Chapter Text
When they’ve been dragged up to the highest room and hurled on the floor, and the door has been slammed, and they’ve both levered themselves awkwardly up to sit despite the impressive iron stocks around their wrists, Ed scoots backwards unabashedly until his spine hits Roy’s and says, “This is your fault.”
Roy can feel Ed’s heartbeat through both of their skins, both of their muscles; he can feel the rhythm settling into his bones. “And how, exactly, have you arrived at that fine and well-researched concl—”
“Because I wanted to stay with Al and Captain Hawkeye and Ling’s guy, but no, you said we’d get there faster if we just popped off and set out by ourselves—”
Roy does not say I have not had a moment alone with you since before we stepped onto the first train, and parts of me I did not know could dry out are parched and cracking.
He does not say I very much needed to usher you up hills and ladders ahead of me so that I could gaze longingly at your beautiful ass without commentary.
He does not say The way ‘Ling’s guy’ looks at you makes my stomach acid boil, and the fumes were asphyxiating me.
He clears his throat. “Surely you were every bit as weary as I was of the navigational incompetence.”
It’s a boring lie, but Ed is too wholly guileless with those he trusts to anticipate an ulterior motive. It also doesn’t hurt that he’s barely even listening.
“—so when we get back, I’m telling Al to kick your ass for this.”
Roy’s jaw is aching with what is going to be a terribly unsightly new bruise, and his bottom lip is split towards the right side. He smiles anyway, simply because Edward Elric lacks the capacity for doubt.
“When we get back,” he says, “that sounds fair.”
If they get back, Ed will go on looking about himself wide-eyed and smiling and fascinated and free, and Roy will wonder just how long he has left. Someday soon Ed is going to realize that there’s nothing tethering him in the kennel anymore, and when that day comes, he will be over the fence and gone. It’s funny, in an awful kind of way, that the world is not big enough to hold the smallest miracle Roy has ever touched.
…it’s the dehydration. Surely it’s the dehydration. Intoxication makes him bitter, and dehydration makes him melodramatic.
Damn his weak, sad little soul. He tilts his head back a fraction—not enough to brush Ed’s; that might just set him off and start him babbling out everything that’s swirling in his chest.
But then he squints. And then he makes out the mark scrawled on the ceiling.
“Wait,” he says.
“Nah,” Ed says. “I was just thinking of jumping up and throwing myself out the window, thanks.”
“This building,” Roy says, straining to look harder, but he must be right, “the people we’re dealing with—this is the Hua Wei.”
Silence. For a moment Roy is almost stupid enough to try to crane his neck around to see Ed’s face.
“The Hua Wei,” he says again. “They’re a fringe group. Different religion, speak a different dialect, don’t believe in empire as a method of government.”
“Huh,” Ed says. “How do you know all that stuff?”
“Because when I heard we were going to Xing,” Roy says, “I researched. Honestly, with all of the reading you do, it is incomprehensible to me that there’s anything you don’t kn—”
“You can’t research a country,” Ed says. “Not in any way that matters—you can’t find out what people are like from a book, and the politics are always changing, and you never know what the air’s like until you’re breathing it. Whereas alkahestry—that shit I researched. That’s just fact. And hang on, how do you even know?”
Roy has to raise both hands and the stocks between them in order to point. “It’s written up there.”
“Hang on,” Ed says. “You can read fucking Xingese?”
“A bit,” Roy says, which is understating matters somewhat. “The written characters are more or less consistent throughout the country, but the dialects vary broadly. My mother spoke one of the northern variants, but I learned imperial Xingese.”
“First of all,” Ed says, “what the fuck?”
“I’m in a position of diplomatic power, Fullmetal; it was only logical to brush up once Xingese royalty started pouring into Central Ci—”
“Second of all,” Ed says, “what the fuck? You mean you’ve been making Ling and everybody talk to you in Amestrian this whole time without them knowing you can understand what they say to each other?”
Roy opens his mouth and then closes it. There is a pause.
“You bastard,” Ed says—but if Roy’s not mistaken, there’s a tone of admiration to it.
“I prefer the term ‘strategist’,” Roy says. “All right, let’s… see…”
“See what?”
“You are insufferable when you’re bored.”
“Al switches between ‘intolerable’, ‘infuriating’, and ‘demonic’, but I guess ‘insufferable’ works too.”
Roy deems that rising to that is unwise and, with a great deal of difficulty and some highly undignified grunting and gritting of teeth, plants one of his fettered hands on the dusty floor and levers himself up to his knees. The balance is all wrong, and it’s hard to concentrate through the throbbing in his head, but he tries to put a mental wall between himself and the myriad distractions as he bends and starts dragging the first two fingers of his right hand through the dust.
Ed shifts, and Roy can feel the weight of his gaze. “What are you doing? That’s not an array. And swords made of dust really suck; I’ve tried that.”
“It’s the pictogram for ‘peace’,” Roy says. “Although technically I believe it’s more accurately translated as ‘non-hostility’—‘truce’, I suppose. And this…” He tries to keep his lines sharp and graceful, which is a bit of a challenge when it feels like he’s scraping the skin off of his fingertips, and his instinct is to jerk his hand away. “…means ‘talk’—the noun, like ‘conversation’. Like ‘parley’.”
Ed is quiet for a moment. Roy doesn’t quite dare to glance back. “You really think they’re gonna buy that?”
“It can’t hurt to try,” Roy says—which of course is a lie, but a lie that’s pleasant and useful.
“Okay,” Ed says as Roy sits back, attempting to figure out how to wipe his fingers on his trouser leg around the obstructive stocks. “Now what?”
“Now we wait.”
“Are your plans always this shitty?”
“Usually.”
He wishes he could say it started here in Xing. He wishes he could say it started at the train station, moments before their departure, when Ed turned and bared his face to the first swell of dawn above the skyline, and the feeble light struck sparks in his hair, and Roy’s stomach dropped out. He wishes he could say it started at Ed’s birthday party, when the newly-minted seventeen-year-old watched Roy ostentatiously lighting candles sans array, rolled his eyes, huffed a sigh, and then favored his commander with one glimpse of a soft and almost affectionate smile.
But it started on the Promised Day. It started when Roy burst into the room where he’d incinerated the homunculus Lust—heart racing, thoughts roiling, adrenaline electric in his veins—and found it full of all-new monsters; with Riza at his heels and his fingers poised, he felt adequate to the task, at least. It started when the grotesque figures shifted aside, and Ed spun to face the door, every line of his body burning with the fight. It started when Ed’s eyes found Roy’s, and the viciousness melted instantaneously into relief and a fragment of something like delight, and a part of Roy whispered, That. That is what I want.
There wasn’t time to contemplate it before the deluge, but the words had crystallized, and they couldn’t be broken apart.
After the absolute consumption of the rage when Envy fell into his grasp—Envy, the worm that had murdered the best man Roy had ever met; the sharp-toothed slug that had pried away the cleanest and kindest and safest thing in Roy’s life and smiled dashing it to the ground—there was no room for anything but the terror for Riza, and then there was the sudden and impenetrable darkness. And then there was the end of it, of all of it—skittering and stumbling down along a trajectory he couldn’t see or slow or influence but for hurling flame into the dark. And then there was the promise of light, of distinction, of the power of observation restored, never again to be taken for granted.
And then there was time to wonder just how long it had been since Fullmetal had been a child.
It was like waking from a nightmare—or a drunken blackout, but Roy was going to stick with the nobler simile for as long as he could get away with it—when the bandages fell away, and their absence made a difference. The room came into focus; the ambient whiteness almost blinded him again; Riza was at his elbow, grinning, and had she always been that beautiful?
It was bizarre and kind of unsettling to need to have events that he had participated in described to him, but nothing seemed terribly important now, weighed against how staggeringly fortunate they’d been. There had been casualties, yes, but no cataclysm. Whatever happened from here, Roy would rest in the knowledge that he was quite possibly the luckiest man alive.
When Fullmetal arrived—dragging his feet, reluctant to be anywhere but Alphonse’s bedside—Roy ordered him to take a full month’s leave. There were a number of excellent reasons that the Fullmetal Alchemist should take a break: someone would need to care for Alphonse constantly; until Miss Rockbell could build a new arm from scratch and stop beating the boy with a wrench for his recklessness, he was oh-so-literally short-handed anyway; he’d just lost his father to the rule of exchange that governed every aspect of his life.
It was an entirely logical decision. And Roy wouldn’t have to look at him with new eyes and fight the urge to marvel.
Two weeks later, Ed stormed into Roy’s office with a shining replacement arm and slammed his watch down on Roy’s desk.
It seemed terribly typical for him to be sweeping out of the military the same way he burst in—eyes blazing, shoulders squared, with the braid slung over his shoulder.
And Roy thought, I will write you sardonic letters; I will demand that you come out for drinks when ‘the team’ misses your vitality; I will stop myself just before I start standing under your bedroom window to watch you comb out your hair and was terrified by his conviction.
“To hell with your leave,” Ed said. “Give me something to do.”
Roy choked on ‘While I can’t in good conscience say that your service was exemplary, it was nonetheless astonishingly excellent in a unique and more or less commendable way’. “Y—what?”
Ed heaved a histrionic sigh. “Al’s already trained his cat to bring him the newspaper—don’t ask me how—and I’ve read every book in the house at least twice, and Al throws shit at me when I pace around the living room, and the only other people I know are all here, and I’m going insane. So give me something. I don’t even care what.”
Roy knew it was a stopgap measure at best—a very small dam against a very large river—but he set Major Elric mostly to researching. If Roy kept him occupied in the libraries and doing odd jobs around the city, Ed was close to his brother, and he was theoretically staying out of trouble. One day the dam would crumble, but perhaps…perhaps by then Roy would have dug a canal. Perhaps Roy would have directed the sheer power of that current away from himself, and perhaps he would not drown.
Thus it was that Roy Mustang treaded water for a year. For a year, Ed investigated minor crimes in the city and threatened small-time miscreants with increasingly outlandish punishments; for a year, Ed was unsettlingly obedient and quietly content; for a year, Ed changed out the picture of Alphonse on his desk (which he used as a chair and a filing cabinet) every time his restored brother gained a few more pounds. For a year, Roy handed him distractions and did not touch him; for a year, Roy let him disdain uniforms not because the waistcoat became him so breathtakingly but because it ‘couldn’t hurt to have a plainclothes major’; for a year, Roy smiled faintly when Edward Elric’s back was turned. For a year, he kept both of them safe from each other and from themselves, and Ed was none the wiser.
And then came the letter on fine parchment that reeked of sandalwood.
“What are they saying?” Ed mutters.
“I can’t understand them,” Roy says. He’s trying to focus on the intonations and expressions instead of on the warmth of Ed’s left arm brushing his right. “Regional dialects aren’t like accents, where the pronunciation only changes marginally; they’re drastically different.”
“Could you be any more useless?” Ed asks.
“I suppose if I gave it my best effort and truly believed in myse—”
“Oh, shut up.”
Before they can get any more high-quality bickering in, the discussion above them stops. The men in the coarse robes set their dark eyes on Roy, who holds his breath and straightens his spine and tries to project calm rationality without looking weak.
He earns a sharp knee to the face for his trouble.
Reading up, Roy thought the Hua Wei were enthralling. He is currently revising his opinion of them.
At least they know how to make an exit, though; the robes swish and snap and churn up the dust.
Ed scoots over and sets his mismatched hands against Roy’s chest to steady him—as much as the stocks allow—when Roy sits up and sways a bit. Ed leans in too close to examine Roy’s petulantly-bleeding nose, and Roy narrowly manages not to gasp and choke and spray blood all over the boy’s distressingly arresting face.
“It’s not broken,” Ed says. “Which is a good thing; I don’t think you could stand to get much uglier.”
“I beg your pardon,” Roy says.
Ed grins. This close, pinioned, with the cool fingers and the warm ones pressing into his chest, Roy almost has to look away. “Good, I don’t think there’s any head trauma. Damn, that was a shitty plan.”
“Thank you for the revelatory wisdom of your hindsight.” Roy tries to raise his own hands to negotiate wiping his nose around the stocks, and there is a moment of frozen awkwardness before Ed withdraws. Then Roy is smearing blood all over his face and hands, and this is familiar territory. “Your turn to generate unspeakable brilliance, then.”
“I’m good for that,” Ed says.
“I’m aware,” Roy says.
Ed looks at Roy’s filthy hands, and then at his slightly-less-filthy ones. He flexes his fingers. And then the corners of his lips curl. “I think I have an idea.”
Roy is not sure he likes the sound of that.
“Just when you think a guy can’t get any more arrogant,” Ed said from his sprawl on the couch with his hands behind his head, “he gets to be emperor of a giant country, and you’re royally fucked.”
“Language,” Roy said disinterestedly, passing a signed report back to Riza.
“Oh, do forgive me, sir. He gets to be emperor, and you are magisterially fornicated with.”
“Don’t be crude, Brother,” Alphonse said, and Roy could have kissed him. With Ed in obliteration range, he would not have survived the endeavor, but the intention stood.
“I don’t see why we have to go,” Ed said, scrubbing at his eyes with his flesh hand. “Al’s still not really up for that kind of traveling, and you’re within spitting distance of your promotion, and it’s not like we’re Xingese citizens, so what the hell do we care about Ling’s big, fancy, I’m-the-emperor-now-ha-ha-you-peons party?”
Roy folded his hands and waited until Ed glanced over at him. “It’s the diplomatic opportunity of a lifetime, Fullmetal.”
“If these are the kinds of opportunities you live for,” Ed said, “your life must suck.”
“Brother,” Al said, and the two syllables conveyed encyclopedias of exasperation.
“Think about it,” Roy said. It was the only challenge Ed never turned down. “He has an informal allegiance with a ranking member of the Amestrian military—that is, you—and is extending that connection to an individual who may very well dictate foreign policy within a matter of years—that is, me.”
“At which point you get your five hundred cens back,” Ed said. “So why don’t you go to his stupid party? I’ll stay here and not bust my ass catching trains and sweating out my own weight in the desert.”
“You’re the liaison,” Roy said. “You are my ticket to an alliance that none of my competitors will ever be able to touch. Besides, isn’t he your friend?”
“I’m sick of being your ticket,” Ed muttered. “And I’m a better friend when I’m long-distance, not that it’s any of your damn business. And do you even know how far Xing is? And how different it is? We can’t just wander over and say ‘hi’ and start redeeming imperial approval, you know.”
“I know,” Roy said—mildly, despite how startling it always was when Ed’s maturity stabbed straight through his compulsive rejection of authority. “I did actually think this through. It’s a lot of time for the captain and myself to be away, but I believe that the benefits of becoming an individual to the primary power in Xing—not just a title and a name—will be more than worth the effort.”
“Worth it for you, maybe,” Ed said. “Are you looking at the larger resource exchange here?”
“Yes.”
Ed’s frown deepened into a scowl. “Are you looking at what a huge pain in my ass this is gonna be?”
Roy smiled thinly. “And here I thought you would be grateful for a reprieve from all of the menial labor.”
“You talk like this is a vacation,” Ed said. “This is not going to be a vacation.”
“But it’s a holiday in Xing,” Roy said.
Even Riza sighed at that wordplay.
“This is a little experimental,” Ed says. “And by that I mean that no one’s ever done it, and a million things could go wrong, and there’s a very minor possibility that we could die.”
“Wonderful,” Roy says.
“However,” Ed says, “if we’re gonna get out of here, we should try it before you lose any more blood and end up totally useless, and I’m pretty sure I’ve figured it out in theory.”
“You always know exactly how to reassure my troubled heart,” Roy says.
“Just trust me,” Ed says. “I am a genius.”
“I’m aware of that.” Roy shifts forward and, after a bit of ungainly maneuvering, manages to sit with his legs crossed, facing the boy who may momentarily lead him to his doom. “If you weren’t, I’m fairly sure we’d both be dead by now.”
Ed attempts—unsuccessfully—to suppress a grin. “You better dial back the optimism, General, or I’m gonna have to start calling you a ‘Roy of sunshine’.”
“You wouldn’t,” Roy says.
“I would,” Ed says.
“Then I suppose I’ll have to trust you,” Roy says.
Ed’s grin widens. He hefts the stocks around his wrists, raises his arms, and opens both his hands.
Roy takes a deep breath, sets his jaw, and presses his filthy palms to Ed’s.
He had anticipated something—a rush of energy, a tingle of power.
It isn’t a tingle. It’s a tidal wave.
He jerks away so violently that he loses his balance and tumbles backwards onto the unforgiving floor. He can just barely brace himself on his elbows with the stocks obstructing his movement, so it’s from an embarrassed sprawl that he stares up at Ed in amazement and a little bit of fear.
“All the time,” he says. “You keep that in you all the time.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Ed says a little too quickly, his eyes a little too sharp. “Part of it—I mean, probably not a whole half, because you’re so useless—but a lot of it’s yours. That’s how it works. Or that’s how I theorized it’d work.”
“I’ve only dabbled in hands-free alchemy,” Roy says. “I’ve practiced my array extensively, and after some thought I fixed the wobbling leg of my desk in the office. I can’t control that kind of power, Ed.”
“You don’t have to,” Ed says, working his way rapidly from startlement to a scowl to a glower. “I’ll do it, and I’ll work out the array—you just sit still and think about the components of iron and let me run it through you. It’s just closing the circuit, okay? And then the lightbulb goes on. Simple.”
“Nothing is ever simple with you,” Roy says.
“Bullshit,” Ed says. “I’m easy.”
Roy pauses.
Ed blinks.
“Oh, fuck you,” he says. “Sit up and stop being such a goddamn violet, and I’ll get us out of here.”
“Such a what?” Roy asks, struggling to follow the part of those instructions that made a lick of sense. If nothing else, the combination of malnourishment and endless shackled sit-ups will probably help to make up for all of the addictively delicious mooncakes he snuck during the ceremonies.
“Violet,” Ed is saying. “It’s—a thing we used to say at home. Y’know, like ‘shrinking violet’. Because they’re so flimsy and shit. Some asshole said it to Al at school once, and I punched him and got suspended. Point is, you’re being one. C’mon, we don’t have all day.”
“I think violets are lovely,” Roy says as he works his way upright at last, steels himself, and offers his hands.
“I’ll bet you do,” Ed says, and claps his hands to Roy’s.
The swell of pure and absolute potential almost bowls him over again, but this time he leans into it instead of away. Ed’s eyes light, and their joined hands spark, and every ounce of Roy’s blood that didn’t dribble out his nose starts to surge and sing. He tries—he tries—to think of nothing but pale light and clear lines and iron, iron, iron; molecules of metal that oxygenate red—
It’s difficult to think of anything but how breathtaking Ed is in his element.
But that makes it easier, somehow, to feed the power back to him, to circulate it, to guide the raging current from Ed’s warm hand through the center of his own chest and back out into the cold-elegant automail, because Roy will give him everything if he’ll just keep looking like that—
Ed’s eyes gleam, and he grins wildly—heedless, flushed—and gasps out, “Oh, hell, yes,” and then—
—peels his palms away from Roy’s and flattens them on the front of the stocks.
The light is briefly blinding, and then chunks of iron are raining into Roy’s lap.
A rather sizable one hits him in a very unfortunate place.
Roy cringes despite the way it makes his split lip sting—and then he cringes because it makes the split lip sting; focusing on that pain is so, so much better than the alternative.
“You could have broken the lock,” he grits out.
Ed blinks. “Oh. Huh. Guess so.” He watches blankly as Roy curls up around himself a little and then begins feebly massaging at his wrists. “Sorry.”
“Never mind,” Roy manages. “It’s that sort of a day.” He tries to meet Ed’s gaze and finds it hazy. “Are you… all right?”
Ed looks down at his shackled hands. “Yeah. I just… I didn’t think it’d feel like that.”
Roy hesitates. “Like what?”
“Good,” Ed says. “Really, really… good.” He swallows. Several wisps of hair have escaped from his ponytail to flirt with his throat. “It’s just… I mean, I can’t help thinking, sometimes, that if I just had enough power, I could fix everything. I could make everything great, make it the way I wanted it, set everything right. And then I realize that’s probably what the homunculus thought he was doing, at the start.”
“If you can recognize the danger of power,” Roy says, “you’re already safe from your ambitions.”
Ed turns a wry gaze on him. “You’re one to talk. How long ’til the Royvolution?”
Roy lets the smirk unfurl slowly. “Don’t get short with me—or can’t you help it?”
Ed growls in the back of his throat, and Roy forgets the pain for a moment as his groin throbs for a different reason.
Before Roy can despair too much, Ed shoves his own bound, mismatched hands forward. “Equivalent goddamn exchange, Mustang; let me out.”
“So demanding,” Roy says. He presses his palms together, focuses intently on decomposition, leans forward, and touches the lock on Ed’s stocks.
“Motherfucker,” Ed says, apparently just in general, as he throws them open, tosses them aside, and starts kneading at his left wrist with his metal fingers. “Ow. Damn it.”
That can’t be helping matters; Roy reaches for his arm. “Let me—”
“C’mon,” Ed says, leaping to his feet. Some days Roy swears the boy is made of elastic and sheer pigheadedness. Ed crosses to one of the windows, circling his left wrist. “How high up are w… aw, shit. I officially hate these guys.”
“Officially?” Roy says, clambering to his feet with a great deal less gusto. “I’ll make sure to have it noted in your file.”
“Shut up,” Ed says, leaning out. The wind catches his hair; Roy’s stomach somersaults less-than-gracefully. “So… how do you feel about rappelling without a harness?”
Roy starts collecting the pieces of the stocks so that they can be reconstructed into cord. “I imagine you probably don’t care how I feel about it as long as I hush up and do it.”
Ed flashes him a terrible, terrible grin.
By the third day of caravanning through the desert, Roy had a dehydration headache, several saddle sores, and a fierce desire to kill most of his companions.
“Hey, Colonel—I mean, Brigadier General—International Relations,” Ed said. “I expect you to put a fucking railroad here the second we get back.”
“Do I look like I’m enjoying this?” Roy asked.
Ed assessed him, eyes bright in the shadow of his cloak. Roy had to admit that they were obscenely lucky the previous emperor had elected to die in the dead of winter; the nights were indescribably cold, but at least no one had passed out from heatstroke. They’d all nonetheless been advised to keep their hoods up against the vicious combination of wind and sand and sun.
“You always enjoy other people’s pain,” Ed decided.
Alphonse stretched his slender arms above his head. “I’m sorry, Brigadier General; Brother’s acting childish because he didn’t sleep well last night.”
“It’s fine,” Roy said, which was not true and never had been and likely never would be. Rationally, he knew that Ed meant those sorts of jibes in jest, but it was still difficult to hear himself accused of sadism by the one person who honestly seemed to believe that he wasn’t monstrous.
“Sir,” Riza said in as much of an undertone as equine travel allowed, “think of the hot bath waiting for you when we arrive.”
Roy made a genuine effort to do so—except that he was still thinking about Ed, and the two thoughts converged, and then he was thinking of Ed in a hot bath, lounging against the side, surrounded by pearly bubbles and wreathed in steam, hair soaked and wet skin gleaming, setting a smoldering gaze on Roy and purring, If you don’t hurry up, it’ll be cold before we’re done.
As Roy discovered, there were few things in the world less enjoyable than trying to combat an erection while riding a horse.
Whether or not Ed cares, Roy feels that rappelling without a harness is fucking terrifying.
“Man up!” Ed shouts from the ground, which looks very, very, very distant and very, very, very hard.
Roy needs to focus on the facts. It is a fact that this transmutation-marked cord supported the weight of Ed including automail and saw him safely down. It is a fact that the wind is buffeting Roy’s body, but not so vigorously that he’s losing his grip. It is a fact that, despite the multiple blows to the head and the blood loss, he has not yet felt his consciousness skittering away from him, ergo the medical likelihood is that he won’t black out with fifty feet of open air remaining.
It is a fact that he can do this. It is a fact that he really ought to, in a hurry, if he wants to get out of this godforsaken place alive. It is a fact that Ed is waiting for him at the bottom.
Clearly, then, this is one of those occasions that calls on his deepest reserves of willpower. That’s all it is: one more test of will; one more bauble on the endless chain; one more footprint to press into the muddied ground; one more rung on the ladder he’s clung to since he was barely old enough to understand his own insignificance. And he’s going to get through it one gesture at a time—hand over hand over sore and dirt-and-blood-streaked hand.
He needs to think of anything but the gaping openness below him, yawning hungrily, waiting for him—waiting for the littlest loss of traction, the slightest slip. He ought to give Ed some credit; this rope is really rather elegant for something alchemically thrown together from bits and pieces of iron. Very thin, very even, very strong. So strong. Strong enough to hold him; all he has to do is hold on.
All he has to do is hold on, bracing the soles of his feet against the crunching, pockmarked stones of the tower wall. All he has to do is dig his toes into the crumbling mortar and release one hand and then clasp it around the rope a little lower; and then again; and then again. Two inches at a time; that’s all it takes. Hand over hand over hand over hand.
Damn it, he’s so exhausted. He knows it’s only going to hit him harder when—if, if, if—they dart off to safety; the adrenaline is still shimmering through his whole body, and he’s giddy with it, pulsating, vibrant, bright. If he falls, he dies; isn’t that delightfully simple? Life hasn’t been this black and white for years. If he falls, he splatters to pulp at Ed’s feet—and hasn’t the poor young man been through enough? Roy had better not fall. There’s so much left to do. He’d better keep holding tight, one hand cramping around the cold metal rope, and then the other, and then the first again. He’d better keep forcing his fingers to curl until they ache. He’d better keep letting the friction scald his palms every time he scrabbles to nudge his toes into a niche in the wall. He’d better keep living, whatever it takes.
It’s funny how alike he and Ed are when it comes to this strange inner tempest of self-loathing and determination and guilt. It’s funny how they’ve both deliberately set their standards for atonement far out of their reach, and the impossibility is the very thing that drives them. It’s funny how they fight like a pair of feral cats, when at the core they see perfectly eye-to-eye.
Figuratively, anyway; literally, Ed has to look up.
Perhaps… that’s the thing. Perhaps they’re staring each other in the face, and that’s why they step on each other’s toes.
Roy could do with a new set of toes in any case; he’s abusing the current model. His hands have started to shake when they’re not clasped around the cable, and his shoulders are burning, and the race of his blood highlights every last little wound he’s collected in the past two days; his jaw and his lip and his biceps and his sinuses and his spine and his feet all trill and pound to the rhythm of his heartbeat.
He can’t look down; his whole skull will swing sideways, and he’ll panic. He looks at the wall, and then he looks outward, to the left. He’s lower than the treetops now. He might even survive if he fell from this distance, depending on how he landed. He’s almost there.
Everything throbs. Surely he’s not too old for this?
“Don’t be such a violet!” Ed is shouting, which is stupid; they can’t afford to alert the Hua Wei. Then again, maybe Ed’s already sealed all of the doors to the tower shut with alchemy and trapped the enemy inside. It’s what Roy would do, were he young and talented and brilliant and astonishingly gorgeous in the sunlight. Astonishingly gorgeous in any light. Astonishingly gorgeous all the time.
Roy closes his eyes and presses his forehead to the jagged contours of the stone. He takes a deep breath, possibly inhaling asbestos that will mold in his lungs and kill him someday. Then he opens his eyes, which are a bit clearer for the reprieve, and keeps going—hand over hand over hand.
A single man dressed in pale yellow met them just before Roy was forced to conclude that their guide was a hack and/or that the desert went on forever. The man clasped his hands in that almost Ed-ish way and bowed; their hack-guide slipped down off of his horse—that the bastard could still move after all this made Roy want to cry endlessly foul—and strode over to start discussing the weather and the length of the journey and the amusement of traveling with inexperienced foreigners. He sounded a little too impressed with how well Riza had taken to this very specific sort of torture; Roy was going to have to keep an eye on him.
“Welcome,” the man in yellow said in Amestrian to the party at large as Roy pried his tormented body from the saddle. “And, well, come.”
He looked terribly pleased with himself. And he was sort of devilishly attractive when he looked terribly pleased. And he couldn’t have been much older than Ed, and from the folds of his cross-body robe Roy could see that he was tall and whip-thin and wiry, and…
And Roy really was far enough gone to be sizing up a total stranger as a competitor for Ed’s attention.
It had been much too long a day spent on a goddamn horse to deal with that maturely, so he gave it a tremendous mental shove and tried to walk rather than stagger over and return the bow impeccably.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Brigadier General Mustang?” the young man asked, and that grin—it seemed to be permanent; and it seemed to be mocking Roy, just too lightly to protest. “And the Captain Hawkeye.” Roy hadn’t even heard her footsteps in the sand—their guide was right, of course; she adjusted so smoothly to the new environment that it verged on preternatural. “And the brothers Elric.”
“It’s very nice to meet you,” Alphonse said.
“S’up,” Ed said.
The young man bowed again. “My name is Qiang Yao. Please consider me your humble servant. If you will follow me, just over this ridge is the town of Suzhao, where all of our hospitality will be at your command.”
Roy wasn’t sure quite what sort of hospitality to expect from the borderlands of Xing, and he tried to keep his hopes in check.
As it turned out, he needn’t have bothered.
The bath alone was enough to make him seriously consider becoming an expatriate. The bathtub was almost more like a small well—wide-mouthed and cylindrical and shallow, large enough for him to spread all of his aching limbs without quite touching the heated stones that lined the bottom and set the whole surface to steaming. They’d poured in oils, too; one had to be mint, and one smelled a bit like tangerine, and there was a hint of something floral, and the rest he couldn’t fathom.
The particulars couldn’t have mattered less; the overall effect was one of curling, mingling scents—sharp spices and gentler tones from the fruit and the flowers; it was soothing and refreshing and rejuvenating all at once.
And the soap stung like a bitch in the saddle sores. Roy made a valiant effort to luxuriate in the heat and fragrance anyway—Qiang had said that it was traditional for the most acclaimed individual to take his leisure first; for courtesy’s sake, Roy had attempted to demur, whether or not every jarred cell in his sand-scoured body was wailing We haven’t been clean in days. But then Riza had very subtly nudged him forward with a very subtle elbow to the ribs, and Ed had said “You probably stink the most anyway,” and Roy had remembered that his relative rank and prestige were not exactly an issue for any of the present company. In addition, he really wanted a fucking bath.
When at last it felt like there was only a small castle’s worth of sand clinging to his person, he dragged himself out of the Pool of Wonder and Sanity, wrapped himself in the provided towel, and began to make his way back out to the lounge where he’d left his luggage and therefore his clean clothes.
He hadn’t even made it out of the bathhouse before he’d been waylaid by two slender Xingese girls who pinned him down on a padded table and started kneading at his back.
Roy had had a dream like this once. Except in the dream they hadn’t set more warm, smooth stones on each side of his spine and pressed sharp knuckles into the knots in muscles he hadn’t known he possessed. And it had ended a bit differently, although this experience similarly concluded much too soon.
They still wouldn’t let him leave—when he finally fought for balance upon climbing off of the table, they offered him a pair of pale linen trousers and a dark blue robe, and they sat him down on a painted star within a circle, and in fifteen glowing seconds, the sores were healed.
There was—he thought as he dressed himself and bowed and bowed again and staggered out to the lounge and said “Move” and dropped facedown onto the couch that had previously been occupied by the Elrics—an increasing danger of Roy Mustang deserting the Amestrian military altogether and staying here until he died or ran out of money for massages.
“Huh,” Ed said when a few moments passed and Roy only breathed deeply. “Did they drug you?”
“This is not a chemical high, Fullmetal,” Roy said into the couch cushion. “This is bliss like you have never experienced. This is the new standard for contentment in your life.”
“That sounds like a challenge,” Ed said. “And like they slipped you something.”
Roy managed to raise a hand and point the way he’d come. “Go. That is an order.”
The silence was slightly odd, but Roy couldn’t quite muster the strength to raise his head and look when all of his muscles had turned to beautiful, quivering jelly beneath his softened skin.
“I dunno,” Ed said slowly. “I don’t really—I don’t like people—I don’t like strangers touching me.”
What a wonderful couch this was. “Their names are Bai and Shu. Now you’re acquainted.”
It was strange how Ed’s body language was so pronounced that the air changed when he bristled. “Fuck you, Musta—”
“Brother,” Al cut in, “I’ll go with you. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before—” Oh, for the love of caffeinated beverages; just like that, Roy was thinking about Ed naked, wet, dripping, white towel slipping from his narrow hips. “—and it’ll be nice to watch what they do so I can decide whether I feel up to all of it.”
“Fine,” Ed said. “Thanks, Al. C’mon. General High and Not-So-Mighty is probably gonna end up in a lazy-coma anyway.”
After the door had slammed behind them (and Al had squeaked “Sorry!”), Roy flailed an arm around a little. He succeeded in turning his head on the couch cushion just as an attendant scurried over and bowed.
“He hates needles,” Roy said. He’d learned the Xingese word just in case; he added it and reaped a very gratifying look of perfect comprehension. “Spare the acupuncture, perhaps?”
Another bow; more scurrying; Roy relaxed wholly again and bit back a moan.
“Ah,” Riza said. The nearest armchair creaked as she sat. One of several holsters did not creak as she drew one of the four firearms on her person and quite unnecessarily checked the ammunition.
“Am I that obvious?” Roy asked in the clearest possible mumble.
“I’m afraid so, sir.”
“So Alphonse knew before I did, and Ed hasn’t the foggiest hint of a clue?”
“That would be my guess.”
“Well,” Roy said, “shit.”
He’s getting close—he’s getting tantalizingly close—he’s getting closer—and then his feet touch ground.
He almost doesn’t believe it at first. It was starting to feel like he’d be descending forever—like he’d hang in limbo for the rest of his life, hand over hand over hand until his wrists gave out, and he plummeted.
He turns. He blinks. He steadies himself with one hand on the wall, not that he ever wants to touch that thing again.
“That,” Ed says, “is the slowest I have ever seen anyone flee for their life.”
“Wait until you get old,” Roy says. “You’ll crawl onto my doorstep crying for forgiveness for all of the terrible things you’ve said to me.”
Ed snickers, claps, touches the cable, and has it coiled around his right forearm by the time Roy’s stopped shielding his eyes. “Good damn luck getting me to crawl to you for anything, Mustang.”
Across the floor—no, across the bed—Roy doesn’t care where; doesn’t care why, though he has his preferences—bare back, shoulders rolling, hair draping into his eyes, the sheets pooling before his knees, the mattress dimpling under the weight of his hands as he moves like a cat, and his eyes are so hungry—
There really isn’t time to think about that.
Roy looks back at the tower. He thinks he recalls doors once existing where there is now a stretch of blank wall decorated with transmutation marks.
“We’ll see,” he says. “Shall we go?”
Ed hefts the coil of rope up onto his left shoulder—to balance, perhaps? It’s a wonder his spine hasn’t contorted with the weight of his automail over ti…
His spine. Roy would lick his spine, taste the bulb of every vertebra—
“Need to figure out where the fuck we’re going before we go,” Ed says.
Roy looks around and focuses on the trees this time, rather than on his dangling-from-the-rope height relative to them. “I’m not familiar with this building as a landmark, but most of the literature says that the Hua Wei consider Lin Tu Forest one of their sacred spaces. It’s one of the oldest and best-preserved pieces of wilderness in the region, in large part because they defend it so viciously, despite its being located only thirty miles east of the capital.” When he stops staring at the trees, Ed is staring at him. “What?” He almost adds Is there something on my face? before remembering that he’s covered in grime and blood, which would make that a fairly stupid question.
“It’s really weird,” Ed says, “how you can take a beating like that, and then climb down all goddamn-violet-slow, and I know you haven’t eaten in, like, two days either… and you still talk like a textbook.”
“I take international relations very seriously,” Roy says. He does not say The only thing I take more seriously are carnal relations.
Ed eyes him. “Right. Well…” He swivels on his metal heel, glancing at the angle of the sun and the lichen on the trees, and then starts off at more of a stomp than really a stride. “Westward ho.”
Roy is so damn tired he could lie down and fall asleep on gravel, but even now he’d follow that swinging gold ponytail anywhere.
“Quite,” he says, and they’re on their way.
It took another three days of travel to reach the capital—but at least the second leg took place largely in covered carts and carriages, with frequent stops for food and stretching. It was a different world than the desert, and Roy found this world much more amenable.
“If we actually get there before we all die of old age,” Ed said the final afternoon, laid out bonelessly on the carriage seat opposite Roy and Riza, his head in Alphonse’s lap, “I’m gonna punch Ling in the face. Right-handed. You just watch me.”
Roy watched Riza watching out the window, which was greatly preferable to imagining his and Alphonse’s positions switched so that he could drag his fingers through Ed’s hair. “That will be an excellent way to thank him for the considerable resources he’s expended to facilitate our comfort.”
Ed scowled. “He wouldn’t have to ‘facilitate our comfort’ if he hadn’t demanded we haul our asses all the way out here. Whose side are you on, anyway?”
“My own,” Roy said. “As always.”
“Fine,” Ed said. “You can just stay over on your side while I beat the crap out of Ling.”
“Standing by while you decked the emperor of Xing would be a bit detrimental to my foreign policy plans.”
“Then act like you’re trying to help him, and I’ll deck you, too. It’ll look real heroic.”
Roy set an elbow on the windowsill and looked out at the houses set into the hills—pale spots in the verdure like raindrops caught in the warm yellow light. “If I have to pull rank to prevent you from instigating a diplomatic catastrophe, I will. If I have to tie you to a pillar outside the palace to prevent you from instigating a diplomatic catastrophe, I can do that, too.”
He shouldn’t have gone there even as a hyperbolic hypothetical, but it was too late to take it back.
“None of that will be necessary,” Alphonse said, patting Ed’s shoulder. “Brother knows that Lan Fan will humiliate him thoroughly again if he tries to do anything untoward to Ling.”
“I won that fight, you traitor,” Ed said. “Despite the fact that she cheated with a grenade and ninja skills and secretly being a girl.”
“We’re on her territory now,” Alphonse said. “You’re too smart to try anything.”
Ed glared up at him, rather unconvincingly. “I hate it when you make it so that I either have to agree with you or announce that I’m stupid.”
Alphonse grinned.
And, naturally, was right.
Roy hadn’t spent much time with Ling—spare hours, really, in the safe house and the forest around it, most of which had been spent tenaciously fighting for their lives, not making conversation. It had been enough time to take in a young man who reminded him of Ed and of himself: poised, quick, sharp-eyed, smart-mouthed, calculating, and mischievous. Very likely that was why Ling had riled Ed so easily and with so much gusto: the young then-prince would clearly make either a powerful ally or a legitimate threat, and he was determined to provoke Ed as much as possible while they sorted out which it was.
The next time Roy had encountered him, he had been a homunculus, and Roy hadn’t been able to see him in any case.
This time, the boy was a king.
Roy hardly approved of monarchy for obvious reasons, but he could appreciate that Xing was a vastly different country with a vastly different history and a vastly different way of life. Xing had barely even brushed shoulders with Amestris over the centuries while Xerxes had worn away between them; if Xing’s unique and storied history had selected feudalism as its preferred method of rule—and, more significantly, if feudalism was working—then Roy was in no position to pass judgment. He knew government in Amestris from the inside out. In Xing, he was a stranger. He was a tourist. He was a mote of dust set against this nation’s antiquity.
Qiang had ensured that they were all dressed finely and traditionally, which lent some credibility to the three shocks of yellow hair that the Yao clan’s current representative was ushering into the emperor’s palace. For all that Roy blended in marginally better than his captain and the last stock of Xerxes, he could still feel his skin prickling with the weight of other people’s eyes as Qiang quite cheerfully led them up an endless set of stairs and into an entrance hall like an opera house. There were eyes everywhere—tapestry eyes in impossibly fine thread; eyes of statues and carvings fixed unblinking on his back; eyes sharply outlined in red and black kohl, half-hidden by careful swoops of inky hair or ornate sleeves or open fans. The emperor of Xing knew how to make an impression.
Roy glanced at Riza to his right as they walked the endless thick carpet towards a staggeringly regal throne. Anyone who had not been observing the nuances of her shoulders for over a decade would not recognize their tightness—although whether it was in answer to the challenge, in preparation for a fight, or because the holsters didn’t sit quite right under her borrowed raiment Roy couldn’t determine from a single look.
He slanted his gaze back at Ed and Alphonse. The younger Elric looked positively delighted—like his birthday had come early and coincided with the solstice, and a storm had given way to a pair of rainbows just as all of his friends arrived to shower him with gifts. He was trying to look at everything, and his eyes were so bright and his smile so wide that Roy couldn’t help wondering if, in a life of his own choosing, he would have become nomadic voluntarily.
And Ed… looked like he was walking to the gallows.
Roy faced front, clearing and re-clearing his expression of anything other than calmness tempered with appropriate awe and underpinned by unshakable dignity. It was a reasonably involved poker face; it required a bit of concentration. But it didn’t need enough to stop him thinking.
What was Ed afraid of? Actually, that was a stupid rhetorical question to himself inside his head; the only thing Edward Elric was afraid of was losing people close to him. Ed had explored every shade and nuance of wariness, circumspection, anxiety, sullenness, and rage, but fear he reserved for the greatest of personal tragedies—of which, of course, he’d had his share.
What, then, had piqued Ed’s nerves enough to make him overcompensate with that hunched-shouldered glower?
Did this have something to do with that bizarre statement about long-distance friendships? Roy hadn’t had a chance at the time to analyze the absurdity of it; Ed was a dynamo, and his power was most concentrated up close. He was a naked star in the night, down to the inescapable drag of his gravity and the likelihood of incineration if you gave in to it.
Then again, Roy couldn’t exactly count himself one of Ed’s friends. An ally, yes; a mentor, if you tilted your head just the right way; a collaborator and a conspirator and a pain in the ass, certainly. Far from a friend. It was—strange, and slightly destabilizing, to think so suddenly that there was a large portion of Ed’s life and heart and universe to which Roy had no access simply because of the terms and circumstances of their acquaintance. There were things in the way. He was cut off, for someone’s safety, for both of theirs, perhaps. Given Ed’s habit of all-or-nothing ultimatums in every aspect of his existence, Roy didn’t imagine that would ever change.
And now Brigadier General Roy Mustang of the Amestrian Military was standing in front of the emperor of Xing, trying to envision a world where he and Ed were perfect strangers who passed in the street, or both reached for a newspaper, or collided in a cafe. Ed spilled his coffee all down the front of Roy’s uniform, and Roy very nearly lit him on fire right then and there, except that then he saw Ed’s eyes and couldn’t seem to locate his tongue, let alone a scathing reprimand to utter with it.
Mustang, Roy’s internal Führer monologue said slowly, you are hereby ordered not to fuck this up like an unbelievable idiot.
Roy swallowed. Sir.
He looked up at the boy on the throne, met the trace of amusement in the dark eyes, and bowed.
Ling’s headpiece alone looked like it weighed more than Alphonse, and Roy didn’t even want to think about the robes. Nonetheless, the moment he blinked, Ling had bounded off of the chair and was flinging both arms around Ed and pounding him on the back.
“I’d somehow forgotten how much I missed your frowny face!” the emperor of Xing was saying warmly. “Don’t make me pinch your cheek to get a smile, Ed; you know I will!” He gripped Ed’s shoulders, grinning borderline-maniacally, and turned to Alphonse. Somehow his eyes lit up even more. “Look at you!” Roy blinked again, and Ling was pumping Al’s hand. “You should give that brother of yours some growing lessons!”
“He should whaaaaaat?”
At least now Ed was himself again.
Ed digs the knuckles of his left hand into the juncture of metal and flesh on the right side of his chest. “Are you sure Lin Tu Forest is east of the capital?”
“Yes,” Roy says.
Ed kicks viciously at the undergrowth, as if it’s the forest’s fault that they managed to get themselves captured in a foreign country. “You sure? ’Cause we’ve been walking for a long fucking time.”
“It’s not even dark yet. We’ve hardly been walking long enough to cover thirty miles. It’s probably closer to four.”
“Damn it. This is going to take fucking forever. Al and Captain Hawkeye are gonna fuckin’ leave without us at this rate.”
“You know very well they will not. My concern is that they’ll track us all the way to the tower only to find that we’ve already started back.”
“This fucking sucks.”
“I concede the point.”
“I told you this wasn’t going to be a fucking vacation.”
“I concede that point as well.”
“You’re fucking useless.”
“That’s a bit much.”
“Fuck.”
“Look on the bright side,” Roy says. “At least we’re not being pursu—”
Of course that’s when they hear distant shouts and cracking branches.
“You just had to say it,” Ed says. “You just fucking had to.”
“Sorry,” Roy says.
And then they run.
Initially, Roy couldn’t help keeping a mental tab for the ceremony—costumes; banners; lanterns; flowers shredded into petal confetti in advance; startlingly luxurious new robes for Roy and Riza and the Elrics and quite possibly a number of other dignitaries; organizers’ rates; dancers and gymnasts and puppeteers for the parade; a gilt-filigreed litter held high; guards’ salaries, and did the Xingese pay overtime?
When it stopped being a ceremony so much as a festival—so much as a party—he lost track.
It wasn’t his fault. The whole capital was lit and gleaming and giddy and splashed with color; everything was red and black and golden; the strings of lanterns dipped and swung, and the banners snapped, and everyone was smiling, and perhaps there was a case to be made after all for processions that involved more than just dress uniforms and a few miniature flags. Perhaps the cost was not so cut and dry when the whole night was alive with celebration.
Roy couldn’t help getting swept up—swept in, swept through. The capital was a maze of cobblestone streets; the labyrinth had been dizzying before, and it was dazzling now, with every window lit and every citizen’s face split by a grin that flashed beneath the lanterns. Riza was leading them along the avenues, past the booths and under the endless strings of colored flags; on his own Roy would have long since gotten irretrievably lost. It was amazing that his eyes hadn’t fallen out of his head, and that no insects had flown into his mouth; a tiny part of him that wasn’t floating rather hoped that he still had his wallet.
Alphonse had brought a camera. He kept balancing it on Ed’s metal shoulder in lieu of a tripod, chattering half-audibly about motion blur and inconsistent lighting and night shots and the new technique for developing better colors, and Roy just prayed that he would take one proper photograph of his brother’s face. Ed was amazed and illuminated, silent and staring in delight. Roy would haven given anything to bottle that look like the finest of liquors—bright amber, tangy and heady and burning sweet. Just an ounce; he could make it last for the rest of his time on this wonderful planet; he would take such tiny sips so slowly that it would never run dry.
They wound their way into a wide square right as the fireworks began above the palace. Among the gasping and the booming and the colors ravaging the sky, Roy thought of the explosive brevity of a human life and admitted the truth to himself in so many words.
I’m in love with him, he thought. It was easier than he’d expected—it was a relief, actually. I’m in love with Ed. It has been a slow and inevitable slide, and I fought it, but it won, and he would think I was mocking him if I said it, but it’s a fact. I love his intellect and his courage and his dogmatically unwavering morality and his resilience and his sarcasm and his brilliance and his beauty. I love his scientific compulsion to question everything, including me—especially me. I love the way he looks at his brother like his heart’s too full to bear and the rest of the world is so much static in the background. And there is so, so little I wouldn’t sacrifice to have him look at me that way just once.
Could you wish on fireworks instead of meteors? That sounded cheap.
It didn’t matter. Life was good. The universe seemed to have taken an unscheduled break from its usual occupation of kicking them all in increasingly tender places whilst clad in steel-toed boots.
So Roy raised his eyes to the magnificent display of pyrotechnic prowess in celebration of a boy not unlike Ed—too young and too jaded already; too powerful by half and too compassionate to contemplate abusing that power; clever and silly and instigating change with every indrawn breath. Ed really should have gotten a parade in Amestris, except for the obvious problem that he would have seen them all dead before he let them spend the taxpayers’ money feting him.
Well, in some sense, this whole profusion of splendor was for Ed, too: he’d been instrumental in Ling’s success. It had been a team effort. And Roy’s heart was rising, rising, swelling, emanating heat—
There it was, then. Fireworks strafing color across the black sky; the tips of his bare fingers tingling in the cold while his chest stayed warm; Edward Elric at his elbow, very nearly against his arm. An almost-perfect night. And almost was enough.
“Okay, General,” Ed calls as he vaults effortlessly over a dead tree. Meanwhile, it’s all Roy can do not to fall on his face and get his nose broken for real this time. “What do we do?”
“That depends,” Roy says.
He’s not sure how Ed can have the breath to run for his life and snort derisively at the same time; it must be glorious to be young. “It depends?”
“On whether you would like me to torch them,” Roy says.
“They’re people,” Ed says adamantly. “If you torch them, I will fucking end you.”
Roy stumbles as a particularly marshy patch of soil gives beneath his feet. “Two options, then—keep running, or stand and fight.”
“This is why you suck,” Ed says.
He skids to a stop, lichen spraying from beneath his boot treads, and Roy almost topples trying to slow his own momentum—
Before he’s even had time to assess the available geological resources for striking sparks off of Ed’s arm, half a dozen of the Hua Wei tear out of the woods to bear down on them—to Roy’s dismay, the tall, silent one with the crossbow has already leveled a bolt at him.
“Let’s see how they like a fair fight,” Ed says, and his palms meet, and he drops to one knee to press his hands to the soil.
The bedrock. Edward Elric can bend the bedrock to his every whim; the boy can clap his hands and literally reshape the planet. When Roy lets his guard down and conceptualizes the sheer unrivaled might of Ed’s talent, it terrifies him.
The stone roars upward, earth rumbling, displaced dirt hissing, and takes the shape of a deep bowl, raised on a pillar like a goblet. There are several not-entirely-necessary spikes along the rim, and evidently there’s space inside to contain the entire collection of their captors-turned-pursuers—perhaps not entirely comfortably, judging by the indignant yelling from within.
Ed straightens with a satisfied little smile, but Roy’s instincts balk—
And when he chaotic jostling within the trap resolves into a heavy shift of weight, and the silent man with the crossbow launches himself just high enough to aim, Roy throws himself sideways and tackles Ed to the shattered ground.
It’s always the quiet ones.
He levers himself off of Ed before any accusations of fatness can be shouted in his face, meets Ed’s startled eyes, and opens his mouth to say There’s no such thing as a fair fight, Fullmetal.
What comes out is “Motherfucker.”
They both look over and notice that there is a crossbow bolt protruding from Roy’s calf muscle.
“You should say that more often,” Ed says faintly. “Sounds good. You drop a solid F-bomb.”
“Thank you,” Roy says. “Would you mind removing this so that we can proceed before he adds another?”
Ed shifts, so Roy shifts back to offer his afflicted left leg, glancing up at the vessel full of Hua Wei, which is still producing a great deal of furious sounds. Ed sets his jaw, reaches out with his right hand, and—
—puts Roy in the most spectacular agony in a very long while. But it’s not as bad as Bradley stabbing through the flesh of his palms, and it’s not even in the same category of pain as Lust’s attempts to shish-kebab his organs and the rush cauterization job that followed, so Roy will simply grit his teeth and—
“Bet you don’t usually ask guys to pull out the shaft,” Ed says lightly.
While Roy is goggling at him in wordless disbelief, Ed claps, touches Roy’s trouser leg, and transmutes it into a bandage so tight that Roy barely catches the cry behind his teeth.
“Are you ready?” he asks, trying not to pant. “I’m only going to do this once.”
Ed blinks. “Do wh—”
“Motherfucking-piece-of-shit-son-of-a-bitch.”
Ed is wide-eyed and silent for a moment. Then he says “It’s so weird when you’re awesome,” and then he’s hauling Roy upright and slinging Roy’s arm across his shoulders, and they’re hobbling off as fast as the spears of pain vivisecting Roy’s leg will allow.
Roy was ever-so-slightly ashamed to discover that he was hungover the morning after the coronation ceremony. He’d waxed the tiniest bit bitter once the fireworks had stopped, and the celebratory spirit had worn down to much more ordinary weariness. Riza gave him the You and I both know you will regret this, sir look when he started accepting most of the cups of wine held out to the passing revelers by patriotic merchants. And he did know; he knew that his skull would feel dried out and rattly and like it was being squeezed in a vise when he woke; he considered the price, and he knocked half a dozen drinks back anyway. He just wanted to hold onto the feeling of peace—the contentment, the low-and-strongly-burning joy, the total acceptance of his place in the universe. And the buzz of the alcohol in his veins, the blurring at the edges of his mind, had helped at first. It had dulled the edges of the analysis that inevitably shouldered its way into his thoughts—the things he should have done, could have said, might have had; the things he could still have if he wanted them badly enough.
Because he could have had Ed—could have had him for a while. Brigadier General Roy Mustang could have anyone for a while. The boyish grin plus the hair in his eyes, multiplied by charisma and gallant urbanity squared, times the prestige and the power, plus the mystery of Flame Alchemy and the dark drama of a war veteran—he could be intoxicatingly irresistible. He could turn the magnetism on and off. The façade was faultless.
The veneer always scraped off slowly, though. Roy always gradually tired of sustaining the charm—broadcasting attractiveness was draining. The tact, the quips, the beaming smiles, the fluid shrugs, the long gazes and the florid compliments were all exhausting, and the cumulative energy they demanded left Roy enervated after that first rush of open potential, that initial challenge, that what if.
Perhaps it was better to specify that Brigadier General Mustang could have anyone his eyes lighted on—but Brigadier General Mustang never loitered long. Roy, who was thoughtful and cautious and critical, who trusted himself only a fraction more than he trusted others, who went without sleep to keep up with alchemy publications, who more often than not just wanted a quiet night in, who dreamt in red and woke up hateful, who couldn’t drink coffee without cream, who couldn’t stop questioning, who couldn’t live up to the promises, who couldn’t be happy with whatever he had, who couldn’t give without giving everything, who loved so stiflingly that the sane and the savvy and the independent fled…
He could have had Ed—for a while. He could have come on hard and hot and snatched that fierce little heart up in one hand. He could have held it out of reach for a long time, perhaps; for the sake of keeping Ed, he could have found the strength to stay seductive; Ed would not have been a toy. But he couldn’t have kept it up forever.
Ed would have drawn back, as the sheen faded; as Brigadier General Mustang gave way, and patches of Roy showed through. Ed’s gaze would have drifted and snagged on someone else—someone young, and bright, and fun; someone pleasant; someone uncomplicated.
Someone like Ling, who was feeding Ed a tiny pinkish dumpling at the moment Roy finally braved the lunchroom.
“Brigadier General!” Ling said, and good God, did he have to shout?
Ed lurched backwards, cheeks stuffed, eyes huge, face aflame—away from Ling’s long fingers holding the chopsticks.
“How kind of you to join us,” Ling said while Ed struggled to swallow. “Can I tempt you with a spread of Xingese delicacies? I’m sure you’re better with your chopsticks than Ed over here.”
“Shutthefuckup,” Ed choked out.
Roy was not allowed to feel a hot-poison sting of jealousy rankling in his throat. For one thing, he had no claim whatsoever to Edward Elric; for another, he was thirty-one goddamn years old. As a bonus, the jealousy on top of the hangover made him feel like he was going to vomit.
Slightly delicately, he sat. Ling and Ed had just flopped down on the floor, but Roy’s back wasn’t up for that nowadays, and in addition his reputation would suffer greatly if he tried to lounge artfully and immediately started dropping food all over his clothes.
“Did you party a bit too heartily last night, Brigadier General?” Ling asked, looking positively delighted at the prospect.
“Only to demonstrate my great admiration for Xing and its rulership,” Roy said. Speaking made it feel like his mouth was full of cotton and sand. He didn’t quite dare to clear his throat as he selected a cup from the rather haphazard tray of dishes and filled it with—
“That dishwater shit doesn’t count as tea,” Ed said. “It doesn’t even have caffeine.”
Roy and Ling leveled the exact same look of long-sufferance at the exact same time, so perhaps the young emperor was not all bad.
Ed scowled at both of them and then shifted his whole body at once in that disconcertingly feline way he had—everything undulated, and then he was stretched out on his front, chin propped up on a hand, prodding at the rather large supply of food with a chopstick. “Which other ones are all shrimpy?”
Roy raised a silver tray towards him to act as a mirror.
As it turned out, it hurt to have chopsticks hurled at one’s already-aching head.
Ling laughed with his whole body the same way Ed did, and Roy wondered whether it was the shared youth or the shared fearlessness.
“Shut up!” Ed said, and then he scowled until Ling’s shoulders stopped shaking, and the emperor of Xing dragged in a breath and slowly released it as a massive and contented sigh.
“Try the sticky rice, General,” Ling said.
Roy obliged in large part because he was hoping to garner an expression of amazement from Ed as he ostensibly set a ball of lotus leaves on his plate only to unwrap them and reveal actual food. Naturally, Ed did not disappoint.
“There is something wrong with the people who do your cooking,” Ed said.
“You’re lucky I spared you the chicken feet,” Ling said. “Did you make plans for today, General?”
“Not as yet,” Roy said. “I’d hate for you to have to entertain us; the captain and I can find someth—”
“I’m sending Ed and Al out to tour the alkahestry academy,” Ling said. “If we’re lucky, they’ll even survive. It’s the perfect opportunity for us to discuss business, don’t you think?”
Roy looked at Ed, who had discovered the rice noodles with the minced beef wrapped inside and was therefore deaf to the conversation.
“I think that sounds extremely productive,” Roy said.
As it transpired, Ling and Roy had another thing in common: a talent for ruthless efficiency tucked underneath an appearance of laziness. Within the hour, Alphonse had arrived and wolfed down lunch so fast that Roy felt ill, Riza had been fetched from her in-depth conversation with the head of the palace guard, Roy had shotgunned some sort of noxious herbal concoction to mitigate his headache, the Elrics had been packed up and sent out for their tour, and Ling was leading Roy and Riza on a long stroll through the high-ceilinged halls.
Roy was having a bit of trouble avoiding the extremely long train of Ling’s robes even though the throbbing in his head was beginning to recede.
“I didn’t expect that I’d ever be grateful for the Amestrian dress uniform,” he said, gesturing to the fabric pooling on the floor. “The effect is stunning, of course, but the size alone must be troublesome.”
“It’s not so bad,” Ling said. “I had the seamstresses make my whole wardrobe custom; the designs are very traditional, but the little catches inside that let me tear everything off in two and a half seconds are quite innovative. I’m hoping we might be able to shave some time off of that for my everyday robes—two and a half seconds is a long time if the assassin is any good. And they’d have to be very good to get that far.”
“Oh?” Roy said.
Riza coughed delicately into her fist, but it was too late.
There was an incremental change in the air currents—Roy spun instinctively and found himself face-to-face with the slender figure that had just dropped down from the ceiling.
“Hello,” he said. His voice came out sounding nice and cordial, although it was a shame that he couldn’t seem to unfreeze from his guarded stance. “You’re looking well.”
The solemn dark eyes visible through the mask narrowed a little, and then they crinkled at the corners with a smile.
“I’d forgotten you hadn’t seen it,” Lan Fan said, raising her left arm for scrutiny. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s terrifying,” Roy said. “And a work of art.”
“Stop flirting with my bodyguard,” Ling said.
“As soon you stop sneaking glances at my captain’s cleavage.”
Ling laughed all the way through to the tips of his fingers again. “You have yourself a deal.”
Much as it had been a very General Mustang compliment, Roy had meant what he said—and it was strange, wasn’t it, that most automail looked so hostile?
Ed’s didn’t. Lan Fan’s arm was all sharp-plated angles and built-in knives; Captain Buccaneer’s Roy remembered as half-chainsaw and half-medieval club. Roy would have to thank Winry someday, because Ed’s automail was not a slice of steel; it was a part of him. The love in it was evident: she had built something elegant and powerful and eminently useful, and for all that it was a replacement, it suited his extraordinariness like no plain flesh could have done. It was beautiful in all of the same ways he was, and it was human, whether or not the silver gleam against the gold made him look too precious altogether to touch. Ed’s arm defined him—‘Fullmetal’, after all; and of course the cost of it was what had laid out his whole life. And Ed’s automail was apparently unusual in that it was, more than most, a limb like any other—it wasn’t a weapon until he used it that way.
“So,” Ling said, and the train began to drag across the floor again; “let’s talk trade.”
So they did.
They talked railroads, tariffs, labor laws, the stupid desert, routing through Xerxes or not disturbing a historical ruin and an informal monument to the dangers of alchemy thank you very much, the division of funding, resource agreements, and jurisdiction of the wayside stations.
“Your fluency is absolutely remarkable,” Roy couldn’t help saying after Ling used the word ‘superlative’ in a sentence with a flash of the spotlight grin. “We barely even have how-to books for learning Xingese.”
Ling shrugged—possibly; it was difficult to tell under the robes. “The Yao clan realized a long time ago that if we couldn’t be the biggest or the strongest, we would be wise to have the biggest, strongest friends. We teach Amestrian starting very young. Maybe that’s something else we could exchange.”
It had not yet ceased to unsettle Roy immensely that he was hearing everything alchemically now—and, worse, that it often made perfect political sense.
“And we want Maria Ross back,” Ling said. “She’s a national hero, you know.”
Roy didn’t bother to suppress the grin. “I know. I’ll propose it to her. After everything she’s been through on both of our accounts, I’m not willing to uproot her for the sake of diplomacy—but if she wants to, I’ll back it all the way.”
Ling stopped walking again, and Roy at his right paused as well. Ling’s eyes were sharp and amused at once, and Roy very slowly tightened his hands around each other where they were clasped behind his back.
“That’s why he hasn’t defected,” Ling said. “You’re very… decent, General. You’re purer than you think.”
Roy mentally retracted everything he had said about Ling’s grasp of the Amestrian language. “I… beg your pardon?”
“That’s not enough, though,” Ling said slowly, gazing at the wall. “When you walked in earlier—the look on your face—Ed expected judgment. That’s what he’s accustomed to, from you; you pass judgment, and you make corrections, and you steer him right.” Roy wanted to tell him that it had always been closer to the other way around, but Ling didn’t stop for breath. “Remember that, by the way—and consider how many people’s opinions actually matter to Ed. In any case, I…” He grinned and folded his arms across his chest, tucking his hands into his rather capacious sleeves. “Well, I don’t know you, General, so I didn’t have expectations. I wasn’t looking for anything but what was there.”
This could not possibly be going where Roy feared it would—
Ling frowned at the floor for a long moment before he spoke. “What Ed and I had was everything it needed to be at the time. It was what we needed to get through those days—something else to think about, mostly; something good enough that Greed let us have it just to skim off the top sometimes. When we were getting close to civilization again, Ed took me aside on one of our last nights and asked me if I meant it. I knew what he was getting at, but I played dumb, obviously. Ed usually just assumes you really are that dumb, which works out fine. But this time he said… ‘I don’t want it if you don’t mean it.’ Pretty good ultimatum, huh?”
Roy swallowed. Ling looked him in the eyes. He could feel Riza’s, too, tracking the changes in Ling’s face down to the angle of his eyebrows.
“I suppose,” Roy said.
Ling smiled. His shoulders rose a fraction and then dropped. “I thought about it—I did. Doubt anything you like but that. It was… sincere, you know? What we had was honest, if nothing else. But I understood Ed by then, and I knew what he was really asking. The whole time, Greed was in my head, shouting at me, But you want him, you idiot kid; we take the things we want, and we keep them, or are you new around here? And I thought about that. I thought about holding onto him. But it was Ed—you know how much he is. You know that better than anyone except Al, by the sound of it. And I knew I couldn’t take him and keep him and make him be second to this.” Ling spread his hands to indicate the corridor, the palace, the country, the life. “I think he might have accepted it if I’d offered, but I wouldn’t have forgiven myself if I did that to him. So I let him go. I left him to be found by someone who could afford to give him everything he deserved—which is just everything. I left him to be found by someone who would understand that the equivalent exchange for Ed’s love is everything you’ve got.”
His gaze flicked up to Roy’s forehead and slid down slowly, in stuttering increments, until it reached his toes.
“Ed is very important to me,” Ling said. “I want him to be happy. And so I want you to do two things for me, General. I want you to ask yourself if you are the person I’ve described. And if you are, I want you to prove it to him—whatever it takes.”
Roy…
Roy really could not deal with this in the wake of a tremendous diplomatic discussion and on top of a hangover.
Ling beamed. “Well!” he said. “That should be interesting. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a few things to finalize for your trip tomorrow. I’ll tell you about that later; don’t you fret, Captain.” He started down the hall, robes trailing, waving over his shoulder without turning his head. “Ta-ta!”
It took Roy a few moments to do anything more intelligent than blinking.
He cleared his throat. “Is it that obvious?”
Riza smiled ruefully.
From the shadows of the ceiling, Lan Fan’s voice said, “Yes, it is.”
The last of the light is dying, and Roy’s left leg is alive with pulsing flame. That seems poetically just. Perhaps he’ll just lie down and burn out to nothing.
He doesn’t really want to let go of Ed—how long might it be before he has another chance to hold so tightly to him?—but beneath the more pressing sensation of the fiery agony, his knees feel like tapioca pudding.
“They won’t still be…” Good Lord, is that all he can manage with a single breath? “…following.”
Ed doesn’t even slow down from his furious, singleminded tromp. “How the hell do you figure?”
“It’s getting too dark, and… besides, if they’ve even… climbed out of your trap by now, they haven’t had time… to fetch reinforcements. They’d have to double back.”
Ed is squinting into the encroaching night as though it personally offends him. “Then we should push our lead.”
It’s difficult to argue with that, because it’s what Roy would demand if he wasn’t so… tired.
“I can’t,” he says. “Ed, I’m not strong enough.”
Ed stops—well, stops short. It’s not Roy’s fault.
The trace of amusement slithers back down to the pit of his stomach and dies when Ed’s eyes fix on his face, and even in the dimness they blaze.
“What?” Ed asks.
“I’m exhausted,” Roy says, fighting the urge to gulp in full and proper breaths of air, to double over panting, to collapse to the carpet of pine needles strewn across the ground. “Every step is excruciating, and my head has gone light; I know that’s a bad si—”
“You’re not strong enough?” Ed asks slowly, and—there it is; he withdraws his arm from under Roy’s and steps back. “What the fuck, Mustang?”
Rarely in Roy’s life does he have occasion to say truthfully that he has no idea what the hell is going on, but now is one of those times. “I… am a human being, Ed, if you hadn’t noticed.”
And then it’s strange to think about—strange to think that it was Alphonse who witnessed the aftermath of the battle with Lust; strange to think that Ed saw him drag himself out of the Gate, blinded and bursting with knowledge, and get back up; strange to think that Ed can’t really be blamed for assuming that Roy Mustang was something more than mortal.
He’s always wanted to be. It never occurred to him to tap a Philosopher’s Stone for eternity, but he’s not just an alchemist; he’s also a soldier. In the history of a country, every leader lives forever.
And he’s always tried to be just the slightest bit incomprehensible in front of Ed, hasn’t he? He’s always tried to be smooth, aloof, unruffled, unbowed. He has always striven to be something greater than a man.
“Of course I noticed, dumbass,” Ed says—not looking at Roy, dragging his filthy left hand through his hair. “It’s just… well, fuck it anyway; we could be dead by the time we wake up. But—you’ve always been the strong one when I wasn’t, okay? You’re always too-smart and above it, and you know what you’re fucking doing all the time. So excuse me if it’s fucked up to hear you say something like… that.”
“I’m… sorry,” Roy says. “I—I’m afraid sometimes I’m really rather pathetic.” His knees actually wobble. He didn’t realize knees could do such a thing. In fear of affronting them further and prompting them to worse, he sits down on the nearest available log. “Now, for instance.”
Ed rolls his eyes. The light has more or less entirely failed; a slant of moonlight through the naked branches catches on the yellow spark. “You got a crossbow bolt in the leg. I guess you’re allowed to be pathetic just this once. I mean, not that it’s not weird as hell, but I can’t really stop you.”
Roy laughs, dryly—literally dryly, feeling as though his throat has been rubbed down with sand; and tonally dryly, because ‘wry’ suits Brigadier General Mustang better than ‘weeping’. “I’m sorry to impose.”
Ed paces around twitchily for a few moments before he drops down next to Roy like a particularly sullen stone. “You don’t have to keep apologizing for the fact that we got our asses kicked today.”
Roy sets his jaw and lifts his right calf up to balance it on his left knee. “I’m concerned this is going to get infected.”
“Just spit on it,” Ed says. “It’ll be fine.”
His grin is luminous in the dark and only brightens further at Roy’s glare.
“Never mind,” Roy says. He would kill for a fifth of whiskey; whether he would pour half of it on the wound or drink the entirety he hasn’t quite decided. “It can wait until tomorrow, provided that we don’t freeze to death tonight.”
“We won’t,” Ed says. “I’ll make us a cave, and you can make us a campfire. You ever had roasted rabbit?”
It was hares, in the desert, when the rations ran low. “That sounds terrifically appetizing.”
“Such a violet,” Ed says, and starts clapping them a shelter.
Roy averts his gaze from the searing light, watching electric blue playing in the shadows of the trees. He tries not to think about the fact that he will be spending the night cold and in pain and entirely alone while Edward Elric lies within arm’s reach.
“It’s traditional,” Ling said.
Apparently tradition could justify anything in Xing—at least when you and your sideways-slipping grin were Xing.
“Hiking four miles,” Ed said slowly, hackles rising with the volume of his voice, “clinging to some kind of janky platform on a cliff face, and crawling up to some shrine just to dunk our heads in some shitty spring is traditiona—”
“Brother,” Alphonse said calmly, “shut up.”
Ed’s mouth snapped closed, just like that, but he didn’t look pleased about it.
“Of course we’ll go,” Alphonse said. “That sounds like a wonderful and culturally-educational excursion. We would be honored.”
Ling was grinning and trying to make it look like his amusement was not entirely at Ed’s expense.
Ed was too busy kicking uncharitably at the rug to notice. “I can think of about a billion things I’d rather do with my last day in Xing than blow the whole thing trekking up some stupid, too-big mountain.”
There was a pause, and Ed glanced over at Roy—who looked back at him entirely blankly for a moment before realizing that he’d missed a cue to say something about how it wouldn’t be such a trek if Ed’s legs weren’t so short.
It was just that he’d been watching Ed spitting fire and thinking that Ling, in his vital youth and its effortless arrogance, had missed a critical point. It didn’t matter how much Roy would, could, wanted to give if Ed didn’t want it from him. Ling talked like Ed came cheap.
Roy wasn’t that stupid.
“Surely you can set aside your personal objections for such an important rite of passage,” he said in his idlest tones. “You’ll be a bigger man for it—figuratively speaking.”
Somehow Ed had acquired an entire pocketful of tiny paper cranes, which Roy found out when all of them were hurled into his face at once.
Roy wakes feeling worse than he did when the sheer exhaustion dragged him down into oblivion. He aches everywhere—the cold, deep, bone-weary stiffness that can only be derived from sleeping on a hard, flat surface too long. It feels as though he’s been rubbing dust directly onto his own eyeballs. His left leg throbs almost mournfully, like it knows it’s been forgotten and will only be pushed aside again as the day begins.
Ed sleeps on. He’s eerily quiet when he sleeps; Roy can’t help wondering if he’s plotting something in his dreams. He snores very quietly—just the faintest whistle of breath, in and out, his cheek pressed to his forearm; the folds of the fabric will leave lines. Roy wants to tuck his hair back behind that intricate little ear and stroke a single fingertip down along his jaw.
Instead he stands, tries to stretch, tries not to wince, and staggers out to assess the first pale forays of the dawn.
There’s a sharp, erratic rustling as he starts out of their makeshift hovel-cave, and in the gray-blue light he can see that one of Ed’s traps secured a rabbit after all.
“Edward,” he says.
“Nnh. Fi’ m’r m’ns.”
“Edward, breakfast.”
“…say what?”
He’ll have to remember that.
He pockets the excellent bit of flint he finds for coaxing sparks from Ed’s automail (they’ve agreed, for both of their safety, not to tell Miss Rockbell of this). And as the rabbit that Ed had petted and thanked and then slaughtered grimly (Roy flinched as he skinned it before remembering that the boy received his alchemical training behind a butcher’s shop) turns on their improvised spit, Roy focuses on the flame.
He sautés, when he has time to cook. He bakes. He broils. He grills. He does not roast. Whatever the meat is, it always ends up smelling too much like a human being, and he loses his appetite.
He’s lost it now, but he makes himself eat anyway. He’ll be glad of it later.
It’s starting to unnerve him how difficult it is to hide things from Ed—it seems like he just feels more, feels more powerfully, when Ed is in front of him, and the shell of concealment trembles trying to hold it all in.
He feels—sick. He has to eat, has to eat this, but the meat and gristle and grease are going hard and sour in his mouth. A trickle of hot juice runs down his hand, just the right consistency—just the right thickly heavy drip of warmth—and cuts through the dirt, leaves his bare flesh glistening—
He can’t give up; he needs the food. Just turn a blind eye, Mustang; you’re so good at that.
He makes his tongue and teeth keep moving; makes his throat swallow. He feels sick—ill, churning, unclean. He feels wrong.
Ed… doesn’t seem to notice. But then, Ed eats the way he reads, the way he does anything—Ed gets absorbed by the everyday, eats like he’s ravenous, reads like his sight’s going, sleeps like the dead, and then breezes through the impossible. Ed finds reports to be a nigh-on-unbearable chore, but he’ll rappel down a building without a second thought.
Ed should be the one to run this country—Ed and his golden heart. Ed, who cannot back down, who doesn’t know the meaning of ‘compromise’. Ed, who would never fail them, who would never fail himself.
Ed, who is groaning, holding both hands over his stomach, and dropping back onto the leaves. “Half a rabbit was so filling when I was a kid.”
The blackened flesh in Roy’s mouth tastes like ash and sand. “Perhaps your stomach is bigger now, even if nothing else—”
Ed growls at him emphatically, leaps up, and stalks over to disassemble their makeshift cave. Roy tosses the bones and the fat into the fire and stands, making a halfhearted attempt to wipe his greasy fingers on his trouser legs.
“Well,” Ed says, planting his hands on his hips and grinning the most devastating of all the grins. “Westward ho. Unless you’re not up to it, old man.”
“I do not want to burn awkward pictograms of phalluses onto exposed areas of your skin,” Roy says, focusing on killing the fire’s supply of oxygen; “but if I have to, I will.”
“…all right, so that’s the last thing I would’ve thought you’d say to that.”
“You called me ‘old,’” Roy says, stifling the flames and turning his attention to the larger, slower, duller burn of dawn on the horizon. “I was simply demonstrating that ‘old’ does not necessarily mean ‘stodgy’ or ‘mature’.”
Ed skips up alongside him, spraying pine needles with abandon. Put a little bit of food in him, and he’s all brightness again. “It kind of loses the effect when you explain it.”
Roy raises an eyebrow at him, and they start walking, away from the dawn. “You would have spent the entire day ruminating if I hadn’t said anything, and you’d been forced to reason it out yourself.”
“Nah,” Ed says. “I just give up with you. You never make any damn sense, so it’s a waste of time. I pretend you’re straight-up crazy and don’t respond to logic; that works much better.”
“That the picture is too large for you to see does not necessarily make it illogical,” Roy says, and then he tries not to smile as he waits.
“It’s not even logic with you so much as doing your damnedest to manipulate everybody else half just ’cause you ca… wait a damn second, who’s so small he can’t see over the pawns on your fucking chessboard?”
Roy keeps his face schooled into absolute seriousness as he raises a hand and pats Ed on the top of the head.
He almost get his eyes clawed out, which is entirely worth it.
The triumph fades quickly; Ed’s scowl persists.
“Not short,” he mutters after a while. “Slightly smaller than average, within a totally normal statistical margin for the human species, maybe, but I make up for it by being such a huge badass.”
“I think you’re the perfect size,” Roy says before he can stop himself.
Ed blinks at him. “I don’t get it. What’s the joke?”
“It wasn’t a slight,” Roy says.
Ed’s wide eyes go shuttered, and his eyebrows arch.
“Pardon me,” Roy says, focusing on articulating the words, a bit at the expense of his balance. “I misspoke. I wasn’t goading you; I like you at precisely the height that you are.”
Ed’s expression goes from I see what you did there to What the crap?
“Since when do you like me?” he asks.
“One of the ways that we’re too alike,” Roy says, “in cataclysmic compliment to our shared obstinacy, is that we’re rather bad at expressing affection.”
The pause is very long. Roy admires the shift of the butter-yellow light through the trees.
“You… feel… affection… for me?”
When Roy lost his grip and fantasized about this conversation, it tended to involve a great deal more of Ed hurling himself at Roy’s chest and wailing about long-concealed love grown too potent to suppress. It had also tended to take place in a conservatory or a terraced garden, which should have been his first clue that he was way off. All the same, this seems a bit… mundane. “Of course I do.”
“I mean, I know you’re always—watchin’ our backs, keepin’ our asses out of the worst trouble when you can, but… okay, also, ‘affection’ is a stupid word.”
“Is it?”
“It’s all… sharp. It’s practically got ‘fuck’ in it, except it’s supposed to be about warm fuzzy shit. Whoever coined it sucks.” He slants an accusatory gaze up at Roy. “I know I’m not a fucking poet, but neither is whoever thought that up, so wipe that smirk off your face before I do it for you.”
“This isn’t a smirk,” Roy says. “It’s just a smile twisted by a bit of wry amusement.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s true. I assure you that this is just how I smile.”
“And I assure you that’s bullshit, because I’ve seen how you smile, and it’s not like that. When you smile at Elysia or Hayate or even Al, sometimes—that’s different. None of that snarky-bastard face in it.”
“I am hurt,” Roy says, “that you don’t appreciate the snarky-bastard face, Edward.”
More than that, he’s stunned that Ed pays enough attention to him to recognize the distinction. That Ed, who has been known to miss shouts of his name, shoves to his shoulder, natural disasters, and multiple deadlines when he’s intent on something, has noticed the nuances of Roy’s expressions—it’s… disconcerting. What else has he picked up on? How is he planning to use it to his advantage?
No, wait. This isn’t Hakuro; this is Ed. Ed doesn’t bother with ulterior motives; Ed’s probably never plotted anything more sinister than pranks on Winry.
In which case, why has Ed watched Roy’s face enough to know its character so well? He’s a scientist—perhaps it’s just a matter of observing everything he can pan his eyes over. Perhaps he’s trying to work out the tiny tells of Roy’s emotions so that he’s prepared to gauge Roy’s sincerity at any given moment. Perhaps…
Perhaps he’s—interested. Is that even possible?
Well, Roy’s a scientist, too—most people forget that about him, which he’s glad of; his colleagues underestimate the breadth and versatility of his intellect. He can test this hypothesis easily within the scope of his existing plans, and if the wisp of a theory is wrong, Ed will simply attribute the whole thing to regular Mustang-Brand Weirdness. He would consider it foolproof, but the word is a trap; the fact of the matter is that he is the cleverest fool he knows.
“Yeah, well,” Ed says. “You don’t appreciate my crazy-good impression of you, where I do the dramatic snap and the pelvic thrust and the diaphragm voice, so that’s equivalent.”
Roy wonders suddenly if he is either hallucinating or still asleep. “The—pel—”
“You do this thing with your hips when you’re being all authoritative. And you plant your feet really wide. You totally did it when you were arguing with Qiang earlier, and the second you turned your back, he gave you this look like you were made of chocolate.”
“Me?” Roy says—and, oh, he shouldn’t, but he can’t not, and he can’t help it— “He looked at you like you didn’t even need to be covered in chocolate to make him consider cannibalism.”
Ed snorts. “You better go ask Marcoh for a refund; you’re going blind.” He raps his knuckles on his right forearm. “Can’t eat this.”
“You must have hit your head yesterday while you were rappelling as though you were half-spider,” Roy says. “You’re—this is… I’m speaking in confidence, you understand, but it’s true. You are astoundingly attractive, and you somehow seem to get more arresting every year. The prospect that a young man like Qiang Yao would waste his attention on someone so much older and so world-wear—”
“You’re not that old,” Ed says. “Come on, my… Hohenheim was still kicking ass at four-hundred-something. And you’re still pretty—I dunno, limber. You can still light shit on fire easy as breathing, and you look pretty good for, what, forty-fi—”
“I’m barely thirty-one, you cretin,” Roy says. “And I’ll have you know I’m in excellent sha—”
“There you go, then,” Ed says, cheeks staining, eyes on the trees ahead. “That’s why he was checkin’ you out like you were gonna vanish if he took his eyes off of you.”
First of all, Roy can’t believe Ed just tricked him—him—into that.
Second, and perhaps even more startling, he can’t believe he didn’t notice. He thrives on attention. He knows when people are looking at him—and between the unending scrutiny of the brass waiting for him to stumble and the appeal of his appearance, there’s almost always someone—because he can use it. It’s a tool and a weapon; rarely is he not performing for an audience.
So can this lapse be explained by the fact that he was perfectly comfortable in the company, and the sense of safety left him less aware?
Or was he so busy watching Ed that everything else just… faded?
“Even by our standards,” Roy says, “I think it’s impressive that we’re arguing about which of us a stranger prefers to look at.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Ed says. “As long as he wasn’t perving on Al. ’Cause if he did, I’d castrate him.”
In grudging recognition of the young man’s good taste, Roy decides, in the interests of preserving Qiang’s manhood, not to mention just how far his gaze roamed when Ed’s focus was elsewhere.
Then again, Roy once caught Alphonse winking back.
Roy takes a moment and attempts to evaluate the conversation. Ed cornered him into saying he wasn’t old; Ed almost complimented him outright in the process. It’s data, but it isn’t proof, and Roy isn’t going to rely on guesswork. Not this time—not when it matters.
When he’s taken that moment, he takes a second one to reflect on the way that Ed has transformed his entire thought process. He’s thinking like a chemist again.
The scientific method doesn’t lie.
By the time Roy hears the gurgling of a good-sized stream, the morning’s settled in, and his left leg is a maelstrom of mutinous hurt. He considers backing down—gathering more evidence, revising the experiment, waiting, waiting, being sure—but the moment he sees the contours of the clear water, all he can think of is the itch of the filth all over his skin. Even if the worst-case scenario duly unfolds, he will emerge from this endeavor clean, and at the moment that’s enough to justify the risk.
“We could probably jump over,” Ed is saying. “Well, I can; I bet you’re too fa—”
“I’m having a bath,” Roy says. He peels off his sweater, pauses to turn it right-side-out, and drapes it over a sturdy tree branch. He kneels to unlace his thoroughly mud-caked boots.
“General,” Ed says slowly, “you have finally lost your fucking mind. Do you know how cold—”
“Have you ever seen gangrene?” Roy asks.
Ed’s eyebrows swoop adorably as he shuts his mouth and shakes his head.
“Let’s keep it that way,” Roy says, unbuttoning his shirt, which he drapes over the branch with the sweater.
Ed starts to avert his eyes and then does a double-take. “Holy crap, is that the—from when you fried the hell out of that Lust chick?”
Roy has developed a tendency to keep his arm more or less in front of the scar, a habit derived partly from the early period of protecting the tender spot and partly from the ongoing desire to hide it. He shifts, raises his elbow, and glances at it, not that he doesn’t know what he’ll see. It’s just so—
“Funny,” Ed says, mouth quirking, eyes half-lidded and trained on the furious snarl of knitted flesh. “You look so perfect all the time. This is, like, a really good metaphor or something.”
“I look ‘perfect’?” Roy says slowly.
Ed blinks, and then he seems to realize that he’s staring at Roy’s abdomen at the same time that his statement occurs to him, and the combination leaves him flushing bright red. “You—you know what I mean, douchebag.”
Inwardly, Roy draws a deep breath. Outwardly, he flashes his brightest, smoothest, most roguish grin and rolls his shoulders. “I’m sure I don’t; could you elaborate?”
Somehow Ed’s cheeks go even darker. “You—smug son of a—will you just get your ass in the water before those Hua Wei fuckers show up and perforate you some more?”
“I suppose you’re right,” Roy says, unbuckling his belt in as leisurely a fashion as he can manage. “Perhaps you’d better keep watch.”
A glance up confirms that Ed looks like his face may actually burst into flame. “Will you shut the fuck up and get the fuck in the stream so you can move on to freezing your dumb fucking ass off… sir?”
“Oh, all right.” Roy steps out of his boots and shimmies out of his trousers. Ed’s eyes go remarkably wide, and his right hand spasms. Roy hangs the trousers and then—no way around this, and no way to make it sexy, but he’ll recover—his socks over the branch currently straining under the rest of his outfit.
“Um,” Ed says, slightly faintly, “I… just get in the goddamn water, Mustang.”
“Right away, Major Elric,” Roy says. By the sound of the frustrated hissing noise, Ed’s turned away, but Roy knows he’ll sneak a look. They always do.
Just to maximize the opportunities, though, he removes his underwear slowly, adjusts the drape of the fabric after he settles it over the branch, and stretches extravagantly before he starts down the bank to the stream.
When he touches his toe to the water, it takes every iota of his willpower to bite back the gasp that slingshots up his throat. Ed was right, although Roy will die before he admits it; this water is frigid, and he is almost certainly going to regret submerging himself in it.
But he’s committed now—he clenches his teeth and takes a proper step in; the cold is like knives—and can’t go back. That just means he’s going to have to make sure the sacrifice is worth it for the gains. Opportunity cost. Equivalency. Fucking cold; he’s going to back out after all if he doesn’t start this before his better judgment conspires with his nerves and overrules his pride—
The splashing is not terribly dignified, but momentarily he’s waded to the center of the streambed, where the water comes up almost to his hips. His toes are already numb, but at least the depth is perfect.
Ed has clasped his metal hand around a low—a very low—tree branch and is leaning his weight on it, taking care to look unconcerned as he glances over. “Nice bath so far?”
“Ch-charming,” Roy manages. The wound in his leg stung when it met the water and then settled to throbbing angrily; he can’t really feel it anymore.
“Maybe hypothermia’s more fun than gangrene,” Ed says. “You know ducks shit in that water, though, right? And fish have sex in it. And—”
Roy braces himself, dips a hand in, and drags it down the other arm; the rivulets slice through the dirt. “Waterf-f-fowl e-excrement and a-aquatic c-c-coitus are the l-least of my c-concerns—”
“You are something else, Mustang,” Ed says.
He is something exceedingly stupid.
After one more deep breath and a preemptive apology to his nervous system, he quite literally takes the plunge.
There has never been a cold so agonizingly, astonishingly, all-encompassingly cold as the cold jolting through every muscle in his body, and he’s surely reached a critical surface area of goosebumps by now—
He comes up gasping and barely remembers, through the fritzing bewilderment in his brain at just how cold it is possible to be, to toss his head back and hurl shining droplets from his hair. He angles his chest just a little towards the spectator; runs a hand down his face; arches his spine; flicks his head again so that his sopping bangs draggle into his eyes. The effect must be phenomenal even though he’s shivering.
It takes another moment to squint through the water dripping all down his face, and then he doesn’t bother holding back a grin.
Ed looks very surprised to see that the tree branch he was holding onto has broken off in his hand.
illustrated by the amazing Bob Fish - full art post
Ed was looking at Roy with evident distaste. Roy let the glaring continue uninterrupted for a full ten seconds to see if an explanation was forthcoming, and then he gave in and prompted.
“Has my torso done something to earn your disapproval, Fullmetal?”
As was his habit, Roy tried to watch everyone at once: Riza remained intent on the map; Alphonse remained intent on the scenery; Qiang glanced over, smiled thinly, swept his gaze down to linger on the seat of Ed’s trousers, and then occupied himself with their route again.
“Maybe,” Ed said. “It’s always weird seeing you dressed like a real person.”
Quite despite the fact that Roy understood the point about clothing and context, he raised his eyebrows and started in on a slow-build smirk. “Are members of the military not real people?”
“Careful, Brother,” Alphonse said airily as Ed opened his mouth. “Technically, that includes you.”
Ed shut his mouth, twisted it into a scowl, and—entirely without warning—reached out with his right hand to pluck at Roy’s pullover, grasping the fabric over the center of his chest. “Why are you wearing a sweater?”
If it had been the other hand, Roy would have been doomed; Ed would have felt the uneven leap-skitter of Roy’s heartbeat and known that he’d just very nearly committed manslaughter by sending his commanding officer into cardiac arrest.
Roy was also lucky that it had become a hobby of his to respond to Ed’s semi-rhetorical questions with further semi-rhetorical questions to see how long he could keep the conversation lilting towards nonsense. And that game was easy even when he was reeling—fighting the urge to clench his fists, to gasp for breath, to stare into Ed’s dandelion eyes.
“Is there something wrong with my sweater?” he asked.
“Is this wool?” Ed asked.
“Are you involved in some sort of sheep sympathizing movement that prohibits the wearing of wool garments?”
Ed blinked. “What? Fuck, no; I hate sheep; they’re assholes. I was just hoping there was an explanation other than that my C.O. is dumb enough to wear wool on a hike.”
Roy blinked back. Ed’s silver index finger was still hooked in the fabric. “It’s winter. It’s cold.”
“We’re going on a hike,” Ed said again, much more slowly, tugging now. “A trek. A pilgrimage. What-the-fuck-ever. Is one of the perks of promotion to general that you stop sweating or something?”
“Maybe you should try accepting a promotion one of these years,” Roy said. “All sorts of mysteries would be revealed.”
Ed released the sweater, swiveled on his heel, and stalked over to look at the map. “Bullshit.”
Quietly Roy began to draw in a deep breath, only to notice halfway through that Alphonse was watching him in great amusement, which made him choke on it.
“So where the fuck are we going?” Ed was asking. “And how the fuck are we getting there?”
“I have not actually been to the Shrine of Yashui before,” Qiang said contentedly, shifting closer to Ed’s side under the guise of sharing the map. “So we can find our way together, hm?”
“Yeah, whatever,” Ed said, gaze glued to the rather unhelpful triangles representing the terrain, and Roy’s several-times-damned heart sang. “Look, I’m not leading this thing; you and the captain can figure it out.”
“Not the general?” Qiang asked with a tone of innocence that grated on Roy’s ears a bit.
“The general,” Roy said, “is delegating.”
The general knew East City and Central inside-out and sideways but had a tendency to become fantastically disoriented in unfamiliar locales. The general had been known, according to one distressingly insubordinate second lieutenant back home, to “get lost in a paper cup”. The general elected not to mention any of these points; and in addition the general thought it was in his best interests to cease referring to himself in the third person.
“The general still thinks this is a vacation,” Ed said.
One of these days, Roy was going to go on a real vacation—to a beach. To a beach with powder-fine sand and radiating sunlight and the hushed roar of the waves and lots and lots of gorgeous women strutting around in bikinis.
“I believe,” Alphonse said calmly as Roy eyed Ed and Ed eyed him right back, “that we’re on the correct trail and need to follow the rightmost fork after it curves and we lose sight of the city.”
“I think that’s correct,” Riza said.
Qiang grinned broadly. “Is this the thing you call democracy?”
“No,” Alphonse said, starting briskly up the path, “this is just regular old indecisiveness. I’m going now; the rest of you are welcome to follow me if you ever want to get there.”
Ed was at his brother’s elbow like there were magnets between them. “Take it easy, Al—we’ve got the whole day.”
“Not anymore, we don’t,” Alphonse said.
Roy always thought temptation should be red, or perhaps a smoky-edged wine-purple. But of course—of course—temptation is bright gold.
Roy could win him. Ed’s looking; he’s receptive; there is a hunger darting at the corners of his eyes that makes Roy’s stomach clench and heat and roil. Roy could win him, take him, have him, keep him for as long as the illusion stood. Roy could hold him nightly and kiss him awake; Roy could learn every line of his body with fingertips and teeth and tongue; Roy could pull him closer and closer and always leave him wanting more; Roy could bury the past in the hot, wet, perfect places where their skin met. And when he felt it fading, he could go so cold that Ed recoiled in horror, and they’d both let go before it fell apart.
That’s a lie.
He wouldn’t be able to stop when Ed eventually found him out. That’s why he can’t risk starting. The first and foremost lesson in tactical strategy is never to enter a situation from which you can’t retreat.
“I’m fucking starving,” Ed mutters.
Roy is still warming up after his little leap into the stream. Ed transmuted him a truly nightmarish towel out of pine needles, and he lit a rather nice fire, but the freeze was in his bones by then, and it’s taking its sweet time filtering back out.
He clears his throat. “Would you like to take a break to hunt and kill some adorable forest creatures?”
“Dick. Maybe. Not much meat on a squirrel.”
“I imagine not.”
“What we need is a quail or some shit.”
“I’m not sure what kind of birds are native.”
“I’m just gonna start trying berries at random in a minute.”
“No, you are not.”
“Do you think they’re still after us?”
That’s the question that’s been preoccupying Roy’s brain when it can pry its greedy imagination away from Ed. “Difficult to say. I don’t know that they actually recognized our value as hostages, and I’m not sure how long they’ll pursue us based solely on the principle of the thing.”
Ed nibbles on his bottom lip. Roy’s mouth waters. “You don’t think I killed any of ’em, do you? I mean, they could starve to death, eventually.”
“You didn’t kill anyone,” Roy says, folding his arms a little tighter across his chest, which is much more dignified than hugging himself outright. “On neither occasion did you put them into a position they couldn’t get out of if they really wanted to.”
“I just—I mean, Kimblee kicked my ass in Baschool because I had the chance to kill him, and I didn’t. But—well, that’s the military, right? That’s what you have to do, sometimes; you have to—end people’s lives, period, go to the Gate, no take-backs. So—maybe Kimblee wasn’t right that it was weak, you know, but—but it was childish. I’ve been in denial since I started, really. I’ve been trying to act like something I’m not. I’m not a soldier. I shouldn’t get the benefits of being one.”
“First of all,” Roy says, “Kimblee was a sociopath. Second, one can be both a soldier and a pacifist. Third, there is nothing childish about refusing to value your own existence above that of another human being.”
“Okay,” Ed says slowly, “but he made a pretty convincing argument when he brought the whole building down and got me impaled.”
Roy stops walking. “He what? You—”
Ed pauses to hike his shirt up, and the wealth of taut muscle makes Roy’s heart jump into the back of his throat, silencing him rather effectively. “See?”
Roy sees. Another story, another scar—Ed’s skin is a book of tales, and Roy is burning to memorize it word by word.
“Kind of matches yours,” Ed says, dragging his shirt back down, which is a bit disappointing. “Boy, that was a shitty day. But for your future reference, it’s possible to use your own soul as a tiny Philosopher’s Stone if you’re gonna be fucked otherwise.” He sees the way Roy’s staring. “What? I mean, it hacked, I dunno, maybe half a decade off of my natural lifespan, but that’s better than not having a lifespan at all.”
“It’s not that,” Roy says. “Well—that’s terrifying, and honestly it’s sort of painful on a very deep level that you’ve had to make decisions like that, but—you’re… unbelievable, Edward. You are unbelievable.”
Ed goes still, shoulders squared, head tilted, and his eyes flare with something like suspicion. “Well, don’t worry about it; I’m gonna be out of the military as soon as my contract’s up, so me dying young won’t affect your epic long-term ascendancy plans.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Roy says, because he is simply too tired and too cold and too beaten-down to lie. It makes him feel light, acknowledging the truth aloud. “You are amazing. That’s all. No hidden meaning, no snarky-bastard faces. Just my honest opinion of your character. You are brilliant and committed and braver than I can ever hope to be.”
Ed’s eyes narrow.
Light indeed; his heart was a balloon swelling against the confines of his ribcage, but now Ed is stabbing it with a fistful of needles, and it’s shrinking back to size.
“I know you don’t trust me,” Roy says. “That’s fine. I can hardly blame you, after all the times I’ve looked you in the eye and lied.” They bandaged his leg while he was attempting to dry off; the cold numbness is finally receding enough to distinguish the dully-throbbing pain again as he breaks Ed’s gaze and starts off down the trail. “But I mean that. I admire you.”
“I do trust you,” Ed says, and Roy’s feet stop without his permission. Apparently his whole body thinks they’re in one of those terrible films he always sleeps through, where the romantic leads invariably spend a several-minute scene trying to walk away from each other only to cast dozens of soulful backwards glances as they go. “It’s… weird. You’re always weird, so that’s no surprise—but then that’s part of the thing. Because—there’s Mustang, right, and he’s the one who lies and schemes and folds his hands on his desk and smirks over them. But then there’s… Roy, I guess, and he’s weird, and kind of dumb, and kind of nice, and funny if you’re sort of sick on the inside, which I guess I have been for years. So I kind of—I kind of like Roy. And I believe him even when he says shit like that, because I’m pretty sure he believes it.”
Roy swallows. “You make it sound like I have a split personality.”
“I think everybody kind of does,” Ed says. “It’s just that you’re playing such a huge game with your Mustang side that the Roy part gets shoved into a corner and starved.”
Roy swallows again. He has to say something. Doesn’t he?
Ed takes a breath, sucks on his bottom lip for a moment, and pins Roy with the sheer intensity of his attention. “I think the problem is that you don’t like Roy very much, so you think nobody else will either.” He shrugs, just slightly lopsided. “But—y’know. Captain Hawkeye’s obviously seen through you for years, and she wouldn’t put up with all of your shit unless the real Roy was somebody worth believing in. And Mustang pisses me off, but I think Roy is kind of… cool. And since apparently I’m amazing, you should take my word for it.”
Roy clears his throat. “I’m not sure you know… him… well enough to judge.”
“It’s negative space,” Ed says. “Mustang and I are damn well-acquainted, and Roy’s the stuff Mustang is conspicuously not. Easy. Look, dumbass, just take the compliment.”
Which part of that bewildering rant…? “I—thank you?”
“Anytime,” Ed says. “Come on, now I’m really starving. When we get back to the capital, I’m eating Ling.”
Fortunately it’s not too great a struggle to keep pace with Ed even when he and his shorter stride have a head start. “Any particular reason?”
“Because this whole damn thing is his fault,” Ed says, “obviously.”
“I thought it was my fault.”
“Okay, I’ll eat you. Happy?”
“Disconcerted, actually.”
“Damn violet.”
“Did you know violets are also called Flame Flowers?”
“That’s definitely not going to convince me to stop calling you that.”
Roy almost—almost—tells him that another folk name for the Viola tricolor is ‘Jump Up and Kiss Me’.
Once it had been firmly established that Alphonse was not about to drop to the dusty trail from exertion, Ed fell back to where Roy was loitering at the rear of the group.
“I’m coming up with alternative explanations for your sweater,” he said.
“I didn’t realize it was such a hot-button issue,” Roy said.
Ed wrinkled his nose. “Don’t do that.”
“What, weave in a pun?”
“Stop.”
“I’m sorry,” Roy said. “I’ll sleeve it be.”
“General.”
“I can see it’s knit to your tastes.”
“I am going to push you off this fucking mountain.”
“What were you going to tell me at first?” Roy asked. “I’m afraid I’ve lost the thread of the conversation.”
“Never fucking mind,” Ed said.
They walked in silence for a moment, companionably enough. Ed was show-fuming; he wanted to hit Roy but wouldn’t have throttled him given a chance. Roy was quite fluent in Ed’s rages by now.
“Maybe you’re trying to impress someone,” Ed said.
“I’m sorry?”
“With the stupid sweater,” Ed said. “Maybe you’re trying to look nice for somebody in particular.”
“Is it a crime to enjoy looking presentable for its own sake?” Roy asked. He glanced over at the white shirt and very fitted waistcoat Ed had on—the shirt with its dizzyingly tantalizing open collar, with its terrible peek of collarbones and gleaming scars, with its cruel promise of shoulders and pectorals and breastbone and ribs. “I could use the same argument against you.”
“Nuh-uh,” Ed said. “This is just a shirt. I spilled crappy leaf-juice-not-tea on it, actually. It’s not like I’m not wearing a sweater. A sweater is premeditated.”
This was one of the strangest and most entertaining conversations Roy had ever had.
“I didn’t realize my sartorial motives were quite so complicated,” he said.
Ed scowled at him, checked to make sure that they’d fallen far enough behind to be out of earshot, and scowled at him a bit more. “If you’re trying to impress Al, give it up.”
“Much as I value Alphonse’s very discerning opinion,” Roy said, “I assure you that his approval is not the reason I put a sweater on this morning.”
Ed eyed him a bit more mistrustfully. “That’s what they all say.”
And Roy… laughed. He laughed like his past was empty, and his heart was full.
How could he possibly be blamed for loving someone who made him feel like that?
“Still no ambush,” Ed says when they’ve settled for the night. A great deal of running about in the undergrowth on Ed’s part had turned up something like a pheasant; he wrung its neck and plucked it without batting a surprisingly thick, dark, alluring eyelash. Roy choked down as much as he could, and the universe has rewarded his tenacity by permitting him to lie here watching the firelight play on Ed’s face. “Honestly, it’s kinda starting to make me nervous.”
“‘Wary’,” Roy says. “Not ‘nervous’. Nervous is for violets like me.”
Ed makes a face and then wriggles, resettling his folded arms behind his head. Roy can’t imagine the steel one makes for much of a pillow—which is not to say he wouldn’t snuggle with it like a child given half a chance.
“Whatever,” Ed says. “I’d say we should keep watch, but I’m just too fucking tired.”
“I’m a light sleeper,” Roy says.
“Oh, like hell. You snore.”
“So do you.”
“No fucking way!”
“Ask Alphonse.”
“He’ll beat the crap out of you for slandering me.”
“We’ll see,” Roy says. “In any case, rest—literally rest—assured that an assault would wake me, and all I need then is an ember.”
“You’re not allowed to fry anyone,” Ed says, yawning cavernously. “Defensive stuff only. Damn it, this sucks. How much further do you think we’ve got?”
“I don’t know,” Roy says. “I’m surprised we haven’t come across anything inhabited; we could get directions. I suppose our only option is to persevere.”
Ed sighs. “Guess so.” He levers himself up and stretches—back arching, arms curling, every line of him taut and exquisite. “Okay, I’m gonna go make our cave-thing before I pass out. C’mon and help me, General Violet.”
“You did it fine on your own last night,” Roy says, closing his eyes and settling his hands on his chest. “A general of the Amestrian military can hardly be expected to engage in menial construction labo—hup.”
Ed is sitting on his stomach.
Ed is sitting on his stomach.
Roy scrabbles a little, automatically, shifting his arms back against the ground for leverage. Ed’s legs are spread, knees bent; he leans forward and plants both palms on Roy’s chest, vicious grin lighting up his tiger eyes. Roy cannot, cannot, must not think about the tight, smooth, round, compellingly gropeable ass pressed to his abdomen—he must not.
“C’mon,” Ed says. “We need to master this joint alchemy thing so we can patent it and make a shit-ton of money for your democratic government campaign.”
It’s a very good thing Ed isn’t sitting any lower. Roy needs to say something. First, though, Roy needs to remember how to breathe. The firelight darts through Ed’s hair, flinging sharp, dark shadows across his face.
“Ed,” Roy says, and of course the wheeze to his voice is only because Ed’s not-inconsiderable weight has landed on his diaphragm, “I can’t do much of anything in this position.”
Well—not anything appropriate.
Not thinking about—
“Obviously not,” Ed says, tilting his head back just a little—just enough that his bangs slip into his eyes, just enough that the firelight dances on his cheekbones and kisses the curve of his jaw—and then springing off, bouncing to his feet. “C’mon, I said.”
“I heard you the first half-dozen times,” Roy says. He lies still for another moment, draws in a deep breath, thinks intently about Grumman in drag, exhales, and clambers upright. His pulse is still pounding in his throat, and his skin is still prickling with heat, but he’s not in any prominent discomfort, and that’s about as much as he can hope for right now.
Fortunately, Ed’s too busy scuffing his boots around in the pine needles to pay Roy’s physical reactions any heed.
“Okay,” Ed says. “Here should be good.” He flumps down, sits cross-legged, raises his hands with his palms out, and looks up at Roy expectantly.
It really is a wretched pity that firelight looks so romantic. Roy doesn’t care what happens now; he could stare at Ed all night like this. It chases all of the repartee straight out of his brain, which leaves him settling wordlessly within arm’s length. If he’s very lucky, the inconsistent light will not betray him and let Ed read everything in his eyes.
“Are we collaborating on the alchemy itself?” Roy asks. “I imagine that’s very different from just pooling our resources like before.”
“It’s fine,” Ed says. “You’re not totally brainless; you’ll figure it out as we go.”
It must be rather extraordinary to face the world—at least the world of science—completely confident that you will always understand it. “But what array—”
“It’s fine,” Ed says. “Trust me. Worst-case scenario, we build two separate things, and they meet in the middle, and we’ve got a shelter that looks like crap but still keeps the rain out.”
“That’s very philosophical of you,” Roy says.
Ed glares a bit and wriggles his fingers meaningfully.
Roy doesn’t want to meet his hands; he wants to take them, hold them, shift the pad of his thumb over the knuckles of the left, press it into the grooves and valleys of the right. He wants to internalize every specification—the length of every finger, the bend of every joint, where the warm palm’s thickest, where the automail’s been scratched too deeply to repair. He wants to lathe the almost-dainty, softly-calloused flesh fingers with a gentle tongue, eyes closed, feeling the tendons twitch in the wrist, basking in the faint, half-stifled sounds of startled desire. He wants to wake early and crack an eye open and watch past the edge of the pillow as Ed tugs on a pair of gloves, knowing that he can pull them off with his teeth later that night. He wants those hands on his face, in his hair, skating down his sides, clasping at his hips, grazing brushing squeezing stroking—
“General,” Ed says slowly, “are you feeling okay?”
“Never better,” Roy says, and he flattens his hands against Ed’s before the little brat can get a word in edgewise.
The lightning surges through his veins the instant they touch—white-hot, crackling power pouring into his body, tingling under his skin. It snaps and twists in him like a thing alive; this—this—is what happens when their essences combine.
He wants to tear himself away from the harsh glow of their joined hands, because he can’t control this, and it can’t be overcome; it is too much, too great; it careens through both of them, around and around and around the circle of their bodies, ferocious and untamed.
He presses his hands harder to Ed’s, meets the boy’s glittering eyes, and thinks intently of stone—stone as substance, stone as servant, stone as subject of his will—
He thinks of caves, of curves, of arches; he thinks of fine straight lines that intersect at perfect angles; thinks of corners; thinks of sigils; thinks of the combination that will make the rock below them scoff at gravity. Ed’s eyes narrow, and there’s a—nudge. He hadn’t realized his mind could flinch; something external is prodding gently at the array that’s slipping out of focus now, changing signs, shifting lines—it wavers as though he’s watching it through water; Ed’s lips part, and his teeth are clenched; his eyebrows cinch inwards towards a frown, and the array solidifies—
“Now,” Ed says, and as one they part their hands and press their palms to the ground.
The whole world rumbles, rocking back and forth beneath them; needles jump, leaves rattle, the hard-packed soil cracks, and the stone arcs above them and slams into place, blocking out the sky.
They’re still staring at each other. Roy thinks he’s barely blinked.
Ed clears his throat, licks his lips, and grins… nervously?
“Well,” he says. “That was kind of—sexy.”
Now Roy’s blinking enough to make up for the deficit.
Before he can even begin to decide what to say to that, Ed’s up and examining the structure of their shelter.
“This is pretty solid,” he says, running his flesh fingers along the ceiling and then knocking on the nearest wall with his right hand. “We’ve got a good thing going here, General. I expected this to take a lot of practice, but we’re just kickin’ its ass.”
Roy flexes his hands. He can almost feel the imprint of Ed’s against them. “It’s… remarkable.”
“It’s funny,” Ed says, dusting his hands off on his trousers and stepping outside to kick the edges of their fire pit back into shape. “We make a pretty good team.”
“It’s mostly you,” Roy says, and he should really get a medal for his modesty.
“What part of the word ‘team’ don’t you understand?” Ed asks.
“Are two people technically enough for a team?” Roy asks.
“Partnership,” Ed says. “Union.” Roy’s heart executes a terrible, squishing flip. “Whatever. Fuck you. I’m goin’ to sleep. See?” He transmutes two of his abominable (and tragically necessary) pine-needle blankets, tosses one at Roy, and drops down onto the ground to pull the other up to his shoulder. “Asleep now. So you shut up.”
“Goodnight,” Roy says.
“I told you to shut up.”
“Sleep tight.”
“Damn it—”
“Sweet dreams.”
“Bastard.”
Apparently Ed didn’t like the sweet little Xingese peas that had been packed into their lunch, because he spent the duration of the break pitching them at Roy’s forehead. His accuracy and Roy’s reflexes were fairly evenly-matched.
“This is equivalent,” the extraordinarily mature officer of the Amestrian military said when Alphonse eventually heaved a sigh. “He wouldn’t quit punning at me earlier. This is necessary. I need to beat the habit out of him.”
“You’re wasting food, Brother,” Alphonse said. “Are you ill?”
“No, I’m pissed.”
“His behavior really is quite distressing,” Roy said. “Alphonse, how can I appease him?”
He barely dodged the rock in time.
He wakes with a harsh breath lodged in his throat—with his heart racing and his head spinning, and the dark’s too heavy; he’s going to drown—
And when he sinks through the ground, he’ll fall into an ocean of eyes—blood-red and shot with veins, perfectly round and sticky with their own fluids, pried loose and left there, with no eyelids for blinking, waiting just to watch him—
Just a dream. Just a dream. Just the truth twisted up and regurgitated by his unconscious brain. Just—
He startles, hard, and tries to scrabble away from the touch; his heart’s straining against his ribs, his whole body’s started shaking—
“Relax,” Ed whispers, and his little warm hand settles on Roy’s waist. “Jeez, you were thrashing like a motherfucker.”
“I’m fine,” Roy says. “It was just—I’m sorry I woke you; it was just—”
“Hey,” Ed says, and dirt and needles scrape, and then the warmth of his body is nestling in against Roy’s back. “You think I don’t know a nightmare when I see one? I bet you’ve got some good shit locked up.” His hand shifts, fumbles, spreads over Roy’s thudding heart. “You lock it up here. And then your head tears it all out and throws it in your face. I know the drill. It’s okay.” He curls a little closer, pressing his forehead between Roy’s shoulder-blades; when he speaks, the sound resonates straight down Roy’s spine. “It’s okay. I’ve got you. Just go back to sleep.”
It’s funny and a little bit stupid that this is all Roy really wants.
It’s even funnier and definitely stupid that he’s taking orders from Ed.
When he let himself fantasize, he’d always sort of assumed it would be the other way around—he’d comfort Ed, murmur rational nothings, run a hand slowly through his hair. He should have known it would be backwards with Ed. He should have known that Ed would turn his predictions upside-down and shake them to see if they had anything interesting in their pockets. He should have known it would be like this, with Ed’s tightly-muscled arm snug across his chest, Ed’s breath soft and humid against his back, Ed’s automail cool between them, Ed’s body fitted to his like they were designed to lie together.
“You’re amazing,” he murmurs.
“I said sleep,” Ed mutters back.
“Yes, sir.”
“Shut up. If you’re even capable.”
“You’re surprisingly cozy given your tendencies towards excessive violence.”
“Shut up.”
“If you insist,” Roy says. “Goodnight, Edward.”
“G’night, Roy. You dumbass.”
And Roy feels so safe that he can’t believe that the emotion fits inside him.
“Al’s right,” Ed said.
They had paused at a fork in the paths; both options appeared to lead further up into the gray craggy mountains, and Alphonse and Qiang were pointing different ways. Ed and Roy had fallen far enough behind in the throes of their invigorating bickering that the argument over the route was well underway by the time they approached. Riza was standing between the two young men, holding the map and looking rather bored.
“You can tell by the register of his voice,” Ed said, “and the way he’s holding his shoulders. They tightened up a little bit, see? He used to make this scraping sound when he did that; there were two plates that overlapped. Anyway, he’s a hundred percent positive that he’s right, but Ling’s lapdog over there won’t listen, and he’s starting to get annoyed.”
“Only starting?” Roy asked. “If it was you, I think Qiang might already be in pieces. You’re a bit sh—”
“I am not fucking short-tempered, you bastardly piece of shit,” Ed said—quite calmly, actually; the words were ferocious, but his tone was almost idle. “Next chance I get, I’m alchemically turning all your hair gray. And then it’s gonna fall out. And then you’re gonna look even more hilarious.”
“I’ve been told I’m a reliable source of amusement,” Roy said. “This articulation is new, but I think I’ll take it as a compliment.”
“You’re losing it,” Ed said.
“I think it’s the caffeine imbalance in my bloodstream,” Roy said. He considered Alphonse’s increasingly agitated gesticulation, Qiang’s bright grin, and Riza’s hand inching towards the nearest holster. “If Alphonse is right,” he said, “shall we just proceed the way he’s directing?”
Ed glanced at the route his brother favored. “What, and leave everybody?”
“We’re not leaving,” Roy said. “It’s a head start. They’ll catch us up when Alphonse’s inimitable logic has prevailed.”
Ed eyed him, waiting for the punchline. One of these days, he was going to realize that Roy just had a stupid sense of humor.
“Okay,” Ed said slowly. “Let’s go, then.”
From her unenviable position between a glaring Alphonse and a beaming Qiang, Riza raised an eyebrow at them as they sauntered down the eastward fork of the path. Roy slipped a hand into his right trouser pocket and smiled sunnily back—he’d left the dummy cigarettes with his luggage, but they’d decided that in most company a lighter was more diplomatic than the gloves. Riza rolled her eyes in an indulgently permissive sort of way, and with the little metal wheel beneath his thumb and Ed’s ponytail snapping before him, Roy felt bright and full and invincible.
He really ought to have known better, of course.
The next time Roy opens his eyes, it’s to the yellow-gray half-light of dawn, and there is a warm wet spot where his clothing is sticking to his back.
Ed’s a drooler. How romantic.
On further reflection, Roy despairs of the fact that he finds that more cute than disgusting.
If he can just extricate himself from under the heavy arm draped over his waist without waking Ed, they’ll be able to avoid the morning-after conversation—even though it’s not the morning after much, Roy finds that he really doesn’t fancy having the discussion. He can hear Ed’s voice and see the slanted smile; he doesn’t need to live it. So I guess you’re pretty vulnerable after all, huh, Mustang? Guess you’ve got some shit to work out. It’s funny, though, ’cause I spent this whole time learning how much you have to give to pay for just a body—a physical form, you know, not even a whole life—and here you are trying to make up the difference with a million murders on your head.
No, he really doesn’t want to start today with that.
He shifts and wriggles cautiously. Ed snuffles into his shoulder-blade and mumbles, “Al.”
Damn. It figures that the boy who couldn’t be roused with gunfire when passed out over a book sleeps feather-lightly against Roy’s back.
His arm is far from feather-light, however—rather, it’s a slightly problematic weight against Roy’s side, putting pressure on his ribs.
Carefully he extracts his own arm, narrowly avoids elbowing Ed in the cranium, and very gently starts to shift Ed’s arm downward; if he’s extremely lucky, he’ll manage to slide it all the way off and then backwards to rest on Ed’s own body, and Roy will be unencumbered enough to flee for—
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Ed says blearily when his wrist is on Roy’s hip, such that his hand dangles in a rather suggestive spot. “Buy me a drink firs’, Mustang. Nn. A lot of drinks.”
“Good morning,” Roy says, perhaps a bit stupidly.
“Or whatever,” Ed says. He yawns, and then he buries his face in Roy’s shoulder-blade and snuggles closer, and Roy thinks that he may be experiencing a major neural malfunction. “Five more minutes.”
“We really ought to get going,” Roy says, because it won’t be long before Ed feels the way his heart is pounding, the way his skin is heating, the way his muscles are relaxing of their own accord—the way every molecule of his body wants to move closer to Ed.
“Lame,” Ed says.
“But aren’t you excited for the morning’s breakfast of half-burnt rabbit?”
“Yeah, that’s real persuasive.”
Roy swallows, vacillates, and then plays the trump. “Aren’t you excited to get back to your brother so that he can stop panicking about what might have befallen you?”
Ed groans, and the sound makes Roy’s whole spine go rigid. “Fuck. All right, fine, you win, you goddamn bastard; you happy now?” He sits up, and Roy can hear the tendons popping as he stretches.
“Copacetic,” Roy says. He levers himself upright, and everything is agony. “I humbly request that once we have returned to civilization, we never sleep on the ground again.”
“Friggin’ violet,” Ed says. “Ow. Okay, maybe you have a point. Jeez, we better’ve caught something; I’m starving.”
When Roy has finally succeeded in prying his miserable, aching body out of the dirt, he finds Ed crouched and staring morosely at their empty snare.
“I’m sorry, General,” Ed says without looking up. “I’m just going to have to kill you and eat you. There’s no way around it.”
“I believe the military regulation is that the lowest-ranking officer present gets eaten first,” Roy says.
“Military ain’t here,” Ed says. “Law of the jungle presides.” He stands, making an absent attempt to brush some of the embedded dirt off of his trousers. “Anything in this forest that doesn’t move fast enough is breakfast.”
Roy gives him a long look, pointedly focusing on his proportionate legs, and then takes off running in spite of the rather predictable pain.
“That’s fast enough!” Ed howls after him. “You bastard! Stop! I said stop!”
The path was steep enough that they were ascending quickly—but not so steep that they were working up a sweat.
Roy cast a long look at the goosebumps rising on Ed’s forearms as the air thinned and cooled around them.
“Goodness,” he said. “Don’t you wish you had a premeditated sweater?”
“Fuck you, sir,” Ed said through clenched teeth.
“Can I keep the sweater on?” Roy asked.
Ed choked.
Roy expects Ed to take him up on the playfulness, give chase, run him down, and describe him using several impolite words and phrases.
He does not expect Ed to rocket after him, tear the ground up to make an arcing bridge with alchemy, race along it, hurl himself down, fling both arms around Roy’s waist, and tackle him to the pine needles.
Roy is too winded to do much more than wheeze forlornly and stare up at him in shock.
“So there,” Ed pants, grinning down at him, hair hanging all around his face.
Roy scrapes up the breath for a few words: “Even when I am Führer of Amestris, you will still be the undisputed king of the jungle. That said, if you’ve broken anything, the medical bill is coming out of your research budget.”
“You’re not that fragile,” Ed says. He has his hands planted on Roy’s shoulders, one warm heel and one cold one digging in just under Roy’s collarbones. Ed’s knees are settled on either side of Roy’s hips, and Roy is precipitously losing the presence of mind to retort. Ed’s right knee nudges inward. “Boy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this…”
“Unkempt?” Roy asks. Six inches stand between the tips of their noses; Ed’s hands haven’t moved a fraction; Ed’s hair is almost brushing at his face; Ed’s gaze rakes slowly over his battered skin.
“I was going to say ‘dirty’,” Ed says.
Roy makes a strong effort but cannot stop the blood from rushing to his cheeks. “I—see.”
Ed’s grin tilts, sharpens, gleams. “Do you feel dirty?”
“Edward,” Roy says slowly.
“It suits you,” Ed says. Five inches between their noses; four— “Makes you look… real. Tangible.”
Three. Two. One and a half.
“Fullmetal,” Roy says.
Ed drops his ass onto Roy’s groin, and Roy’s breath leaps out of his lungs in a gasp as his hands jump to Ed’s hips—to steady him or to hold him there or to push him back Roy doesn’t even know—
And Ed kisses him open-mouthed, and oh, oh, there is nothing else in the world like this.
It’s all teeth and tongue and grit and pine needles jabbing at the back of Roy’s neck, and it’s not the best kiss of Roy’s life. It’s not the deftest; it’s not the finest; it’s certainly not the cleanest.
It is the most anticipated, the most passionate, and the most destructive. It is damp and desperate and hungry, and it imparts a moment where Roy actually thinks Ed was serious about eating him, because there is no other reason a human being would bite his lip quite so avidly; the blood burns metallic in his mouth, and a distant part of him wonders why he likes this.
But of course it’s all backwards with Ed.
And of course it’s only now, only when it’s concrete, only when their tongues are meeting that Roy understands the enormity of his mistake.
He was never free to offer this. He should never have teased; he never should have encouraged; he should never even have acknowledged—
He never should have let it come this far. He certainly shouldn’t be letting it go further—
He can’t help himself.
He gives in for a little while—he rises into it, nips back, licks and sucks and steals Ed’s breath for his for a little while—before he summons all of his willpower, grasps Ed’s jaw as gently as he can manage, and leverages them apart.
“We can’t,” he says. “You know I want to, but we can’t.”
Ed’s face falls, and Roy’s heart plummets. “But—”
“Fraternization,” Roy says. “Nepotism. Nooses of red tape, Ed.”
“But you’ve—the secretaries—”
“They don’t report to me,” Roy says. “It’s different.”
“It’s not differe—”
“A direct superior officer has so much power to abuse.”
“But you wouldn’t,” Ed says.
“The rules weren’t made for me,” Roy says. “That doesn’t mean I don’t have to respect them.”
Ed’s eyes are too full, too warm, too lovely altogether. “But you wouldn’t do that. You never would. Even if it was somebody who dumped you in public with a ton of drama and made you feel like shit, even if it was somebody you hated, you wouldn’t.”
Roy swallows, runs the pad of his thumb across Ed’s cheekbone, and smiles as convincingly as he can. “Laws are laws, Ed. I can bend them to keep you safe, but I can’t break this one unle—”
Ed’s eyes narrow, and his face contorts; he snaps his head out of Roy’s reach. “Fuck your law, and fuck your military, and fuck y—”
The crossbow bolt whistles as it passes through the three-centimeter gap between Ed’s jaw and Roy’s fingertips.
Ed claps, and there’s a wall of tight-packed dirt muffling the noise of the oncoming force.
“I’m not fucking finished,” Ed says. “I’m going to kick your ass so hard later you’ll wish that’d hit you.”
“Fine,” Roy says, scrabbling to sit up. “Come on.”
Ed eyed the chains along the cliff face even more mistrustfully than he usually eyed Roy. Did that count as progress in their relationship? Was Roy delusional for thinking that they had a relationship? Obviously they had a rapport, but that wasn’t the same thing at all.
“I don’t think I like this,” Ed said.
“Where’s your sense of adventure?” Roy asked.
“Somewhere I picked,” Ed said, “instead of on some stupid-ass errand for stupid-ass Ling.”
Roy glanced down over the edge—glanced way down—and reprimanded himself for taking such a long look; he was going to make himself lightheaded, which would increase the risk of falling and make him more nervous about the whole escapade.
He almost asked if Ed was acrophobic before remembering the Ed was acrobatic. The sky would never betray him; the way he flipped and spun and pinwheeled—the way gravity seemed to make an exception for his weight—the open air clearly wanted him for its own.
“I thought you two were close,” Roy said, despising himself for his pettiness all the while. He was an idiot; there was nothing available, and even if there had been, he wouldn’t have been allowed to take it.
“Close to homicide, maybe,” Ed said, squaring his shoulders and reaching out his left hand to grasp the chain. “You’ve never really wanted to smother someone in their sleep until you’ve had Ling kicking you all night.”
illustrated by the amazing Bob Fish - full art post
As Roy curled his fingers tightly around the weathered chain, he spotted a flare of pink in Ed’s cheeks. “Why, Fullmetal, you’re blushing. Am I to take it that you and the young Emperor were—”
“Shut the fuck up,” Ed said. “You with your rotating harem of chicks have no idea what we were, and it’s none of your business anyway, and I don’t want to talk about it.”
Ed’s metal hand clinked against the chain as he shifted his grip, stepped sideways, and smoothly moved out onto the boards. Roy paused before he followed.
“Do you honestly believe I’ve never had feelings for someone?”
Ed huffed out a breath. “Well—I know you’ve had pissed-off feelings. And I know you’d die for Captain Hawkeye same way I’d die for Al. Maybe if you didn’t make your face like a statue all the time, I’d figure you were capable of more.”
“I spent the best years of my life in love with Hughes,” Roy said. Somehow, somehow, what sort of witchcraft this was he didn’t know, it came out easily—darted up his throat and rolled off his tongue and spread out into the space between them. “I doubt he ever intended it, but he was the reason I learned how to hide emotions that wouldn’t be advantageous. I suppose I’ll always wish I could have been the one who made him happy, but in the end I think all that mattered was that he was. I think he was the happiest man I’ve ever met. I sometimes think that’s because the only thing he ever hid from the world was his intelligence.”
Ed’s face had gone tight, and he’d lowered his head a little. He shuffled another step, and the wind pulled insistently at his hair. “Yeah, I was always—confused—because he seemed like such a dumbass, but he was thinking circles around the rest of us the whole time. And that’s why—”
“How many of us will be able to die with no regrets?” Roy asked. “And how many of us will have left as immensely positive an impact as he did?”
Ed smiled faintly. “I guess so.” Then he stopped smiling and scowled over at Roy. “Wait a second, you were—in love—with him? The guy was insane, and he never shut up!”
“Depending on whom you ask,” Roy said, “the same could probably be said of me.”
Ed ducked his head again, reaching out for a new handhold, sliding his boots along the weathered planks. “Well… whatever. I wasn’t—in love with Ling. Or maybe I was. I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter, because it’s over, and he wasn’t really—there were more important things. Everything was more important. And I said I wasn’t going to talk about this, you manipulative bastard.”
“My apologies,” Roy said. “It’s better than thinking about the incalculable distance we would fall to our deaths, isn’t it?”
“You’re sick.”
“Quite possibly. I’ve been having caffeine withdrawals for so many days now that I can’t really remember what health feels like.”
“That shit’ll kill you,” Ed said.
“Life will kill us both,” Roy said.
“Okay, it’s really not cute to philosophize about that kind of shit when we’re clinging to the side of a fucking mountain.”
Personally, Roy was finding the conversation significantly more treacherous than the task. “Does that mean that I’m cute normally?”
“What? No! For fuck’s sake, you—and, I mean, ‘cute’ would be a ridiculous word for you if I was going to say you were attractive, which I’m not, because you’re not.”
“You’re hurting my feelings,” Roy said. “My very valid, tender feelings.”
“Smirking a lot always seems to make you feel better.”
“I can’t squander any of my high-quality smirks directing them at a cliff; that would be a terrible waste.”
“Have you always been such a dork?”
“I believe I was fairly neutral on the dorkiness scale until I was about six.”
Ed glanced over, and Roy gripped the chain and raised his eyebrows.
“Huh,” Ed said. “It’s a different side of you, that’s all.”
“I find,” Roy said, “that people are rather like dodecahedrons, and it’s really only after you’ve turned them over in your hands that you understand all of their angles.”
Ed shot him another dubious glance. “Or you could just ask people instead of getting your grubby hands all over ’em.”
“No one sees themselves from within quite the way that the rest of the world does from the outside,” Roy said. “If I’d started the discussion saying ‘Ling mentioned that the two of you were together for a good while, and I was wondering how deep it ran,’ you wouldn’t have told me a thing.”
“You’re damn right I wouldn’t’ve,” Ed said. “Wait, so according to your crappy simile, did you just feel me up?”
Good Lord; Roy was going to fall and die. “I—that wasn’t—what I meant—”
“Sick, Mustang,” Ed said, but just before he turned away Roy caught him grinning.
Ed claps and slaps his hands down on a root snaking out from one of the nearest trees—the branches of which promptly explode into tiny shards of wood, the rain of which rouses indignant shouts from the Hua Wei.
“You be brilliant this time,” Ed says, voice raised over the rather uproarious ambient noise. “How should we trap ’em?”
Roy has to focus—has to. Has to stop thinking about Ed’s mouth, Ed’s tongue, Ed’s eyelashes on his cheek. Was he always this stupid, or is it a function of age?
Maybe it’s a function of Ed.
He darts a glance past the edge of Ed’s wall to gauge the position of the enemy—and damn the Hua Wei for having the wits to fan out. He draws a breath, presses his palms together, and flattens them on the ground; his brain fumbles for control of the array for a moment, but then he locks it down. It’s really only redistribution—snatching the soil out from under the bulk of the Hua Wei party and moving it up to reinforce Ed’s barrier instead. He peeks out past the wall again, sees flailing limbs, and ducks back just fast enough that three arrows mark the edge of the dirt instead of lodging in his skull. If those had been guns, he’d be dead. Bless the damned Hua Wei for their old-fashioned armaments.
“Your turn,” he says to Ed.
He earns a sour look.
And then the wall collapses on them.
Roy’s feet had begun to feel extremely large and extremely unsteady on the planks. The planks themselves had started to feel extremely wobbly, and the chains had started to feel loose. He knew it was in his head—most of the worst things were. Maybe if he could produce a brilliant quip about how Ed’s small feet and relative height were an advantage for once, the requisite shouting match would help him forget about the fact that his whole body would splatter on the distant ground like a water balloon if he slipped.
“Well,” he said. “Your lower center of gravit—”
“I will push you to your death,” Ed said, “and say it was an accident.”
“Captain Hawkeye would see you court-martialed.”
“Nah, she’d just take your job. And procrastinate on it less.”
“What flagrant insubordination. I will see you court-martialed.”
“You can’t court-martial me if you’re dead.”
“My restless spirit will return and sit at the end of your bed and wake you once per hour by moving the blankets off of your feet. And that will be your due every night for the remainder of your life.”
“You’re a special kind of crazy, General.”
“That’s rather rich coming from you, Fullmetal,” Roy said, starting to grin despite himself. He wasn’t thinking about the fall anymore; that had to count for something.
“I’m not crazy,” Ed said. “I’m differently sane.”
“Starkers,” Roy said.
Ed snorted. “You’re the one willingly going into government.”
Roy gave him a long look. “I’m not even going to try to describe the kind of madness that makes a twelve-year-old enlist in the army.”
“That was strategy,” Ed said.
Over his shoulder—ought to mention that—Roy could see their dizzying route segueing into a path in the mountains proper, winding through the trees. “Will you take a rain check for my response?”
“Don’t need it,” Ed said. “Once I figured you out, you got pretty predictable.”
Roy blinked. “You’ve figured me out, have you?”
“Yup,” Ed said, and then he hopped from the last crumbling-edged plank to the dirt path and started uphill. “I think we’re almost there. I can’t wait to get back and punch Ling in the kidney.”
“Diplomacy, Fullmetal,” Roy said. He swallowed hard, did not look down, planted his left foot on solid ground, shifted his weight, and carefully released his vise grip on the rusted chain. “We do not sucker-punch our international allies.”
“Except when they really deserve it.”
“Fullmetal.”
“Spoilsport. Hey, that’s what they should call you—the Spoilsport Alchemist.”
Roy lengthened his stride and started closing the gap between them. “I’m not a spoilsport.”
“The Killjoy Alchemist. The Party-Pooper Alchemist. The Stick-Up-His-A—”
“Fullmetal.”
“Hey, is that the shrine thing?”
“‘The shrine thing’,” Roy said faintly—not that Ed would hear, since he was already taking off at a run.
The shrine thing was, Roy had to admit, unequivocally worth the arduous ascent: the wellspring was small but lively, burbling over mossy stones in a tiny waterfall to fill a wide, shallow pool fringed delicately by the trees. The air was thin and cold and crisp up here, and below them the valley sprawled in violet-grays and greens—the whole hubbub of the capital was reduced to a dark spot tucked into a fold of the land, tiny from this height.
“Humbling,” Roy said. “Don’t you th—”
“So, what,” Ed said. “We just have to dab some water on our foreheads, right? Then we can leave?”
“I believe the word is ‘anoint’,” Roy said. Ed was clambering all over the rocks, automail blinding beneath the open sky. Across the pool another dusty path wound down along the other face of the mountain—presumably, Roy thought, Ling had sent them along the most difficult route as a test of their commitment.
“I believe the word is ‘c’mere so I can dab you’,” Ed said.
“That’s… six words.”
“The Wiseass Alchemist, huh?”
“I suppose that’s an improvement.”
Ed snorted. “Oh, right—useless when wet. Maybe you should stop showering; doesn’t that make you vulnerable for, like, three hours every day?”
“If only,” Roy said, “mankind had invented some sort of portable fire-starting device—perhaps a stick of wax that could be placed next to the bath to provide lovely, ethereal light. Or perhaps a more mechanical object; it would be so very efficient for cigarettes.”
He tried, avidly, to think of the cigarettes—to think of Havoc masticating the ends of unlit specimens when he was stressed; to think of the acrid smoke; to think of ash and crumpled butts on the pavement; to think of filtered tar. He tried, avidly, to think of anything other than Ed stretched out in the bathtub at home, head lolling, eyelids low, with candlelight flickering rosily across his skin.
Ed stuck his tongue out at Roy, which went a long way towards shattering the image.
It was funny that Ed seemed surprised when Roy crossed to the pool, knelt, cupped a handful of spring water, and hurled it directly at Ed’s face. Surely he understood that immaturity manifested in uncountable forms, and keeping the office shenanigans to a necessary minimum did not in any way preclude mischief of all kinds inside Roy’s head.
In any case, the splash fight was inevitable. There was a portion of Roy that thought this was extremely unwise—they would be cold on the way back down, for one thing; for another, this was probably more than a bit blasphemous.
The rest of him was too busy laughing to care. And sometimes—just sometimes—he recognized the importance of prioritizing that.
Predictably, Ed was, if anything, more viciously bloodthirsty in a mock battle. Roy’s head was submerged in the sacred spring before he’d had a chance to do much more than slap at the surface. Ed was so strong and so merciless that Roy feared greatly for his dignity, whether or not he knew his life had rarely been safer; a bit of flailing banged his wrist against an automail knee, and from there it was easy to tickle the inside of Ed’s thigh.
It was a pity he was too busy yanking his head out of the water and gulping in deep breaths to focus properly on the wail Ed unleashed, which dissolved into helpless giggles and some fairly dangerous thrashing. Roy took the opportunity of Ed’s breathless indisposition to bat another spray of water at him, and in the sunlight, it glimmered in his hair—
Off-limits. Art behind glass. It was better that way; he couldn’t smear his grimy fingerprints all over it, couldn’t ruin the beauty with a touch, couldn’t breathe poison onto a perfect canvas, couldn’t—
Ed swept his feet out from under him with one perfectly-angled kick, and Roy narrowly avoided slamming his face into the stone. That would have been attractive, not to mention terribly fun to explain to Riza.
“Ow,” he said, cheek to the dirt instead.
“You deserved it,” Ed said, nudging at him with a toe without getting up.
“I think we’re anointed,” Roy said. He pushed himself up onto his hands and knees and considered Ed’s blithe, easy sprawl. “If just a dab would have done the job, I daresay we’re anointed enough to last us several years.”
“Good,” Ed said, stretching, and Roy’s heartstrings pinged, “’cause I’m never coming all the way up this damn mountain again, but I need the luck.”
“Oh?” Roy asked.
With typical unconcerned grace, Ed swung himself off of the ground to sit upright—bringing his face within inches of Roy’s.
“There’s something,” he said, as Roy’s heart stammered helplessly, “that I was thinking of.” He grinned, slowly—tentatively? Was Edward Elric capable of consternation? “Only I could do with a little bit of luck.”
Roy swallowed, cleared his throat, and swallowed again. A man could get into an infinite feedback loop this way. “Precisely… what were you th—”
Ed’s eyes widened, and his head turned so quickly that his ponytail whipped across Roy’s face.
On the other side of the spring stood half a dozen men in robes, one of whom carried a heavy recurve crossbow.
“Are they priests?” Ed muttered out of the corner of his mouth.
Roy’s soul was writhing—to be crawling about in the dirt and leaves, hair soaked from what had obviously been a tussle with a teenager where holy spring water was the weapon of choice, in front of anyone, let alone religious authorities… it was difficult to bear. If he’d sabotaged this entire venture in a single moment of levity—but it wasn’t Ed’s fault that beneath the clean veneer, Roy Mustang was a child—
“I’m not sure,” he said.
“Fat lot of good you are,” Ed said. He hopped to his feet like his spine was made of rubber. “Uh, hi, we—”
There was a harshness to the tone of the leader’s response that had Roy on his feet and edging in front of Ed almost before he knew he’d moved.
“All right, General Diplomat,” Ed said. “Now’s your chance to shine.”
Roy took a deep breath.
He hadn’t had a chance to release it before there was a crossbow aimed between his eyes.
Well, shit.
“All right,” he said in the lowest, most soothing voice he could muster, “let’s all slow down here, shall we?” Surely he could calm them at least enough to negotiate. Surely he could slide his hand into his pocket so slowly that they wouldn’t notice, that they’d stay focused on his face. “We’re only passing through. We’re envoys from Amestris; we were summoned by the emperor himself, as it happe—”
He hadn’t recognized any of their words, but evidently they knew those. Evidently they weren’t fond of them.
“I don’t get how you can suck even when you’re doing something that should be good,” Ed muttered.
“Talent,” Roy said, extending his fingers and touching…
…the bottom of his pocket. Nothing but fabric and lint.
The lighter had fallen out at some point while he and Ed were tumbling around on the ground like a pair of puppies.
“Oh, God,” Roy said.
Ed tensed; the juncture of his automail shoulder whispered audibly. “What?”
“Don’t fight,” Roy said.
“Are you fucking kidding m—”
“Keep your voice down.”
“Keep your fucking head down, you useless sack of—”
“Insolent little br—”
“Who’s little?”
On the upside, their opponents looked rather baffled by the unheralded explosion of the argument.
On the downside, they could not afford to be doing this right now.
On the other downside, the man with the crossbow was leveling it at Roy’s neck—
“Not today,” Ed said, and his right hand swept in front of Roy’s chest, and the crossbow bolt pinged and ricocheted harmlessly off into the dirt. “What is these guys’ probl—”
“Down,” Roy said, grasping a fistful of Ed’s shirt and dropping to the ground. Ed wailed as Roy’s weight brought them both down heavily into the meager shelter offered by the pool’s edge. “There are too many of—”
“There are not!” Ed said, scrabbling to brace his hands beneath him. “And all we have to do is hold them off ’til Hawkeye gets h—”
Roy hauled on Ed’s ankle, and the next bolt whizzed past his protrusive antenna hair. “Do you ever consider that the life you gamble with is the only one you’ve go—”
“Don’t preach at me!” Ed clapped his hands furiously and slapped them to the rim of rocks around the pool; a spike jutted up on the opposite side and scattered robed men, garnering further shouts of amazement.
Roy clapped and touched the surface, accelerating the molecules into a ferocious torrent of steam—not quite hot enough to scald anyone; this sort of alchemy he’d long since fine-tuned. “What would Alphonse th—”
“And don’t bring Al into this!”
“Can you please be civil?” Roy asked, and then he ducked as another swift clap from Ed summoned the familiar blade from his arm—significantly closer to Roy’s face than was comfortable. “That is not civ—”
Ed jumped up and shifted to hurl himself towards the half-dozen adversaries, and Roy caught him by the knapsack. “Damn it, Mustang!”
“Diplomatic catastrophe,” Roy said. “As in, ‘This already is; for the love of all that is beautiful, don’t make it worse’.”
“We’re being fired on!”
Roy gritted his teeth, clapping to gust more steam outward in the hopes of buying them the time to talk this out. “We’re in a very delicate positio—”
“It’s gonna be even more delicate when they shoot us dead!”
“Take your shirt off,” Roy said.
…of course that got Ed’s undivided attention.
…at thirty-one, as a decorated general, Roy should not have been flushing.
“To use as a white flag,” he said.
Ed snarled. “Use your own!”
Roy’s heart was slamming itself against his ribs in sympathy with the rest of him, which wanted to slam his head against a wall. “It’d take too long; I’ve g—”
Ed hissed through his bared teeth. “I knew the sweater was premeditated!”
Why was this happening? What could Roy possibly have done wrong enough to deserve the last-minute collapse of everything he’d striven for with this assignment?
Ah. Perhaps this was Equivalent Exchange’s way of telling him not to fall in love with a subordinate fifteen years his junior.
They needed to get out of there, get out of this; he could worry about the rest later; he could do damage-control—first and foremost they needed to get out from under the hail of crossbow bolts before one of them lost a vital body part.
“Hold that thought,” Roy said. He clapped and touched the ground, concentrating hard to send a ripple through it that would rise into a wave beneath their attackers’ feet. His heart scrabbled upward into his throat as he risked a glance to watch the bodies fall—they weren’t corpses; they were not, but they looked like—
No time for that.
“Up,” he said, catching Ed’s left arm. “Tactical retre—”
“We can’t pin ourselves to a rock face,” Ed said. “Are you insane?”
The automail skimmed past his stomach as Ed spun—Roy thanked his moody lucky stars; friendly-fire evisceration would have been an awful way to die—and clapped to bring a tree crashing down, but the crossbowman dodged, leapt, charged towards—
“You asshole!” Ed shouted, which didn’t slow him in the slightest; another improvised earthquake did, but only barely; the man was unstoppable—
Roy’s instincts failed him once and for all. Some part of his brain was trying to reason, and it reasoned that flame alchemy conferred the power for which he was feared, was the power that sustained him, was the power that had always kept him alive, and he needed it right now. He dropped to his knees on the carpet of needles and started searching for the lighter; it had to be here—
“You dumb fuck!” Ed howled, clapping again; the earth rumbled and roiled; the ground split; Roy spared a glance, but it was too—
—late—
—to avoid the silver-tipped bolt that pressed its cold point to his throat.
Past the disinterested expression of the bowman’s face looming over him, Ed looked livid. He was panting, hair in disarray, face hot with the tangled assortment of emotions, and—and Roy really shouldn’t have been thinking what he was given the situation, but he couldn’t help himself.
Funny how helplessness seemed to be the theme of this whole escapade.
One of the robed men who had extracted himself from the downed tree’s branches approached Ed waving a spear, and Roy thought that he would have been better off kicking his heart down a staircase today; the ride would have been less bumpy, and he’d have had less bruises afterward. The man said… something hostile, and Ed just growled back.
When they started to tie Ed’s hands behind his back—and as he very nearly spit sparks at them in his anger—Roy shifted towards him automatically and received a knee to the jaw for his compassion. That, he thought vaguely as stars blinked and flashed before his eyes, made a rather efficient metaphor for life, didn’t it?
Well, judging by his behavior today, no one would notice anyway if he’d jarred his brain to the point of injury; apparently he wasn’t using much of it in the first place.
Evidently the crossbowman wanted to make sure: a firm blow from a very solid fist landed squarely on his mouth, and he tasted blood as the dark cinched in and the world tilted drunkenly to one side.
He could already tell this was going to be very unpleasant when he woke up.
Of all of the sordid fates in the sordid-fate-filled world, the two Roy has most avidly feared since childhood are drowning and being buried alive. So far he doesn’t like his taste of the latter.
The dirt is everywhere, and it’s heavy—it doesn’t feel like individual grains; it feels like a blanket made of lead, cold and damp on his skin, heavy on his whole body, suffocating, stifling, huge—
Is this what dying feels like? Everything closing in, irrevocable, colder, colder, dark—
He is not dying today. Today, he woke up with Ed’s arm around him; today, Ed kissed him, and then proceeded to demand a better response than ‘no’; he is not concluding today with a pathetically ungraceful demise.
There’s dirt in his nose, in his mouth, in his lungs; every inch of him is coated and covered and smeared, but he summons all of the resolve that’s made him famous and pushes with both arms. If he hits something solid, that’s the ground; if it gives, he’s moving skyward—
The whole world is wet and crumbling—
Oh, air—
He gasps in a breath, chokes on the dirt, coughs, and tries to assess the situation through his watering eyes. There are knives in the dirt—knives with loops, ribbons tied through them; they look quite like the ones May Chang carried, though they’re longer. The Hua Wei have an alkahestrist, an alkahestrist who brought down the—
Ed. Where—
Silver fingers like hooks, like question marks, protruding from the mound; arrows hiss past Roy’s ears, but he has no heart left to care; he’s diving, he’s digging, he’s clawing through t—
The steel-tipped bolt slams into his shoulder, and it’s deep—the momentum throws him backwards, tips his whole weight and hurls him along its trajectory, away from the too-small patch of pale skin that he’d uncovered.
The panic disintegrates, and all that remains is anger. This has gone on too long, and the Hua Wei fight like guerrillas, sniping from the trees. Now they’ve aimed for his throat while he was trying to rescue a comrade. He needs to get back to Ed. This is wrong. This is over.
Steel fingers glimmer in the dirt, and the flint drags in his pocket. An arrow misses; he has bet his life on the quickness of his fingers a hundred-thousand times, and this time, like so many others, the gamble pays.
He strikes the flint on Ed’s hand and claps his hands—a tree’s alight; the man perched in it screams, scrabbles; Roy can’t care.
He claps again, snatching a spark from the first fire and channeling it along a dozen narrow lines—all of the bows ignite; the fools made them from wood and twine; they drop them, the skin of their hands bubbling with the heat.
He claps again, slinging the oxygen onward—a ring of flame surges upward around the stragglers; pine needles make excellent kindling, and the red roars high.
And again—the forest floor is a living orange sea, all rippling waves and undulating heat—
There’s something throbbing in his head, and bile is rising in his throat, but there’s no time for that. He plunges both hands deep into the soil—finds Ed’s head and cups it, finds his shoulder and grips tight. He pulls.
Ed’s still, so still, too still, but Roy can feel his heartbeat, and Ed wouldn’t go down this easy; he’d step up to the Gate and refuse.
Roy shakes him. Roy strokes his tangled hair off of his forehead, a little too fast, a little too vigorously; it probably hurts; he’s sorry, he’s sorry, he’s—
Ed’s heart is still beating—why won’t he—?
The thick, oily black smoke billows around them, and a part of Roy that’s attached to normalcy by a scrap of thread observes the terrible heat. A part of him that lives in a cell in the lowest, darkest region of his stomach, which spends its days watching the shadows on the wall and rocking back and forth, pricks its ears and sniffs the air and grins.
Ed’s spine shudders, and he jerks forward in Roy’s arms as he wheezes in a breath so deep it must be bigger than his lungs, a breath so ragged it must tear them open—
His eyelids snap up, and his eyes light, and he writhes against Roy’s grip and pants, hands curling around Roy’s forearms, tightening until bruises bloom.
“Wh—” he chokes out.
Roy wants to kiss him again, pour his own breath into Ed’s chest and hold him safe—
Ed coughs, hacks, turns his head, spits mud, and groans. His eyes narrow as his gaze fixes on Roy’s shoulder.
“You just—” He spits again. Sometimes he’s so adorable it hurts. “—like getting stuck fulla arrows? Some kind’f masochist, I swe…” He starts to roll his eyes and stops.
His left hand jumps to Roy’s collar, clenching, dragging—
“Put it out,” he says. “No fucking fire, Mustang—”
Roy hikes the unevenly-weighted body up against his chest, which makes Ed yelp; hands freed, he presses his palms together and kills the oxygen in the thick air around them; the flames sink down and dwindle and die.
Their faces are inches apart; Ed fisted both hands in Roy’s shirt. The soft fingers of the left stumble up the nape of his neck and curl into his hair as Ed looks at the charred chaos around them.
“Well, that was—” He coughs up a little more dirt. “—craptastic.”
“Agreed,” Roy says. There’s dirt in Ed’s eyelashes, dirt smeared dark in the sweat on his forehead.
Ed tugs gently at Roy’s hair and then stands, knees quavering just once. “You—you’re… Holy shit, Roy.”
“I know,” Roy says.
“You leveled—how many of them—you’re—”
“A human weapon,” Roy says.
“You have to get to the top,” Ed says, “so that you don’t have to report to anyone. Is that it? Because nobody—because even you can’t control this once you let it out. And you don’t trust anybody else. Because nobody should have the power to order you to do this.”
“That’s right,” Roy says.
Corpses around him—lives he cut short to save himself, bodies strewn everywhere, human beings lying where they fell. He swore this would never happen again.
Ed drops to his knees again in the dirt and looks into Roy’s eyes. The smoke drifts around him like a halo.
“You’re fucking crazy,” Ed says. He folds his left hand into a fist and thumps it gently over Roy’s heart. “I’m in. I’m in for the long haul.”
“I appreciate that,” Roy says.
“Somebody’s got to kick your ass all the time,” Ed says. “Somebody’s got to protect people from you, and somebody’s got to protect you from yourself.”
“You keep me honest,” Roy says.
Ed flattens his hand against Roy’s chest, and his eyes heat. “Then it’s in your best damn interests to have me around, isn’t it?”
“That’s…” Roy swallows, grittily. “That’s a rather convincing point.”
Ed sighs, coughs, and leans forward to drop his head down on Roy’s shoulder, face turned in against his neck. “Dumbass,” he says.
“That’s starting to sound like a pet name,” Roy says.
“Eew,” Ed says.
As it turned out, waking a few spare moments later, en route to the tower with his split lip scabbing over and his head pounding like an overzealous construction crew, was one of the single least-pleasant things he’d ever experienced. So at least he was right about that.
“All right,” Roy says softly when he’s counted out a full thirty seconds of holding Ed so tightly that it must be slightly painful. “Up we go.” His knees don’t want to support him; his legs don’t want to stand; his arms don’t want to unwind. There are still a few pine needles smoldering; he should put them out before the whole forest goes up in flames. Instead he lifts Ed’s awkward-wonderful, uneven weight with him as he forces himself to get to his feet.
Ed coughs and twists both hands into Roy’s sweater a little more. “Up you go. Straight to the top. And then smirking’ll become a mandatory part of the uniform.”
“Something like that,” Roy says. He hesitates, touches Ed’s hair, starts to count the dead and stops when his stomach lurches hard.
Ed looks grimly at the nearest smoldering form, sighs heavily, presses his lips together, and buries his face in Roy’s chest again, smearing mud everywhere. The list of things Roy used to dislike that Ed makes attractive is expanding at a staggering rate.
“I’m not letting go until you make me,” Ed says.
Roy takes a deep breath. “I think you overestimate my strength.”
Ed scowls upward. “I don’t think you have any idea how fucking much you are.” He releases one fistful of sweater to prod Roy’s chest, none too gently. “How fucking important you are, and how much you affect people. You’re—don’t let this go to your head, okay, dumbass, but you’re a big damn deal. You matter. A lot. And—and you matter a lot to me.”
“I must be dreaming,” Roy says. “That sounded like it came from the extended family of a compliment.”
Ed smacks his chest—vigorously, but with the left hand, so at least Roy’s not in any immediate danger of bodily harm. “Damn it, Roy, I was trying t—”
“I know what you were trying to do,” Roy says, touching his hair, smoothing it back from his face. “I didn’t mean to be… sardonic. It’s just that I don’t… feel worthy of praise, or of approval. Certainly not from you.”
Ed blinks at him. “Who the fuck are you, and what’ve you done with Colonel Bastard?”
“Brigadier General Bastard,” Roy says.
“Oh, good, there he is.”
“You’re principled,” Roy says, “in a way that I have never been and can never hope to be—look around you, Edward. Being the way you are takes a tremendous amount of courage, which I don’t have. I don’t think you really understand how much I admire you.”
“Sure,” Ed says.
“You,” Roy says, laying a sooty finger under his chin and tipping his face upward, “are proof that fantastic things come in marginally-smaller-than-average packages.”
Ed pauses. “Let’s… not say the word ‘package’ until I can use it as a segue.”
And Roy stares at his partner, tongue-tied, flattered, wrong-footed and off-guard, because everything is backwards with Ed.
Backwards has never been so stunning.
Ed’s eyebrows draw together, and his thin smile softens into something thoughtful. “I mean, I think—I kind of have to think—that a person can do stuff that’s really wrong—” His eyes dart sideways. “—and still be… good, you know? Intentions matter—they have to matter. And humanity is about picking yourself up off the ground every time you go down, which I figure applies to when you put yourself down, too. You’re really shit about that. You hold yourself to a different standard than you hold other people, and you’re a much harsher critic when it comes to what you’ve done—or haven’t done, or should’ve done and can’t change now anyway. And you just can’t live like that, dumbass. You can’t keep trying to pick up the pieces forever. At some point you just have to walk away, and it’s where you walk to that makes up the difference.”
“You committed your entire life to recovering Alphonse’s body,” Roy says. “Isn’t that a similar sort of repentance?”
“Yes and no,” Ed says—which is characteristically helpful. “That was such a concrete thing. And it’s done now—it’s just… over. I still wake up in the morning and… But yours isn’t a task; it’s a future. You see what I mean? You’ve built your whole world and balanced all of your self-worth on making up for something you’ve forgiven other people for. You’ve based everything on this endless penitence game. You’re going to kill yourself trying to live like that.” His mouth twists, and the corners twitch upward. “Or worse, you’ll make yourself go gray.”
Roy’s stomach does a strange, unsteady thing; they are standing in a field of ruin he dealt with his own hands, and Ed is opening his heart and rooting through it right here, right now. “I categorically will not.”
Ed grins broadly, reaches up, and smoothes his thumbs through the hair at Roy’s temples. “You already are.”
“Shush,” Roy says.
“Make me,” Ed says, and that glint in his eye is just—
Roy swallows and hesitates. “Am I to take it that my options are… firstly, deeming our connection too dangerous and refusing to pursue it, thereby hurting you a great deal, incurring your unending wrath, presumably receiving a metal fist to the face, and having Alphonse sneak crushed insects into my every meal for the rest of my li—”
“Spiders,” Ed says; his voice comes out raspy, and he clears his throat. “Spiders aren’t insects, and it’d be spiders. Guarantee it.”
“Ah,” Roy says. “Of course. I… secondly, risking everything that both of us have cobbled together in the hopes that you and I will be spectacularly beautiful instead of mutually destructive.”
Ed’s eyes narrow where they’re trained immovably on Roy’s face.
“It’s never going to be easy,” Roy says—helplessly, pleading; when Ed’s face closes off like this it feels like his chest is caving in. Surely Ed understands. He has to. He has to have thought… “It’s never going to be normal. It’s never going to be free. We—both want so much, Edward, but I don’t know how to deal with getting what I want, and—and you’re right. You’re right about all of it, all of the psychology, all of the… I wake up every morning with blood on my hands, Ed. I wake up every morning, and I am guilty; I am already convicted; and I push past it because I have to survive if I’m ever going to fix a damn thing, but I don’t… I never will. I’m never going to be all right—not really.” He spreads his arms to the spread of ash and bodies—some of them writhing, some of them smoking, some of them still. “I’m never going to be anything other than this.”
Ed’s eyes are hard, and his voice is steady, and his right hand curls slowly in Roy’s sweater front.
“I know that, dumbass,” he says. “And I’m still here.”
Roy swallows. His heart beats, once, twice, three times.
“That’s is the point, though, isn’t it?” Ed asks. “The point is finding somebody who knows everything you’ve done—all the worst shit, all the terrible shit that made you into who you are—and still wants you closer. I mean, look at us: we’re two torn up, fucked-up, broken sinner-soldiers. And—and we get that. We get each other. We get the ways it messes with your head, and—like, I’m not going to take it personally if I startle you in a dark hallway and almost get my ass incinerated; I get that. And with this, with the whole Promised Day, with everybody we lost and everything we went through—we dragged our asses through that hell together. Common suffering. That means something. We—grew together, kind of, going through all that shit and being on the same team and trusting each other even though we both know what we are. You owe it to both of us to give this a chance.”
Roy takes a breath, takes another, breathes in smoke and Ed. “I am a waste of your time,” he says. “I will live dreading the day you discover that.”
“You suck,” Ed says, voice curiously devoid of venom. “You come on like this gallant rake bastard straight out of one of Al’s crappy paperback novels, and then when you’ve got something you actually want in your hands you keep trying to throw it away before you can drop it.” Ed hits him with the right hand this time—still avoiding his wounded shoulder, but Roy’s not sure how long that mercy will last. “In a fucking battle, you’re the bravest son of a bitch I have ever seen, but with this you’re a fucking coward.”
“Circumspection and cowardice are not the s—”
“Don’t you fucking talk in circles,” Ed says. “I’ve had about enough of circles in my life. Give me a goddamn answer, Mustang.”
Roy breathes a few times more, thinking, as he does, what he used to think in Ishval, and after, and always—that as long as he’s breathing, there’s hope.
What would Hughes say? If Maes Hughes could see him standing here, bruised and bleeding and frankly quite filthy, staring into Edward Elric’s precious-metal eyes, what cavalierly critical advice would he offer?
It’s a stupid rhetorical question. Roy knows what Hughes would say. Roy has known it from the beginning.
Follow your heart, you great, big idiot.
As if it really is that simple—as if it can be, if they try hard enough.
Roy leans forward, leans down, and presses his lips to Ed’s forehead—soot and salt, smooth warmth, sheer fucking perfection.
“Fullmetal,” he says as he draws back, as the beautiful boy’s smoldering eyes scour his face, “I have a top-secret assignment for you that will be carried out almost entirely in private.”
Ed blinks.
Then he grins.
“Smug bastard,” he says. “That’s more fuckin’ like it. Assignment accepted, General.”
And it feels like Roy’s blood is kerosene, and Ed’s proximity strikes sparks in his stomach. It feels like Roy is young and volatile and dangerous and alive.
So Roy kisses him. Hard.
For once, Ed’s got it backwards. The strong thing, the brave thing, the wise thing to do would be for Roy to resist this—to fight it, to forsake it, to deny himself the towering joy in order to protect the both of them. This is weakness. This is giving in.
But God, Roy wouldn’t trade it for all of the power in the universe.
“Okay,” Ed says, breathing lightly as he draws away. “So—I—” He looks around them, pales a little, stands up straighter, raises his right forearm, and coughs into his sleeve. “What’s the Xingese funeral tradition like? I mean, we’re—we’re sort of—halfway between burial and c-cremation right now. No, wait, Ling said they were taking Fu back so they could…”
For a moment, he’s eleven, twelve, fifteen, hacked at and crushed down and overwhelmed by the knowledge that the list of losses will just keep growing, will always keep growing; that the names will be printed and the headstones engraved; that even if he dances out of the shadow of mortality daily, not everyone he loves will be so lucky. For a moment, the prospect that, even after everything he’s done, even after the miracles he’s crafted and the magic he’s made, he is ultimately powerless—for a moment, the revelation makes his shoulders drop. For a moment, the inevitability cuts him to the core.
But then the fire rekindles in his eyes. Ed’s not much of a soldier, but he’s always been a warrior, and he will fight past his fears until the day that he dies.
“Fuck it,” he says. He claps, kneels, presses his hands to the extraordinarily tortured ground—the broken wall, the arcing bridge, and the pit Roy made all roil and resolve into a series of neat, evenly rectangular graves. A faint sheen of sweat stands out on Ed’s forehead by the time he finishes. What Roy wouldn’t give for that kind of raw, incalculable brilliance; for that kind of command of it; for that kind of control—
“You don’t have to do this,” he says. “Help me, I mean. This was my doing.”
“It was self-defense,” Ed says. “In defense of both of us.”
“All the same—”
“Just shut up,” Ed says, voice catching.
And Roy… is walking the crumbling cliff’s edge of madness, but that’s long since become par for the course. “Are you sure you want our first date to be burying bodies?”
Ed chokes, but a genuine smile trembles its way onto his lips. “You’re fucked-up, Roy. And deaf. I told you I was in, and I’m in.”
Roy wonders how long he will have to wait to say I love you more than I can stand most days. The last thing he wants to do is to make Ed think he’s being pressured—he knows very well what happens when Ed feels trapped.
He shuts his mouth and cages I don’t deserve you behind his teeth. Ed’s wrong. Roy is selfish, needy, sad; Roy will take this if it’s offered, whether or not that’s just.
He crosses to the nearest of the corpses and wedges his hands underneath the torso to raise it off the ground. Ed takes the ankles; crisped skin peels under Roy’s hands—it flakes off and leaves him with wet muscle, slippery and difficult to grip. He swallows the urge to gag. This should not be easy. This should never be easy. The day this is easy is the day that he ceases to call himself a human being.
They don’t speak. Ed looks sick at first, and Roy’s stomach tightens as he watches the color leach from the boy’s face. But then Ed just looks… tired. Resigned. And he’s looking at Roy like he’s waiting for something, and they lift bodies, and Roy finds the entirely quotidian ache in his back very disorienting. He and the young man he loves are burying his victims, but as far as his spine is concerned it’s quite like another day of sprawling in the chair in his office. Life is a well of nonsense sometimes. Most times, perhaps.
A few of the Hua Wei were spared, one way or another. Roy wasn’t particularly cautious at the time, and he’s too numb now to separate the threads of relief from the strings of weary disappointment. They’re still dangerous if they’re not dead; more importantly, they’ll carry the weight of their hatred of him off into the world again. It’s bizarre that even not killing has a cost.
“C’mon,” Ed says, hauling one of the survivors through the dirt to prop him up against a tree, ignoring the wails of pain. “Walk it off, champ. Think twice before you attack alchemists next time.”
Roy drags one who’s unconscious but breathing over to lay by his colleague. It’s remarkable how Ed never seems to run out of energy; Roy feels like his muscles are eroding, his knees are gelatin, his spine is telescoping, and his heart is made of lead. It warms, though, as he watches Ed gather up that deservedly famous resolve, squaring his shoulders, setting his jaw, shouldering the weight of so much more than a teenager should have to bear. The lead warms—such a conductive metal, and so very, very soft…
All the same, the adrenaline is fading, and Roy is fast regaining the capacity to think. Ordinarily that would be a good thing, but in this case—what in the hell are they meant to do? He has to think of something to say, of the perfect thing to say, of a way to explain this that doesn’t involve the words “I murdered several of your countrymen to protect the young man before you whom I happen to be in love with”, of a way to defuse one of the largest and least stable powder kegs of his extremely explosive career.
If he fails, the consequences… don’t bear contemplation.
He can’t fail.
Ed. He’ll have to use Ed. Putting it in so many words even in his head, even with the rather pertinent distraction of a semi-conscious, half-scalded human being in his arms, makes his guts writhe. He’ll have to use Ed. That’s nothing new, is it? It’s a pity Ed’s red coat didn’t have tails; it was only metaphorically that he could ride the fame. He’s still cashing in the wealth of rewards he gambled both of their lives for—and Alphonse’s, and Riza’s. Roy built towers on Ed’s foundation: everything Ed touched turned to sharp-edged amber; Roy Mustang would still be an upstart colonel in the East if he hadn’t swaggered into Central City with his arms full of gold. He bartered with it, traded in it, lined pockets, stopped throats, hammered out stars and fixed them to his own shoulders—and now he’s going to use Ed again. He always thinks Just this one last time, and usually even he believes it.
Let this be the last one. Ling thinks Ed can do no wrong, and Roy can twist the words into all the right shapes, stuff up all the cracks with them, polish them to a shine—
He hears the voices before he hears the footsteps—voices speaking in Amestrian.
This encounter misses the top five occasions on which Roy was gladdest to meet Riza’s eyes, but very narrowly. The list of things he loves about Riza Hawkeye is too long to consider enumerating, but at this particular moment his favorite aspect of her personality is the way she assesses a situation, comprehends it, and immediately takes action. Riza gets shit done like no one else he’s ever met. Honestly, she’d make a better Führer than he would.
Than he will. Than he has to.
She doesn’t give him a hug, which would look unprofessional in front of the contingent of Xingese soldiers at her heels, but she does cross the crunching needles to clutch his arm, which means the same thing.
“This isn’t what it looks like,” Ed says loudly. “I mean—it is, but the reasons are different than you think. They kidnapped us and then chased us down when we escaped and tried to kill us. On top of which they shot Roy a bunch of times.”
Riza’s right eyebrow quirks at the usage of his first name. “I was going to ask, sir—”
“I’m fine,” Roy says, which is a necessary lie to save face in front of the Xingese soldiers, who don’t seem to have made up their minds about the scene before them. Except perhaps he should have played up the injuries; made it clear his judgment was impaired when he tacked a few more murders onto his list—
Ed has already moved on to looking hopefully at Riza’s pack. “Did you guys bring food?”
Riza opens the bag, removes two firearms and a case of ammunition, and passes it to him; with that done, she turns back to Roy. “We’re only a few miles from the capitol now—you led us on quite a sightseeing tour.”
Ed’s mouth is full of some sort of oat bran, which does not even remotely deter him from trying to speak. “Where’ff Al?”
“The emperor prevailed upon his better judgment,” Riza says, “and convinced him to direct the operation from safety given that his physical condition and his unfamiliarity with the terrain would have made him something of a liability.”
Ed blinks. He chews, slowly and with a touch of uncertainty. Crumbs escape his lips, and Roy wants to kiss him, mouth full of oats and all.
“She means,” Roy says at Ed’s enduring bewilderment, “that Ling very nearly had to tie your brother down while convincing him that he would endanger the rescue in order to keep him from rushing out to find you.”
“That’s correct,” Riza says.
Ed swallows his tremendous mouthful and then grins.
Riza turns back to the dozen Xingese soldiers still watching them closely. “Gentlemen,” she says, “half of you are going to remain here. The other half will accompany us to the capitol, and then we will escort a priest back to this spot to lay these individuals to rest. Please choose among yourselves who will belong to each party.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Roy says as he quickly loses the thread of the murmuring in Xingese.
“Of course, sir,” Riza says. She takes her bag back from Ed and thrusts it at him. “Now eat something.”
“Yes, Captain,” Roy says.
Ed snickers until Roy shoves another oat bar into the boy’s fat mouth.
Roy thinks his feet may never recover from this excursion. If nothing else, he hopes the Xingese people will take the near destruction of a pair of fairly important appendages as a sign of good faith. He sacrificed his soles in Xing. Good ring to that. He will compose a stirring monologue about heels and toes and fortitude and how it all ties back in to his foreign policy plans. He will hold them rapt. He will sock it to them. He will be a shoe-in for Führer. They will give an inch, and he will take several feet to replace these uselessly damaged ones he has.
“Just relax, General,” May Chang says. “It won’t take hold if you keep squirming.”
“I’m sorry,” Roy says. “I was thinking.”
May gives him a look like he is a stubborn five-year-old with icing on his face, and she’s extremely glad she has her precious prince Alphonse to restore her faith in Amestrians.
Roy attempts to look as dignified as humanly possible when one is sitting in a wicker chair with one’s bare and much-abused feet settled atop a specially-designed alkahestric array. He’s flattered that May came so far to see them (or at least to see Alphonse) before they left, and he sincerely appreciates that she’s willing to try to heal his various injuries—he does.
It’s just that there is a great deal to think about. And some of it lends itself to squirming a bit.
No, not to squirming; to… shifting irregularly. Roy Mustang does not squirm.
“Thank you for taking the time to treat me,” Roy says, attempting to resemble a statue. “I hope this goes without saying, but I would be more than happy to sponsor you if you ever feel inclined to make another trip to Amestris.”
“I know,” May says cheerfully. “That’s how you and… Alphonse’s brother and other alchemists think, isn’t it? I helped you, so you owe me, right?”
“It’s that simple in Ed’s mind,” Roy says, “but nowhere else. Alchemy works in finite quantities; life doesn’t. I like you, Miss Chang, and I think your presence in Amestris had a positive effect. My appreciation for your general assistance with our troubles was reinforced by the kindnesses you rendered more specifically to me—that you saved Captain Hawkeye’s life, for instance, is a debt I could never concretely repay if I was operating according to the principles of equivalent exchange. No one could measure the effects on the world that you facilitated by preventing Riza Hawkeye from dying that day. And who knows where we would be if you hadn’t been involved in the endeavor to recover Scar’s brothers notes, if you hadn’t helped Alphonse to return Edward’s arm…? I can’t begin to offer you a quid pro quo reward for all of those things and all of their consequences. What I can offer you—and what I am offering—is to give you anything within my power should you ever so much as ask.”
May eyes him. The little panda pops up from nowhere to appear over her shoulder and glare at him as well, which almost sends Roy into cardiac arrest.
“You’re very charming, Mr. Mustang,” May says, “but you’re way too old for me. I need someone I can start a family with, you know.”
Roy wonders if almost having two heart attacks in ten seconds sets a record in the field of medicine. “I didn’t mean—well, thank you, but that is not even remotely what I was trying to…” He takes a deep breath and starts over. “Alphonse is going to help me to arrange an exchange program for Xingese students to attend Central University. We would be honored if you would consider being one of our scholarship students.”
May’s eyes widen. The panda makes a quizzical noise. “You mean… go to university… with Alphonse?”
Ed is going to kill him. He clears his throat. “In a… sense, ye—”
May leaps to her feet shrieking and hurls her five knives towards his feet. Roy narrowly evades a third heart attack, but they find their marks on the circumference of the alkahestry circle, and May, still cooing, kneels to touch the lines and light them blue.
“We’re still working out the details, of course,” Roy says in his single smoothest voice.
May doesn’t seem to hear him over the buzz of the alkahestry and her own delighted sighs.
Roy gives up; he’s more interested in the intensity with which his feet are tingling regardless. The blue snaps and jackknifes like lightning, licking at his toes, at the tendons, swimming around his ankles. It zings right down to the hair follicles, hisses through the sore spots, courses up into his veins and throbs—but it’s cool, soft in its mildness, soothing, sweet.
The light recedes, and Roy sucks in a breath. Tentatively he raises one foot, finds it unmarred; lifts the other, marvels.
“Wow,” he says, slightly stupidly.
They really do need this. The things hospitals could do with this sort of power…
“Right,” May says. “The wounds from the crossbow bolts are going to scar—there’s nothing I can do about that, because they’ve already taken shape. Alkahestry can clean it and knit the skin back over it faster so that you don’t get infected, but they’re not new enough to heal completely.” She and the panda both look distressed. “I’m sorry, General Mustang. They’re going to be kind of… icky.” She blinks up at him. “I, um. Need you to take your shirt off.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “Don’t tell Alphonse.”
Roy smiles thinly as he undoes the buttons. “I won’t breathe a word. And it’s really all right about the scars—wait ’til you see my prizewinner.”
The panda actually topples off of her shoulder when he flicks his shirt aside.
Roy is nursing some tea, burning some incense, and reviewing the section in his Xingese etiquette book on traditions for formal gratitude when the door to his quarters bangs open.
Roy saw the silhouette just before Ed reached for the door handle. He blows gently on the surface of his tea without looking up—there is little in this world so satisfying as goading Ed to the verge of incandescent rage.
“Okay,” Ed says, “explain to me why May Chang thinks she and Al are gonna be college roommates and have lots of study parties, emphasis definitely not mine. And explain fuckin’ fast.”
Roy sips demurely and then gazes up at Ed from where he’s sitting cross-legged on the floor. This is an unusual angle for the pair of them, and Roy finds that he likes it. Ed’s stunning from any side, obviously, but the way his hair frames his face when he slants his glare downward… “I always thought that perhaps I’d missed my true calling as a wedding planner.”
After Ed has been speechless for a full five seconds, Roy sips the tea again and turns the page.
“That was a joke, Fullmetal,” he says.
“You have a lousy fucking sense of humor, Mustang,” Ed says, kicking the door shut and folding his arms. “What the fuck is May—”
“I didn’t make any promises,” Roy says, “and I said nothing your brother hadn’t given me permission to say. It’s an idea he and I have been discussing for a while—that’s all. The rather aggressive young Miss Chang would be one of many students Alphonse would assist and oversee.”
Ed grumbles indistinguishably and flops down on the floor across from Roy—in typical style, when Ed flops down, he does so thoroughly; he’s sprawled out on his stomach on the floor and looking moodily at the upside-down pages of the book in the time it takes Roy to blink.
“Well?” Ed says.
Roy sets down his tea. “Well.”
Ed wedges a fingernail under the corner of one of the pages, right arm folded beneath his chest. His eyes flick up to Roy and then back to the text. “Look, Mustang, I’m not gonna stand on the other side of your desk and click my heels and pretend like I haven’t seen you naked. Or like we didn’t fucking snuggle for half the night, or like we haven’t fucking made out a couple times.”
Roy’s heart is pounding in his ears again, a frenetic bass drum beat. Ed’s eyelashes dip low, and he fingers the edge of the book cover. Roy finds his voice and tries to tune out the percussion. “I don’t intend to deny this.”
Ed’s fingers curl. “Good intentions don’t do much for me nowadays.”
Roy tests his lungs and finds them functional. “Edward, we…”
Ed’s hand clenches into a fist, and his chin tilts lower; his hair hides his eyes. “Just don’t fucking hedge with me. I’m not one of your politicians, and I’m not a kid anymore.”
“I know,” Roy says softly. “We couldn’t be—public. Not while you report to me.”
Ed’s voice is low. “That’d look pretty bad for your campaign, wouldn’t it?”
Roy is nothing if not a masochist. Even Ed’s bludgeons fall like blessings. “That’s not what I mean.”
Ed huffs out a breath. “Oh, yeah. You’d get court-martialed. That’d set your procrastinating back a bit.”
It’s starting to sting now, even over the hum of panic held at bay. “That’s not what I mean, Edward.”
Ed’s head jerks up sharply, and his narrowed eyes fix on Roy like bayonet blades. “Then what the fuck do you—”
“You deserve better,” Roy says. “You deserve better than me in the first place, and you damn well deserve better than the half of myself that I can give to you in private. You have spent your entire life compromising in ways most of us can’t even begin to understand, and I can’t ask you to settle for what little I am behind closed doors. I can’t ask you to keep yourself a secret again—not now, not when you’re finally free, not when I want the whole fucking world to know I’d die for you. I want so much of you; I want everything; I don’t trust myself to be able to hold it in. You have an incredible life ahead of you, and it would be indescribably selfish to ask you to waste any of it on a shadow of a courtship with me.”
Ed’s eyes widen, deepen, soften; he bites down on his bottom lip and searches Roy’s face for clues. Oh, God, is he really waiting for a punchline after that?
“I don’t need—courtship,” he says slowly. “I’m not one of your stupid swooning girls.”
“Courtship isn’t just roses and restaurants, Ed,” Roy says. “It’s rearranging your life to prioritize another person, and it’s important, because it demonstrates how important that person is to you.”
“I’m not—”
“You are.”
Ed scowls. “Well—whatever. It can be ‘important’ without being necessary, okay? I don’t need all the frills and ribbons and crap; I just want—you, dumbass.”
“I always suspected you were crazy,” Roy says.
“Oh, shut up.” Ed levers his arms up, rests his chin on his left hand, and taps the fingers of the right on the edge of the book. He watches Roy like he expects the skin to peel away and reveal something terrible. “I don’t—care if it’s not perfect. Or if it’s a secret. Or if it doesn’t… I’m not asking for forever, okay? And I saved your ass, like, six times in the last week, so it’s equivalent fucking exchange that you shut your giant mouth and let us try, Roy.”
Roy pauses.
“Giant?” he says after a moment of composing his voice.
“Fucking colossal,” Ed says. “You could talk for days and not run out of bullsh—”
“Implying that your own is small?” Roy asks.
Ed stares.
Then he attempts to hit Roy’s arm with his metal hand, but he’s laughing so hard he’s having difficulty finding his target. “I said shut it, you lousy bastard—”
For all of the protests, however, he kisses Roy shamelessly open-mouthed. Deft automail fingers sweep the book out of the way, but the teacup is not so lucky. Roy would rue the warm pool spreading on the floor if he wasn’t so preoccupied with absolute elation.
And it’s—he hadn’t been able to savor the first kiss, or the second, but this…
This is no more reservations, no more apprehension, no more holding back. This is Roy’s whole body thrilling—toes curling, head spinning, spine jolting, heart rattling hard against his ribs. This is a stockpile of good Xingese firecrackers lit and sparking in his stomach, because Ed wants this—wants him, wants—knows what he wants—oh, God—
This is Ed pushing him back onto his elbows; this is Ed climbing over him, straddling his hips, gripping his shirtfront, whimpering into his mouth.
Roy forces his short-circuiting brain to focus on breathing. It would be a crying shame to pass out when he’s finally found something that feels so good all of his vital systems have gone haywire.
He pulls back just far enough to drag in a deep breath that smells and tastes like Ed, like sun and sweat and steel; he cracks his eyes open and watches Ed’s eyelids flicker, watches Ed lick his lips, watches Ed arch his back and toss his head to whip his hair out of his face.
The grin starts behind Roy’s breastbone and just grows. It builds, it swells, it bursts and doesn’t dissipate; it’s warm. It’s waves of heat from the fireplace; it’s embers in the night sky as the pyrotechnics bloom.
“I don’t get you,” Ed says, tilting a bright smile back at him, right hand tightening on his collar, left nudging scraped knuckles at his cheek. “You try so fucking hard to be unhappy sometimes.”
“You used to do the same thing,” Roy says. He flattens his hand on Ed’s chest, because it’s there, and he can.
“Yeah,” Ed says. “And then I turned sixteen.”
Roy sticks his tongue out at Ed—who stares for a moment and then laughs, surprised and delighted and far, far too beautiful.
Roy curls a hand around the back of his neck and drags him down into another kiss, and then another; he tries to think cold-shower thoughts even as he rises up into Ed’s radiance; he doesn’t want their first chance at normalcy to get out of hand.
Ed draws back a little, grins, and bites his swollen red lip. Everything in Roy is straining towards him, wanting; every bone, every muscle, every drop of blood warms to him, craving his touch.
“Path of least resistance,” Ed says. “You and me, I mean. You letting yourself be fucking happy about you and me. ’Cause I’m gonna fight you for this, and I’m gonna win. Whether it’s sooner or later is up to you.”
“Sooner,” Roy says, curling his fingers into the soft, silken hair at the back of Ed’s neck and pulling him back down. He dreamed this—sleeping and waking, in bed, at his desk, in meetings, in the shower, in the car as the streetlamps blurred to the color of Ed’s eyes in shadow. He imagined Ed’s nose grazing his cheek, Ed’s tongue in his mouth, Ed’s palm along his jaw, Ed’s eyelashes flicking against his skin. He fantasized vividly in the hopes that reality would pale in comparison, but it turns out he was committing the cardinal sin of underestimating Ed.
He’s still committing it, up until the point at which Ed shifts to press the flesh knee hard and unambiguously between Roy’s legs, and Roy’s breath catches in his throat.
He fumbles to catch Ed’s shoulders, grasp them, and push just forcefully enough to pry them apart.
The breath that stuck takes the opportunity to stumble out of his throat in a half-choked gasp, and watching the way that the sound summons blood to Ed’s cheeks only makes it worse—makes it all worse, the wanting, the desperation, the struggle to keep his head on straight.
“Not now,” Roy manages.
Ed looks positively offended and then slightly hurt, and Roy’s heart stops staggering drunkenly around in his ribcage long enough to squeeze.
“What the fuck do you mean, not now?” Ed asks. He jerks his hips against Roy’s, and the contact makes Roy’s heartrate skyrocket again as his body leaps to respond in kind. “We’re both fuckin’ ready, I don’t see—”
“We,” Roy says, tussling with the quaver in his voice, “are approaching the conclusion of a diplomatic visit. This room has been very courteously lent to me, its walls are thin, and its door does not have a lock.”
Ed looks… bereft. Shit. Roy really is too old for this; he’s going to have a heart condition after two weeks of Ed.
“It’s not that I don’t want to,” Roy says, reaching up and tugging gently at his hair. “It’s—the opposite, really. I honestly don’t know that I’d survive if we were interrupted in the middle and had to stop.”
Ed stares down at him for a long, long moment. Then Ed quirks a smile, and then Ed rolls his much-too-tantalizing eyes and sprawls out, settling his body over Roy’s. The automail is somewhat heavier even than Roy expected—and he’d thought about it in some detail; should he still be ashamed to admit as much?—but on the whole Ed’s weight is… perfect. It’s pleasant. It’s warm and concrete and grounding. Their legs are tangled; it’s just a breath away from painful to be throbbing into one another’s thighs. Their hearts prod at each other through their chests, and Ed’s tucked his head neatly up under Roy’s chin, and as he blows out a faintly exasperated sigh, the humid air flutters over Roy’s throat and past his ear.
“Fine,” he says. “Figures you’re already a fucking tease. Just doomed us both to having to ride horses through the desert all horny and shit.”
“Some of us,” Roy says delicately, “have a bit of practice.”
He can feel Ed’s face making way for the grin. “Perv.”
“I’m just getting started,” Roy says, running his fingers through Ed’s ponytail; this, too is even more wonderful than he dreamed—
“I don’t—” Ed swallows, fidgets, twists his automail fingers into Roy’s shirt again. How can this already be so comfortable? “—care. I don’t care, I don’t mind, whatever. I know you’ve got… priorities. I understand that better than pretty much anyone. So I can be your dirty little secret for as long as… you want to. As long as you want—me.”
“My dirty, statistically average-sized for his age secret, surely,” Roy says softy, which just barely stops the Forever, forever, please, I’ll do anything, the sun won’t rise in the morning without you before it slips out past his lips.
“Bastard,” Ed mumbles.
“Your bastard,” Roy says, “for what it’s worth.”
Ed’s smile twitches wide against his skin. “Guess it’ll have to do, won’t it?”
Xing isn’t so different from Amestris, and Ling is coming spectacularly into his own.
What they hold on this particular occasion is more a council meeting than a trial, although Roy, Ed, and Riza are all required to attend the entirety and testify about their experiences through a translator. Ed and Roy each have to tell the story from start to finish; Ed sketches the tower with as much scientific accuracy as his left hand will depict; Roy reproduces the character he saw on the ceiling and describes the Hua Wei’s clothing in such extensive detail that Ed rolls his eyes. The circle of men with narrow mustaches and impressive beards exchanges glances in almost every possible combination; occasionally someone will nod. Ling spends the duration looking interested and faintly amused. There’s silence as Roy and Ed speak, but when the questions come, the voices are loud and fast and concurrent; the councilors speak over one another indiscriminately, and the pretty young woman translating stares at them like they’re unruly animals.
Riza is a pillar, of course, but Roy’s long since relied on that—Roy has founded his life and his career and his sanity on her strength. With Ed, it’s a bit more surprising. Ed makes eye contact with Alphonse at the edge of the room, and then Ed stands up straight and… well, tall. The bravado that’s bolstered him since he was twelve has developed into a much gentler kind of confidence—nothing can touch Ed now; nothing can unseat him; he has accomplished the most important thing in the world and left it perched on a wooden chair by the door, chewing on its tangible fingernails; he cannot be shaken.
He can still be exasperated, as quickly becomes evident, but Roy finds his heart warming to that, too. Roy wants to wrap both arms around him and murmur soothingly, laugh softly as the complaints peter out, kiss the scowl away.
Roy is… proud seems like the wrong word; proud is presumptuous; proud sounds like he’s taking credit. It’s not pride, not really; it’s an appreciation so deep, so profound, and so all-encompassing that it makes his skin tingle and his heart sing paeans to his inexplicable luck. Roy’s impressed, and grateful, and irretrievably in love.
When he can tear his eyes away from Ed’s face, Ed’s cheekbones, the tightening line of Ed’s jaw, the resigned annoyance in his bright-gold eyes, he watches the councilors for clues. They seem to be believing it, if nothing else. Ed’s conviction tends to be believed; Ed’s sincerity is unassailable.
Whatever the particulars of the arrangement, however equitable the layout of the tables, Roy is aware that his fate hangs in the balance here. He has killed again. He has ended lives. And it’s a familiar vacuum in his stomach, yes—but Ed is so much that he keeps filling the space even as it empties itself out. Ed is perpetual. Roy would endure a hundred-thousand of these accusations for Ed’s safety; it’s equivalent; he cares, of course, he’s suffering, he feels the weight of consequence, but he doesn’t fear.
All he has is the truth. All he has is a good intention. All he has is a prayer for justice.
Today, for once, what he has seems to be enough.
“Mostly just a formality,” Ling says brightly, hands hidden in his sleeves as they gather afterward for farewells. “You’ve all seen me cutting homunculi heads in half and so on and so forth, but it’s best if we establish a tradition of transparency, don’t you think?”
“You better get a new Amestrian dictionary,” Ed says. “‘Transparency’ is a really shitty synonym for ‘interrogation’.”
“I do so enjoy exercising my vocabulary,” Ling says.
“Yeah, well, you oughta exorcise it next time.”
“Well-punned,” Roy says before the banter can continue indefinitely. “Your Highness, I cannot tell you how grateful we are for your support; the situation was extraordinarily sensitive, and I reacted emotionally.”
“All of us are only human,” Ling says. “I think we wield our power best when we remember that. Don’t pout, Ed; you know it makes you irresistible.”
Ed sputters. Ling’s elusive hands emerge from his sleeves to clasp both of Ed’s tightly.
“I wish you the best things the world has to offer, my friend,” he says. “And I wish you would write letters, you miserable punk.” He beams. “Pornographic ones would be lovely.”
Ed sputters again, cheeks flaring hot pink, and his elbows twitch as he tries to pull his hands away. Before he succeeds, Ling reels him in and kisses him soundly on the mouth.
Roy thinks, distantly, that he should be consumed with jealousy. Perhaps it’s the shock, but he’s mostly just turned on. Is that what kissing Ed looks like from a distance of more than an inch? Damn, Roy has never been luckier in three decades; this is the break of a lifetime, and he cannot, will not, waste it.
Ed’s sputtering resolves into “—the fuck, Ling?” as the emperor of Xing pulls away looking positively tickled.
“It’s traditional,” Ling says.
“Like fuck it is!”
“That’s the great thing about this job,” Ling says. “I get to decide what’s traditional and what’s not.”
Ed bristles and finally extracts his fingers from Ling’s grip. “That’s not what ‘traditional’ fucking means—”
“Then think of it something to remember me by,” Ling says. He takes Alphonse’s hand next and shakes it firmly. “Please visit. Please don’t poison me.”
“Oh,” Alphonse says airily, “it wouldn’t be poison. That would be too pleasant. Thank you very much for your hospitality, Your Highness.”
Ling’s grimace becomes another grin as Riza moves to shake his hand next. It is a testament to the young emperor’s agility that he manages to maneuver to kiss her knuckles instead. Riza’s eyebrow rises very, very slowly, and Roy swears he hears a weary sigh coming from the ceiling.
“We’re honored by your support and grateful for your time,” Riza says. “Please do keep in touch, sir.”
“If I know what you mean?” Ling asks hopefully.
Roy catches himself rubbing his thumb and fingertip together.
But then, of course, it’s his turn. And then, of course, his crisp, practiced, perfectly-executed bow turns into an ungraceful stumble as Ling grabs his arm and tugs.
“None of that!” Ling says as Roy stares, righting himself. “We’re going to be very good friends, General Mustang. This is how friends say goodbye.”
And then the Emperor of Xing is pulling Roy into a rib-cracking hug.
“Careful, by the way,” Ling murmurs into his ear. “Ed’s a biter.”
Roy can’t quite decide whether to be aroused or terrified.
Ed is making his horse keep pace with Roy’s in order to glare at Roy from under the edge of his hood.
“I already apologized,” Roy says.
Ed continues to glare.
“Do you think I’m not in a similar position?” Roy asks.
Ed’s bottom lip pushes out. Dry-to-peeling as it is, Roy wants to nibble it, lick it, lathe it up and down, corner to corner, back and forth.
“Do you think—” Roy lowers his voice, glances around them. “—it would be any better if we had the specifics of experience to think about?”
Ed sighs feelingly. Roy wants to tackle him out of the saddle and have him in the sand.
It’s going to be a long trip.
“You’re a general,” Ed says. “If you can’t even get a private compartment, who the fuck can?”
“I don’t believe in abusing the privileges of rank for my personal comfort,” Roy says.
“Even if he had, Brother,” Alphonse says, legs crossed at the knee as he studies the newspaper Roy bought at the station, which had disappeared from under his arm even before they’d boarded, “Captain Hawkeye and I would still be here. You wouldn’t want to do anything private in a private compartment with an audience, would you?”
Ed’s mouth hangs open, and his eyes widen hugely.
Riza sorts through the sachet of folders she had Breda send East for them to pick up, selects one, and passes it across to Roy. “In addition, I don’t imagine that it would be particularly comfortable, with all of the rattling.”
“We should also take the saddle sores into consideration,” Alphonse says thoughtfully.
Roy flips the cover of the folder open and works his voice on the second attempt. “Could we please all agree not to discuss train compartment sex in public ever again?”
“We’re just looking out for your best interests, sir,” Riza says calmly. “The bruises would be troublesome to exp—”
“Holy… shit.” Ed’s voice is a burble at best; Roy is legitimately worried that he’ll pop his own eyes out.
“I order everyone who reports to me to stop talking about this,” Roy says quickly.
Alphonse laughs low and deep, like a villain in a melodrama, and Roy gains an entirely new understanding of the word dread.
The second train, after the transfer, is better. The second train verges on magnificent. The second train offers them a quieter carriage and a smoother track, and inside of ten minutes, Ed has stretched out on the seat and fallen asleep with his head on Roy’s thigh.
Roy’s tired, too. He thinks giddily, ludicrously, overflowingly. Ed’s ponytail pours over his knee like a waterfall of liquid gold.
I will never take you for granted, Roy thinks. Not once.
“Go ahead,” Alphonse says idly as Roy holds his hands entirely still to stop the folders from rustling.
Roy blinks at him. Riza does not appear to be listening, which of course means that she is.
“He’s like a cat,” Alphonse says. “He loves to be petted. He just won’t let you most of the time, because he thinks it’s girly, so you should get a start on it while he can’t argue.”
Roy’s life is blessed, blessed, and he runs his fingers slowly through the trailing fan of hair again, gently working the tangles out. Ed sighs in his sleep and mutters unintelligibly.
“Has he snored for you yet?” Alphonse asks.
Despite the fact that such distinctions are usually the pulsing lifeblood of his career, Roy can’t tell if he should count Alphonse as a powerful friend or an absolutely terrifying enemy.