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Roy knows what sort of a day they’re in for when Ed stomps into the outer office twenty minutes after twelve. Ed’s break between classes starts at five minutes to the hour and concludes at five minutes to one, which means that he prioritized hoofing it to headquarters over any sort of lunch.
The way that Ed slams the door and the weariness of his affectionate greetings to the team don’t hurt, either, but the bottom line is that Roy has gotten to his feet by the time Ed lets himself into Roy’s office.
He slams that door, too.
“Hand it over,” Ed says, jaw set, eyes fixed on the carpet so hard that he doesn’t even seem to notice the fact that Roy has already undone half the catches on his jacket. “Please. Thank you. Whatever.”
The first time in their cohabitation that Ed nested, Roy hadn’t understood the breadth of it, and therefore hadn’t had the slightest idea what was going on. Ed had been so angry that he had—embarrassingly enough in retrospect—mistaken it for nothing but a nasty fight for the first two days. It hadn’t been until he’d dourly let himself in on the third night and found Ed passed out in the bedroom closet, half-buried in a pile of Roy’s laundry, with circles under his eyes that could have cradled sailing ships, that Roy realized that Ed had been fighting his instincts all along. Roy had been collateral damage right up until he’d interfered and made it worse.
He’d gotten over the guilt rather precipitously when he’d curled up around Ed and clung on tight enough to summon purring at such a volume that Ed woke himself up with it. Ed immediately tried to pick a fight about that, but this time Roy was ready, and simply pushed Ed’s head back, nipped his throat, and shoved him back into the laundry. And that was that.
Unsurprisingly, it took quite a lot longer and more than a bit of whiskey to get a verbal explanation out of Ed. He described it as being unpleasantly, unsettlingly similar to his automail—a mess of impossible-to-predict phantom pains and uncontrollable, intractable bone-deep aches that shake him like a rag doll for a variable interval that seems like it might never end. Even on suppressants, it whips itself up into a hurricane of background noise that drowns out his coherent thoughts and pries his own personality out of his reach, and it’s all that he can do to hold onto something that seems stable and try to survive. He rotates through the closets around the house because supply closets and the tragic little cubby of a thing that they used to offer in the dorms were the only places isolated enough to dull the deafening roar of it to a distant howl when he was growing up.
Roy does feel that he deserves some sort of an accolade for never having made the obvious coming out of the closet joke—not even once.
That probably means that the joke is on him, all things considered, and Ed considered most of all.
Roy shrugs off his uniform jacket, letting it crumple on his desk chair, and then starts towards Ed while he finishes unbuttoning his shirt.
Ed stands stock-still, rooted to the floor and maintaining the vigorous glare that he’s directing at it. The silver fingers of his right hand gleam as they curl slowly and uncurl slower still—measured movements—even before Roy gets close.
When Roy gets close, Ed’s fingers wrap into a fist so tight that Roy can hear the metal creak.
“How was your morning?” Roy asks, keeping his voice very low, very soft, and very gentle—as close as sonorously possible to the environment that Ed would be securely bundled up in right now, if he wasn’t so devoted to his work.
“Sucked,” Ed mutters, but the tension visibly eases out of his shoulders, and then a shudder goes through him as he releases his next breath. He swallows, sighs, and hangs his head. “Just the usual. Bunch of fuckin’ rich kids who already think the world’s their oyster, and somehow I gotta be the one who makes them understand that treating alchemy like that always ends in murder.”
Roy raises his left hand slowly, lays it against Ed’s cheek, and guides Ed’s heavy head gently in against his neck. “For what it’s worth, if anyone can accomplish the impossible on that front, it would certainly be you.”
“Fuckin’ flatterer,” Ed mutters. He nudges his nose in against Roy’s neck, and the next exhale that shimmers across Roy’s shoulder feels stabler by far. “Think I might’ve finally met my match, anyway. Stubbornness will only get you so far with these little fucks. You know half of them have private chefs at home? Half of them. I counted.”
The conversation about income equity barriers to quality education is probably better suited to a time when Ed is less perilously on-edge. And a time when he doesn’t have another four and a half hours of dealing with the results of it still ahead.
“You could have a private chef at home,” Roy says, stroking his hand slowly down over Ed’s hair. He can’t help savoring the scent of it, the scent of Ed’s skin— “I could resign right now, to get a good head start on dinner.”
The bleary laugh makes his skin tingle and his heart clench, and the growl of a voice at the core of him says merely Mine. “Like fuck. Captain Hawkeye’d kill you. Then I would. And you’d probably burn it.”
Ed always gives off heat, to Roy’s perception—a beacon in the night, utterly unmistakable. It was fucking torture, at the start of this, when Ed had returned from Xing and Creta and the ruins of Xerxes and several other sun-blistered places besides, nineteen and warmly tanned and suddenly aware of exactly how appetizing he could be. He had positively glowed in Roy’s peripheral vision. Roy had fought it for weeks—weeks on end of excruciating dreams and fervent, feverish grappling for self-control. Ed had smelled like the first step into a candy store, when the concentrated sugar steamrolls all of your senses at once. Ed had smelled like sex and absolution.
Now Ed smells like home.
And sex, too, frequently.
“I am extremely confident,” Roy says, unzipping Ed’s coat and easing it off of his shoulders, “that I would improve enough to stop burning things if I could dedicate more time to it.” Ed has a soft wool sweater on under that, which Roy has to roll up off of him, and he obediently raises his arms before pressing his face right back into Roy’s shoulder. Roy’s brain fizzes. They can’t fuck in the office—they can’t. Riza would pry Roy off of Ed, put sixteen bullets in him, and hurl his corpse right out the window. Also, Ed’s lunch hour isn’t long enough to get to anything good. “Would you like me to pick something up on the way home?”
“No,” Ed mumbles. Roy unbuttons Ed’s shirt—that is, his shirt, on a familiar loan—next. It fits Ed well in the shoulders, which always makes Roy’s mouth water a little extra. Far worse is the way the sleeve cuffs hang past Ed’s knuckles, and the tails drape down over the curve of his ass. “Don’t waste fuckin’ time. Or money. And don’t work late, you hear me?”
Roy peels his own shirt off first, then Ed’s. Ed steps back, scowl instantaneously renewed, snatches Roy’s shirt out of his hands, and threads his arms through the sleeves to haul it on as quickly as possible.
He’s not quite quick enough to prevent Roy from catching a gut-wrenching little glimpse of the bruised-in marks of his own teeth before they’re covered by the collar, but, to be fair, Roy is watching very close.
Roy puts Ed’s shirt on while Ed mutters half-voiced vituperations at the buttonholes of the new one. Roy has a clean spare folded up in one of the desk drawers in case of rain and other undignified emergencies, but that one won’t wreathe him in the smell of Ed even after he adds his jacket. If he’s very, very lucky, Riza won’t notice how much it distracts him for the rest of the day.
“I won’t work late if you won’t,” Roy says as Ed yanks the sweater back on over his head so hard that it musses the hell out of his already disastrous ponytail. “Stay still.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Ed mumbles, taking the coat draped over Roy’s arm, but he doesn’t squirm any more than usual as Roy tries valiantly to fix his hair.
“I wasn’t,” Roy says, giving in to the urge to run his fingers through the beautiful silky length of the tail as soon as he’s tied the band. “It was a cordial suggestion made with only your best interests at heart.”
“Save the bullshit for the boardroom,” Ed says. Roy has never in his life seen someone manage to zip up a coat quite so aggressively.
Ed shoves his hands into the pockets and then vacillates for a second, eyeing Roy. Roy attempts to look as neutral as humanly possible despite how badly he wants to sink his teeth into the meat of Ed’s protruding bottom lip. He knows damn well that all he has to do is not fuck this up, and the scent compulsion that drowns Ed’s considerable willpower on days like today will do the rest.
Sure enough, he only counts a handful of heartbeats before Ed darts in to smush his face into the side of Roy’s neck for the length of one more long, deep breath.
“Fuck me,” Ed mumbles into his skin, and before Roy can make the obvious response, Ed is stepping back and squaring his shoulders. He gives Roy another warning look. “I’d say ‘Don’t work too hard’ if you were even capable.”
Roy puts on the journalist-friendly beaming grin for him. “No danger of that.”
Ed rolls his eyes, but he doesn’t pull away when Roy raises his right hand, kisses his first two fingertips, and presses them to the side of Ed’s neck over the marks of the most recent bite.
“Be as good as you’re capable of, asshole,” Ed says, turning on his heel just a touch too slowly to hide the faint flush climbing his cheeks. “I’ll see you tonight.”
Roy waits until the fingers of Ed’s right hand clink against the doorknob before letting just a little iron into his voice. “Ed.”
He probably deserves the glower he receives over Ed’s right shoulder.
He modulates the hard tone with a bit of honey. “Just take it easy, all right? Please. For me.”
“If I took it any easier,” Ed says, swinging the door open, “I’d be dead. Get back to work already, wouldya?”
The open doorway gives Roy a perfect view of Riza standing by the filing cabinets, looking delighted and more than a little proud.
Roy balances on the tightrope about as well as he could have hoped. Ed’s scent rises from his own collar for the entire duration of the afternoon, but he keeps his head down and forges through the work as swiftly as he can. He owes it to Ed. He promised he’d come home in good time.
It’s not that Ed needs him, precisely—getting his head and his heart around that took some concentrated effort. Ed doesn’t need anyone, except for Al.
But Roy can make Ed’s life markedly better.
And he wants to.
He always wants to.
In the darker corners of his mind where he’d imagined bonding, he’d always thought that it would feel like an obligation—a duty, not a desire.
Ed, of course, turned every single one of his haphazard predictions methodically inside-out. And then stepped on them. And then set them on fire.
Roy’s good with fire, at least.
The lights are on in the entryway when he drives up, but since Ed’s classes let out before five, that’s almost always the case. Ed’s boots lie tipped over next to the shoe rack—some days, he manages to put them on the shelf. Tonight, though, the bootlaces trail across the floor like desiccated worms. Roy sets them upright on the top shelf and lines his up beside them, which is not especially kind on his back. Aging is, as it happens, crap.
He tries to keep his footsteps soundlessly light as he proceeds down the hall to the bedroom and peeks through the doorway. Ed isn’t in the bed—between the two of them, they managed to leave it a chaotic mess, but the maelstrom of twisted sheets wouldn’t hide a huddled body even of Ed’s size. Something smells good. Roy eases the door of the bedroom closet open, peers through the gap, finds it empty, and goes back out into the hall to try the coat closet next.
The hinges don’t squeal—he’s too careful for that. But the strip of light that the crack in the door admits around his own shadow paints a band of yellow across Ed’s face where he has interred himself in a small mountain of coats and blankets.
A very small mountain, it should be noted, but Roy has a vested interest in living to see the dawn.
Luck isn’t with him, in any case: the light spilled directly across the center of Ed’s eyelid, which makes Ed scrunch his face up, bury it in the blanket, and growl, “Shut the fuckin’ door.”
“Yes, sir,” Roy says, sidling in and drawing it gently closed behind him, attempting not to acknowledge the fact that the growl just burrowed into his ribcage and sucker-punched his libido at the same damn time. “Of course, sir. Thank you, sir.”
A fragment of the light seeps in from the crack beneath the door. By the time Roy steps carefully over the scattered papers on the floor and crouches down, his eyes have nearly adjusted, and he can see that Ed has raised his head just enough to glare a little more. “You actually think you’re funny, don’t you?”
“I have it on good authority that I’m funny,” Roy says.
They say “-looking” at the exact same time, and Ed cracks a smile that he isn’t quite quick enough to hide in the blankets.
Roy sits down on the nearest available coat sleeve and attempts to find a way to shuffle in and wrap both arms around Ed that won’t displace any of the pockets of warmth. “How are you holding up?”
“By force of will,” Ed mutters, none too surprisingly, but a faint sigh escapes him when Roy strokes a hand through his hair. “How was your day?”
“Better when you were in it,” Roy says, which is, of course, the truth; but which also prompts Ed to make violent fake-vomiting noises into the nearest pillow, which is satisfying in its own right.
Roy settles in against Ed’s warm left shoulder, but he doesn’t want to close his eyes. Letting his gaze roam over the sharp angle of Ed’s jaw where it’s softened by the silken fall of his hair is a better pastime, regardless of how tired he is.
“Need you to do something,” Ed mutters.
“Consider it done,” Roy says, which is a more efficient articulation of I’d burn the world to the ground and build you a new one if you even whispered the word.
“There’s fries in the oven,” Ed says, without even lifting his head. At least that explains the second-best smell in the residence. “Wedges? Fries. What-the-fuck-ever. Your semantics shit isn’t… shut up.”
“I haven’t said anything,” Roy says.
One dark fan of eyelashes lifts. Ed’s pupils are enormous, but the intent is unmistakable all the same. “You were thinkin’ it. So shut up. Anyway. I ate, like, half of ’em, but I made a lot, and the oven’s on low ’cause I was keeping ’em warm in case I wanted more, but with my fucking luck it’d burn the house down if I just left it on all night.” He wriggles a little deeper into the blanket, emanating the usual fascinating combination of bone-deep comfort and undiluted resentment. “And I like this stupid house.”
“If I rescue them,” Roy says, “may I have one?”
Approximately twenty percent of it is that Ed’s craving cooking is, in fact, extraordinary, but the other eighty is for the sheer joy of provoking him. One of Ed’s eyes opens a sliver again, and somehow manages to glow malevolently despite the circumstances. “Are you the one whose biology is fuckin’ him up the ass with a rusty spike and no goddamn motherfucking lube?”
Roy offers him a winsome smile that very predictably exacerbates the glare. “I suppose not.”
“Then no,” Ed says, “you fuck.”
Roy runs a fingertip around the shell of Ed’s ear, shepherding his hair behind it. Ed shivers, and then makes a furious noise—one that resonates so deeply from the back of his throat that it makes Roy’s cock throb without the slightest bit of preamble.
“That’s fair,” Roy says, in the soothing voice that Ed claims to hate but never fails to respond to at times like this. “I’ll leave them for you.”
Sure enough, the grumbling continues in earnest, but Roy can see Ed’s body relaxing as the gentle stroking back of his hair continues.
“Fucker,” Ed mumbles. He prods a fingertip into the center of Roy’s chest and then curls his fist and leaves it resting against Roy’s sternum. “Guess you can have… one. Maybe two. If you’re good.”
Roy leans his head on Ed’s for a second. “I intend to be exemplary. Shall I go get them? I’ll be right back.”
He plants a hand on the floor—fortunately, his palm is intercepted by the cushioning influence of a puffy coat instead of meeting hardwood—and levers himself up to his feet. The reluctance is tempered by a hazy sense of responsibility. Ed asked him for something. He’s going to do it.
He’s also going to eat as many of Ed’s wedges as he can get away with.
“Hurry your ass up,” Ed mumbles, and a previous Roy—a very sad man indeed, all empty rooms and polished knives—would have interpreted that as an admonishment to leave.
Tonight’s Roy recognizes it for what it really is: a plea that he comes back as soon as possible.
He nudges his toe against Ed’s ankle and tries not to devote any more attention than necessary to the way his back aches. “Go back to sleep, you brat. What do you want for dinner?”
“I had dinner,” Ed says into the blanket. “It was fries.”
Roy nudges more pointedly, and Ed kicks at him, and he narrowly dodges, and the bleary string of curses follows him out into the hall.
Gently, gently, he shuts the door.
The fries—or wedge-fries, or possibly fry-wedges—are good. Ed had a heavy hand with the garlic powder, the paprika, and the cayenne, and he’s going to be able to taste all three of them in Roy’s mouth even after only the authorized amount of samples. Roy packs the rest of them into a container in meticulous little rows and lays a lid on sideways so that he steam can continue to escape. He puts his head into the fridge. Ed needs something heartier than fries, whether he likes it or not. There’s something mummified in foil and labeled grnd bf, which is probably not Grand Boyfriend, since Roy’s standing right here. There are carrots. There’s tomato sauce. Roy is a resourceful scavenger, which he thinks is more practical most of the time than being a creative chef.
He cheats at boiling the water, because he doesn’t want to wait. He cheats a little at the tomato sauce, too.
Waiting on the pasta gives him time to put a tray together. He has a premonition of tomato-sauce-stained blankets that look like they’re splattered with blood. He lights a candle. Ed will deride it mercilessly and then tellingly leave it be. Roy digs up one of the nice forks, more for its own sake than because he thinks Ed will even notice the difference.
He’s blown the better part of half an hour before he makes his way back to the closet with his prize, but evidently Ed has mustered up a characteristic stubbornness-based second wind. The door is open, his jaw is set, and there are partly-graded papers strewn across his lap.
“You think their parents will sue me for failing them if they deserve it?” Ed asks.
Roy places the tray very carefully in arm’s reach before he sits. “Yes. You could c—”
“I am not going to cancel class,” Ed says, in a muted impression of the usual derisive snarl. “Are you fucking kidding me? ‘Hey, kids, I’m postponing your final exam ’cause my stupid fuckin’ hormones decided that I’m supposed to split the difference between hibernating and trying to get fucked six ways from Sunday.’”
Roy reaches up and strokes his hair back again. Ed’s eyelids flutter for a second before he recovers the scowl. “Both can be arranged.”
“No,” Ed says, eyeing him.
And Roy, somehow, simply says, “All right.”
“Damn it,” Ed says. He picks up the fork in his right hand instead of relinquishing the pen clutched in his left. Tomato-based bloodstains are imminent. That sort of thing used to make Roy see red figuratively, too. “How about a low D? Is a D lawsuit-worthy? We can’t afford to fight ’em all.” He taps the end of his pen on the page, twisting the tines of the fork into the bowl without even looking at it. Already had dinner is a familiar and fairly meaningless phrase around here, so Roy isn’t terribly surprised. “Do you think they just need positive reinforcement? Al says I should ‘learn to speak their language’, but I can’t tell if he meant encouragement or monetary bribes. I’ve been trying to do the encouragement thing, and a few of them are responding, but with some of them, it’s like beggin’ a brick wall to give a shit about academic excellence. I think the brick would probably be more motivated.”
Roy reaches across him, pries the pen out of his fingers, sets it aside, takes Ed’s left wrist, and moves it over to the fork. “The brick is probably destined for the military.”
“Yeah,” Ed says. His right-hand fingers clink as he—mercifully—picks up the bowl and holds it directly beneath his chin. Roy’s shirt and the blankets might both survive this without a restorative alchemy intervention after all. “Get ready to report to Lieutenant-General Brick McNo-Show.”
“I think we’ve met before,” Roy says. “If I recall correctly, he got embarrassingly drunk at a gala because his wife was flirting with me the whole time in the hopes of scrounging up five minutes of intelligent conversation.”
Ed manages to snicker around spaghetti. Wonders never cease. “She was barkin’ up the wrong tree there.”
Roy elbows him, albeit gently—he bruises easily when his body is on a self-destruction mission like this, and there’s tomato sauce to consider besides. “Very true. I haven’t the slightest idea how you put up with my inanity. It’s a miracle that you haven’t smothered me in my sleep yet.”
“Your sleep is fine,” Ed says, slurping the next string of pasta entirely for the purpose of making it worse. “It’s when you’re awake that it’s a problem.”
Roy elbows him a little harder. The blankets will soften it a bit. “I love you, too.”
Ed still sometimes struggles to navigate the foggy crags of the chasms between the words—bond and love and choice and necessity and codependence. Roy thinks, sometimes, that it can all be wrapped up into balance: an equivalency of sorts, even if it’s challenging to pin it down.
“Shut up,” Ed says, but his fingers tightened around the fork. “What are you gonna eat? The candle? I assume that’s why you brought it.”
Edward Elric, die-hard romantic, strikes again.
“I can’t help it,” Roy says. The fact that Ed’s shoulders are relaxing draws him in, and he snakes an arm around them again. “I had a hankering for some wax.” The way the tines of the fork press into his lip is torture. Roy may have to take a nap as an act of self-preservation. “How is it?”
“Keep your day job,” Ed says. At Roy’s expression, he has to put the fork down in the bowl to laugh, and it crinkles up his eyes and shakes his shoulders, and he looks less exhausted in that instant than he has in days.
Roy makes a point of looking as dejected as possible to try to extend the amusement. Ed twirls the fork in the pasta and then holds it out to him, and he obediently opens his mouth.
He considers, chews, and swallows before he speaks, which is still the appropriate order. Ed has a tendency to throw revelatory announcements in the middle somewhere. “I think it’s great.” He wouldn’t be angling towards politics if he couldn’t stretch the truth, but for a few minutes’ work to cram some nutrients into Ed’s body, he really did do rather well. “I have an extraordinarily bright future in the privately-funded culinary arts,” he says, in the hopes of pushing Ed’s sardonically-raised eyebrow even higher. “Tomorrow, I may just quit on arrival so that I can follow my real passion at long last.”
“Goody,” Ed says. He eases one of the papers out from under the edge of the tray and holds it closer to the candle to read. “If I’m gonna be the only breadwinner around here, I definitely can’t afford to get sued.” He squints at the lackadaisically loopy handwriting that veers around all over the page—apparently these children’s parents or previous instructors didn’t even bother teaching them to write between the lines, which seems shortsighted considering how many unearned checks they’ll have to sign over the courses of their lives—and lays the fork down in favor of the pen again.
“Ed,” Roy says, in a very gently warning tone.
Ed’s jaw is set again before his eyes even shift sideways far enough to glare. “What are you whining about? Your plan worked. That’s your thing. I’m feeling better, so I’m gonna get some more work done before this…” He gestures in an ambient way. Roy is fleetingly grateful that he didn’t do that with the fork, at least. “…gets worse, and then… I think tomorrow… I mean, it’s gotta be halfway over.” Roy clears his throat as delicately as possible, but Ed just pushes the blankets around until he’s cleared enough space to rest the paper on his metal knee and make a definitive red mark. “I’m not giving in to this shit. You know I’m not.”
Roy knows.
Ed’s ferocious, unassailable conviction that he’s the master of his own fate was one of the things about him that Roy admired most long before he fell in love with it, too.
That doesn’t mean that he has to sit here and watch Ed grind himself down to nothing for the sake of defiance alone.
“Finish your expertly-prepared, lovingly-crafted five-star meal first,” Roy says, infusing it with just the slightest hint of a command, “or I will tie you to the bed tomorrow to make you rest.”
Ed’s eyes flick up to his, but Ed’s hand goes still.
Roy watches him for a few seconds. Ed has some grounds for fighting it, to be sure: his personality has overpowered some of his instincts so much that it blotted them out altogether.
But some of them are waging wars on his system that he won’t—that he cannot—win. That’s the point, in a way. That’s why they’re here. They’re biologically designed to watch each other’s backs, protect each other’s edges, and fill each other’s gaps in every sense, although Roy wishes it was only the fun one. Ed is simply too intelligent—and too stable, now; too self-aware and too mature—not to have identified the shape of something he can’t hope to conquer. If nothing else, he has to have learned from everything that his life has hurled at him that there’s no shame in needing help. There’s no shame in giving in, sometimes, when the only alternative is letting the battlefield consume you. There’s no shame in leaning on someone who loves you past expression, and in trusting in the understanding that they’ll be leaning back before too long. There’s no shame in admitting that the world can be too big to get your arms around, let alone to shoulder. There’s—
“Was that supposed to be a negative incentive?” Ed asks. “Because it really didn’t sound like one. Is this how you threaten people in the boardroom, too? I don’t know how you ever get anything done. Oh, wait.”
Roy curls his fingers around Ed’s left wrist. He pries the pen out of Ed’s fingers. He lays it on the floor, and replaces it with the fork again.
“Eat,” he says, “you heinous little shit. I’ll get you some aspirin.”
Ed looks completely nonplussed as he twists another heaping bite of spaghetti around the tines of the fork. “Get yourself a bowl while you’re up. It’s kinda good.”
The entire cosmos is well aware that Roy deserves this.
The main accomplishment of the evening is managing to wrangle Ed out of the closet and into the bed. Roy’s back is killing him. Ed, sitting up in bed, is still inexplicably extracting ungraded sheets from the endless stack of papers that has migrated to the nightstand. Is it possible that he’s generating new ones out of thin air in the hopes that Roy will eventually interject? That would defy the laws of physics, but not the laws of Ed.
“I shouldn’t wait to go in before I quit,” Roy says, mostly to the ceiling. The scratching of the pen on this one sounds quite a lot like a lawsuit in progress. “I should call it in first thing in the morning, so that I can stay here and make you breakfast.”
“Great,” Ed says. “That’ll give us a five-minute head start to hide before Captain Hawkeye shows up with a rocket launcher and a couple of grenades.”
“We can run away to Creta,” Roy says. He stretches. “Change our names. Live on the beach.”
Ed snorts. “I’d like to see you go two days without indoor plumbing.”
“I didn’t say we were going to live on the beach without indoor plumbing,” Roy says. “That’s in the fine print—Alchemist, be thou for the people, and also for adding running water to your fantasies of malingering.”
“You already malinger,” Ed says. “You’re a master malingerer. You’re the only reason I know the meaning of that word. If you malinger any harder, you’ll cease to exist. I don’t think living on the beach is all it’s cracked up to be anyway, whether or not you jury-rigged us a toilet with your sacred gift of creation.”
“Stop hijacking my infeasible narrative,” Roy says. He stretches again, far enough to nudge Ed’s thigh with his elbow this time. “Put those miserable things away and go to sleep, love.”
“They’re not gonna grade themselves,” Ed says, pointedly flipping a page. “And the aspirin killed my headache, but that’s probably only temporary. Gotta use this time while I can.”
“There’s no grading in my alchemically-enhanced oceanside bungalow in Creta,” Roy says, snuggling up with Ed’s right knee for lack of any better option. He is utterly unsurprised by the fact that Ed promptly rests a graded paper on top of his head. “Exams are verboten. Red pens are outlawed.”
Ed lays another page on top of him. “Forgive me if I don’t take the rules too seriously when they’re set down by the guy who instigated the governmental coup.”
Roy closes his eyes and presses his cheek to the side of Ed’s thigh. Ed is warm. He smells spectacular. He’s breathing evenly, and there isn’t any pain radiating off of him in quivering waves that make Roy’s skin prickle with the certainty of something being wrong. “You’re incredible. You somehow manage to get ruder every single day. Even when I think that you can’t possibly best your previous records, you always find a way.”
Ed moves the papers aside and pats Roy’s head—relatively gently—with his left hand. “What are you going to make me for breakfast?”
“Eggs benedict,” Roy says. “Handmade hollandaise. I’ll also get up very early and go pick blueberries and make jam.”
“They grow a lot of blueberries on the beach?” Ed asks.
“No,” Roy says. He drags his fingertips along the inside of Ed’s thigh, which is arguably cheating. Ed shivers deliciously but doesn’t pull away. “But since me getting up very early is also pure imagination, I figure some blueberries can’t hurt.”
“Guess our bungalow has a pretty tricked-out kitchen,” Ed says.
“The tricked-outiest,” Roy says. It feels like the weight of the day has infused all of the blankets, and they’re slowly molding him to the mattress. “Can we sleep now?”
“You can,” Ed says, but this time the affectionate gesture bestowed on Roy’s cranium is much more distinctly hair-stroking than head-patting. “I’m gonna try to finish these.”
“How about if I ask nicely?” Roy says. It is very peaceful here, nestled in against Ed, partway under the covers with his eyes shut, but it would be even more peaceful if they were sleeping.
“Depends,” Ed says, none too surprisingly. “How nice is ‘nicely’?”
“Pretty bitty please,” Roy says, “with hollandaise on top.”
Ed pets his hair a little more. Distracting him from the grading is half the battle, so Roy counts that as gained ground. “You didn’t get enough to eat, did you?”
“I’m fine,” Roy says.
“I coulda told you that,” Ed says, so matter-of-factly that Roy’s heart swells in spite of him. Then there is a less-promising pause. “Wait. Did you brush your teeth?”
Roy opens his mouth to say that oral hygiene can go straight to hell, and he’d be happy to recommend a couple shortcuts, despite knowing full well that Riza will wake up in a cold sweat on the other side of town.
But he doesn’t get the chance, because Ed has already thrown the blankets back, slapped the papers down on the nightstand, and clambered down to the floor.
“No,” Roy says, piteously.
“Yeah,” Ed says, holding both hands out to him. “C’mon. I’ll play your stupid cuddle game after if you get your ass up.”
Roy has been powerless to resist him for too long to start now.
By the time they crawl back into the bed, Roy feels significantly more awake than he did when they left it. Such is the curse of departing from the cozy den, but he was promised a worthy reward.
True to his word, Ed burrows in deep beneath the blankets next to him this time, wriggling in a way that does nothing to help with Roy’s visceral desire to fuck him raw because of how adorable he is, and then stills with his cheek crushed against Roy’s shoulder.
He breathes in deeply and breathes out a soft sigh.
That’s better than fucking him, actually. Roy supposes that they’re both a bit doomed that way.
“Hey,” Ed says, sounding distinctly less strained and significantly more lucid than he did even just a few hours back. “You want to hear about an idea I had for a paper about self-sustaining arrays that you could leave out in the middle of the desert for, like, signaling and emergency power and shit?”
“Oh, no,” Roy says, tugging the blanket a little higher over both of them. “It’s bad enough to trap me here in this miserable place. Now I’m being forced to bask in the light of your genius, too? What have I done to deserve this?”
He can feel the smile toying with Ed’s mouth. It cuts straight through him. “Shut the fuck up. Okay, so—the sun is constantly throwing radiation at us for free, right? That’s just nonstop no-strings-attached energy, and we’re not even using it. So I’m thinking—what if you could do something kinda like hydroelectricity with it? Turn all that wasted potential into power, right?”
“If you patent that,” Roy says, slowly, “you’re going to make us so rich that our Cretan beach bungalow will want for nothing.”
“So what?” Ed says, and Roy can hear the way he’s wrinkled up his nose. “I want for nothing right now.”
Roy doesn’t think he can be faulted for his speechlessness.
“Except some more aspirin,” Ed says, ever so slightly too fast. “Hey. Shut up. Weren’t you supposed to be sleeping?”
“More aspirin coming right up,” Roy says, rolling over and reaching out before Ed can see enough of his expression through the shadow to think that Roy is somehow smiling at his pain.
“Thanks,” Ed mutters as Roy presses two more capsules into the palm of his hand. “Besides, I don’t even know if it’s going to work.”
“It’s you,” Roy says, as the water glass clinks on the nightstand on Ed’s side. “It will.”
“We’ll see,” Ed says. The glass clinks again. “Maybe I’ll work on it this weekend, if I’m not too busy putting a beach in the backyard.”
Ed will hear him grinning, but Roy knows that the purpose will be unmistakable this time. “You’re too good to me.”
“Yeah,” Ed says, rolling closer to sling an arm across him again, and this must be what paradise feels like when it’s at home. “I know.”