll mention it later, if Roy’s in the mood.

Not now.

Now he reaches out just above the surface of the water and brushes his fingertips against Roy’s knee.

“Hey,” he says, softly.  “Are you cold?”

Roy doesn’t raise his head.  “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Ed says.  He brushes a little more firmly.  “Are you hurt?”

Roy’s head shifts incrementally, although Ed can’t quite tell if it’s meant to be a gesture, or if Roy is trying to grind his way through his own arms in the hopes of disappearing altogether.  “No.”

Ed swallows and braces himself a little bit.  Roy doesn’t have the energy left to lie to him like this, which makes the hard questions a hell of a lot scarier.  “Is it better or worse with me here?”

“Better,” Roy croaks out immediately.  He lifts his head just enough to extract one of his hands and extend it towards Ed’s, groping twice in the air before Ed twines their fingers together, and Roy’s clench around his tight.  “Always.”

Ed moves forward just as Roy shifts again, and they meet in the middle—Roy reaching up with the other hand, which shakes before it settles against Ed’s neck and skims up to curl into his hair.  Roy raises his head just enough for his eyes to flicker over Ed’s wet clothes, the damp speckles on his shoulders from his initial impact with the water, the slow seep of it up the fabric.  Ed leans his head against Roy’s.  Roy’s skin is still warm enough that Ed doesn’t think he has to worry about that just yet.

Soon, though.  They’ll both be shivering before long.

Ed takes another breath and asks the next hard question as gently as he can.  “Is it one you want to talk about?”

“Later,” Roy says, and his grip on Ed’s hand tightens.  “Maybe.  I don’t know.”

“That’s okay,” Ed says.

Roy closes his eyes and rubs his forehead against Ed’s—again a movement that verges on shaking his head, but isn’t quite.

“People,” Roy says.  He drags in a breath, and it rattles on its way back out.  “People are so fucked up.  They’re so fucked up.  The things—the things they do to each other—”

Most firefighters these days are certified as EMTs, too.  With fire stations embedded in suburbs and cities alike the way they are, they’re often closer to the populace than full-fledged hospitals, so the dispatchers route them a hell of a lot of the emergency calls that require an immediate response.

Sometimes those are small things—sometimes they’re not even urgent; sometimes they’re easy to fix.

Sometimes they’re not.

Sometimes they represent a caliber of human cruelty that can leave someone like Roy looking like this.

“I know,” Ed says, softly, trying to stroke Roy’s wet hair back from his face, for what little that’s worth.  “I know.”

“You’re not,” Roy eyes.  He shifts back just enough to open his eyes a sliver again and lock them with Ed’s.  “You’re not like that.  And it—that matters.  That matters so fucking much.  There’s so fucking many things I love you for—you know that, right?  Please tell me you—”

“Yeah,” Ed says, which is about all that he can get out just now.

“You’re not capable of some of the things…” Roy fights another breath in.  “I knew that when I met you.  I felt it.  First instant.  First look.  I know I’m safe with you—I know I’m always safe with you.  I know I never have to watch my back.”

“I don’t know,” Ed says, weakly.  “I try, I guess.  There’s—there are good people.  Lots of ’em.  There’s a lot of good stuff out there.  I know it’s easy to say that.  I know it’s damn hard to see it sometimes.  And sometimes even when you can, it’s not enough.”

“You make up for most of it,” Roy murmurs.  “It’s… it’s just that some days, there’s so much.”

Ed had never considered himself a particularly touchy-feely sort of person—other than with Al, who was an exception to all of his instincts and then some.  But he’d had to revise his stance on that topic when this whole thing started with Roy.  It was different when every single heartbeat felt like your body trying to push you closer.  It was different when your fingertips had turned magnetic; when it was half unthinking impulse and half compulsion.  It was different when every echo of someone’s voice brought you a little bit of comfort; and every smile was a sunbeam to lie in on a lazy afternoon; and every time that they touched you, it felt like the universe had settled into harmony, and also like your skin was on fire.  It was different when you just… wanted to.  For its own sake.  For the warmth and for the connection and for the hell of it.  It was different when you wanted to… often.  Very often.  Basically all the time.

And then it was even more different when you could.

He knows that there’s power in that, and solace in it too.

So he kisses Roy’s forehead, and then the bridge of Roy’s nose, and then his mouth—just lightly; just gently.  Just to say I love you no matter fucking what at a volume that’s a little easier to hear.

The softer breath that stutters out of Roy next makes him think that he might just have gotten the message across.

Roy’s eyelashes rise a little further this time, and his eyes focus more sharply as they flick up and down over Ed.

“You’re all wet,” he says.

Ed squeezes Roy’s hand in his.  “So’re you.”

“But you have clothes on,” Roy says.  He blinks.  It’s like he’s pulling the lucidity back into himself with every movement of his eyelids now.  “You—”

“Hey,” Ed says.  “Lemme make you a deal.”

Roy blinks again.  “I—” A shiver runs through him, wracking his whole body in sequence, shaking through his shoulders and trilling out his fingers where they’re twined with Ed’s.  “Okay.”

“If you get up,” Ed says, “and turn the hot water on for a sec, and then get out and get dry and put your bathrobe on, I’ll go put two of the good frozen pizzas in the oven, and then we’ll watch the dog channel for a while.”

The greatest—and perhaps the only—gift that their overpriced cable package gave them was a specific channel meant for dogs.  All they run is videos of dogs getting petted, or dogs running around in parks or fields, or footage of nature scenes that are just a slow pan with no action whatsoever, all underlaid with soothing music and weird sound effects.  It’s probably not intended to be quite so fulfilling for people, but the way that it tends to make Roy doze off on the couch even when he hasn’t had an absolute motherfucker of a day makes its intentions irrelevant anyway.

Roy draws one more deep breath and then musters a tiny bit of a smile.

“Deal,” he says.

The first thing that Ed is aware of the following morning is that Roy is stirring, and the mattress is undulating a little bit.  Waves.  He still needs to do a proper video on waves.  Maybe a ranking video, to make it fun—the ten coolest kinds of waves, in order of coolness.  What’s the coolest kind of wave?  He’ll have to make a spreadsheet.

The second thing that Ed is aware of is that he and Roy fell asleep while holding hands, which is disgusting and makes him want to nope out of the universe almost as much as it makes him want to squeeze Roy’s fingers fondly as Roy tries to disentangle them.

He goes with the squeezing first.  It’s easier.  Especially this early in the morning.  Noping out of the universe is a pretty involved process; that sort of shit is better left for after nine.

It must be damned early.  Normally he doesn’t like to set an alarm when Roy’s had a night like that, but he has a class at eight thirty, which didn’t leave him with much of a choice.  Apparently he didn’t need to worry about it after all, since Roy’s weirdly-wired internal clock just got the better of him anyway.  Or maybe Roy has to pee.  They drank a lot of cocoa after the pizza, and Roy did doze on the couch a bit, so it could be a combination of both.

Roy’s recently-extracted hand brushes Ed’s hair back from his forehead, and then Roy’s mouth grazes over it.  “Sorry.  Go back to sleep.”

“Time s’it?” Ed manages.

“A horrible one,” Roy says.

Ed wrenches his brain out of the sleep-fog and sits up.  They are, collectively, lucky as hell that Roy’s reflexes are so good, because otherwise Ed would have just slammed his head directly into Roy’s face, possibly hard enough to break both of their noses.  Roy would still look damn good with a broken nose, obviously, but Ed would feel awful.

“No hour of the day’s horrible enough to defeat the power of coffee,” Ed says, hearing his own voice sink deep into the accent and then registering the little smile that that puts onto Roy’s un-wrecked face in the weak light.  To avoid having to deal with that, he reaches over to pick up his phone, and after a second his eyes focus on the time.  “Oh.  Shit.”

Roy actually hangs his head.  “I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not,” Ed says, making a valiant attempt at positivity as he scoots to the edge of the bed.  “’Cause I’m not gonna let you be.  We’re gonna grab this one by the horns an’ kick the shit out of it.  C’mon.”

It is definitively too early.  Even after coffee, and a shower, and some more coffee, and some toast, Ed feels like he got beat upside the head with the jelly-kneed, clammy-faced exhaustion stick.  It’s not even that much worse than their normal alarm time, and they went to bed pretty early last night, but evidently Ed’s too damn old to renege on promises to his body these days.  He doesn’t have the slightest idea how Roy pulls those just-about-all-nighters every three days and somehow makes it up with cat naps.  Sure, some of the research says that naps are practically magical, but nothing has nailed down their mystical properties well enough to explain that particular discrepancy.  It’s more likely just good old genetics fucking Ed over yet again; some people are inherently programmed to be able to handle interrupted sleep better in the first place, and people like Roy practice with that gift until they’ve honed it to a talent, and…

And he was trying to look at some lecture notes before his brain wandered off into the ether, never to be seen again.

Roy gets up to take their empty mugs to the sink and kisses the top of his head.  “When does your last class end today?  Four?”

“Yeah,” Ed says, resisting the urge to try to tilt his head towards the retreating affection like a cat wanting to be petted again.  “Why’d you have so much coffee?  You should go back to sleep.”

Roy’s work history has also trained him—with or without the aid of genetics—to be alert in the first instant after waking, but usually a couple hours of peace will calm him down enough to rest again.

“Maybe I will,” Roy says.  He leans back against the counter and runs a hand over his face, and even like this—even haggard with a weariness greater than the sleep debt; even with his cowlicks out in full force and his eyes unfocused; even in the pajamas with the pattern of little fire dogs that Maes bought him so, so many years ago that they’re starting to fall apart—the man is a fucking knockout.  He’s a dream come true.  He never looks bad.  It’s goddamn uncanny.  Ed would break several personal rules and call the fucking church if he didn’t love it so much.  “What are some extremely boring household chores that I could tell myself to do while you’re at work?  If they’re bad enough, I’ll probably end up procrastinating with a nap.  That could work.”

Ed sits back in his chair.  He looks at the ceiling, which appears to be real.  He puts a hand on the tabletop, and it feels fairly solid.

“Are you all right?” Roy says.

“I don’t know,” Ed says.  “I think this is the first time in the full span of human history that someone has asked their partner for a honey-do list.  I’m not too sure how I’m supposed to feel.”

“I’ve got it,” Roy says, smacking one fist into the other palm.  “Cleaning the grout on the shower.  And if I actually get through that, mopping the floors.  And if I get through that, I’ll commit to getting some of our digital photos printed, and then I’ll frame them.”

“What digital photos?” Ed says.

“I have a folder on my computer,” Roy says.  “It’s labeled ‘CUTE ONES’.”

“Wait,” Ed says.  “Pictures of us?”

Roy blinks at him.  “Who else?”

Ed puts his head down on the table.  “You’re going to skip the shower and the floors and do that one, and then take a nap, aren’t you?”

Roy flashes him a grin.  “Guess you’ll find out at four.”

Ed still feels groggy as the day progresses—the way that characters are depicted in comic strips and cartoons with little bubbles popping around their faces comes to mind, and sounds about right—but he’s taught most of these classes enough times that they come relatively easily in spite of the general fuzziness.  He wakes up a little bit more around lunchtime, aided by the power of yet another coffee, and kicks back in his office for a couple minutes of quiet.  He scrolls through the recent emails, flagging the ones that he needs to read and possibly answer.  His brain reflects idly on how fast the semester’s going—and then much less-idly on how close they’ve come, when he wasn’t paying attention, to the worst time of the year.

Like a summons, his phone lights up with a text from Roy, and he knows that Roy’s at home, deliberately procrastinating on unpleasant menial tasks—he knows that.

His heart jumps into his throat anyway, though, and he grabs up the phone in unsteady hands—

I’m struggling to think of the ideal way to say this, Roy has written, so here is my best attempt.

Ed has rarely been more grateful that he reads so fast that it nearly qualifies as skimming.  If he’d digested that on its own, it might have sounded like the start of a breakup text, and he would simply have had to lie down on the floor of his cramped little office and expire.

That sounds like something that Roy would say.

If you’re feeling up to it, Roy went on after that unintentionally ominous beginning, and I do mean ‘if’, because if you aren’t, I won’t be bothered or unhappy or disappointed in the slightest, I mean that! - but if you’re feeling up to it, are there any videos that you might like to film after you get home tonight?  I quite like the idea of doing one later, although I am being entirely sincere when I say that if you’re too tired or just not quite in the right headspace, I am perfectly capable of finding other ways to entertain myself.

While Ed has been reading this block of text, Roy has added one more message beneath it:

That was not actually intended to sound like a euphemism, but with me, I suppose it might as well be.

Ed is lost.  He is forsaken.  He has given up the good fight.

With you is where I wanna be, he writes back, like the damn schmoop junkie he is.  It’s Roy’s fault.  At least he has that.  I could probably be talked into doing one tonight as long as there isn’t a whole ton of intensive sciencing required, haha.

An ellipsis immediately pops up to show that Roy’s typing, and then the bubble isn’t far behind:

Minimal sciencing is fine with me!  If there haven’t been enough commenter questions for a whole video—There have been enough commenter questions for about six videos—I could always try to recreate one of your previous experiments for fun and hilarity and edification, and you could do a running commentary.

Ed is grinning at his screen.  He shouldn’t have another person like this—not after Al; not after Al and Winry.  He’s spoiled rotten.  He’s overloaded.  Luck doesn’t balance out like that.  Nobody should get three people that they trust and love to the ends of the fucking Earth.  That’s too many.  That’s too much.  Sometimes it starts to make his chest feel tight like the first threads of panic cinching in.

I do declare, he writes back, because he knows that Roy will delight in imagining it in his voice.  That is without a doubt the fanciest way I’ve ever heard somebody say that they wanted to test the smoke alarms.

Baby, Roy writes, in its own text bubble, which makes Ed fear and anticipate the next one in equal measure.  I’ll test YOUR smoke alarm any time you like.

Ed sends back no fewer than sixteen copies of the emoji with wide eyes and no mouth.  He considered a few others, but this one seems to strike the best balance.

What???? Roy sends in reply to his silence-but-for-emojis.  You don’t want me to hold down your button until you let out one very long ‘BEEEEEEEEP’ to indicate that your battery is still in good condition???  And here I thought I was being romantic.  Well, I never.

Ed is still grinning at his stupid screen.  ‘Never’ sounds like exactly the right time for whatever the fuck that was.

I tried, Roy writes back.  I hope I will at least earn an A for effort.  Anyway, let’s just see how you feel when you get home.  Another night of crashing on the couch with the dog channel sounds just as appealing, frankly.

Ed knows that Roy means it even before the flood of heart emojis that follows close behind.

“Hi, y’all,” Ed says to the camera, because of course he does.  “Welcome to the special Sleep-Deprivation Edition of Romance for People Who Hate Romance.  At some point during this video, we may both just put our heads down on the desk and take a nap, and I might not edit it out.  Proceed at your own risk.”

Roy gives the camera the good old spirit fingers treatment.  “Dire warnings from a man who bleeps out ‘Jesus’.”

“Now I have to bleep that out,” Ed says.  “You’re a menace to society.”

Roy looks so pleased that Ed no longer feels remotely bad about jumping right to the heavy-hitter.

“Okay,” he says.  “Here’s a reader question that’s for you by default because I don’t know the answer.  Did Al give you a shovel speech the first time he met you?”

Roy blinks.

Then he blinks again, but with slightly wider eyes this time.

Then he turns the wide eyes on the camera, holds a hand to his chest, and incorporates the puppy eyes into a truly piteous expression.

Then he goes totally neutral again, so swiftly that it looks like he flipped a switch.

“Sort of,” he says.

Ed raises an eyebrow at him.  “What the heck does ‘sort of’ mean?”

“‘Sort of’,” Roy says, calmly, “means ‘sort of’.”  The part of Ed that has had too much caffeine, not enough sleep, and not nearly enough vacations wants to see if they can keep this going until it devolves into an off-brand Monty Python sketch, but Roy squares his shoulders, folds his hands on the desk, and beams over at him like a morning news announcer before he can kick off the spiral into cataclysm.  “The first time that Al visited was before we actually started dating.  That particular detail did not, in any way, stop him from heavily implying threats of bodily harm or psychological damage if I put a toe out of line.”

Ed realizes too late that the moment that he just spent considering how tragically clearly he can envision that from Al has left him staring off into space.  “He’s going to enjoy watching this one.  What did he say?  Wait—when did this even happen?  I hadn’t seen him for, like, a year that time; I was practically glued to him for three days.”

“It was the very first morning,” Roy says, settling in his chair and crooking an elbow on the back for extra casual points.  “We’d mostly finished breakfast, and we were working on the last of the coffee, and you went to go take a shower.  The instant that you were out of earshot, he said, ‘Mr. Mustang, forgive me, but precisely what are your intentions towards my brother?’”

Al has eradicated his own accent so thoroughly that sometimes even Ed forgets that he’s a particularly southern demon-child when he wants to be.

Ed is also going to have to bleep out Roy’s last name, just in case, but that’s a very small potato in comparison.

“That’s… frighteningly plausible,” Ed says.  The curiosity itches so hard that it feels physical.  “What’d you tell him?”

“Well,” Roy says, “first I just said ‘What?’, but then I suddenly understood why he’d insisted on buttering his toast with a steak knife about a half-hour prior, because now there was a sharp object on his side of the table and murder in his eyes, and I discovered an entirely new and unidentified variety of terror.”

Ed is powerless to stop his left palm from colliding with his face.  “He would.  Oh, Al.”

“In the interests of not getting eviscerated with toast tools in our own kitchen,” Roy says, “I very gracefully covered with, ‘My intentions?  They’re—good.  Very good.  Extremely good.  Universally good.’”  He tosses his hair out of his face and smiles sunnily.  “Al said ‘I’m very glad to hear that’ in the tone of one discussing agricultural blight, and then he said ‘My brother doesn’t notice the way that people look at him, Roy, but I do.  And if you would like to remain intact in every meaningful sense of the word, I would recommend maintaining your universally good intentions at any cost.’”

“I want the record to show,” Ed says, weakly, “that my brother has never actually killed anyone.”

“That we know of,” Roy says brightly.

“Shut up,” Ed says.  “I can’t believe that you remember this so clearly.  What the hell did you say to that?”

“I was very, very scared,” Roy says, with equal cheer.  “And I said what anyone who didn’t want to die would have said—‘Yes, sir.  I will, sir.’”

Ed puts both hands over his face.  It doesn’t help much.  The idea that Al knew that Roy was into him before Ed knew that Roy was into him—although admittedly Ed hadn’t even quite believed that for several weeks after they’d fucked on the living room carpet—is a lot to wrap his head around.  “Please tell me that he stopped after that.”

“Sort of,” Roy says, and that is fast becoming Ed’s least-favorite phrase in a language full of the worst type of winners.  “He said ‘Good, see that you keep it that way,’ and then picked up his knife, paused, picked up his plate, and went over to wash them.”

“He wouldn’t do a shovel speech,” Ed says.  “He’d do a steak knife speech.  He would.  He has to deal with shovels every day anyway; he doesn’t think they’re intimidating enough.”

“Good point,” Roy says.  “To give him some credit, he never mentioned the fact that he could bury my body in or near an active fault, such that the tectonic movement would crush my co—”

“Okay,” Ed says.  “That is a ‘yes’ to that question.  Lord, is that a ‘yes’.”

“I hope he appreciates the way I delivered his dialogue,” Roy says warmly, “and doesn’t decide to kill me in my sleep.”

Al is going to laugh his ass off watching this one, whether that story is lightly edited for dramatic effect or not.

“My brother,” Ed says again, louder and more distinctly enunciated this time, “has never actually killed anyone.”

“That we know of,” Roy says.

The worst part is that Al’s going to want that on a T-shirt.

“You are,” Ed says, since they’ve long since crossed the border into Catchphraseville anyway, “as usual, making it worse.”

“I do my very best,” Roy says.  “Hey, before we jump into another one, I have two semi-scientific questions for you.”

Ed eyes him.  “Okay.”

“First question,” Roy says, drawing himself up as far as he can get without leaving the chair.  “Why… are you so cute?”

Ed looks at him.

Then Ed looks at the camera.

Then Ed folds his arms on the desktop and lays his head down on them to begin that nap that he warned them about.

“I’m sorry,” Roy says, which is a lie; and he knows it; and he’s trying not to laugh.  “I had to.  You know I had to.  May I ask my second question?”

“Maybe,” Ed mumbles into his arms.

“Where does static come from?” Roy asks.

“It’s a punishment from God,” Ed says.

Silence.

“You’re talkin’ about the kind you get in laundry, right?” Ed asks, shifting his head just enough to make himself audible to the camera mic.  “Where all our hairs turn into these weirdo clusters that attach themselves to socks, and then you can pull them off and stick them on the wall?”

“Yes,” Roy says, and Ed can hear in his voice that he’s not actually bothered by the stupid shit that Ed said a minute ago, and that… 

Jesus, that’s a relief.

“It’s electrons,” Ed says.

“It’s always electrons,” Roy says.  “Sneaking around and setting the physical laws of the universe in motion all the time—the gall.”

“Pretty much,” Ed says.  “S’called the triboelectric effect.  It’s when two materials or objects make contact, and then there’s a slight electron exchange goin’ on that creates a charge imbalance where one thing’s more positive and one thing’s more negative.  Some fabrics are pretty susceptible to it, which is why you often see it with, like, rubbin’ your butt on a car seat as you get out, or scuffin’ your socks on the carpet.  And cotton and natural fabrics tend to take a more positive charge after they meet up with something else, whereas synthetic fabrics like polyester and stuff tend to end up pretty negative.  So if you have different types together, you get that opposition, and then you can make lightning in your laundry basket.”

“Truly,” Roy says, “the goal in any well-maintained home.”

“Or you could pay money for dryer sheets,” Ed says.

“Tomfoolery,” Roy says.  “I want lightning.  And weirdo clusters of hair.”

“I reckon there’s probably something inherent to natural stuff that makes it more positive,” Ed says, “and more plasticky-based stuff that’s more negative.  ’Cause it’s the same principle working when you rub a balloon on your head and then stick it on somethin’, and your hair stands up.”

“We’ve talked about water being a… polar molecule, right?” Roy says.  “Is that why static electricity is usually more pronounced when the air is dry?”

Ed had been working his way progressively closer to that glorious nap, but he has to raise his head for this, because—

Because holy fuck, he never wants to be with anybody else.  Not ever.  He can’t even fucking imagine it anymore.

“Nailed it,” he says.

Roy blinks, and then grins broadly, and then winks broader still.

“It’s what I do,” he says.

“I’m going to start abbreviating ‘family-friendly channel’ to save time,” Ed says.  “From here on out, it’s FFC.  You know what it means.”

“I suspect that you enjoy saying it in full,” Roy says.  “I think you savor every syllable.”

Ed puts his head back down on his arms, but angled so that he can slowly slide his sheet of paper over and tilt the edge enough to read it.

“Next question,” he says.  “Somebody wants to know what our favorite science experiment to do together is, and if you help with cleanin’ up.”

“Of course I do,” Roy says, flattening a hand over his heart and doing his best to look affronted.  “I am an unerring gentleman.  I will admit that I sometimes reserve some time to laugh a little bit first—like on the Mentos and Diet Coke day; I laughed perhaps a touch more than my fair share at that one—but in a gentlemanly way.  And then I help.  I support science even in its messiest forms.”

What that really means is that he supports Ed, obviously, but it’s far too late to try to scale the walls of this schmoop hole.  They’re stuck here at rock bottom until somebody either throws them a rope ladder or a jackhammer.

One of these days, Ed is going to do a special edition adults-only episode on the science of aphrodisiacs to thank Roy for all of the nice things that he’s done during these videos.  Or to annoy the hell out of him, possibly, since Ed’s pretty sure he read that most of the famous ones are bunk, although there was something to be said for mushrooms.  Fungi strike again.

“As for ‘our’ favorite,” Roy says, “that’s… does cooking count?  It’s more or less science, except that you don’t have to write up your results—unless you’re a food blogger, that is.  Wait.  Does that make food bloggers scientists?  Ed—” He reaches over and pats very gently and very insistently at Ed’s bicep.  “Ed, help me.  I’m not sure I like where I ended up.”

“Monologuing’s harder than anybody thinks,” Ed says without raising his head.  “One minute, you think you’re talkin’ about something; next time you look, you’re halfway down a rabbithole, makin’ unsettling speculations.”

Roy upgrades to tugging on Ed’s sleeve.  “I read a recipe online once where the writer really leaned into that.  He spent something in the area of two thousand words on how cooking was his calling, and he felt that the best recipes would go above the heads of amateurs because they were too advanced, and only people who had studied intently were qualified to attempt to replicate his successes.  I almost sent it to you, but I thought you might be offended.”

“I am,” Ed says.  “Not because of comparing cooking to science, but because that guy sounds like a pretentious, gatekeeping asshole.”  Shit.  He’ll have to bleep that.  It’ll sound like one of the words that he was trying not to say.  “What was the question that we were supposed to be on?”

“Our favorite experiment,” Roy says.

“Right,” Ed says.  “Well, you don’t like the ones with fire.  Or explosions.  That narrows it down.”

He can just see Roy’s grimace from here.  “Ah.  Yes.”

“You like electricity a lot,” Ed says.  “And currents.  You liked the potato battery.”

“I like potatoes and batteries quite a bit separately,” Roy says.  “Combining them was a dream come true.”

“At least that makes my Christmas shopping easy,” Ed says.  “I’ll just buy a buncha potatoes and shove batteries in ’em.  Don’t even have to gift wrap.  And I’ll get Al some rocks.”

He can just see Roy’s valiant attempt to maintain a straight face from here.  “Al never seems to get tired of rocks.”

“It’s ’cause he rocks,” Ed says.  “He’s just really devoted to the wordplay.  Uh… next… question… ‘Who’s in charge of the music when you’re in a car for more than half an hour?’”

“I am,” Roy says, perhaps a little more proudly than it really deserves.  “It’s a responsibility I don’t take lightly.  Ed…”

He pauses, opens his mouth, closes it again, and then looks down at Ed.

“Go ahead,” Ed says, sitting up for good measure even though every inch of his body hates him for it.  “Roast me.”

“I will gently toast you,” Roy says.  “Not a fraction of heat more.  Lightly golden-brown.  Only the slightest bit crispy on top.”

Ed feels like he should have an objection to that, but his brain feels mushy, and he can’t decide if it’s cute or weird or both; or if Roy is low-key a cannibal.

The possible people-eater in question turns towards the camera and smiles winsomely.  Ed supposes that maybe that adverb is sort of redundant with Roy; every goddamn thing he does is charming in the extreme.  It’s like a sickness.

“The vast majority of the time,” Roy says, “Ed only listens to classical music.”

Ed takes a very, very, very deep breath and sighs.

“Sometimes he takes breaks,” Roy says, “for really strange, obscure electronica.  Or jazz.  He likes movie soundtracks.  He likes instrumental covers of regular songs, which is extremely jarring when you walk in and know that you recognize what you’re hearing, but you don’t have any lyrics to go on, and you feel like you’re in one of those grocery stores that plays awful easy-listening versions of one-hit wonders.”

“At least you can focus on buying your food and getting out,” Ed says.  “Which is supposed to be the point of grocery stores.”

“I like loitering in grocery stores,” Roy says.  “I love having a nearly infinite amount of functionally identical choices.”

“Eew,” Ed says.  “And—besides—I listen to—”

“One,” Roy says, “count it—one—genre of music with words.”

“That’s a perfectly reasonable number of genres,” Ed says.

“It’s metal,” Roy says—and he delivers that part to the camera, but it comes out much closer to adoring than to roasty.  “He listens to classical music and metal.”

“It’s harder for me to come up with my own words when someone else is singin’ at me,” Ed says.  “Stringing coherent sentences together is bad enough to begin with.”

Roy is doing the gazing-at-him thing.  Again.

“I actually like other stuff,” Ed says.  “Or I guess I don’t have a very strong preference about most of it, so I find it all kind of interesting, so he just puts on lots of different stuff when I don’t have to do any thinking.”

“He loves disco,” Roy says.

“Why would anybody not love disco?” Ed says.  “It’s so much fun.  You love eighties ballads.”

“I grew up on them,” Roy says.  “You didn’t grow up on disco.”

“I grew up on Catholic radio and a lot of people who couldn’t carry a tune tryna’ sing hymns in church,” Ed says.  “I’ll take whatever you can throw at me.”

Roy blinks, pauses, grins, lifts his hands, kisses each of his palms, curls his hands up, and then pretends to toss their imaginary contents in Ed’s face.

Ed stares at him for what feels like a very long time, attempting to determine if this is cute or disgusting or discutesting or an exhaustion hallucination.

He can’t tell.

He puts his head back down on the desk.

Roy strokes his hair.

“Maybe we should wrap this one up,” Roy says.

“One more,” Ed says.  “Somebody wants to know if I put the pun in my sign-off because of you.”

Silence for a second.

“Oh,” Roy says.  “I never would have… did you?”

“Sort of,” Ed says.

“What does ‘sort of’ me—” Roy pauses.  “I deserved that.”

“What?” Ed says, and then he remembers the start of this ill-fated round of filming, and— “No, that’s not—I didn’t do that on purpose.  I just—it’s a ‘sort of’.  Like yours.  ’Cause… I mean, I’ve always sort of thought puns are kind of fun, right, because they’re kind of like a matching game but with language instead of iconography, where you’re making connections between things that are similar in sound but come from different contexts.  Right?”  He wrenches himself upright again, since explaining this to the desk probably won’t help all that much.  “But when I started hangin’ out with Roy a lot, and I realized how much he liked them in particular, it kind of made me pay attention to them more and pick them out more of the time.  So him kinda changing my mindset was what led me to the point of thinking it was a good idea in the first place.”  He takes a deep breath, which is perhaps somewhat overdue.  Monologuing.  Hard to do, and even harder to stop doing.  “But I feel like the question is maybe more askin’ about whether I did it specifically hoping that you’d notice and appreciate it, which isn’t quite true, so… yeah.  That’s what ‘sort of’ was supposed to mean.”

Roy is smiling—the smile that makes it look like he ought to be glowing literally as well as figuratively.  Roy has a great many talents, but phosphorescence isn’t one of them.  At least not yet.

“I think that’s even sweeter,” Roy says.

“Of course you do,” Ed says.

“No, I mean it,” Roy says.  “Because it’s… it wasn’t just something that you did trying to get my attention or something—it was something that you did because it was something that we shared that you liked in its own right.  It was something that you did for both of us, in a way, and because of the ways we’d affected each other.  Because of how we’d grown together over time.”

“‘Grown together’ makes it sound like we’re plants,” Ed says.

“Or fungi,” Roy says.  “Can anyone prove that we’re not fungi?”

“Oh, God,” Ed says.  “Were you watching old videos all day while I wasn’t here?”

“You can’t prove that, either,” Roy says.

“Uh huh,” Ed says.  “So are we gonna visit the mushroom colony, or what?”

“Of course we are,” Roy says calmly.  “How about during your semester break?  Do you want to drive, or fly?  We should look at hotels pretty soon either way, shouldn’t we?”

Ed is too damn tired to muster the emotional capacity to contain all of the love right now.  He struggles with it for a few moments, and then he gives up and puts his head back down on his folded arms.

Roy starts stroking his hair again.

“Why are you so awake?” Ed asks.

“Practice,” Roy says.  “Spite.  A power nap.  Caffeine.  More caffeine.  Take your pick.”

“All of the above, please,” Ed says.

Roy starts rubbing little soothing circles on his back.  “You should take it easy this weekend.”

“But what’s the point of doin’ all those things,” Ed says, “if I can’t say ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead’ at every opportunity?”

“Gosh,” Roy says.  “I haven’t the slightest idea.  Maybe the point is—here’s a wild thought for you, my dear—sometimes, occasionally, once in a while feeling rested.”

“Sounds fake,” Ed says, “but okay.”

Roy moves from soothing circles to gentle patting again.  “Ed, I’m calling this one.”

“Fair,” Ed says.  He attempts to raise one hand and point in what he thinks is the direction of the camera.  “Blah, blah, gonna… do a more coherent episode next time.  Thank you for your support; I don’t know why you’re here; like and subscribe if you’re some kinda masochist.  Meanwhile, make like a proton, and… stay positive.”

He knows Roy’s doing the point-and-wink for him, or possibly very emphatic fingerguns, so all he has to do after that is peel himself off of the desktop, drag himself over to the camera, and hit the button to stop.

“All right,” Roy says, holding both hands out to him the moment that he turns.  “Bedtime.”

“You’re not the boss of me,” Ed says.

“How about this,” Roy says, wriggling his fingers in a beckoning sort of way.  “Bedtime now, and tomorrow I’ll make waffles?”

“Pancakes,” Ed says.  Waffles are still too erotic, but he doesn’t want to say that, or Roy will just consistently make waffles for the rest of time.

“Deal,” Roy says.  He wraps an arm around Ed once they’re clear of the desk, even though it makes moving through the doorway significantly more of a dexterity challenge.  “It was merciful of you not to mention that I also sing to the eighties ballads, especially when there are chores involved.”

“Nothing merciful about it,” Ed says.  “Totally selfish.  If I talked about that, they were gonna wanna see it, and people should have to buy tickets if they wanna see you do ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ with the broom handle like that.”

“I’d say something about the boyfriend discount,” Roy says, “but I think it might be more of a punishment than a VIP experience.”

“Maybe that’s what the P stands for,” Ed says.  “Punishment.”

“Either way,” Roy says, “I maintain that it’s really not my fault that ‘Turn around, bright eyes’ is both so perfect for yowling at the top of one’s voice and so terribly appropriate when it comes to you in particular.”

“Gross,” Ed says.

Roy kisses the top of his head.

“Gross,” Ed says.

“Definitely bedtime,” Roy says.

Chapter Text

Ed waits for the two blinks of the red light, takes his breath, smiles—

“Hi, y’all,” he says.  “Welcome to you-know-what, comin’ to you not-so-live from you-know-where.”

“Wait,” Roy says from at his right.  “Which one are we doing right now?”

Ed looks into the camera for a second, and then he clears his throat.

“Hi, y’all,” he says.  “Welcome to apparently-you-don’t-know-what.”

“I’m serious,” Roy says.  He’s pouting.  His pout is as gorgeous as most of his other expressions.  Ed miscalculated this one badly.  “Is this a science episode?”

“You tell me,” Ed says.  “How do you feel about spontaneous human combustion?”

Roy blinks.

Then he smirks.

“Buy me a drink first,” he says.

Ed looks at the camera again.

Roy is still grinning when Ed dares to look over at him instead.  “Can’t take me anywhere.”

“Not even our own apartment,” Ed says.  “It’s a flippin’ tragedy.”

Roy maintains his magnificently smug expression for a moment longer before he settles down.  “Is that really the topic?”

“Yup,” Ed says.  “So let’s start at the beginning here.  Do you think that people should be worried about spontaneous human combustion?”

Roy wrinkles his nose.  “I think… that they should be more worried about the non-spontaneous kind.”

“Pop quiz passed,” Ed says.

Roy glances at him.  “That was… quick.”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “Usually science isn’t, but sometimes it is.  So!  Just so y’all know—this is gonna be kind of a gross episode.  Just… icky.  Probably not enough to make you physically sick or anything, but if you’re not into squeamish-y stuff, I’d recommend closin’ the window before this goes any further, and you regret it later on.  No heroes on the internet, okay?  And no shame.  Just do what you gotta do.”

Ed looks down at his notes, shuffles them, looks back up at the camera, and stares at it for a second.

“Last chance,” he says.  “I mean it.”

“He does,” Roy says.  “Fire and people don’t mix very well.  We’ll do another video later on that you can safely watch.”  He pauses and then sneaks a glance at Ed.  “Ah… maybe?  Whenever the science maestro feels up for it, I mean.  Sometime later.  Not necessarily right away.  Just… a cute one.  At some point.  In the foreseeable future.”

“Nice backpedal,” Ed says.

“Thank you,” Roy says.  “I’m sorry that I keep committing you to things on your own channel.  It’s very rude.”

“Could be worse,” Ed says.  “But while we’re on the topic, you should add ‘Lucky I’m So Cute’ to your T-shirt list.”

Roy has his own little notepad for the shirt list these days.  He picked it out himself at Daiso when they made an ill-considered trip to the mall to buy Ed new shoes for Winry’s upcoming fancy birthday party.  It has a tiny, adorable teddy bear wielding a knife at the top, and Roy fell in love with it instantly.

“Done,” Roy says, already scribbling.  Ed can only assume that the murder bear approves.

“We’re working on the channel merchandise thing,” Ed says.  “I kinda still feel like I got hit by a truck after midterms and all that, but we’ll keep y’all posted.”

Roy looks lovingly down at his list.  “We should make booty shorts, too.”

“Hard no,” Ed says.

Roy turns an even more formidable pout on him this time.  “Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to die,” Ed says.  “And that’s all we’re gonna say about that on the—”

He gestures.  Roy picks up the piece of paper underneath his notepad and holds it up, so that the viewers can see the giant block letters reading FAMILY-FRIENDLY CHANNEL.

Roy looks at it as he lowers it again.  “I think we should put an asterisk on this.”

“I think you would take that as encouragement,” Ed says.

Roy grimaces.  “It’s like you know me.”  He pauses.  “What… were we…?”

“Spontaneous human combustion,” Ed says.

“Ah, yes,” Roy says.  “Of course.”

“So the first thing that I wanna say,” Ed says, folding his hands on the desk, “is that there’s always gonna be stuff in the world that we can’t explain.  There’s always gonna be details that get reported, or stuff that shows up in the background of a photograph, or question marks that we can’t eliminate.  The universe is just too big to be answerable all the time.  And that’s great.  I love that.  I think that that’s the coolest darned thing there is.  I’m glad that we’ve still got mysteries out there that we can’t quite figure out.”

He sits back in his chair, folds his arms, and takes a deep breath.

“Spontaneous human combustion,” he says, “is not one of them.”

There’s a long pause.

Then Roy says, slightly tentatively, “This is shaping up to be a very short video.”

Ed arches an eyebrow at him.  “Why do you think I asked you to be in it?”

“Aha,” Roy says, trying not to laugh.  “To stall.  Leveraging my finest talent.  Brilliant.”

“I’m kidding,” Ed says.  He considers.  “…sort of.  Okay.  So—here’s the thing.  If you want to believe that spontaneous human combustion is possible—if it’s, y’know, like, personally meaningful to you to keep that as one of the mysteries of the universe—then that’s… fine.  Like, that’s your prerogative, as a thinkin’ human being.  There are enough small gaps in the evidence that we’ve got for just about anything for you to be able to say ‘There’s somethin’ else here’ for pretty much anything that you choose to.  Like ghosts and stuff.  Ghosts are personally meaningful to a lot of people, and I get that, and if that’s your thing, then I respect that.  You do you.  So if spontaneous human combustion is your thing, and you watch this and think, ‘He’s wrong,’ then that’s fine by me.  Just don’t be a jerk in the comments about it, ’cause I’ve still got grading to do, and I’m tired.”

Roy is gazing at him again.  Maybe it’s actually vision related—maybe without his glasses, Roy has trouble focusing, and he ends up sort of staring into the middle distance, and it just looks like he’s constantly admiring Ed.

“I love it when you say things like that,” Roy says.

This does not assist Ed’s attempts to find an alternative explanation.

“That I have grading to do?” Ed says.  “Or that I’m tired?”

Roy rolls his gorgeous eyes, but at least Ed defused that one before the schmoop bomb went off, and glitter exploded everywhere.

“The point,” Ed says, attempting to drag them bodily back on track, “is that this is one of those topics where a lot of people see the evidence and then make a call, and if your call’s not the same as mine, that doesn’t mean that I think that you’re a bad person or somethin’.  So… yeah.  Now we’re gonna talk about history.”

“Oh, dear,” Roy says, looking around himself and getting halfway out of his chair.  “Am I on the wrong YouTube show?”

“Siddown, smarty-pants,” Ed says.  “This is relevant because it’s important to start this out by understandin’ that the reports of spontaneous human combustion mostly started in the nineteenth century, when there were a couple incidents of ‘unexplained’ deaths related to fire somehow, but nobody could quite figure how.  They’d find someone burned mostly down to ash, in a room by themselves, without a whole lot of other things in the room havin’ been damaged.  Usually the person’s feet or most of their leg below the knee or their hands were left behind, practically intact.  Which—like, let’s be real here.  That sounds weird.  That makes your brain go ‘Something’s wrong here; something out of the ordinary must’ve caused this.’”

“Hmm,” Roy says.

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “And so the Victorians did what the Victorians liked to do best, which was pop their monocles and try to find a way to blame it on bad behavior.  So the running theory was that you were much more—or only—susceptible to spontaneous human combustion if you were an alcoholic, because supposedly the alcohol would permeate your whole body and make you much more flammable.”

Roy is wrinkling his nose in a way that is even cuter because it means that he’s about to say precisely what Ed was hoping he would say: “That’s… that wouldn’t be how it would work.”  He blinks.  “Would it?”

Ed looks into the camera and folds his hands on the desk again.

“I would like to reiterate,” he says, “that this is the Victorians.”  He turns to Roy again.  “Nah.  That’s not how it would work.  And I bet that you can give me an example of why, which’ll involve a little bit of controlled pyromania that we’re not gonna tell your firehouse about.”

It takes Roy a second to parse that, but then he grins, bright and broad, and turns the blinding effect of it on Ed’s defenseless viewers.

“Have you ever,” Roy says, “watched a trained professional in a safe environment put alcohol onto a cloth, or an object, or their hand, and then light the alcohol on fire?  If done correctly—and you will not try this at home—the alcohol burns off without burning whatever’s underneath.”

“Did you hear that?” Ed says.  “If you try this at home, he will not come to your house and put the fire out.  He’ll send someone else.  Someone who’s not as hot and won’t be sweet and understanding about it like he would.”

“Thanks, babe,” Roy says.

“Stop distracting them,” Ed says.

Roy blinks.  “By thanking you for a compliment?”

“With a pet name,” Ed says.  “Now they’re gonna be lost in your eyes and making mood boards out of screenshots of your shoulders instead of remembering that they had better not ever do irresponsible stuff with fire.”

“Not ever,” Roy says, turning towards the camera.  “Or I will be extremely disappointed in you.”

His expression looks legendary even from the side view.  Ed gives that several seconds to land.  He’ll put a dramatic sound cue or some meaningful music behind it in post for good measure.

“Okay,” Ed says.  “Now that we’ve cleared up non-spontaneous auto-human combustion—”

Roy laughs.

“You’re encouraging them now,” Ed says.

“I am not,” Roy says.  “Would you like me to turn around and face the wall until you get going?”

Ed eyes him.  “Would you keep your mouth shut?”

“Highly unlikely,” Roy says.

“Then the wall shouldn’t get to enjoy your face while none of the rest of us do,” Ed says.  He claps his hands together, perhaps a little harder than is strictly necessary.  “Spontaneous human combustion!”

“At this rate,” Roy says, “we should put that on a T-shirt.”

“No,” Ed says.

“It’s becoming a catchphrase,” Roy says.

“No,” Ed says.

Roy makes a big, dumb, puppy-eyed sad face, because of course he does.  “We should expand our sartorial offerings to accommodate every sense of style and every degree of tact.”

“Don’t give them that nonsense,” Ed says.  “They’ve figured out by now that we wouldn’t know tact if a mutual neighbor brought it over and introduced it and stood around telling stories about its childhood for half an hour.  Besides, we need to talk about how candles work.”

Roy pauses, and then he makes a face.  “I’m… not sure I like the sound of that.”

“Unfortunately,” Ed says, more feelingly than he meant to, “facts don’t change just because we don’t like them.  What do we know about candles?”

“They’re romantic,” Roy says, transitioning immediately into some advanced eyelash-batting.  “And… sometimes they smell nice, but sometimes they light your curtains on fire, and then you get an unwanted visit from people like me.”

Ed gazes abjectly into the camera again.  “Do not light your curtains on fire.  Not even if you’re some kind of stalker who identifies the backgrounds of videos, and you think that you’re in our area code, so Roy might actually show up at your house.  Especially not if you’re that.”

“Sage advice,” Roy says.  “You should also consider the fact that even really hot firefighters are going to show up at your burning home wearing so much protective equipment that you may never see their faces in the first place, so it might all be for nothing.”

Ed isn’t sure if that’s helping or not, but it is—yet again—a long, long way beside the point.

“Yeah,” he tries.  “So… you’ve really just got two parts to a candle, right?  Wax, and a wick.  What are wicks made out of?”

Roy sits very still for a second, then glances sidelong at Ed, then hesitates for a few more seconds before he says, “…string?”

“Right,” Ed says.

Roy looks relieved.

This is shaping up to be one hell of an episode, and not in the same way as the Mentos-and-Coke one was.

“Usually,” Ed says, “it’s coated in borax or salt or something inflammable so that it doesn’t just burn away right off the bat, which is part of why wicks are usually stiffer than just regular ol’ string.  Sometimes they’ll be reinforced with wire or stuff like that to help keep them upright, too, but… basically, they’re just string.  Usually they’re made out of cotton.  So then what happens to the candle when you add energy to the system by lighting the string?”

Roy eyes him again.

“There are no wrong answers,” Ed says, a little more gently—partly to the camera, but mostly to him.  “Well… okay.  There are wrong answers, scientifically speaking.  But there are no bad guesses.  And there’s no shame in guessing.  Ever.  Period.  Taking a stab at it even if we might be wrong is how we learn, and learning is how we get science in the first place.”

Roy watches him for another second, then gives the camera a conspiratorial Better me than you, huh? sort of a look.  Ed takes a second to despair about the fact that he can already interpret Roy’s silent communications with his own damn viewership.

“My guess,” Roy says slowly, “based on what we’ve said about flame before—back in the states of matter episode where a lot of very interesting, distantly plasma-related things took place… is that adding heat to the system… would… change the state of the wax… and… turn it into a liquid?  You always… you get those little pools of melted wax in the middle right around the wick.”

“That’s exactly right,” Ed says.  Roy looks inordinately relieved again.  Ed was really hoping that this Socratic pop-quiz mechanism would work, but it’s starting to seem like Roy’s been traumatized by previous science experiences even more than he thought.  “So, related side-note—what happens when you dip, like, a cotton T-shirt into water?  Or a towel?”

Roy blinks, blinks again, and blinks some more.

Oh, shit.

“It…” Roy says.  “…gets… wet?”

“Yeah,” Ed says, trying to sound gentler still.  Encouraging or something.  Crap.  “And then, like… you know when you just accidentally get the corner of the towel wet, but then it starts… what?  What does it do?”

Roy blinks a little more.

Then, slowly, Roy says, “It… creeps up?  The water.”  He attempts at a roguish smile.  “Like some kind of monstrosity that doesn’t even care about gravity.”

“Exactly,” Ed says.  “The flippin’ audacity and all that.  So let’s throw some liquid wax at the bottom of a cotton wick—just like gettin’ your towel wet.  What happens?”

Silence.

And there’s a funny sort of tightness to Roy’s smile, which pulls at it for a few more seconds before he says, “The wick says something that I can’t repeat on your channel, and then it runs naked and dripping wet down the hall to the linen closet to get another towel?”

“Oh, my God,” Ed says, helplessly, before he can stop himself.  The words ricochet up his throat and out of him, desperate and utterly sincere.  “I’m not—I meant it.  Roy, I meant what I said.  There’re no wrong answers.  But it’s—I mean, you don’t have to—”

He gets up, crosses to the camera, and turns it off.  And then he shoves a hand into his hair, like he can fix himself to the ground better if he adds weight to the top of his own head.

“Shit,” Ed says.  Everything feels… swimmy.  “Shit.  I didn’t—I—”

“I’m sorry,” Roy says.

Roy’s voice doesn’t sound strangled, exactly, but it’s—low.  Thinner than usual.  Slighter.  And he always either sits upright with his shoulders squared or in a deliberately smug-casual slouch, but this is… different.  He’s just… sitting.  He looks smaller there than normal.

And he’s not looking back at Ed.

“I just don’t know anything,” Roy says.

The next words try to tumble out of Ed so fast that they trip over each other and batter against the backs of his teeth, and he chokes on them as they come loose.  “What?  You—what are you talkin’ about?  Yes, you do.”

Roy’s expression doesn’t give him much to go on—just a flicker of something rueful.  Something in the area of regret.

Ed can feel his heart pounding in the pit of his stomach; can hear it ringing in his ears.  He can’t let that deafen him and drown out what he needs to say.

“I mean it,” he says.  “You do.  I’m not saying that to apologize or something.  I mean—I do want to apologize, because I was makin’ you uncomfortable, and I shoulda bailed way earlier as soon as I… but that’s… you were getting it all right.  You were.  You were thinking exactly the right way.  And you know all kinds of stuff.”

Roy’s eyes stay very soft and very vulnerable, which is the only reason that the rest of Ed’s vital systems don’t follow the cardiovascular one into an absolute meltdown.  Roy’s not mad.  He’s definitely a long fucking way from happy, but he’s not mad.

“I guess I know a thing or two,” Roy says, “but nothing that would be useful here.  And I don’t want to slow it down, or drag it off course.  The two of us seem to have enough trouble staying on-topic as it is.  I don’t know anything about science.”

The problem is that he believes that.

The problem is that he was told one too many times—or two, or three, or thousands—that he’d never be any good at science because he couldn’t take the math.  Ed has probably helped assuage that a little bit, sure, but sometimes one counterweight against a lifetime of casual dismissal doesn’t amount to anything like enough.

Challenging Roy on that front isn’t going to budge that boulder—it’s not the kind of lightly-grasped opinion that you can pluck out of someone’s hand and replace with one refined by different information.  It’s embedded.  To Roy, what he just said feels like a fact.  Ed saying Your explanation of those smoke detectors was fucking aces; I learned a ton won’t replace any of the rot in the foundation.  Maybe Ed can start sneaking copies of the viewer comments into Roy’s wallet or under his pillow or something, but fighting back right now isn’t going to fix anything.

He takes a deep breath.  Roy isn’t mad.  Roy isn’t mad; and Ed can make this better if he’s careful, and he plays some halfway-decent cards.  Al tells him to repeat it to himself—All I can do is the best that I can.

“You don’t have to,” Ed says.  “You’re amazing exactly the way you are, and everybody who ever comments on these videos mostly asks me to stop talkin’ so that you can say more, because they like what you say, whether it’s scientific or not.  But—I mean—that’s okay.  It’s really okay.  What’s not okay is me trying to push you to do somethin’ you weren’t comfortable with, which is—”

“It’s not your fault,” Roy says.  This expression probably qualifies as wistful.  That’s one of Al’s favorite words ever, but it’s not on Ed’s list.  “Normally, I… ordinarily, I like that it’s a little bit of a challenge to keep up.  I like that a lot.  Today’s just…” He lifts a hand and gestures in some abstract way that might be wistful, too.  “I’m a little… off.  So I’m sorry.  I bait-and-switched you.”

“You didn’t,” Ed says—and then he bites his tongue, because he’s learned this one the hard way with Al a million times.  Arguing to try to prove that you’re the one in the wrong is still arguing, and it still sucks, and it still leaves everyone feeling shitty.  “I think—okay.  I think we both just… missed each other.”  On the one hand, Ed hates having this conversation from five feet away; on the other hand, having the ability to lean gingerly on the camera, keeping it and the desk in between them, feels like a godsend.  “I should’ve figured that that would happen anyway; nobody can think about spontaneous human combustion and think about everything that’s going on around them at the same time.”

Roy looks… receptive?  It makes Ed’s skin crawl when Roy walls himself off like this—when he goes so all-over neutral that you can’t guess what he’s feeling.  It’s an old defense mechanism from parts of his life when people would use his feelings against him—Ed has definitely figured out that much.  He’s had a few run-ins with those types himself, but he never learned to keep his heart off of his sleeve and tucked into an inner pocket the way that Roy did a long damn time ago.  Roy’s not trying to lock Ed out deliberately; he’s not keeping his arms folded across his chest like a barrier because he doesn’t like letting Ed in.  It’s just part of being a person.  It’s just a leftover instinct from having been hurt, a lot, in the times before.  He doesn’t want to make Ed nervous.  He doesn’t want Ed walking over eggshells or trying not to shake.  He’s not doing it on purpose.  He’s doing it on instinct, for protection.  And that’s all right.

It’ll have to be.

“Okay,” Ed says, with what remains of his resolve.  “So… okay.  Do you want to start over?  Or do you want me to scratch the whole thing?  I could do this one by myself if you’re just not feelin’ it today.  That’s totally fine.  I get you.”

Roy takes a deep breath, too, and his fingers loosen where they’ve been curled around his arms.

“I know you do,” he says, softly.  “And I’m s—”

“It’s okay,” Ed says.  “I’m sorry, too.  If we’re the same amount sorry, it cancels out, and then nobody has to be sorry anymore.”

Roy smiles at him—warmer, and genuine this time—and arches an eyebrow.  “Is that how it works?”

“That’s the theory that I’m going with,” Ed says.  He watches Roy for another second, trying to gauge how fast the tension is seeping out of the lines of his shoulders.  “Is that… Does that work for you?”

Roy unfolds his arms, sets an elbow on the desktop, and rests his chin on his hand.  He smiles again.

“Yes,” he says.

Ed takes another deep breath and then crosses back over to the desk.  He narrowly resists the urge to brace himself.  Roy doesn’t flinch or shift or eye him as he sits down, though, which is a good sign that he’s on the right track.

“Okay,” he says.  “Here’s what I shoulda been doin’ from the beginning—how do you want to be a part of this one?  Instead of springin’ shit on you like some kind of chainsaw-wieldin’ clown in a haunted house, we could look at my whole outline together.  You could pick places where you wanna jump in, or just do it on the fly as we go once you know where we’re headed.”

The smile that Roy gives him makes the answer to that whole right-track question very, very clear.

“Here,” Ed says, flattening a hand on top of the notes to slide them across the desk.  “Do we have a candle hangin’ around someplace?  I’m gonna ask you to light it, though, since you’re the smoke alarms’ favorite.”

Roy lays his hand on top of Ed’s as soon as the paper comes into reach and just… leaves it there.  Sappy bastard.  “I keep telling you that the smoke alarms don’t play favorites.”

“They do,” Ed says, “and you’re a liar.”

Roy gives him the really bad puppy eyes.

“What?” Ed says.  “Science channel.  Scientific facts.”

Roy gives him the even-worse puppy eyes.

“It’s okay,” Ed says.  “Another scientific fact is that it’s real strategic for me to be datin’ somebody that the smoke alarms like, because that significantly lowers the chances of Riza ending up in our kitchen looking at me like I’m something off the bottom of her boot.”

“She would never look at you like that,” Roy says.  He squeezes Ed’s hand one more time and then releases it back into the wild.  “Especially if I was standing next to you, which would unequivocally make it ‘my fault’, even if you were covered head to toe in soot and holding a burnt-out match in your hand.”

“She must not watch the channel,” Ed says.

“She asked about it once,” Roy says.  “I dodged the question and then extremely smoothly changed the subject.  It’s probably only a matter of time before she Googles ‘guy obsessed with smoke detectors on the hot blond scientist show’ and finds a weird Reddit thread about us.”

Ed steels himself against a shudder, which at least gives Roy a second to glance down at the notes.  It then gives Roy several seconds to squint down at the notes, wrinkle his nose, extract his glasses from his shirt pocket, and glance more successfully this time.

“I think,” Roy says, eyes still skimming down the page, “that at this particular point and time, I am… slightly better suited to being a very interactive visual aide than to participating directly in the educational components.”

Ed bites his tongue again.  Roy is volunteering for this—giving his free time away without a second thought.  He’s never even asked Ed about what goes into the credits or where the ad money ends up.  He just gives.

Ed’s not going to tell him to do anything that he doesn’t want to, no matter how good he is at it in spite of everything and everybody else.

“Okay,” Ed says.  “So how about that candle?  We got anything lyin’ around somewhere that we can sacrifice on the altar of science?  I think that that might be a better way to illustrate it anyway—conceptual’s always harder to wrap your head around than when you can see something as somebody explains it.”

Roy stands up from the desk.  “I’m sure that we have one somewhere.  And now that I’m something of a candle expert, I’m sure I could point towards all the right places.”

“Just don’t catch your hair on fire,” Ed says.  “Or do, if you really want to encourage them to be safe from here on out.”

Roy arches an eyebrow.  “I’ll… think about it.”

“Maybe skip the fire-haircut,” Ed says.  “You have nice hair.”

Roy makes a show of fake-preening.  “Don’t I?  But I’m also very committed to YouTube science education in all its occasionally unsettling forms.”

“I feel like ‘occasionally unsettling’ is better than T-shirt material,” Ed says.  “That should be the subtitle of the whole channel.”

Roy has started for the doorway, presumably to embark on the search for a candle fit to be squandered in the name of science, but he pauses to wink.

As soon as he’s turned the corner, Ed breathes a silent, shuddering sigh of relief.

“So,” Ed says.  “Let’s talk about wax.”

“May I?” Roy asks.

“Uh,” Ed says.  “Sure.  What are you going to do?”

Roy looks right into the camera.  “Wax is whack.”

Ed swallows the dweeby giggle.  “I mean—that’s… kinda what I was going to say, actually.  Wax is weird, because wax is defined by its properties, not its composition—which is the opposite of pretty much everything else that we’ve ever talked about here.”

“That sounds like text that you’d see on one of those terrible ads for overpriced perfume,” Roy says, hooking an arm around the back of his chair for maximum sass.  “One of the ones where there’s this perfectly-framed shot of a supermodel diving into unrealistically clear water, and then she surfaces in a spray of droplets, and then she gazes into the camera with her makeup still perfect and—” He gives Ed’s camera his best catwalk face—which is, unfortunately, right on the money.  “Defined by my properties—not my composition.  Dior.”

“I absolutely hate,” Ed says, “that I can picture that airing on a TV screen right before Christmas and begging us to go to Macy’s.”

“This channel is not sponsored by Macy’s,” Roy says.  “Or by Dior.”

“What does Dior even do?” Ed says.  “Is it just perfume, or—no.  No.  We’re not going on a Dior tangent.  This is a video about spontaneous human combustion, and that’s what we’re going to talk about.”

Roy turns a sultry look on the camera.

“Candles,” he says.  “By Dior.”

Ed applies the heel of his hand to his forehead.  “Sure.  Okay.  Let’s pretend our candle’s a Dior candle and light this sucker up and see how it works.”

“Allow me,” Roy says, whipping out the little box of matches that he wanted to use instead of a lighter, for reasons that are beyond Ed’s comprehension but definitely meet his standards for recklessness in the name of science.  Roy strikes the match with a truly unreasonable amount of panache and then waves it around in front of his face a bit.  “I am defined,” he says, “by my properties—”

“Listen,” Ed says.  “If you wanna become a wax, that’s your prerogative, and I support you in all your dreams and whatever, but you have to be a malleable solid most of the time, but with a really low melting point.  And depending on who you ask, you also gotta be capable of becoming polished after the application of pressure, and you can’t burn too cleanly.”

Roy blows the match out just as the flame starts flirting with the pad of his thumb.  “I think I can promise one of those things.  I’ll let you guess which one.”

Ed casts a look over at the camera.  “Just wait.  He’s gonna wake up in the middle of the night and find me tryin’ to buff him to a nice shine, and he’s gonna forget that we ever had this conversation, and I’ll be the weird one.”

Roy prods the sooty end of the match with his fingertip gingerly.  “Thanks to my endlessly exciting profession, that would be far from the most unusual thing I’ve ever woken up to.”

Ed hesitates for a second, weighing the funniness of the joke versus the swiftly-ticking YouTube second that it will take to deliver it.  He can edit later.  He needs to remember that part.

So he offers a sharpie out to Roy.  “Would you like to write ‘Dior’ on the side of our candle so that we don’t have to keep specifying?”

Roy’s eyes light up.  “Absolutely,” he says, snatching the sharpie.  He puts the spent match down on top of the box, which at least is better than dropping it on the desktop.  That’s what Ed would’ve done.  There are little char marks all over the thing to prove it.  “To answer your earlier question, they do… couture.”

Ed rests his chin on his hand and watches Roy struggle to make even-looking letters on the curved surface of their random candle.  “I don’t know what that means.”

“I’m not sure that anyone knows what it means,” Roy says, “which is precisely why it can be sold at such an exorbitant price.  It’s somewhere near the intersection of fashion and ‘luxury goods’.”

“I think we got this candle from Target,” Ed says.

“Then we’re upcycling,” Roy says.  “As well as infringing on copyright.  There.”  He sets his masterpiece down on the desktop again, turning it so that his mostly stable letters face the camera.  “Couture.”

“That word sounds like you’re getting ready to spit,” Ed says.

“Getting ready to spit,” Roy says in the commercial-narrator voice, “but in a way that is fancy and expensive—Dior.”

Ed swallows another round of snickering.  “You wanna light your little magnum opus there so that we can move on?”

“Avec plaisir,” Roy says, and Ed makes a point of rolling his eyes, but he’s just so glad that they’re… back.

This time of year is hard.  It’s hard for both of them, which makes it harder to look out for each other.

Roy strikes another match and actually applies it to the wick this time.  Ed thinks that they’re off to a much better start until Roy then says, “It’s lit, fam.”

“That’s our specialty,” Ed says, as deadpan as humanly possible.  “Okay, so—let’s talk about what’s actually happening here, scientifically speaking.”

“Hold on,” Roy says, jumping up and quick-stepping over to the camera.  In the flipped viewfinder, Ed can see him zooming on the candle as Ed leans in towards it.  “All right.  They’d better pay us for this beautiful product placement.”

“I’ll have my people call their people,” Ed says.  “Or I would, if I had ‘people’.  Which I don’t.  Okay.  So.  Candles.  Basically just Dior wax and a wick.  But what’s a wick?”

“Cotton!” Roy says from behind the camera.  “Like a towel.  Except that it’s… string.  A towel made of string would be somewhat less effective.”

“I think that’d be a net,” Ed says.  “But—yeah, exactly.  It’s cotton, usually with a coating of something that doesn’t burn as fast as cotton would, so that your whole wick doesn’t just—” He makes a pft noise and an accompanying finger motion.  “You’d have to buy candles a lot more often if the wicks just burned away right off the bat.”

“At Dior candle prices,” Roy says, “that would be an unsustainable expense.”

“Exactly,” Ed says.  “Fortunately for all of us, including the Dior addicts, what we’re trying to accomplish with the wick on a candle is to have something that sustains the flame until other things start burning.  Things like…”

He dips the eraser end of his pencil into the tiny lake of wax that their highly convincing designer dupe has already melted around the wick.

“Wax,” he says.  “The heat energy of the flame is liquefying our wax, because—not that you guys aren’t gonna be hearing defined by my properties in your heads for the rest of time—it’s got a real low melting point.  What happens if you dip cotton into a liquid?”

Roy, still standing behind the camera, whispers, “It gets wet.”

“Correct,” Ed says.  “Cotton and water are BFFs.  You’ve probably heard about ‘moisture-wicking’ fabric or whatever for workout clothes and stuff—those things capitalize on that BFF-ship and basically yank your sweat away from your skin so that you don’t overheat as fast.  A candle wick is doing the same thing.”

“Even if it’s not Dior?” Roy asks solemnly.

“Even if it’s not Dior,” Ed says.  “It’s slurping up wax like a plant drinking the water you pour on the ground in your garden, and the wax is going all the way up to the top of the wick, where it meets its new best friend—our flame.”

“If that’s how its new best friend treats it,” Roy says, “it needs better friends.”

“Good point,” Ed says.  “Viewers, if your friends are…” Crap.  Double crap.  “Actually, I don’t… I’m not even going to think about that.  Not ever.”  He claps his hands together, hard enough that the candle flame gutters.  “Okay!  Moving right along.”  He points as close as he dares to the center of the action.  “The point is that the wick has burned just enough to get this wax melted so that it’ll start moving.  What we’ve got at the top of the wick now is liquid wax.  And that’s what’s burning off and sustaining the fire—the wax.  There’s enough heat energy at the top here to vaporize our wax altogether and turn it into a gas, which will keep burning off here for as long as there’s wax to pull on up.  That’s why candles burn so slow, and so bright.”  He beckons Roy back over.  “C’mere and make a wish.”

“People always ask genies what happens if they wish for more wishes,” Roy says, zooming back out on the camera without even being asked before he saunters over to the table again.  “What happens if you wish that you never had a wish in the first place?”

Ed blinks at him.  “I… I mean, from a…” He makes a face as Roy settles down next to him again.  “If we assume that there is some portion of the fabric of reality where wishes have an actual causal effect, rather than just the potential to influence other human beings through regular channels of communication, then…” He sits back for a second to think it over.  “I mean, either it’d just cancel itself out, and nothing would happen; or you’d rip a hole in the time-space continuum that’d rupture the universe as we know it.”

Roy smiles sunnily.  “So no big deal, then.”

“Nah,” Ed says.

Roy winks at him—the bastard—and then blows the candle out.

“What’d you wish for?” Ed asks.

“It’s a secret,” Roy says.  “But it might have been more videos with you.”

Ed feels himself rapidly going scarlet and is powerless to stop it.  “What?  Why?  All we’ve done is talk about candles for, like, half an hour—”

“Dior candles,” Roy says.  “And I don’t think it’s been half an hour.”

“However long it’s been,” Ed says, “we’ve barely even mentioned the actual topic of this video, which was supposed to be spontaneous human combustion.”

Roy looks right at the camera again, arches an eyebrow, and smirks.

“A new fragrance,” he says, “by Dior.”

Ed laughs so hard that he’s actually going to have to cut part of this out—less because his own wheezing is embarrassing than because it just takes so long.

“Yeah,” Ed says when he’s regained enough breath to form recognizable words again.  “That.  So you’re probably wondering why you just watched all this flippin’ nonsense about candles when that’s not what the video’s even about.  But let’s review a little bit about some of those cases of combustion and see if we can figure out why I just bored your—” In the nick of time, he revises away from pants.  “—socks off and gave Dior an unpaid plug.”

“I believe,” Roy says, “that we left off with ‘The Victorians were the ones who made it a big deal, so it was a vice thing, of course.’”

“Fetch the smelling salts,” Ed says.  “Let’s recap a couple of the things that most of the famous cases had in common, some of which we mentioned a couple minutes ago: a lot of ’em were older women who lived alone—”

“Substantially worse than being an alcoholic, for the Victorians,” Roy says.  “Today, though, pretty likely to put you in the longest-lived demographic in this country.”

“Funny how that works,” Ed says.  “Okay.  So.  Usually it happened in a room where there were, or would’ve been, light sources or open flames, and some of the people who died were smokers.  But only the body and a handful of other things in the room showed any indication that they’d burned—often a chair that they’d been sitting in would get incinerated, but not much else.  Generally hands and feet and sometimes part of a leg got left behind, and everything else was ash.  Sometimes there would be bones left.”

“Yeah,” Roy says, thoughtfully.  “That’s… it all sounds very creepy when you put it together like that.”

“It does,” Ed says.  “But let’s talk numbers for a—shit, sorry.  Let’s talk numbers in the abstract.”

Roy grins.  “That’s much more my style.”

Ed eyes the camera for a long second before he says, “Numbers in the abstract… by Dior.”  When Roy’s finished laughing, Ed folds his hands again.  “Okay, I’m gonna make this quick.  There are almost eight billion people in the world.”

“That’s a lot,” Roy says.

“It sure freakin’ is,” Ed says.  “So if spontaneous human combustion is, in fact, an event that can happen to anyone at any time… how come it only ever does happen inside of people’s houses when they’re alone, and nobody’s paying attention?”

Roy turns very, very slowly so that he can look into the camera this time.

“Yeah,” Roy says, deliberately.  “How come?”

“So,” Ed says.  “Back to candles.  I apologize for the fact that that’s, like, the subtitle of this video.”  He’ll make sure of it, and include a The Dior corporation or whatever type of business they are had nothing to do with this, and we’re sorry.  Sort of.  Your commercials are weird, y’all.  “Before we discovered all of the property-defined wonders of wax, what do you reckon candles were usually made of?  Just take a wild guess.  I’ll give y’all a second, and then we’ll find out.”

Roy pulls a piece of paper over to him and starts scribbling.

Ed tries not to be visibly relieved; it won’t make sense in the final cut of the video, and the viewers don’t need to know how worried he was that Roy wouldn’t ever want to participate actively in one of these things ever again.

The first drawing that Roy holds up depicts a bee.  It has eyelashes.  There is something in the background that probably represents a hive.

“Excellent guess,” Ed says.  “Beeswax was a lot easier to come by in the olden days than our mostly synthetic stuff would’ve been.  That was definitely true in a lot of places.  What about something else?”

Roy makes a point of considering and then takes a new sheet of paper for another sketch.  At this rate, Ed is going to have to buy a ream of printer paper instead of just stealing it from work in unnoticeable amounts.

Proudly, Roy holds up a recognizable drawing of a unicorn.

“You know,” Ed says, “in a weird way, you’re almost right.”

“One of my many talents,” Roy says.

“Sure is,” Ed says.  “But what I was getting at was… tallow.  Lots of candles used to be made of tallow, which is basically just… animal fat.”

“Oh, dear,” Roy says.

“No,” Ed says, pointing.  “‘Oh, unicorn’.”

Before he can retreat or react, Roy holds the paper up—positioning it in between them and the camera to block its view of them—leans in, and kisses Ed very, very hotly.  With tongue.

Then he draws back and lowers the paper again.

“Uh,” Ed manages, slightly faintly.  “O… kay.  Yeah.  T… tallow.”

“The ‘oh, dear’,” Roy says sunnily, “was in reference to my concern that I may know where this is going.”

Ed attempts to keep his grin at an eight or so instead of the twelve-point-five that it wants to be.  “Yeah?  Go for it.  I mean—if you want to.”

“With the power of my—wait,” Roy says.  He ducks to the paper again and adds four now very predictable letters to his latest work of art.  He holds it up.  “With the power of my Dior unicorn, I’m going to do my very best.  So… we discussed that the reason that candles work is because they burn slowly and consistently.  That’s something that wax does, and presumably also something that tallow does, or else it wouldn’t make for good candles.”  He sets the unicorn down and folds his hands on top of it, eyeing their Dior candle instead.  “I don’t think that it’s a stretch to imagine that the animal fat in people would burn much the same way—that is, slowly enough that it wouldn’t necessarily catch an entire room on fire.  And any gym rat worth their Gatorade could tell you that there isn’t much in the way of body fat in your hands or your feet, at least compared to other parts of you, so… perhaps people burn like candles.”  He pulls a face.  “Am I close?”

Ed gazes at him for a couple seconds, utterly helplessly.

Then Ed picks up the unicorn drawing and holds it to shield them from the camera again, so that he can give Roy back as good as he got a minute ago.

They’re both a little short of breath by the time he pulls away and lowers their Dior-labeled shield.

“Ah,” Roy says, ever so slightly faintly.  “I will… may I take that as a ‘yes’?”

“Yeah,” Ed gets out.  “Uh—it’s—jeez, uh.  Sorry.  Um.  It’s called the wick effect.  Your clothes act like the wick of the candle, right, and… and the area at the base of the flame on a candle, right at the tip of the wick, is by far the hottest part of the thing.  And candles burn slow, like we talked about, but pretty thoroughly, as anybody who’s melted a candle down to nearly nothin’ knows.  People figure that it sometimes’ll happen because someone actually dies first, of a heart attack or something, and then they drop their cigarette or fall near a fireplace or whatever, and… yeah.  On a BBC show a while back, they did a more thorough experiment with a pig to see if they could carry it out, and the thing got hot enough to burn everything down to the bones.  So… it’s…”

“It is a very likely explanation,” Roy says, “but due to the specific circumstances under which it occurs, it is not impossible to rule out other scenarios.”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  Roy makes him feel like a kid sometimes—giddy, gleeful, other words that start with G.  Like the obvious one.  Definitely that.  “That’s… exactly what I was tryin’ to say.”

“There you have it,” Roy says, beaming at the camera.  “Spontaneous human combustion.  And spontaneous amateur couture ads.”

“What more,” Ed manages, “could you possibly want?  So… yeah.  That’s about it from us this time.  Until the next one—”

Roy holds up his unicorn drawing.  “Make like a Dior unicorn—”

“And stay positive,” Ed says.

Roy grabs the sharpie and gets up from the table.  “Great.  That was fun.  Now I can go write ‘Dior’ on all of our silverware.”

“What?” Ed says, but Roy’s already booking it out into the hallway by the time that he’s managed to extricate himself from the chair to try to follow.  “Hey—Roy!”

As he had expected, Roy is standing in the hallway to wait for him—twirling the sharpie and wearing a giant grin—because that was, in fact, an offering of a hilarious video conclusion rather than an honest threat to their cutlery.

“I believed you for a second,” Ed tells him, because it’s the truth.

Roy leans in and kisses his forehead before he can escape.  “I don’t blame you.  I thought about actually doing it for a second.”

“Dior should release a sharpie-scented cologne,” Ed says, “just for you.”

“Eau de Copyright Infringing Vandal,” Roy says, offering Ed the sharpie back.

Ed takes it.  “Only at Macy’s.”

All of the positive moments aside, the whole thing is still eating him up so fervently that by the end of the night, the careful little core of Ed’s being that doesn’t want to rock the world’s best boat just can’t take it anymore.

“Hey,” he says across the dinner table, reaching his right foot out to poke Roy’s shin with his toes for good measure.  “Can I tell you something, and you try really hard to hear me even if maybe you don’t believe what I say?”

Roy’s eyebrows rise.  He smiles.  The bastard’s just too beautiful at the worst of times.  “I… yes.  Please.  I’ll certainly try.”

“Okay,” Ed says.  He lets himself have one deep breath to back it up.  “I love your intellect.  I love the way your brain works.  I love that it is different from mine, even if sometimes that means that we get our wires kinda crossed.  I think you’re one of the smartest people I’ve ever fuckin’ met.  That’s part of what I’ve always been attracted to about you.  I think the way that you understand the world is amazing, and I wouldn’t change a single fucking thing.”  He eyes Roy, who hasn’t managed to turn the recent startlement into neutrality quite yet.  “Okay?”

“I—okay,” Roy says.  He sits back for a moment, looking like he’s trying to process what Ed said—after a second, he nudges his glasses way up the bridge of his nose with the back of a knuckle, which is something that he usually only does when he’s really thinking.  He smiles, slightly at first and then wider.  “I hope you know that your aggressive kindness was one of the first things that I found attractive about you.”

“T-shirt,” Ed says.  He got through the hard part; that’s what matters.  It wasn’t as bad as he expected, but there’s still a fresh swirl of adrenaline going through him.  It’s grabbing things in his brain, picking them up, shaking them, and putting them back at a different angle.  It likes to do that.  “Or an indie band name.”

“I suppose that if we picked the band,” Roy said, “we could sell the T-shirts as band merch and kill two birds with one stone.”

“I’ll take that one to the high-end graphic design studio that is me fightin’ with Photoshop,” Ed says.  “Get us something classy with lightning bolts and skulls.”

“That would be fitting,” Roy says.  “It would hearken gently back to the plasma episode, and to this one.”

They look at each other for a second.

Roy smiles again.

“Thank you,” Roy says.  “What you said means a lot, and I appreciate it.”

Emotions are, without a doubt, the single most annoying and distracting thing that humankind has ever produced.  Ed was completely determined to handle this so sedately that zen gardens would seethe with envy, but here he is getting tangled up in the things that he still wants to say.

Then again, the things that he still wants to say include Well, I appreciate your face, so perhaps there are some advantages to the entanglement.

“Here,” Roy says.  Somehow, for some reason, he has been concealing another one of the sharpies in his pocket this whole time; he whips it out, reaches across the table, and steals Ed’s fork from his plate.  He draws something very small on the handle and then returns it.

Ed looks down at it.  Roy has drawn a tiny little heart in sharpie on his fork.

“Uh,” Ed says.  “Thank you.  Maybe.”

“I’m expressing my feelings in modern art today,” Roy says.  He’s adding something to his own fork.

When he holds it up a few moments later, Ed is not surprised to see the word “Dior”.

“They are gonna sue us into oblivion,” Ed says.

“We should be protected by parody law,” Roy says.  “I think.  I hope.”

“I hope so, too,” Ed says.

Roy blows lightly on the handle of his fork to dry the sharpie.  “Maybe they’ll send us something nice to try to bribe us to stop.  Like a couture spittoon.”

“I’m sure they’ve got a million of those at the Dior warehouse,” Ed says.  He prods the little heart on his fork with a fingertip.  “Is this going to come off with dish soap?”

“Alcohol will dissolve it if it doesn’t,” Roy says.  “I most certainly do not know that because of a series of progressively more harrowing dicks-drawn-on-my-face-while-sleeping incidents.  The alcohol is more efficient in trying to get it off of non-porous surfaces, but it’s still better than soap and water when it comes to skin.”

Ed grimaces.  “Please tell me that these theoretical experiences weren’t at the firehouse.”

Roy’s smile takes on a touch of strain.  “It was an ex.  A long time ago.  Long enough that Googling solutions to problems like that on your phone wasn’t anyone’s first instinct, because phones and internet connections had only just started to get along.”  He takes a breath, sighs, smiles more genuinely as Ed’s stomach churns a bit— “It’s ancient history.  He’s probably spontaneously combusted by now.  Hopefully with crude sharpie drawings on his face.”

“Hopefully,” Ed says.  “Gimme a second.”

He gets up and darts off into the office to collect Roy’s unicorn drawing.  When he returns, he holds it up against the door of the fridge and sorts through their collection of oversized letter magnets—which were probably intended for children, but were instead purchased by people who enjoy spelling stupid shit on their refrigerator in primary colors—and fixes on FUCK THAT GUY across the top of the page.  Then he adds BY DIOR at the bottom.

When he turns around and steps aside to display his handiwork, Roy is already leaning his chin on one hand and gazing at Ed, which seems to be a common theme around this schmoopy hell of an apartment.

“This,” Roy says, “is precisely why I have no regrets.  Everything that I have done and been through has brought me here.”

“Finish your dinner,” Ed says.

“With my designer fork?” Roy asks.

“Damn right,” Ed says.

Chapter Text

“Welcome back,” Ed says, folding his hands.  Black glove today.  It’s got a couple pyramid studs on it.  Al once called this one charmingly tasteless.  “Today on Romance for People Who Hate Romance, we’re going to try something new: we’re going to set a timer and see if we can answer one question inside of two minutes.  Just one.  It’s going to be an adventure.”

“I feel like Indiana Jones,” Roy says.

“We should rig up a tiny boulder to land on both of our heads when we run out of time,” Ed says.

“I suspect that that would take longer than two minutes,” Roy says.

“It would,” Ed says.  “And we’re already doing exactly what we were gonna try not to do.”

“They love it,” Roy says.  He turns his gooey eyes on the camera and bats his eyelashes.  “Don’t you?”

“Stop flirting with my followers,” Ed says.

Predictably enough, Roy turns his head and gives Ed the exact same treatment.  “You love it, too.”

“No comment,” Ed says.

“Well,” Roy says, “it’s a good thing that we haven’t started the timer yet.”

“I was trying to ease us in,” Ed says.  “I… don’t think we’re off to a good start.”

“Wait!” Roy says.  “Wait, wait—”

He’s up and off before Ed can ask what they’re waiting for, or whether he means mass instead of weight, or much of anything.

Ed unfolds his hands, refolds his hands, and looks at the camera.

“He puts milk in his coffee,” he says.  “That’s the only explanation I can think of.”

Roy calls back from the other room, distantly enough that Ed might have to caption it on the video: “It’s the sleep deprivation!”

“Maybe it’s Maybelline,” Ed says.

“That’s a big step down from Dior!” Roy calls.

“Today,” Ed says, “we’re going to answer a couple of the questions y’all submitted, if we can ever get started.  Which is apparently a big ‘if’.  I mean, some people’ve been asking if we’re gonna diversify, so maybe this is our chance.  We can just do a whole video where Roy’s in another room, and that’s the gimmick.”

Perhaps predictably, Roy sings this time: “Hello from the other side… of the wall.”

“What are you even doing in there?” Ed asks.

“If I told you,” Roy says, “it would ruin the surprise.”

Ed put a watch on for this.  He looks at it, somewhat pointedly.

“Oh,” he says.  “One thing—couple’a people asked me if I know about the fungus that takes over ants’ brains and turns them into zombies.  I’d heard about that one, and I looked into it a little before I was workin’ on that video—” Working on is a very generous way to say Science bingeing in bed for a bit before I turned the camera on, but surely he’s entitled to some creative license by now.  “—but I wanted to keep it kinda… positive?  We should do a Halloween episode or somethin’ and talk about all the creepy stuff at once.  Consider that one bookmarked.”  He has a list for those, but it’s a different list than the one in front of him, since he hadn’t expected Roy to be MIA doing fuck-knows-what.  “Uh… oh, someone was also surprised that I didn’t realize yeast was a fungus.  But that’s the thing, right?  You can know something but not realize it.  Like, even for me, when I see mold, I think Eew, mold, not about its scientific classification and the implications thereof.”

He pauses as that sentence settles in his own head.

“Holy cow,” he says.  “I just sounded so much like Roy there for a second.  Should I start doin’ math out loud just in case?  I don’t want us to, like, merge into one person.  Roy, get your ass back in here; my brain’s tryin’ to compensate for you, and I don’t like it.”

“Almost found it!” Roy calls.

Ed sighs, shuffles his notes, and looks at the ceiling.  Not that he thinks the ceiling has answers, or anything.  Old habits die hard.

“Okay,” he says.  “Someone also asked me what I’ve got against cheese.  And… without goin’ into too much unnecessary detail, the cheese situation… okay.  So.  If I was in a relationship with cheese on Facebook, I’d set the status to ‘it’s complicated’.”

“I’m jealous of cheese!” Roy calls.

Ed sighs again, louder.  “So—here’s the thing, right?  Like… almost anything that you put on toasted bread is gonna be good.  Grilled cheese is the bomb.  Pepperjack is cheese that’s spicy.  But if you go super melty and more… like… sour-tasting… then I can’t stand that stuff.  You know what I’m talkin’ about.  ‘Fancy’ cheese and all that.  But I also reject that neon-orange goo they dribble over nachos.  And Cheez Whiz.  That’s not cheese; it’s masquerading chemicals in a semi-liquid form, and that’s just… it’s goopy.  Like yogurt.  But more obviously radioactive and probably not biodegradable.”

He hears Roy from the doorway.  “At least Cheez Whiz admits that it is not, in fact, cheese, based on the spelling.”

Ed turns to argue with the premise that spelling words incorrectly on purpose exonerates you from misrepresenting your product as something edible, but he forgets everything that he meant to say, because Roy is wearing what is unmistakably an adventurer hat.  It’s just about the spitting image of the one from the Indiana Jones movies, and he’s gone to the trouble of changing into a loose white shirt that Ed didn’t know he owned, and tight brown slacks.  He is, in summary, the worst.

“Why,” Ed manages.  He doesn’t have the brainpower left to inflect it as a question, but at least he got the word out all right.

“‘Why’ what?” Roy asks, returning to the table to sit down next to Ed as if any of this is normal.

“Why do you own that,” Ed says.  He’s a little closer on the inquisitive tone this time.

“A better question,” Roy says, slinging one leg over the other at the knee, “is why we don’t own a whip.”

Ed feels his life flash before his eyes.  His life includes a bright red and extremely neglected caption that reads Family-friendly channel.

“You know,” Roy says.  “For… livestock.  Horses?  Valid reasons.  Very valid and… tame…”

“Anyway,” Ed says, faintly, “I… cheese… cheese is… The thing, for me, with stuff like cheese, a lot of the time, is the… consistency.  So cheese that bears any sensory resemblance to snot is gonna be out.  But if it’s melty and delicious, and you put it in a sandwich, I’m gonna give it a chance.”

Roy flashes a very young-Harrison-Ford-worthy roguish grin at the camera, which does not help anything at all, with the possible exception of the prospect of future likes.  “Don’t get him started on milk.”

“The thing that kills me,” Ed says, “is that you just can’t have cereal without it.  You can’t.  If I focus hard enough that I forget that I’m eating cereal, I can almost enjoy it; but then the second I start enjoyin’ it, I remember what it is, and then I can’t.”

Roy sits back, drumming his fingers on the tabletop in a way that also doesn’t help matters, because it emphasizes the fact that he rolled his shirtsleeves up to the elbows.  “I sometimes shudder to think of what kinds of cereal you’d eat if this was a simpler situation.”

“You already know the answer to that,” Ed says, blinking at him innocently.  “It’d be Lucky Charms three meals a day around here.”

Roy bites his lip.  “I… was… trying not to bring up the Marshmallow Abomination.”

“Just because it makes you physically ill doesn’t mean it’s an abomination,” Ed says.

“No one is safe,” Roy says.  “Except you and your iron-clad stomach, apparently.”

“I think I just like ’em because I couldn’t have ’em as a kid,” Ed says, which is, tragically, probably true.  “So they took on that, like, mystical quality of things you only get on special occasions or at other people’s houses or whatever.”

Roy wrinkles his nose.  “Forbidden food-dyed-to-hell marshmallows.”

“Exactly,” Ed says.

“For anyone who was wondering,” Roy says to the camera, “which I would bet is zero people—no, he doesn’t drink the disgusting purple milk that’s left at the bottom when he’s eaten all of the forbidden marshmallows.”

“Eew,” Ed says.  “Why would I?  The only thing worse than regular milk is purple milk that’ll rot your teeth before you can say ‘Can you believe a children’s cereal gets away with a marketing campaign so outright offensive to the Irish?’”

“Unfortunately,” Roy says, grimacing, “I can definitely believe it.”

“I know,” Ed says.

“What about chocolate milk?” Roy asks.  “I’m honestly curious; I’ve don’t think we’ve ever talked about that one.”

“Well,” Ed says, “it depends.  Is it Nesquik chocolate milk, Ovaltine chocolate milk, or Hershey’s syrup chocolate milk?”

Roy blinks.  “Are some of those acceptable?”

“The syrup,” Ed says.  “Sometimes.  If you put enough in and mix it up well enough that it balances out some of the nasty components of the milk.  Nesquik might be okay if it was easier to stop it from bein’ gritty.  Ovaltine is, like… malt-flavored.  Which is fine if you’re into that, I guess, but it doesn’t even taste like chocolate.”

Roy turns back to the camera, smiling serenely.  Serenely, and like Indiana fucking Jones.  “You heard it here first, folks.”

There is a natural pause for a few seconds.

“Wait,” Roy says.  “I put this on because… of a timer.  Didn’t I?  Something about that.”

Ed rests his chin on both hands and gazes into the camera as abjectly as possible.  “Somehow I knew that this was gonna happen.”

“Quick,” Roy says, “what are the winning lottery numbers?”

Ed scowls at him.  “Do you even play?”

“No,” Roy says.  “I may not understand probability on a very specific basis, but I sure as hell know that one in fourteen million is pretty bad odds.”

“I think you’re more likely to get struck by lightning while you’re getting bitten by a shark,” Ed says, thoughtfully, “but don’t quote me on that one.”

“That,” Roy says, “sounds like the sort of vacation that would result in extremely scathing Yelp reviews.”

“Two out of five stars,” Ed says.  “Best piña colada I’ve ever had, but they stopped serving them when the storm started—I mean, c’mon, who’s the customer here?—and then the shark problem really put a damper on things.”

Roy looks at Ed.

Ed looks at Roy.

Roy says, “This is why Indiana Jones needs a whip.”

“For sharks?” Ed says.

“It’s a Spielberg crossover,” Roy says.  “Audiences are going to love it.”

Ed looks directly into the camera.  He’ll figure out what to caption that later.  Maybe the classic excruciatingly slow zoom accompanied by a “Mad World” cover will do it.  Has he used that lately?

“Let me tell you all a story,” he says.  “Once upon a time, we started a video, and we said we were gonna answer one—one—question inside of two minutes.”

“How long has it been?” Roy asks.

“I don’t know,” Ed says.  “And I’m terrified to find out.”

“I’ll rescue you from terror,” Roy says.  He flashes another grin and runs his fingers along the brim of the hat.  “That’s my job, as the resident adventurer.”

“And stealing relics,” Ed says.

“And punching Nazis,” Roy says.

“We should keep that part,” Ed says.  “Okay.  Hold your horses.”  It’s tragic that his viewers won’t know why that’s so funny, because he’s not about to put Roy’s last name out there on the internet.  “I’m setting this timer, and I’m setting it now, and we’re gonna have to do this in two minutes, or else… consequences.”

“No ice cream,” Roy says.

“For anyone,”  Ed says.  He pushes the little button on his watch.  “Two minutes and counting.  Question reads: Roy, can you bench-press Ed?  Asking for science.”

Since Ed has a timer going, he has incontrovertible evidence that Roy laughs for an entire fifteen seconds uninterrupted.

“My dearest love,” he says when he’s breathing again—and fanning himself with his hat, and smiling fit to break his stupid-wonderful face.  “How much do you weigh?”

“No,” Ed says.

“But it’s for science,” Roy says.

“Science is just going to have to learn to live with disappointment,” Ed says.  “Like the rest of us.”

Roy gives him the ultimate puppy eyes.  “If I’m very, very good, can we try it after we finish all the other questions?”

Ed eyes him.  “Depends on how good ‘very, very good’ is.”

“Impeccable,” Roy says, sitting up straighter.  “Exemplary.  So staggeringly angelic that you may not even recognize me at first.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it,” Ed says.  “Consider yourself on probation.”  He looks at his watch.  “I dunno if it counts that we did that so fast when we didn’t actually answer anything.”

“Of course it counts,” Roy says.  “I’m the resident expert on counting, as you well know.”

Ed raises an eyebrow at him.  “And here I thought you might just take my side on everythin’ I said for a little while in the hopes of qualifying as ‘very, very good’.”

“You would never buy that,” Roy says.  “I wouldn’t insult your intelligence that way.”

The urge to facepalm is intense and compelling, but Ed overcomes.  He restarts the timer.

“Okay,” he says.  “Let’s try this again.  Two minutes.  Someone wants to know if we play any video games.”

“Please,” Roy says, gesturing to Ed in a way that he seems to think will look gracious.  “Go ahead.”

Ed eyes him and then eyes the camera.  “I never got too into ’em.  We couldn’t really afford anything like that when we were kids.  We had a couple of those educational computer games—which we liked pretty well, don’t get me wrong—but getting a console wasn’t really on the table.  And then later, when we were probably old enough to enjoy ’em more, when we were livin’ with Win and her grandma, I had…” He holds up his right hand.  “This whole business goin’ on.  It doesn’t like repetitive motion too much.”

Roy opens his mouth.

Roy closes his mouth.

Ed realizes that Roy was about to make a joke about other repetitive motions that a boy old enough to start enjoying video games might also undertake.

“Thank you,” Ed manages, “for not saying it, you shameless innuendo machine.”

Roy points one finger-gun at the camera and winks.  “T-shirt.”

Ed runs his un-gloved hand down his face as slowly as he can for maximum humorous effect.

“You do like to play them casually,” Roy says.

“I don’t know what that means,” Ed says.  “Winry treats Mario Kart like it’s Mortal Kombat.  Are there people who do things casually?  I’d really like to meet some of those people someday.”

“Al likes Minecraft,” Roy says.

“Yeah, he does,” Ed says.  “But why do you know that?”

“He asked me about the fire safety of a building he was working on,” Roy says.  “And he didn’t want there to be other fire hazards in his city, so we discussed those a bit.  At least—I think that’s what we were talking about.  I have to confess that every conversation about Minecraft sounds like a foreign language that I took one class in when I was in high school.”

Ed looks into the camera.  “You know.  Back in the Dark Ages.”

“Excuse you,” Roy says.  “It was the Late Middle Ages.”

“He hung out with Chaucer,” Ed says.  “That dude partied pretty hard.”

“Anyone who’s attempted to read Chaucer could tell you that,” Roy says.  “Get a couple beers in that guy, and it’s nothing but a string of rhyming dirty jokes.”

Ed gives him a look.  “No wonder you two got along.”

Roy tries to suppress a grin.  He fails.  “That’s… touché.”

“What about you?” Ed says.  “Weren’t you always kinda into that stuff?”

“Of course,” Roy says.  “I was spiraling progressively deeper into hopeless nerdery right as games started to gain traction.  We played Doom II.  We played Tomb Raider—well, Riza played Tomb Raider, and I watched.  She was so invested in it that I was far too scared to try to get the computer mouse away from her; I was pretty sure she’d bite me.”

“I think she’d stab you before she bit you,” Ed says.  “She’d want to make it clean.  For her, I mean.”

“You’re right,” Roy says.  “She would.  And she wouldn’t risk them being able to match the teeth marks to her; much easier to wipe prints off of a knife.”

There’s a pause.

“So you were… supervising,” Ed says.

“How do you think I got so good at it?” Roy asks.  “Anyway, we both took a bit of a break from games while we were in college, although I know we both missed them, because we started shopping around for bestsellers as soon as we could afford it again.  That was right about when Nintendo 64 was getting big, though, and both of us were still leery of buying a console when there was so much available on the computer.  I picked up Diablo II, which was probably the beginning of the end for me, now that I think about it.”

Ed looks at his watch.

“We have ten seconds left,” he says.

Roy blinks at him.

Then Roy takes his hat off, puts it down on the table, buries his face in his hands, and laughs.

“I have failed as a two-minute adventurer,” he says.

Right on cue, Ed’s watch starts beeping insistently.

“Turn it off,” Roy says, raising his head with the single most hangdog expression Ed has ever laid eyes on.  “Silence the relentless electronic signal of my shame.”

“Did you practice that?” Ed asks, fumbling to kill the alarm.  It’s a new watch.  He mostly doesn’t like having stuff on his wrists; getting used to the gloves on the right hand took a long time.

“You know me,” Roy says.  “My ability to flaunt my obscene vocabulary like a word-peacock only gets worse when I’m in distress.”

Word peacock is going to have to go on a shirt.  Ed hates that, also loves it, and hates the loving-it part.

At least he’s got the watch under control.

“Okay,” he says.  “We’ll just… let that one go.  So… Roy’s favorite game is Dark Souls.  Dark Souls one—the first Dark Souls.”

“Don’t ask me to rank my favorites,” Roy says.  “That’s like picking children.”

“You don’t have children,” Ed says.  He pauses for effect.  “…I hope.”

“Exactly,” Roy says.  “That’s why I have to be fair to my games instead.”

“Your logic is a thing of great and terrible beauty,” Ed says.  “Emphasis on the ‘terrible’.  Go ahead.  Tell ’em why it’s one of your favorite children.”

“I like that the storyline is unsettling and deliberately ambiguous,” Roy says.  “And that it is, from a technical gameplay standpoint, just… difficult.  I like somewhat less that it’s made more difficult by the fact that I have to level up practically at random, because I have no idea what my stats mean at any given time, but the frustration is weirdly very rewarding.”

“Go on,” Ed says.

“It also,” Roy says, “has both some of the most grotesque enemy designs and some of the most staggeringly beautiful level and character design work that I have ever seen in any medium.”

“So what you’re saying,” Ed says, “is that you’re a gameplay masochist and a sucker for medieval fantasy armor.”

It’s a bit of a pity he couldn’t say slut for aesthetics on his channel, since that’s also true, and Roy would know that he meant it playfully.  You win some, lose some, and tactfully rephrase some, he supposes.

As he’d expected, Roy grins back at him.
“Guilty as charged,” he says.  “If you have a slightly less… stubborn and self-punishing perspective on gaming, there are an endless amount of excellent let’s-play video series that you can watch instead, several of which I’ll try to get Ed to link to in the description for you.  The upside is that you get to enjoy someone else’s suffering, and most of them will politely cut or fast-forward the videos so that you don’t have to join them on the boss-fight-failure walk of shame five hundred times.  The downside is that if you’re not in control of the character, you don’t get to play Fashion Souls.”

“Do you want a cape?” Ed asks.  “We can get you a cape.”

“It’s not about the cape,” Roy says, which is a bald-faced lie.  “It’s about the ambiance.”

Ed gives the camera a You asked look.

“And about the dragons,” Roy says.  “There are several dragons.  Most of them want to kill you.”  He considers.  “All of them want to kill you.  Pretty much everything does.”

“Sounds legit,” Ed says.  “Our commenter suggested that maybe we should do a gaming side channel.  You could have your Dark Souls guy model all your favorite outfits, and I could do commentary.”

Roy’s eyes light up.  “Streaming, you mean?  I think I’m too old to do that.  I’m fairly sure that there’s a legal restriction in the fine print.”

“In your case,” Ed says, “the damn-fine print.  Nobody who gets a look at you is gonna try to stop you from videotaping your face.”

“But we’d have to get a mic,” Roy says.  “And a green screen.  And a better internet connection.”

“Those are all feasible,” Ed says.

“You’d have to teach me how to edit video,” Roy says, but his eyes are going all dreamy-distant.  “And people probably wouldn’t want to watch me repeatedly run my character’s well-dressed face into walls.  Or read all of the awful in-game messages from other players out loud.”

“I reckon,” Ed says, “that people would listen to you read the phone book.”

Roy folds both hands primly on top of the hat still sitting on the desktop, looking unusually bemused.  “Well—I don’t know.  I’ll think about it.”  He pauses to consider again.  “I die a lot.”

“But you say cute things when you die,” Ed says.  “Like ‘Argh’ and ‘Aw, f… fiddlesticks’ and ‘You shitty fucking asshole, I am going to annihilate you when I get back the—don’t you dance on my corpse, you desecrating monstrosity!’”

He’s going to have a hell of a time bleeping that, but he is absolutely positive that it will be worth it.

Roy blinks a few times.  He still has his hands folded on the hat.

“I hadn’t realized,” he says, slowly, “that you heard that.”

“I think half the neighborhood did,” Ed says.  “I was on the phone with Al, and there was this epically long pause, and then he whispered, ‘Was that the roommate guy you’re so in love with?’, and I said ‘Shut the fuck up, Al’, and then he laughed until he cried.”

Roy’s smile takes on a significant quantity of strain.  “I… always aspire to provide entertainment.”

Ed opens his mouth to say That sounded like a euphemism if I’ve ever heard one and then snaps his mouth shut just in time.

“Okay,” he says.  “Now that… now that we’ve… I don’t know if we’ve even answered the question.”  He looks down at the sheet.  “It’s ‘Hey, Ed, do you guys play any videogames?’ and then suggestions of ways to revamp the channel since all anybody ever wants to see is your face anyway.”

Roy knits his fingers together, holds his hands just beneath his chin, and bats his eyelashes at the camera again.  Then he winks at it.  “Good taste.”

“The commenter adds,” Ed says, “‘Your BF is so hot that it’s kinda ironic that he became a fireman.’”

“My only other choice,” Roy says measuredly, “to fulfill the irony of my God-given hotness, was to become a weatherman, and they wear such terrible ties that I just couldn’t do it.”  He turns to Ed, imploringly.  “Please tell that commenter that I love them.”

Ed wrinkles his nose.  “You just told them that yourself.  Don’t try to get me doing your dirty work on my own channel.”  He debates leaving off the rest, but he’s committed to trying to tell the truth in this place: “They also said that if we made that calendar of you, they’d buy ten.”

Roy bites his lip, which just holds back the laughter but doesn’t quell the grin.  “I love them even more.”

“Get a room,” Ed says.

Roy turns the arched-eyebrow sultry-smile look on him next, which is really not playing fair.  “Still not as much as I love you.”

It is an indescribable tragedy that cheesy shit heats Ed’s cheeks every bit as fast, if not faster, as the suggestive stuff.  He clears his throat, shuffles his notes, and clears his throat again.

“Next question,” he says.  “I’m starting the timer again.”  His watch beeps obligingly as he does, although it sounds slightly reluctant this time, possibly because it feels ignored.  He deserves that.  “Someone wants to know what kind of dog—or other animals—we’d get if our lease didn’t get in the way.”

Roy gets all shiny-eyed again.  “Oh.  Oh.  That’s a good question.”

Ed glances down at his watch and then up at the lens.  “It’s going to take him about a minute and forty seconds to decide what kind of fluffball he likes best today, and then he’ll have exactly five seconds to shout it at you.”

“I wouldn’t shout,” Roy says.  “If anything, I would raise my voice marginally out of sheer excitement, but I’m not going to shout.”

Ed grins at him.  “You’re burning through your time to talk about what kinda fluffball you like best.”

“Two hours wouldn’t be enough for that,” Roy says.  “Okay, so… I mean, obviously, what will actually happen is that in some theoretical future, we’ll be in a position where one or both of us can be home often enough, or has a workplace that is dog-friendly enough, to give our hypothetical furbaby the consistent attention that it would need… and we’ll go to a shelter with a ‘Maybe we’ll find a dog like this’ mindset only then to immediately fall madly in love with a dog that’s nothing like what we expected, and that’ll be that.  But as far as the loose criteria that I would go in with, I like dogs that fit in your lap.  And the ones that almost fit in your lap, don’t quite, but think they do.  So—small-to-medium, I guess?  But when it comes to small dogs, while I will absolutely pet and coo at anything under the sun, I think I’d prefer a dog that’s built solidly enough that you won’t lose sleep at night about the prospect of accidentally hurting it while you’re playing tug-of-war.  Less Yorkshire Terrier size and more Westie, you know?”

Ed realizes that he’s doing the gaze-at-Roy thing.  It’s not his fault that Roy’s even more adorable when he’s rambling about something that he’s passionate about, but he tries to shift it into an I told you so look at the camera instead, just in case it’s not too late.

“The single and solitary paramount criterion,” Roy says, “is floof.”

“Floof,” Ed says.  “The fifth element.”

“No,” Roy says.  “That’s…” He pauses, hesitates, sneaks a swift glance at the camera, and then starts counting on his fingers, mouthing syllables as he goes.  “…boron.”

Ed’s heart speaks without waiting for the FFC signal from his brain.  “Shut the fuck up; I love you.”

A broad grin breaks through Roy’s unsettled expression so fast that it looks like the sun coming out.  Ed’s chest hurts.  This is just so damn good that he feels like he cheated at his entire life.  Is this fake?  Is this a TV show?  It’d make a really boring TV show; half of the episodes would be him teaching the same classes over and over and then muttering at his laptop a lot.  If it’s too boring to be fake, it must be real.

“Well,” Roy says, still beaming, “in any case—yes, floof.  Floof can manifest in a variety of different ways.  It’s almost more of a personality trait than a physical descriptor.  As long as there is a part of the dog that is soft and floofy—ears, face, tail, back, whatever—then I have a deep and feverish compulsion to pet it.  All dogs are good dogs; there are only bad owners.  Many people have different aesthetic preferences than I do, and I respect that entirely.  But for me… I love some good floof.”

Ed is probably gazing again.

The watch alarm beeps.

“Wow,” Roy says, staring at it.  “I… can’t believe it.  We actually did it.”  He picks the hat up off of the desk and settles it on his head again, tipping the brim to a perfect roguish angle.  “I think I’ve earned this back now.”

“Dashing,” Ed says, trying to make it sound sarcastic even though it’s not.

“Thank you,” Roy says, because he’s been too damn good at reading Ed’s tone of voice since day one.  He starts to frown before Ed can think of anything clever to respond with.  “But we blew the whole two minutes listening to me.  We didn’t talk about what kind of dog you want.”

“I don’t care,” Ed says, and the easiness with which the words leave him makes it clear that they’re true.  “Just a nice one.  One we could teach not to bark too much, I guess.  It’s like you said—all dogs are great, and as long as you’re happy, I’m good.”

The silence says everything right up until Ed just can’t help it anymore:

“Don’t look at me like that,” he says.  “I’m gonna puke.”

Utterly delightedly, Roy says, “You started it, my dear.”

From a purely logical standpoint, Ed has to concede that that’s true.  “But… it’s still your fault.  I wouldn’t be starting things like that if you hadn’t brainwashed me into becoming some sort of Schmoop Creature from the Black Lagoon.”

Roy beams at him.  “The cutest little Schmoop Creature that the Black Lagoon ever—”

“Okay,” Ed says.  “Next question.  Somebody wants to know if y’all ever get up to shenanigans at the firehouse, and what that’s like.”

Roy settles in the chair, pushing his hat up just a little so that it won’t block his face as he shifts into the artful slouch.  Either he knows exactly what he’s doing, or his instincts are so damn good that he doesn’t have to.  “Shenanigans?  In my firehouse?  It’s more likely than you think.”

Ed grimaces.  “Is that your way of telling me that I shouldn’t start the timer, ’cause there’s no way you’ll be able to keep this under two minutes?”

Roy grimaces right back.  “I could… try.”

“Nah,” Ed says.  “Just go.  I’m pretty sure that half my followers show up specifically to see you talk about stuff like this anyway, at this point.”

“They should be here for you,” Roy says, favoring the camera with a gentle reprimanding look.  “And learning.  And science.  And occasional danger to your wonderful eyebrows.”

“‘Wonderful’? Ed says.  “They’re just weird hair on my face.  Dang, I wonder why we evolved eyebrows.  Like, eyelashes make sense, but I wonder what eyebrows are for.”

Roy grins at him.  “You could Google it while I ramble about shenanigans for probably more than two minutes.”

“But I want to hear that, too,” Ed says.

The grin softens, and Ed’s heart softens, and he really is just going to turn to mush head to toe one of these days.  Then he’ll have to do an episode on that.

“Well,” Roy says, “why don’t you Google it now, and we’ll wait, and you can just cut the Googling part out of the final edit, and I’ll collate my best hijinks-related stories while you find the answer?”

“You,” Ed says, pulling his phone out, “are brilliant, and I will personally fight anyone who has ever said otherwise.”

At least it looks like Roy will turn to mush first, at the rate that they’re both going, so Ed will have a chance to study the condition a little bit before he succumbs to it.

He wishes sometimes that he had a clapboard for times like this, so that he could hold it up and smack it and mark this bit for himself for future editing, but it’s probably better to save that money for a mic for Roy’s theoretical Dark Souls streams instead.  Roy is charming as fuck, eloquent as shit, funny as hell, and extraordinarily attractive; if anyone could make absolute bank failing at video games on a semi-public platform, it’s him.

“Huh,” Ed says after examining a couple quasi-reliable sources.  “Consensus seems to be that their primary function is to keep the sweat and dirt and rain and stuff out of our eyes, since we’re so reliant on vision most of the time.  Also very important to non-verbal communication and to facial recognition.”

“That’s interesting,” Roy says, sincerely by the sound of it.

“The whole world is interesting,” Ed says.  “That’s the worst thing.  There’s just not enough time.  Anyway.  Do you have at least two minutes of shenanigans ready to go?”

Roy smirks, which is, as usual, mega ultra not-okay.  “Do I ever.”  He sits up a little straighter and adjusts the hat again.  “Some names have been changed to protect the not-especially-innocent.”

“Uh huh,” Ed says.

Roy beams.  “This is… well, it may be more of just a funny story than a shenanigan, strictly speaking.  We don’t actually have all that much in the shenanigans department, which is primarily because a harmless prank would be much less harmless if it affected our ability to work.  The reason that we spend so much time with the trucks is that they have to be prepped at all times and ready to roll at a moment’s notice.  If anything’s missing or set up incorrectly, or something doesn’t work right when your teammate is counting on it, that’s not a practical joke—it could come at the cost of people’s lives.  There is an enormous amount of camaraderie, and of course we constantly give each other a hard time, but all of us understand what’s at stake, so we take our jobs very seriously.”

Ed can’t help it: he looks, somewhat pointedly, at Roy’s Indiana Jones hat.

“Hey,” Roy says.  “I never said we take ourselves seriously.  That’s another matter entirely.  It just means that our primary shenanigan is the fact that we have a firehouse low-grade klepto, whose name I will not be sharing, and who doesn’t actually steal so much as… relocate.  And it’s only ever bulk office supplies—paperclips, ballpoint pens, that sort of thing.  They just disappear when you’re not watching and then reappear several hours later on someone else’s desk, or in the bathroom, or in someone else’s locker.  We’re not entirely sure that he knows that he’s doing it, since it only seems to happen when he’s anxious or preoccupied, and we haven’t quite managed to have a team meeting to discuss how we’re going to talk to him about it, so for a long time we’ve just been… finding new paperclips.  It’s a lot better than the running theory we had for a while, which was a firehouse gremlin.”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “Everybody knows gremlins love paperclips the most.”

“Precisely,” Roy says.

“If some money magically appears in my life,” Ed says, “I’ll send y’all some of those key tags with GPS tracking.”

“Perfect,” Roy says.  “And thank you for the gift-related segue.  As far as Christmas—on the whole, most of us tend to schedule the celebration parts at an alternate time, if we are so inclined, because ’tis the season for people to suddenly start using their fireplaces after placing dead trees beside them.  Also just the simple fact that people, and sometimes unattended children, are often spending more time at home, with more electronics on; and they’re cooking a lot… you get the idea.  This is all barely-useful context for the fact that, last year at the firehouse, we did a white elephant gift exchange.  The context part is that none of us took it particularly seriously, but one teammate whose identity has still not been discovered—although I have my suspicions—managed to find a remarkably eerie little plush raccoon.  Said individual wrapped it with an extremely fancy gift bag with gold tissue paper and so on, and it was the first gift chosen and opened when the exchange started.  My colleague… Harvey?… who had been seduced by its beautiful packaging took one look at it and then instinctively hurled it across the room.”

“Wait,” Ed says.  “How bad is this thing?  Do you have a picture?”

“No,” Roy says.  “I don’t want to risk it emerging from my phone screen in the dead of night.”  At Ed’s expression, he grins a little.  “It’s… not that bad.  Harvey is a bit leery of animals to begin with.  It’s just one of those stuffed animals that was designed and perhaps made by someone who… does not have an especially firm grasp on the concept of either animals or anatomy; or perhaps has never actually seen a raccoon, or even a picture of a raccoon, but gave it their best shot.  Its eyes are very big and very shiny and a touch too human-looking.  I named him Oswald.”

“Of course you did,” Ed says.

“It just sounded right,” Roy says.  “Unsurprisingly, at the end of the white elephant exchange, no one wanted Oswald.  What was a surprise, however, was that Oswald was, somehow, an extra gift—there were enough relatively decent ones to go around to everyone, and Oswald was left over.  This means, of course, that not only did someone purchase this minor abomination, that individual purchased it separately from a better gift, with the specific intention of it winding up in the middle of the coffee table staring at us after everyone had picked.”

“Diabolical,” Ed says.  “Are you sure Al didn’t work there that year?”

“Not as sure as I was before you suggested that,” Roy says.  “In any case, with a strange and slightly creepy stuffed raccoon now adrift in the firehouse, we did what any group of sensible, mature adults would do.”

“Yeeted it off the roof?” Ed asks.

“No,” Roy says.  “Same spirit, longer game.”

“Attached it to the top of the flagpole,” Ed says.

“Slightly less likely to get us written up during an inspection,” Roy says.  “But, if we’re unlucky, not much less likely.”

“Put it on the dashboard of one of the firetrucks,” Ed says, “only detachably, so you can shove it into the center console or whatever when the inspector’s on their way.”

“Getting warmer,” Roy says.  “By the way, would you like to change career paths?  You’d fit in beautifully.”

“I think I’m a little too broken,” Ed says.  “But thanks.  Always good to have a backup plan.”  He sits back, shrugging for good measure.  “Okay, that’s all the mischievous creativity I’ve got today.  I give up.  What’d y’all do with it?”

“We started a very simple scavenger hunt,” Roy says.  “It’s called ‘Where’s Oswald?’.  You lose a round when you find him, and then you have to take a picture, go into the Google Doc, and report where he was and whether you screamed like a victim in a horror movie.  Then it’s your turn to hide him somewhere accessible, innocuous, and likely to scare the absolute bejesus out of one of your coworkers when they stumble on him in the middle of a shift.”

“That is,” Ed says, “absolutely freakin’ terrible, and I want to play immediately.  Are you keeping score somehow?”

“Screams count for points,” Roy says.  “If you scream, you lose two; but if you make someone else scream, you gain one back.”

“Who’s winning?” Ed says.

“I have no idea,” Roy says.  “There’s a table at the top of the Google Doc—I’ll show it to you later.  I’m doing pretty well, but you already know who my biggest competition is.”

Riza is probably also Roy’s prime suspect for having purchased Oswald and cursed the entire firehouse with his presence.  “Figures.  Okay.  So—what are some of the best places that people’ve found that creepy little rascal?”

“In the cot,” Roy says.  “Under the cot.  Attached to the ceiling directly above the cot, so that when one rolled over and looked up, Oswald was waiting.  In the cabinet under the sink in the bathroom.  In the snack cabinet.  In the painkiller drawer.”

“Holy moly,” Ed says.  “That sounds like… I mean, I guess ‘fun’ is a word you could use.  Loosely.”

“Under a throw pillow on the couch,” Roy says.  “Immediately behind the television.  Taped to the wall right above the lightswitch in our office area for the next person who walked in.  In my backpack.  In someone’s gym bag.  Buckled into the passenger seat of someone’s car.  In an unmarked box that someone shipped to the firehouse without a return address.  On top of one of the blades of the ceiling fan, so that when we turned it on, it flung him at somebody’s face.”

“Oh, my God,” Ed says.  “But you know who does it, right?  And then you know who has it next, because it’s in the log in the Google Doc.”

“That doesn’t usually get updated right away,” Roy says.  “Which is part of the beauty of it; you never know if we’re one or two Oswald incidents behind, so he might not be in the hands of the person that you think he is.”

“This is amazing,” Ed says.  “I can’t believe you never told me about this.  And I can’t believe you didn’t think it qualified as shenanigans.”

Roy grins.  “Well—like I said.  We’re all keeping our fingers crossed that an unfortunate Oswald intervention won’t get us written up one of these days.  If it doesn’t, we’re planning to play up until the one-year anniversary of his unfortunate adoption and then do a final tally of the scores.  I was going to tell you about it then—when I win.”

“‘When’, huh?” Ed says.  “I’ll check that out later and see how you’re lookin’ so far.  Is it okay for me to give you some ideas?”

“I don’t think there’s anything in the rules that specifically outlaws external conspiracy,” Roy says, “so I’m going to take that as a ‘yes’.”

Ed contemplates.  “Is it okay for Al to give you ideas?”

“I’m not sure that that would be sporting,” Roy says.  “I’m also not sure that I’d have any coworkers left by Christmas.”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “That’s fair.  Honestly, I’d be sorta scared to see his suggestions.”

Roy turns another blazingly charming smile on the camera.  “If you, too, have terrifyingly dastardly suggestions for where to hide the little stuffed raccoon, let us know in the comments.  Keep in mind, please, that you will lose me points if your suggestion gets us written up by the inspectors, and my job… wait for it.”

“Don’t,” Ed says.

“Comes under fire,” Roy says.

“You can’t even get under fire at your job,” Ed says.  “I mean—I guess arguably in a two-story house, but—you’re in front of it, with a hose.  That’s the whole point.”

Roy folds his hands very delicately on the desktop.

“I think,” he says, “that I have been very good, and very restrained, and I should be allowed to say one single, solitary little thing about what I’d like to be in front of with a hose, if you know wh—”

Ed actually puts a hand over his mouth.

He has never had the impulse to actually follow through with the physical gesture before, but here he is, leaning across the table, with his palm pressed over Roy’s lips.  He instinctively cupped his hand and pushed relatively firmly, in a way that would discourage further movement of the jaw, but not especially hard.  He can always edit later.  Put it in slow-mo, gradually dip into black and white, slap a few bars of Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem over it.  Hyper-dramatizing a very small, very stupid, completely anger-less scuffle might make it funny as hell.

Roy apparently already thinks it is, since he starts laughing before Ed has even managed to fix his free hand on the back of Roy’s chair for leverage.

Ed eyes him and slowly retracts the hand.  Roy’s laughter is a thing of such immense beauty that he can’t bring himself to deprive his viewership of it, even in the circumstances.  It should be shared.

“No?” Roy says.  “I thought I’d earned one.”

“You know da—” Shit. “—darned well that if we start makin’ dirty jokes about hoses, any chance you ever had of takin’ your job seriously is—”

He stops.

Roy blinks.

Ed attempts to look as dead inside as possible as he turns to the camera and reluctantly finishes his sentence:

“…going up in smoke.”

Roy folds both hands under his chin and smiles like the sun just came out after a thunderstorm.

“Shut up,” Ed says.

“I didn’t say anything,” Roy says.

“You were thinkin’ it loud enough that you didn’t have to,” Ed says.

“My thoughts,” Roy says, “definitely do not belong on the family-friendly channel.”

Ed drags both hands down his face.  “I’m just gonna… I’m gonna put this whole thing on mute, and add some subtitles that are a whole heck of a lot better than what we’re saying right now.  Yeah.  That’s it.”

“Are there any other questions that you wanted to get to?” Roy asks, with more than a hint of a purr to it.  “Or can I go make you a drink?”

“It is,” Ed says, making a show of looking at the watch that he went to the trouble of wearing, “two in the afternoon.  Two twenty-seven, to be precise.”

“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” Roy says.  “Weren’t they serving you wine in church first thing in the morning on a Sunday?”

“First of all,” Ed says, “that wasn’t wine.  That was Jesus juice.  Seco—stop laughing; you brought up transubstantiation, and now you have to deal with the consequences.”

“Forgive me,” Roy says, completely insincerely.  “You see, I have a very different understanding of the metaphysical implications of fermented grape squeezings, as I was raised in an aggressively agnostic household directly above a bar.”

“I know,” Ed says.  “And this whole topic would be a lot cooler if wine didn’t taste like ass anyway.  But we’re not gonna bash religion!  That’s not what we do here.  This is the horrible romance subset of the science channel.  We don’t bash anything except bad science.”

“Which deserves it,” Roy says.

“Mostly,” Ed says.  “Sometimes people make mistakes, and that’s okay—that’s part of learning.  But people who know that they have made mistakes and go on to spread their mistaken information broadly on purpose are a whole ’nother thing, and we don’t respect that around here.”

“Nor does Oswald,” Roy says.

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “If you won’t listen to us, listen to Oswald.”

“Maybe I can borrow him from the firehouse now that you know about him anyway,” Roy says.  “He could guest-star.”

Ed grimaces.  “That’s a dark road to start down.  It ends with puppets.  I don’t think we wanna go that way.”

“Where is your sense,” Roy says, whipping his hat off and depositing it on Ed’s head, “of adventure?”

“I prefer my adventures without puppets,” Ed says.  The hat’s warm from being on Roy’s head.  Extraordinarily basic thermodynamics shouldn’t be cute, but this time, they fucking are.  “Besides which, the odds of me keepin’ a straight face through an entire video of you doing a voice for Oswald are functionally zero, so we wouldn’t get anything useful done.”

“Art,” Roy says, “is the most useful thing there is.”

Ed raises his eyebrows.  “I dunno if I’d call this ‘art’.”

“You’re making something out of nothing,” Roy says, “and then refining it using a skill that you’ve practiced.  What else would it be?”

Ed wrinkles his nose.  “I dunno.  Entertainment?”

“As far as I know,” Roy says, “that’s just art that’s outward-facing.  And possibly panders a bit.”

“Let me know in the comments,” Ed says, as dryly as he’s capable of, “if you think I pander a bit.”

Roy gives the camera a look so stern that it verges on threatening, which is adorable.  “Yes, because we all know that nothing says ‘pandering’ quite like spending twenty minutes lovingly explaining how electrons factor into everything.”

“I don’t take twenty minutes,” Ed says.

There’s a pause.

“…very often,” Ed says.

“Tell him in the comments,” Roy says, adjusting the stupid hat he put on Ed’s head, “about what a fine job he’s doing, and how he’s inspired so many of us to rediscover science as something that can be fun and interesting for its own sake, instead of just a class where we’re destined to wind up with a failing grade.”

“Whatever,” Ed says, even though that is kind of the point.  And kind of the name of the channel.  And kind of his life’s mission.  “Don’t leave any comments at all if you don’t want to.  That’s okay, too.  In the meantime—”

“Make like a proton,” Roy says.

“And stay positive,” Ed says.

They do the finger guns together, and then Roy uses one of his finger guns to tip up the brim of the hat until it topples off the back of Ed’s head, which makes them both laugh, which will be disgustingly cute on camera.

Two hours into Roy’s shift the next day, Ed receives a text message that reads:

WE FORGOT ABOUT THE BENCH-PRESSING

Ed sends back, Maybe YOU forgot about the bench-pressing.

Roy writes, I was good.  I was so good.  I was barely even bad.  I made so few dirty jokes, and the ones I did make were well-crafted, and this is me groveling in case you couldn’t tell.

Considering the time that Roy is taking out of his workday—worknight—work-twenty-four-hours—for this, Ed feels like he has no choice except to relent a little bit:

Okay, how about this.  If THEY’RE good, and the comments aren’t shitty, and it gets a lot of likes, then maybe we can give it a shot and see if it turns out funny.

How many likes?? Roy writes.  I’ll call all my friends.  I’ll make eighty YouTube accounts.  Please fill in your own schmoopy joke about how my greatest aspiration in life is to lift you up.

Ed wishes that he wasn’t grinning at his stupid phone like a stupid sap.  I haven’t decided how many likes yet.  Go back to work.  Schmoopy jokes are still your responsibility.

I guess that’s fair, Roy writes.  I don’t suppose that I could sweeten the deal with questionable offers including the Indiana Jones outfit and possibly an actual whip this time…?

Ed now wishes that his face wasn’t, aptly enough, on fire.

Knowing full well that Roy will understand it for precisely the admission that it is, he sends nothing more or less than the words GO BACK TO WORK.

Roy sends back an angel emoji.

Ed puts both hands over his remarkably warm face and then shoves his phone over to the other couch cushion before this gets any worse.