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“You know, I guess I always just assumed you would love these things. Guess I was wrong about that one.”
Roy spins around so fast he nearly spills his champagne. Thankfully, he doesn’t -- and his smile doesn’t slip even a little bit when he turns around and finds exactly who he was expecting. “Edward, what a pleasant surprise,” he says warmly, completely ignoring the comment about his enjoyment of the event. It’s true, in its own way, but neither Edward nor anyone else in earshot needs to know that. “I’ll admit, I didn’t think you were coming.”
Ed shrugs, and the way it makes the perfectly-tailored lines of his tuxedo shift and pull is mesmerizing in all the worst possible ways. Edward Elric is wearing a tuxedo, Roy realizes, and downs half of his glass in one swallow.
“I had to come see at least some of the glitz for myself,” Ed says, waving his hand like it’s nothing, like showing up more or less at random -- though he was of course invited, so he’s not quite a party crasher -- to the inaugural ball is nothing. “I was in the crowd earlier, too. I hate to admit it, but your speech was actually pretty good. Fuery write it?”
Edward watched him become Fuhrer and didn’t give him any warning or feel the need to so much as tell him he was in town until just now, Roy summarizes in his head, where they are surrounded by all the grace and finery of the Fuhrer’s mansion and a sea of people who are, for the most part, doing a very poor job of concealing the fact that they’re all hanging on every word of this exchange. “I wrote most of it myself, actually,” he says, and he’s fairly confident that Ed understands that he means he’s known exactly what he was going to say on this day since he was still standing on the battlefields of Ishval.
Ed confirms that with a snort and a roll of his eyes that almost, almost classifies as fond. Then something in his face shifts almost imperceptibly, at a cue or shift in the air that Roy manages to miss completely. “Say, you look like you could use a bit of a break,” he says, his tone neutral and pleasant and entirely uncharacteristic. Roy almost shudders; sometimes he really does wish Ed had taken some of the things he’d once tried to impress on him less to heart. “I don’t suppose there’s somewhere we could sit and chat for a while?”
Well. If anything could pique Roy’s interest beyond the level of Ed’s already unexpected appearance tonight, it was possibly that. “Of course,” he says smoothly. “I’d love to catch up. I’m sure I can be spared for a few minutes. Why don’t we retire to my office?”
Ed gives him a mocking half-bow, complete with a flourishing indication to lead the way, but he follows silently when Roy goes, slipping through the crowd behind him as a wolf might wind through the woods.
They both relax slightly as soon as they’re out of the ballroom, and more and more so as they get farther away and the corridors become noticeably less crowded with other people who have escaped for a breath of fresh air. Roy glances at Edward, striding along beside him like he belongs here -- like he belongs everywhere -- and can’t quite manage to start up the small talk on his own.
“So, did you come alone, or have you picked someone up since the last time I saw you?” Ed asks as they walk, and his facade of disinterest is almost, almost believable. Roy tries to tell himself he doesn’t understand the true nature of the question.
“Technically, I’m here with Colonel Hawkeye,” he responds, even as he places a guiding hand on Edward’s elbow for just a moment to indicate that they turn down a particular hallway. “She decided it was, in her words, ‘too damn depressing for you to attend stag, sir.’”
Ed laughs, a genuine, full-bodied laugh, and Roy sternly squashes down whatever it is in his stomach that does an entirely undignified little flip at the sound. “That sounds like her, all right. Meant to talk to her tonight too, but I spotted you first. You’re still taking her with you, right?”
“Edward,” Roy says very seriously, even as they finally draw to a stop in front of his office and he nods at the guard stationed at the door, who immediately goes to open it for them, “If you think I’m going to try even for a second to run this country without Riza Hawkeye in my immediate vicinity, you’re out of your goddamn mind.”
“Fair enough,” Ed says, with an odd quirk of his lips, and breezes into the office in front of him.
It’s not the same space Bradley had used, because Roy’s not too fond of sharing this thing with even the memory of him, and Grumman hadn’t been, either. It’s smaller, a bit less intimidating, but with the sense of power the room itself conveys not lessened at all, just. Softened, maybe, just enough to be human.
He turns to look at Ed, and finds him examining the room, expression halfway between amused and proud. “You really cleaned the place up,” he says, and Roy laughs a little.
“That was mostly Fuhrer Grumman,” he admits, rapping his knuckles absentmindedly on the backs of one of the ornate chairs. “He had much more of an eye for this kind of thing than I do. And, I think, he cared much more than I do. About whether the chairs match, at least.”
Ed snorts at that. “I would say you’re preaching to the choir, but instead I’ve gotta say yeah, right. You’re way pickier than you let on, asswipe.”
Roy just smiles at that, which is probably a sign all its own that this whole process has driven him crazy -- never, after all, let anyone tell you it will be easy to achieve your dreams. In his experience, it had usually entailed a whole hell of a lot of people telling him what to do, and the military, well -- for all their failings, they were still possibly at least more coherent than listening to parliament.
But here he is, standing in the Fuhrer’s office -- his office -- with Edward Elric, who has never done a thing in his life that didn’t one way or another push Roy to be better, and who’s looking everywhere but him, as though this office contains whatever secrets the world is still managing to withhold from him.
Then, out of nowhere: “It’s not like I hated you, you know.”
Roy’s stunned into silence; it’s all he can do to stare. Ed turns, mouth fixed in a grim line, and stares back at him, like he’s squaring up for something he doesn’t particularly want to do but feels bound to.
“I never hated you,” he repeats, voice tightly reined in. “That’s not why I -- fought you so much, when I was younger. And it’s certainly not why I quit.”
Roy clears his throat, torn between “I never thought it was” and “Then what the hell was it, Fullmetal?” and “You should have.” Whichever way his gut would have taken him, Ed doesn’t give him the chance.
He smiles, but it’s lopsided and falls far, far short of meeting his eyes. “I wanted you to be what I thought you were, because it was easier for me to parse, and you weren’t,” he says, his tone carefully blank in a way that Roy would never have thought his brash, vibrant, ill-tempered Fullmetal Alchemist could manage. “And I wanted to be what you thought I was, because I thought maybe that was the only way to keep myself from going nuts in the military, and I couldn’t.”
Roy licks his lips and swallows hard. “What did you think I was?” he asks, embarrassingly relieved at how neutral he manages to keep his own voice. If he went back in time twenty -- hell, even five years ago and told himself that one day he’d be fighting to keep his voice calmer than Edward Elric’s, he’d have laughed so hard he cried.
“I thought you were a lazy, self-interested asshole with more power and arrogance than fuckin’ anyone I’d ever met, including myself,” Ed snorts, and Roy can’t help it -- he feels a smirk tugging at his lips and releases an answering huff of laughter. Most of that, it turns out, he’d known -- it wasn’t as though Edward had ever been quiet about voicing what he saw as Roy’s flaws, especially come debriefing time. Still. It sounded like there was a “but” coming, and he had to admit that made him nervous.
“But I ended up figuring out you were way too noble for your own good a lot quicker than I would have liked,” Ed adds, confirming Roy’s suspicion and sending something in his stomach reeling all at once. “I dunno, it just -- not that I don’t think you still have flaws, Your Excellency Fuhrer Dickhead Bastard, Sir, but. Well, here we are, right?”
“Here we are,” Roy agrees, more a voiceless displacement of breath than anything.
“Which reminds me.” And then there’s something cold being pressed into his hands, unexpectedly -- though of course he knows what it is long before Edward adds, “I think I owe you some change, yeah?”
“You’re sure you want to give it back now?” Roy asks, honestly a little surprised, both at Edward and at himself, for the coil of disappointment that goes through him. The loan had always, after all, been at least some sort of promise that Edward would be, if nothing else, watching his life from the sidelines. Not to have even that seemed… bereft. Which was certainly a feeling he wasn’t entirely comfortable with acknowledging.
“And what did I want you to be, if you don’t mind me asking?” he manages, trying his best to believe the slight jab hides the way his hands are shaking. Of course -- naturally --- it’s this that gets to him. These months leading up to his inauguration have been among the most stressful in his life, and certainly since the Promised Day. He has been faced with almost nothing but questions of his character, of his past, of every sin he’s ever tried to hide, of all the things he most regrets. He has had every part of him drug out into public view, for interrogation and examination and deconstruction. And the thing that makes his hands shake is Edward Elric standing in his office looking at him like he knows far more of Roy than Roy will ever know of himself.
“You wanted me to be your equal,” he says simply. “Someone you could trust. Someone who saw the future the same way you did.”
Roy lets his eyes flutter shut, just for a moment. Just one long moment, because he finds he can’t quite bear to look Edward in the face. He takes a deep breath, opens his eyes, and says, “You were never my equal, Ed, you were my better. I thought we both knew that.”
Ed snorts. “At the time, I sure thought I knew that.” He spreads his arms wide, indicating the office around them, the lights of Central through the window, the sprawl of Amestris beyond. “But I think all this begs to differ.”
“Men don’t have to be great to hold this office,” Roy tells him quietly, with his own gesture towards the ground, where nothing has stirred for more than fifteen years. “You and I know that better than most. The best we can hope for is that we can use it to do some good.”
“Roy,” Edward says quietly, and Roy -- Roy flinches, because damn him, having him standing here half-lit by the moon through the window and the lamp on the desk, golden hair gleaming against the suit Roy knows he’s usually rather die than wear, eyes burning in that way they do when there’s something bottled up inside of him and screaming to get out -- that was bad enough, but now he says Roy, not bastard, not Mustang, but Roy, which has been rare enough in all this time they’ve known each other, in a voice that is, at least, nothing short of wrecked. “A great man makes the office great. And you’ve already done more good than most do in a lifetime.”
Roy cannot -- will not -- look at him. “Edward,” he says, with 520 cens clutched so tightly in one hand inside his pocket that they might leave bruises. “Why are you here?”
“I came to say congratulations,” Edward breaths, and kisses him.
It has been -- Roy has kept careful, obsessive count -- nearly twenty years to the day that they’ve known each other. In all that time he has allowed himself once -- once -- to think of kissing Edward Elric, to dream the sounds he might make or the way he might press forward. That one fantasy is not even a pale imitation of the truth.
Roy had been picturing a wildfire when he should have imagined an earthquake, his own biases leaving him completely unprepared for reality. His fantasy Edward had been untamable, burning him at the touch with a heat like the core of a sun, bright light shining from every plane of him. In reality Ed does not burn; he demands, firm and immovable and sure, and it is Roy who buffets against him, flaring around him and seeking purchase. But Ed shakes him to his core, and in the moment before he shuts his eyes he thinks, Please let us both survive this.
There are sharp teeth at his bottom lip and insistent hands at the collar of his dress uniform, and Roy tilts his head and parts his lips and marvels at the slick press of Ed’s tongue against his own. He scarcely dares breathe, but he does slowly lift his hands to bracket Ed in reverence, one at his waist, one at his jaw.
They come apart with a soft, wet sound, and it isn’t until then that he realizes that the rumble he can feel where their chests are pressed together, the points of contact like sparks of flame all their own, is Ed’s low moan. Twenty years, he thinks dazedly, and says, “Your congratulations are most appreciated.”
Ed doesn’t dignify that with a response, just studies him carefully, clearly trying to decide whether or not Roy’s freaking out and his bolt reflex is just a little slow to activate. Finally, finally, he glances down and says levelly, “Consider that payback for that suit you wore to Al’s wedding.”
“Payback?”
Ed just glares at him. “No one should end up with a hard-on at their baby brother’s wedding.”
Roy blinks, then laughs; that certainly explained why Ed had been glowering at him from across the room the entire time. Roy had mostly assumed he was just glowering at everyone over the prospect of his little brother finally leaving the nest. He lets the warm, glowing feeling settle in his stomach for as long as he reasonably can, then slowly pulls away from where Ed is still firmly within his personal space, moves his hands from where they’re still pressed against Ed’s skin and tries to figure out what else to do with them. “We should probably get back,” he murmurs.
“Yeah.” A sigh, and then he knocks his fist against Roy’s chest, not quite gently but not nearly as hard as Roy would have expected, honestly.
They make their way to the door in silence, falling into step with one another with an ease that honestly makes Roy’s breath come a little faster. The guards nod at them again on their way out, and Roy shuts the door behind him with a soft snick and turns to follow the swish of Ed’s ponytail back down the hall.
“Say, your excellence,” Ed says slyly, slipping his hand into the crook of Roy’s extended elbow. “I don’t suppose I could interest you in a dance? This is your big shindig, after all.”
Roy looks down at him, feels something in his chest give way, and smiles. “I would be honored.”