Back Together Again: Roy/Maes fic, Chapter Seven
TITLE: “Back Together Again”
GENRE: Yaoi/Drama
RATING: Overall Hard-R to light NC-17 (or just M, if you prefer) for violence, language, sexuality and adult concepts
WARNINGS: Violence. Grief/PTSD. Sexuality (including some borderline non-con). Angst/Darkfic. Hughesmunculus. And finally: THIS FIC MAY CONTAIN HETEROSEXUAL SEX. <-- consider yourself warned!
PAIRING(S): HUGHES/ROY!!!!! (with a dab of Hughes/Gracia and a pinch of Roy/Gracia - sorta)
SUMMARY: A still-grieving Roy Mustang is visited by a ghost made flesh - a ghost in the form of Maes Hughes! Did Roy actually succeed in bringing back his dead best friend using alchemy … or is he being haunted by a homunculus?
DISCLAIMER: All characters belong to Ms. Arakawa, I just take them out to play.
Chapter Seven: Hell
Found myself alone, alone, alone above a raging sea
Who stole the only girl I loved and drowned her deep inside of me
You, soft and only
You, lost and lonely
You, just like heaven
- “Just Like Heaven”, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me (the Cure)
Maes didn’t show up that night; or the next night, or the next. Mustang spent a great deal of time pacing his floor and cursing. Asking himself questions, asking questions aloud to the silence of his home. He did sleep, but not well.
Finally, in the middle of the fourth night, he growled to himself, “Fuck this.”
He knew it was far too late to be polite, but he dialed Gracia’s home. She answered after fewer rings than Roy would have suspected, sounding cautious, then surprised. “Well, it is awfully late,” she ventured hesitantly. “Are you sure it can’t wait until tomorrow?”
“I’m sure,” Roy said. “Peaches.”
There was a silence on Gracia’s end; then she said,
“I’ll be here.”
The phone went dead in Mustang’s ear.
This time, he had no need for a cab; he was currently using one of the military’s vehicles. He, like most of the other officers, preferred being driven to keeping up with and maintaining a car of their own, and he knew some people might be curious; but even the Fuhrer himself drove sometimes. If greater personal mobility was needed outside working hours, it was logical to use a car.
He drove faster than was strictly necessary. He couldn’t help it.
In spite of everything, he hesitated before knocking on the door. What the hell was he doing? It was the middle of the night…
No. He had to know. He had to do this.
He didn’t even knock, only tapped softly, and the door was opened. Gracia, in her night-dress, robe and slippers, wordlessly motioned him in.
Rather than the kitchen table this time, they sat on the smaller of Gracia’s couches. Without preamble, she said, “What is it?”
“Gracia,” he said hesitantly. He licked his lips, unsure how to proceed. “There’ve been some new developments. I need to ask you more about your … dream.”
She sighed. “May I ask what the developments are?”
He couldn’t help grinning, knowing she already knew the answer; it was one she sometimes gave to her daughter. “You can always ask.”
She smiled back wanly. She did not seem distressed, just very, very tired. Roy was sure he appeared much the same. “All right, then. What do you want to know?”
“I…” his nerve failed him. But his need was stronger than his fear, just barely. He tried again. “I need to know … did you remember anything else about it?”
Her expression turned hard. “I thought we compared notes last time?”
He blushed in spite of himself. “We … we did.”
“No, I haven’t remembered anything else.” She stood. “Is that all?”
He stood up, too, and put a hand on her arm. “Gracia, please. I’m not trying to antagonize you. I know this must be hard enough …”
“Yes, it is,” she snapped. “You don’t know what it’s like…” and she stopped.
He said nothing.
“Oh, by all the gods.” She covered her face. “Why couldn’t you leave well enough alone?”
He knew her anguish was not his fault, and her anger not truly directed at him. In an even tone, he replied, “What do you mean?”
“It happened again,” she said almost violently. “He came here … came to me. No matter how tired … how confused I was … when he was here, everything was all right.”
Roy nodded. He didn’t trust his voice.
“H-he…” Her incredible self-control was slipping again; he watched her wrench it back into place. “I felt so good … it was like … like going back in time. All my fear and my questions and all I had wanted to say to him, all that was gone.” She looked at Mustang candidly. “And I can’t say I was dreaming, either. Because now I know I wasn’t.”
“How … how did you know?” he asked. His hand was still on her arm. He thought he heard something behind them: a faint clink-clink. He did not turn around, but continued to listen carefully.
“Because of Elicia,” she replied.
His eye flew wide open. He didn’t … he DIDN’T approach Elicia! She knows her daddy’s dead! He would never scare his daughter like that! Then again - if this isn’t him… “Gracia - ”
“It happened the last time he was here,” she continued in a low voice. “I’m not sure how. As I’ve said, it’s so hard to think straight when he’s near me.” It was dark in the sitting-room, but Roy could hear her blush. “But after - after we were done, something was nagging at me. It wouldn’t leave me alone. Something I’d thought about so many times before, but I couldn’t remember it for some reason … and then it hit me. Elicia. He - Maes would never, ever come home without wanting to see his daughter. She was his favorite thing. From the moment he saw her when he came home, he would do nothing else but play with her as long as he could. This - person - who looked like Maes, did everything else like Maes - never even asked about her. Not once! This couldn’t be Maes. Could not. But if it wasn’t him, who was it?
“As soon as I had the thought, it was as though a spell had lifted. For just a moment. I opened my mouth to ask him about it, and right then he rolled over and said, ‘So, how is Elicia doing?’ I told him that she was well and that she’d stopped asking for her daddy, but she’d never forgotten him. ‘It’s too bad I can’t go see her right now,’ he replied, as casually as if we were talking about some, I don’t know, some mutual acquaintance, instead of our daughter. His face - it changed, became darker, as though something unpleasant had occurred to him. He said, ‘She’s asleep. I wouldn’t want to wake her up.’ Then he said, in a whisper, ‘But I really miss her, too.’
“After that … the spell was back. Everything was happy again. All my questions were gone.
“And until the next morning, it never occurred to me - not once - that he might have been lying. That if he really - really wanted to see his daughter - our child - ” At this point she was actually weeping - “he could come around during the day and … I don’t know what, just something besides this … visiting at night like this … doing only what we do … it’s not like Maes at all. It’s not like him … it’s not…”
“Gracia,” Roy said … and ran out of words. His whole military persona, his gifts with political speech and word choice and all that, went completely out the window. What could he say? There was nothing. And she had spoken out loud what he could barely dared to think in the privacy of his mind.
He stepped closer to her and took her in his arms. She was tall for a woman, he noted dispassionately. It was odd to feel the softness of a woman’s body, the softness of breasts, after … after …
“Gracia, I don’t have all the answers for you,” he murmured in her ear. “We’ll figure it out. It won’t be this way forever.”
“Roy - how can he only come out at night, like some kind of wampyr from the old stories? Why was he so different? Why won’t he talk about any of this? And when I’m with him, why can’t I ask him? What’s wrong with me?”
“Something is different,” Roy acknowledged. “It’s not you who’s wrong, I can promise you that. But Gracia, don’t give up. We will get to the bottom of this.” He realized, with a dull sort of shock, that when he said “we”, he didn’t mean the military, Investigations, or any of that. He couldn’t go to the State with tales of a dead man alive again and alchemy gone wrong and homunculi … not when all the homunculi were supposedly dead. (Like Hughes.) No. When he said “we”, he meant the two of them … him and Gracia.
Again - how could he have forgotten about the first time? - he had the almost overwhelming urge to kiss her. He felt uncomfortable pressed up against her, and he realized - and this was a true shock - that his discomfort came from the fact that he was getting hard, and he didn’t want her to feel it … because she was … she was Hughes’ wife, damn it, you didn’t fuck around on your friends like that … do what you like with other people, but military wives were sacred ground in the Amestrian military - you just didn’t do that. But even that thought only lasted a second, like a smoke ring blown away in the wind. She was here, she was so warm, she was part of Maes, she was his legacy, she knew what it was like to be in Maes’ arms, to have Maes’ lips on her neck and his broad strong hands on her back … she knew Maes, and he did … what could be more beautiful…
This makes no sense, his rational, logical mind screamed at him. Yes, she’s an attractive lady, but you never wanted to do this before! Before he came back - you never gave it a thought! You’ve been friends with her for YEARS, you’ve babysat her KID for the gods’ sake, how can you -
Shut UP, his heart snarled back. I want to know what he knew, I want to go where he’s been … I want her … and I want him…
And his loins were throbbing, aching in a way they hadn’t in years, not until recently. He couldn’t think. If he didn’t have her right now, this instant, he would die, of that he was completely certain. He didn’t want this; he just needed it. He needed to feel her the way Maes had.
So rather than drawing back, he pressed into her with all his strength, crushing her to him. He expected her to be surprised, but she shoved her groin against his with equal force. Embracing him hungrily, she bit him on the side of the neck. He gasped. She pulled back just enough to look him in the eye.
He didn’t even have to ask, Are you sure? His eye had adjusted and he could see the fever-brightness that gleamed back at him. Her lips were still drawn back in something like a snarl. She grabbed his hair, hard enough to make his eye water in pain, and kissed him with a bruising fierceness.
He opened his mouth to receive her attack. Soft, warm, wet…
His eye was still slightly open as they kissed, and as it happened, their heads were tilted to the left. And behind them, in the deep shadows of the hallway, Roy saw … something. Just a flicker. A shine. He almost dismissed it, but then remembered the tiny jingle of a sound he’d heard earlier. A connection fired in his lust-addled brain.
His realization gave him just a little sanity back. He broke the kiss long enough to lick the side of her neck, and to whisper in her ear: “Gracia - are you sure? What about Elicia?”
“My cousin is staying the night with us, they’re both in Elicia’s bedroom,” she whispered back feverishly. “The door-hinge is squeaky. It’s louder than an alarm bell. We’ll know if they get up.”
Roy nodded. He drew her to him, head over her shoulder, and kissed the side of her neck again, more fervently this time. She moaned and shivered, and he heard it again: that faint clinkclink, almost a jingle … it reminded him of the days Hawkeye brought Black Hayate into the office. He focused his gaze sharply on that place in the shadows.
They were being watched. He was watching them.
He had only one thought, and it was like a punch in the gut: He would never do this. Maes Hughes was a kinky bastard, that was for sure. Years of experience had taught Roy that. But if Maes wanted to do something like this, he would be straightforward about it. Not skulking around …
Should he tell her? With his body screaming at him like this, he was just coherent enough to think, No. It would only hurt her more. It’s bad enough that we’re…
And then he felt her unbuttoning his shirt.
By mutual unspoken consent, they sank onto the couch with her straddling him. He kissed her again, closing his eye this time, holding her gently. She would have none of it. She ripped open her robe, grabbed his hands, and slid them up her night-dress. She wore no underwear. As much as Roy’s body was clamoring for him to linger in that area, he continued his caresses upward until he reached her back. At about the same moment, her hands (which were exploring inside his newly-opened shirt) encountered his back.
Both of them stopped and let out a nearly-simultaneous gasp.
“You …” he stuttered. “H-he … did this to you?”
She withdrew her touch from his back but did not pull away. “I didn’t notice it at the time.” She paused. “You?”
He exhaled. “Yes.”
For a long minute they neither moved nor spoke; they barely breathed. Roy’s physical desire had not abated one bit, and he did not think hers had, either; but now neither of them could ignore what was really going on.
“Gracia,” he breathed. “What the hell are we doing?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But … I don’t want to stop.”
Roy’s head was still swimming. It was so hard to think. But he had to. Hughes had marked Gracia. Marked her. When Maes was alive, he and Roy had spoken on this topic more than once. They’d agreed that while neither of them minded being marked by a woman, or by each other for that matter, they took special care not to lose control to the point where they would do this to a female. It was not about gentility or feeling like the woman was “weaker” and couldn’t take the pain (although it was true that Roy’s foster-mother had told him to avoid physically harming a woman unless she was a threat). It was more that they both felt that during a sexual encounter with a woman, they wanted to focus on her pleasure and her experience, wanting her to enjoy herself to the fullest. Both of them were amazed at a woman’s ability to enjoy exponentially greater pleasure and more climaxes than a man could, and both of them loved bringing out that pleasure, seeing a woman go out of her mind like that. A few scratches just meant they were doing their job well.
So why would Hughes do that to Gracia? Unless he was just playing with Roy? With both him and Gracia?
Gracia reached for him again. “I mean it,” she panted. “I don’t care. Let’s do this.”
“Graci - ” She smashed her lips against his, cutting him off. He melted into her, kissing her back. That feeling of euphoria, that all was right in the world and nothing could be better than this, returned to him. It was like that first breath of air after having almost choked; like water to a thirsty throat. He tried to keep in mind how little sense this made; he tried to hold on to the thought that the person he had been with recently was not Maes, could not be Maes. None of it did any good. He was so enthralled, so rampant with desire … she felt so good, her hands on him, her soft mouth, her soft skin underneath his touch…
In a last desperate attempt to overcome his feelings, he looked over toward the dark hallway and thought of this … creature, made in the image of Maes, watching them, gloating, getting off on the two great loves of Maes’ life … what? Forced together like this?
The thought only made him harder.
Horror crept over him as he realized how much he did not want to do this. But he was utterly powerless to stop it. He couldn’t even slow himself down, or her, any more than he could have turned the tide.
Almost the entire time, he focused on the shadowed hallway where he knew Maes (Maes?) was watching. The encounter was quick and furious, not at all how he usually preferred to do things. But then again, his preference didn’t much matter this time, did it? When his own wishes made no difference? When he was doing this seemingly against his will? Where was his power of choice, of reason? Why couldn’t he stop even though he knew, he knew what was happening was ultimately nothing good?
Trying to hold on to those thoughts in the face of the lust that consumed him, though, did as much good as a paper’s wishing to not be consumed as it was thrown in the fire.
Gracia was clearly enjoying herself, and Roy also couldn’t help getting lost in the ecstasy she brought him. But his joy, even his climax, was tinged with despair.
Onward to Chapter Eight
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