tierfallen

Title: Raising the Stakes
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Ed
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,031
Warnings: language, post-BH AU with the usual
Summary: Roy ruins what would have been an epic date, but Ed does get to see some skeevy assholes get their comeuppance, so that's all right.
Author's Note: Written for the Equivalent Exchange Anthology (yes, again) and edited masterfully by gracelesso, who is more vital to me than my organs.

This fic also has a lovely podfic by Annapods, which you can find here! ♥


RAISING THE STAKES
Ed puts his feet up on the dashboard. He’s pretty sure that Roy hates it when he does that, but tonight he feels entitled to some boorishness.

“I cannot believe,” he says, “that you canceled that dinner reservation for a stakeout.”

Roy doesn’t even put down the opera glasses that he’s using as binoculars, which he just happened to have in the car. There’s so much wrong with that whole situation that Ed hasn’t figured out where to start yet; he’s still trying to get his head around the hijacked date night thing.

“Yes,” Roy says, “you can.”

“Well, la-di-da,” Ed says, scowling at the back of Roy’s head. “Look who’s Brigadier General Literal all of a sudden. You know what I mean. The kind of steak out that we were supposed to be at sounds a hell of a lot better than sitting here, waiting for one corrupt asshole to leave the other corrupt asshole’s place with a sack full of money, or whatever you’re expecting. I’m hungry.”

“I know,” Roy says. He lowers the opera glasses for a second, squints, frowns, and raises them again. “And I’m sorry. I just didn’t know when—or if—I would ever get another opportunity quite this golden.” He pauses. “If it’s any consolation, the restaurants that advertise their steaks based entirely on volume, with no mention whatsoever of preparation technique, tend not to be quite as life-changing as one might hope.”

As is often the case when Roy really gets going, Ed has to take that sentence apart in his head, make sense of the individual pieces, and then put it back together. “How do you know? Have you ever even had a fourteen-ounce steak before?”

“I have not,” Roy says. His breath mists on the window. Ed pays too much attention to his breath these days. And to his mouth. And to his eyelashes. And to a lot of shit. “I’m not exactly looking forward to it, but it’s very possible that I’m judging too harshly. Maybe it’s a very lovingly seared hunk of signboard gimmick, and I’ll be terribly embarrassed.”

Ed pushes a hand into his hair. That’s about as close as he can get these days to repeatedly smacking himself in the forehead without Al accusing him of melodrama, like it’s some sort of federal crime. “Back up. Why did you make the reservation if you don’t even want to eat there?”

“For the same reason that I’m going to make another one for next weekend,” Roy says, perfectly calmly, like Ed isn’t having a minor existential crisis in the seat next to him. To be fair, Ed has a lot of those, and he probably picked it up from Roy in the first damn place. “Because you want to.”

Ed makes a serious attempt to process the idea of Roy fucking Mustang deliberately putting his precious name on the guest list for a restaurant that he doesn’t want to go to or be seen at, just because Ed expressed a craving for an inadvisably large steak.

Consolidating all of the mixed feelings into a single sentence is difficult, but he makes an effort: “This is not what I expected dating you to be like.”

“Good,” Roy says. “Keep ’em guessing. That’s my motto.”

Ed frowns at the sliver of Roy’s stupid, gorgeous face that’s visible from this angle. The streetlamps out here make everybody else look sort of sallow, but of course they make Roy look like a million cenz and change. That has to be a conspiracy. Roy probably uses at least eighty-five percent of his growing governmental influence to push through infrastructural changes that will make him look prettier in public. “I thought your motto was ‘If you can’t compel them with wisdom, confound them with bullshit.’”

“I’m a complicated person,” Roy says. He fiddles with the focus on the opera glasses. “And a font of catchphrases, apparently. When did I say that?”

“I don’t remember,” Ed says. “Must’ve been in front of Al, though, because he did it as a cross-stitch.”

Roy lowers the glasses again and turns all the way around to look at him. “He—”

“Watch your guy!” Ed says, making waving—or possibly shooing—gestures at the window. “I’m not gonna miss that dinner just for you to ruin your own damn stakeout, Mustang, I can promise you that.”

“Forgive me,” Roy says, obediently returning to the task of staring at what looks, from Ed’s distance, like a totally dark and uninteresting window in the second corrupt asshole’s corrupt bank building or whatever it is. “I’m just… please tell Al that I’m touched. Honored, actually.”

“All right,” Ed says. He tries to shift a little in his seat without displacing his heels from the dashboard. Sometimes being comfortable makes his brain thresh information faster, and he’s still trying to parse some of the shit that Roy has said tonight. “Y’know, if you… We could do stuff that you want to do sometimes, too. Even if you don’t think that I’ll like it.”

Watching intently, he can just see a trace of Roy’s smile reflected in the window. “Is that not what we’re doing right now?”

“This is work,” Ed says. “That’s different. Just—y’know. Something to keep in mind.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Roy says. He must not realize that Ed can see his smile widening a little bit more.

“No, it’s not,” Ed says. “It’s equivalent.”

Roy’s going to strain his face in another second. “Well—”

“Hey,” Ed says as the front door of Corrupt Asshole Number Two’s building opens. “Heads up.”

Roy tucks the opera glasses into his coat pocket and adjusts his lapels, then his tie, like Corrupt Asshole Number One is going to give a single shit how good Roy looks while busting him. “Showtime.”

The guy looks shadier leaving than he did when Roy spotted him on the street corner near the restaurant; Ed’s willing to bet that he has a gun. “Would it be weird if I came with you?”

Roy is pulling on the ignition gloves, which is both unfairly sexy and extremely reassuring. “I think he’ll assume that I brought you as muscle rather than as my date, if that’s what you’re asking.”

It’s just like Roy to manage to frame Ed’s question in a way that sounds condescending even though Ed was the one asking it. “Well—yeah.  Is that a problem?”

“Not at all,” Roy says, smoothly swinging the door open and stepping out of the car. “I think Colonel Hillman probably remembers you, actually.”

“What?” Ed says.

Roy is already strolling away from the car, pretending to tug idly at the wrists of his gloves so that the movement will draw Hillman’s gaze directly to the arrays on the backs. “Colonel! What a surprise.”

Ed rolls his eyes as he scrambles out of the car on his side and slams the door. By the time that he hastens over to catch up to Roy’s long, measured, not-quite-lazy strides, Colonel Hillman has frozen with one foot halfway off of the curb, hand stilled in the air where he’d started to reach behind himself for his sidearm.

“You remember Fullmetal, don’t you?” Roy says, so pleasantly that it almost gives Ed the fucking chills. “There was that one morning that he was so mad at me for making him rewrite a report that he blew up your desk.”

Ed doesn’t remember that, but the expression of horrified recognition that dawns on Hillman’s face indicates that it definitely must have happened.

Awkward.

“What a perfect time,” Roy is saying, still in the ice-cold-calm voice, “for a little chat—don’t you think, Colonel Hi—”

Hillman takes off running down the street.

Roy cups a hand around his mouth and calls, “It’s very rude to leave when a superior officer is talking to you, Colonel!”

Ed sighs, crouches, claps, and lays his hands down on the pavement. Concrete liquefies under Hillman’s feet, roils, and then snakes up around his legs. He screams. Ed sends it slithering up a little higher to pin his arms against his sides so that he can’t go for the gun, and then lets the cement solidify again.

“Thank you,” Roy says. When Ed straightens up, Roy’s hand settles on his left shoulder and squeezes gently just once. “Would you mind keeping an eye on him while I go see if I can locate our other dear friend inside?”

“Sure,” Ed says, eyeing Roy for a second before shoving his hands into his pockets and heading over towards Hillman, who is writhing up a storm and getting nowhere.

Roy skips up the steps into the building and slips inside. What an ass. Damn.

Ed kicks a couple pieces of loose gravel on his way over to Hillman, who stops writhing and stares at him in abject horror as he comes close.

“Hi,” Ed says. “Sorry about your desk, I guess.”

Hillman looks like he might cry. That would be even more awkward. “You retired. I checked. What are you even doing here?”

“What are any of us doing anywhere?” Ed says. He sits down on one of the extraneous extensions of the concrete, which is a decent height to use as a temporary chair. “Life’s weird like that.”

Hillman makes a weak noise. “This is—this is illegal.”

Ed swings his left leg and glances over at the building, from which some Roy-apprehending-a-second-asshole-with-judicious-use-of-fire-like noises have begun to emanate. “Wanna bet?”










The upside is that Roy is much more efficient at cleaning up this sort of mess than Roy has ever been with paperwork. The downside is that, in spite of that particular talent, Ed is still starving by the time that they’re done.

Roy must sense it, because he drives them a couple blocks over and parks across the street from a little stand selling kebabs and stuff. The smell of them is so fucking killer that Ed’s knees go weak, and he’s almost afraid to step out of the car in case he immediately does a header.

Roy insists on paying. Ed kicks Roy’s shoe hard enough to make him squawk and hop backwards before he starts laughing. The vendor looks at them like they’ve both lost it, which could be true, depending on what it is. Ed’s not sure that he ever had it, but whatever it is, he doesn’t miss it very much.

They settle down on a little stone wall in front of one of the nearby buildings to eat. Ed gets grease all over his nice clothes in less than forty seconds; Al’s going to love that. Roy waits until Ed has torn through half of his food before uttering a word of conversation, which means that he’s learning.

“I’m sorry that we didn’t make it to the restaurant,” Roy says. He licks oil off of his fingers. Ed looks intently up at the sky so that he won’t have to start thinking cold shower thoughts in public again. “I know you were looking forward to it.”

“S’okay,” Ed says around the huge bite he just took. “This was probably more fun than fourteen-ounce steaks.”

Roy lays a hand over his heart and blinks. “Is such a thing even possible?”

“Shut up,” Ed says, but it’s really hard to keep from grinning. “Hey, just for the record, you had better not ask me to write a report.”

Roy smiles back, arching an eyebrow at him for good measure. “Will you blow up my desk if I do?”

“Yes,” Ed says. “Repeatedly.”

“Oh, dear,” Roy says idly. He’s licking his fingers again, the fucking sadist. “I may have to take a break from paperwork if I have no desk.”

Ed snorts. “Good luck talkin’ Riza into that one.”

“Thank you,” Roy says. “I’ll need it.” He glances at the paltry remnants of Ed’s food. “In the meantime, I think I also owe you dessert.”

Fuck it. Weird dates and politics and catchphrase overdoses aside, if things keep up like this, Ed’s going to marry this bastard.