Work Text:
It is not often Roy gets to indulge in a slow awakening. His standard is eyes open, get up, and it is standard to prefer that over staying in bed doing absolutely nothing. That is, nothing besides listening to his thoughts. However, this morning — is it morning yet? He can't tell, can never tell, his little outpost in the north is always too dark to tell, but this morning, he opens his eye and for the first time in years, he doesn't get up.
He's had a fitful night, sleep interspersed with flashes of wakefulness that only lasted long enough for him to take in his surroundings. Roy is used to it. It's how he has been sleeping for the past decades. What he is not used to though, is whatever is going on in his bed.
There is a weight draped across his stomach, a firm pressure curled around his waist. Roy's eye roams around the room, hesitant to settle on the golden crown of the head resting on his chest. Roy has one arm up and hidden under the pillows and the other hovering over metal, too afraid to touch the skin. At some point between the last time he woke and now, Edward threw a leg over his.
It's too much, he thinks, and at the same time: how dare he.
How dare this boy turn into a man, then show up on his doorstep unannounced? How dare he waltz into the house, making demands and shaking Roy out of his self-induced stupor? How dare he be here, how dare he be real, how dare he ruin Roy's nightly ritual of getting up to pace around the room in an anxious haze?
It's been years since Roy last shared a bed with someone, and in his memories, none of them clung to him like Edward does now, none of them breathed against his skin and sent startled shivers down his spine, none of them stayed until the morning.
None of them Roy loved as much as he loves Edward right now.
Love, love, love — the word keeps spinning around his head, even as his back and shoulders ache a little with the lack of movement. For someone as volatile as Edward, he is surprisingly still in his sleep, and Roy, for one, is not used to staying in the same position for the whole night, not used to staying in bed for the whole night either, but then love, love, love and so every time he opened his eye, he closed it again and counted Edward's breaths until he fell asleep again.
"Are you awake?"
Roy feels the whisper on the naked skin of his chest.
"I'm not sure," he replies. "Every second I spend with you feels like a dream."
"Sap." Edward raises his head to glare at him. "I'm not one of your women, that you can woo with a few pretty words."
Roy laughs. Something dry but content, sad but complete.
"It's true," he says between a smile. He tucks a strand of very real blond hair behind a very real ear. "I dreamt about you. A lot. Often. Then tonight, whenever I opened my eyes, it was hard to tell if I was seeing reality or some beautiful fantasy."
Edward softens — his frown eases, the fierce glow of his eyes dims, he shifts to touch Roy's chin with his flesh hand and scratch the stubble Roy forgot to shave yesterday.
"I'm real," he reassures. "This is real. And you better get used to it because it's about to get more real, Mustang."
"Is that a threat?"
"Very much so."