FMA -- Choose Your Own Rainbow
Title: Choose Your Own Rainbow
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: pre-Roy/Ed
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 15,600
Warnings: language; absurdity; I did, like, two Google searches on some of this stuff and then left it at that because Roy is kind of a poser anyway?; this needs a lot more editing but ain't nobody got time for that; modern AU
Summary: Edward Elric has the most singular talent of anyone alive for taking Roy's zen, thrashing it thoroughly, and then hurling it into a Dumpster. …metaphysically speaking, anyway.
Author's Note: A now extremely late birthday present for Obersten!!!!! ♥ Based on his ridiculously A+ Downward Dogs AU - the premise is founded in some intel I acquired from Secret Insider Sources, and then I made up everything else. :'D tl;dr if you like a detail/aspect of this, it's probably Berg's; if you're like "wtf is this shit," it's probably one of my additions. X'D (Or it's one of the things I half-assedly pretended to research! I am a pro at this writing shit.)
CHOOSE YOUR OWN RAINBOW
Today Roy is going to tell Ed how stupid it is to hate on chakra beads. The trick to arguing with Ed-
Well, the trick to arguing with Ed is that if you want to win, you shouldn’t even start, because the combination of ever-increasing volume and ferociously single-minded logic will eventually steamroll even the most valid of points.
But in the event that it’s a battle worth waging all the same, the trick is to organize your evidence in order, from least to most convincing, and execute the outline calmly and precisely. It also helps to prepare counterarguments to the usual objections, which tend to go along the lines of “That is the dictionary definition of mumbo-fucking-jumbo” or “A five-year-old would call bullshit on you right now, Mustang.” The most important thing is staying as unflappable as possible while he ramps up towards the peak of his righteous hard-science-rage, because if you can get him tongue-tied, it basically counts as a draw.
It’s bizarre, too, to be looking forward to it-to Ed. Ah, that is-Ed’s appointment. To all of the snark and frustration and the cynical dismissals and the eye-rolling and the muttering and the rare but delightful occasions when he’ll actually hiss through his teeth like an aggravated cat.
It’s less bizarre to be looking forward to the way the stark lines of tension ease from his neck and his shoulders and his jaw-the way the harshness etched at the corners of his eyes smoothes out just slightly; the way his whole face softens when he relaxes, and he starts to talk about Al, or therapy dogs, or something quantum-physicky that occurred to him the other day. It’s less bizarre to be looking forward to the way Roy’s whole chest fills and lights like a hurricane of fireworks when the gentle pressure of his hands can bring comfort, and the comfort turns to safety, and the safety leads to openness, and the openness makes Ed seem so alive.
In any case-the chakra. It’s really no more mystical than all of this quantum business; it’s just a different way of interpreting the invisible weave of the fabric of the universe. Plus it lets you choose your own rainbow-which he should really write down so he can use it as the title of his autobiography one of these days.
Also, if they’re such “mystical pseudo-science made-up crap,” why does he keep ending up with his rose quartz heart chakra rolling between his fingertips every time he thinks of Ed?
…Ed would probably say “It’s a psychosomatic self-fulfilling prophecy, you hippie hack,” but Roy is going to pretend he didn’t just hear that, loud and very well-enunciated, in his own darned head.
It’s good. It’s all good. The universe is charitable when you look at it the right way around; when you give positive energy, it circles back, even if it doesn’t take a form that you recognize, let alone expect. Everything is good; everything is in balance, and…
And Roy catches sight of the minimalist clock face and realizes with a bit of a jolt that Ed is late.
Ed’s never late.
Ed’s like clockwork: tightly-wound, for one thing; and for another, he turns up on the dot, out of the ether, without fail, at the precise time he’s promised. He holds to the clock hands like a code of honor, and Roy keeps trying to explain to him that sometimes when the world is flowing, you have to move with it instead of marching to the beat of the secondhand; that you can’t let it tally out the individual moments of something as nebulous and beautiful as a human life…
But the point is that if Ed is late-
Something’s wrong.
It could be traffic, theoretically. It could be a lot of things. But something in Roy’s guts, something in his bones, something in the beat of his blood and the swell of his lungs knows that it’s something-
Bad.
He slings himself up out of the extraordinarily ergonomic and deliciously comfortable hammock-chair (patent pending) which is also remarkably good to include in fantasies about patient-related sexcapades, and crosses to the soothingly-painted pastel front of his filing cabinet. He pulls Ed’s manila folder-blood-red. Some of them give him trouble, but he knew Ed’s color in an instant: vibrant and angry and powerful, searingly hot and maybe just a little bit scared of its own potential.
His phone trills at him as he taps out of his antioxidant tracker and into the maps app. It occurs to him that he could just call, instead of showing up on Ed’s doorstep unannounced and probably unwanted.
But he trusts his instincts-it’s one of the hardest and the most valuable lessons he’s ever ground into his own brain over the years. He trusts the feeling, fluttering too-bright and frantic in the pit of his stomach. He trusts that the universe speaks in ways that are unquantifiable; in ways that can’t be transcribed, and that sometimes you have to believe in your own ability to listen.
He knows that Ed didn’t forget about the appointment and go to the grocery store to glare at the almonds and mutter unflattering things about Roy under his breath. He knows that Ed didn’t sleep through his alarm. He knows that it is not a coincidence; it is not harmless; it is not all right. He knows, which is why he checks Blanche’s water dish, strokes her head at her uncertain whuff, locks up his office, grips his car keys in his right hand, and jogs down the stairs and out to the parking lot.
His Prius-which is called Fido-greets him with the usual soft, reluctant sort of whine as he pushes the button to start the engine.
“Me, too,” he says, fitting his phone into its little clasped mount above the radio panel.
As he draws out onto the street, he turns the music on-and then immediately off again. Instead of acting as a pleasant distraction, it clashes so loudly with his thoughts that the cacophony is jarring; it’s like reaching for a butterfly and touching a wasp, and accepting the caprices of the world is one thing, but stung fingertips are another; and Ed’s home is much too far and all too close, and the slowly-building ache of the fear in Roy’s chest is hollowing him out with every heartbeat.
It’s all right. It’s all right. Whatever happens, whatever has happened, they will cope; they will deal; they will adapt themselves to the contours of reality and chart out their course based on the terrain that lies before them.
It’ll be fine. It is fine; he’s just on his way to confirm that.
He keeps hitting red lights-over and over and fucking over; the green flickers out right when he enters snap-decision range, and you can’t gun it in a hybrid, and the cops in this city are so overzealous he’d be mad to try-
Ed could be-
No.
Ed could be a lot of things, but speculating about the worst-case scenarios won’t prepare Roy for contingencies; it’ll only make him miserable until he finds out. It’s not fair to himself, and it’s not fair to Ed-if he gets himself worked up over things that haven’t even happened, he runs the risk of taking out the leftover emotional energy on its unwitting cause, and that’s one of ten-thousand ways to hurt people over a problem that doesn’t even exist.
Roy would kill for a real car right now.
Okay-no. But he’d-maim someone.
Well-
He’d-
Walk on coals. That he would definitely do. Coals which were not endangering anyone else, which would be indescribably painful to him and him alone once he started strolling.
Sacrifice the self-the ego. Never anyone else. Never another being; never another life. Conceptualizing one’s own is difficult enough; the value of another is past comprehension, and it should never be used as a bargaining chip. Even in a theoretical game where he could trade an unthinkable action for an impossible item-even then, it’s arsenic dripping in down the walls of his skull, and he can’t let it fester there, or what might start growing next?
He’s half a mile from the cul-de-sac-just a little loop on the pixel-map on a tiny screen, but so damn big in his head, in his thundering heart; just one more stoplight, which-
Goes yellow-then-red the instant he lays eyes on it.
He slams his hand on the wheel and catches the “Motherfucker!” right as it bounces against the backs of his teeth; he swallows it down-every spiked leg of every letter-and drags in a deep breath.
It’s fine. It’s going to be fine. Fucking namaste. Ed’s going to be all right; it’s probably nothing; it’s probably…
The world will go on no matter what it is.
Funny, how that’s comforting applied to his own life, and terrifying when it comes to Ed’s.
But it’s all part of the same circle, isn’t it? Sacrifice the self. Ed is capable of, is destined for, things he himself can’t even begin to imagine, things Roy can sense more than he sees-the first glow of light on the horizon, fighting the darkness to be free. Ed is beautiful in ways that mean so much more than just the mind-numbingly delicious shape of his perfect, perfect ass. Underneath the endless, sedimented layers of agony compressing every part of him, there is a soul so absolutely golden that it’s blinding, and all Roy wants to do is show him that it’s there.
Ed believes he’s broken. Believing’s half the battle, and Roy is not about to let him lose.
If he’s even-
The light changes, and Roy puts the pedal to the floor; Fido jerks forward, making a high noise of electronic protest, but Roy’s knuckles bleach where his hands clench the wheel-
Because Ed is not afraid of anything-not of pain, not of disapproval, not of consequence. He’s not afraid of living, or of dying, or of anything between.
But he’s tired.
And weariness-bone-deep, age-old, through-the-heart exhaustion-is so much harder to fight.
Roy whips the car around the turn so fast he almost clips the minivan that’s leaving; the whole circle is quaint little townhouse duplexes, and Ed’s address said 4A-
He parks Fido on the curb, practically strangles himself with his own seatbelt, tumbles out of the car, and starts up the walk at a run, with the key fob beeping at him insistently to tell him that he hasn’t stopped the car-
One foot on the doorstep, and his mind skids to a halt, replaying snatched-up fragments of the little conversations-Ed ranting about Al’s unhealthy obsession with morning classes; the quaver of guilt in Ed’s voice even questioning who should take precedence with the schedule of their air filters, between the boy who’s allergic to everything under the sun and the one who hears machine-gun fire in every rattle of the fans; the eye-scrubbing annoyance at the fact that boot camp ruined him for staying in bed past sunrise, regardless of the quality of his sleep the night before; the slow, slow, halting question, hesitant because he knew the answer-Does everybody have to go around three times and double-check the locks on all the windows before they can convince themselves to leave?
Nothing will be open. Nothing will be unattended and unlocked. This was a fool’s errand; this is a dead end-
No. He has to remember. He has to remember to believe that the world can be kind when you ask kindly; that the energy you put into the lives of those around you feeds back into your own. Good things happen-they don’t have to be bought and paid for; they aren’t necessarily earned; but they happen. When you open your eyes, your heart, your lungs, your veins; when you tap into the ever-shifting currents of the world; when you participate in your own life without trying to control the movement of the electricity around you-
He has to remember to let go. He has to remember to unclasp his clenched hands and let things be-to reach out and take them, yes, but to take them as they are. To take them mindfully and gratefully and not too tightly, and to release them when they start to slip.
He draws in a deep breath, squares his shoulders, and sets his hand on the doorknob.
He twists.
It turns.
The door opens into a narrow entryway with framed pictures on the walls; a fraction of his heart yearns recklessly to see them, but the rest of him’s already running.
“Ed?” he calls. “Ed-”
No answer but the hum of the infamous filters; no What the fuck are you doing here; no I’m all right, I’m all right; no indignant howl from the shower; no…
Anything.
Despite his size-or perhaps, Roy often thinks, because of it-Ed’s always easy to find. For all that he snarls and bristles like a threatened alley cat at every opportunity, his physical presence is so profoundly warm that he practically radiates light-gold light, bright gold light; and sometimes, Roy thinks, blue. Ed’s got the closest thing most people will see to an aura this side of a migraine-in addition to which, he takes up space. He makes himself known. There are times he doesn’t want to; there are times he collapses his shoulders and condenses himself and starts to disappear, but mostly… It’s not even that he makes himself bigger so much as that he makes the most of what he is-broad shoulders, fine ass, gravity-scorning hair and gleaming metal wound up with the gold. He’s hard to miss.
Well-he’s easy to miss, late nights and sleepless mornings; but he’s nearly impossible not to find. You can feel him from the other side of the room.
Which is why it’s so damn disconcerting that Roy can’t sense a thing right now.
“Ed,” he says again-through the little living room piled with books on books and stacks of Nature magazines; through the cozy kitchen, patterned mugs hung on tiny hooks, kitten-face teapot on the countertop, word magnets and square ones with element names in bright colors scattered on the refrigerator door-
A sharp turn into another dim, semi-claustrophobic hallway (is it the feng shui or the fear that’s making it so small?), and then two doors-one left open, and a glimpse of off-white bedspread with silhouettes of little cats; one-
Shut.
He knocks. He knocks harder.
“Ed,” he says.
He has to remember; he has to remember-
He tries the handle.
The door opens, but none of the details of the room register, because Ed is curled up on the carpet with both arms wrapped tight around his head, metal fingers buried in his hair.
He’s breathing.
Barely-high-fast-quick and ragged, little hitches that can’t be getting any useful amount of oxygen into his system-but it counts.
And Roy knows-
That this is the part he hides from. This is the part he crams into the corners; this is what waits in the background, biding its time. This is what lies beneath the gestures-true, important gestures, but they’re shadow puppets all the same. This is what no zenith of zen acceptance, however genuine, can change.
Good things happen. They happen more often when you hold yourself open to embrace them; when you anticipate without expecting; when you carry the positivity forward in everything you do.
Good things happen.
Shitty things happen, too.
And sometimes shitty things happen to the people who have already suffered so much for so long that they don’t believe in the existence of the good things anymore.
Sometimes shitty things happen to people like Ed, who are so used to being beat down and kicked while they’re cringing that they’ve built up walls of retaliatory anger-of preemptive resentment-and the cynicism is like cyanide working through them slowly; and they’re so used to disappointment that it doesn’t even sting them anymore; and they can’t taste the poison that they’re breathing in.
Sometimes shitty things happen to people like Ed, and they keep happening, and it’s hardly his fault if the defensive shell has been so necessary his whole life that he can’t even understand that there are good things it’s keeping out, too.
Ed has spent his whole life protecting himself from a world that has always done its damnedest to hurt him.
This-something as horrifying as finding him lying on the floor writhing in pain-this is just another droplet in the ocean as far as Ed’s concerned.
And sometimes even good swimmers drown.
“Ed,” Roy says, in his softest voice, his calmest voice-the gentlest, deepest, closest-to-the-soul voice he hears in his head when he meditates. He crouches down and lays his hand as lightly as he can on Ed’s shoulder. “It’s R-”
“Fuck you,” Ed chokes out, and the words all shudder, the muscle contracts perceptibly under Roy’s fingertips. “Ahh-fuck-f-fucking-” He curls up tighter, tighter, and the faint sound of agony that slips out of him cuts into the center of Roy’s chest like a carving knife. “It f-fucking-”
“I know,” Roy says.
“You don’t,” Ed grinds out; he shakes and shakes and shakes, and his right hand spasms, and the fingers hook tighter into his hair. “Don’t-f-fucking-touch me-” He convulses, and he takes a good-sized chunk of Roy’s heart into the depths of hell right with him. “God-”
Is it better to keep the pads of his fingertips pressed to Ed’s bicep to reinforce that he’s not alone, or is the addition of another sensation only going to make this worse?
Roy takes a deep breath. “What hu-”
“Fucking everything!”
His instinct is to grip Ed’s shoulder and try to ground him, but this is-oh, hell. This teeters on the border of hysteria. This is a kind and caliber of pain that would crack the mind of a lesser human being; Roy’s watched Ed endure torments to his nerves the likes of which would reduce most people to-well, this-and trudge straight through them with a grimace and a shrug.
Roy licks his lips; scans Ed’s spine and his shoulder-blades; nothing’s obviously misaligned, but- “How often-”
“Just leave!” The gasping sharpens, harsher by the second, into sobs. “Fucking-go, what are you-fuck-”
He will not panic. He won’t; Ed needs him to be stable now, whether either of them likes it or not.
“Where’s your phone?” he asks, glancing up for it-surely it ought to rest on the nightstand? But the table’s bare except for a small black digital clock and a reading lamp. “Where…” His is still in the car. Or it will be, unless some hooligans wandering the neighborhood noticed his unlocked doors and purring engine and-
No. He has to trust in people, in the concept of people-now and always.
“I’ll be right back,” he says.
Of course there’s no landline; of course he has to run outside, down the little pathway, back to Fido; of course he slips climbing into the car and bangs his shin on the edge of the door-
Of fucking course-
He beeps the locks this time; his hands are shaking so hard he can’t put his fucking passcode in on the screen the first time, or the second, or-
Stop. Breathe. Zen. Acceptance. Peace with the universe. Zen, zen, zen.
He doesn’t even need the stupid passcode; there’s that emergency button.
He’s fine. He’s fine; everything’s fine; the line is ringing; his chakras are aligned, and his veins are leylines laid back when the world was new; he is a figment of evolution’s imagination, and his purpose is to move, to carry on, to build, to be; that’s all that’s asked of him, and all he wants. He’s fine. It’s going to be okay.
“911 dispatch,” a woman’s voice says. “What’s your emergency?”
“Fuck,” Roy hears himself say.
Oops.
“Sorry,” he says. “Ah-I need-I need an ambulance; I’m at-Charland Circle, number 4, apartment A-”
“Charland, 4A,” she says, and she is much too calm about all of this, which he sort of despises and admires at once. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“It’s-” Deep breaths; deep damn breaths; he needs… not to trip over the threshold on his way back into the house; is he incapable of running and talking and keeping his damn head all at the same time? “I’m-a chiropractor, my patient-” ShitfuckGod. “I’m sorry-”
“It’s all right, sir,” she says. “Just slow down.”
“Early twenties male,” he says.
“Conscious?”
“Barely.” One of the word magnets says pulchritudinous, and the letters imprint themselves on the surface of his brain. “I think it’s-he has lots of-chronic pain; I think maybe nerve damage; I think-”
“Are you in a safe place, sir?”
“I’m here,” Roy says, which sounds-immensely stupid, come to think of it. “I mean-I’m at the residence. It’s safe.”
Ed hasn’t moved from his spot on the floor, but he’s still shuddering hard enough to set the bedside lamp to trembling.
“Exactly what’s happening, sir?”
“Just-” Roy kneels again, touches Ed’s shoulder; the skin’s on fire. “He’s really-he’s in so much pain-can you send some-”
Ed recoils and then groans. “The fuck are you talking t-” His breath catches, then hisses back out of him, and he half-rolls over, eyes winched open halfway- “No fucking hospital shit-”
“Is this the best callback number for you, sir?” the dispatcher asks.
“Yes,” Roy says.
Ed fumbles, grabs Roy’s wrist-with the metal hand, and his grasp transcends too-tight from urgency and leaps right into agonizing death grip.
“No-” he growls. “-fucking-hospitals.”
“You need something stronger than I can give you,” Roy says. A terrible little light flickers on in his head. “I’ll pay for it if you need me to-the ambulance and whatever the visit ends up costing. Is that the-”
“Sir?”
“Sorry,” he says. Ed’s eyes are slivers of molten brass, so scalding hot, and his grip’s so tight Roy’s fingertips are numb- “Ah-”
It’s the twitch of the corner of Ed’s mouth that gives it away-in that instant, the rage and the pain slip aside for just long enough to unveil a cavernous void of absolute-
Terror.
“Make ’em cancel the fucking ambulance,” he says through clenched teeth, and he squeezes his eyes shut. “No fucking-doctors and needles and-none of that shit-”
“Sir, are you there?”
“Yes,” he says, and his heart beats light and fast in his throat-swift and skipping, frantic, like the dapple of desperate rain, like a wild animal panicked with the impulse to escape. “Do you need anything else?”
“That’s everything,” she says. “We’ll send someone as soon as we can, sir.”
He wants to ask her if that means five minutes or fifteen or thirty-something-wants to ask her if she thinks Ed can survive that long; wants to ask he if she has the slightest damn idea what he should do in the meantime-
“Fuck you, Mustang,” Ed forces out.
“What am I supposed to do?” he asks, and really that’s a question for both Ed and the operator-although he’s only expecting one of the answers to involve anything other than a suggestion about spiked objects and his orifices.
“Keep him calm,” the dispatcher says. “No medication; don’t move him. Keep talking to him.”
At least if Ed tries to murder him, the EMTs will already be on the way.
“Right,” Roy says, and if it sounds weak even to his own ears, it’s hardly his fault at this point, is it? “Do you know about how long it’s going to be?”
“Can’t say, sir. When you hear the sirens, if it’s safe to leave him, you can meet them outside to help direct them in.”
“All right,” he says, and he puts the phone down on the floor without even hanging up.
Is there an app for this? An emergency response app? How to deal with possibly-life-or-death situations for dummies? There must be some kind of a pain manager or a vitals-checker or-
“Fucking hate fucking hospitals,” Ed mumbles, and then he gasps in another breath, sharp-edged and sudden, and tenses anew.
“I know,” Roy says, more because it’s the ingrained language code for I’m trying to be sympathetic, but I have no idea what to say than because he has the slightest concept of what Ed feels. He reaches out to lay his hand on Ed’s arm again. Ed doesn’t shake him off. “Has this happened before?”
Ed musters a dry, croaking fragment of a laugh. It’s a sick sound-a wrong sound; overwhelmingly sardonic and devastatingly matter-of-fact.
Unfortunately, it answers the question.
“How often?” Roy tries next. “How does it start?”
He doesn’t-
Want to hear the response to that one.
He doesn’t want to hear it, because he doesn’t want confirmation of what a part of him already knows.
It’s his fault.
It’s not his doing-not at a basic level; Ed’s body was damaged past description long before it ever landed under Roy’s hands-but he made it worse. He set out cloaked as some kind of savior, but when the fabric falls away-
He’s a charlatan. He’s a fucking fake. He paints himself like a beacon of knowledge, of understanding, of power, of aid-
And this is what he does. This is what his hands make; this is what he wreaks. After everything he’s had-all of the opportunities, all the magnificent good luck, everything he’s been given-this is what he gives back.
He touches someone like Ed-someone riven through with pain of every possible type; someone who’s never felt safe, or whole, or happy-
And he makes it worse.
“Since f-fucking-” The metal hand clenches tighter in Ed’s hair and tugs hard. Roy can’t fight the instinct to grab it and start prying the fingers open, working them carefully loose. “-quit-fucking-” Ed drags in a breath. “Since-fucking d-deployment. F-fucked up-” He gasps; Roy grips his wrist tighter, and the metal fingers tremble like narrow branches in a storm. “Fucked up-all kinds of shit over there; started to-I mean, it wasn’t great to st-start with, ’cause of-” His body shudders in a way that might be directed towards the automail. “-and-it all just-went to fuckin’ hell. Broke a lot of-bones, whatever shit. Everything. ’F I get out of bed wrong, it just-quits. Fucking t-tweak one thing, and the whole fucking house of c-cards comes down.”
Roy wants to-
Hug him, hold him, stroke his hair, kiss his face, soothe the fucking pain, promise it’ll be all right, make it true somehow-
He picks the last few strands of hair free of the metal knuckle joints and wraps his hand around them. Ed starts squeezing, and it hurts; Roy’s blood beats hard and frantic against the pressure, and the interlocking plates of the metal palm rasp on his.
“Is it-” He takes a breath. “Is it worse since…?”
“Since what?” Ed asks, twisting just enough to crack one of those gorgeous eyes open and glare at him with it.
Roy gestures vaguely to the pair of them, tangled here with Ed in agony. “Since…”
The eye narrows to a slit of amber, and then the lashes flick apart.
“You mean-” Ed’s face contorts in a way Roy can’t even begin to parse with his heart thrumming in his ears like this. “Since I-is it worse since you?”
It’d be nice if he had the guts and/or the balls and/or the gumption to come right out and say it, but he does think it stands to his credit that he nods.
“Fuckin’ hell, Mustang,” Ed mutters, and his mouth’s a thin line creased around the corners with the pain, and Roy can’t begin to guess-
Cue sirens.
For a second, Roy legitimately thinks they’re just in his head-like some sort of “Kill Bill” soundtrack kind of personal warning system kindly reminding him that he just fucked up, as if he’d forgotten in the past three dangerously rapid heartbeats.
Then he remembers that the Doppler effect doesn’t tend to happen inside of his own skull, and-
“I’ll be right back,” he says.
What Ed half-grumbles and half-moans into the carpet sounds a lot like Of course you will, asshole, but that doesn’t make much sense in context, does it? So either he’s starting to get delusional, which is a bad sign; or Roy’s ears are starting to go, which isn’t a whole lot better. Maybe he can get his hearing tested at the hospital, just in case.
In the meantime, he settles with careening through the Elric brothers’ residence and hurling himself back out the door, waving his arms as he goes.
“Here!” he says, which is probably entirely unnecessary; likely there’s a whole section of EMT training dedicated to spotting the wild-eyed caller leaping around on the front step trying to flag you down.
Odds are high that they’re actually moving extremely fast and extremely efficiently, but to Roy it seems like slow-mo through molasses on a hazy day; at one point, until he blinks hard, he honestly believes they’re going backwards. Was that a brief and ill-timed moonwalk in tribute to the late MJ, or is this entire incident affecting him far too much?
He’ll have to sort it out later; just now-
“Are you the one who called it in, sir?” the medic in front asks, and the other ones are getting a stretcher, so he nods a lot and starts beckoning. “Male, mid-twenties, is that correct? Is he stable?”
“Maybe?” Roy says. Hopefully they realize that’s in answer to the second question; he’s more confident about the first, but it seems less important, and…
He really needs to breathe. He really needs to breathe deeply and from his center, several times, and focus his energies, and sustain some inner-
The second he sees Ed curled up on the floor like a tortured animal, his heart drops right out of him again.
“Ed,” he says, kneeling and reaching out in one motion, and anyone who thinks yoga doesn’t improve balance and coordination is a lying liar who lies, “are-”
“Please step aside, sir,” the head EMT says, and it’s hard to argue with someone who saves lives every day.
Well-it’s just as easy as arguing with anybody else, but probably stupid, and a petty EMT could do damage the likes of which doesn’t bear thinking about, so he bites his tongue and shifts back to stay out of the way.
Ed makes a noise so agonizingly bereft that it takes everything Roy’s got not to dive forward again and scoop that poor, beautiful boy up in both his arms and just-hold him. So warm, so tight, with so much of his soul in it that all of this would melt and disappear-
“Don’t-” Ed chokes out as they start to move him-gently, by the looks of it, but Roy’s heart’s up from the carpet and back in his body now, the better to rattle around his throat and stop his mouth. “-touch me-” His voice breaks. Roy’s heart does, too. “Mustang, d-don’t you dare fucking l-leave me with the-”
“I’m coming with you,” Roy says to the EMT. “Is that allowed?” Wait. “I don’t care if that’s allowed. I can pay.”
They’re lifting Ed onto the narrow little stretcher, though he’s still coiled up so tight his shoulders are straining; the metal rings and scrapes against itself as he shakes. The sound that escapes him racks Roy’s ears; it’s like the ungodly lovechild of a hysterical laugh and a rough-throated scream.
“Bribes,” he musters, gasping. “Real f-f-fucking zen, Mustang-”
“Easy,” one of the EMTs says as the other lifts the foot of the stretcher faster than she’s raising the head of it.
Roy figures no answer is almost as good as a weary, resigned sort of a yes in this situation, so he follows them right the hell down the hall and out the door-and then he realizes-
Ed won’t have his house keys or his phone to contact Al, and it’d be awful to leave the door unlocked with no one here with everything else-
So he sets off running again-scrambling back to Ed’s room, and where in God’s name does the boy keep his personal effects? He should have a hook, or a magnet, or a pinboard; or a repurposed ashtray or vase; or a designated place on the nightstand, because ordered objects are the manifestation of an ordered being, and…
Desktop-phone screen gleaming next to a pile of shining steel with teeth.
Fervently regretting his lack of pockets, Roy jams his own phone into the waistband of his pants, snatches up the keys, races back outside, slams the door and locks it, and bounds over to the ambulance, where they’re trying to bundle Ed into the back despite the way he’s thrashing like-
Like they’re making it worse.
“Hey!” he calls, but it’s not like they’re going to hear him over the ragged howls tearing free of Ed’s throat, or their own tetchy communications as they try to strap Ed down on the stretcher so that they can lift it into the ambulance.
More running. Great cardio. So’s the blind panic.
“Roy-” Ed grits out just as he gets close, flailing the softer arm towards him, and it feels like a bell struck in the center of his chest-like the resonance of a single note chiming off of crystal-loud, sweet, shuddering, and devastatingly clear.
One of the EMTs thrusts her shoulder in front of him. “Sir, it’s really not safe for you to be-”
“Excuse me,” Roy says. “I’m his chiropractor.”
It is extremely difficult to get respect in this city-well, anywhere-when you’re wearing black and silver workout pants and a neon pink off-the-shoulder custom-printed T-shirt with the full lyrics of “Safety Dance” spiraling around your torso.
People are so closed-minded.
One of the EMTs starts to say “Are you sure?”, but Ed’s flailing with the other arm now, and he puts the metal elbow into the closest attendant’s stomach, and while they’re doubling over and wheezing, and everyone’s expressing varying degrees of concern and/or shock, Ed fixes Roy’s nearest wrist in a vise grip with both hands.
“Ow,” Roy says.
“Fuck,” the head EMT says.
“Fuck you,” Ed snarls through his teeth-at someone other than Roy, for once; he would like the record to be painstakingly clear on that point.
“Just let him,” the other EMT says. “We’re never getting out of here otherwise. Unless we amputate his hand.”
“And then you’d have to take me for the bleeding anyway,” Roy says. “Why don’t we not amputate my hand and say we did?”
The head EMT is giving the rule-breakers an evil eye that would make Riza enormously proud.
“Fine,” she says after a fraught second. “Stay out of the way, sir.”
He’s about to acquiesce when he finds himself being shoved up and crammed into a space so small he can’t lift his head all the way without colliding with equipment or banging his skull on the roof. The only position he can find to take up that doesn’t obstruct something important-looking hung overhead or from the walls is an awkward half-crouch in the tiny corner behind the passenger seat, with one of his knees crushed right up against the frame of the stretcher.
Thank goodness for all those squats. This will burn tomorrow, but he’ll survive.
…at least, he hopes so. He has a moment of doubt when they slam the back doors shut with a sound like a sledgehammer falling on the axis of the universe.
“Mustang-” Ed croaks out, writhing against the restraints; the tendons in his neck stand out in ever-tightening ropes, which is going to wreak merry hell on the aggravated nerve in his shoulder, and Roy can actually see his pulse beating far too fast in his jugular.
The lead EMT has grabbed his forearm and raised a needle. Because of course she has.
“Is that strictly necessary?” Roy manages.
He can’t really blame her for the venomous Don’t you dare fucking tell me how to do my job in my own workplace vibe-he can only imagine how often she has to put up with variations on that theme from people with all kinds of intentions. Probably it’s mostly men.
The engine turns over, and they all lurch to the side as the driver drags this whole mad caravan around the cul-de-sac and back out towards the road.
“Needles,” Roy says, raising his voice over the noise, torn between feeling helplessly chagrined under her gaze and fiercely protective as Ed breathes harshly, straining to twist his spine up off of the stretcher. “He’s-really-”
“It’s a sedative,” she says. Her hand’s barely wavered despite the rocking of their entire environment as they rumble over potholes and divider lines alike.
“Don’t need to be f-fucking sedated-” Ed reaches for Roy with both hands, and it’s not even voluntary; Roy clasps them tight. A small, guiltily-flitting thought: is Ed even going to remember this later? Will he appreciate it? Does it mean anything to him, or does he just need someone to cling to, and Roy’s the closest physical being that’s not trying to stick him with a hypodermic? “Need-fucking-opioids. Something. ’M not allergic to iodine if shots’re all you got-fuck’s sake, just-please-”
If he wrings Roy’s hands any harder, they’re going to have two patients to deal with. He tries to convey that to the head EMT with nothing more than a plaintive look-he’s been told his puppy eyes are irresistible and legendary. Admittedly, he said it to himself in the mirror while he was practicing them, but it should still count.
“Christ,” the EMT mutters. “Jared, hook him to the fentanyl-”
And then Jared is clamping the little diamond-shaped inhaler mask down over Ed’s face, and Ed’s eyelids flutter, and Roy can’t fight the instinct to touch his hair-half just to make sure he’s still here, still solid, still moving, breathing, real. It’s soaked in sweat, no damn surprise; what can he do but card his fingers gently through the damply-hanging bangs and try not to topple over as the ambulance swings around another corner so fast it feels like they’re on a roller coaster?
Would it be rude to ask how far it is? He’s already imposing just by being here; he shouldn’t push his luck. Ed has his eyes squeezed shut now; he dropped the right hand to his side, but the left stays wrapped around Roy’s, tight enough to tingle. Funny, in a manner of speaking. He always figured on some electricity the first time they held hands, but he didn’t think it’d be like this.
He rubs with the pad of his free hand’s thumb-very gently-at the little spot right above Ed’s collarbone, which is one of about six hundred places tension goes to lurk and settle and multiply.
“Hey,” he says, as softly as he dares with all the ambient rattling and the rush of traffic around them. “Is that any better?”
Stupid question-not the question itself, really, but the fact that he asked when Ed’s got a thick layer of plastic between his mouth and an audible answer.
Ed responds, though, with what looks like either a concentrated spasm of pain or a slight nod. Roy withdraws his hand from the world’s most beautiful clavicle; is he making it worse? He always does; he always is; surely-
To be fair, though, if he provides nothing but constant exacerbation of the existing pain, that begs the question of why Ed is still paying him decent money for the privilege. Ed is-to understate matters perhaps more grossly than he ever has since that time in the first grade when he began a book report with “The universe is pretty big, actually”-extremely intelligent and unerringly logical. He wouldn’t shell out cash for something exclusively unpleasant, and since he seems to be physiologically incapable of receiving Roy’s increasingly neon and flashing I would like to have all of the sex with you please signals, it’s not like there are any noticeable fringe benefits to turning up and getting his miserable muscles and bones beaten up and realigned. It must not be all bad. Roy must be contributing something of benefit to Ed’s existence in order to have remained a part of it for as long as he has. Few fools would call Ed a quitter, but he’d go to another guy with a gold-stickered certificate on the wall if he really believed that three months of bitching and moaning under Roy’s hands and tutelage had been a total waste.
Curious.
Curious, and encouraging.
But it doesn’t change this. It doesn’t change now. It doesn’t change Jared and the one who wants to put a scalpel through Roy’s testicles monitoring Ed’s vital signs like he’s about to go into shock or a coma or cardiac arrest-
And who’s to say he won’t?
Roy aside, Roy’s whole being irrelevant-how bad is this? And how much worse is it likely to get?
There isn’t much more time to mull over it while Ed strangles the hell out of his hand: momentarily, they screech to a halt-which Roy had sort of assumed was something that only happened in movies; but he’d also sort of figured that was true of approximately half of what’s taken place today, so he supposes that’s fair.
The paramedics have flung open the doors and started wheeling the gurney down onto the pavement before Roy’s righted himself from tumbling backwards and slamming into the back of the driver’s seat when they stopped.
He scrambles down the suddenly empty bay of the ambulance and down off of the bumper to follow, but they’re already at the entrance to the E.R.-Ed’s left hand flutters upward briefly, like a flag of surrender, as the automatic doors hiss open, and then they barrel through.
Roy forces his startled body directly from a standstill to a run, but they’re too damned efficient-which he never thought he’d say of a government-funded anything, but that doesn’t change how fast they race through the lobby towards the nearest hallway-
The cavalcade thunders towards the front desk, and the receptionist glances up and calls “Elric?” after the paramedics as they rattle past. A female doctor with a long brown ponytail steps out, looking up from her clipboard and sidestepping in the nick of time.
“Hi, Ed,” she says.
The terrible groan Ed musters sounds almost like a greeting. Sort of. Not really at all.
“Wait!” Roy attempts. “I’m his-”
Doctor? Sort-of-chiropractor? Massage therapist, wink wink?
“Forty-five’s open,” the real doctor-hell, that still rankles just a bit-says, gesturing to the indefatigable paramedics. “I’ll be there in a second. Can I help you, sir?”
The last to him-with a side-dish of blocking the hallway so that he can’t just follow them.
She’s five feet and hardly any spare, but her eyes remind him of Riza’s, and that alone is sufficient to stop him in his tracks.
“I’m with him,” Roy says, trying to point without putting a hair into her personal space. “Can I-”
“Are you a family member?” she asks.
“No,” he says. He clears his throat. “But I’m-”
“Wait over there,” she says, nodding over to the excruciatingly un-ergonomic chairs bolted to each other and the wall. Roy’s spine tingles with a premonition of misery just looking at them. “Someone will come tell you when you can see him.”
He tries again. “But I-”
She eyes him.
Have a certificate dies on his tongue.
“We’ll take care of him,” she says. “Sit.”
It’s not persuasion so much as coercion by way of vague fear of intense retribution, but he supposes they’re more or less the same in the end anyway.
He crosses the room and sits.
At least she doesn’t smile or roll her eyes or gloat or anything before she turns on her heel and strides off down the hall, hopefully to alleviate Ed’s incomprehensible pain.
Roy crosses his legs and puts one elbow on the armrest. The armrest is made of textured plastic, so putting his elbow on it hurts. He puts his arm down and crosses his legs the other way. He scoots back until he’s sitting right at the very back of the chair seat, which should theoretically reduce the strain which his instinct to slouch would inflict. He forces himself to sit upright. He uncrosses his legs; that’ll strain his hips. He folds his arms over his chest instead. He swallows. He sighs.
He tugs his phone out from where it has gamely endured this whole adventure inside the waistband of his pants, having gotten chummy with Ed’s house-keys and miraculously clung to him despite all of the turbulence and turmoil during the ambulance ride. He just wants to storm down that hall and help, but-
What he knows how to do hasn’t fixed this yet. He’s no damn use right now.
He glances at the time on his phone screen, then taps his first speed-dial and waits while the line rings twice.
“What do you need?” Riza says.
“Only your affection,” he says. “Possibly your respect.”
“Uh huh,” she says.
“I need a favor,” he says.
“Hang on,” she says. “I’m paralyzed with shock.”
He sets his jaw. “I’m in the emergency room.”
Silence, for a long and-guilty as it makes him feel-vindicating second.
“Is everything all right?” she asks, much more gently.
“It’s Ed,” he says. “I-I mean, I think… we’ll have to see. I don’t think it’s life-threatening, but it’s not… good.”
“What can I do?” she asks.
“I’m going to stay here as long as I have to,” he says, narrowly resisting the urge to say that loud enough for the receptionist to hear. “Can you look after Blanche for me?”
He still stands by his assertion that it’s the best dog name in the history of domesticated animals. She is, after all, as he explained to Riza in gleeful jubilation after he hit on the thought, a female golden retriever-a Golden Girl. It’s brilliant. He’s brilliant. At the pregnant pause, he said so, and Riza said I’m glad that you think so, because she hates him and enjoys his suffering.
But in a loving way.
Which is why it’s no surprise that she says, “Of course.”
Too late, he remembers that she’s one of those terrible, awful, conniving carnivore people that he has to set out conditions for, and he adds, as fast as he can make his mouth form the syllables, “But don’t feed her any m-”
“What?” she says. “Roy, you’re breaking up; I can’t hear a word you’re saying. Text me later and let me know what happens, okay? Good luck; goodbye!”
She hangs up on him.
The witch.
That’s what happens when you eat meat, isn’t it? All of the carcinogenic proteins and the poisonous preservatives worm their way into your bloodstream and slowly erode your soul.
It’s incredible that the WHO has only implicated bacon so far.
He shakes his head slowly to mourn the tragic loss of her quintessence, and then he taps over to the single most soothing of all of his mindless fair-etrade puzzle games.
He spares a glance for his battery, which is somehow in the red zone even though he charged this ridiculous piece of diversionary circuitry last night.
The universe is testing him today, and no mistake. He breathes in, holds it for a count of five, and exhales slowly. He sets the phone down on his thigh and counts out his chakra beads. He is going to handle this with grace and calm and peaceful serenity if it kills him.
[Part 2]
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: pre-Roy/Ed
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 15,600
Warnings: language; absurdity; I did, like, two Google searches on some of this stuff and then left it at that because Roy is kind of a poser anyway?; this needs a lot more editing but ain't nobody got time for that; modern AU
Summary: Edward Elric has the most singular talent of anyone alive for taking Roy's zen, thrashing it thoroughly, and then hurling it into a Dumpster. …metaphysically speaking, anyway.
Author's Note: A now extremely late birthday present for Obersten!!!!! ♥ Based on his ridiculously A+ Downward Dogs AU - the premise is founded in some intel I acquired from Secret Insider Sources, and then I made up everything else. :'D tl;dr if you like a detail/aspect of this, it's probably Berg's; if you're like "wtf is this shit," it's probably one of my additions. X'D (Or it's one of the things I half-assedly pretended to research! I am a pro at this writing shit.)
CHOOSE YOUR OWN RAINBOW
Today Roy is going to tell Ed how stupid it is to hate on chakra beads. The trick to arguing with Ed-
Well, the trick to arguing with Ed is that if you want to win, you shouldn’t even start, because the combination of ever-increasing volume and ferociously single-minded logic will eventually steamroll even the most valid of points.
But in the event that it’s a battle worth waging all the same, the trick is to organize your evidence in order, from least to most convincing, and execute the outline calmly and precisely. It also helps to prepare counterarguments to the usual objections, which tend to go along the lines of “That is the dictionary definition of mumbo-fucking-jumbo” or “A five-year-old would call bullshit on you right now, Mustang.” The most important thing is staying as unflappable as possible while he ramps up towards the peak of his righteous hard-science-rage, because if you can get him tongue-tied, it basically counts as a draw.
It’s bizarre, too, to be looking forward to it-to Ed. Ah, that is-Ed’s appointment. To all of the snark and frustration and the cynical dismissals and the eye-rolling and the muttering and the rare but delightful occasions when he’ll actually hiss through his teeth like an aggravated cat.
It’s less bizarre to be looking forward to the way the stark lines of tension ease from his neck and his shoulders and his jaw-the way the harshness etched at the corners of his eyes smoothes out just slightly; the way his whole face softens when he relaxes, and he starts to talk about Al, or therapy dogs, or something quantum-physicky that occurred to him the other day. It’s less bizarre to be looking forward to the way Roy’s whole chest fills and lights like a hurricane of fireworks when the gentle pressure of his hands can bring comfort, and the comfort turns to safety, and the safety leads to openness, and the openness makes Ed seem so alive.
In any case-the chakra. It’s really no more mystical than all of this quantum business; it’s just a different way of interpreting the invisible weave of the fabric of the universe. Plus it lets you choose your own rainbow-which he should really write down so he can use it as the title of his autobiography one of these days.
Also, if they’re such “mystical pseudo-science made-up crap,” why does he keep ending up with his rose quartz heart chakra rolling between his fingertips every time he thinks of Ed?
…Ed would probably say “It’s a psychosomatic self-fulfilling prophecy, you hippie hack,” but Roy is going to pretend he didn’t just hear that, loud and very well-enunciated, in his own darned head.
It’s good. It’s all good. The universe is charitable when you look at it the right way around; when you give positive energy, it circles back, even if it doesn’t take a form that you recognize, let alone expect. Everything is good; everything is in balance, and…
And Roy catches sight of the minimalist clock face and realizes with a bit of a jolt that Ed is late.
Ed’s never late.
Ed’s like clockwork: tightly-wound, for one thing; and for another, he turns up on the dot, out of the ether, without fail, at the precise time he’s promised. He holds to the clock hands like a code of honor, and Roy keeps trying to explain to him that sometimes when the world is flowing, you have to move with it instead of marching to the beat of the secondhand; that you can’t let it tally out the individual moments of something as nebulous and beautiful as a human life…
But the point is that if Ed is late-
Something’s wrong.
It could be traffic, theoretically. It could be a lot of things. But something in Roy’s guts, something in his bones, something in the beat of his blood and the swell of his lungs knows that it’s something-
Bad.
He slings himself up out of the extraordinarily ergonomic and deliciously comfortable hammock-chair (patent pending) which is also remarkably good to include in fantasies about patient-related sexcapades, and crosses to the soothingly-painted pastel front of his filing cabinet. He pulls Ed’s manila folder-blood-red. Some of them give him trouble, but he knew Ed’s color in an instant: vibrant and angry and powerful, searingly hot and maybe just a little bit scared of its own potential.
His phone trills at him as he taps out of his antioxidant tracker and into the maps app. It occurs to him that he could just call, instead of showing up on Ed’s doorstep unannounced and probably unwanted.
But he trusts his instincts-it’s one of the hardest and the most valuable lessons he’s ever ground into his own brain over the years. He trusts the feeling, fluttering too-bright and frantic in the pit of his stomach. He trusts that the universe speaks in ways that are unquantifiable; in ways that can’t be transcribed, and that sometimes you have to believe in your own ability to listen.
He knows that Ed didn’t forget about the appointment and go to the grocery store to glare at the almonds and mutter unflattering things about Roy under his breath. He knows that Ed didn’t sleep through his alarm. He knows that it is not a coincidence; it is not harmless; it is not all right. He knows, which is why he checks Blanche’s water dish, strokes her head at her uncertain whuff, locks up his office, grips his car keys in his right hand, and jogs down the stairs and out to the parking lot.
His Prius-which is called Fido-greets him with the usual soft, reluctant sort of whine as he pushes the button to start the engine.
“Me, too,” he says, fitting his phone into its little clasped mount above the radio panel.
As he draws out onto the street, he turns the music on-and then immediately off again. Instead of acting as a pleasant distraction, it clashes so loudly with his thoughts that the cacophony is jarring; it’s like reaching for a butterfly and touching a wasp, and accepting the caprices of the world is one thing, but stung fingertips are another; and Ed’s home is much too far and all too close, and the slowly-building ache of the fear in Roy’s chest is hollowing him out with every heartbeat.
It’s all right. It’s all right. Whatever happens, whatever has happened, they will cope; they will deal; they will adapt themselves to the contours of reality and chart out their course based on the terrain that lies before them.
It’ll be fine. It is fine; he’s just on his way to confirm that.
He keeps hitting red lights-over and over and fucking over; the green flickers out right when he enters snap-decision range, and you can’t gun it in a hybrid, and the cops in this city are so overzealous he’d be mad to try-
Ed could be-
No.
Ed could be a lot of things, but speculating about the worst-case scenarios won’t prepare Roy for contingencies; it’ll only make him miserable until he finds out. It’s not fair to himself, and it’s not fair to Ed-if he gets himself worked up over things that haven’t even happened, he runs the risk of taking out the leftover emotional energy on its unwitting cause, and that’s one of ten-thousand ways to hurt people over a problem that doesn’t even exist.
Roy would kill for a real car right now.
Okay-no. But he’d-maim someone.
Well-
He’d-
Walk on coals. That he would definitely do. Coals which were not endangering anyone else, which would be indescribably painful to him and him alone once he started strolling.
Sacrifice the self-the ego. Never anyone else. Never another being; never another life. Conceptualizing one’s own is difficult enough; the value of another is past comprehension, and it should never be used as a bargaining chip. Even in a theoretical game where he could trade an unthinkable action for an impossible item-even then, it’s arsenic dripping in down the walls of his skull, and he can’t let it fester there, or what might start growing next?
He’s half a mile from the cul-de-sac-just a little loop on the pixel-map on a tiny screen, but so damn big in his head, in his thundering heart; just one more stoplight, which-
Goes yellow-then-red the instant he lays eyes on it.
He slams his hand on the wheel and catches the “Motherfucker!” right as it bounces against the backs of his teeth; he swallows it down-every spiked leg of every letter-and drags in a deep breath.
It’s fine. It’s going to be fine. Fucking namaste. Ed’s going to be all right; it’s probably nothing; it’s probably…
The world will go on no matter what it is.
Funny, how that’s comforting applied to his own life, and terrifying when it comes to Ed’s.
But it’s all part of the same circle, isn’t it? Sacrifice the self. Ed is capable of, is destined for, things he himself can’t even begin to imagine, things Roy can sense more than he sees-the first glow of light on the horizon, fighting the darkness to be free. Ed is beautiful in ways that mean so much more than just the mind-numbingly delicious shape of his perfect, perfect ass. Underneath the endless, sedimented layers of agony compressing every part of him, there is a soul so absolutely golden that it’s blinding, and all Roy wants to do is show him that it’s there.
Ed believes he’s broken. Believing’s half the battle, and Roy is not about to let him lose.
If he’s even-
The light changes, and Roy puts the pedal to the floor; Fido jerks forward, making a high noise of electronic protest, but Roy’s knuckles bleach where his hands clench the wheel-
Because Ed is not afraid of anything-not of pain, not of disapproval, not of consequence. He’s not afraid of living, or of dying, or of anything between.
But he’s tired.
And weariness-bone-deep, age-old, through-the-heart exhaustion-is so much harder to fight.
Roy whips the car around the turn so fast he almost clips the minivan that’s leaving; the whole circle is quaint little townhouse duplexes, and Ed’s address said 4A-
He parks Fido on the curb, practically strangles himself with his own seatbelt, tumbles out of the car, and starts up the walk at a run, with the key fob beeping at him insistently to tell him that he hasn’t stopped the car-
One foot on the doorstep, and his mind skids to a halt, replaying snatched-up fragments of the little conversations-Ed ranting about Al’s unhealthy obsession with morning classes; the quaver of guilt in Ed’s voice even questioning who should take precedence with the schedule of their air filters, between the boy who’s allergic to everything under the sun and the one who hears machine-gun fire in every rattle of the fans; the eye-scrubbing annoyance at the fact that boot camp ruined him for staying in bed past sunrise, regardless of the quality of his sleep the night before; the slow, slow, halting question, hesitant because he knew the answer-Does everybody have to go around three times and double-check the locks on all the windows before they can convince themselves to leave?
Nothing will be open. Nothing will be unattended and unlocked. This was a fool’s errand; this is a dead end-
No. He has to remember. He has to remember to believe that the world can be kind when you ask kindly; that the energy you put into the lives of those around you feeds back into your own. Good things happen-they don’t have to be bought and paid for; they aren’t necessarily earned; but they happen. When you open your eyes, your heart, your lungs, your veins; when you tap into the ever-shifting currents of the world; when you participate in your own life without trying to control the movement of the electricity around you-
He has to remember to let go. He has to remember to unclasp his clenched hands and let things be-to reach out and take them, yes, but to take them as they are. To take them mindfully and gratefully and not too tightly, and to release them when they start to slip.
He draws in a deep breath, squares his shoulders, and sets his hand on the doorknob.
He twists.
It turns.
The door opens into a narrow entryway with framed pictures on the walls; a fraction of his heart yearns recklessly to see them, but the rest of him’s already running.
“Ed?” he calls. “Ed-”
No answer but the hum of the infamous filters; no What the fuck are you doing here; no I’m all right, I’m all right; no indignant howl from the shower; no…
Anything.
Despite his size-or perhaps, Roy often thinks, because of it-Ed’s always easy to find. For all that he snarls and bristles like a threatened alley cat at every opportunity, his physical presence is so profoundly warm that he practically radiates light-gold light, bright gold light; and sometimes, Roy thinks, blue. Ed’s got the closest thing most people will see to an aura this side of a migraine-in addition to which, he takes up space. He makes himself known. There are times he doesn’t want to; there are times he collapses his shoulders and condenses himself and starts to disappear, but mostly… It’s not even that he makes himself bigger so much as that he makes the most of what he is-broad shoulders, fine ass, gravity-scorning hair and gleaming metal wound up with the gold. He’s hard to miss.
Well-he’s easy to miss, late nights and sleepless mornings; but he’s nearly impossible not to find. You can feel him from the other side of the room.
Which is why it’s so damn disconcerting that Roy can’t sense a thing right now.
“Ed,” he says again-through the little living room piled with books on books and stacks of Nature magazines; through the cozy kitchen, patterned mugs hung on tiny hooks, kitten-face teapot on the countertop, word magnets and square ones with element names in bright colors scattered on the refrigerator door-
A sharp turn into another dim, semi-claustrophobic hallway (is it the feng shui or the fear that’s making it so small?), and then two doors-one left open, and a glimpse of off-white bedspread with silhouettes of little cats; one-
Shut.
He knocks. He knocks harder.
“Ed,” he says.
He has to remember; he has to remember-
He tries the handle.
The door opens, but none of the details of the room register, because Ed is curled up on the carpet with both arms wrapped tight around his head, metal fingers buried in his hair.
He’s breathing.
Barely-high-fast-quick and ragged, little hitches that can’t be getting any useful amount of oxygen into his system-but it counts.
And Roy knows-
That this is the part he hides from. This is the part he crams into the corners; this is what waits in the background, biding its time. This is what lies beneath the gestures-true, important gestures, but they’re shadow puppets all the same. This is what no zenith of zen acceptance, however genuine, can change.
Good things happen. They happen more often when you hold yourself open to embrace them; when you anticipate without expecting; when you carry the positivity forward in everything you do.
Good things happen.
Shitty things happen, too.
And sometimes shitty things happen to the people who have already suffered so much for so long that they don’t believe in the existence of the good things anymore.
Sometimes shitty things happen to people like Ed, who are so used to being beat down and kicked while they’re cringing that they’ve built up walls of retaliatory anger-of preemptive resentment-and the cynicism is like cyanide working through them slowly; and they’re so used to disappointment that it doesn’t even sting them anymore; and they can’t taste the poison that they’re breathing in.
Sometimes shitty things happen to people like Ed, and they keep happening, and it’s hardly his fault if the defensive shell has been so necessary his whole life that he can’t even understand that there are good things it’s keeping out, too.
Ed has spent his whole life protecting himself from a world that has always done its damnedest to hurt him.
This-something as horrifying as finding him lying on the floor writhing in pain-this is just another droplet in the ocean as far as Ed’s concerned.
And sometimes even good swimmers drown.
“Ed,” Roy says, in his softest voice, his calmest voice-the gentlest, deepest, closest-to-the-soul voice he hears in his head when he meditates. He crouches down and lays his hand as lightly as he can on Ed’s shoulder. “It’s R-”
“Fuck you,” Ed chokes out, and the words all shudder, the muscle contracts perceptibly under Roy’s fingertips. “Ahh-fuck-f-fucking-” He curls up tighter, tighter, and the faint sound of agony that slips out of him cuts into the center of Roy’s chest like a carving knife. “It f-fucking-”
“I know,” Roy says.
“You don’t,” Ed grinds out; he shakes and shakes and shakes, and his right hand spasms, and the fingers hook tighter into his hair. “Don’t-f-fucking-touch me-” He convulses, and he takes a good-sized chunk of Roy’s heart into the depths of hell right with him. “God-”
Is it better to keep the pads of his fingertips pressed to Ed’s bicep to reinforce that he’s not alone, or is the addition of another sensation only going to make this worse?
Roy takes a deep breath. “What hu-”
“Fucking everything!”
His instinct is to grip Ed’s shoulder and try to ground him, but this is-oh, hell. This teeters on the border of hysteria. This is a kind and caliber of pain that would crack the mind of a lesser human being; Roy’s watched Ed endure torments to his nerves the likes of which would reduce most people to-well, this-and trudge straight through them with a grimace and a shrug.
Roy licks his lips; scans Ed’s spine and his shoulder-blades; nothing’s obviously misaligned, but- “How often-”
“Just leave!” The gasping sharpens, harsher by the second, into sobs. “Fucking-go, what are you-fuck-”
He will not panic. He won’t; Ed needs him to be stable now, whether either of them likes it or not.
“Where’s your phone?” he asks, glancing up for it-surely it ought to rest on the nightstand? But the table’s bare except for a small black digital clock and a reading lamp. “Where…” His is still in the car. Or it will be, unless some hooligans wandering the neighborhood noticed his unlocked doors and purring engine and-
No. He has to trust in people, in the concept of people-now and always.
“I’ll be right back,” he says.
Of course there’s no landline; of course he has to run outside, down the little pathway, back to Fido; of course he slips climbing into the car and bangs his shin on the edge of the door-
Of fucking course-
He beeps the locks this time; his hands are shaking so hard he can’t put his fucking passcode in on the screen the first time, or the second, or-
Stop. Breathe. Zen. Acceptance. Peace with the universe. Zen, zen, zen.
He doesn’t even need the stupid passcode; there’s that emergency button.
He’s fine. He’s fine; everything’s fine; the line is ringing; his chakras are aligned, and his veins are leylines laid back when the world was new; he is a figment of evolution’s imagination, and his purpose is to move, to carry on, to build, to be; that’s all that’s asked of him, and all he wants. He’s fine. It’s going to be okay.
“911 dispatch,” a woman’s voice says. “What’s your emergency?”
“Fuck,” Roy hears himself say.
Oops.
“Sorry,” he says. “Ah-I need-I need an ambulance; I’m at-Charland Circle, number 4, apartment A-”
“Charland, 4A,” she says, and she is much too calm about all of this, which he sort of despises and admires at once. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“It’s-” Deep breaths; deep damn breaths; he needs… not to trip over the threshold on his way back into the house; is he incapable of running and talking and keeping his damn head all at the same time? “I’m-a chiropractor, my patient-” ShitfuckGod. “I’m sorry-”
“It’s all right, sir,” she says. “Just slow down.”
“Early twenties male,” he says.
“Conscious?”
“Barely.” One of the word magnets says pulchritudinous, and the letters imprint themselves on the surface of his brain. “I think it’s-he has lots of-chronic pain; I think maybe nerve damage; I think-”
“Are you in a safe place, sir?”
“I’m here,” Roy says, which sounds-immensely stupid, come to think of it. “I mean-I’m at the residence. It’s safe.”
Ed hasn’t moved from his spot on the floor, but he’s still shuddering hard enough to set the bedside lamp to trembling.
“Exactly what’s happening, sir?”
“Just-” Roy kneels again, touches Ed’s shoulder; the skin’s on fire. “He’s really-he’s in so much pain-can you send some-”
Ed recoils and then groans. “The fuck are you talking t-” His breath catches, then hisses back out of him, and he half-rolls over, eyes winched open halfway- “No fucking hospital shit-”
“Is this the best callback number for you, sir?” the dispatcher asks.
“Yes,” Roy says.
Ed fumbles, grabs Roy’s wrist-with the metal hand, and his grasp transcends too-tight from urgency and leaps right into agonizing death grip.
“No-” he growls. “-fucking-hospitals.”
“You need something stronger than I can give you,” Roy says. A terrible little light flickers on in his head. “I’ll pay for it if you need me to-the ambulance and whatever the visit ends up costing. Is that the-”
“Sir?”
“Sorry,” he says. Ed’s eyes are slivers of molten brass, so scalding hot, and his grip’s so tight Roy’s fingertips are numb- “Ah-”
It’s the twitch of the corner of Ed’s mouth that gives it away-in that instant, the rage and the pain slip aside for just long enough to unveil a cavernous void of absolute-
Terror.
“Make ’em cancel the fucking ambulance,” he says through clenched teeth, and he squeezes his eyes shut. “No fucking-doctors and needles and-none of that shit-”
“Sir, are you there?”
“Yes,” he says, and his heart beats light and fast in his throat-swift and skipping, frantic, like the dapple of desperate rain, like a wild animal panicked with the impulse to escape. “Do you need anything else?”
“That’s everything,” she says. “We’ll send someone as soon as we can, sir.”
He wants to ask her if that means five minutes or fifteen or thirty-something-wants to ask her if she thinks Ed can survive that long; wants to ask he if she has the slightest damn idea what he should do in the meantime-
“Fuck you, Mustang,” Ed forces out.
“What am I supposed to do?” he asks, and really that’s a question for both Ed and the operator-although he’s only expecting one of the answers to involve anything other than a suggestion about spiked objects and his orifices.
“Keep him calm,” the dispatcher says. “No medication; don’t move him. Keep talking to him.”
At least if Ed tries to murder him, the EMTs will already be on the way.
“Right,” Roy says, and if it sounds weak even to his own ears, it’s hardly his fault at this point, is it? “Do you know about how long it’s going to be?”
“Can’t say, sir. When you hear the sirens, if it’s safe to leave him, you can meet them outside to help direct them in.”
“All right,” he says, and he puts the phone down on the floor without even hanging up.
Is there an app for this? An emergency response app? How to deal with possibly-life-or-death situations for dummies? There must be some kind of a pain manager or a vitals-checker or-
“Fucking hate fucking hospitals,” Ed mumbles, and then he gasps in another breath, sharp-edged and sudden, and tenses anew.
“I know,” Roy says, more because it’s the ingrained language code for I’m trying to be sympathetic, but I have no idea what to say than because he has the slightest concept of what Ed feels. He reaches out to lay his hand on Ed’s arm again. Ed doesn’t shake him off. “Has this happened before?”
Ed musters a dry, croaking fragment of a laugh. It’s a sick sound-a wrong sound; overwhelmingly sardonic and devastatingly matter-of-fact.
Unfortunately, it answers the question.
“How often?” Roy tries next. “How does it start?”
He doesn’t-
Want to hear the response to that one.
He doesn’t want to hear it, because he doesn’t want confirmation of what a part of him already knows.
It’s his fault.
It’s not his doing-not at a basic level; Ed’s body was damaged past description long before it ever landed under Roy’s hands-but he made it worse. He set out cloaked as some kind of savior, but when the fabric falls away-
He’s a charlatan. He’s a fucking fake. He paints himself like a beacon of knowledge, of understanding, of power, of aid-
And this is what he does. This is what his hands make; this is what he wreaks. After everything he’s had-all of the opportunities, all the magnificent good luck, everything he’s been given-this is what he gives back.
He touches someone like Ed-someone riven through with pain of every possible type; someone who’s never felt safe, or whole, or happy-
And he makes it worse.
“Since f-fucking-” The metal hand clenches tighter in Ed’s hair and tugs hard. Roy can’t fight the instinct to grab it and start prying the fingers open, working them carefully loose. “-quit-fucking-” Ed drags in a breath. “Since-fucking d-deployment. F-fucked up-” He gasps; Roy grips his wrist tighter, and the metal fingers tremble like narrow branches in a storm. “Fucked up-all kinds of shit over there; started to-I mean, it wasn’t great to st-start with, ’cause of-” His body shudders in a way that might be directed towards the automail. “-and-it all just-went to fuckin’ hell. Broke a lot of-bones, whatever shit. Everything. ’F I get out of bed wrong, it just-quits. Fucking t-tweak one thing, and the whole fucking house of c-cards comes down.”
Roy wants to-
Hug him, hold him, stroke his hair, kiss his face, soothe the fucking pain, promise it’ll be all right, make it true somehow-
He picks the last few strands of hair free of the metal knuckle joints and wraps his hand around them. Ed starts squeezing, and it hurts; Roy’s blood beats hard and frantic against the pressure, and the interlocking plates of the metal palm rasp on his.
“Is it-” He takes a breath. “Is it worse since…?”
“Since what?” Ed asks, twisting just enough to crack one of those gorgeous eyes open and glare at him with it.
Roy gestures vaguely to the pair of them, tangled here with Ed in agony. “Since…”
The eye narrows to a slit of amber, and then the lashes flick apart.
“You mean-” Ed’s face contorts in a way Roy can’t even begin to parse with his heart thrumming in his ears like this. “Since I-is it worse since you?”
It’d be nice if he had the guts and/or the balls and/or the gumption to come right out and say it, but he does think it stands to his credit that he nods.
“Fuckin’ hell, Mustang,” Ed mutters, and his mouth’s a thin line creased around the corners with the pain, and Roy can’t begin to guess-
Cue sirens.
For a second, Roy legitimately thinks they’re just in his head-like some sort of “Kill Bill” soundtrack kind of personal warning system kindly reminding him that he just fucked up, as if he’d forgotten in the past three dangerously rapid heartbeats.
Then he remembers that the Doppler effect doesn’t tend to happen inside of his own skull, and-
“I’ll be right back,” he says.
What Ed half-grumbles and half-moans into the carpet sounds a lot like Of course you will, asshole, but that doesn’t make much sense in context, does it? So either he’s starting to get delusional, which is a bad sign; or Roy’s ears are starting to go, which isn’t a whole lot better. Maybe he can get his hearing tested at the hospital, just in case.
In the meantime, he settles with careening through the Elric brothers’ residence and hurling himself back out the door, waving his arms as he goes.
“Here!” he says, which is probably entirely unnecessary; likely there’s a whole section of EMT training dedicated to spotting the wild-eyed caller leaping around on the front step trying to flag you down.
Odds are high that they’re actually moving extremely fast and extremely efficiently, but to Roy it seems like slow-mo through molasses on a hazy day; at one point, until he blinks hard, he honestly believes they’re going backwards. Was that a brief and ill-timed moonwalk in tribute to the late MJ, or is this entire incident affecting him far too much?
He’ll have to sort it out later; just now-
“Are you the one who called it in, sir?” the medic in front asks, and the other ones are getting a stretcher, so he nods a lot and starts beckoning. “Male, mid-twenties, is that correct? Is he stable?”
“Maybe?” Roy says. Hopefully they realize that’s in answer to the second question; he’s more confident about the first, but it seems less important, and…
He really needs to breathe. He really needs to breathe deeply and from his center, several times, and focus his energies, and sustain some inner-
The second he sees Ed curled up on the floor like a tortured animal, his heart drops right out of him again.
“Ed,” he says, kneeling and reaching out in one motion, and anyone who thinks yoga doesn’t improve balance and coordination is a lying liar who lies, “are-”
“Please step aside, sir,” the head EMT says, and it’s hard to argue with someone who saves lives every day.
Well-it’s just as easy as arguing with anybody else, but probably stupid, and a petty EMT could do damage the likes of which doesn’t bear thinking about, so he bites his tongue and shifts back to stay out of the way.
Ed makes a noise so agonizingly bereft that it takes everything Roy’s got not to dive forward again and scoop that poor, beautiful boy up in both his arms and just-hold him. So warm, so tight, with so much of his soul in it that all of this would melt and disappear-
“Don’t-” Ed chokes out as they start to move him-gently, by the looks of it, but Roy’s heart’s up from the carpet and back in his body now, the better to rattle around his throat and stop his mouth. “-touch me-” His voice breaks. Roy’s heart does, too. “Mustang, d-don’t you dare fucking l-leave me with the-”
“I’m coming with you,” Roy says to the EMT. “Is that allowed?” Wait. “I don’t care if that’s allowed. I can pay.”
They’re lifting Ed onto the narrow little stretcher, though he’s still coiled up so tight his shoulders are straining; the metal rings and scrapes against itself as he shakes. The sound that escapes him racks Roy’s ears; it’s like the ungodly lovechild of a hysterical laugh and a rough-throated scream.
“Bribes,” he musters, gasping. “Real f-f-fucking zen, Mustang-”
“Easy,” one of the EMTs says as the other lifts the foot of the stretcher faster than she’s raising the head of it.
Roy figures no answer is almost as good as a weary, resigned sort of a yes in this situation, so he follows them right the hell down the hall and out the door-and then he realizes-
Ed won’t have his house keys or his phone to contact Al, and it’d be awful to leave the door unlocked with no one here with everything else-
So he sets off running again-scrambling back to Ed’s room, and where in God’s name does the boy keep his personal effects? He should have a hook, or a magnet, or a pinboard; or a repurposed ashtray or vase; or a designated place on the nightstand, because ordered objects are the manifestation of an ordered being, and…
Desktop-phone screen gleaming next to a pile of shining steel with teeth.
Fervently regretting his lack of pockets, Roy jams his own phone into the waistband of his pants, snatches up the keys, races back outside, slams the door and locks it, and bounds over to the ambulance, where they’re trying to bundle Ed into the back despite the way he’s thrashing like-
Like they’re making it worse.
“Hey!” he calls, but it’s not like they’re going to hear him over the ragged howls tearing free of Ed’s throat, or their own tetchy communications as they try to strap Ed down on the stretcher so that they can lift it into the ambulance.
More running. Great cardio. So’s the blind panic.
“Roy-” Ed grits out just as he gets close, flailing the softer arm towards him, and it feels like a bell struck in the center of his chest-like the resonance of a single note chiming off of crystal-loud, sweet, shuddering, and devastatingly clear.
One of the EMTs thrusts her shoulder in front of him. “Sir, it’s really not safe for you to be-”
“Excuse me,” Roy says. “I’m his chiropractor.”
It is extremely difficult to get respect in this city-well, anywhere-when you’re wearing black and silver workout pants and a neon pink off-the-shoulder custom-printed T-shirt with the full lyrics of “Safety Dance” spiraling around your torso.
People are so closed-minded.
One of the EMTs starts to say “Are you sure?”, but Ed’s flailing with the other arm now, and he puts the metal elbow into the closest attendant’s stomach, and while they’re doubling over and wheezing, and everyone’s expressing varying degrees of concern and/or shock, Ed fixes Roy’s nearest wrist in a vise grip with both hands.
“Ow,” Roy says.
“Fuck,” the head EMT says.
“Fuck you,” Ed snarls through his teeth-at someone other than Roy, for once; he would like the record to be painstakingly clear on that point.
“Just let him,” the other EMT says. “We’re never getting out of here otherwise. Unless we amputate his hand.”
“And then you’d have to take me for the bleeding anyway,” Roy says. “Why don’t we not amputate my hand and say we did?”
The head EMT is giving the rule-breakers an evil eye that would make Riza enormously proud.
“Fine,” she says after a fraught second. “Stay out of the way, sir.”
He’s about to acquiesce when he finds himself being shoved up and crammed into a space so small he can’t lift his head all the way without colliding with equipment or banging his skull on the roof. The only position he can find to take up that doesn’t obstruct something important-looking hung overhead or from the walls is an awkward half-crouch in the tiny corner behind the passenger seat, with one of his knees crushed right up against the frame of the stretcher.
Thank goodness for all those squats. This will burn tomorrow, but he’ll survive.
…at least, he hopes so. He has a moment of doubt when they slam the back doors shut with a sound like a sledgehammer falling on the axis of the universe.
“Mustang-” Ed croaks out, writhing against the restraints; the tendons in his neck stand out in ever-tightening ropes, which is going to wreak merry hell on the aggravated nerve in his shoulder, and Roy can actually see his pulse beating far too fast in his jugular.
The lead EMT has grabbed his forearm and raised a needle. Because of course she has.
“Is that strictly necessary?” Roy manages.
He can’t really blame her for the venomous Don’t you dare fucking tell me how to do my job in my own workplace vibe-he can only imagine how often she has to put up with variations on that theme from people with all kinds of intentions. Probably it’s mostly men.
The engine turns over, and they all lurch to the side as the driver drags this whole mad caravan around the cul-de-sac and back out towards the road.
“Needles,” Roy says, raising his voice over the noise, torn between feeling helplessly chagrined under her gaze and fiercely protective as Ed breathes harshly, straining to twist his spine up off of the stretcher. “He’s-really-”
“It’s a sedative,” she says. Her hand’s barely wavered despite the rocking of their entire environment as they rumble over potholes and divider lines alike.
“Don’t need to be f-fucking sedated-” Ed reaches for Roy with both hands, and it’s not even voluntary; Roy clasps them tight. A small, guiltily-flitting thought: is Ed even going to remember this later? Will he appreciate it? Does it mean anything to him, or does he just need someone to cling to, and Roy’s the closest physical being that’s not trying to stick him with a hypodermic? “Need-fucking-opioids. Something. ’M not allergic to iodine if shots’re all you got-fuck’s sake, just-please-”
If he wrings Roy’s hands any harder, they’re going to have two patients to deal with. He tries to convey that to the head EMT with nothing more than a plaintive look-he’s been told his puppy eyes are irresistible and legendary. Admittedly, he said it to himself in the mirror while he was practicing them, but it should still count.
“Christ,” the EMT mutters. “Jared, hook him to the fentanyl-”
And then Jared is clamping the little diamond-shaped inhaler mask down over Ed’s face, and Ed’s eyelids flutter, and Roy can’t fight the instinct to touch his hair-half just to make sure he’s still here, still solid, still moving, breathing, real. It’s soaked in sweat, no damn surprise; what can he do but card his fingers gently through the damply-hanging bangs and try not to topple over as the ambulance swings around another corner so fast it feels like they’re on a roller coaster?
Would it be rude to ask how far it is? He’s already imposing just by being here; he shouldn’t push his luck. Ed has his eyes squeezed shut now; he dropped the right hand to his side, but the left stays wrapped around Roy’s, tight enough to tingle. Funny, in a manner of speaking. He always figured on some electricity the first time they held hands, but he didn’t think it’d be like this.
He rubs with the pad of his free hand’s thumb-very gently-at the little spot right above Ed’s collarbone, which is one of about six hundred places tension goes to lurk and settle and multiply.
“Hey,” he says, as softly as he dares with all the ambient rattling and the rush of traffic around them. “Is that any better?”
Stupid question-not the question itself, really, but the fact that he asked when Ed’s got a thick layer of plastic between his mouth and an audible answer.
Ed responds, though, with what looks like either a concentrated spasm of pain or a slight nod. Roy withdraws his hand from the world’s most beautiful clavicle; is he making it worse? He always does; he always is; surely-
To be fair, though, if he provides nothing but constant exacerbation of the existing pain, that begs the question of why Ed is still paying him decent money for the privilege. Ed is-to understate matters perhaps more grossly than he ever has since that time in the first grade when he began a book report with “The universe is pretty big, actually”-extremely intelligent and unerringly logical. He wouldn’t shell out cash for something exclusively unpleasant, and since he seems to be physiologically incapable of receiving Roy’s increasingly neon and flashing I would like to have all of the sex with you please signals, it’s not like there are any noticeable fringe benefits to turning up and getting his miserable muscles and bones beaten up and realigned. It must not be all bad. Roy must be contributing something of benefit to Ed’s existence in order to have remained a part of it for as long as he has. Few fools would call Ed a quitter, but he’d go to another guy with a gold-stickered certificate on the wall if he really believed that three months of bitching and moaning under Roy’s hands and tutelage had been a total waste.
Curious.
Curious, and encouraging.
But it doesn’t change this. It doesn’t change now. It doesn’t change Jared and the one who wants to put a scalpel through Roy’s testicles monitoring Ed’s vital signs like he’s about to go into shock or a coma or cardiac arrest-
And who’s to say he won’t?
Roy aside, Roy’s whole being irrelevant-how bad is this? And how much worse is it likely to get?
There isn’t much more time to mull over it while Ed strangles the hell out of his hand: momentarily, they screech to a halt-which Roy had sort of assumed was something that only happened in movies; but he’d also sort of figured that was true of approximately half of what’s taken place today, so he supposes that’s fair.
The paramedics have flung open the doors and started wheeling the gurney down onto the pavement before Roy’s righted himself from tumbling backwards and slamming into the back of the driver’s seat when they stopped.
He scrambles down the suddenly empty bay of the ambulance and down off of the bumper to follow, but they’re already at the entrance to the E.R.-Ed’s left hand flutters upward briefly, like a flag of surrender, as the automatic doors hiss open, and then they barrel through.
Roy forces his startled body directly from a standstill to a run, but they’re too damned efficient-which he never thought he’d say of a government-funded anything, but that doesn’t change how fast they race through the lobby towards the nearest hallway-
The cavalcade thunders towards the front desk, and the receptionist glances up and calls “Elric?” after the paramedics as they rattle past. A female doctor with a long brown ponytail steps out, looking up from her clipboard and sidestepping in the nick of time.
“Hi, Ed,” she says.
The terrible groan Ed musters sounds almost like a greeting. Sort of. Not really at all.
“Wait!” Roy attempts. “I’m his-”
Doctor? Sort-of-chiropractor? Massage therapist, wink wink?
“Forty-five’s open,” the real doctor-hell, that still rankles just a bit-says, gesturing to the indefatigable paramedics. “I’ll be there in a second. Can I help you, sir?”
The last to him-with a side-dish of blocking the hallway so that he can’t just follow them.
She’s five feet and hardly any spare, but her eyes remind him of Riza’s, and that alone is sufficient to stop him in his tracks.
“I’m with him,” Roy says, trying to point without putting a hair into her personal space. “Can I-”
“Are you a family member?” she asks.
“No,” he says. He clears his throat. “But I’m-”
“Wait over there,” she says, nodding over to the excruciatingly un-ergonomic chairs bolted to each other and the wall. Roy’s spine tingles with a premonition of misery just looking at them. “Someone will come tell you when you can see him.”
He tries again. “But I-”
She eyes him.
Have a certificate dies on his tongue.
“We’ll take care of him,” she says. “Sit.”
It’s not persuasion so much as coercion by way of vague fear of intense retribution, but he supposes they’re more or less the same in the end anyway.
He crosses the room and sits.
At least she doesn’t smile or roll her eyes or gloat or anything before she turns on her heel and strides off down the hall, hopefully to alleviate Ed’s incomprehensible pain.
Roy crosses his legs and puts one elbow on the armrest. The armrest is made of textured plastic, so putting his elbow on it hurts. He puts his arm down and crosses his legs the other way. He scoots back until he’s sitting right at the very back of the chair seat, which should theoretically reduce the strain which his instinct to slouch would inflict. He forces himself to sit upright. He uncrosses his legs; that’ll strain his hips. He folds his arms over his chest instead. He swallows. He sighs.
He tugs his phone out from where it has gamely endured this whole adventure inside the waistband of his pants, having gotten chummy with Ed’s house-keys and miraculously clung to him despite all of the turbulence and turmoil during the ambulance ride. He just wants to storm down that hall and help, but-
What he knows how to do hasn’t fixed this yet. He’s no damn use right now.
He glances at the time on his phone screen, then taps his first speed-dial and waits while the line rings twice.
“What do you need?” Riza says.
“Only your affection,” he says. “Possibly your respect.”
“Uh huh,” she says.
“I need a favor,” he says.
“Hang on,” she says. “I’m paralyzed with shock.”
He sets his jaw. “I’m in the emergency room.”
Silence, for a long and-guilty as it makes him feel-vindicating second.
“Is everything all right?” she asks, much more gently.
“It’s Ed,” he says. “I-I mean, I think… we’ll have to see. I don’t think it’s life-threatening, but it’s not… good.”
“What can I do?” she asks.
“I’m going to stay here as long as I have to,” he says, narrowly resisting the urge to say that loud enough for the receptionist to hear. “Can you look after Blanche for me?”
He still stands by his assertion that it’s the best dog name in the history of domesticated animals. She is, after all, as he explained to Riza in gleeful jubilation after he hit on the thought, a female golden retriever-a Golden Girl. It’s brilliant. He’s brilliant. At the pregnant pause, he said so, and Riza said I’m glad that you think so, because she hates him and enjoys his suffering.
But in a loving way.
Which is why it’s no surprise that she says, “Of course.”
Too late, he remembers that she’s one of those terrible, awful, conniving carnivore people that he has to set out conditions for, and he adds, as fast as he can make his mouth form the syllables, “But don’t feed her any m-”
“What?” she says. “Roy, you’re breaking up; I can’t hear a word you’re saying. Text me later and let me know what happens, okay? Good luck; goodbye!”
She hangs up on him.
The witch.
That’s what happens when you eat meat, isn’t it? All of the carcinogenic proteins and the poisonous preservatives worm their way into your bloodstream and slowly erode your soul.
It’s incredible that the WHO has only implicated bacon so far.
He shakes his head slowly to mourn the tragic loss of her quintessence, and then he taps over to the single most soothing of all of his mindless fair-etrade puzzle games.
He spares a glance for his battery, which is somehow in the red zone even though he charged this ridiculous piece of diversionary circuitry last night.
The universe is testing him today, and no mistake. He breathes in, holds it for a count of five, and exhales slowly. He sets the phone down on his thigh and counts out his chakra beads. He is going to handle this with grace and calm and peaceful serenity if it kills him.
[Part 2]