FMA -- Reconcile the Dark, Part 2
Title: Reconcile the Dark
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist(/Doctor Who)
Pairing/Characters: Roy/Ed
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: eventually 20,000+ (5,100 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: Sorry this took so long! :[ I was bouncing around between projects like an idiot I always do, and I didn't want to get too far ahead of myself. Which unfortunately is why I can't promise any kind of update schedule, but there will be more when I get my shit together! ^^;;
RECONCILE THE DARK
PART 2
It was good.
That was the terrifying part.
It was the most fun Roy had had in as long as he could remember.
Not that there hadn’t been a handful-a rather large handful; possibly two generous cupped hands full-of moments of heart-stopping horror in the process, but unfortunately Roy’s psyche has twisted into so many convoluted knots over the years that that actually added to the fun.
The twisted psyche aspect was also the reason that he could believe that any of it had really taken place. Ed, in his battered jacket, had strode in with broken glass scattering away from his heels and started opening crates. Evidently they contained vast quantities of a smuggled-and highly unstable-element called chrysopium. Roy had pointed out that such an element did not, in fact, exist; Ed, with his head halfway into one of the containers, had said only, “Maybe not in your solar system.”
Clearly, none of it was happening in any recognizable reality, which freed Roy up to enjoy it as much as he liked without having to fret about concrete consequences.
And it was fantastic-it was a delightful change from the familiar dreams. It was all swash and buckle and adrenaline; the chrysopium smugglers returned for their goods mere moments after Ed deduced that they’d taken advantage of Earth’s de facto interstellar trade neutrality because “this lot” hadn’t figured out lightspeed travel yet; the two of them wound up in a knockdown, drag-out fistfight with a couple of cronies whose appearances went fuzzy when you saw them out of the corner of your eye-
And it felt magnificent. Roy was utterly, absolutely, unremittingly free in this little fantasy. He was free to give a grand total of zero shits about whether he hurt one of the smugglers-was it ‘Kevdal’ that Ed had said, as though that was a race or a species that should have registered with Roy?-and to deck them, trip them, pull one into a headlock and twist his arm back behind him until he screamed and dropped his gun-
It was dangerously exhilarating to be in danger-and to be in control. Danger was one thing; danger came easy and thrashed you and disappeared again before you’d even blinked-but to be in the thick of it, with power, affecting the hurricane even as the gusts picked up-
That was the drug.
And Roy wanted it.
He’d even reveled in the part where the man-the Kevdal, apparently-in charge returned with guns literally blazing; Roy had never seen a weapon like that before, like something out of a futuristic movie; and Ed had hauled him away from the flunky he’d been swiftly subduing and made him raise his hands above his head to surrender. They’d gotten locked up in a very chilly refrigerator room, handcuffed to a piece of shelving welded to the wall, and Roy had said, “Ordinarily, I am overwhelmingly in favor of light bondage, but in this particular instance-”, and Ed had said “Keep your pants on” and laboriously rolled up his sleeve.
Beneath the sleeve had been an arm-but not the kind that Roy expected. Regular arms, ordinary arms, did not allow a focused-scowling, fair-haired, fiery-dispositioned young man to peel a rubbery layer of false skin away, reveal a complicated metal grille in place of the bones of a forearm, and withdraw a small cylindrical piece of metal from within it with the opposite hand.
Ed had said, “Sit tight,” and pressed a button on the object he’d retrieved, and there’d been a whirring noise-
The tip of the thing in his hand-which looked like some kind of an ungodly cross between a whiteboard marker, a presentation clicker, and a remote control-lit up lightning-blue, and he twirled it deftly to apply what appeared to be the business end to the closest handcuff. The whirring ramped up to a rattling, and the chain between the cuffs jingled wildly, and the shelf began to shake-
And then there was a sharp click, and the handcuff fell open.
It took all of thirty seconds to duplicate, triplicate, and quadruplicate-if that was, in fact, a word-the tactic, and then Roy was rubbing his wrists and staring unabashedly at the one of Ed’s that consisted of wires and steel.
“Surprise,” Ed said, but there was something grim about the way that he was grinning.
“How is that possible?” Roy asked with some startlingly stubborn remnant of his voice.
“Welcome to the future, hot stuff,” Ed said.
“It’s Roy,” Roy said. “But thank you.”
“I meant it ironically,” Ed said, hauling his sleeve down and whirling on one heel to start for the door. “’Cause we’re in a fucking fridge and all.”
Roy had not gotten this far by failing to notice the telltale signs of a blush suffusing the cheeks of a beautiful young person, and he couldn’t help the extremely satisfied smirk that spread itself across his face.
Ed was pointing his science-magic wand at the lock on the refrigerator door now and muttering vigorously, however, so Roy sauntered in pursuit.
They crept back into the room they’d broken into before, where the smugglers were taking a break from what was evidently a busy schedule of dastardly derring-do in order to raid the student supplies and have a snack. Ed’s eyes were distracting-their color, their intensity-and his mouth might have been the single most tempting specimen that Roy had ever seen. He’d always meant to catalogue the worst offenders so that he’d have a metric when he needed one; now he couldn’t think of anything more descriptive to say than that Ed was a fifteen out of ten on a disaster scale, and Roy had always been weak for the type of people who embodied earthquakes.
Ed looked like there was nowhere on the planet that he’d rather be as he eyed their quarry and turned his strange device over in his even stranger hands.
“What is that?” Roy asked of the tool that had freed them. He could smell a fight by now; he doubted there’d be time later, and adrenaline had a tendency to conspire with curiosity and grab him by the throat.
“Sonic screwdriver,” Ed said, as though that, too, should have been a regular feature of Roy’s vocabulary. “You have a pretty good right hook. You think you can hold off three at once while I get that chain off the freezer and try to wrap ’em up in it?”
Roy considered the Kevdals. They still blurred at the edges every time he tried to focus on their shapes, which helped explain why they’d hit so much harder than they looked capable of.
Then he considered the crates. Then he considered the small silver lighter that one of the Kevdals had just tossed down onto the table after starting a cigarette indoors-which was, for the record, a violation of half a dozen Earth laws in addition to whatever interstellar ones they’d broken.
“I have a question about chrysopium,” he said.
Ed’s eyes were on the Kevdal leader, who was using one hand to tap a message into something that looked like a touchscreen tablet while stuffing bread into his mouth with the other. “Shoot.”
“Is it flammable?” Roy asked.
That snared Ed’s attention in a hurry, which might not have qualified as what most people would have called a ‘good sign’.
Ed grinned, broad and bright and seismic.
“Highly,” he said. “And I like the way you think.”
“Thank you,” Roy said.
Ed zeroed in on the Kevdals again. “I sure hope you don’t die.”
“Me, too,” Roy said.
He didn’t.
He did, however, sustain a very broad and remarkably painful slash across the entire palm of his right hand when one of the Kevdals, down his gun and also his eyebrows after a localized chrysopium explosion, pulled the glowing interstellar equivalent of a Bowie knife. On the upside, the spray of blood as Roy steeled himself, curled his fist, and then applied it to the responsible party’s slightly singed face must have looked dreadfully exciting, and it made the knockout all the more enjoyable.
There wasn’t long to spend clutching his gushing hand in any case; Ed had made literally short work of the remaining Kevdal still standing after the blast, and then it was just a matter of hauling them all into range of the repurposed chain and using the screwdriver to pop the padlock.
“Shit-motherfucker,” Ed said, and he was peeling the jacket off again, the better to tear out a long strip of the lining and offer it to Roy. “Put some pressure on it-this’ll just be a minute, and then we’ll get you fixed up, yeah?”
It was difficult to argue with people who didn’t leave you time to get a word in edgewise.
Ed had already moved on to snatching up the snarling Kevdal leader’s communication device, which had skittered underneath a table during the conflagration-confrontation. Ed pointed the screwdriver at it, which appeared to be his solution for just about everything; the whirring went on for a few seconds, and then the screen lit up, and he tucked the screwdriver back into the gap in his forearm and applied one fingertip to the task of tapping away.
“Cool,” he said after a moment, tossing the tablet aside like a used wrapper and starting back towards Roy. “Cops’re coming.”
Roy wanted to gesture towards their chained-up charges, but any sudden movements were likely to fling more blood all over the room. “What the hell kind of cops will know how to deal with this?”
“Judoon,” Ed said. “Bunch of thugs, mostly, but they’ll take care of this. They like that kind of thing. Here, c’mon, I don’t want you passing out on me after all that.” He hesitated-just long enough to falter for one step on his way across the room to Roy, but it was enough to notice. “Let me… you want it way tighter than that.”
“I know,” Roy said. Deployment taught you a lot of things that the recruitment brochures didn’t mention. “It’s a bit of a challenge with one hand.”
Ed, who had just gripped the two ends of the makeshift bandage, glanced up at him, eyebrow arching, and lifted the elbow of the arm made of metal.
“Lots of shit is,” he said.
Roy started to wince, and then continued in earnest-although for a different cause-as Ed hauled hard on the knot.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and then “Thank you,” and then “The hospital on the medical school campus-”
“You can’t take this to any old joint,” Ed said, apparently satisfied with the bandage. He threw the remains of the leather jacket over his right shoulder-which half-concealed his arm-and waved Roy along after him as he started for the door. “These assholes lace their weapons with all kinds of stuff you don’t want to waltz with, and the instruments in this era won’t even be able to detect it. It’s fine, though-I got you. Trust me.”
Even accounting for the deep, bleeding, persistently-throbbing hand wound, this was the nicest dream Roy had had in a long, long time.
“All right,” he said, and followed.
Ed led him just across the closest street bordering campus, at which point he directed them towards a relatively classy-looking, albeit incredibly tiny, tattoo parlor. The narrow façade, which a very questionable architect with a loose grasp of fire codes had somehow crammed into a gap between two storefronts no larger than an alleyway would have been, read Al’s Empowerment Emporium: Inkings, Jewelry, & Accoutrements in flowing white letters on crisp black paint. The door was rimmed in powder-blue, and there were forget-me-nots in the windowbox.
Roy hesitated. Something about this wasn’t… right.
“How have I-” He cleared his throat and stalled his stride. “I’ve never noticed this place before. It’s very… unique, but I’ve never-”
“C’mon in,” Ed said, heading for the door. He opened it, held in, and gestured for Roy to enter. Roy crept forward, slowly, uncertainly, bolstered only by the knowledge that Ed hadn’t steered him into certain death just yet, and stepped inside… “It was the coolest thing I could get him to look like,” Ed was saying. “I had to beg even for this. He’s real prissy that way.” The door smacked shut against Ed, hard-hard enough to send him staggering forward, clutching at his back. “Shit, ow! Okay, okay, I’m sorry!”
It was-
Physically impossible. It had fit into an alleyway; it had; he’d just seen it-
He wanted to step back outside to verify his own recollection, but his feet were rooted to the grating on the floor. He stared-up, back, around himself. They were in what had to be an engine room, half again as big as physics should have permitted. There was some sort of a center console rising in the middle of it, gunmetal gray with a shaft down the center where pale white steam writhed restlessly; the hexagonal spread of operational plates around it was dotted with buttons and dials and joysticks and a lever that looked like it might once have been an emergency brake; there was a pinwheel tucked into a transparent cylinder, and two small rubber-rimmed screens on the side further from the door, which for just a moment glowed dark red-like a pair of eyes.
“What do you think?” Ed asked calmly, striding over to hang his shredded jacket from the lever, which didn’t budge.
“I have no idea,” Roy said faintly. “Does it matter?”
“Nope,” Ed said. “Hang on-here.”
He reached down and hooked his fingers into the holes in the silver floor grating just to Roy’s left, jerked once, and lifted it free. He set it aside, knelt next to the crevice, and reached up.
“Give me your hand,” he said.
Roy could hardly be blamed for hesitating, but the trepidation-
Swelled, peaked, and then melted as Ed started to smile.
How goddamn cheesy was that?
Fortunately, his poker face would preserve his dignity; Ed would only be able to see him weighing his options and then gingerly offering his still sluggishly-bleeding palm down to the single unlikeliest of all of these implausibilities.
Ed caught his wrist gently in deft, clever fingers.
And then yanked on his arm.
And then shoved his hand into the gap, muttered, “C’mon, guys,” and-
Somehow summoned a swirling rush of tiny gold-things, minuscule particles lit from within, like a cross between fireflies and fireworks; they rose in a sweeping stream and clustered around Roy’s hand as Ed unwrapped the fabric tied across his palm-
And his skin tingled, bright and odd but not painful-like-Pop Rocks? Like Pop Rocks on his nerve endings; like carbonated soda fizzing everywhere beneath his skin-
Then they retreated just as suddenly as they’d appeared-spiraling back down into the shadowed depths beneath the floor, leaving him with…
A hand crusted with blood but utterly healed-sealed up right along the gash, with nothing but the thinnest, slightest white scar remaining where the open wound had bisected his palm. He flexed his fingers once; dried blood flaked away, but the tiny pale line held firm.
Just a touch belatedly, perhaps, Ed released his hand.
“Nanogenes,” Ed said. “Worth tanglin’ with the Chula every now and again just to steal a few.”
“That’s impossible,” Roy’s idiot voice said.
Ed grinned. “The good shit usually is.”
The discarded lining-bandage monstrosity had ended up on the grate just in front of Roy’s toes. He knelt to retrieve it and then wasn’t sure what to do with it, and discovered that he couldn’t ruminate on his options and stand up without banging his head against the console at the same time, so he favored the latter. “Is there a…?”
“Oh, yeah,” Ed said. “Just don’t throw it in anything that looks like a trashcan, or he’ll hit you with doors.”
Roy paused, tried to parse that, failed, and attempted to approach a different part of it sideways. “‘He’?”
“Yeah,” Ed said. “Al. The ship.” He gestured in a way that appeared to be encouraging Roy to follow him, and then in a way that seemed to indicate their surroundings on the whole. “Like it says on the front.”
Roy…
…gave up.
And trailed Ed through an arched doorway lined with little blinking yellow lights, into a room that looked like an independent thrift store on methamphetamine.
Ed swanned right into the midst of the sartorial chaos-he’d caught up his mangled jacket on their way, but now he tossed it into a frosted white storage bin to the side, the better to beeline over to a rack of fifty obnoxious red leather jackets identical to the one he’d just abandoned.
“Hot Topic goes out of business in 2050,” he said, jackknifing one off of the hanger and shouldering it on. “Prepare for that.”
“Thank you,” Roy said, because his obscenely vast vocabulary and relatively impressive intellect couldn’t conjure a single other option.
“Well,” Ed said, tugging on his lapels to settle the jacket, “anything you’re dying to see while you’ve got Al at your disposal, or do you just wanna get back to your life and all that?”
Roy blinked. “What… do you mean?”
Ed waved his hand around them. “He’s a-shit, what do you guys call it? A spaceship.”
Roy stared.
Ed snapped the fingers of his left hand and then pointed the first one at Roy. “Time machine. That’s the one I was thinking of.”
Something in the pit of Roy’s stomach had coiled itself into a tight, thudding knot. It had been so long since he’d felt anything like this that he couldn’t tell whether it was pleasant anticipation or something more akin to fear.
“That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll just… be going.”
Something shifted in Ed’s remarkable eyes. It might have been disappointment-flaring first, and then shuttered away.
“Okay,” Ed said. “I appreciate the help. You were pretty good out there.”
“You were phenomenal,” Roy said, because it was the truth, and this was a dream. He started back the way they’d come, assuming the door would materialize in front of him at some point. Time to let it go. All things came to an end, after all; and if you wanted the terrors to leave you alone, you had to relinquish the good things, too.
“’Bye, Roy,” Ed said when Roy put his hand on the door.
Roy shouldn’t have looked back, but he wanted to cement the image in his mind-Ed, hair mussed, eyes bright, hands shoved into his pockets, in a new leather jacket, with a half-smile that seemed far too familiar.
“See you around,” he said.
“Sure,” Ed said. “Maybe.”
Roy breathed out, pushed the door open, and stepped through. It fell shut behind him without a sound, and he looked up at the front of the little not-a-tattoo-shop for a moment both too long and not nearly long enough before he turned and walked away.
Riza had been better than he deserved from the very beginning. Frequently he wondered why-and, almost as frequently, it occurred to him that he must have been offering her something in return that was tantamount in some way to what she offered him, because she was too smart to waste her energy on a time sink.
She’d created and set aside a Monday afternoon appointment slot for him, and she charged him significantly less than any of her other regulars-as far as he knew, anyway; the hourly rate she ran him was unreasonably low for psychiatry, and at some point in the process, they had silently agreed to pretend not to notice. Accordingly, he’d never asked her what clients who couldn’t claim the Ex-Commanding Officer Discount had to pay.
He honestly tried to stay focused-discount or no, it wasn’t as though this time was cheap; and, more than that, it wasn’t as though it wasn’t a highlight of the week, both for seeing her and for the relief-while they talked through the usual business, and he swore up and down that he’d been keeping up with his mindfulness exercises and his meditative breathing, sharpening all of the little weapons in the larger war. He’d sat with his back turned to his office door for a full hour last Wednesday before he had to swivel his chair around again, when the shaking got to be too much. He’d only bled out in the desert twice in dreams this week.
“All of that sounds like progress,” she said, resting her elbow on the arm of her chair and her chin on her hand. Her eyebrows arched up before her thin smile mirrored them. “So what’s the distraction?”
A rather insipid, and yet apparently inextricable, part of him was always tempted to play dumb, coy, or both.
He steamrolled it.
“I’m going to ask you a strange question,” he said. “Tell me the truth?”
“I’ll do my best,” she said, and the smile tilted slightly.
He held out his right hand. “What do you see?”
She made sure to give him the dubious look in advance, just in case, before she directed her attention to his palm.
She paused.
She leaned forward.
She took his hand in both of hers and frowned down at it.
“This wasn’t here last week,” she said. Her eyes flicked up to his face, although her question sounded so much like a statement that it hardly needed confirmation. “Was it?”
“No,” he said.
“It looks like it was deep,” she said, one fingertip hovering just above the scar. “But it healed-even. And impossibly fast; impossibly clean, like-”
“Magic?” he asked.
Her eyes met his again, but this time the acidity of her gaze almost bowled him over.
“Very funny,” she said.
“I wish it was,” he said.
“I don’t believe in magic, Roy,” she said. “And neither do you.”
“You’re right,” he said. “But if you’re seeing it, and I’m seeing it, that means it had to have happened. And if that’s true, then… hell. I don’t know what else is.”
Now her eyes were narrowing, and her grip on his hand had begun to tighten, and here they went-
“What happened, Roy?” she said.
They’d made a pact, when they were children, that they’d tell each other everything, and they’d never, ever lie.
So he told her the story from the start.
The Saturday after that was the sort of beautiful, brisk fall day that normally eluded them in this climate. Roy had learned to take advantage of life’s little pleasures, fleeting as the bastards were; he’d parked himself at an outdoor table at his favorite coffee shop café to do his grading. Sometimes a pleasant place could mitigate a less-than-pleasant task.
A flash of movement drew his eye upward. He hardly had time to lower the essay he’d been marking and jolt in startled recognition before Ed was clambering over the back side of the empty chair opposite him like a rather desperate lemur and folding himself into it, looking over his shoulder all the while. “Hi, I’m Ed; I promise I don’t bite. I’ll pay for your coffee if you act like I’m supposed to be here for five mi…” He turned his head at last and blinked owlishly-very animalistic all around today-at Roy. “Holy shit.”
“I’ve already paid for the coffee,” Roy said, “but thank you.” He reached into his bag, rustled the contents around until he found yesterday’s newspaper sudoku, and offered it across the table. “Unfold it; it’s better coverage than anything else I’ve got.”
“You are a fucking miracle,” Ed said, shrugging out of the leather jacket, hurling it under the table, and hauling the hood of his black sweatshirt up over his hair.
“I’m not sure about that,” Roy said, “but thank you, I sup-”
Footfalls pounded around the streetcorner, and Ed snapped the newspaper up, burying his face in it. Roy watched, dumbfounded, as a troop of apparently sentient rhinoceroses in what looked like riot gear stampeded past his little table, rustling his stack of essays with the heedlessness of their passage, and then disappeared on down the road.
“I just saw that,” he said. “Didn’t I?”
“Told you about them,” Ed said, peeking around the side of the newspaper and then gingerly setting it down. “Judoon. Bunch of assholes. All I did was liberate a prisoner who shouldn’t’ve been locked up anyway. That’s the problem with having a sorta-kinda intergalactic police force that’ll immediately side with the highest bidder.”
“That’s who you called for the Kevdals?” Roy asked.
He really had just said that word out loud, without air-quotes. Ed really was sitting in front of him, at least as far as his senses could be believed.
“Given the smuggling bit,” Ed said, “probably there was a lot of money in it for them from the Kevdalu government, and I figured we had to get your hand handled, so…”
He shrugged.
Then he paused.
Then he started scowling.
“I never meet anybody twice,” he said, peering at Roy. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I beg your pardon,” Roy said.
“Other than the fact that your speech patterns are from the wrong era, I mean,” Ed said. “That can’t be it.” He rocked back in the chair, folding his arms across his chest, and frowned deeper still. “Al must like you. Why would Al like you? What’d you do? Did you bribe him?”
“Not that I recall,” Roy said, “but I’ve been told I’m irresis-”
“Or unless you’re stuck out of time,” Ed said. He leaned in again, far too close across the tiny little table, but if Roy leaned back, he’d lose ground. It wasn’t an unpleasant compromise, but it did make it very difficult to resist the urge to kiss Ed’s mouth to stem the flow of nonsense. “You’re a professor at the school, right? How long’ve you been teaching there, exactly? Do your students actually look at you, or does it seem like maybe they’re lookin’ at something past you most of the time?”
“Since the year 2012,” Roy said. “They look me directly in the eyes, or at least look directly at my collarbones, and some of them doodle me in their notebooks and turn adorable colors when I compliment their skill. Are you asking me if I’m a ghost?”
“Well, I was,” Ed said, scowling at him even more intently. “Not anymore. There’s something… Why’d you start this whole teacher gig, anyway?”
Roy supposed there was no harm in being overly honest with an extremely detailed figment of his tormented imagination. “Because my life was hollow and meaningless after the war,” he said, “and I had to find something to take my mind off of everything that I’d become. At least here, occasionally, I can get through to some of them-and I try to believe that if I do that enough times, just as a matter of the law of averages, one of them will go out there and make a difference.”
Ed titled his head to the side-just slightly, like a puppy trying to figure out if that thing in your fingertips was a treat or not.
“Huh,” he said. “Which war?”
“Iraq,” Roy said.
“Not familiar,” Ed said. “Guess maybe you’ll have to fill me in.”
Roy blinked. Did that-
Ed shoved his chair back, stood, and folded the newspaper again. His hand was… covered, like it had been the first time Roy had seen it; this close, and focused, Roy could see that there was something unusual about the skin, because it didn’t wrinkle, and there weren’t any hairs, and the fingernails were all too uniformly even-
Ed was using it to hold the newspaper out to him.
“Thanks for this,” Ed said. “You wanna help me bring a princess back to her home planet?”
Roy could have said a lot of things.
He could have said What the hell are you talking about?
He could have said Even after the rhinoceros police, that is too much gibberish for me to believe.
He could have said What we did last week-that is the most alive I have felt in so long that when I walked past that building again and saw that the window was still broken, I cried.
And there was a chance of the rhinoceroses coming back, wasn’t there, if they weren’t quick?
So he picked the simplest answer:
“Yes,” he said.
Ed grinned like a whole galaxy full of stars.
There are a hundred billion unimaginable places in the universe. Roy always daydreamed of the ones he’d make it to someday-some mythical tomorrow when he had the money stacked up, and the time carved out, and the will, and the inclination, and the organizational impetus. Someday he’d see Paris; someday he’d go to Niagara Falls. Someday, Hạ Long Bay; someday, Giza; someday-
Someday, he’d sleep through the night. Someday, dragging his body out of bed would feel more like a blessing and less like a meaningless, self-flagellating trial. Someday, the cinema wouldn’t be too loud; someday, the engine noise in an airplane wouldn’t make him grip the armrests until his knuckles ached; someday, his heart-rate wouldn’t skyrocket at the slam of a door. Someday, he could travel; could stay in hotel rooms he hadn’t yet seen; could wake up alone and not feel like the dark was strangling him, smothering him, thrusting its poison into his lungs and exploding him from the inside out-
He’d clung to the possibility, but a part of him had always known it was procrastination. A part of him had always known that you had to stand up and start to face the music; it wouldn’t just turn up on your doorstep when you least expected.
But Ed does.
Ed does, over and over and over again.
Ed takes him to cities where every tower’s made of glass. Ed takes him to waterfalls that run upside-down. Ed takes him to places he couldn’t have dreamed of if he’d had a thousand years and an unlimited supply of LSD, and Ed teaches him how to save the people that they find there. Some of them look like humans; some are unrecognizable; some are grateful; some try to murder them; some have fins or claws or fangs or bleed in strange colors, but bleed they do, and that much Roy can always understand.
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist(/Doctor Who)
Pairing/Characters: Roy/Ed
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: eventually 20,000+ (5,100 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: Sorry this took so long! :[ I was bouncing around between projects like an idiot I always do, and I didn't want to get too far ahead of myself. Which unfortunately is why I can't promise any kind of update schedule, but there will be more when I get my shit together! ^^;;
RECONCILE THE DARK
PART 2
It was good.
That was the terrifying part.
It was the most fun Roy had had in as long as he could remember.
Not that there hadn’t been a handful-a rather large handful; possibly two generous cupped hands full-of moments of heart-stopping horror in the process, but unfortunately Roy’s psyche has twisted into so many convoluted knots over the years that that actually added to the fun.
The twisted psyche aspect was also the reason that he could believe that any of it had really taken place. Ed, in his battered jacket, had strode in with broken glass scattering away from his heels and started opening crates. Evidently they contained vast quantities of a smuggled-and highly unstable-element called chrysopium. Roy had pointed out that such an element did not, in fact, exist; Ed, with his head halfway into one of the containers, had said only, “Maybe not in your solar system.”
Clearly, none of it was happening in any recognizable reality, which freed Roy up to enjoy it as much as he liked without having to fret about concrete consequences.
And it was fantastic-it was a delightful change from the familiar dreams. It was all swash and buckle and adrenaline; the chrysopium smugglers returned for their goods mere moments after Ed deduced that they’d taken advantage of Earth’s de facto interstellar trade neutrality because “this lot” hadn’t figured out lightspeed travel yet; the two of them wound up in a knockdown, drag-out fistfight with a couple of cronies whose appearances went fuzzy when you saw them out of the corner of your eye-
And it felt magnificent. Roy was utterly, absolutely, unremittingly free in this little fantasy. He was free to give a grand total of zero shits about whether he hurt one of the smugglers-was it ‘Kevdal’ that Ed had said, as though that was a race or a species that should have registered with Roy?-and to deck them, trip them, pull one into a headlock and twist his arm back behind him until he screamed and dropped his gun-
It was dangerously exhilarating to be in danger-and to be in control. Danger was one thing; danger came easy and thrashed you and disappeared again before you’d even blinked-but to be in the thick of it, with power, affecting the hurricane even as the gusts picked up-
That was the drug.
And Roy wanted it.
He’d even reveled in the part where the man-the Kevdal, apparently-in charge returned with guns literally blazing; Roy had never seen a weapon like that before, like something out of a futuristic movie; and Ed had hauled him away from the flunky he’d been swiftly subduing and made him raise his hands above his head to surrender. They’d gotten locked up in a very chilly refrigerator room, handcuffed to a piece of shelving welded to the wall, and Roy had said, “Ordinarily, I am overwhelmingly in favor of light bondage, but in this particular instance-”, and Ed had said “Keep your pants on” and laboriously rolled up his sleeve.
Beneath the sleeve had been an arm-but not the kind that Roy expected. Regular arms, ordinary arms, did not allow a focused-scowling, fair-haired, fiery-dispositioned young man to peel a rubbery layer of false skin away, reveal a complicated metal grille in place of the bones of a forearm, and withdraw a small cylindrical piece of metal from within it with the opposite hand.
Ed had said, “Sit tight,” and pressed a button on the object he’d retrieved, and there’d been a whirring noise-
The tip of the thing in his hand-which looked like some kind of an ungodly cross between a whiteboard marker, a presentation clicker, and a remote control-lit up lightning-blue, and he twirled it deftly to apply what appeared to be the business end to the closest handcuff. The whirring ramped up to a rattling, and the chain between the cuffs jingled wildly, and the shelf began to shake-
And then there was a sharp click, and the handcuff fell open.
It took all of thirty seconds to duplicate, triplicate, and quadruplicate-if that was, in fact, a word-the tactic, and then Roy was rubbing his wrists and staring unabashedly at the one of Ed’s that consisted of wires and steel.
“Surprise,” Ed said, but there was something grim about the way that he was grinning.
“How is that possible?” Roy asked with some startlingly stubborn remnant of his voice.
“Welcome to the future, hot stuff,” Ed said.
“It’s Roy,” Roy said. “But thank you.”
“I meant it ironically,” Ed said, hauling his sleeve down and whirling on one heel to start for the door. “’Cause we’re in a fucking fridge and all.”
Roy had not gotten this far by failing to notice the telltale signs of a blush suffusing the cheeks of a beautiful young person, and he couldn’t help the extremely satisfied smirk that spread itself across his face.
Ed was pointing his science-magic wand at the lock on the refrigerator door now and muttering vigorously, however, so Roy sauntered in pursuit.
They crept back into the room they’d broken into before, where the smugglers were taking a break from what was evidently a busy schedule of dastardly derring-do in order to raid the student supplies and have a snack. Ed’s eyes were distracting-their color, their intensity-and his mouth might have been the single most tempting specimen that Roy had ever seen. He’d always meant to catalogue the worst offenders so that he’d have a metric when he needed one; now he couldn’t think of anything more descriptive to say than that Ed was a fifteen out of ten on a disaster scale, and Roy had always been weak for the type of people who embodied earthquakes.
Ed looked like there was nowhere on the planet that he’d rather be as he eyed their quarry and turned his strange device over in his even stranger hands.
“What is that?” Roy asked of the tool that had freed them. He could smell a fight by now; he doubted there’d be time later, and adrenaline had a tendency to conspire with curiosity and grab him by the throat.
“Sonic screwdriver,” Ed said, as though that, too, should have been a regular feature of Roy’s vocabulary. “You have a pretty good right hook. You think you can hold off three at once while I get that chain off the freezer and try to wrap ’em up in it?”
Roy considered the Kevdals. They still blurred at the edges every time he tried to focus on their shapes, which helped explain why they’d hit so much harder than they looked capable of.
Then he considered the crates. Then he considered the small silver lighter that one of the Kevdals had just tossed down onto the table after starting a cigarette indoors-which was, for the record, a violation of half a dozen Earth laws in addition to whatever interstellar ones they’d broken.
“I have a question about chrysopium,” he said.
Ed’s eyes were on the Kevdal leader, who was using one hand to tap a message into something that looked like a touchscreen tablet while stuffing bread into his mouth with the other. “Shoot.”
“Is it flammable?” Roy asked.
That snared Ed’s attention in a hurry, which might not have qualified as what most people would have called a ‘good sign’.
Ed grinned, broad and bright and seismic.
“Highly,” he said. “And I like the way you think.”
“Thank you,” Roy said.
Ed zeroed in on the Kevdals again. “I sure hope you don’t die.”
“Me, too,” Roy said.
He didn’t.
He did, however, sustain a very broad and remarkably painful slash across the entire palm of his right hand when one of the Kevdals, down his gun and also his eyebrows after a localized chrysopium explosion, pulled the glowing interstellar equivalent of a Bowie knife. On the upside, the spray of blood as Roy steeled himself, curled his fist, and then applied it to the responsible party’s slightly singed face must have looked dreadfully exciting, and it made the knockout all the more enjoyable.
There wasn’t long to spend clutching his gushing hand in any case; Ed had made literally short work of the remaining Kevdal still standing after the blast, and then it was just a matter of hauling them all into range of the repurposed chain and using the screwdriver to pop the padlock.
“Shit-motherfucker,” Ed said, and he was peeling the jacket off again, the better to tear out a long strip of the lining and offer it to Roy. “Put some pressure on it-this’ll just be a minute, and then we’ll get you fixed up, yeah?”
It was difficult to argue with people who didn’t leave you time to get a word in edgewise.
Ed had already moved on to snatching up the snarling Kevdal leader’s communication device, which had skittered underneath a table during the conflagration-confrontation. Ed pointed the screwdriver at it, which appeared to be his solution for just about everything; the whirring went on for a few seconds, and then the screen lit up, and he tucked the screwdriver back into the gap in his forearm and applied one fingertip to the task of tapping away.
“Cool,” he said after a moment, tossing the tablet aside like a used wrapper and starting back towards Roy. “Cops’re coming.”
Roy wanted to gesture towards their chained-up charges, but any sudden movements were likely to fling more blood all over the room. “What the hell kind of cops will know how to deal with this?”
“Judoon,” Ed said. “Bunch of thugs, mostly, but they’ll take care of this. They like that kind of thing. Here, c’mon, I don’t want you passing out on me after all that.” He hesitated-just long enough to falter for one step on his way across the room to Roy, but it was enough to notice. “Let me… you want it way tighter than that.”
“I know,” Roy said. Deployment taught you a lot of things that the recruitment brochures didn’t mention. “It’s a bit of a challenge with one hand.”
Ed, who had just gripped the two ends of the makeshift bandage, glanced up at him, eyebrow arching, and lifted the elbow of the arm made of metal.
“Lots of shit is,” he said.
Roy started to wince, and then continued in earnest-although for a different cause-as Ed hauled hard on the knot.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and then “Thank you,” and then “The hospital on the medical school campus-”
“You can’t take this to any old joint,” Ed said, apparently satisfied with the bandage. He threw the remains of the leather jacket over his right shoulder-which half-concealed his arm-and waved Roy along after him as he started for the door. “These assholes lace their weapons with all kinds of stuff you don’t want to waltz with, and the instruments in this era won’t even be able to detect it. It’s fine, though-I got you. Trust me.”
Even accounting for the deep, bleeding, persistently-throbbing hand wound, this was the nicest dream Roy had had in a long, long time.
“All right,” he said, and followed.
Ed led him just across the closest street bordering campus, at which point he directed them towards a relatively classy-looking, albeit incredibly tiny, tattoo parlor. The narrow façade, which a very questionable architect with a loose grasp of fire codes had somehow crammed into a gap between two storefronts no larger than an alleyway would have been, read Al’s Empowerment Emporium: Inkings, Jewelry, & Accoutrements in flowing white letters on crisp black paint. The door was rimmed in powder-blue, and there were forget-me-nots in the windowbox.
Roy hesitated. Something about this wasn’t… right.
“How have I-” He cleared his throat and stalled his stride. “I’ve never noticed this place before. It’s very… unique, but I’ve never-”
“C’mon in,” Ed said, heading for the door. He opened it, held in, and gestured for Roy to enter. Roy crept forward, slowly, uncertainly, bolstered only by the knowledge that Ed hadn’t steered him into certain death just yet, and stepped inside… “It was the coolest thing I could get him to look like,” Ed was saying. “I had to beg even for this. He’s real prissy that way.” The door smacked shut against Ed, hard-hard enough to send him staggering forward, clutching at his back. “Shit, ow! Okay, okay, I’m sorry!”
It was-
Physically impossible. It had fit into an alleyway; it had; he’d just seen it-
He wanted to step back outside to verify his own recollection, but his feet were rooted to the grating on the floor. He stared-up, back, around himself. They were in what had to be an engine room, half again as big as physics should have permitted. There was some sort of a center console rising in the middle of it, gunmetal gray with a shaft down the center where pale white steam writhed restlessly; the hexagonal spread of operational plates around it was dotted with buttons and dials and joysticks and a lever that looked like it might once have been an emergency brake; there was a pinwheel tucked into a transparent cylinder, and two small rubber-rimmed screens on the side further from the door, which for just a moment glowed dark red-like a pair of eyes.
“What do you think?” Ed asked calmly, striding over to hang his shredded jacket from the lever, which didn’t budge.
“I have no idea,” Roy said faintly. “Does it matter?”
“Nope,” Ed said. “Hang on-here.”
He reached down and hooked his fingers into the holes in the silver floor grating just to Roy’s left, jerked once, and lifted it free. He set it aside, knelt next to the crevice, and reached up.
“Give me your hand,” he said.
Roy could hardly be blamed for hesitating, but the trepidation-
Swelled, peaked, and then melted as Ed started to smile.
How goddamn cheesy was that?
Fortunately, his poker face would preserve his dignity; Ed would only be able to see him weighing his options and then gingerly offering his still sluggishly-bleeding palm down to the single unlikeliest of all of these implausibilities.
Ed caught his wrist gently in deft, clever fingers.
And then yanked on his arm.
And then shoved his hand into the gap, muttered, “C’mon, guys,” and-
Somehow summoned a swirling rush of tiny gold-things, minuscule particles lit from within, like a cross between fireflies and fireworks; they rose in a sweeping stream and clustered around Roy’s hand as Ed unwrapped the fabric tied across his palm-
And his skin tingled, bright and odd but not painful-like-Pop Rocks? Like Pop Rocks on his nerve endings; like carbonated soda fizzing everywhere beneath his skin-
Then they retreated just as suddenly as they’d appeared-spiraling back down into the shadowed depths beneath the floor, leaving him with…
A hand crusted with blood but utterly healed-sealed up right along the gash, with nothing but the thinnest, slightest white scar remaining where the open wound had bisected his palm. He flexed his fingers once; dried blood flaked away, but the tiny pale line held firm.
Just a touch belatedly, perhaps, Ed released his hand.
“Nanogenes,” Ed said. “Worth tanglin’ with the Chula every now and again just to steal a few.”
“That’s impossible,” Roy’s idiot voice said.
Ed grinned. “The good shit usually is.”
The discarded lining-bandage monstrosity had ended up on the grate just in front of Roy’s toes. He knelt to retrieve it and then wasn’t sure what to do with it, and discovered that he couldn’t ruminate on his options and stand up without banging his head against the console at the same time, so he favored the latter. “Is there a…?”
“Oh, yeah,” Ed said. “Just don’t throw it in anything that looks like a trashcan, or he’ll hit you with doors.”
Roy paused, tried to parse that, failed, and attempted to approach a different part of it sideways. “‘He’?”
“Yeah,” Ed said. “Al. The ship.” He gestured in a way that appeared to be encouraging Roy to follow him, and then in a way that seemed to indicate their surroundings on the whole. “Like it says on the front.”
Roy…
…gave up.
And trailed Ed through an arched doorway lined with little blinking yellow lights, into a room that looked like an independent thrift store on methamphetamine.
Ed swanned right into the midst of the sartorial chaos-he’d caught up his mangled jacket on their way, but now he tossed it into a frosted white storage bin to the side, the better to beeline over to a rack of fifty obnoxious red leather jackets identical to the one he’d just abandoned.
“Hot Topic goes out of business in 2050,” he said, jackknifing one off of the hanger and shouldering it on. “Prepare for that.”
“Thank you,” Roy said, because his obscenely vast vocabulary and relatively impressive intellect couldn’t conjure a single other option.
“Well,” Ed said, tugging on his lapels to settle the jacket, “anything you’re dying to see while you’ve got Al at your disposal, or do you just wanna get back to your life and all that?”
Roy blinked. “What… do you mean?”
Ed waved his hand around them. “He’s a-shit, what do you guys call it? A spaceship.”
Roy stared.
Ed snapped the fingers of his left hand and then pointed the first one at Roy. “Time machine. That’s the one I was thinking of.”
Something in the pit of Roy’s stomach had coiled itself into a tight, thudding knot. It had been so long since he’d felt anything like this that he couldn’t tell whether it was pleasant anticipation or something more akin to fear.
“That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll just… be going.”
Something shifted in Ed’s remarkable eyes. It might have been disappointment-flaring first, and then shuttered away.
“Okay,” Ed said. “I appreciate the help. You were pretty good out there.”
“You were phenomenal,” Roy said, because it was the truth, and this was a dream. He started back the way they’d come, assuming the door would materialize in front of him at some point. Time to let it go. All things came to an end, after all; and if you wanted the terrors to leave you alone, you had to relinquish the good things, too.
“’Bye, Roy,” Ed said when Roy put his hand on the door.
Roy shouldn’t have looked back, but he wanted to cement the image in his mind-Ed, hair mussed, eyes bright, hands shoved into his pockets, in a new leather jacket, with a half-smile that seemed far too familiar.
“See you around,” he said.
“Sure,” Ed said. “Maybe.”
Roy breathed out, pushed the door open, and stepped through. It fell shut behind him without a sound, and he looked up at the front of the little not-a-tattoo-shop for a moment both too long and not nearly long enough before he turned and walked away.
Riza had been better than he deserved from the very beginning. Frequently he wondered why-and, almost as frequently, it occurred to him that he must have been offering her something in return that was tantamount in some way to what she offered him, because she was too smart to waste her energy on a time sink.
She’d created and set aside a Monday afternoon appointment slot for him, and she charged him significantly less than any of her other regulars-as far as he knew, anyway; the hourly rate she ran him was unreasonably low for psychiatry, and at some point in the process, they had silently agreed to pretend not to notice. Accordingly, he’d never asked her what clients who couldn’t claim the Ex-Commanding Officer Discount had to pay.
He honestly tried to stay focused-discount or no, it wasn’t as though this time was cheap; and, more than that, it wasn’t as though it wasn’t a highlight of the week, both for seeing her and for the relief-while they talked through the usual business, and he swore up and down that he’d been keeping up with his mindfulness exercises and his meditative breathing, sharpening all of the little weapons in the larger war. He’d sat with his back turned to his office door for a full hour last Wednesday before he had to swivel his chair around again, when the shaking got to be too much. He’d only bled out in the desert twice in dreams this week.
“All of that sounds like progress,” she said, resting her elbow on the arm of her chair and her chin on her hand. Her eyebrows arched up before her thin smile mirrored them. “So what’s the distraction?”
A rather insipid, and yet apparently inextricable, part of him was always tempted to play dumb, coy, or both.
He steamrolled it.
“I’m going to ask you a strange question,” he said. “Tell me the truth?”
“I’ll do my best,” she said, and the smile tilted slightly.
He held out his right hand. “What do you see?”
She made sure to give him the dubious look in advance, just in case, before she directed her attention to his palm.
She paused.
She leaned forward.
She took his hand in both of hers and frowned down at it.
“This wasn’t here last week,” she said. Her eyes flicked up to his face, although her question sounded so much like a statement that it hardly needed confirmation. “Was it?”
“No,” he said.
“It looks like it was deep,” she said, one fingertip hovering just above the scar. “But it healed-even. And impossibly fast; impossibly clean, like-”
“Magic?” he asked.
Her eyes met his again, but this time the acidity of her gaze almost bowled him over.
“Very funny,” she said.
“I wish it was,” he said.
“I don’t believe in magic, Roy,” she said. “And neither do you.”
“You’re right,” he said. “But if you’re seeing it, and I’m seeing it, that means it had to have happened. And if that’s true, then… hell. I don’t know what else is.”
Now her eyes were narrowing, and her grip on his hand had begun to tighten, and here they went-
“What happened, Roy?” she said.
They’d made a pact, when they were children, that they’d tell each other everything, and they’d never, ever lie.
So he told her the story from the start.
The Saturday after that was the sort of beautiful, brisk fall day that normally eluded them in this climate. Roy had learned to take advantage of life’s little pleasures, fleeting as the bastards were; he’d parked himself at an outdoor table at his favorite coffee shop café to do his grading. Sometimes a pleasant place could mitigate a less-than-pleasant task.
A flash of movement drew his eye upward. He hardly had time to lower the essay he’d been marking and jolt in startled recognition before Ed was clambering over the back side of the empty chair opposite him like a rather desperate lemur and folding himself into it, looking over his shoulder all the while. “Hi, I’m Ed; I promise I don’t bite. I’ll pay for your coffee if you act like I’m supposed to be here for five mi…” He turned his head at last and blinked owlishly-very animalistic all around today-at Roy. “Holy shit.”
“I’ve already paid for the coffee,” Roy said, “but thank you.” He reached into his bag, rustled the contents around until he found yesterday’s newspaper sudoku, and offered it across the table. “Unfold it; it’s better coverage than anything else I’ve got.”
“You are a fucking miracle,” Ed said, shrugging out of the leather jacket, hurling it under the table, and hauling the hood of his black sweatshirt up over his hair.
“I’m not sure about that,” Roy said, “but thank you, I sup-”
Footfalls pounded around the streetcorner, and Ed snapped the newspaper up, burying his face in it. Roy watched, dumbfounded, as a troop of apparently sentient rhinoceroses in what looked like riot gear stampeded past his little table, rustling his stack of essays with the heedlessness of their passage, and then disappeared on down the road.
“I just saw that,” he said. “Didn’t I?”
“Told you about them,” Ed said, peeking around the side of the newspaper and then gingerly setting it down. “Judoon. Bunch of assholes. All I did was liberate a prisoner who shouldn’t’ve been locked up anyway. That’s the problem with having a sorta-kinda intergalactic police force that’ll immediately side with the highest bidder.”
“That’s who you called for the Kevdals?” Roy asked.
He really had just said that word out loud, without air-quotes. Ed really was sitting in front of him, at least as far as his senses could be believed.
“Given the smuggling bit,” Ed said, “probably there was a lot of money in it for them from the Kevdalu government, and I figured we had to get your hand handled, so…”
He shrugged.
Then he paused.
Then he started scowling.
“I never meet anybody twice,” he said, peering at Roy. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I beg your pardon,” Roy said.
“Other than the fact that your speech patterns are from the wrong era, I mean,” Ed said. “That can’t be it.” He rocked back in the chair, folding his arms across his chest, and frowned deeper still. “Al must like you. Why would Al like you? What’d you do? Did you bribe him?”
“Not that I recall,” Roy said, “but I’ve been told I’m irresis-”
“Or unless you’re stuck out of time,” Ed said. He leaned in again, far too close across the tiny little table, but if Roy leaned back, he’d lose ground. It wasn’t an unpleasant compromise, but it did make it very difficult to resist the urge to kiss Ed’s mouth to stem the flow of nonsense. “You’re a professor at the school, right? How long’ve you been teaching there, exactly? Do your students actually look at you, or does it seem like maybe they’re lookin’ at something past you most of the time?”
“Since the year 2012,” Roy said. “They look me directly in the eyes, or at least look directly at my collarbones, and some of them doodle me in their notebooks and turn adorable colors when I compliment their skill. Are you asking me if I’m a ghost?”
“Well, I was,” Ed said, scowling at him even more intently. “Not anymore. There’s something… Why’d you start this whole teacher gig, anyway?”
Roy supposed there was no harm in being overly honest with an extremely detailed figment of his tormented imagination. “Because my life was hollow and meaningless after the war,” he said, “and I had to find something to take my mind off of everything that I’d become. At least here, occasionally, I can get through to some of them-and I try to believe that if I do that enough times, just as a matter of the law of averages, one of them will go out there and make a difference.”
Ed titled his head to the side-just slightly, like a puppy trying to figure out if that thing in your fingertips was a treat or not.
“Huh,” he said. “Which war?”
“Iraq,” Roy said.
“Not familiar,” Ed said. “Guess maybe you’ll have to fill me in.”
Roy blinked. Did that-
Ed shoved his chair back, stood, and folded the newspaper again. His hand was… covered, like it had been the first time Roy had seen it; this close, and focused, Roy could see that there was something unusual about the skin, because it didn’t wrinkle, and there weren’t any hairs, and the fingernails were all too uniformly even-
Ed was using it to hold the newspaper out to him.
“Thanks for this,” Ed said. “You wanna help me bring a princess back to her home planet?”
Roy could have said a lot of things.
He could have said What the hell are you talking about?
He could have said Even after the rhinoceros police, that is too much gibberish for me to believe.
He could have said What we did last week-that is the most alive I have felt in so long that when I walked past that building again and saw that the window was still broken, I cried.
And there was a chance of the rhinoceroses coming back, wasn’t there, if they weren’t quick?
So he picked the simplest answer:
“Yes,” he said.
Ed grinned like a whole galaxy full of stars.
There are a hundred billion unimaginable places in the universe. Roy always daydreamed of the ones he’d make it to someday-some mythical tomorrow when he had the money stacked up, and the time carved out, and the will, and the inclination, and the organizational impetus. Someday he’d see Paris; someday he’d go to Niagara Falls. Someday, Hạ Long Bay; someday, Giza; someday-
Someday, he’d sleep through the night. Someday, dragging his body out of bed would feel more like a blessing and less like a meaningless, self-flagellating trial. Someday, the cinema wouldn’t be too loud; someday, the engine noise in an airplane wouldn’t make him grip the armrests until his knuckles ached; someday, his heart-rate wouldn’t skyrocket at the slam of a door. Someday, he could travel; could stay in hotel rooms he hadn’t yet seen; could wake up alone and not feel like the dark was strangling him, smothering him, thrusting its poison into his lungs and exploding him from the inside out-
He’d clung to the possibility, but a part of him had always known it was procrastination. A part of him had always known that you had to stand up and start to face the music; it wouldn’t just turn up on your doorstep when you least expected.
But Ed does.
Ed does, over and over and over again.
Ed takes him to cities where every tower’s made of glass. Ed takes him to waterfalls that run upside-down. Ed takes him to places he couldn’t have dreamed of if he’d had a thousand years and an unlimited supply of LSD, and Ed teaches him how to save the people that they find there. Some of them look like humans; some are unrecognizable; some are grateful; some try to murder them; some have fins or claws or fangs or bleed in strange colors, but bleed they do, and that much Roy can always understand.