FMA -- Heat
Title: Heat
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Ed
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,145
Warnings: language, major spoilers for '03/CoS
Summary: The final part to Smoke and Light: In which the rain brings wonders.
Author's Note: I really don't think it's my fault that this song is on the album two songs after the other one. Happy Thanksgiving; have some utter schmoop! ♥
HEAT
Surely thirty-seven is not too old for a sense of adventure.
Surely thirty-seven is not too old to don a brave face and keep fighting.
Surely thirty-seven is not too old to bear the inconveniences and the unpleasantries and wring some wry amusement from them all.
…and from his clothing, which is saturated so thoroughly that he’ll be chilled for several days.
Surely, surely, thirty-seven should be much too young for giving up. It should be much too young for creaks, and aches, and bitterness that can’t be drowned in the contents of a liquor cabinet still several blocks away.
It seemed like such a fine idea to buy a narrow little townhouse in one of the quiet neighborhoods nearer to Central Command. It was a mausoleum when he started; it was an icebox, an echo chamber, empty halls and open rooms betraying all the nothing in his character. But he’s collected plenty of personal detritus over time, and now it actually looks inhabited.
He supposes he should be fair to his own fancy-most of the time, it is a fine idea. Most of the time, he revels in the money saved on fuel and vehicular maintenance alike; most of the time, a brisk, brief walk clears his head of all the grit and muddle of the day, and he either solves problems or sleeps better or both.
Most of the time, it isn’t raining.
It’s not that he’s helpless; he could take an ordinary assailant down at fifty yards with his sidearm; Riza has a designated Look now for You will be going to the firing range tonight, sir, to reassure me that you’ve learned to compensate for your mediocre depth perception. While it still seems grossly inelegant next to the smooth lines of the flame array, he’s far from disarmed.
It’s not even the way the downpour rattles like falling machinegun shells on the pavement and makes it impossible to track the world by sound-such that his nerves grate, and his fingers twitch, and he keeps panning his eye back and forth across the darkened, silvered streets.
It’s the fact that the sun was ablaze with promises this morning, so he abandoned his umbrella in the foyer, and his trusty greatcoat doesn’t have a trusty hood. It’s the fact that he’s soaked to the bone marrow, and this is a worse kind of cold than the arid, frigid whisper of the snowbanks rising towards the sky.
He just wants to get back to the house-he just wants to strip off the layers of wet fabric clinging to his skin, leaching warmth, weighing on his shoulders, slowing down his steps. It’s a terrible feedback loop-the colder and wetter he gets, the greater his miserable desperation to retreat to safety and let his guard down at last; and the harder it is to make it there. Isn’t thirty-seven too young to be so tired? ‘Tired’ isn’t even enough-he’s exhausted. He is being exhausted; he is being used up, and soon he will be spent, and then… what? What happens when there’s nothing left to give?
That’s the tidal wave he’s running ahead of. Unthinkable thought; if it catches him, he drowns. What then? What if the weariness finally wins out after all? What becomes of him if, after all of the striving and the endless uphill battles, after all the penance and all of the unrelenting drive to do some right-what becomes of him if he fails?
He just wants to get to the house. He just wants to get inside and cast his net out for kinder dreams.
It’s late-very late, much too late for civilized citizens; he doesn’t know exactly anymore. And as he draws close enough to make out the lawn, the mailbox, the pillars of the porch through the sheet of rain, he has to wrestle with an instinct to turn around and go back to Central Command. The off-white walls and rows of doors are the bane of his existence, yes, but at least he wouldn’t be alone in the building. At least his office wouldn’t echo with its own emptiness; at least the lights would be on; at least the corners wouldn’t always be cold.
But then he draws a little closer, and he sees the figure on the porch, which was curled up next to a shadowy block of a suitcase and is now unfolding to its feet.
The shape of the coat is wrong, but the rest of the silhouette-the jaw, the trailing ponytail, the slant of the shoulders, the set of the feet-the way the left hand rises, and the fingers start to curl in half a greeting, half a wave, something like a summons, while the right arm hangs heavy-the faintest, softest gleam of gold against the night-
He’s frozen, for a moment. He is the sentry in the snowstorm; he is a dead man on his feet; he is ice at the core, just waiting.
And then he runs.
Ed meets him halfway; they collide at the end of the front walk into an embrace so violent that Roy’s already haphazard breath leaps straight out of his chest-which, on the upside, makes more space for the mad ricocheting of his heart.
“How-” he begins, and his hands rise unbidden to cradle Ed’s face as the rain darkens the bright gold hair to a deeper shade like honey, like wheat. For a moment, he’s mesmerized by Ed’s bangs plastering themselves to his forehead, by the droplets in his eyelashes, by the tiny rivulets running down his face… And then he jolts with the sheer force of the realization and grips Ed’s shoulders instead. “But Alphonse-”
“Is at Gracia’s,” Ed says. “Prob’ly painting Elicia’s toenails and rambling about Paris by now.”
Roy blinks at him, blinks again to clear the water; is this really…? He’s had this dream before, a dozen times, a thousand; even with the stark sensation of the cold rain dripping down the back of his neck, can he make himself believe…? “Why didn’t-”
“She spotted me for a cab,” Ed says. It figures, doesn’t it? Five years older, five times as beautiful. “I told her not to call you.”
Roy keeps blinking. The rain keeps cutting into his vision, and Ed keeps grinning up at him and doesn’t disappear. “Why not?”
“’Cause I wanted to see you do this,” Ed says, lifting both hands to Roy’s shoulders to run them slowly down his arms. It’s a light touch-a skimming touch, a slight pressure; hardly even a touch at all. It’s an implication and a suggestion, punctuated by the arch of Ed’s eyebrow and the curve of his smile, but the question is entirely unvoiced. The boy is gone, and what an extraordinary man Roy has here in his arms. “Didn’t count on you working ’til an ungodly hour of the night, and I figured alchemizing your deadbolt into putty would be kinda rude, but… y’know. I was holding out for the dramatic reunion.”
Roy can’t help his hands; they know what they want. With a fingertip he guides a lock of streaming hair back behind the curve of Ed’s ear. “Was it dramatic enough for your tastes?”
Ed shrugs, and his grin widens. “Not bad.”
“What a ringing endorsement,” Roy says.
There’s a wicked edge to the grin now, and a smudge of something-grease? grime? heaven knows what or where from-on his collarbone. “I mean, it did take fuckin’ forever and a dozen hopped freight trains and another dozen rides hitched on oxcarts and shit to get here.” Roy nudges Ed’s shirt collar aside to rub at the smear of unidentifiable road dust with the pad of his thumb, and Ed shivers deliciously. “And I did always want to kiss you in the rain.”
“You don’t say,” Roy says.
“Was that too much?” Ed asks. It looks, in the faint glow of the streetlamps, like there’s a touch of pink in his cheeks; Roy runs his fingertips up along Ed’s jaw and finds it warm under all the water. Ed’s eyes dart over Roy’s face, and he bites down on the corner of his bottom lip. “Jesus, I kept… I was planning all these things to say, but…”
Roy strokes his hair back from his forehead, twining his fingers into the wet strands. “But nothing’s quite enough.”
Little rivers of rainwater are winding their way down Roy’s back. Every square centimeter of fabric that he’s wearing is sticking to his skin. He is so thoroughly cold that it feels like his pancreas and his spleen are curling up together to huddle for warmth.
And he’s not sure he’s ever been happier in his life.
“Yeah,” Ed says, gnawing on his lip in earnest now, smiling around it all the same. “Two worlds of languages and literature, and I can’t think of a fucking thing.”
“I missed you more than I thought was possible,” Roy says. “You took more of me with you than I thought it was possible to lose.”
“You knew, didn’t you?” Ed says. “When I came back-you knew I wasn’t staying.” He swallows, white throat and stark gold eyes in the dark night. “That’s why you wouldn’t touch me. Wouldn’t even come near me; you already knew I wasn’t staying, and… right?”
“If I had,” Roy says, “I never could have let you go. And I could see it in your eyes that you had to. The fate of both of these… universes, what have you-were more important to you in that moment than me or than yourself. I’ve spent a lot of my life trying not to hold you back. And I’ve spent longer than that trying to learn how to be selfless.”
“I’m staying this time,” Ed says, unsteadily, curling the fingers of both hands into Roy’s sleeves. “We locked all the doors behind us, too; can’t ever go back. I don’t want to. I mean, I know we-you and me, we… left a lot of shit hanging, y’know, up in the air and sort of… unfinished, but-”
“You are the only thing I have ever wanted like this,” Roy says. “You are the only thing I have ever waited for like this, with my heart on a razor’s edge every moment. And I would have waited forever. I would have bled out for you, Edward. A thousand times over, if you’d asked.” He traces with his fingertips, to remember-Ed’s hairline, his ears, his temples, his jaw, his neck, his shoulders, his uneven arms. “The rest is irrelevant. Just stay.”
“Well, jeez,” Ed says, beaming up at him. “Said I was stuck here, didn’t I?”
“I suppose you did,” Roy says. “And since that’s my fantasy, I suppose I owe you yours.”
Ed is smiling so hard that Roy’s heart squeezes inward until it trembles. “Equivalent exchange, huh?”
“Precisely,” Roy says, and tilts his chin and leans down to kiss him.
It’s extremely wet, and Ed grasps two fistfuls of his collar so tightly that he has a bit of trouble breathing, and it is luminescent with everything they had before and everything they could have now, and Roy would trade it for nothing on any world.
art by the wonderful Pax, originally posted here
Ed sucks on his lip, and their tongues get thoroughly reacquainted, and the rain runs down the bridge of Roy’s nose and spills into Ed’s hair, and Ed gasps half-breaths against his mouth. They are one tangle of wet clothes and thunderous heartbeats; they are one narrow flame of fulfillment in the night. Oh, for two eyes to see Edward Elric drawing back, bright-eyed and brazen, grinning wide, right hand still clutching Roy’s lapel like he has no plans to release it as long as they live.
“I hope that was suitably dramatic,” Roy says.
“Dunno,” Ed says. “Think we need to try making out in a couple more places for comparison. Like… everywhere. Let’s try everywhere.”
“Let’s,” Roy says.
“But first let’s get the fuck inside,” Ed says. “If you get pneumonia, I’ll kill you.”
Roy takes his left hand, and their fingers intersect so easily he can’t help but to marvel at the sight. “That seems a bit counterintuitive, doesn’t it?”
“You’re decrepit,” Ed says. “And apparently a workaholic now. We better get your ass in the house.”
“On the condition,” Roy says, “that I make a very large pot of coffee, and you tell me the story from start to finish.”
“How much coffee you got?” Ed asks, dragging him up the walk.
“Enough,” Roy says, fishing for his keys.
“It’s a long fuckin’ story,” Ed says.
Roy holds the door open for him. “We’ve got a long time.”
Thirty-seven is not too old for kindling to catch a spark.
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Ed
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,145
Warnings: language, major spoilers for '03/CoS
Summary: The final part to Smoke and Light: In which the rain brings wonders.
Author's Note: I really don't think it's my fault that this song is on the album two songs after the other one. Happy Thanksgiving; have some utter schmoop! ♥
HEAT
Surely thirty-seven is not too old for a sense of adventure.
Surely thirty-seven is not too old to don a brave face and keep fighting.
Surely thirty-seven is not too old to bear the inconveniences and the unpleasantries and wring some wry amusement from them all.
…and from his clothing, which is saturated so thoroughly that he’ll be chilled for several days.
Surely, surely, thirty-seven should be much too young for giving up. It should be much too young for creaks, and aches, and bitterness that can’t be drowned in the contents of a liquor cabinet still several blocks away.
It seemed like such a fine idea to buy a narrow little townhouse in one of the quiet neighborhoods nearer to Central Command. It was a mausoleum when he started; it was an icebox, an echo chamber, empty halls and open rooms betraying all the nothing in his character. But he’s collected plenty of personal detritus over time, and now it actually looks inhabited.
He supposes he should be fair to his own fancy-most of the time, it is a fine idea. Most of the time, he revels in the money saved on fuel and vehicular maintenance alike; most of the time, a brisk, brief walk clears his head of all the grit and muddle of the day, and he either solves problems or sleeps better or both.
Most of the time, it isn’t raining.
It’s not that he’s helpless; he could take an ordinary assailant down at fifty yards with his sidearm; Riza has a designated Look now for You will be going to the firing range tonight, sir, to reassure me that you’ve learned to compensate for your mediocre depth perception. While it still seems grossly inelegant next to the smooth lines of the flame array, he’s far from disarmed.
It’s not even the way the downpour rattles like falling machinegun shells on the pavement and makes it impossible to track the world by sound-such that his nerves grate, and his fingers twitch, and he keeps panning his eye back and forth across the darkened, silvered streets.
It’s the fact that the sun was ablaze with promises this morning, so he abandoned his umbrella in the foyer, and his trusty greatcoat doesn’t have a trusty hood. It’s the fact that he’s soaked to the bone marrow, and this is a worse kind of cold than the arid, frigid whisper of the snowbanks rising towards the sky.
He just wants to get back to the house-he just wants to strip off the layers of wet fabric clinging to his skin, leaching warmth, weighing on his shoulders, slowing down his steps. It’s a terrible feedback loop-the colder and wetter he gets, the greater his miserable desperation to retreat to safety and let his guard down at last; and the harder it is to make it there. Isn’t thirty-seven too young to be so tired? ‘Tired’ isn’t even enough-he’s exhausted. He is being exhausted; he is being used up, and soon he will be spent, and then… what? What happens when there’s nothing left to give?
That’s the tidal wave he’s running ahead of. Unthinkable thought; if it catches him, he drowns. What then? What if the weariness finally wins out after all? What becomes of him if, after all of the striving and the endless uphill battles, after all the penance and all of the unrelenting drive to do some right-what becomes of him if he fails?
He just wants to get to the house. He just wants to get inside and cast his net out for kinder dreams.
It’s late-very late, much too late for civilized citizens; he doesn’t know exactly anymore. And as he draws close enough to make out the lawn, the mailbox, the pillars of the porch through the sheet of rain, he has to wrestle with an instinct to turn around and go back to Central Command. The off-white walls and rows of doors are the bane of his existence, yes, but at least he wouldn’t be alone in the building. At least his office wouldn’t echo with its own emptiness; at least the lights would be on; at least the corners wouldn’t always be cold.
But then he draws a little closer, and he sees the figure on the porch, which was curled up next to a shadowy block of a suitcase and is now unfolding to its feet.
The shape of the coat is wrong, but the rest of the silhouette-the jaw, the trailing ponytail, the slant of the shoulders, the set of the feet-the way the left hand rises, and the fingers start to curl in half a greeting, half a wave, something like a summons, while the right arm hangs heavy-the faintest, softest gleam of gold against the night-
He’s frozen, for a moment. He is the sentry in the snowstorm; he is a dead man on his feet; he is ice at the core, just waiting.
And then he runs.
Ed meets him halfway; they collide at the end of the front walk into an embrace so violent that Roy’s already haphazard breath leaps straight out of his chest-which, on the upside, makes more space for the mad ricocheting of his heart.
“How-” he begins, and his hands rise unbidden to cradle Ed’s face as the rain darkens the bright gold hair to a deeper shade like honey, like wheat. For a moment, he’s mesmerized by Ed’s bangs plastering themselves to his forehead, by the droplets in his eyelashes, by the tiny rivulets running down his face… And then he jolts with the sheer force of the realization and grips Ed’s shoulders instead. “But Alphonse-”
“Is at Gracia’s,” Ed says. “Prob’ly painting Elicia’s toenails and rambling about Paris by now.”
Roy blinks at him, blinks again to clear the water; is this really…? He’s had this dream before, a dozen times, a thousand; even with the stark sensation of the cold rain dripping down the back of his neck, can he make himself believe…? “Why didn’t-”
“She spotted me for a cab,” Ed says. It figures, doesn’t it? Five years older, five times as beautiful. “I told her not to call you.”
Roy keeps blinking. The rain keeps cutting into his vision, and Ed keeps grinning up at him and doesn’t disappear. “Why not?”
“’Cause I wanted to see you do this,” Ed says, lifting both hands to Roy’s shoulders to run them slowly down his arms. It’s a light touch-a skimming touch, a slight pressure; hardly even a touch at all. It’s an implication and a suggestion, punctuated by the arch of Ed’s eyebrow and the curve of his smile, but the question is entirely unvoiced. The boy is gone, and what an extraordinary man Roy has here in his arms. “Didn’t count on you working ’til an ungodly hour of the night, and I figured alchemizing your deadbolt into putty would be kinda rude, but… y’know. I was holding out for the dramatic reunion.”
Roy can’t help his hands; they know what they want. With a fingertip he guides a lock of streaming hair back behind the curve of Ed’s ear. “Was it dramatic enough for your tastes?”
Ed shrugs, and his grin widens. “Not bad.”
“What a ringing endorsement,” Roy says.
There’s a wicked edge to the grin now, and a smudge of something-grease? grime? heaven knows what or where from-on his collarbone. “I mean, it did take fuckin’ forever and a dozen hopped freight trains and another dozen rides hitched on oxcarts and shit to get here.” Roy nudges Ed’s shirt collar aside to rub at the smear of unidentifiable road dust with the pad of his thumb, and Ed shivers deliciously. “And I did always want to kiss you in the rain.”
“You don’t say,” Roy says.
“Was that too much?” Ed asks. It looks, in the faint glow of the streetlamps, like there’s a touch of pink in his cheeks; Roy runs his fingertips up along Ed’s jaw and finds it warm under all the water. Ed’s eyes dart over Roy’s face, and he bites down on the corner of his bottom lip. “Jesus, I kept… I was planning all these things to say, but…”
Roy strokes his hair back from his forehead, twining his fingers into the wet strands. “But nothing’s quite enough.”
Little rivers of rainwater are winding their way down Roy’s back. Every square centimeter of fabric that he’s wearing is sticking to his skin. He is so thoroughly cold that it feels like his pancreas and his spleen are curling up together to huddle for warmth.
And he’s not sure he’s ever been happier in his life.
“Yeah,” Ed says, gnawing on his lip in earnest now, smiling around it all the same. “Two worlds of languages and literature, and I can’t think of a fucking thing.”
“I missed you more than I thought was possible,” Roy says. “You took more of me with you than I thought it was possible to lose.”
“You knew, didn’t you?” Ed says. “When I came back-you knew I wasn’t staying.” He swallows, white throat and stark gold eyes in the dark night. “That’s why you wouldn’t touch me. Wouldn’t even come near me; you already knew I wasn’t staying, and… right?”
“If I had,” Roy says, “I never could have let you go. And I could see it in your eyes that you had to. The fate of both of these… universes, what have you-were more important to you in that moment than me or than yourself. I’ve spent a lot of my life trying not to hold you back. And I’ve spent longer than that trying to learn how to be selfless.”
“I’m staying this time,” Ed says, unsteadily, curling the fingers of both hands into Roy’s sleeves. “We locked all the doors behind us, too; can’t ever go back. I don’t want to. I mean, I know we-you and me, we… left a lot of shit hanging, y’know, up in the air and sort of… unfinished, but-”
“You are the only thing I have ever wanted like this,” Roy says. “You are the only thing I have ever waited for like this, with my heart on a razor’s edge every moment. And I would have waited forever. I would have bled out for you, Edward. A thousand times over, if you’d asked.” He traces with his fingertips, to remember-Ed’s hairline, his ears, his temples, his jaw, his neck, his shoulders, his uneven arms. “The rest is irrelevant. Just stay.”
“Well, jeez,” Ed says, beaming up at him. “Said I was stuck here, didn’t I?”
“I suppose you did,” Roy says. “And since that’s my fantasy, I suppose I owe you yours.”
Ed is smiling so hard that Roy’s heart squeezes inward until it trembles. “Equivalent exchange, huh?”
“Precisely,” Roy says, and tilts his chin and leans down to kiss him.
It’s extremely wet, and Ed grasps two fistfuls of his collar so tightly that he has a bit of trouble breathing, and it is luminescent with everything they had before and everything they could have now, and Roy would trade it for nothing on any world.
art by the wonderful Pax, originally posted here
Ed sucks on his lip, and their tongues get thoroughly reacquainted, and the rain runs down the bridge of Roy’s nose and spills into Ed’s hair, and Ed gasps half-breaths against his mouth. They are one tangle of wet clothes and thunderous heartbeats; they are one narrow flame of fulfillment in the night. Oh, for two eyes to see Edward Elric drawing back, bright-eyed and brazen, grinning wide, right hand still clutching Roy’s lapel like he has no plans to release it as long as they live.
“I hope that was suitably dramatic,” Roy says.
“Dunno,” Ed says. “Think we need to try making out in a couple more places for comparison. Like… everywhere. Let’s try everywhere.”
“Let’s,” Roy says.
“But first let’s get the fuck inside,” Ed says. “If you get pneumonia, I’ll kill you.”
Roy takes his left hand, and their fingers intersect so easily he can’t help but to marvel at the sight. “That seems a bit counterintuitive, doesn’t it?”
“You’re decrepit,” Ed says. “And apparently a workaholic now. We better get your ass in the house.”
“On the condition,” Roy says, “that I make a very large pot of coffee, and you tell me the story from start to finish.”
“How much coffee you got?” Ed asks, dragging him up the walk.
“Enough,” Roy says, fishing for his keys.
“It’s a long fuckin’ story,” Ed says.
Roy holds the door open for him. “We’ve got a long time.”
Thirty-seven is not too old for kindling to catch a spark.