Work Text:
He should do it tonight.
He should have done it a long time ago.
Much as procrastination has become his calling card—some might say his truest talent, even ahead of his affinity for alchemy and his natural gift for bastardly scheming—he’s already let this go on too long.
It’s strange to know someone so well that you can plot out the precise trajectory of several different passive reactions in detail, but not quite well enough to be sure which one is coming.
Ed might feel cheated and deceived, which would make him angry in the cold, poisonous way that’s rare for him. He might feel blindsided and awkward, which would provoke the more familiar volcano. He might—
Well. He might be sad. He might feel like he’s losing something wonderful that he’s come to rely on—that he was stupid and arrogant enough to craft into a load-bearing pillar propping up so much of his life.
That’s how Roy feels, because that’s what Roy has done.
He didn’t mean to. It just… started, innocuously enough; and then it gained momentum and gathered speed and got away.
He knows that’s a coward’s answer in the face of culpability, but it’s also the truth. He did let it happen, to some extent—he did make out the silhouettes of the shapes that it was taking, and instead of digging in his heels, he followed them where they led. He let himself develop an affinity for—and then an addiction to—the sweetness of something he never asked for, but never rejected.
Ed has become his best friend.
And Roy is a little bit in love with him.
Maybe a lot.
Arguably, it’s a particularly poignant form of poetic justice after all the times that Roy shoehorned mean-spirited country-related idioms into conversations when Ed was enlisted: now it feels like he fell off the turnip truck and got dragged behind it for the length of a one-horse town.
He needs a plan.
All of this went sideways and spiraled hopelessly out of control because he went in without a plan.
It also spiraled because Ed is Ed, obviously, and gives no quarter and takes no prisoners, but a plan would have helped. A plan keeps you on the train tracks, or at least on a visible trail.
Ed is the wilderness. There are much more interesting and much less gruesome ways to die than getting mauled and eaten by the bears.
A plan, then.
Roy will bring dinner—food helps. It evens out Ed’s moods, although his temper has tempered quite a bit over the years all on its own. Dinner still won’t hurt, especially if it’s from the good Cretan place, since that will put him in high spirits. Maybe it’ll even make him forgiving.
Once he’s full of curry and charitable feelings, Roy will sit him down and explain to him in very simple terms that it’s just not a good idea for them to cohabitate anymore, because Roy has feelings for him that are not paternal, platonic, protective, or otherwise housemate-oriented, and it would be unethical even by Roy’s rather elastic standards to force him to stay here given the situation.
Easy.
As he’s collecting the excessively stupid paperwork that he excessively stupidly failed to finish this afternoon because he was too engrossed in the minutiae of his machinations, he rings up the phone at the house.
No answer.
Which means Ed is either still at the school, so deep in grading that he hasn’t noticed the sun going down; or he dropped by the hospital to annoy Al and forgot to stop. Either way, even accounting for the detour of an errand, Roy will make it home ahead of him or at nearly the same time.
The true beauty of plans is that they’re their own consolation prize: if you put your unrivaled genius and best efforts towards ruining the best thing that has ever happened to you, for instance, your miserable success will be mitigated by the slight reassurance that at least the plan itself was unimpeachable. You did a fine job of achieving something awful. Roy keeps promising Ed he’ll stop saying “What a coup” about the most negligible possible victories, and he’s always lying.
So he packs up the one thing he’s permitted to love and heads off to be the executor of his own wretchedness.
He gets a lot of food. If Ed elects to walk out, he’ll be left with more than he can eat, but Ed is more pragmatic nowadays. He’ll probably try to grin and bear it for a few more days while he sorts out whether he can cram his few belongings and his ten thousand books into Al’s little closet of an apartment while he finds one of his own. Maybe the two of them will go in on a larger place together. That might make Ed very happy—to get to be shoulder-to-shoulder with his brother again, albeit with a bit more breathing room now that their lives intersect a little less.
In any case, the plan gets off to a fine start, and the house smells overpoweringly of every single last one of Ed’s favorite dishes from the Cretan restaurant by the time Ed slams the door open and calls “Did you know you can get cited for telling the streetcar driver how to use physics to his advantage?”
Roy did not, but as with most of Ed’s excavations of the fine lines of legal limitations in the not-so-illustrious nation-state of Amestris, he’s not surprised.
Ed doesn’t wait for an answer in any case: he bursts into the kitchen where Roy is still unpacking the mountain of food.
This is such a good plan. It’s proceeding perfectly. All Roy has to do is not fuck it up.
That noble goal may be complicated, however, by the confounding detail of the substantive bouquet clutched in both of Ed’s hands—which definitely looks like it has been on at least one physics-optimized streetcar ride and might not survive another.
“What did they cite you for?” Roy says, trying not to stare at the flowers. They’re… surprisingly nice, albeit clearly cowed by their humbling streetcar experience. “Being correct in public?”
Ed grins. It’s the one Roy is weakest for—the one where the delight just overtakes him, and it shines out of him like a whole night sky’s worth of stars.
“The cop said something about obstructing a state-owned transport service,” Ed says, “but yours is better.” He waves the inexplicable bouquet and crosses to the kitchen cabinets, where he starts banging around in the general area where dishware-adjacent miscellanea go to die. “Doesn’t matter. Only reason I was in such a hurry was to beat you home and cook, and you took care of that anyway, so it’s all gravy.”
It is not even a little bit gravy, but Roy is having second thoughts about the Plan. Ed’s in such a good mood. It would be such a shame to take that from him.
But it’s worse to keep taking advantage.
“Speaking of gravy,” Roy says, depositing the container of Ed’s favorite curried rice on the table, “don’t let this get cold.”
Ed has unearthed a vase. Roy wonders sometimes if Ed secretly still has a few wisps of alchemical capacity left, and chooses to use them for mundane purposes to keep it under wraps, but in his heart he knows that Ed would have used it to add spikes to the car and ten more bookshelves to the bedroom, neither of which has yet occurred.
It is very odd that Roy apparently owns a decent vase, though. Maybe it was meant to be a pitcher.
Ed fills it halfway with water from the tap and then shoves the flowers in after. He pauses. He makes an attempt to rearrange them, or possibly to fluff them as one would a highly unusual pillow.
“Keep your pants on,” he says, but that’s all the time he wastes before making a telling beeline to the table. “You know, we could use plates, like civilized human beings.”
Roy sits down and hands him a fork. “Seems inefficient to me.”
And it would leave him with more dishes to contend with when the house is silent, because Ed is either gone altogether or avoiding him so intently that it overcomes his hilariously intermittent small-town manners.
Ed takes the fork. The good mood is making him remarkably pliable. Roy craves the sweet embrace of death a bit more than usual.
Eating without conversation has become conventional, at least for the first ten minutes or so while Ed is completely focused on sating his ravening hunger. On evenings when Roy wants to extend the meal as long as possible, he sometimes skims the newspaper.
Tonight, though, he just… looks. He tries to appreciate the finer details, the littlest things. He tries to pin down each feature, note it, carve it, hold it. If the rest goes the way he expects it will, he wants to remember this. He wants to have the good parts wrapped up in ribbon and hidden away.
Ed has always been a messy eater, although the celebrated return of his right hand did alleviate that condition somewhat—once he reacquainted himself with his estranged nerves and honed its motor skills again.
In truth of fact, it’s more than a little distressing that it doesn’t bother Roy at all when Ed wolfs food down like a four-year-old with no concept that another meal is on the visible horizon, frequently smearing sauce all over his face. The first time Roy gestured at a particularly pernicious smudge—with the intention of drawing attention to it in a relatively diplomatic way—Ed went perfectly still but for tilting his cheek meaningfully in Roy’s direction.
So now, through no fault of his own, Roy is perpetually on-call to scrub wayward condiments off of Ed’s face. It should be infuriating, or at least slightly gross, but it is neither. Ed always basks in it like a cat.
Roy thinks he might have Al to thank for this particular circle of hell. No one else could have trained Ed to do that.
At least Ed’s gotten a little better over time. He barely splashes anything on his shirt or the table tonight.
He’s also distracted enough by how much he’s enjoying the meal not to notice that Roy is mostly just stirring his food around.
Several minutes later, with the worst of the hunger held at bay, Ed slows down.
Then he stops.
Then he takes a deep breath and lets it out as a contented little sigh.
Then he sits back and smiles at Roy, eyebrow arched. “I can’t believe it’s been a year.”
It hasn’t quite, and a roommate milestone is a strange thing to celebrate—let alone with flowers—but to say that Ed is a strange person is like calling the sun a little warm.
In a good way.
Mostly.
“The older you get,” Roy says, “the faster the time goes by.”
Ed rolls his eyes and loads the fork up again, much more slowly this time. “I mean, duh. It’s proportional to how many minutes you’ve experienced, right? Every increment becomes a smaller fraction of the whole as you add more.” He shoves the bite into his mouth, speaking around it. “Not the point.”
It gouges even deeper than Roy expected to think that this could be the last chance to humor him. “Which is?”
Ed swallows loudly and points the fork at him. “Time with you, idiot. Never reckoned it’d be easy.”
Roy slow-blinks at him. “You didn’t think I’m easy? I’m losing my touch.”
Ed stares at him for a second.
And then laughs much more uproariously than it deserves.
Did the restaurant spike the curry?
Or does Ed sense what’s coming, and he’s dragging his feet instinctively, because he’s already had so many good things ruined for him in his life?
“I’m not even gonna say it,” Ed says, his eyes still mercilessly aglow. He waves both beautiful hands. “It’s okay. It’s kinda crap how they say good things come to those who wait, but it sure seems like you can be so damn persistent that the universe eventually gives you what you want just to make you go away.” His smile is more compassionate than one would expect during a discussion of the relative lengths of one’s roommateship. “You know how I feel about a challenge,” Ed says. “We’ve got time.”
Roy now—officially—has no idea what they’re talking about.
It certainly doesn’t sound like the way one would express appreciation for approximately a year of living in a house that required months of gradual customization before a person like Ed could even consider calling it a home.
But he can’t be celebrating the time since he came to Central, either—that’s now several months more than a year.
What happened in between?
Other than Roy definitively losing his mind, of course. That one is less important.
Ed had arrived in the late spring, as unexpected storms often do. He hadn’t been unexpected, but the tempest had ripped Roy off-course and shipwrecked him almost before he could feel the wind.
Al had invited Roy to join the small procession of better human beings attending his graduation ceremony, so that they could all politely applaud while he donned a silly-looking hat and walked across a stage to signify that he had completed his medical degree. Roy had, of course, anticipated that Ed would move heaven and Earth and God and man and any obstacle the universe could hurl at him in order to be there.
Roy had not anticipated that Ed would stay.
The little party they’d had afterwards at Christmas’s new place had been perfectly civil and perfectly civilized. Roy had cut himself off firmly after one drink so that he wouldn’t get maudlin. Al had been so calm and cheery and dignified and delighted that it was hard to look away from him, especially if one’s evil mind was overlaying remembrances of steel plates and spikes and a tinny echo and a cautious trepidation seeded by how much the world had stolen from him before he turned ten.
It wasn’t true that that boy was gone. He’d just been enveloped—absorbed. He’d been incorporated into the young man sitting at the table, sipping a cup of chamomile tea at his own party in the middle of a bar. He’d been the foundation for a fortress.
Apparently Roy needed to cut himself off at half a drink.
But he’d been smart enough, at least, at last, to stay close to Gracia and Elicia—proximity to them had reined in his moronic brain and forced him to behave.
He’d watched Ed, though, too.
He’d watched Ed a lot.
Ed was brash and boisterous still, but there was a level of restraint that made it evident that he, too, had found a way to move through a life that wasn’t just running from the dark. Ed had settled into the simple, stark-edged, raw and honest confidence of someone who’s come up against the worst of the world and beaten it in a fair fight.
Both of them had also, not negligibly, grown into their father’s sharp jaw and broad shoulders and their mother’s delicate mouth and expressive eyes with such reckless panache that they were both absolutely arresting. Roy had noticed heads turning on the street while they’d all walked over, but their ethereal magnetism was somehow even more pronounced in dim lighting.
And Ed was worse than Al.
Ed was a vision, which was all the more agonizing because Roy’s brain kept trying to overlay the way he used to snarl and spit like an aggravated alley cat, the bobbing upflick of his hair barely protruding over the stacks of tragically neglected paperwork on Roy’s desk. Attempting to reconcile the precocious little punk that Ed had been with the cool dynamo commanding attention even from a sprawl across a booth seat made Roy’s head hurt like the hangover had come early.
He’d sat down at Ed’s table.
There hadn’t really been any other choice.
He’d almost managed to convince himself that he’d made a calculated decision—that he’d done just enough of the rounds to have greeted nearly everyone, and now was the time to retire to relative quietude for a few minutes before he started to look annoyingly overbearing at someone else’s party.
But it was, of course, more about Ed than anything else. The charybdis had dragged him in before he could circumnavigate. He’d felt strangely calm about the prospect of finding out what waited at the bottom of the whirlpool.
He’d felt less calm about the odd flicker of irritation in the pit of his stomach watching Ed rest his right elbow on the table and his chin on his palm, eyelids lowered, every line of his body languid as he leaned in towards Havoc and smirked prodigiously.
“Come on,” Ed had said. “Live a little.”
“I’ve already lived too much,” Havoc had said, waving both hands. “I’d like it to slow down a little.”
“Traitor,” Ed had said.
“Yeah,” Havoc had said, shooting Roy a more accusatory glance even than usual. “That was part of the ‘living too much’.”
Roy had given him a more winsome shit-eating grin even than usual.
Ed had leaned further across the table, gazing into Havoc’s eyes. “You know you want to.”
“I did my time,” Havoc had said as Roy’s blood had boiled, and his brain had fizzled. “I paid my dues. I ate my share of the noodles that made my lips burn for three days straight.”
Ed had leaned in closer, his head slightly tipped, his index fingertip tracing the table close to Havoc’s arm. “Just one more little adventure. What do you have to lose?”
“My entire mouth,” Havoc had said. “My tastebuds. My sweat. My life.” Ed had just laughed, and Havoc had wrinkled his nose. “Stop flirting with me. I have a girlfriend. A hot girlfriend. Somehow.”
“Your loss,” Ed had said. He’d turned. He’d grinned. Absolutely inescapable. “Hey, Mustang, you’re still single as all hell.”
Roy had met his eyes and maintained a perfectly neutral frown. “You’d better not say that where my jealous wife, the Amestrian military, can hear you.”
Ed had laughed like a jackal. “Come try out the new Cretan place with me. I won’t tell her if you don’t.”
Roy had leaned in. It hadn’t felt like there was any other choice. “The one on Third Street?”
Ed had pointed at him, grinning, and that—
That had looked like Hughes.
“That’s the one,” Ed had said. “Bet you handle your spice better than Havoc anyway.”
Roy had been so tired and so stupid and so lonely and so weak for him, in that moment.
And just about every moment since.
“What makes you so sure?” he’d asked, more to keep the conversation going than because it mattered in the least.
“I’m not,” Ed had said, even more smugly. “But I am sure you’ll pretend you are instead of losing face. Which all amounts to the same thing anyway, right?”
“No,” Roy had said.
“Great,” Ed had said, clapping his two warm hands and rubbing them together. The first part was gut-wrenchingly ordinary, but he savored the second so much that it dragged Roy’s heart back up out of the usual pits of sulfurous regret. “Friday? You wanna say six thirty?”
Roy had not been entirely sure what was happening—which, in retrospect, should have been his first and loudest warning of everything to come—but he’d shrugged gamely, half just to make Havoc look like a killjoy. Roy never got to make other people look like the killjoy in any given situation.
“It’s a date,” he’d said.
Ed had beamed.
It had not been a date.
It had been an adventure.
It had been pissing rain the whole day—with the notable exception of the stunningly bright, clear, beautiful morning, which had convinced Roy to leave the house without an umbrella. That had bitten him in the ass as well as everywhere else less than halfway to Command, at which time clouds enclosed the sky and promptly unleashed a downpour of historic proportions. Roy had been soaked to the skin before he could even duck beneath a shopfront awning, so he’d just carried on.
It had been many years since he’d been so abjectly grateful for all the spare custom uniforms the military saw fit to spend taxpayer money on, or for the well-equipped showers, which heated up far faster than the water at his house.
The day had dragged. He’d been more excited than he ever would have imagined at the prospect of getting to pick Ed’s brain now, after so many intervening years, without being beneath the watchful eye of so many of their mutual friends.
And then there had been, of course, the not so negligible detail that Ed had gotten very, very hot. Watching him up close was its own reward. Like most arrogant, moderately intelligent men, Roy had, in his youth, occasionally fancied himself an aesthete. He just wanted to appreciate the finer things in life, like the roll of Ed’s extremely broad shoulders under his shirt and the wicked angle of his cheekbone. What harm could it do?
One bite into the most scandalously spicy curry ever shat out by a high-ranking demon from a particularly culinarily-inclined region of hell, Roy had had an answer to that question.
“You’re sweating,” Ed had said.
“It’s unevaporated rain,” Roy had said, slightly raspily.
“You’re lying,” Ed had said.
“It’s unverified editorializing,” Roy had said.
Ed had laughed. It had lit up the room. Roy had regretted the curry so much less in a single instant that he ought to have known, right then, what was to come. “Shouldn’t you leave the editorializing to the professionals?”
“As you well know,” Roy had said, lowering his voice, “I’m trying to make this a free country.”
Ed had shoved another forkful of concentrated spice and agony into his mouth.
“Hurry up,” he’d said through it.
Spoken like someone whose response to wisdom like Political change is incremental up until the avalanche had more than once been punching through a desk.
“I’ll get right on that,” Roy had said. He’d leaned in—towards Ed, more than away from his curry, but arguably a bit of both. “You know, now that you’re a seasoned, worldly, well-traveled expert on the topic—what did you see in other countries that worked? Or didn’t?”
Ed had blinked at him. “You want my opinion?”
“At least your editorial,” Roy had said. “For my edification.”
It had been, of course, a request with two substantial benefits, because Roy had no longer been in the business of wasting time.
Ed would have excellent observations, which could well be advantageous; and Roy would get to keep him talking for longer.
As a third and smaller corollary, in his preoccupation, he might be less likely to notice Roy wimping out on the curry.
Regardless, a win was a win, and Roy had intended to wring this one dry.
Ed had been staying with Al—just a few blocks from the Cretan place, as it happened; Roy had feared for Al’s recently-restored tastebuds—and had apparently run the whole way with his coat over his head because “Umbrellas are for people with jobs.” Roy had walked him back with the one he’d conscripted at Command after his disastrous morning, feeling unusually employed about the whole thing.
“How long are you planning to stay?” Roy had asked.
Ed had eyed him. The rain had pattered strangely merrily on the canvas. Having Ed this close did things to Roy’s brain.
“A while,” Ed had said slowly. “If I can find a job.”
“So you can rightfully claim an umbrella,” Roy had said.
“That’s the most important bit,” Ed had said. He’d eyed Roy again. “We should—do this again. Right?”
Just those few words had suffused Roy’s heart with so much delicate delight that he’d felt sick in a way that had nothing to do with murder-curry.
He’d always just assumed most people—or at least, and most pertinently, Ed—tolerated him to leverage his usefulness, but didn’t actually like him.
It had been deeply unsettling how much that had warmed him at his damn age. He should have been past caring about that sort of thing a long, long time ago. He should have walled it off. You really couldn’t concern yourself with whether you were broadly liked by your peers when your primary objective was to undermine a major governing body to force sweeping institutional change. Didn’t play well.
But the philosophy of it all hadn’t meant he could leave Ed’s question hanging in the humid air, after all.
“That depends,” Roy had said. Ed’s eyes had shuttered up in a fascinating way. “Would you think less of me if I went for the ‘Have mercy on my feeble constitution’ option on their heat scale next time?”
The grin had broken out like a sunrise, of course. Roy had felt like a million cens and quite a lot of pocket change, of course.
“Not much less,” Ed had said.
Two weeks later, when they met up for their third dinner, Ed had raised an umbrella. The sky had been devoid of so much as a dream of a cloud for the entire day, which made the significance somewhat unequivocal.
“Congratulations,” Roy had said. “Or apologies to whoever you now report to.”
“Both,” Ed had said, brandishing it contentedly. “I’m teaching, Roy. I’m a teacher. That poor damn schoolhouse mistress back in Resembool probably woke up in a cold sweat. Can you believe they’re going to let me corrupt their impressionable youth?”
Given that Ed had been a minor celebrity with a mind like a steel trap: “Yes. But you have to start it out very slow. Really sprinkle the corruption in sparingly here and there so that no one sees it at the start.”
Ed had nodded sagely, swinging the umbrella. “I knew you’d find a way to advise me to procrastinate on a job I haven’t even started yet.”
“It’s not procrastination,” Roy had said, feeling more than a bit scandalized on behalf of all of the enterprising schemers in human history. “It’s the long game. There’s a difference.”
“Yeah?” Ed had said, grinning at him. “How’s that working out for you? Your long game won you any long prizes?”
“That’s not the point,” Roy had said.
“Okay,” Ed had said. “That was smooth. Procrastinating on telling me the point of why I should procrastinate. You’re advanced.”
Roy had held the door to the restaurant for him. “Thank you?”
Ed had smirked at him, but with such overwhelming fondness that it made Roy’s knees feel unpleasantly unsound. “Any time.”
The problem had stemmed from the fact that Roy liked Ed so much.
The level of restraint that relative maturity had imbued him with had leveled out his temper enough for other parts of the topography to show. Roy had always known he was deeply compassionate under the fits of rage, but Ed had usually not been funny intentionally as a kid. His new air of calm and control, freed from the debilitating dual time pressures of Al’s soul eroding and their enemies marshaling more power with each passing day, had cleared space for a rapier wit cloaked in a freshly unashamed acceptance of folksy verbiage. He could rip someone to pieces with a backhanded compliment in charming country vernacular without batting an excruciatingly beautiful eyelash.
Roy had been intoxicated.
And perfectly aware of where that led.
It had been so dizzyingly simple just to be with Ed—to meet up, to wander the city, to sit and talk about everything and nothing until the curry went cold. It had felt so easy that Roy had let the quicksand drag at him. He’d shifted in ways that an uncharitable observer might have called stepping in deeper.
It had felt inevitable.
It had felt like Hughes.
It had felt like they’d known each other their whole damn lives—which, in Ed’s case, was nearly true—but they’d whiled that time away specifically because they were waiting for this. They were waiting to evolve into the versions of themselves that they needed to bridge the gap like this—to know each other. To understand and never look away.
In less than a month, Roy had had to contend with the intractable revelation that Edward Elric, of all people, had waltzed back into his city and become his best friend.
Roy had naïvely dared to conjure that it couldn’t get any worse.
And one Saturday afternoon, illuminated by the greedy stretch of the sun’s rays, monumental and majestic but for all the yammering about obscure alchemical philosophy that even Roy found pretty damn boring, Ed had said “I gotta find my own place. Last night, Al rolled over in bed, and a bookshelf fell on me. You know anybody looking for a shitty roommate?”
Roy’s idiot mouth had, of course, said “Me.”
Ed had given him a look. “You sure about that?”
“No,” Roy had said. “But if we both hate it, you can always go back and try to make amends with the bookshelf, right?”
That had gotten Ed grinning again, which was—profoundly unfortunately—enough to smother all the rational apprehension bubbling up in Roy’s chest.
“Right,” Ed had said.
But that wasn’t a year ago.
It was about eight months.
Ed had offered to pay rent, which Roy had informed him was ridiculous. He’d moved in one whole suitcase of clothes and so many books that Roy had understood why the shelf had attacked him. He had, the very first day, made Roy breakfast.
“I can’t believe you’ve survived this long when you can’t cook worth shit,” Ed had said as he’d slung a plate in front of Roy, who had been pretty well-convinced that he was still dreaming.
“Seems like a waste of effort when I can trick other people into doing it for me,” Roy had managed.
Ed had rolled his eyes, but that had only been the beginning.
They’d ended up even more inseparable, precisely as Roy had feared. He could have tried to blame the early stages on innocent missteps and happenstance, but at the point where someone was curling up on your couch next to you essentially every night of the week and showing you the greatest hits of their students’ poor handwriting, you couldn’t really claim you weren’t complicit.
Roy had tried to take it as a compliment: Ed felt so safe around him as to treat him with the same casual physical intimacy normally reserved for Al. In some ways, that ought to have qualified as the greatest achievement of Roy’s life—not too different from stroking a half-tamed lion accustomed to waiting for the sting of the whip. It was a testament to the person Roy had made himself into, in spite of all of the cause he had to see the world as an unending pit of vipers.
It was also, not especially incidentally, fucking killing him.
Ed smelled good these days. His hair was a goldspun daydream at the worst of times, even when it draggled down over Roy’s shoulder or matted at the back of his neck when he kept sliding lower and lower down on the couch. He was always a little warm, but never too hot. He had adorable ears. The cadence of his breathing slowed slightly when he was truly focused, and his brain had changed gears. He never let Roy stay up too late. He stopped using the points of his elbows to garner Roy’s attention and took to nudging with his hip or tipping his head gently against the side of Roy’s.
Roy had always been a fraud. He’d been a foundling and a pauper masquerading as an intellectual, gathering the mystique of alchemy around him to cover up the tatters of his soul. He’d been a remorseless backalley murderer draped in crisp blue wool, burying the bloodstains under the shifting sands and smearing off the ash. He’d been a smiling, subservient toy soldier with his hands smartly folded behind his back to hide the knives. He’d been a liar, and a liar, and a liar.
But this had felt true.
It had felt incalculably deep and searingly sincere.
Shoulder-to-shoulder—more literally than he could say he appreciated, now, given how many inches Ed had gained on him—with the last person he’d ever expected, he’d stumbled onto something splendid and mercilessly real.
Which made the withholding into a betrayal.
Ed had continued to be genuine with him—sometimes to a fault, although the years had blunted some of the edges of his brutal honesty. Ed had been upfront and uncompromising. Ed had been unabashedly affectionate in small ways, subtle ways, comforting ones, without ever asking anything in return.
And Roy had been taking advantage of that wholehearted instinct for loyalty—pretending that companionship was all he wanted so that he could keep Ed close enough to imagine it as something else.
It was always somewhat remarkable to discover a new low to which he was evidently capable of sinking. Interesting landscape down here.
In the bravest part of his heart, he’d always meant to say something—at least to ask if Ed found it unsettling and wanted him to hide it better, or if it was sufficient motivation for them to part ways.
He’d talked himself up to readiness when Ed had had a week-long holiday from classes, and he’d hopped on a train to Resembool to spend it there. Roy had assumed he was trying to patch things up with Winry after the smoldering train wreck of their first attempt at a relationship several years ago, before Ed had determined that constant movement still suited him more than the sedentary life he’d always thought he wanted. It had seemed natural enough—Ed had grown more, learned more, come closer to understanding why they hadn’t been able to fulfill the fantasy before. He’d decided to give the perfect future another shot.
At the end of the week, when he’d been due to return, Roy had rearranged the words in the car on the way to the train station. He’d shuffled them into an order that felt serviceable, albeit far from reassuring. There had only been so much he could do with a confession so pathetic that it made his stomach turn, and with the admission that he’d wittingly seeded rot into the foundations of one of the best things that had ever happened to him. He’d hoped Ed might eventually forgive him. He’d hoped he might eventually forgive himself.
It had still been something of a coward’s way out—starting the conversation in a public place would diminish both of their natural inclinations towards histrionics. He’d had to hope that Ed wouldn’t be so disgusted that he’d opt to take a taxi and collect his belongings from Roy’s house later, but that unavoidable risk had been outweighed by the benefits of getting it the fuck over with so that they could both move on with their measly little lives.
He’d seen Ed’s silhouette first—unmistakable even though the shapes had lengthened and strengthened; even though his legs were longer, his shoulders were wider, and the ponytail rippled behind him. He still had a fighter’s grace tempered by the indomitable earnestness. Utterly unique.
Roy had made himself walk closer, curling and uncurling his hands in his trouser pockets, skimming through the words again. He’d always had a knack for speeches. He’d had to whittle as much of the bullshit as humanly possible out of this one—he’d had to carve it almost down to the aching bone—but he’d known it was still just words. It was still just breath sounds and imparted meaning. All he’d had to do was talk. He was much too good at talking. That part of the plan would go off without a hitch.
Ed’s eyes had found him through the hubbub of humanity on the platform.
And lit up.
He’d smiled so bright it had melted Roy’s knees—turned them to slag.
Immobilized, Roy had had no choice but to stand there, more stupidly than usual, as Ed had broken into a run, dodging through the crowd.
When he’d come close, he’d hurled himself at Roy.
Roy had barely even managed to lift his arms in preparation for the collision—arguably fortunately, Ed hadn’t quite bowled him over and knocked him on his ass in the middle of a populous train station.
But the fact that Ed had hugged him so tightly that it had choked the breath out of his lungs had left him reeling.
And then Ed had drawn back just far enough to meet his eyes, panting breathlessly. Ed’s gaze had flicked down to his mouth, and then back up. He’d swallowed. He’d leaned in.
He couldn’t possibly—
He’d just come back from seeing Winry—
There simply hadn’t been—
Roy’s brain had shorted out like one of Fuery’s radios meeting a sledgehammer at high speed.
And he’d flinched.
Ed’s eyes had widened fractionally, and then he’d dropped back down on his heels, reestablishing more than a faint gasp of space between them. He’d grinned—it had only looked ever so slightly forced—and shoved Roy’s shoulder strangely gently with his right hand.
“Come on,” he’d said. “I’m starving. You don’t want to know what passes for curry out there.”
That much Roy had believed.
The rest—
Had tormented him, some nights.
But mostly it had just seemed like a hallucination—like another desert mirage of a world where he was different, and everything was a little kinder in recompense.
So he’d tried not to let it needle at him. He’d tried to ignore it. He’d tried to pretend it had never happened.
As far as he’d been able to tell, Ed had too.
Most likely it had been an odd instinctive impulse after spending all that time with Winry—Ed’s brain had forgotten what type of affectionate greeting he was appropriate and defaulted to the wrong one. He’d certainly been in some pain from the automail tune-up; Roy had noticed a trace of a limp even at the train station, and Ed had ended up rubbing at the edge of the port all night. That explanation had made the most sense. It had been the only thing that made sense.
But none of that was a year ago, either.
Which leaves Roy sitting at his kitchen table, which is gradually being colonized by still more of Ed’s inexhaustible supply of books, and staring in unflattering incomprehension.
He doesn’t have a choice anymore: he has to bite the bullet of his own stupidity until he cracks the casing and tastes the powder.
“Since what?” he says. “A year since what?”
Ed stares at him. Roy isn’t sure if that’s reassuring or disconcerting. Maybe they’ve both lost their minds. Maybe Ed has forgotten how to do math—which would be worse than insanity, from his perspective. Maybe the whole damn world inverted while Roy was focused on survival, and nothing he considered familiar even exists anymore. Maybe they’ve done away with the calendar, and he missed the memo. Maybe—
Very slowly and deliberately, Ed says, “A year since we started dating.”
Tiny firecrackers pop in Roy’s brain. It seems like a fire hazard. They don’t help.
“What?” he says.
Not for the first time, Ed’s expression befits a witness to an otherwise ordinary human being suddenly starting to speak in tongues. “Exactly what I said. Happy anniversary.” He leans closer, squinting, but Roy’s nerves don’t respond to a polite request to duck away in abject horror. “Roy, are you okay?”
“No,” Roy says, which at least is straightforward. “We’re not dating.”
Ed resumes the original wide-eyed stare.
Roy stares back.
Roy has always thought he was almost as good at puzzles as he is at plans.
Whether or not that’s still true, a few pieces start to shift. The gears that had been frozen by the sheer shock grind, squeal, and slowly turn.
“…are we?” Roy says.
Ed blinks.
He runs his hand over his face—from top to bottom, and then back upwards from bottom to top, which makes it easier for him to scrub it through his hair. He dishevels the ponytail a bit. He tips his head. He keeps blinking.
“I mean,” he says, “yeah?” His eyes narrow. “Like—our first date was the Cretan place. The very first time we went. A year ago. Hence the anniversary shit.”
Roy stays very still. “That wasn’t a date.”
Ed cringes. “I asked you out to dinner, Roy.”
Staying still makes it marginally easier to hold his ground when it feels like the rest of the universe is a mudslide. “You’d gone out to dinner with Havoc the week before.”
“So?” Ed says. “That’s Havoc. This is you.”
That is the least compelling argument Roy has endured since the last military board meeting, but he can hear the slow creep of mortification suffusing Ed’s voice, and he doesn’t want to make it worse. Besides, he can concede one ludicrous point without remotely jeopardizing the ten thousand others in the pipeline.
“Ed,” he says, deliberately, “we’ve never kissed. We’ve never had sex. We’ve never even held hands.”
Ed scowls at him, which at least feels like one familiar handhold in the ambient collapse. “I figured you have hangups.”
Roy’s ears start ringing. “I—hangups? I have—”
“You definitely have trust issues,” Ed says, perfectly calmly, itching at the base of his ponytail and making that situation worse as well. “And—like—hell, so do I. And everybody—well, Winry—always said me and Al are way too close, and it’s creepy how much we touch each other, or whatever. So I figured that was abnormal, and you grew up in the brothel and whatever, and probably you just didn’t want to be touched yet, and that’s fine. I don’t care. The way I feel about you isn’t contingent on getting laid.”
In the wildest, strangest, worst way, that’s very sweet and extremely encouraging.
Roy still wants to fling himself off of a bridge, though.
A tall one.
“Do you mean to tell me,” he gets out, with no small amount of difficulty, “that for this entire past year that I’ve spent desperately trying to keep my hands off of you because of how much I respect you as a person and appreciate you as a friend, you thought we were an item, and I was just being a prude?”
Ed wrinkles his nose. “That’s a really judgmental way to say it. Lots of people aren’t into that kind of stuff.” His eyes illuminate again. “Hold the damn phone—you’ve been what because you what? My hearing went out for a second. Say all that again.”
“No,” Roy says. He does not despair, which is a substantial accomplishment. “What—” He clears his throat, which is less impressive. “What should we do now?”
Ed goes right back to staring at him. At least Roy has given him a lot of practice.
“Uh,” Ed says. “I dunno. Did you want to marinate in shame for a while, or did you just want to start really dating and pretend this never fuckin’ happened?”
That, as it happens, sounds phenomenal.
There’s just one minor detail that could impede this brilliant rerouting of the master plan.
“Don’t most of our friends think we already are?” Roy asks, because he’s a masochist.
Ed shrugs. “Apparently only my friends.”
Roy looks him in the eyes. He has evidently forgotten another key side effect of joining oneself to another at the hip, even though this isn’t his first offense. “We have the same friends.”
Ed considers that.
He sits back.
He lifts his fork and licks smudges of curry off of the back of the tines.
“Fair point,” he says.
The maelstrom in Roy’s head coughs up a spar of thought even worse than most of the previous ones: “So—Al thinks we’re dating?”
“We are dating,” Ed says, gesturing between them with the fork. “But Al thought we were before, if that’s what you mean.”
Semantics are so often Roy’s beloved ally that this feels like a particularly cruel betrayal. “I—yes.”
Ed jams the fork back into the takeout container he’s been scarfing from. “He’s chill. He thought it was a good thing—something about how it was about damn time I learned some patience because something I wanted wasn’t in my control.”
Roy leans far enough to pry Ed’s fork back out of the container and sample a bite of the murder-curry, which he has privately been calling murry for a long time. Meeting a new private named Murray the other morning was a bit bewildering.
He regrets the bite, but since he regrets a lot of this conversation—since he regrets a lot of his life—it all seems rather fitting.
“You don’t think he’s going to remark on it if I turn over a completely new leaf overnight immediately after our one-year noniversary?” Roy says.
Ed shrugs again. “Remark? Sure. Al’ll remark on the sun rising in the East if you let him. But you’ve done weirder shit.”
Roy resents how true that is. He replaces the fork where he found it. “Who else have you talked to about it?”
Ed blinks at him. “…it wasn’t a secret, Roy.”
Roy blinks back. “Meaning…?”
Interestingly, Ed’s cheeks darken slightly. “Meaning I talked about it to a lot of people. Like you do when you’ve got a fucking boyfriend. Because it’s normal to talk about your fucking boyfriend when you’ve got one.”
Roy resists the extremely tantalizing urge to point out that Ed did not have a fucking boyfriend, and that should have been a pretty significant cue.
More important, at least at the moment, is what lies between the lines of what Ed just said. The way he clumsily tries to cover his heart on his sleeve has only gotten more charming over time.
“Meaning you were excited,” Roy fills in. “Meaning you were happy about it.”
A deeper flush floods Ed’s face. “Pretty fucking rich to make fun of me for appreciating your dumb ass when you didn’t even notice I was courting you for a whole fucking year.”
Roy smiles prettily. “Perhaps you weren’t very good at it.”
Ed’s eyes go huge.
Roy knows in his heart that, a few spare years ago, he would be about to get half a box of leftover murry hurled in his face. And then ground in.
But this is the new Ed—the one he fell in love with, somehow without realizing that this Ed was also falling in love with him.
‘Was’ may be the operative word at the moment.
“That’s it,” Ed snaps. “I’m dumping you. And I’m going to keep the fucking house.”
“You can’t dump me if we were never dating,” Roy says, as cheerfully as possible. “And it’s my house.”
“Even if we weren’t,” Ed fires back, jabbing a fingertip at him for good measure, “which we were, we started again five minutes ago. So I can dump you either way. And the house likes me better, so it’s mine.”
The house does not like him better.
The house doesn’t like anyone, and it doesn’t make exceptions.
But Roy can’t afford that tangent, since he provoked precisely the setup that he wanted:
“Then I guess I’m in deep shit,” he says, leaning in and lowering his eyelashes, “unless there’s some way I can make it up to you.”
Ed stares at him, lips parted in surprise, for a long second.
Then he throws his head back and laughs.
Maybe Roy was better off when he didn’t know.
“Okay, but seriously,” Ed says. “What the hell are we going to say? Especially to Al. I hate lying in the first place, and I can’t lie to Al. It doesn’t work.”
Roy bats his eyelashes. They were already primed anyway. “If only you hadn’t just dumped someone who happens to be extraordinarily good at presenting the facts in a way that promotes the exact interpretation that he wants.”
“That’s the longest way I’ve ever heard somebody say ‘politician’,” Ed says.
“Most people abbreviate it to ‘scum’,” Roy says.
Ed plucks the fork out again and licks it exactly where Roy put his mouth a moment ago. He smiles, and Roy knows that one is genuine.
“All right,” Ed says. “I’m listening.”
Unfortunately, it is perversely fitting to establish—or arguably reestablish, though Roy maintains that that argument is objectively incorrect, because dating is a reciprocal arrangement that requires active or at least conscious participation from both parties, which their previous arrangement lacked—their relationship on the basis of some ludicrous collusion.
And it’s fun.
They blow the better part of two hours and two glasses of whiskey—Ed keeps stealing it and drinking from the exact same place Roy did while looking him directly in the eyes, but angrily—finessing their strategy for how to explain the shift in their dynamic to each of the people most likely to ask. Ed offers a number of remarkably insightful comments on the way each person thinks, although his ability to articulate his perspicacity dwindles dramatically as he poaches more and more of Roy’s drink. The liquor makes him liquid—makes him start sinking into the couch, makes him list back and forth, makes him move slower but more fluidly. His eyes soften. He smiles more. He laughs a lot.
It’s probably a good thing Roy left the point of no return in the dust a long, long time ago. He doesn’t think he’d be able to handle that existential crisis tonight. He has too many of them stacked up and teetering as it is.
They start out with a grid of people, likely perspectives, and proposed methods for slipping the change past each individual without undue attention. They end up with a few completed matches and a great deal of alchemical doodles, as well as three drawings of Al and six of Hayate. There’s also a drawing of the house, with Ed pulling on it from one side and Roy pulling on it from the other. Ed managed to make the arrangement of the windows in the front door look like a sad face.
Better still, even before they’ve made much headway into the whiskey, Ed starts leaning against Roy’s side much more intently than he used to. It feels like a challenge, which obviously Roy has a normal and healthy knee-jerk response to.
It is extraordinarily satisfying to finally, finally get to fake-stretch and extend his left arm across the back of the couch, then slowly cinch it downward until it comes to rest around Ed’s shoulders. Ed asks him if he learned that move in gradeschool or the loony bin but doesn’t even pretend to pull away.
It’s everything Roy wanted and didn’t dare to ask for—everything he yearned for knowing all the while he can’t deserve it.
But deserving has little place in a world that would take what it did from Ed.
Deserving has little place in a world that would let Roy do what he did.
Deserving is for people who still believe it’s as simple as equivalent exchange, rather than the much less pithy, much more complicated, much more difficult Do the best that you can with what’s in front of you, and then get up and try again tomorrow.
So Roy rests his head against Ed’s and attempts to find space around the doodles to write promising words in the appropriate columns and lets himself savor what he has just now, whether he earned it or not.
The only downside is that the alcohol makes it all seem sort of misty, and he keeps having to pause to wonder if he’s dreaming. Or possibly having a stroke.
When they straggle upstairs, later than they ought to on a worknight, hanging off of each other’s clothes and grabbing for the railing, as they reach the landing, Ed turns to proceed towards the guest room.
Roy already has a grip on the back of his shirt, which makes for a convenient handhold to haul back on.
Ed blinks at him. “What?”
Roy gestures munificently—or some word like that—towards the doorway to his bedroom.
“We can economize,” he says.
Ed blinks at the doorway for a few seconds, then at him again, eyebrow rising in a way that does not imply an overpowering appreciation for Roy’s genius.
“How romantic,” he says.
Roy tugs on the back of Ed’s shirt and gestures again, possibly ever so slightly helplessly. “It would reduce the amount of sheets we have to wash by half.”
The grin sparks in Ed’s eyes before it parts his lips and spreads the grin. “Better.”
“You have a mediocre pillow,” Roy says. “And an old mattress. You don’t even know what you’re missing.”
Ed laughs, which is almost enough on its own. “What’s the catch? Do you snore? Kick? Shout obscenities in your sleep?”
“You’d find the last one charming,” Roy says.
“Maybe the first time,” Ed says. “I need my damn sleep these days to keep up with my teacher’s creatures.” He squints at Roy. “How else are you gonna sweeten the deal?”
Roy pulls him closer by his shirt and kisses him, obviously.
He fumbles it a bit. He’s tipsy and giddy in approximately equal parts, and while he has been wanting to do this for about a year, in some ways that makes it worse. There’s so much to live up to.
Then again, Ed has always had a knack for exceeding expectations and bowling him over onto his ass—almost invariably at the same time.
As it turns out, whether or not there’s any guarantee that good things come to those who wait, there’s certainly something to be said for delayed gratification.
Maybe this still would have been just as spectacular eleven months, three weeks, and a handful of days ago, but somehow Roy doubts it. He thinks it’s far better now than it would have been, because they know each other so well—because he spent so long avidly trying not to fantasize about it; because the pent-up anticipation is even headier than the whiskey; because they can’t take any part of it for granted when it’s taken so long to get here at all.
Ed’s mouth is softer than it looks and much nicer than it usually sounds. Both of his hands curl into Roy’s shirtfront so tightly that it jerks him another half-step forward, and he instinctively lifts his hands for balance—which makes it all the easier to rest one under Ed’s jaw and thread the other back into his hair, at long last.
As he’d always hoped, Ed kisses with a kick like the whiskey—fierce and fiery and sharp, but with a smooth sweetness that soothes it before you can conceive of any regret. He releases his grip on Roy’s shirt with his right hand, flattening it instead on Roy’s chest, which feels more like a warning than an attempt to feel his heartbeat. Knowing Ed, it’s likely both.
Roy doesn’t need to know how or when or with whom he learned to do that with his tongue. His eyelashes whisper against Roy’s, almost tangling; and his nose rubs Roy’s cheek; and the wet heat of his ravenous mouth is more than a better man could ask for. Roy Mustang is not in the habit of looking gift horses in any of their orifices.
Eventually, the compromised oxygen input making him pleasantly lightheaded forces him to draw back.
Ed blinks and shivers like someone waking from a dream.
Then he scowls.
So at least he’s feeling all right.
He uses the leverage of his hand on Roy’s chest to shove gently.
“Idiot,” he says, which could be referring to a hundred-thousand individual instances, or which could just be a general assessment.
“You’re going to have to be more specific,” Roy says, albeit slightly breathlessly.
“Nope,” Ed says, reestablishing his fistful of Roy’s shirt to drag him off towards the bathroom. “That’s what you get.”
For possibly the first time in his entire life, Roy has no complaints.
In keeping with both of their admittedly somewhat deplorable tendencies towards reckless arrogance, they do not revisit their damage control plan sober: they just leap right in to the deepest part of the murky lagoon holding their noses and hope for the best.
The worst part is that Roy is increasingly convinced that between the two of them, they can do anything they set themselves to.
Including persuading one of the most intelligent people he’s ever met that both of them are smarter than they are.
Like all of Roy’s plans, it has a built-in consolation. Even if this all goes down in hilarious cataclysmic flames, they’ll get a lovely breakfast from the deal.
Roy always holds the door for Ed, who always rolls his eyes, but—utterly unsurprisingly—Al doesn’t fail to notice the subtle difference right off the bat.
“Hi,” Al says, his eyes flicking instantly to the way that Roy’s free hand grazes against the small of Ed’s back as Ed passes through the doorway. “You guys are… on time.”
“We’re turning over some new leaves,” Roy says.
Ed glances back and rolls his eyes.
Perfect—new and normal behavior mixed together.
Roy pulls Ed’s chair out, which earns him a pronounced huff and sends Al’s eyebrows shooting up to flirt with his bangs. Roy attempts to look as innocent and unconcerned as possible while brushing his hand all the way across the top of Ed’s shoulders—which is, not so incidentally, absolutely delicious in its own right—before placing his benevolently deceitful ass in his own chair.
Al doesn’t look back and forth between them. He looks directly at Ed.
All part of the plan.
“We had a breakthrough,” Ed says, exactly as they planned it, managing only to sound a little smug. He shoots Roy an unmistakably sultry look before wrangling his expression back under control and focusing on Al again. “You… don’t want to know.”
Al smiles blandly.
But Roy has spent just enough time with the Elrics—and more than enough with nepotism hires who have spent their whole lives counting on never getting caught—to recognize the trace of terror in his eyes.
“You’re right,” Al says calmly. “I don’t.”
It’s a good thing Roy has had so much practice keeping a straight face while decorated blowhards pronounce the most insipid utterances in human history as if they’re brilliant revelations, because he very badly wants to laugh.
The rest of the outing goes even better than Roy expected. Al stops eyeing him before either of them has even finished their first cup of coffee, and after that he doesn’t even seem to pay attention to the myriad ways Roy’s body language has changed. It seems to help substantially that Ed’s hasn’t changed at all, which is also part of the plan.
After a wonderfully leisurely breakfast and some updates on Al’s recent medical miracles in slightly grislier detail than Roy would have liked over a meal, they part ways so that Al can go right back to work, Roy can go right back to scheming, and Ed can go right back to muttering at his students as he marks their quizzes.
Roy and Ed both glance back subtly to make sure Al is out of sight and out of earshot before they look at each other.
Ed grins. It makes Roy’s heart leap. This is very stupid and very splendid.
Perhaps—just perhaps—a little bit like him.
“Well,” Ed says. “One down, all the rest to go.”
“The progress should be weighted,” Roy says. “That was the hardest one.”
Ed gives him a look. “What about Hawkeye?”
They’re probably at a bit of an advantage with Riza, as it happens, if only because she’ll have received such mixed messages between the two of them that if she hasn’t given up already, she’ll be on the verge.
“Riza stopped trying to make sense of me when we were twelve,” Roy says, which seems like a slightly more favorable way to express it. “We can leverage her many years of practice accepting that there’s something wrong with me.”
“Just one thing?” Ed mutters, but before Roy can even scoff, Ed’s curled fingers bump against his where their hands hang between them.
He’s right anyway.
“A collective ‘something’,” Roy says. “A ‘something’ that encompasses multitudes.”
“That’s all right,” Ed says, fingers tangling loosely with his. “There’s a couple multitude-somethings wrong with me, too.”
“Besides,” Roy says, keeping his voice light in spite of the relevant detail that his heart seems to be trembling on the brink of a beautiful explosion. “It’ll be kind of fun.”
Ed snorts so loudly that a woman walking ahead of them turns around.
But he doesn’t let go of Roy’s hand.
And none of the rest of it matters much compared to that.