tierfallen

Title: No Exception
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Ed
Rating: PG
Word Count: 9,932
Warnings: schmoop tbh
Summary: Factoid-sharing as a form of intimacy wasn't ever on either of their lists, but here they are, somehow.
Author's Note: A Fandom Trumps Hate charity auction fic for nohmisung, who is: (a) an absolute baller at winning FTH auctions; and (b) a wonderful human being who cares about me as a person and insisted that I keep the fic under 10K this time, including coming up with a premise that even my dumb ass couldn't stretch too far. X'D

Premise on this one is the usual post-BH situation, although no return of alchemy this time!


NO EXCEPTION
Dear Edward,

Given your flawless recall when it comes to times you tried to torture me, I suspect that the answer is a resounding ‘yes’, but do you happen to remember that time you told me—and I quote—that “horses are an anatomical nightmare and a testament to the fact that evolution can fail just enough to keep something that should collapse under the weight of its own incompetence clinging miserably to life, and apparently Mustangs are no exception”?  And then went on to explain in great and condescendingly patient detail how bafflingly delicate their legs are?  And that they breathe passively while running by letting the movement of their legs and other organs compress their lungs?  And that they can’t vomit, so if something goes severely gastrointestinally awry—which happens often since those are included in the organs that are swinging around for lung-pressure while they run—then they more or less have to lie down and die?

I’m not entirely sure if you noticed at the time that the reason I was avoiding looking at you was not, in fact, because of a swell of shame at the devastating insult, or even because I was too angry to trust myself with speech, but instead because I was struggling very, very hard not to laugh.

You may also recall concluding your tirade with the delightfully sanctimonious comment that this forbidden knowledge might just save my skin someday.

Well.  I regret to report that you were right.

Anyway, how are things?  Hope Alphonse is hale, healthy, and well, and possibly terrorizing you as part of a long-term revenge plot.  And that the Rockbells are also doing well, and that you’re finding retirement to be generously uneventful.

…I’m kidding, I’m not quite cruel enough to wind you up like that and not even tell you the story.  I certainly owe you that much, as a matter of equivalency if nothing else.

I was trapped at one of those parties the brass are so nauseatingly fond of—I do believe you attended almost a quarter of one of those before you grabbed me by the braiding of my uniform and dragged me into a hall and demanded to know how it was legal to subject you to this kind of torture, after which you climbed out a third-story window to escape into the night.  The remaining three-quarters of that one were quite as boring as the first quarter, if you’d ever wondered.  I imagine you didn’t.  You were even less prone to second-guessing in the early days.

In any case, I was trapped like a rat, or possibly a caged exotic animal, and when I tried to stage a strategic retreat near the hors d’oeuvres so that I could make sure none of them were more poisoned than usual—for everyone’s safety, you understand—I ended up cornered by the wife of one a brigadier general whom I think is becoming an ally, but I’m not quite sure.

And I had my mouth full.

At long last, a challenge worthy of Roy Mustang.  I’m sure you would agree.

As she introduced herself—which fortunately took ages, as a result of her extensive pedigree, because she’s related to so many other people in government that I’m starting to wonder whether the gene pool is safe to enter under any circumstances; and which therefore gave me time to swallow—I realized that I recognized her from having arrived shortly after she did.  Because she’d arrived on a beautiful white horse, and had managed it like she knew precisely what she was doing.

I can nearly hear you muttering “Rich people and their fake fucking hobbies,” and Edward, I have no choice but to confess that I agree.  I hope you will take that admission to your grave, since the timing of me meeting mine may depend upon it.

Anyway.

I told her your horse fact.

And that convinced her that I was both brilliant, for some reason, and interested in her fake rich person hobby, which was far more important regardless, and she monopolized me for the better part of an hour, and appeared to enjoy every minute of it.

Which also led me to discover that she really wasn’t so bad.  Evidently the apparent compulsion to make a scene arriving at social events astride a white horse is simply because she just finds it much more fun, and then she can leave whenever she wishes, since she doesn’t have to wait for her husband to “piss about and schmooze with the valet for twenty minutes before he’ll even deign to go get the car.”  I think you might like her.

But the important part of all of this is that I do believe your vituperatively-delivered little factoid did, in fact, save my life, or will certainly contribute to as much in the future.

Thank you for your continued loyal service to the Amestrian Military, whether you like it or not.

If you have any other skin-savers, let me know the next time you’re in Central.  I think I owe you a coffee, too, as far as the exchange rate goes.

All the best,

R.M.










Roy,

You absolute fuck.

I’m so glad I can say that now.  I mean not that I didn’t say it before but now I can say it without any fear of consequences.  Did you know that being a regular citizen is actually the best.  There’s a fun fact for you.

I did actually believe for a second that you were going to withhold the juicy story, you ASS.  Al would say I shouldn’t call you nasty names just because you’re an intolerable bore, but he really likes “intolerable bore” right now so I think that’s hypocritical.  (He just says it about everything though so don’t take it personal.  Or as a challenge.  Actually do take it as a challenge, and send me a copy of the newspaper the next day.)

I’m going to be in Central when I feel like it and not a second before but Winry does kind of want to go for Paninya’s birthday and that’s in March so put a big red X in your calendar or whatever.

If you are still kicking by then as a direct consequence of the unmatched quality of my conversation, maybe I’ll see you around.

Things are fine.  By the way.  Our parties are better than your parties at any rate.  Although to be honest there are a lot of intolerable bores.  To be more honest there’s just nothing to do and I’m starting to feel like I’m climbing the walls of my skull so maybe I’ll turn up on your doorstep on a white horse one of these days just to have something to DO.

It’d keep you on your toes too wouldn’t it.  And you’re not that tall no matter what you used to say so you should probably stay on your toes.

“All the best” is such a stupid way to end a letter Mustang, you don’t and never did have all the best.

You did pretty good with what you had, though.  I’ll give you that.

CHEERY SALUTATIONS,

Ed.







It’s not like Ed is worried about meeting up with Mustang.

Ed doesn’t worry about anything anymore: that’s one of the rules.  Life is good.  Life is easy.  Life is boring as shit, and there’s nothing to worry about, except occasionally things like a goat escaping confinement and going on a potentially-bloody rampage.  Those tend to be a whole hell of a lot easier to stop than the bloody rampages from Ed’s youth, which were usually spearheaded by psychotic alchemists and/or unkillable monsters.  Generally better to take your chances with the goats.

The point is, Mustang is just Mustang, and he can’t have changed much, given that his letters are functionally identical to his rambly-ass missives and mission assignments, except for having marginally more of a sense of humor.  Ed’s not planning to give him an award for that just yet.  And Ed’s not worried about meeting him for a coffee in Central and seeing him in the flesh for the first time in three years, because Ed is over the stupid little schoolboy crush he used to have when he was thirteen (and fourteen, and fifteen, and sixteen) and didn’t know any better.

He knows much better now.  He knows Roy Mustang is a fucking dweeb, and an idiot, and a genius, and a cataclysm carved in the shape of a man, with a heart that bleeds fit to match what’s on his hands.  Ed knows that Roy is never to be trusted except when it counts.

That’s not the kind of guy you have a crush on.

That’s the kind of guy you fall for.  And keep falling.

That’s the kind of guy who fucks you up forever.

Ed’s done having big city problems.  Ed’s done with the desperate research binges and the fractured sleep and the bone-breaking weariness of dragging himself through one day after the next, forcing himself to believe there was a light on the horizon.  Ed’s done getting tangled up in all the petty politics and cutthroat nonsense.  Ed’s done playing games for keeps.  

Ed’s biggest concern these days is which neighbors will reward them with food for fixing up fences and mowing lawns and replacing cracked shingles on the roof before it rains.  And he likes it that way.  He does.  He really does.  He swears he—

Fuck it.

Who the hell is he kidding?

His heart was in his throat for half the train ride, and swelling fit to smash out of his ribcage for the rest of it.  Resembool is asleep—it’s always asleep.  It was a lucky place to be born, a great place to be raised—the halcyon days of his childhood are the rule, not the exception, in a town like that, and it gave him an appreciation for the simpler, quiet joys of life.  The little things.

But Central is alive.

Central makes him feel like he’s waking up, and every single sunbeam is a promise.

There are so many people, just walking around and puttering past in their cars, talking and yelling and laughing, bustling around all over the sidewalks.  Something tugs hard on his heart at the thought of what that energy almost turned into—how it was almost wrested away from them, from this, and twisted into the worst possible form of itself.  It’s good to see them.  It’s good to remember.  It’s good to keep in mind that he was here, when they needed him.  He did everything he could to make it right.

A shape separates smoothly from the crowd, but Ed’s reflexes and instincts and observational skills are still tuned so tight that he doesn’t miss it.  A part of his brain will never stop waking in the middle of the night.  A part of his brain will never stop searching for movement in the shadows.  A part of his brain will never stop believing that half the world is trying to kill him.

Al tells him to listen to the crickets, to count the clouds, to watch the sunsets from the roof.  Al tells him that if he practices soothing himself slowly—if he wraps himself tight enough in all the gentle things—that eventually it’ll fade.

Al doesn’t promise it’ll go away.

Ed appreciates that part.

And the sunsets are nice.

He appreciates somewhat less how fucking fine Roy Mustang looks in plainclothes, sauntering up to the table and drawing back the chair opposite Ed’s.

“Good afternoon,” he says.

Ed makes the no-longer-contractually-but-still-morally-obligated face at him.  “Well, it was.”

Roy sprawls in the chair like he’s making a show of how relaxed he is, even though both of them know that he’s just as painfully alert as Ed.  “If you’re trying to get me to pay for your coffee here as an apology for my basic existence,” Roy says, grinning at him, “you’ll have to try a little harder.”

Ed stares at him.  “You invited me.  You put it in writing that you’d buy my coffee.”

“My dear Edward,” Roy says, which at least sends a horrible, horrible shiver up Ed’s spine to counteract all of the avid boiling that his blood has taken up, “have you somehow forgotten so quickly that I work in government?”

Ed keeps staring.  Maybe he’ll get a miracle, and it’ll suddenly start to have an effect.

Roy blinks placidly back at him for three abominable seconds.

Then he laughs—brightly, warmly, with his shoulders shaking.  None of that smarmy bullshit he did in the office, or the measured, artificial crap he meted out to higher-ranking officers to make them believe he didn’t hate their sorry guts.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and that sounds weirdly genuine, too.  “It’s been years.  I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to pull your leg.”

“I’m gonna pull it, too,” Ed says, flatly.  “Off.  And beat you with it.”

Roy beams at him.  It’s lucky nobody swoons on the street.  Ed keeps his breathing under control by force of will.  He’s backslid.  He used to be much better at masking the effect Roy has always, always had on his traitor of a cardiovascular system.

“I fully intend to buy you coffee,” Roy says.  Inexplicably, he stands up again.  “Just not here.”  At least that explicablates that.  “Their coffee’s crap, for one thing.  For another, there’s a lovely new place that just opened up near the university.”

Ed eyes him, standing slowly.  “This had better not be another scam.”

Roy flattens his hand on his chest and blinks big, sad doe eyes.  “I’m wounded.”

“You will be,” Ed says, reorienting his brain while he speaks and then starting towards the intersection that will let them turn off to the east, “if you keep giving me shit when I’m not being paid to put up with it anymore.”

“You never put up with it,” Roy says, genially.

“I know,” Ed says.  “Just imagine how much worse it’s gonna get.”

By the way Roy keeps smiling at him, Ed assumes that he is, characteristically, ignoring the instructions.










The coffee place by the university is nice.  It’s cute inside, with lacy white curtains and lots of cheery little flowerpots, and most of the patrons look to be students or professors who have retreated to it as a pocket of quietude where they can imbibe an inadvisable quantity of caffeine while digging their way out of the piles of papers they’ve laid out on the tables.

Ed and Roy sit on a bench across the street, which gives them an obnoxiously scenic view of the front façade of the main university building, which is big and majestic, but constructed with kinder curves and prettier windows than the government buildings, and somehow hardly bears any resemblance to them at all.  It’s a particularly pleasant part of the canal that winds past—one of the bits that they dressed up more like a river, with walkways and bridges and shady trees.  Students race by on bicycles, many of them calling to each other and laughing.  One girl staggers across the wide front lawn carrying a precarious stack of books, and she reminds Ed of Sheska so much that he shoves his coffee at Roy and runs over to help her.

She tries to insist that she’s fine, but he does manage to redistribute the books in a way that’s much less likely to end in collapse, disaster, and library fines.  He knows an awful lot about all three.

Roy is smiling at him as he comes back to the bench—smiling at him differently.  Differently than before, differently than earlier today, differently than… everything.

Makes sense, maybe.  Ed is a different person than he was when he left.  And he’ll be a different one again tomorrow.

He’s not quite different enough not to call it out, though.

“What?” he says as he accepts his coffee back.  “Thanks.  Or whatever.”

“Nothing,” Roy says, the liar.  And then— “I missed you,” which is way, way worse.

Ed’s throat gets annoyingly gummy, partly just because he doesn’t know what the hell to say to that.

He missed stupid fucking Roy like sundials miss the light, like fledglings miss a nest and old maps miss the press of a fingertip.  Like—

Okay, that’ll work.

“Missed you, too,” Ed says, sipping his coffee just hard enough to slurp.  “Like a cart misses a horse.”

Roy laughs the real laugh again.










Roy also buys him dinner, even though he gripes about it.  Roy makes all of the machinations he’s navigating through these days sound very, very funny, which Ed knows they’re not.  Roy drags him out for drinks, after, and the rest of the team turns up, and everybody pounds him on the back and nudges at both of his shoulders and yammers at him nonstop.  Roy just keeps smiling in the background, every time Ed turns to look.

Roy walks him back to his hotel—which isn’t a looker, or really even much of a sleeper, but Ed’s only staying the one night, for now, until Paninya stops being a party-pooper and getting sick on her own birthday, so it doesn’t matter much.

Roy also bought all of Ed’s drinks—not that there were that many, and the only reason Ed let him get away with it with all of his extremities intact is because he also bought everybody else’s.

But it feels, now, like Ed owes him something.  Equivalent damn exchange.  He could spend his whole life running to the edges of the world and never get away from that one.

He’s starting to wonder if he wants to—run to the edges of the world, that is.  Get away.  He’s starting to wonder if the running was ever the good part, or if he just used to like it because the slamming of his heartbeat in his chest made him so damn sure he was alive.

He’s starting to wonder if having a place to run back to is the part that makes it worth it.

He can dig through that mess later.  Right now, he needs to settle the balance so he doesn’t have to carry it on his back.

“Hey,” he says, as they start down the last block.  “Fun fact for you.”

“Oh?” Roy says, and he’s had just enough to drink that he can’t disguise the eagerness.

It’s so damn cute on him—excitement is.  The way his eyes widen slightly, lighting up a little as he smiles.  The way he leans in, just a fraction, like he doesn’t want to miss a single word.

Maybe Ed shouldn’t have come back here—shouldn’t have risked it.

Maybe it was overdue.

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “So, like—tea can slow down bleeding.  Tea leaves, I mean.  Wet ones.  When they’re… you want the caffeinated shit, though, because it’s the tannins—that bitter shit.  So I guess coffee might work, too.  But it’s an astringent, so it tightens up the blood vessels and stuff, and it helps with clotting a little bit.  It’s not gonna, like, bail you out with dismemberment, or anything, but—”

“That is very interesting,” Roy murmurs, and his eyes are so bright that Ed takes his chances gazing up at a streetlamp instead.

“Obviously,” Ed says.  They’re close to the hotel.  Finally.  Shit.  “I wouldn’t give you a crappy fun fact.  Then it wouldn’t be fun, so it’d be self-defeating anyway.  Witch hazel works, too.  It’s similar.  But I figure you’ve probably got more tea than witch hazel in your house.”

“Maybe,” Roy says, probably aiming for loftily mysterious, and ending up squarely in the middle of absurd.

“Maybe you’d better go home and sober up before you have to pretend to work tomorrow, Mustang,” Ed says.

Roy shoves his hands into his pockets, tips his head back, and sighs at the sky.  “Would it be a travesty to admit that you’re probably right?”

“I’m always right,” Ed says.

Roy smiles at him, one more time.

“Goodnight, Ed,” he says.  “Travel safe, or I’ll be very distraught.”

“G’night, Mustang,” Ed says.  “Get home safe, or I’ll kick your ass.”

Roy salutes.

The bastard.










Ed is fifteen minutes into the train ride home, sipping reluctantly at the cup of shitty train station coffee he had no choice but to shell out his hard-earned cash for, and thinking about tannins when it occurs to him that there are a lot of nice coffee shops in Central.

There are a lot of them that are much, much closer to Roy’s house than the university is.

And there are probably a lot of research alchemists and professors and administrators who would look the other way as far as Ed’s patchy educational record, if he decided that he wanted to be one of those people hauling huge stacks of books around or tearing along the pretty canal walk on a bike.

He can’t even be mad about it.

Roy wasn’t really manipulating him, for once—just opening doors and showing him what was inside.

And he’s been sitting in the same room for a long time.










Three days later, a telegram delivery comes to Pinako’s door.  Ed shoves the disruption out of his mind and tries to focus on his book again, which becomes significantly more difficult when she howls “Edward?” up at the stairs.

Considering everything, he’s decided to be better to her, even when he doesn’t want to, so he trots down the stairs contemplating the fact that he never should have given anybody this address.

He has to revise the last part a little when he reads the type on the card that the messenger slaps into his hand before turning and striding away.

ED STOP.  REMEMBER THE LITTLE FACTOID YOU TOLD ME THE OTHER DAY STOP.  WELL YOURE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE THIS STOP.

Ed laughs so hard that the messenger runs back up the walk again to make sure he’s not going to asphyxiate.







Roy has taken to walking home most nights.  It frequently clears some of the cobwebs from his head, even if thoughts alone can’t vanquish any of the spiders.  It gives him time to release some of the poison—breathe it out into the night and watch the air mist above his mouth and dissipate.  It lets him notice other things about the world.  It reminds him that there are other things to notice—other lives pulsing all around him, other universes ever unfurling, other eyes gazing half-plaintively up at the stars, knowing full well no help will come.

As he reaches the corner of his neighbor’s lawn, he notices something else:

A body lying in the middle of his.

No quantity of evening constitutionals could cure him of the instinct to grasp onto the worst-case scenario.

There’s a corpse in his front yard.  Why?  Whose?  What’s the message, and who paid for it?  Why isn’t the whole neighborhood swarming with police digging through his kitchen drawers for evidence when the motive is signed at the bottom of every single form?  

If a day comes when nearly everyone Roy knows doesn’t want to kill him, he’s either implausibly succeeded or abjectly failed.

Weak starlight gleams on long, pale hair.

Roy’s heart clenches so tight, curling so small, that it’s a minor miracle his chest doesn’t collapse around it—that his whole body doesn’t crumple from the draw of the vacuum, the pull of the void—

His feet keep moving.  Even steps.  Boot heels hitting the pavement one after the other.

The body on his lawn stretches both arms over its head and yawns cavernously, covering its mouth with its left forearm halfway through.

Roy breathes out.

Ed usually comes by on Fridays.  He usually comes by a lot of other days, but on Fridays they have something of a standing dinner reservation, insofar as Ed turns up and stages a coup of the kitchen, which Roy tries to keep relatively clean and extremely well-stocked to furnish his culinary escapades.  A number of them are quite intrepid indeed: some are phenomenally productive, others are unintentionally hilarious, and a notable handful have tested the structural integrity of Roy’s kitchen.  Fortunately, there is a very good Xingese restaurant within smoky-walk-of-shame distance, which offers takeout at all hours.

Ed wasn’t supposed to be here tonight, though, which is why Roy didn’t crawl out of the office earlier—it was Ed’s first day of exams, which apparently marks the first time he’s had to submit a written test since he was in elementary school, well prior to every single one of the events that precipitated their ever having met.  

Ed had said, rather cheerfully, that he wasn’t sure how it would go, and he didn’t want to ruin Roy’s night with the ‘not-insignificant possibility of a rage bender of epic proportions’.

Roy had suggested that food tends to ameliorate rage benders, regardless of how disproportionate they are to the people experiencing them.

Ed had peeled off one sock, balled it up, and threw it at his head.

The right sock.

Roy—a master of emotional perception, both as a matter of course and as a necessity for survival—had rationally interpreted that to mean that Ed was unmoved from his original intention to postpone their regular plans.

Ed hadn’t made any effort to correct him, although he did take a study break last night to call and howl indignantly in Roy’s ear about the box of chocolates with a calligraphic note reading Good luck (since you believe in luck), please don’t inflict grievous bodily harm on any particularly distinguished members of the faculty.

Roy isn’t entirely sure that they’ll let him into that chocolate shop ever again.

He is sure that Ed ate them all in spite of his misgivings about the sentiment.

He isn’t sure what lying in the grass on his front lawn portends, as far as Ed’s relative mood.

The yawn was a good sign, though, since at least it implies that Ed must not be so mad that he’ll be up until three in the morning muttering disparagingly about the future of education in this shithole of a country, like he was when he got his first homework assignments.

Roy sets his bag full of shithole-country-related paperwork down on the front walk, since the grass looks slightly damp, and then crosses over, sits, and lies down next to Ed.

He folds his hands on his chest.

A few wispy fingers of cloud are grasping at the crescent moon, but mostly the sky is clear.

“How did it go?” Roy asks.

“Hell if I know,” Ed says—calmly, at least.

Roy has not, as it happens, ever spent more than five tour-oriented minutes in a university lecture hall, but he has a vague recollection of traditional exams involving a lot of memorization.  Ed once memorized the local phone book in a small town that Roy had sent him to, so that he could come back and recite it as evidence of how boring the place had been.

“I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” Roy says.

“This is the professor that kicked me out of the class for saying I’d been to Xerxes,” Ed says.  “And then had to let me back in when he found out who I was.”

Ah.  “You may have… a few minor, quibbling things to worry about,” Roy says.  “But only if he’s very stupid, because any obviously unfair actions on his part clearly qualify as retaliation.”

Without once looking away from the stars, Ed reaches down, plucks a blade of grass, and tucks it into the corner of his mouth.  “Yeah.  I totally trust institutions to punish people who abuse their power.  Fell off the turnip truck on my way here.”

Roy smiles.  It comes too easy, with Ed, these days—too suddenly for him to mask it or modulate it.  Ed’s just too damn fun to be with, to be near—to orbit, slowly, wondering what the hell he’ll think of next.

Roy can’t wait to find out.

This looking forward to the future business is exceedingly strange.

He reaches over and flicks the torn edge of the bit of grass.  “Aren’t you supposed to do that with wheat?”

“Shows what you know,” Ed mutters, “city boy.”

Roy would like the record not to show that he experiences a bizarre shiver of delight at that particular diminutive.

Roy would, in fact, like to scratch that out of the record, deep enough to scar several pages underneath, and then set the record on fire for good measure.

“I submit without qualification to your unquestionable pastoral omniscience,” he says.

“Stop eating dictionaries,” Ed says.

“No,” Roy says.

Ed shakes his head.  His hair glimmers.  What a disgusting cliché.  The back of Roy’s neck is wet, and he never wants to move again.

Ed points straight up.  “Stargazing’s crap out here.”

It’s not so bad when you aim it sideways.

“We city boys have it rough,” Roy says.

Ed snorts as he drops his hand to the grass again.  Good old unassailable Eastern manners.  Infinitesimal droplets splatter on Roy’s knuckles. 

“You know they’re thinkin’ nowadays that the stars must be so far away from us that the light we see from them is actually old?” Ed says.  “Like, years old?  Just flooding through space for ages and ages before it gets to us.  If one of those stars died—burned out or blew up or collapsed in on itself and disappeared—we wouldn’t even know.  Not for a long, long time.”

Roy wants to ask him, sometimes.

If he was collapsing.

If he saw it that way.  If he felt it, but couldn’t say it, because he’d won the wars and gotten what he’d dreamed of all along.  If he forced a smile and then a laugh and put his head down and kept on moving, the same as always, because he didn’t dare complain about getting what he’d always begged the world to give him, and finding out that it had taken things from him that he hadn’t known how to lose.

Maybe he’ll say something on his own.

Maybe he won’t have to.

Maybe he knows that Roy knows, and that’s enough.

He’s shining now, at any rate.  And Roy’s too close, these days, for him to blink out in the darkness without anyone the wiser.  Roy’s too close to let him go.

“Makes all of this exam shit seem pretty small in comparison, right?” Ed says, folding his hands behind his head.  His elbow settles against Roy’s shoulder.  “But I guess we have to deal with what’s in front of us first, or we’d lose our tiny little minds.”

“How long do they last?” Roy asks.  “Stars.  On average.”

“Fucked if I know,” Ed says, and that’s a dangerous thought, given that he seems to know an awful of things.  “Millennia, I think.”

Roy looks up.  The whole sky was white, in Ishval.  The whole sky was an avalanche of light, unnumbered sparks of endless sizes, so many that the darkness shouldn’t have been able to hold them all without buckling beneath their weight.  The cosmos were infinite and incomprehensible and so beautiful that they struck something fundamental, grafted to the core of your humanity—so beautiful that they forced you to remember that you had some.

Roy had understood their God, in those moments.  He’d understood their grief.  He’d understood what he’d done.

He points at a pinprick.  “I wonder if when that star was born,” he says, “your professor was still a person instead of a crotchety old bastard propagating his misery.”

Ed laughs, almost chokes on the stupid blade of grass still stuck against the corner of his lip, and then makes a point of pretending that that was his intention and chewing on the tip of it.

He pauses.

He makes a face.

“Is it better to eat dictionaries, or my lawn?” Roy asks.

“Not my fault your grass tastes like shit,” Ed says, as if this is somehow a personal failing on Roy’s part.  He rolls himself smoothly up onto his elbows and then rocks himself up to his feet.  Roy’s spine twinges in a sad, wistful sort of way.  Ed makes a show of dusting himself off, but since it’s dew instead of dust, he doesn’t make much progress.  “Are you hungry?”

“Not hungry enough to sample the landscaping,” Roy says.

Ed holds both hands out and rolls his eyes.  “Up, Roy.”

Roy can’t really help reaching for him.
















“Homework is a scam,” Ed says.

“It’s the paper,” Roy says, idly, from where he’s been avidly pretending to read some nonsense on the couch for the past hour even though Ed knows he’s mostly daydreaming about all the ways he’s going to sexily outfox the asshole of the week.  “I’ve been telling you for years.”

Ed puts his pencil down and scrubs at his eyes.  At least he can do it with both hands without bruising himself these days.  Focus on the positives, polish up the silver linings, blah blah blah.

“No,” he says, leaning on the coffee table.  His back is starting to hurt from sitting on the floor.  And probably also just from his whole life, but the floor’s not helping.  “I mean the whole concept.  Like—you’re gonna show up.  We’re gonna teach you something.  You’re gonna learn it.  But then, because we don’t trust you, or because we’re shit at our jobs and didn’t teach it well the first time, we’re gonna make you learn it again, on your own, and then grade you on how well you re-taught it to yourself.  What’s the point?  Why do I drag my ass out of bed in the morning to go to class at all if I’m just going to have to do this little song and dance at the end of the day anyway?  It’s crap.”

Roy makes a moderately regretful little noise of agreement in the back of his throat.  “Much of life is, my dear.”

Ed puts his elbows on the table and rests his head in his hands so he can glower with better leverage.  “Could you be any less helpful?”

“I’d be delighted,” Roy says brightly.  “For instance, did you know—writing tends to go faster when you’re actually applying the pencil to the page.”

Ed makes a substantive effort to incinerate him with just a look.

The worst thing is that Roy knows that he can get away with just about anything when he widens his big, dark eyes and flashes that dumb pretty boy smile.

Ed hopes it’ll keep him alive for a long, long time.

“Did you know,” Ed says, “that it hurts to get hit in the head with a pencil?”

Roy beams.  “I did!  It’s a shame you missed the day that a shelf tipped over in Lieutenant-Colonel Praediel’s office upstairs, and the impact shook all of mine out of the ceiling.  It rained writing utensils.”

He’s right, though.  Ed would’ve loved to see that.

“It’s always so reassuring to hear that my tax money is being put to good use,” Ed says.

Roy arches an eyebrow.  “What tax money?  You’re a student, and you’re not paying rent.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” Ed says.

“Ah, yes,” Roy says.  “Of course.  The principles tax.  How could I forget?”

“Beats me,” Ed says.  “You know better than anyone that our government’s got no fucking principles.”

That makes Roy smile, though he tries to hide it behind his arm as he makes a point of stretching.  “Are you nearly done with your educationally futile torment?  I have an early meeting tomorrow.”

“You mean you have an early nap,” Ed says.

“With my eyes open,” Roy says.  “But I do have to drag my weary skeleton into the room by eight, which speaks to your point about principles.  Are you sure I can’t drop you off to save some time in the morning?”

The idea of being deposited on the sidewalk in front of the university by a military vehicle makes Ed want to stab things, and not with a pencil.  “Pretty damn sure, Roy.”

It’s a familiar refrain, but Roy gives it a shot anyway.  Ed would admire the persistence if it wasn’t so annoying.  “What about the streetcar?”

“That’s an even bigger waste of my tax money than your ceiling pencils,” Ed says.

“Your tax money in principle,” Roy says.

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “Seriously.  I’ve never seen one of those fucking things show up on schedule.  It’s like they exist in a universe with only three dimensions, so they’re not bound to the linear passage of time.”  He taps his fingertip on the edge of the table.  “If only we knew a big, strong, handsome military official who could do something about that.”

Roy slow-blinks at him.  “Serious question: are you venting about unreliable public transit, coming on to me, or asking me to become the Minister of Transportation?”

“Never mind,” Ed says, partially because a part of him—a small, warm, fragile part that rings like a distant bell at times like these—is genuinely afraid that Roy would go all in for streetcar improvements if Ed was ever fool enough to ask.  And he’s too tired to make good on the second one, more’s the goddamn pity.  “Let’s go the hell to bed.”

“Wait,” Roy says, the playful edge limning his voice as he stretches extravagantly again.  The way it arches his back heats up the pit of Ed’s stomach a little more, but he’s still too pissed off about the concept of homework to do much about it.  “Are we going to hell, or going to bed?  I mean, I’m planning to accompany you either way, but—”

“Sure,” Ed says, as deadpan as he can manage this late.  “Why not?  The streetcars are from another universe.  I’m wasting countless minutes of my one and only life regurgitating information to people who are purportedly experts on it, so that they can tell me why I’m not an expert, which I thought was the point of learning in the first place.  Given how much sense everything else makes, we might as well, okay?  We might as well go the bed to hell.”

The rare and ruinous helpless version of Roy’s laugh makes up for a lot of homework.  It’s a shame that Ed can’t tell him, or his ego will explode the house.

Ed likes this house, wherever its beds are, existentially speaking, at any given time.

By the time they get upstairs, at least, the bed doesn’t look any more sulfur-wreathed than usual, so that’s a start.

Ed’s slept in a lot of places over the years—a lot of shitty hotels, a lot of trains and train stations, a lot of in-between spots, a lot of leaps and bounds and temporary stopgaps, a lot of connective places—but precious little that’s been solid.  There’s been precious little permanence.

He knows what happens when he counts his chickens instead of his blessings.  He knows what happens when he whispers secret wishes to the world.

But that’s one of the things about Roy that’s different.  Roy would become the fucking Minister of Transportation if it was the only way to get Ed to class on time, when that’s what Ed wants.  He’d sure as hell fight to wrench Ed’s dreams back out of the teeth of the hungry universe trying to shred them to bits.

…sure as bed?

Ed used to be able to get a lot further on spit, vinegar, and minimal sleep.

He reaches for his toothbrush with the left hand and has to remind himself that he can safely use the right.  Letting himself get distracted by all the swirling too-late-at-night thoughts while applying automail amounts of pressure used to make his gums bleed on a semi-regular basis.  Al was always pissed.

The first few times that Ed stayed over here, at Roy’s place—most of which were accidental, and enforced by the fact that Roy, too, has seen too many knives emerge from the dark to let Ed straggle home at three in the morning after they’d accidentally co-crashed on the couch together after dinner—brushing his teeth in Roy Mustang’s bathroom had felt unspeakably weird.

It’s still weird, but only because of how un-weird it’s become.  These days, Ed is a person who spitefully turns his shitty homework in early, and makes valiant attempts at the ‘challenge’ recipes that Roy digs up out of magazines and cookbooks and fuck-knows-where, and sleeps through the night a lot of the time.  These days, Ed is a person who brushes his teeth not just in Roy Mustang’s bathroom, but elbow-to-elbow with the man himself.

Roy hums when he brushes his teeth.  Which is weird, but in a nice way.  He started out doing it under his breath, got all flustered and self-conscious about it when Ed noticed, and mumbled his way through an explanation that it was an old childhood habit Chris instilled in him so that he would stay on-task and keep at it for long enough.

Ed had told him about the automail thing, and suggested maybe his teeth would have thanked him for a cool strategy like that.

Roy does it a little louder lately.

It’s always the same song, which has enough variation here and there through the wordless verses that it’s easy to keep your place.  On the relatively rare occasions that Roy has to travel overnight, Ed hums it himself, less because he’s worried his dental hygiene will drastically regress in a single day than because it’s sort of reassuring to think that Roy, wherever the hell his dumb ass ended up, is probably doing it too.

And Roy does need to worry about his dental hygiene from one day to the next.  He’s gotta keep that front-page photo smile super clean and shiny.

And it does help, a lot of the time, but Ed’s mind hasn’t stopped wandering just because his feet now tend to pass over a much smaller sub-grid of the map.

He thinks about teeth, and unhappy teeth, and about how bizarre it is that baby teeth are basically vestigial bones that winch themselves out of your face and fall off forever, and then about replacing teeth, and then about sharks.

“You know sharks?” Ed asks, through the foam.  They’re almost done anyway, so Roy won’t be miffed if he loses his place.

Roy skips a few bars.  “None personally.”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “They’re pretty crap conversationalists.  You know how supposedly they always have to keep swimming, or they’ll die, ’cause they have to keep water constantly flowing through their gills or something?”

Roy pauses.  He spits.  He lifts his head.  “Well, I do now.”

“Un-know it again,” Ed says.  “That’s not true.”  Roy shifts out of the way, and he spits, and Roy’s palm grazes his shoulder-blades for no real reason.  “There was this time in Creta where we were in this boat—and the word ‘boat’ here is being used about as generously as possible; I’m talking, like, the most tragic little fucking dinghy you can possibly imagine, where the bottom’s basically held together with used chewing gum—and the water was so clear you could see all the fish, and Devon dropped his kebab.”

“Ah, yes,” Roy says, fake-darkly.  He fills the cup of water and offers it to Ed first, like a weirdo.  “Good old Devon, the undisputed mastermind.”

Maybe Ed tells too many stories.

Maybe he tells exactly the right amount.

“I can’t talk,” Ed says.  He sips, sloshes, spits again.  “Those kebabs were so good I almost went over the side to try to get it.  But anyway—a bunch of little sharks were like ‘Fuck, yeah’, for obvious reasons, and then afterward they were just sort of swimming around.  And a couple of them just sorta sat down on the bottom of the ocean and hung out there.”  He hands the cup back.  “So the always-swimming thing is either crap, or at least crap for some of them.  I dunno about the bigger ones.”

“I think I’m glad you don’t,” Roy says.

“But they’re so cool,” Ed says.

“You being in one piece is even cooler,” Roy says.

Ed sustains eye contact, blinks slowly, and very gently presses his bare metal toes down on top of Roy’s foot.

“I would argue that counts as one piece,” Roy says, making a weak effort to hide a smile.  “Should I have said ‘the normal amount of pieces’?”  Before Ed can even get into that one, though, he tips his head.  “Where did the always-swimming gill myth come from, do you know?  Don’t fish have some sort of… internal air storage or something?”

Ah, fuck.

Ed’s never getting out of this being-in-love-with-him thing.  Not ever.

“Well,” Ed says, swiping a little bit of toothpaste overflow off of his chin, “since you asked—”










Roy sinks to sleep like a rock tossed off a cliff, or maybe like a fish without a swim bladder, or maybe like a kebab dropped over the side of a shitty dinghy.  Ed listens to him breathe and wonders—

How the fuck he got so lucky, for one thing.

And whether maybe he should learn to keep his mouth shut, for another.

Al is the only person he’s ever known who’s actually wanted to pay witness to the wild unfurlings of his overactive brain.  Does Roy actually like it, or does he just play along because the rest of Ed’s better traits—whatever he thinks those are—make it worth tolerating the annoying idiosyncrasies?  Roy’s good at long games.  Roy’s good at compromises.  Roy’s good at making do.

Maybe it doesn’t really matter which one it is.

Maybe they’re both love, at the heart, and that’s what he’s here for.

That’s why he stays.










Two days later, Roy comes home late, wearing a slightly deranged expression and lugging a bag full of books about marine life.

“I can’t stop thinking about gills,” he says, by way of explanation or apology or both or neither.  “This is way too much, and the librarians hate me, so they’re all due back in three days.  I fully intend to make that illegal soon.  But in the meantime, you have to help me.”

Ed can’t stop smiling.

So that answers that.







Ed disdains birthdays almost as much as Roy does, albeit apparently for a different reason.  Roy’s objection is to the meaningless milestone like a countdown clock, tapping its wristwatch to foreground how little he’s done in the time he’s spent, and to remind him of how little time he might have left.  Twenty-five wasn’t kind to him, either.

As far as Roy can tell, though, Ed’s distaste for them is—appropriately enough, for the University of Amestris’s youngest-ever professor of either mathematics or archaeology, let alone both—more academic.  He was muttering something last week about how pinning a specific date should be confounded by a hundred factors including but not limited to length of gestation, birth complications, and relative time zone.  Roy hasn’t asked if he’s come to a resolution on how to standardize for the variables, since he’s sure he’ll hear about it if Ed manages to arrange them into an equation he considers presentable.  The front-row seat still hasn’t gotten any older, even if the two of them aren’t quite so lucky.

Roy has no complaints about his luck, though, all things considered—which is strange in its own right.  Anyone on his team, past or present, could passionately testify to how rare it is for him to forgo an opportunity to whine.

Ed rolls his eyes at the little cake Roy bought, but, as anticipated, he isn’t too proud to dig in.  Roy ducks out into the front hallway while Ed’s hands are occupied, keeping his breathing even and his steps measured and his head high.  He has a lot of practice at that.

“Ah,” Roy says, making himself flip through the envelopes that Ed stepped over and left on the mat by the mail slot, as he always does when he’s ‘on a roll’.  Roy can’t even see the writing on any of the others, can’t read the words—he selects the one he knows, sets the rest on the table, and coaxes himself into breathing again.  “Something came for you.”

“S’it from Al?” Ed calls with his mouth full.  “If the kid took their phone apart again, I’m gonna make them change her name to ‘Destructo, Empress of Entropy’ for real this time.  Once and for all.”

“Good luck,” Roy says.  His feet feel rather distant, and his hands might as well belong to someone else.  He steps into the kitchen.  He does not grip the letter.  He offers it out.

Ed blinks at the envelope, not at him, and takes it.  He waves it in the air experimentally and glances at the front before wrenching it open with his fingertip, mangling the flap as he goes.  “Kinda heavy.  There’s no return address on here.”

Roy throws on a grin.  “Secret admirer?”

Ed snorts.  Still with his mouth full.

“Hate mail,” he says.  “Hands down.”

That is going to be very funny if Roy’s heartrate slows back down before it kills him.

Ed starts squinting slightly—fighting the glasses is becoming an increasingly lost cause, but of course those have always been his favorites—as he draws the page out of the envelope and immediately starts scanning the words.

Roy knows exactly how fast Ed reads.  He also knows exactly what Ed’s reading, because the first draft took him the better part of an hour and went through no fewer than six rounds of edits before he laboriously copied it onto a new page.  And then he’d copied it again, because his handwriting had been so wobbly in the original transcription that it verged on illegible.  Soothing his own ego had taken almost another hour after that.  That had been a hell of an evening.

Dear Ed – my impossibly dear Ed,

I thought maybe I would start this by listing out the times that things you said to me have saved my devilishly handsome ass, but then I remembered that, unfortunately, I have to work for a living.  Nominally, at least.  If anything related to our government can be said to work.

I suppose that the ass-saving started before you took it upon yourself to share so many interesting tidbits of information with the likes of me, in any case.  But it has never escaped me how much I owe to a rant about horses in my office almost a decade ago.

And it has never escaped me that sharing is an act of love.  It has never escaped me that knowledge is an unparalleled joy, for you, and that one of my favorite facts about you is that you don’t believe joys should be kept to oneself or kept secret.  The willingness to welcome another human being into your boundless enthusiasm marks a depth of generosity I never really deserved, but that’s never stopped you.

Your curiosity for and fascination with everything beneath the sun—from the cosmic scale down to the rare delicacy of the grass on the lawn—is and always will be one of my many, many favorite things about you.  I love how much you love to be alive.

Another fun fact about you: it is indescribably fitting that your heritage is technically mythical, and even more fitting that you maintain that that’s bullshit, because everything that you’ve done with it is your own.  It will never cease to tickle me that you look like an angel and swear like a sailor.  It will never cease to amaze me how gentle you are, beneath them both.  It will never cease to inspire me that you give so much of yourself to everything you do and everyone around you.

Fun fact: you are, quite simply, the best of what humanity has to offer, and in striving to touch the people in arm’s reach, to fix the broken things closest to you, you spread a kindness so profound that the whole universe must feel it.  You could move the stars, Ed.  You’ve changed mine.

I also thought perhaps I would just make a list of things I love about you, and things I love you for, but the answers to both are just ‘everything’, and every day you insist on giving me something new to add, so by the time I put this in the post to fulfill my compulsion for melodrama, it would already be outdated.

So instead here is a coordinating fun fact that you might like to know about me: I would cherish nearly nothing in the world so well as the chance to spend the rest of my life learning from you.  Even, or perhaps especially, because I am an intolerable bore.  I cannot fathom any greater honor and delight or any truer blessing.  Although I would propose (pun intended) that we set ourselves a collective challenge to be much more annoying to other people about it going forward.  I aspire to being so openly obnoxious about how desperately in love I am with you that other people walk out of the room when I enter.  More than they already do, I mean.  I will only be satisfied with a statistically significant increase.

Fun fact:

If you marry me, I will be utterly insufferable, and so, so much happier than I can hope to describe.

All my best (as in, everything I have, but especially the best of it; and as in, it’s yours),

Roy

At exactly the moment Roy expected, keeping time by the skitter of his heartbeat in his ears, Ed reaches the little piece of paper folded into a tiny second envelope and taped down at the bottom of the note.

Roy’s respiratory system chooses this opportunity to quit on him, too—possibly in solidarity with his rebel heart.

Ed’s fingertips slip a little, and they move slowly, but he doesn’t hesitate.

He peels back the tape, pries it open, and delves his right thumb and forefinger inside to pluck out the gold band that has been caging Roy’s thoughts and hopes and future for far more than just the past few weeks.

Ed stares at it.

Roy’s lungs hitch a bit of air in, reluctantly, and he tries to press his advantage.

“Just wanted to get you a birthday present in your favorite shape,” he says, managing not to sound very strained at all.  “Seemed practical.”

“Oh, fuck off,” Ed says—and he’s already laughing, already lighting up the room, already setting the breath in Roy’s lungs on fire and sapping all the oxygen no matter how much he inhales.  “And fuck circles.  You’re my favorite shape, you asshole.  Well—you and rhombicosidodecahedrons, but that’s complicated.”

“I’m honored to have secured a place in the top two,” Roy says.

Ed hasn’t—

Said—

It’s Ed.  He values actions more, he doesn’t trust bullshit, he doesn’t do anything by halves.  It’s Ed.  He’ll say something, he just—needs a moment.  Needs a second to process this before he’ll have the intellectual space to notice that Roy is still vibrating out of his skin, because to Roy, words have to mean something, because words are all they get to work with, all they get to go on, the only place to start—

“Oh,” Ed says.  “Duh.  Hey, hold on.”

He gets up.

What—

Fuck.

How badly did Roy miscalculate—

Ed reaches forward, takes Roy’s shaking hand, draws a tiny velvet bag out of his own back pocket, and slaps it into Roy’s palm.

It’s warm from the proximity to him.

It feels weighty in a way that’s familiar.

“I was saving it for after your next shitty board meeting,” Ed says, beaming at him so brightly that he could swear his skin tingles.  “If I’d known you were gonna do something stupid, I would’ve beat you to the punch.”

Roy scrapes up some mock terror and stares down at the tiny bag.  “How did you fit something in here that will punch me?”

“Roy,” Ed says, eyes on his, right-hand fingers curling slowly around the ring in the palm of his hand.

It’s fine.  Everything’s fine.  Roy can handle this.  Roy has scraped through much worse, including at times when there wasn’t even a promise of leftover cake.

He loosens the drawstrings of the little bag and tips its contents out into his left hand.

The ring Ed got for him is silver.

“May I do the honors?” Roy asks.

“Be my guest,” Ed says.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Roy says, feelingly.

Ed keeps grinning.  “Attaboy.”  And then he says “Here,” and reaches out, and picks up the ring, and catches Roy’s left hand with his right—still the softer of the two, the wealth of new writing calluses notwithstanding.

The metal still feels warm as it slides into place at the base of Roy’s third finger and settles there with a strange and staggeringly beautiful finality.

He wriggles his fingers.

He clears his throat.

“How did you even know my size?” he asks, more to avoid saying something humiliating than because it matters very much.

“Mustang,” Ed says, patiently, “I am a mathematician.”

“You’re a great deal more than that,” Roy says, somewhat less than steadily.

“I’m going to stop you right there,” Ed says, “before this gets any more embarrassing than it already is.”

Somehow they’re even on the same page about that.

Ed deposits his ring in Roy’s palm and holds his left hand out, wrinkling his nose.  “Is this how you’re supposed to do it?”

“Probably not,” Roy says.  His hands are still trembling.  Apparently indestructible monsters are a petty inconvenience compared to committing to a magnificent eternity with the unexpected love of his life.  The world never fails to grab him by the ankles, turn him upside-down, and shake him for change.  He makes a serious attempt to steel himself and slides the ring very carefully onto Ed’s finger, where it nestles neatly.  Roy is not a mathematician, but he is not too proud to call mathematicians’ brothers and beg them for their input in secret, which goes a long way.  “I hereby pronounce you: stuck with me.”

“Oh, no,” Ed says, eyes starting to glisten noticeably as he tips his hand back and forth without pulling it free from Roy’s.  “I’ve been trapped.  Bamboozled.  Whatever will I do.  I just came here for the free food, and now look at me.”

“There will still be free food,” Roy says.

Ed’s hands lift from his this time—the better to graze over his cheeks and then wrap themselves around the back of his neck and Ed grins fit to outshine a whole damn universe of stars, regardless of their age, regardless of their light.

“Well, shit,” he says.  “Why didn’t you say so?”

Roy gets to kiss him for nearly five solid minutes before he remembers that he didn’t finish the cake.