Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The next few days slide by so quickly that they blur.  Roy testifies, and testifies again; the bullet extracted from his shoulder is forensically identical to the ones pulled from Belmor’s last few targets at the firing range.  His shoulder aches, and burns, and stings every time that the shower water touches it.

It stings less every time that Ed touches it.  Ed is getting very good at wrapping bandages with one hand.

In typically indomitable style, Ed stomps through the week on a temporary prosthetic requisitioned from the medics at headquarters, making his way undaunted through his work without the aid of a right arm.  Roy empathizes much more acutely than usual—and also spends a considerable portion of the week with his heart in his throat, choking on terror at the prospect of what might happen if the brats-turned-thugs who have it out for Ed were to try to corner him now.

Perhaps his posturing on Monday got the point across.  Perhaps Ross is keeping an extra sharp eye out for her most volatile direct report.  Perhaps… perhaps those boys are just grown enough to realize that not every battle is worth winning, and sometimes you’re not on the side that you thought you were.

One way or another, they slide through to Friday more or less unscathed—or at least no more scathed than they were when they started.

Friday is when Winry Rockbell arrives.

Ed, in all of his undiminished glory, turns up in Roy’s office a few minutes past five.  He manages to close the door very quietly despite the lack of a secondary door-closing appendage, which just goes to show that anyone who slams it, as a matter of rudeness or carelessness or simple ignorance, and tries to defend themselves really doesn’t have a leg to st…

Well.

“Hey,” Ed says.  “You ready?”

Roy gathers up a few more files and slots them all into his briefcase.  “Ready?  Most likely not.  Bracing myself to do it anyway?  Certainly.”

Ed smirks a little, but Roy gets the sense that he has his own trepidations about what lies ahead.  “You campaigning for king of the Smartass Club?”

“Depends,” Roy says, switching out the lights and crossing the room to join him.  “Will you swear fealty to my wit?”

“Fuck no,” Ed says.

“I didn’t think so,” Roy says.  “Shall we?”

The northbound train is right on time.  By some uncharacteristic stroke of luck, so are they.

Roy doesn’t need his glasses to spot the bright blonde ponytail—and it helps, so to speak, that Ed tenses beside him, which gives him something of an advanced warning system in addition to the fact that Winry is wearing a pale pink coat.

“Hey, nerd!” she calls across the crowd, which also helps.

Ed, still ever-so-slightly noticeably cautious on his interim leg, starts towards her.  “Hey, nerd, yourself; c’mere, you jerk—”

They meet without an instant’s hesitation, and despite having only the single arm to work with, Ed holds her tight.  Winry drops her bags to the platform—even over the hubbub, Roy can hear the clunk of their weight hitting the pavement, and the tinkle of some of the contents against one another—and hugs him right back.

“So,” she says, brightly, patting his back once as she finally releases him.  “Did you tell Al yet?”

Ed wrinkles his nose.  “That I busted your precious masterpiece again?  There wasn’t enough blood to call him over it, but I figure I’ll mention it in passing next time I talk to him so that he can give me some crap, and—”

“Not about that,” Winry says.  “About how you’re fucking Roy.”

Ed stares at her.

Then he stares at Roy.

“It’s not really his fault,” Winry says.  “He took your side on the phone, so I put two and two together.”

“I’m… sorry,” Roy attempts.

Ed makes a face that combines significant amounts of both agony and confusion.  “That you took my side?”

“That it backfired,” Roy says.

“I mean,” Ed says, “it’s you.  It has to fire one way or another.”

“Gross,” Winry says.  She waits not a single second longer before she gathers up her bags.  “Come on, already—I’ve got a consultation on Monday that I can’t miss.  Let’s get this show on the road.”

“Can we get the show on my arm?” Ed asks.

“Leg first,” Winry says, latching onto Ed’s left side and towing him off towards the exit gate.  “It’s killing me to watch you limping.  What did they give you?  Can we burn that thing?”

“I’m afraid that it’s government property,” Roy says, “or I would be absolutely on board.”

He can’t let her—can’t let this situation—intimidate him.

The man that he was a year ago, six months ago, any instant from the time before, would laugh him out of the country at the thought.  Winry Rockbell is a gentle, giving teenaged girl.  Yes, she’s extremely intelligent, occasionally blunt to the point of abrasion, and has been known to throw metal objects around, but all of the same things could be said of Ed.  The two of them are cut from the same cloth, and have been subjected to similar varieties of pain.

It’s just that Ed understands—Ed understands Roy better than anyone Roy’s ever met, except for Riza.  Hughes came close, but then he discovered happiness, and that’s a separate story.

Ed… Ed knows the guilt, and the accountability, and how excruciatingly narrow the difference is some days between going on and giving up.  Ed has seen the deepest reaches of Roy’s weakness, examined them, and consciously decided not to push him aside.

Roy’s not sure how many of his particular vulnerabilities Winry can be trusted with—that’s what’s unsettling him.  He’s not sure how much of himself he can be without being found pathetic.

He misses the days when he used to revel in other people’s underestimation, when there was a special sort of smugness that came from knowing that they were wrong.  Judgment rankles now.  So many of the things that people whisper might be true.

Neither of Roy’s current charges seem to have noticed his discomfiture, at least: Winry’s dragging Ed off towards the street, and he’s valiantly attempting to keep up on the borrowed leg.  Roy stays a few steps behind to give them a chance to snipe at each other; presumably Ed remembers where they parked the car, and—

Except that then Ed looks back—craning his neck over his shoulder, and for a moment there’s a flicker of consternation in his eyes before they light on Roy, and then they warm.  He raises his eyebrows and offers a faint, questioning sort of smile, and that…

Is enough to make Roy lengthen his stride until he catches up.

“What’s wrong?” he asks as he does.

“Nothing,” Ed says.  “But it’s bad form to ditch your chauffeur.”

“Gauche in the extreme,” Roy says.

“Can you even drive with just the one arm?” Winry asks Roy, nodding to the sling.

“He couldn’t drive before,” Ed says.  “I haven’t noticed any difference.”

“It’s also bad form to insult your chauffeur in front of a client,” Roy says.  “Especially when neither of you has a choice—unless you’d prefer to walk.”

“Oh, man,” Ed says.  “I can’t believe I haven’t been taking advantage of the ‘shot’ jokes.  I mean—it’s worth a shot.  It’s a shot in the dark.  Your driving skills are shot.  C’mon, Win, help me out here.”

“I can’t believe that I acknowledge you in public,” Winry says.  “The last thing I’m gonna do is contribute to the Elric Book of Bad Puns and go down in history as a crappy joke conspirator.”

“Very sensible of you,” Roy says innocently.  “Don’t let him call the shots.”

Winry stares at him, and then at Ed, and then at the road ahead of them.

“I quit,” she says.

“You can’t quit on me,” Ed says.  “Everybody else does such shotty work.”

“I quit forever,” Winry says.

Roy rolls two of his favorite words around in his mouth for a half-second before he voices them: “I’m sorry.”

Ed snickers.  “I’m not.”

“At least I understand now why people keep shooting at you,” Winry says.

“That’s fair,” Roy says.  He supposes that they should all count themselves fortunate that they’ve made it to the car without any casualties: he unlocks it and opens the back door for his chauffeur-ees.

“Thank you,” Winry says, sliding onto the seat.  “How come you don’t hold doors for me, Ed?”

“How come you don’t doors for me?” Ed asks, climbing in somewhat more carefully to join her.  “You’re buff as hell, and I’m missing two limbs.”

“More like one and a half,” Winry says.

“Roy,” Ed says—in a voice so borderline coy that Roy’s hand stills without his permission even as he starts to move to close the door.  “You have my permission to drive off of a cliff and kill us all.”

“Veto,” Winry says.

“Co-vetoed,” Roy says.  He closes the door and gets into the driver’s seat.  “Who would feed the cats?”

“Damn it,” Ed says.  “I hate it so much when you’re right.”

“For what it’s worth,” Roy says, firing up the engine, “me, too.”

The moment that Roy has parked in front of Ed’s apartment building, and Ed and Winry have climbed out of the car, there is a part of him that wants to press the gas pedal to the floor and peel off homeward in a shriek of tires and a plume of smoke.

It’s a small part—which is fitting, in its way.  And it’s an unpersuasive one.

It is curious indeed to recognize that even at the cost of dignity—even at the cost of safety; even at the cost of comfort and retreat—he wants more time with Ed.  Even on unsteady ground, with an unfamiliar player, at the end of the week that they’ve had, a few more minutes of Ed’s company sounds preferable to hiding all alone.

Strange.

Terrifying.

Inescapable.

Roy tries to make the whole thing look a bit more natural by insisting on carrying some of Winry’s luggage up to Ed’s apartment with his usable arm.  The incredible weight of the bag that she hands to him serves the secondary purpose of proving what Ed said about her musculature to be absolutely true.

When Ed has let them in to the apartment and gently shepherded the cats out of the doorway with his softer foot, Winry wastes only half a breath on a “Thank you!” before taking the suitcase full of anvils back from Roy, plunking it down on the floor, and starting to unpack.  Both pieces of Ed’s damaged automail rest calmly on the coffee table, stranded among a scattering of books.  They look bereft and bizarre there—like wings torn off of a butterfly and cast aside, gleaming and sharp-edged and lifeless—but that does make the carpet nearby a better place than most for Winry to start setting up shop.

“Hey, Mustang,” Ed says, starting for the kitchen.  “Get your hands in here and help me feed the monsters.”

“Only my hands?” Roy asks, sauntering after him—a careful sort of sauntering, given that Maggie keeps trying to twine herself around one or both of his ankles, and the last thing that he wants to do is hurt her.  “I’m not sure I can separate them from the rest of me and still convince them to be useful.”

“Har-dee-har,” Ed says.

Roy crosses the kitchen to join him at the counter, where Ed is wrestling one-handed with a little aluminum can of cat food.  He grimaces and then skids it across the countertop towards Roy.

“Question for you,” he says, in a voice low enough that Winry would be hard-pressed to overhear.  “Do you want to stay over here again tonight?”

Despite having spent significant portions of today wondering if or when Ed was going to ask precisely that question, it still catches Roy off-guard.  The brain is a remarkable organ.  Roy’s is, currently, a remarkable piece of crap.

He tries to weigh his options quickly, to avoid his hesitation stretching into a pause long enough to qualify as awkward—but Winry is a stronger force than he’d accounted for; the warm cat trying to trip him is bizarrely comforting; he has a can of cat food in his hand; there are so many factors in flux—

“Hang on,” Ed says.  “Before you decide—let me finish my thought here.  There’s stuff I didn’t mention last time.  Like… this is a really good neighborhood.  This place is actually harder to find and harder to access than your place, first because nobody knows you’re here; and second because of the way that it’s built, where they’d have to get into the building, and then the hall, and then figure out which apartment you’re in.  And there’s a fake name on the mailbox, just so you know.  And even if somebody did get that far, Winry’s gonna be up half the night with a lot of really sharp tools and no mercy for anybody who interrupts her.  And… I figure that if you try it out for a while, and it’s not going very well, you can always bail and go home later on.”

Roy employs the discouraged hand of his outlawed left arm to hold the can steady, works his right fingernail under the leverage tab, and opens the lid.

Then he looks at Ed.

Maggie meows loudly.

“Can it,” Ed says to her.  “Pun completely fucking intended.”

“You shouldn’t talk to your brother’s pets that way,” Roy says.

“You shouldn’t avoid every question that’s hard to answer without giving something up,” Ed says, eyes on him again in an instant.  “‘Should’ doesn’t carry a whole lot of weight with me.”

Roy continues looking at him—at the set jaw, at the arched eyebrow, at the fake-casual lean on the counter and the stubborn turn of his beautiful mouth.

Roy could tell Ed that Ed doesn’t carry a whole lot of weight to begin with, which is fair enough, proportionally speaking.

Roy could tell Ed that it’s not about difficulty; it’s about survival.

Roy could tell Ed no.

Roy could tell Ed a lot of things.

But they have, more than a bit incidentally, proceeded through an extensive educational course in reading one another since this began, and Roy can hear and see the thousand tiny ways that Winry’s presence has set Ed on edge.  Roy doesn’t blame him: she’s a force to be reckoned with.  The pair of them have both grown a great deal over the past several years, and Roy thinks it highly unlikely that tonight’s Winry would ever deliberately use her position of power to cause Ed any pain, but the fact remains that she’s his ex-girlfriend—ex-romance, ex-something—and a number of offhand references have added up to an impression that Ed doesn’t know anymore quite where he stands.  One of the pillars of his entire life has tilted towards an unprecedented uncertainty.

Just this once, it is possible that Ed needs Roy some small fragment as much as Roy needs him.

“I suppose that it wouldn’t hurt to try,” Roy says.

“It might,” Ed says, casually, but the slight shift of his features spells relief.  “Depending on the trajectory and velocity of any wayward airborne wrenches.  But—y’know.  You have an escape route.”

“True,” Roy says.  He holds the opened can out to Ed.  “Would you like to do the honors?”

“And lose one of the five fingers I have left?” Ed says.  “No, thanks.”

Roy opens several more cans, and Ed casts several more glares down at the swarm of fur rotating around the food dishes, and a considerable and somewhat disconcerting array of noises emanate from the living room.

“We should most likely eat, too,” Roy says.

“I guess,” Ed says.  “Do you wanna cook?”

Roy does not imagine that he has to remind either of them that Ed has been living nearly exclusively at Roy’s house for the past few weeks.  “Do you have anything that can be cooked?”

Ed looks towards the fridge, then at the floor, then at their feline entourage.  “Other than the cats, you mean?”

“I may already be on thin ice with your brother,” Roy says.  “I feel that it would be extremely unwise to endorse eating his cats.”

Ed smirks.  “What else are they good for?”

“Right,” Roy says.  “I’m sure that they’ve never provided you a moment’s joy or comfort in the duration of the time that you’ve had them.”

“They just shed on my clothes and sit on my books,” Ed says, but the grin gives him away.  “Bunch of fuzzy parasites.”

Roy looks at him.

Ed blinks back.  “What?”

Roy reaches down, slowly, and plucks a hair off of his own uniform jacket.  He holds it up to the light so that the gold will gleam, and it will be utterly unmistakable that it’s one of Ed’s.

Ed stares at him.  “I don’t sit on your books,” he says.  “I just hold them hostage.”  He pauses.  “You asshole.”

“Hmm,” Roy says.

“Shut the hell up,” Ed says.  “We haven’t solved the problem.  What—”

“I’ll go pick something up,” Roy says.  “I can swing by my place on the way over and get my things.  Are there any books in particular that you’d like me to bring back for you to take captive?”

Ed takes up staring again, which makes Roy wonder what he said that was wrong—but in the instant before he formulates the question, Ed starts to smile.

It’s not the mischievous smirk or the one that Ed bites back when he’s rolling his eyes.  It’s not the reckless grin, or the growing amusement smile that’s usually followed by raised eyebrows and a challenge.

It’s something new and altogether softer—something slightly delicate, and staggeringly sweet.

“I dunno,” Ed says.  “Surprise me.”

“I’ll do my best,” Roy says.  Sometimes small promises can still be safe.  “What would you like to eat?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Ed says.  Before Roy can ask about that, either, he turns towards the doorway and calls, “Hey, Win, what do you want for dinner?”

There is one feature of the apartment that Ed failed to mention in his survey of its safeguards, and this one is a weak point: the walls are very, very thin.

They are thin enough, as it happens, that Roy can hear the voices in the living room perfectly clearly while he’s standing outside the front door with Ed’s keyring in his hand.

“You’re so damn lucky,” Winry is saying.  “If you’d fried any of the connections—”

“Hey,” Ed says.  “I didn’t fry anything.  I was fried.  Passive voice.  If you want to yell at somebody, we can go to the jail at HQ, and you can visit the dipshit who did the frying.”

“Whatever,” Winry says.  “The point is that replacing just the wires that shorted is a lot easier than re-rigging the whole system.  I might be out of your hair by tomorrow night.”

Ed is quiet for a half-breath too long, and then he says, “Oh.”  After another moment, he adds, “Well—I mean—you’ve… probably got a lot of… clients.  And stuff.  Waiting.  So… that’s… probably a good thing.  Not getting stuck here for as long.”

There’s a pause.

“…right?” Ed says.

“Y’know,” Winry says, “it wouldn’t kill you to come visit every once in a million years or so.”

Roy can hear a trace of shock in the silence—and more than a trace when Ed breaks it.  “You… want me to?”

“Of course I do,” Winry says, sounding moderately offended at the question.  “Even if you’re obnoxious, you’re still my best friend.”

“Thanks,” Ed says.  “Sort of.  Maybe.  But—”

“But nothing,” Winry says.  “I’m sick and tired of waiting around for other people to do what I want, or be what I want, or come back, or—whatever.  I’ve spent half my life waiting.  Nothing good has ever come of any of it.  So just… be your stupid self.  I don’t care.  I’d rather have the you that I can get than sit around pretending that there’s some other you who might’ve been more, or might’ve wanted more, or whatever.  It was dumb of me to wait for him.  And it wasn’t fair—not to you, and not to myself, either.  He doesn’t exist.”  She draws in a deep breath and lets out a huge sigh.  “But that’s okay.  Fuck him anyway.  You and me doesn’t have to be all or nothing.  I just want my friend back.”

“You can’t have me back, dummy,” Ed says.  “You can’t have something back if it never left.”

“What about a yo-yo?” Winry asks.

It’s Ed’s turn to take offense.  “Rotational inertia doesn’t count.”

“Why not?” Winry says.

“Because shut up,” Ed says, “that's why.”

“What about a boomerang?” Winry says.

“This is why I don’t friggin’ visit,” Ed says.

Roy releases a breath, moves six soundless steps backwards in the hallway, and starts jingling the keys as he retreads the half-dozen paces closest to the door.

Dinner—which is cheap Cretan takeout food, because this place is always fast, and the food stays hot long enough to transport—with Winry and Ed at the same table involves a substantial amount of arguing about everything from the most mathematically efficient way to fold a napkin to whether Al is going to bring them souvenirs to something in an area of advanced engineering that completely loses Roy the instant that they drop the chemistry component and dive into the physics.  Roy feels that as long as he makes it out of this experience with all of his fingers and most of his eardrums intact, he’ll consider himself lucky.

In the interest of both, he chooses not to comment on the fact that Ed welcomes Maggie up into his lap the instant that she starts kneading at his softer shin.  He rubs behind her ears every time that he’s contemplating a riposte to Winry, and he sneaks her no less than six different morsels of his food.

Parasites indeed.

Roy has some files to work through, because of course he does, and also because he lost several valuable minutes of today to complaining about the cafeteria, which was necessary after he and Ed had ventured into it for the first time in recent memory.  The food was not even remotely worth suffering the claustrophobic crowds, the noise, the endless seeking eyes, and the extremely uncomfortable seating, but Roy doesn’t believe for an instant that the quality of the cuisine was why Ed insisted that they try it all of a sudden.

Roy weathered it, though, which is the point, he supposes.  And then he got to complain about weathering it for the better part of a half-hour, which set him behind, which has landed him with a handful of files on a Friday night.  Perhaps there is a modicum of justice in the universe after all.

Ed settles down on the couch beside him with one of the books that Roy brought—close enough that their complementary undamaged shoulders brush together.

Roy can’t tell for certain whether the distance is to assuage any awkwardness with Winry, or simply a matter of habit.  Ed’s displays of physical affection have varied wildly so far: Roy’s not sure how much of that can be traced to some sort of a psychological division between the staggeringly mediocre dating experiences that Ed has alluded to; or whether Ed was only ever so pointedly tactile with Alphonse in the hopes of proving that he still considered Al his flesh and blood when his brother was possessed of neither.  It’s possible that family and established friends are entitled to the full breadth of contact, but that Ed was taught, one moment of painstaking negative reinforcement at a time, not to touch a lover unless they ask.

It’s a good thing that Roy doesn’t know the identities of the exes responsible for that.  A substantial part of him still wants to burn them all.

The only ex that he does know currently sits cross-legged on the floor, toiling away with her supplies spread out on the coffee table, unconcernedly pushing the cats away when they investigate too avidly and insert their noses too close to her work.

Roy waits to make sure that she’s intent on a stubborn screw before he sneaks a proper glasses-on glance over at Ed, who is as mesmerizing as ever when engrossed in a book like this.  Roy is faintly embarrassed to realize that he is quantifiably envious of the book in question for holding Ed’s attention.  Receiving that fire-eyed focus is a privilege that inanimate objects really can’t appreciate.

“So,” Winry says.  “Are you guys always this exciting on a Friday night?”

“Yes,” Roy says.

Ed’s eyes don’t even pause in flicking back and forth across the page.  “We went to the opera one time.”

Winry’s head snaps up.  “You what?”

“Why is everyone always so surprised?” Roy asks.  “Ed’s a scientist.  It was an untested experience enjoyed by others, which he couldn’t easily understand the appeal of.  Obviously the only solution is firsthand data collection to try to identify the discrepancy.”

Winry stares at him.

“Thank you,” Ed says.

“Jeez,” Winry says.  “Well—that sort of explains a lot.  I always figured part of why you two butted heads so much was because your modes of thinking were really different, but… I think it’s actually because you’re fundamentally alike.”

“That is a higher compliment than I can begin to describe,” Roy says.

Ed is staring at him now.  “Holy shit, you’re smooth.”  He employs his elbow in a manner that seems to be meant to be discouraging.  “Knock it off.”

“Ah,” Roy says.  “I’m not allowed to say that I’m sorry.”

“You’re damn right you’re not,” Ed says.  He stretches his arm over his head, nearly unbalances the book open on his knee, rescues it, and then frowns at the cat that leaps up onto the unoccupied couch cushion and curls up beside him.  The frown redirects itself towards Winry once he realizes that the cat isn’t going to budge.  “What’s Friday night supposed to be like?  What are you so eager to do, anyway?”

“Anything,” Winry says.  “Rush Valley’s nightlife makes Resembool look hip.”

“Oh,” Ed says.  “Shit.”

“Yeah,” Winry says.

“Do you like jazz?” Roy asks.

“I like anything that isn’t one single, solitary bar full of the same old greasy gear-heads that you work with every day of your life,” Winry says.

“That,” Roy says, “I am positive we can arrange.”

“Do I have to come?” Ed asks.

At the very least, that gives both Roy and Winry a chance to stare at him, and nothing unites two disparate parties quite like a common source of shocked dismay.

“I don’t like cabarets or wherever you’re planning on taking us,” Ed says.  “The smoke always makes me gag.  And their drinks are overpriced.  And the people are too loud.  And I can’t dance.”

“I can teach you,” Roy says.

Ed eyes him.  “I’ve got a metal foot.”

Wordlessly, Winry lifts his disembodied leg from the coffee table.

“Good point,” Ed says.  “Right now, I don’t have any foot.”

“Well, I’ve got a stone heart, a bad back, and a chip on my shoulder,” Roy says.  “Hasn’t slowed me down overmuch.”

Ed elbows him.  “Shut up.  None of that is even close to being true, you asshole.”

“My back is terrible,” Roy says.

“It looks fine to me,” Ed says, and then his expression tightens as he realizes what he just said in front of Winry.

“Eew,” Winry says cheerfully.

“It’s his fault,” Ed says.

“I would apologize,” Roy says, “but I’m still on probation.”

“At least your ears work, like, eighty percent of the time,” Ed says.

Roy considers the increasingly scowlish set of Ed’s expression.

“You don’t have to dance,” Roys says.

“Good,” Ed says.  “Then you don’t have to die.”

“Perfect,” Winry says.  She taps the grip end of a screwdriver against the grille of Ed’s shin and then gestures ambiguously with it.  “I’ll get enough of this done tonight that I can be sure I’ll finish in the morning, and then you can buy me lunch, and then you can buy me a new dress, and then we can give it a real test-drive when we go out.”

“That sounds like a plan,” Roy says.

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “A plan designed specifically to cause me to suffer.”

“You busted my baby again,” Winry says, tapping the leg more vigorously.  “The least you can do is suffer a little bit.”

Ed stages a dramatic collapse against Roy’s arm.  “Fucking save me.”

“I can’t,” Roy says, though he does offer some consolatory shoulder-patting.  “And I can’t say ‘sorry’ either.”

“Eugh,” Ed says.

But he doesn’t say What the hell are you good for?, and he also doesn’t stop leaning on Roy’s arm.

A few hours slip away in companionable silence-but-for-tinkering, and eventually Roy feels himself starting to slide from the familiar weariness into the half-drowsing quagmire that usually accompanies this time of night.

“All right,” Ed says, stretching extravagantly.  “Good luck, Automail Princess.  We’re gonna go to bed.”

She glances at the clock.  “Already?”

“This one—” Ed jerks his thumb in Roy’s direction, as if it was necessary.  “—actually sleeps, like a real person.”

“Am I not a real person?” Roy asks.

“Are any of us real people?” Ed asks.

“Jeez,” Winry says.  “You’re right.  It is time.  Go to bed.”

Roy’s not sure if that was deliberate on Ed’s part, or if it’s just a fortunate coincidence.  He’s planning to ask when they start to settle in, but by the time that they’ve finished with the teeth-brushing and the hair-taming and stepped into Ed’s bedroom, that question disappears in light of a much more pressing observation:

“That is… still a very small bed,” Roy says.  “It was barely—”

“Get fucked,” Ed says.  “Or don’t.  I’m tired.  It’s gonna be cozy.  I thought you liked that.”

“I do,” Roy says.  “What I don’t like is the possibility of me rolling over in the middle of the night and pushing you onto the floor.  I can’t believe we avoided that the first time, actua—”

“Try it,” Ed says.  “See what happens.”  Despite the characteristic aggression, he’s grinning, so Roy supposes that that’s something.  “Look, just get in.  If for some reason, it’s not big enough this time, we’ll go steal Al’s bed, and Winry can sleep on the couch.”

“We cannot,” Roy says, “under any circumstances, ask your houseguest to sleep on—”

“I knew you were going to say that,” Ed says.  “So get in the damn bed already.”

Roy gives him a long, slow-simmering baleful look and then obeys.

The bed seems… marginally bigger this time, once they’ve climbed into it.  Roy has to bite his tongue on a comment about there being one upside to Ed’s reduced quantity of limbs—he can tell by the taste of the words in his mouth that they would come out wrong.

Distracted as he is by a few attempts to figure out if there is, in fact, any way to say such a thing that wouldn’t be disastrous, it doesn’t occur to him until Ed’s already lying beside him and tugging one-handed at the covers that Ed sent him in first, deliberately, again—that Ed, this time without asking and without ever offering a chance for protest, directed him to the side of the bed further from the door.

It had always amused him when people thought that Ed was all scorn and spite and volcanic anger—when people thought that the rage was the defining element of him.  That’s always been a smokescreen.  It’s always been bravado, blindingly bright and deafeningly loud on purpose to conceal how soft Ed’s heart is underneath.  Ed bleeds kindness.  He breathes compassion.  He doesn’t even seem to notice his own generosity most of the time, because he genuinely seeks nothing in return.  It’s more than just an instinct—instincts drive actions, and Ed’s gold-heartedness is more than actions, or instances, or iterations.  It’s who he is.  It is fundamental.  It is a fact.

Roy supposes that his perspective is a bit unfair, when his introduction was the other way around than most.  He saw the brokenness first, and then the defiance—the open wounds before the scars, long before the steel.  He knew where Ed was starting from, and he could guess at what that uphill battle was liable to teach.

And he saw Ed’s lifelines.  He knew what was at stake.  He knew what mattered to Ed, and what motivated all the reckless choices way back then.

Which is why he needs to get this out of the way, because if they are going to try this, honestly, with the hope of maintaining something healthy for a substantial quantity of time—

No matter how much both or either of them want to make it work, one thing could still destroy this, effortlessly.

Or one person, really.

Ed stretches up, twisting at what looks like a contorted angle to turn out the light, and then he settles down and folds his solitary arm to lay his hand in the center of his chest.

“You’ve got your worried face on,” Ed says.

“I don’t have a worried face,” Roy says, “because I don’t worry.”

“Bullshit,” Ed says.

“I strategize,” Roy says. “Extensively.  I make contingency plans.  Occasionally I indulge the tiniest amount of tactical… fretting.”

Ed waits until Roy has succumbed to the overtures of the wince before he repeats, agonizingly slowly: “‘Tactical fretting’.”

“It’s a technical term,” Roy says.  He sniffs for good measure.  “It has a dignified military history.”

“Like goddamn hell it does,” Ed says, but there’s a trace of sheer delight in it.  “So what are you tactically fretting about?”

“I will confess to a touch of concern,” Roy says, “about what torments to expect at Alphonse’s capable hands the next time that he’s in town.”

“Don’t bother,” Ed says.  “He’s not gonna hurt you.  Winry’s just being super dramatic to make sure you’re serious.”  Roy suspects a seed of jealousy, too, beneath the flowering histrionics, but somehow he doesn’t imagine that Ed could conceptualize the idea of two people wanting him at once.  “Honestly, he’s probably gonna be happy about it.”

That… reorients the world a little bit.  Roy thinks that he likes the newer balance better, but it would be preemptive to sink into relief at the first sign of safety.  “Oh?”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “I mean—he’s just like that, for starters.  All cutesy and romantic and stuff.  And he knows you better than she does.  And he saw how fucked up I got over—y’know.  Her.  That.  The whole… situation.  And some others.  So he’ll probably be glad.  I mean… you… meet me halfway.  And you really listen to me.  And you treat me like I’m special, even with the stupid little stuff that doesn’t matter.  And you make me laugh a lot.  And… I’m happy, so… Al’ll probably be happy, too.”

Roy—

Reaches for words.  Reaches for breath.  Reaches for anything to say, anything to work with, anything at all—

There is nothing.

There is nothing but the throb of his heartbeat, warm and so fast that it feels frantic—as if he’s terrified; as if his life’s in danger; as if he’s falling, even though he knows that that’s a foregone fact by now.

But it’s not like that.

There’s no fear.  No fury.  No dread; no desperation; no hollow, stone-cold misery, seeping through his bones.

Just Ed—Ed, burning almost too bright to lay eyes on.  Just Ed stoking a bonfire in the center of his chest.

The reason that Roy couldn’t find words for this is because there aren’t any.  Words aren’t big enough.  They aren’t sufficient.

It’s easier, at least, in a tiny bed that barely fits the two of them, to wrap both arms around Ed and hold on so tight that it might just press some of the magnitude of what Roy’s feeling straight into Ed’s skin.

Ed half-laughs, softly—and Roy started to tense at the indrawn breath alone, but there isn’t a trace of malice or dismissal in it.  Nothing cruel.  Nothing dissatisfied.

Ed’s hand grazes up over Roy’s shoulder-blade and then works itself into his hair.

“Shit,” Ed says.  “I thought you might get sappy, but—”

“Get bent, beautiful,” Roy manages to mumble into his collarbone.

Ed laughs again, and it’s much more than half this time.  “You first,” he says.

Coaxing himself to the edge of sleep and letting himself tip over takes as much time and concentrated effort as Roy had expected it to, although not quite as much as he’d feared.  He’ll take that.  He imagines that Ed will let him laze around the bed—such as it is—for several hours tomorrow morning to make up the deficit regardless; he imagines that the softly-breathing gift of a man beside him will show him every ounce of the mercy that made the Fullmetal Alchemist famous once.

That’s a comforting thought to wrap himself in as Roy grapples as quietly as he can with the hissing demons, trying to silence them without raising his own heart-rate any higher; without jeopardizing any of the peace.

It’ll be fine.  He can take his time.  Ed is so close beside him that Roy can feel the bedclothes rising and falling with every precious breath.  This is a good place to be, even if it’s far from perfect.  This is good.

He eases his eyes closed; relaxes his muscles deliberately, one at a time; tries to focus on the dark of the backs of his eyelids until it envelops him.

This is good.

Less good is the scrabbling, scratching noise that makes him sit bolt upright fewer hours later than he would have liked.

A pale sweep of light suffuses the room—well past dawn, then, but it feels sticky on his skin, and his mouth is dry, and his heart’s already racing—

Two tiny white paws appear, disappear, and reappear in the crack beneath the bedroom door, accompanied by a renewed bout of the sound that woke him.  It appears to be the cat’s claws catching in the carpet.

“Fuck,” Ed says, so blearily that the very familiar syllable is barely recognizable.  “Sorry.  They do that.  Now do you understand why I hate ’em so much?”

“They’re probably just lonely,” Roy manages.

“Or evil,” Ed says.

Roy tries to fit himself back into the bed without impinging too much on Ed’s sprawl.  “Perhaps a bit of both.”

Ed wriggles in a way that looks aimless until he succeeds in rolling onto his side to face Roy.  His eyes are only open a sliver, and his hair is a matted mess, and there’s a tiny spot at the corner of his mouth of something white and flaky that Roy suspects is dried saliva.

Roy would burn worlds for him.  Roy would level cities and scorch a hundred-thousand, a hundred-million miles.

“You should go back to sleep,” Ed says.  “Winry’s gonna be crashed out for a couple more hours, and you probably need it.”

Roy reaches out—not very far, of course, given that there is a grand total of about an inch to spare between them—and grazes his knuckles across Ed’s cheek.  Ed’s eyelashes flutter.  Roy could die satisfied right this second, sleep-deprived or not.

“I think you need it more than I do,” he says.

Ed smiles faintly.  “I think arguin’ about who needs it more is cutting into the sleep time.”

Roy leans forward—not very far, of course—and kisses the bridge of his nose.  “I think you’re right.”

“Barf,” Ed says.

“Barf indeed,” Roy says.

Even the slight shift brought them close enough that it’s easy to slip his uninjured arm around Ed’s waist, which makes it easy to run his hand lightly up and down Ed’s back.

Ed leans in, head coming to rest against Roy’s chest.  In another minute, Roy may just coax him into purring, whatever complaints Ed might have about the cat comparison.

He slows the progress of his palm, trying to make it more soothing—for both of them, really, although the shot of adrenaline from the recent incursion may have sealed Roy’s fate as far as the sleep is concerned.

Ed breathes out slowly, and the damp heat of it ghosts across Roy’s collarbones.  “Why’re you doin’ that?”

“I’m sorry,” Roy says, keeping his voice low.  “Is it distracting?”

“No,” Ed says.  “S’nice.  Just… I’ve only got two and about a quarter limbs right now.  S’weird.”

Roy goes still despite himself.  He didn’t mean to react so obviously; it’s possible that Ed’s too tangled in the first threads of the next dream to notice, but—

“It’s not weird,” Roy says.  “It’s you.  You make the automail very much a part of yourself, yes, and you use it like no one the world has ever seen, but—this is… you.  This is something you did, something you are, something… inherent.  Undeniable.”  He swallows, hesitates—he’s already gone too far, most likely, so it can’t hurt too much to go further.  “I don’t want to deny it.  I want you the way you are.  All of you; the most of you; the least of you; the truth of you.  However many limbs that is at any given time.”

Ed stays silent long enough that Roy thinks that he must have crossed a boundary—set it ablaze, more likely; burned down the fence and danced among the ashes.  Stupid of him.  His guard was down; he has to remember to tread so damn cautiously where Ed’s feelings—

“Shut up,” Ed says, and his voice is—thick.  Heavy with held-back tears.  This close, he’ll be able to hear exactly what that does to Roy’s heartbeat.  “You—just—shut up.  Can’t just—say shit like that.  Outta nowhere.  When I’m not even awake.”  He buries his face in Roy’s T-shirt, curling the fingers of his left hand into the fabric until he’s got a whole fistful of it captive.  “Asshole.  Fuck.  I—you, too.  I want—all of it.  Even the worst shit.  Okay?  If you’re gonna get all of me, then you have to let me in.  Always.  No matter how bad it gets.”

Roy attempts to find a breath of air somewhere in the room that might revive his brain.

“I can’t promise always,” he says.  “I’m… I don’t even know where some of the walls are.  They’re old, and they’re tall, and—but—between the two of us, I think…”

Ed snorts without lifting his head a centimeter.  “Who the hell are you callin’ so small he can’t blast the fuck out of your crusty-ass defense mechanisms?”

“Someone other than you,” Roy says, dragging his hand through the expanses of hair streaming across the pillow.  “Obviously.”

Ed drags a shuddering breath in and manages to make the exhale sound a little like a laugh.  “Obviously.”

Roy discovers several new things over the course of the rest of the day.  He discovers that Ed’s showerhead is tilted down so that the spray is angled very low, which forces him to smother a laugh in the crook of his elbow for fear that he’ll be heard and summarily annihilated.  He discovers that a wildly self-destructive love of all-nighters runs in the extended family.  He discovers that Winry can put away as much food, with comparable terrifying speed, as Ed can, or at least when she’s been working for too long.

Roy also discovers that reattaching the automail arm is an experience so unimaginably painful that it actually registers on Ed’s extraordinarily skewed scale of physical discomfort—and registers high.  It registers high enough, in fact, that Ed grips the couch arm hard until his knuckles crack; high enough that the cords stand out in his neck, and the sound that escapes him—

High enough that Roy really never had a choice: the instant that his mortified body unfreezes, he’s at Ed’s side, hands flitting over him helplessly, stroking back his hair, touching his face, knitting their fingers together to squeeze his left hand.

“It’s fine,” Ed says, completely breathless, with an unconvincing attempt at a smile.  “That one’s worse than the leg.”

“No, it’s not,” Winry says calmly.

“Shut up,” Ed says.

Roy grips his hand a little harder.  “You don’t happen to have any vodka lying around, do you?”

Ed musters a wink.  “For you or for me?”

“Both,” Roy says.

“It’s fine,” Ed says.

Roy looks at him.

Ed smiles, marginally more strongly this time.

“Some shit you just gotta get through,” Ed says.  “Besides.”  He tugs on their joined hands.  “It’s easier with a little bit of help.”

Roy’s not sure that he believes that, but he doesn’t seem to have too many options.

He discovers more, as the day goes on: that Winry’s work on lunch is just as respectable as her obliteration of breakfast; that the extent of Ed’s ability to commentate on a vast variety of shiny satin dresses for sale in Central’s boutiques is “You look good in everything; just buy one”; and that “Al is so much better at this than you, you total dweeb”.

Roy also discovers that nothing more or less than the words “My vote is for the powder blue one—it brings out your eyes more than the others, and the lines are especially flattering on you” subtly but unmistakably changes the way that Winry Rockbell looks at him.

They’ve all earned a coffee break after what Roy calls an experience, which Ed calls an ordeal.

“What,” Ed says, “is that?”

Winry waves her cup under his nose, somehow managing not to slosh any foam over the side.  “It’s a latte, dummy.”

“I repeat,” Ed says.  “What is—”

“It’s espresso and steamed milk,” Winry says.

“It’s an abomination,” Ed says.  “Why would you taint—”

“You’re an abomination,” Winry says.

“Sure,” Ed says.  “But at least I’m not the kind with scalded milk in it.”

“It’s not the latte’s fault that you’re uncultured,” Winry says.  “And picky.”

“Ed,” Roy cuts in, “would you like a cookie?”

Ed eyes him.  “Are you trying to pacify me with sugar?”

“Depends,” Roy says.  “What do you think are the odds that it’ll work?”

“Low,” Ed says, rather disdainfully.  “But it’s probably the only plan you’ve got, so maybe you should try it anyway.”

“That’s very practical advice,” Roy says.

“I know,” Ed says.  “Practicality is my calling card.”

“Chocolate chip or snickerdoodle?” Roy asks.

“Second one,” Ed says.  “Just so that I get to make you say that three more times.”

“Snickerdoodle, snickerdoodle, snickerdoodle,” Roy says.  “Now we’ve summoned a diabetic demon.”

Ed’s laughter carries him all the way to the counter, and he’s starting to think—

That perhaps he can actually do this.  If he has that behind him, perhaps he really can.

The discoveries continue that night, when they find a cabaret that suits Winry’s liking: apparently she wants one that’s loud and dim and crowded, with a wide dance floor and a well-stocked bar.

Roy supposes that he should just count it as a blessing that she didn’t pick his mother’s.  Another boon—they manage to snag a booth table in the corner, where the acoustics almost allow one to hear oneself think.  Roy knows that he needs to try to focus on those things, rather than on the way that his heart keeps attempting to climb with hooks and grapples up the back of his throat.

As soon as they’re settled, Ed grabs his hand beneath the table and squeezes tight.  The questioning look is just that—inquisitive, but not accusatory.  There’s a touch of concern in it.

“Nice place,” Roy says, more to reassure Ed than because he means it.

“It’s got people in it,” Winry says.  “I’ll take it.”

“How do you know that they’re quality people?” Ed asks.

“I don’t care,” Winry says.  “Are you gonna get up and make sure that your leg’s aligned properly, or what?”

“I’ll get the drinks,” Ed says.  “I am not gonna dance.”

“You’re such a party-pooper,” Winry says.

Ed scoots off of the bench seat and stands.  The moment’s hesitation as he braces himself, repositions his body, and then shifts his weight onto both feet evenly to push himself upright is so brief that Roy almost misses it altogether.  “Yeah, well, you drink coffee that defies the essence of coffee.  I’ll take my chances.  The usual?”

“Yup,” Winry says.  “Thanks.”

Roy considers her.  She went with the dress that he recommended.  He was not exaggerating its effect at the time, and he has not failed to notice the looks that she’s garnered for it since the moment that they walked in.  “What’s the usual?” he asks.

“I have no idea,” Winry says, grinning as she looks over the dance floor.  “I just want to see what he thinks it is.”

“That’s fair,” Roy says.

She turns to him, immediately focused again.  “So.  How’d you sleep?”

For a breath-stopping moment, Roy thinks that she knows—knows everything.  Knows his weakness; knows the risks; knows the depths of the shame and the wretchedness and the despair—

Then he realizes that she’s talking about Ed.  More specifically, most likely, she’s talking about the size of Ed’s bed.

He clears his throat.  “Better… than I expected.”

“Shit,” she says, which is… startling, to say the least.  To someone who relies on observation the way that Roy does, the fingernails give her occupation away long before she would ever have the chance to speak, but he imagines that she’s sent a citizen or two to the brink of cardiac arrest with the lethal combination of a winsome smile and a practiced curse.  “Should’ve intimidated you better.  I’m not doing my job.  Al’s gonna be so disappointed.”

“You could try recruiting Riza in the meantime,” Roy says.  “She’s often very eager to inform me that I would be better off leaving my life choices to a four-year-old child with a coin to flip for big decisions.”

The next smile curves slow and merciless.  “That is a very good suggestion, General.”

Self-sabotage has always been his specialty.

But what Winry doesn’t realize is that Riza takes no pleasure in kicking him when he’s already bleeding on the ground.  That’s probably why she couldn’t help him this time—beyond the prominent fact that he wouldn’t let her, that is; because if he did, he wasn’t sure that he could ever let her go.

Ed was different.  Ed saw where Roy could take a few more knives and went right for the weak spots to force him to fight back.

Winry might have guessed as much, having known Ed for as long as she has, but she won’t know the rest of it, so Roy says only, “I try.”

She tilts her head towards the bar.  “How has he been, though?  Not—particular to—this, I mean.  Just… generally.  How’s he been holding up since Al left?”

“Ah,” Roy says.  It’s the sagest-sounding interjection that he’s yet found when one needs to stall for time.  “He and I… weren’t especially close during the worst of it.  Not until relatively recently, really, and I think the edge had worn off by then.  But I suspect that it’s been a struggle, and the type of struggle that he thinks shouldn’t be one, so he buries all the evidence as deep as possible in the hopes that no one else will notice that it exists.”

Winry grimaces.  “Sounds about right.”

Ed, because he is Ed, has made a black shirt, black slacks, and a red tie utterly unmissable in a crowded room.  Roy’s eye finds him before he’s made it halfway back to their table.

Ed sets two glasses down firmly—one of which contains a lot of orange; one of which contains a lot of amber.

“Okay,” Winry says, taking the orange item offered and swirling the straw around within it.  “What is this?”

Ed freezes halfway to sliding onto the bench seat, staring at her.  “It’s your drink.”

“I got that part,” Winry says.  “What kind of drink is it?”

“Your drink,” Ed says, frowning.  “It’s a screwdriver.”

Winry is the one staring now, because Ed has rolled his eyes and started scotting over onto the cushion next to Roy.

Which leaves one item unexplained, of course.

“I, um,” Ed says.  He pulls the other glass closer to him.  “They had a cider on tap that the guy said was good, and… I figured since—y’know—you’re driving, and I’m not really jonesing to fall on my face right after I got my extremities back, that… maybe we could… split it.  If you want.”

Roy would very much appreciate it if his heart would stop trying to ram itself through his vulnerable ribs.  “I would love to.”

“Not until I’m done with you,” Winry says, seizing Roy’s arm and hauling hard enough that he fears for his ligaments.  He scrambles to follow—with as much dignity as possible, of course—before she can wreak any damage that feels permanent.  “I wanna get one dance in first so I don’t get dizzy.  C’mon.”

“Go easy on him,” Ed calls, although by the smirk he doesn’t really seem to mean it.

“Are you all right?” Roy asks as Winry tows him towards the swirling bodies on the floor.  He fights to keep his heart steady, fights to keep his head; smothers the voices drawing breath to scream at the claustrophobic crush of unknown people—

“Yeah,” she says, though the touch of pink in her cheeks tells a slightly different story.  “Just—I know it’s—” She takes a deep breath, tosses her hair over her shoulder, and looks intently over at the band.  “Just that it’s hard when he does stuff like that.  Every now and again, when I expect it the least, he does something so damn cute that I can’t stand it.”

Roy sympathizes, and opens his mouth to say so.

“Anyway!” Winry says, brightly, before he can get a word out.  “That’s the other thing.”  She beams at him.  “If you hurt him, I swear to all that’s sacred in the universe that I will make you regret every last second of your life since the one where you were born.”

Her intentions are so good that he really doesn’t have the heart to tell her that she’s quite a lot too late for that.

He has a few, though, doesn’t he?  A few moments that he categorically does not regret.  A few moments that were so thoroughly and genuinely good that he wouldn’t trade them back for anything.  A few that were right.

That’s something.

That’s a lot.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he says.

“Good,” she says.  She holds her right hand out to him, swishing her skirt with the left, and this grin is much less terrifying and much more playful than the last.  “You gonna impress me, or what?”

Time was, Roy had more than one dance in him.  Time was, the brassy jubilation of the music and the tornado of deftly-stepping, swiftly-twirling bodies would have made his heart sing instead of racing—would have left him grinning rather than setting his teeth on edge.  Time was, the things that he loved didn’t have the power to drown him the instant that he’d had too much.

That time is past him.  It’s gone.  Clinging to the last wisps of its memory won’t bring it back.

Besides, the time that he has now comes with a number of its own advantages.  One of them is sliding back onto the seat next to Ed, reaching over to sweep his hair back from his face just for the sheer glory of it, and feeling a hand settle—less than certainly, but Ed’s expression betrays no remorse—on his knee in recompense.

Winry is still out on the floor, knocking bystanders dead with every single twist of her hips.

“I really hope she finds somebody,” Ed says, watching her.  “Or—maybe not even somebody.  It doesn’t have to be a person.  I hope she finds something.  Something that makes her feel like she did it, and it’s worth it, and shit makes sense.”

Roy looks at him.

Ed looks back, and then the look darkens into a glower.  “What?”

“Nothing,” Roy says.

“Bullshit,” Ed says.  He pushes the pint glass of cider—which contains somewhat less than a pint by now—over in front of Roy.  “And for the record, you make no sense.”

“That’s fair,” Roy says.

“Nothing’s fair,” Ed says, fumbling under the table until he finds Roy’s right hand with his left, at which point he tangles their fingers together, and Roy can feel his heartbeat through his skin.  “But sometimes it’s decent anyway.”

Unsurprisingly, Winry crashes out on the drive home.  Surprisingly, she snores loudly enough to wake the dead.  Half-surprisingly and half-not, Roy’s a bit grateful for it, since it keeps his nerves piqued, which counteracts the tiny flicker of a buzz that he gleaned off of a substantial portion of Ed’s cider.

“Hey, Win,” Ed says when they park.  “I broke it again.”

She startles awake so violently that Roy can’t help but be impressed.  “You—Ed, you absolute idiot—”

“Kidding,” he says.  “We’re here.”

She blinks, glances around herself, flings the door open, and jumps out before Roy can even consider that he should be getting up to help her in a gentlemanly sort of way.  “You should know better than to joke about that, you jerk.”

Ed’s grin gleams in the dim light.  “Worked, didn’t it?”

“That’s been your excuse for wrecking things since you were twelve,” she says.

“Give me some credit,” he says, climbing out after her.  “At least since I was ten.”

Roy locks the car and follows the pair of bickering blonds up the walk to the apartment complex, and from there, once again, it’s all much too easy.

After seeing Winry safely to her long-awaited slumber, nearly tripping over a cat each on the way back from the bathroom, and settling in bed, the question that Roy has been swallowing down for several hours surfaces again, and he thinks that now might be time to voice it.

He draws a deep breath first just in case.

“Why did you share your drink with me?” he asks.

Ed was reaching for the lamp—he pauses there, steel arm extended and gleaming in the light.  “I told you.  I didn’t want to have it all by myself and then fall in a gutter and put a bunch of scratches on the stuff that she just fixed.”

“That rationale I follow,” Roy says, watching him.  “But why offer it to me when you’ve spent nearly a month trying to keep me away from alcohol?”

Ed settles back on the pillow, meeting Roy’s eyes so intently that the back of Roy’s neck prickles.

“Because I knew that I could now,” Ed says.  “I knew that you could have a little bit and then put it aside.  I knew that you could stop yourself, and it wasn’t going to start some kind of an avalanche, and you weren’t going to relapse or whatever.  I know that you’re there now.  It doesn’t have to be a crutch anymore.  You’re in control of it, not the other way around.  And I figured that that sort of needed… I dunno.  Acknowledgement.  Celebration, maybe.”

“And a scientific test of your theory,” Roy says.

“Well, duh,” Ed says.

Roy looks back, although with rather less searing genius.

“Thank you,” he says.

“Whatever,” Ed says, wrinkling his nose up adorably.  “You’re the one who did it.  I just sort of helped a little bit and then noticed what you’d done.”

“My turn,” Roy says.

Ed’s eyebrow arches.  “For—”

“To call bullshit,” Roy says.

Ed grins.

Then the grin fades, and he goes back to the intense-staring thing, and Roy’s heart wobbles in a way that he doesn’t like.

It isn’t that he doesn’t trust Ed to the ends of his wits and the ends of the planet, obviously.  It’s just that he never quite knows how far towards those boundaries he’ll have to go, and the anticipation sometimes wears him very, very thin.

Ed sits up—with a bit of difficulty, but he’s balanced himself before Roy can reach out and try to support his back—and opens the drawer of the nightstand.  He reaches in, rummages, and draws out—

The flask.  Roy’s flask.  The gleaming silver hostage that he had almost managed to convince himself that he’d forgotten.

Ed holds it up, just out of reach.  “Do you want this back?”

Maes gave it to him—for their one-year anniversary, which turned out to be the only one that they ever had.  Maes had had it custom-engraved with a stylized nonsense-design that he’d caught Roy doodling, of their first initials tangled up together.

Roy wants the object back, yes.  He wants to be able to run the pad of his thumb across the grooves and batten down the heartbreak all over again.  He wants to be able to hold it tight in both hands and pretend that he can feel the warmth of Maes’s fingers for a second when he lets it go.

But he remembers the deal—the bargain.  He remembers the exchange.

If he takes back the flask, he has to see a shrink.

He has to let a stranger into this.

Is it worth it?

Is what he’s built here, in the unexpected interim, worth risking all the rest?  He’s already come inconceivably far—inconceivable, at least, compared to what he could have done alone.  Is it even possible to keep moving onward and up from here?  Is there even anything left to gain?

Ed quirks an eyebrow.  “If you break the windows in my apartment thinking that loud, Mustang,” he says, “you’re gonna be paying my deposit.  Do you want it, or not?”

Heedless ambition has always been Roy’s greatest fault.  Maes loved him for that, once.

Perhaps there’s one more leap of faith left in him.

“Yes,” Roy says.  “I do.”

There’s a fraction of a second where Ed looks relieved and elated in nearly equal measure, and then he forces every trace of it off of his face and feigns something much more akin to calm neutrality.  It’s rather cute, entirely because they both know that Ed’s never felt neutral about anything in his life.

Ed sets the flask down firmly on top of the nightstand, reaches across the bed to pin Roy in place by the uninjured shoulder, and leans down to kiss his forehead.

It’s just a graze of lips on skin—skin which has, as it happens, long since been desensitized by the amount of frowning that Roy’s work requires—and yet it is so much more, given how precious few gestures like it Ed has initiated so far.  It feels generous and promising on top of being radiantly sweet.

“Good,” Ed says, and then he shifts over, stretches up again, and turns out the light.

There’s something different about the brightness of a winter afternoon—Roy thinks that it’s the fact that the air always seems to hang on the verge of crystallizing, and the sunlight fractures as it filters through.  The first inklings of sunset paint the whole world rose-gold.

He will say that, unreservedly, for this place: its location, just outside the city center, where the gaps between the buildings widen enough for you to breathe, and there’s space for trees and bigger windows and little lines of flowers along the sidewalk, is a pleasant one.  It is a decent place to be.

The profusion of nearby coffee shops is also a plus.  He hopes that the nearest one charges at the counter, because once Ed—who is sprawled in a cutesy wrought-iron chair at one of their street-side tables—looks up, he definitively does not pay a bill before slugging the rest of his coffee and vaulting over the railing.

“Hey!” he calls, not even pretending to look both ways before he jogs across the street, because he knows that Roy’s doing it for him.  “How’d it go?”

“I should be asking you that question,” Roy says.  “I’m sorry that I had to miss it.”

Ed jumps up onto the curb to join him, somehow managing to shrug at the same time.  “Wasn’t much to miss.  This one was all indoors, and there was a lot of staring at petri dishes.  Definitely the most boring exam I’ve ever done.  Committee was real impressed and shit, though, so I’m pretty sure I passed.”

Roy smiles in spite of himself—or perhaps in spite of everything except himself.  “Then I suppose the State Alchemy program lives to ensnare innocent young hopefuls another day.”

“Neither of us was ever innocent,” Ed says.  “Where’s the car?”

“This way,” Roy says, going to the trouble of a completely unnecessary gesture before he starts off in the right direction.  “Did you walk all the way here?”

“As opposed to what?” Ed asks, smirking at him.  “Hitching a ride on a couple of pigeons strapped together?”

Roy can’t help that he smiles back at the mental image alone.  “Perhaps you could recruit some crows.”

“Yeah, right,” Ed says.  “Crows are too smart for that crap.”  He elbows Roy’s forearm, meaningfully.  “So—second time’s the charm.  How’d it go?”

It’s been less than ten minutes since Roy stepped out of the room and gently closed the door behind him.  He hasn’t had a chance to sort his way through the muddle yet—hasn’t had time to extract anything like an overall impression from the maelstrom of mixed feelings.

“I’m not sure,” he says.  Ed won’t hold it against him.  “I… think it was all right.  It’s unspeakably strange trying to summarize the entire trajectory of your life for a total stranger inside of an hour, and trying to make sure to mention the parts that you think are most thematically significant.  She’s… very smart.  I suppose that I’m optimistic about that much.  But the introduction is one thing; the rest of it will be the real test.  I’m not sure that she’ll want to commit to it for the long haul.”

“Maybe,” Ed says.  “Maybe not.  Knox said that he’s been going to her for a year and a half now, and he’s got some pretty big skeletons in the closet, too.”  At Roy’s startled expression, he—predictably—grins.  “That’s where I got the recommendation.  I asked him ’cause I figured maybe he’d happen to know somebody, but he did me one better.  You gave me the idea, actually.  When you mentioned that that one book I was reading was from Marcoh, it made a little light go on in my brain.”

“Well,” Roy says.  He’s starting to recognize this particular variety of freewheeling, discombobulated helplessness as a symptom of Ed, which means that he’s almost beginning to enjoy it.  “Perhaps that’s a good sign, then.  At the very least, it bodes well for her putting up with me.  I’m much less intense than he is.”

Ed sidles a step closer, catches Roy’s swinging hand, and seizes it with his.  His fingers are freezing.  How long was he sitting outside to wait?  The instant that they reach the car, Roy’s going to mummify that hand in his scarf and force Ed to hold it in front of the heating vent until this is remedied.

For now, though, he lets himself revel just a little in how tightly Ed clutches his hand.

“Plus you’re cuter,” Ed says casually.

“Are you sure?” Roy asks.  “I think I’m headed rather clearly in that direction—old, grizzled, graying, the glasses, my inability to stop greeting people with the word ‘dumbass’—”

“Yeah,” Ed says, fighting down a snicker.  “That’s definitely you.”

Roy tries not to gaze at him soppily enough to emit noticeable volumes of sap from any of his pores.  “Thank you.”

Ed gives him a sardonic look.  “For thinking that you’re cuter than Doctor Knox?”

“For all of it,” Roy says.

Ed grimaces.  “Yeah.  I figured.  That was a joke.  Y’know, to lighten the mood so you don’t get all weird on me?  Ringing any bells?”

“Several, and loudly,” Roy says.  “I just take such joy in ruining your fun.”

“Asshole,” Ed says, adoringly.

“Your asshole,” Roy says.  “Which I believe makes you a masochist.”

“I think I can live with that,” Ed says.  He pauses.  “You’re—doing okay, though?  I hear the whole catharsis thing can really wear you out.”

“So far, so good,” Roy says.  “I’m… a strange part of me is looking forward to it.”

“All the parts of you are strange,” Ed says.  “But—y’know.  Good.  I guess we’ll see how it goes, huh?”

Roy squeezes Ed’s hand.  Ed squeezes back, and grins up at him, and this—

This feels… right.

Roy smiles as the fading sunlight sparks on Ed’s hair, and the cold air cinches in around them.

“I guess we will,” he says.