Work Text:
Blood and death, the old hag had warned him. She’d conveniently left out the slime, the hallucinogens, and now the cigar smoke, clouding the air and curling around his head, sinking into his lungs like carcinogenic claws and scraping until he coughed his throat raw.
A little blood and death Roy could fucking handle, he’d dealt with more than enough of it in Ishval. He’d passed amateur, skipped over proficient and advanced entirely, and crash landed straight at the expert level of handling blood and death .
No one had warned him about the metal-limbed, homoerotic, cowboy nightmare man and he wanted to speak to someones’ commanding officer.
Maes was dead ; Elicia was in several pieces in his tattered old backpack, wrapped carefully in one of Lust’s enormous gowns (Roy was, at this point, seventy-eight percent sure that they were very expensive bed sheets in a past life) so the flasks didn’t clank and shatter against the ammunition and bits of metal they were packaged with, and now every wet dream he’d had as an idiot bisexual teenager who liked the idea of being held down just a little too much was leering at him like Roy was a steak and he’d just come off of a month long no-meat diet.
Given the golden eyes, sharp teeth, and pointed fingernails on his flesh hand, Roy wasn’t entirely sure that the other man didn’t see him as a delicious entree. There were too many lycanthropic traits for Roy to be entirely comfortable so close to the wicked grin that split the last lord’s face.
The space where his left ring and pinky fingers used to be throbbed in agreement.
“We can save Elicia and use her to grind Father into paste!”
Ignoring the way that he pronounced Father with a very hard ‘er’ at the end, there was, surprisingly, only one thing with that idea that Roy wasn’t on board with.
“My god-daughter is not a weapon,” he spat, because he was absolutely done with Xerxes, and while he couldn’t get Elicia out of this godforsaken desert in one piece he was goddamn well going to stop her from being used as a weapon , “Fuck you!” He tossed on, for good measure. And because he’d had a goddamn day (or was it two? Three? He wasn’t sure he hadn’t slept except for when he’d been physically knocked unconscious so everything was kind of blending together into one continuous, blood soaked, miserable nightmare) and needed to yell “fuck” a couple of times just for the sheer catharsis of it.
Usually, Roy believed in solving his problems while very eloquently speaking circles around his opponent.
Today, all of his favorite words had four letters.
Was he telling Elric to go fuck himself or was he just yelling it into the void? The world may never know because the chair Roy had been shoved into tilted deliberately, sharply backwards, leaving him dangling helplessly over the hole in the floor that, apparently, led to more unspeakable horrors.
The only thing keeping him from tumbling backwards to his death (or, more probably, physical and emotional trauma he was never going to recover from) was Elric himself, who had grabbed Roy by the wrist at the very last second, peering at him from over his sunglasses, eyebrows raised expectantly.
“Last chance,” he said, “you really don’t want to find out what’s in that hole.”
No. No, he really didn’t.
As much as Roy would have loved to take that mic-drop moment, to have let go of the other man’s wrist and told him that he would take his chances, to really just take the big dick energy offered to him on a platter and run with it… he really didn’t need any more variety added to his night terrors. They were already pretty creative as it was.
Mother fucker . What a bad month to give up drinking.
Roy sighed, shoulders slouching and his grip on Elric’s coat tightening as he jerked his head to the cigar in the man’s mouth, “You wouldn't happen to have any scotch in this trash heap, would you?"
In his apparent shock, Elric’s fingers loosened around Roy's arm and nearly dropped him despite his acquiescence.
“Fuck!” The hatch slammed closed behind Roy even as the other man redoubled his hold.
With the whirring of the propeller finally muffled, the only audible noise in the workshop was the pounding of Roy’s pulse in his own ears. Finally, with a quiet shriek, Elric lowered Roy’s chair back onto two legs.
“ Trash heap ?” He asked, shoving his bangs out of his eyes indignantly, “Did you just call my factory a goddamn trash heap , Mustang?”
“If the shoe fits,” Roy replied dryly, “or in this case the mountain of scrap metal.”
“I can still throw you into the pit, you know."
Roy eyed Elric, raising one eyebrow with a kind of calm he hadn't felt in a decade. He'd long since figured out that nothing was ever as it seemed and that expectations were worthless, but even so.
Everything about Elric was so opposite of everything he logically should have been. He was strong, yes, but small. Tanned but for the various, pale scars that littered every exposed bit of skin. His features were soft, almost delicate, and Roy had never met any person brave (or stupid) enough to keep their hair long enough to brush their lower back while operating heavy machinery.
Then again, Roy figured, watching a screwdriver fly through the air to land in Elric's outstretched hand, someone who had complete control over metal wouldn't necessarily have to worry about his hair getting caught anywhere.
"You could at least thank me for saving your ass."
And Roy must have heard that incorrectly. Because there was no possible way --
"Saving my ass? You almost dropped me to my death two minutes ago."
There was a moment of silence before Elric looked up again, the bottle he had pulled from seemingly nowhere hanging limply from metal fingers, "Oh my God, you really are this stupid." The handle of a paintbrush smacked roughly into Roy's shoulder, leaving what was going to be a sizable bruise and a streak of --
"Yellow paint?" Roy rubbed the pigment between two fingers curiously; he should probably move from the metal chair near the metal door leading to apparently hell at some point, "Like the ammo boxes," he realized, "and the signs."
"Finally, he catches on," Elric rolled shockingly bright eyes and settled his mouth into a frown, "Surprise, asshole! I've been on your side the whole time!"
"You stabbed me," Roy pointed out.
"A little light stabbing here and there builds character. And besides, no use dwelling on the past." A large tumbler of shockingly good scotch was pressed into Roy's undamaged hand, "Gotta focus on the present. And presently we need to do a little freelance murder."
Freelance murder .
Roy downed the scotch in one go (and he'd been so close to breaking a month, too. Fucking Xerxes.) and held the glass out for a refill, "I have a feeling I'm not going to want to be sober for this."
"Sorry," Elric did not, in fact, sound sorry, "I need that fancy pin-point accuracy of yours in working order. So, about our murder spree–"
“ Our ?” And really, Roy should stop antagonizing the man, should remember that Elric was, above all else dangerous , but there was something about poking at this particular beast that was viscerally pleasing, “Excuse me if I’m wrong-"
"I will not."
"- but I’m reasonably sure that providing supplies does not give you ownership over my murder spree.” He paused, “I thought you’d be angrier about that, actually. They were your siblings–”
“No, they were not ,” all of the tools and bits of metal that had been hovering around the workshop, barely registering on Roy’s radar after all of the weird shit he’d been subjected to recently, dropped to the ground with an abrupt, shattering crash, “None of them were my siblings. Not Gluttony, not Wrath, and definitely not that bitch Lust or any of her band of freaks. If you hadn’t killed them then I gladly would have.”
And the thing was, Roy believed him without a second thought. Elric looked like he would have made it slow and relished every second.
“I’m starting to get the feeling that you’re not here of your own free will.”
The look that Elric leveled him with could have demolished half a city block, “Wow, you fucking think?”
Well, that at least made Roy feel slightly better. Minutely. Barely. Infinitesimally.
“Excellent,” taking a deep, calming breath that only moderately annoyed his aching ribs, Roy relaxed himself muscle by reluctant muscle until he was artfully sprawled in the creaky, suspiciously stained metal chair hovering mere inches from certain death, “we’re still not using Elicia so I suggest we find a compromise and we do it quickly.”
Roy never actually got to see Father go down. One moment he was setting off the largest scale transmutation of his life , power that made everything he'd done in Ishval look like child's play, and the next Elicia was clinging to his neck and Elric was gripping his wrist, hauling him through the endless black.
Elric was shouting things to someone who kept calling him brother , which, at first, made Roy’s wrist twist to snap; the metal configuration that Elric had made him, his array sitting top and center, was much harder to tear apart than his gloves had been and thus, hadn’t been shredded the second Father had gotten a little annoyed. Elric stopped him, knocking his arm off course and growling in unmistakable warning.
“They’re going to bomb the city,” the stranger panted, “wipe Xerxes off the map so none of this gets out.”
“So none of us get out you mean,” Elric broke off to swear and jerk Roy sharply into a left turn, huffing in annoyance when Roy stumbled and nearly lost his footing, “For fucks sake, Mustang, keep up.”
“I am blind and carrying a toddler,” Roy hissed indignantly, “you watch where you’re pulling me.”
“I could have left you at the ceremony site!”
“Could you two save the sexually charged bickering until we are out of the blast radius !”
Roy would have argued that the bickering was not at all sexually charged, and that furthermore the word ‘bickering’ implied that Roy wasn’t bringing up perfectly sound, valid points and that Elric wasn’t just being a combative little brat , except there was one (1) more pressing matter than his own wounded pride, “And where, exactly, are we headed?”
“Someone’s waiting for us at the factory. The lowermost levels make the bomb shelters from World War II look like they’re made of aluminum foil.”
Once more into the trash heap, it would seem.
“Who’s waiting for us? Who the hell did you let into my factory, Alphonse?” Another sharp turn and the terrain they were sprinting across smoothed out from the bumpy, packed dirt roads of Xerxes proper and into the shifting sand landscape of nothing-ness that lead towards Elric’s factory.
“A friend,” the stranger, Alphonse, was being pointedly vague and they all knew it, “he was being held captive with me. Father kidnapped him as part of his master plan. And also, it's our factory , Edward."
Roy’s balance faltered again, the left boot sinking into a particularly loose patch of sand, and (Edward?) Elric groaned a moment before Roy’s feet left the ground entirely.
Without his vision, suddenly being picked up and carried in a dead sprint was pretty disorienting , especially when he was also holding a traumatized three-year-old.
Any protest he may have made, however, would have undoubtedly been ignored, so he bit them back and hugged Elicia a little bit closer to him.
The first thing she'd said when Roy finally reached her was that she wanted her father and Roy hadn't had the heart to tell her that Maes was gone . He still didn't know how he was going to do it.
How was he supposed to explain it to her? How did Chris explain it to him? He was so young that he didn’t even remember his parents, let alone the aftermath of their death.
“Al, get the door!”
“You know what, brother, I thought I’d just sit out here and watch the sun set !”
The grinding shriek of metal against metal and then they were back in Elric’s factory; Roy recognized it by scent alone. Because it smelled like the body he was being held against, just stronger . Machine oil and gasoline and steel.
The elevator was just as creaky and disconcerting as Roy remembered it, but he supposed with someone who could control metal inside of the death-box with them there wasn’t much of a cause for concern, even as Elric set him roughly on his feet and left him to lean against the wall.
Down and down they went, lower than Roy had been in his cursory exploration of the factory, until all the sounds of the upper floors faded away into nothingness. They had to have been 50 or 60 feet down when the bomb went off. The world around them shuddered, then it shook, and then it jerked .
Having only just regained his balance, and only barely managing in the first place, Roy didn’t stand a chance. All he could do was twist his torso and curl around Elicia and wait for impact.
“Goddammit, Mustang ,” Elric’s arms were around him again, keeping him pulled flush against his chest; machine oil and gasoline and steel, but also sweat and blood and dirt because he’d fought Father for Roy – he could argue that it was for himself until he turned blue in the face, but Roy could read people and even if he couldn’t, Elric had just carried a fully grown man and a quarter grown child over a mile over rough terrain; had he really only been in it for himself he could have left them behind the second Father was done in.
He also didn’t have to catch Roy and Elicia before they hit the ground.
The echo of the explosion was deafening, even so far underground and it seemed like it was enough to shake Elicia out of her shocked silence; tiny hands curled tighter in the remains of Roy’s jacket as she started to cry.
“ Fuck , Al–”
“I’m on it,” less than five seconds had elapsed between Elicia’s first, startled wail and the gentle hands that pried her from Roy’s grip, “Don’t worry, Mr. Mustang, I’m just going to hold her while Ed fixes your eyes.”
Roy had traded his sight fair and square for the power to finish Father off for good, beyond any of his regeneration abilities. There was no way to fix it and, while he’d only had a split second to make the decision, Elicia in one piece was more than worth all five of his senses.
“It’s impossible,” Roy choked out around the sand and the grit that coated his throat with every breath, even as hands – one warm, and made of flesh and blood and one cool, smooth, metal – settled on the sides of his face. Elric –Ed’s– thumbs just barely grazed the tops of Roy’s cheekbones and it was impossible to not notice how intimate the position was.
“How many times,” Ed grunted, touch becoming just the slightest bit firmer as he settled into position, “do I have to tell you to shut up?”
“At least once more,” was all Roy could think to say, “You think this will work?”
Because had Roy known that his vision was on a timeline there were some things he would have looked harder at, some things he would have committed to memory until even the smallest of detail was so ingrained in his brain that there was no chance in hell he’d ever lose them.
Elicia’s smile; the way her eyes lit up when Roy walked through the front door; how she’d looked, delicate and content curled against Gracia’s side before all hell had broken loose.
The gentle fall of Gracia’s hair; the particular blend of green and blue and flecked amber that made up her eyes; the silly apron she always wore on special occasions.
Maes, alive. Maes brandishing photo after photo at Roy like weapons. Maes’ incredible bedhead as he glared silently at Roy over coffee served in mugs shaped like cross sections of a human cell because they always had been two halves of a whole idiot.
Elric’s expression as Roy studied paint in the most obnoxious shade of yellow he could conceive; the rippling wave of pure gold as Elric threw his hair over one shoulder in the workshop; the grim, determined set of his jaw as he stumbled back to his feet after taking hit, after hit, after hit.
Taking hits for Roy . Keeping Father away from Roy . Trusting Roy to be able to pull off his part of the plan knowing full well that if he failed they were all dead.
“It better work,” Ed said, and Roy could hear the scowl in his voice.
Quite abruptly –though, possibly not if you considered Roy’s penchant for stunning, competent blondes who could murder him without a second thought– Roy wondered what that scowl tasted like.
“One moment,” Roy reached up to grab at Ed’s hands, curling his fingers around the blonde’s and trying to hide the way his own were shaking, “Just. Wait.”
“You realize that I–”
Roy kissed him.
Roy kissed him and had to wonder if all of it had been worth it; the blood, the death, the slow trudge through hell, to get him to this exact moment.
Ed tasted like sunshine ; like copper and sweat and rain storms in July and Roy decided, then and there, that he was going to be chasing that taste for the rest of his life, however long or short that may turn out to be. The teeth were interesting; Roy had never had to account for fangs before but Ed knew what he was doing and how to use them. They scraped roughly against Roy’s lip, already split and swollen, before biting down with just enough pressure to make Roy gasp.
Though he’d only been actively imagining it for less than a minute, Roy had never dreamed that kissing Ed would go so well. He’d done it out of desperation and adrenaline and several other things he was going to have to sort through and process eventually. He’d never expected Ed to respond with his own, jagged brand of hunger.
Roy’s hands slid from Ed’s wrists and back into the tangle of his hair – Roy would have memorized the exact shade, if he’d known it was likely to be the only time he’d get to see it. Ed’s ears were pointed and when Roy’s nails scratched behind them he made a noise like a growl and lurched forward to crowd Roy entirely against the wall before wrenching himself away and holding Roy steady when he tried to follow.
“It is going to work,” Ed said, firmly, “Okay? It’s going to.”
Roy believed him. Roy would believe anything Ed said, probably, first impression notwithstanding. The stab wound had already healed, anyhow, which was not encouraging as to Roy not being somehow genetically altered by any of the events in this godforsaken desert, but went a long way to smooth over any hard feelings he’d been feeling about the act itself.
“Mr. Hughes is going to be very upset if it doesn’t,” Al said absently; he’d gotten Elicia to stop crying and for a moment Roy was so busy being impressed by that fact alone that he didn’t register what had actually been said, “he specifically said to keep an eye on Mr. Mustang.”
“Mr. Hughes?” Roy asked, gaze unfocused but sharp over Ed’s left shoulder, towards Al’s voice.
“The man Father threw into the cell with me. I think he was hoping I’d lose control and eat him. Which is just insulting , really. He’s the child’s father, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” Roy rasped, ribcage collapsing in on itself and throat closing, “He’s her… He’s alive .” Maes was alive.
When Gracia had pressed Roy’s gloves into his hand and told him to save her child and avenge her husband, that was exactly what he’d intended to do. But now – Maes was alive. Roy was going to bring both of them home to her because of Edward Elric and his beautiful, incredible everything.
“Oh, good. He’s shocked into staying still,” Ed said, very close to Roy’s face, breath ghosting over his skin, “thanks, Al.”
Electricity raced over Roy’s skin, the familiar, pure ozone of a well balanced array pricked at the back of his throat and clogged his sinuses. His head spun.
For a moment, there was nothing.
Then, Roy’s world exploded – light and color and raw sensation that had him convulsing in Ed’s grip. It couldn’t have lasted more than fifteen seconds, but time was a fickle thing when his brain was being put in a blender.
Ed was speaking directly into his ear; the hands on his face had disappeared and instead Ed had both arms wrapped tight around Roy’s heaving shoulders as he struggled to breathe. It was several more agonizing moments before Roy’s auditory processing came back online.
“You’re okay,” Ed was whispering, “It’s okay. Just open your eyes, okay? Open your eyes, Roy.”
It occurred to Roy that, while he’d switched to Ed’s given name shortly after Al had said it, it was the first time that Ed, in turn, had used Roys’ and it was that, more than anything, that had his eyes fluttering open.
Had he been at all hydrated, Roy probably would have cried when he realized that his cheek was pressed to a very familiar, garishly red coat. Of all the impossible things…
Roy tilted his face until he could see Ed’s face; his pinched expression, the indent in his bottom lip where he was worrying it impatiently between his teeth, the always startlingly intense gold of his eyes.
Without a second thought, Roy reached up and pressed his thumb to the furrow between Ed’s eyebrows, lips spreading into a grin when all of the air left Ed in one long exhale.
“Unbelievable,” He hissed, like Roy was the one who had done something astounding, and then he was hauling Roy into another kiss and any comment Roy could have made about that flew right out of the elevator.
“Gross,” Al muttered, presumably to himself, but there was a small noise of exasperated agreement that could only come from the child of Gracia Hughes, “When I said ‘ out of the blast radius ’ this is not what I meant and you both know it.”
It was probably safer to assume that Roy, at least, knew nothing as a general rule and he fully intended on informing Al of this fact.
The second that Ed removed his tongue from Roy’s mouth and returned the few functioning brain cells he had left.
Seriously.
Cross his heart.