tierfallen

Title: Horse to Water
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Ed
Rating: PG
Word Count: 9,070
Warnings: Depresso™, post-canon
Summary: Eight years on, Roy wishes he could give up. Ed wishes he would read his damn mail.
Author's Note: A Fandom Trumps Hate charity fic for the truly wonderful geckoplasm, who wanted something with a "Remains of the Day" vibe. If you're not familiar with the book (or film), it's basically about reaching a point in your life where you look back and realize you wasted all the beautiful time you could have had. :')

Because this is me, all's well that ends well as far as the fic goes, but buckle up for a little bit of despair first. Technically canon-compliant, but definitely not in spirit. X'D

Hope you enjoy! ♥


HORSE TO WATER
There are days he can’t believe his ears—moments stacked upon moments of such staggering surreality that he longs for the significantly less permanent absurdity of dreams.

Two major generals, each of whom he happens to know owns a mansion home up in the hills staffed by a fleet of servants for when slumming it in a penthouse apartment in Central grows too onerous, are arguing about the best way to refuse to maintain the infrastructure in the parts of town where tax collection yields less because no one has any damn income to speak of.

It feels like a joke.  It feels cartoonish.  The vast majority of the people in this room are just sitting there and nodding—or nodding off.  A panel of ancient rich men maps out the course of the future with the specific objective of it not inconveniencing their plans to expand the horse track that they want to build so that they can tax the gambling.

Roy can feel his blood pressure rising until it floats his brain, and he can’t think clearly enough to talk himself out of speaking.

“Forgive me,” he interjects, smoothing his voice.  “I didn’t go to school for economics.”  He rests his elbows on the tabletop and folds his hands to draw their attention to the backs of his gloves.  “I was a bit preoccupied at that age.”  He blinks slowly into the sinking silence.  “But isn’t the primary goal of taxation to collect a pool of funds that can then be redistributed to where the need is greatest, to increase the standard of living for everyone at once?”

There’s another silence.

Hartford clears his throat.  Roy wants to rip his overstated mustache off of his jowly face, or possibly set his eyebrows on fire.

“With all due respect, General Mustang,” Hartford bites out, “this isn’t your division.”

Roy smiles.  It’s hard to make it as sweet as he intended with the rage choking him.  “Yes, of course.  I don’t mean to present myself as an expert in city planning or civil engineering—heaven forbid.  It’s just that I do have something of a vested interest in the proposition of functional infrastructure throughout the city, given that I, like several others in this room, have been known to drive a car and use a telephone.”

There’s a young lieutenant sitting in for General Patrick, who was called away for a death in the family—it was a relative distant enough that Roy only needed to send a note, not a floral arrangement, but he headed West and sent a proxy.  Her name is Janine Winters, and she’s been watching the proceedings intently, feverishly taking notes and trying not to let her eyes go wide enough for anyone to recognize her dismay at the way that the proceedings in question have gradually devolved into bureaucratic bloodletting.

She just leaned forward very slightly, as if she can’t bear to miss any of the reactions to what Roy just said.

There aren’t any reactions.

Of the generals who aren’t making better use of the hour than the rest of them by napping in their chairs, Oldridge huffs something like a laugh, Naraphe huffs something like a curse, and Westler shifts in a way that very faintly implies shaking his head.  Given his track record, it’s probably a dismissal of Roy’s audacity rather than a condemnation of Hartford’s determination to further disenfranchise the disenfranchised for the sake of saving a modicum of effort.

“Your input,” Hartford says stiffly, “has been recorded.”

The fascinating thing about institutional power is the balancing act.  The longer Roy stays and the more respectable a reputation he cultivates, the more he puts at risk if he steps out of line.  He’s perceived as far more of a threat now than he was as an upstart colonel—no one took much notice, then, because he had so much less weight to throw around.  

Now, if he pushes his luck too far, they’ll push him out in anticipation of the damage he could do to their precious status quo.  They’re tighter-fisted than ever, desperate to seize onto the relative stability now that the ripples have finally calmed in the wake of the coup.

If Roy goes too far in a room like this, none of his team will ever find work again.

These scavengers know he knows it.  They know they have him on a wire, because he cares about other human beings, and they only care about themselves.  He will always have more to lose.

It’s increasingly tempting to schedule a one-on-one meeting with one of the sleeping generals so that Roy can at least carve out a designated hour for a nap.  The afternoons drag like a cadre of ghosts clinging to his coattails, but when he actually lies down at night, his mind unwinds into endless dimly-lit avenues, and the sleep he does find doesn’t let him rest.

He said what he had to say.

Only an addict would keep gambling.

So he bites his tongue, again and again, as they quibble over meaningless self-aggrandizements for the remainder of the time, and then he sweeps out the door before any of them can waylay him and make embarrassingly clumsy veiled threats.

He’s not quite fast enough.

The boots that stride after him hit the carpet too lightly and too swiftly to belong to any of the blowhards, so he knows who he’ll see when he turns.

“That was clever, sir,” Winters says.  “Ensnaring them in the logic in front of others.  Do you think it’ll work?”

If what he thinks actually mattered, he’d be at the top by now.

“How old are you?” he asks.

She arches an eyebrow, smiling thinly.  “Does that mean that you want to say ‘no’, but you don’t want to discourage me, sir?”

General Patrick doesn’t hate him, but he can’t trust anyone who hasn’t been with him since the beginning.

So he can’t say Grumman is too old for this.  He let the games run on without him, and the weevils overwhelmed the woodwork.  He’s too complacent to raise the whip, but he doesn’t want to release the reins.  The chair is too comfortable.  Nothing ever changes.

“Things were a bit more flexible in the immediate aftermath of the apocalypse,” he says instead.  “But now people don’t want to lose their grasp on what we have.”

“‘We’,” she mutters.

“Well,” he says.  “The governmental ‘we’.”

He’s probably said too much already.

“General,” Winters says, with the measured cadence that tends to carry something of significance, “do you think—”

“I don’t get paid to think,” he says, softly, and he turns on his heel towards the next hall.  “Good afternoon, Lieutenant.”

She lets him walk away.










As the sun is going down, Riza lays a slip of paper on the edge of his desk blotter—the one space clear of towers of squandered trees.

“Committee meeting on Monday at two,” she says.  Of course it’s at two.  Two is the worst possible time for a meeting, except for three and four, and then noon and eleven, and then eight, and then whatever other hours are left.  “About the train route to Ishval.”

Roy doesn’t ask why yet another obviously necessary, hugely beneficial minor infrastructure project needs to be brought to a committee, let alone discussed, let alone mummified in so much red tape that their soft, delicate palms and fingertips will all be crimson with it.

Roy doesn’t ask why government works—or, to be more precise, routinely fails to work—this way.

Roy doesn’t ask why he’s still trying to persuade a committee composed entirely of fat-cat bureaucrats with substantial investments in asphalt and paving, motor vehicle production and assembly, and local textile sales that extending viable transportation to a region that they themselves disadvantaged by annihilating a substantial portion of the population in recent memory is in their best interests.

They don’t have ‘best’ interests.

They have personal interests.

They have financial interests.

They have nephews to hand high-level jobs to.  They have pockets to line, and palms to grease, and hands to shake under the table.  They have endless opportunities to elevate themselves ever higher in the system that produced them, and those prospects are much more appealing than people they don’t know, don’t like, and don’t intend to consider fully human any time in the foreseeable future.

“Thank you,” Roy says.

Riza looks at him.

He looks back.

There’s gray in her hair now.  It’s subtle, threaded through the blonde, but her temples are slowly turning silver.

They knew it would be an uphill battle.  They didn’t come into this barefoot.

But Roy hadn’t realized, somehow, just how enervating it would be to try to climb through shifting sand—retreading the same laborious steps over and over and over as the sun burns higher and hotter overhead.  As the night falls, and every molecule of the air turns so cold that it stings your lungs.  As the morning creeps up again, and you keep crawling, and crawling, and crawling, but the dunes go on forever.

He dreams, sometimes, about waking up with no sand beneath his tongue.

He has a folder somewhere of the notes from the previous meetings on this subject—agendas bloated with legalese, crammed full of convenient policy, insulated from any tangible impact by the thick, elastic blubber of unnecessary words.  The margins of the pages overflow with his fastidious translations, digging for a loophole, pawing through the palaver for a glimmer of hope.

Maybe that means he’s still an idealist.

It doesn’t feel like it.

Ideal tends to blur towards the more familiar shape of idiot when his stolen eyes tire.

Riza steps out and shuts the door.  He makes himself breathe.  He bought that breath with other people’s blood.

That’s what he has to remember.

None of this is for nothing.

None of it came free.

He owes it to the long-rotted corpses of the children in the streets—owes them this breath, and the next.  Owes them every step forward, no matter how grueling.  Owes them a tomorrow where he tries again.

And again.

And again.

He disinters his notes from the prior meetings.  He reviews them.  He scrawls more marginalia on top of the existing commentary, responding to his own rhetorical questions from some weeks ago.  He doesn’t remember them.  They might as well have been written by a stranger.

He reads two of the reports that have piled up.  He sits back and stares at the ceiling and thinks about how he’s going to try to sell a room full of monsters on the concept of morality.  He reads another report.  His eyes burn.  He collects all of the notes and then the folder of recent newspapers that mention the Ishval project—mostly disdainfully, because these mongooses also pay the press—and wedges everything into his briefcase to bring back to the house, so that he theoretically won’t have to come back into the office over the weekend.

He lifts the strap over his shoulder and tries to lift his chin.  Someone might be watching.

He walks out into the night.










There’s something peculiar about the staleness of the air in a house that no one really lives in.  Moving through regularly and with intention must circulate it, but passing back and forth between the kitchen and the bedroom doesn’t even disturb the dust.

He leaves his bag and his boots at the foot of the stairs.  It’s not like anyone is liable to trip over them.  His knees ache on the stairs.  His head has ached all day.

This isn’t what Hughes died for.

But it’s all that he can do.

It’s all he’s got.

He sits on the edge of the bed.  His hands ache.  The snarled scar tissue over the rents that Wrath put through them constricts to torment him sometimes.

He was supposed to be able to beat them at their own game.  That was the purpose—that was the whole point.

He was supposed to be able to fling his coat and flash a smile and win.

But the battlefield has shifted around him—the sand scouring, the wind howling, the world changing.  When the storm dies, nothing is ever familiar again.

He’s surrounded.  He’s outnumbered.  His hands are bound so tightly that it doesn’t matter that he’s not outgunned.  There’s nowhere to move.  There’s nothing to climb.  There’s nowhere to run.

He sold his soul for this.

For this.

Was there some turning point?

Was there a flicker of a golden opportunity that he just missed, out of neglect or distractedness or self-absorption?

Or was it always doomed?

Was it always going to end this way, with the shining dream winnowed down to one last feeble sliver of resolution, clinging to the cliff’s edge out of habit more than hope?

Perhaps this is the real penance.

Long.

And slow.

And empty.










Cynicism sleeps in late.  Mornings feel fractionally kinder.

It’s good practice in any case: he needs to be able to bullshit himself if he wants to have any hope of weaving a tale fit for the most masterful liars who have ever gilded their shoulders with stars.

He drags himself out into the sunlight.  Weekends have that, at least.  He should look in on Christmas Enterprises today before the evening rush, but the hours between now and then, at least, burst with open-ended possibility.

Well.  Really they sag with their own listless, pointless, undirected weight.  But if he squints hard enough into the sun, he can pretend to mistake one for the other.

So he walks.

He walks down past the shops, past the school, past the cemetery, past the bank, past the bars shuttered up tight like elderly ladies pulling their shawls in close against the rain.  He walks past bus stops and telephone poles and streetlamps and hydrants, and the intersection where the trolley car rail slices through the roadway with the finality of a knife through a tent flap.

He walks to the park.

He’s still squinting, which is why the fiery autumn light and the faint, faint remnants of mist conspire to form a mirage in the shape of a golden whip of a ponytail, accompanied by a grin so sharp that it’ll leave you bleeding out with no idea where the wound first was.

He rubs his eyes.

The figure sprawled on the park bench, right leg kicked up over the left, arms hooked over the back, head tipped idly to one side, still looks like Ed.

Two very blond children of about the right age—which would be something utterly ungodly like four and six—come gallumphing up to show the figure that looks like Ed something that the younger girl is keeping in her cupped hands.

Ed leans forward, instantly devoting his full attention to whatever creature or object or curiosity she’s acquired, holding his right hand underneath her two, his entire body bending inward as he focuses.  In this moment, these two children are the only thing in the world.

And then the moment concludes as Ed says something, looking up at them, and they both nod avidly and then go tearing off.

Roy considers just walking away.

He might be dreaming.  He’s almost certainly intruding.  And he would definitely not be a highlight of Ed’s unheralded vacation.

Ed had turned partway to watch the children pelting off towards the stream again like they can’t afford to lose a single instant of their little lives.  Roy knows where that philosophy came from.

But as Ed settles on the bench again, he turns far enough that his eyes find Roy, and then it’s too late to stage a strategic retreat.

Too late to run.

Ed arches an eyebrow, which only softens his face for a second before he starts to smirk.

“Typical,” he calls.

Roy resists the urge to shove his hands into his pockets like a chastised child.  “What is?”

“You just standing there,” Ed says, “instead of doing the thing you’re obviously supposed to do.”

Roy does not think any of this is obvious.

Roy does not think any of this is real.

Ed slaps his right palm heartily down on the slats of the bench beside himself.  “Let me make it real simple for you.  Your ass goes here.”

He makes it hard to hesitate.

Roy takes one step, and then another, concentrating on measuring out his stride.  He glances over, but the faint, high-pitched strains of the children’s voices filtering up from by the creek don’t waver.  If they’re anything like Ed, they’re fearless anyway.  A stranger in a black coat approaching their father wouldn’t register as a threat.

That’s something of a reversal of the reality in any case.

Roy sits down at the safest available distance.  The only true safe distance would be approximately ten miles in the direction with the most hiding places and obstructions, but this will have to do.

Roy looks at Ed, who is blinking equably back at him.  The hint of a smirk hasn’t stopped playing around his face.  Surely that was meant to be Roy’s part in all of this—the knowing looks, the joviality, the What’s a nice young man like you doing in a stinking snake pit like this.

Roy’s voice can’t muster joviality, and his brain can’t summon cleverness.  He sifts through the ash in his skull and the smoke in his ribcage and comes up empty-handed.

“You should have told me you were going to be in town,” he says.

Ed raises the eyebrow again.

“I did,” he says.  “Wrote you a whole damn letter.”

Roy envisions the mound of decaying tree pulp on the end table near the door.  The furniture lives up to its name: an end table, where correspondence goes to die.  Roy usually extracts the bills, and the occasional subpoena.  Critical missives he rescues.  The rest…

The rest is things that pertain to him, and things that pertain to him don’t seem to matter.

But one can’t mewl out stupid, self-defeating tripe to the likes of Edward Elric and expect to survive.

“You probably didn’t recognize my handwriting,” Ed says, lifting his right hand and wriggling the strangely un-silver fingers.  “It’s eerily legible.”

Roy takes a breath.  “You should have called.”

A flash of teeth.  “I don’t report to you.”

“Even if I hadn’t witnessed a rather spectacular contract bonfire in my office on the occasion of your resignation,” Roy says, “the sudden dwindling of the complaint filings likely would have tipped me off to that.”

“I still think you filed half of those yourself,” Ed says.

“You know me,” Roy says.  “Any excuse to fill out extra paperwork.”

“You could’ve gotten a stamp made,” Ed says, making an illustrative gesture for good measure.  “Or a couple different stamps for each section, so you could mix and match.”

It is somewhat excruciating how illuminating it is just speaking to him.  Every word feels like a candle, flickering into glowing warmth, light dancing towards the dim corners of this indistinguishable maze.

Ed still loves living.

Ed still finds joy just in being alive.

“Based on the exhaustive detail you always provided in your extremely honest reports,” Roy says, “I assume you covered this in the letter, but—”

“What the hell am I doing here, polluting your precious city with my backwoods spawn?” Ed asks, with another slash of a grin.

“Not exactly the phrasing I was going to use,” Roy says.

The corners of Ed’s eyes crinkle.  “You’ve been in politics too long.”

He’s always had a way of cutting to the core of it.

“You haven’t answered the question,” Roy says, “regardless of how it’s phrased.”

Staring out at the spread of autumnal colors washed over the leaves that dot the lawns seems much safer than looking at him directly.

“Is it bills or stalkers?” Ed asks.

Roy feels slightly lightheaded.  “What?”

“The reason you’re not reading your mail,” Ed says.

If only.  “It’s the papercuts.”

“We live in the future, Mustang,” Ed says, delightedly.  “They’ve got this newfangled thing now called a letter-opener.”

“Experience taught me not to keep sharp objects in my office,” Roy says.

All of it feels incredibly surreal—distant, and faintly tingly.  He can’t actually be bantering so easily with Edward Elric after eight solid years of relative silence.  That simply doesn’t make sense.

“I’ll get you one,” Ed says, reaching over and—

Patting his knee.

That—

Rather confirms that none of this is happening.

Doesn’t it?

“Custom,” Ed says.  “With a flaming skull on top.  All the other fuckoff bigshot generals are going to be so jealous they’ll steam with it.  Consulting.”

Roy looks at him again.

It should be a non sequitur.  It should be confusing, and irritating for it.

“What you’re doing in Central, you mean,” Roy says, more to buy himself time than because of any doubt.  “Consulting.  On what?”

Ed snorts.  “Boutique fashion.  What do you think?  The library’s arcana specialist decided to defect to a private collection, so they called up and asked if I’d help them curate their alchemy shit.  Pays better than the bodyguard crap, and I can bring the little monsters along and just stick ’em in a records room with coloring books while I’m working.  Everybody wins.”

Roy does not imagine for a single second that Ed himself would have been satisfied with a coloring book all day at the age of six.

But the question that comes out of his mouth is—

“Is it boring?  After having spent so much time exploring the fraying edges of the world map, I mean.”

Ed shrugs.  It’s a different movement now, but there’s still the slightest hint of the weight of the automail in it—he raises his right shoulder with more force.

“It’s still a kind of exploring,” he says.  “You find stuff in there that you wouldn’t believe some bookworm stashed away a hundred years ago or whatever.”  His eyes drift over to the flickers of the lavender and emerald green visible of the tiny wool coats bouncing around down near the creek.  “It’s not the edge of the map anyway.  It’s the edge of our map.  As a society of blindered morons.”

Regrettably, Roy could only agree more unless he dedicated a significant quantity of sincere, concentrated effort to further agreement.

And he doesn’t have that kind of energy in him anymore.

“It’s good,” Ed says, idly.  “It’s been harder to get time with them since the divorce.”

Roy’s breath takes on an extraordinary thickness and clogs his throat.  “The what?”

Ed laughs.  “See what happens when you don’t read my fucking letters?”

“You didn’t think that was enough to call about?” Roy manages, albeit only barely.  “What can actually motivate you to pick up the phone?  Would another apocalypse do it, or would you just send me a postcard?”

“Telegram, I think,” Ed says, sounding quite tickled for someone whose marriage apparently recently fell apart.  “Something to the effect of ‘What did you do this time, stop’.”  Leave it at that.  Save a couple cens.”  He shrugs again.  “Figured you’d heard about it, given how good you are at sticking your nose in everything.”

“I know what’s going on in my city,” Roy says.  “I’m less familiar with the happenings in bumfuck nowhere.”

Ed laughs again—so damn bright.  It’s a miracle that anyone can look at him directly and linger in his orbit without being burned to a crisp.  “Been way too long since I heard you drop a good ‘fuck’.”

“What are your metrics?” Roy says.  “For what separates a good ‘fuck’ from one that’s just average?”

“It’s primarily about emphasis,” Ed says, as if this is an ordinary part of an ordinary conversation.  “You have to say it like you mean it.”  He smiles sunnily.  “Full points on that one.”

Much as that’s high praise coming from someone with standards like Ed’s for activities such as cussing your brains out, Roy doesn’t think it’s an accolade he’ll be framing on the wall any time soon.  “All of that aside, the question stands.”

Ed shrugs.  The smile disappears so fast it doesn’t leave a trace.

“It wasn’t really a surprise,” he says, more quietly.  “To me or her or anyone.  I mean—we got married because that’s what you do.  We threw some kids in because that’s what you do.  But neither of us has ever been the type to do stuff for that reason.  I think…” He sighs softly and scrubs his left hand back through his bangs.  “I like to think we were both just convinced that everything had changed, so obviously we had, too, you know?  Like the point of the journey was to come back to where you’d started.”  He traces a circle in the air with his fingertip—perfectly even, of course.  “You do what you have to, and then you’re done, and once you’re done, you can settle in and settle down and be a normal person like you were meant to be all along.”

“But you’ve never been normal a day of your life,” Roy says.  “And neither has she.”

Ed smiles thinly, looking into the air he drew in as if the shape is hanging there, mocking him still.

Roy’s life has stopped pretending that the circles are anything other than the rings of a spiral, gradually winding him down towards the bottom of something.  He’s not sure he wants to know what it is, but the constant whirl has become so wearisome that he isn’t sure he cares.  Maybe it’s worth hitting rock bottom just to make the spinning stop.

“I don’t know,” Ed says.  “I’m pretty boring when you get down to it.”

The corners of his mouth twitch fractionally as Roy scoffs.  “Come back to Command and say that.”

“What’s so exciting about kicking down a couple doors and blowing up a few reports?” Ed asks, but there’s a touch of warmth seeping back into his voice.  “Anyway—I’m dumb as shit about a lot of things.  I never figured out how not to be like my father when you get real deep down, and I never figured out how to deal with the fact that I never figured that out, so I was just suppressing a whole lot of stuff in a desperate attempt to seem ordinary enough to buy myself a second chance at life.”

They both look up sharply when the distant chatter of children’s voices takes on a detectable tone of alarm.

Ed is on his feet in an instant, but before he can move, the little boy comes tearing up the slight hill with the little girl riding piggy-back, her arms looped around his neck and her knees hooked over his elbows.  One of the knees in question is bleeding freely where she’s managed to gash straight through her leggings and scrape it.

As the boy trots closer, Roy can see that he looks much closer to tears than she does.  She mostly just looks put-out.

“Daaaaaaad,” the boy wails, with all the breath he can muster.

“Uh oh,” Ed says.  “Did your adventure take a dangerous turn, there, guys?”

That may well be the funniest thing he’s ever said.  Roy used to keep a list.  He might still have it somewhere.

As they come close, the girl whispers something in the boy’s ear, and he skids to a stop, tiny little boots digging into the dirt, to gaze solemnly at the unfamiliar party monopolizing their father’s attention.

The girl stares up at Roy open-mouthed, utterly undeterred by her injury.  “I’m Hanna Elric, and I’m four, and this is my bestest brother Jonathan, who’s six, and he’s tall.”

Without a doubt the finest introduction ever iterated, but there’s no time to commend it before—

“Who’re you?”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Hanna,” Roy says, holding his hand out for her to shake.  She catches his first two fingers in a disconcertingly sticky vise grip, solemnly pumps his hand, and then releases it for him to offer to the second-most celebrated brother in the family.  “And you, too, Mr. Jonathan.  I’m Roy Mustang.  I used to work with your dad.”

He can just see Ed’s thin smile out of the corner of his eye.

The potential peril of a stranger in their midst duly resolved, both children turn to Ed again.

“It’s real bad,” Jonathan says, voice quavering as he tightens his grip on his injured sibling.  “She might die.”

“Nuh-uh,” Hanna says.  “You’re a worrywart.”

“Hey,” Ed says, stepping forward and carefully scooping her up off of Jonathan’s stalwart shoulders.  He sits down on the bench again, setting her on his knee.  “Is that nice to say to our bestest brother?”

Hanna’s bottom lip protrudes in reluctant chagrin.  “No.  But he is.”

Jonathan’s hand-wringing would make Al very proud.  “You give me lots of worries!”

Ed starts inspecting the frankly rather impressive amount of dirt that she managed to grind into the open wound.  “Sometimes you give me worries, too, kid.  We still love you.  But let’s just make sure we know when to be careful, so that we all can be safe and maybe worry a little less.”

Hanna does not look swayed by that argument.

“We’re gonna have to clean this out,” Ed says, “so that it doesn’t get worse later.”

“No,” Hanna says, visibly and audibly distressed for the first time since Jonathan dragged her out of the woods.  “We’re not done, Daddy, we gotta—we’re making houses for the frogs, they’ll be cold, they’ll be homeless—”

Ed sighs, patting at one of his trouser pockets and then rummaging in a coat pocket instead.  He turns up a bandage.  “All right.  Half an hour.  Then we go back to the hotel and clean you up properly, okay?  Otherwise, your mother’s gonna make me go live with the frogs.”

Jonathan gasps.  “She wouldn’t.”

Ed smiles wearily.  “Probably not.  It was a j—”

“You’re too big,” Jonathan says.

Ed looks satisfied with that outcome.

Hanna looks satisfied with the patch job Ed executes on her knee in record time.  She flexes it a few times and then scrambles back down onto the grass and grabs Jonathan’s hand, trying to haul him in the direction of the creek again.

Jonathan leans back, effectively stopping her in her tracks.  “What do we say?” he intones, his inflections a perfect imitation of a weary parent.

“ThanksDadcomeonJonny,” Hanna replies, which—in her defense—probably is what she usually says.

“You’re welcome, warrior princess,” Ed says, and then they’re off.

Roy folds his hands.

“You don’t have to say it,” Ed says, with one of the grins so thin that it looks slightly fragile on his face.

“Was that a strategy or a coincidence?” Roy asks.

Ed snorts.  “Winry always wanted a sibling.  I tried to explain to her that me and Al got lucky with what we have—” And forged it in blood and steel.  “—but she said, and I quote, ‘If they hate each other, we’ve got a big house.’”

“For them to ignore each other?” Roy asks.  “Or for you to escape from the fallout?”

“She’s an engineer,” Ed says—adoringly, still, even with what must be at least a strain of poison spilled between them.  “She thinks about all the angles.”

Roy wishes that his first thought was that he should emulate that.

His first thought was that it sounds exhausting.

He watches the tiny figures racing back and forth and then hunkering down to muddy their hands past help.  “Should I call him Jonny or Jonathan?”

“Just don’t call him late for dessert,” Ed says.  “Dinner he could take or leave.  Got a sweet tooth like a saber-toothed tiger.  Should have called him Leo.”

“Jonathan is nice,” Roy says, intending nice to be understood at restrained in its normalcy.

“Win picked it,” Ed says, so easily—as if he doesn’t know as well as anyone that names are the first blessing and the first curse and the first burden.  “She said I could name the second one as long as she reserved veto power.”

It’s good that Winry Rockbell didn’t go into government.  Roy watches the tiny girl’s butter-pale hair flood out behind her as she runs with all of her not-so-little heart.  “I suppose we should all consider ourselves lucky that you didn’t name her ‘Hellraiser’.”

Ed grins wider.  “That’s not a name, that’s a title.  Don’t worry.  She’ll come by it honest.  I give it two years, max, and that’s only if Jonny keeps following her around like a border collie and dragging her out of trouble.  This one was born with a tragic congenital lack of fucks to give.”

“I’m sure it’s from Winry’s side of the family,” Roy says.

Ed turns his head so slowly, so languidly—with such startlingly predatory grace, such effortless and monolithic power—that Roy’s breath sticks.

And Ed just looks at him, blinking lazily, until Roy remembers that the one of the reasons that these children don’t have any grandparents is that Sarah and Urey Rockbell left a four-year-old of their own behind to hurl themselves into a war that made hell look highly appetizing, even in the hushed-up papers.

It’s a pity, then, more than anything else.  They’ll have so much love in them, and so little caution.  They’ll be magnificent and miserable.

But maybe—

Maybe things change.

Maybe things evolve.

Maybe Ed and Winry both had the lesson carved in deep enough that they passed the hard-won wisdom through their very genes.

Maybe the cycle can be broken.

Maybe there’s hope.

Roy has to doubt it, though.

Roy has to doubt just about everything to stay alive.

“Can you keep a secret?” Ed says.

Roy actually chokes on a laugh.

Ed grins, broader and brighter.  “I’m serious.  Pinky swear or something.”

“I’m not sure what you could share with me,” Roy says, “that would require more discretion than hiding my parentage or staging a coup.”

“I told Win I just thought ‘Hanna’ would be a cute nickname,” Ed says.  “But it’s actually ‘Johanna’ after Johann Glauber.”

Roy chokes again.  “Not enough alchemy in her already?”

Ed slaps his back much more vigorously than would be helpful even if he was having breathing difficulties for normal reasons.  “You know me, Mustang.  Gotta tempt fate like it’s a cat, and I’m the string.”

Roy has not heard that one before.

Roy has not heard anything as restorative as this conversation in a long, long time.

“So that’s, like, literally everything there is to know about me right now,” Ed says, kicking his right leg up over his left knee again.  “Bring me up to speed on the last eight years for you.”

Roy casts around for some adequate summary in the wasteland of mediocrity that he tries never to let himself focus on, because the desert will drown him if he ever begins to understand its breadth.

“The military sucks,” he says.

Ed laughs—head thrown back, shoulders shaking, sunlight sparking in his hair.  “Hate to rain on your revelation, Roy, but I could’ve told you that a decade ago.”

“You did,” Roy says.  “Sometimes several times a day.”

Ed chews on his lip, which sends Roy’s mind down avenues it would be much wiser to avoid.  “Damn.  Our train leaves tomorrow morning, or I could come by HQ on Monday and strut around loudly threatening to reenlist to see if that would straighten anybody out.”

It is somewhat terrible and somewhat telling that Ed already knows that the problem is other people, more than anything else.

“Very kind of you to consider it,” Roy says.

Ed eyes him.  “There wasn’t anything in the paper that looked like your work.”

“The journalists also have to put food on the table,” Roy says, “and they have, somewhat paradoxically, finally discovered discretion.”

“Don’t call it a paradox when it’s just people being stupid,” Ed says, already so lost in thought that there isn’t even any bite to it.  “Misusing words dilutes their meaning.  We’ve got enough problems as it is.  So they’re preventing you from appealing to the masses with your democratic notions and your pretty face.  What are you trying to put through that they’re so afraid of?”

Curious, to think of it in those terms.

Roy keeps seeing closed doors—blocked exits, padlocks and chains.  He interprets them as emblems of his own powerlessness.

But Ed’s right.

They wouldn’t be working so hard to silence him if they weren’t scared he might succeed.

“Infrastructure for the poorer parts of town,” Roy says, “and a rail line to Ishval.”

Ed whistles.  “That’d do it.  How dare you try to distribute government resources to taxpayers that we don’t personally like.  What are you, a communist?”

“Interesting question,” Roy says.

It’s Ed.

It’s a new Ed, an altered Ed, who speaks softly to his children and sits on park benches for untold hours and lets Roy finish entire sentences before assailing his logic.

“It feels like I’ve tried everything,” Roy says.  “I don’t know what to do.”

Ed sucks on his teeth.  Charming habit.  “You ever fixed a fence?”

Roy looks out at the darkening world.  “Successfully?”

He can hear the smirk whether he’s looking or not.  “How do you unsuccessfully fix a fence?”

“Ask Riza sometime,” Roy says.  “I’m sure she would love to tell you several stories about my extremely ill-fated escapades as her father’s de facto repairman.”

“Typical city boy shit,” Ed says, voice curling on the verge of a snicker.  “And typical Mustang shit, derailing my whole metaphor.”

“Good of you to lay rail for a new one,” Roy says.  “Would you be willing to put some down for Ishval?”

Ed slaps his palms together, grinning.  “Would in a heartbeat.  Honestly, that’s how you should solve it.  Liberate some iron and sneak out there in the middle of the night.  They’re not gonna legislate it away when it’s already on the ground.”

“Not everyone,” Roy says, lightly, “can proceed where their whims take them, under the auspices of the Fullmetal Amnesty crafted from a combination of scintillating fame and someone carefully sweeping up their tracks.”

Ed snorts.  “You weren’t careful.”

Roy was.  

“You were canny,” Ed says.  “That’s different.”

Ed has always underestimated how much Roy cares.

Which is understandable.  He hid it and muffled it and masked it and lied, because anyone who could locate his heart could destroy it—enemies and allies alike.

“Anyway,” Ed says, “the point is—” He waves his right hand.  “When you’re fixing a fence—at least when you’re doing it the old-fashioned way—you can’t repair the whole length of the thing in a single day.  And you usually don’t have unlimited supplies.  And that hammer hungers for your vulnerable bones.”

“Does it,” Roy says.

“The objective is to keep the thing off the ground,” Ed says.  “To make it usable first, and then make it better later, once you’ve done enough to keep it standing.  So you target the worst parts, and you think for a little while about where you can apply a single nail to have the greatest effect before you ever pick up the hammer.  Maximize your energy.  Focus on what you can fix, one post at a time.”

“I thought Winry was the engineer,” Roy says.

Ed salutes, exceedingly poorly.  “She is.”  He raises both hands and wriggles his fingers.  “I’m just the handyman.”  

Ed has never been just anything in his life.

“I wish I had your faith in humanity,” Roy says.  

Ed smiles, and it’s as much a threat as it is a solace.

“You’re an alchemist,” he says.  “Make your own.”










Roy takes Ed and his unsurprisingly prodigious progeny to dinner.  With some dutiful assistance from her brother and some gentle suggestions from Ed, Hanna constructs a relatively impressive tower from items on the table.  Roy asks who might live in this one, and she patiently explains to him that it would be insulting to the restaurant owners to imply that they have mice, and that it’s mostly just a prototype in any case.

The past decade has mellowed Ed’s vicious charisma into a mellifluous charm.  Roy is a fly.  Even though Ed works tirelessly to ensure that the children are included in the conversation, Roy hasn’t enjoyed an evening this much in… possibly ever.  If that’s damning, it’s too late.

At least he’s finally found a new kind of trouble to get himself neck-deep in.  The familiar ones are so boring now that the weariness adds weight to the hopelessness.

Ed makes him feel stronger.

Ed makes him feel like he can carry it, for a while.










He’s early to meet them at the train station.  He can’t remember the last time he was excited for an appointment.

There’s an excruciation in it, too, of course.  If it’s another ten years before Ed comes back—

Well.

Roy is a strategist.

And Ed isn’t the only one deciding where Ed comes and goes anymore.

Roy kneels down to present Jonathan with the pretty wax-paper bag.  “Would you promise to share with your sister?”

Jonathan takes it, blinks down at it, and then blinks up at him.  “What is it?”

Good.  He’s got Al’s circumspection, too.  Equivalent exchange—nothing is free.

“See for yourself,” Roy says, and turns to Hanna as Jonathan unrolls the top of the bag and gasps in delight at the fancy candies filling it high.  “Something for you, my lady.”

It wasn’t easy to find a tiny toolkit on such short notice, but he’s nothing if not resourceful.  If they’re a little too big, or he missed something, Winry’s workroom can probably provide for any gaps.

And Hanna’s eyes light up, which is the important thing.

Roy straightens up before his back starts to punish him.

Ed puts his hands on his hips.  “What do we say to Mr. Mustang?”

“Thank you, Mr. Mustang!” comes the little chorus.

“You should get one of those for yourself,” Ed says, grinning at Roy like he’s worth it.  “Mend a couple fences.”

“We’ll see,” Roy says.  He takes the last gift out of the satchel he had to dig up from the hall closet just to carry them all.

Ed glares with a distinct flavor of You shouldn’t have—like, you really shouldn’t before he takes the brown-paper-wrapped book carefully in both hands.

He looks down at the not-especially neat bow that Roy tied with the twine.

“It’s Glauber,” he says.  “Isn’t it?”

It is the finest, oldest, most impressive edition of Opera Chymica that Roy thinks any human being could have procured in so little time.

“You’ll find out,” Roy says.

Ed rolls his eyes.

Then he tosses the book into his left hand, freeing his right arm to hook around the back of Roy’s neck and haul him into a more-than-slightly crushing embrace.

“Read your mail,” Ed whispers into his ear.

Roy has to concentrate to suppress a shiver.

Which lowers his guard enough that he doesn’t suspect a damn thing until it’s too late—and Ed is kissing his cheek soundly before letting him go and brushing down the lapels of his coat.

Roy’s chest tingles.

His head rings.

“Thank you, Mr. Mustang,” Ed says, mercilessly sweetly, and then he gestures to the kids.  “C’mon, we’d better go so we can sit by the window, huh?”

“Yeah!” both cry in unison, and then the babbling about all of the cows and horses and houses and mountains that they’ll see begins, and Roy is still blinking stupidly.

Ed smiles.

And winks.

“See you soon,” he says.

“I hope so,” Roy manages.  “You have a lot of explaining to do.”

At least he sends Ed off laughing.  It’s certainly not the first time, although many of those weren’t intentional.

Roy is starting to believe it might not be the last.










Roy stands on the platform with his hands in his pockets, watching the conductor dart back and forth to latch the doors, watching the faint shapes moving behind the glossy windows, watching the plume of smoke unfurling endlessly into the sky.

He watches the train pull away, grinding its way down along the iron rails, chuffing and churning, the mechanical miracle roaring to life to ferry much smaller miracles off towards some distant destination.

When Ed’s train disappears from the horizon, Roy looks down at the empty track.

It’s just metal and lumber—isn’t it?

Just a few components and quite a lot of space.

There are several ironworks at the outskirts of the city, and an increasing number of factories manufacturing motor vehicles.  There are a lot of lumber mills.  There must be a truly remarkable amount of scrap and excess that no one wants or needs.

He feels his coat swirling around his ankles as he turns—it feels good.  It feels promising.  He hasn’t felt inclined to move this fast in a long time.










When he gets back to the house, he takes off his coat and hangs it from the hook by the door.  Then he grabs the end table in the front hall in both hands and tips it far enough to send the mountain of mail sloughing off to scatter all over the floor.

He settles down in the midst of the chaos and starts sorting.

Much of it is useless, and most of it is uninspiring.

There is one unmarked envelope—no return address, no postage; just General Mustang penned in a shaky hand, crawling across the front.  Inside is a brief typewritten letter with weak, faded ink thanking him for trying to pass a rent control statute for the city center.

Not all battles can be won in the time that we have, the petitioner wrote.  But it helps to know we’re not forgotten.

He finds Ed’s letter, eventually.

He sits there, between the stacks of bills and advertisements—one tower demanding his money and one soliciting it—and reads it through.

Ed was right.  His right-handed penmanship is uncannily decent.  If it wasn’t for the inescapable fact that his narrative voice is so distinct, this might well have come from another person.

But it’s Ed.

It’s Ed, always and unchanged.

Most of it is what he described in passing in the park—a deceptively neutral-sounding high-level summary of the events of the past several years, cataloguing the births of the children and the separation from Winry with an airy disinterest befitting a journalist.  Roy knows him well enough to feel the cold coming off of the protective wall.

The tone warms again when he details a few of Al’s recent adventures as a traveling medic.  There’s a touch of bittersweetness—a muddled mix of envy and pride.  The love is cut through with longing.

The words stay warm as he talks about the children in more detail, fascinated by their whims and their rapidly-expanding minds, wary of the streaks of himself that appear in them.  He doesn’t want them to be like him.

After two and a half full pages, he comes to the point—an old Mustang-Annoyance tactic from the days of the reports, which revives a nostalgia so sudden and specific that it tightens Roy’s throat.

Anyway the reason you ought to know all that is that I’m going to be in Central for a few days come November.  It’s for a job but I’ll have some time to kill too.  Credit where it’s due, nobody on the PLANET is better at killing time than you are.  I’ve checked in a couple of countries now so I can say that with some authority.

But I guess it’s been so long I should just be honest.  Even when it sucks.  I’ve been trying to teach the kids that so they end up like Al instead of like me.  Lying to other people’s wrong and lying to yourself is stupid.  I’m still workshopping how to make that more appropriate to tell a four year old.

Point is.

If you’ve got time (don’t bullshit me, I know you’ve got time) and the inclination I’d really like to get to see you while I’m in town.

I spent a lot of time thinking about whether I miss YOU, or the life you represent.  I bet you’ve thought about that too.  Seeing as how you think about everything.

It’s weird to think I threw the baby out with the bath water in a lot of ways.  Nobody ought to be throwing bath water either, by the way, at least not anyplace other than the drain, given all the stuff they’re putting in soaps nowadays but that’s beside the point.  I walked away from so much thinking I could start fresh and be somebody different.  But I’m still me.  Just someplace else.  Someplace I don’t want to be, that I thought maybe I could tell myself I would.  Someplace I thought anyone would want, anyone would fight for, but all the time I just feel caged in, like the world got so small it’s crushing me.

And I know you’ll get it.  And I trust you not to laugh.  How’s THAT for the tables doing a 180 while I had my back turned?  I trust you more than anybody right now because I know you understand better than anybody, and I know you care.  You looked out for me in ways I didn’t see then, that I do now, when I look back.  I know you’ll help me even if there’s nothing in it for you.

I think we could be better friends now than we were ever coworkers anyway.  So maybe there is something in it for you.

And maybe there’s more than that.  Al said there is but sometimes Al is an idiot.  Bet I know where he learned that from.

I reckon me writing you long-ass letters about it won’t answer that, but you can.  So tell me when you’re going to be around.  And we’ll see.

Roy supposes that much came true, even if it didn’t happen quite the way that Ed was hoping.

He really should read his mail.










He slogs home late most of the nights of the following week, primarily because it turns out that the ironworks are further out of town than he’d realized.  People are also unreasonably leery these days of offering a short-term warehouse lease to a perfectly normal, entirely unsuspicious man who is clearly giving his real name.

Progress is slow.

But it is progress.

On Thursday, he straggles in slightly earlier than he has been, most of the other nights—just in time to hear the phone ring.

He stares at it for a second, perplexed by the concept of someone trying to reach him here at all, let alone at a time when sensible people are settling down with a whiskey and a book to wind down for an attempt at sleep.

After the second has elapsed, Roy remembers that the likeliest cause for such a breach of etiquette is an emergency.

And he runs.

He manages to slip and slam his knee into the leg of the table in the same instant that his fingers curl around the receiver, so he’s biting back a breathless curse as he battles out, “Hello?”

“Hi,” Ed says.  “Is the phone underneath all of your mail?”

That might just be Ed’s way of saying that he tried to call earlier this week, and no one picked up.

“I hide it in a different place every morning before I leave,” Roy says.  His knee throbs.  “I need to stay sharp, as you know.  Crossword puzzles are so passé.”

“I won’t tell the newspapers if you don’t,” Ed says.

“Deal,” Roy says.  “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Oh, right,” Ed says—which might just be Ed’s way of saying that he was enjoying their tangent so much that he misplaced the actual purpose of the call.  “I’m gonna be back in town in three weeks,” he says.  “Without the kids.  So this time you’re gonna take me to dinner and drinks.”

Fascinating.  “Am I indeed?” Roy says.  “Why am I going to do that?”

Even dampened by the tinny telephone, the grin shines through.

“Because you’re not in love with me yet,” Ed says, so matter-of-factly that Roy almost drops the receiver.  “But you could be, if you applied yourself.”

Ed has always underestimated how much Roy cares.

Roy stays very still and focuses on the weight of the phone receiver in his hand.  He listens to a breath entering him, escaping him—and then another.

It’s rather funny, actually, that something so sudden could be so overdue.

“I have a better idea,” he says.

“Like hell you do,” Ed says, cheerfully.  “What?”

“As it turns out,” Roy says, “I’m in need of an alchemy consultant to double-check my arrays and make sure that I don’t blow myself up while I try to construct enough railroad track in the desert under the cover of night that it’s more work to demolish it than to finish.”

There’s a pause.

And then—as Roy had expected even before this conversation took the most impossible, inevitable, intriguing turn imaginable—Ed cackles like a jackal.

“Fuck off with your ‘consultant’,” he says.  “You know damn well that I’ll do that for free.”

“I’d hoped,” Roy says.  He takes another breath, lasts another heartbeat, gives another try.  “If I make it through in one piece, our second date should definitely be dinner and drinks.”

Ed makes a thoughtful humming noise that resonates all the way down the line and worms into the marrow of Roy’s bones.  “You’re setting the bar pretty high with the secret midnight infrastructure espionage, you know.  Some regular old dinner in a fancy restaurant might not cut it.”

Roy makes sure to toss his head—just a little.  Ed will know.  “I’ll figure something out.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Ed says.

No hesitation.  No doubt.  He presented a challenge, and he knows Roy will rise to it.

“Take down my number out here,” Ed says, “so you can call me the next time you successfully find your stupid phone.”

Roy turns over one of the useless pieces of mail that he hasn’t jettisoned just yet.  He has a pen.  He has a purpose.

“I’m ready,” he says.