Fic: Invincible Summer, Chapter One (FMA Mangaverse, Roy/Ed, Ensemble, not worksafe)
Invincible Summer
Chapter One: Portions for Foxes
Ed looked happy sometimes, but Roy wasn't sure he'd ever seen him look content.
Fullmetal Alchemist, Roy/Ed, ensemble. 11,000 words.
NC-17. Post-manga; manga spoilers.
Note: This is the first of a series that will probably be quite long, but this first chapter should stand alone.
If he had any inclination to a life of crime, Ed thought, he'd be unstoppable. It was a good thing he didn't like hurting people -- and probably also a good thing that material possessions mostly struck him as pointless.
A press of his hands together to make the circle, the splitsecond mental calculations to form the array in his mind -- invisible but very real -- and his palms on the wall to direct the energy, and a doorway opened for him, silently. The walls here were two feet thick. He ducked through and closed the entrance on the other side.
You could build a wall thick enough that even slamming an automobile into it wouldn't knock it down, could put barbed wire on the top and razor-wire in loops at the bottom, but none of that would stop an even vaguely determined alchemist. People were stupid.
Creeping across the compound grounds by night made him think of -- oh, a hundred times he'd done this before, and usually with Al, back in the day. Al had been remarkably good at sneaky for someone who was seven feet talk and clanked when he walked, and remembering that (the grounds outside of Lab Five, the courtyard of the Blue Star Alchemist, the tunnels beneath the city) made him feel suddenly lonely. But Al was well out of this. Al had better things to do now than sneak around at night --
The lock and doorknob changed shape beneath the muted flare of his alchemy, tumblers clicking back and melting into the unlocked position for good measure, eased the door open, slipped into the darkened hallway. Why crazy alchemists always kept such large houses he would never know, they were always in the back or in the cellar and the rest of the place always looked deserted, maybe it was some kind of weird tradition --
He crept down the hall. Three steps, pause; three steps, pause; three steps, pause. It wasn't that he was afraid of facing the researchers (ha, 'researchers,' Mei-Chan was a better researcher than any of them and she was all of about thirteen, they weren't researchers, they were selfish narrow-minded meddlers). He just didn't want them alerted to his presence so they could flee before he got his evidence.
(Yes, Al was well out of this, Al had more important things to do with his time these days than tromp around in the darkness with Ed, he had goals and dreams and a body to pursue them with, he didn't need to risk his neck on things like this. Anyway, he'd try to talk Ed out of it.)
Down the narrow hallway, ears pricked for sounds, and -- there. A snarl that turned to a whine, he didn't know exactly what kind of chimeras they were making here but chimeras almost always sounded miserable, even people who were good enough to make a chimera that didn't suffer physical pain all the time (which was hard enough) couldn't figure out how to merge two animals and make them happy about the idea. Conflicting instincts, conflicting memories, a brain that doesn't quite jigsaw together and a body that isn't quite right....
He headed toward the noise. To the left, and... downward. A cellar again. It was like chimera makers and other crazy alchemists got some kind of handbook to follow: do your work in a cellar, by candlelight, and if you can possibly manage it involve blood in your array in some way.
(Of course, those criteria matched both the time he'd tried to resurrect his mother and the time he restored Al, which just went to show you.)
He hesitated by the stairs, listening. Another animal whine, and two sets of voices. Good. Both of them still here.
Hand on the banister, shoulder to the wall. Down into the darkness of the cellar; he could still move lightly when he wanted to...
The fight went fast -- so fast, because the man who called himself the Blood River Alchemist was good at deceiving humans and torturing animals but he was not so good at fighting -- and then the alchemist and his assistant were tied up under bonds made from the floor itself.
Ed could see the diagrams tacked up everywhere, and for the most part they were the same sickening shapes he knew all too well: the fluid lines of biological alchemy, but with the sigils and words for mutation and integration, many with an actual representation of the lion-goat-serpent from which the alchemical construct got its mythological name. But --
-- but --
-- if you knew what you were looking for (and Ed did, because he couldn't forget it, it seared behind his eyelids at night and itched at the tips of his fingers during the day) you could see something new in the designs, something Ed hadn't seen in any transmutation circles before three years prior but that he now saw all the time, and that he almost always saw in situations like this, the seedy and unethical underbelly of alchemical research, almost always it turned up in the worst places.
and no wonder, right?
The man who'd called himself the Blood River Alchemist (stupid, Ed thought, you didn't get a Something Something Alchemist name unless you passed the state qualifications, and if you wanted the qual so badly you'd pretend you already had it you really were stupid) struggled as Ed leafed through the stacks of notes, papers, arrays in various stages of composition.
"You can't just -- I demand -- "
"Military police will be here soon," Ed said absently, riffling through the stack once more and then abruptly wrenching the whole half-foot-thick pile of papers off the workbench and onto the floor. The workbench was wood, and therefore flammable...
"What are you doing?" screeched the would-be chimera master.
Ed yanked open the filing cabinet, hauled out the paper -- no point sorting -- and dropped it on the floor too. "There was a fight," he said, "accidents happen, you really shouldn't have open flames around so much paper anyway -- "
"No!"
Ed swept the fattest of the candles on the workbench off it and onto the stack of papers.
"That's -- that's destruction of property, you little brat, you're not going to get away with -- "
"There was a fight," Ed repeated, watching to make sure that the fire didn't spread even as it licked eagerly through the stack of paper. It made him think of Roy, and no wonder, but fire was the most efficient and plausibly deniable way to make sure those arrays were destroyed, gone, irretrievable... "Accidents happen."
"Oh, Ed," came an exasperated voice behind him, and he froze and whirled to find... Major Ross, pinching the bridge of her nose and giving him a Look. "If you could be a little faster about your accidents, it would really help keep my blood pressure down."
***
Roy's first-thing-in-at-work ritual, while he waited for his brain to wake up and engage: a cup of black coffee, the window open behind him (unless the weather was really atrocious), and the daily paper spread out before him. It was, also, a way of connecting with Riza even though she now had a well-merited office of her own to take care of; technically the paper he read was her paper, and as she skimmed it on her way in to work she circled in blue things she thought he'd find interesting. Then he circled in red the things he thought she'd find interesting and passed it back to her at lunch.
This morning's circled items: the coming-of-age ball for the Emperor of Aerugo's only granddaughter (he filed that away in memory, wondered if any of Amestris' spies in Aerugo had netted an invitation), a city improvement bill was close to passing the parliament (good), a military funding bill was also close to passing (not so good), the football playoffs were drawing to a close (Riza's hometown team was doing very well indeed), and....
At first he couldn't understand why she'd circled the article in the Science and Technology section; it was on alchemy, certainly, but she didn't circle just any article on alchemy. He skimmed down over it ("Professor Maynard notes that some compounds, such as insulin, that have proved difficult to synthesize using ordinary alchemy, can be created by alchemically modifying bacterial cultures to encourage them to produce the compounds as a byproduct. 'Just as a brewer uses yeast in order to create alcohol, we're using these bacteria to create insulin...'"), but the last paragraph made him sit up and take notice:
"Alphonse Elric, one of Professor Maynard's students, was very excited about the direction of this research. 'We're looking into using Xing alchemical techniques next, for multistep biochemical reactions -- Xing alchemy allows for gradual reactions over time in a way that you really can't manage with standard Amestrian transmutation circles. I think there's a lot of fertile ground for combining the best attributes of both Xing and Amestrian alchemy.'"
It was not difficult, if you knew how to read between the lines, to put the pieces together: Alphonse studying biochemical alchemy could only mean one thing.
Hm. Perhaps it was time to share a cup of coffee with Alphonse and see how things were. He hadn't heard anything from either Elric brother in some time, and that tended to be a dangerous sign.
"Havoc?"
"Sir?" Havoc's voice came from the rest of the office, through Mustang's partially-open door.
"Can you find me the current number for Alphonse? It's been a while since I've seen what either of them were up to."
"Sure, boss--" Havoc began, and then the outer door slammed open, slammed closed. "-- But I don't think you'll need that to talk to an Elric," Havoc finished.
Ed stood by the window while Major Maria Ross filled Roy in. He looked tired, and he smelled like... smoke?
"We got a tip to check the cellar of forty-eight Woodlawn Avenue," Maria Ross said, "and sure enough we found illegal chimeras -- and, uh, Ed."
"And the call was from...?"
"The caller was anonymous."
Roy considered this, and used the first -- and, often, most effective -- tool in his arsenal: the serious look. Ross sighed.
"The caller was Alphonse," she said, "but you didn't hear it from me."
That surprised him. He'd expected that it would be Ed, underestimating how long it would take him to get clear of the scene of the crime. Why would Alphonse rat his own brother out...?
"Ordinarily, I would've just told him to get lost," Ross continued. "I mean, we owe him that much, right?" She seemed to be looking to him for confirmation. He gave her a brief nod. That was fair, at least; they did owe the Elric brothers a lot. "But finding him burning the notes... well, I didn't want to make that decision on my own, so..."
"You did the right thing," Roy said, and saw Ross relax marginally. Well, he couldn't blame her; the tribunal after the revolution had found her cleared of all charges, but there were still some in the military who thought of her as quite possibly a murderer; she couldn't afford any stains on her record. "Leave it to me. I'll sort things out."
"Thank you, sir," Ross said.
When she had let herself out, and the door clicked decisively behind her, Roy seated himself in his chair and waited. Ed was still staring out the window. He hadn't grown much in the prior four years, presumably to his chagrin, but he had very clearly aged and matured; his face had the strong bones of an adult, without any of the softness of youth. He looked even more severe with his hair drawn sharply back into a ponytail. He smelled of smoke, and his eyes were a little red.
It was Ed who broke the silence, as Roy had anticipated; he'd never had much patience. "Look," he said, sounding both aggressive and weary, "either it's a citizen's arrest and you clap me on the back and tell me 'well done' and send me on my way, or it's a breaking-and-entering and you hand me over to the civilian authorities. I'm not your subordinate anymore."
"That's true," Roy said. "And yet."
"What?" Ed demanded, with surprising force, turning away from the window. "And yet what?" Straight-backed, strong, angry. Roy was taken aback, though he didn't allow his face to show it.
"You know I'm not going to hand you over to the police for breaking and entering, Edward," he said. "Not least because you were quite right. They were breaking the law."
"Of course they were." Ed glared at him, pale bonfire shine of his eyes and then turned back to look out the window, leaving Roy with only his eagle profile. "All alchemical experiments involving living creatures of any type must be cleared by a panel of ethicists, and all actual transmutations of animals must be done under strict oversight. That's a quote."
It was almost word-for-word, in fact. Ahh, the Elric memory -- "I know."
"So why exactly do you have me here? Pat me on the back, well done lad, off I go," Ed said, with an undertone of sarcasm that was unexpected and, quite frankly, disturbing. Edward had been angry, snarly, surly, contentious, but often almost painfully earnest. Where had this bitterness come from? Alphonse was fine --
He made his voice soft, low. "So why," Roy said, "did you burn the evidence?"
Ed was silent.
"It would make the case against them all the more ironclad, and I know you hate chimerists, Edward, I know that you find the manipulation of living beings abhorrent unless it's for purely advantageous medical alchemy -- "
Ed was silent.
" -- so why wouldn't you want the prosecutors to have the best case possible? Why would you burn the arrays that proved precisely what they were doing?"
Ed spoke, finally, to the skyline of Central. "The chimeras in the cages were proof enough."
"Proof that they'd contravened the Ethical Alchemy Act, yes. Proof of exactly what they were up to -- "
"It was enough," Ed said, his voice tight and sharp.
"What was so important in those papers that you couldn't let the prosecutors see them, Edward?"
"The prosecutors are hired by your goddamned government -- " Ed began, his voice hot, and then he broke off and his eyes widened.
Aha.
"What don't you want the government to see?" Roy asked, softly.
Ed closed his mouth stubbornly and did not speak.
"Edward," Roy said. "I'm not going to betray whatever it is. I just need to know what you were doing. Otherwise there will be inquiries."
"They had some research that no one should have," Ed said. "About life and death. And I wasn't about to let anyone, anyone see it. And that's all you're getting out of me."
The look in his eyes -- in profile, just slivers of pale light -- reminded Roy of Riza, so many years ago, demanding (not pleading, demanding) that he burn her back. He didn't ask any questions, not now. He said, "You're free to go, Edward. I'll make certain this does not affect your files."
"I don't care about the files."
"No," Roy said, "but Alphonse does, I imagine."
Ed's mouth tipped up at one side, as though he couldn't help himself. "You're still a bastard," he said, but then he turned away from the window so fast that his ponytail spun (a whip of gold around his shoulders), and slouched his way out of the office.
Roy stared after him, at the closed door, for a long time, thinking, hell, not again. And then he picked up the phone and dialed Riza's extension, and said, "You won't believe who I just had in my office...."
***
Ed walked, as insouciant and careless as he could manage, through the halls of Central Command, out down the long straight path of the lawn, down Front Street to the alley behind the Blue Cartwheels. And then he ran, as though there were hellhounds at his heels, as though his heels were on fire, as though --
-- as though the long arms of the gate were chasing him --
No no no, he didn't need to remember this, he didn't want to remember this, it was over, damn the chimerists for making him remember, damn Roy for not letting him just forget --
***
He knows he was physically gone because when he returns to the cave -- it had to be a cave, it's always a cave, cave womb spark the beginning of the world -- he lands on his back, and Alphonse lands on top of him.
Alphonse -- !
The armor is gone, blown into a million pieces, but on top of him is Al's body, sixteen years old and skinny as a starvation victim, long lank hair dark bronze and his eyes closed and his emaciated chest perilously still and Ed thinks oh no no no, you can't, you can't give him his body back dead, no --
-- and then a deep shuddering wrack of breath, coughing, a whine on Al's inhale as though his lungs are rusty with disuse, do you need to breathe in the Gate -- ?
And then, and then, the blood.
Like some kind of horrible joke, the blood. It felt like gallons of it, pouring out of nowhere over his clothed body and Al's naked one, warm as though it were pouring out of a living vein, pulsing out of... nowhere. Maybe it wasn't some kind of joke, maybe it was just equivalent exchange, all the blood he'd bled for Al, all the blood Al had bled for him.
He wiped blood out of his eyes, his face, his thick-hanging bangs. He eased Al off himself -- Al, breathing deep steady breaths, painfully thin and covered in blood but alive, alive, enfleshed and alive -- and looked up.
Alchemical symbols burned their way through his eyes, past his brain, into his soul.
He'd drawn a circle, a circle born half of his expertise and half of pure terrified desperation, on the floor of the cave. That circle, drawn in chalk, was, gone, obliterated by blood. But on the ceiling of the cave was --
Not its twin. But its sibling: alike but not the same. There were patterns there that he'd never seen, never thought of. There were symbols there....
And he knew what they were.
Life. Death. The secrets therein. The Gate was the guardian of mortality, and as he'd spoken to it, so it spoke to him, white-light writings on the ceiling.
He looked away, looked down, even the sea of blood preferable, because what he saw there was enough to drive better people than him insane. He didn't have time for this. He didn't have time for this. He needed to pay attention to Alphonse, breathing deep but still comatose.
He hefted his brother (taller than him somehow but still so light, still fragile) onto his back, turned away from the white-light writings of mortality and immortality, and made his way out of blood and darkness and into daylight.
***
Ed wiped his eyes and looked up to the sky. If he closed his eyes for too long he could still see the writings. And sometimes, even if he didn't, on paper....
Goddamn Mustang for making him think about it.
***
"Alphonse," Roy said, "Thanks for taking the time to meet with me."
"Of course," Al said. He put down the book he'd been reading -- not only about Xing alchemy but actually written in Xing script. "It's good to see you again."
"That's hardly likely," Roy said, and smiled. "I only turn up when there's bad news."
"That's not true at all," Al said. "You turned up -- er -- well, you -- hm." He frowned, then brightened again. "You were there when I got my body back. And when Falman got married, you came to the wedding."
"I could hardly have missed that."
"But it's a solid counterexample. You aren't always a harbinger of bad news." Al grinned at him. In a lot of ways, objectively, he looked like his brother -- same bone structure, same unique golden eyes, and hair just a few shades darker -- but he never quite looked like Ed. He didn't have the same desperate, unearthly edge.
He looked, Roy realized with a lurch, content. Ed looked happy sometimes, but Roy wasn't sure he'd ever seen him look content.
"I'm sure you didn't come just to talk about Falman's wedding."
"As remarkable an event as that was," Roy agreed. "No. I came because I read about your research in the paper. It sounded like something of interest to the military. And to me."
Al brightened. "Of course," he said. "Amestris has neglected medical alchemy for a long time -- not that that's entirely a bad thing, with Amestrian alchemical techniques all we could really manage was mutation, not restoration, and that's a dangerous game, although Marcoh has managed to turn it to his advantage -- but Xing alchemy's focus on cyclical patterns opens up whole new frontiers -- "
Roy just let himself listen as Al held forth on cutting-edge advancements in biological alchemy. It wasn't too hard to see where it was going --
"You want to restore your brother's limbs," he said, when Al had wound down.
"Of course," Al said, easily and without argument. "Since he wasn't able to do it for himself."
They'd both been pretty tight-lipped as to why that was. Roy didn't press. "So how is Edward, these days?"
"Ed is... Ed," Al said, and looked rueful, but also somewhat... sad? "Ed doesn't know what to do with himself without a crusade."
"Hence the midnight raids on the compounds of dubious alchemists?"
Al gave him a level look, and didn't say anything, reminding him -- for the first time -- very sharply of Ed.
Roy added, "Lieutenant Ross does know your voice."
"I know she does," Al said.
Ah. Ah. "You're trying to manipulate me," Roy said, unsure whether he should be flattered or offended.
"Is it working?" Al asked, and looked at him with Elric-golden eyes, mouth tipped up to one side -- wry, where Ed was never wry, where Ed was earnest or furious but never subtle. But then Al was very much his own person.
"Better than it ought to have," he admitted, and Al laughed. He continued, "Are you trying to manipulate me to look after your brother? He is an adult."
"He's bringing himself to your attention,"Al said. "I'm just helping things along."
"Because you're worried about him."
"Well," Al said. "Yes." And there was that, the undeniable sweetness of Al's personality. Who could deny that request?
"I'll do what I can," he said. "But Ed is an adult, and not under my command anymore."
"I know," Al said. "But I'm worried, and you were always the only person who could actually work around him adequately."
"Which is why you decided to use me."
"Well, yes," Al said. "If I was going to manipulate someone, I was going to manipulate someone effective, right?" And he looked so helplessly sincere that Roy couldn't feel offended, could only laugh.
***
"Brother," Ed heard through the fog of sleep -- and the more tangible muffle of the pillow over his head. "Brother. Brother." Al, not raising his voice but patiently repeating the one word.
"Whf?" Ed said, pulling the edge of the pillow off his head and squinting into the daylight.
"It's nearly five. I thought maybe you'd better get up before you run out of daylight."
It would have been easy to get angry at being mothered by his own younger brother, but it was so hard to actually get angry at Al, especially when he was standing there with such a worried look in his eyes -- and standing there with a steaming mug of coffee. "Yeah, okay," he said, tossing the pillow to the foot of the bed and swinging his legs over the side. His flesh foot touched the floorboards silently; his metal foot clicked.
Al put down the mug on his bedside table. "Where were you all last night?" he asked. "I don't even know when you got in."
Nearly five AM. "I dunno. Just wandering around. Lost track of time."
"Well, there's more coffee in the kitchen, and, uh -- you should also probably drink about a quart of water and take some willowbark tea."
"I didn't actually have that much to drink."
"Still." Al gave him his patented I'm-worried-about-you-but-I-know-you-won't-react-well-if-I-say-so look, which was almost as bad as the 'I'm worried about you' talk itself but harder to complain about.
"I think I'm going to take a shower," Ed said, to circumvent the whole non-discussion, and headed for the bathroom, scrubbing a hand back through his rumpled mess of slept-on hair.
He was careful not to look at himself too closely in the mirror (the exploded-dandelion mess of his hair was bad enough caught in profile, without the added sight of bloodshot eyes) and ran the water hot, hot enough to almost scald. This close to winter, it wasn't a bad idea to get the automail good and warm before the ambient temperature started to suck the heat back out of it; Al always courteously kept the heat up in winter, up to temperatures that had to be bordering on uncomfortable for him, but there were still drafts. It was an old building. Anyway, the hot water pounding on his skull helped drive the last fuzziness of overlong daytime sleeping after overlong insomnia out of his brain.
He'd been telling the truth: he hadn't had that much to drink. A beer and a half, along with a meal, which wasn't so much. But the night had sunk through the pub door, spread itself out like wings, and at closing time he hadn't been able to bring himself to go home. He couldn't even say why. So he'd walked, and walked, and walked, all around Central at night (it wasn't actually as dangerous as all that, though a few muggers had, over the past months, learned not to pick on people just because they were sh-- young, and fair, and long-haired). He'd walked and felt the night seeping into his brain and hadn't been able to convince himself to go home until he was flat-out exhausted.
He shook his head, tried to shake the night out of it as well, let the hot water pound and pound.
When he emerged, he found a tall glass of water and two pills next to it -- and, as if in silent apology for the criticism implied in the water-and-aspirin, a bowl of spicy chili and a hunk of bread. Ed's sleep patterns were shot all to hell, but his appetite was still good; he fell to with enthusiasm. Al smiled at him.
"How're things at the university?" he asked, which in the silent language of Elrics meant that he wasn't going to get weird about Al dragging him out of bed and feeding him aspirin and coffee.
"It's okay," Al said. "My grant came through for studying poison and toxin neutralization using stable array loops, which I'm pretty excited about, so the next step is writing to Mei-Chan and seeing if she wants to co-author a paper."
"I guess it'd be hypocritical of me to ask whether people will have an issue with a paper co-authored by a fourteen-year-old."
Al grinned. "Quite. Anyway, that's just the first step -- if we can get that working reliably we might be able to use it in conjunction with targeted arrays to kill parasites and other disease agents, and then flush them out of the body. There's a lot of potential for combining Xing and Amestrian alchemy in the medical sector, and we have so much ground to catch up." Ed could feel the next sentence coming even before Al put down his coffee cup and said, "You know we'd love your help, brother."
"Al."
"Not that you'd need to go into biomedical alchemy just because I love it. I know you were doing good work with chemical and physical alchemy -- Doctor Ericsson says your paper on the implications of the double-headed eagle in arrays involving the transmutation of transistors and electronic parts was excellent, even half-finished and with no citations -- "
"Al."
" -- or if you don't want to work for the university, there's always -- "
"Al!" Ed said, finally raising his voice, and Al stuttered off to a stop. "I don't need a pep talk. Okay? I'm fine."
Al leveled him a serious look, and god, sometimes he looked so much like their mother it was heartbreaking. Ed had always envied him that, that he'd got their mother's hair, the shape of her face, and her peculiar expressions... "I'm not sure people who are 'fine' wander around the streets all night."
"I didn't say I was normal," Ed said, and tried for a grin. It was apparently good enough to make Al relax marginally. "Look," he went on, "the university and me just wasn't working out. You love it there, I get that, I'm thrilled for you, and they'd better keep giving you fellowships and staying out of your way. But it didn't work for me."
"That's the thing, though, it worked great for you for the first year, and then -- "
"Stuff changes. People change. Look." Ed daubed the last of the chili out of the bowl with the crust of the bread. "I'm okay, okay? I'm fine. I'll let you know if that stops being the case."
Al looked dubious, but he said, "Okay. I'll trust you, brother."
Which, as far as Ed was concerned, was fighting dirty.
Despite what Al thought, Ed didn't totally keep his head stuck in the sand, although the more he heard, the more he wished he had. He knew the newspapers were biased and bigoted and knew very little, but he read them anyway. The Grand Duchess Marguerite Lucubrate of Aerugo had her coming-of-age ceremony -- none too soon, since her grandfather the Emperor seemed likely to bite the dust any day and she was the only heir -- and was saying nasty things about Amestris. Well, no doubt over the past few centuries Amestris had deserved those nasty things....
He hung around the house and looked meek until Al went to work (thank goodness -- he'd never forgive himself if Al hobbled his career looking after him), and then spent the afternoon napping and reading alchemy books. Not that any of them ever contained the answer to his questions, but they soothed him. And then, when evening came down low and close on the horizon, he got dressed and went out, not to the Cartwheel, but to the Three Serpents.
Al didn't know about the time he spent at the Serpent, or at least if he did he didn't show any indication of it. Winry didn't either, or any of Mustang's office (Mustang's former office, that was years ago, he had to get with the times -- ), because even though they weren't technically Mustang's office anymore, they would have still ratted him out.
Maria and Denny knew about the Serpent, though. In a weird way they'd earned it. In a weird way, he didn't mind them being there.
Mostly because they left him alone if what he wanted was to order a pint of beer and brood.
***
The hospital: white, white, white, sterile white, acres of it. Antiseptic smell. And Al, awake, finally, thank god, thank god -- sitting up and looking at him with real eyes, real dark-gold eyes and not glowing reddish armor-lights, and saying --
-- "I don't remember -- "
"Don't try. It's okay." Elation bright like a bubble of sunlight behind his breastbone. "You're fine. You're going to be fine. That's all that matters."
"I remember something, pulling, something tugging at me, was that you?"
(I don't think so.) "I don't know. It doesn't matter. You're okay now. You're fine. You're going to be fine." Al was so -- dark-gold eyes but hair like their mother's, brown, and his body so thin but tall, tall, he'd had trouble dragging it (naked and bloodstained, god what a sight they'd been) because it was so tall, which meant he'd kept it okay, which meant he hadn't ruined his brother permanently -- "You're going to be perfect."
Al, sitting up, looking at his hands -- flexing them, tensing them. "It's so strange. I don't know how to, sometimes I think I might faint, they give me weak broth and I think my mouth is going to explode."
"You'll get used to it." Al was going be fine, Al was going to be perfect --
And then, dark gold eyes, serious expression, "What about you?"
"What about me?" For the moment Ed was baffled.
"Your arm. Your leg."
"Oh." And the question made him -- remember. No. He was okay with automail, it wasn't worth -- "Me, I'm fine. I'll be fine."
"We were going to restore both of us."
"I'm fine. You were in danger. I wasn't. Plenty of people have -- soldiers have automail their whole -- "
"We were going to restore both of us."
"I'm fine, Al." He could feel his voice go tense and strange. "I'm fine. I don't need anything else." Please don't make me go back.
"But -- "
"Sleep. Please. Just sleep. I want you to be better. Okay?"
"But how did you... restore me? Can't we -- "
"Please," Ed said, and heard the strained rawness of his voice, saw Al recoil. "Just sleep, okay? It's all okay now. Just sleep."
***
Ed clearly thought he was hiding a great deal with his forays into the seedier part of town, but the confidantes he'd chosen included Denny Brosh. Brosh was loyal as the day was long, but he wasn't the... cleverest fish in the barrel. Roy doubted he'd even been aware that he'd given away Ed's secret watering hole.
(He would've felt bad for, essentially, stalking Ed, except that Al had sent him on this mission, and Al was one of the sanest people he'd ever known.)
So it was that Roy wound up at the doorway of the Three Serpents.
It wasn't a dive bar by any stretch of the imagination. It was actually quite a nice place, and the only real difference between that and the Blue Cartwheel was that... nobody else Ed knew spent time at the Three Serpents. Which was in and of itself rather odd. Ed had never been a solitary creature, not really; he'd always had Al, and he'd gotten along well with people, in a crude and rough-edged way. Nobody would have pegged him as a smooth talker, and yet people liked him; he'd been called Alchemist of the People for a reason. So why....?
He'd hesitated outside, looking up at the sign. (The sign predated even the pub's name: a red serpent with three heads, and from each head came three tongues. It had the look of an alchemical symbol, though Roy couldn't place its specific meaning.) What drove him inside was neither altruism nor manipulation but sheer curiosity. If something was up with Edward Elric, he wanted to know what. Whatever it was, chances were it was interesting.
As soon as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he got his great surprise of the day. He'd seen Ed off and on in the past few years, but he must not have really looked, because --
Ed sat near the bar, nursing a beer. The light swinging on a chain over his head illuminated his distinctive bright-gold hair (tied back in a tail at the nape of his neck), but somehow even that splash of color wasn't what drew the eye. It was the breadth of his shoulders, the strong line of his back even as he slouched, the planes and angles of his profile as he turned his head. The years had been, oh, kind to him -- or maybe he'd always been this attractive, and Roy had simply not allowed himself to notice it back when Ed was a subordinate, underage, and otherwise A Very Bad Idea.
He was noticing now. And that complicated his simple mission of curiosity enough that he almost backed right out of the Three Serpents, except just then Ed turned a little more, and noticed him, and raised one eyebrow.
And that was a challenge Roy wasn't equipped to pass up.
"So you want to tell me why exactly you're following me around?" Ed asked, and he looked at Roy through the veil of his own thick golden bangs, and --
"Honest truth?" Roy said.
"Like you'd ever give me that," Ed snorted, and took a long pull of his beer.
"Al's worried about you," Roy said, mostly because he thought the truth would startle the hell out of Ed. He was right, too. Ed snorted into his beer and got foam on the bridge of his nose and Roy was shocked to find himself fighting the urge to lean forward and lick it off.
"Al shouldn't waste his time worrying about me."
"But he does."
"He shouldn't." Ed drew patterns in the condensation on the table.
"But he does."
"Stop repeating yourself, you sound like a parrot."
"Hm," Roy said. "My plumage is too drab. As I think you've mentioned, you never liked the uniform."
"I dunno, you look pretty..." Ed said, and then choked off.
Roy tried not to reveal how much that admission had shot through his body. He just raised an eyebrow.
"Shut up," Ed said.
***
Onward to Part 2!
Chapter One: Portions for Foxes
Ed looked happy sometimes, but Roy wasn't sure he'd ever seen him look content.
Fullmetal Alchemist, Roy/Ed, ensemble. 11,000 words.
NC-17. Post-manga; manga spoilers.
Note: This is the first of a series that will probably be quite long, but this first chapter should stand alone.
If he had any inclination to a life of crime, Ed thought, he'd be unstoppable. It was a good thing he didn't like hurting people -- and probably also a good thing that material possessions mostly struck him as pointless.
A press of his hands together to make the circle, the splitsecond mental calculations to form the array in his mind -- invisible but very real -- and his palms on the wall to direct the energy, and a doorway opened for him, silently. The walls here were two feet thick. He ducked through and closed the entrance on the other side.
You could build a wall thick enough that even slamming an automobile into it wouldn't knock it down, could put barbed wire on the top and razor-wire in loops at the bottom, but none of that would stop an even vaguely determined alchemist. People were stupid.
Creeping across the compound grounds by night made him think of -- oh, a hundred times he'd done this before, and usually with Al, back in the day. Al had been remarkably good at sneaky for someone who was seven feet talk and clanked when he walked, and remembering that (the grounds outside of Lab Five, the courtyard of the Blue Star Alchemist, the tunnels beneath the city) made him feel suddenly lonely. But Al was well out of this. Al had better things to do now than sneak around at night --
The lock and doorknob changed shape beneath the muted flare of his alchemy, tumblers clicking back and melting into the unlocked position for good measure, eased the door open, slipped into the darkened hallway. Why crazy alchemists always kept such large houses he would never know, they were always in the back or in the cellar and the rest of the place always looked deserted, maybe it was some kind of weird tradition --
He crept down the hall. Three steps, pause; three steps, pause; three steps, pause. It wasn't that he was afraid of facing the researchers (ha, 'researchers,' Mei-Chan was a better researcher than any of them and she was all of about thirteen, they weren't researchers, they were selfish narrow-minded meddlers). He just didn't want them alerted to his presence so they could flee before he got his evidence.
(Yes, Al was well out of this, Al had more important things to do with his time these days than tromp around in the darkness with Ed, he had goals and dreams and a body to pursue them with, he didn't need to risk his neck on things like this. Anyway, he'd try to talk Ed out of it.)
Down the narrow hallway, ears pricked for sounds, and -- there. A snarl that turned to a whine, he didn't know exactly what kind of chimeras they were making here but chimeras almost always sounded miserable, even people who were good enough to make a chimera that didn't suffer physical pain all the time (which was hard enough) couldn't figure out how to merge two animals and make them happy about the idea. Conflicting instincts, conflicting memories, a brain that doesn't quite jigsaw together and a body that isn't quite right....
He headed toward the noise. To the left, and... downward. A cellar again. It was like chimera makers and other crazy alchemists got some kind of handbook to follow: do your work in a cellar, by candlelight, and if you can possibly manage it involve blood in your array in some way.
(Of course, those criteria matched both the time he'd tried to resurrect his mother and the time he restored Al, which just went to show you.)
He hesitated by the stairs, listening. Another animal whine, and two sets of voices. Good. Both of them still here.
Hand on the banister, shoulder to the wall. Down into the darkness of the cellar; he could still move lightly when he wanted to...
The fight went fast -- so fast, because the man who called himself the Blood River Alchemist was good at deceiving humans and torturing animals but he was not so good at fighting -- and then the alchemist and his assistant were tied up under bonds made from the floor itself.
Ed could see the diagrams tacked up everywhere, and for the most part they were the same sickening shapes he knew all too well: the fluid lines of biological alchemy, but with the sigils and words for mutation and integration, many with an actual representation of the lion-goat-serpent from which the alchemical construct got its mythological name. But --
-- but --
-- if you knew what you were looking for (and Ed did, because he couldn't forget it, it seared behind his eyelids at night and itched at the tips of his fingers during the day) you could see something new in the designs, something Ed hadn't seen in any transmutation circles before three years prior but that he now saw all the time, and that he almost always saw in situations like this, the seedy and unethical underbelly of alchemical research, almost always it turned up in the worst places.
and no wonder, right?
The man who'd called himself the Blood River Alchemist (stupid, Ed thought, you didn't get a Something Something Alchemist name unless you passed the state qualifications, and if you wanted the qual so badly you'd pretend you already had it you really were stupid) struggled as Ed leafed through the stacks of notes, papers, arrays in various stages of composition.
"You can't just -- I demand -- "
"Military police will be here soon," Ed said absently, riffling through the stack once more and then abruptly wrenching the whole half-foot-thick pile of papers off the workbench and onto the floor. The workbench was wood, and therefore flammable...
"What are you doing?" screeched the would-be chimera master.
Ed yanked open the filing cabinet, hauled out the paper -- no point sorting -- and dropped it on the floor too. "There was a fight," he said, "accidents happen, you really shouldn't have open flames around so much paper anyway -- "
"No!"
Ed swept the fattest of the candles on the workbench off it and onto the stack of papers.
"That's -- that's destruction of property, you little brat, you're not going to get away with -- "
"There was a fight," Ed repeated, watching to make sure that the fire didn't spread even as it licked eagerly through the stack of paper. It made him think of Roy, and no wonder, but fire was the most efficient and plausibly deniable way to make sure those arrays were destroyed, gone, irretrievable... "Accidents happen."
"Oh, Ed," came an exasperated voice behind him, and he froze and whirled to find... Major Ross, pinching the bridge of her nose and giving him a Look. "If you could be a little faster about your accidents, it would really help keep my blood pressure down."
***
Roy's first-thing-in-at-work ritual, while he waited for his brain to wake up and engage: a cup of black coffee, the window open behind him (unless the weather was really atrocious), and the daily paper spread out before him. It was, also, a way of connecting with Riza even though she now had a well-merited office of her own to take care of; technically the paper he read was her paper, and as she skimmed it on her way in to work she circled in blue things she thought he'd find interesting. Then he circled in red the things he thought she'd find interesting and passed it back to her at lunch.
This morning's circled items: the coming-of-age ball for the Emperor of Aerugo's only granddaughter (he filed that away in memory, wondered if any of Amestris' spies in Aerugo had netted an invitation), a city improvement bill was close to passing the parliament (good), a military funding bill was also close to passing (not so good), the football playoffs were drawing to a close (Riza's hometown team was doing very well indeed), and....
At first he couldn't understand why she'd circled the article in the Science and Technology section; it was on alchemy, certainly, but she didn't circle just any article on alchemy. He skimmed down over it ("Professor Maynard notes that some compounds, such as insulin, that have proved difficult to synthesize using ordinary alchemy, can be created by alchemically modifying bacterial cultures to encourage them to produce the compounds as a byproduct. 'Just as a brewer uses yeast in order to create alcohol, we're using these bacteria to create insulin...'"), but the last paragraph made him sit up and take notice:
"Alphonse Elric, one of Professor Maynard's students, was very excited about the direction of this research. 'We're looking into using Xing alchemical techniques next, for multistep biochemical reactions -- Xing alchemy allows for gradual reactions over time in a way that you really can't manage with standard Amestrian transmutation circles. I think there's a lot of fertile ground for combining the best attributes of both Xing and Amestrian alchemy.'"
It was not difficult, if you knew how to read between the lines, to put the pieces together: Alphonse studying biochemical alchemy could only mean one thing.
Hm. Perhaps it was time to share a cup of coffee with Alphonse and see how things were. He hadn't heard anything from either Elric brother in some time, and that tended to be a dangerous sign.
"Havoc?"
"Sir?" Havoc's voice came from the rest of the office, through Mustang's partially-open door.
"Can you find me the current number for Alphonse? It's been a while since I've seen what either of them were up to."
"Sure, boss--" Havoc began, and then the outer door slammed open, slammed closed. "-- But I don't think you'll need that to talk to an Elric," Havoc finished.
Ed stood by the window while Major Maria Ross filled Roy in. He looked tired, and he smelled like... smoke?
"We got a tip to check the cellar of forty-eight Woodlawn Avenue," Maria Ross said, "and sure enough we found illegal chimeras -- and, uh, Ed."
"And the call was from...?"
"The caller was anonymous."
Roy considered this, and used the first -- and, often, most effective -- tool in his arsenal: the serious look. Ross sighed.
"The caller was Alphonse," she said, "but you didn't hear it from me."
That surprised him. He'd expected that it would be Ed, underestimating how long it would take him to get clear of the scene of the crime. Why would Alphonse rat his own brother out...?
"Ordinarily, I would've just told him to get lost," Ross continued. "I mean, we owe him that much, right?" She seemed to be looking to him for confirmation. He gave her a brief nod. That was fair, at least; they did owe the Elric brothers a lot. "But finding him burning the notes... well, I didn't want to make that decision on my own, so..."
"You did the right thing," Roy said, and saw Ross relax marginally. Well, he couldn't blame her; the tribunal after the revolution had found her cleared of all charges, but there were still some in the military who thought of her as quite possibly a murderer; she couldn't afford any stains on her record. "Leave it to me. I'll sort things out."
"Thank you, sir," Ross said.
When she had let herself out, and the door clicked decisively behind her, Roy seated himself in his chair and waited. Ed was still staring out the window. He hadn't grown much in the prior four years, presumably to his chagrin, but he had very clearly aged and matured; his face had the strong bones of an adult, without any of the softness of youth. He looked even more severe with his hair drawn sharply back into a ponytail. He smelled of smoke, and his eyes were a little red.
It was Ed who broke the silence, as Roy had anticipated; he'd never had much patience. "Look," he said, sounding both aggressive and weary, "either it's a citizen's arrest and you clap me on the back and tell me 'well done' and send me on my way, or it's a breaking-and-entering and you hand me over to the civilian authorities. I'm not your subordinate anymore."
"That's true," Roy said. "And yet."
"What?" Ed demanded, with surprising force, turning away from the window. "And yet what?" Straight-backed, strong, angry. Roy was taken aback, though he didn't allow his face to show it.
"You know I'm not going to hand you over to the police for breaking and entering, Edward," he said. "Not least because you were quite right. They were breaking the law."
"Of course they were." Ed glared at him, pale bonfire shine of his eyes and then turned back to look out the window, leaving Roy with only his eagle profile. "All alchemical experiments involving living creatures of any type must be cleared by a panel of ethicists, and all actual transmutations of animals must be done under strict oversight. That's a quote."
It was almost word-for-word, in fact. Ahh, the Elric memory -- "I know."
"So why exactly do you have me here? Pat me on the back, well done lad, off I go," Ed said, with an undertone of sarcasm that was unexpected and, quite frankly, disturbing. Edward had been angry, snarly, surly, contentious, but often almost painfully earnest. Where had this bitterness come from? Alphonse was fine --
He made his voice soft, low. "So why," Roy said, "did you burn the evidence?"
Ed was silent.
"It would make the case against them all the more ironclad, and I know you hate chimerists, Edward, I know that you find the manipulation of living beings abhorrent unless it's for purely advantageous medical alchemy -- "
Ed was silent.
" -- so why wouldn't you want the prosecutors to have the best case possible? Why would you burn the arrays that proved precisely what they were doing?"
Ed spoke, finally, to the skyline of Central. "The chimeras in the cages were proof enough."
"Proof that they'd contravened the Ethical Alchemy Act, yes. Proof of exactly what they were up to -- "
"It was enough," Ed said, his voice tight and sharp.
"What was so important in those papers that you couldn't let the prosecutors see them, Edward?"
"The prosecutors are hired by your goddamned government -- " Ed began, his voice hot, and then he broke off and his eyes widened.
Aha.
"What don't you want the government to see?" Roy asked, softly.
Ed closed his mouth stubbornly and did not speak.
"Edward," Roy said. "I'm not going to betray whatever it is. I just need to know what you were doing. Otherwise there will be inquiries."
"They had some research that no one should have," Ed said. "About life and death. And I wasn't about to let anyone, anyone see it. And that's all you're getting out of me."
The look in his eyes -- in profile, just slivers of pale light -- reminded Roy of Riza, so many years ago, demanding (not pleading, demanding) that he burn her back. He didn't ask any questions, not now. He said, "You're free to go, Edward. I'll make certain this does not affect your files."
"I don't care about the files."
"No," Roy said, "but Alphonse does, I imagine."
Ed's mouth tipped up at one side, as though he couldn't help himself. "You're still a bastard," he said, but then he turned away from the window so fast that his ponytail spun (a whip of gold around his shoulders), and slouched his way out of the office.
Roy stared after him, at the closed door, for a long time, thinking, hell, not again. And then he picked up the phone and dialed Riza's extension, and said, "You won't believe who I just had in my office...."
***
Ed walked, as insouciant and careless as he could manage, through the halls of Central Command, out down the long straight path of the lawn, down Front Street to the alley behind the Blue Cartwheels. And then he ran, as though there were hellhounds at his heels, as though his heels were on fire, as though --
-- as though the long arms of the gate were chasing him --
No no no, he didn't need to remember this, he didn't want to remember this, it was over, damn the chimerists for making him remember, damn Roy for not letting him just forget --
***
He knows he was physically gone because when he returns to the cave -- it had to be a cave, it's always a cave, cave womb spark the beginning of the world -- he lands on his back, and Alphonse lands on top of him.
Alphonse -- !
The armor is gone, blown into a million pieces, but on top of him is Al's body, sixteen years old and skinny as a starvation victim, long lank hair dark bronze and his eyes closed and his emaciated chest perilously still and Ed thinks oh no no no, you can't, you can't give him his body back dead, no --
-- and then a deep shuddering wrack of breath, coughing, a whine on Al's inhale as though his lungs are rusty with disuse, do you need to breathe in the Gate -- ?
And then, and then, the blood.
Like some kind of horrible joke, the blood. It felt like gallons of it, pouring out of nowhere over his clothed body and Al's naked one, warm as though it were pouring out of a living vein, pulsing out of... nowhere. Maybe it wasn't some kind of joke, maybe it was just equivalent exchange, all the blood he'd bled for Al, all the blood Al had bled for him.
He wiped blood out of his eyes, his face, his thick-hanging bangs. He eased Al off himself -- Al, breathing deep steady breaths, painfully thin and covered in blood but alive, alive, enfleshed and alive -- and looked up.
Alchemical symbols burned their way through his eyes, past his brain, into his soul.
He'd drawn a circle, a circle born half of his expertise and half of pure terrified desperation, on the floor of the cave. That circle, drawn in chalk, was, gone, obliterated by blood. But on the ceiling of the cave was --
Not its twin. But its sibling: alike but not the same. There were patterns there that he'd never seen, never thought of. There were symbols there....
And he knew what they were.
Life. Death. The secrets therein. The Gate was the guardian of mortality, and as he'd spoken to it, so it spoke to him, white-light writings on the ceiling.
He looked away, looked down, even the sea of blood preferable, because what he saw there was enough to drive better people than him insane. He didn't have time for this. He didn't have time for this. He needed to pay attention to Alphonse, breathing deep but still comatose.
He hefted his brother (taller than him somehow but still so light, still fragile) onto his back, turned away from the white-light writings of mortality and immortality, and made his way out of blood and darkness and into daylight.
***
Ed wiped his eyes and looked up to the sky. If he closed his eyes for too long he could still see the writings. And sometimes, even if he didn't, on paper....
Goddamn Mustang for making him think about it.
***
"Alphonse," Roy said, "Thanks for taking the time to meet with me."
"Of course," Al said. He put down the book he'd been reading -- not only about Xing alchemy but actually written in Xing script. "It's good to see you again."
"That's hardly likely," Roy said, and smiled. "I only turn up when there's bad news."
"That's not true at all," Al said. "You turned up -- er -- well, you -- hm." He frowned, then brightened again. "You were there when I got my body back. And when Falman got married, you came to the wedding."
"I could hardly have missed that."
"But it's a solid counterexample. You aren't always a harbinger of bad news." Al grinned at him. In a lot of ways, objectively, he looked like his brother -- same bone structure, same unique golden eyes, and hair just a few shades darker -- but he never quite looked like Ed. He didn't have the same desperate, unearthly edge.
He looked, Roy realized with a lurch, content. Ed looked happy sometimes, but Roy wasn't sure he'd ever seen him look content.
"I'm sure you didn't come just to talk about Falman's wedding."
"As remarkable an event as that was," Roy agreed. "No. I came because I read about your research in the paper. It sounded like something of interest to the military. And to me."
Al brightened. "Of course," he said. "Amestris has neglected medical alchemy for a long time -- not that that's entirely a bad thing, with Amestrian alchemical techniques all we could really manage was mutation, not restoration, and that's a dangerous game, although Marcoh has managed to turn it to his advantage -- but Xing alchemy's focus on cyclical patterns opens up whole new frontiers -- "
Roy just let himself listen as Al held forth on cutting-edge advancements in biological alchemy. It wasn't too hard to see where it was going --
"You want to restore your brother's limbs," he said, when Al had wound down.
"Of course," Al said, easily and without argument. "Since he wasn't able to do it for himself."
They'd both been pretty tight-lipped as to why that was. Roy didn't press. "So how is Edward, these days?"
"Ed is... Ed," Al said, and looked rueful, but also somewhat... sad? "Ed doesn't know what to do with himself without a crusade."
"Hence the midnight raids on the compounds of dubious alchemists?"
Al gave him a level look, and didn't say anything, reminding him -- for the first time -- very sharply of Ed.
Roy added, "Lieutenant Ross does know your voice."
"I know she does," Al said.
Ah. Ah. "You're trying to manipulate me," Roy said, unsure whether he should be flattered or offended.
"Is it working?" Al asked, and looked at him with Elric-golden eyes, mouth tipped up to one side -- wry, where Ed was never wry, where Ed was earnest or furious but never subtle. But then Al was very much his own person.
"Better than it ought to have," he admitted, and Al laughed. He continued, "Are you trying to manipulate me to look after your brother? He is an adult."
"He's bringing himself to your attention,"Al said. "I'm just helping things along."
"Because you're worried about him."
"Well," Al said. "Yes." And there was that, the undeniable sweetness of Al's personality. Who could deny that request?
"I'll do what I can," he said. "But Ed is an adult, and not under my command anymore."
"I know," Al said. "But I'm worried, and you were always the only person who could actually work around him adequately."
"Which is why you decided to use me."
"Well, yes," Al said. "If I was going to manipulate someone, I was going to manipulate someone effective, right?" And he looked so helplessly sincere that Roy couldn't feel offended, could only laugh.
***
"Brother," Ed heard through the fog of sleep -- and the more tangible muffle of the pillow over his head. "Brother. Brother." Al, not raising his voice but patiently repeating the one word.
"Whf?" Ed said, pulling the edge of the pillow off his head and squinting into the daylight.
"It's nearly five. I thought maybe you'd better get up before you run out of daylight."
It would have been easy to get angry at being mothered by his own younger brother, but it was so hard to actually get angry at Al, especially when he was standing there with such a worried look in his eyes -- and standing there with a steaming mug of coffee. "Yeah, okay," he said, tossing the pillow to the foot of the bed and swinging his legs over the side. His flesh foot touched the floorboards silently; his metal foot clicked.
Al put down the mug on his bedside table. "Where were you all last night?" he asked. "I don't even know when you got in."
Nearly five AM. "I dunno. Just wandering around. Lost track of time."
"Well, there's more coffee in the kitchen, and, uh -- you should also probably drink about a quart of water and take some willowbark tea."
"I didn't actually have that much to drink."
"Still." Al gave him his patented I'm-worried-about-you-but-I-know-you-won't-react-well-if-I-say-so look, which was almost as bad as the 'I'm worried about you' talk itself but harder to complain about.
"I think I'm going to take a shower," Ed said, to circumvent the whole non-discussion, and headed for the bathroom, scrubbing a hand back through his rumpled mess of slept-on hair.
He was careful not to look at himself too closely in the mirror (the exploded-dandelion mess of his hair was bad enough caught in profile, without the added sight of bloodshot eyes) and ran the water hot, hot enough to almost scald. This close to winter, it wasn't a bad idea to get the automail good and warm before the ambient temperature started to suck the heat back out of it; Al always courteously kept the heat up in winter, up to temperatures that had to be bordering on uncomfortable for him, but there were still drafts. It was an old building. Anyway, the hot water pounding on his skull helped drive the last fuzziness of overlong daytime sleeping after overlong insomnia out of his brain.
He'd been telling the truth: he hadn't had that much to drink. A beer and a half, along with a meal, which wasn't so much. But the night had sunk through the pub door, spread itself out like wings, and at closing time he hadn't been able to bring himself to go home. He couldn't even say why. So he'd walked, and walked, and walked, all around Central at night (it wasn't actually as dangerous as all that, though a few muggers had, over the past months, learned not to pick on people just because they were sh-- young, and fair, and long-haired). He'd walked and felt the night seeping into his brain and hadn't been able to convince himself to go home until he was flat-out exhausted.
He shook his head, tried to shake the night out of it as well, let the hot water pound and pound.
When he emerged, he found a tall glass of water and two pills next to it -- and, as if in silent apology for the criticism implied in the water-and-aspirin, a bowl of spicy chili and a hunk of bread. Ed's sleep patterns were shot all to hell, but his appetite was still good; he fell to with enthusiasm. Al smiled at him.
"How're things at the university?" he asked, which in the silent language of Elrics meant that he wasn't going to get weird about Al dragging him out of bed and feeding him aspirin and coffee.
"It's okay," Al said. "My grant came through for studying poison and toxin neutralization using stable array loops, which I'm pretty excited about, so the next step is writing to Mei-Chan and seeing if she wants to co-author a paper."
"I guess it'd be hypocritical of me to ask whether people will have an issue with a paper co-authored by a fourteen-year-old."
Al grinned. "Quite. Anyway, that's just the first step -- if we can get that working reliably we might be able to use it in conjunction with targeted arrays to kill parasites and other disease agents, and then flush them out of the body. There's a lot of potential for combining Xing and Amestrian alchemy in the medical sector, and we have so much ground to catch up." Ed could feel the next sentence coming even before Al put down his coffee cup and said, "You know we'd love your help, brother."
"Al."
"Not that you'd need to go into biomedical alchemy just because I love it. I know you were doing good work with chemical and physical alchemy -- Doctor Ericsson says your paper on the implications of the double-headed eagle in arrays involving the transmutation of transistors and electronic parts was excellent, even half-finished and with no citations -- "
"Al."
" -- or if you don't want to work for the university, there's always -- "
"Al!" Ed said, finally raising his voice, and Al stuttered off to a stop. "I don't need a pep talk. Okay? I'm fine."
Al leveled him a serious look, and god, sometimes he looked so much like their mother it was heartbreaking. Ed had always envied him that, that he'd got their mother's hair, the shape of her face, and her peculiar expressions... "I'm not sure people who are 'fine' wander around the streets all night."
"I didn't say I was normal," Ed said, and tried for a grin. It was apparently good enough to make Al relax marginally. "Look," he went on, "the university and me just wasn't working out. You love it there, I get that, I'm thrilled for you, and they'd better keep giving you fellowships and staying out of your way. But it didn't work for me."
"That's the thing, though, it worked great for you for the first year, and then -- "
"Stuff changes. People change. Look." Ed daubed the last of the chili out of the bowl with the crust of the bread. "I'm okay, okay? I'm fine. I'll let you know if that stops being the case."
Al looked dubious, but he said, "Okay. I'll trust you, brother."
Which, as far as Ed was concerned, was fighting dirty.
Despite what Al thought, Ed didn't totally keep his head stuck in the sand, although the more he heard, the more he wished he had. He knew the newspapers were biased and bigoted and knew very little, but he read them anyway. The Grand Duchess Marguerite Lucubrate of Aerugo had her coming-of-age ceremony -- none too soon, since her grandfather the Emperor seemed likely to bite the dust any day and she was the only heir -- and was saying nasty things about Amestris. Well, no doubt over the past few centuries Amestris had deserved those nasty things....
He hung around the house and looked meek until Al went to work (thank goodness -- he'd never forgive himself if Al hobbled his career looking after him), and then spent the afternoon napping and reading alchemy books. Not that any of them ever contained the answer to his questions, but they soothed him. And then, when evening came down low and close on the horizon, he got dressed and went out, not to the Cartwheel, but to the Three Serpents.
Al didn't know about the time he spent at the Serpent, or at least if he did he didn't show any indication of it. Winry didn't either, or any of Mustang's office (Mustang's former office, that was years ago, he had to get with the times -- ), because even though they weren't technically Mustang's office anymore, they would have still ratted him out.
Maria and Denny knew about the Serpent, though. In a weird way they'd earned it. In a weird way, he didn't mind them being there.
Mostly because they left him alone if what he wanted was to order a pint of beer and brood.
***
The hospital: white, white, white, sterile white, acres of it. Antiseptic smell. And Al, awake, finally, thank god, thank god -- sitting up and looking at him with real eyes, real dark-gold eyes and not glowing reddish armor-lights, and saying --
-- "I don't remember -- "
"Don't try. It's okay." Elation bright like a bubble of sunlight behind his breastbone. "You're fine. You're going to be fine. That's all that matters."
"I remember something, pulling, something tugging at me, was that you?"
(I don't think so.) "I don't know. It doesn't matter. You're okay now. You're fine. You're going to be fine." Al was so -- dark-gold eyes but hair like their mother's, brown, and his body so thin but tall, tall, he'd had trouble dragging it (naked and bloodstained, god what a sight they'd been) because it was so tall, which meant he'd kept it okay, which meant he hadn't ruined his brother permanently -- "You're going to be perfect."
Al, sitting up, looking at his hands -- flexing them, tensing them. "It's so strange. I don't know how to, sometimes I think I might faint, they give me weak broth and I think my mouth is going to explode."
"You'll get used to it." Al was going be fine, Al was going to be perfect --
And then, dark gold eyes, serious expression, "What about you?"
"What about me?" For the moment Ed was baffled.
"Your arm. Your leg."
"Oh." And the question made him -- remember. No. He was okay with automail, it wasn't worth -- "Me, I'm fine. I'll be fine."
"We were going to restore both of us."
"I'm fine. You were in danger. I wasn't. Plenty of people have -- soldiers have automail their whole -- "
"We were going to restore both of us."
"I'm fine, Al." He could feel his voice go tense and strange. "I'm fine. I don't need anything else." Please don't make me go back.
"But -- "
"Sleep. Please. Just sleep. I want you to be better. Okay?"
"But how did you... restore me? Can't we -- "
"Please," Ed said, and heard the strained rawness of his voice, saw Al recoil. "Just sleep, okay? It's all okay now. Just sleep."
***
Ed clearly thought he was hiding a great deal with his forays into the seedier part of town, but the confidantes he'd chosen included Denny Brosh. Brosh was loyal as the day was long, but he wasn't the... cleverest fish in the barrel. Roy doubted he'd even been aware that he'd given away Ed's secret watering hole.
(He would've felt bad for, essentially, stalking Ed, except that Al had sent him on this mission, and Al was one of the sanest people he'd ever known.)
So it was that Roy wound up at the doorway of the Three Serpents.
It wasn't a dive bar by any stretch of the imagination. It was actually quite a nice place, and the only real difference between that and the Blue Cartwheel was that... nobody else Ed knew spent time at the Three Serpents. Which was in and of itself rather odd. Ed had never been a solitary creature, not really; he'd always had Al, and he'd gotten along well with people, in a crude and rough-edged way. Nobody would have pegged him as a smooth talker, and yet people liked him; he'd been called Alchemist of the People for a reason. So why....?
He'd hesitated outside, looking up at the sign. (The sign predated even the pub's name: a red serpent with three heads, and from each head came three tongues. It had the look of an alchemical symbol, though Roy couldn't place its specific meaning.) What drove him inside was neither altruism nor manipulation but sheer curiosity. If something was up with Edward Elric, he wanted to know what. Whatever it was, chances were it was interesting.
As soon as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he got his great surprise of the day. He'd seen Ed off and on in the past few years, but he must not have really looked, because --
Ed sat near the bar, nursing a beer. The light swinging on a chain over his head illuminated his distinctive bright-gold hair (tied back in a tail at the nape of his neck), but somehow even that splash of color wasn't what drew the eye. It was the breadth of his shoulders, the strong line of his back even as he slouched, the planes and angles of his profile as he turned his head. The years had been, oh, kind to him -- or maybe he'd always been this attractive, and Roy had simply not allowed himself to notice it back when Ed was a subordinate, underage, and otherwise A Very Bad Idea.
He was noticing now. And that complicated his simple mission of curiosity enough that he almost backed right out of the Three Serpents, except just then Ed turned a little more, and noticed him, and raised one eyebrow.
And that was a challenge Roy wasn't equipped to pass up.
"So you want to tell me why exactly you're following me around?" Ed asked, and he looked at Roy through the veil of his own thick golden bangs, and --
"Honest truth?" Roy said.
"Like you'd ever give me that," Ed snorted, and took a long pull of his beer.
"Al's worried about you," Roy said, mostly because he thought the truth would startle the hell out of Ed. He was right, too. Ed snorted into his beer and got foam on the bridge of his nose and Roy was shocked to find himself fighting the urge to lean forward and lick it off.
"Al shouldn't waste his time worrying about me."
"But he does."
"He shouldn't." Ed drew patterns in the condensation on the table.
"But he does."
"Stop repeating yourself, you sound like a parrot."
"Hm," Roy said. "My plumage is too drab. As I think you've mentioned, you never liked the uniform."
"I dunno, you look pretty..." Ed said, and then choked off.
Roy tried not to reveal how much that admission had shot through his body. He just raised an eyebrow.
"Shut up," Ed said.
***
Onward to Part 2!