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When Ed first hears the news, it’s like his blood has frozen in his veins. He demands that Lieutenant Havoc repeat it, hoping against hope that it will somehow change the words he hears, but it all echoes the same horrifying truth as the first time.
Routine mission, he says. Missed a check-in, he says. Missing for two days now, he says. No one knows where he is, he says.
Statistically unlikely to return at this point, he very carefully doesn’t say. He doesn’t have to. Ed hears it anyway.
The phone falls from his grasp, clattering on the floor, but he hardly hears the racket it makes over the white noise that suddenly fills his mind. Only one thing makes it past that barrier, in fact, one single thought repeated over and over, louder and louder until it drowns out everything else.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
It’d been the kind of mission Ed had handled semi-routinely as a teenager, the kind of mission Roy hadn’t tackled personally in nearly a decade. Ed still isn’t sure, really, why it had fallen to Roy. He’d known from the moment it had come up, though, that there would be no talking Roy out of it, not when the Fuhrer himself had asked for Roy’s aid.
Ed hadn’t even tried, really, beyond a few token protests. Just enough to let Roy know he’d be missed, he’d thought at the time. Fuck, he should’ve tried harder. Maybe if he’d tried harder…
Well. It probably wouldn’t have actually stopped Roy from going. But maybe he’d feel less guilty now, less like he should’ve done something, should’ve snuck away and handled it himself instead of letting Roy go.
Probably he wouldn’t. Probably nothing he could’ve done beforehand would’ve helped with the now, with the realization that he’s now facing a lifetime without his—
Without his what, exactly? They aren’t married, ring he still wears on a chain around his neck notwithstanding and despite his many arguments that they might as well just get the formalities over with. His boyfriend doesn’t settle right, though. It never has, not when his heart had so firmly decided it would have no other that he’d almost died over the whole thing.
His soulmate is probably what Al would say, the fucking sap. It sounds stupid as hell to Ed, but he hasn’t exactly come up with anything better despite his best efforts. Now…
Now it might be too fucking late, and there isn’t a damn thing Ed can do about it.
Indistinct shouts echo from the phone receiver where he’d dropped it, but he can’t pick it up and reassure Havoc. He can’t do anything except for lean against the wall and hope against hope that—
It’s no good. He should’ve known hope wouldn’t do a goddamn thing for him. It only rarely has, in the life he’s led.
It starts with that damned sickly sweet scent, just like it always does. Just like it had the first time, probably, even though he’d been far too fucking pigheaded to notice something as subtle as that at the time. He still is stubborn as shit, really, though, so that’s not fair to his past self. It’s just that he knows the signs, now.
Sure enough, the tickling sensation in his throat follows only seconds later. It’s pretty subtle too, in its way—it disguises itself as hay fever, or a mild cold, or anything really. He’d written this symptom off too, the first time, when it had developed over the span of weeks rather than seconds. Now that he knows better, it’s impossible to feel it as anything other than what it is—the inexplicable rush of fragrant petals creeping up his throat.
The cough starts next. Once upon a time, this had been a dry cough that lasted about a month before progressing further, as the love that would one day be the death of him had slowly crept in. Now what had taken months takes mere moments, and the hacking sensation in his chest translates directly to petals tumbling past his lips and onto the floor—individual ones at first, but followed all too quickly by whole blossoms that do remarkably little to muffle the sound of Ed’s knees hitting the floor.
He's never been able to stay upright for long when this happens, not when it feels like his chest is about to burst—whether from worry for Roy or from the damned plant that apparently still resides there, he can’t decide. He doesn’t bother trying to get up, or trying to move out of the hallway at all. He just wraps his arms around his own waist and tries to cling to what faint hope he can that maybe, just maybe, this is all some crazy office prank and any moment now a far warmer set of arms will wrap around his and—
“Ed!”
Ed jolts awake, sitting upright as his heart races and his chest heaves. He can’t breathe, he can’t breathe, the flowers are—
Nowhere to be found. He’s in a familiar bed, in a familiar room, without a petal in sight but with the sheets twisted around him in a way he supposes could’ve mimicked some of the tightness that came with an attack. It’s not that he can’t breathe, he realizes belatedly, it’s that he’s struggling to catch his breath like he’s just run across the city as the blind panic he’d felt in the dream slowly releases its hold on him.
A switch clicks across the room from him, and he flinches as the room is filled with the soft light of a bedside lamp and a familiar soft voice. “Ed. Whatever it was, it’s over now.”
Ed glances over, but can hardly even see the man he knows is just across the bed. The edges of his vision are grey, and his heart and lungs are still racing, and he still can’t—
A hand rests against his shoulder, thumb caressing along his collarbone. “Ed.”
Ed looks up into concerned dark eyes and then away. “You went missing,” he says. “I couldn’t…”
“You’re okay,” Roy replies. “I’m here.”
The dark-haired man stays across the bed, the hand on his shoulder the only point of contact between them. It’s a relief in its own way; they’d found out the hard way after the first of these dreams that if Roy embraces him too quickly, some primal part of his brain interprets the sensation as continued choking on blossoms and neither of them will get any more sleep. Instead, he waits, and eventually Ed leans against him to be immediately rewarded with long fingers slowly combing through his hair.
Ed sighs and shifts even closer. “It’s stupid and I hate this.”
Roy’s fingers don’t even pause for a moment. “I imagine it’s likely you’ll have fewer of these dreams in time. It’s only been seven months, after all, and with how rarely you’re in town I’d wager that part of you isn’t used to getting what you want just yet.”
Ed scoffs. “Who said anything about that?”
Roy just smiles into his hair, and Ed finally sighs. “Whatever. Fine. Don’t let it go to your head.”
It’s still pretty likely that Ed won’t sleep again for at least a few more hours, if not a few days. But as Roy drifts back to sleep beside him, he decides that doesn’t matter so much. He’s had plenty of sleepless nights, after all. This is one of the better ones, all things considered.