Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Admitting that the walls have started closing in would constitute surrender.  He hasn’t earned the right: he hasn’t paid the debts.  He can’t, and won’t ever—the scale shattered a long time ago; the hill is insurmountable; the path unfurls forever.  There is no turning back, and no giving in.

It doesn’t matter.  The dark is swallowing him whole.  No white flag in the world would save him.  No one would be able to see it if he had one to wave.

Riza slaps a file down on his desk blotter, and his breath catches in his throat and then shudders clear.  Her eyebrows start to draw together, so he flashes a blindingly bright iteration of the roguish grin.  She’s unlikely to forget, but it’s possible that he can convince her that it was a trick of the light or a figment of her imagination.  Roy Mustang doesn’t flinch away from every unexpected sound.  Why would he?  He’s fine.

“Is it lottery tickets?” he asks.  “No, don’t tell me—takeout menus.  And a coupon.  Or even just cash.  It’s cash, isn’t it?  You’re much too kind, Lieutenant.”

“If only, sir,” she says, but her eyes don’t linger on him before she turns on her heel and strides back out, drawing the door shut behind her, so he might have slid it past her this time.

Keeping a sufficient portion of his attention on the room instead of dedicating it to tuning out his team proves… taxing.  Virtually impossible, he supposes, if he wants to try for honesty.  Attempting to monitor the sounds from the spaces outside in order to anticipate any actions made in his direction precludes any sort of useful level of focus on his own work.  He can’t do both.  And trying is making his head hurt like hell.

He pushes the glasses up onto his head, only then to regret it immensely when the nose pads tangle into his hair.  How did Maes ever do this?  A few moments’ struggling manages to extract them, and this time he sets them down on the desk while he grinds the heels of his hands against his eyes and then massages at his temples on both sides.  The ache lies deeper.  There’s nothing he can do.

He should count himself lucky that he can still see the damn glasses when he’s not wearing them—that he can still read most of the form, even; the smallest print starts to fuzz up into indecipherable letter-blobs, but most of it’s distinguishable.  It could be a lot worse.  All of it could be a lot worse.  He has nothing to complain about.  There’s nothing—

The door flings open, crashing against the wall with a sound precisely like a gunshot, ricocheting back and hurling Roy’s heart with it; the skittering tempo of it in his ears makes his head swim and his chest seize up tight—

“Don’t—” he starts, and it’s the way that Fuery freezes, eyes so wide that the sudden terror shows Roy his own reflection, that makes him realize that it came out as a shout.

He can’t.  He can’t; he can’t—not here; he can’t—they would have given up their lives for him a thousand times; they are so much better than he deserves, and they need—

They need the person that he’d like to be.  Not the one he is.

He drags a breath in and holds it for a count of three; his heart keeps pounding, but the sharp sting of his own teeth on the inside of his lip helps to ground him.

“Please,” he says, much more quietly, “don’t slam that door.”

Fuery’s fingers curl closer around the folder in his hands.  He works his jaw for several seconds, and then he smiles—the expression is flat, but the gesture is charitable.

He knows.  Doesn’t he?  He knows, because he’s seen it, because he’s smelled it, because he’s been there, because the blood-thinned mud of the trenches coats his hands no matter how many times he runs them underneath the tap.  He has to know.

“Sorry, sir,” Fuery says, lightly.  “I… got excited about that radio project we were talking about.  I think the amplification system is really going to work.”

“Excellent,” Roy says, trying to remember what that word sounded like back when he knew how to mean it.  “Show me.”

Fuery closes the door quietly once they’re finished.

Hakuro comes back through it like a freight train screaming off the rails.

Riza tried to deflect him when he blasted into the outer office, but that still left the bang of that door, the squeal of its hinges, and the start of a protest in her voice as Roy’s only warning before the disaster blew through his flimsy barrier, too.

“Exactly what is the purpose of this press release?” is apparently a question worth threatening the structural integrity of his entire office for.

“General,” Roy says, holding his voice as steady as he can, keeping his hands folded tightly and his shoulders settled low, “everything that the papers printed was approved by the Führer’s office.  I’m made to understand that he edited some of it personally, a—”

Hakuro’s temper will be his downfall, which would be a more encouraging prospect if Roy didn’t have to weather its tumults until then.

The man’s hands flatten themselves on Roy’s desktop, closer to him than remotely necessary, to make sure that he gets the point as Hakuro leans in, eyes at once sharp and cold and ablaze with… jealousy, likely.  That’s probably what did it.

“You’re a fraud, Mustang,” Hakuro says.  “You wear the war hero title like a badge of honor and then turn around and publicly decry everything we stand for, everything your subordinates went out there and died for, every—”

“With all due respect, sir,” Roy says, and perhaps he’s raised his voice higher than he should, but he can barely hear himself over the pounding of his own heartbeat in his ears, and he has to make sure the words come out right, “you weren’t there.  You can’t possibly—”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Hakuro says.  “Everyone who actually earned their stars knows that the only reason you mattered—the only reason you lasted—is your little party trick.  Take those filthy gloves away, and you’re just some would-be provincial politician who thinks he can sweet-talk his way up to the top and take his pick of who to sleep with once he gets there.”

The pulse of Roy’s heartbeat resonates in his stomach, too—quick, flittering, feverish; his guts quiver with the beginnings of a nausea he knows he has to suppress—

He’s grateful for the glasses, sometimes.  Now, for instance: he can’t make out the details of the vein bulging in Hakuro’s neck, and he can’t tell if any flecks of tirade-borne saliva have speckled the surface of his desk.

“General,” Roy says, measuring out each word, fighting every syllable to modulate the volume and the tone, “while I’m indescribably sorry to hear that you feel that way, if you have any concerns about my qualifications for my rank, you really ought to take them up with Füh—”

One of Hakuro’s hands lifts, the better to curl itself into a fist and slam itself back down on the desktop, and everything in Roy coils up, winds tight, and braces for a blow.

His head spins, and the room teeters, and he clenches his hands around each other in a desperate last-ditch effort to confirm some sort of concrete reality around himself as the echoes of a thousand gunshots riddle his brain.

“I don’t know how you got him into your pocket,” Hakuro is saying, or something like that, or something with words— “But I can promise you, Mustang, that he’s the only one you’re fooling.  The rest of us know a dilettante when we see one, and we recognize disrespect to what every single one of us has worked to build in this place.”

He leans forward.  Roy holds his face completely still as he scrambles to gather the fragments of his willpower, cobbles them together, and narrowly defeats the impulse to lean back.

“You’re nothing,” Hakuro says.  “You’re an impostor and a cheat, and every man of value sees straight through your hoity-toity bullshit charm.  The only reason you’re even here is because Berthold Hawkeye gave you a backdoor into fake power, and you took it like a hungry dog.  Mongrels don’t get to prosper here, Mustang.  Don’t you ever think I don’t have my eyes on you.”

Roy does not say I am not surprised to learn that you don’t have the slightest concept of how alchemy works, let alone my alchemy, let alone the precision and discipline required to use it without obliterating yourself in the process.

He doesn’t say Why, General, that’s much too kind, but aren’t you married?

He doesn’t say Power is power, you imbecile.  You can’t fake it.

He doesn’t say It’s always nice to have a little confirmation that I executed a coup so efficiently that three years have passed, and even now no one who wasn’t involved realizes the extent to which I was responsible.

He doesn’t say anything, because he can’t risk opening his mouth when there are so many screams choking their way up his throat.

He can still see every line that was inked on Riza’s back; the curves and the letters and the sigils superimpose themselves across the vistas, over the rolling dunes and the white walls and the striped pink sashes and the piled-up bodies of the dead.  Cinders float on the air; he can smell them; he can smell the beginnings of the rot beneath; the sun takes no prisoners, shows no mercy, brooks no protests, feels no shame—

He does.

He feels everything.  He can taste the ash; he can hear the cries, the wails, the begging—so many of them begged, when they had time; if they saw him soon enough; if he didn’t murder them from too great a distance ever to see the terror in their eyes.

So many shot back, but what damn difference could it make against a man who had become a force of nature?  No one ever tallied the names of the dead.  No one knows how many lives he ended in that city; no one knows how many of the corpses bore his signature, his fingerprints—

“I will strive to be worthy of your attention,” he says, and his hands keep struggling to shake despite the vise grip they have around each other, but his voice emerges levelly.  That’s a miracle, of a sort.

Hakuro’s lip curls, and the rage in his eyes hasn’t dissipated a whit, but he’s bored of the game now; he’s said what the anger compelled him to say.

“Enjoy the office, Mustang,” he says, straightening, and one hand smooths down over the front of the uniform, probably without him ever registering that it’s moved.  “It’s temporary.”

“All things are, General,” Roy forces out.  Sweat beads hot on his spine; it prickles at his hairline, and his stomach churns, but he makes himself smile and speaks over the chaos of the gunfire in his head.  “Have a wonderful afternoon.”

Hakuro glares, which is typical, and then turns on his heel and strides back out.  His treatment of the outer door leaves the frame rattling; Roy’s head doesn’t fare much better, and the shaking’s moving upward through him from his hands.  His heart doesn’t want to stay in his chest; he’s full of jittering empty bullet casings and the noise—

He waits, counting out the seconds one struggle of a breath at a time, until he’s sure Hakuro will have made it to another section of Command, and then he pushes his chair back, sets his clammy hands down on the desk, and stands.

His entire team is staring back at him when he looks up.  He doesn’t blame them; he must be a wreck.

It’s not… humiliating, exactly, but it stings like shame—being weak, openly, in front of them.  It’s a considerable blessing that he can, of course; knowing that he can trust them not to steamroll him every time his constitution wavers is more reassuring than he can wrangle language to describe, but… all the same.  He wanted to be more.  He wanted to be someone that they could believe in without the sorts of reservations that they must have now.

“Excuse me,” he says, and he locks his knees and sets his shoulders and starts towards the door.

“Sir,” Riza says, very softly.

“Won’t be long,” he says, sweeping past her, keeping his eyes on the doorknob, and he doesn’t even know if it’s a lie.

He takes the halls at a pace too swift to suffer greetings or interruptions; an unpracticed eye would only see the haste and infer importance.  It would take a much astuter judge to detect what’s underneath.

Dignity.  Composure.  Control.  Those are the only weapons that haven’t failed him—the only ones that haven’t cut him open on a double edge; the only ones he can rely on.

He doesn’t run.  He won’t.  Every muscle in him quavers with the urge; the adrenaline beats through him faster by the second, urgent, thoughtless, desperate, giddily intense—all he wants to do is quell it; all he wants to do is silence the screaming, but the last few rational scraps of him know that he can’t afford to submit to its demands.  The reputation is all he has left.  Talk is cheap.  Images are fragile.  He can’t risk it.  He can’t.

So he walks—briskly, swiftly, smoothly, as though the storms don’t soak him; as though he’s never known anything but the calm.  He doesn’t spare a glance for the officers he passes; it’s easier to unfocus his eyes, now, after the damage that the Gate did to them; he nods acknowledgment of the motion of the salutes but doesn’t look at anyone directly—just keeps moving.

His heart thunders; his head roars; he clenches his hands behind his back, but his shoulders keep trying to fold in on themselves; he sets his jaw and tries to think his way through an imaginary chess game; if he’s actively strategizing, he can’t collapse.

That’s the theory, anyway.  The practice proves a challenge: can he make it down this last hall before his knees give way, his lungs give out, his heart explodes, his tumbling mind gives up altogether—?

He can’t even think it.  If he gives the panic an inch, it drags miles out from him.  If he spares it a thought, it will find a voice, and it’s louder than his reason; it’s louder than the instincts shouting at him, prodding at him, needling him to keep himself alive.  If he lets it stake a claim, it will destroy him; he and it both know it can.

He’s fine; he’s fine; everything is fine; he inclines his head to recognize another sharp salute; it’s remarkable that he hasn’t crossed paths with anyone above him.  They don’t tend to stay much later than they have to, he supposes; they don’t frequent the upper levels of the building where the records rooms and the other unglamorous necessities make their home.

It’s an unglamorous necessity that he’s looking for.

He has a favorite one these days: it’s hardly ever used; he suspects most people don’t know it exists.  It’s practically a private retreat at this point, and the fact that it has showers in it hardly diminishes its ability to offer him solitude and silence when he needs them most.

He’s almost there.

The dark behind him has teeth, and it’s fast, and it’s so damn hungry, and he can feel its wet breath on the back of his neck with every step; and he doesn’t deserve to escape it—

Hakuro’s right.  Not in the way he thinks he is, of course: the war was real; the war was much too real; what Roy did in the desert was an ongoing massacre that no amount of politicking can qualify or alleviate or erase.  There are no reparations tantamount to what he wrought.  There is no such thing as an equivalent exchange.

He can make it.  He knows he can; he doesn’t have a choice.  He owes too much to too many to let them down now; he carries too much borrowed faith to sink to his knees in a hallway of headquarters and bury his face in his hands.

He’s running on the fumes of his own resolve now—heart hammering; head whirling; vision blurred around all the edges, fading into black.  Every anvil-ring of his heartbeat feels like it compresses his whole body—like he’s imploding around it; like the whole of him is destined to condense into a neutron star, and if there are any survivors—

Well.  It wouldn’t be the first time that he obliterated just about everything in his wake, would it?  It wouldn’t be the first time that he charted high on the list of the worst creatures that have ever sauntered back and forth across this planet; it wouldn’t be the first time that he crawled through dreck and dragged himself upright and tried to play at humanity.  It wouldn’t be the first time that he fooled the susceptible with the act.

He can see the door.  The fear runs hot—is that ironic?  He can’t remember anymore; he just knows that his blood burns underneath his skin; the sweat simmers; the frantic pulse in his temples and his throat might light an uninitiated man on fire.

Ten more steps—five—three—he reaches out, misses the door handle on his first attempt, grits his teeth, grabs it—

He shoulders through and waits, easing the door shut behind him as best he can when his whole body bears a striking resemblance to an earthquake in progress.  The shower room greets him with silence: no running water; no squeak of toes on tile; no whisper of terrycloth.  He waits, holding his breath for another long, excruciating second—it scrapes defiantly at his throat, an animal seeking freedom; he can hardly blame it, but it hurts—before he turns to the door, presses his palms together, and then applies them to the lock.

It’s flimsy, as barriers between him and the rest of the universe go, but it’ll do.  It’ll hold.  At least for long enough.

Most of his body wants to sag backwards, lean against the door, sink to the presumably bacteria-swarmed damp of the linoleum and just lie still for as long as he can stand the old screams and silences and prayers and curses that accompany his whirling thoughts.

But there’s bile in his throat; he can taste it, and it keeps clawing its way higher the same as the sand does, and the night does, and the dreams do—doggedly, unhesitating, like it owns him.

He staggers forward, casting around for something like balance to steady himself, but the pounding of his heart in his ears must have damaged them too much to serve their secondary purpose now.  He fumbles for the edge of the closest sink, grasps it, leans on it, fixes his other hand on it for more leverage when his knees begin to shake—

The acrid taste percolating in the back of his throat doesn’t usher up anything else—he waits, fighting the breaths in and downward and back up again one at a time, but nothing more follows.  Just the bitterness.  Just a premonition; just a promise of worse to come.

He drags in a deeper breath, lets it out as slowly as he can, and tries to focus on the gleaming brightness of the porcelain in the bowl of the sink.  Silver drain—the kind with two dozen little holes in it, rather than a stopper.  It’s very clean.  He will say that for Central Command: their janitors are and always have been top-notch.  It’s everyone else you have to worry about.

Rinsing his mouth out doesn’t purge the taste; he spits twice, three times, considers cramming his fingers down his throat, reconsiders once he remembers how many pens he’s twirled and spun and tapped against the desk today, and settles for splashing his face with the chilly water instead.  His glasses are still on his desk, aren’t they?  He hopes so.  He hasn’t developed a knack for keeping track of them yet; he never remembers.  He needs to buy an extra pair for the house so that he doesn’t leave himself squinting to the verge of migraines again; that wasn’t his favorite way to spend a weekend, but…

This is better.  This is better, because frigid water against his skin is not a sensation that the desert offered often; he always showered at the end of the day, to scrub as much of the blood and ash as he could eradicate off of himself before he slept.  Maes got into the habit of hoarding water for him to be sure there was a fraction left, but it was tepid at best, boiling at worst, from sitting in the sun until he used it.

The fact that he got water was a privilege of rank.

The fact that he got one night after another to use it was a combination of injustice and abuse of power and luck of the draw that crushed so many other, better people beneath the ever-grinding wheels of the war machine, and—

He was doing so well at determinedly not thinking about it for fifteen seconds at a stretch, there.

He can do this.  He knows he can.  It doesn’t matter if he knows he can; he has to.  He won’t be able to function here—here, now, in this building, at this work; and this work is the only thing on offer that might see him forgiven for a flake or two of the sheets of ash—unless he can get his head under control.

It used to be easier.  Never easy, but rarely this hard.  This part—

It’s another trial he’s more than earned.  He’s in no position to complain; he has no right to resentment.  This is his due.  This is less than his due; his due should be a slow, slow, blood-spattered, agonizing death—brimstone and fire like the world has never seen, greater and powerfully worse than anything he ever dealt.  Pushing through some minor mental torment doesn’t even chart on the scale of what he—

A shower curtain hisses, grommets rattling along the bar, and his head jerks up as his heart-rate surges; he has time to watch his own pupils dilate in the mirror as he hears his pulse start to race in his ears again—a ruthless staccato like machine-gun fire—

“Huh,” a voice says from within the stall revealed by the sweep of a familiar silver hand.  “I wondered.”

This is like one of those dreams with the quicksand pits of blood, where all his muscles freeze despite the sweltering heat.

Ed steps out of the shower stall fully-clothed—even more remarkably, fully-uniformed, without any serious quartermaster violations that Roy can pinpoint—which is unfortunate insofar as most of the alternatives might have startled Roy out of today’s edition of waking nightmare.  Roy finds it very difficult to believe that Ed outgrew his old boots, given that they were immensely oversized to start with, and the feet fitting into the current black and slightly over-buckled model look no larger than those were, but it’s strangely unsettling to see him wearing not a scrap of red.  He is the only person Roy has ever met who can make that color enough his own to shake Roy’s conviction that it belongs to the desert and the dead.

“It was the smacking your hands to the door thing that gave you away,” Ed says, gesturing vaguely towards Roy’s hack-job handiwork on the lock.  “Aren’t a whole lot of people in this building who pat the shower room doors to make sure they’re doing okay, and fewer of ’em who get an energy feedback crackle afterward.”

Roy swallows, weighing his words.  After a moment’s indecision, he decides against trying to fake a smile.  Ed won’t buy it anyway.

“I thought that might be it,” he says.  He tilts his chin towards the shower Ed just emerged from—at the worst possible moment, of course.  Like the old times never ended.  “What are you in for?”

Ed extracts a book from under his arm and holds it up, more as a visual aide than for scrutiny—although perhaps he’s forgotten that Roy can’t make out the title from this distance anymore.  Perhaps he never learned that.  They might never have had that conversation; Roy can’t remember who he told the details, and who he left to piece it together from the context clues.  He’s never liked looking weak in front of Ed, either.  Most likely that’s the single greatest sign of weakness.

“Research,” Ed is saying.  “There’s a new librarian at the main branch who’s… I dunno.  Really into me or something.  She’s nice and everything, but I can’t get any work done there ’cause she just wants to talk to me all the time, and I can’t get anything done in the office ’cause there’s constantly people going in and out, so I asked Lieutenant-Colonel Ross if I could conduct some of my research hours elsewhere, and she’s cool with it.”  He shrugs; the book goes back into hiding.  “Quiet up here.”  Roy can still distinguish the way his eyes sharpen—his focus returns from ranging around the room at large as if he’s seeing it in an entirely new light now that he’s described it, and it fixes far too intently on Roy’s face again—which means that he’s about to make a point.  “I guess you figured that part out.”

“It had occurred to me,” Roy says.

“Guess we can’t say it’s peaceful,” Ed says.

“That,” Roy says, gesturing to Ed from head to toe, and his hand hardly shakes, “is what I would call a low blow.  And then I would add that I expect nothing less, because I have proportionate standards, a—”

“And I’d get so huffy and offended that I’d go full volcanic on you,” Ed says, idly, “and you’d’ve distracted me from the point.”

Roy leans back against the sink—gingerly, but he knows he sells it.  He trusts his limbs enough to risk folding his arms, although the tremor probably undermines him.  Ed will notice.  Ed has gotten much too good at noticing those sorts of things.  “All right.  Would you care to illuminate precisely what the point is?”

“You tell me,” Ed says, eyeing him harder still.  “What’s going on?”  Before Roy can speak, Ed holds up the hand unburdened with literature—the metal one.  “And just as far as fair warning—if you say you’re fine, I’m gonna hit you.”

Roy smiles, thinly.  It almost hurts.  “Violence isn’t the answer, Fullmetal.”

Ed’s gaze doesn’t waver.  “Neither is locking yourself up in the showers every time your brain goes on the fritz.”

Roy can’t help staring at him.  At least some things haven’t changed.  “‘Fritz’?”

“What would you call it?” Ed asks.  “It’s not doing what it’s supposed to.  Problem is you can’t just smack it on the side like a radio and hope the wires settle better now that it knows you’re serious.”  He pauses.  “I mean—you can, obviously, but usually that does more harm than good in the long run.  You know they’re saying now that multiple concussions probably causes all kinds of memory loss?  Makes sense, I guess, but I would’ve been a little more careful back in the day if I’d known that.”

“You were a little everything,” Roy says.  It is not unlike a half-drowned shipwreck victim hurling himself at another drifting spar that he knows quite well won’t hold his weight, but he has to believe that it’s preferable to not trying at all.

“Ran into Sergeant Fuery in the hallway the other day,” Ed says.  “We were talking, y’know, and I asked him how you were, and he said you’d been tetchy since the trip.  I asked him what trip, and he paused a second like he’d said too much, and then he changed the subject.  I thought maybe it was something personal—bad news about a relative or something like that.  But that was a stupid guess.”

Roy knows it’s coming.  He turns towards the sink again, avoiding looking at the mirror, and watches his hands tighten their grip on the rim of the porcelain until his knuckles blanch white enough to match it.  It’s easier not to look, and the rest of this will be difficult enough.

“It was Ishval,” Ed says.  “Wasn’t it?”

“Grumman is convinced that if we make a big show of making peace,” Roy says, slowly, measuring the words out with every breath, “everyone will forget what was done.”  He works the saliva around in his mouth and looks intently at the drain.  “Unsurprisingly, the Ishvalans themselves think otherwise.”

Ed is silent for long enough that Roy almost musters the will to glance at him.

“Anybody come after you?” Ed asks.  “While you were there, I mean.  I know people’re coming after you all the time, more or less.  Anybody in particular up there?”

“Yes,” Roy says.  “Three attempts to assassinate me—three that made it far enough for us to notice, that is.  As far as we can tell, separate organizations.  I’m the only unifying factor.”  He swallows, and he forces the corners of his mouth to turn upwards into something like a smile.  “I don’t blame them.”

“Figures,” Ed says.

That is just enough to overcome the gravity holding his head down: Roy turns to look.  Ed’s face doesn’t shift a centimeter as their eyes meet.

“What does that mean?” Roy asks.

“Exactly what it sounded like,” Ed says.  “That I’m not surprised you said that, given that you’re buried under about ten feet of guilt at the best of times, and it sounds like this little excursion added another five all on its own.”  He draws a deep breath and lets it out slow.  He breaks the eye contact first—to look at the floor as he raises his shoulders again in another lopsided shrug.  “I think there’s probably a part of you that wanted them to do it—kill you, I mean.  ’Cause carrying fifteen feet of shit gets hard, and after long enough, you’re willing to take just about anything if it’ll give you a break.  And I think there’s also a part of you that thinks that you deserve it.”

Roy can’t feel his fingertips, but that’s all right, because he doesn’t need them to scrounge up the last rasp of his own voice.

“Do you think I deserve it?” he asks.

“No,” Ed says, looking at him again.  “You were doing what you had to—”

“What I was ordered to,” Roy says.

“If you hadn’t,” Ed says, “they would’ve cut you down and sent Kimblee through your quadrants, too.  Once it started, it was over.  You couldn’t have stopped it.  Maybe you could’ve deserted the second you saw it for what it was, and maybe you even would’ve gotten away if you’d been quick enough, but it still would’ve happened, and then there’d be nobody here who really understands.  There’d be nobody here who knows shit needs to change and has the power to try to do it.  If you hadn’t been there, we’d be worse off.  They would, too.  No, that doesn’t fuckin’ excuse any of it, on an individual level, but—big picture’s what history’s going to put in the books.  It’s a better picture if you’re in it.”

“It was murder,” Roy says.

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “But murdering you isn’t gonna make anybody else less dead.  Penance is great, Mustang, but if it stops you in your tracks instead of pushing you forward, it’s useless.  Just like everything else in this shitty-ass world.  Either you keep moving, or you quit.”

Roy can’t say The doctors say you should stay as still as possible while you’re actively bleeding.  He hasn’t earned a scrap of self-pity, and Ed has never paid much attention to doctors anyway.

He digs for something—anything—else to offer and comes up empty.  That in itself is a terror that he can’t describe.

“Hey,” Ed says, mercifully, and they both know it.  “Where’s the flask?”

Never mind.

Roy arches an eyebrow.  “I don’t—”

“I’ve seen through your bullshit for years now,” Ed says.  Roy believes it.  “I’m on your side.”  That he doesn’t believe, but Ed extends a hand.  “Give it here.”

Roy looks at the hand extended towards him—really looks.  It’s not purely procrastination, either: Ed’s automail is a marvel of engineering.  The design combines such unprecedented heights of functionality and understated flare that Roy wants to walk to Rush Valley and shake Winry Rockbell’s hand.

Incidentally, walking to Rush Valley would take him very, very far from the rest of this conversation.

“If another part of my body was uncooperative,” he says, slowly, “would you take away the crutch that was the only thing getting me through the day with some semblance of normalcy?”

“I would if it was gonna kill you,” Ed says.  “And I’d break it over my metal knee and throw it back in your face if you didn’t hand it over.”

That sounds… frighteningly plausible, for Ed.

“It’s my property,” Roy says.  “You ca—”

“Stealing poison from somebody is a service to their liver and their life,” Ed says.  “Gosh, I feel so bad.”

Roy folds his arms again.  “I don’t need—”

“To pour whiskey onto your problems?” Ed says.  “Yeah, I agree.  Give it here.”  As Roy sets his jaw, Ed’s eyebrows arch, and then his mouth follows suit, wryly.  “Let me put it this way.  Neither of us is leaving this room until you cough it up, Mustang.  You and I both know I can kick your ass on a good day if you don’t have your gloves on first, and somethin’ tells me this isn’t a good day anyway.”

Roy wouldn’t fancy his odds overmuch even if his knees were holding steady, which they are currently not particularly inclined to do.

It doesn’t mean that he’s admitting anything.  It doesn’t mean that he’s giving in.  This is a simple compromise in the better interests of his heretofore unbroken nose.  He’s starting to sense the years prowling behind him, still mostly in the shadows, but catching up—waiting for him to slip, or slow, or leave a stretch of vitals open for their teeth.  He’ll need his nose intact if he wants to have any charm left at all, pretty soon.

“Heavens,” he says, lifting his hand slowly and deliberately in the hopes that it might stop shaking simply out of courtesy.  Not much luck there, but he slides it into his jacket anyway.  “Threatening a superior officer with bodily harm?  And all this time, I thought you were such an exemplary subordinate.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” Ed says.  “You think I’m gonna forget the whole thing if you move at the speed of molasses?  I don’t have all day here, Mustang.”

Roy goes still and blinks as owlishly as he’s able.  He hasn’t lost his touted and well-practiced knack for contrariness just yet.

He hopes that doesn’t wash away with all the rest.  It’s always looked good on him.

“Don’t you?” he asks.  “What a shame.  I have so many pockets, you see; it may take me several minutes to discover which—”

“If you’ve had that much by four in the afternoon,” Ed says, “you’re gonna get a lot worse than me repossessing your property.  Give it.”

Toying with Ed, for all that the action is its own reward, has summoned a slight downturn to Ed’s mouth that makes Roy wonder if he might be pushing this a fraction too far.

Is Ed really scared for him?  Or is Ed scared that he won’t be able to repay the old debts?  They both know he amounted quite a tally, in the days when Roy bent the rules to make room for all of Ed’s shenanigans, signing off on forms that would have jeopardized the whole trajectory of an enterprising colonel’s career if anyone had realized precisely how long a leash Roy had granted his fiercest little dog.  They fought like children, then, but when the chips were down, Roy opened every door that Ed tried the handle of.  Has Ed sussed out, in the interim, just how much of his desperation rang familiar, and just how many dangerous allowances Roy made and covered up for him as a result?

The most likely scenario is that Ed recognizes a condemned building when he sees one, and he doesn’t want to be blamed for the impending implosion this time.  Ed’s the one renowned for favoring logic over just about everything else, but Roy’s no stranger to the scientific method.  People tend to forget that—to forget that it was alchemy that damned him first.

He fishes out the flask and holds it out into the space between them.  He’s not abandoning the sink just yet; he’s endured enough humiliation here without subjecting himself to buckling knees and a brief interlude splayed out on the floor.  The floor in question looks clean enough from here, but he doesn’t trust Central’s janitors that much.

Ed hesitates for a fraction of a second before stepping forward and snatching the flask from his fingers.  Metal clinks on metal.  It sounds like a cascade of bullet casings, and Roy’s head rings with it, and his heart clenches tight again.

“When you show me a check-in form from a doctor’s office,” Ed says, tucking the flask into one of the pockets just inside his jacket, and it’s hardly Roy’s fault that they include a perfect flask-sized compartment in the uniform that you live and die and kill in, “then you can have this back.”

There is something truly exhilarating about the fact that Ed can still surprise him, and it still registers on the barren flatline stretch of his available emotions as something of a shock.

Terrible, too, of course.  But terrible and exhilarating is better than terrible alone.

“Exactly what do you think that will accomplish?” Roy asks.  “They can’t give me a pill.  Shall I go to a hypnotist, perhaps?  That might be worth pursuing.  You and I are both so credulous; perhaps a few swings of a pendulum will cure me of my absurd notions of how the things I’m guilty of are deeper than most people can fathom.  Or you could come with me, and we could simply hypnotize you into believing that I’d been hypnotized, at which point—”

“Don’t care who,” Ed says, utterly unmoved by the histrionics.  “Or what, or for how long.  But you have to see somebody.”

Roy works his jaw, swallowing half a dozen sharper things to say.  They cut, on the way down, but he deserves that, too.  “Whom would you suggest?”

“Psychiatry as a field is getting bigger by the day,” Ed says, eyes still hard-edged agate.  “There’re gonna be tons of people with no connections to this place, who aren’t gonna spread all your secrets to the people who’d use them against you.”

Roy curls his hands a little tighter where they’re holding him up against the sink.  The porcelain still feels cold.  That must be something like a good sign.

“You want me to talk to someone,” he says.

“Yeah,” Ed says, and his eyebrows shift, but his posture doesn’t—there’s a defiant angle to his hips; in retrospect, no one ever should have outfitted him with a cavalry skirt.  The shape of his waist implies far too many hells without a draping red coat in the way, and Roy intended never to notice those things.  Roy intended never to notice any of it.  “It’s not going to fix everything.  It’s not going to change any of what you did out there.  But it might change you.  And it might help.  For a lot of people, it does.”

“I don’t need help,” Roy says.

And Ed—

—laughs.  Harsh and fast and dry; sun-bright and sandstorm-vicious.

“The nightmares,” Roy grinds out, “and the paranoia, and the… all of it—small-scale misery is a luxury for the living.  The only ones with any right to other people’s pity are the dead.”

“The dead don’t have any use for it,” Ed says, and his eyes stay so cold that Roy’s heart stills for a second.  “They’re gone.  It’s over.  You’re still here.  And needless suffering isn’t going to swap you out for them.”

Roy sets his jaw against the knee-jerk impulse to say Rarely have I needed anything more.

“You’re never gonna wake up one morning and be the same person you were before the damage,” Ed says.  “You have to work with the you that you’ve got.”

Roy watches him for a few more seconds.  This is a game.  This has to be a game.  If he can determine the objective, he can decipher Ed’s strategy, and then—

“Your choice,” Ed says.  He pats his jacket, just over the pocket, with the metal hand, to summon a dull reminiscence of the clinking noise.  “Don’t forget I’ve got a hostage.”

That’s easier.  Ed must know it.  In a way, he’s being kind.

Roy wets his lips.  “Are you going to start sending me ransom letters pieced together from newspaper print?”

“Probably,” Ed says.  “Would that work?”

“I doubt it,” Roy says.

“Me, too,” Ed says.  He smirks, and puts his hand on his hip instead, and Roy might have gone the rest of his life without realizing how absolutely perfect the angles of that body are, if Ed hadn’t caught him when he was just so weak.  “I’ll figure something else out.”

“I have no doubt that you will,” Roy says.  “And I have no doubt that I will regret every moment of it.”

“We’ll see,” Ed says.  He jerks his head towards the door, and his ponytail swings.  “You gonna let me out, or what?”

“Only because you asked so nicely,” Roy says.  He steels himself, tests his knees, finds them relatively reliable, draws a deep breath, and starts towards the door.

After slogging through a few more hours of forced attempts at normalcy, all Roy has the slightest desire to do is drag his body into his house, throw all the deadbolts on the door, hurl himself down onto the couch, and drink until the dark caves in around him.  Is that so much to ask?  If he plays his cards—well, his cups—precisely right, he may just manage to snatch a dreamless stupor out of the jaws of sleep; he may just—

See a light on within the house as he approaches—from the parlor, most likely.  By the color, faintly visible through the frosted glass of the windowpane beside the door, it must be one of the reading lamps.  It couldn’t be the fireplace; no burglar in the world—

There’s something on the door—a little pale square secured to it just beneath the peephole.  A… note?  No burglar in the world would leave a note either.

Roy knows whose handwriting it will be before he makes it up onto the step and tugs the slip of paper free of the tape securing it in place.  Which is good, because all it says is Relax, it’s me.

He folds it up, slides it into his pocket, and pushes one hand back through his hair while he breathes a few more times.  This is fine.  He can handle it.  He can put off his escape into oblivion for a few more minutes while he eradicates a persistent pest from the safety of his house.

He’s in control of this.  He’s in control of himself.  It’s fine.  All of it is fine.

He takes his time extracting his keys from the depths of a pocket and fitting them one by one into the locks.  He’s not quite optimistic enough to hope that it might make Ed squirm a bit; he suspects that the sheer lack of shame is an intractable congenital defect.  Ed’s never been disposed to respect personal boundaries before—at least not when he thought that they were stupid boundaries that shouldn’t have existed in the first place—and Roy doesn’t expect him to start now.

He lets himself in, shuts the door behind himself, turns the three bolts and the lock on the knob, sets down his briefcase, hangs up his coat, and leans down—gingerly; his back has begun to execute myriad minor vengeances for the many years of slouching at his desk—to remove his boots.  Ed’s are arranged next to the umbrella stand, almost neatly; one stands upright, but the other tipped over onto the floor.

“Not that I’m not honored past description by your presence alone,” Roy calls in the general direction of the unlit fireplace in the parlor, “but exactly what are you doing here?”

“Helping,” Ed calls back.

“I’ve always been fascinated by the speed at which language evolves,” Roy says, starting down the hall.  “Why, just last week, we would have called this ‘breaking and entering’.”

“Yeah,” Ed says, and Roy’s close enough now to see the slice of his grin in the lamplight.  “Must be tough to keep up at your age.”

He’s somehow splayed himself out enough to claim the entire couch despite his limited surface area, so Roy drops into the armchair opposite.

“What are you doing here?” Roy says again, with a quarter of the volume and none of the warmth.

The remnants of the smile vanish, and a part of Roy curls forlornly at a loss that he doesn’t have the time to mourn before Ed’s eyes flare defiant instead.

“Same thing as always,” Ed says.  “Makin’ sure you don’t do anything stupid.”

It’s a wonder that the guilt hasn’t smothered Ed by now: he seems to manufacture more of it everywhere he goes.

“I’m not in any danger,” Roy says, which is something like the truth; “and even if I was, I’m hardly your responsibility.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Ed asks, and he actually goes to the trouble of sitting up straight so that he can re-slouch at an angle with more attitude.  It just figures, doesn’t it, that the only thing Roy ever succeeded at teaching him was melodrama?  “Tough shit.  You need somebody here right now, whether you like it or not.  You don’t have to talk to me if it’s such a pain in the ass to acknowledge my existence, but I’m sticking around.”

“You’re not a pain in the ass,” Roy says—partly just on autopilot; partly because it’s been such a long damn day that the dregs of the social niceties are all he has left when he reaches down and scrabbles around for speech.  And partly because then he can add: “I’d estimate you can reach at least my lower back these days.”

“Wow,” Ed says, widening his eyes.  “That’s so original.  I’ve never heard anything that crushingly witty before in my entire life.  You should write a book.  No, you should do a radio show.  Oh, hey!  I’ve got it—you should run the country!  How’s that?”

It shouldn’t sting, but with Roy’s nerves as raw as this week’s worn them, he can’t say that he’s surprised.

He heaves himself back up out of the chair and starts for the kitchen.  “I know better than to argue with you when you’ve got some fool idea that you’re doing the right thing, so… make yourself at home, I suppose.  More at home.  At home with my blessing.”

“Hard to do that when you don’t have any damn food,” Ed calls after him.

“What an unspeakable tragedy,” Roy says.  “If only someone had warned me that I’d be having an unannounced guest, I could have stopped by the store.”

“I mean you don’t have any food,” Ed says.  By the creak, followed by a few soft thumps, followed by the increasing volume of his voice, he’s heading down the hall as Roy stands very still in his kitchen and stares at the items on the countertop.  “Which is weird, first of all, because presumably you eventually have to eat something, since most of my extensive research has indicated that bastards are still classified as human.  And which, second of all, meant I had to go find some so that I could eat something.”

Roy approaches the bags strewn across his counter with caution.  They may yet reveal themselves to be full of snakes.  “You… bought me food.”

“Can’t believe your hearing’s going at the ripe old age of forty-five,” Ed says.

Roy blinks, half-turning.  “I’m thirty-t—”

“I bought myself food,” Ed says.  “Because you’re apparently a secret ascetic, or you’re torturing yourself, or you just don’t have any energy left to care, or whatever it is—but I was hungry.  If there’s some left over when I’m done, I guess you can have it.  It’d be stupid to carry it all the way home.”

Roy listens to his heart beating for a few seconds.  It’s all of those things, isn’t it?  A different blend of them on any given day.

“Quite right,” he says.  “Waste of energy.  Might as well just leave it.”

A better and more relevant question, then: why is Ed squandering some of that golden-hearted goodness on the likes of him?

“What did you get for yourself?” he asks.

“Xingese,” Ed says, crossing to the bags and starting to rip them all open.  “I didn’t know what y… I… liked… from this place… ’cause it’s new, and all… so I just got a lot of everything.”

“That was very kind of you,” Roy says.  “Towards yourself, I mean.”

“I try,” Ed says.  He shoves a little paper container at Roy’s chest.  “Here, I got three of these.  I doubt I can finish more’n two, so have at it.”

“Thank you,” Roy says, and he lets the sincerity filter through into his voice.

Ed looks up and then directly at him—eyes locked on his for a long second, analyzing fast.

Then he quirks a smile, and then he ducks back to the food again.

“Sure thing,” he says.  “You like potstickers?”

They eat more or less in silence, excepting the occasional mouthful-muffled request for a seasoning or sauce that migrated to the other side of the table.  This part’s fine.  This is what Roy would expect from Ed, whose single-mindedness lends itself to a strange sort of appreciation for one sensation at a time.  He suspects that Ed started cherishing food a great deal more when Al could cherish it with him again.  He suspects that Ed tried avidly not to let himself enjoy it up until that point, and that it marked a momentous discovery for both of them when they realized together how wonderful it could be.

There.  That’s good.  That’s a good thing to think about.  That’s a good thing to have in the world.  There are some left; he just has to find them, and hold on tight, and make himself believe that they matter enough to counteract the rest of it.  That’s not so hard, is it?

Ed cleans his plate with the approximate speed and ferocity of an eager vacuum and then pushes it away from himself, sits back, and watches intently while Roy moves the contents of his around with his chopsticks a bit.  It’s not that he’s not hungry—or not that he’s particularly un-hungry, he supposes.  It’s just that he’s not much of anything at all.

Ed swallows, looks at the wall for a few seconds, looks at Roy again, tilts his head, and works his jaw.  Roy braces himself and draws an abstract design through his rice with the leading chopstick.  Modern art.

“You wanna talk about it?” Ed asks.  “Either… y’know.  Today, or the trip.  Both.  Whatever.”

Roy lays his chopsticks down, sits back, and folds his hands on the edge of the tabletop.

“I don’t,” he says, levelly, “but thank you.”

Ed nods once, but he stays upright and tensed in his chair, which can only mean he hasn’t finished.

He doesn’t keep Roy waiting long.

“Have you talked to Lieutenant Hawkeye about it?” he asks.  “Did she go with you?  On that trip.”

“No,” Roy says, “and no.  I would prefer—”

“I’d prefer a pony,” Ed says.  “We’re both gonna be sad, disappointed little boys tonight.  You have to do something.”

Roy watches him.  “No, I don’t.”

Ed’s eyes narrow, and his body tilts forward over the table.  Roy doesn’t retreat.

“Yes,” Ed says, “you do.  Or it’s gonna get bigger, and you’re gonna get worse, and everything you’ve spent all this time building is going to fall apart.  And then you’re not even going to have the choice to deal with it, because it’ll be too late.”

“How portentous,” Roy says.

Ed drums his fingers on the tabletop—the right hand, presumably because it makes more noise.  The scowl sets in.  “You really think you’re better off suppressing all of it?  You really think that?  Or you just think that the shit that you did makes you unworthy of anything kinder than the worst that you can get?”

Ed’s levying it like a challenge so that Roy’s instinct will be to prove him wrong.  He’s gotten much subtler over the years, and it’s a tactic more manipulative than he ever would have been able to execute in the early days, but it’s still rather evident from where Roy sits, and he’s too damn tired to play this game.

“What I think,” Roy says, “is that the barest scrap of equivalency possible is for me to find a way to cope with this on my own.”

Ed sits back, mouth flattening into a thin line.  This is real anger, half-contained—not the showy, explosive rage he flings at other people to make them go away, like an insect with poison colors on the backs of its wings.

“You’re an idiot,” Ed says.

“And a fraud, apparently,” Roy says.  “And a coward who hides in the showers.”

Ed’s mouth tightens a fraction more, and then there’s a flash of teeth.  “I didn’t fuckin’ say that.”

“You wouldn’t,” Roy says.  “But I did.”

He can almost see the calculations unfolding—a hundred-thousand scribbled variables; overlapping functions ushered by a spray of numerals—behind Ed’s eyes.

“Is that what you really think?” Ed asks.

“I don’t know,” Roy says.  “It’s getting difficult to know anything.”

“Fuck it,” Ed says.  “Wild speculation’s almost as good.  It’s gotten me through a lot.”

“I’m not sure that works for everyone as well as it works for you,” Roy says.

Ed plants his metal elbow on the table.  It makes a nice, solid thunk against the wood, and then he leans forward, raising an eyebrow slowly.

“Mustang,” he says, “what’ve you got to lose?”

Roy stares him down, smothering the flicker of anger before it can catch his stomach lining, and then his ribcage, and then his esophagus.  “Do you realize how agonizing it is for me every time your reckless excuses for emotional logic start to make sense?”

Ed claps his free hand over his heart and mimes collapsing against the back of the chair.  “Oh, no, a mortal blow to my wounded feelings.  You fucking cad.”  He sits up.  “You ever consider rock bottom’s actually a great place to be?  Nowhere to go but up.  Everything you do is an improvement.”

“That’s specious,” Roy says, folding his hands, “and you know it.”

“You think you’re gonna get me to shut up by beating me to death with your vocabulary?” Ed asks.

“Hardly,” Roy says.  “I occasionally dare to dream that it might slow you down.”

“Good luck,” Ed says.  He picks up his fork, twirls it, and then sucks on the tines.  “Really, though,” he says.  “What’s your alternative?  Don’t figure the higher-ups would look nicely on you asking ’em to relocate your office closer to the shower room.”

Damn.  Too late.  Roy can feel his blood heating; steam seeps upward, steeps his bones—when it starts to boil, the calm on the surface shatters straight through.  Ed deserves better than that.  Ed’s here because he cares, whatever his reasons; Ed’s here because he feels, inexplicable as it may be, that this is the right thing to do.  That’s what drives him.  That’s why Roy can’t afford to push him away, whether or not he merits a moment of the time.

He takes a deep breath, and then another, and then forces a narrow smile.

“Maybe I could cordon off that back corner and use it as a satellite desk,” he says.  “Install a capacious ‘in’ box to ignore.  Hide behind the curtain every time things started to go south.”

“Hiding,” Ed says, tapping the fork against the edge of his plate—just loud enough that each clink in the slightly uneven rhythm feels like a tiny nail battering through Roy’s skull.  “That’s good.  That’s a great solution.  That’s what we came all this way for—for our last chance at something like a sane fucking country to sit in his office and shake every time the past comes after him, and hide.  That’s what we fought for.  That’s what Fu died for, and Captain Buccaneer, and Lieutenant-Colonel Hu—”

“Don’t,” Roy says.  His pulse beats in his ears, in his fingertips, in his toes—fervently against his sternum, against the back of his eyes—

“Don’t what?” Ed asks.  “Tell you the truth?  This is nothing you don’t already know.  You’re smart, Mustang.  You know.  You know you’re balling up everything everybody else has helped you build and throwing it away if you let this shit get the better of you.  You know the only thing stopping you is—what?  Is it pride?  Or is it just that you’re scared that if you start showing any sign you don’t have it all figured out, the whole damn house of cards will come down?  You ever think maybe it’s coming down whether you like it or not, Mustang?  Who else are you planning to blame?”

How dare he.

How dare this insolent child who’s only ever seen the kindest, softest edges of the darkness—who’s only ever wounded monsters who looked and talked like villains; who’s only ever drawn blood of his own volition, because he was protected from so many sides that he never even saw the deepest corners of the night—

How dare he even speak of what it means, and what’s behind it, and what’s owed, and how damn easy it must be to push it all into the past.

How dare he—

No.

Just before the fury crests into a blood-red wave, a gasp of clear air suffuses Roy’s brain.

No.

He almost cracked.  He’ll have to be more careful.

He takes a breath, and then a second, and then a third.

“You’re trying to make me angry,” he says.  “You’re riling me up on purpose, so that I’ll…” He pauses, extracts his clenched fingers from one another, and re-folds his hands.  “Well, the motive I’m not as clear on.  What was the intention of baiting me into throttling you, exactly?”

“Wanted you to go to jail for murder,” Ed says, mouth twisting up.  “Duh.  Figure they’d straighten you out over there in a hurry.”

Roy looks at him.

Ed sighs, scrubs his left hand down his face, and then pushes it back up, threading his fingers into his hair.

“Tryin’ to get you to feel something,” he says.  “Don’t care what.”

“I feel all kinds of things,” Roy says, stupidly, before his better judgment picks itself up off the floor enough to stop his mouth.  “Far too many, and far too much.  That’s the whole problem; I can’t—I don’t have any control over myself, and the slightest provocation—”

“That doesn’t count,” Ed says, shifting his weight to tilt his chair back to the brink of precariousness, with just his right hand resting on the table for balance.  “Shit you’re actively trying not to feel isn’t the same.  You’re locked up.  You know that, right?  You’re getting buried.  And you gotta blast your way out of there somehow.  It’s only gonna get deeper.”

Roy watches him for a long, long moment—long enough that the chair teeters back and forth three times, and Ed’s gaze stops wandering the far reaches of Roy’s kitchen and darts towards his face again, and then Ed lets the chair fall, and the front two legs slam back down on the floor.

“What?” Ed asks.

“Why are you here?” Roy asks.

“Because of earlier,” Ed says.  “Figured you’d probably installed at least one more deadbolt on the door, which put it into the challenge category, so I had to give it a shot.”

Roy makes sure to blink as slowly and as dryly as possible.  It’s a bit of an art form.  He’s a bit of a virtuoso.

Ed rolls his eyes.  “Fine.  I don’t get to do anywhere near enough stupid hero crap in my new job as I did when you were letting me run around wrecking stuff and then saving people from it, so seeing you struggling with shit was like catnip.  Al keeps saying I’ve got a savior complex.  Guess maybe he’s right.”

Roy raises his eyebrows, also slowly.  He’s excellent at arch, muted surprise, too.

And at humility, obviously.

“Shut up,” Ed says—and then, immediately, “It does so qualify as talking when you’re doing that much with your face.  So shut up.  I owe you one.  Maybe even two.  You pulled out a lot of stops for me back in the day.  My turn to show up and try to make things suck a little less.”

Is he… blushing?

Interesting.

Regardless of the curious condition of the capillaries in his cheeks, Ed shoves his chair back, stands, grabs up his plate, and reaches towards Roy’s, only then to hesitate.

“You done with this?” he asks.  “Or were you planning to pick at it for another half an hour?”

“I don’t ‘pick’,” Roy says.  “I artfully rearrange.”

“Bullshit,” Ed says, snatching up the plate.

“Thank you,” Roy says.

“Don’t get used to it,” Ed says, dumping the dishware in the sink.

“I wasn’t planning to,” Roy says, and that, for once, is the truth.

Roy waits, expecting Ed to stretch, probably extravagantly—he’s imagining both arms up over the head, the left arcing more easily of course; and at least one leg flung out, and a jaw-cracking catlike yawn—and make a comment, take his leave, and go.

How is it that he can still forget how much unholy glee Ed gleans from defying him for its own sake?

Ed has claimed the entirety of the couch again, as well as several volumes from Roy’s library.  He’s made significant headway into the first one by the time the clock hands start creeping towards eleven, and Roy sets his newspaper down.

“Ed,” he says.

The noncommittal noise usually indicates that a small fraction of Ed’s brain has acknowledged the interruption and would like the interruption to cease and desist so that the remainder of Ed’s brain can continue to devote itself to the task at hand.

“Ed,” Roy says again, louder.

This noise, marginally more committal, comes accompanied by a faint growl from the back of Ed’s throat, and segues into a reluctant prying of Ed’s eyes away from the text.  They blink a few times before they succeed in focusing on Roy.

“What?” Ed says.

“It’s a bit late,” Roy says.  He also lists tactful understatement among his many talents.

Ed blinks again, contorts to tip his head back over the arm of the couch and look upside-down at the clock on the fireplace mantel, frowns, and then reconfigures his spine into a better position for eyeing Roy.  “Yeah?”

Roy has also somehow forgotten that Ed can be remarkably unreceptive to hints the size of a supply truck.

“It just occurred to me,” Roy says, as delicately as he can with the exhaustion hauling at every last centimeter of his will, “that if we’re going to call you a cab, it might be wise to do that soon so that you make it home with plenty of time to sl—”

“Okay,” Ed says, wrinkling his nose.  “Comin’ clean—I didn’t do all of that just out of the goodness of my heart and shit.  I—I also kind of—I mean, as an exchange, just… could I sleep here?”

Roy manages to stop his mouth from falling open, but he can’t help the staring; that’s too involuntary altogether to suppress.

“Just crashin’ on the couch for a night or two, maybe,” Ed says quickly.  “It’s—I mean, I’m—having trouble sleeping.  At my place.  Is all.  Because I got so used to listening to Al breathing at night, and then I got used to the little steel chafing sounds, and then right when I got used to the breathing again, he picked up and took off to Xing to go get educated and all that crap, so—”

“Of course you can,” Roy says.

The immediacy of it startles even him, but apparently Ed doesn’t stay surprised for any longer than he tends to stay defeated.  The bright, broad grin splits his face again, and the odd flutter of relief in Roy’s chest—accompanied by some dozen much more familiar flutters of trepidation—makes it seem that he chose the right course.   Perhaps he’s allowed to have that satisfaction unadulterated, just this once.

“Cool,” Ed says.  “Appreciate it.  Promise I’m house-trained.”

“I’m aware,” Roy says.  “You slept on the couch in my office without incident on numerous occasions, including several memorable episodes where I was trying to have a conversation with you at the time.”

“The reports told you why I needed the sleep so bad,” Ed says.  “Redundant for me to tell you, too.”

“Ah, yes,” Roy says.  “Redundancy: the great enemy of the modern world, unrivaled foe of the orderly and efficient.  Inconceivable that your boss should waste a moment of anyone’s time asking for explanations about several rather questionable expense lines where the handwriting looked somewhat more deliberately smudged than usual, as if its originator was trying to make it indistinguishable in the hopes that a hopelessly overworked superior officer might just give up and sign.”

“You were never hopelessly overworked in your life until after Bradley went down,” Ed says.  “And then it was your own fault.”

“Slander,” Roy says.

Ed shrugs, and then the grin returns in full force.  “S’not insubordination anymore, though.”

“Yes, it is,” Roy says.  “And will be as long as I outrank you.  It doesn’t matter if you’re a direct report or n—”

Both of Ed’s hands slap themselves over his ears, vigorously enough that the right one probably aches something awful.  “La, la, la, can’t hear you; whatever you’re saying’s probably crap anyway, sir, based on piles and piles of concrete scientific data I’ve collected over the years from putting up with y—”

Roy folds his glasses, tucks them into his shirt pocket, sets the paper aside, and levers himself up out of the chair.  “Shall I get you some linens?”

One hand lifts, as does one eyebrow.  “It’s a couch, and you’re doing me a favor.  Neither of those things needs sheets.”

“Hospitality is dead, I see,” Roy says.  “If only someone had sent me a memo.”

“You would’ve ignored it,” Ed says.

“Very likely,” Roy says, starting for the hall.  “Humor me, just this once.”

“Really don’t, though,” Ed says, and a rustle followed by footsteps means he’s trailing.  “I’ll just leak machine oil all over ’em.  It’s gross.  And it’s real hard to get the stains out.”

Roy sets a hand on the banister and glances back at him.  “I am an alchemist, Edward.”

The scowl reprises its favorite position and its fabled intensity.  “I don’t want you to go to any stupid trouble.  Just—I went home at lunch and fed the cats anyway, and… I’m just—it’s a pain in the ass bein’ all alone over there.  So I’m putting you out, when I acted like I was doing something nice for you, so—”

“You did do something nice for me,” Roy says.  “Several things, one of which involved sustaining me nutritionally, which I’m told is an important element of survival most of the time.”

“Don’t be a smartass,” Ed says.

“Then don’t feel guilty for negotiating an arrangement that benefits you slightly,” Roy says.

Ed eyes him.  “This is why we gotta take care of your shit,” he says.  “Politics needs you.”

“Politics doesn’t need anyone,” Roy says.  The first step of the staircase always feels higher than the next few, though the last four usually seem inches taller than even this one.  “It certainly doesn’t need me more than I need it.”

Ed leans on the railing.

“Then I guess you’d better get your shit together,” he says.

Roy won’t let the brat wind him up—not after this pathetic excuse for a day; not after everything he crawled through to get to it in the first place.

He tops the stairs.  He breathes in, and then out again.  The rest is simpler, isn’t it?  It has to be.

“How many pillows would you like?” he asks.