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Roy’s waiting by the phone and listening to the rain. Is that pathetic?
He knows the answer to that. He knows a lot of things now that he wishes he didn’t.
He knows that this could never have been easy, but that he hasn’t made it any easier. He knows that he’s lost so many, so much, that when the shadow of heartbreak starts to spread, he clings too tight. He knows that this is precisely why fraternization is illegal; he knows that even for the decent and the decorous and the well-intentioned, impartiality is a myth.
He knows that this will come down to a choice—not his; not both of theirs; he knows he doesn’t have the right. He knows that Ed and Ed alone will have to decide: between the position that has sustained him all this time, that has afforded him his purpose and his power and a home… and the fledgling beating fragile wings in rhythm with the synchronized stuttering of their respective hearts.
Roy knows that he’s a fool—knows he’s failed; knows he’s hopeless. If it was up to him, he’d choose the feathers every time, because the way that bird sings when their skin meets makes him so damn weak—
He draws a breath, and eyes the whiskey bottle on the mantelpiece, and considers putting a fire behind the grate underneath it. But it’s five minutes to eight, and he doesn’t want to turn his back on the phone, and somehow the sound of the rain is more soothing than the fire would be.
It started with a coincidence. He supposes, when you get down to it, all things technically do.
He’d been planning to take Vanessa to the theater to catch up on her quadrant of the network—and, of course, her life, since she could spin a story like no one else he’d ever met. They’d both learned that particular art at Madame Christmas’s unrivaled knee, and he had to confess that he favored meetings with Vanessa with just a touch more frequency and just a smudge more eagerness than any of his other liaisons. He was only human, after all; and business as usual with Vanessa was simply much more fun.
But on that evening, she called ten minutes before five to cancel—which left him with two tickets to what was purportedly a spectacular performance at the city’s most celebrated venue, and the prospect of a rather barren night at home. It wouldn’t do to go alone—his reputation couldn’t harbor much more tarnish; and if left unattended, he’d probably drink too much at intermission to be capable of driving home.
He’d stepped out into the rest of the office with the tickets fanned out between his fingers before anyone could edge out the door and escape for the weekend. Falman and Breda looked up guiltily from a report that bore a suspicious resemblance to the newspaper crossword; Fuery squinted trying to read the lettering on the little slips in Roy’s hand; Riza raised an eyebrow; Havoc made a noise of faint alarm.
Ed’s head turned, and his eyes flicked up and down, as though the entirety of Roy’s being—not a pair of theater tickets—was the item on display. He’d tilted his chair back on two legs, just far enough to tempt intervention while gravity kept him suspended. His feet were up on the table, legs crossed at the ankle, which left his cavalry skirt draped far enough from them where it trailed down the chair that you could almost make out the contours of his ass. The adoption of the uniform was a blight in exactly as many ways as it was a blessing, when it came to Ed.
“One of you has to take these,” Roy said. “That’s an order.”
“Why?” Havoc asked, pushing his chair back from the table slowly, as if no one would notice him making a break for it as long as he kept the sudden movements to a minimum. “Is it a bad play?”
“I don’t go to bad plays,” Roy said. “But I don’t go to good plays alone, and my plus-one just subtracted herself.”
And he’d always been driven, hadn’t he, by the compulsion to put his hand into the center of every fire within reach?
He held them out to Ed. “You could do with some culture, Fullmetal. Take Alphonse with you.”
The less-argumentative but equally illustrious Elric brother was, Roy knew, still recuperating in their new apartment on the far side of Central City Park. Alphonse spent much of his time luxuriating in the sunlight in front of their broad bay window, and the rest of it writing out lightly-edited, transparently ‘fictional’ accounts of their escapades, which were in higher demand than any other newspaper serial in the history of the Central Times.
Ed eyed the tickets for a long moment, then—with an abruptness that made Roy’s stomach simultaneously seize and drop—kicked his feet off of the table so that his chair rocked forward, and the front two legs of it slammed back down on the floor. Roy did not need to pry his gaze away from this somewhat overstated display of insubordinate nonchalance to know that Riza was gritting her teeth.
Ed raised his left hand and plucked the tickets out of Roy’s without letting their fingers touch, and then he scrutinized them with the same forehead-furrowed intensity that he applied to everything of any interest.
“Starts at eight,” he said, sounding detectably disappointed. “Al’s usually passed out by nine.”
Roy folded his arms across his chest so that it was impossible to hand them back. “Take your girlfriend.”
Ed’s eyes narrowed, but he’d gained enough control of his temper over the years not to crumple the tickets in his fist. “I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“That’s easy to fix,” Roy said, keeping his voice light, as he started back towards his desk to pack up the dismayingly sizable stack of reports he still needed to read. “Stop by the switchboard on your way out and ask for a volunteer. Problem solved.”
Ed’s chair scraped on the floor, and then his boots scuffed on it, and Roy did not turn around. The footfalls stopped just inside the doorway.
“I don’t want one,” Ed said. “A girlfriend. And if you think I’m stupid enough not to know you missed your calling in theater and love every damn minute of that stuff, think again.”
Roy lifted a few piles of papers in succession; he’d buried his favorite pen again. He was not going to think too much about the first thing Ed had said. “Are you calling me melodramatic, or a liar?”
“Both,” Ed said. A pause—a careful little silence. “So why don’t you cut the crap, and we can go see the stupid play together.”
Roy waited two heartbeats before he turned with one eyebrow neatly arched.
Ed’s mouth was in a thin line, and his jaw was set, and there was a faint pink stain riding each cheekbone and rising towards his ears.
Roy kept his voice completely neutral. “Are you asking me out on a date?”
“I’m asking you not to waste your stupid tickets,” Ed said. “Isn’t that what you want?”
Roy had drawn careful little boundaries about what he wanted—so many that they had started to look like an array. And then he’d built them into fences, and cages, and walls, because what he wanted was irrelevant to what the world needed from him, and he could not afford to let what he wanted wriggle out into the open and run free.
It wouldn’t have been the first time that Ed had put his fist straight through a barricade. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d curled five steel fingers around Roy’s heart and heedlessly squeezed.
And it wouldn’t be the last.
“Shall I pick you up a quarter after seven?” Roy asked. “Or would you like to have dinner first?”
“Al cooks on Fridays,” Ed said. “Gotta be there for that. A little after seven’s fine.”
The less like a date it was, the more hope Roy had of getting through it with his psyche more or less intact.
“Excellent,” he said.
Fortunately, unfortunately—both of those words were meaningless, based in subjectivity and perspective. The bottom line was that ‘excellent’ was an understatement, and there were pearlescent bubbles swirling through Roy’s chest well before they went from the theater to a pub half a mile from his house; well before he let the second and the third and the fourth glass of wine drown his better judgment and buoy all the things that shouldn’t have been said. Ed was drinking, too—a print of his lower lip on the rim of a pint glass; he kept wrinkling his nose up right before he laughed—
Roy caught his sleeve—a white shirt, with a line of tiny buttons that didn’t run high enough to hide his collarbones from Roy’s hungry eyes and starving imagination; he’d worn a waistcoat and tight slacks, and how could he not know—?
Roy leaned in too close, and the alcohol had silenced all of the alarms; he breathed thoughts he never should have harbored, let alone given voice.
You’re so beautiful in this light; you’re so beautiful in every light; you’re so beautiful all the time that some days I can’t bear to look at you, but I never want to stop—
And Ed whispered You’re a fucking liar and fisted the steel hand in his hair to kiss him.
It’s been delicate but undeniable since then—just a scattering of weeks; it feels like forever and like yesterday. He’s realized, in the interim, after significant amounts of staring at the wall in various and sundry locations, that he hadn’t been taking advantage that night: Ed, who had had more of his mental faculties at his command than Roy by that point, had known exactly what he wanted and been hell-bent on getting it all along. It’s gone on that way. Ed is driving this—Ed is in the lead. Roy offers, yes; sometimes he nudges at the wheel to help to steer, but mostly…
Mostly he has sensed from the beginning that if he tries to curl his fingers in around it, Ed will break and run. And securing something stabler isn’t worth the possibility of losing what he has.
What he has is good—is wonderful. It doesn’t have a name, or a definition; it doesn’t have a schedule, or a procedure, or a face in public where it could drag him directly into pits of mud he’d never shake. It doesn’t have much of anything concrete.
What it does have is a lot of nights that Ed turns up on his doorstep—sometimes just for food, sometimes just to fight, sometimes just to raid his library and drop onto his couch with a selection of his books and remain insensible to distraction for several hours at a stretch.
Sometimes Ed comes to talk. Sometimes he talks for hours—haltingly at first, and then the words pour out of him like a fountain overflowing. Sometimes he talks about the things he’s most afraid of, and the things he’s never done—the things he’s never dared to ask for no matter how ferociously he wanted them, because the instant that the universe hears that he’s invested, it’ll all get dashed to bits. Sometimes he talks about how terrified he is that Al won’t need him anymore as soon as all the atrophied muscles are set to rights—that in fulfilling his own lifelong goal, he’s made himself obsolete to the most important person in his life. Sometimes he talks about how the charitable things that people say to him don’t register anymore—how the compliments roll off; how moments that should inflate with pride just sort of whisk on by, and sometimes there’s a bitterness on the back of his tongue. Sometimes he talks about the bone-deep, deadening certainty that he doesn’t really matter anymore.
On those nights, Roy opens his arms and says I know, I know, I know, believe me and I think you matter more than anyone I’ve ever met. I’d be delighted to keep saying it until you hear it someday.
Other nights, Ed prowls in with a grin like the most sublime damnation, eyes aflame, and starts shedding clothing in the entryway.
Roy rather likes those nights. The others are important, but those are simpler. That’s a language he’s fluent in and a battle neither of them has to lose.
But even the complicated nights aren’t the problem.
The problem is the days.
The problem is the things that happen in between, and the narrow silver chains that they’re beholden to.
He couldn’t avoid sending Ed to Riedd—not without drawing attention; not without raising suspicion; not without having to wonder who he was protecting, and what was at stake. Not without putting Amestrian citizens at risk for his personal benefit, to help himself sleep a little better for a couple nights. They needed Ed—more than he did, very likely; certainly more than he needed Ed right now. More than he needed Ed to be safe just so that he didn’t have to field a week of nightmares.
But he could avoid sending Ed to Riedd dressed like he was begging to be shot.
“I thought you’d retired that,” he said when Ed sauntered in for the train tickets wearing that same old blood-red coat.
“Mostly,” Ed said, completely unconcerned. He came to the desk; held his left hand out— “Dug it out of the closet for old times’ sake.” He clenched and unclenched his fingers, realized no tickets were forthcoming, and tugged on his lapels instead. “Figured it’d remind me how this gig works. Muscle memory. You know.”
“What I know,” Roy said, “is that you’d be going out there with a target on your back.”
Ed bared his teeth, and Roy missed the days when that reaction only fired up his adrenaline in anticipation of a shouting match. It was much more difficult to walk this tightrope when righteous fury lay on one side, and a startlingly intense desire to bend Ed over his desk and fuck him lovingly awaited on the other.
“You think the blues are any better?” Ed asked, gesturing sharply, as if Roy had forgotten the persona that he’d fastened on this morning. “Shit like this—when you have to ask questions, you have to get to the root of it—people don’t trust the military. They’ve already talked to the cops. This way, they know that even though I’m carrying a watch, I’m different. And they know I’m not about to turn them in if I find out that maybe they stretched the truth a little bit before.”
Roy took slow, measured breaths and let them out levelly. “You don’t need allies,” he said. “You need authority. You can’t afford to be this memorable—or this damn obvious in someone’s crosshairs. You can’t—”
“Mustang,” Ed said, with the snarl unfurling underneath it, and Roy’s spine tightened; “you can tell me where to go, and you can tell me what to do, and you can tell me when to roll over and when to play dead. I’ll follow your goddamn orders. I’ll pretend I like to be your stupid dog to get things done.” His lip curled; his eyes had narrowed down to gleaming gold-sparked slits— “But you can’t fucking tell me what to wear. You don’t fucking own me.” The right hand clenched into a fist; the left shoved out towards Roy’s desk, palm held open. “Are you gonna put me on that train, or are you gonna fire my ass right now?”
There were a lot of other things that Roy would rather do with it instead.
He picked up the tickets and extended them over the desk.
The instant Ed reached for them, however, he snatched them back.
“Things are different now,” he said. “I know you know that, but I want you to be thinking about it. I want you to remember. We no longer have your brother, who made a spectacularly useful free employee, acting as your bodyguard. And you no longer have the element of surprise, because more people within this organization as well as out there are aware that you are a threat. There is more at stake. There is more to lose, and there is more to fear.”
“Anything that takes damage doesn’t scare me,” Ed said, wriggling his fingers for the tickets. “If you can stop it with a bullet, I can handle it.”
“This is a different game,” Roy said. “Don’t forget that. Don’t ever turn your back.” He stretched the tickets out again, and he let Ed yank them from his grip this time. “I expect a report at twenty hundred hours every night.”
Ed had zeroed in on the times marked on the tickets, but he glanced up long enough to make a face. “Jeez, R—”
Roy’s expression caught him. He swallowed, scowled, and huffed out a breath.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“Thank you, Major,” Roy said. “Dismissed.”
Ed’s jaw worked, but apparently none of the smartass remarks he was considering were quite good enough to spit back at this point in the conversation. He went to the trouble of saluting—though not especially cleanly—before he spun on his heel and started for the door.
“Ed,” Roy said as the steel hand wrapped around the doorknob.
Ed turned, and the golden ponytail whipped, and an amber eye fixed on Roy.
He allowed himself one little smile. “Be careful.”
Ed’s whole face changed as he smiled back—somehow the grin was sharper than ever, but the rest of his features softened around it.
“C’mon,” he said. “‘Careful’ is my middle name.”
“And I was born yesterday,” Roy said. “Call at eight.”
“You gonna be home by then?” Ed asked.
“I will if I know you’ll be calling,” Roy said.
“Damn,” Ed said, and the grin slanted into smirk territory, and Roy wished this boy had never conquered that place. “You boxed me in. Now I have to make reports so that you’ll leave your stupid paperwork long enough to sleep.”
Roy arced an eyebrow right back. “They don’t pay me to strategize for nothing.”
Ed rolled his eyes, and then he stepped out and shut the door—gently, by his standards.
And that was that.
The first few nights, the telephone in the front hall rang two, three, four and a half minutes after eight. The first night, Ed told him in great detail about how the trains were shit, then parted with a cheerful salutation right at eight thirty because he had to “call Al pretty much right now, ’bye!” The second night, Ed told him in great detail about how all of the locals were extremely irritable, which was definitely because of the weather, since it had nothing whatsoever to do with his winning personality. The third night, Ed told him in great detail about how the hotel was falling apart more by the minute, but he’d done some repairs, and they’d tried to pay him, but of course that was ridiculous, and he was going to do some more tomorrow, and funnily enough they seemed to like him better now.
Last night, he called ten minutes early, and Roy had barely made it halfway through a greeting before he said “Look, I’m—I got in pretty deep today, but… people know people in this part of town. I don’t wanna say too much. I’ll just… Just trust me, okay?”
Tonight, Roy leans his head back until he’s gazing at the ceiling so that he can’t watch the clock.
He can still hear it over the rain.
He revisits an extremely pleasant memory from just two weeks past—Ed appeared from the night, as he so often insists on doing even though people have these perfectly useful things called cars and doorbells both; they were both too tired for any sort of energetic extracurriculars, but they made up the difference with some very languid, very lovely foreplay for its own sake; and somehow it ended with them tangled up together underneath the comforter, and Ed rambled about lesser-known alchemic symbols and traced two dozen of them on Roy’s bare chest with a cool steel fingertip, and…
Roy glances at the clock face.
Eight fifteen.
He presses his knuckles into his eyes. He won’t stare over at the phone; that’s ridiculous. And despite the fact that there is clearly more confirmation bias than actual correlation implicated in the idiom about the watched pot, it could still be posited that a watched telephone will not ring on the grounds that it’s ornery and derives immense mechanical schadenfreude from the way you startle when it trills in the silence.
He can remember exactly sixteen of the glyphs Ed’s finger outlined on his skin. For ten of those, he retained the specific meaning, and their implications within the context of a few different types of arrays. If all of his education had consisted of beautiful blond lovers spelling the lessons across him, he might be the single most brilliant man alive.
Eight thirty.
He gets up, pointedly ignores the whiskey, and directs his numb-footed stagger towards the kitchen. There must be something in this house that is not the phone and its tragic gravity; surely he can find some object in this unnecessarily enormous building to distract him from the question of what Ed’s doing, where Ed’s been, what happened, whether he’s all right—
Making coffee on top of this is a truly terrible idea—which one would think would guarantee he’d do it, but he narrowly manages to refrain. Riza bought him white tea for some long-since-forgotten occasion several years ago; the tin still lurks under a shroud of dust on a shelf in the cabinet. He brings it down and puts the kettle on and sits down to watch that boil.
Eight forty-five.
He owns nine mugs and five very odd, ornately decorated little teacups. He counts them twice just to be sure he has the inventory right.
There are cobwebs draped along the top edge of the curtains, but the spiders aren’t doing any harm, and he doesn’t feel inclined to drag a chair over in order to wage war against them.
The water boils.
He brushes dust into the sink, regrets it, brushes more into the trash, and then selects a teabag from the tin.
He pours.
He waits.
Eight fifty-two.
He twirls the teabag’s little string around the tip of his finger and dips it once, twice, three times under the water; he dunks it deep like it’s a living creature that he has to drown. He swirls it around. He lets it bob up to the surface. He drags it around the circumference of the mug. He tries to coax some of the air bubbles out of the fine mesh without actually touching it, simply by batting it against the walls at varying speeds. Then he lifts it out, lets it spin, lets it drip, waits while one droplet coalesces agonizingly slowly—and quavers—and falls—and then tosses it into the trash.
Eight fifty-four.
He takes his tea over to the kitchen table and sits down alone, letting the steam billow softly up around his face.
This is not sustainable. This is an unstable system. This is a danger to them both; this is a disaster waiting to happen; this is a lit match flirting with the edges of a short fuse, and if something doesn’t change, no one is going to make it out unscathed.
Roy won’t anyway—that, too, he knows by now. He’s the match. He started this, whether or not Ed took it up almost as eagerly; it’s his doing. He’ll burn out either way.
He picks up his mug, blows on the tea, and takes a tiny test-sip, too quickly to scald anything. It’s still too hot. He sets it down.
Eight fifty-five.
Ed could be dead.
Ed could be facedown in a ditch, with two inches of muddy standing water clogging up his unused airways.
Ed could be torn full of bullet holes. He could be lying on a cold table in a silent morgue, wreathed in the cloying-acrid perfume of the formaldehyde, staring at the ceiling. He could have had his skull split open; he could have had his ribcage punctured and everything inside it shredded into bleeding pulp; he could have had his spine snapped or his eyes gouged out or his throat cut—one long, curved line; one spilling, speechless smile—
It’s eight fifty-nine, and Roy is getting up and crossing to the phone and dialing Ed’s apartment.
The line rings twice.
“Hello?” Alphonse says. He’s trying to sound calm, but Roy can hear the hopefulness beneath it.
“Sorry,” he says. “It’s me.”
“Ah,” Al says. “He hasn’t called you either, I take it?”
“Not yet,” Roy says.
Perhaps that’s overstepping the bounds of what the universe will permit. The instant you start expecting good things, as though something is owed to you—
That thought sounds remarkably like Ed.
“For what it’s worth,” Alphonse says, “I usually give him a full day before I let myself worry.”
Roy looks at the wallpaper. It’s green. There are little designs on it that appear to be deliberate, rather than just the result of several years’ accumulated dust. They might be tiny flowers. “I see.”
“Well,” Alphonse says, “that’s a bit dishonest. I don’t let myself worry; the worrying just happens. I give him a day before I do anything about it.”
“I may not be able to emulate your patience,” Roy says.
“Most people can’t,” Al says. “Waiting out every night of your life for a few years running will do that for you. He’ll probably secretly appreciate it, though you won’t ever hear that from him. Just so long as you keep it relatively subtle. If he thinks you’re meddling because you don’t trust him to get the job done, he’ll be hurt.”
“This is terrible,” Roy says.
“I know,” Al says. “But I know you can’t just hold him back from doing a mission ever again—he’d feel useless and restless, and that always makes him extra-destructive; and he’d wonder if he’d just gotten worse at his job, or if it was a favoritism thing, and not know which was worse—”
“No,” Roy says. “I mean… yes, that, too; the situation, but—what you were saying before. Am I to understand that if I’d just asked you what was going on in his head at any given time, you would have set it out in simple terms and saved me hours of beating my head against the wall?”
“Only if I thought it was in his best interests at any given time,” Alphonse says.
Roy would swear off Elrics forever if they weren’t so damn wonderful underneath the dizzying combination of insight and spite.
“Right,” he says. “I’ll see what I can find out tomorrow, then.”
“Thank you,” Al says. “My resources are pretty limited, but I’ve got a couple friends I can call in favors with. Keep me posted? And I’ll do the same.”
Equivalent exchange. Maybe if they all just keep repeating it, someday the balance will seem fair.
“Perfect,” Roy says.
He doesn’t sleep—or at least not in any meaningful sense of the word. Not enough to matter; not enough to clear his brain and wipe it clean and restore any of his vital processes. Not enough to count. Not enough to help.
Intermittently, he dozes, sinking into the sticky mire of the shadows creeping up the folds in the sheets and on the pillowcase; he phases through the flimsy barrier between idle, abstract thoughts and something like unconsciousness.
And then a hundred-thousand permutations of gore and murder haul him out.
The scenes are hazy, and all of his limbs turn to lead—they’re almost more like hallucinations than dreams. They’re almost more like visions of some sort of present-future, seeping through because he’s more receptive on the borderline of waking; because the weight of the blood soaking through them has finally dragged them right back to their cause.
If Ed is dead, it’s his fault.
If they bury Ed alive and stack some slabs of granite on the top—
If they cut diagonal across his abdomen and let him watch his own intestines bulging out—
If they beat him to the brink of human endurance and hang him up and leave the elements to do the rest—
If it’s just two shots to the back of his skull—
If they chain him down and slice him open and wait there for the animals to smell the meat—
If they tear the automail off of him and leave him bleeding out until it all just stops—
Roy might as well have done it all himself. He signed the order. He did this; he started this; the responsibility sits squarely in his two scarred hands.
He rolls over, and lies still, and listens to his own breathing. He rolls back, folds an arm under the pillow, stares up into the dark, and forces himself to close his eyes. He tries to breathe slowly. He tries to think of nothing but a deep, rich, even velvet black. His shoulder tenses in a way that’s uncomfortable. He shifts. He rolls back to where he started, smoothes a hand across the pillow, tugs it over to open a cool space for his cheek—
If Ed is dead—
Well, he’s got a head start on paying for it.
“Whoa,” Havoc says on seeing him shortly after eight. “Rough night, Chief?”
That has always seemed like something of a stupid phrase to Roy; the day that follows is invariably so much rougher as a result. “You could say that.”
“You want to talk about it?” Havoc asks. Presumably that sounds more fun than whatever work has been set in front of him, which means he doesn’t have the slightest idea what Roy’s demons look like when they’re at home.
Havoc might be downright flattered to know how many times his impalement and intended execution has featured in the grotesque pageantries that pass through Roy’s head most nights. Then again, he might be scandalized. He might feel guilty. By some contortion of emotion-logic, he might try to shoulder some part of the blame—for the incident itself, for Roy’s miserable brain’s endless rehashing of it—
Better to move on.
Better no one knows.
“Not especially,” Roy says. His skull is full of cloying fog, but at least the sharp click of his boot heels on the flooring doesn’t miss a beat. “But it’s kind of you to offer.”
“I have that report on the communications grid in Ishval that you asked for, sir,” Fuery says, pushing his chair back and scrambling out of it. “There were a few things I wanted to explain—”
It’s past ten before he gets a chance to call his contact at the Riedd town hall.
“I don’t know,” Marena says, sounding scared—sounding helpless. “There was—there was all this noise last night; someone said a hotel got blown up. I don’t know exactly—there was a lot of ash; I smelled that… like something had been burning. You know?”
“I know,” Roy says.
“I can probably get over there if it’s important,” Marena says. “They just—there were policemen going around to houses this morning telling everyone to stay inside. I only got here a couple minutes ago, and that was partly just… just to see what was happening, but nobody else who’s here seems to have a clue.” She hesitates. “I’ll see what I can find out. I’ll let you know.”
“Not at the cost of your own safety,” Roy says. “Don’t take risks. Understand?”
“You sound like Mom,” Marena says.
“Good,” Roy says. “You listen to her.”
Marena half-laughs. “That’s news to me. But I hear you. Okay? Don’t freak out.”
“Decorated officers in the Amestrian military don’t ‘freak out’,” Roy says. “We demonstrate appropriate amounts of rational concern.”
“Right,” Marena says. “Talk to you later.”
“I’m counting on it,” Roy says.
He’s just stepped in the door from a meeting that more or less melted every quadrant of his brain—the intricacies of the political machinations cinching in around him would make anyone claustrophobic; having to look these scheming bastards in the eye and fake a smile makes him so sick sometimes he can’t even bring himself to speak—when he hears the cheerful trill of his desk phone.
“Fuck,” he says, just this side of under his breath.
Fuery gasps aloud.
Riza barely stifles her snort.
What a goddamn day. Roy takes a deep breath.
“Sorry,” he says; and then he says, “Excuse me” and darts around the backs of the chairs, managing a full-tilt run for two strides before he has to skid to a stop lest he crash into his own desk. He snatches the phone up out of the cradle and, most likely over-energized by the leftover momentum, brings it to his ear too quickly—he manages to clap the speaker against his head hard enough that a scattering of little yellow stars flutter across his vision as he chokes out the requisite: “Mustang.”
“Hi,” Marena says. “I poked around a little bit. It was a building right next to the hotel that got flattened—must’ve been some fire, by the looks of it, but they cordoned it off, so it’s hard to tell what happened. I chatted up a police officer, and he was telling me there was an alchemist involved. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that that’s why you asked.”
“No comment,” Roy says.
“Uh huh,” she says. “Anyway, the cop said there weren’t any casualties that he knew of, but I’m not sure how much he’d be told in a situation like that. I tried to get into the police station and see if they had anybody locked up, but they weren’t having it. I think I need you to get me a new Negotiation Dress or something.”
“Only the best for you,” Roy says. “Is your birthday coming up?”
“No,” she says. “Red, please. Something just a little bit shiny—you know the type.”
“Intimately,” he says.
She snickers. “Sometimes I forget how fun you are. I’ll see if I can get some solid information on the alchemist you may or may not be interested in. What’re they wearing?”
“Also red,” Roy says. “But not shiny at all. He’s blond, short, and brilliant right up until the point where unscheduled demolitions become a remote possibility, at which point he’s an idiot of an unprecedented caliber.”
“Ooh,” Marena says. “Loose cannon. Just my type.” She pauses just long enough for him to start formulating a riposte—not long enough for him to deliver it. “Or is he already yours?”
“No comment there either,” Roy says.
“Uh huh,” she says.
“Let me know what you find out,” he says.
He can almost see her tossing her hair over her shoulder. She doesn’t need a new dress; she could seduce a police officer in a burlap sack with a hole cut through it for her head. “Sure thing. Talk to you soon.”
He’ll have Vanessa help him pick out something stunning.
He learned how to compartmentalize in Ishval. It goes further than just narrowing his focus until he can’t hear the hurricane of what-ifs drawing closer; it’s a large-scale shutdown of all of his ancillary thought processes until he becomes just enough of a hollow human-shell to do the work that is required.
He forces himself into a rhythm of reading and cross-referencing and signing off and setting aside. Everything feels numb—numb and clumsy and gummy; there’s a reason all those words sound the same. Sounds cluster. Biologists say that form follows function; language’s answer is onomatopoeia and the cross-culture unity of verbalizations that mimic the thing they mean.
This is an endless pile of forms.
His brain is a swamp of terrors; inside his ribcage, there’s a void.
He makes himself push through paperwork until four o’clock, and then he digs up the contact sheet he hoped he wouldn’t have to use and dials the second number on the list.
“Riedd City Police Station,” a low voice on the other end of the line says, less than cheerily. “How may I direct your call?”
“This is Brigadier General Roy Mustang,” Roy says, unable to resist the urge to twirl the phone cord around his index finger. “I understand you may have some information concerning a state alchemist I sent out your way several days ago.”
He was expecting a minor pause, but this one is a behemoth.
“Oh,” the voice on the other end says after an eon or so has passed. “Oh… hell.”
Roy pulls out all the sharpest consonants he’s capable of and clips every word off just a little too soon. “Is there a problem?”
“Um,” the voice says, “a… bit. A bit. Sir. A bit, sir.”
He introduces a filed edge of steel. “Would you care to elaborate?”
“We… uh. There was a—situation, real early this morning. A… hostage situation. And there was this guy who came out of nowhere and got involved, and actually kind of… well, the way it looked to me, he saved a lot of people, but the way he did it involved a historical building no longer being… built… so… we took him in for questioning after it was over, and he kept saying he was a state alchemist, only he didn’t have the watch—or anything else, no ID at all; he said he’d left everything in the hotel, but…”
Roy adds a thin but extremely potent layer of ice. “But what?”
The voice very faintly says something like Augh before it goes on: “But—when we checked—we didn’t find anything in the room the hotel owners said was his. So…”
“Put him on,” Roy says.
“But—”
“Put him on,” Roy says.
“Yes, sir,” the voice gasps out, and then there’s a clatter, and then there are a few more voices, faintly muffled. One “What?” reaches a volume he can hear and a register that would startle canines; then there is some more commotion, and then there is a substantial wait.
Roy drums his fingertips on the desktop and takes a cursory glance at the cover page of the next report. It is not nearly as interesting as imagining the entire staffing body of the Riedd police station running up and down the halls and flailing their arms at the prospect of what he might do to them if Ed returns with a single honey-colored hair out of place.
He grants himself a moment to close his eyes and bask in the relief—when he faces the flood head-on, it’s almost overwhelming. Ed must be alive. None of this could have played out in any of the ways he’d dreamt up and imagined in so much agonizing depth. It feels like his whole skeleton is expanding; like his joints are going weak—like sinking into a bath that’s almost too hot, remembering just in time that water’s still water no matter how warm, and people drown much faster than you’d think. It’s like a clawed fist that had curled around his whole torso is slowly, slowly, tentatively opening its grip.
The feeling subsumes him, and he isn’t Roy Mustang anymore—he is tingling limbs and tremulous elation alone, unmitigated; he’s tortured bliss all the way through.
And then he hears the dulcet tones of the distant strains of an elegant serenade:
“Take your fucking hands off me, or I’ll take ’em off of you,” Ed is saying as he approaches. A soft thunk, and static on the line, and— “Took you long enough.”
“Good things come to those who wait,” Roy says despite the swelling of his heart in his throat.
“That’s something slow people say,” Ed says.
Roy’s heart beats in his ears—which is a shame, because he wants to isolate the sound of Ed’s voice as much as the phone will allow. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” Ed says, and another shudder of the could-have-beens racks Roy’s whole frame. “More or less. Got a little banged up doing the police’s job and then getting pitched in a cell for it.”
Roy can imagine, with immense precision, the looks Ed just received for that. He can see Ed’s I-dare-you grin even more clearly.
“We’ll have a talk with them about that,” Roy says.
“Upshot is, I guess they were dumb enough to think I couldn’t be dangerous with a notebook and a pencil,” Ed says, “so I got a head start on my report.”
“You are a gift to the universe itself,” Roy says—he cloaks it in the dry sarcasm that Ed has come to expect, of course, but damn if it isn’t true. “I was told that they looked in your hotel room for your watch, and it had gone missing.”
“Couple things could’ve happened there,” Ed says. “Which I explained in excruciating detail, but it’s not like it’s their institutional duty and moral obligation to protect all citizens, including the ones they’ve accused of ridiculous shit like deliberately destroying local landmarks. I got no problem with landmarks. Which is beside the point, because either the hotel took my request not to let on who I was a little too seriously and sent them to the wrong room; or they realized that those damn things are worth something if you melt the silver down.”
If one of the factions less enamored of Roy than his immediate associates is listening in on this line, they’re going to get exactly what they deserve. “If it is the second,” he says, “that strands you there without any way to buy your ticket back, doesn’t it?”
“Bingo,” Ed says. “You’re getting quick, Mustang.”
It’s probably true: the more times he tracks backwards along Ed’s chain-reaction lines of thought, the easier it becomes. “I try. I’ll wire enough to the local branch of the bank to cover the train—I’ll tell them to give it to you once you tell them your ID number. I don’t suppose you paid the hotel in advance?”
“Couldn’t,” Ed says cheerfully. “Didn’t know how long I’d be stuck in this shithole.”
Roy can’t even blame him for provoking his audience at this point. Idly he wonders if the station chief will have the guts to submit a letter of complaint. If he does, Roy intends to let Ed fold it into a hat.
“I’ll wire more than you could possibly need,” Roy says, “and trust you not to go on a shopping spree.”
“You kidding?” Ed asks. “Expenses reports are bad enough when I do have a reason for them. All right, bet you have important shit to do, or something—the bank’ll probably close in an hour; is that enough time for you?”
“I have people for that,” Roy says. “Specifically, Sergeant Fuery.”
“Sir?” Fuery asks from the other room. Someone bothers to shush him, which is a bit unnecessary given that Roy was counting on them all listening in so that he wouldn’t have to waste time telling them that Ed’s alive.
“Okay,” Ed says. “Sounds like a plan. Not quite as exciting as some of your other plans, but I’ll take it. You get your ass back to work.”
“You get your ass back to Central,” Roy says. “As soon as possible. Understood?”
“Sir, yes, sir,” Ed says. “Tell Fuery to throw in a little extra so I can have a nice di—”
“Dismissed, Fullmetal,” Roy says.
“Does that even work on the ph—”
Roy hangs up—partly just so that Ed can bestow several unprintable titles upon him in front of the Riedd police.
Ed reads Roy orders of magnitude better now than he did once, but he still doesn’t hear the undertow most of the time. Very likely it’s just because Ed says what he means, when he means it, in as few words as possible, which makes it difficult for him to grasp the fact that Roy usually says twice as much with silence as he ever does out loud.
But Ed’s instincts for the feelings of those around him have also improved by leaps and bounds—maybe he’ll intuit it. Maybe he’ll hear some part of it in a subconscious register, and he’ll know.
It wasn’t just Come back. It was Come back to me.
Roy stifles the sigh, flips a page of an irrelevant report to the blank backside of the sheet, and jots down Ed’s ID and a rather generous estimate for the costs. He stands and takes it to the outer office, where everyone pretends not to have been listening for his steps, and holds it out to Fuery.
“This shouldn’t take long,” he says.
Fuery’s eyes are unsettlingly huge—although the glasses don’t exactly deemphasize them, either. “So—Ed’s okay?”
“Safe, sound, and sassy as ever,” Roy says.
A collective sigh of relief ripples through the room, and it takes most of his considerable willpower to hold back a contribution.
Two minutes after eight, the phone rings.
“Mustang,” he says, although he already knows—
“Hi,” Ed says. “Reporting in.”
“That isn’t really necessary at this point,” Roy says. “I’m assuming I’ll get the full story when you arrive.”
“Never assume anything,” Ed says. “Assumptions are the origin of fucking up. Besides, I have to prove that I can follow instructions—when they’re not stupid, anyway. When they’re stupid, I ignore them.”
“I’d noticed,” Roy says.
“Are you calling your own orders stupid?” Ed asks.
“I’ve noticed it regarding other people’s orders,” Roy says. “Mine are a statistical anomaly.”
“Whatever helps you sleep at night,” Ed says.
“Speaking of which,” Roy says, “where are you?”
“Kissel,” Ed says. It’s always been a wretched name for an otherwise innocuous little town, but it’s never been more wretched than it is tonight. “Transfer, of fucking course. Should be about another hour if we leave on time. I already called Al and told him not to wait up.”
Roy’s approaching doom sounds uncannily like the ticking of the hall clock. “Would you like me to pick you up?”
“I don’t wanna put you out,” Ed says. “I can get a taxi.”
“That reminds me,” Roy says. “Did you find your watch?”
Ed’s laugh sounds ever so slightly strangled. “Put it this way—somebody’s gonna have some real historic black market jewelry pretty soon.” He draws a deep breath and lets it out slowly as a sigh, and the phone line hisses with static for a second. “It’s… I’m kinda bummed to lose it, but it’s also like… I think it was time. I think it was time to let it go. I don’t need that one anymore. I can just… have a regular one, now. Like anybody else.” He pauses. “Or—can I? Didn’t you say one time that they were practically fucking impossible to replace?”
“Yes,” Roy says. “But I may have been stretching the truth considerably in an attempt to discourage you from destroying yours every other week.”
“Asshole,” Ed says. “Well—good. I guess. I guess that’s good.”
“Do you have enough money for a cab?” Roy asks.
“I think so,” Ed says. “Hang on, let me…”
“I’ll pick you up,” Roy says.
“You don’t have t—”
“I really don’t mind.”
“Okay, okay,” Ed says. “If you’re determined to waste time and gasoline, I guess I can’t friggin’ stop you.”
“You can’t,” Roy says, brightly. “No point trying. Shall I expect you to get in around nine?”
“I think so,” Ed says. “As far as probability goes, this is the point where something almost has to go according to plan.” He makes a heart-stoppingly adorable discontented noise in his throat. “Shit. Shouldn’t’ve said that. Now the train’ll be late.”
“I’ve got time,” Roy says.
“Like hell you do,” Ed says.
“I’ll bring some reports,” Roy says, “and read them in the car while I wait.”
Ed laughs, and that sound—
The list of what Roy wouldn’t do to hear it is so brief that it terrifies him most days.
“Now we’re talkin’,” Ed says. “All right, I’ll—see you soon.”
“Travel safe,” Roy says.
“Drive safe,” Ed says. “I wanna make it home, after all this.”
“At your service,” Roy says, and the truth of that terrifies him, too.
As promised, he parks the car across the street from the station just before nine—in a spot where the nearest streetlamp streams through the window, such that he can lean a sheaf of papers against the steering wheel and just make out the letters of the text. Given the price that was paid to restore his eyes, he should probably take better care of them, but some situations call for extreme measures. He’s so damned calculated and cautious and responsible most of the time these days that it can’t be tempting fate too much to ask for this one wild thing—can it? In daylight he usually feels entitled, but somehow in the shroud of night it’s so much more difficult to tell.
Maybe he deserves to be the reason that it fails. Maybe he deserves to have this whole spindly little house of cards fall down around him; maybe it was always doomed to end like this. Maybe this is his equivalent exchange, finally come to fruition after so many years of getting away with murder. Maybe he’s overdue for a taste of this particular sort of pain.
Hughes was a monument to agony, yes—but it wasn’t, isn’t, can’t be enough. That wasn’t personal. That was something that was done; not something that was done to him.
Perhaps Ed will ensure that here, at least, in this tiny way, he gets his due.
He turns a page and squints anew. It’s going to be a long night.
A flicker of movement and the fall of a shadow snare his attention. Roy looks up just before Ed raps on the window with the softer set of knuckles, offering up a weary little smile.
Roy doesn’t think. Roy is too damn tired, too damn broken, too damn cold—stretched too far and worn too thin to spare a second thought or muster an inhibition or balance some better judgment and tip the latest bout of sheer stupidity off the other side of the scale.
Ed steps back as he opens the door, then steps towards him, arms open, as he stands.
It’s late. There probably aren’t enough people around for anyone to notice, anyone to know them, anyone to care.
Odds are it wouldn’t matter to him anyway. He’s no stranger to justifying his own impulses after the fact.
Ed reaches slightly upward, expecting to be held—but Roy’s body knows that this is their last chance. Roy’s body knows that this death knell of his dignity is the last sound before the silence, and he has to make the most of it.
He sinks to his knees on the street and wraps his arms around Ed’s waist.
Ed hesitates—but only for the duration of a single, sharply-indrawn breath. He lets it out slowly, and then his whole body curls in around Roy, right hand smoothing up Roy’s arm while the left tangles itself into his hair—
“I thought you were dead,” Roy hears his rat bastard traitor of a voice whisper. “I thought you were dead, and I sent you to it, and I didn’t even deserve to hurt for it, because you’d be so far from the first.”
“Shut it,” Ed says. “I’m not goin’ anywhere.”
Surely he’s been thinking it too. Surely he knows—surely he feels it closing in.
But that’s not a conversation for the middle of the street at any hour, let alone well into the night.
Roy gets to his feet, and his knees and his back both protest more than he’d like to admit. He brushes Ed’s hair back gently with one hand—whether it was the chaos, the police station, or the train that disheveled it, he couldn’t begin to guess—and settles the other on Ed’s shoulder.
“I’m sorry you had to go through all that,” he says.
“Eh,” Ed says, with a slice of a grin and a halfhearted portion of a shrug. “It’s not the first time I’ve been wrongfully imprisoned, and I seriously doubt it’ll be the last.”
“I’d be disappointed,” Roy says.
“Me, too,” Ed says.
Roy holds himself together and sweeps a hand towards the car. “Shall we?”
“Hell, yeah,” Ed says, grabbing up his suitcase and striding past the hood of the car so fast that his coat actually flutters behind him.
Roy turns the key in the ignition, guides them out into the street, and keeps his voice completely level. “Back to your apartment?”
Perhaps it’s cowardly to omit the or.
“Nah,” Ed says, which circumvents the careful diction in a fraction of a second—typical, for Ed. Roy doubts he even recognizes the second conversation underneath the one they’re having audibly. “Al’ll be in bed, and I’m way too wired to sleep right now, and I don’t…” He looks out the window. Streetlamps flicker by like so many distant candles. “I don’t really want to be alone.”
Maybe it can wait. Maybe it can wait until another time, another day, another life where Roy Mustang is whole and stable and has enough to give.
“I don’t blame you,” he says softly, instead of No one ever does; that’s precisely how I got you into this mess. “Do you think coffee would hurt or help? Or we could run you a bath.”
“Jeez,” Ed says. “I’ve been in Central for five minutes, and you’re already scheming to get me naked and touch my hair?”
“I am only a man, Edward,” Roy says.
“You’e a friggin’ menace, is what you are,” Ed says.
It’s difficult to argue with that.
He manages to keep his menacing hands to himself while Ed cleans up by occupying them with the coffee as the shower runs. He makes a little more than Ed is likely to want. He needs some for himself, if he’s going to get through this.
It has to happen now—doesn’t it? It has to happen tonight.
He leans back against the counter once he’s half-filled a mug, leaving two cups for Ed still in the carafe. He’ll have to play it delicately enough that Ed will wait for him to call a taxi instead of just storming out into the dark. He’ll have to be very, very careful to make the causes of this completely unmistakable without going so far as to spell them out—Ed needs to know precisely who’s to blame, needs to understand this right, needs to bypass any notion that this is the result of his own inferiority in some ridiculous way; but nothing riles him faster than condescension, real or perceived. Roy will have to choose his words one at a time. And that’s harder, with Ed. It’s harder to be anything less than genuine in the face of someone so unrelentingly honest.
He swills the coffee and then sips it. It’s strong but smooth, so at least that turned out right. At least he has that to offer. As consolation prizes go, it isn’t much, but…
The water shuts off. Some unidentifiable banging noises follow. Momentarily, the door creaks, and then ever-so-slightly uneven footfalls proceed down the stairs.
Ed saunters into the kitchen wearing Roy’s white bathrobe, with his soaked hair streaming down around his shoulders, and Roy’s heart squeezes so tight it’s a miracle that the rest of his circulatory system keeps functioning around it.
This is going to be even worse than he thought.
“Oh, hell, yeah,” Ed says, making such a swift beeline for the coffee that Roy has to sidestep out of the way. He’s wearing Roy’s slippers; they’re far too big, and it’s far too cute and far too intimate, and Roy had almost hoped it might ache less than this. “Today just got a little better.”
Roy lets him fill his mug, dump in half a dozen sugar cubes, sip, cringe, cast a rippling breath across the surface, and sip again. It’s only fair. He promised coffee; he should at least give Ed time to enjoy some of it before he tears all of this to pieces.
“How is it?” he asks, despite the fact that it’s the sort of platitudinous courtesy he’d normally despise. He knows it’s good; he just had some.
Ed sips again, vigorously enough to slurp a bit this time. There is something terribly charming about the disarmingly earnest way in which Ed tends to be rude. “S’nice,” he says, blinking. His bangs draggle in his eyes; the circles underneath are deep and wide and gray-purple-brown like a healing bruise. Roy wants to kiss them; want to kiss him; wants to wrap him up in fleecy blankets and never let him leave. Ed smiles, tired and lopsided but still starlight-bright over the rim of the mug. “Thanks. And thanks for picking me up. It’s a hell of a lot nicer this way.”
Roy makes the corners of his mouth turn up. “You’re very welcome.”
Ed drinks just a little more than half of the cup—not exactly slowly, but with enough reverence and visible gratitude for the smell and the warmth and the power of the caffeine that it makes up for the speed.
Then he puts it down on the counter, uses his left hand to tuck his damp hair back behind one ear at at time, takes a deep breath, and lets it out as a sigh.
“Okay,” he says. “I feel about a million times more like a person now.” His eyes narrow. “So what’s with this weird, meaningful silence thing you’re doing?”
If only there were better words—warmer, softer, subtler words; new ones, clever ones; anything to dull the edge of the implications.
“I think we need to talk,” Roy says, hating every single syllable. “About… this.” He gestures uselessly between them. “About us.”
Ed’s eyes widen, and he lifts his right hand to point, needlessly, at the center of Roy’s chest.
“I was thinking the same thing,” he says. “I was thinking about… this half the damn night over there, actually.” He folds his arms, plants his feet, and raises his eyebrows. “So what’re you thinking?”
Better to hear him out. Better to let him say whatever he needs to, and carve an exit route from wherever they wind up.
“You first,” Roy says.
Ed opens his mouth.
He shuts it.
He glowers.
“That’s part of what I was thinking about,” he says.
Roy attempts to sort through the rather limited quantity of sentences spoken so far. “About… common courtesy?”
“No,” Ed says. “About you putting me first.”
Roy’s heart stumbles. It must show on his face for a moment before he schools his features back into place, because Ed seizes on it and drives forward without a shred of mercy.
“You do,” he says. “You know you do. And I kept pushing you, at the start, to see if you would—I set up all these damn tests; I kept blowing you off for Al, and talking about myself for fucking hours without ever asking how you were, and turning up out of the blue demanding that you feed me or fuck me or whatever it was on any given day—”
Roy is reminded of the Gate. There is a rushing flood of white and howling silence in his head.
He is a career manipulator, and he somehow didn’t notice that Ed was playing him on purpose.
“But you just kept letting me,” Ed says. “I kept setting up these stupid tests, and you kept passing them, and you never ask for anything, and—and I don’t… that’s not fair. That’s not how I want it to go. I want it to—” He falters, swallows, looks at the floor, gives an approximation of a shrug. “I want it to—matter to you. I want it to be… good, and… important. I want to give you something back.”
His eyes flick up to Roy’s—molten amber; a shine like brandy under bright light.
“So—what were you gonna say?”
Roy’s voice almost fails him, but—for once—his courage does not.
“I don’t think we should do this anymore,” he says.
The silence falls. It breaks open, and catches, and burns.
The naked agony in Ed’s eyes might kill a kinder man.
“Well—” Ed’s voice wobbles; he clears his throat, squares his shoulders, and sets his jaw. “Well—fuck you, I just—I just told you we could—we can fix it, I—”
“Not because of that,” Roy says, and it seems very strange that this distant image of him—this disconnected vessel speaking on behalf of his wounded soul—sounds so effortlessly collected. “Because I thought I could keep my being with you and my being your employer separate, but after what happened this week, I don’t believe I can. And I think it’s better for Amestris if you stay in th—”
“Fuck Amestris,” Ed says, stronger now, fists curled at his sides. “What’s better for you?”
“For you to be safe,” Roy says. “Wherever that’s possible; whatever that means.”
“I am,” Ed says, and the harder he scowls, the brighter his eyes seem to get. “I’m safe with you.”
“That’s not the point,” Roy says.
“It’s exactly the goddamn point,” Ed says. “You think this—” He waves his hand down at Roy’s robe, Roy’s slippers, the bare skin and the gleaming automail. “—is fucking trivial? I feel at home with you, Roy. That’s not—shit, you’re probably picking my hairs off your pillow every other morning—”
Roy usually leaves them for a day, sometimes two. They’re just so staggeringly beautiful when the sunlight hits.
“You could have that with anyone,” he says. “And you could have anyone you wanted.”
“Bullshit,” Ed says. “And anyway, I want you.” He scrubs a hand back through his hair, grimacing, and barrels straight on— “But I only want to want you if you want me to want you, or else what the fuck’s the point?” He glances up, and his eyes are always extra sharp when he’s trying not to be vulnerable. “You with me?”
“Yes,” Roy says. “Of course it has to be two-sided, but—”
“But nothing,” Ed says, gesturing fervently between them, the mirror of Roy’s movement from before. “Do you know how rare that is?”
Roy takes a breath. “Someone following your thought process, do you mean?”
“Yeah,” Ed says. “Mostly people just—I mean, they know I’ll go back and rephrase it if they can’t keep up, so they just don’t bother. But you—it’s not just that you’re smart, although that’s part of it. It’s that you really fucking listen, because you really fucking care. How can you not get—that’s important, okay? That’s fucking important to me, all of the other shit aside.”
“Ed,” Roy says, “I am not saying this to flatter you, but if you don’t believe me, believe the additional years of experience—anyone you graced with your attention with would fall all over themselves trying to do right by you. It’s not something specific to me; it’s not something mystical that I have that no one else—”
“Damn it, Roy,” Ed says, throwing his head back for a little extra emphasis as he grits his teeth, and just the way his throat moves is so delectable that Roy’s feted willpower quails. “You were so much easier when I thought you were an arrogant piece of shit.”
“Pun intended?” Roy asks. Distraction hasn’t failed him once ye—
“Shut up,” Ed says. “I just—” He plants his left hand on the countertop and leans on it, heavily, and it takes everything Roy’s got in him not to dive forward and wrap him into both arms, stroke his hair until that heart-rending weariness seeps out of him and dissipates into the ether where it belongs. “I don’t… get it, Roy. I don’t get it. Why are we having this fucking conversation? No, not even—why are we having it this way? I get that there’s shit I should do differently. I was trying to be scientific, but I guess I ended up being an asshole instead, but—but that’s not what you’re saying. That’s the part… Why are you trying to convince me to get rid of you when that’s not what either of us wants?”
Roy draws a deep breath and releases it gingerly. He has to stay on top of this; he has to stay in control of himself, or all of this will have been for absolutely nothing, and the status quo is just too damn dangerous now.
“I want,” he says, “what’s best for both of us, and what’s best for Ames—”
“Like I said,” Ed says. “Fuck Amestris. Fuck that excuse.”
Roy pushes his tongue against the back of his teeth and swallows the sharp things he wants to say. They rankle all the way down. “That’s not what it’s about,” he says. “The fraternization laws exist for a reason—for your protection and mine, and for the protection of the military as a whole. I can’t make unbiased decisions about you as a soldier anymore. That’s what it’s come to. Do you understand the implications of that? It doesn’t matter that you have no intention of rising through the ranks; it doesn’t matter if I know that my people will keep their mouths shut to keep us out of a court martial. I cannot do my job. I cannot do my duty. And if I fail at those things, I cannot pay my debts. I know you know what that means.”
Ed looks at him. Ed’s eyes are too old for his face; they are too deep and too dark and too knowing, and some nights just the thought of it keeps Roy awake.
“Okay,” he says. “Then I’ll quit.”
Hell.
“That’s not what I’m asking,” Roy says. “I don’t want you to sacrifice. You’ve spent your whole life giving things up; the last thing I want you to do is compromi—”
“I don’t give a shit about the military except as a vehicle for what you need to do,” Ed says. “You’ve known that since day one—except back then, it was a vehicle for what I needed to do, and then eventually I did it. I don’t need it anymore. I’ll find something else. I don’t care.”
Roy feels that he is a wince personified, rather than a person performing the action. “You’re an extremely critical part of my operation,” he says. “You’re incredibly valuable to the military on the whole, and I need you more on my team than I need you in my personal life.”
“Bullshit,” Ed says again. “If that was the problem, you would’ve talked me into signing on as a contractor instead. Which I could do, if you want. I told you. I don’t care.”
Roy takes another breath, focusing on the way his lungs fill. If he panics—if he succumbs now to the swell of desperation rising in him—he is lost.
“That wouldn’t solve the problem,” he says. “I can’t be your commander. I can’t knowingly put you in situations where your life is on the line. It isn’t in me to do that anymore.”
“Then I’ll quit for good,” Ed says—calmly, matter-of-factly, like he isn’t turning the whole sprawling tapestry of potential futures inside-out. “Al used to tell me—he used to say you and I were too alike in a lot of ways. And I didn’t fucking believe him; I told him to stop making fun of me, but—he’s right. What a freakin’ surprise, obviously, but—you and I are both always trying to fucking sabotage ourselves before good things can get the better of us. Or before they can slip out of our grip and start to be less good than they were before. Or before we even have the chance to fuck ’em up.”
Roy slams steel vault doors shut on the parts of his brain stirring with recognition of the uncomfortable truths in every one of those sentences. He will not get diverted. He will not change course.
“A lot of times,” Ed says, “when there was some kind of food that he talked about wanting, I wouldn’t touch it, no matter how much I wanted it, because it didn’t seem fair if he couldn’t have it, too. And he’d tell me—he’d say ‘Depriving yourself of something nice doesn’t make the penance go any faster.’ And he’d say ‘You don’t have to suffer to be good.’”
Ed’s always had a singular talent for making Roy’s blood boil—and it’s almost always been because Ed is so good at poking holes in the carefully-woven veils that Roy drapes around his vulnerabilities, and steel fingers have a tendency to bruise.
But if either the frustration or the despair takes hold of him, this is over, and he has to forge through. He’s endured worse. He’s forced a smile for fools of an indescribable caliber, with more power balanced on their star-speckled shoulders than anyone has any right to have, and he’s listened to them coo over the heroic patriotism of the country’s most prolific murderers. This is not as difficult as that.
If he breathes deep enough, Ed can’t drown him—not even in the truth.
“That’s not the same,” he says. “This isn’t about small-scale gratification; this is about what’s best for this countr—”
“Again with the fucking military martyr thing,” Ed says, planting both hands on his hips, tilting his weight forward—not realizing it makes him look smaller instead of more intimidating when his body’s angled like that. “Stop playing that stupid card.”
There’s blood-steam building in Roy’s ears. It’s all he can do to keep tamping the fires down—dividing his attention makes it harder to shuffle up his hand.
“I went into this,” he says, “with the intention of having as little impact on your life as possible. You have fought tooth and nail for years to build something stable that you can be proud of, where you’ve set everything to rights, and I refuse to jeopard—”
“You’re not my babysitter,” Ed says.
“I am your boss,” Roy says.
“So what?” Ed says. “This is still my life—just like you just said. It’s my choice if I wanna quit. It’s my choice if I wanna stay here with you. It’s my choice if I wanna drink right out of that coffee pot until I vibrate out of the visible spectrum, although I guess you’d be within your rights to smash it out of my hand at that point.”
Roy holds his breath and counts down from ten. Backwards. Slowly.
This is Ed. And this is molten, moving, essential Ed—not the older, maturer, more calculated Ed he usually sees in the office. This is the avenging spirit of alchemy incarnate, fluid and frenetic and blindingly bright—channeled lightning; hissing ozone and a flaring burst of unadulterated power.
Maybe he should have started counting at fifteen.
“Listen to me,” he says. “I can’t be unbiased anymore. I can’t let you do your job. I am unable to let you make the choices that you want—I can’t do that anymore, not when they’re dangerous to you. I thought I was prepared for this, and I thought I was up to the task of keeping my distance, but I overestimated myself. I overestimated my ability to stay impartial and to separate the two halves of myself well enough to treat you properly in both.”
Ed’s whole face crinkles up. “You treat me fine. You treat me great. You treat me like—well. Nice. Like—”
Roy’s heart tries to melt, and he shores it up with scraps and splinters of his ribcage. “I’m—glad to hear that, but the issue is that on occasions like yesterday—”
“We were fine!” Ed says. “It all turned out fine! Nobody even got hurt! Except the shitbag taking hostages; I roughed him up a little bit. And that building was ugly anyway.”
“I can’t do my job when it involves putting you in danger,” Roy says. “I can’t stay neutral enough on the question of your safety to command you anymore. And you and I are both far too proficient in our positions to give them up.”
“You listen to me,” Ed says, stepping towards him now to look right up into his eyes. “If you want me to go, I’ll go. If you want me to leave, I will walk right out that door, and it’s done. But if you think for a second that we can go back to work like nothing’s changed, you’re lying to yourself. If you think for a second that the fucking emotions are going to go away if we change the name we put on them—”
“That isn’t the point either,” Roy says. “Professionalism is an entirely separate issue.”
That sounds a hell of a lot better than I loved you from across the chasm of unspokenness before, and I could do it again. It’s just the chance to have you that makes it so damn hard.
“You just said,” Ed says, “that all of it’s mixed up together, and that’s the fucking problem.” He throws his hands up and then shoves both of them back into his hair, pinning it back from his face—he’s beautiful; he’s so beautiful; he’s beautiful and anguished and searingly raw and toweringly perilous at the best of times. “I get it, okay? I’m—scared too. I’m scared it’ll… well, shit, I’m scared it won’t work; I’m scared it will; I’m scared you’ll get bored; I’m scared one of us’ll get too wrapped up in our own special kinds of stupid and just capsize the whole thing, but—” He meets Roy’s eyes again, and his just… smolder. “If you want it over, it’s over. I’m gone. But only if that’s what you want for you. Not what you want for fucking Amestris. Not what you want for the office. Not what you want for some theoretical future you think I’m gonna have if I don’t stick around here. Only it’s what you want for you, and what you want for me.”
Roy takes a breath and gazes into Edward Elric’s mesmerizing eyes.
Roy Mustang is strong enough to do this. He is.
“I mean,” Ed says, and his voice wavers, and his helpless smile does, too, as it tilts crookedly upward on one side, and his eyes dart away. “It’s the only thing I’ve wanted for me in a long damn time.”
No, he’s not.
Maybe a better man could bear it, but he is not a better man; he’s only this, and—
And right this moment, perhaps that’s not so bad.
He tries to fight it. If there is anything up there remotely like a God; if there is any omniscient sentience in the universe, benevolent or no; if there is anything other than the white face with the wide grin wearing his eyes—let it witness that he tries. Surely there’s something to be said for that.
Sometimes the right thing, the smart thing, and the brave thing diverge so early there’s nothing you can do to twine them back together. Sometimes the definition of courage is speaking from the heart when it’s an open invitation for future pain. Sometimes people matter more than principles.
Roy breathes, deeply, and then he says, “All right.”
Ed’s watching him closely. “‘All right’?”
“Stay,” Roy says. “I’ll figure something out.”
Ed’s smile starts slow and fragile, and then it blooms across his whole face and lights his eyes up with it.
“No,” he says, and he deliberately waits for Roy’s heart to skip several beats—perhaps a whole measure. “We’ll figure something out together.”
Roy’s had enough enough ricocheting back and forth between extremes of feeling for one over-long day.
“That,” he says, reaching across the small remaining space between them to tuck a straggling section of Ed’s hair behind his ear, “sounds wonderful.”
Ed grins. “Yeah?”
“Yes,” Roy says.
“No, you have to say ‘yeah’,” Ed says, managing to wrangle his face back into a solemn expression. “You have to return it the way I gave it.”
“Linguistic equivalent exchange,” Roy says. “What is this world coming to?”
“Just say it,” Ed says.
Roy feels himself starting to frown and is unable to contain it. “I don’t th—”
“Say it,” Ed says.
Roy grimaces. He clears his throat. He steels himself, and he takes the plunge, because this is for Ed—and he is powerless in the face of anything Ed asks.
“Y… eah,” he manages.
“Close enough,” Ed says. He darts forward—he always moves like a single burst of energy; like there’s no transition between the thought and the action; like instinct alive—and slings both arms around Roy’s chest. “Thanks.”
“For defying my own vocabulary?” Roy asks, though not before wrapping both arms around the most exquisite wriggling conglomeration of terrycloth and damp hair and flushed skin and steel that anyone could ever imagine.
“For doing something just ’cause you knew it’d make me happy,” Ed says, which is breathtakingly sweet; “dumbass,” which is less so. Ed squeezes gently before releasing his grip enough to step back and look up into Roy’s face again. “I told you—stuff’s gonna… change. I guess. The way I treat you is, anyway. ’Cause I was trying to push you so that I could find your limits before, but you just kept… well, I couldn’t find ’em, so—obviously they’re far enough out there that my life can fit inside. Which is all I really needed to know.”
Roy smiles at him as gently and blithely and innocently as possible.
“Are you implying,” he asks, delightedly, “that my limits don’t have to be especially large because you’re comparatively sm—”
“Oh, that’s it,” Ed says, shoving him—but not too hard—with both hands, before snatching up the abandoned coffee cup, and stamping off towards the living room, offering Roy a choice metal finger over his shoulder. “Come hang out on the couch with me when you’re ready to grovel for fucking forgiveness.”
“Give me a moment to revel,” Roy calls after him. “I’ll be there soon.”
Ed spares him a two-second glare. Either those used to be a lot sharper, or Roy’s just started to enjoy the edge.
“Whatever,” Ed says, and then a flash of terrycloth whips around the doorway, and his footsteps fade off down the hall.
Roy grants himself a few deep breaths, letting his body sag against the counter. That was the best choice he could have made in the circumstances. That was the best choice he could have made when Ed had put so much on the line—for him, of all people; when Ed was offering up such pure and unwarranted trust for the likes of Roy Mustang, celebrated murderer and washed-up paperwork-pusher extraordinaire. That was the best choice he could have made without wounding either of them any worse.
He’s tempted to have a little more of the coffee, but that will probably end in jitters, insomnia, and tears. He has to work tomorrow. He has to get up tomorrow morning and pretend like the planet is still turning at an ordinary rate, and reasonable things are still happening upon it, despite the fact that this sequence of events will go down in history as a firm example to the contrary. In a just world—in a rational world—
Then again, he’s known better than that for many, many years.
He heaves himself upright, stands up straight, and dumps the last of the coffee down the drain in the sink.
He’s not sure how long this is going to hold together with the whole hellish wrath of the universe tearing at it from every side, but he is sure that he’s damn well going to try to enjoy it for as long as it does.
Ed does not relinquish the stolen bathrobe even when they climb into bed, which leaves Roy no choice but to snuggle up with a very warm mound of terrycloth tipped in places with steel. He has had, he will admit, much worse and much stranger bedfellows than this.
Besides, Ed’s hair has dried with fantastically random little crimps and kinks in it, and the effect is overpoweringly adorable in addition to making Roy’s finger-combing explorations a bit more eventful than usual.
“I meant it,” Ed mumbles, and Roy knows he has to leave off scalp-scratching for a moment if he wants to hear the rest. Ed makes a faint disapproving growl-noise in the back of his throat, of which he may or may not even be conscious. “That I’ll quit,” he says next. “If that’s what you… if that’s what’s… best. Easiest. Most practical or whatever.”
Roy has to choose his words very carefully. “But—”
Or perhaps he doesn’t, if Ed’s going to pin the gentler hand over his mouth the instant he tries to speak them.
“No buts,” Ed says. Roy wants to make an innuendo out of that, of course—and would, if he wasn’t being stymied. “I really don’t give a crap. Ever since we got Al back, it was like—it was just something to do. It was nice to be able to give something back for you after all those years you’d snuck in all that shit for us. That’s it. That’s the only commitment I’ve got to the stupid military. I never wanted to be here. I didn’t pick it because it mattered to me; I picked it because I needed a little bit of power, and this was a quick way to get enough to build up some more. It doesn’t mean the same thing to me as it does to you. I don’t have anything to gain from it, honestly—and I don’t have to prove to myself that it can be good and decent and idealistic again someday. I don’t have any scores to settle here. I just needed something to make money at, and since I was still enlisted, and you were still there, it was like—sure, why not? I don’t even like it. You probably know that by now.”
Roy clears his throat. Ed finally lowers his hand—too swiftly for Roy to kiss the palm before it goes.
“I know it’s far from your calling,” he says, and Ed snorts, which is precious; “but the issue is… broader than that. I don’t want this—” He nudges his knuckles at Ed’s cheek again, and Ed’s eyelids flutter shut, and he rises into the touch like a kitten, and Roy was really trying to end this a few hours ago, wasn’t he? “—to force you to alter any other aspect of your life.”
Ed winches an eye partway open to look at him.
“What’s so bad about change?” he asks.
Roy opens his mouth to answer.
No words are forthcoming.
He shuts it again.
“Really,” Ed says. “I mean—shit, it’s good that things are different now. It’s good that Al’s back to corporeal form, and I don’t need the connections that you’ve got anymore. It’s good that everybody’s settling down again, but you’re working the inside angles to make stuff right in the government and shit. It’s good that you’n I have got something that’s… y’know. Nice. Warm. Weird. Complicated. All my favorite fuckin’ things.”
“Are those your favorite things?” Roy asks.
“Pretty much,” Ed says. He reaches up and tugs on a lock of Roy’s hair. “You’re even one of my favorite colors in a couple places.” He smirks, wickedly. “Though I dunno how long that’s gonna last.”
“If you’re going to imply that I’m old,” Roy says, “I reserve the right to make references to the fact that you’re small enough to use a tea cosy as a tent and set up thimble chairs for little chats with doormice.”
Ed’s mouth falls open, and his eyes go very, very round. Rarely has Roy seen a more pronounced expression of pure betrayal—which is really saying something, given that he led a fairly major coup.
“You know what they say,” Roy says, kissing the tip of Ed’s nose; “about playing with fire.”
Ed makes a soft wheezing noise. “See if you ever get laid again, you goddamn motherfucking—”
Roy kisses his mouth this time to smother the rest of that unprintable tirade; he knows the gist of it anyway.
“Goodnight, my dear,” he says when they surface.
“Kill you,” Ed manages, batting his left fist rather weakly at Roy’s chest.
“You’re going to have to try a bit harder than that,” Roy says.
Ed buries his face in the pillow and intones just one more word:
“Eugh.”
Difficult to argue with that, too.