Archive of Our Own

“Serious question,” Ed says.  “How many times have you been punched in the face?”

“By you?” Roy asks.  “Or over the entire course of my life?”

“Aggregate number,” Ed says.  “Near misses with clear intention count.”

Roy rummages in his somewhat rattled brain.  “Should I consolidate if it’s a single fight with multiple combatants?”

“No,” Ed says.  “I can’t believe you’d even be lazy about this.”

“Of course you can,” Roy says.  “You’re very good at pattern recognition.”

The upside is that the representative of the rebel faction currently guarding them may crack at any moment and simply kill them to force them to shut up.

The downside is that Roy really doesn’t want to die with a black eye.  Unbecoming.

“Answer the fucking question,” Ed says, ramming his right shoulder ungently into Roy’s left where their respective chairs are shoved together.

By the faint noise of exasperation the guard makes, he agrees.

And he’s focused enough on the insipid conversation that Roy’s shifting looks like prissy posturing, and he hasn’t noticed that Roy and Ed are both using their fingernails to carve arrays into the soft wood of the framed manacles restraining each other’s hands behind their backs.

Roy suspects that not separating them was as much an issue of resource management as it was sheer idiocy, but the end result is the same.  Letting two of the most powerful alchemists in the nation, both of whom are renowned for their ability to wriggle out of the jaws of death with implausible regularity, sit within conspiring distance—let alone back-to-back—is such a vast strategic oversight that it’s clear these amateurs do not deserve to stage a coup.

A coup used to have some dignity.  A coup used to mean something.

“At least five,” Roy says.  “But I’ve always been careful to make sure they don’t break my nose.  I need to maintain a suave, youthful glow for the campaign posters.”

“Follow-up question,” Ed says.  He raps his knuckle against the wood, too quietly to be audible over the rustle of Roy’s wool uniform, just hard enough that Roy can feel it.  “Do you think these guys would let me out for long enough to make it six?”

“At least six,” Roy says.

Ed’s high ponytail grazes against the back of Roy’s neck as Ed turns, presumably to make meaningful eye contact with the guard.  Roy suspects that it’s a pointed glower, not the puppy eyes.

“Do I look stupid?” the guard says.

Ed swallows hard enough that Roy knows for a fact that he just valiantly resisted saying You don’t want me to answer that.

“It’s not about how you look,” Ed says.  Oh, well.  “It’s about whether you want to watch me punch the guy who smacked your dude straight out of the big chair for the crime of doing his job.”

“He didn’t smack him,” the guard says, sounding deeply affronted.  “No one smacked King Bradley.  Did you—”

“I know, like, three people who smacked him once,” Ed says.

Roy digs one last line into the wood, grazes his fingertip over the array to assess it as best he can, and then raps gently with his knuckles to signal that his is finished, too.  “At least once.”

“Bullshit,” the guard says.

“Nope,” Ed says.  “Ling Yao.  Fu.  Scar from Ishval.  Buccaneer.”

“You’re making up names,” the guard says.

“You know why your shit’s going to fail, and Mustang’s isn’t?” Ed asks, and Roy can feel those beautiful shoulders straightening.  That’s the cue.  “Because you don’t fucking learn from your own history.”

“Also my campaign posters,” Roy says.

“Shut up,” Ed says.  “Now.”

Roy touches the tiny array that Ed carved into the pillory isolating his wrists, at the same instant that Ed touches the one Roy made.  Wood splinters—shatters—and falls away.

They’re both on their feet before the guard can even stumble a step backwards.

And then they both drop to their knees, each clapping their palms together before slapping them to the ground.

The guard’s panicked shots veer so high over their heads that every bullet would have missed them even if they hadn’t ducked, but the simultaneous columns of stone flooring that whip up to slam into the underside of the unfortunate imbecile’s chin ensure that he won’t get a chance to adjust his aim.

“‘No one smacked King Bradley’,” Ed mutters, already stalking towards the doorway with his fists clenched.  “The only thing worse than radicals is revisionists.”

“I mean,” Roy says, “Bradley did go head-to-head with a tank.”

“So what?” Ed says.  “I went head-to-head with my teacher when I was eight.  She’s way worse.  This way.”

“Is that the exit?” Roy asks.

“Hell if I know,” Ed says, ponytail twirling with the usual accidental artfulness as he rounds the corner.  “We’re about to find out.”

Once upon a time, Roy had been a relatively ordinary—albeit distressingly attractive—colonel who had had really nothing whatsoever to do with all of the nasty transfer-of-power business that had messily unfolded in the midst of the near-apocalypse a few years prior.  He had simply been far too busy adjusting his collar and practicing his signature and prettying up his facial expressions in the mirror to have had the time to get involved with any of that.  Vanity was very demanding.

Some people had still believed it.

A growing number hadn’t.

So Roy had continued creeping up the ladder, becoming ever more of an expert at watching his back.

Perhaps that’s why he hadn’t thought to watch for catastrophes that walked right through the door.

He’d known, of course, that Ed and Al had spent the past few years building houses and so on in Ishval—not least because he’d received one very memorable phone call early on in the project, during which Ed had shouted at him over the static that he needed to remove the officer in charge, regardless of who the ‘useless fucking fuck’ reported to or was related to, and suggested Alex Armstrong as a replacement.  Roy had asked why it was taking so long when Ed could have fairly literally built a new canal network for Central City overnight.  Ed had explained to him, in a tone one might use for a rather dull four-year-old asking about dinner for the fiftieth time, that reconstructing Ishval with alchemy just to get it over with would be so ludicrously culturally insensitive and ethically deplorable that his mother would come back from the dead for real this time to tan his miserable hide.

Several hours later, when Roy had finished choking on his own spit, it had occurred to him that Ed making a joke about human transmutation was probably a positive sign as far as the state of his psyche.

What Roy had not known, however, was that upon the completion—or near enough—of the Ishval project, Ed would flit around the country for a few months, occasionally running across one of Roy’s increasingly innumerable contacts.  He had not known that Ed would duck the entire informant network for several weeks, effectively disappearing, such that Roy had assumed he was off on another scenic tour of ‘a country with a semi-functional government, arguably’—only then for him to simply walk into Central Command and stride directly into Roy’s office.

Roy had also not known that the intervening years and the desert heat and the physical labor had turned a strikingly unique teenager into an absolutely gobsmackingly gorgeous adult—like some sun god incarnate; like such a splendid distillation of pure gold that it would grant you eternal life, if only you could make yourself worthy of it.

Which raised a secondary problem: Roy’s informants were falling down on the job.

The primary problem was more pertinent, though.

Roy had barely been able to keep his mouth closed and his jaw off of the desktop.  It had been something of a miracle that he hadn’t drooled.

“Hi,” Ed had said, feet planted in the center of the carpet, arms folded over his chest—his chest, good Lord.  “I need money.”

Roy had blinked at him to an extent that was probably embarrassing, but at least he could attribute most of it to allergies.

There was, however, no equally plausible excuse for the fact that he had immediately reached for his wallet, because he would give the stunningly beautiful creature alighting in his office anything it asked.  “How much?”

Ed had stared at him, which was unfortunately fair.  “I mean that I need a job.”

“Oh,” Roy had said, managing not to sound especially strangled.  “Why didn’t you say so?”

“I just did,” Ed had said, still looking at Roy like he was a particularly awkwardly-shaped bleach stain on black fabric.  “I’m pretty much unemployable by the standards of normal people, so I figured, like… you’re the most abnormal person I know.”

“Thank you,” Roy had said.  “If there’s one thing we’ve truly mastered in the Amestrian military—”

“It’s procrastination,” Ed had said.

“If there are two things we’ve truly mastered in the Amestrian military,” Roy had said, “they’re procrastination and nepotism.”  He’d folded his hands on his desk blotter while Ed had squirmed.  The job market must have been dire indeed for him to risk asking Roy for a favor.  “What would you like to do?”

“Make rent,” Ed says.

Roy had started nudging at dominos in his head.  “Let me see what I—”

“Everybody hates the military,” Ed had said.  “There’s got to be some public-facing higher-up moron in desperate need of a bodyguard.”

Roy had blinked.

At least Ed had simply snatched a domino without so much as a by-your-leave, rather than yanking on the table so hard that most of them tumbled to the floor.

Maybe the time away had done him some… something.  Good, perhaps.  Some solace, some rest—maybe just time.  Maybe it was just that time had worn the edges down.

And polished him to such a shining gold that he was almost impossible to look at.  It was like staring at the sun.

Still better than an eclipse.

“Come back this time tomorrow,” Roy had said.  “I’ll figure something out.”

Ed had snorted.  “You mean you’ll stir something up.”

Roy had smiled, making a point of folding his hands, fingers extended and touching at the tips.  “Isn’t that what I said?”

Ed had rolled his eyes.

And he’d come back as he’d been bidden.

He had soon come back—unbidden—after just one week of the new arrangement that had anointed him as the personal protector of one Brigadier General Aloysius Armand.

“Mustang,” Ed had said.

It had been late.  Roy had been tired.  His mind had run rampant, slipping the cuffs his better judgment tried to clasp around its wrists to keep the daydreaming in check.

“Let me guess,” Roy had said.  “While you’re exceedingly grateful for my boundless generosity, you don’t like the job.”

Ed had grown into enough grace to stand very still with his arms folded and grimace prodigiously instead of leaping straight to shouting in his own defense.  “Look, I don’t think it’s exactly a state secret.”

Roy had, obediently, arched the eyebrow.

“This guy is stupid,” Ed had said.

“Doesn’t that make it easier?” Roy had asked.

Ed had glared at him.  “Does it make it easier for policy shit when they’re dumber than a box of rocks but convinced that they’re world-class intellects, and they genuinely believe that none of their crackpot ideas that a hunk of granite would reject are ever gonna go south?”

Roy had swallowed the snicker, not without difficulty.  “I had hoped this might be different.”

Ed had maintained the glare.

“Well,” Roy had said, “I can keep an ear to th—”

“Let me work for you,” Ed had said.

Roy had blinked at him.  That was somewhat perilous in its own right, given the intensity with which the last frets of the fading sunset streaming through the window made him glow.

“I’m serious,” Ed had said.  “There were people who hated you enough to try to kill you even before you actually started doing anything.  There must be a line forming now.  Being paranoid’s all good and well, but sometimes you just need a second pair of eyes.”

Roy had looked at him—looked closely, at the sharpened square angle of his jaw, the casual cascade of the ponytail over his distressingly powerful shoulder.  He was going to have etched the frown lines in deep within two years, tops.  He’d left the top button of his shirt undone, but the shirt itself was spotlessly clean and possibly even pressed.

This was not the Ed that Roy had known, then—not by a longshot.

That one almost led him to his death.

This one could bring him to his knees.

Roy didn’t have the time.  He didn’t have the energy.  The last damn thing he should do, in a position so precarious that it made airless mountaintops look reassuring, was invite a distraction.

Hughes had eventually taught him enough about self-preservation that some of it had sunk in.

Roy had refolded his hands, but he hadn’t looked away.  He owed Ed that much.

“I can’t afford you,” he’d said.

Ed had shrugged, which had not helped at all with the problem of how deliciously appealing those damn shoulders looked in an ordinary shirt.  “Free trial.  Give it a week.”

Roy had stayed very still.  “I’ll look for something for you.”

Ed had rolled his eyes.  “Fine.  Anyone with two brain cells to rub together would be a treat.”

“Tall order,” Roy had said.  Ed had given him a pointed look.  He’d somehow forgotten how much fun that was.  “Just a figure of speech,” he’d said, lightly.  “I’ll see what I can do.”

“For now,” Ed had said, “you should see about getting your ass out of here before it melds with the chair.  Do you know what time it is?”

“Time for a new chair,” Roy had said, “if this one is trying to eat me.”

Ed had stared at him for a moment more.

Then Ed had thrown his head back and laughed.

“It is a public service to drag you out of here before you get even more unhinged,” Ed had said.  “I’ll accept the medal later.”

The gravity of his presence had tripled in his time away—the way he’d moved was more mesmerizing than ever.  He’d always carried himself with a degree of ferocity that no one else could replicate—like every single step was a declaration of war against the world that had tried to crush him so many times.

But it was a promise, before.  It was spite.  His spine was straight not because the world wasn’t weighing on him, but because he refused to bend.

Now, though—now the commitment had turned to confidence.

Ed had fought all of his demons and won.

Roy hadn’t really had a choice except to hurl a few things into his bag and follow Ed towards the door.

They made it halfway to the trolley stop.

Roy had started to turn first, but Ed had shoved him before he’d found his balance, and he’d stumbled.

The bullet had streaked just past Ed’s beautiful, beautiful shoulder.

Roy had snapped his fingers.

Ed had surged forward, spinning into the lunge like a whirlwind, moving effortlessly around the flame—twirling right alongside it as if Roy had summoned him, too.

The firelight had illuminated a man in a mask—who was trying to make a break for it, which was wise but futile.

The flame had bathed him just enough to make him howl and duck away from the pain, his jacket smoking.  In three seconds flat, Ed had pinned him to the pavement with a touch more enthusiasm than necessary.

Roy had crouched and drawn the mask down, but the face behind it—which made a valiant but also doomed effort to spit at him—didn’t look familiar.

Ed had pressed the man’s cheek down into the sad little trail of spit.

“Requesting permission to say ‘I fucking told you so’,” Ed had said.

“Maybe he’s a mugger,” Roy had said, entirely to be a bastard.  “I do look expensive.”

Ed had laughed again, incredulously this time, while the man’s eyes bugged in indignation.

Other than the reaction, though, their captive had maintained such stolidly neutral silence that the spitting attempt was the only reason Roy didn’t check to see if his tongue had been cut out.  The interrogation team at headquarters hadn’t gotten a word out of him—but the gun had been an antique.

Roy had taken Ed with him, for some reason—some whim, some soft whisper of fate into his ear—and tracked it down.  With a date and time range, an area of town, and a photograph, the barkeep of a nearby pub had been able to give Roy a tab with a first name and an assurance that the man lived relatively close.  The apartment complex four blocks down had had a matching surname, and General Mustang had had an ID.

“Okay,” Ed had said.  “I get why they let you run Investigations now.”

“My dear Edward,” Roy had said, not failing to notice the way Ed’s eyes refocused at the diminutive, “I’m only getting started.”

Silas Birwoch was not ex-military, which meant he’d learned to aim somewhere else.  The firing range closest to his flat confirmed acquaintance, if not association, with a man that Madame Christmas had pegged as the head of the fractious little faction calling themselves the Old Guard, on account of their fervent nostalgia for Bradley’s reign.

“Well?” Ed had said, drumming his metal fingers on the counter of the bar.

“I suppose,” Roy had said, “that there might currently be a few more people trying to kill me than the usual baseline.”

“And?” Ed had said.

“And they’re less likely to succeed if you’re with me,” Roy had said.  “Although I won’t hold it against you if they manage it anyway.”

Chris had snorted loudly, which wasn’t helpful; and then poured each of them a shot, which was.

“All the best business deals start with whiskey,” she’d said.  “Bottoms up, boys.”

And that had been that.

Once upon a present moment, Roy can’t help wondering how things might have gone if he’d pursued an alternative career path.  Freelance alchemy doesn’t seem to go a whole lot better than the morally bankrupt mercenary approach, so that’s probably a hardline policy the universe sets to keep hubristic idiots more or less in check.  Maybe he could have gone into architecture.  That still uses a lot of math.

Arguably, of course, if Roy hadn’t been where and who he’d been at the time he was, Father would have scrounged up a few more souls to hurl into the Gate, and the rest of them would have been ground down or melted into the planet-scale alchemical equivalent of petrol, but the theoretical point stands.  Maybe Roy could have established himself in a vocation where fewer people would be committed to the prospect of murdering him for trespasses both real and imagined.

Probably not, though.  He’s a shit-stirrer before he’s anything else—a meddler with the status quo; a peddler of transformation.  He makes trouble like most people make tea.

He burns himself on it just as often, too.

“Tell me the truth,” Roy says to Ed.  “Did you miss this, or does it just feel exhausting?”

Hand completely soundless on the knob, Ed eases the door ahead of them open just a crack and peeks into the gap.  Half a heartbeat later, he draws it open, his shoulders lowering, and strides through.  He doesn’t even bother to beckon: he knows Roy will follow him into the newly-revealed wine cellar, which is quite an improvement after the convenient crypt-like basement where they were being detained.

“I guess I missed the excitement,” Ed says.  “But I was starting to be able to sleep at night, and that sure as hell went right out the window.”

“A young man once told me that he would sleep when he was dead,” Roy says.

“There was a ‘fucking’ in there somewhere,” Ed says, checking down every aisle of looming barrels as he stalks towards the far door.  “And he was an idiot.”

“It always seemed to me,” Roy says, lightly, as he trails close enough behind to provide backup but not close enough to impede Ed’s steps, “that he was doing the best he could.”

“That’s part of what made him an idiot,” Ed says, ponytail whipping smoothly as he glares down another row—empty again, at least.  “You were right in front of him the whole time, constantly getting promoted for doing the barest possible minimum of shit that pertained to your actual job, and it still took him years to figure out that no one’s ever going to pat you on the back when you break it for them.”

Roy reaches forward and pats his left shoulder.

Ed’s snarl is unconvincing, because the laugh almost shatters it from underneath.  “Fuck off,” he gets out, closing in on the next door.  “You have any idea where we are?”

The truck bed they were transported in—with burlap sacks over their heads and some sort of canvas tarp on top to keep them out of sight—left quite a lot to be desired as far as creature comforts, but its poor handling did make it all the easier to track the turns, because the whole damn vehicle would lurch, and the tires would grind.

Roy had also pretended to be asleep, including some expert imitation snores, but their abductors had mostly spent the ride complaining about the price of drinks these days instead of revealing anything useful.

“Based on the time and estimated distance that we traveled,” Roy says, “the only estate of sufficient size, age, and opulence within that radius belongs to the Pelleriost family.”

“Cool,” Ed says, which it is not.  “Are they collecting more wine than anyone could ever possibly drink just to make themselves look important?”

“Yes,” Roy says.  “But they don’t need it, because they’re one of the most prominent old-money families in the country.  They’ve been buying military favors since the beginning.”

“Awesome,” Ed says, which it is also not.  “I love kicking useless hyper-rich ass.  It’s more satisfying.  Better foot-feel.”

“There’s no such thing as ‘foot-feel’,” Roy says.

“Kick with me,” Ed says, as if Roy has ever or will ever or would ever have a choice but to act how Ed compels him, “and you’ll find out exactly how wrong you are.”

So that’s something to look forward to.

If they ever make it out of this lavish labyrinth, that is.

In order to hire Ed as a personal security consultant, Roy had scraped the bottom of the budgetary barrel so vehemently that he’d carved through the oak and hit the steel of the hoops.

Ed lasted a grand total of two hours in the office before he got so bored that he started doing the filing, and after that he just picked up whatever was available—with periodic breaks to use alchemy to fix things that weren’t even really very broken.

Together, they had lasted a grand total of two weeks before The Idea.

Ed had accompanied Roy to an exceptionally dull party, even by the uninspiring standards of Amestris’s self-appointed aristocracy.  Ed had lingered around the edges of the room, occasionally ghosting through and passing inches behind Roy’s back—presumably just to check on him—before claiming a different position that made him look just as unassuming and uninterested as the one before.  In every single one of those positions, he had a broad view of the room, a clear sightline on Roy, and a direct route to at least two exits.

Roy had to agree that he’d been wasted on Armand.

It was possible that he was wasted on Roy, too, since nothing went amiss except for the fact that all of the hobnobbing kept Roy even later than he’d feared.  The drive home was an exercise in keeping himself alert by force.  Ed had to nudge him meaningfully more than once.

“You know,” Ed had said as Roy had let them in to his townhouse so that Ed could do a sweep, “anyone who was really serious about killing you probably wouldn’t wait for business hours.”

Roy had hung his coat.  “In general, having designs on my life points to a grievous lack of politesse.”

“Also,” Ed had added, ducking into the kitchen to survey it, sounding for all the world as if Roy hadn’t spoken, “anyone even remotely serious about killing you would find out in a single day of stalking that I just leave at night, and this place is much less secure than Command.”

“Assassins simply don’t have a code of conduct anymore,” Roy had said.  “What is this world coming to?”

Ed had spared him a Shut up look en route to the living room.  “That’s called ‘context’, Mustang.  What I’m getting at is that it’s safer for you and a win-fucking-win if, instead of me paying rent for a place I don’t want and barely spend time in, you just let me sleep on your couch.  You wouldn’t have to pay me as much, either.  Solves practically every problem that we’ve got.”

Roy hadn’t realized that they had so many problems, but presumably that’s precisely why he needs a bodyguard in the first place.  Problem identification is a key stage of not getting murdered, or at least a strong first step.

And Ed was probably the only person Roy knew—possibly the only person he’d ever met—who was presenting the proposition in the moment that it came to him, expecting it to be judged unerringly logically and entirely on its relative merits.

He was the only person who wouldn’t even consider the fact that Roy was tired and tipsy and more than a little bit sweet on him.

He was taking action, not taking advantage.

“What’s the catch?” Roy had asked.

Ed, looking into the hall closet, which was admittedly where Roy might wait if he was planning to do someone in, snorted so loudly that it almost echoed.  “What do you think?  You can’t get rid of me even when you want to.  I can be quiet, though.  Ask Fyodor.”

Roy had heard enough stories about the adventures in Creta with a motley crew of ex-pats from all over the world to know that Fyodor was a reliable character witness, and also so difficult to impress that he made Olivier Armstrong look kittenish.  Roy had determined a long time ago that he would count himself very lucky if he was able to live out the rest of his natural life without ever having to ask Fyodor anything at all.

“All right,” Roy’s idiot mouth had said before his brain could even roll the full thought over and see if it was molding on the underside.  “Why not?”

Awaiting them on the far side of the door from the cellar is an even chillier little stone-walled room occupied only by some large stacked crates and a set of wooden stairs complete with a switchback.  A single torch gutters in a wall sconce, spilling intermittent light down over the steps.  A tiny window seven feet up on the left wall—which must just barely be above ground level—admits a sliver of anemic starlight.

Ed sighs.

Cautiously, he puts one foot on the lowest stair, leaning his weight forward slowly like he expects it to collapse.

It doesn’t.

But he and Roy both glance up in unison at the muffled voices emanating from just behind the door at the top.

“Yeah, no,” Ed mutters, and Roy has to scramble back to give him space to storm over to the wall.  He looks up, then down, brow furrowed in the concentration that makes him look even more ethereal right up until it makes him look like he has a stomachache.  He raises his left hand, presses his open palm to the stone, and then slides it back and forth.  “Limestone?”

“Almost certainly,” Roy says.  “It’s traditional on top of being the most durable, and this lot wouldn’t have had to cut corners.”

“Assholes,” Ed says.  He cranes his neck to look up at the window.  “Good.  They can afford to put it back.”

The first clap of his hands starts the lightning of the pent-up energy sparking around his wrists, sizzling out as he slaps both palms against the stone.  Clean, even stair steps obediently emerge from the wall, starting near the floor and rising neatly to where a less-than-tall young genius can easily assess the limited view of the lawn.

Ed has skipped up them before Roy has had time to blink.

With the second clap of his hands, he ushers the power right into the wall—which glows, then seethes, then churns, then… settles.

For a second, Roy wonders if his estimation of the stone was incorrect, sabotaging Ed’s control of its chemical structure.

Then he realizes that deconstruction wasn’t the point.

Reconfiguration was.

“Come on,” Ed says, circling his right shoulder.

When Roy makes it to the second step up towards him, he draws his arm back.

“Cover your nose,” Ed says.

Ed punches through the wall.

The scrambling up and tumbling out isn’t quite as dramatic as it would have been if they’d been higher off the ground, rather than Ed breaking through just above where the wall rises over the grass, but a daring escape is a daring escape.

Or it would be, if the universe didn’t have a special sort of balance—Roy’s not sure he’d call it justice—set aside for alchemists.

As far as he can tell, it’s fairly simple:

If you transmute what the world offers you instead of accepting it, it will never welcome you home.

If you choose to be clever, you will never be fortunate.

They’ve only just hauled themselves out of the explosive profusion of calcium dust and dragged themselves upright when half a dozen rather sizable men tackle them right back to the grass.

Ed fights like an alley cat, but there are enough enemies to hold his arms away from each other—too far for him to use his hands in any of their many capacities.

Another man lands on the center of Roy’s back with so much force that he sees stars, and the breath that departs from him in a single scraping gasp seems tragically uneager to return in the foreseeable future.

That man also pins his right arm behind his back and his left wrist to the grass.

At least it’s all a little bit less embarrassing knowing that they did their homework.

Roy has almost wrenched free and displaced the knee digging into his spine when the largest of the goons grabs hold of Ed’s right arm in both hands and hauls on it with enough brutal force to rip it out of the port.  

The howl of agony that shreds its way up out of Ed’s throat illuminates every last square centimeter of Roy’s body with incandescent rage.

He wrests his right arm away from his captor, gets one palm flattened on the dirt, and uses the leverage to twist his body with the wild, temporary strength of desperation.

It works.

The first guard tumbles off of him, scrabbling for a grip on the back of his uniform coat as he flings himself up onto one knee, bringing both hands together—

He feels the initial impact of another man tackling him from the side—a swelling shock to his nerves that blossoms into the first blush of pain as the bruises bloom.

Then he hits the ground so hard that everything goes black.

It wasn’t as though Roy was a stranger to the concept of a roommate, especially considering the claustrophobic closeness of the quarters they’d had in Ishval, but it had been a while since he’d cohabitated with another human being whose routine overlapped with his.

He spent the first weekend converting the spare room into a guest bedroom, which he’d never had cause for until now.  

Ed had insisted that the couch was fine.  Roy had reminded him that the point of this whole exercise was to save money, which would ultimately be moot if Ed had to go spend it all on a chiropractor anyway. 

Ed had insisted on contributing to groceries, only then to make the unfortunate discovery that Roy lived on takeout and sandwiches and a lot of things that came from cans.  He’d said “This isn’t the kind of saving-your-life I was figuring on, you freak,” and then dragged Roy to the market, where they’d had a shockingly lovely day, even accounting for the fact that Ed had stood there with his arms folded and glowered every time Roy fished out his wallet and paid for one mission-critical vegetable or another.

Ed had insisted on paying for the gelato that concluded their excursion.  They’d sat on a park bench.  Ed had made such a truly incredible mess that Roy had started doing calculations as far as whether he could afford both the mission-critical vegetables and a significantly increased volume of laundry detergent.

It all should have felt stranger than it did.

He’d felt it, even then—in the hazy, quasi-mystical sixth-sense way that he despised most, because he knew he couldn’t trust it, but he also knew he couldn’t outrun it.

There was something to this.  There was something in this.  He wasn’t going to be able to fight it.

Ed had always been a part of things, which made it all too easy to accept him being a part of everything.  It felt obvious.  Easy.  Alchemical.  It felt like a sinking in and a settling down—a comfortable silence because nothing whatsoever needed to be said.

Ed was just… there.  Everywhere.  Always.  Burning at the edge of Roy’s vision like the promise of dawn.

They had skipped the part with the awkward reacquaintance.  They had skipped the part where Roy battled with his psyche over whether it was some feeble moral failing to find a shining, splendid, ice-cream-spattered Ed breathtaking at twenty when he’d taunted him at twelve.  They had skipped the part where they had to dance around each other, finding stupid ways to avoid asking stupid questions.  They’d leapt right into the deep end without looking back.

They had both always been more comfortable trying not to drown than learning how to swim.

“Do you want me to get you a napkin?” Roy had asked.

Ed had been licking his fingers—mostly but not exclusively the ones on the left—as if for the sole purpose of demonstrating Roy’s revelation.

“You might need to get a hose,” Ed had said.  He’d nodded to Roy’s cup.  “You gonna finish that?”

“Not if I can watch you drench yourself with it instead,” Roy had said, handing it over.

Ed had grinned and mock-saluted with Roy’s spoon.  “Honestly, I hope somebody comes at you right now.  If I punched ’em, they’d stick to my fist.”

As Roy had laughed, it had felt like something in him was coming loose.

Yes.  He was very fucked indeed.

The rest of the week was more of the same—more of the impossible easiness of Ed filtering into the fabric of his life like a dye setting, right down to the way that the color made all the fraying fibers look complete.

Unfortunately, Roy can’t tell if he’s a blanket or a rug.

Ed has ended up walking all over him.

It’s uncanny how quickly he got used to it.

It’s miraculous how infrequently Ed takes advantage.

It’s not that Roy ever mistook Ed for cruel, but no one who’s faced the unyielding sledgehammer bluntness of his approach to the world—a conviction that logic will prevail in spite of most people’s natural aversion to it—would expect him to have empathetic instincts.

It occurred to Roy far too late—well after Ed had moved a literary stockpile of mysterious and slightly questionable origin into the spare room and changed the curtains to “a cooler color” and alchemically added claw feet to all of the furniture—that Ed wasn’t just accustomed to shepherding someone else along towards better habits without hurting their feelings.  He had made it his life’s entire mission.  It was probably a relief to be able to micromanage Roy’s diet and order him to bed at a reasonable hour.  Ed had spent the formative years of his life perfecting his techniques, but Al hadn’t needed the supervision in years.  

Roy found himself resenting it for about half a day, considering that he’d been making his own miserable way though this world quite sufficiently for almost four decades with minimal intervention.  He was obviously not a child.  Like Ed, he had hardly ever had the chance to be.

But that afternoon—as a not-unexpected result of a rushed morning trying to collect his scattered notes for an excruciating meeting, the meeting itself, and his tenuous grudgingly Gate-granted eyesight—he had had a splitting headache of a caliber that might have felled a lesser reprobate.

Ed had sauntered in from the outer office, where he’d probably once again been editing vast swathes of editorializing out of young officers’ reports and feeding on the irony.  He had smacked a tall cup of coffee, an even taller cup of water, and an entire handful of painkillers down on top of the missive Roy had been trying to annotate through the firestorm in his cranium.

“I’m coming back in twenty minutes with food,” Ed had said.  “If those aren’t gone, I’m going to eat it in front of you.”

The only kind of condescension Ed has ever been capable of was intellectual.

He wasn’t patronizing Roy by expanding the definition of ‘physical protector’ to be much closer to ‘existence executive’.  He finally had a new vessel—or perhaps a new target—for the sincerest form of love that he knew how to give.

Roy had been starving for somewhere to direct his devotion since the day that he’d lost Hughes.

This—this thing, this collision, this inevitability—would either be too perfect altogether or a complete and utter catastrophe.

Horrifyingly, headache from hell notwithstanding, Roy found himself thrilled at the prospect of finding out.

The dark is deep, but Roy is too damn stubborn to let it swallow him.  It does shroud his eyes for longer than he’d like—long enough to run a frigid finger down his spine.  It’s a chilling sort of familiarity.

His head aches vindictively.  There’s something crusted on his face, which he hopes is blood, since somehow that’s the least unappealing of the likeliest options.  His lip is split—the upper one, on the right side, which is also where the crust is.

The blurry, bleary, blinding, and generally joyless ascent back into consciousness is an ungainly thing—stumbling and step-wise.  Roy hears before he sees.

They’re indoors again, but in a bigger room this time—the sounds echo.

More specifically, Ed’s voice echoes.

“…going to kill him, you would have done it by now,” Ed is saying, since reminding them of their leverage is always the best way to negotiate in a hostage situation where you’re the hostage.  “Are you trying to get him to endorse your little club?”

Roy blinks a lot.  It hurts.  Devlin Pelleriost, who was smiling in Roy’s face at that first damn party where Ed ate all the profiteroles and blamed it on the skinniest general in the room, is standing there in a smoking jacket, frowning down at Ed.  Wisely, perhaps, while Roy was unconscious, they tied Ed to a dining chair with enough twine to supply a post office for a year.

Roy has also been granted the luxury of a chair, and the extraordinarily unwise luxury of having one wrist handcuffed to either side of the back.  He flexes his fingers very, very slowly.  It’s just too wide to reach across, but he didn’t make it this damn far without being resourceful.  At its blackened heart, alchemy is about trying to make something from what the uninspired consider to be inconsequential.  It’s about seeing potential in nothingness.

“Ah,” Devlin says as he turns towards Roy.

‘Ah’ really does make for a goatee-stroke-worthy interjection in situations like this.  Roy should probably stop saying it.  Perhaps that’s what gave these simpletons the wrong impression.

“The general’s awake,” Devlin adds, since apparently stating the obvious is just one more service that offered by the braintrust behind this conspiracy.  Devlin strolls over with his hands folded behind his back, wreathed in the cloying fragrance of imported cigar smoke like an overpriced cologne.  “Feeling rational, I hope?”

Striking a man around the head is not a particularly well-documented way of inspiring clear thinking, but since Roy has suspected that this was coming since the first gunman in the alleyway, he has no delusions on the topic of their intentions in any case.

“More or less,” Roy says, blinking at Devlin as serenely as possible.  “Which is what makes it somewhat difficult to understand your intentions.”  He keeps his face completely neutral.  “Bradley is dead.  You can’t bring him back—you really, really can’t.  So what exactly do you want me to do?  Put on some taller boots and grow a mustache?”

“I would quit,” Ed says.

“Everyone would quit,” Roy says.  He tips his head as Devlin stares at him.  “Is that the plan?  Clear out the ranks that way?”

Devlin’s eyes narrow.

It’s a bit of a pity.  That strategy might actually have done some good.

“You,” Devlin says, in a tone one might use to address a particularly persistent mosquito, which Roy has to admit actually isn’t that far off; “are going to use your disproportionate influence and vast network of contacts to change public perception of our cause.”

Roy waits.

Devlin scowls.

“That’s it?” Roy asks, inserting just enough borderline-cheerful brightness to give it a mocking edge.  “You want me to rehabilitate your image?  Me?  You plan assassinations but draw the line at extorting journalists?”

“Eliminating you was the preferred option,” Devlin grits out, and the Not least because then I wouldn’t have to listen to your bullshit is heavily implied, “but when Birwoch’s failure only made you more popular, it became eminently clear that killing you would make you some sort of martyr for democracy for the suggestible populace.  You’re slightly more valuable alive.”

“I get that a lot,” Roy says.  “Can you explain it to me again?  I’m quite stupid, you see.”

The scalding derision in Ed’s snort may well qualify as the highest compliment Roy has ever received.

“I’m trying to make sense of it,” Roy says, unerringly innocently.  “As far as I can tell, you want me to convince both the military and the citizenry that a half-immortal dictator enthroned by an ancient monstrosity who was functionally farming the entire country for the alchemical energy of their souls was providing them a superior form of government than they would get if they could hold their political representatives accountable in any way at all.”

Devlin blinks.

And then scowls again.

“And then what?” Roy says.  “Am I supposed to replace him and serve as a puppet while you pull strings from the shadows to advance your personal agenda, on the basis that I’m so scared for my own precious life that I’ll submit to anyone who threatens it?”

By the resonating silence, Roy gathers that that was, indeed, the plan.

He looks Devlin in the eyes.  “Have you seen my hands?”

It sounds like a non sequitur.  Devlin’s scowl deepens.  “As you may recall, we confiscated your gloves immediately.  We know very well what you can do with them.”

“Wise of you,” Roy says, holding Devlin’s gaze so that he won’t notice the way that Ed squirms with a delight that he has very weakly disguised as discomfort.  Roy tugs with his right wrist, jingling the cuff.  “May I?”

Devlin nods.

Roy clenches his jaw as subtly as he can and tamps down any trace of triumph.

The guard looming behind him hesitates—but not for long.

As the clinking metal of the cuff falls away, Roy makes a show of circling his wrist and wincing.

“Thank you,” he says.

He doesn’t extend his arm to its full length as he holds his hand out towards Devlin, palm open, to show the snarled white well of the scar.

“Substantial nerve damage,” Roy says, pleasantly.  “Nothing helps.  Even after an alchemical intervention, most doctors think I might lose mobility in my fingers altogether by the time I’m your age.  I suppose a stabbing while you’re being sacrificed to the portal of Truth will do that for you.”

Devlin’s scowl would make for a masterpiece of portraiture: there are so many layers of disgust.

Being underestimated always gives you the upper hand.

“What the hell,” Devlin says, “are you on about?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Roy says, as warmly as possible.  “Do you have somewhere else to be?”

Ed chokes on a laugh that sounds moderately painful.

“The point,” Roy says, keeping his voice light, “is that you were on the right track when you tried to have me murdered.  Even setting the politics aside—as a matter of principle, do you really think I would accept acting as a replacement for a man who sent me to a genocidal war and then tried to kill me for having the temerity to complain?”

Devlin looks unimpressed by this development.

Roy hopes it’s more than that—Roy hopes that he’s agitated.  Roy hopes that he’s stressed.

When Havoc reaches a point like that—especially in the first moment that he realizes his carefully laid plans have wrenched free of his control, before he’s started to figure out how he might be able to salvage them—he always reaches for a cigarette.

“Honestly,” Roy says, laying his hand delicately on his knee, just clear of where the guard could reach to catch his forearm again, “I know my pretty face bewilders a lot of people into believing that I’m some sort of dandy, but you must have heard about what I did in Ishval.  Did you really think that a man who was capable of all of that would cave at the first sign of pressure from someone like you?”

Devlin’s shoulders rise.  His mouth sets into a tight line.

“I mean, really,” Roy says sweetly.  “Did you think this through at all?”

Devlin clenches his teeth.

Then he twists his grimace into a grin.

“You can shut your prodigious mouth now,” Devlin says.

“No,” Ed says—sounding, of all things, faintly dazed, which makes Roy dart a glance at him.  He looks strangely elated.  Relieved.  And… happy?   Almost adoring.  “He can’t.”

Devlin ignores that, which just goes to show how shortsighted he is, pun fully intended.  “I think you know what I’m going to say next, Mustang.”

“That you’re revising the priority of your options,” Roy says, perhaps obediently.  “And now you’re simply going to have to kill me to shut me up.”

Devlin shrugs.

And then he decides to celebrate by retrieving a box from his pocket—from which he extracts a cigar.

Roy can’t help holding his breath.

And Devlin, who has kept himself concealed behind the curtains all this time—who would have gotten away with this if he’d simply slit their throats at the outset and left their corpses in a ditch—rewards Roy’s slow, subtle campaign of psychological warfare by extracting a lighter from his pocket next.

“Oh, you’re stupid,” Ed says, the observation dripping with so much undiluted disdain that Roy can’t help feeling proud.  “They don’t say ‘Know your enemy’ because they think you’re lonely.”

Devlin looks up sharply, his left hand balancing the cigar on his lip, his right holding up the shining silver box of absolution.  “You need one of your hands to do alchemy.”

“At least one,” Ed says.  “But I’m not talking about me.”

Yet again, Devlin disregards the warning.

He frowns at Ed.

And flicks the wheel of the lighter with his thumb.

Roy smiles.

It doesn’t even seem sporting.

Roy lifts his right hand off of his knee, slings it around himself, and slaps it against the handcuffed left.  He pulls with everything in him—channels the oxygen, funnels it, fills the whole parlor with invisible canals.

The fire floods the room.

And the breathable molecules of the air disappear from in front of the mouths of every single one of their adversaries.

Ed hurls his weight sideways, tipping the chair over.  Like much of the furniture in this palatial home, it’s probably an antique—the wood is old.

And it splinters when it hits the stone floor.

Roy strikes his hands together again before the flame crackles out, this time to shear the steel of the handcuff still restraining his left wrist.  Before the smoke has even begun to clear, he’s out of the chair and running to Ed, clapping his hands again to reestablish the array—to catch the embers clinging to Devlin’s clothes and ignite them into a new, blindingly bright wall of pale flame that the whole room instinctively cowers away from.

Except Ed, obviously.

Who has already scrabbled halfway to his feet unaided.

Roy reaches him in time to help haul him up perhaps a split-second faster than he would have managed it alone.

By the time their adversaries realize that the flame was more of a distraction and a deterrent than a weapon, it’s too late: Ed has his feet beneath him and his balance back.

Nothing and no one in this room can stop him.

Roy elbows the guardsman who ripped Ed’s automail off—in the throat, because the bastard deserves it.  Then Roy throws his chair at another one, steering flame from the burning tablecloth directly into the path of Devlin’s prospective escape route.  Roy isn’t new to this game.  The rats always run, and the rich ones truly believe that they’ll walk free.

Sometimes they do.

But Devlin won’t.

Roy has clawed and kicked and scraped and crawled this high entirely so that the next time someone tried to stab him in the back and bleed him dry, he could take them down forever.

Devlin is going to find out what Roy Mustang really is—what they made him.

But first, he’s going to trip over the hem of his own stupid smoking jacket in his heedlessly desperate attempt to flee the room.

Roy understands the impulse.  Devlin doesn’t know what a fight is, let alone one with lives at stake.  He’s been a societal parasite for so long that it’s never even occurred to him to wonder.  In his world, everything comes on silver platters, raised directly to his delicate hands so that he can pick and choose what’s most palatable.  No one has ever turned the ornate, runner-lined, china-laden tables on him before.

Seeing Edward Elric—whom he likely assumed had never lived up to the legends in the first place, and if nothing else had clearly been domesticated in the intervening years—turn into a nightmarish whirlwind of concentrated, brutally elegant, utterly merciless martial power with only a single arm at his disposal must make for a rather rude awakening.

Ed angles a backflip perfectly to bring his right heel up under one guard’s chin, then slings his momentum sideways to apply the left foot to the wrist of one who just drew a gun.  He doesn’t wait for the howls, or the reeling, or the collapsing to the floor—he just moves in, slamming his empty metal shoulder into the gut of the next man, then dropping to the expensive rug to sweep his automail foot expertly and knock the next one’s ankles out from under him.

Roy, for his part, claps his hands together and focuses.  Limestone.

He kicks the corner of the rug aside and presses his palms to the floor.

The wall he raises between Devlin and the doorway is both hideously ugly and so thin that Devlin could probably shoulder his way through it if he’d ever had a single ounce of mettle in his substantial frame.  Roy figured it was better that than the risk of compromising the structural integrity of the floor and dropping the fool into the basement when they need him up here in one piece.

Devlin doesn’t seem to see the details of the wall in any case—he sees a blocked escape, and the panic blinds him to the rest.

He scrambles away, casting a mortified eye over his contingent of erstwhile thugs and protectors just in time to watch two more of them get the Elric treatment.  A stunning swirling kick that makes Ed look particularly like a dervish handcrafted in hell lets him transition quite smoothly between toppling the first with a foot to the side of his neck and bringing his other leg up on the backswing to slam his heel into the next adversary’s ribcage.

There’s only one guard still standing, more than a bit slack-jawed.

Roy hasn’t risen from the floor.  He claps and taps, but on the carpet this time.

It’s more than a bit satisfying to turn such an expensive article into a makeshift rope in any case, and the scream as it snakes up the man’s body to cinch in around his torso is better yet.

Roy stands.  He makes a bit of a show of dusting off his hands.

“Well,” he says.  “I believe that conveys my position on the subject of your proposal.”

“I think he gets it,” Ed says.

Roy smiles without looking away from Devlin’s wide, wide eyes.  “I think you may be overestimating the average Amestrian aristocrat.”

“I think you may be obnoxious,” Ed says, coming up beside him.  “Actually, scratch that—I’m sure.”

Roy can actually pinpoint the moment that Devlin decides he has nothing left to lose.  There’s a flicker in his watery blue eyes, and then he slowly sets his jaw, as if Roy won’t notice the shift.

Roy supposes most generals wouldn’t.  Most of them don’t spend most of their nights forging through sandstorms in unknown cities, where justified men with long knives wait at every turn.

Devlin sinks to his knees, holding both hands out in front of him, and makes a sincere effort to look humble and imploring.

“What do you want?” Devlin pants desperately, like they always do.  “I can give you anything you want—anything.”

Roy smiles again.

This time, Devlin seems to notice.

After all this time, Devlin actually seems to see him.

The resignation settles in his eyes like ice solidifying over a lake.

“I want Ishval never to have happened,” Roy says calmly.  “And I want Maes Hughes to be alive.”

Devlin has paled, but he doesn’t flinch.  He tries one more time—runs one more mental calculation—but he still comes up empty-handed.

“I’m valuable,” he says.  “I could be a very good friend to you, Mustang.”

“No,” Roy says.  “You’re not.  And you don’t even know what that means.”

Devlin swallows hard.

Roy stays still, head high, gaze level.

Devlin looks away.

Ed ghosts over to the corner where one of the guards left the automail arm lying on the floor—on the floor.  Devlin and his crew of cronies should really thank their lucky stars that Winry isn’t here to witness this, since she wouldn’t leave anyone alive.

As Roy had expected, given the profusion of broken wires protruding from Ed’s shoulder port like mechanical gristle, Ed sighs.  “Yeah, it’s busted.  You’re on restraint duty, Mustang.”

Roy turns away from Devlin just fast enough to get a good sweep out of his mud-splattered cavalry skirt.  The only purpose those serve is drama, so he doesn’t think he can be faulted for putting them to use.  “Would you believe me if I said I wasn’t going to enjoy this?” he asks.

“No,” Ed says.

“Good,” Roy says.

He doesn’t, though.

Much.

Mostly it’s just a lot of work—keeping the array fixed neatly in his mind and focusing to incorporate his arms into the outermost ring of it requires so much concentration that it leaves his head pounding.  The injury certainly isn’t helping.

Ed does, though, managing to use his one hand in concert with his feet and teeth to manually tighten and re-knot most of the ropes that Roy produces from table linens and rugs and curtains—fabric specimens that he chose in part just to see if Devlin would shudder.  Which he does.

“This might be a new experience for you,” Ed says, stepping back and planting his hand on his hip to assess their shared handiwork.  “A job well-done being its own reward, I mean.”

Roy shrugs.  “I’d rather get paid for mediocrity.”

Ed’s scowl starts to shiver as he struggles not to laugh.  “Shut up.”

Roy doesn’t want to give Devlin’s crew too much credit.  They were well-staffed and opportunistic—he’ll give them that—but if it hadn’t been for a perfect storm of unanticipated distractions, Roy and Ed would have slept at home last night.  Or maybe at the courthouse, waiting for these shitheels to get what was coming to them after subduing them in a matter of minutes.

But the storm came, and he’d been right—he couldn’t hold it back.

They’d been on their way to Chris’s bar.  They’d had time, that night, to eat a full meal at Ed’s favorite hole-in-the-wall Cretan place, rib each other the whole way home, and go so far as to take off their damn boots in the front hall before the phone rang.

Chris had said she had news.

They’d put their damn boots back on.

But they’d never made it to the bar.

Musicians have taken to playing in the park on Thursday nights.  It was intermittent, at first; and then—once they realized that the military police weren’t coming down on their heads for the disturbance and the unauthorized gatherings of people who went out of their way to come and listen and dance down the walkways—so regular that they’d taken to posting paper schedules on the lampposts so that people knew which bands were slated when.

Roy himself had put a moratorium on any official disruption of the proceedings.  He’d gotten word to the ringleaders—of course Chris knew them; Chris knew everyone—that they ought to start taking donations to cover the costs of cleaning up after themselves, and he’d kept the brass at bay with every trick in the book and a few no one had ever written.

This was a sign that people felt safe.

He’d be damned if he let some pompous killjoy administrator take it from them.

But it was a bit inconvenient on Thursday nights, when their prospective audience clogged the streets for half a mile in almost every direction as people tried to find their way in.

So instead of driving, Roy and Ed had walked to the bar.

Well—almost to the bar.

They’d veered around the park on the opposite side of the street instead of trying to cut through.  The fewer people who saw them out, generally the better.  Keeping his extracurricular excursions quiet had saved Roy’s life so many times that he’d long since lost count.  The last damn thing he wanted to do was compromise his own information network by waltzing into Christmas’s semi-famous tavern wearing telltale blue.  People noticed that sort of thing.  People noticed a lot, these days.

Which wasn’t to say that Roy was capable of keeping his head down on a literal level.  He wanted to see how the project was evolving—how much of a crowd they’d drawn, what the mood was, whether this whole thing still seemed controlled and sustainable.

They’d strung lights through the tree branches above their rickety wooden stage, which was collapsible in every sense of the word.  But they weren’t waiting for the wood to give: they were playing their hearts out, and the people who had gathered were sending the sentiment right back.

Roy couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen so many people smiling.  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard so much laughter, so much celebration—intermittent cries and whoops and cheers like they just couldn’t contain it.  Like life was too beautiful, and the world was too big, and all of it was waiting—all they had to do was reach up for it.

He hadn’t realized that he’d slowed down until Ed had elbowed him, relatively gently.

“What?” Ed had said.  “You wanna dance?”

“I think I do,” Roy had said, which was far more honest than he’d intended.  He tried to swallow down the urge to qualify, to equivocate, to cover it up.  “But that’s not… who I am.  Not anymore.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Ed had said, without a trace of malice.  “Just this once, there’s a really easy solution, here, Mustang.  You wanna be someone who dances?  Start dancing.  And then you are.”

Roy had turned to lay on what he knew was an unusually weak reprimanding look.  “It’s not—”

Ed had grabbed Roy’s right hand in his left.  He’d slung it up over both of their heads.  He’d twisted his wrist in just such a way that Roy had no choice but to stumble right into the momentum, and Ed spun him around on his heel.

Ed did not release his hand when he got both feet back on the pavement and caught his breath just enough to start to stare.

Ed’s eyes met his so levelly that Roy’s heart kept right on spinning.

“You get so hung up on the rest of it,” Ed had said.  “And I get that—you know I do.  But life’s still for living.  And that’s always going to be the best revenge on everyone who tried to stop you and everyone who tried to take it away.”

Ed’s fingers, curled around his, had been warm.  Ed had had them in his coat pockets up until now so that people wouldn’t see his steel fingers gleaming and recognize him at a glance.  Roy had been able to feel the beat of his pulse—swift but steady.  He wasn’t unaffected, but he sure as hell wasn’t afraid.

Roy had been afraid.

Looking into Ed’s brandy-gold eyes, bright with the amusement, razor-sharp with the intellect, gleaming with the burgeoning heat, Roy had felt the straining leash thin, fray, and…

Snap.

He’d grasped for the splitting threads, but he’d known it was too late.

He’d hauled on Ed’s hand, half-blind with the combination of elation and disbelief, breathless and reckless and helpless—utterly possessed.

He’d dragged Ed off of the sidewalk and into an alleyway dark enough to shield them from view.  It wasn’t safe, but it was sufficient—enough, just barely, to smother the protests from his self-preservation instincts.

Enough, just barely, to let him shove both hands up into Ed’s hair, palms fixed to his perfect jaw, to hold him still and lean in as both of Ed’s hands fisted in the front of his uniform and pulled him in so violently that he stumbled.

Their mouths had met once.

And then Ed had jerked back, gasping in a deeper breath, his left palm flattening on Roy’s chest as he extended his right arm, turning—

The club missed his skull by centimeters, slamming down into the steel of his shoulder with enough force to make it ring.

Ed half-crumpled—less, Roy knew, from the pain than from the pure physics.

Roy’s head had already shifted gears as abruptly as humanly possible, shuffling the pieces of the scene ahead of him, searching for a victory.

He’d had his gloves on.  No kinder choices left.

He’d raised his hand.

Ed, swearing, voice ragged, had reached out to him.

Too late.

The next solid object had caught Roy in the back of the knees—bowling him directly on top of Ed so that they both went down hard on the unforgiving pavement.

Roy had rolled off, shoving through the immediate sting and the slower ache, and lifted his hand clear of Ed’s clothes—

Only to have an extraordinarily strong hand close around his, flattening his fingers by force.

It was almost enough pressure to break them.  Roy could feel that that was a mercy, not a mistake.

Especially after someone had then smacked him in the eye socket with a fist even though he’d already functionally surrendered.

The bag had gone over his head immediately after that, and Ed had kicked him at least twice in the process of trying to lash out at their captors, which likely meant they’d obscured his vision, too.  The wooden manacles went on immediately, and something splashed, and Ed choked and coughed and came up swearing with every fraction of breath he could get.  Someone—probably the one who had demonstrated such a meaningful grip—flung Roy over their shoulder for a brief trip down the alley, at which point he was tossed into a truck bed.

Ed had landed beside him, still sputtering.

It certainly wasn’t the best Thursday night Roy had ever had.

But what these bastards didn’t know was that Chris would only wait a few hours before calling Riza.  Riza would check the house.  The only thing Roy needed to do was to identify their destination to relay it back.

Or even simply stay alive long enough for her to figure it out.

Staying alive has always been a Roy Mustang speciality.

Given that none of the Old Guard minions attempted to use the compromising position against them, Roy can’t tell whether they thought that Roy was clutching Ed’s face and subsisting on his breath in a platonic and/or supervisory capacity, or if it’s just sort of assumed that anyone who achieves the rank of general is sleeping with as much of his staff as humanly possible, making the situation so quotidian that so they didn’t even perceive it as a source of leverage.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Roy wasn’t about to look that gift horse in the mouth.

Or the one he has now.

They drag their trussed-up culprits into different rooms—which is made far too easy by the fact that there are so damn many rooms that you could get lost in this gilded maze with a compass and a map.  Once all of their erstwhile captors turned captives are very thoroughly secured and equally thoroughly separated, Roy sets off in search of a newfangled communications device that will let him reach the appropriate authorities.

That is, Riza Hawkeye.  Who will be within inches of pistol-whipping anything or anyone that moves with even the remotest trace of suspicious intent by now.  Never let it be said that Roy’s first priority isn’t protecting the citizenry from further governmental abuse.

It’s not long before Roy finds a switch button, framed in brass, installed in one of the polished mahogany panels on the wall of yet another dining room.  At a touch, it illuminates the glass bulbs of the chandelier above the luxurious table.  They must have rigged the wires up recently, and it must have cost a fortune—but Devlin couldn’t have run a proper conspiracy out of this place just sending messengers and missives.  He would have needed instantaneous correspondence.  Why not retrofit with electricity while he was at it?

“Are they all like this?” Ed asks, peering into yet another palatial parlor as they pass.

“Not quite,” Roy says.  “This is one of the biggest ones in the country.  Many of these families are probably barely making ends meet with only one tennis court.”

“Tragic,” Ed says.  He spots the sprawling kitchen opening up at the end of the hall.  “Oh, finally, a real room.  I could eat a horse.”  That’s always a theme with Ed, which begs for a low-hanging fruit short joke.  It doesn’t necessarily mean anything in particular now, after… all of this.  “Come on.  Pit stop before we go search for signs of civilization.”

It’s probably a bad sign about his commitment to the finer things and the simple joys in life, but Roy is more interested in the telephone mounted on the wall just inside, right beside the recently-added light switch.  Roy picks up the receiver, swallows his sigh of relief at the long, low ring of a connection, and starts dialing, casting a look over the huge, stunning, spotlessly clean expanse of the room as he waits. 

This was so damn premeditated that Devlin sent away every single servant. 

What a day.  Night.  Experience.

The operator patches him through.

Riza picks up, her voice tight around the half-swallowed agitation.  “General Mustang’s office.”

“Such a nice ring to that,” Roy says.  “Somehow it just tells you immediately that a very handsome man works there.”

She doesn’t gasp, but the silence lasts three full seconds before—“Where the hell are you?”

“Pelleriost estate,” he says, glancing out the window as the sunrise starts to creep up over the gardens, spilling buttery light over the hedges, fountains, and flowerbeds.  “It’s actually quite lovely.  You should come visit.  Right now.  And bring a contingent of military police and a prisoner transport.”

“A big one,” Ed calls.  “To fit their fat heads and all the hot air.”

“The biggest you have,” Roy says.  “And boxes for evidence.  A lot of boxes.”

“Sir,” Riza says.

“Permission granted to speak freely,” Roy says.

“Thank you,” Riza says.  “Sir, you are a piece of fucking work.”

“I’m going to have that engraved on a plaque for my desk,” Roy says.

She sighs quietly, and then he can almost see her straightening up and squaring her shoulders.  “We’ll be there in four hours.”

“It takes almost five,” Roy says.

“I’m aware,” she says.  “We’re going to drive like you do.”

He can’t help the slow grin, which feels like it leeches strength from the swelling dawn.  “In that case, godspeed.  See you soon.”

“Yes, sir,” she says, and hangs up.

Ed somehow managed both to assemble and consume nearly half of a large and complicated sandwich one-handed during the two and a half minutes that Roy spent on the phone.  He gestures with his elbow at Roy’s face, speaking through a mouthful of his prize.  “You wanna clean up, or are you planning to scandalize ’em?”

“Depends,” Roy says, straightening his collar and turning the injured side towards Ed.  “Does it read as ‘I got my ass kicked’, or more like ‘I was needlessly brutalized by these hyper-rich and extremely short-sighted barbarians’?”

Ed chews for several seconds, considering him seriously before saying “Yes.”

“I guess both is better than neither,” Roy says.

“That’s above my pay grade,” Ed says, tearing off another bite.  “Most things are, with what you’re coughing up.”  Before Roy can remind him that that was his idea, he shoves the remaining half of the sandwich into Roy’s hand.  “You’re pale.  Eat.”  Roy doesn’t have much choice but to take it, since Ed is already letting go of it and pushing past him.  “What are we supposed to do in this shithole for four hours?”

Roy shudders to think what descriptors a normal house would receive when one of the most beautiful residences in the entire country earns that one, but he’s frankly afraid to ask.

“Well,” he says, “they almost certainly have a library.”

Ed stops and stares at him.  “Why didn’t you say so?”  He spins on his heel, utterly undeterred by the altered balance from the absent automail, and starts striding off significantly faster than before.  “Are you coming, or what?”

Roy always does.

He always will.

“If you were a gazillionaire psychopath,” Ed says, conversationally, as they approach a stunning spiral staircase, and Roy tries not to shower too many crumbs on his dirt-crusted, blood-spattered uniform, “where would you hide your book bastion?”

“In a turret accessible only by a secret passage,” Roy says, “but I don’t think I’m representative.  Second floor, perhaps?  Something tells me this lot doesn’t devote much time to education.”

“Egads,” Ed says, starting briskly up the pale marble stairs.  “I think you’re on to something.”

Roy follows him, of course.  The sandwich is surprisingly good.

It is, obviously, nowhere near as good as the way Ed’s whole face lights up when he steps into one of the double-wide doorways and sees a sea of books beyond.

“Jackpot,” he says.  “Call Hawkeye back and tell her to drive slower.”

“She’s bringing evidence boxes, remember?” Roy says.  “Just pick out the ones that are the most seditious and take them back to read at home.”

Stupid of him—using that word on instinct, as if Ed would—

Slowly start to beam at him like he’s the best thing since books and math and liberated sandwiches.

“She was right,” Ed says, warmly—almost lovingly.  “Honestly, I think ‘piece of fucking work’ is understating it a bit.”

“I live to exceed expectations,” Roy says.

Ed eyes him for one more second before turning to the books, casting his gaze over the wealth.  His shoulders relax slightly just looking at them.  “And to cause a whole new type of headache that nobody had ever invented before.”

“I’m a trailblazer,” Roy says. 

“These assholes were right to try to recruit you when killing you didn’t work,” Ed says, sauntering over to one of the shelves to scan the titles, his lonely left hand rising to trail over the embossed letters as he sidesteps slowly.  “Even if they were incredibly stupid about the execution.  Ain’t no spin like a Mustang spin.  That’s exactly what they need to rehabilitate their image as a bunch of washed-up, outdated, history-rewriting, society-shredding fuckheads.”

“The truth is a hard sell,” Roy says.

Ed snorts.

He glances over at Roy again.

He returns his attention to the books, moving further down along the shelf, examining the spines.

Roy takes one step towards him, and then another.

He could wait.

He could let it sit.  He could think it over.  He could probe the edges, test his weight.  He could play it safe.

But Ed was right, as Ed so often is.

At some point, you just have to start dancing.

“Speaking of the truth,” Roy says.

Ed spares him a look.  “Could you not call it that?”

“Speaking,” Roy says, taking just one step closer, “of the lower-case-T truth that I try to speak when it isn’t overly disadvantageous—”

“I think that’s worse,” Ed says.

“I think it’s too late,” Roy says.  “May I?”

Ed gestures around them, more effusively than usual, with his remaining arm.  The tension in his spine and the brittleness of his scowl—on top of the clumsy, evasive procrastination—make it clear that he recognizes the topic, but he probably doesn’t know what Roy is going to say, and he’s not sure if he wants to find out.  “If I really wanted to get away, I’d’ve thrown myself out the window by now.  Would you just spit it out already?”

Eloquent, as always.

And upfront, as always.

Ed might be bracing himself, but he isn’t running.  It’s not in him.

Roy wants to be worthy of that someday.

And Roy wants him to realize that he doesn’t have to anymore.  Roy wants him to understand that Roy will always protect Ed’s back with the same unyielding ferocity with which Ed holds his.

“A confession,” Roy says.  “I wasn’t entirely honest with Devlin.”

“Who?” Ed says, eyeing him.

“Pelleriost,” Roy says.

“Oh,” Ed says, shoulders relaxing.  “Well, since he isn’t worth your gym socks, I’d chalk that one up as a negligible ethical dilemma.”

“I didn’t tell him everything that I wanted,” Roy says, taking one more step.

Ed shrugs.  “Whatever, Mustang.  What do you want?  New gym socks?  Yours are kinda… you know.  Rank.  And not in the ‘about to make colonel’ way.”

Roy stops moving.  Ed looks him up and down, more than slightly exasperated.

“Mustang,” Ed says, “what the hell is it?  You know damn well I’m the last person you should be using as a moral compass when it comes to whether nasty rich fucks deserve your unreserved honesty—which is, by the way, the weirdest thing you’ve ever asked me, so if you’re hiding a head wound, fifteen minutes ago was the time to—”

“I also want you,” Roy says.

Ed stares at him.

Roy stares back.

Ed swallows.  He shifts his weight.  He curls his fingers slowly into a fist at his side, his eyes searching Roy’s face for a long second before he works his jaw and huffs out a breath that shivers a little bit as it leaves him.  “Fuck’s sake, Mustang.  Is that all?  Did you really have to set up this whole long introduction or whatever?  You could’ve just said.”

There’s a different brightness to his eyes—a new glow, gradually warming.  Relief, Roy thinks, but tempered by anticipation—drawn by a thread of wonder.  Fueled by hope.

“I just did,” Roy says, trying to hold himself steady.  The hardest part is over.  If Ed was going to knock his teeth out, they would already be scattered on the floor. 

The slow-spreading, slightly wolfish grin sabotages all of his attempts to control his heartbeat.

“Well?” Ed says.

Roy blinks.  His feet don’t seem convinced that they should stay on the carpet.  His skull wants to float away and take his brain with it.  “Well…?”

“Well,” Ed says, loudly and deliberately, as if he’s just discovered that bastardliness adversely impacts hearing, but he’s not terribly surprised, “now that you got that out of the way, are we going to finish what we started, or what?”

Apparently something has succeeded in absconding with Roy’s brain, even though his cranium remains attached.  “I thought you wanted to check out the books.”

“We’ve got four hours,” Ed says, advancing so aggressively that Roy doesn’t know whether to laugh aloud or stage a retreat before Ed slams into him.  “Or are you planning to start talking again?”

It occurs to Roy that retreating won’t help.  The impact is a fact of the universe—every bit as inevitable as the draw of polarized atoms, carved in like the outermost ring of a future alchemist’s first array.  The cause and the effect and the consequences are inextricably entwined.

So instead of trying to stop him, Roy tries to catch him.

Which works well, other than the dizzying revelation that Ed is even more devastating up close than he is at a distance or in the dark.

“Just who,” Roy manages, “do you think I am?”

Ed smirks.

Roy surrenders.

“The only guy around here remotely qualified to overthrow any governments,” Ed says.  “Who do you think you are?”

“Someone who probably should have kissed you a long time ago,” Roy says, slowly reaching out to tuck a wayward sliver of silken gold back behind the curve of his ear, “in a situation that didn’t leave us vulnerable to kidnapping.”

Slowly and deliberately, Ed curls his fingers into the front of Roy’s uniform again.  He grins like a knife—an edge so sharp that it could skin you or save you, or maybe both at once.

“Make it up to me,” Ed says.  “With two right now.”

Roy’s hand settles itself against the side of his neck, caressing on instinct as it moves.  He can feel Ed’s heartbeat again.  The whole world narrows to that rhythm; the soft, shallow breaths; and the glimmering pale light of the morning seeping through the room, striking more gold sparks than ever in Ed’s tangled hair and irresistible eyes.

“Only two?” Roy says.

Ed drags him in, already laughing against his lips.  “At least two.”