Chapter Text
Edward Elric is made of the most precious metal of all.
Golden eyes, golden hair, golden skin.
Roy’s addicted to looking at him; has been ever since they parted ways shortly after the Promised Day so Ed could take Al home to Resembool to allow them both to recover from their injuries and ill health.
They don’t see each other for a whole three years after that, but they keep up contact through letters and the occasional phone call. Ed’s calmed down since returning his brother to his real body, and they’re finally able to form something akin to a real friendship. There’s a lot of history weighing down their relationship, but Roy likes to think that they’ve moved past it.
When Ed makes it to Creta, their communication becomes even more sporadic. Every so often a letter from Ed makes it to his desk at work (because if there’s one thing Ed will never forget, it’s how to address a letter to any of the command centres), but Roy struggles to send letters back because Ed’s always on the move.
Eventually he gets an address to the hotel in Chania, Creta’s capital, and the first letter he sends is almost long enough to qualify as a research paper. It doesn’t contain much alchemy, but it’s written over the course of a week and the poor envelope is fit to burst with the amount of paper he’s stuffed into it (even taking the care to write on the thinnest paper he’s found). After a year of being unable to write Ed back, he has so much to catch up on.
He keeps trying to update Ed from then on, the small events rather than anything that forms the big picture, because he rather thinks that Ed, who is the most opinionated apolitical person he’s ever met, has had enough of politics in his short, but illustrious, life. So instead he writes about his neighbour having her first child, about the cat that always uses his outdoor potted plants as litter boxes, about the gradually increasing quality of mess hall food.
Slowly but surely, Roy finds himself falling for the version of Ed that’s presented in long, rambly letters. He’s nineteen now, more of a man than the kid he never was. And this version of Ed, the one that is more passion than anger, is enticing to Roy in a way few others have been. He can’t say for sure that it’s reciprocated, because for all that Roy thinks himself good at reading other people, he’s never actually been particularly good with romance.
When Ed returns to Amestris on the third anniversary of the Promised Day, he goes directly to Resembool to have his automail leg checked up on. Roy knows from Ed’s letters, and from a short phone call in-between trains in West City, that it’s held up remarkably well now that he’s not trying to save the world twice a week, but that even the most well-looked-after automail needs a check-up by a mechanic every so often. He doesn’t pretend to know automail politics all that well, but even a novice such as he knows that it’s a declaration of war to go to a different mechanic than your own, with the exception of it being a life-threatening situation.
With Ed back in Amestris, the return to twice-weekly phone calls is seamless.
Something deep inside Roy settles knowing that Ed is safe and sound back on Amestrian soil.
Roy doesn’t know what he expected Ed to look like after three years away, two of those on the move. But it isn’t exactly this.
“Colonel asshat!” Ed greets, standing in the outer office, suitcase in hand like he’s just come from the train station. Knowing Ed, he probably had.
“It’s Brigadier General now, Fullmetal,” Roy finds himself saying on autopilot, because with this Ed standing in his office, there may just be a benevolent god looking down on them all.
Ed’s all grown up now.
Logically, Roy had known this, had had this realisation months ago already. But some part of him had failed to account for this also meaning physically.
Ed’s taller now, no longer weighed down by the automail arm and port, and he’s not even wearing platform boots to boost his height. He’s dressed like an adult, less screaming colours and leather, instead looking like he took a page out of Roy’s book. Admittedly it’s with his own touch, because the coat is definitely still leather (smart, with it being water resistant). But apart from that — Ed looks like a whole new person.
He’s gorgeous.
When Ed turns to say something to Kain, Roy sees it.
There, glinting in Ed’s ears, is piercing after piercing, each of them a stellar, beautiful silver colour, some of them inlaid with amber or diamond gems. He doesn’t know the name of each of the piercings, even though his sister Iris has tried to get it to stick in his mind every time she got a new one, but there are rings and studs and a whole needle-looking contraption going through the ear.
He doesn’t know if it’s the same on the other ear, but it’s so beautiful Roy almost feels short of breath.
It’s right for Ed in the same way that the leather and screaming colours of his youth had been. Just as right as the bright-as-the-sun smile on his face as he talks with Vato about the Cretan language.
“You’ve finally grown taller than just to my chin. I’m impressed,” Roy says, because if he doesn’t start talking he’ll end up blurting out something stupid. “One would have thought it impossible, but here you’ve gone and done it.”
“Oh shut up,” Ed says, but he’s grinning. “Doing the impossible’s kinda my trademark at this point, isn’t it?”
“Of course, of course,” Roy says. “So, looking to rejoin the military?”
“In your dreams maybe.” Ed’s tone is warm. “I’ve got a job at the university, ‘n I’m starting in three weeks. It’s mostly research, but I’ll probably have to work a bit with the kids, too.”
“The kids are your age, aren’t they?” Heymans asks. “You make yourself sound way older than you actually are, kid.”
Ed waves a hand around. “Maybe so. But I’ve been out of school a whole lot longer than any of them. And I joined the workforce at twelve. Putting me in the same group as them is just stupid.”
“You never finished first grade,” Roy can’t help but point out. “If I hadn’t vouched for you, the military would have forced you to take a basic skills test beyond the state alchemy test.”
He knows that Ed’s been reading since he was three and a half; had heard him talk about it with that mechanic friend of his a handful of years ago, before the conspiracy had become known to all of them. Roy had also been a good reader when he was young, and he knows that Riza was too, but Ed can run circles around all of them and not even sweat about it.
“I’d like to think I’d get an exception for, y’know, my mum kicking the bucket,” Ed says, and in the years he’s been gone it looks like he’s finally had the time to sit down and process some stuff. “’Sides, it’s not my fault that the schoolhouse couldn’t cope with three geniuses at once.”
“And no one could tutor you?” Kain asks.
Ed turns to Kain to answer his question, and the incandescent light glints off his piercings.
It really is unfair that Ed’s put his hair up in a bun, showing off everything, including his neck. It’s like he woke up and chose violence, the victim of which being Roy’s sanity. Distantly Roy picks up something along the lines of there only being so many people in Resembool able to teach kids in the first place, what with the rest of them being invested in the shepherding industry. He really is far too fixated on the way that Ed looks now.
Roy thinks himself a man with great self-control— would never have made it as far in the military if he hadn’t —but Ed’s tempting in a way that few others have ever been.
And as he watches Ed talk with the members of Roy’s team, of Ed’s old team, he finds that he has to know if Ed might possibly reciprocate his emotions.
When Ed turns back to him, a question on his lips, Roy despairs.
As it turns out, Ed had come to the office to ask Roy if he could crash at his place for a week, just until the lease on his university-sponsored housing started. He has the money for a hotel, sure, but Roy gets it. A hotel is cold and impersonal, and why would you suffer with that when a friend is more than willing to put you up?
Roy distantly recalls offering it in one of the many letters he’d written Ed, that Ed would always have a place to stay with him should he ever find himself in Central. He knows that Ed always has a home with Gracia Hughes, but with how sporadic the trains between West City and Central have been since part of the railway washed out in the spring, he can imagine Ed not wanting to randomly show up at her doorstep.
“Make yourself at home,” Roy says. “You’ve been here before, I know you have.”
“Yeah,” Ed agrees. “I wanted to say sorry for that, by the way. I didn’t mean to raid your stash of chalk.”
“You most certainly did,” Roy says. “You were incorrigible when you were younger. I’m glad to see that some of Alphonse has finally rubbed off on you. Would it have hurt you to go buy chalk in one of the many stationery stores that Central has to offer?”
“You see—” Ed starts, bending down at the waist to take his shoes off. They’re a polished leather now, solid black, and wouldn’t look out of place in Roy’s own shoe cabinet. The casual display of flexibility just does something to him. “—I did check almost every store in Central but they didn’t have the right brand. It was before Al realised that he could do circle-less transmutations, and I knew you kept a stash of it, since you gave me that first pack as a gift when I passed my exam.”
“So you broke into my house to get my chalk,” Roy says, nodding along sarcastically. “Of course, that makes perfect sense.”
“I’m so glad you agree,” Ed says. “Can I put my coat in your closet or do you, like, have a place for guest coats?”
“Wardrobe’s more than sufficient,” Roy says, stepping out of his own boots. “Since you’ve been here before, with permission or not, I’m sure you can find your way to the bathroom to take a shower, since I assume you haven’t had one since you left Resembool. You look like you’ve been on a train for two days.”
“Feel like it too,” Ed says, cracking out his back like it’ll prove a point. “The delay from East City was almost seven hours, can you believe it?”
“Considering they’re still renewing the railway, and can currently only accept trains in one direction at a time, yes, I can in fact believe it. It’s rather unfortunate that both the connections to East and West City are currently impacted,” Roy says. “Off to the shower with you, I’ll make us dinner.”
“If this is your idea of flirting, people need to start better rumours about you,” Ed says. “Isn’t it supposed to be dinner first?”
But he vanishes up the stairs before Roy has the chance to begin considering a response, leaving him standing there in the hallway like an idiot. He can’t believe Ed just said that.
It takes him almost an embarrassingly long time to come back to the present. Roy hasn’t felt so out of sorts since he’d met Maes at the Academy and fallen for him painfully fast. His descent into madness where it comes Ed has been far more gradual, but no less intense. Like with Maes, for the two years that their romance had lasted (before Ishval, Ishval had changed everything), it’s a comfortable thing, being in love with Ed.
This thought carries him into the kitchen, where he takes to chopping potatoes, carrots and onions to make a simple stew. He doesn’t have any meat on hand, but he does have that block of tofu that one of the Madam’s girls had brought by the other day. He’s had their vegetarian stew a couple times, so Roy tries to go for that. In Ezra’s stew it had been pan-fried, but it’s past eight in the evening and Roy wants to save himself as much work as he possibly can. It can boil like the rest of the ingredients.
The rice is washed and quickly set to boil. It’s a longer grain than he usually buys, but it had been all that had been available at the market the Sunday before, and so he’d gone with it. Rice serves as a good base for most meals, and can be cooked in advance, saving him some work every other night of the week.
The food’s a little odd, with the meat replacement and the unusual rice, but considering that he also has a dinner guest that he hasn’t seen in over three years, it almost feels fitting.
Just as he’s plating the food, Ed comes back downstairs, dressed in lounge wear likely scavenged out of his suitcase. His bare feet patter on the hardwood floors of Roy’s hallway and kitchen, one soft and fleshy, the other hard metal. Despite one of his legs being automail, Ed’s mastered the art of being relatively quiet.
“Smells good,” Ed announces. “Didn’t know you could cook.”
“Maes taught me when we were on break from the Academy,” Roy says. He can’t help the soft smile that appears on his face. “He always loved cooking, in every form. I only knew the potluck style of meal from my childhood, and he opened my eyes to the idea of a cohesive dinner. Most of the recipes in my personal collection are variations of his, accounting for my own personal tastes.”
“I always thought it was Gracia that cooked,” Ed says thoughtfully. “But you’re right, I did notice a difference when, well…”
“You can say it,” Roy says. “He’s dead. He’d want people to be frank about it.”
“It’s his stew recipe, then?” Ed asks, standing behind one of the chairs. “I think I had it once, when I first met him. For my birthday, I think. It was curry and then one of Gracia’s apple pies. She managed to balance candles in it for me. It was the first time I had a proper birthday cake just for me since mum died.”
“It’s more my recipe at this point,” Roy says, trying to bring the mood back up. “You might like it. It doesn’t have any meat in it, but I don’t think that detracts from it.”
“Eh, now that I’m not sustaining Al anymore, I don’t need to eat meat to fulfil my protein requirements,” Ed says easily. “Can I sit, or do you, like, need any help?”
“Please feel free to sit. You’re a guest after all.” Roy reaches into the cupboard above the sink and pulls out two glasses. “Would you like water or juice? I might also have beer in the ice box if that’s something you drink now.”
“Water’s more than fine,” Ed says. “I do drink. Not a lot, but I can appreciate a good beer. The stuff you used to drink though? Brandy and whiskey and that stuff? That shit’s nasty. I tried it once, and never again.”
“Remind me to take you to visit my aunt once,” Roy tells him. “Those harder liquors make wonderful cocktails, if you can’t handle the taste of it on its own.”
He places the glass of water in front of Ed along with some cutlery. “Feel free to dig in. You’ve been travelling all day. You must be starving.”
“Yeah,” Ed agrees, picking up the spoon to get a bit of the curry onto it. “I did buy a boxed lunch in East City to have on the train, but then I was stuck on the train itself for seven hours and they didn’t have anyone come through selling food for all of that time. Is that just a Western custom?”
The conversation flows seamlessly from there, discussing all matter of things. Roy’s grateful that Ed’s less uptight than he had been when he’d been under him in the military. He rather likes this Ed, and it’s no wonder to him that he’d fallen for him over the course of writing letters to him. It’s an easy kind of love to be in, all things considered.
Eventually, though, Ed seems to be growing tired. He’s been travelling all day and Roy knows that train travel has never been easy on his body. It’s better now that he only has one automail limb, but Roy understands the stress of it. It’s a two-day trip from Resembool to Central, with one night staying in an East City hotel, and Ed’s got an automail port that must be jostling around something awful with the unsteady movement of the train.
“I just have to put some put sheets on the bedding in the guest room, and then you’re free to retire for the night,” Roy tells him, picking up the dishes and depositing them in the sink. He’ll have to do the dishes later, after Ed’s asleep. It’s something he’s done religiously for years, not leaving any dishes in the sink, lest they all pile up and leave it an uncontrollable, overwhelming mess.
“You don’t gotta go to the stress of that,” Ed says immediately. “Blanket on the couch is more than sufficient.”
Roy levels him with a stare. “I do employ the bare minimum of hospitality in my own home,” he says evenly. “I have that guest bedroom for a reason, and you’re staying here long enough to be deserving of something like your own space. It would be cruel of me to expect you to sleep on my frankly terrible couch.”
His guest room’s not as nice as the Hughes’, where he’d stayed for three weeks while looking for a place to rent upon his return to Central, but it serves its purpose. It’s more his study with a day bed tucked underneath the window that looks upon the small communal garden behind his home. Ed might just find it comforting, what with all of the books that fill the bookshelves.
In total it takes him less than five minutes to dress the bed with sheets pulled from the linen closet. They’re the darkest colour he could find, because Roy remembers an off-handed comment from Ed years ago, where he’d talked about the unending oil stains that come with wearing automail. He doesn’t want to inconvenience Ed by making him fear stains on pristine white sheets.
“You’re really efficient,” Ed says. “I never got the skill down. Winry, though, she’s a beast. I swear she learnt how to do it with surgical precision before she could write her name.”
“I’m uncertain of how much I’ve told you about my childhood,” Roy says, fluffing up the pillows and placing a couple more blankets on the desk chair in case Ed gets chilly throughout the night or needs a bit more comfort than just the duvet can provide, “but I was raised in a brothel by my aunt. As you can imagine, we went through a fair bit of laundry to keep everything hygienic.”
“Yeah, that’d do it,” Ed says. “Don’t imagine they made you change the laundry between … what do you even call the people that came by? Victims?”
“ʻClients’, typically.” Roy can’t help the small chuckle that escapes him at Ed’s choice of words. “Sometimes, if one of my sisters needed a bit of help in-between clients I would come in to help. I was already older at that point though, and able to consent to actually doing it. It wasn’t something I minded doing. I wanted to be helpful, at that age.”
“You? Helpful?” Ed says, finally throwing himself down on the day bed, effectively ruining Roy’s handiwork. What an incredibly Ed-like thing to do. “I can’t imagine you as a teenager. ‘S far as I’m concerned, you popped out a twenty-nine year old asshole with a full black book.”
“I admit I was quite different,” Roy confesses. There aren’t many people that knew him at the time who he’s still in contact with. His aunt, the girls, Riza … Maes. “Less sure of myself, that’s for certain. I’m sure Riza would be able to tell you that I had more than one identity crisis at the time, especially as I learnt more and more about alchemy.”
He’s not sure why it’s so easy to tell Ed about all of this. Roy trusts Ed with his life, has been entirely sure of this since Ed finally discovered the truth of the philosopher’s stone and started unravelling the conspiracy holding their entire nation together. And this Ed, who has calmed down significantly from his younger teenage years — he’s as easy to talk to as Maes was.
They’re not the same, by far not. They’re entirely different people, both in temperament and personality, but they have that same vibe about them. Roy’s not sure how much of Maes had rubbed off on Ed, what with all the time Ed spent at the Hughes’ place throughout the years, enjoying the ability to have something akin to family life instead of spending the night in the cold, unwelcoming military dorms.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Ed declares, stifling a yawn behind his hand. “I’m shot.”
“I’ll leave you to sleep,” Roy promises. “I have to work in the morning, but you’re free to whatever food is in the kitchen when you wake up. There’s a spare key in the dish on the shoe cabinet, so you don’t have to stay here all day or wait for me to come home. You’re not a prisoner here.”
Ed nods and leans down to pull off his socks. “Thanks again. You really didn’t have to. I didn’t expect you to accept when I actually asked you.”
Roy looks down at Ed’s feet and notes how similar they actually look, despite one of them being metal and the other flesh. It’s clear that Ed’s mechanic, Ms Rockbell, has taken exceeding care to model the leg after Ed’s actual foot. There are obvious differences, but the sizes are exact, and the circumferences of the actual calf has to be pretty much an exact one to one match.
He quickly looks away, because whether he’s in love or not, it’s weird to stare at someone else’s feet without permission. To Roy, it feels pretty weird to stare even with consent.
“It’s no issue at all, Edward,” Roy says, entirely honest.
Ed looks down at the floor, then seems to come to a decision with himself and looks up again, precious golden eyes meeting Roy’s. “You can call me Ed. We’re friends, right?”
Roy looks back and nods, the action somehow meaningful. “Yes. I’d like to think that we are.”