FMA -- Reconcile the Dark, Part 1
Title: Reconcile the Dark
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist(/Doctor Who)
Pairing/Characters: Roy/Ed
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: eventually 20,000+ (2,200 in this bit)
Warnings: language; some dark themes and violence (canon levels); fandomsmash
Prompt: Time Travel ~and~ Fandom Swap AU for Roy/Ed Week
Summary: Nothing puts a lifespan into perspective quite like the prospect of eternity. Sometimes, some days, the universe is kind. And sometimes its curators are very, very hot.
Author's Note: There's more of this, but it's still writing itself into new and exciting corners. XD I'm at a con next weekend (hi!), but I might get a chance to throw another piece at you guys next Monday, and I'll see what I can do from there. XD …aaaaaand I ran out of time to post even more than I expected to, so if you spot any egregious typos, incomplete sentences, etc., please let me know so I can fix them later! ^^;
If you're not a Doctor Who aficionado, I tried to make it pretty accessible! All you really need to know is that anything that seems super cool and creative, I probably did not make up. :'D If you are a Doctor Who fan, I stopped watching after Series 5, so I'm afraid it likely won't be compliant with anything after that, though I tried to do my homework when writing this stupid thing left me time. XD The title is borrowed from the song in an amazing fanvid from Back In The Day which also doubles as a great trailer for RTD-era Doctor Who!
And I don’t want to break the heart
Of any other man but you, but you, oh
- “Sinner’s Prayer” - Lady Gaga -
RECONCILE THE DARK
PART 1
There are probably several more remarkably inconvenient occasions to recognize that one is in love than while surfacing from the breathless embrace of a frigid river, but Roy is distracted enough by the task of not-drowning that he can’t think of one.
Ed-drenched and dark gold and sputtering, starting to laugh on the tail end of a wet gasp-is a vision.
Roy-treading water, shaking his sopping hair out of his face, unable to look away even long enough to check whether they’re still being followed-is royally fucked.
That’s Ed’s phrase. Most of Roy’s favorites are.
Ah, well. Men have fallen headlong and heart-first for less, and no one with two eyes, red blood, and half a wit could blame him.
Roy met Ed for the first time on a Thursday afternoon. He’d been sitting on a bench in one of the desperate-little-gasp-of-greenery attempts at something like a park that the regents had interspersed between the campus building, apparently in the hopes of giving them all something to stare at other than gray walls and blackboards. In theory, it was a good idea. In practice, every one of them was overrun with speeding bikes and/or students who collapsed on the grass at intervals and stopped moving. If they stayed where they’d fallen for more than ten minutes without a twitch or a detectable breath, Roy would go over and nudge them with his foot; such were the responsibilities of the faculty, or something like that. All in all, though, it was a decent place to do sudoku if you didn’t mind the occasional dead-student scare.
It was also, evidently, a decent place for someone to drop down next to you on your selected bench-which was engraved with the name of an alumni who had wanted to donate, but not too much-and sling one leg up over the other at the knee.
“Hey,” the newcomer said. “Is your hand okay?”
Roy had looked up at the intrusion, so he’d already met the startling tawny eyes by the time the dangerously reckless mouth admitted speech. The hair was even worse; and what bone structure-Roy had half a mind to drag him over to the art department and give the figure classes the session of their lives.
He was, however, wearing the most unspeakably gaudy red leather jacket that Roy had ever seen in sartorially-themed nightmares. Roy wasn’t sure whether that would be a blessing or a cataclysm for the art students, so perhaps it was better not to test their mettle just yet.
“I’m sorry,” Roy said, and he was-though not surprised. It tended to be the case around here that the cute ones were strange. “Do I know you?”
The young man stared at him.
Then the young man looked down at Roy’s newspaper, folded for efficient access to the sudoku grid.
“Shit,” he said. “I thought I-what day is it?”
“October eleventh,” Roy said.
“Thursday?” the young man asked. At the beginning of Roy’s nod, he shoved a hand back into his bangs-cute, but stranger by the second-and gritted his teeth. “Damn it. That explains a lot. Um… okay. Uh… have a nice day.”
“Thank you,” Roy said. “You, too.”
“’Kay,” the guy said, standing and tugging on the lapels of his cataclysmic jacket. “See you.”
Roy bit his tongue on the response he always wanted to make to that, which was How can you be so sure?
But there was something-
Familiar. There was something familiar about…
Well. Hell. There was something familiar about a lot of people when you scanned so many young faces in lectures halls every day that they blurred together at the edges. Other than the standouts, students started to resemble one another an awful lot-and that was hardly his fault; pattern recognition was a critical element of human survival, after all. Categorization of the universal data helped prevent it from burying you in details and smothering all of your higher faculties once and for all.
People were like sand that way. And sand would suffocate you just as fast as you would drown in water, if you were at an equal depth in both.
It didn’t matter. Unless that kid was one of the back-row lurkers in one of Roy’s classes after all, it wasn’t especially likely that they’d ever see each other again.
Or, of course, they would: barely twenty-six hours later, to be precise. Roy had taken the shortcut around the back of the dining hall nearest to his lecture room, hoping to make a break for his car and escape-after distributing all of his paper prompts and ruining several dozen student weekends, that was. If he was quick enough, none of them would catch him and try to scam him into offering them some free ambulatory office hours.
A scuffling noise drew his fickle attention sideways as he swung around the corner and started along the rear of the building. He glanced over, and then he slowed his stride, and then he stopped-because that had to be the same young man from yesterday, unless remarkably-bright, sexily-flowing, tantalizingly-silky-looking blond ponytails were suddenly becoming as common in real life as they were in Roy’s fantasies.
There was also the pertinent detail that the corporeal carnal dream in question was standing on his tiptoes, hands braced on a windowframe, peering through the foggy glass.
“Excuse me,” Roy said, because old habits died hard, and good manners died harder, apparently.
The kid glanced back and smiled at him sunnily-and completely blankly. Since Roy had taken up civilization yesterday, he was liable to believe that crap.
“Hi,” the beautiful demon said before returning his attention to the window.
“You aren’t supposed to be back here,” Roy said. “Who-”
“Hey, what day is it?” the fair-haired cretin asked before he could get another word in edgewise.
“Is that your catchphrase?” Roy asked.
“Huh?” the young man said. He was still glued to the window.
“It’s Friday,” Roy said. “October twelfth. Which is, at least the last time I checked, the today that was schedule to follow yesterday, although I could be wrong.”
“Okay,” the guy muttered. “We’ve got time. Well-we can make time.” He laughed-a quick, slightly harsh trill of a thing-and started tilting his head from side to side like he was trying to get a better angle. “That was a joke.”
“What in the world are you doing?” Roy managed, better late than never. “Are you a student?”
“Sure,” the young man said.
Very convincing. “Of what?”
“The human condition,” the young man said smoothly, though his attention to whatever was happening on the other side of the window never wavered. “And physics, applied physics, astrophysics, theoretical physics, hyper-theoretical physics, aeronautics, astronomy, and literature. But that shit’s hard.” He waved Roy over, and-strange thing; strangest thing-Roy went. His body moved for him like magnetized iron; he never had a choice. “Does this look funny to you?”
There were several things about this that looked funny according to a number of meanings of the word, but Roy didn’t suppose that this unexpected new campus plague was referring to any of the things that had caught Roy’s eye. Especially not the one that had caught Roy’s eye the most, which was how absolutely, breathtakingly gorgeous the plague’s ass was.
Dutifully, Roy squinted through the window, trying to follow the direction that his unwillingly-accepted guide was pointing.
A variety of shadowy figures moved around inside. Further squinting made it hazily evident that one of them appeared to have…
…a gun?
“This is a dining hall,” Roy said, perhaps a modicum stupidly. “This is a student establishment.”
“I know,” the odd young man next to him murmured. “By now that sorta shit should be outlawed around here, right?”
Roy managed to tear his eyes away from the travesty long enough to stare at his companion again. “What?”
“Never mind,” the young man said. “Shouldn’t be pointing it around, in any case. Wait, hang on-”
The shadowy figures were now, in typical shadowy figure style, skulking around and collecting what looked to be a series of large crates or boxes, which they were stacking near a doorway. The one with the handgun appeared to think that the weapon was more or less interchangeable with a baton, and was gesturing with it heedlessly.
The blond beside him didn’t flinch-Roy checked. That was interesting.
“Are they leaving?” the boy asked, pushing up further on his toes like another half an inch would offer a better vantage. “We gotta get in there.”
“What?” Roy said-yet again. This one seemed to have a talent for drawing it out of him. “No, we most certainly do not; we’re going to call campus poli-”
“Okay,” the boy said. “You call campus police, and I’ll figure out what the fuck’s going on. That sounds good, actually. Teamwork.” He shrugged off the indefatigable obnoxious red leather jacket and started wrapping it around his hand. “You got their number?”
Roy refused to be chagrined by a madman. “I-do not. But I have a 3G network, and what I do not have is a death wish-what are you doing?”
“Getting answers,” the young man said. “It’s… sorta my hobby, I guess.” With his right hand swathed in red leather, decorative chains swinging freely, he nudged Roy aside with his elbow, took one pace away from the window, drew his arm back-
Roy was getting a bit slow in his… not old age, obviously, but- “Don’t-!”
The boy punched through the window.
He punched through the window-
Shards of shattered glass burst outward like firework sparks; that only ever worked in movies-
Roy had ducked instinctively away from the impact, throwing both arms over his face to shield it, but when he carefully raised his head, the young man was just… standing there. He unwound the leather jacket from around his hand like nothing had happened, and no considerable property damage had just been dealt.
And despite the breakage, the ferocity of the blow, the spray of jagged edges-rips and nicks and shark-tooth tears marred the red leather for several inches down from where the bright-eyed hellion had smashed it through a windowpane-Roy couldn’t see a single drop of blood. That couldn’t-there wasn’t-how in the world-
“Your-jacket,” he said, stupidly, since neither Are you all right nor What the hell is wrong with you seemed necessary or likely to garner a reply.
“S’fine,” the young man said. “I’ve got a ton of ’em.” He started shouldering the jacket in question back on, rising to his toes again to peek through the broken window. He paused in threading his right arm through the sleeve to flick at a little piece of glass sticking to the bottom of the frame, sending it ricocheting inside, where it tinkled as it met its brethren on the floor. “You coming?”
Roy had a more pertinent question: “Who the hell are you?”
The young man paused, blinked at him, and flashed a staggeringly winsome smile. “I’m the Educator.”
“What?” Roy managed. His dignity was slowly slipping away, never to be seen again. Not once in his life had he repeated that word so many times within a quarter of an hour.
“Just call me Ed,” the young man said. “Most people do.”
“Ed, then,” Roy said, and something… something about it tingled, faintly, on the edges of his tongue, like the first inklings of fine chocolate.
“Don’t wear it out,” Ed said. He adjusted his abominable jacket, pulled the right sleeve down to cover his hand, and swiped glass dust and detritus off of the windowsill.
Which he then planted both hands on so that he could vault himself through the empty frame like it was easy.
He spun to look back once he was inside; Roy could hear the giant black boots-which had to be two sizes larger than his feet, proportionally speaking-crunching in the glass.
“C’mon,” he said. “Trust me.”
Roy’s heart pounded. He hadn’t felt this way in years-hadn’t felt this… what? Startled? Trepidatious? Excited?
He cleared his throat. He had to be rational here. He couldn’t let the prospect of the thrill of it cloud his judgment; he couldn’t let the sheer gold-gleaming transcendence of Ed’s hair and eyes and grin blind him to reality. Not here; not now; not ever. He’d crawled through too much shit getting here to throw it away over a moment’s misjudgment. “I don’t imagine the dean would smile on this sort of beha-”
“Fuck the dean,” Ed said. “Is that what you’re worried about?”
“Well,” Roy said. “That, and life and limb, and legality, and the simple fact that I don’t have the slightest idea who you a-”
“I already told you who I am,” Ed said. “And relax-what the dean doesn’t know won’t hurt him, and he’ll know whatever we want him to know.” He reached into a pocket in the lining of the jacket and withdrew a little leather wallet, which he flipped open to reveal an identification badge.
There wasn’t time to read much more than Federal Bureau of Investigation before he snapped it closed. Roy hadn’t finished gaping before he tipped it open again, distracting Roy with a broad wink-but this time, the ID said Secret Service-
“What?” Roy choked out, rather faintly.
Damn it. He’d been hoping not to have to say that again.
“Just get your ass in here,” Ed said. “This is gonna be good.”
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist(/Doctor Who)
Pairing/Characters: Roy/Ed
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: eventually 20,000+ (2,200 in this bit)
Warnings: language; some dark themes and violence (canon levels); fandomsmash
Prompt: Time Travel ~and~ Fandom Swap AU for Roy/Ed Week
Summary: Nothing puts a lifespan into perspective quite like the prospect of eternity. Sometimes, some days, the universe is kind. And sometimes its curators are very, very hot.
Author's Note: There's more of this, but it's still writing itself into new and exciting corners. XD I'm at a con next weekend (hi!), but I might get a chance to throw another piece at you guys next Monday, and I'll see what I can do from there. XD …aaaaaand I ran out of time to post even more than I expected to, so if you spot any egregious typos, incomplete sentences, etc., please let me know so I can fix them later! ^^;
If you're not a Doctor Who aficionado, I tried to make it pretty accessible! All you really need to know is that anything that seems super cool and creative, I probably did not make up. :'D If you are a Doctor Who fan, I stopped watching after Series 5, so I'm afraid it likely won't be compliant with anything after that, though I tried to do my homework when writing this stupid thing left me time. XD The title is borrowed from the song in an amazing fanvid from Back In The Day which also doubles as a great trailer for RTD-era Doctor Who!
And I don’t want to break the heart
Of any other man but you, but you, oh
- “Sinner’s Prayer” - Lady Gaga -
RECONCILE THE DARK
PART 1
There are probably several more remarkably inconvenient occasions to recognize that one is in love than while surfacing from the breathless embrace of a frigid river, but Roy is distracted enough by the task of not-drowning that he can’t think of one.
Ed-drenched and dark gold and sputtering, starting to laugh on the tail end of a wet gasp-is a vision.
Roy-treading water, shaking his sopping hair out of his face, unable to look away even long enough to check whether they’re still being followed-is royally fucked.
That’s Ed’s phrase. Most of Roy’s favorites are.
Ah, well. Men have fallen headlong and heart-first for less, and no one with two eyes, red blood, and half a wit could blame him.
Roy met Ed for the first time on a Thursday afternoon. He’d been sitting on a bench in one of the desperate-little-gasp-of-greenery attempts at something like a park that the regents had interspersed between the campus building, apparently in the hopes of giving them all something to stare at other than gray walls and blackboards. In theory, it was a good idea. In practice, every one of them was overrun with speeding bikes and/or students who collapsed on the grass at intervals and stopped moving. If they stayed where they’d fallen for more than ten minutes without a twitch or a detectable breath, Roy would go over and nudge them with his foot; such were the responsibilities of the faculty, or something like that. All in all, though, it was a decent place to do sudoku if you didn’t mind the occasional dead-student scare.
It was also, evidently, a decent place for someone to drop down next to you on your selected bench-which was engraved with the name of an alumni who had wanted to donate, but not too much-and sling one leg up over the other at the knee.
“Hey,” the newcomer said. “Is your hand okay?”
Roy had looked up at the intrusion, so he’d already met the startling tawny eyes by the time the dangerously reckless mouth admitted speech. The hair was even worse; and what bone structure-Roy had half a mind to drag him over to the art department and give the figure classes the session of their lives.
He was, however, wearing the most unspeakably gaudy red leather jacket that Roy had ever seen in sartorially-themed nightmares. Roy wasn’t sure whether that would be a blessing or a cataclysm for the art students, so perhaps it was better not to test their mettle just yet.
“I’m sorry,” Roy said, and he was-though not surprised. It tended to be the case around here that the cute ones were strange. “Do I know you?”
The young man stared at him.
Then the young man looked down at Roy’s newspaper, folded for efficient access to the sudoku grid.
“Shit,” he said. “I thought I-what day is it?”
“October eleventh,” Roy said.
“Thursday?” the young man asked. At the beginning of Roy’s nod, he shoved a hand back into his bangs-cute, but stranger by the second-and gritted his teeth. “Damn it. That explains a lot. Um… okay. Uh… have a nice day.”
“Thank you,” Roy said. “You, too.”
“’Kay,” the guy said, standing and tugging on the lapels of his cataclysmic jacket. “See you.”
Roy bit his tongue on the response he always wanted to make to that, which was How can you be so sure?
But there was something-
Familiar. There was something familiar about…
Well. Hell. There was something familiar about a lot of people when you scanned so many young faces in lectures halls every day that they blurred together at the edges. Other than the standouts, students started to resemble one another an awful lot-and that was hardly his fault; pattern recognition was a critical element of human survival, after all. Categorization of the universal data helped prevent it from burying you in details and smothering all of your higher faculties once and for all.
People were like sand that way. And sand would suffocate you just as fast as you would drown in water, if you were at an equal depth in both.
It didn’t matter. Unless that kid was one of the back-row lurkers in one of Roy’s classes after all, it wasn’t especially likely that they’d ever see each other again.
Or, of course, they would: barely twenty-six hours later, to be precise. Roy had taken the shortcut around the back of the dining hall nearest to his lecture room, hoping to make a break for his car and escape-after distributing all of his paper prompts and ruining several dozen student weekends, that was. If he was quick enough, none of them would catch him and try to scam him into offering them some free ambulatory office hours.
A scuffling noise drew his fickle attention sideways as he swung around the corner and started along the rear of the building. He glanced over, and then he slowed his stride, and then he stopped-because that had to be the same young man from yesterday, unless remarkably-bright, sexily-flowing, tantalizingly-silky-looking blond ponytails were suddenly becoming as common in real life as they were in Roy’s fantasies.
There was also the pertinent detail that the corporeal carnal dream in question was standing on his tiptoes, hands braced on a windowframe, peering through the foggy glass.
“Excuse me,” Roy said, because old habits died hard, and good manners died harder, apparently.
The kid glanced back and smiled at him sunnily-and completely blankly. Since Roy had taken up civilization yesterday, he was liable to believe that crap.
“Hi,” the beautiful demon said before returning his attention to the window.
“You aren’t supposed to be back here,” Roy said. “Who-”
“Hey, what day is it?” the fair-haired cretin asked before he could get another word in edgewise.
“Is that your catchphrase?” Roy asked.
“Huh?” the young man said. He was still glued to the window.
“It’s Friday,” Roy said. “October twelfth. Which is, at least the last time I checked, the today that was schedule to follow yesterday, although I could be wrong.”
“Okay,” the guy muttered. “We’ve got time. Well-we can make time.” He laughed-a quick, slightly harsh trill of a thing-and started tilting his head from side to side like he was trying to get a better angle. “That was a joke.”
“What in the world are you doing?” Roy managed, better late than never. “Are you a student?”
“Sure,” the young man said.
Very convincing. “Of what?”
“The human condition,” the young man said smoothly, though his attention to whatever was happening on the other side of the window never wavered. “And physics, applied physics, astrophysics, theoretical physics, hyper-theoretical physics, aeronautics, astronomy, and literature. But that shit’s hard.” He waved Roy over, and-strange thing; strangest thing-Roy went. His body moved for him like magnetized iron; he never had a choice. “Does this look funny to you?”
There were several things about this that looked funny according to a number of meanings of the word, but Roy didn’t suppose that this unexpected new campus plague was referring to any of the things that had caught Roy’s eye. Especially not the one that had caught Roy’s eye the most, which was how absolutely, breathtakingly gorgeous the plague’s ass was.
Dutifully, Roy squinted through the window, trying to follow the direction that his unwillingly-accepted guide was pointing.
A variety of shadowy figures moved around inside. Further squinting made it hazily evident that one of them appeared to have…
…a gun?
“This is a dining hall,” Roy said, perhaps a modicum stupidly. “This is a student establishment.”
“I know,” the odd young man next to him murmured. “By now that sorta shit should be outlawed around here, right?”
Roy managed to tear his eyes away from the travesty long enough to stare at his companion again. “What?”
“Never mind,” the young man said. “Shouldn’t be pointing it around, in any case. Wait, hang on-”
The shadowy figures were now, in typical shadowy figure style, skulking around and collecting what looked to be a series of large crates or boxes, which they were stacking near a doorway. The one with the handgun appeared to think that the weapon was more or less interchangeable with a baton, and was gesturing with it heedlessly.
The blond beside him didn’t flinch-Roy checked. That was interesting.
“Are they leaving?” the boy asked, pushing up further on his toes like another half an inch would offer a better vantage. “We gotta get in there.”
“What?” Roy said-yet again. This one seemed to have a talent for drawing it out of him. “No, we most certainly do not; we’re going to call campus poli-”
“Okay,” the boy said. “You call campus police, and I’ll figure out what the fuck’s going on. That sounds good, actually. Teamwork.” He shrugged off the indefatigable obnoxious red leather jacket and started wrapping it around his hand. “You got their number?”
Roy refused to be chagrined by a madman. “I-do not. But I have a 3G network, and what I do not have is a death wish-what are you doing?”
“Getting answers,” the young man said. “It’s… sorta my hobby, I guess.” With his right hand swathed in red leather, decorative chains swinging freely, he nudged Roy aside with his elbow, took one pace away from the window, drew his arm back-
Roy was getting a bit slow in his… not old age, obviously, but- “Don’t-!”
The boy punched through the window.
He punched through the window-
Shards of shattered glass burst outward like firework sparks; that only ever worked in movies-
Roy had ducked instinctively away from the impact, throwing both arms over his face to shield it, but when he carefully raised his head, the young man was just… standing there. He unwound the leather jacket from around his hand like nothing had happened, and no considerable property damage had just been dealt.
And despite the breakage, the ferocity of the blow, the spray of jagged edges-rips and nicks and shark-tooth tears marred the red leather for several inches down from where the bright-eyed hellion had smashed it through a windowpane-Roy couldn’t see a single drop of blood. That couldn’t-there wasn’t-how in the world-
“Your-jacket,” he said, stupidly, since neither Are you all right nor What the hell is wrong with you seemed necessary or likely to garner a reply.
“S’fine,” the young man said. “I’ve got a ton of ’em.” He started shouldering the jacket in question back on, rising to his toes again to peek through the broken window. He paused in threading his right arm through the sleeve to flick at a little piece of glass sticking to the bottom of the frame, sending it ricocheting inside, where it tinkled as it met its brethren on the floor. “You coming?”
Roy had a more pertinent question: “Who the hell are you?”
The young man paused, blinked at him, and flashed a staggeringly winsome smile. “I’m the Educator.”
“What?” Roy managed. His dignity was slowly slipping away, never to be seen again. Not once in his life had he repeated that word so many times within a quarter of an hour.
“Just call me Ed,” the young man said. “Most people do.”
“Ed, then,” Roy said, and something… something about it tingled, faintly, on the edges of his tongue, like the first inklings of fine chocolate.
“Don’t wear it out,” Ed said. He adjusted his abominable jacket, pulled the right sleeve down to cover his hand, and swiped glass dust and detritus off of the windowsill.
Which he then planted both hands on so that he could vault himself through the empty frame like it was easy.
He spun to look back once he was inside; Roy could hear the giant black boots-which had to be two sizes larger than his feet, proportionally speaking-crunching in the glass.
“C’mon,” he said. “Trust me.”
Roy’s heart pounded. He hadn’t felt this way in years-hadn’t felt this… what? Startled? Trepidatious? Excited?
He cleared his throat. He had to be rational here. He couldn’t let the prospect of the thrill of it cloud his judgment; he couldn’t let the sheer gold-gleaming transcendence of Ed’s hair and eyes and grin blind him to reality. Not here; not now; not ever. He’d crawled through too much shit getting here to throw it away over a moment’s misjudgment. “I don’t imagine the dean would smile on this sort of beha-”
“Fuck the dean,” Ed said. “Is that what you’re worried about?”
“Well,” Roy said. “That, and life and limb, and legality, and the simple fact that I don’t have the slightest idea who you a-”
“I already told you who I am,” Ed said. “And relax-what the dean doesn’t know won’t hurt him, and he’ll know whatever we want him to know.” He reached into a pocket in the lining of the jacket and withdrew a little leather wallet, which he flipped open to reveal an identification badge.
There wasn’t time to read much more than Federal Bureau of Investigation before he snapped it closed. Roy hadn’t finished gaping before he tipped it open again, distracting Roy with a broad wink-but this time, the ID said Secret Service-
“What?” Roy choked out, rather faintly.
Damn it. He’d been hoping not to have to say that again.
“Just get your ass in here,” Ed said. “This is gonna be good.”