FMA -- Systole
Title: Systole
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Ed
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 13,000
Warnings: language, major spoilers for '03/CoS, Transparent Fix-It Syndrome, blood!kink galore, shoddy editing
Summary: Six years on, Roy's whole heart gets shaken back to rights.
Author's Note: …this was supposed to be short. And good! Short and good. It is neither of those things. But it was inspired a long while back by a thing that the too-lovely Pax drew, although it… barely… touches… on the wonderful art. So in addition to being bad at writing fic, I'm bad at being inspired. :'| Despite its general mediocrity, however, it is for Pax, with love and CoS feels; and also for Panda, with love and blood!kink. ♥♥♥♥ Hope it makes you smile, guys! ♥
SYSTOLE
Roy doesn’t remember much of the in-between times. The first is just a shuddering flashback to the sharp cold-burn of frostbite, a scream of wind, and a sprawl of white; the second is a valley strangled by the hush of solitude and silence, broken by a soft, mechanical sort of clicking-the sound of an automaton going through the motions of a life.
He is a seismograph, then. He is pits of hissing radio static, wells of waiting, quiet motionless despair-and then, at intervals, comes Ed.
Nothing else can feed the fire that Ed summons instantaneously, with just a glance, just a breath, just a flickering shadow of his form in the night-
But it always turns out to be an ordinary streak of moonlight wreaking mischief in Roy’s heart. It always turns out to be the blind spot playing tricks. It’s always a wish; a dream; a figment; a gasp of stupid, heedless hope that sticks and scrapes inside his throat. It’s always someone else’s silhouette with one curve or angle in common, another insufficient body with one tantalizing similarity.
It’s always a false alarm, and there’s no spike from the needle. It’s always just another lie to pave another day.
And he’s almost used to it, now. He tumbles through the hours; he forces himself to care. He can feel things, most of the time, at least in daylight; he’s exasperated when Jean falls asleep on paperwork; he’s concerned when Kain comes down ill; he’s furiously angry when the brass try to tie his hands with red tape. He supposes this is better than the winter, when it was just the cold straight through, beyond the walls and at the core of him, within and without.
Without. In a detached and faintly aching sort of way, it’s an extraordinary word.
The phone in the downstairs hall wakes him at some hazy lightless hour well past midnight.
He wonders what the point is, and it rings.
He wonders if it matters, and it rings again.
He wonders whether he still has something left to lose, and he concedes that there are pieces of him that could yet go missing, and he drags himself out of the bed.
He very nearly breaks his neck on the stairs; his quick right hand seizes the banister and saves him from everything but a sizable bruise on his knee. He has one telephone trill left. He swings around the foot of the staircase; he knows this house from top to bottom, but in the dark its contours change. The phone rings; he can almost feel the soundwaves thrumming through the air; he can certainly feel them pounding at his skull.
His hand wraps itself around the invisible receiver, and he lifts it to his ear.
“Shit-fuck,” a voice says, a voice ribboned through with choking wetness-tears? blood?-and a harsh, hoarse tremble. “Are you there?”
“Edward,” he says.
It’s not a question.
This is a dream.
“Who the fuck else would greet you like that?” A shaky laugh, slick, unsteady, riddled- “Look, I-it went-wrong-it-Al’s breathing, but he won’t wake up, and I had to break into somebody’s house to use their phone-”
Roy isn’t breathing or waking up. “Where are you?”
“Intersection of-of Twenty-First and Wright-”
“I’m coming.”
“Roy-”
He has to soften his voice, iron out the fear, crush down the soaring muddle of terror and of ecstasy- “Yes?”
“Bring-bandages. And hurry.”
“I’m coming,” he says, and he runs.
He doesn’t drive especially well when he has the aid of clear sunlight, when he’s not beset by the maddening seethe of adrenaline through his veins, but he’d drive fully blind tonight if he had to; he’d run the distance; he’d crawl.
There’s a tangled lump of humanity on the sidewalk, centered in a streetlamp’s glow-one young man huddled around the splayed body of another.
As he steps out from the car, he registers that the cold, brisk wind slicing through his wrinkled shirt is the same force twisting the long yellow ponytail into the air, but then sensations mostly fail him.
Ed is clutching Alphonse’s torso to him with his left arm, because the right hangs limply. His sleeve and his side are soaked with blood, staining deepest in a ring around his shoulder, following the line of the automail bracing. Alphonse lies motionless but for the gentle rise and fall of his chest; mist ghosts above his lips and then dissipates, here and gone. To Roy’s left is a house with all but one of the windows dark and a hole fringed with transmutation marks cut through the door.
“Edward,” he says.
“This can’t be right,” Ed says, tightening his grip on Alphonse’s shoulder. “I mean, it’s not-equivalent-and he started here; if anything, it should be me-”
“What happened to your arm?” Roy asks.
“I dunno,” Ed says, eyes fixed on the faint cloud of white hovering over Alphonse’s mouth. “Backlash. Gate tried to keep it, prob’ly. I don’t remember. Al. Al, d’you hear me? Hey, dumbhead, we made it.”
“Do you think perhaps we should take him to a hospital?” Roy asks.
“I dunno,” Ed says. “Yeah. Maybe.” He shakes the pale-faced young man cradled in his lap. “Al, come on.” His voice catches; his eyes fill- “Don’t you fucking leave me, you little shit-”
“May I carry him?” Roy asks softly. “I have my car; we can go straight there. It won’t be long.”
Ed closes his eyes for a long moment, holding Al’s head to his chest and rocking gently back and forth. When he opens them again, they’re clear.
“Yeah,” he says. “Help me out-the automail’s fucked. Winry’s going to murder me in my sleep. We should get somebody to fix that door. Here, take hi-careful-”
Roy had noticed that Ed’s cheekbones are the slightest bit sharper, because Roy’s mind is a parched, desperate, hoarding repository of all things Edward, but he thought perhaps it was simply the beautiful bone structure settling in. It’s not until he lifts Alphonse’s gangly body in both arms that he realizes it may well be because they haven’t been eating half enough.
“I’m going to need you to get the car door,” he says, shifting the ungainly weight closer to his chest, feeling the thrum of discontentment in the muscles of his back, which will blossom into agony tomorrow.
Ed scrambles ahead with the automail arm swinging at his side; dark droplets slung from the fingertips splatter on the pavement.
It’s not a great distance, but Alphonse is not a small boy, and Roy’s arms are beginning to feel slightly leaden as he reaches the vehicle; his spine twinges as he crouches to try to lay the warm body on the backseat.
That’s when Alphonse begins coughing so violently that Roy startles back, bangs his head on the inside edge of the car door in the process, and very nearly drops his charge into the gutter in his surprise.
Alphonse’s eyelashes lift just far enough for a sliver of cinnamon-brown to show.
“Colonel?” he mumbles.
“Al!” Somehow Ed squeezes in between the car door and Alphonse’s knees, which presses him up against Roy’s shoulder; he leans in and fumbles urgently to grab his brother’s hand. “Al, are you okay? Do you know what year it is? How many fingers am I holding up?”
Alphonse blinks at their twined hands. “None? And… I think that depends on… what year we ended up in.” With the hand Ed isn’t wringing the life out of, he grips Roy’s shoulder to steady himself. “What’s the date today, Colonel? And please, for goodness’ sake, put me down before you hurt yourself; I’m sorry.”
Roy lowers him to the car seat and sets him on the edge, keeping a flattened hand on his back in case he sways. “It’s the fourth of November, 1923. Well-the fifth, now, given the hour.”
“That’s interesting,” Alphonse says. “We’re practically time-travelers now, as well as universe-leapers and general ne’er-do-we-Ed, what happened to your arm?”
“Gate, I guess,” Ed says. “It’s fine.”
Alphonse’s eyes are saucer-sized now, without a trace of bleariness. “You destroyed it!”
“The Gate destroyed it,” Ed says. “And that’s what we’re telling Win if you want either of us to survive. It’s no big deal.”
“‘No big deal’,” Alphonse mutters in the tones of one who suffers long and often. “His arm is hanging off and bleeding all over the sidewalk, and it’s ‘no big deal’.”
“Let me fix that house,” Ed says, reluctantly releasing his brother’s hand, “and then let’s get our sorry asses to a hotel or something.”
“Stay with me,” Roy says before his better judgment knows he’s drawing breath.
Ed stares at him for a long, long moment. There are too many tiny lines at the corners of his eyes; there are too many scars on his cheeks and his neck and his jaw, silvered in the starlight; there are too many stories with sad endings in the depths of his gaze.
Then he offers up a small, tired sort of smile.
“If you’re sure,” he says. “It’ll be an awful lot easier than explaining this anywhere else.”
“Forgive him,” Alphonse says as Ed tromps over to the mangled door and touches his left palm to the dangling one on his right. “Of everything, it was you that he missed the most-more than alchemy, I think; you’d have to ask him to be sure, but of course he’d never tell. I don’t think he could if he wanted to-I don’t think he has the words for what he feels, and that’s part of what he’s so afraid of. It gives you a great deal of power over him. I don’t suppose I have to tell you this, do I?”
He’s watching Roy’s face closely and smiling thinly, and somehow his dark eyes are very soft, but all the same Roy feels like he’s being flayed alive.
“You’re different,” Alphonse says. “I didn’t know what I was looking for last time-I’d never met you, not in any way that counted; I was working from the evidence of secondhand accounts. But we’re not the only ones who limped along without something that made us feel whole, because life marches on, and we never had a choice-are we, Colonel?”
“Brigadier General,” Roy says.
Alphonse’s smile curls upward at both ends. “My apologies.”
“Not at all,” Roy says, listening to the just-slightly-uneven steps behind him, still hardly daring to believe the sound. “I was a corporal when last you saw me; I believe I actually set a historical record for speed in rising through the ranks.”
“Like it counts if they just restored you,” Ed says. “Try catching up on a hundred years of science and a thousand years of literature and then come talk to me.”
“You liar,” Alphonse says calmly. “You didn’t even pretend to care about the literature.”
“It’s all the same anyway,” Ed says, shoving his left hand into his trouser pocket and then changing his mind and wrapping it around his dripping metal arm. “Oh, no, some Byronic asshole doesn’t love me; woe is I; no one understands; let me waste away to nothing, which is made all the easier given that I have no fucking backbone. Excuse me while I vomit.”
“Was that supposed to be a summary of Wuthering Heights?” Alphonse asks.
“Maybe,” Ed says.
“Did you read it?” Alphonse asks.
“I tried,” Ed says. “What the hell does it matter, anyway? Let’s blow this joint. Shift your ass, Al.”
Roy moves past him and makes a point of holding the car door open, keeping his posture impeccable.
“What’s your problem?” Ed asks, eyeing him.
“If I’m going to be your chauffeur,” Roy says, “wouldn’t you rather that I looked the part?”
“Never seen a chauffeur with an eyepatch before,” Ed says, dropping onto the seat. The way his hair bounces over his shoulder stops Roy’s throat; the way he cringes and clutches at his arm almost stops Roy’s heart. “If you kill us on the road after all this, I’m gonna be real pissed, Mustang.”
“Me, too,” Roy says, and shuts the door.
“I don’t know what I expected,” Ed says, gazing around himself where he stands in the middle of the foyer, dripping blood on the tiles. “Flags, maybe. A shrine to your career. An encyclopedia of sarcastic comebacks for every occasion.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” Roy says. “We should really deal with that arm of yours; the lavatory’s upsta-”
“Did you just say ‘lavatory’?” Ed asks.
“Shut up, Brother,” Alphonse says. “General, do you suppose I should call the Rockbells and the Hugheses now, or in the morning?”
“It’s probably better not to wake Elysia,” Roy says, “but I imagine Miss Rockbell would begrudge the delay.”
“And by ‘begrudge’,” Ed mutters, “you mean ‘beat us all to unrecognizable pulp with wrenches for’.”
“That was the insinuation I was going for, yes,” Roy says.
Ed grins at him and looks… surprised. Surprised and delighted and young and free.
“Run along upstairs, Brother,” Alphonse says, making a shooing motion with one hand for good measure. He’s so much taller than Ed now-does it drive the elder Elric to distraction, or has he finally made his peace? “You’ll probably be able to hear Winry screaming from there anyway.”
“There’s a telephone book under the table,” Roy says.
“It’s all right,” Alphonse says. “I remember the numbers. I remember a lot of things.”
There isn’t time to ask about that, or about what he said before-the love of Roy’s life is currently bleeding on the carpet runner from wounds unseen.
Ed is gritting his teeth by the time they top the stairs, and it’s all Roy can do not to reach out and stroke his hair to soothe him.
“I may’ve-” Ed cranes his neck to try to glance at Alphonse over the railing. Roy can’t tell if he’s successful. “-understated-this-a bit.”
There is a terrible sort of quaking in Roy’s heart, like an echo of things to come-like a glint of lightning and the sick certainty of imminent thunder ravaging the windowpanes. “We’re nearly there.”
Ed huffs out a laugh. “Easy for you to say.”
“Touché,” Roy says, slipping past him to lead the way down the hall. He holds the bathroom door open, and Ed gives him an unreadable look before stepping through.
That’s new.
“Time was,” Ed says, flicking on the light, “you’d die before you let me get the last word.”
“Times change,” Roy says.
Ed looks at him for another long moment before he smiles faintly and carefully lowers himself to sit atop the porcelain wall of the bathtub. “All right,” he says, clenching his teeth again. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
What they’ve got is a horrific tangle of torn flesh and twisted steel streaked with old blood and welling with the new. The bolts securing the edge of the automail have been ripped almost entirely out of Ed’s skin; when he peels the stained and stiffening fabric all aside, the whole arm hangs crookedly, completely unsupported. Raw flesh gleams in pits and pockets everywhere the metal has been wrenched away, and for a moment even Ed looks disconcerted.
“Oh,” he says. “Huh. Yeah, that smarts.”
Roy’s stomach keeps clenching and unclenching on the off-beats of his banging heart; to see Ed’s skin shredded, his hair matted, his indefatigable body so damaged is to stare a tragedy in the blood-bespattered face-but all the same, the primary emotion surging through Roy’s weary frame is relief. Ed will survive this. Ed will heal and come back stronger, greater, brighter. Of all the tolls he could have paid for passage-of all the things he could have lost-
“Come here,” Roy says. “Sit on the edge of the sink; we need to sterilize this.” He starts to extend his hand, but he has no right; he’s been granted no permissions; he has no knowledge and no cause but his own self-interest. “Do you suppose it would be better or worse to unfasten the arm?”
“Less strain,” Ed says, hiking himself up onto the counter left hip first, swinging the rest of his weight smoothly after, and gathering his steel elbow in against his chest. There’s a massive, jagged white scar just beneath his left collarbone, slicing almost all the way from sternum to shoulder. “But given the inoperability, I figure either the wires or the nerve connections pulled loose.” He reaches down to yank half a dozen squares of toilet paper loose and starts dabbing at the curved edge of the steel, trying to peer into the workings. “See, if it’s the connections, I could free this fucker without feeling a thing-but if it’s the wires, and they’re damaged or tangled or some shit, and I tear ’em out…” He grins, pale under the harsh overhead lights. “Well, it’s a toss up whether Winry or the pain’d kill me first.”
“Delightful options, both,” Roy says. He tugs the hand-towel from its ring, dampens it beneath the faucet, and cautiously begins to wipe the blood from the metal, folding it half a dozen different ways to find clean fabric for another blot. He makes his way across and reaches the torn skin-the gut-twisting wreck where the bolts pulled free and took far too much flesh with them to ease their passage. He is a cultivator of restraint, a connoisseur of self-control, and still he almost hesitates. His heartbeat sounds uneven, and the deliberate draw of breath into his lungs seems insufficient.
Every night he’s dreamt; every day he’s wished and wondered; it’s really almost funny that he’s not prepared.
That’s Ed for you.
There’s a hiss from behind the clenched teeth as Roy presses the towel in against the wounds. “Ahh-shit. No, keep going. Get it over with.” Ed’s jaw is tight, and his eyes are narrowed almost to slits as he curls his left hand around the edge of the countertop. He tilts his head back, grinding his teeth as Roy swabs deeper, further, onward across the worst of it. “Hey, if you-ha, oh, fuck-if you-cold water before the stain sets-it’ll wash out-”
“Forgive my crudeness,” Roy says, “but I don’t give a fuck about the stain.”
The visible slivers of Ed’s eyes gleam. “If you think that’s crude, you wouldn’t even want to hear some of the shit I said in Latvia.”
“All the same,” Roy says, and his fingertips are grazing Edward Elric’s skin; slick smears of blood or no, this is what he’s been living just to dream of, and now it’s real- “I want to hear everything.”
Ed’s eyes flit to him, startled, and his tired body wants to freeze.
But cowards count no victories, and he is through retreating. He’s been a moving corpse for years; he will not back down from the dizzy possibility of all he’s ever dared to want-even if it fails, even if it falls, if it crashes and burns like a comet scorching through the sky; even if it ends in nothing but a swathe of broken Earth and a streak of ash and one last shattering of a heart too weak and scattered to be reassembled when the wreckage cools-
He pauses with the towel in one hand and splays the fingers of the other gently, so gently, from Ed’s sternum upward, thumb resting in the hollow of Ed’s throat. Ed’s pulse beats softly against his skin, fluttering as Ed swallows hard-once, twice-
“You sure about that?” Ed asks, and his eyes lift to Roy’s and start to smolder. “There’s some shit I can’t even think about without feeling sick all over again.”
“I have a great deal of those stories,” Roy says, meeting his gaze. He barely dares to blink; if this were to vanish, he’d be done for.
Ed’s eyes flick away and then back to him, and the warmth in them is indescribable as the grimace stretches into something like a grin. “Yeah?” he says, and-slowly, so slowly-he pries his clenched fingers from around the edge of the counter, curls them, uncurls them, and winds them into Roy’s shirtfront. “Guess maybe we should stick together, then. Negotiate a trade.”
“You’ve developed a knack for diplomacy in your absence,” Roy says over the deafening beat of his disbelieving heart. “I didn’t think it was possible.”
There’s a touch of a smirk to Ed’s grin, and a shadow at its edges. “I’d ruled out a hell of a lot of things until they happened.”
Roy is too giddy to play coy; the ice he’s stepped out onto is thicker than he thought. He touches Ed’s jaw as lightly as he can manage, and he can’t help the burn in his gut at the bloody smudges of fingerprints he leaves behind. Is it wrong to thrill at the thought of marking his claim? “I tried not to hope for too much.”
“I know that feeling,” Ed says. The animal wariness hasn’t left his eyes, but his lashes dip, and he leans into Roy’s hand.
They’re two of a damned miserable kind, aren’t they? They’re both ceding ground inch-by-inch, grudgingly, guardedly-
But it’s been so long, and the fissures in the bedrock run so deep, that there’s no stopping the landslide now. It’s only a matter of time before the ground gives way, and they collapse directly into one another, and whatever crawls out of the rubble will be their due.
Well. Roy’s no stranger to digging, or to dust.
“I think,” he says, softly, sliding the pad of his thumb over Ed’s cheekbone, savoring its curve, “that we’d better put you back together before your brother tears both of us apart.”
“Probably,” Ed says, and his grin is tired and tentative, but there’s a sweetness to it-and with his voice thrumming straight through Roy’s skin, twining down the tendons in his wrist, burrowing into his bones-God, it’s a beautiful thing; and God, but blood and weariness and harsh fluorescence can’t even dull Ed Elric in the flesh. “He doesn’t have a whole lot of patience for procrastinators.”
“Or for those who leave his brother coping with indescribable pain,” Roy says.
Ed shrugs his remaining shoulder-and, by the wince, regrets it. “Not that I’m not used to it, but… yeah.”
“That’s worse,” Roy says. “And all the more reason to spare you as much as we can.”
Ed’s smile is lopsided and faintly wry. “You know how they say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger? I used to think that was true-and sometimes it is, I guess. Sometimes it teaches you just how much you’re capable of, and sometimes it hones you to a sharper edge, and the next time you’re not as scared. But sometimes it just sort of carves a hole in you from the inside, right up to the underside of the skin, and no one can see it, but then if they break through that one spot, you just-cave.” His eyetooth dimples his lower lip for a moment; it’s chapped and full and wonderful, and then it’s curving as he grins again, darkly this time. “And the longer you go, the more of those holes you get, and the higher the likelihood that someone’ll hit one without even knowing it.”
“I think perhaps that’s why we seek other people,” Roy says. “In the hopes of finding someone who knows where all the weak spots are but protects them for us instead of taking advantage.”
Ed swallows, and his hand lifts to let his fingertips dance so lightly against Roy’s wrist. “That’s the thing,” he says. “With the trying not to hope for too much.”
“You close yourself off,” Roy says. “You shut yourself away. And you cease hoping altogether, and you lose the ability to believe in anything.”
“Yeah,” Ed says, breath light, eyes searching. “Well-anything except Al.”
“Al,” Roy says, “who will slay me for my slowness and be justified-you’ve always had a talent for getting me sidetracked.”
Roy would live another thousand years in hell for Ed’s grin. “Oh, so it’s my fault?”
All of the happenings on a planet are, of course, the fault of the sun it orbits; all of the things that live, that grow, that parch, that scorch, that die-
All of the things that warm and warm until they burst into beautiful flame-
Roy spreads his hand just below a deep, wretched split in the skin where the force of a bolt dragging outward tore the flesh around it. “We should stitch this.”
“‘We’?” Ed says. “Please, do the damn honors. Don’t tell me you keep suturing thread in your bathroom cabinet.”
Roy opens his mouth, shuts it, opens the cabinet, and… “If I don’t tell you, is it less absurd?”
“Holy shit, Roy,” Ed says-Roy, Roy, Roy; never has his own name battered at the insides of his skull until he doubts his ears- “There’s a difference between ‘well-prepared’ and ‘fucking creepy’, and you’re flirting with it.”
“How foolish of me,” Roy says, gathering needle and isopropanol and more gauze still. “All this time, I thought that I was flirting with you.”
Roy glances up through his eyelashes-which is unwise given the combination of compromised depth perception and sharp object in hand, but he just can’t help it. Ed is biting his lip in a failed attempt to cage another grin.
“Do you always brandish fucking needles at people you wanna get with?” he asks. “You know I’ve got a problem with those things, right? Is it a habit to try to seduce people with their own fucking phobias, or am I special?”
“You are most assuredly one-of-a-kind,” Roy says. He dips a cotton ball in the alcohol and dabs blood away from the edges of the rift in the skin. “You are also, as they say, looking a gift horse in the mouth.”
Ed appears to be trying not to laugh. “You didn’t. You just-you didn’t.”
“What didn’t I do?” Roy asks, knotting the thread. He only ever uses these implements for stitches, repairs, and the necessary embroidery-broken skin and buttons and red arrays on white.
“You didn’t set yourself up for a ‘gift Mustang’ joke,” Ed says, “because that would be fucking criminal.”
“I didn’t realize creative interpretations of idioms were against the law,” Roy says.
“Creative interpretations?” Ed asks. “That was a shitty pun; if they’re not illegal here, I’m going ba-ohfuck-”
“It’s all right,” Roy says, guiding the needle through as Ed grinds his teeth and squeezes his eyes shut. “This won’t take long; keep breathing.”
“Easy for you to fuckin’ say,” Ed grits out.
“I know,” Roy says. That’s two; the blood is welling; he soaks another cotton ball and tosses it into the sink. “I’m sorry.”
“Fuck your ‘sorry’; just stitch already.”
“There’s only sew much I can do,” Roy says.
The laugh that emerges from Ed is a sad and strangled thing, but Roy will take it-and treasure it until the end of days.
“You’re a fucking riot. Who even lets you get outside?”
“I’m crafty enough to slip through the cracks sometimes,” Roy says. That’s three. He pinches the next inch of broken flesh together with his free hand; his fingers slip in the blood, and he fumbles for another piece of cotton to wipe it clean. “The worst is holding them back in meetings with the generals; they don’t even seem to realize how many punning opportunities they’re passing up. It’s really rather tragic.”
Ed hisses through his teeth as Roy draws the next stitch tight-but not too tight; if the skin protrudes between the loops of thread, it’ll scar unevenly, won’t it? He’s only ever done this in emergencies, on battlefields, with the mortar blasts ringing in his ears too loud for him to hear the misery caused by his ministrations.
“And here I used to think you had dignity,” Ed gets out, looking determinedly at the wall.
“Only the thinnest pretense,” Roy says. He tugs-gently, but not quite cautiously enough; Ed’s jaw tightens until Roy thinks he’s going to break a tooth. “Is that disappointing?”
“It’s a relief, actually,” Ed says, and Roy’s heart leaps, and his stomach drops, and his fingertips slide, and he chases another trail of red with the cotton. “Always figured that was one of the main things keeping us apart, you know?” He chokes out half a laugh. “Back before there were universal barriers in the way, I mean. I always thought you wouldn’t… well, I always thought you wouldn’t. That’s all.”
“Dignity was never an obstruction,” Roy says. “I haven’t claimed any in my own mind for a long time, although it’s flattering to know I’ve got most people fooled.” Five. That’s enough. Carefully, carefully, he starts to tie it off. “More than anything, I think, it was the prospect of tainting you.”
This laugh bears an odd edge of something like hysteria. “Tainting me? You remember how we met?”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” Roy says, striving hopelessly to smooth out the thread. “I was older than you are now when I hired you, Ed.”
“Don’t give yourself so much credit,” Ed says. “You didn’t hire me; you made a sales pitch, and I sold my soul-at a profit, as far as I’m concerned, given how fucking shattered and forsaken the damned thing was by then.”
Roy cuts the thread as close to the knot as he thinks he can get away with; given Ed’s incapacity to stay still, the likelihood is awfully high that he’ll end up pulling at the stitches. “No one with a quarter of a conscience would have conscripted you like I did, knowing what I do.”
“Yeah, well,” Ed says. “We were both young and stupid and ambitious, right?”
“And these days we’re just stupid?” Roy asks.
Ed grins. “Now you’re gettin’ it.”
Roy wipes his fingers as best he can on the nearest towel and starts taping gauze over his handiwork, and then over all of the open wounds he doesn’t dare to touch. The Rockbells will have to look to it. They’ll be over the moon, won’t they? It would be a gross injustice to keep the Elrics away from them-away from their family, away from their home-for long. Roy’s duty here is to patch them up and send them on; he has no claim to anything.
“Whoa,” Ed says. “You went grim all of a sudden. I fucking hate it when you do that; what did you start thinking about?”
“Nothing,” Roy says. When did Ed-renowned through the ranks for his inability to comprehend even the most painfully blatant of social cues-learn to read people? When did he learn to do it well? Roy can’t afford to give him anything else to go on-his wide-eyed candor as a child was brutal; to add emotional intelligence to his arsenal could make him unassailably destructive no matter how noble his intentions. “We should get you a sling.”
“We should get me a new body,” Ed says. “One that actually works once in a while would be fucking fantastic.”
“I don’t know,” Roy says. “I’m rather fond of this one.”
Ed snorts, cradling the unresponsive automail to his chest and watching the way the bandages bow when his muscles shift. “I guess I’m kinda attached to it.”
Roy looks at him.
He grins, slowly, but then broader by the moment as Roy starts to smile.
“People are going to say I’m a bad influence on you,” Roy says.
“Fuck ’em,” Ed says. “You and I have both always lived by that rule, haven’t we?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Roy says, “I suppose you’re right. Hold that thought.”
He steps out into the hall and raids the linen closet for the oldest, thinnest sheet in his haphazard years-of-living accumulation. Returning to the sheer weight and power of Ed’s presence is like an instantaneous sunburn; he doesn’t know how long he can bear this without disintegrating, and it’s hopelessly bizarre that he’s eager to find out.
One of the drawers by Ed’s knee yields a tiny silver pair of scissors meant for some grooming process or another, and he hacks the sheet into strips perhaps less expertly than a man of his renowned consideration ought-but given that the span of his elbows is wider than the space between the counter and the wall, and that his hands are trembling from the seething maelstrom of adrenaline and endorphins roaring at his core, and that Edward Elric’s fierce gold eyes are fixed on him for the first time in years-
He can hardly be blamed for a bit of clumsiness, can he?
He’s no doctor-quite the opposite-and he’s never had a knack for repair. All the same, once he’s wrapped the sheet around Ed’s metal forearm, over one shoulder, over the other, back and forth across and underneath until its weight is carefully supported in the loop of fabric instead of dragging downward on Ed’s flesh, he thinks that he can say fairly that he hasn’t made it worse.
Ed twists his torso experimentally, and the tightening of muscle under his scar-tracked skin stops Roy’s throat and steals his breath and ignites every last nerve in his body; he’s piqued for panic or battle or-
“Not too bad,” Ed says. “It’ll hold, anyway. Probably until Winry gets here.”
Roy pauses. At the rate this is going, Ed might just have an appreciation for tact by now. “Is that your intention? I had assumed that the two of you would want to go to her.”
“You kidding?” Ed asks, and there’s a sliver of the old grin, the first grin-the one’s that’s half-challenge and half-delight. “You think I’m gonna take this goddamn thing on a train right now and jar it more? And more to the point-” He reaches out and curls his left fist in Roy’s shirtfront. In another moment he’ll be holding Roy’s heart in his hand literally as well as figuratively, because it’s about to squeeze itself out between his ribs and tear straight through. “-you think I’m gonna take my eyes off your dumb ass for a second now that I’ve finally got you back?”
“I didn’t want to presume,” Roy says.
Ed tilts his head slightly-just enough to make his hair swing as his eyes narrow, and his smile curls. “Yeah, you’ve changed.” He flattens his left hand on Roy’s chest, and the surging gallop of Roy’s heartbeat seems to startle them both. “But I think… I mean, I think I like it.”
Roy lays his hands very lightly on Ed’s knees. “That’s different, too-for you and I to be in agreement.”
art by the wonderful uchiha-umeko, originally posted here
Ed’s grin is more sunbeam than knife blade, and Roy has been so cold for so long- “It’s a whole new fuckin’ world, Roy.”
He can feel it in his veins and his bones and the lightning-tingle forking on his skin. “Well-put.”
Ed’s devastatingly clever eyes scour his solitary one for another moment, then two, and then the warm hand planted over his sternum clenches around a fistful of his shirtfront and hauls him forward, toppling him into a kiss like the ground-like the universe-giving way.
The fabric of that universe is shredding too fast to contemplate or comprehend; for a long series of seconds he couldn’t hope to number, there is nothing in the wide cosmos but this soft darkness and Ed’s mouth, Ed’s breath, Ed’s tongue, Ed’s teeth, Ed’s dizzyingly tantalizing gasp-moan, Ed’s faint and oh-so-satisfied sigh whispering across his cheek-
Ed’s fingertips creep up along his throat, probing with a shy, gentle sort of tentativeness all the sweeter for being so flagrantly uncharacteristic-they settle at his jaw, at about which time he rediscovers both of his own hands buried in Ed’s hair, thumbs sweeping back and forth along his cheeks, and from the slickness on Roy’s skin and underneath his fingers, both of them are smearing blood everywhere-
It’s giddy-it’s mad; it’s all the dreams and all the desperate wishes; it’s heady with the innumerable hopes abruptly fulfilled, with the rush of abstract desires made bone-rattlingly real-
Ed’s mouth is so beautifully warm and welcoming, surprisingly deft and startlingly playful-there’s an odd twirl of relief in the pit of Roy’s stomach at the kind thought that that bright little flare in Edward Elric’s soul hasn’t been crushed entirely beneath the weight of years.
Ed draws back, drags in a breath, and opens his eyes slowly, as though his eyelashes are heavy-and they look it, thick as they are.
“Well,” he says. He licks his lips, clears his throat, and smoothes Roy’s collar, gaze flicking to it and then back up. “That was worth the wait.”
“That was just to thank you for saying you’d stay,” Roy says, dragging his open hands slowly, slowly, worshipfully down Ed’s sides. “I haven’t even begun trying to make up for the wait.”
“Oh, yeah?” Ed asks, ribs shifting under Roy’s fingertips as he raises both legs to curl them around Roy’s back, heels digging into his spine, forcing him to stumble another half-step forward, so that their bodies press tight, Ed’s hips to Roy’s, slotted close like they were cut to fit together-only the edge of the counter seems to be keeping them from merging entirely, and Roy can’t help resenting its intrusion. “You wanna get started?”
Roy can hardly say no to a sin that feels like absolution. If that makes him weak, after all these years of wanting-so be it.
Kissing Ed again, a touch more gently, with a sliver more care and even more admiration, with an intent to caress, to appreciate, to memorize-it’s just as transcendent as the passion was mere moments ago; it’s a duller burn, warmer but not as bright, and this one he could bathe in for the rest of his life, if he was lucky.
He’s never been lucky before. What if-?
Ed’s legs fold in closer still around him, clinging; Ed’s fingers tangle in his hair-their chests are aligned so closely that the ridges of their collarbones collide; burnished-but-battered steel edges scrape at Roy’s skin and the buttons on his shirt, and he can feel the latter sticking to him with a warm wetness; they must have rubbed one of the wounds to bleeding again-
When he can bear to pull away, he sets his forehead against Ed’s. The fabric of the patch whispers, and he wonders-just how far might they go? Just how much might be possible in this space of mingled breath between them?
“Jesus,” Ed says, panting lightly. His tongue flicks out to touch the corner of his bottom lip, which Roy was very much enjoying nibbling on. “I could do this all night.”
“But you won’t,” Roy says, making sure he’s offering a smile that will reach his eye. “Because you’re going to get plenty of rest as part of the healing process, and in the meantime, you’re going to go downstairs and reassure your brother that I did not do any intentional damage to your person and furthermore am very committed to your recovery so that he doesn’t feel inclined to stab me in the back.”
“He wouldn’t,” Ed says, and his bent legs squeeze Roy’s hips once more before they release; there’s a terribly enticing mischievous gleam in his eyes. “It’d be poison. And he’d make sure you knew it was him.” He waves his left hand and then braces it on Roy’s shoulder to slide down off of the countertop. He winces at the way that dropping the last few inches jars his right arm, then grins up at Roy as he steadies himself on his feet. “Oh, come on, as if he would-you’re the safest guy in Amestris right now.”
“Oh?” Roy asks.
Ed breezes past him and out the door. “Hell, yeah. He knows how much I want you.”
Alphonse is tidying the knickknacks and curios on the end table and straightening the runner when Ed and Roy reach the bottom of the stairs.
“Winry screamed,” he says calmly. “Then she cried. Then she said she was stupid for crying, because she hated us. Then she asked if we were okay. Then she asked if your automail was okay. Then she said she was going to kill you. Then she said she has an appointment early tomorrow, but she’ll be on the first train after that.”
Only when he’s finished the narrative does he look over. His eyes linger on the finger-shaped smears of blood drying on Ed’s jaw and then the matching stains on Roy’s throat and shirt collar, and he rolls his eyes.
“Brother…”
Ed bristles. “What?”
Alphonse sighs and turns back towards the table, but not before Roy thinks he sees the beginnings of a smile. “Nothing, never mind. Forgive me, General, but could I trouble you for something to eat?”
Before Roy can tell him he’s welcome to anything as long as he forgives Roy’s bloody fingerprints up and down his brother’s skin, Ed is barreling towards the kitchen. “Jesus, Al, you’re a genius! Roy, hey, what’ve you got?”
Elrics will be Elrics.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Roy says honestly. “Help yourself.”
“Christ,” Ed says. He reaches up to open the first cabinet and, rather transparently, tries to make it look like he’s wincing at the bareness of the pantry, not the twinge in his shoulder. “We gotta shake you out of this tragic bachelor thing pronto.”
“‘We’?” Alphonse asks, gliding past Roy and then in front of Ed, opening the next one for him. “I’ll leave that herculean endeavor to you, Brother.”
“I beg your pardon?” Roy says.
“Here,” Alphonse says, grabbing down a box. “Muesli. Your favorite.”
“Oh, gag me with a spoon,” Ed says. “I’ll just starve.” He favors Roy with a look that’s two parts wistful and one extremely seductive. “What’s your plan of action, sir?”
Oh, God. Oh, God.
Roy’s mouth is very, very dry of a sudden. It’s probably a coincidence. He clears his throat. “I believe the corner store is open all night.”
“Goody,” Alphonse says.
“Like we haven’t had worse,” Ed says.
“What a shame it is,” Alphonse says, “to aspire towards improvement in the conditions of one’s life.”
“Whatever,” Ed says. He nudges a lower cabinet open with his right toes, crouches down, and sighs. He’s wrapped his left arm around the sling to protect it from his own knees; time has imparted a degree of self-awareness that no quantity of near-death experiences could teach. “What do you eat?”
Roy shrugs, which, while not precisely dignified, is less disastrous than saying Black coffee and whatever Breda leaves behind.
“Perhaps we should just go to bed,” Alphonse says.
“What’s the point?” Ed asks. “It’s, like, five in the morning. The sun’ll be up soon.”
“The point is that you’ve been awake for thirty-eight hours, two of which were spent bleeding profusely,” Alphonse says. “I counted.”
Ed turns to Roy with an expression of absolute betrayal and jabs his thumb towards his brother. “Can you believe this shit?”
“If you come upstairs and rest,” Roy says, “I’ll tuck you in.”
Ed’s eyes widen. He’s really here, isn’t he? Even Roy’s tortured brain couldn’t conjure a dream of him scouring the kitchen for edibles in an improvised sheet-sling with Roy’s own bloody handprints on the sides of his neck, stark against his skin in the artificial light.
“Oh, yeah?” Ed asks slowly.
“No warm milk required,” Roy says.
“I don’t believe you have any milk to work with,” Alphonse says.
“Sold,” Ed says.
Alphonse makes a valiant attempt-accompanied by several vaguely reprimanding noises-to scrub the worst of the damning dried blood off of his brother’s face, an endeavor from which Roy swiftly escapes in order to shake the worst of the dust from the sheets in the guest bedroom. Just once does Alphonse’s voice rise (“I don’t disapprove of that; I disapprove of you being filthy and weird!”), and then it’s not long before both of the Elric brothers are hesitating in the hallway, glancing at each other and then at him.
Not everything has changed. Not everything that was has been lost to the ravenings of time and hard-earned wisdom, and there is so much hope in that-
Alphonse thanks Roy extraordinarily politely, shuffles past him, and shuts the guest room door.
The vastness of the silence makes it all the easier to hear Ed swallow.
“Um,” he says. “So.”
“So,” Roy says, and holds a hand out, and Ed’s latches onto his so tightly he can’t feel his fingertips.
“Aren’t you going to sleep?” Ed mumbles with what appears to be the last of his wakefulness, if the heaviness of his eyelids and the slurring of his syllables are reliable indications.
“No,” Roy says.
“Just gonna watch me?”
“Yes.”
“Perv,” Ed says.
“Possibly.”
“S’okay,” Ed says, mostly into the pillow. “I like you that way.”
“That’s good to hear,” Roy says.
‘Good’, of course, is the wildest understatement in the known world for what he feels, but Ed’s drifting at the feathery edge between sleep and waking as it is, and Roy doesn’t imagine he’s eager to sit through the outpouring of the sandstorm in Roy’s chest-unwelcome promises and soaring declarations swirl white-hot and diamond-edged, howling into every crevice, wearing down his resolution to be more than just this need-
Sagely, Ed says something to the effect of “Mmngh”, and then he’s solidly unconscious at last.
Even pale and battered, with the violet-dark crescents underlining his too-beautiful eyes; even with blood matted here and there in the hair trailing over the pillow, he looks so damned perfect in Roy’s bed that it’s staggering all over again.
Roy reaches out a careful fingertip and tucks a wayward wisp of hair back behind his ear. Faintly-but unmistakably-Ed’s mouth curves up into a tiny, satisfied smile.
[PART II]
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Ed
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 13,000
Warnings: language, major spoilers for '03/CoS, Transparent Fix-It Syndrome, blood!kink galore, shoddy editing
Summary: Six years on, Roy's whole heart gets shaken back to rights.
Author's Note: …this was supposed to be short. And good! Short and good. It is neither of those things. But it was inspired a long while back by a thing that the too-lovely Pax drew, although it… barely… touches… on the wonderful art. So in addition to being bad at writing fic, I'm bad at being inspired. :'| Despite its general mediocrity, however, it is for Pax, with love and CoS feels; and also for Panda, with love and blood!kink. ♥♥♥♥ Hope it makes you smile, guys! ♥
SYSTOLE
Roy doesn’t remember much of the in-between times. The first is just a shuddering flashback to the sharp cold-burn of frostbite, a scream of wind, and a sprawl of white; the second is a valley strangled by the hush of solitude and silence, broken by a soft, mechanical sort of clicking-the sound of an automaton going through the motions of a life.
He is a seismograph, then. He is pits of hissing radio static, wells of waiting, quiet motionless despair-and then, at intervals, comes Ed.
Nothing else can feed the fire that Ed summons instantaneously, with just a glance, just a breath, just a flickering shadow of his form in the night-
But it always turns out to be an ordinary streak of moonlight wreaking mischief in Roy’s heart. It always turns out to be the blind spot playing tricks. It’s always a wish; a dream; a figment; a gasp of stupid, heedless hope that sticks and scrapes inside his throat. It’s always someone else’s silhouette with one curve or angle in common, another insufficient body with one tantalizing similarity.
It’s always a false alarm, and there’s no spike from the needle. It’s always just another lie to pave another day.
And he’s almost used to it, now. He tumbles through the hours; he forces himself to care. He can feel things, most of the time, at least in daylight; he’s exasperated when Jean falls asleep on paperwork; he’s concerned when Kain comes down ill; he’s furiously angry when the brass try to tie his hands with red tape. He supposes this is better than the winter, when it was just the cold straight through, beyond the walls and at the core of him, within and without.
Without. In a detached and faintly aching sort of way, it’s an extraordinary word.
The phone in the downstairs hall wakes him at some hazy lightless hour well past midnight.
He wonders what the point is, and it rings.
He wonders if it matters, and it rings again.
He wonders whether he still has something left to lose, and he concedes that there are pieces of him that could yet go missing, and he drags himself out of the bed.
He very nearly breaks his neck on the stairs; his quick right hand seizes the banister and saves him from everything but a sizable bruise on his knee. He has one telephone trill left. He swings around the foot of the staircase; he knows this house from top to bottom, but in the dark its contours change. The phone rings; he can almost feel the soundwaves thrumming through the air; he can certainly feel them pounding at his skull.
His hand wraps itself around the invisible receiver, and he lifts it to his ear.
“Shit-fuck,” a voice says, a voice ribboned through with choking wetness-tears? blood?-and a harsh, hoarse tremble. “Are you there?”
“Edward,” he says.
It’s not a question.
This is a dream.
“Who the fuck else would greet you like that?” A shaky laugh, slick, unsteady, riddled- “Look, I-it went-wrong-it-Al’s breathing, but he won’t wake up, and I had to break into somebody’s house to use their phone-”
Roy isn’t breathing or waking up. “Where are you?”
“Intersection of-of Twenty-First and Wright-”
“I’m coming.”
“Roy-”
He has to soften his voice, iron out the fear, crush down the soaring muddle of terror and of ecstasy- “Yes?”
“Bring-bandages. And hurry.”
“I’m coming,” he says, and he runs.
He doesn’t drive especially well when he has the aid of clear sunlight, when he’s not beset by the maddening seethe of adrenaline through his veins, but he’d drive fully blind tonight if he had to; he’d run the distance; he’d crawl.
There’s a tangled lump of humanity on the sidewalk, centered in a streetlamp’s glow-one young man huddled around the splayed body of another.
As he steps out from the car, he registers that the cold, brisk wind slicing through his wrinkled shirt is the same force twisting the long yellow ponytail into the air, but then sensations mostly fail him.
Ed is clutching Alphonse’s torso to him with his left arm, because the right hangs limply. His sleeve and his side are soaked with blood, staining deepest in a ring around his shoulder, following the line of the automail bracing. Alphonse lies motionless but for the gentle rise and fall of his chest; mist ghosts above his lips and then dissipates, here and gone. To Roy’s left is a house with all but one of the windows dark and a hole fringed with transmutation marks cut through the door.
“Edward,” he says.
“This can’t be right,” Ed says, tightening his grip on Alphonse’s shoulder. “I mean, it’s not-equivalent-and he started here; if anything, it should be me-”
“What happened to your arm?” Roy asks.
“I dunno,” Ed says, eyes fixed on the faint cloud of white hovering over Alphonse’s mouth. “Backlash. Gate tried to keep it, prob’ly. I don’t remember. Al. Al, d’you hear me? Hey, dumbhead, we made it.”
“Do you think perhaps we should take him to a hospital?” Roy asks.
“I dunno,” Ed says. “Yeah. Maybe.” He shakes the pale-faced young man cradled in his lap. “Al, come on.” His voice catches; his eyes fill- “Don’t you fucking leave me, you little shit-”
“May I carry him?” Roy asks softly. “I have my car; we can go straight there. It won’t be long.”
Ed closes his eyes for a long moment, holding Al’s head to his chest and rocking gently back and forth. When he opens them again, they’re clear.
“Yeah,” he says. “Help me out-the automail’s fucked. Winry’s going to murder me in my sleep. We should get somebody to fix that door. Here, take hi-careful-”
Roy had noticed that Ed’s cheekbones are the slightest bit sharper, because Roy’s mind is a parched, desperate, hoarding repository of all things Edward, but he thought perhaps it was simply the beautiful bone structure settling in. It’s not until he lifts Alphonse’s gangly body in both arms that he realizes it may well be because they haven’t been eating half enough.
“I’m going to need you to get the car door,” he says, shifting the ungainly weight closer to his chest, feeling the thrum of discontentment in the muscles of his back, which will blossom into agony tomorrow.
Ed scrambles ahead with the automail arm swinging at his side; dark droplets slung from the fingertips splatter on the pavement.
It’s not a great distance, but Alphonse is not a small boy, and Roy’s arms are beginning to feel slightly leaden as he reaches the vehicle; his spine twinges as he crouches to try to lay the warm body on the backseat.
That’s when Alphonse begins coughing so violently that Roy startles back, bangs his head on the inside edge of the car door in the process, and very nearly drops his charge into the gutter in his surprise.
Alphonse’s eyelashes lift just far enough for a sliver of cinnamon-brown to show.
“Colonel?” he mumbles.
“Al!” Somehow Ed squeezes in between the car door and Alphonse’s knees, which presses him up against Roy’s shoulder; he leans in and fumbles urgently to grab his brother’s hand. “Al, are you okay? Do you know what year it is? How many fingers am I holding up?”
Alphonse blinks at their twined hands. “None? And… I think that depends on… what year we ended up in.” With the hand Ed isn’t wringing the life out of, he grips Roy’s shoulder to steady himself. “What’s the date today, Colonel? And please, for goodness’ sake, put me down before you hurt yourself; I’m sorry.”
Roy lowers him to the car seat and sets him on the edge, keeping a flattened hand on his back in case he sways. “It’s the fourth of November, 1923. Well-the fifth, now, given the hour.”
“That’s interesting,” Alphonse says. “We’re practically time-travelers now, as well as universe-leapers and general ne’er-do-we-Ed, what happened to your arm?”
“Gate, I guess,” Ed says. “It’s fine.”
Alphonse’s eyes are saucer-sized now, without a trace of bleariness. “You destroyed it!”
“The Gate destroyed it,” Ed says. “And that’s what we’re telling Win if you want either of us to survive. It’s no big deal.”
“‘No big deal’,” Alphonse mutters in the tones of one who suffers long and often. “His arm is hanging off and bleeding all over the sidewalk, and it’s ‘no big deal’.”
“Let me fix that house,” Ed says, reluctantly releasing his brother’s hand, “and then let’s get our sorry asses to a hotel or something.”
“Stay with me,” Roy says before his better judgment knows he’s drawing breath.
Ed stares at him for a long, long moment. There are too many tiny lines at the corners of his eyes; there are too many scars on his cheeks and his neck and his jaw, silvered in the starlight; there are too many stories with sad endings in the depths of his gaze.
Then he offers up a small, tired sort of smile.
“If you’re sure,” he says. “It’ll be an awful lot easier than explaining this anywhere else.”
“Forgive him,” Alphonse says as Ed tromps over to the mangled door and touches his left palm to the dangling one on his right. “Of everything, it was you that he missed the most-more than alchemy, I think; you’d have to ask him to be sure, but of course he’d never tell. I don’t think he could if he wanted to-I don’t think he has the words for what he feels, and that’s part of what he’s so afraid of. It gives you a great deal of power over him. I don’t suppose I have to tell you this, do I?”
He’s watching Roy’s face closely and smiling thinly, and somehow his dark eyes are very soft, but all the same Roy feels like he’s being flayed alive.
“You’re different,” Alphonse says. “I didn’t know what I was looking for last time-I’d never met you, not in any way that counted; I was working from the evidence of secondhand accounts. But we’re not the only ones who limped along without something that made us feel whole, because life marches on, and we never had a choice-are we, Colonel?”
“Brigadier General,” Roy says.
Alphonse’s smile curls upward at both ends. “My apologies.”
“Not at all,” Roy says, listening to the just-slightly-uneven steps behind him, still hardly daring to believe the sound. “I was a corporal when last you saw me; I believe I actually set a historical record for speed in rising through the ranks.”
“Like it counts if they just restored you,” Ed says. “Try catching up on a hundred years of science and a thousand years of literature and then come talk to me.”
“You liar,” Alphonse says calmly. “You didn’t even pretend to care about the literature.”
“It’s all the same anyway,” Ed says, shoving his left hand into his trouser pocket and then changing his mind and wrapping it around his dripping metal arm. “Oh, no, some Byronic asshole doesn’t love me; woe is I; no one understands; let me waste away to nothing, which is made all the easier given that I have no fucking backbone. Excuse me while I vomit.”
“Was that supposed to be a summary of Wuthering Heights?” Alphonse asks.
“Maybe,” Ed says.
“Did you read it?” Alphonse asks.
“I tried,” Ed says. “What the hell does it matter, anyway? Let’s blow this joint. Shift your ass, Al.”
Roy moves past him and makes a point of holding the car door open, keeping his posture impeccable.
“What’s your problem?” Ed asks, eyeing him.
“If I’m going to be your chauffeur,” Roy says, “wouldn’t you rather that I looked the part?”
“Never seen a chauffeur with an eyepatch before,” Ed says, dropping onto the seat. The way his hair bounces over his shoulder stops Roy’s throat; the way he cringes and clutches at his arm almost stops Roy’s heart. “If you kill us on the road after all this, I’m gonna be real pissed, Mustang.”
“Me, too,” Roy says, and shuts the door.
“I don’t know what I expected,” Ed says, gazing around himself where he stands in the middle of the foyer, dripping blood on the tiles. “Flags, maybe. A shrine to your career. An encyclopedia of sarcastic comebacks for every occasion.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” Roy says. “We should really deal with that arm of yours; the lavatory’s upsta-”
“Did you just say ‘lavatory’?” Ed asks.
“Shut up, Brother,” Alphonse says. “General, do you suppose I should call the Rockbells and the Hugheses now, or in the morning?”
“It’s probably better not to wake Elysia,” Roy says, “but I imagine Miss Rockbell would begrudge the delay.”
“And by ‘begrudge’,” Ed mutters, “you mean ‘beat us all to unrecognizable pulp with wrenches for’.”
“That was the insinuation I was going for, yes,” Roy says.
Ed grins at him and looks… surprised. Surprised and delighted and young and free.
“Run along upstairs, Brother,” Alphonse says, making a shooing motion with one hand for good measure. He’s so much taller than Ed now-does it drive the elder Elric to distraction, or has he finally made his peace? “You’ll probably be able to hear Winry screaming from there anyway.”
“There’s a telephone book under the table,” Roy says.
“It’s all right,” Alphonse says. “I remember the numbers. I remember a lot of things.”
There isn’t time to ask about that, or about what he said before-the love of Roy’s life is currently bleeding on the carpet runner from wounds unseen.
Ed is gritting his teeth by the time they top the stairs, and it’s all Roy can do not to reach out and stroke his hair to soothe him.
“I may’ve-” Ed cranes his neck to try to glance at Alphonse over the railing. Roy can’t tell if he’s successful. “-understated-this-a bit.”
There is a terrible sort of quaking in Roy’s heart, like an echo of things to come-like a glint of lightning and the sick certainty of imminent thunder ravaging the windowpanes. “We’re nearly there.”
Ed huffs out a laugh. “Easy for you to say.”
“Touché,” Roy says, slipping past him to lead the way down the hall. He holds the bathroom door open, and Ed gives him an unreadable look before stepping through.
That’s new.
“Time was,” Ed says, flicking on the light, “you’d die before you let me get the last word.”
“Times change,” Roy says.
Ed looks at him for another long moment before he smiles faintly and carefully lowers himself to sit atop the porcelain wall of the bathtub. “All right,” he says, clenching his teeth again. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
What they’ve got is a horrific tangle of torn flesh and twisted steel streaked with old blood and welling with the new. The bolts securing the edge of the automail have been ripped almost entirely out of Ed’s skin; when he peels the stained and stiffening fabric all aside, the whole arm hangs crookedly, completely unsupported. Raw flesh gleams in pits and pockets everywhere the metal has been wrenched away, and for a moment even Ed looks disconcerted.
“Oh,” he says. “Huh. Yeah, that smarts.”
Roy’s stomach keeps clenching and unclenching on the off-beats of his banging heart; to see Ed’s skin shredded, his hair matted, his indefatigable body so damaged is to stare a tragedy in the blood-bespattered face-but all the same, the primary emotion surging through Roy’s weary frame is relief. Ed will survive this. Ed will heal and come back stronger, greater, brighter. Of all the tolls he could have paid for passage-of all the things he could have lost-
“Come here,” Roy says. “Sit on the edge of the sink; we need to sterilize this.” He starts to extend his hand, but he has no right; he’s been granted no permissions; he has no knowledge and no cause but his own self-interest. “Do you suppose it would be better or worse to unfasten the arm?”
“Less strain,” Ed says, hiking himself up onto the counter left hip first, swinging the rest of his weight smoothly after, and gathering his steel elbow in against his chest. There’s a massive, jagged white scar just beneath his left collarbone, slicing almost all the way from sternum to shoulder. “But given the inoperability, I figure either the wires or the nerve connections pulled loose.” He reaches down to yank half a dozen squares of toilet paper loose and starts dabbing at the curved edge of the steel, trying to peer into the workings. “See, if it’s the connections, I could free this fucker without feeling a thing-but if it’s the wires, and they’re damaged or tangled or some shit, and I tear ’em out…” He grins, pale under the harsh overhead lights. “Well, it’s a toss up whether Winry or the pain’d kill me first.”
“Delightful options, both,” Roy says. He tugs the hand-towel from its ring, dampens it beneath the faucet, and cautiously begins to wipe the blood from the metal, folding it half a dozen different ways to find clean fabric for another blot. He makes his way across and reaches the torn skin-the gut-twisting wreck where the bolts pulled free and took far too much flesh with them to ease their passage. He is a cultivator of restraint, a connoisseur of self-control, and still he almost hesitates. His heartbeat sounds uneven, and the deliberate draw of breath into his lungs seems insufficient.
Every night he’s dreamt; every day he’s wished and wondered; it’s really almost funny that he’s not prepared.
That’s Ed for you.
There’s a hiss from behind the clenched teeth as Roy presses the towel in against the wounds. “Ahh-shit. No, keep going. Get it over with.” Ed’s jaw is tight, and his eyes are narrowed almost to slits as he curls his left hand around the edge of the countertop. He tilts his head back, grinding his teeth as Roy swabs deeper, further, onward across the worst of it. “Hey, if you-ha, oh, fuck-if you-cold water before the stain sets-it’ll wash out-”
“Forgive my crudeness,” Roy says, “but I don’t give a fuck about the stain.”
The visible slivers of Ed’s eyes gleam. “If you think that’s crude, you wouldn’t even want to hear some of the shit I said in Latvia.”
“All the same,” Roy says, and his fingertips are grazing Edward Elric’s skin; slick smears of blood or no, this is what he’s been living just to dream of, and now it’s real- “I want to hear everything.”
Ed’s eyes flit to him, startled, and his tired body wants to freeze.
But cowards count no victories, and he is through retreating. He’s been a moving corpse for years; he will not back down from the dizzy possibility of all he’s ever dared to want-even if it fails, even if it falls, if it crashes and burns like a comet scorching through the sky; even if it ends in nothing but a swathe of broken Earth and a streak of ash and one last shattering of a heart too weak and scattered to be reassembled when the wreckage cools-
He pauses with the towel in one hand and splays the fingers of the other gently, so gently, from Ed’s sternum upward, thumb resting in the hollow of Ed’s throat. Ed’s pulse beats softly against his skin, fluttering as Ed swallows hard-once, twice-
“You sure about that?” Ed asks, and his eyes lift to Roy’s and start to smolder. “There’s some shit I can’t even think about without feeling sick all over again.”
“I have a great deal of those stories,” Roy says, meeting his gaze. He barely dares to blink; if this were to vanish, he’d be done for.
Ed’s eyes flick away and then back to him, and the warmth in them is indescribable as the grimace stretches into something like a grin. “Yeah?” he says, and-slowly, so slowly-he pries his clenched fingers from around the edge of the counter, curls them, uncurls them, and winds them into Roy’s shirtfront. “Guess maybe we should stick together, then. Negotiate a trade.”
“You’ve developed a knack for diplomacy in your absence,” Roy says over the deafening beat of his disbelieving heart. “I didn’t think it was possible.”
There’s a touch of a smirk to Ed’s grin, and a shadow at its edges. “I’d ruled out a hell of a lot of things until they happened.”
Roy is too giddy to play coy; the ice he’s stepped out onto is thicker than he thought. He touches Ed’s jaw as lightly as he can manage, and he can’t help the burn in his gut at the bloody smudges of fingerprints he leaves behind. Is it wrong to thrill at the thought of marking his claim? “I tried not to hope for too much.”
“I know that feeling,” Ed says. The animal wariness hasn’t left his eyes, but his lashes dip, and he leans into Roy’s hand.
They’re two of a damned miserable kind, aren’t they? They’re both ceding ground inch-by-inch, grudgingly, guardedly-
But it’s been so long, and the fissures in the bedrock run so deep, that there’s no stopping the landslide now. It’s only a matter of time before the ground gives way, and they collapse directly into one another, and whatever crawls out of the rubble will be their due.
Well. Roy’s no stranger to digging, or to dust.
“I think,” he says, softly, sliding the pad of his thumb over Ed’s cheekbone, savoring its curve, “that we’d better put you back together before your brother tears both of us apart.”
“Probably,” Ed says, and his grin is tired and tentative, but there’s a sweetness to it-and with his voice thrumming straight through Roy’s skin, twining down the tendons in his wrist, burrowing into his bones-God, it’s a beautiful thing; and God, but blood and weariness and harsh fluorescence can’t even dull Ed Elric in the flesh. “He doesn’t have a whole lot of patience for procrastinators.”
“Or for those who leave his brother coping with indescribable pain,” Roy says.
Ed shrugs his remaining shoulder-and, by the wince, regrets it. “Not that I’m not used to it, but… yeah.”
“That’s worse,” Roy says. “And all the more reason to spare you as much as we can.”
Ed’s smile is lopsided and faintly wry. “You know how they say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger? I used to think that was true-and sometimes it is, I guess. Sometimes it teaches you just how much you’re capable of, and sometimes it hones you to a sharper edge, and the next time you’re not as scared. But sometimes it just sort of carves a hole in you from the inside, right up to the underside of the skin, and no one can see it, but then if they break through that one spot, you just-cave.” His eyetooth dimples his lower lip for a moment; it’s chapped and full and wonderful, and then it’s curving as he grins again, darkly this time. “And the longer you go, the more of those holes you get, and the higher the likelihood that someone’ll hit one without even knowing it.”
“I think perhaps that’s why we seek other people,” Roy says. “In the hopes of finding someone who knows where all the weak spots are but protects them for us instead of taking advantage.”
Ed swallows, and his hand lifts to let his fingertips dance so lightly against Roy’s wrist. “That’s the thing,” he says. “With the trying not to hope for too much.”
“You close yourself off,” Roy says. “You shut yourself away. And you cease hoping altogether, and you lose the ability to believe in anything.”
“Yeah,” Ed says, breath light, eyes searching. “Well-anything except Al.”
“Al,” Roy says, “who will slay me for my slowness and be justified-you’ve always had a talent for getting me sidetracked.”
Roy would live another thousand years in hell for Ed’s grin. “Oh, so it’s my fault?”
All of the happenings on a planet are, of course, the fault of the sun it orbits; all of the things that live, that grow, that parch, that scorch, that die-
All of the things that warm and warm until they burst into beautiful flame-
Roy spreads his hand just below a deep, wretched split in the skin where the force of a bolt dragging outward tore the flesh around it. “We should stitch this.”
“‘We’?” Ed says. “Please, do the damn honors. Don’t tell me you keep suturing thread in your bathroom cabinet.”
Roy opens his mouth, shuts it, opens the cabinet, and… “If I don’t tell you, is it less absurd?”
“Holy shit, Roy,” Ed says-Roy, Roy, Roy; never has his own name battered at the insides of his skull until he doubts his ears- “There’s a difference between ‘well-prepared’ and ‘fucking creepy’, and you’re flirting with it.”
“How foolish of me,” Roy says, gathering needle and isopropanol and more gauze still. “All this time, I thought that I was flirting with you.”
Roy glances up through his eyelashes-which is unwise given the combination of compromised depth perception and sharp object in hand, but he just can’t help it. Ed is biting his lip in a failed attempt to cage another grin.
“Do you always brandish fucking needles at people you wanna get with?” he asks. “You know I’ve got a problem with those things, right? Is it a habit to try to seduce people with their own fucking phobias, or am I special?”
“You are most assuredly one-of-a-kind,” Roy says. He dips a cotton ball in the alcohol and dabs blood away from the edges of the rift in the skin. “You are also, as they say, looking a gift horse in the mouth.”
Ed appears to be trying not to laugh. “You didn’t. You just-you didn’t.”
“What didn’t I do?” Roy asks, knotting the thread. He only ever uses these implements for stitches, repairs, and the necessary embroidery-broken skin and buttons and red arrays on white.
“You didn’t set yourself up for a ‘gift Mustang’ joke,” Ed says, “because that would be fucking criminal.”
“I didn’t realize creative interpretations of idioms were against the law,” Roy says.
“Creative interpretations?” Ed asks. “That was a shitty pun; if they’re not illegal here, I’m going ba-ohfuck-”
“It’s all right,” Roy says, guiding the needle through as Ed grinds his teeth and squeezes his eyes shut. “This won’t take long; keep breathing.”
“Easy for you to fuckin’ say,” Ed grits out.
“I know,” Roy says. That’s two; the blood is welling; he soaks another cotton ball and tosses it into the sink. “I’m sorry.”
“Fuck your ‘sorry’; just stitch already.”
“There’s only sew much I can do,” Roy says.
The laugh that emerges from Ed is a sad and strangled thing, but Roy will take it-and treasure it until the end of days.
“You’re a fucking riot. Who even lets you get outside?”
“I’m crafty enough to slip through the cracks sometimes,” Roy says. That’s three. He pinches the next inch of broken flesh together with his free hand; his fingers slip in the blood, and he fumbles for another piece of cotton to wipe it clean. “The worst is holding them back in meetings with the generals; they don’t even seem to realize how many punning opportunities they’re passing up. It’s really rather tragic.”
Ed hisses through his teeth as Roy draws the next stitch tight-but not too tight; if the skin protrudes between the loops of thread, it’ll scar unevenly, won’t it? He’s only ever done this in emergencies, on battlefields, with the mortar blasts ringing in his ears too loud for him to hear the misery caused by his ministrations.
“And here I used to think you had dignity,” Ed gets out, looking determinedly at the wall.
“Only the thinnest pretense,” Roy says. He tugs-gently, but not quite cautiously enough; Ed’s jaw tightens until Roy thinks he’s going to break a tooth. “Is that disappointing?”
“It’s a relief, actually,” Ed says, and Roy’s heart leaps, and his stomach drops, and his fingertips slide, and he chases another trail of red with the cotton. “Always figured that was one of the main things keeping us apart, you know?” He chokes out half a laugh. “Back before there were universal barriers in the way, I mean. I always thought you wouldn’t… well, I always thought you wouldn’t. That’s all.”
“Dignity was never an obstruction,” Roy says. “I haven’t claimed any in my own mind for a long time, although it’s flattering to know I’ve got most people fooled.” Five. That’s enough. Carefully, carefully, he starts to tie it off. “More than anything, I think, it was the prospect of tainting you.”
This laugh bears an odd edge of something like hysteria. “Tainting me? You remember how we met?”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” Roy says, striving hopelessly to smooth out the thread. “I was older than you are now when I hired you, Ed.”
“Don’t give yourself so much credit,” Ed says. “You didn’t hire me; you made a sales pitch, and I sold my soul-at a profit, as far as I’m concerned, given how fucking shattered and forsaken the damned thing was by then.”
Roy cuts the thread as close to the knot as he thinks he can get away with; given Ed’s incapacity to stay still, the likelihood is awfully high that he’ll end up pulling at the stitches. “No one with a quarter of a conscience would have conscripted you like I did, knowing what I do.”
“Yeah, well,” Ed says. “We were both young and stupid and ambitious, right?”
“And these days we’re just stupid?” Roy asks.
Ed grins. “Now you’re gettin’ it.”
Roy wipes his fingers as best he can on the nearest towel and starts taping gauze over his handiwork, and then over all of the open wounds he doesn’t dare to touch. The Rockbells will have to look to it. They’ll be over the moon, won’t they? It would be a gross injustice to keep the Elrics away from them-away from their family, away from their home-for long. Roy’s duty here is to patch them up and send them on; he has no claim to anything.
“Whoa,” Ed says. “You went grim all of a sudden. I fucking hate it when you do that; what did you start thinking about?”
“Nothing,” Roy says. When did Ed-renowned through the ranks for his inability to comprehend even the most painfully blatant of social cues-learn to read people? When did he learn to do it well? Roy can’t afford to give him anything else to go on-his wide-eyed candor as a child was brutal; to add emotional intelligence to his arsenal could make him unassailably destructive no matter how noble his intentions. “We should get you a sling.”
“We should get me a new body,” Ed says. “One that actually works once in a while would be fucking fantastic.”
“I don’t know,” Roy says. “I’m rather fond of this one.”
Ed snorts, cradling the unresponsive automail to his chest and watching the way the bandages bow when his muscles shift. “I guess I’m kinda attached to it.”
Roy looks at him.
He grins, slowly, but then broader by the moment as Roy starts to smile.
“People are going to say I’m a bad influence on you,” Roy says.
“Fuck ’em,” Ed says. “You and I have both always lived by that rule, haven’t we?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Roy says, “I suppose you’re right. Hold that thought.”
He steps out into the hall and raids the linen closet for the oldest, thinnest sheet in his haphazard years-of-living accumulation. Returning to the sheer weight and power of Ed’s presence is like an instantaneous sunburn; he doesn’t know how long he can bear this without disintegrating, and it’s hopelessly bizarre that he’s eager to find out.
One of the drawers by Ed’s knee yields a tiny silver pair of scissors meant for some grooming process or another, and he hacks the sheet into strips perhaps less expertly than a man of his renowned consideration ought-but given that the span of his elbows is wider than the space between the counter and the wall, and that his hands are trembling from the seething maelstrom of adrenaline and endorphins roaring at his core, and that Edward Elric’s fierce gold eyes are fixed on him for the first time in years-
He can hardly be blamed for a bit of clumsiness, can he?
He’s no doctor-quite the opposite-and he’s never had a knack for repair. All the same, once he’s wrapped the sheet around Ed’s metal forearm, over one shoulder, over the other, back and forth across and underneath until its weight is carefully supported in the loop of fabric instead of dragging downward on Ed’s flesh, he thinks that he can say fairly that he hasn’t made it worse.
Ed twists his torso experimentally, and the tightening of muscle under his scar-tracked skin stops Roy’s throat and steals his breath and ignites every last nerve in his body; he’s piqued for panic or battle or-
“Not too bad,” Ed says. “It’ll hold, anyway. Probably until Winry gets here.”
Roy pauses. At the rate this is going, Ed might just have an appreciation for tact by now. “Is that your intention? I had assumed that the two of you would want to go to her.”
“You kidding?” Ed asks, and there’s a sliver of the old grin, the first grin-the one’s that’s half-challenge and half-delight. “You think I’m gonna take this goddamn thing on a train right now and jar it more? And more to the point-” He reaches out and curls his left fist in Roy’s shirtfront. In another moment he’ll be holding Roy’s heart in his hand literally as well as figuratively, because it’s about to squeeze itself out between his ribs and tear straight through. “-you think I’m gonna take my eyes off your dumb ass for a second now that I’ve finally got you back?”
“I didn’t want to presume,” Roy says.
Ed tilts his head slightly-just enough to make his hair swing as his eyes narrow, and his smile curls. “Yeah, you’ve changed.” He flattens his left hand on Roy’s chest, and the surging gallop of Roy’s heartbeat seems to startle them both. “But I think… I mean, I think I like it.”
Roy lays his hands very lightly on Ed’s knees. “That’s different, too-for you and I to be in agreement.”
art by the wonderful uchiha-umeko, originally posted here
Ed’s grin is more sunbeam than knife blade, and Roy has been so cold for so long- “It’s a whole new fuckin’ world, Roy.”
He can feel it in his veins and his bones and the lightning-tingle forking on his skin. “Well-put.”
Ed’s devastatingly clever eyes scour his solitary one for another moment, then two, and then the warm hand planted over his sternum clenches around a fistful of his shirtfront and hauls him forward, toppling him into a kiss like the ground-like the universe-giving way.
The fabric of that universe is shredding too fast to contemplate or comprehend; for a long series of seconds he couldn’t hope to number, there is nothing in the wide cosmos but this soft darkness and Ed’s mouth, Ed’s breath, Ed’s tongue, Ed’s teeth, Ed’s dizzyingly tantalizing gasp-moan, Ed’s faint and oh-so-satisfied sigh whispering across his cheek-
Ed’s fingertips creep up along his throat, probing with a shy, gentle sort of tentativeness all the sweeter for being so flagrantly uncharacteristic-they settle at his jaw, at about which time he rediscovers both of his own hands buried in Ed’s hair, thumbs sweeping back and forth along his cheeks, and from the slickness on Roy’s skin and underneath his fingers, both of them are smearing blood everywhere-
It’s giddy-it’s mad; it’s all the dreams and all the desperate wishes; it’s heady with the innumerable hopes abruptly fulfilled, with the rush of abstract desires made bone-rattlingly real-
Ed’s mouth is so beautifully warm and welcoming, surprisingly deft and startlingly playful-there’s an odd twirl of relief in the pit of Roy’s stomach at the kind thought that that bright little flare in Edward Elric’s soul hasn’t been crushed entirely beneath the weight of years.
Ed draws back, drags in a breath, and opens his eyes slowly, as though his eyelashes are heavy-and they look it, thick as they are.
“Well,” he says. He licks his lips, clears his throat, and smoothes Roy’s collar, gaze flicking to it and then back up. “That was worth the wait.”
“That was just to thank you for saying you’d stay,” Roy says, dragging his open hands slowly, slowly, worshipfully down Ed’s sides. “I haven’t even begun trying to make up for the wait.”
“Oh, yeah?” Ed asks, ribs shifting under Roy’s fingertips as he raises both legs to curl them around Roy’s back, heels digging into his spine, forcing him to stumble another half-step forward, so that their bodies press tight, Ed’s hips to Roy’s, slotted close like they were cut to fit together-only the edge of the counter seems to be keeping them from merging entirely, and Roy can’t help resenting its intrusion. “You wanna get started?”
Roy can hardly say no to a sin that feels like absolution. If that makes him weak, after all these years of wanting-so be it.
Kissing Ed again, a touch more gently, with a sliver more care and even more admiration, with an intent to caress, to appreciate, to memorize-it’s just as transcendent as the passion was mere moments ago; it’s a duller burn, warmer but not as bright, and this one he could bathe in for the rest of his life, if he was lucky.
He’s never been lucky before. What if-?
Ed’s legs fold in closer still around him, clinging; Ed’s fingers tangle in his hair-their chests are aligned so closely that the ridges of their collarbones collide; burnished-but-battered steel edges scrape at Roy’s skin and the buttons on his shirt, and he can feel the latter sticking to him with a warm wetness; they must have rubbed one of the wounds to bleeding again-
When he can bear to pull away, he sets his forehead against Ed’s. The fabric of the patch whispers, and he wonders-just how far might they go? Just how much might be possible in this space of mingled breath between them?
“Jesus,” Ed says, panting lightly. His tongue flicks out to touch the corner of his bottom lip, which Roy was very much enjoying nibbling on. “I could do this all night.”
“But you won’t,” Roy says, making sure he’s offering a smile that will reach his eye. “Because you’re going to get plenty of rest as part of the healing process, and in the meantime, you’re going to go downstairs and reassure your brother that I did not do any intentional damage to your person and furthermore am very committed to your recovery so that he doesn’t feel inclined to stab me in the back.”
“He wouldn’t,” Ed says, and his bent legs squeeze Roy’s hips once more before they release; there’s a terribly enticing mischievous gleam in his eyes. “It’d be poison. And he’d make sure you knew it was him.” He waves his left hand and then braces it on Roy’s shoulder to slide down off of the countertop. He winces at the way that dropping the last few inches jars his right arm, then grins up at Roy as he steadies himself on his feet. “Oh, come on, as if he would-you’re the safest guy in Amestris right now.”
“Oh?” Roy asks.
Ed breezes past him and out the door. “Hell, yeah. He knows how much I want you.”
Alphonse is tidying the knickknacks and curios on the end table and straightening the runner when Ed and Roy reach the bottom of the stairs.
“Winry screamed,” he says calmly. “Then she cried. Then she said she was stupid for crying, because she hated us. Then she asked if we were okay. Then she asked if your automail was okay. Then she said she was going to kill you. Then she said she has an appointment early tomorrow, but she’ll be on the first train after that.”
Only when he’s finished the narrative does he look over. His eyes linger on the finger-shaped smears of blood drying on Ed’s jaw and then the matching stains on Roy’s throat and shirt collar, and he rolls his eyes.
“Brother…”
Ed bristles. “What?”
Alphonse sighs and turns back towards the table, but not before Roy thinks he sees the beginnings of a smile. “Nothing, never mind. Forgive me, General, but could I trouble you for something to eat?”
Before Roy can tell him he’s welcome to anything as long as he forgives Roy’s bloody fingerprints up and down his brother’s skin, Ed is barreling towards the kitchen. “Jesus, Al, you’re a genius! Roy, hey, what’ve you got?”
Elrics will be Elrics.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Roy says honestly. “Help yourself.”
“Christ,” Ed says. He reaches up to open the first cabinet and, rather transparently, tries to make it look like he’s wincing at the bareness of the pantry, not the twinge in his shoulder. “We gotta shake you out of this tragic bachelor thing pronto.”
“‘We’?” Alphonse asks, gliding past Roy and then in front of Ed, opening the next one for him. “I’ll leave that herculean endeavor to you, Brother.”
“I beg your pardon?” Roy says.
“Here,” Alphonse says, grabbing down a box. “Muesli. Your favorite.”
“Oh, gag me with a spoon,” Ed says. “I’ll just starve.” He favors Roy with a look that’s two parts wistful and one extremely seductive. “What’s your plan of action, sir?”
Oh, God. Oh, God.
Roy’s mouth is very, very dry of a sudden. It’s probably a coincidence. He clears his throat. “I believe the corner store is open all night.”
“Goody,” Alphonse says.
“Like we haven’t had worse,” Ed says.
“What a shame it is,” Alphonse says, “to aspire towards improvement in the conditions of one’s life.”
“Whatever,” Ed says. He nudges a lower cabinet open with his right toes, crouches down, and sighs. He’s wrapped his left arm around the sling to protect it from his own knees; time has imparted a degree of self-awareness that no quantity of near-death experiences could teach. “What do you eat?”
Roy shrugs, which, while not precisely dignified, is less disastrous than saying Black coffee and whatever Breda leaves behind.
“Perhaps we should just go to bed,” Alphonse says.
“What’s the point?” Ed asks. “It’s, like, five in the morning. The sun’ll be up soon.”
“The point is that you’ve been awake for thirty-eight hours, two of which were spent bleeding profusely,” Alphonse says. “I counted.”
Ed turns to Roy with an expression of absolute betrayal and jabs his thumb towards his brother. “Can you believe this shit?”
“If you come upstairs and rest,” Roy says, “I’ll tuck you in.”
Ed’s eyes widen. He’s really here, isn’t he? Even Roy’s tortured brain couldn’t conjure a dream of him scouring the kitchen for edibles in an improvised sheet-sling with Roy’s own bloody handprints on the sides of his neck, stark against his skin in the artificial light.
“Oh, yeah?” Ed asks slowly.
“No warm milk required,” Roy says.
“I don’t believe you have any milk to work with,” Alphonse says.
“Sold,” Ed says.
Alphonse makes a valiant attempt-accompanied by several vaguely reprimanding noises-to scrub the worst of the damning dried blood off of his brother’s face, an endeavor from which Roy swiftly escapes in order to shake the worst of the dust from the sheets in the guest bedroom. Just once does Alphonse’s voice rise (“I don’t disapprove of that; I disapprove of you being filthy and weird!”), and then it’s not long before both of the Elric brothers are hesitating in the hallway, glancing at each other and then at him.
Not everything has changed. Not everything that was has been lost to the ravenings of time and hard-earned wisdom, and there is so much hope in that-
Alphonse thanks Roy extraordinarily politely, shuffles past him, and shuts the guest room door.
The vastness of the silence makes it all the easier to hear Ed swallow.
“Um,” he says. “So.”
“So,” Roy says, and holds a hand out, and Ed’s latches onto his so tightly he can’t feel his fingertips.
“Aren’t you going to sleep?” Ed mumbles with what appears to be the last of his wakefulness, if the heaviness of his eyelids and the slurring of his syllables are reliable indications.
“No,” Roy says.
“Just gonna watch me?”
“Yes.”
“Perv,” Ed says.
“Possibly.”
“S’okay,” Ed says, mostly into the pillow. “I like you that way.”
“That’s good to hear,” Roy says.
‘Good’, of course, is the wildest understatement in the known world for what he feels, but Ed’s drifting at the feathery edge between sleep and waking as it is, and Roy doesn’t imagine he’s eager to sit through the outpouring of the sandstorm in Roy’s chest-unwelcome promises and soaring declarations swirl white-hot and diamond-edged, howling into every crevice, wearing down his resolution to be more than just this need-
Sagely, Ed says something to the effect of “Mmngh”, and then he’s solidly unconscious at last.
Even pale and battered, with the violet-dark crescents underlining his too-beautiful eyes; even with blood matted here and there in the hair trailing over the pillow, he looks so damned perfect in Roy’s bed that it’s staggering all over again.
Roy reaches out a careful fingertip and tucks a wayward wisp of hair back behind his ear. Faintly-but unmistakably-Ed’s mouth curves up into a tiny, satisfied smile.
[PART II]