tierfallen

Title: The Rite Stuff
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Ed
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 23,000 (a bit more than half in this part)
Warnings: language, wild and unapologetic abuses of the fantasy genre
Summary: All magic is blood magic. And all vampires are bastards, although in that case, Ed's working from a sample size of one.
Author's Note: So… this happened mostly because of Cowania, who did this gorgeous-wonderful fanart that brought the delightfully ridiculous official art to my attention. You can also partly blame it on Max, because he's the one who got me started listening to Les Friction, and by now I'm sure you've all noticed that having a brainstorming/theme song is a lot of what makes the fics go.

The rest is all me, because it's been a rocky couple of months, and this was fun, so I ran with it. (And did not research. Like, ever. :x Making stuff up as you go along is fun!!) Because I'm me, I thought I was going to finish with plenty of extra time, and then that was hilarious. Have barely edited, so please forgive me/let me know if anything's typoed or missing! ^^;;



THE RITE STUFF
“Where,” Ed says, mostly to himself, “in eight hells is my damn rosemary?  I swear I just saw—”

“It’s hanging over the sink,” Al says without so much as opening his eyes where he’s curled up on the windowsill.  Ed watches him, just to check.

“Why do you know that?” Ed asks, but he doesn’t have much of a choice except to stomp over towards the kitchen in case it’s true.

“Because I know everything,” Al says.

“Shut up,” Ed says.

“You first,” Al says.

The rosemary is hanging over the sink.  Ed manages to suppress a sigh.

“Your ward’s blinking,” Al says.

“Tell ’em to fuck off,” Ed says.  Why did he hang it so unreasonably fucking high up?  Now he’s on his tiptoes, stretching until his right arm makes a crackly sound, in his own damn kitchen.  The indignity.

“I think it’s Roy,” Al says.

Ed works his spit around in his mouth so that he doesn’t react right away.  Usually that’s his poker tell; he knows he has to fight it.  “Why would it be Roy?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?” Al says.  “I know everything, remember?”

Ed makes sure his indistinct but emphatic grumbling is audible as he storms back over to the front door.  The rune above it is, as promised, illuminating itself in blue, fading out, and re-illuminating at regular intervals to indicate that there’s someone coming up the path.

Ed gives Al a half-reprimanding, half-challenging look, which is wholly spoiled by the fact that Al still has his eyes closed.  He’s resting his head on his paws and twitching just the last inch or two of his tail to demonstrate exactly how few fucks he gives about Ed’s determination to doubt his prescience.

Ed goes over to the window and hooks one finger in the edge of the curtain, pulling it back just far enough to peek.

It is Roy.

Damn it.

Ed opens the door before the bastard can saunter up the rest of the way and do his fancy little rhythmic knock.

“What?” Ed says.

“My dearest Edward,” Roy says, all schmooze and glamor and stupid red silk waistcoat.  It’s like he knew it was Ed’s favorite color and turned it into his trademark on purpose so that Ed would get mesmerized by the little silver buttons all the goddamn time.  “It is an unparalleled delight to see you on this fine evening, too.”

“Get your ass in here before the other mosquitos follow you,” Ed says, but he steps back out of the doorway, because he wasn’t raised in a barn.  Or at least not much.  Mostly in the house part; the barn was just a bonus.  “What’s so fine about it?”

“You,” Roy says, sweeping in.

“Christ,” Ed says, partly just to make him grimace.  “What would you do if I wasn’t here for you to hit on badly every other flippin’ night?”

“Flirt with your brother instead,” Roy says.

“Indescribably flattered,” Al says, still without opening his eyes, and even Ed can’t tell if the undertone is sleepiness or sarcasm.  No one on the planet can sass like Al in Cat Mode.

“You’re awfully freakin’ lucky I barely ever sleep,” Ed mutters for good measure.

“I am,” Roy says—sunnily, which is, incidentally, very fucking funny and all that.

The bastard always puts Ed on edge these days, even though he never does anything… wrong, or anything.  It’s just that Ed doesn’t know what the game is, but he’s still right here, obviously playing it, and that rubs him the wrong way like petting Al’s fur backwards.

He used to think it was a closure thing—or a guilt-trip, or both.  He figured Roy was hanging around all the time because he was trying to make absolutely damn sure that Ed was okay, and/or because he was waiting for Ed to pay him back.

Three years ago, when he and Al had only just barely found their way out here, when the cottage was still half-empty because they didn’t own enough to fill it, Ed hadn’t sussed out the lay—or the ley—of the land yet, and he’d sort of been making it up as he went along.  Al had been scared back then, too, in a different way than he is now—you get acclimated to it, obviously, but at that point, for Al, it was the kind of sharp, stark, intrusive fear that keeps you inside all the time, away from the light, dwelling on the way it knifes through your chest and interrupts your heartbeat at intervals.  The fear’s much older, now.  It’s almost friendly.  And Al’s learned so much about what he’s capable of, and when the guilt of it gets the best of Ed, he shifts into his favorite sleek black kitty shape and rolls his shoulders and says “It’s all right, Brother, I’m not in a hurry.”

Ed is.  But Ed’s been in a hurry since he was three, because by then he knew that life was short and shitty and arbitrary, and he had to do everything that he wanted to as fast as he could before he lost his chance.

He was in a hurry the night he met Roy, which was why his cloak slipped, and his sleeve slipped, and the slow-pulsing glow of his arm showed through.  That was why when he turned a corner, as part of a hasty shortcut through the warehouses near the docks, there were three men standing in the middle of his path.

He hadn’t liked the look of them—enough that he’d known, instantly on instinct, that it would be better to make a break for it than to stick around and find out why.

But turning revealed two more men, blocking his intended egress, and a kid at their head—small, wiry, with shaggy hair and teeth that looked too sharp.

The kid was tossing an apple in one hand, idly, but in perfect time.  Like he really needed you to know he didn’t give a shit.

“You’re new around here, aren’t you?” he asked.

Ed listened to his heartbeat in his ears and tried to scan the corners of his eyes without moving.  Five men total; the kid was a wildcard; he talked like he wasn’t scared of anything, which could either mean that he was used to having bodyguards do the dirty work, or that he’d bathed his own hands in the filth enough times that he simply didn’t care anymore.

“Yeah,” Ed said, slowly.  “S’that a problem?”

Al had called him ‘Captain Obvious’ enough times that he’d given up the tally, but sometimes it was the only way to hold your ground without giving out any information that they didn’t already have.

The kid jerked his chin towards Ed’s arm, and Ed glanced down at it—fuck and double fuck.  The three-inch gap between his sleeve and his glove was more than enough for the thickly-twined black branches along his forearm to show, and the pale gold light was seeping through the cracks—brightening, then fading, then brightening again.  Small blessings or whatever: at least if they assumed that it mimicked the beat of his pulse, they’d think he was calm as a fucking cucumber.  If they didn’t know much about Hearthwood trees, he might have that sliver of intel in reserve, and right about now he’d take anything he could get.

“You’re a witch, aren’t you?” the kid asked.

Ed ran the tip of his tongue along the back of his teeth.  There wasn’t much of a point lying when they could see the evidence themselves—but on the other hand, sometimes stating the facts acted like a catalyst for the confrontation.  People were stupid that way.

He split the difference: “How do you mean?”

The kid grinned without a single iota of humor.  His teeth were sharp; it wasn’t just Ed’s imagination.  The apple rose—fell—slapped its weight into the palm of his hand.

“You know how I fucking mean,” he said.  “What color do you bleed?”

Ed’s heart hammered so hard that he worried—slightly less than rationally, perhaps—that the veins in his temples might betray the answer before he could even muster words.  “What the hell kind of question is that?  Red, like everybody else—what other—”

All magic is blood magic.

But people who wanted the kind he had—

“Funny thing,” the kid said, and he barely even tilted his head, but the men started closing in from every side.  The apple rose—spun in the open air, faintly gleaming— “I don’t believe you.”

“Figures,” Ed said.

The next signaling twist of the kid’s head was much more pronounced, but even without it, Ed would have been waiting.  He knew how to smell a fight by now.

He knew how to win one, too.  But he also knew how to gauge the odds, and this…

This wasn’t what he would have called promising.  Or not for him.  Maybe for that creepy-ass kid with his creepy-ass grin and his creepy-ass apple that he kept—

This time, when he caught it, he held on.

“We don’t need all of it,” the kid said.  “Spill some and find out how dark it is.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Ed said, trying for a pleading tone even as he sunk his center of gravity, bending his knees, shifting his weight.  “C’mon, what do you even want?  I’m just—”

“You’re just what we’re looking for,” the kid said, and the men’s shadows had fallen over Ed now; they were all faceless this way, backlit by the distant lanterns hanging on the walls—

Ed hoped that if he didn’t make it out of this, the record would somehow show Al that he’d done everything he could to defuse the whole damn thing.  He really had.  He’d tried.

“I’m not—” he started, one more time, purely for the sake of argument.  If he lived through this, Al was going to ask if he’d done everything he could.

And he had.

And one of the kid’s enormous minions was drawing an arm back and curling the associated fist.

Being drastically outnumbered in an unfamiliar location was one thing, but it wasn’t the thing Ed was concerned about.  The concerned part was his own goddamn motherfucking fault, as it happened:

He’d been in a hurry.  He’d taken a shortcut.  He’d gambled that nothing would happen if he took the faster route back from the market—across the docks, not all the way around the lake.

But the docks were built on mud and silt, and the only organisms here were rats and the cats that ate them, and the concrete foundations went ten feet down.  The only thing Ed could reach out to was the water, and the water wouldn’t help him one damn bit.

Even if he could, it would chart as spectacularly stupid—even on the extremely well-plotted graph of his life—to give them the answer they were gunning for in the very process of dodging the bullets.

The best he could hope for was to get away more or less intact.

At least that made it easy, though—having a specific goal in mind, whether or not it was a shit goal that he hated with every fiber of his being and every scrounged-up shred of pride that he had left.  At least that made it simple.

He waited until the first man feigned lunging, stepped back, and then dove in for real—waited until the instant the asshole’s weight shifted forward, and the momentum got the better of him—

And Ed slipped out of the way faster than the shadows that his attackers cast.

The problem with having five adversaries to one you was that there was always another bad guy waiting everywhere you moved—the next one, who’d blocked his exit from the first, leapt forward, trying to hook an arm around Ed—

Who ducked under the bastard’s elbow and swung backwards with his right arm—extending its length to give himself a little more torque as he slammed his hand into that guy’s back to send the asshole stumbling forward; with any luck he’d crash right into the wall—

But there wasn’t time to wait and see if gravity was on Ed’s side, since nothing else was: he had another monstrously huge attacker incoming, this one with a knife.

Drawing his right arm in, across himself, to put its durability between his vulnerable chest and the blade, ate every instant between him turning and him ramming into it.  The sound made the attacker scowl—that much Ed caught a glimpse of as he yanked his arm free of the knife; the gouged space spat tiny shards of bark as he pulled loose.  He warped the fingers this time—longer, slimmer, sharp at the edges.  Two could play at this fucking game, and if it was a bloody one they wanted, that was what they were going to get.

He didn’t want to kill anybody, though.  Even people who were trying to kill you didn’t necessarily deserve to die, and who the fuck were you to decide?  That was up to the Earth and the ether; when people interfered, they got what was coming to them.  And it hurt.

So he slashed instead of stabbing, and the third guy went down howling and clutching at his arm, but with his throat and his jugular and all of the vital pieces still intact.

Diverting three of the initial five left two men on the side the kid had stood on—the kid had moved, but Ed didn’t give a flying fuck where to; the point was that Ed had carved a hole in the wall of aggressors, and nothing else mattered as much as—

Hurling himself through the gap, cloak billowing out behind him, ducking a hand that swiped for his hair—

He scrambled with everything he had in him; almost tipped forward with the force of his own momentum; his boots scraped on the cement, but he’d worn the shit out of their soles for a reason, and they caught traction, and he—

Jerked back as one of the reaching hands seized his cloak and hauled—the clasp dug into his throat so hard and so suddenly that he didn’t have the time or the impulse to drag in a breath before it strangled the one he’d had right out of him—

Whoever had the death grip—not literally, fucking please—on his accoutrements used the handhold to fling him backwards; his feet went out from under him, and he slammed into the cinderblock wall shoulders first.  At least that counted as good news for his skull, which only bounced against it after the initial impact—though that nonetheless mustered bright gold stars and a black mist at the edges of his vision, and it wrung the dregs of the oxygen out of his lungs—

He couldn’t even fucking move but to raise his right arm over his face as the remaining three thugs loomed over him, and the moonlight danced across their knives.  He wanted to say something shitty and clever, but he couldn’t even wheeze a whole breath in just yet, and—

“Interesting,” the kid’s voice said from somewhere past the wall of bodies.  Let this not be the last thing Ed ever saw; let Al not find out in the papers—or never, if they just dumped his body off the docks with bricks roped to him; or if they cut him up in pieces too small for anybody to identify and kept the Hearthwood limbs to sell the lumber— “He’s a disproportionate amount of trouble, isn’t he?”

That—that Ed could find the breath for, somehow.  It came out faint and reedy, but he said it, and that mattered: “Fuck you.”

“You could cut his tongue out,” the kid said.  “That would solve all of our problems, wouldn’t it?  You know—I really like that.  Do it.”

The assailants he’d felled were dragging themselves upright, but Ed couldn’t worry about them just yet, because one of the remaining ones was maneuvering past his last-ditch defensive slashes with the right arm and pinning it to the wall where he could lengthen it and sharpen it as much as he pleased without damaging a goddamn thing.  A second man had grabbed his left arm, and the third kicked his flailing legs aside and reached in to grip his chin far too fucking tight—

Ed worked his jaw as much as he could despite the vise of dirty fingers, lined up the trajectory to the fucker’s right eye, and spat.

Depending on whose side you took, arguably he deserved to get clocked so hard that the blackness spun in close and thick and intimate.  He wasn’t sure whether to consider himself lucky that it faded out again, giving him a good damn look at the brightness of the knife blade as it moved close—

“Good evening, gentlemen,” a voice like honey and butter and velvet and lamplight said, unless Ed was hallucinating from the concussion… which, on second thought, was very possible.  “I do hope you’re not harassing a helpless citizen.”

All of them looked up at the same instant—at the instant of the first syllable, in perfect sync.  It was… eerie.  Eerier still was the fact that none of them seemed to be able to look away.

The fact that it was affecting the other assholes was eerie, anyway: Ed had gotten mesmerized by men that looked that good once or twice before, but statistically it was very unlikely that that was the reason the others couldn’t stop staring.

“What’s it to you?” one of the men said, very slowly, slurring the words a little—like he was in some kind of a trance.

“Oh, nothing,” the newcomer said, smiling thinly.  His—eyes.  His eyes were like—they were enveloping; they were so deep and so dark; they had gravity like a hundred-thousand stars despite being the color of the night between— “Just curious.  I’ve been told it’s one of my vices.”

Ed couldn’t stop watching him—like he had some kind of power; like there was some kind of hold—

“It’s a glamor, you fucking idiots,” the kid said, and Ed could almost slide his gaze over far enough to see, just out of the corner of his eye, that the kid had slung an arm across his face.  “Don’t look at him—just don’t listen—”

The newcomer smiled—slow, bright, and broad, so that Ed could see the sharp points of the long, long fangs.

“They say it kills cats, you know,” their owner said, and the purr beneath it still had them all frozen in place like so many statues, struck dumb.  “Curiosity, I mean.  What do you suppose it does to someone who’s already dead?”

“Marcus!” the kid’s voice cut in, edged with a shrillness that almost sounded like panic, and one of the thugs shook himself like a wet dog and blinked repeatedly.

Then he turned to the newcomer with his knife raised.

The newcomer’s smile disappeared, and his shoulders lifted with half a sigh.

Then Ed blinked, and in the time it took—

Either the world blurred, or the creature that had just joined them did—

The man who’d moved screamed, clapping a hand to his neck as the black-mist shadow dematerialized; blood oozed between his fingers and cascaded from under his palm—

The shadow seized the shoulders of the next-closest man, who lifted his blade and half-turned, away from Ed and towards the danger—the darkness solidified into a humanoid shape again just long enough to sink its teeth into his throat—

Blood spurted anew—and the next man howled like a demon had possessed him, slashing wildly at the shifting shadows—

Ed shoved his heavier foot directly at that one’s ankles and sent him down flailing; the knife clattered off onto the pavement somewhere, but he couldn’t track it and the surge of shadows at once.

And the shadows had just felled a third, which only left—

One would-be assailant.  One would-be murderer, or mangler, or cutter-up of the likes of Ed—

Who looked between the shadows, which had swirled into a man’s shape again and sharpened into the smirking mouth and the dancing eyes; and Ed, dragging himself upright and sharpening his forearm into another makeshift blade.

And who then turned tail, and ran.

The kid was gone—Ed couldn’t fathom where to, and couldn’t give a fuck.  One of the men on the ground was still clutching at his throat and twitching violently, and Ed’s stomach turned so hard that his fleshier knee quaked underneath him.

The vampire that had just saved his life and very likely concluded three others was dabbing—mopping, really—at his chin and the edges of his mouth with an honest-to-what-the-fuck-ever white handkerchief.  There was a shape embroidered in black on one of the corners, but Ed couldn’t tell what kind of animal it was, and before he could squint at it stupidly for any longer, the vampire licked his lips, swiftly folded the fabric, and tucked it into a pocket of his dark red waistcoat.

Then he extended one pale, perfect hand.

“I think we should go,” it said.

Ed stared at the hand, which was only marginally better than staring at the eyes.  “‘We’?”

“I know all of the quickest ways out of here,” the vampire said, cheerfully.

Ed chanced a glance upward, and the eyes didn’t drag him in the same way this time.  Everything felt—firmer.  Less breathless; the floaty, dizzy, compulsive strangeness of staring at the vampire had faded.  Looking was voluntary now.

“Come on,” the vampire said.  “I’ll buy you a drink.”

“No,” Ed said.

A smirk bloomed across the bastard’s face, and to say that it was devastating was overselling natural disasters.  “To the coming along, or to the drink?”

Ed set his jaw, swallowed, and weighed his options as quickly as he could.  Contributing anything further to this conversation would put him at a disadvantage—this new monster had probably just killed three men that otherwise might have killed him, sure, but that didn’t exactly make the vampire safer than they’d been.  If anything, he was confirmed to be worse, and—

And the playful tone of his voice sent little ripples of something simultaneously warm and cold up and down Ed’s spine, and he didn’t like it.

Besides which—there was the matter of the several groaning bodies on the ground.  Whatever happened, Ed couldn’t really afford to stick around, so at least that made his mind up about that.

He hauled his sleeve down, retracted all of the altered parts of his right arm, hitched his cloak higher over his shoulders, and started off swiftly and resolutely the way he’d been walking before any of this had begun.

“It doesn’t have to be alcoholic,” the vampire said, striding smoothly beside him with an alacrity that was, for the record, maddening.  “You just look like you could use one—not that I blame you.  Cocoa?  Cider?  Something warm, I thi—”

Ed did not slow down; he did not look away from the path ahead of him.  “Why did you do that?”

The smirk was back; he could hear it.  That was even worse than the incongruous delight.  “Save your wonderful ass, do you mean?”

“Or whatever,” Ed said.

“Truthfully,” the vampire said, “because I can’t stand bullies.  And because you’re very cute.  And because we freaks and frightmares have to look after one another; goodness knows no one else will.”  His tone brightened again.  “And because we’re neighbors, after all.”

That made Ed stop so fast—mid-stride, no less—that he almost bowled himself over like a fucking idiot and smashed his face into the concrete after all of that effort to preserve it from harm.

“We’re what?” he said.

The vampire looked positively tickled.  Ed hated him.

“You just moved in to that little cottage with all the garden space, didn’t you?” the bastard asked.  “I’m right down at the end of the road.”

Ed was staring at him again, the risks of it be damned.

“It’s a bit big for one,” the vampire went on, completely undaunted, “but it’s a very nice property.  Yours is, too, of course—bit of a fixer-upper, but it’s darling, and I love what you’ve done with the plants already.  It looks so alive.”

Ed scrounged around in his brain for some words to speak, but he couldn’t…

The house at the end was a mansion.  There were horses sometimes.  Ed was pretty sure he’d seen servants.  It wasn’t as big as some of the estates further out in the hills, or anything, and it didn’t have any turrets, but it was huge, and white, and fine, with pillars and a sprawling lawn and a huge wrought-iron gate with a stylized RM laid out in the front in gold.  He and Al had joked about how whoever lived there must be…

Well, they’d joked about how whoever lived there had to be a posh, arrogant recluse, and that didn’t exactly seem to be wrong.

The vampire raised his eyebrows, and the smirk widened until a tiny sliver of ivory showed.  “If you’d rather,” the vampire said, “you could come over for a drink instead.”

Ed swallowed.  He took a breath.  And he decided that it would be better to die stubborn than to placate this… whoever, whatever he was.

“I just want to go home,” he said.

His voice didn’t shake.  Given that he was, more or less, staring death in the face here, he felt like that was worth commending, even if it did go a little faint on him towards the end of the sentence, just to make sure he couldn’t celebrate too much.

And the vampire—

Smiled.  Thinly.

“That is eminently reasonable,” he said.

Ed watched him for a second, trying to parse the lines and angles of his expression, and then gambled again.

“Is it the vampire thing that makes you talk like that?” he asked.  “Or is that just you?”

For a split-second, he could see the points of the teeth again as the vampire started to grin and then suppressed it.

“That’s just me.”  One of the pale hands extended into the careful space between them again.  “Forgive me—where are my manners?  Roy Mustang; pleasure’s all mine.”

He’d held out the left hand.  Ed’s stomach did another somersault-like thing, so swiftly that he couldn’t figure out what the feelings underneath it were.

If this creature had wanted him dead, it would have had its work cut out for it a couple of minutes ago.  And if it changed its mind about that, and it really did live down at the end of the same damn street, it wasn’t like knowing Ed’s name was going to make any damn difference.

Ed shook.  “Ed.  Elric.”  It wasn’t like anything sh—less than his whole name could do any damage, anyway, and as far as the registers were concerned, he and Al didn’t exist.

“Charmed,” Roy said, which was really not funny at all, as he squeezed Ed’s hand tight and then let go.  “May I walk back with you?”

“I don’t figure I can stop you,” Ed said, and he started striding forward again for good measure, and Roy followed.

“No?” Roy asked, mildly, as they turned another corner.  “I imagine that once you’re in your element, you must be very formidable.”

“You’ve got a big imagination,” Ed muttered.

“Sometimes the world seems very small,” Roy said.  “And at those times, I’ll use any weapons at hand to expand it.”

Ed glanced at him.

Roy smiled again—the same light, narrow, almost-mocking little smile, with both eyebrows arched and his eyes alight with something quite like mischief.

“You’re weird,” Ed said.

“A high compliment,” Roy said.  “One I’ll treasure until the end of my days.”

“Aren’t you going to live forever?” Ed asked.

There it was again.  “That’s the theory,” Roy said, idly.  “But I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that theories have their limits, and the universe doesn’t always like to play by the rules.”

Ed eyed him a little harder.

“So,” Roy said, brightly, as they finally stepped free of the horrible fucking labyrinth of warehouses and back onto solid ground, and Ed’s entire being breathed a sigh of relief.  “How are you enjoying our humble village so far?”

“Fuck you,” Ed said before he could stop himself.

Roy—laughed.  And he laughed even better than he smiled, and Ed hated him—so much; so very, very much—

So much that he caught himself snickering too.










Mustang strolled alongside him all the way to the cutesy little front gate—which would never have impeded anyone who was actually serious about entering the yard—at the end of the path up to the cottage where Al would be waiting, possibly napping, likely not even worried yet.

Mustang’s far-too-clever eyes did not miss the warm yellow light seeping out through the gap between the curtains in the front window.

“What color do you bleed?” he asked.  “If that’s not too personal.  I understand that for witches it depends.  Or are you a druid?”

Ed tried to assess the balance of the scale of his crap choices for what felt like the billionth time tonight.  He owed this bastard something, and despising the debt so deeply that it resonated in his chest wouldn’t change a thing.

“My father was,” he said.  “Or is.  Or whatever.  I don’t give a fuck.  We—I mean, I—I’m—sort of in between.”

The worst part was, he couldn’t even blame it on the glamor; he had a well-documented tendency to say stupid shit when there was an attractive man up in his face.

Tonight’s specimen gave him that same terrible little smile.  “Ah,” he said.  He’d noticed that Ed hadn’t answered the question; it was painfully obvious that he was too damn smart by half.  “Makes sense.  Well—I hope you have a much more palatable remainder of your night, hm?”

“Thanks,” Ed said, very slowly, because that sounded an awful lot like being set loose without having to pay the toll.  “You, too.”










Mustang waved in a sanguine sort of way and then turned smoothly, strode smoother still, and disappeared almost immediately into the night.

Ed told Al the whole story the next morning while he was standing on a ladder, painting the finishing-touch rune for the ward over the door.  The answer to Mustang’s question would have been flagrantly evident if he’d been here: darker than an ordinary human, but a hell of a lot lighter than you.

“They wanted tainted blood?” Al asked, and his ears were twitching in a way that would have been obnoxiously cute if it hadn’t meant that he was anxious.

“By the sound ’f it,” Ed said, sucking on his fingertip to try to stop the bleeding before he smeared his own work everywhere.  “Dunno for sure.”

“Fantastic,” Al said, so sarcastically that it was a miracle the acid hadn’t materialized and worn a hole through their floor.  “I’m sure it’s fine: tainted blood magic is always for good things, after all.  They’re probably throwing a nationwide picnic.”

“They might not’ve been planning to do anything with it,” Ed said.  “They never said anything like that—just that they wanted to find out.  Could’ve been an extermination thing.”

“Oh, good,” Al said.  “Maybe they’re only trying to kill us.  That makes me feel so much better.”

“Do you have a single not-sassy bone in your body?” Ed asked.

“Do you have a single self-preservation instinct?” Al asked.

“Jeez,” Ed said.

“I mean it,” Al said, more softly.  “Just—sometimes—it’s better to be late and alive, Brother.  It really, really is.”

Ed examined the little nick in his fingertip closely so that he wouldn’t have to meet the intensely earnest kitty eyes.  “I know.  I know.  I just—”

“Wish we could be safe somewhere?” Al asked.  “Anywhere?”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “That.”  He checked the edges of the ward rune.  “This should help.”

“‘Should’ is my favorite word in matters of life and death,” Al said.

Ed wanted to laugh, but he ended up grimacing.  “Me, too.”










The next night, shortly after sundown, while Ed was in the kitchen sorting out which of the only-slightly magically-modified produce would sell best at the market, Al called “Brother?” from the front room, and the second syllable wobbled a bit.

Ed dropped everything and flung himself through the doorway, halfway across the rug—

The rune had lit up lightning blue.

Ed breathed.  He knew he was breathing, because he could see his chest rising; because he could hear the sound of air rasping in and out of him over the frantic tattoo of his heartbeat.

He swallowed hard, squared his shoulders, and crossed to the window as fast as he could without giving in to the impulse to run—pulled the curtains just far enough aside to peer past them, and—

“What the fuck,” he said.

It wasn’t a question, because questions prompted explanations, and there was no possible fucking explanation for Roy Mustang sauntering up their front walk bearing a bouquet of flowers and a bottle of wine.

He stepped back from the window, blinked, stepped over to the door, flung it open, and tried again: “What the fuck.”

“Not the most favorable greeting I’ve ever received,” Roy said, beaming for just a half a second before he buried it in smirk again, “but far from the worst.”

Ed made a face that hopefully conveyed exactly how he felt about this entire situation and that pathetic excuse for a quip in particular.

“What do you want?” he asked.

Al hissed “Brother,” which Ed pointedly ignored, because that was the primary perk of being the older sibling most of the time.

“Only to see that you were all right,” Roy said.  He held out the flowers.  “I never brought a housewarming gift when you moved in.”  He held out the wine.  “And the offer of a drink still stands.”

“I don’t need a drink,” Ed said, because that sounded worlds better than I don’t want a drink with you, because I can’t hold my liquor, and I’ll probably tell you how excruciatingly easy on the eyes you are.  He stepped back out of the doorway, though, because Al was going to kill him in another minute, and death by kitty claws sounded very painful and rather slow.  “Well?” he said after a second of being out of the way yielded nothing but a strange facial expression from Roy.  “What are you waiting for?”

This smile was different—most of them were thin, but this one was tight, and there wasn’t the same amusement in it.

“An invitation, I’m afraid,” Roy said.  “I can’t enter a dwelling without being invited.”

“Every time?” Ed asked.  “Or just the once?”

“Every time,” Roy said, and the smile was—gone, now, and his eyes had gone from regular-dark to weird-dark, and Ed… didn’t like it.

“So if I’m ever pissed at you,” Ed said, slowly, “I can just leave you outside in the rain?”

They were now a slightly-scandalized dark, but also surprised enough that they no longer looked weird.

“I… suppose,” Roy said.  “Although I would hope—”

“C’mon in,” Ed said.

“Brother, you are the worst,” Al said.

Roy froze with one foot on either side of the threshold and turned to stare at the talking cat.

“Oh,” Ed said.  “Um… Al, meet… Roy Mustang.”

Roy’s face transitioned seamlessly from shock to suavity, the absolute bastard.  “That actually explains a lot,” he said.  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Al.”

“I can’t believe you want to leave him out in the rain,” Al said.

Ed stomped, loudly, back into the kitchen to start collecting all of the vegetables that had ended up on the floor.  “Whose side are you on?”

“Mine,” Al said.

“Lovely place you’ve got here,” Roy said, and his voice was getting closer.  “Where may I leave—these?”

Ed straightened up from where he’d been bent double gathering carrots from their tiles.  He’d have to deal with the dirt later.  “Uh… I dunno.  Make yourself at home or whatever.”

“Thank you,” Roy said.

And that was exactly what he did.










At first, Ed was waiting for him to ask for something—not that Ed knew what, but he wasn’t anticipating anything good.  Roy had saved his sorry ass from death or something damn close to it: there was a debt to be paid.  Weren’t vampires supposed to be counters of things?  That had to include points, tallies, what one being owed another.  Roy had to be thinking about it.  There had to be something that he wanted in return.

Ed figured it wasn’t just hospitality—where he and Al were from, though, that was a requirement anyway, so they extended it to Roy as best they could given that they weren’t exactly magnificent at taking care of themselves.  They were getting by, though—the market loved the ever-so-subtly-enhanced food that grew so reliably around their humble abode, aided by some water, some light, some love, a few drops of Ed’s blood, and an incantation or two.  The profits kept them afloat, and there was enough to spare to jaunt off to the city periodically and spend a few days holed up in the big libraries, searching for clues about how to bring Al back to his proper form.

Roy just kept on… visiting, though.  He’d come by, and try to charm the fuck out of them, and Ed would tell him where to shove it, and he’d sprawl out in one of the armchairs and offer conversation or commentary until Ed showed signs of sleepiness.  Al even got into the habit of curling up in his lap, and Roy would scratch behind his ears until the purring got to be deafening, and Ed experienced the supremely surreal feeling of not knowing who to be jealous of and not wanting to be jealous of either.

Al still does that.  Ed suspects it’s on purpose now, because he knows that it makes Ed uncomfortable in a way that he doesn’t really know how to describe.

But Roy’s never once asked him for anything.  That’s the weirdest thing.  That’s the part that keeps him up some nights, wondering if…

Just—wondering.

Once he’d accepted that Roy didn’t seem to be waiting for him to offer anything in return for the original kindness, Ed used to hazard that it might be a predator thing—the way Roy looks at him from across the room sometimes, when he thinks Ed’s too engrossed in reading to notice his attention.  Roy’s pretty justified thinking that, for the record, given how damn long it took Ed to realize that there was any attention being given out at all; for a long time he’d just assumed that Roy just got bored of being all alone in that big-ass house, or appreciated their squishy couches, or really liked petting cats, and he’d more or less ignored Roy’s presence in the living room altogether.

But it’s not—is it?  It’s not a hunger thing.  Or at least not in the way Ed would have guessed.

It’s scarier this way, honestly.  Predators Ed can handle; he’s been to hell and back, fairly literally; he’s been roughed up and counted out more times than he can number anymore, and every time he’s come back fighting.  He’s used to being an underdog; he’s used to wriggling free; he’s used to proving himself and then moving on.

But this—

Because if it’s not his blood Roy’s thinking of, when those too-dark eyes follow the movement of his fingers against the cover of the book, track the way their tips slide between the corners of the pages—

If it’s not his veins Roy’s looking for, when he sets that stupid fucking smoldering gaze on the hollow of Ed’s collarbones every time the neck of his shirt slips open—

If it’s not a meal Roy wants from him—

Then Ed’s in so much fucking deeper than he thought.

It’s easy, if it’s just—him.  If it’s just his stupid little fantasies in a stupid little void.  If it’s just lying in bed trying to suffocate himself with his own pillow so that at least he won’t have to keep thinking about the way the lowest note of Roy’s laugh resonates in the pit of his stomach and spawns tiny bats and butterflies every single time.

If it’s just him, he can hide it, and smother it, and try again and again and again to kill it until he finally fucking wins someday, and no one will ever have to know.

If it’s just him, it never has to start, which means that he can’t ever fuck it up.

If it’s just him, he never has to try to nurture something that he knows full well will only ever defy him—will only ever blossom into a bitter, bitter disappointment.  Rot and thorns.  And… aphids.  Little snappy-mouthed motherfuckers streaming up his hand.

If it’s just him, it’s safe to dream about it being something better than it would be if it was both of them.

But if that’s what Roy’s really watching for—

Well—he’ll just—not show it.  Roy doesn’t ever have to know.  It’ll be a hell of a lot easier for everybody in the long run; Ed can’t afford another distraction anyway.  He might be making some headway into sorting out Al’s corporeal dysfunction with some alterations to one of the spells he found in that book he bought the last time they were in the city (Al hates being a snake, because “they don’t even have paws, Brother, and paws are the best part of life,” but he hates even more not getting to sneak into the library wrapped around Ed’s torso), and—

“You’re thinking so loud it’s a wonder your skull doesn’t shatter,” Roy says, and Ed categorically does not startle a little bit where they’re standing at the kitchen counter chopping things.  “The sheer force of the soundwaves, let alone the thoughts themselves—”

“Har, har,” Ed says, ducking so that his hair will slide in front of his face a little, because he can feel his cheeks heating up.  “More cutting vegetables, less cutting commentary.”

The good news is that Roy tends to find it amusing to follow half of his instructions.  The bad news is that nobody handles celery as sensually as Roy Mustang, which is twice as bizarre given that he can’t even eat it.  He says he still likes the way that food smells, and it’s just that it doesn’t actually register with his body or satisfy him at all, but he misses cooking and certainly doesn’t mind helping—

But what if this is another piece of evidence that—

Shit.  Can’t think it.  Can’t go there; can’t even visit; can’t even peek through the window, or the whole place is gonna come down around Ed’s ears before he knows what hit him.

“Everything all right?” Roy asks.

“Yeah,” Ed says, and then of course his right arm chooses that moment to act up—a little spark of phantom pain spirals downward and outward from his wrist, making sure to visit every single finger, and he tries to shake it to make the needling feeling fade out faster.  “It’s just been a little weird lately, ’s’all.”

Roy sets his knife down on the cutting board, leans against the counter, and asks, “Weird how?”

Like it matters.  Like he cares.  Like there’s anything he could do about it if Ed had some kind of an answer—if Ed had anything to say that wasn’t Weird kind of like it was the night I met you; weird kind of like it was the night before we tried to bring her back.  Weird like something bad is going to happen.

“I dunno,” he says instead, extending and retracting the edges on the fingers.  Maybe Roy will get the hint; maybe they can go back to cutting vegetables and pretend he never said anything, and he won’t have to think about what might go wrong—about everything he still has left to lose.

“That’s probably not helping,” Roy says of the blade-hand calisthenics, and Ed glares at him, but then Roy’s lifting up his hand and grazing his fingertip so feather-lightly across Ed’s cheek, pushing his hair back— “What happened here?”

Ed’s heart has taken up pounding so hard that the task of parsing human speech just tripled in complexity.  Roy’s hands are always, always cold, but there’s something weirdly sort of nice about it.  Almost… soothing.  “What happened where?”

“You have a cut just here,” Roy says, and most of his fingers stay tangled in Ed’s hair, but one sweeps back and ghosts along a little arc that does, when Ed is hypersensitive and piqued and frozen in place with all of his nerve endings on fire, feel a bit different than the rest of his skin.  “Please tell me you don’t shave with those.”

“I’ll shave with whatever the fuck I want,” Ed says, and it sounds like the words come from another person in another universe who is not bound and suspended by the curve of Roy’s hand against his cheek; who is not staring into Roy’s eyes and fathoming that they must simply go on forever— “I think… the berries kinda fought back earlier.  Prob’ly that’s it.”

“Ah,” Roy says softly.  “How terribly ungrateful, after all you’ve done for them.”

“Yeah,” Ed says, hardly any louder.  He’s not completely sure either of them is breathing. “Little shits.”

“Still,” Roy says, barely audible, and two fingertips draw slowly around the curve of Ed’s ear, and it’s all he can do to set his jaw in time to contain the shiver— “Shouldn’t be cavalier about that sort of thing—your hand, I mean.  It could be a symptom of something bigger.”

Roy’s mouth has the most exquisitely beautiful shape of any that Ed has ever seen.  It’s just—balanced.  Perfectly balanced.  With this incredibly sharp, delicate dip in the top lip and just the right amount of curve to it, and—

And it occurs to Ed that he could not possibly recognize these things if he was not staring openly and intently at Roy’s mouth.

“Uh,” he chokes out.  He’s still staring.  His eyes are broken; they won’t move.  “Y-yeah.  Guess.”

“Mm,” Roy says, which makes everything a billion times fucking worse; Ed can see the way it resonates in his throat— “When’s the next time Winry’s coming by?”

Winry.  Thank fucking… someone.  Thank the planet; thank the Earth; thank the soil and the air and the electricity that boils between them.

Winry is good—good in general, and good to be thinking about at a time like this.  Winry would eviscerate him with a spoon if she knew that he was thinking, in great detail, about making out with Roy.  Not that she knows who Roy is, but—conceptually—

“Um,” Ed says.  The problem is that despite very nearly being able to feel the steely progress of a spoon marking out its intended trajectory on his stomach, he can very definitely still feel Roy’s fingers curled around his ear, settled just behind the hinge of his jaw.  Roy must be able to mark his pulse beating frantically in the vein—is that the vampire equivalent of smelling someone cooking bacon?  “I… guess… probably soon.  She… hates winter up here.  Thinks it’s too cold.”

“Mm,” Roy says again, because he is a merciless fucking bastard and apparently wants Ed to pass out and/or die on the spot.  “It does get a bit chilly, if one is sensitive to such things.”

They’d had an incredibly fascinating—albeit slightly intoxicated—conversation one night a while back about how vampires are more or less cold-blooded.  Or cold-ichored, since the ink-black liquid that runs through Roy and others like him falls into a separate category altogether.

Ed wishes, though, that Roy hadn’t just used the word ‘sensitive’.  It’s very descriptive, after all.  Very evocative.  And very accurate.  If Ed’s nerves were the plates on a xylophone, or the keys on a piano, or a set of strings—

Well, it’d be a cacophony, but you’d damn well hear it.

“Um,” Ed says, yet again, every bit as brilliantly as all the times before.  He hates the way Roy’s touch makes his brain fizzle—almost as much as he loves the way it makes his flesh tingle like there’s static underneath his skin.  “Kinda.  Yeah.”

He tries to funnel the impulse to shake like a leaf out through his extremities—if just his hands tremble, only slightly where they’re still laid out on the cutting board, maybe Roy won’t notice.  The bastard would pick up on a full-bodied shudder before Ed would even have time to tell him that it wasn’t really a bad thing, so—

“I suppose cold is just an opportunity, though,” Roy is saying, and his fingertips drift so slowly down the side of Ed’s neck,  “to find better ways to stay wa—”

The part of Ed that deals in instinct—the part that keeps his ass alive; the part that sees the way the pieces of the world shift around each other before they settle, and dives into the gaps—knows before he feels the first spear of pain.

The rest of him releases a faint yelp-gasp abomination and looks stupidly down at where he just cut his left index finger open with the edges of the one on the right.

“Aw, fuck,” he manages, which at least has a word in it—and most of him’s too preoccupied to mourn the growing space between them as Roy steps back, and Ed stretches across the counter to reach for the dishtowel to wrap it around his streaming finger—

And it takes him an embarrassingly long five seconds of scowling down at the reddening terrycloth, thinking about what a pain in the ass it’s going to be to magic this out later on, before he realizes why Roy’s moved so far and gone so quiet.

His heart’s getting a goddamn workout today: racing and thudding and tripping over itself, back and forth and up and down; now it’s banging against the back of his sternum at the way Roy’s eyes are fixed immovably on the towel around his hand.

“Shit,” Ed hears his idiot voice say.  “I—sorry, I—”

“Don’t be absurd,” Roy says, and it sounds strained for a second, but then the stillness of his face cracks into an approximation of a smile, and then he shadow-shifts out through the doorway, collides with something in the hall, says “Ow,” and returns with the first-aid kit from their bathroom.  “Put it under the tap,” he says.  “Did you get carrot in it?”

“Of course I didn’t get carrot in it,” Ed says.  Then he pauses, and then he peeks.  “Or… not… much.”

He doesn’t give Roy an assessing glance before he peels the towel off his finger and shoves his hand underneath the faucet and struggles to turn the ornery hot water handle with the one that isn’t bleeding.  He doesn’t look, because he doesn’t have to check; he trusts Roy; he does—

He managed to nick himself pretty deep, because of course he fucking did.  He tries to pinch it shut once he’s rinsed off the worst of the blood—and the carrot—and only then lets himself glance towards Roy, as though he hasn’t been itching to the entire time he’s been tussling with the stupid sink.

Roy has a clean new towel draped over the palm of one hand and a length of gauze trailing from the other.  Ed doesn’t know how he accomplished that with only the two hands to work with.  Maybe that’s some sort of subsidiary vampire power.

“Thanks,” Ed says, though that might be a little premature when he’s still clutching his finger to try to prevent it from bleeding ever again, because that fucking gleam in Roy’s fucking eyes—the way every centimeter of his face went stiller than statuary and smoother than glass—

It did something in Ed’s guts.  He can’t tell if it was fear or something else that dressed up like it, but he sure as hell knows he doesn’t want to tangle with it again.

Roy reaches out—reaches out to the length of his arms, keeping the greatest possible physical distance between them; and he has to know that Ed notices, but by his neutral expression you wouldn’t think he has a care in all the vastness of the world—and pats the water off of all of the exposed parts of Ed’s left hand.  Then he gently turns it over, which involves cupping it in his—which Ed completely forgot to calculate for, because evidently some part of him really does want to die tonight—and pries the Hearthwood fingers away, and dives in with the gauze before the gash has time to start welling in earnest again.

Roy does an extremely deft and gentle and efficient job of wrapping Ed’s finger up tight, which adds up to a combination of adjectives that really shouldn’t go uncelebrated.  But he keeps swallowing, and there’s a little line between his eyebrows, which means he’s thinking about something that he wants to say.

Words never elude Roy: he’s got too damn many of them; if you cut him with a knife-finger, he’d probably bleed dictionaries’ worth.

He ties off the bandage, but then he… doesn’t let go of Ed’s hand.  Just… holds onto it—but lightly, gently, so that Ed could pull it free from where both of Roy’s are cradling, it if he wanted to.

He doesn’t.  Which is the scary part.  Roy’s palms and his fingers are cool, but they’re careful, and he likes the way Roy’s skin slides over his as Roy squeezes just once—

“I’m trying to find a graceful way to say this,” Roy says.

Ed doesn’t know what ‘this’ is, and his pulse is beating in his brain so hard that it seems to have kicked the shit out of any complex thoughts he might once have harbored there.  “Eh.  Graceful’s overrated.”

“Fair,” Roy says.  He squeezes again, and smiles a little, and raises an eyebrow— “Edward,” he says, “whatever I am, whatever happens—you are not food.”

Ed’s tired, tormented, overstimulated psyche makes an immense and heartfelt and genuine effort to contain the immediate impulse to laugh.  It really, really does.  The rest of him bites down hard on the tip of his tongue to try to assist it in its noble endeavor to stay calm and mature or whatever shit.

A snicker slips out anyway.

Roy sighs, loud and feelingly, because apparently even dying can’t dull one’s knack for melodrama.  Unfortunately, he also releases Ed’s hand, which… Ed’s just not going to spend much time thinking about the fact that losing that contact registers at all, let alone as a pity.  “This is precisely why graceful is not overrated, you little cretin.”

“Fuck you,” Ed says, but he can’t make it sound anything but cheerful.  “I’m the biggest cretin you’ve ever fuckin’ seen.”

Roy looks at him, meaningfully, and raises an eyebrow.  “We can go with that if you prefer.”

“See?” Ed says.  “Now you’re talking sense again.”

Roy’s eyes narrow—and then they do that thing again.  The thing with the darkness and the glimmer and the slowly-curling smirk.

“One of these days, Edward,” Roy says, and it’s not the glamor voice, but it’s so damn close; it’s silkier, and twice as fucking potent— “I’m going to shut you up good.”

The tension in the room just changed so violently that it feels like whiplash—the air practically hums; Ed’s skin tingles with it.

“Oh, yeah?” he says, and probably it sounds stupid, but it’s about the best he can do with his mouth instantaneously going dry.  “How do you figure you’re gonna do that?”

Sometimes it’s a shame that challenging authority is his default reaction.

Sometimes it’s fucking great.

Roy’s hand rises; his fingertips graze down along Ed’s jaw again; he leans in close enough that he doesn’t have to speak, only breathe against Ed’s skin— “I have a few ideas.  All of them would have to be examined rather thoroughly.”

Ed may still be alive, but he’s not positive.  Do vampires have that effect on everyone, or just people they’re…

…seducing.  That’s what—is that what this is?  Holy shit—

Ed swallows, hard, and tries to wet his lips, but that just makes Roy’s eyes flick to them, and that—

“What makes you so sure any of ’em are gonna work?” he forces out.

Roy’s fingertips trail down his throat, dappling over his skin, sending ripples through him everywhere, and settle on top of his collarbone, and just—sit there, somehow radiating even though they don’t generate any heat—

“I’ve got a good feeling,” he says.

Ed’s counting Roy’s eyelashes, cataloguing the tiny grooves on his lips—mesmerized by the way they shift as he starts to smirk again, the bastard—

“You talk an awfully big fuckin’ game,” Ed says.  They’re breathing the same damn air; there can’t be more than three square centimeters of it now; he can feel Roy’s body cooling it; their noses would’ve brushed by now if Roy hadn’t tilted his head.  “How’m I supposed t—”

Something shatters in the living room.

Ed can’t quite tell by the sound whether that particular combination of sounds heralds ceramic or glass, and he doesn’t give a shit; he’s flung himself over the threshold into the room at a run before he’s really had time to wonder.

Al perches primly on one of their little twined-branches end tables, one paw extended.  He lowers it and tucks it next to the other, curling his tail around both of them, as if that will erase the innumerable shards of a vase  scattered all over the floor.

“What,” Ed says, “the hell, Al?”

“Sorry,” Al says, sounding so distinctly un-sorry that Ed’s head spins a little bit trying to wrap itself around the irony.  There’s something else in it, too—something… frigid.  “Instincts, you know.  Cat problems.  See something minding its own business; suddenly feel compelled to destroy it.”

“Uh,” Ed says.  “Why?”

Al cat-shrugs.

Then he fixes his yellow eyes on Roy, who has moved to stand just behind Ed’s right shoulder—silently, but Ed has a weird sense of Roy’s physical presence these days, which is another thing he doesn’t like to dwell on.

“Not sure,” Al says.  “Sometimes these things just happen.”

“Ah,” Roy says, softly but with a strange note of finality that makes Ed turn and look at him.  “I… think perhaps I should—go.”

“What?” Ed says.  Sometimes he wishes he had more than one head, or at least an extra pair of eyes; it’s impossible to monitor Al and Roy at once, and he’s still preoccupied with the remains of the ex-vase that have distributed themselves across the floorboards.  With his luck, he’s going to end up with a thick shard embedded in the sole of his solitary vulnerable foot on the same night that he sliced himself open with his own hand, isn’t he?

“Perhaps,” Al says, apparently in answer to Roy’s question, which illuminates a grand total of jackshit.  “We’ll see you again soon, though?”

“I hope,” Roy says.  Ed turns to scowl at him, which he should understand by now is a wordless What the fuck, in time to see him hesitate, plaster on a smile, and reach out to clap Ed’s left shoulder in a bewilderingly impersonal sort of way.  “Goodnight, Edward.”

“Goodnight,” Ed says.  “Why are you like this?”

Roy flashes an uncharacteristically unconvincing grin, and the glimpse of teeth makes Ed’s skin prickle.  “Just lucky, I guess.”

“‘Lucky’ is close to the word I would’ve picked,” Ed says.

Roy mock-bows—because bastard; that word starts to sound tired inside Ed’s head some nights—and then makes his merry way to the door and out through it before Ed can come up with a clever response to that.

He would have, though.  Definitely.  Given another five or six seconds.  No doubt about it.

But once the door shuts behind Roy’s maddeningly easy-to-admire ass, Ed’s brain loosens up and starts to process other inputs, and then the gears are grinding—maybe that’s… not the best word to use right now—and he’s back in business.

“Al,” he says, slowly, turning to the particularly evil feline face of his already fairly evil brother, “what the hell was all of that about?”

He’s always found it remarkable how much human emotion Al can convey with cat features.

“Brother,” Al says, “I know it’s Roy.  And I know he’s your type.”

“What?” Ed says.  Fortunately, the staunch stone wall of his denial can withstand an immense blast of white-hot panic.  It’s held up through worse.  “I don’t have a type.  And if I did, he wouldn’t be it.  And—”

“The point is,” Al says, completely undaunted, “he’s still a vampire.”

Ed stares at him.  “…duh?”

“You can’t date a vampire,” Al says.

Ed stares harder.  It doesn’t help.  Nothing is going to help.  This is it: his brain’s going to explode.  It’s the end.  He had a pretty good run.

“I’m not dating him,” Ed says.  He barrels on to the next thought as fast as he can—before he has time to reflect on the way that the simple act of uttering those words made something molten curl up tight in the pit of his stomach.  “And even if I—was, you are the last person I’d expect to be racist about it.”

Al appears to be regretting the fact that cats can’t physically execute the maneuver known as the facepalm.  That used to be one of his trademarks when it came to conversations like this.

“Brother,” he says, “vampirism is not a race.  It’s a condition.  And it’s communicable.  And I adore Roy—you know I do—but this isn’t about Roy.  This is about the food chain.”

“I can’t believe this,” Ed says, faintly, because at this point he’s so damn stupefied that he’s just speaking all the thoughts without reviewing them first.  “What the fuck is going on?  Is it the water?  That is the second time somebody’s referred to me being food in one night, and I only talk to two people.”

“Perhaps that’s a sign that you should pay attention,” Al says.

“To you telling me Roy’s too dangerous to get close to?” Ed asks.  “Kinda too fuckin’ late, given he hangs out in our house all the damn time, and brings you those little tuna flakes that turn you into a slavering ragdoll—”

“They’re delicious,” Al says.  “And that’s not what I said.  I just—there are—the boundaries get—they change when you—”

“He’s not going to fucking eat me,” Ed says.

“How do you know?” Al asks.  “It’s easier for him at a safe distance, but—” One paw gestures towards Ed’s hand in a way that is so unmistakably human that it’s sort of surreal.  “He almost took a bite out of you tonight, didn’t he?  And that wasn’t even a whole heck of a lot of blood—what if it was more?  What if he was closer to you at the time?  What if he was used to having access to some of your other bodily fluids, and—”

“Nope,” Ed says, weakly.  “We are not talking about that, now or ever or—ever.  Not over my dead fucking body.  Not doing it.  Not—”

“We have to be careful,” Al says.  “There’s—so much to lose, and if—I don’t know, if he did change you, then—it’s hard enough to restore limbs to someone who’s alive, Brother; I don’t know—”

Ed’s stomach drops, and his heart plummets with it, and it’s a wonder none of his organs are on the floor.

It’s more than that, too, isn’t it?  Whether Al recognizes it or not.  It’s more than that, because Al doesn’t—Al can’t—know exactly what it feels like.  Not now.  Not anymore.

And Ed’s the one who took it from him.

Funny, with revelations, how they land like a hammer blow to an anvil, and your whole being rings with the impact for a second before it clears.

“Okay,” Ed says.

Al, who was in the middle of kitty-rambling something about sharp objects being everywhere and frequently invisible, stops, blinks at him, and then blinks at him again.

“‘Okay’?” Al says.  “What do you mean, ‘okay’?”

“I mean okay,” Ed says.  “If you don’t want me to… whatever… with Roy—not that I was, and not that I was even thinking about it, but since apparently it’s a big concern in this household all of a sudden—then… I won’t.”

Al blinks at him several more times.

Then Al buries his kitty face in his folded front paws and makes a distinctly un-kittyish groaning noise.

“What?” Ed asks, taking two steps forward and then hesitating.  “What’s wrong?  Are you okay?  Is it a hairball?  Wh—”

“That’s not how this conversation was supposed to go,” Al says.  He raises his head enough to twitch his whiskers around in an aggravated sort of way, and Ed stays very still where he’s standing in the middle of their rug, in case he’s the source of the aggravation.  Maybe if he doesn’t move— “You’re supposed to argue, and then I’m supposed to ask why you’re arguing so much, and then you’re supposed to say you’re just like that, and then I’m supposed to ask if you’re in love with him, and then you sputter for about five minutes uninterrupted, and th—”

“What the fuck?” Ed says, but he barely has to move for that.  He’s not sure he could, anyway; his heart seems to have stopped, and he won’t get far without a functioning circulatory system.  “I—if I’m—what?”

“Well, you are,” Al says.  “Anyway, you were going to protest, and we were going to negotiate, and I was going to give in only on the condition that you let me talk to him first, so that I can give him the shovel speech of his life.  Or his afterlife, I guess.  Only then you went and did the opposite of what you were supposed to do, because you really are that contrary, Brother.”

“I’m not in—love with him,” Ed says.  The word feels strange on his tongue—sharp and soft at the same time; velvety with a tang like iron.  “I’m not in anything with him; he’s just—”

“No, of course not,” Al says, and his ears go flat for a second before they perk up again, and Ed’s not sure any of this is really happening anymore.  “It’s just a coincidence that you’ve become progressively more nocturnal since he started coming by regularly; and it’s just a coincidence that you have a totally different smile for the things that he says than you use for everybody else; and it’s just a coincidence that you’ve let him in on every single secret in your life after he met me and was excited instead of scandalized.”

“I mean,” Ed says, helplessly, because this feels a lot like tumbling off a cliff without the slightest idea what lies at the bottom and not being optimistic about the future of your vulnerable skull, “you’re… pretty much the biggest thing, so… once he was on board with that, it was…”

“I don’t mind,” Al says.  “That’s what I’m trying to say.  I just think you should be careful, because even people as wonderful as Roy aren’t always what they seem like, and circumstances can change, and I don’t know how difficult it is for him when he’s faced with a genuine temptation, because we’ve never seen him pushed to that extreme before.”  He sighs, very loudly, which looks bizarre emanating from a cat.  “It’s just that you were supposed to have to fight for it first, so I could get a couple favors out of it and then lord them over you and then rough him up a little bit.”

“What favors do you need?” Ed asks.  “They don’t have to be favors; you can just ask.”

“You’re missing the point, Brother,” Al says.

“I know,” Ed says, because he is, and the part of him that is not just spinning heedlessly through the lightless void is aware of it.  “What is the point?”

“Date Roy,” Al says.

“What?” Ed says.

“Brother,” Al says, “you are a marvel.”

“No,” Ed says.  “I’m confused.”

Al collapses into a puddle of cat on the end table and manages to drape one paw over his face despite the fact that cat joints really aren’t built for gestures like that.  The effect is slightly unsettling, but Ed’s impressed all the same.

“Go to bed, Brother,” Al says.

“But I never finished making dinner,” Ed says.

“Okay,” Al says.  “Finish dinner.  Then go to bed.”

“But your premise is fundamentally flawed,” Ed says.  He takes a breath and strains to make the rest sound casual, which is… probably a bad sign to start with.  “How do you even know Roy wants to date me?”

Al somehow convinces his feline throat to make a noise that sounds exactly like a human sob.

“You can tell me later,” Ed says.  “I’ll go finish dinner.”

“To answer your other question,” Al says as Ed starts into the kitchen and tries to remember where the fuck he left off, “which I definitely wasn’t eavesdropping on at all, because it’s just that my ears are so much more sensitive than a person’s, and I always forget, which I can’t possibly be blamed for—Winry’s actually coming tomorrow.”

“Oh,” Ed says.  There’s blood on the counter.  There are one or two little discs of carrot stranded in it like islands.  He probably shouldn’t eat those, but the rest are okay, aren’t they?  “Nice of her to mention it.”

“She sent you a note,” Al says.

“When?”

“Last week,” Al says.  “But…”

At least Ed has two slightly bloodied towels to choose from for cleaning up the rest.  “But what?”

“But she… sent it…” There is a chagrined cat shape skulking around the doorframe, and then it settles underneath one of their kitchen chairs and drops its head onto its paws.  “…with one of those little catnip packets.”

“Just for the record,” Ed says, collecting the forsaken carrots and considering the merits of pitching the towels into the garbage and buying new ones later, “if Winry was mailing me drugs, you’d throw a fucking fit.”

“But she doesn’t,” Al says.  “Because she knows that I’m responsible.”

“Responsible enough to eat my mail when you’re high,” Ed says.

“I didn’t eat it,” Al says, emulating the picture of indignity about as much as can be expected when one’s a cat curled up under a kitchen chair.  “I just… shredded it.  And then got rid of the evidence.”

Fuck the towels.  Ed will just… they’re not that expensive.  He rolls the reddened ones up with the bloody carrots and drops them into the trash.  “It’s pretty amazing that you can give me crap about Roy and then say things like that all in the space of five minutes.”

Strangely—or maybe not strangely at all—cat features lend themselves well to shit-eating grins.  “What are brothers for if not to appall you with their gifts for hypocrisy?”

“I dunno,” Ed says.  “I heard something once about, y’know, like, support and companionship or something…”

“Meh,” Al says.  “Overrated.  Just like getting to read your own mail.”

They look at each other for a long series of fake-solemn seconds before they start to laugh.