FMA -- Head Over Heels
Title: Head Over Heels
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Ed
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,700
Warnings: language (very not PG :'D); post-some-canon AU; crap-ass barely-edited speedfic ahoy!
Prompt: people saying things and thinking they're normal because they're concussed and HILARITY ENSUES
Summary: Roy gets a head wound; Ed gets a headache.
Author's Note: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HACHA!!!!! ♥♥♥ You rock my socks, friend. ;___; Hope you had a good one! Special thanks to my bb Mthaytr for rescuing this silly thing. XDDDD
HEAD OVER HEELS
Roy’s first thought is That could have gone better.
His second is Either someone is patting my cheek, or an overlarge rat has taken a grievous disliking to my face and is making a serious effort at tail-whipping it into a more palatable shape.
His third is Damn, that hurts.
His fourth, as he opens his eyes and automatically tries to brace himself to sit, is Where the hell am I?
On the upside, the chilly batting at his face stops immediately; on the downside, it gives way to a familiar voice yelping “No, you stupid shit!” so loudly that his head rings, followed by a too-firm hand planting itself in the center of his chest to pin him to the…
Floor? Ground?
His final question is still, it seems, quite relevant. He lifts his eyelids again, slower this time, and tries to blink away the white and yellow sparks.
Ed’s face swims into focus. Dim light paints hazy stripes across it; dust motes dance around the frizzy flyaways that have made their escape from the braid. The bright gold eyes look darker here, but there’s a flicker in them; Ed’s brows have cinched in so tight his whole forehead furrows in a way that’s almost comic. His jaw is set tight, cords standing out in his neck; there’s a thin red line bleeding sluggishly just below his right cheekbone. Roy can feel the tips of the automail fingers digging in just above his collarbones; they’ve curled slightly with Ed’s determination to hold him down.
Roy lifts his own hand towards the cut, watching with a detached sort of curiosity as his fingers waver through the air like they’re supremely drunk. The words spill out anyway, unaffected by his abject failure at hand-eye coordination: “Are you all r-”
Ed’s other hand seizes his wrist with the speed and dexterity of a striking cobra and slams it down onto the carpet, where he can faintly feel layers of grit digging into the meat of his palm. It occurs to him-distantly; all of this seems to be happening to someone else, in another room; how delightfully voyeuristic-that he hasn’t the slightest idea what happened to his glove.
“Stop moving,” Ed says. “I’m fucking fine. You, on the other hand, managed to get yourself a fucking head wound. You’d think somebody fucking renowned for their fucking reflexes-”
The flicker in his eyes and the tightness in the muscles of his face-he’s worried. Ed is scared. Perhaps that should prompt Roy to heretofore uncharted heights of terror, but at the moment he just feels… touched.
“-would be marginally less fucking pathetic when it comes to falling through floors and shit and landing on their feet-” Ed’s voice is rising, and Roy’s head throbs a little, but it’s almost a pleasant sort of pain. “-but no, like the fucking drama queen you are, you had to go and knock your own dumb ass out, and I can’t even tell if your pupils are the same size ’cause your stupid fucking eyes are so damn dark, so you’re probably gonna die, and everybody’ll think it was my fault-”
“No one would think that,” Roy says.
“Easy for you to say,” Ed says. “You’ll be dead.”
“I sincerely hope not,” Roy says. Very strange-the bulk of his thoughts have swarmed into a churning muddle, but little slivers of speech keep streaming out of the maelstrom and slipping past his lips. His tongue feels thick and clumsy, an insufficient implement for striving to corral the syllables, but then these clever little sentences… slide past it. “There’s a great deal yet that I’d like to do and make up for.”
“That’s such a fucking politician answer,” Ed says, hanging his head, shaking it; the faint light positively glitters on the gold, and oh… “If you’re stubborn enough to survive this, I’m gonna tell General Hawkeye to cut down on your public appearances until you start talking like a normal person again.”
“I don’t know that I’ve ever talked like a ‘normal person’,” Roy says.
“You haven’t,” Ed says, glaring through his bangs. His hands are still fixed on Roy’s chest and Roy’s right wrist; very belatedly, Roy realizes Ed is, in fact, sitting on him, knees to either side of his hips. A rather unhelpful region of his brain surfaces long enough to remind him that he’s had this dream before. “So I guess you’re past help. Dumbass.”
“That’s Führer Dumbass to you,” Roy says.
Ed’s shoulders sag visibly, and he shakes his head again, this time with a croaky hint of a laugh. “At least you remember the important shit. I gotta…” The flesh hand lifts from Roy’s wrist; Ed sits back and runs it through his hair, smearing grime across his forehead; he grimaces, but not at the filth; he probably hasn’t even noticed that. “I gotta keep you talking. Right? You can’t go to sleep. Gotta keep your systems going. Hang on, I’m gonna-” He leans down again; his hand grazes Roy’s jaw on its passage towards the floor; fingertips start probing gently at the back of Roy’s neck. “Knowing my luck, you’d fuck up your fucking spine and not even know. I-okay, so-keep talking. Give me the spiel. Since you’re definitely going to live to be a bastard another day, what are these fucking things you wanna do?”
Ed’s fingertips feel wonderful against the endlessly tense muscles of his neck; relief trembles upwards along the back of his skull.
“Fall in love with you,” he says, “for one. I simply haven’t had the time.”
Ed goes very still.
Something he said?
Clearly the solution is to say more.
“I’d also like to see the ocean,” he says. “I hear the Cretan coastline is vastly superior in just about every possible way. But first I’d like to start watching you out of the corner of my eye every time you’re in the room, until you nearly notice, and Riza has to catch my elbow and haul me aside and flay me with her eyes and tell me I’m being foolish and self-destructive, and don’t I remember what happened last time? And then I’ll tell her it’s harmless, and it’s just that you’ve come into your own so magnificently; it’s just that when the light hits you, you’re radiant; it’s just that you care so unconditionally, and you give of yourself with such fervent generosity; it’s just that it would be such an enormous honor to be worthy of your affection, even for a moment, that I can’t help but dream. And I’ll tell her I can’t hurt you with a dream, and I wouldn’t dare to try, and it’s all right, because the poison tastes like liqueur at the start, and I know when to stop; and I won’t have too much this time, I swear…”
Ed’s mouth is open just slightly. His chest rises, falls, and rises; every out-breath makes the trailing half-curtain of his bangs flutter. His eyes are enormous; whole worlds, whole galaxies, could turn in their depths and still have space to bloom among the flecks of olive and the flakes of gold.
He looks… what? Distressed?
That’s not right. Roy would hate for him to go around this… whatever this room is; some sort of basement level library with dust-clogged carpeting and far too much ambient mustiness-Roy would hate for him to have to go around it feeling distressed. He’d better say something comforting. He’d better…
Lift his hand faster this time, and run the pad of his thumb very gently just under the curve of the cut on Ed’s cheek.
Ed flinches at the sudden motion, but he doesn’t move except to swallow-hard, by the looks of it, by the laboring of his beautiful throat.
“Don’t worry,” Roy says. “It doesn’t even take all that-mostly it seems to happen without anyone being conscious of it at all; mostly it seems like I woke up one morning and realized that you’re stunning and staggeringly compassionate, and everything you say makes a tremendous amount of sense. That threw me for something of a loop, you understand. I doubt you remember-I kept staring at you, and you asked if you had snot on your face, and I said I’d just been looking into thin air, actually, because I wasn’t feeling well, so you came over to see if I had snot on my face and might be contagious, and I retreated so fast I fell over a chair.”
Ed swallows again. And again. His eyes dart towards Roy’s fingertips against his face.
“I remember,” he says. “Breda had a score-card. You got a nine.”
“If you look at it that way,” Roy says brightly, “I’ve already fallen for you, so there’s nothing to be concerned about.” He curls his fingers now, the better to brush his knuckles down along the curve of Ed’s jaw, and then to sweep his hair back.
Ed’s eyes slide shut, and he clenches his jaw, and he presses his lips together tightly.
“Mustang,” he says, voice low but steady, belied by the pulse fluttering in his throat, “you hit your head. Worse than I th-”
Roy starts to sit up to try to kiss him, but Ed’s automail hand shoves him back down on the carpet before he’s made two inches of headway.
“Mustang,” he says again, and his voice shakes this time; there’s a ring of a warning in it. “You are fucking concussed. Shut your goddamn mouth.”
To be fair, the way the grin stretches his face does sort of make his head throb. “I thought you wanted me to talk.”
“Changed my mind,” Ed says. He has both hands on Roy’s chest now; he is straddling Roy’s hips with both hands spread on him, and who could blame a red-blooded man for wanting to read this scene a little differently…? “Shut up and die. See if I care.”
“You would, though,” Roy says. He reaches up to tug on the braiding of Ed’s half-buttoned uniform. “You do. That’s why you’re here.”
Ed scowls at him. “Yeah, well,” he says. “You’re not as shitty as most of the others.”
Roy does his best to look offended. “‘Most’?”
Ed wrinkles his nose, which is devastatingly adorable. “You heard me.” He curls his automail hand into a fist and thumps it gently against Roy’s chest. “Look, you made me a promise, and I made you one. That’s how it works. Now lie still and don’t fuck up your nervous system.”
“Ironic,” Roy says drily as Ed’s glorious weight disappears from atop him, and Ed’s glorious ass proceeds off into one of the shadowed corners he can’t crane his neck to see. “You give such tall orders.”
The sound that emanates from Ed is either a stifled laugh or him choking on his own spit, and either way Roy is absolutely delighted.
“You-” Ed says.
“Me,” Roy says. “Unavoidably.”
“Fucker,” Ed says.
“Also unavoidable,” Roy says.
There’s some banging around. Missions with Ed usually tend to involve quite a lot of banging, and not the kind Roy likes.
“This is a library,” Ed says. “Or a study… -thing.”
“Is it,” Roy says.
“Yeah,” Ed says. “Might be a phone in here.”
“Might there,” Roy says.
Ed snorts. “You are real fuckin’ helpful when you put your mind to it.”
Roy tries to swallow the grin so it won’t be audible. “Am I.”
“You’re also fucking concussed,” Ed says. There’s some slightly more subdued banging, then some shuffling, then a rippling sound like fabric falling, and then a sneeze.
“Bless you,” Roy says.
“Har har,” Ed says. “Guess what?”
“The assassination rate for Führers of Amestris is just over seventy percent,” Roy says, “and all of them died in office?”
“Uh…” Ed says.
“Lieutenant Falman told me,” Roy says. “Which means it must be true.”
“Well,” Ed says uncertainly, “on the… other hand, there’s a fucking phone right here, and it’s even hooked up, since apparently even creepy, questionable recluse alchemists need to make a call every now and again.”
“How terrifically convenient,” Roy says.
There’s a clacking sound.
“…or not,” Ed says. “No fucking dial tone; are you serious?”
“Color me surprised,” Roy says.
“Yeah,” Ed says. There’s a clatter-presumably the telephone falling victim to Ed’s misdirected anger-and then some stomping around. “You’re so damn optimistic all the time. No wonder we trust you with the future of this fucking place.”
“Who, precisely,” Roy says, “does that reflect on?”
“Shut up,” Ed says. There’s some more kicking-at-carpet noises, and perhaps some books being removed from shelves and replaced. “You’re-concussed.”
“So you have reiterated on several occasions,” Roy says.
“So-” Ed clears his throat; another book slots back into its place a little too hard. “You’re just-talking out of your ass.”
“I am talking out of my mouth,” Roy says, “last time I checked, but if you’d like me to talk about asses, there are several things I’d love to say about yours.”
“Mustang,” Ed says, storming towards him, and oh, what a beautiful pillar of cloud and thunder to see on the horizon- “You have suffered fucking head trauma, and you’re not rational, and-”
Roy holds both hands out to him. “I never claimed to be rational. I am being honest.”
“Fuck you,” Ed says, folding his arms across his chest, eyes aflame, and only the prospect of how thoroughly that man would thrash him if he stood keeps Roy from getting up and going to him, touching him, explaining-swearing up and down, if that was what it took-
Instead, he clasps his hands in front of him; he’ll beg if he has to; he’s always been a d-
“Oh, holy fucking hell, you’re right,” Ed says. “Duh. Fire me when we get back.”
Roy blinks.
Ed claps his hands and drops down to slap them against the floor.
Between the improvised carpet-stretcher (which, it should be noted, is a terribly undignified mode of transport for a head of state) and the various rising platforms that extract them from the wreckage of the basement for Ed to go find a working telephone, it’s only a matter of about an hour before Riza’s pulling up to the curb. Roy winces at the squeal of the brakes, and Ed-sprawled on the overgrown lawn beside him-pats his shoulder idly.
“What happened?” Riza asks. Charitably, she does not also ask, Now will you admit that it is not an exaggeration to say I can’t leave you alone for five minutes?
“Fell through the floor,” Ed says. He jerks a thumb at Roy’s head. “Concussion.” Riza doesn’t ask him how he knows; Ed’s something of an expert. “He started talking crazy.”
“How could you tell?” Riza asks.
Roy gives her a long, slow-burn glare.
Not that she’ll find it anything other than amusing, but it’s the principle of the thing.
Ed huffs half a laugh and draws his left knee up to his chest as Riza crouches next to Roy, with a faint trace of a smile to indicate that she’s truthfully relieved that he’s all right.
“He kept babbling on about how he’s in love with me and shit,” Ed says.
Roy is awake enough-properly awake enough-now to realize that he should probably feel embarrassed about all this, but frankly it’s a weight off of his shoulders. He’s given the words their freedom with a confession that will never be believed. Isn’t that the best of both worlds?
Except that Riza goes stock-still, and her expression of startled dismay makes it painfully obvious that she knows it’s true.
“Wait,” Ed says in mounting horror. “Wait, shit, are you-wait, are you serious?”
“Ah,” Riza says, “I think we should be going. Führer Mustang needs immediate medical atten-”
Ed’s on his feet with both arms waving. “All that shit you said about my ass?”
Riza gives Roy a look-a look, no less, that she’s been perfecting since she was ten, which says Really? so profoundly loudly that he can hear it echoing inside his head.
“What?” Roy says. “I didn’t even start on his hair.”
…maybe he hasn’t recovered quite as much as he thought.
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Ed
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,700
Warnings: language (very not PG :'D); post-some-canon AU; crap-ass barely-edited speedfic ahoy!
Prompt: people saying things and thinking they're normal because they're concussed and HILARITY ENSUES
Summary: Roy gets a head wound; Ed gets a headache.
Author's Note: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HACHA!!!!! ♥♥♥ You rock my socks, friend. ;___; Hope you had a good one! Special thanks to my bb Mthaytr for rescuing this silly thing. XDDDD
HEAD OVER HEELS
Roy’s first thought is That could have gone better.
His second is Either someone is patting my cheek, or an overlarge rat has taken a grievous disliking to my face and is making a serious effort at tail-whipping it into a more palatable shape.
His third is Damn, that hurts.
His fourth, as he opens his eyes and automatically tries to brace himself to sit, is Where the hell am I?
On the upside, the chilly batting at his face stops immediately; on the downside, it gives way to a familiar voice yelping “No, you stupid shit!” so loudly that his head rings, followed by a too-firm hand planting itself in the center of his chest to pin him to the…
Floor? Ground?
His final question is still, it seems, quite relevant. He lifts his eyelids again, slower this time, and tries to blink away the white and yellow sparks.
Ed’s face swims into focus. Dim light paints hazy stripes across it; dust motes dance around the frizzy flyaways that have made their escape from the braid. The bright gold eyes look darker here, but there’s a flicker in them; Ed’s brows have cinched in so tight his whole forehead furrows in a way that’s almost comic. His jaw is set tight, cords standing out in his neck; there’s a thin red line bleeding sluggishly just below his right cheekbone. Roy can feel the tips of the automail fingers digging in just above his collarbones; they’ve curled slightly with Ed’s determination to hold him down.
Roy lifts his own hand towards the cut, watching with a detached sort of curiosity as his fingers waver through the air like they’re supremely drunk. The words spill out anyway, unaffected by his abject failure at hand-eye coordination: “Are you all r-”
Ed’s other hand seizes his wrist with the speed and dexterity of a striking cobra and slams it down onto the carpet, where he can faintly feel layers of grit digging into the meat of his palm. It occurs to him-distantly; all of this seems to be happening to someone else, in another room; how delightfully voyeuristic-that he hasn’t the slightest idea what happened to his glove.
“Stop moving,” Ed says. “I’m fucking fine. You, on the other hand, managed to get yourself a fucking head wound. You’d think somebody fucking renowned for their fucking reflexes-”
The flicker in his eyes and the tightness in the muscles of his face-he’s worried. Ed is scared. Perhaps that should prompt Roy to heretofore uncharted heights of terror, but at the moment he just feels… touched.
“-would be marginally less fucking pathetic when it comes to falling through floors and shit and landing on their feet-” Ed’s voice is rising, and Roy’s head throbs a little, but it’s almost a pleasant sort of pain. “-but no, like the fucking drama queen you are, you had to go and knock your own dumb ass out, and I can’t even tell if your pupils are the same size ’cause your stupid fucking eyes are so damn dark, so you’re probably gonna die, and everybody’ll think it was my fault-”
“No one would think that,” Roy says.
“Easy for you to say,” Ed says. “You’ll be dead.”
“I sincerely hope not,” Roy says. Very strange-the bulk of his thoughts have swarmed into a churning muddle, but little slivers of speech keep streaming out of the maelstrom and slipping past his lips. His tongue feels thick and clumsy, an insufficient implement for striving to corral the syllables, but then these clever little sentences… slide past it. “There’s a great deal yet that I’d like to do and make up for.”
“That’s such a fucking politician answer,” Ed says, hanging his head, shaking it; the faint light positively glitters on the gold, and oh… “If you’re stubborn enough to survive this, I’m gonna tell General Hawkeye to cut down on your public appearances until you start talking like a normal person again.”
“I don’t know that I’ve ever talked like a ‘normal person’,” Roy says.
“You haven’t,” Ed says, glaring through his bangs. His hands are still fixed on Roy’s chest and Roy’s right wrist; very belatedly, Roy realizes Ed is, in fact, sitting on him, knees to either side of his hips. A rather unhelpful region of his brain surfaces long enough to remind him that he’s had this dream before. “So I guess you’re past help. Dumbass.”
“That’s Führer Dumbass to you,” Roy says.
Ed’s shoulders sag visibly, and he shakes his head again, this time with a croaky hint of a laugh. “At least you remember the important shit. I gotta…” The flesh hand lifts from Roy’s wrist; Ed sits back and runs it through his hair, smearing grime across his forehead; he grimaces, but not at the filth; he probably hasn’t even noticed that. “I gotta keep you talking. Right? You can’t go to sleep. Gotta keep your systems going. Hang on, I’m gonna-” He leans down again; his hand grazes Roy’s jaw on its passage towards the floor; fingertips start probing gently at the back of Roy’s neck. “Knowing my luck, you’d fuck up your fucking spine and not even know. I-okay, so-keep talking. Give me the spiel. Since you’re definitely going to live to be a bastard another day, what are these fucking things you wanna do?”
Ed’s fingertips feel wonderful against the endlessly tense muscles of his neck; relief trembles upwards along the back of his skull.
“Fall in love with you,” he says, “for one. I simply haven’t had the time.”
Ed goes very still.
Something he said?
Clearly the solution is to say more.
“I’d also like to see the ocean,” he says. “I hear the Cretan coastline is vastly superior in just about every possible way. But first I’d like to start watching you out of the corner of my eye every time you’re in the room, until you nearly notice, and Riza has to catch my elbow and haul me aside and flay me with her eyes and tell me I’m being foolish and self-destructive, and don’t I remember what happened last time? And then I’ll tell her it’s harmless, and it’s just that you’ve come into your own so magnificently; it’s just that when the light hits you, you’re radiant; it’s just that you care so unconditionally, and you give of yourself with such fervent generosity; it’s just that it would be such an enormous honor to be worthy of your affection, even for a moment, that I can’t help but dream. And I’ll tell her I can’t hurt you with a dream, and I wouldn’t dare to try, and it’s all right, because the poison tastes like liqueur at the start, and I know when to stop; and I won’t have too much this time, I swear…”
Ed’s mouth is open just slightly. His chest rises, falls, and rises; every out-breath makes the trailing half-curtain of his bangs flutter. His eyes are enormous; whole worlds, whole galaxies, could turn in their depths and still have space to bloom among the flecks of olive and the flakes of gold.
He looks… what? Distressed?
That’s not right. Roy would hate for him to go around this… whatever this room is; some sort of basement level library with dust-clogged carpeting and far too much ambient mustiness-Roy would hate for him to have to go around it feeling distressed. He’d better say something comforting. He’d better…
Lift his hand faster this time, and run the pad of his thumb very gently just under the curve of the cut on Ed’s cheek.
Ed flinches at the sudden motion, but he doesn’t move except to swallow-hard, by the looks of it, by the laboring of his beautiful throat.
“Don’t worry,” Roy says. “It doesn’t even take all that-mostly it seems to happen without anyone being conscious of it at all; mostly it seems like I woke up one morning and realized that you’re stunning and staggeringly compassionate, and everything you say makes a tremendous amount of sense. That threw me for something of a loop, you understand. I doubt you remember-I kept staring at you, and you asked if you had snot on your face, and I said I’d just been looking into thin air, actually, because I wasn’t feeling well, so you came over to see if I had snot on my face and might be contagious, and I retreated so fast I fell over a chair.”
Ed swallows again. And again. His eyes dart towards Roy’s fingertips against his face.
“I remember,” he says. “Breda had a score-card. You got a nine.”
“If you look at it that way,” Roy says brightly, “I’ve already fallen for you, so there’s nothing to be concerned about.” He curls his fingers now, the better to brush his knuckles down along the curve of Ed’s jaw, and then to sweep his hair back.
Ed’s eyes slide shut, and he clenches his jaw, and he presses his lips together tightly.
“Mustang,” he says, voice low but steady, belied by the pulse fluttering in his throat, “you hit your head. Worse than I th-”
Roy starts to sit up to try to kiss him, but Ed’s automail hand shoves him back down on the carpet before he’s made two inches of headway.
“Mustang,” he says again, and his voice shakes this time; there’s a ring of a warning in it. “You are fucking concussed. Shut your goddamn mouth.”
To be fair, the way the grin stretches his face does sort of make his head throb. “I thought you wanted me to talk.”
“Changed my mind,” Ed says. He has both hands on Roy’s chest now; he is straddling Roy’s hips with both hands spread on him, and who could blame a red-blooded man for wanting to read this scene a little differently…? “Shut up and die. See if I care.”
“You would, though,” Roy says. He reaches up to tug on the braiding of Ed’s half-buttoned uniform. “You do. That’s why you’re here.”
Ed scowls at him. “Yeah, well,” he says. “You’re not as shitty as most of the others.”
Roy does his best to look offended. “‘Most’?”
Ed wrinkles his nose, which is devastatingly adorable. “You heard me.” He curls his automail hand into a fist and thumps it gently against Roy’s chest. “Look, you made me a promise, and I made you one. That’s how it works. Now lie still and don’t fuck up your nervous system.”
“Ironic,” Roy says drily as Ed’s glorious weight disappears from atop him, and Ed’s glorious ass proceeds off into one of the shadowed corners he can’t crane his neck to see. “You give such tall orders.”
The sound that emanates from Ed is either a stifled laugh or him choking on his own spit, and either way Roy is absolutely delighted.
“You-” Ed says.
“Me,” Roy says. “Unavoidably.”
“Fucker,” Ed says.
“Also unavoidable,” Roy says.
There’s some banging around. Missions with Ed usually tend to involve quite a lot of banging, and not the kind Roy likes.
“This is a library,” Ed says. “Or a study… -thing.”
“Is it,” Roy says.
“Yeah,” Ed says. “Might be a phone in here.”
“Might there,” Roy says.
Ed snorts. “You are real fuckin’ helpful when you put your mind to it.”
Roy tries to swallow the grin so it won’t be audible. “Am I.”
“You’re also fucking concussed,” Ed says. There’s some slightly more subdued banging, then some shuffling, then a rippling sound like fabric falling, and then a sneeze.
“Bless you,” Roy says.
“Har har,” Ed says. “Guess what?”
“The assassination rate for Führers of Amestris is just over seventy percent,” Roy says, “and all of them died in office?”
“Uh…” Ed says.
“Lieutenant Falman told me,” Roy says. “Which means it must be true.”
“Well,” Ed says uncertainly, “on the… other hand, there’s a fucking phone right here, and it’s even hooked up, since apparently even creepy, questionable recluse alchemists need to make a call every now and again.”
“How terrifically convenient,” Roy says.
There’s a clacking sound.
“…or not,” Ed says. “No fucking dial tone; are you serious?”
“Color me surprised,” Roy says.
“Yeah,” Ed says. There’s a clatter-presumably the telephone falling victim to Ed’s misdirected anger-and then some stomping around. “You’re so damn optimistic all the time. No wonder we trust you with the future of this fucking place.”
“Who, precisely,” Roy says, “does that reflect on?”
“Shut up,” Ed says. There’s some more kicking-at-carpet noises, and perhaps some books being removed from shelves and replaced. “You’re-concussed.”
“So you have reiterated on several occasions,” Roy says.
“So-” Ed clears his throat; another book slots back into its place a little too hard. “You’re just-talking out of your ass.”
“I am talking out of my mouth,” Roy says, “last time I checked, but if you’d like me to talk about asses, there are several things I’d love to say about yours.”
“Mustang,” Ed says, storming towards him, and oh, what a beautiful pillar of cloud and thunder to see on the horizon- “You have suffered fucking head trauma, and you’re not rational, and-”
Roy holds both hands out to him. “I never claimed to be rational. I am being honest.”
“Fuck you,” Ed says, folding his arms across his chest, eyes aflame, and only the prospect of how thoroughly that man would thrash him if he stood keeps Roy from getting up and going to him, touching him, explaining-swearing up and down, if that was what it took-
Instead, he clasps his hands in front of him; he’ll beg if he has to; he’s always been a d-
“Oh, holy fucking hell, you’re right,” Ed says. “Duh. Fire me when we get back.”
Roy blinks.
Ed claps his hands and drops down to slap them against the floor.
Between the improvised carpet-stretcher (which, it should be noted, is a terribly undignified mode of transport for a head of state) and the various rising platforms that extract them from the wreckage of the basement for Ed to go find a working telephone, it’s only a matter of about an hour before Riza’s pulling up to the curb. Roy winces at the squeal of the brakes, and Ed-sprawled on the overgrown lawn beside him-pats his shoulder idly.
“What happened?” Riza asks. Charitably, she does not also ask, Now will you admit that it is not an exaggeration to say I can’t leave you alone for five minutes?
“Fell through the floor,” Ed says. He jerks a thumb at Roy’s head. “Concussion.” Riza doesn’t ask him how he knows; Ed’s something of an expert. “He started talking crazy.”
“How could you tell?” Riza asks.
Roy gives her a long, slow-burn glare.
Not that she’ll find it anything other than amusing, but it’s the principle of the thing.
Ed huffs half a laugh and draws his left knee up to his chest as Riza crouches next to Roy, with a faint trace of a smile to indicate that she’s truthfully relieved that he’s all right.
“He kept babbling on about how he’s in love with me and shit,” Ed says.
Roy is awake enough-properly awake enough-now to realize that he should probably feel embarrassed about all this, but frankly it’s a weight off of his shoulders. He’s given the words their freedom with a confession that will never be believed. Isn’t that the best of both worlds?
Except that Riza goes stock-still, and her expression of startled dismay makes it painfully obvious that she knows it’s true.
“Wait,” Ed says in mounting horror. “Wait, shit, are you-wait, are you serious?”
“Ah,” Riza says, “I think we should be going. Führer Mustang needs immediate medical atten-”
Ed’s on his feet with both arms waving. “All that shit you said about my ass?”
Riza gives Roy a look-a look, no less, that she’s been perfecting since she was ten, which says Really? so profoundly loudly that he can hear it echoing inside his head.
“What?” Roy says. “I didn’t even start on his hair.”
…maybe he hasn’t recovered quite as much as he thought.