FMA -- Loud and Clear: Another One of Those Heartbreak Songs, Chapter 1 (1/2)
Title: Loud and Clear: Another One of Those Heartbreak Songs
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Ed (with Al/Win)
Rating: R
Word Count: 60,700 (17,700 in this chapter)
Warnings: please see note below!!
Summary: Sometimes the tall, dark, handsome ones are poisoned underneath.
Author's Note:SWEET BABY JESUS, wow. The next two chapters come with a huge host of warnings: general creepiness that starts out insidiously subtle and segues into an openly abusive relationship; borderline dub-con; and stalking. AWWWWWRIGHT. :| No, seriously - if any of that is likely to be unsettling to you, now that you know what it is, you aren't going to miss anything plot-wise if you wait this out / only read the present-day parts / skip ahead to chapter 3 once it's up. Please, please don't endure any hurt on account of this silly fic, okay? ♥
[MORE NOTES!](P.S. If anybody would like me to tag anything additional up here, let me know; and I'll add it in.)
Also: this installment of the series ends in a cliffhanger that makes everything up until now look like fun and games. :'D I'm hoping to be able to keep adding one chapter per weekend all the way through this fic and the next one, but there are some editing holes I haven't filled in just yet, and I have some conventions scattered around through the summer, so there's a chance I'll get delayed. Bear with me! And/or just wait until it's all posted and then marathon the whole thing, as you prefer. XD
Final also: this fic would not have survived the first major block without Mthaytr, whose help and cheerleading was more instrumental than I can put into words; and you probably wouldn't be getting it today if it wasn't for Xyriath. We have an amazing community, guys. Please cherish your authors, and your artists, and your gif-makers, and your commenters, and your friends. ♥
After-final also since I can't shut up: the title of this one is jacked from Rob Thomas's "Something to Be", because with this fic I have now titled over 300 on AO3 alone, and any time I don't repeat myself verbatim is a win. :'D
RECAP: We last left off with present-day!Ed about to meet up with Hohenheim in London between academic commitments; and we left past-tense!Ed about to tell Roy the story of how Kimblee fucked everything up, so that Roy wouldn't try to take Kimblebee as a client.
LOUD AND CLEAR
PART 4: ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE HEARTBREAK SONGS
CHAPTER 1, PART I
Paddington Station on a Saturday morning is significantly more populous than he expected. At least the rush of humanity here and there and everywhere-dense streams of people parting around the kiosks, feeding out onto the platforms and dribbling up through the doors-is distracting him from the fact that he’s waiting for his father’s train.
He texted Roy a couple minutes ago Do you want a paddington bear? they have them in like sixteen sizes. you think Elicia’s at that stage where stuffed animals have gone from uncool to cool again?, but it’s probably too early back home for Roy to respond. Hopefully the phone didn’t wake him up.
Except-wait a goddamn second; Ed’s being an idiot, and the tossing and turning and jet-lag-dodging he’s been doing the last few nights is catching up. First off, it’s ten in the morning here, which means it’s two in the morning Roy’s time. Second, Roy’s already got a backlog of messages from him from yesterday-the trial started Roy’s-time-Friday, so he was pretty much out of commission all day, probably using his precious court recesses to pore over more material instead of dealing with messages like I guess if you’re going to open a kitschy souvenir store in London the least you could do is give it a bad pun name like ‘Tchotchke to the City’ from his nerdy-ass absentee boyfriend. And then he was probably so dead-tired when he got home that he just couldn’t find the energy to answer them then. Which is fine. Ed totally understands that. It’s a completely valid set of circumstances which does not in any way constitute an emergency, and Ed is not going to worry about it.
He’s not.
Here he is, not worrying. Obviously.
Shit.
They have a Krispie Kreme store here. Sometimes globalization blows Ed’s mind. He’s not quite brave enough to hurl processed sugar and/or mediocre fake-ass-“coffee” into the roiling mess of agitated acid that is his stomach right now, though. Much as it would be weirdly sort of satisfying-almost poetic, really-to vomit all over Hohenheim the instant he arrives, it’s probably not worth the pain and the mess and the humiliation.
The doughnut smell is so damn generally tempting, though, that he fords the flood of people and gets into the line-the queue, the queue-at one of the little food carts instead. They’re asking for a pound fifty for a cup of tea, which is kind of silly given that you could get a box of ten of the same store-brand teabags for about that cost, but it’ll be hot, and it’ll fortify him for when the train from Oxford duly arrives. According to the signage, it’s due on time-ten more minutes; one more woman queued up ahead of him; two pound coins jingling in his pocket as he clenches and unclenches his hand.
Despite the fact that the lady before him orders, like, eight different pastries and a complicated coffee-well, as thoroughly established, “coffee”-this is shaping up to be the longest ten-minute stretch of Ed’s entire life. He’s not including the interminable limbo while Al was in the PICU after the thing in the factory; that doesn’t count as normal time. That was straight-up fucking Purgatory. That was a sampler plate of what eternity tastes like for sinners-presuming that any of that stuff is remotely credible, which is sort of difficult to believe; but on nights like that, Ed was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt if there might be anything that could help him.
With tea in hand, he wanders over into a little cutesy accessories store filled to the brim with impulse buys. Maybe something in here will be more Elicia’s style. She keeps talking about wanting to travel the world and take pictures of everything; if it wasn’t the middle of the school-year, he would’ve slipped her mom a check for the airfare and brought her with him for this trip.
Her style has shifted from sort of a girly-lite-goth to a subtly-vintage-with-a-hint-of-punk, which is making this a bit of a challenge. He has to do better than a T-shirt with a glittery outline of a red phone booth, though; what he really needs is…
Classy black chandelier-y earrings that come in a package blazoned with a bunch of Union Jacks, for a start. Maybe he can find her some Sherlock Holmes merchandise later; she’s still got Al’s copy of Doyle’s complete works stashed in her bedroom.
He manages to negotiate the purchase item, the cup of tea, and the bills to buy it by playing musical hands on the counter by the register, and then he tucks the earrings into one of the inner pockets of his laptop bag to keep them safe. He almost forgets the tea, which is a pretty clear sign of how much he needs it, and then he strolls back out to the platform, and…
Finally, finally, the train rumbles up, hissing steam.
And that’s when his heart clambers up his throat and sticks there, throbbing like a raw wound.
He tries to count the lengths of his breaths-tries to hold the most recent gasp of air for one, two, three, four full seconds before he lets it out; tries to hear Roy’s soft voice in his ear; tries to feel Roy’s soft hands on his back, his shoulders, his neck.
His heartbeat jitters around behind his collarbones like it’s come loose off a string, and his whole chest tightens up around it like it’s trying not to let the pulse escape-but so far he’s still breathing; he has to focus on that.
He stumbles backwards a few steps to move the fuck out of the way as people start pouring off of the train and filtering through the turnstiles. He looks intently up at the high, arching iron frame of the ceiling, bowing on both sides like a… curly bracket. Like a curly bracket. For notation. Just like that.
He shoves his left hand into his pocket, fumbles until he gets a hold of his phone, and squeezes it tight between his fingers. Al and Roy are both just a long-distance phone call away.
And Al won’t judge him. Al won’t hold this against him-whatever happens. Al just wants him to be happy; that’s all. Al wants him to do what he wants. And if that’s scrabbling for closure? Fine. If that’s turning his back right now and walking out of this train station and going and having a scone somewhere and never seeing his father’s face again? Al’ll still love him just as much.
He has nothing to lose.
And that’s liberating.
He breathes out slowly-slow and as steadily as he can-and drags his gaze back down to the eddy of humanity spilling from the train.
Hohenheim’s just fitting himself through the turnstile, frowning slightly as the pole in front of him resists the pressure of his hand instead of rotating properly. The nearby attendant sighs soundlessly and smacks a button, and it gives way, and Hohenheim smiles and edges through. He pushes at his glasses with a fingertip, glances around himself, and-
Only smiles wider as his eyes find Ed.
Ed’s tried a thousand times to calculate it, but he’s never figured out the optimal distance for offering someone a verbal greeting when they’ve already seen you. There are too many variables-ambient noise; air quality; how much spit’s still in your mouth after a narrow aversion of a streak of panic.
“Hey,” he says when Hohenheim gets kind of close.
It sounds weird. It sounds fucked up. It sounds like the sort of thing you’d say to someone that you know.
And at the same time, he can hear the guardedness in his own damn voice. It’s not Hey, Dad. It’s not much of anything. It’s deliberately noncommittal, because he doesn’t know what the hell to say.
“Good morning!” Hohenheim says brightly.
It’s a damn good thing Ed didn’t have a doughnut, because he’d actually puke.
“I was thinking on the ride up about what you might like to do,” Hohenheim says. He nudges the bridge of his glasses again even though they haven’t slipped at all. “Is it your first time here?”
That’s it-the thing about Hohenheim that makes Ed feel absolutely fucking gutted every single time.
He acts like they’ve been close all these fucking years, talks like there’s no lost love between them, and then oh-so-fucking blithely asks about shit he’d already know if he’d ever even tried to make that true.
“Yeah,” Ed says. “I did a little bit of the touristy kind of stuff the last couple days.”
“Have you seen Kensington Gardens?” Hohenheim asks. When Ed shakes his head, Hohenheim extends a hand to point. “We could walk from here, if you’d like-it’s really very pleasant.”
Ed swallows. Bitter brambles all the way down, plummeting into his stomach and splashing in the tea he’s been chugging.
“Sure,” he says.
“Wonderful,” Hohenheim says, sounding like he means it. “I think it’ll be very nice to have a little stroll and just… catch up.”
“Yeah,” Ed says. Hohenheim gestures, then starts leading the way, and Ed must still have the cup of tea in his hand, but he can’t seem to feel it as he follows. “Okay.”
It had been just about two and a half years prior to the day Roy walked into Has Beans and asked for a coffee and ruined Ed’s life in the best possible way. There’d been one last big bookstore in town-Roy probably didn’t remember; the Borders had gone spectacularly out of business, and then a family with too much money and too much time on their hands had figured that they could make bank if they just reused the shelves and the fixtures and opened their own place for secondhand books and knickknacks and shit. There was a little coffee shop space on the first floor, and since they were perpetually understaffed because they’d hired a grand total of about three desperate kids, Ed was constantly getting shuffled over from the register to the kiosk and learning how to pull an espresso shot on the fly. It worked out for the best in the long run, given that the experience definitely helped him get the barista job-but… The point was, the place was kind of a disaster, somewhat redeemed by the simple fact that it was the only damn bookstore on the whole downtown stretch.
The other advantage was that, because of their incredible inability to staff the store properly at any time, ever, Ed could pretty much ask for the hours he wanted, and they were always available. He usually just sort of penned himself in on the schedule around his classes and his lab time; and they were always glad to have him and scrounging to fill the gaps; and the pay wasn’t total shit; and he got to take home pastries at the end of the day relatively regularly, so Al always got a nice breakfast.
One Thursday night, when he’d been working there for just about four months, he was shelving a crap-ton of textbooks they’d gotten dirt-cheap from a publisher that was going out of business and marked up halfway to hell. The Reynolds were good at that shit; they were born and bred scavengers no matter how nice they dressed. They mostly knew it, too, and Ed kind of admired their weird sort of finesse about it.
In any case, he was in the history section with his arms full of huge-ass hardcover tomes, and his shoulder was starting to throb, but he was pretty sure the Reynolds dodged their workman’s comp shit semi-illegally so that they’d pay less taxes, and he was thinking about the homework he still had for tomorrow when he got home.
So when someone said “Excuse me” in a weirdly kind of nice voice-smooth, smooth voice; liquid, like ink more than honey-he just about jumped out of his skin.
“Sorry,” he managed, and then the guy-whose hair was even inkier than his voice, and fell in this incredible whip of a ponytail; and who had the most startling stormcloud blue-gray eyes that Ed had ever seen-said “No, I’m sorry; can I help you with-”
That was when the balance tipped, and Ed dropped the textbooks all over the floor.
“Crap,” he said, crouching, and the guy knelt to help him, and he said, “Don’t worry, I got it, it’s fine,” and the guy said “No, no, I insist,” and then their hands kept meeting over books, and Ed blushed scarlet, and the guy gave him this smile like a satisfied snake.
For a genius, Ed was about the slowest learner of anyone he fucking knew.
But God, if that red flag didn’t look just a little like a blanket.
He cleared his throat and got to his feet with the books, managed a “Thank you,” and then choked out a “Can I help you find anything today?”
“I hope so,” the guy said. “I’m looking for anything you might have on the natural sciences.”
“Sure thing,” Ed said. He put the evil fucking history books down on one of the display tables. “Sciences are right over here. Any discipline in particular?”
The guy was looking at Ed’s free lanyard from the biochem department’s Christmas party, which he’d hung his employee badge on. “How terribly fortunate that I’ve stumbled upon someone who actually knows what they’re talking about,” he said. “Can you recommend me anything specific to organic chemistry?”
The way the guy’s eyes kept lingering on his and then darting down along the lines of his face-then to the triangle of throat and collarbones where the first few buttons of his black Oxford were open-then-further down than that-
Ed could be kind of oblivious, but he wasn’t stupid.
“Well,” he said, fumbling for the words, which were tumbling out of his grasp just like those fucking history books. “I mean, I-sort of.”
The guy just smiled again.
Store policy-slash-tradition dictated that Ed was supposed to stay on the floor and send the customer off with his pile of science literature, and somebody else would check him out at the register. There was a weird miasmatic sort of feeling rising in Ed’s chest about it-a strange combination of disappointment and relief.
He had to shake it off. Fucking history books weren’t gonna shelve themselves, and his problem sets weren’t gonna do themselves, and his life wasn’t going to keep chugging along unless he fucking pushed it every inch of the way.
He latched his eyes onto the textbooks’ covers and didn’t watch the guy walk off towards the stairs.
On Saturday-as with practically every Saturday-Ed was stationed at the register, in the midst of what he and Dolch had unofficially named the Dawn-to-Dusk Murder Shift, though they abbreviated it to DDMS in front of the Reynolds. Dolch was the one who ended up helping him get the Has Beans job later on, because he and Marta went way back, and had apparently, like, dated once back when they were in high school, before she realized she wasn’t really into guys at all. Dolch was very specific on that, like Ed would have accused him of not being man enough or some shit when Ed had about the single least heterosexual love life track record of anyone he knew.
Anyway, they were on DDMS, and it was ten in the morning or something, and Ed was stickering the shit out of some books and trying not to hear the intercom music, and Dolch elbowed him in the ribs. Not gently. Dolch had what Al had once called “occasional enthusiasm-related boundary confusion”.
“That guy was in here yesterday,” Dolch said. “He was looking for you.”
Ed knew who it was before he glanced over. The guy was really-striking. Not, like, damn-I’d-tap-that-fine-piece-of-ass-if-I-didn’t-think-I’d-burn-my-hand hot, but attractive. Like a magnet. Sort of captivating. Something about the ease of his stride and the casual slant of his shoulders-something about the hooded eyes and the thin, almost-caustic smile. Something so calm and disaffected that it made just the concept of garnering his interest seem… challenging. Exciting. Addictive.
Ed just sort of wanted to affect him, was all.
Maybe he didn’t think all that right at the start. Maybe it was way simpler than that, and he was just projecting backwards, with the perspective that time and a hell of a lot of thought had lent him.
The guy was good-looking, and he was looking at Ed. In the miserable, toxic wake of how Greg had replaced him with more convenient bodies-in the wash of bitter self-loathing and carved-out loneliness; in the poisonous fury at the betrayal and the pathetic collapse of the defeat-that felt… kind of… nice. Kind of… promising. Like maybe he wasn’t just fucking trash to be crumpled up and tossed out after all; like maybe people might not hate looking at him; like maybe there was hope for him offering his heart to someone and coming away with anything other than heel prints on it by the end. Like at least he wasn’t everybody’s last resort. Like someone might want him, only him. Like someone might appreciate the sight of him enough to size him up in his stupid bookstore-peon quasi-uniform.
He wanted to be wanted. He wanted to be loved, for fuck’s sake-cherished and cooed over, sure, fine; he just wanted to be listened to; he wanted to be held tight and kissed softly when he was so fucking worn out he couldn’t stand. Al couldn’t give him that. Al was stuck with him, anyway, and it was the best kind of necessary codependence anybody could’ve imagined, but Al’s affection for him was a given. It was owed, and he gave back every iota that he got.
From somebody else, though-
From somebody who wanted to see him happy and also wanted to get him naked-
Just-
Was it too much to ask? Was that his fucking problem? Was he demanding too much from the indifferent universe, and that was why it kept fucking slapping him down?
Maybe he needed to learn some damn humility and teach himself some gratitude, and… and something good might come his way eventually. Right? It was stupid to try to hurry it, and he didn’t deserve anything; he didn’t have a right to any of his stupid, hazy-warm little fantasies; people were dying in droves in countries he couldn’t pin on a map, and his mother had died not much older than he was now. Life was not fair; the world was not kind; anyone who couldn’t cope with that was a child.
He’d be fine.
He’d get through it, like he always did.
He looked away from the guy in the store even though Dolch elbowed him again, even less-subtly this time. He looked down at the register keys and curled his hands into fists on the counter and didn’t fucking beg for the attention.
That was a step in the right direction, wasn’t it?
…except.
Except that the guy came in again on Sunday afternoon, and Ed didn’t have the DDMS warning system digging a pointy joint into his ribs-he just looked up from the register, and the guy was standing there, smiling at him.
His breath stuck, and his heart jittered hard and wouldn’t stay still no matter how carefully he tried to breathe.
“Hi,” he said, fighting to keep his voice level, and maybe it was a war he’d lose, but so far- “Finding everything okay?”
“Nearly everything,” the guy said. “Could I trouble you for your educated opinion?”
He had two genetics books-a newer and an older-with contradictory passages on the same topic.
Well, shit, Ed hadn’t sacrificed all these years of his life and hours of sleep for nothing, right? He pushed past the weird fluttery sensation in his stomach-not butterflies, really, unless butterflies had gotten a whole lot stickier since he was a kid-and started in on how the reason the older book was still in print was that it was just better-researched, honestly, and more reputable all around. Conventional wisdom was starting to favor the newer results just because people were loud about them, but that was basically a freaking myth-and if you looked at the footnotes about the study they were citing, their sample size was dangerously small, and if that didn’t turn you off of their results, their smarmy use of certainty words instead of qualifiers was another thing, and…
And the guy was just-looking at him.
“Thank you,” he said. “That’s very useful.”
“Sure,” Ed said.
The guy inclined his head just slightly towards Ed’s badge. “May I call you Edward?”
Fuckin’ too late now. “Ed’s okay.”
“Ed, then,” the guy said. “I think I’d like to buy this one.” He laid one long-fingered hand on Ed’s pick. “And do you know if there’s going to be anyone serving over in the coffee shop soon? There really isn’t anything more pleasant than a cup of coffee and some time to read.”
Ed couldn’t argue with that. He attempted to convince their ornery fucking scanner-which somebody, he suspected Dolch, had Sharpied little eyes on, because it looked like a brontosaurus’s head and neck-to read the barcode. “I can run over there and do that for you. Gotta check you out separately, though-sorry. You’re looking at $22.58 here.”
“Delightful,” the guy said, and his hands were really something; Ed couldn’t help watching the way he flipped through the bills in his wallet to pull out thirty dollars in cash.
He met Ed’s eyes the whole time as he handed them over, and then again as Ed counted the change out into the palm of his hand. It was-what? What the fuck was it? Ed was getting goosebumps, and his blood was running so hot, and he could hear his heartbeat resonating back against the walls of his skull.
“Righto,” he said, offering up the receipt. The guy plucked it out of his fingers so fucking deliberately, eyes on him, eyes always on him- “If you wanna just follow me… What can I get going for you over at the café?”
“Just coffee,” the guy said as Ed led the way over. “Black.”
“You bet,” Ed said, slipping back behind the counter and throwing an apron on. He washed his hands and tried not to think about the fact that the towel by the sink had to be a bacterial bar mitzvah after hanging there slightly damp for God-only-knew-how-long. “You mind if I make a new pot? It’ll take a little while, but I dunno how long this’s been sitting here.”
“Not at all,” the guy said, settling at the closest little wooden table and stretching out his legs. He laid one ankle across the other and folded his hands on top of the book, and then he just… watched. “That’s very kind of you.”
Ed kind of wanted to say Well, no, I get paid for this shit, but he couldn’t afford to lose this job. “No problem. It’ll be just a minute.”
“Take your time,” the guy said, and the elegant angles of his body did something funny to Ed’s throat.
Dolch’s elbow reunited with Ed’s ribcage Tuesday night. “Your guy’s back.”
“He’s not my guy,” Ed said.
“Dude,” Dolch said. “He was in here yesterday, ‘Might I inquire’-ing if you were around.”
Just as Ed was about to say Him looking at me like spiders look at flies does not make him ‘mine’, the guy pushed the front doors open and strode on through.
“Hi,” Ed said. “How are you tonight?”
“Excellent,” the guy said. His eyes flicked briefly to Dolch, but you could tell that everything but Ed was window-dressing, and he didn’t give a shit. “And you?”
“Doin’ all right,” Ed said, which was more or less the case. “Anything I can help you find?”
“Do you carry anything on neurology?” the guy asked.
Ed gave him a smile and turned to the computer to click into the inventory. “Let’s find out.”
Every night that week that Ed was working, the guy came in and asked for a science book-then cracked it open and started asking seriously intelligent questions. Ed went back and forth trying to figure out what the game was-did he really just want someone to talk obscure knowledge trivia with, or was it something… other… than that?
Either way, the dude was spending a small fucking fortune on books-the technical shit wasn’t cheap, and he was getting something brand-new every other day. Either he had a hell of a lot of money to burn, or he was seriously desperate for… whatever it was that he wanted. Whatever he was here for, over and over and over again.
He was sort of nice to talk to, though, weirdly enough. At first it was just that Ed didn’t have a choice except to do the polite-customer-conversation-small-talk thing, but then it was-better than that. The science stuff was really good, because the guy was smart, not to mention articulate as hell. He really got it, which was more than you could say for most people who tried to dabble in just about every scientific discipline that was making headlines these days. And he was curious, too, and not a big douchebag about it when he didn’t know something-he was genuinely interested in learning about shit. Ed liked that. Kind of a lot.
And-more and more and more-it seemed like he was genuinely interested in Ed. Not just in eyeballing him from the stationery section anymore, either; he’d… ask questions. Good questions, pleasant questions-how Ed’s day was going, what he was studying, what had made him pick this field, this school (“because of course you must have had all of them groveling at your feet, with a mind like yours”), this part of town-
And Ed had said something about Al somewhere, and something about his car, and a couple things about where he grew up, and it was only towards the end of the week that he realized-with a feeling like surfacing from warm water-that he didn’t know the first fucking thing about this guy.
On Friday night, the guy came in a few minutes before eight. It was starting to get kind of… exciting, waiting for him, wondering what topic he’d be interested in next. For bonus points, he was practically singlehandedly keeping this place in business.
By eight-fifteen, they’d found him a collection of transcripts of lectures at an interdisciplinary engineering conference, which they took back down to the registers so Ed could ring him up.
“When does your shift end tonight?” the guy asked, handing over cash.
“Ten,” Ed said as he took it.
“Excellent,” the guy said. He said that a lot. But not in a Wayne’s World way at all. “Can I buy you a drink afterwards?”
Ed was halfway through counting change, and his mind ground to a full and complete stop, with hands and arms flailing furiously outside of the ride. “What?”
“After your shift,” the guy said calmly, “would you meet me at the Ace of Spades so that I can buy you a drink?”
Ed swallowed. He looked at the money in his hand, then the money in the drawer, trying to remember how much switching around he still had to do between them. Had the guy given him two twenties, or a fifty? Just as pertinently, what the fucking fuck was going on?
“Um,” he said. “S-sure. Yeah.” A furtive glance confirmed that the guy had his thin, pleased smile firmly in place, and heat rushed into Ed’s cheeks. “It’ll-take me a couple minutes to get there. You’d be waiting a while.”
“I don’t mind,” the guy said.
Ed tried out a grin, aiming for carefree and roguish and adventurous or some shit. “Okay. Cool.”
“Fifteen forty-seven,” the guy said.
Ed blinked.
“My change,” the guy said. “It’s fifteen forty-seven.” The smile was back. “You’re really very fetching when you’re flustered.”
That turned Ed’s face the color and temperature of marinara sauce in point-two seconds flat. “I-oh, God. Uh. Thanks. Um. Here.”
The guy laughed-a soft, light, melodious kind of a sound. Smooth and understated and utterly entrancing, like everything about him. He took his change, and his fingertips grazed Ed’s way more than was remotely necessary, and his eyes never left Ed’s face. “Yes, quite like that.”
Was Ed an attention whore for liking this? Was he vain for feeling-what? Flattered? Validated?
Shit.
“Jeez,” he said, fumbling to tear the guy’s receipt off without shredding the fucking thing. “Um-okay. I’ll head over there at ten, I guess. Um. You gonna be inside, or…?”
It wasn’t exactly a dive bar, but all bars sort of made Ed antsy, so he wasn’t exactly thrilled about the idea of wandering in alone.
Maybe that was a good thing-a good sign. Maybe he needed to shake his life the fuck up, change something, rework and rewrite and rebuild and do something different to jar himself out of this rut and feel like a human fucking being again.
“Why don’t I give you my cell number?” the guy said. “I can put it into your phone, if you like.”
Ed wasn’t sure he liked. He was sure, however, that this was gonna get awkward as shit if he didn’t hand his phone over, and he didn’t want to fuck it up this time; somebody was actively giving a shit about him for once, and it felt nice, and…
“Sure,” he said. He dragged it out of his pocket, tapped in his passcode, and then pushed it across the counter.
“Excellent,” the guy said. His gaze dipped, reluctantly it seemed, from Ed’s face to the phone screen. Unbelievable hands. Unbelievable fingers. “Call if you’re having trouble finding me, and then you can just stay put until I get there, hm?”
He pushed the phone back, and his eyes lifted slow, slow, slow until they latched onto Ed’s again.
“Yeah,” Ed managed. “Okay.”
“Perfect,” the guy said. He tucked his receipt into the front cover of the book. “I’ll see you soon, then.”
“Yeah,” Ed said again.
He watched the guy walk out the front doors and wondered what in the ever-loving fuck he thought he was doing.
…the dude had a pretty great ass, though.
Two hours later, Ed was standing on the sidewalk in front of Ace of Spades. His shoulder ached like hell from vacuuming upstairs as fast as humanly possible after close, and his head was throbbing a little bit on the off-beats of the nerve pain, apparently just for shits and giggles.
Ed liked alcohol. He liked taking the easy way out every now and then; he liked having a surefire recipe for filing the edge off of everything. He liked tripping his stupid brain in mid-frantic-scurry and forcing it to shut up. He liked how it made him funnier-made everything funnier-and how the world felt smaller and a little less cold when he had a stomach full of bubbles and a sticky-sweet film over the cruelest parts of his own fucking intellect.
Ed didn’t like bars.
He was pretty sure it was the concept more than the actual experience that made him so fucking leery that the doors of the Ace looked like a black hole right that second. He just… didn’t like the noise, didn’t like the too-loud laughter and the bad music and the shouted conversations that got muddier and muddier the more that people drank. He didn’t like the hazy eyes and the sharp elbows; he didn’t like the sense he always got that he was being watched from a dark corner by somebody who’d drowned their own inhibitions an hour ago. He didn’t like thinking about what people were capable of when they’d had too much. He didn’t like being in the middle of all that, in a wash of lost control, trying to preserve himself-protect himself-when his own faculties were numbed to shit the second he started to participate in the reason he was there.
Point was, he did his drinking at home. Bars made his skin crawl; bars made him feel small and lost and stupid and vulnerable and desperate. He couldn’t let himself be any of those things; all the shit he’d built up brick by brick would fucking crumble if he dropped his guard for a second.
Except… here he was anyway, ’cause some fucking stranger with nice hands and nice hair had smiled and asked.
Fuck.
He closed his eyes for a second, listening to the rattle of the leaves in the slight wind and the draw of his own breath into his lungs. It was just a building. It was just a building full of people, and he didn’t have to drink anything, and he didn’t owe anybody in there a goddamn thing. And he could kick any of their asses even if he’d had, like, a whole fifth of whiskey; they weren’t shit.
For fuck’s sake. He could do this. He owed it to himself to try-owed it to his pride and all the goddamn Everests he’d scaled to get here; to the people who supported him all the way; and to the maybe-half-a-chance at something awesome waiting for him just inside.
He squared his shoulders, dragged in a breath, let it out slow, and opened the door.
The cacophony of intoxicated chaos steamrolled him right off the bat, but he soldiered through it. He had to be cool. He had to be fucking cool; maybe this guy was into scientists, but nobody liked a loser.
Speaking of the guy, Ed’s quick and possibly slightly distressed search of the main barroom the instant he stepped in revealed no tall figure with a crisp white shirt and a brain-shorting fall of stark black hair. Where the fuck was he? Had he just set Ed up for a small and pointless prank or some shit? Was that what this was?
He had to play cool. If he just played fucking cool, he’d be fine; he’d be bulletproof-untouchable.
He sized up the room as he started towards the bar, fishing his phone out of his pocket again-it was, apparently, too much to hope for a text message telling him where the mystery guy was.
Although-speaking of, what the hell had he called himself when he was adding himself as a contact in Ed’s phone?
That was good; that gave him something to do with his hands. He thumbed his way down through the admittedly pretty fucking short list-the only reason there was any scrolling to do at all was that all the other lab members were in there, by order of Izumi-and kept one eye on the fluid shifting of the people on all sides.
There was one entry he’d never seen before: Soph Kimblee. What the hell kind of a name was that?
…then again, Ed had been told on more than one occasion that his own damn name sounded fake. And he’d gotten a hell of a lot of seriously unwanted attention for it right after Twilight came out.
There was an open segment of the bar, and he picked the seat exactly in the middle of it-buffer zone. Never hurt.
The bartender was a big guy with a broad forehead and broader forearms, which were blanketed in tats. He came over and raised an eyebrow.
Play it fucking cool; be ice; be Arctic-
“Your dragon is totally kickass,” Ed said, pointing at the one coiling downward from the guy’s elbow, with its head on his wrist so that the flames from its mouth could shoot out over the back of his hand.
“Thanks,” the guy said. “What can I get you?”
“Can I have a Coke for now?” Ed asked. “I’m-waiting for somebody.”
“Sure,” the guy said. “Two-fifty. Still need ID if you’re gonna sit there, though.”
Ed put his phone down on the driest part of the countertop in front of him and dug for his wallet. “Here.” Judiciously, he didn’t add the long rant about markups on diluted soda syrup and shit. Al probably knew that one by heart by now.
The bartender returned his driver’s license in favor of taking his three bucks, slipping off towards the register. Ed started a text to the new number.
hey i’m here can’t find you sorry
He looked at it for a minute. That was the fucking beautiful thing about text messages-you could think about what you wanted to say for as long as you liked before you sent the damn thing. No such luck on a phone call; real time required you to generate coherent responses on the fly. Plus you could manually lower yourself on someone’s list of priorities if you sent a text-texts weren’t urgent in the same way as an incoming call, and that took even more of the pressure off.
The barkeep brought him a glass of Coke and a coaster. After five long, time-killing sips on the straw, a text to Al that said nothing more or less than hi i’m at ace of spades with a guy from work don’t wait up but just in case i’m not back tomorrow morning call the cops love you kid <3, Ed sighed inwardly, navigated back to the newly-added number, and picked the button to dial it this time.
His throat went kind of dry, and his hands went kind of clammy, and he clutched the phone to his ear and chewed on his straw, scouring the room all the while. There weren’t exactly a whole lot of places to fucking hide-
The line caught on the third ring.
“Hello,” the guy’s voice said, buttery as hell.
“It’s me,” Ed managed. “Ed. From the bookstore.”
“Wonderful,” the guy said.
Uh… okay. “I’m here,” Ed said. “I’m on the right side of the bar.”
“I see you,” the guy’s voice said.
Ed twisted around, and-sure enough-the guy was standing off on the far side of the room directly behind him, lowering his phone with a slow smile and a small wave.
Why the fuck was Ed so fucking awkward all the time? What was it that other people did to fill the time gap between making eye contact and coming into earshot? Did it just not bother them? Was awkwardness just something you had to opt into by acknowledging its action potential?
More likely Ed was just-wired wrong. He always had been; odds were this wasn’t any different.
“Hope you haven’t been waiting long,” the guy-Soph-said, right as he got close enough to hear, just as Ed was starting to part his lips to blurt out something probably-stupid. The guy settled on the bar stool on Ed’s right and spread one hand on the bar. “What’s your poison?”
“I’m okay,” Ed said, gesturing with his elbow to his Coke. It was a fucking miracle that he managed not to knock the damn thing over for once.
“Nonsense,” the guy said. “My treat.”
Ed tried at a genial kind of smile. “It’s really okay.”
The guy’s other hand rose to brush something off of Ed’s shoulder-a touch so light it barely registered, and goosebumps chased Ed’s pulse all the way down his arm. “Come on. I insist.”
Soph Kimblee’s eyes were somehow bright and amused and fucking intense at the same time, and it made Ed’s stomach clench, and maybe… maybe he did just need to liquor himself up enough to relax, right? “I-okay. I’m already started on Coke; they can just put rum in the next one.”
The guy smiled and then half-turned to signal to the bartender with the rad tattoo, who dutifully returned. “Could you bring a rum and Coke for this charming young man-” Ed flushed hot and red to the very fucking tips of his fucking ears; didn’t this guy know they were in fucking public? “-and a vodka martini? Belvedere, if you’d be so kind.”
Ed waited for the deluge of homophobic rage, but it… never arrived. The bartender just sort of nodded and said “You want me to start a tab?”
“Please,” the guy said-and Ed was such a moron; he had a name.
Ed cleared his throat as soon as the bartender moved away. “So is… Is ‘Soph’ short for something?”
“Sophocles,” the guy said, smiling again.
“Fancy,” Ed said, trying to grin back. “You sure you can slum it with somebody named like me?”
Soph’s smile curved higher. “You have a king’s name,” he said, “and a prince’s aspect. What else could I ask for?”
Ed’s face was on fire again. You’d think he’d be used to it by now, but it was a mortifying shock every single goddamn fucking time.
“That,” Soph said, narrow smile parting for a gleam of teeth as he lifted his hand and touched two fingertips to Ed’s flaming cheek. “That is really rather beautiful.”
Naturally, the blaze under Ed’s skin escalated to three-alarm status at that. “Wh-at?”
Soph laughed, low and quiet, and his eyes glittered, and his fingertips traced down to Ed’s jaw. “You have such an expressive face. Surprise flatters you enormously.”
Ed wasn’t sure he would’ve called it surprise so much as-what? It wasn’t embarrassment, really; it wasn’t shame. He didn’t… really… know… what it was. Maybe there wasn’t a word for it. It was sort of a mush-pot of being pleased at the compliments without actually believing them at all, and a hyper-awareness of all the people around them, and a draw to the increasing allure of Soph’s thin little smile-the man looked like he could do amazing things with that mouth.
The rush of heart-pounding adrenaline at that thought definitely swirled some shame in with the endorphins. Apparently Ed was gunning for sex before they’d even had a fucking drink. Edward ‘Self-Respect’ Elric; that was him.
Their drinks clinked down on the counter, and Ed just about jumped out of his skin as the bartender’s shadow fell across them. Soph’s hand dropped gracefully away from his face, which sort of left his cheek tingling, like the fingerprints had left a mark-a brand-and everyone would know, now, who he belonged to.
That shouldn’t have been such a good thought-such a comforting thought. Being beholden to someone. Belonging; being someone’s belonging. Being owned; being claimed; being wanted, badly. But it was. He was just so fucking desperate.
Fuck.
Whatever-he was playing it cool. He was dry ice on a winter evening, and he was doing okay so far, and he was going to get through this, and it was fine.
So they… talked. Him and Soph. Soph had a way of tilting his head down just a little and looking up through his lashes, with his eyelids kind of low, and that should’ve looked lazy, but it was so fucking focused that it made Ed’s guts wobble in a seriously disconcerting way. The guy was still just so good to talk to-they went on about science for ages, and then Ed asked what Soph did for a living if advanced science discussions were his fucking hobby, and Soph said something about weapons tech, which was a little unsettling, but Ed had lab-friends who did things to test animals that would make most people vomit, so he tried not to judge.
There were a lot of drinks. Soph just kept-making this really graceful gesture with his hand, and the bartender would come and sweep away Ed’s empty glass and set down a new one, and Ed knew his words were starting to blur together at the edges a little bit, and he was starting to laugh a little too easily. He knew he should stop, but it felt nice-not thinking anything; not over-thinking anything; just… having fun. With a guy he’d just met, who kept smiling at him and touching his face and his arm and his hand and-once-his neck, and he probably shivered, and that should’ve been embarrassing as shit, but he just felt… floaty. Calm. Good.
Next thing he remembered, they were outside, and the streetlamps were bobbing around like fucking fairy lights-like will-o’-the-wisps-and he was saying “Shit, shit, I’m sorry, I had too much, I-?”, and then there was an arm around his shoulders.
Then his shoulders were against a wall-brick?-and it was dark, and then it was even darker because someone was kissing him, and he couldn’t see anything around them; there was a curtain of thick, dark hair, and he buried his fingers in it.
It was a good kiss, too-a kiss like a velvet dream; like a river of dark chocolate flooding its banks; like the mathematical average of heaven and hell, and he whimpered into it, and a beautiful voice laughed softly.
“You have had a bit too much, haven’t you?” it asked, and things were sort of tilting, and he wondered how many hours he had left before his digestive system would stage the full-scale rebellion. What time was it, anyway?
“Told my brother I’d get home,” he forced out-or something like it, something with words; maybe it was those words. “C’n you-I could-taxi, or-”
“Nonsense,” the lovely voice said. “I’ll take you. Come along.”
Like he could do much of fucking anything.
The arm was around him again, and even though his feet kept trying to tangle up and hurl him to the spinning sidewalk, somehow it supported him until he was looking at his distorted reflection in the shiny window of a car. The door was opened, and then he was guided down onto a really comfortable leather seat, and then he started fumbling for the seatbelt at the same time that a much more dextrous pair of hands reached for it, and they pushed his aside.
“Let me,” the voice said, and buckled him in, and then he was being kissed again, and he tried to rise up into it, but the shoulder-belt was sort of cutting into his throat. The one in his car was so frayed on the edge that it didn’t hurt anymore even when it hit him at an angle like that, and he shouldn’t’ve been thinking about seatbelts while he was kissing someone anyway; that was rude.
He didn’t want to be rude. He wanted to be lovable.
When the kiss receded, he tried to say so, but he heard it starting to come out in an incoherent mumble of backwards syllables and gave up partway through.
The door closed, and then the door on the other side opened, and then the car bounced just slightly-but enough to jar Ed’s nausea from a creeping-lurking thing into a predator-and then the engine roared too loud, and then…
Somehow he was letting himself into the lobby of their apartment building with his first key, and the second one kept swimming in his vision, and he staggered over to the elevator and managed to hit the up button on his third try. Was he alone again? He tried to turn around and check, and he almost fell on his ass; somehow his fucked-up reflexes resulted in an arm against the wall that steadied him a little. The elevator dinged real loud and then shuddered open, and he glared down at his feet and tried to make them carry him inside.
There was a sort of handrail-bar-thing on the wall, which he clung to while the elevator car lurched up and up and up to the eighth floor, then parted its doors again so that he could stumble out into the hallway. He seemed to be good at the stumbling thing, or at least good at gathering and maintaining momentum, judging by the fact that he stumbled out of the elevator and all the way across the hall and collided with the opposite wall at a fairly impressive speed.
What the fuck time was it? He’d gotten off work at… ten, right? He couldn’t’ve started drinking before ten thirty, after all that fucking around with his phone that he’d done before he’d even gotten to the rum. It had to be, what? One? Two? Didn’t they close the bars at two? Was that why they’d left? He couldn’t remember; either everything was swaying around him, or he was swaying, and everything else was staying obnoxiously still.
The math was vaguely comforting, though. Made him feel a tiny bit less like a dumbass piece of shit gallumphing down the hall at fuck-knows-o’-clock, probably about to garner some fucking complaints from the fucking neighbors that would make Al get all upset and shit, and-
And-
Where were his keys?
It was a miracle that their apartment was the one at the end of the hall, because he couldn’t seem to get his eyes to understand the numbers on the doors. Which was kind of ironic, given that the numbers in his head were having a stabilizing influence. He sort of wanted to laugh about that, but he had a weird premonition that if he opened his mouth for too long, he was gonna barf.
His stumble took him to the door-or, more specifically, into the door, as he lost his balance and sort of banged into it, and his whole fucking arm surged with violent pins-and-needles agony at the impact on his elbow, at which point he sagged down to the floor to cradle his forearm to his chest and make mournful noises to himself.
…it seemed like a pretty good idea at the time.
He really only had time for two distinct noises (sort of a “Mrrrr” and then a “Hnnuu”, each masterpieces in their own right) before the door opened, and he tipped over and ended up sprawled over the threshold, arm clutched beneath him.
“Ow,” he said.
“Oh, gosh,” Al said in a high voice. Because of course Al was waiting up for him, even though Ed had told him not to; of course he was; he always did; he got so worried, and Ed was such a shitty brother that he kept giving Al reasons to worry, and it was probably affecting Al’s sleep and his studies and his beautiful soul, and…
Ed might have been crying a little.
“Sweet mother of pearl,” Al said. His hands were on Ed’s shoulder, and the blurry jeans-colored things in front of Ed’s face might have been his knees. “Brother-are you-oh, gosh, Ed, you smell like a liquor store.”
“I feel like one,” Ed said.
“What?” Al said. “Um-never mind. Brother-c’mon, here, we’ll just-c’mon, you can sleep on the couch; we’ll get you a bucket. How are you feeling?”
“Gross,” Ed said.
“I’m shocked,” Al said. “Easy-you’re okay, c’mon, use your feet, Brother-all right, here we go-”
Somehow, he ended up collapsed on the couch, which he had to admit was significantly more comfortable than the floor of their entryway.
“I’m sorry,” he managed to get out. “I’m so sorry, Al, I’m so sorry-I’m such a piece of shit; I can’t even go out for a drink without getting fucked up and then fucking you over even though you have nothing to do with it, and I’m the worst brother ever, and you hate me, and I’m so sorry, Al, I love you, I’m so fucking sorry, I-”
Al put a hand over his mouth, which he noticed after a few of the words got even more mangled than their predecessors on their way off his tongue.
“Hush up,” Al said. “Gosh, Ed, you… gosh. I’m not mad, okay? I’m just worried about you. This isn’t like you, and you must’ve had a lot if you’re this… messed up, and-and that’s scary, but we’re going to get through it, okay? You and me. Like always. It’s going to be fine, Brother. You don’t have to be sorry; there’s nothing to be sorry about. I love you, too.” He took his hand away slowly. “Okay?”
“You won’t love me anymore if I barf on you,” Ed said, feeling the truth of the statement resonate though every miserable bone in his miserable body.
“Oh, Brother,” Al said with more than a hint of a sigh-the sigh of a good person giving up on a bad one at long, long last. “Do you think you’re up to drinking some water?”
“I think I’m gonna puke up my lungs,” Ed said.
“That doesn’t really answer the question, but…”
“Bucket,” Ed said weakly.
Al handed it to him, and Ed filled it, and…
Well, that sucked.
But then he passed out while Al was stroking his hair a lot and murmuring a little, and that sucked much less.
[Chapter 1, Part II]
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Ed (with Al/Win)
Rating: R
Word Count: 60,700 (17,700 in this chapter)
Warnings: please see note below!!
Summary: Sometimes the tall, dark, handsome ones are poisoned underneath.
Author's Note:SWEET BABY JESUS, wow. The next two chapters come with a huge host of warnings: general creepiness that starts out insidiously subtle and segues into an openly abusive relationship; borderline dub-con; and stalking. AWWWWWRIGHT. :| No, seriously - if any of that is likely to be unsettling to you, now that you know what it is, you aren't going to miss anything plot-wise if you wait this out / only read the present-day parts / skip ahead to chapter 3 once it's up. Please, please don't endure any hurt on account of this silly fic, okay? ♥
[MORE NOTES!](P.S. If anybody would like me to tag anything additional up here, let me know; and I'll add it in.)
Also: this installment of the series ends in a cliffhanger that makes everything up until now look like fun and games. :'D I'm hoping to be able to keep adding one chapter per weekend all the way through this fic and the next one, but there are some editing holes I haven't filled in just yet, and I have some conventions scattered around through the summer, so there's a chance I'll get delayed. Bear with me! And/or just wait until it's all posted and then marathon the whole thing, as you prefer. XD
Final also: this fic would not have survived the first major block without Mthaytr, whose help and cheerleading was more instrumental than I can put into words; and you probably wouldn't be getting it today if it wasn't for Xyriath. We have an amazing community, guys. Please cherish your authors, and your artists, and your gif-makers, and your commenters, and your friends. ♥
After-final also since I can't shut up: the title of this one is jacked from Rob Thomas's "Something to Be", because with this fic I have now titled over 300 on AO3 alone, and any time I don't repeat myself verbatim is a win. :'D
RECAP: We last left off with present-day!Ed about to meet up with Hohenheim in London between academic commitments; and we left past-tense!Ed about to tell Roy the story of how Kimblee fucked everything up, so that Roy wouldn't try to take Kimblebee as a client.
LOUD AND CLEAR
PART 4: ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE HEARTBREAK SONGS
CHAPTER 1, PART I
Paddington Station on a Saturday morning is significantly more populous than he expected. At least the rush of humanity here and there and everywhere-dense streams of people parting around the kiosks, feeding out onto the platforms and dribbling up through the doors-is distracting him from the fact that he’s waiting for his father’s train.
He texted Roy a couple minutes ago Do you want a paddington bear? they have them in like sixteen sizes. you think Elicia’s at that stage where stuffed animals have gone from uncool to cool again?, but it’s probably too early back home for Roy to respond. Hopefully the phone didn’t wake him up.
Except-wait a goddamn second; Ed’s being an idiot, and the tossing and turning and jet-lag-dodging he’s been doing the last few nights is catching up. First off, it’s ten in the morning here, which means it’s two in the morning Roy’s time. Second, Roy’s already got a backlog of messages from him from yesterday-the trial started Roy’s-time-Friday, so he was pretty much out of commission all day, probably using his precious court recesses to pore over more material instead of dealing with messages like I guess if you’re going to open a kitschy souvenir store in London the least you could do is give it a bad pun name like ‘Tchotchke to the City’ from his nerdy-ass absentee boyfriend. And then he was probably so dead-tired when he got home that he just couldn’t find the energy to answer them then. Which is fine. Ed totally understands that. It’s a completely valid set of circumstances which does not in any way constitute an emergency, and Ed is not going to worry about it.
He’s not.
Here he is, not worrying. Obviously.
Shit.
They have a Krispie Kreme store here. Sometimes globalization blows Ed’s mind. He’s not quite brave enough to hurl processed sugar and/or mediocre fake-ass-“coffee” into the roiling mess of agitated acid that is his stomach right now, though. Much as it would be weirdly sort of satisfying-almost poetic, really-to vomit all over Hohenheim the instant he arrives, it’s probably not worth the pain and the mess and the humiliation.
The doughnut smell is so damn generally tempting, though, that he fords the flood of people and gets into the line-the queue, the queue-at one of the little food carts instead. They’re asking for a pound fifty for a cup of tea, which is kind of silly given that you could get a box of ten of the same store-brand teabags for about that cost, but it’ll be hot, and it’ll fortify him for when the train from Oxford duly arrives. According to the signage, it’s due on time-ten more minutes; one more woman queued up ahead of him; two pound coins jingling in his pocket as he clenches and unclenches his hand.
Despite the fact that the lady before him orders, like, eight different pastries and a complicated coffee-well, as thoroughly established, “coffee”-this is shaping up to be the longest ten-minute stretch of Ed’s entire life. He’s not including the interminable limbo while Al was in the PICU after the thing in the factory; that doesn’t count as normal time. That was straight-up fucking Purgatory. That was a sampler plate of what eternity tastes like for sinners-presuming that any of that stuff is remotely credible, which is sort of difficult to believe; but on nights like that, Ed was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt if there might be anything that could help him.
With tea in hand, he wanders over into a little cutesy accessories store filled to the brim with impulse buys. Maybe something in here will be more Elicia’s style. She keeps talking about wanting to travel the world and take pictures of everything; if it wasn’t the middle of the school-year, he would’ve slipped her mom a check for the airfare and brought her with him for this trip.
Her style has shifted from sort of a girly-lite-goth to a subtly-vintage-with-a-hint-of-punk, which is making this a bit of a challenge. He has to do better than a T-shirt with a glittery outline of a red phone booth, though; what he really needs is…
Classy black chandelier-y earrings that come in a package blazoned with a bunch of Union Jacks, for a start. Maybe he can find her some Sherlock Holmes merchandise later; she’s still got Al’s copy of Doyle’s complete works stashed in her bedroom.
He manages to negotiate the purchase item, the cup of tea, and the bills to buy it by playing musical hands on the counter by the register, and then he tucks the earrings into one of the inner pockets of his laptop bag to keep them safe. He almost forgets the tea, which is a pretty clear sign of how much he needs it, and then he strolls back out to the platform, and…
Finally, finally, the train rumbles up, hissing steam.
And that’s when his heart clambers up his throat and sticks there, throbbing like a raw wound.
He tries to count the lengths of his breaths-tries to hold the most recent gasp of air for one, two, three, four full seconds before he lets it out; tries to hear Roy’s soft voice in his ear; tries to feel Roy’s soft hands on his back, his shoulders, his neck.
His heartbeat jitters around behind his collarbones like it’s come loose off a string, and his whole chest tightens up around it like it’s trying not to let the pulse escape-but so far he’s still breathing; he has to focus on that.
He stumbles backwards a few steps to move the fuck out of the way as people start pouring off of the train and filtering through the turnstiles. He looks intently up at the high, arching iron frame of the ceiling, bowing on both sides like a… curly bracket. Like a curly bracket. For notation. Just like that.
He shoves his left hand into his pocket, fumbles until he gets a hold of his phone, and squeezes it tight between his fingers. Al and Roy are both just a long-distance phone call away.
And Al won’t judge him. Al won’t hold this against him-whatever happens. Al just wants him to be happy; that’s all. Al wants him to do what he wants. And if that’s scrabbling for closure? Fine. If that’s turning his back right now and walking out of this train station and going and having a scone somewhere and never seeing his father’s face again? Al’ll still love him just as much.
He has nothing to lose.
And that’s liberating.
He breathes out slowly-slow and as steadily as he can-and drags his gaze back down to the eddy of humanity spilling from the train.
Hohenheim’s just fitting himself through the turnstile, frowning slightly as the pole in front of him resists the pressure of his hand instead of rotating properly. The nearby attendant sighs soundlessly and smacks a button, and it gives way, and Hohenheim smiles and edges through. He pushes at his glasses with a fingertip, glances around himself, and-
Only smiles wider as his eyes find Ed.
Ed’s tried a thousand times to calculate it, but he’s never figured out the optimal distance for offering someone a verbal greeting when they’ve already seen you. There are too many variables-ambient noise; air quality; how much spit’s still in your mouth after a narrow aversion of a streak of panic.
“Hey,” he says when Hohenheim gets kind of close.
It sounds weird. It sounds fucked up. It sounds like the sort of thing you’d say to someone that you know.
And at the same time, he can hear the guardedness in his own damn voice. It’s not Hey, Dad. It’s not much of anything. It’s deliberately noncommittal, because he doesn’t know what the hell to say.
“Good morning!” Hohenheim says brightly.
It’s a damn good thing Ed didn’t have a doughnut, because he’d actually puke.
“I was thinking on the ride up about what you might like to do,” Hohenheim says. He nudges the bridge of his glasses again even though they haven’t slipped at all. “Is it your first time here?”
That’s it-the thing about Hohenheim that makes Ed feel absolutely fucking gutted every single time.
He acts like they’ve been close all these fucking years, talks like there’s no lost love between them, and then oh-so-fucking blithely asks about shit he’d already know if he’d ever even tried to make that true.
“Yeah,” Ed says. “I did a little bit of the touristy kind of stuff the last couple days.”
“Have you seen Kensington Gardens?” Hohenheim asks. When Ed shakes his head, Hohenheim extends a hand to point. “We could walk from here, if you’d like-it’s really very pleasant.”
Ed swallows. Bitter brambles all the way down, plummeting into his stomach and splashing in the tea he’s been chugging.
“Sure,” he says.
“Wonderful,” Hohenheim says, sounding like he means it. “I think it’ll be very nice to have a little stroll and just… catch up.”
“Yeah,” Ed says. Hohenheim gestures, then starts leading the way, and Ed must still have the cup of tea in his hand, but he can’t seem to feel it as he follows. “Okay.”
It had been just about two and a half years prior to the day Roy walked into Has Beans and asked for a coffee and ruined Ed’s life in the best possible way. There’d been one last big bookstore in town-Roy probably didn’t remember; the Borders had gone spectacularly out of business, and then a family with too much money and too much time on their hands had figured that they could make bank if they just reused the shelves and the fixtures and opened their own place for secondhand books and knickknacks and shit. There was a little coffee shop space on the first floor, and since they were perpetually understaffed because they’d hired a grand total of about three desperate kids, Ed was constantly getting shuffled over from the register to the kiosk and learning how to pull an espresso shot on the fly. It worked out for the best in the long run, given that the experience definitely helped him get the barista job-but… The point was, the place was kind of a disaster, somewhat redeemed by the simple fact that it was the only damn bookstore on the whole downtown stretch.
The other advantage was that, because of their incredible inability to staff the store properly at any time, ever, Ed could pretty much ask for the hours he wanted, and they were always available. He usually just sort of penned himself in on the schedule around his classes and his lab time; and they were always glad to have him and scrounging to fill the gaps; and the pay wasn’t total shit; and he got to take home pastries at the end of the day relatively regularly, so Al always got a nice breakfast.
One Thursday night, when he’d been working there for just about four months, he was shelving a crap-ton of textbooks they’d gotten dirt-cheap from a publisher that was going out of business and marked up halfway to hell. The Reynolds were good at that shit; they were born and bred scavengers no matter how nice they dressed. They mostly knew it, too, and Ed kind of admired their weird sort of finesse about it.
In any case, he was in the history section with his arms full of huge-ass hardcover tomes, and his shoulder was starting to throb, but he was pretty sure the Reynolds dodged their workman’s comp shit semi-illegally so that they’d pay less taxes, and he was thinking about the homework he still had for tomorrow when he got home.
So when someone said “Excuse me” in a weirdly kind of nice voice-smooth, smooth voice; liquid, like ink more than honey-he just about jumped out of his skin.
“Sorry,” he managed, and then the guy-whose hair was even inkier than his voice, and fell in this incredible whip of a ponytail; and who had the most startling stormcloud blue-gray eyes that Ed had ever seen-said “No, I’m sorry; can I help you with-”
That was when the balance tipped, and Ed dropped the textbooks all over the floor.
“Crap,” he said, crouching, and the guy knelt to help him, and he said, “Don’t worry, I got it, it’s fine,” and the guy said “No, no, I insist,” and then their hands kept meeting over books, and Ed blushed scarlet, and the guy gave him this smile like a satisfied snake.
For a genius, Ed was about the slowest learner of anyone he fucking knew.
But God, if that red flag didn’t look just a little like a blanket.
He cleared his throat and got to his feet with the books, managed a “Thank you,” and then choked out a “Can I help you find anything today?”
“I hope so,” the guy said. “I’m looking for anything you might have on the natural sciences.”
“Sure thing,” Ed said. He put the evil fucking history books down on one of the display tables. “Sciences are right over here. Any discipline in particular?”
The guy was looking at Ed’s free lanyard from the biochem department’s Christmas party, which he’d hung his employee badge on. “How terribly fortunate that I’ve stumbled upon someone who actually knows what they’re talking about,” he said. “Can you recommend me anything specific to organic chemistry?”
The way the guy’s eyes kept lingering on his and then darting down along the lines of his face-then to the triangle of throat and collarbones where the first few buttons of his black Oxford were open-then-further down than that-
Ed could be kind of oblivious, but he wasn’t stupid.
“Well,” he said, fumbling for the words, which were tumbling out of his grasp just like those fucking history books. “I mean, I-sort of.”
The guy just smiled again.
Store policy-slash-tradition dictated that Ed was supposed to stay on the floor and send the customer off with his pile of science literature, and somebody else would check him out at the register. There was a weird miasmatic sort of feeling rising in Ed’s chest about it-a strange combination of disappointment and relief.
He had to shake it off. Fucking history books weren’t gonna shelve themselves, and his problem sets weren’t gonna do themselves, and his life wasn’t going to keep chugging along unless he fucking pushed it every inch of the way.
He latched his eyes onto the textbooks’ covers and didn’t watch the guy walk off towards the stairs.
On Saturday-as with practically every Saturday-Ed was stationed at the register, in the midst of what he and Dolch had unofficially named the Dawn-to-Dusk Murder Shift, though they abbreviated it to DDMS in front of the Reynolds. Dolch was the one who ended up helping him get the Has Beans job later on, because he and Marta went way back, and had apparently, like, dated once back when they were in high school, before she realized she wasn’t really into guys at all. Dolch was very specific on that, like Ed would have accused him of not being man enough or some shit when Ed had about the single least heterosexual love life track record of anyone he knew.
Anyway, they were on DDMS, and it was ten in the morning or something, and Ed was stickering the shit out of some books and trying not to hear the intercom music, and Dolch elbowed him in the ribs. Not gently. Dolch had what Al had once called “occasional enthusiasm-related boundary confusion”.
“That guy was in here yesterday,” Dolch said. “He was looking for you.”
Ed knew who it was before he glanced over. The guy was really-striking. Not, like, damn-I’d-tap-that-fine-piece-of-ass-if-I-didn’t-think-I’d-burn-my-hand hot, but attractive. Like a magnet. Sort of captivating. Something about the ease of his stride and the casual slant of his shoulders-something about the hooded eyes and the thin, almost-caustic smile. Something so calm and disaffected that it made just the concept of garnering his interest seem… challenging. Exciting. Addictive.
Ed just sort of wanted to affect him, was all.
Maybe he didn’t think all that right at the start. Maybe it was way simpler than that, and he was just projecting backwards, with the perspective that time and a hell of a lot of thought had lent him.
The guy was good-looking, and he was looking at Ed. In the miserable, toxic wake of how Greg had replaced him with more convenient bodies-in the wash of bitter self-loathing and carved-out loneliness; in the poisonous fury at the betrayal and the pathetic collapse of the defeat-that felt… kind of… nice. Kind of… promising. Like maybe he wasn’t just fucking trash to be crumpled up and tossed out after all; like maybe people might not hate looking at him; like maybe there was hope for him offering his heart to someone and coming away with anything other than heel prints on it by the end. Like at least he wasn’t everybody’s last resort. Like someone might want him, only him. Like someone might appreciate the sight of him enough to size him up in his stupid bookstore-peon quasi-uniform.
He wanted to be wanted. He wanted to be loved, for fuck’s sake-cherished and cooed over, sure, fine; he just wanted to be listened to; he wanted to be held tight and kissed softly when he was so fucking worn out he couldn’t stand. Al couldn’t give him that. Al was stuck with him, anyway, and it was the best kind of necessary codependence anybody could’ve imagined, but Al’s affection for him was a given. It was owed, and he gave back every iota that he got.
From somebody else, though-
From somebody who wanted to see him happy and also wanted to get him naked-
Just-
Was it too much to ask? Was that his fucking problem? Was he demanding too much from the indifferent universe, and that was why it kept fucking slapping him down?
Maybe he needed to learn some damn humility and teach himself some gratitude, and… and something good might come his way eventually. Right? It was stupid to try to hurry it, and he didn’t deserve anything; he didn’t have a right to any of his stupid, hazy-warm little fantasies; people were dying in droves in countries he couldn’t pin on a map, and his mother had died not much older than he was now. Life was not fair; the world was not kind; anyone who couldn’t cope with that was a child.
He’d be fine.
He’d get through it, like he always did.
He looked away from the guy in the store even though Dolch elbowed him again, even less-subtly this time. He looked down at the register keys and curled his hands into fists on the counter and didn’t fucking beg for the attention.
That was a step in the right direction, wasn’t it?
…except.
Except that the guy came in again on Sunday afternoon, and Ed didn’t have the DDMS warning system digging a pointy joint into his ribs-he just looked up from the register, and the guy was standing there, smiling at him.
His breath stuck, and his heart jittered hard and wouldn’t stay still no matter how carefully he tried to breathe.
“Hi,” he said, fighting to keep his voice level, and maybe it was a war he’d lose, but so far- “Finding everything okay?”
“Nearly everything,” the guy said. “Could I trouble you for your educated opinion?”
He had two genetics books-a newer and an older-with contradictory passages on the same topic.
Well, shit, Ed hadn’t sacrificed all these years of his life and hours of sleep for nothing, right? He pushed past the weird fluttery sensation in his stomach-not butterflies, really, unless butterflies had gotten a whole lot stickier since he was a kid-and started in on how the reason the older book was still in print was that it was just better-researched, honestly, and more reputable all around. Conventional wisdom was starting to favor the newer results just because people were loud about them, but that was basically a freaking myth-and if you looked at the footnotes about the study they were citing, their sample size was dangerously small, and if that didn’t turn you off of their results, their smarmy use of certainty words instead of qualifiers was another thing, and…
And the guy was just-looking at him.
“Thank you,” he said. “That’s very useful.”
“Sure,” Ed said.
The guy inclined his head just slightly towards Ed’s badge. “May I call you Edward?”
Fuckin’ too late now. “Ed’s okay.”
“Ed, then,” the guy said. “I think I’d like to buy this one.” He laid one long-fingered hand on Ed’s pick. “And do you know if there’s going to be anyone serving over in the coffee shop soon? There really isn’t anything more pleasant than a cup of coffee and some time to read.”
Ed couldn’t argue with that. He attempted to convince their ornery fucking scanner-which somebody, he suspected Dolch, had Sharpied little eyes on, because it looked like a brontosaurus’s head and neck-to read the barcode. “I can run over there and do that for you. Gotta check you out separately, though-sorry. You’re looking at $22.58 here.”
“Delightful,” the guy said, and his hands were really something; Ed couldn’t help watching the way he flipped through the bills in his wallet to pull out thirty dollars in cash.
He met Ed’s eyes the whole time as he handed them over, and then again as Ed counted the change out into the palm of his hand. It was-what? What the fuck was it? Ed was getting goosebumps, and his blood was running so hot, and he could hear his heartbeat resonating back against the walls of his skull.
“Righto,” he said, offering up the receipt. The guy plucked it out of his fingers so fucking deliberately, eyes on him, eyes always on him- “If you wanna just follow me… What can I get going for you over at the café?”
“Just coffee,” the guy said as Ed led the way over. “Black.”
“You bet,” Ed said, slipping back behind the counter and throwing an apron on. He washed his hands and tried not to think about the fact that the towel by the sink had to be a bacterial bar mitzvah after hanging there slightly damp for God-only-knew-how-long. “You mind if I make a new pot? It’ll take a little while, but I dunno how long this’s been sitting here.”
“Not at all,” the guy said, settling at the closest little wooden table and stretching out his legs. He laid one ankle across the other and folded his hands on top of the book, and then he just… watched. “That’s very kind of you.”
Ed kind of wanted to say Well, no, I get paid for this shit, but he couldn’t afford to lose this job. “No problem. It’ll be just a minute.”
“Take your time,” the guy said, and the elegant angles of his body did something funny to Ed’s throat.
Dolch’s elbow reunited with Ed’s ribcage Tuesday night. “Your guy’s back.”
“He’s not my guy,” Ed said.
“Dude,” Dolch said. “He was in here yesterday, ‘Might I inquire’-ing if you were around.”
Just as Ed was about to say Him looking at me like spiders look at flies does not make him ‘mine’, the guy pushed the front doors open and strode on through.
“Hi,” Ed said. “How are you tonight?”
“Excellent,” the guy said. His eyes flicked briefly to Dolch, but you could tell that everything but Ed was window-dressing, and he didn’t give a shit. “And you?”
“Doin’ all right,” Ed said, which was more or less the case. “Anything I can help you find?”
“Do you carry anything on neurology?” the guy asked.
Ed gave him a smile and turned to the computer to click into the inventory. “Let’s find out.”
Every night that week that Ed was working, the guy came in and asked for a science book-then cracked it open and started asking seriously intelligent questions. Ed went back and forth trying to figure out what the game was-did he really just want someone to talk obscure knowledge trivia with, or was it something… other… than that?
Either way, the dude was spending a small fucking fortune on books-the technical shit wasn’t cheap, and he was getting something brand-new every other day. Either he had a hell of a lot of money to burn, or he was seriously desperate for… whatever it was that he wanted. Whatever he was here for, over and over and over again.
He was sort of nice to talk to, though, weirdly enough. At first it was just that Ed didn’t have a choice except to do the polite-customer-conversation-small-talk thing, but then it was-better than that. The science stuff was really good, because the guy was smart, not to mention articulate as hell. He really got it, which was more than you could say for most people who tried to dabble in just about every scientific discipline that was making headlines these days. And he was curious, too, and not a big douchebag about it when he didn’t know something-he was genuinely interested in learning about shit. Ed liked that. Kind of a lot.
And-more and more and more-it seemed like he was genuinely interested in Ed. Not just in eyeballing him from the stationery section anymore, either; he’d… ask questions. Good questions, pleasant questions-how Ed’s day was going, what he was studying, what had made him pick this field, this school (“because of course you must have had all of them groveling at your feet, with a mind like yours”), this part of town-
And Ed had said something about Al somewhere, and something about his car, and a couple things about where he grew up, and it was only towards the end of the week that he realized-with a feeling like surfacing from warm water-that he didn’t know the first fucking thing about this guy.
On Friday night, the guy came in a few minutes before eight. It was starting to get kind of… exciting, waiting for him, wondering what topic he’d be interested in next. For bonus points, he was practically singlehandedly keeping this place in business.
By eight-fifteen, they’d found him a collection of transcripts of lectures at an interdisciplinary engineering conference, which they took back down to the registers so Ed could ring him up.
“When does your shift end tonight?” the guy asked, handing over cash.
“Ten,” Ed said as he took it.
“Excellent,” the guy said. He said that a lot. But not in a Wayne’s World way at all. “Can I buy you a drink afterwards?”
Ed was halfway through counting change, and his mind ground to a full and complete stop, with hands and arms flailing furiously outside of the ride. “What?”
“After your shift,” the guy said calmly, “would you meet me at the Ace of Spades so that I can buy you a drink?”
Ed swallowed. He looked at the money in his hand, then the money in the drawer, trying to remember how much switching around he still had to do between them. Had the guy given him two twenties, or a fifty? Just as pertinently, what the fucking fuck was going on?
“Um,” he said. “S-sure. Yeah.” A furtive glance confirmed that the guy had his thin, pleased smile firmly in place, and heat rushed into Ed’s cheeks. “It’ll-take me a couple minutes to get there. You’d be waiting a while.”
“I don’t mind,” the guy said.
Ed tried out a grin, aiming for carefree and roguish and adventurous or some shit. “Okay. Cool.”
“Fifteen forty-seven,” the guy said.
Ed blinked.
“My change,” the guy said. “It’s fifteen forty-seven.” The smile was back. “You’re really very fetching when you’re flustered.”
That turned Ed’s face the color and temperature of marinara sauce in point-two seconds flat. “I-oh, God. Uh. Thanks. Um. Here.”
The guy laughed-a soft, light, melodious kind of a sound. Smooth and understated and utterly entrancing, like everything about him. He took his change, and his fingertips grazed Ed’s way more than was remotely necessary, and his eyes never left Ed’s face. “Yes, quite like that.”
Was Ed an attention whore for liking this? Was he vain for feeling-what? Flattered? Validated?
Shit.
“Jeez,” he said, fumbling to tear the guy’s receipt off without shredding the fucking thing. “Um-okay. I’ll head over there at ten, I guess. Um. You gonna be inside, or…?”
It wasn’t exactly a dive bar, but all bars sort of made Ed antsy, so he wasn’t exactly thrilled about the idea of wandering in alone.
Maybe that was a good thing-a good sign. Maybe he needed to shake his life the fuck up, change something, rework and rewrite and rebuild and do something different to jar himself out of this rut and feel like a human fucking being again.
“Why don’t I give you my cell number?” the guy said. “I can put it into your phone, if you like.”
Ed wasn’t sure he liked. He was sure, however, that this was gonna get awkward as shit if he didn’t hand his phone over, and he didn’t want to fuck it up this time; somebody was actively giving a shit about him for once, and it felt nice, and…
“Sure,” he said. He dragged it out of his pocket, tapped in his passcode, and then pushed it across the counter.
“Excellent,” the guy said. His gaze dipped, reluctantly it seemed, from Ed’s face to the phone screen. Unbelievable hands. Unbelievable fingers. “Call if you’re having trouble finding me, and then you can just stay put until I get there, hm?”
He pushed the phone back, and his eyes lifted slow, slow, slow until they latched onto Ed’s again.
“Yeah,” Ed managed. “Okay.”
“Perfect,” the guy said. He tucked his receipt into the front cover of the book. “I’ll see you soon, then.”
“Yeah,” Ed said again.
He watched the guy walk out the front doors and wondered what in the ever-loving fuck he thought he was doing.
…the dude had a pretty great ass, though.
Two hours later, Ed was standing on the sidewalk in front of Ace of Spades. His shoulder ached like hell from vacuuming upstairs as fast as humanly possible after close, and his head was throbbing a little bit on the off-beats of the nerve pain, apparently just for shits and giggles.
Ed liked alcohol. He liked taking the easy way out every now and then; he liked having a surefire recipe for filing the edge off of everything. He liked tripping his stupid brain in mid-frantic-scurry and forcing it to shut up. He liked how it made him funnier-made everything funnier-and how the world felt smaller and a little less cold when he had a stomach full of bubbles and a sticky-sweet film over the cruelest parts of his own fucking intellect.
Ed didn’t like bars.
He was pretty sure it was the concept more than the actual experience that made him so fucking leery that the doors of the Ace looked like a black hole right that second. He just… didn’t like the noise, didn’t like the too-loud laughter and the bad music and the shouted conversations that got muddier and muddier the more that people drank. He didn’t like the hazy eyes and the sharp elbows; he didn’t like the sense he always got that he was being watched from a dark corner by somebody who’d drowned their own inhibitions an hour ago. He didn’t like thinking about what people were capable of when they’d had too much. He didn’t like being in the middle of all that, in a wash of lost control, trying to preserve himself-protect himself-when his own faculties were numbed to shit the second he started to participate in the reason he was there.
Point was, he did his drinking at home. Bars made his skin crawl; bars made him feel small and lost and stupid and vulnerable and desperate. He couldn’t let himself be any of those things; all the shit he’d built up brick by brick would fucking crumble if he dropped his guard for a second.
Except… here he was anyway, ’cause some fucking stranger with nice hands and nice hair had smiled and asked.
Fuck.
He closed his eyes for a second, listening to the rattle of the leaves in the slight wind and the draw of his own breath into his lungs. It was just a building. It was just a building full of people, and he didn’t have to drink anything, and he didn’t owe anybody in there a goddamn thing. And he could kick any of their asses even if he’d had, like, a whole fifth of whiskey; they weren’t shit.
For fuck’s sake. He could do this. He owed it to himself to try-owed it to his pride and all the goddamn Everests he’d scaled to get here; to the people who supported him all the way; and to the maybe-half-a-chance at something awesome waiting for him just inside.
He squared his shoulders, dragged in a breath, let it out slow, and opened the door.
The cacophony of intoxicated chaos steamrolled him right off the bat, but he soldiered through it. He had to be cool. He had to be fucking cool; maybe this guy was into scientists, but nobody liked a loser.
Speaking of the guy, Ed’s quick and possibly slightly distressed search of the main barroom the instant he stepped in revealed no tall figure with a crisp white shirt and a brain-shorting fall of stark black hair. Where the fuck was he? Had he just set Ed up for a small and pointless prank or some shit? Was that what this was?
He had to play cool. If he just played fucking cool, he’d be fine; he’d be bulletproof-untouchable.
He sized up the room as he started towards the bar, fishing his phone out of his pocket again-it was, apparently, too much to hope for a text message telling him where the mystery guy was.
Although-speaking of, what the hell had he called himself when he was adding himself as a contact in Ed’s phone?
That was good; that gave him something to do with his hands. He thumbed his way down through the admittedly pretty fucking short list-the only reason there was any scrolling to do at all was that all the other lab members were in there, by order of Izumi-and kept one eye on the fluid shifting of the people on all sides.
There was one entry he’d never seen before: Soph Kimblee. What the hell kind of a name was that?
…then again, Ed had been told on more than one occasion that his own damn name sounded fake. And he’d gotten a hell of a lot of seriously unwanted attention for it right after Twilight came out.
There was an open segment of the bar, and he picked the seat exactly in the middle of it-buffer zone. Never hurt.
The bartender was a big guy with a broad forehead and broader forearms, which were blanketed in tats. He came over and raised an eyebrow.
Play it fucking cool; be ice; be Arctic-
“Your dragon is totally kickass,” Ed said, pointing at the one coiling downward from the guy’s elbow, with its head on his wrist so that the flames from its mouth could shoot out over the back of his hand.
“Thanks,” the guy said. “What can I get you?”
“Can I have a Coke for now?” Ed asked. “I’m-waiting for somebody.”
“Sure,” the guy said. “Two-fifty. Still need ID if you’re gonna sit there, though.”
Ed put his phone down on the driest part of the countertop in front of him and dug for his wallet. “Here.” Judiciously, he didn’t add the long rant about markups on diluted soda syrup and shit. Al probably knew that one by heart by now.
The bartender returned his driver’s license in favor of taking his three bucks, slipping off towards the register. Ed started a text to the new number.
hey i’m here can’t find you sorry
He looked at it for a minute. That was the fucking beautiful thing about text messages-you could think about what you wanted to say for as long as you liked before you sent the damn thing. No such luck on a phone call; real time required you to generate coherent responses on the fly. Plus you could manually lower yourself on someone’s list of priorities if you sent a text-texts weren’t urgent in the same way as an incoming call, and that took even more of the pressure off.
The barkeep brought him a glass of Coke and a coaster. After five long, time-killing sips on the straw, a text to Al that said nothing more or less than hi i’m at ace of spades with a guy from work don’t wait up but just in case i’m not back tomorrow morning call the cops love you kid <3, Ed sighed inwardly, navigated back to the newly-added number, and picked the button to dial it this time.
His throat went kind of dry, and his hands went kind of clammy, and he clutched the phone to his ear and chewed on his straw, scouring the room all the while. There weren’t exactly a whole lot of places to fucking hide-
The line caught on the third ring.
“Hello,” the guy’s voice said, buttery as hell.
“It’s me,” Ed managed. “Ed. From the bookstore.”
“Wonderful,” the guy said.
Uh… okay. “I’m here,” Ed said. “I’m on the right side of the bar.”
“I see you,” the guy’s voice said.
Ed twisted around, and-sure enough-the guy was standing off on the far side of the room directly behind him, lowering his phone with a slow smile and a small wave.
Why the fuck was Ed so fucking awkward all the time? What was it that other people did to fill the time gap between making eye contact and coming into earshot? Did it just not bother them? Was awkwardness just something you had to opt into by acknowledging its action potential?
More likely Ed was just-wired wrong. He always had been; odds were this wasn’t any different.
“Hope you haven’t been waiting long,” the guy-Soph-said, right as he got close enough to hear, just as Ed was starting to part his lips to blurt out something probably-stupid. The guy settled on the bar stool on Ed’s right and spread one hand on the bar. “What’s your poison?”
“I’m okay,” Ed said, gesturing with his elbow to his Coke. It was a fucking miracle that he managed not to knock the damn thing over for once.
“Nonsense,” the guy said. “My treat.”
Ed tried at a genial kind of smile. “It’s really okay.”
The guy’s other hand rose to brush something off of Ed’s shoulder-a touch so light it barely registered, and goosebumps chased Ed’s pulse all the way down his arm. “Come on. I insist.”
Soph Kimblee’s eyes were somehow bright and amused and fucking intense at the same time, and it made Ed’s stomach clench, and maybe… maybe he did just need to liquor himself up enough to relax, right? “I-okay. I’m already started on Coke; they can just put rum in the next one.”
The guy smiled and then half-turned to signal to the bartender with the rad tattoo, who dutifully returned. “Could you bring a rum and Coke for this charming young man-” Ed flushed hot and red to the very fucking tips of his fucking ears; didn’t this guy know they were in fucking public? “-and a vodka martini? Belvedere, if you’d be so kind.”
Ed waited for the deluge of homophobic rage, but it… never arrived. The bartender just sort of nodded and said “You want me to start a tab?”
“Please,” the guy said-and Ed was such a moron; he had a name.
Ed cleared his throat as soon as the bartender moved away. “So is… Is ‘Soph’ short for something?”
“Sophocles,” the guy said, smiling again.
“Fancy,” Ed said, trying to grin back. “You sure you can slum it with somebody named like me?”
Soph’s smile curved higher. “You have a king’s name,” he said, “and a prince’s aspect. What else could I ask for?”
Ed’s face was on fire again. You’d think he’d be used to it by now, but it was a mortifying shock every single goddamn fucking time.
“That,” Soph said, narrow smile parting for a gleam of teeth as he lifted his hand and touched two fingertips to Ed’s flaming cheek. “That is really rather beautiful.”
Naturally, the blaze under Ed’s skin escalated to three-alarm status at that. “Wh-at?”
Soph laughed, low and quiet, and his eyes glittered, and his fingertips traced down to Ed’s jaw. “You have such an expressive face. Surprise flatters you enormously.”
Ed wasn’t sure he would’ve called it surprise so much as-what? It wasn’t embarrassment, really; it wasn’t shame. He didn’t… really… know… what it was. Maybe there wasn’t a word for it. It was sort of a mush-pot of being pleased at the compliments without actually believing them at all, and a hyper-awareness of all the people around them, and a draw to the increasing allure of Soph’s thin little smile-the man looked like he could do amazing things with that mouth.
The rush of heart-pounding adrenaline at that thought definitely swirled some shame in with the endorphins. Apparently Ed was gunning for sex before they’d even had a fucking drink. Edward ‘Self-Respect’ Elric; that was him.
Their drinks clinked down on the counter, and Ed just about jumped out of his skin as the bartender’s shadow fell across them. Soph’s hand dropped gracefully away from his face, which sort of left his cheek tingling, like the fingerprints had left a mark-a brand-and everyone would know, now, who he belonged to.
That shouldn’t have been such a good thought-such a comforting thought. Being beholden to someone. Belonging; being someone’s belonging. Being owned; being claimed; being wanted, badly. But it was. He was just so fucking desperate.
Fuck.
Whatever-he was playing it cool. He was dry ice on a winter evening, and he was doing okay so far, and he was going to get through this, and it was fine.
So they… talked. Him and Soph. Soph had a way of tilting his head down just a little and looking up through his lashes, with his eyelids kind of low, and that should’ve looked lazy, but it was so fucking focused that it made Ed’s guts wobble in a seriously disconcerting way. The guy was still just so good to talk to-they went on about science for ages, and then Ed asked what Soph did for a living if advanced science discussions were his fucking hobby, and Soph said something about weapons tech, which was a little unsettling, but Ed had lab-friends who did things to test animals that would make most people vomit, so he tried not to judge.
There were a lot of drinks. Soph just kept-making this really graceful gesture with his hand, and the bartender would come and sweep away Ed’s empty glass and set down a new one, and Ed knew his words were starting to blur together at the edges a little bit, and he was starting to laugh a little too easily. He knew he should stop, but it felt nice-not thinking anything; not over-thinking anything; just… having fun. With a guy he’d just met, who kept smiling at him and touching his face and his arm and his hand and-once-his neck, and he probably shivered, and that should’ve been embarrassing as shit, but he just felt… floaty. Calm. Good.
Next thing he remembered, they were outside, and the streetlamps were bobbing around like fucking fairy lights-like will-o’-the-wisps-and he was saying “Shit, shit, I’m sorry, I had too much, I-?”, and then there was an arm around his shoulders.
Then his shoulders were against a wall-brick?-and it was dark, and then it was even darker because someone was kissing him, and he couldn’t see anything around them; there was a curtain of thick, dark hair, and he buried his fingers in it.
It was a good kiss, too-a kiss like a velvet dream; like a river of dark chocolate flooding its banks; like the mathematical average of heaven and hell, and he whimpered into it, and a beautiful voice laughed softly.
“You have had a bit too much, haven’t you?” it asked, and things were sort of tilting, and he wondered how many hours he had left before his digestive system would stage the full-scale rebellion. What time was it, anyway?
“Told my brother I’d get home,” he forced out-or something like it, something with words; maybe it was those words. “C’n you-I could-taxi, or-”
“Nonsense,” the lovely voice said. “I’ll take you. Come along.”
Like he could do much of fucking anything.
The arm was around him again, and even though his feet kept trying to tangle up and hurl him to the spinning sidewalk, somehow it supported him until he was looking at his distorted reflection in the shiny window of a car. The door was opened, and then he was guided down onto a really comfortable leather seat, and then he started fumbling for the seatbelt at the same time that a much more dextrous pair of hands reached for it, and they pushed his aside.
“Let me,” the voice said, and buckled him in, and then he was being kissed again, and he tried to rise up into it, but the shoulder-belt was sort of cutting into his throat. The one in his car was so frayed on the edge that it didn’t hurt anymore even when it hit him at an angle like that, and he shouldn’t’ve been thinking about seatbelts while he was kissing someone anyway; that was rude.
He didn’t want to be rude. He wanted to be lovable.
When the kiss receded, he tried to say so, but he heard it starting to come out in an incoherent mumble of backwards syllables and gave up partway through.
The door closed, and then the door on the other side opened, and then the car bounced just slightly-but enough to jar Ed’s nausea from a creeping-lurking thing into a predator-and then the engine roared too loud, and then…
Somehow he was letting himself into the lobby of their apartment building with his first key, and the second one kept swimming in his vision, and he staggered over to the elevator and managed to hit the up button on his third try. Was he alone again? He tried to turn around and check, and he almost fell on his ass; somehow his fucked-up reflexes resulted in an arm against the wall that steadied him a little. The elevator dinged real loud and then shuddered open, and he glared down at his feet and tried to make them carry him inside.
There was a sort of handrail-bar-thing on the wall, which he clung to while the elevator car lurched up and up and up to the eighth floor, then parted its doors again so that he could stumble out into the hallway. He seemed to be good at the stumbling thing, or at least good at gathering and maintaining momentum, judging by the fact that he stumbled out of the elevator and all the way across the hall and collided with the opposite wall at a fairly impressive speed.
What the fuck time was it? He’d gotten off work at… ten, right? He couldn’t’ve started drinking before ten thirty, after all that fucking around with his phone that he’d done before he’d even gotten to the rum. It had to be, what? One? Two? Didn’t they close the bars at two? Was that why they’d left? He couldn’t remember; either everything was swaying around him, or he was swaying, and everything else was staying obnoxiously still.
The math was vaguely comforting, though. Made him feel a tiny bit less like a dumbass piece of shit gallumphing down the hall at fuck-knows-o’-clock, probably about to garner some fucking complaints from the fucking neighbors that would make Al get all upset and shit, and-
And-
Where were his keys?
It was a miracle that their apartment was the one at the end of the hall, because he couldn’t seem to get his eyes to understand the numbers on the doors. Which was kind of ironic, given that the numbers in his head were having a stabilizing influence. He sort of wanted to laugh about that, but he had a weird premonition that if he opened his mouth for too long, he was gonna barf.
His stumble took him to the door-or, more specifically, into the door, as he lost his balance and sort of banged into it, and his whole fucking arm surged with violent pins-and-needles agony at the impact on his elbow, at which point he sagged down to the floor to cradle his forearm to his chest and make mournful noises to himself.
…it seemed like a pretty good idea at the time.
He really only had time for two distinct noises (sort of a “Mrrrr” and then a “Hnnuu”, each masterpieces in their own right) before the door opened, and he tipped over and ended up sprawled over the threshold, arm clutched beneath him.
“Ow,” he said.
“Oh, gosh,” Al said in a high voice. Because of course Al was waiting up for him, even though Ed had told him not to; of course he was; he always did; he got so worried, and Ed was such a shitty brother that he kept giving Al reasons to worry, and it was probably affecting Al’s sleep and his studies and his beautiful soul, and…
Ed might have been crying a little.
“Sweet mother of pearl,” Al said. His hands were on Ed’s shoulder, and the blurry jeans-colored things in front of Ed’s face might have been his knees. “Brother-are you-oh, gosh, Ed, you smell like a liquor store.”
“I feel like one,” Ed said.
“What?” Al said. “Um-never mind. Brother-c’mon, here, we’ll just-c’mon, you can sleep on the couch; we’ll get you a bucket. How are you feeling?”
“Gross,” Ed said.
“I’m shocked,” Al said. “Easy-you’re okay, c’mon, use your feet, Brother-all right, here we go-”
Somehow, he ended up collapsed on the couch, which he had to admit was significantly more comfortable than the floor of their entryway.
“I’m sorry,” he managed to get out. “I’m so sorry, Al, I’m so sorry-I’m such a piece of shit; I can’t even go out for a drink without getting fucked up and then fucking you over even though you have nothing to do with it, and I’m the worst brother ever, and you hate me, and I’m so sorry, Al, I love you, I’m so fucking sorry, I-”
Al put a hand over his mouth, which he noticed after a few of the words got even more mangled than their predecessors on their way off his tongue.
“Hush up,” Al said. “Gosh, Ed, you… gosh. I’m not mad, okay? I’m just worried about you. This isn’t like you, and you must’ve had a lot if you’re this… messed up, and-and that’s scary, but we’re going to get through it, okay? You and me. Like always. It’s going to be fine, Brother. You don’t have to be sorry; there’s nothing to be sorry about. I love you, too.” He took his hand away slowly. “Okay?”
“You won’t love me anymore if I barf on you,” Ed said, feeling the truth of the statement resonate though every miserable bone in his miserable body.
“Oh, Brother,” Al said with more than a hint of a sigh-the sigh of a good person giving up on a bad one at long, long last. “Do you think you’re up to drinking some water?”
“I think I’m gonna puke up my lungs,” Ed said.
“That doesn’t really answer the question, but…”
“Bucket,” Ed said weakly.
Al handed it to him, and Ed filled it, and…
Well, that sucked.
But then he passed out while Al was stroking his hair a lot and murmuring a little, and that sucked much less.
[Chapter 1, Part II]