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Fandom Trumps Hate 2021, The RoyEd Canon
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Published:
2021-12-29
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2022-06-19
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3/3
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Backbone

Summary:

Ed is trying not to let any tangled-up personal bullshit interfere with a diplomatic visit in Aerugo, which would be marginally easier if Roy wasn't so gorgeous.

Notes:

My final 2021 Fandom Trumps Hate fic in the nick of time! ♥

Maeve wanted a post-Brotherhood AU, keeping alchemy and automail, in which top!Ed figures out that he wants to be top!Ed. She had some wonderful ideas about that, most of which I don’t think I managed to execute very well. ;__; The rest is my fault!

Eat your hearts out, Ed/Roy fans! XD Dear, sweet Maeve, I hope you enjoy it in spite of [gestures at everything]. ;__; There will be porn in the next bit, but it isn't quite finished yet, as a result of… [gestures at everything]. Soon!

Since I took so hilariously long to get this year sorted out, FTH is opening auctions for 2022 in the fairly immediate future! The best way to get my words at your disposal to write exactly the thing you want is to buy my ass one of my offerings. It all goes to the super amazing cause of your choice. :) FTH is actively trying to recruit more anime fans, so if you're interested, check them out! Anybody can auction off fanwork, and anybody can bid. It's awesome stuff and extremely well organized. I've had a ton of fun getting to be a part of it. ♥

ETA: I was in such a hurry I forgot to mark chapters, I'M SO SORRY IF YOU READ THIS RIGHT AWAY AND WERE LIKE ????

Chapter Text

Ed has learned more than he ever wanted to know about the kinds of wood-paneled walls and intricately-patterned carpets that government buildings the world over like to spend taxpayer money on.  This particular carpet has a design with chain links in it.  And some sort of carnation-looking flower that’s probably a national symbol of some kind, but looks weird as hell with the chain links.  And a lot of aimless little spiral things.  There was one in the Aerugan embassy in Central that had a repeating pattern of some dude’s face, distorted by scuffs and carpet fibers in several places, which was equal parts memorable and strikingly bizarre.  Roy somehow managed to contain himself the entire time that they were walking up and down the hall, grinding their heels all over this supposedly historic guy’s not-especially-noble profile, until they made it out onto the front steps.  Then Roy sat down, dropped his head into his hands, and laughed until he couldn’t breathe.

Ed has also learned—more recently than the walls and carpet thing—that sex is really inconvenient.  It’s fun, obviously, while you’re doing it, but then you end up thinking about it while you’re standing around in hallways with vaulted ceilings, desperately trying to look cool and calm and professional while the guy who fucked you last night is trying to sweet-talk a bunch of diplomats behind closed doors.  And you’re thinking about the fucking, not the diplomats.  You’re thinking about him naked.  You’re thinking about a lot of things that sounded like extremely good ideas at the time, which now make you feel a bit like one of those little old ladies who would hang out near the market in Resembool and look pointedly aghast any time a girl walked by in a skirt they thought was short.  Did you do that?  Like, yeah, it was hot, but—still.  Was that you?

Knowing the answer doesn’t help much, and also doesn’t help with the problem of Ed’s face catching fire while he’s standing in an unbearably fancy hallway.

He tries to make it look like he’s gazing pensively out a window further down the hall, which gives him excuse to turn his increasingly warm face away from the liveried servant-slash-guard standing on the opposite side of the doorframe from him.  Her presence means that he can’t even pace around the hall until he hears the endless cordial goodbyes and the footsteps from inside the room.  Pacing usually helps.  Making his blood move puts his brain into a different gear, and then he can have real thoughts—complicated, coherent, interesting, useful ones—instead of his unoccupied mind drifting constantly to the curve of Roy’s spine and the absolutely fucking breathtaking spot where the muscles dip into a little dimple right above his ass.

Ed would still be truly disgustingly head-over-heels for the fucking bastard even if he hadn’t stayed in such good shape, but that part definitely… doesn’t… hurt.  Except if you count Ed’s dignity and intellectual ability and desire to have ordinary thoughts in serious, job-related situations, which that part hurts a lot.

He really needs to put all of this into perspective: it’s good.  It’s the kind of good that makes him sit up in bed, freeze, glance around surreptitiously, and then mouth What? at the walls or the ceiling.  They don’t answer.  He has to sit there and sift through his memories a few at a time and verify them in small groups before he can determine that he isn’t dreaming.

It’s a little bit easier to accept the impossible reality when he wakes up in Roy’s bed on weekends—which he does, sometimes.  Not all the time.  Not every weekend.

This weekend, for instance, they’re both going to be waking up in an Aeurgan guest suite so clean and white that it makes Ed feel like Roy should hitch him to a post outside before entering.

Ed’s a lousy diplomat.  Roy keeps trying to convince him—trying to convince people is, of course, the Roy solution to any problem, which is why Roy is a great diplomat—that that makes him twice as valuable as yet another officer with an identical perspective and the exact same set of skills.  Roy says that people ‘respond to Ed’s honesty’—which is an extraordinarily diplomatic way of saying They obviously have to argue back when you point out something stupid.  Roy also says that Ed’s point of view is ‘refreshing’, which is an extraordinarily diplomatic way of saying that he’s like an upended bucket of ice water over the heads of people like this.  Ed doesn’t believe the way Roy keeps trying to sell that as a good thing.

Still, though.  If he can keep his mouth shut most of the time, and stay outside of the rooms where the conversations are the most precarious, and observe details to tell Roy about later because everyone thinks he’s some sort of hick kid who lucked his way into a uniform—which is, in a manner of speaking, the truth—then that’s good enough.  If he can help, he’s happy.

And horny, apparently.  At least today.  Fuck.  Professionalism is the worst shit that humankind ever invented, including alchemy and sweater-vests and those shiny-ass dress shoes that pinch the shit out of your defenseless toes.

It’s not Ed’s fault—it’s really not.  Because competence is the hottest thing there is, and Roy is terrifyingly competent when he isn’t being a self-deprecating dork.  Roy is searingly smart.  He’s an expert at reading people, and toweringly skilled at projecting what they want to see, so that they can’t read him back.  He turns words into strings that he braids into ropes to tie things together, or bind them shut, or truss up people’s hands—or hang them, if he has to.  And he also just so happens to be a casual math whiz who calculates atmospheric pressures and molecular concentrations in the time it takes to blink.

The last part is the only one that Ed can fully understand.  The rest of it…

When he was a kid, he thought that people were automatons: that they move like clockwork and act in ways that are rational and predetermined.  That they do things efficiently, and those things make sense.

They don’t.

They aren’t.

People are a nightmare.

People are, individually and universally, as fallible and uncertain and emotion-driven and protective and confused and scared about it all as he is.

That’s way too many damn variables to account for.  That’s too many contingencies and contradictions to begin to understand.  Hell, most days, Ed can’t even understand himself.  The fact that Roy can look at someone and know what they’re planning and how to circumvent it, or know who they are and how to communicate with them, or know just about anything is absolutely wild.  It’s incredibly impressive.  It’s practically superhuman.

Obviously, Ed can’t tell him that, since adding any more hot air would make Roy’s already bloated head explode, and that would be a mess for everybody, but it is the truth.

Ed’s not smart like that.  That’s the truth too.

He’s not even smart like that about things that he, himself, is actively doing, with a rationalizing interior monologue the entire time.

For instance—just as a little throwaway example—several years ago, after they’d so, so slowly worked their way up to Al being fit as a fiddle and back to jumping fences, mending roofs, and conducting long, one-sided philosophical conversations with cows, Ed had started to feel… bored.  And tetchy.  And aimless.

And when Winry had said, “Why don’t you just go back and work for Roy again, if you miss it so much?”, and Al had said, “Brother, no,” and Ed had said, “Maybe I will, then,” then…

He had.

Working as an adult for the guy that you’d been mooning over since you were a kid was, as it turned out, an exercise in masochism that managed to put all of Ed’s previous record-breaking self-destruction to shame.  About a month in, he’d mentioned to Al that it had felt like he hadn’t had a choice—that it felt like they’d helped to build the beginning of Roy’s career, and they’d had a hand in crafting his dreams while he’d bankrolled theirs, so of course Ed had to see it through.

Al had laughed in his face.

Ed’s still not entirely sure whether he deserved that or not.

He probably did.

He can dress it up all he wants, but the bottom line is that he’s here because Roy radiates a magnetism unmatched by any other human being Ed has ever met.  The combination of charisma and incisive intelligence alone makes Ed humiliatingly weak in the solitary knee, and then you throw in those eyes and those hands and his shoulders and that waist and… and… fuck.  Ed is the victim here.  He is a victim of Roy Mustang’s unrelenting attractiveness, and he can’t be held accountable for any of the actions that he’s taken as a result.

It really didn’t help that Riza figured it out somehow—Al would probably say, very patiently, Brother, Riza can sight a target the size of a tin can from fifty feet away, whereas a child playing pirates and wearing an eyepatch could see how devoted you are—and deliberately started to set him up.  She did it pretty subtly at first, occasionally finding little excuses why she couldn’t accompany Roy to meetings or appearances or events.  After a while, though, when she was running out of ideas, she ended up saying things like “I really need to stay in tonight and clip Hayate’s nails,” and at that point even Ed put two and two together.

It took him a lot longer to realize that she’d done it as much for Roy’s benefit as she had for his.  Left to their own devices, they would have both just stayed a careful, respectful, professional two and a half feet apart for the rest of their miserable lives.

The first trip like this—a diplomatic thing where they took a train to the border of Amestris, and then a different train past trenches and bulwarks and barren wasteland strewn with ash and blasted with the craters that the mortars left behind, and then a chauffeured limousine to a government building that looked like a palace—had been absolutely hellish.  For the better part of a week, Ed had hovered at Roy’s elbow during the day and lain awake listening to him breathe softly in the next bed over every night.  Roy had showered, like, six times and blamed it on the humidity.  He’d walked around their unsettlingly beautiful, highly-curated room in nothing but a towel no fewer than four times in five days, saying he’d gotten inspiration in the shower and needed to write something down, or pretending that he couldn’t find the shirt he’d wanted.  He asked Ed to knot his tie for him at one point, before they had to go to a horrible, stuffy formal dinner.

And Ed had believed him—believed all of it.  Ed had suspected exactly nothing, because the prospect of Roy trying to get into his pants was so utterly unimaginable that his brain simply wouldn’t entertain it.  He’d really, truly, honestly believed that Roy was torturing him on accident, although he’d considered the remote possibility that it was a sick joke at his expense.  Roy wasn’t really the rub-it-in-your-face type when it came to genuine feelings, though, which was part of the reason that Ed was so stupidly in love with him in the first place.

Riza had tricked them into going on another one after that.  She’d given Ed a steely look at the train station and ordered him to take care of Roy.  She and Ed both knew damn well that he still took orders from her regardless of their respective ranks, and he would have agreed to it anyway, and then her expression had softened a little, and she’d said You could also try letting him take care of you, which had made so little sense that it had just bounced off of Ed’s brain like a rubber ball pelted at a marble monument.

Not that Ed had ever done that, in the olden days.  No one could prove it.

In any case, Brigadier General-slash-newly elected Vice Chancellor Roy Mustang was in high demand.  Foreign dignitaries bought into the cream-thick charm that the brass had seen disproved by the small matter of a coup, and Grumman trusted Roy to be simultaneously wilier and warmer than any of the other emissaries.  The job of Roy’s attaché, in situations like that, was mostly just to stick close to him and loiter meaningfully and make him look important.  Important people always had an assistant and/or bodyguard.  Hell, Ling had had two.

Over the brief course of the second trip, Roy had asked Ed to help him button up a brand-new fancy dinner shirt.  That had been a damn struggle for both of them, given the unideal combination of automail and tiny pearly buttons, but Ed had just been starting to assume that someone was listening in on them or something, and Roy had to look very imperious and also moderately incompetent, and telegraphing that he couldn’t dress himself was a good start.  But then Roy had nearly fallen over in his rush across the room to help when Ed’s uniform jacket sleeve had gotten caught on the corner of one of the plates on his arm, which didn’t support that theory very well.  And he’d kept insisting that Ed take first pick from the overflowing tray brought up to them for breakfast.  And he’d been showering like a maniac again, even though it wasn’t hot at all this time.

Riza had looked so despairing when they’d come back that Ed had wondered if he’d fucked up without noticing and somehow set diplomacy with Drachma back by two hundred years.

Two nights after, he’d stayed late in the office to help finish up the reports—which were a right horror for shit like this—and caught Roy staring at him from the other side of the table, chin propped up on one hand.

Ed had said “If I have something on my face, just tell me,” and Roy had said, very calmly, “I think I figured it out.”

Ed had said, “‘It’ had better be how we’re gonna sell Grumman on the things you said about Ishval, or I’m going home,” and Roy had said, “You really don’t realize that I’m attracted to you, do you?”

Ed had stared at him, bug-eyed and open-mouthed, for what ought to have been long enough to cure him of that notion in the first place.  Roy had leaned back in his chair, sighed, smiled, and said, “Well, that explains it.”

After a considerable amount of additional staring, Ed had croaked out, “What?”, and Roy had said, “Are you free for dinner this weekend?”, and Ed had said, “Depends.  Are you gonna show up in a fuckin’ towel?”, and Roy had laughed in the way that shakes his shoulders and brings his whole face to especially beautiful life.

About a month—which is how long it’s been since that—is not nearly long enough to get used to the idea that the guy you angrily daydreamed about in the library as a kid is now your doting boyfriend as well as your boss.

It’s at times like this that a bitter little knot of grief in Ed condenses, and he wishes that he had a parent to talk to about this shit.  He’s toyed with the idea of asking Izumi, but he’s pretty sure she’s still mad at him about reenlisting, and that would end up being half of the conversation—which is fair, certainly, but not what he needs to get out of it.  Pinako wouldn’t understand that he was serious, and would probably just laugh at him until she strained something, and then tell him embarrassing stories about names he made up for Roy when he was fifteen and hormone-addled and furious with the entire universe.  Asking Gracia would be weird, because she’s even closer friends with Roy than she was before; and asking Riza would be worse.  Eliminating his own coworkers and Roy’s confidants leaves him with practically no one.  Writing it in a letter to Ling sounds worse than bottling it up, not least because Ling would probably commission someone to make traditional Xingese wall scrolls artistically depicting Ed’s awkward articulations immediately after offering help.  And Ed just can’t quite bring himself to say I need some advice about my love and sex life to his baby brother.  Just—no.  No, thanks.  He’ll walk through fire and lie facedown on glowing coals instead.

At the moment, though, what he has is this hallway, and the ostentatious carpet.

And questions he can’t even wrap his head around—thoughts that are still more abstraction than inquiry, which are miles away from cramming into syllables that he could speak.

It’s not that there’s anything missing—it’s more like the opposite.  This whole thing with Roy is so much, so overwhelmingly fun and exhilarating and gobsmacking but remarkably comfortable, too, that he can’t even dig down past the endless flashes of joy and delight to figure out what it is that he wants.

He does, though.  Want something.  That much he can tell.

He feels like shit about it, too, which is probably an Elric trademark at this point.  This is, objectively, the best that his life has ever been.  Who the fuck does he think he is wanting anything else?  What kind of a greedy, self-important asshole of a moron would even think about asking for something to change?

He doesn’t want much to change, either—that’s part of what’s tough about it, and part of what’s dangerous.  The absolute last thing he wants is for Roy to think that there’s something wrong.  They’ve got enough damn problems.  There’s already way too much on the line, even on an average day, for Ed to be dragging in the personal shit.  This relationship—if that’s the word for it, which he thinks it is, but he tends to shy away from labels; especially because if Roy thinks it’s something different than he thinks it is, that could be a whole thing, which again they just don’t have the time for—has to be stable.  It has to be simple.  It has to stay good.

They both must have recognized that going in—that a condition of this is that they just can’t fuck it up.  If anybody gets the slightest inkling that it’s even happening, the press would eat Roy alive, and the brass would set fire to his bones.  Ed would have to go live out the rest of his miserable life in Xing, where word of the disgraceful mess he’d made of all this shit would hopefully would never travel.  Ling might stop making fun of him for it after a decade or two.  Maybe.

So… yeah.  It either has to work, or everything falls apart.  No pressure, or anything.

Ed twists his fingers around themselves behind his back and sneaks a sidelong glance at the woman guarding the other side of the door.  She doesn’t seem to have noticed his ongoing existential crisis, so at least that’s something to be thankful for.

He’s been half-listening in to the conversation going on inside, which is his habitual tack—significant changes in tone and volume always jolt him out of whatever reverie he ends up in, and he usually can’t make out distinct sentences anyway, so he counts on Roy’s summaries after the fact before they collaborate on future strategies.  Roy’s so damn good at all of this that he doesn’t tend to piss anybody off, but sometimes ordinary diplomats, who have lived their whole lives with the velvet furniture and the marble bathrooms and the stupid carpets, are so afraid of Roy’s reputation that they’re on-edge before he even starts negotiating.  And then they try to intimidate him to compensate for how intimidated they are, and then they can’t even put a hairline crack in his façade, and then they get frustrated, and… Ed’s good at listening for that.  That’s the important thing.

What he’s listening to now is clearly the start of the goodbye process, which can take up to four or five minutes if they’re either really getting along, or really pretending to.  But he hears the faint scrape-thunk of chair legs moving on the carpet after about ninety seconds this time, which is relatively average.  Not a bad sign.  Roy’s fake cordial laugh sounds so easy that it makes Ed’s spine tingle a little bit—a pale echo of what the real laugh does, and barely even a whisper like the way it ignites him when they’re curled up together, skin to skin, with their chests so close that he can feel Roy’s ribcage expanding with every breath.

He attempts to look disinterested and unintelligent, which is an ideal combination for assistant/bodyguards.

“Yes, of course,” Roy is saying as he approaches the door.  Ed hears the faint click of the knob settling as he sets his hand on it.  “I’m greatly looking forward to it.  Good afternoon, Commissioner.”

Roy steps out, all smooth stride and smoother smile, and arches an eyebrow at Ed, who has learned that he can only afford to make faces back when they’re at headquarters.  People there are used to it.

He gestures subtly to the right so that Roy will tuck the new folders full of bullshit under his arm and start walking in the correct direction towards their rooms.  You get turned around while you’re inside those opulent diplomat rooms; they’re all full of mirrors, and by the time you make it back outside, all the hallways look the same.

Ed waits until they’re out of earshot of the first guard and haven’t made it close enough to the next little cluster of mealy-mouthed minor politicians.

“Liar,” he mutters, very quietly just in case.  “You’re not looking forward to jackshit.”

Roy grins broadly.  Ed refuses to let the record show that his heart squeezes up like someone’s got their fist around it.  “What Commissioner Palevino doesn’t know won’t hurt international relations.  Was it the second floor?”

“Third,” Ed says, fishing out the key that Roy palmed to him immediately for safekeeping.  “Second door on the left.  Based on the blueprint, oughta have a killer view.”

“That won’t hurt international relations either,” Roy says.

When they make it to the hall, after a merciful minimum of meaningless waving and cordial greetings to people who think they’re more important than they are, Roy stops a few feet shy of the doorway to their room.

Ed unlocks the door with alchemy, steps clear, waits a few seconds, and then swings it open.  Behind him, Roy breathes very softly.  Ed counts three inhalations before he peeks around the doorframe to confirm the place is empty.

Somebody brought up their suitcases, which was thoughtful.  There’s a huge, gorgeous four-poster bed for Brigadier General Vice Chancellor Conqueror of the World, and a significantly smaller but still pretty nice bed for Ed pushed into the corner.  That’ll be convenient for laying their clothes out on this time around.

While Ed makes sure that the key actually does work in the lock, Roy saunters in, tearing the clasps of his jacket open about as fast as you can without snapping them in half—not that Ed would know anything about that—and then shrugging it off and tossing it at the foot of the fancy bed.  The medals clink like sleigh bells as it hits the footboard, but just enough wool tipped onto the mattress that it doesn’t just crumple on the floor.  Ed shuts the door.  Roy collapses into a matching impressive armchair and slaps the new folders down on the end table generously provided for the purpose of ignoring paperwork.

“Nothing whatsoever until dinner, right?” Roy says.

Ed doesn’t have to check the schedule folded up in the inner chest pocket of his jacket, which is about to join Roy’s uniform in disregarded disgrace: he waited through three policy meetings in a row.  At least he didn’t have to pretend to be enjoying them, like Roy did.  “Yup.  Free for a whole hour and a half.  Minus prep time.”  He usually has to build in at least twenty minutes of that, because Roy is a born preener and will never change.  “I’m gonna… avail myself of the generously provided facilities.”

Roy blinks, biting his lip on a grin.  Makes him look fucking delicious.  “You mean you need to pee.”

“Hey,” Ed says.  “I’m trying.”

The bathroom is so shiny that it would probably make his eyes hurt if it didn’t have deliberately dim lighting that’s probably supposed to make it look sophisticated.  Heaven forbid you should be able to see what you’re fucking doing in a bathroom, of all places.

“You’re gonna like this,” Ed calls through the door as he washes his hands.  The soap dispenser looks offended that he just tried to depress it with his elbow because his hands are wet.  “This sink probably cost more than a month of my rent.”

“At Central’s prices,” Roy says, “that is truly terrifying.”

“Shit,” Ed says, as the perfume of the lather just about clocks him in the face.  “They’ve got the fancy soap.  I think this is…” Cautiously, so that it won’t go right to his head, he tries to scent it as he starts to rinse the bubbles off.  “Kinda like if rosewater and lavender and sandalwood got into a three-way fistfight, and nobody won.”  The embroidered hand towel is also posh as fuck.  He tries to touch it as little as possible, since they probably prefer it that way, and then steps back out into their room.  Roy has already lowered whatever file he was reading to look in Ed’s direction, and the telltale gleam of amusement in his eye makes Ed’s chest feel too small.  “Here, smell.”

There is nothing even remotely begrudging about the way Roy leans forward, clasping Ed’s extended hands in both of his, and sniffs at Ed’s curled fingers.

“Like a firebombed floral shop,” Roy says, solemnly.

After what’s already been a long-ass day of standing around on awful carpets, Ed’s so taken with that mental image that he loses track of the all-important filter that normally modulates the traffic between his brain and his mouth.  “I like the stuff at your place.”

Roy, who is still leaned over and holding onto both of Ed’s stupid hands, smiles up at him—no hesitation, no masks, no walls, no sarcasm, no ulterior motive.

“Gone,” Roy says, “are the halcyon days of old when soap was allowed to smell like soap.”

The spirit of Romance haunts Ed so relentlessly these days that he sometimes worries he’s going to wake up in a bottomless pit of rose petals, never to be seen again.  Right now, it’s possessing him to squeeze Roy’s hands gently where they’re wrapped around his.  “Dunno if they ever had those here.  Probably the soap’s smelled like garden arson since the minute they realized they might be able to impress somebody.”

“Probably,” Roy says, and he draws Ed’s hands in close enough to kiss Ed’s knuckles—the left, first, and then the right, so lingeringly that a shiver rattles its way up Ed’s spine—before he releases them.  So if nothing else, Roy will probably drown in the rose petal ocean first.  “Do you mind if we go over the family tree again?”

“’Course not,” Ed says.  Now that he’s freed of his schmoopy confines, he can also go over to assess their luggage.  The diagram in question is sandwiched in between a bunch of innocuous-looking reports in his briefcase, so that even the nosiest of concierges probably wouldn’t notice it, and it’s a little bit of a work of genius.

Digging up relatively recent photographs of all of the relevant Aerugan politicians and nobility took ages of scouring newspapers in a language that Ed doesn’t even understand, and he had to identify them primarily by a list of names and titles that he also didn’t understand particularly well.  He drew out the structure of the family tree first, with only a few embellishments, followed by some nearby posts and road signs to create associations for the important political players who aren’t blood relations of the royal family.  He glued little folded flaps of cardstock onto the paper so that you can hide individual faces or names to test yourself on one or the other, and then reveal them to check if you’re right.

Ed had started to doubt its coolness when the moment came to reveal the product of the huge amount of library time he’d logged, so he’d slid it across Roy’s desk reluctantly and started trying to downplay it as he explained it.  Then the way that Roy’s face lit up completely fucking wrecked him, and he lost track of everything he’d been trying to say and just let Roy gleefully flip the little windows open and shut until Riza came in to see why he’d stopped speaking in the middle of a sentence.

She thought it was pretty awesome, too.

Roy’s gotten dead-shot good at the vast majority of the big names, but there’s a few of them that still elude him.  Ed knows that he’ll pick it up quick once they actually meet most of these people face-to-face, and he’ll charm their pants off without even trying, but giving him an edge on everyone like this makes him feel like he’s in complete command of the entire room.

Ed wants to give him that.  Ed wants to give him a whole shit-lot more.

Roy frowns at the next name for a few seconds, opens his mouth, closes it, and frowns harder.

“Shit,” he says.  “May I have a hint?”

“Sure,” Ed says.  “Absolutely nonsense hair.  Muskrat nest.  The critters are going to come back and claim their ancestral homeland any day now.”

There it is—the laugh.  That’s the one that turns Ed’s insides to jelly so fast that it’s a little bit humiliating.

Roy reaches forward and opens the little paper door to reveal the full majesty of Archduke Leo Novila’s cataclysmic coif.

“This,” he says, “is a muskrat castle.”

“Historic and highly defensible,” Ed says.

Roy nods slowly.  Ed’s pretty sure he’s going to remember that one now.  “All right.  Who’s next?”




The worst part about these dinners is that they’re interminable.  The second-worst part is that what makes them interminable is that they’re composed of at least six separate courses—which is a double whammy, because all of them are completely impregnable to someone who grew up shucking corn on the back porch without shoes on, and he has to subtly watch other people at the table to figure out how to eat any of them; and also because all of the courses are individually tiny, so if you do wind up with something that tastes good, there’s hardly any of it to eat.

The third-worst part, which is rapidly climbing to try to grapple for the just-underneath-interminability spot, is that Ed can’t just keep his head down and avoid eye contact, because that would make Roy look bad.

The fourth-worst part, which dovetails abominably with the third-worst, is that most of the diplomats and semi-royal whatnots speak enough Amestrian to want to talk to him.

Ed thinks that the absurdly undersized bowl in front of him contains some kind of soup, but it could be sauce.  He isn’t sure.  He has five spoons that all look identical at a glance, and fractionally different if you squint at them.  Roy at his right looks incredibly calm for someone with five not-quite-identical spoons.  Ed is irrationally jealous.

“You are Major Elric?” the bordering-on-elderly woman sitting on his left side asks.

A part of Ed wonders what would happen if he just said No, very evenly, and slurped his soup, and refused to speak to anyone for the rest of the meal.

He wishes that part were bigger.

“Yeah,” he says, plastering a courteous-sized smile on.  “Sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”  At least Roy taught him that one as a polite replacement for You aren’t important enough to be on the cheat-sheet, so I have no idea who the fuck you are.

“Baroness Maritsa Avieli,” she says.  Good thing he went with the polite version.  And good thing that Amestris’s magnificently corrupt underpinnings just decided to replace landed nobility wholesale with a military hierarchy, since Ed can’t keep track of titles to save his life.  “Have you been under the Brigadier General Mustang very long?”

Filter.  Hard hand-brake, and the filter.  In no universe is Ed allowed to say, Well, last Saturday night, I was under him for almost two solid hours, but I think that was a personal record for both of us.

He swallows.  Courteous-sized smile.  “Guess so.  It’s been… about… twelve years, now, I guess.  Jeez.”

She stares at him.  That’s not very courteous-sized.

“There was a break in the middle,” Ed says, trying to sound helpful.  “I took a couple years off.”

She hasn’t stopped staring.  “You are… how old are you?”

“Uh.  Twenty-four.”  It’s his own fault that it took him until now to realize what she’s actually asking.  “I mean, it was… they don’t usually let kids that age into the military, but I needed the job really bad, so I… talked them into it.”  That’s close enough to the truth.  “Better than a factory or something, right?”  She doesn’t look like she thinks it was better than a factory or something.  “I got to… it was fine.  Spent a lot of time in the library.  Getting educated.  Sort of.  And my brother helped.”

They need to pour seconds on wine a lot fucking faster around here, because he appears to have found the solitary remaining way to make this worse.  “Your—your brother was also employed by the military at the age of twelve?”

Ed gets the feeling that He was just following me around, but he was eleven will not invoke a dramatic change of heart on the topic.  “It’s, uh… complicated.  I promise.  It wasn’t a big deal!  I was pretty safe.  Learned a lot.  Turned out fine.”

Maritsa Avieli looks between him and Roy and then back again.

“I see,” she says.

Ed does not think that she sees.  But then, most people don’t.

Fortunately, a wonderfully perceptive waiter sees that Ed’s glass is empty and fills it again.  Fancy wine tastes even worse to Ed than the stuff you can get at the corner store, but at least it makes these events go by a little faster.  He can’t afford to chug the thing, though, given that he’s already talking out of his ass and making a mess that Roy will probably have to clean up later, if Baroness Avieli starts gossiping to anybody on the cheat-sheet that Roy Mustang endorses child labor.

“Thanks,” Ed says to the waiter in tragically bad Aerugan, resisting the urge to reach for the glass the instant that the guy lets go of it.  He gives Avieli what he hopes is a winning smile.  “I should probably mention that it, uh, wasn’t like it was General Mustang who was hiring me, anyway.  All kinds of people higher up than him had to sign off on it.  I had to pass a bunch of tests.  Everybody kind of knew it was a special circumstance, one-time thing.  It wasn’t just like he picked some kid up off the street and gave me a paycheck.”

At times like these, Ed discovers that he really just has a talent for not helping.

To her credit, and Ed’s immense relief, Avieli at least attempts to smile back.  “Amestris must be very… interesting.”

Ed looks around the table at a whole host of people he vaguely recognizes from little flash-card-style windows that he glued together in a library reading room.  “It’s awfully different from here.  I can tell you that much.”

Avieli slants another glance at Roy, re-folds her napkin delicately in her lap, leans in, lowers her voice, and says, “As a soldier—have you ever killed anyone?”

Maybe not too different.




Maritsa turns out to be pretty cool, for a weird old lady who isn’t well-connected enough to ever make it into the papers.  Apparently that’s because she more or less just hangs out at her castle and breeds racehorses and raises dogs, so they get to talking about livestock for a while, and Ed learns that Aerugan has a different word for almost every type of animal shit.  That’s brilliant.

Ed catches Roy giving him a knowing look at one point, which makes his guts boil with a combination of annoyance and something a lot… nicer… than that.  It’s obnoxious that Roy always thinks he’s got Ed figured out, and it’s obscenely hot that he’s almost always right.  This one is clearly a You can and will make friends anywhere if I leave you to your own devices for five minutes at a stretch kind of a look.  There’s an unmistakable fondness in it, and a hint of an I told you so that makes Ed want to throttle him for two seconds and then kiss him for two hundred.

Bastard is as bastard does, Ed’s always said.

Ed has a little more wine than he probably ought to, and Maritsa excuses herself for a minute to go yell at a distant cousin who never brought back a horse he “borrowed”, who’s been trying to hide from her for years, so at that point Ed ends up watching Roy talking to the people around him.

Roy’s dangerous here—he is staggeringly beautiful, poised and deliberate and debonair, articulate and attentive and just… good at this.  He’s so good at this.  He makes conversation look like dancing.  He weaves himself into the flow of the words and twists them like silk veils; he enraptures everyone around him without ever seeming to steal the spotlight.  He uses his hands just the right amount—Ed can never get that part down, and always ends up looking like he’s trying to flag a cab at some point in all of the wild gesturing.  Roy, though… Roy looks like the whole world only ever existed to allow him to have this moment of tilting his hand just so, palm open, white scars gleaming in the gold light, as he says something uncannily clever about the state of current affairs that will manage to offend precisely no one.

Ed loves seeing him like this: in his element, in control, suave and commanding and confident to the point of irresistibility.

The only problem is that when he’s shining like this, it’s impossible to miss it, and impossible to take your eyes off of him.  Some people watch him with a wistful sort of admiration, and for some it’s more of a fascinated aesthetic appreciation, and some people just get sucked in and stare.

But some people watch him and look very, very hungry.

Ed loves that a lot less.

He knows that jealousy is ugly—and that it’s all the more poisonous because he doesn’t have any right to it, or any claim to Roy.  Roy is his own person.  He has his own life.  The way that people react to him is their own problem, and their own business.  Roy is doing what he feels is necessary at any given time, and he just happens to look so goddamn motherfucking attractive while doing it that he turns heads and draws eyes, and sometimes people look at him like he’s a raw steak when they’re starving.

Ed knows, rationally, that he wouldn’t want to lock Roy up in a box or a basement somewhere even if it was an option.  He knows that he would never want to deprive the rest of the world of Roy—let alone pry Roy away from the rest of the world—even if he could.  He knows that, deep down, it’s rooted in some sort of insecurity, like most of his nastiest feelings really are.  He knows that it’s born from a fear that if Roy did spot somebody better staring at him and licking their lips, he’d drop Ed for them in a heartbeat.  Who wouldn’t?

Ed knows what he is, and what he’s not, and what he’s missing.  Over the past couple years, he’s gotten better at knowing how to sort out the source of the fire from the shape of the smoke.

Ed still can’t believe that he lucked into this.  Ed still thinks that Roy is way the hell out of his league, and is going to wake up one morning and realize that he’s made a terrible mistake.  And Ed’s life has taught him, one tortured moment at a time, that anything he loves, he has to cling to like hell, or it’ll simply disappear.  His life has taught him that people don’t stay.

So he understands it.  Other people eyeing Roy makes him afraid that he’s going to get replaced, and the thought of that is agony after all the brambles and barbed wire he’s dragged himself through to make it here.  The fear makes him feel possessive.

Unfortunately, understanding it doesn’t make it any easier to swallow it down when it feels like acid boiling in the pit of his stomach, and the fumes start to rise.

Ed swirls his wineglass, trying to swing the meniscus right up to the edge without spilling it over.  It’s—unsettling.  The part of him seething doesn’t feel familiar, but he knows that it’s attached, because it burns at the core of him, and everything else around it is catching fire.  He’s always been wary of the streak of violence in himself—of the capacity to turn into someone he could never forgive.  Everybody has that in them.  Some people just don’t fight it very hard.

Roy’s not his.  Roy’s not anyone’s.  Touching him, kissing him, stealing those breaths and that laugh and his attention and his interest—those are privileges.  They’re gifts.  The universe doesn’t owe Ed a single goddamn thing, and Roy doesn’t either.  They have an agreement.  They’re lending themselves to each other for as long as they both enjoy it.  Roy doesn’t belong to him.  Roy isn’t a plaything.  There isn’t a promise.

Ed doesn’t think he would want one.  Promises don’t seem to hold a whole lot of weight when it comes to this sort of thing.  People say a lot, at the start, when their brains are addled and their blood is pumping and they’re too excited to hazard at a future through the hormone fog.  When Ed was dating Jon, primarily because he was nice and quiet and sometimes funny, and a little bit because he looked like Roy out of the corner of your eye, all sorts of shit got said, but after a couple weeks, none of it mattered.  They went to the gym together a lot and messed around a lot, and then it was over, and the blurted-out I think I love you that had blown Ed’s whole world to smithereens didn’t make the slightest difference.  It was like it had never been said at all.

Talk is overrated.  Ed wants to see it in Roy’s eyes, instead, this time—wants to feel it in his fingertips and taste it in his mouth.  Ed wants scars where the fingernails cut in.  He wants Roy to want him so fucking badly that there can’t be a goodbye, because neither of them would survive it.

Well.  He wants that when he’s tipsy, anyway.  Probably that should scare him worse than any of the rest of it.  Probably this is who he really is when you untie him, and the confines of culture fall away.

Ed forces himself to take a deep breath and tries hard to focus on the positives.  First and foremost, he thinks that Roy might just be the prettiest man that he has ever, ever met.  Roy is just… arresting.  The way his facial features are aligned, the way they move in complement, the way he holds himself, the angle of his head and the proportions of his hands.  He’s beautiful.

And he’s sexy as fuck.

Ed always knew that a lot of the reason he couldn’t stick around with anybody else was because he was comparing them to Roy—which also motivated him not to stick around, because that wasn’t fair, and it crawled constantly in his guts, feeling like he was stringing somebody along like that.  He kept it casual, mostly.  Scratch an itch, have a nice time twice or so at a maximum, and move on.  Ideally pick people who were just visiting, who had a distant cousin in town, who wouldn’t come back and would barely recognize you if they saw you on the street.  He always knew that he was waiting.  He always knew that he was hoping against hope.

What are you supposed to do when you get the thing that you were hoping for?

Ed’s used to making do with what’s handed to him.  This part?  This might as well be the surface of the moon.  He has no idea how to navigate, and up looks like down, and half the time it feels like he’s trying to breathe inside a vacuum, and…

And Roy glances over at him, like the bastard just knows.  Roy arches an eyebrow—inquiring instead of judgmental—and offers him one of those subtle little smiles that no one else is supposed to notice.  The ones that are only for him, only ever for him.

Aren’t they?

Maybe that’s conceited.  Maybe it’s stupid, maybe it’s just plain wrong.  Maybe that’s the smile for the person that Roy’s currently sleeping with, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s Ed’s.

Nothing is.  You can’t scratch your name on atoms.  You can’t hold on.

Ed smiles back and tries to make it look like he knows something Roy will want to ask about.  He doesn’t have much left, as far as secrets go—Roy knows all the worst things about him, and witnessed a hell of a lot of the hardest days.  Is that a bad thing?  Al seemed to think that it put them at an advantage, to know the darkest edges of each other before they’d ever even met in the middle and made out, but if there’s supposed to be some sort of mystery that keeps you with someone, then Ed is fucked.  There’s nothing to discover anymore.  They just… are.

Although Ed may have some discovering to do, insofar as he needs to identify the nature of the knot in his stomach before it ruptures and goes septic.

Roy’s eyes tell a lot of stories without ever seeming to try.  Ed’s pretty sure that his just tell Roy that he’s a little bit too drunk to keep his mouth shut, and a little bit too stupid to keep a good thing going.

This is why Al doesn’t let Ed keep much liquor around their place—it makes him a sopping wet blanket.  Wool, probably.  Soaked through.  Dripping on the carpet, warping the hardwood, doing absolutely nobody any good.

He can’t let himself think like this.  There’s nothing to be jealous of.  Roy could have any person in the world that he fucking wanted, and he picked Ed.  Furthermore, he picked Ed despite the incredible force of Ed’s obliviousness, which made picking Ed into an ordeal of quasi-legendary proportions, so he had to have been serious about it, or they never would have made it this far.  Roy wants this, too.  The games he plays and the charm he plies in front of business associates doesn’t change that.  The fact that there are a million other people out there who Ed thinks are a better choice doesn’t matter.  Roy’s smart.  Roy made an informed decision.  Roy knows what he’s doing, and knows what he wants, so it follows that he knows that he wants Ed.  As long as that stays true, Ed has nothing to kvetch about.  He can’t let fear of something that hasn’t even happened, that might not ever happen, stop him from enjoying what’s happening now.

He manages to keep his mouth shut for the remainder of the meal, which is an especially impressive achievement given how agonizingly slowly these things always wind down.  As the assembled company gets drunker and sleepier and more comfortable, though, they speak less Amestrian and more Aerugan, and Ed’s brain starts to tune them out.  He mostly just watches the people around him for a long time, keeping a weather eye on the folks who topped the cheat-sheet.  A few of those are still talking avidly to Roy, but some of them are watching Roy the same way that Ed is watching them—except that they apparently don’t expect Ed to be anything more than a glorified thug, so they don’t notice him in the slightest; and they’ve obviously underestimated Roy if they don’t think he’s aware of everything that’s going on around him at all times.  He wouldn’t have lived this long if he wasn’t.

The looks Roy’s getting are mostly positive, though, as far as Ed can tell.  The neutral ones tend more towards thoughtful than guarded, which is safer by far.  Probably a lot of them are mostly just curious—likely they’ve read up on Roy enough to know that he didn’t buy his way into the military, and he isn’t part of a bloodline.  They’re more familiar with both of those ascension strategies around here.  The idea of someone getting so close to the top on pluck, persistence, brilliance, and alchemical firepower must be downright fascinating in a society where you have to be born directly into the ruling class, and the only way to climb up into politics is to latch on to a patron with the right pedigree.

Some hazy, slippery span of time later, Roy stands up and shakes a lot of hands and graciously excuses himself and Ed, citing the wine—which he barely touched, so that he could stay sharp as a whip the whole way through—and the long stretch of meetings planned out tomorrow.  Ed looks around for Maritsa to say goodbye, but he can’t spot her anywhere, so it’s possible she had to take that thieving cousin out back someplace and beat the shit out of him.  He hopes she had a nice time.

Ed can tell as they saunter back towards their room that Roy is trying not to say something.  As a general rule—and, increasingly, a Brigadier General rule—that tends to be a waste of time.

Once they’re clear of everybody’s earshot, and they’ve started down a hall where none of the shadows move, Ed eyes him.  “Spit it out.”

“Me?” Roy says, and even if the extremely pertinent fact that it couldn’t possibly be anyone else hadn’t given it away, his delight would have sold him out in a second.  “I don’t know what you mean.”

Ed waits him out.  And glowers.  He’s good at one of them, at least.

Roy’s concession smile ought to be easier to celebrate.  “It’s just that you went very quiet,” Roy says, keeping his voice light like that’ll mask the concern, and it won’t twist a knife of guilt in Ed’s guts.  “And you had this… look.”

“I did not,” Ed says.  Grasping the right sounds to make the words he thinks he wants is harder than it ought to be.  Wine is such a sneaky fucker.  All the perfect syllables keep dissolving like wisps of cloud when his fingers curl around them.  “I wasn’t looking at anything.  People were looking at you.”

Ed,” Roy says.  The smuggish curl of his grin makes Ed want to punch him in the mouth.  With Ed’s mouth.  And then maybe with the automail.  “Are you jealous?”

“No,” Ed mutters.  Repeating lies until they sound true is how the history of Amestris was written, after all.  It might as well be his turn.

Roy’s grin, which has increased its smugness quotient by a factor of ten in the time it took Ed’s heart to beat, kind of makes him want to shrivel up and die.

“Are you embarrassed?” Roy asks, sounding positively tickled about Ed’s suffering, which… what a bastard.  Maybe it’s a good sign that that hasn’t changed.  “Oh, Ed.”

“Don’t you ‘Oh, Ed’ me,” Ed mutters, which sounded somewhat more cutting inside the sloshiness of his head.  “It’s your own fuckin’ fault for being—for looking like—that.”

He’s glaring at the carpet, so he startles and almost flinches back when Roy’s right hand brushes his left one.  Steeling himself against recoiling now that he’s identified the intrusion monopolizes the dregs of his attention, and all he can do is stare a little more as Roy links their hands, fingers knitting themselves with Ed’s, and raises Ed’s arm high.

Roy twists his wrist, and Ed instinctively lets himself be led, stumbling through a poor imitation of a waltz step as Roy twirls him once, then guides him two steps backwards, then—

Pushes him back up against the wall, pinning his wrist above his head.

Places like this tend to do fancy decorative molding shit when they don’t do shiny wood panels, and Ed can feel some sort of overly ornate flower-vine-like shape digging into his shoulder blades as he stares up into Roy’s extremely warm eyes.

It’s only when Roy’s other hand rises, the knuckles of his curled fingers grazing underneath Ed’s chin, that Ed realizes that his mouth fell open somewhere along the way.

“I,” Roy says, and Ed can feel the vibration of the way he’s building to a purr, “happen to think that a little bit of jealousy is healthy—as long as it doesn’t overshadow the sense of trust.”  He leans in close, breath hot, voice worse, and his mouth brushes Ed’s throat on its way up towards his ear.  “It shows that you’re invested, in me and in us.  What’s so wrong with that?  I would love to know, though… Precisely what was I looking like?  If you don’t mind me aski—”

Ed’s never been as good at thinking as Roy is.

Ed’s good at moving.  Ed’s good at letting that speak instead.

Ed’s good at using his weight and his agility to his advantage in the precise moment that someone underestimates him and lets their guard down.  Instincts are inescapable.

He clasps his fingers around Roy’s wrist, dropping to one knee to enlist gravity’s help in pulling Roy down along with him.  Before the shock has even registered in Roy’s widening eyes, Ed has slipped past and stepped around him, bending Roy’s captured arm up behind his back, and planted the automail hand right in the center of Roy’s immeasurably fine ass, the better to pin him to the wall with his cheek pushed to the molding hard enough that it may leave a mark.

Ed can’t help himself—can’t contain it.  He aligns his hips against Roy’s ass, fixing him there, and revels in the way the body heat swells between them.

The ferocious spark of arousal in Roy’s eyes catches in Ed’s guts, and his blood starts pounding through him hard enough that his breath shakes.

“Huh,” Ed says.  He doesn’t know where the casual voice comes from—it sounds like his, but his brain is spinning somewhere in the stratosphere, trying to memorize the image of Roy’s eyes in that instant of revelation.  “Kinda like this.”

“That’s interesting,” Roy says, but the embers in his eyes flare a little higher, and he hasn’t tried to break Ed’s grip.  The slow spread of the smirk across his mouth like a sunrise spilling light makes Ed’s throat go dry.  “I don’t remember doing anything like this during dinner.”

Ed’s hands feel far away, like they belong to someone else—like both of them are automail, and the more he thinks about it, the slower they respond.  Part of him wants to nip the shell of Roy’s ear, grind in hard against the gorgeous curve of his gorgeous ass, and throw caution to the fucking wind from there.

But part of him has started screaming What the hell are you doing? too loud for the rest to ignore.

He forces his numb fingers to unclench, releasing Roy’s wrist, and manages to convince both of his feet to stumble a few steps back.  His dick throbs.  Fuck.  What the hell is he doing?  What the hell was that?

Bizarrely, Roy looks smugger than ever as he straightens up and turns around, taking his sweet damn time.  He adjusts the cuffs of his sleeves and then smoothes a hand down his shirt, which did get roughed up more than a little while Ed was… shoving him up against a wall in a diplomatic building where a total stranger could have seen them at any goddamn fucking time.  Fuck.

The shadows in the dim hallway play tricks, but Ed’s almost positive that there’s a dark red indentation on Roy’s cheek from being crammed against the decor on the wall.  Ed’s dick throbs harder, at the same time as his guts curl up and go cold.

When Roy glances up from adjusting his shirt, the contentment wavers into concern, which just makes Ed’s stomach flip faster.  “Are you all right?”

Me?” Ed says.  “I mean—yeah.  I—are you?”

“Never better,” Roy says, so cheerfully that Ed can’t imagine that he doesn’t mean it, but— “Shall we?”

Roy remains in unusually high spirits all the way back to their room.  Ed can’t tell whether the mood is genuine, or if he’s putting it on because he can tell that Ed is feeling conflicted, and he’s trying not to let an otherwise extremely successful night flounder into awkwardness on the homestretch.  Roy thinks circles around Ed when he’s sober, when it comes to things like this—Ed doesn’t stand a chance of analyzing all of it when his brain has been marinated in expensive wine.  He’s just going to have to sort it out tomorrow.

It’s encouraging, though, that Roy starts acting normal—or normal-for-Roy, at least—as soon as the door shuts behind them.  Roy’s hand skims over the small of Ed’s back and then along his left forearm, just for the sake of touching him instead of for any particular purpose, and then Roy undoes two of the buttons of his shirt, fluffs his hand through his hair, and collapses dramatically into the armchair.

He gazes up at the ceiling for a few seconds, looking so unsettlingly solemn that a chill ricochets up Ed’s spine.  Maybe he was wrong.  Maybe—

“This government is going to tear itself to pieces,” Roy says, as much to the ceiling as to Ed.  “Not tomorrow, and probably not before next year, but… there are too many people vying for control.  It’s a pile of gunpowder with dozens of different fuses.  Eventually it’s going to explode.”

Ed blinks at him.  It has to be true.  Roy knows a thing or two about coups and conspiracy, after all.  Ed just hopes people like Maritsa don’t get caught in the crossfire.  The people who have nothing to do with it so often end up getting hurt.

“That doesn’t make good pillow talk,” Roy says, and Ed sees a wry smile for a second before he runs his hand over his face.  “And there isn’t much that we can do about it, although I suppose it’s possible that if we play the alliance in just the right way, and very gently push the right people, we might… Ed, are you sure you’re all right?”

“’Course,” Ed says.  He has to do something with his hands, so he shoves them in his pockets.  He looks at the ceiling.  Like most things, it must be more revealing to Roy, because it sure isn’t helping him at all.  “Just… drank a lot.  Sorry.”

Roy stands—fluidly, like always, like the world warps around him to suit his style—and reaches out, and Ed can’t fucking resist him.  Never could.

Roy’s hand on his left arm swivels him around, and then both hands start kneading gently at his shoulders on both sides.

“Not your fault,” Roy says.  “It’s part of the game.  You handled yourself beautifully.”

Ed is not exactly in control of himself right now.

“I’ll handle you beautifully,” he mutters, and then it’s too late to take it back.

He must be on some sort of a lucky streak: Roy just laughs, low and soft and unassuming, and then leans in from behind him and kisses the hinge of his jaw.

“I’m looking forward to it,” Roy says, lightly, as he steps away.  It’s just banter.  He can’t possibly mean— “You haven’t had any water, have you?”

Ed’s brain has apparently given up tonight for lost.  He eyes Roy, who has paused in the bathroom doorway to arch an eyebrow at him, and manages only: “Fight me.”

“I have a different suggestion,” Roy says, still so calmly that he can’t have meant to imply any of the things it sounded like.  He’s filling a little glass from the tap.  “Did you get enough to eat?  I could call up for something.  I’m going to need you tomorrow.”

That’s what Ed wants, at the truly awful heart of it—he wants Roy to need him.  He wants to be more than just wanted.  He wants to be essential.  He wants Roy to keep him at all costs.

That’s indisputably selfish and probably sick.

“I’m okay,” he says.  “The food was better than the wine.”

Roy crosses back to him and presses the glass into Ed’s hands.  The way he clasps his fingers around Ed’s in the process is completely unnecessary, and also happens to make Ed’s heart the approximate consistency of warm butter.

“I hope it wasn’t too bad,” Roy says.  Ed’s staring down at their tangled hands, but he’d bet that Roy is watching him with that soft sincerity that fucks him up every time.  “Am I remembering right that tomorrow we have a bit more of the evening to ourselves?”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  Roy’s fingers are fascinating.  He wants them in his mouth.  He wishes that he hadn’t just thought that.  “Last meeting is supposed to end at four, and then there’s a coffee thing, but the guy who was supposed to give us a city tour after that kinda bailed.”

“Good,” Roy says.  “We can give ourselves a tour.  It’ll be much more fun that way.  The likelihood of us getting lost and having to scrape by on our collective wealth of mediocre Aerugan phrases will be high, and we’ll get some excellent pub stories out of the deal.  Much better all around.”

He finally releases Ed’s hands, and then uses the ensuing moment of bewilderment to lean in and kiss Ed’s forehead before Ed can dodge out of the way.

“Can I get you anything else?” he asks.

“Hold on,” Ed says.

He transfers the glass of water very carefully into his left hand—he’s learned that lesson the hard way, enough times that it’s finally sunk in—and hooks two automail fingers in the button placket of Roy’s shirt to keep him there.  He slugs down a few good gulps of the water, lowers the glass, and then pulls Roy in by the shirt buttons to kiss him properly.  None of this mincing, romantic, faint brush-of-the-mouth shit.  Properly.

He ends up having to pry his fingers loose when they eventually break apart to breathe.  It’s miraculous that he hasn’t spilled the rest of the water.  He tries to smooth Roy’s shirt down, but the wrinkles don’t want to leave.  Will they have time to steam it tomorrow?  Roy’s got some stupid meeting at nine, like anybody’s ready to have meetings at nine in another country where you don’t know where to get decent coffee.  Roy always says No rest for the wicked like he thinks that’s cute.

Ed’s fairly confident that the wicked actually rest pretty easy, because they simply don’t give enough of a shit to care who they hurt over the course of their self-aggrandizement.

“We should get some sleep,” he says.  If he doesn’t suggest it fast enough, and sound like he means it, Roy will stay up late reviewing notes and policy documents, and Ed will stay up with him reading, and then they’ll both be dead on their feet tomorrow.

“My second-favorite reason to get into bed with you,” Roy says.  He probably thinks that’s cute, too.

It is, kind of.  Obviously, Ed will take that to his grave.

Ed tries to hurry along the preening that inevitably follows the more necessary teeth-brushing, because Roy is just going to preen again tomorrow morning, and he’ll mess up his hair in the meantime anyway.  Ed lets his down, and Roy runs his fingers through it no fewer than four times, which feels better than Ed wants to admit.  Roy takes up more than his share of the bed, but he doesn’t snore, and he doesn’t kick like Ed does.  Ed put a bruise the size of a goose egg on his shin one of the first times he stayed over at Roy’s place.

Roy’s nightmares are still, as far as he can tell—the kind where you can’t move, and you can’t change anything.  Ed thinks maybe those are worse.  It’s hard to tell.  Roy hasn’t wanted to talk about it.

Roy flops down and ruins the results of the preening more or less immediately by burying his face in the pillow as he slings an arm across Ed’s chest.  That always feels so good that Ed hardly even wants to breathe in case he displaces it, or makes the position less comfortable.  It makes him feel anchored in a way he can’t work out the words for.

“Hey,” Roy says, softly, and the eye barely visible over the curve of the pillow opens a sliver to meet Ed’s.  “As far as I’m concerned, the only thing in this world more valuable than your brain is your heart.  So if there’s something on your mind… that matters to me.  If there’s anything you want to say, I’ll always want to hear it.”

Ed has to swallow twice.  Maybe the arm thing is an evil Mustang master plan to be able to feel things like that, and know if Ed is struggling to sell the little lies.

“Thanks, I guess,” he grinds out, “but I’m—I’m really okay.  Promise.”

Roy’s hand shifts up to brush his hair back from his face.  “You’re allowed to ask for things.  You’re encouraged.”

Not in this life.  Not in this universe.  The moment that Ed first acknowledged how much he wants this, how good it is, how important—he probably doomed it with the thought.

“Okay,” he says.  He catches Roy’s hand and kisses the scar bisecting the palm so that he doesn’t sound like quite as much of an asshole.  “How about it I ask you to go the hell to sleep?”

Roy laughs warmly, and his fingertips drag down along Ed’s cheek and the side of his neck before settling above his shoulder again.  The automail must be kind of cold, and it’s completely unyielding, but he doesn’t move his hand.

“Yes, sir,” Roy says, the bastard.  “Right away, Major Elric, sir.”

“Shut it, or I’ll shut it for you,” Ed says.  “G’night, Roy.”

“Goodnight, Ed,” Roy murmurs, and his eyes are already closed again.

Ed listens to him breathing for what might be a long damn time.  He can’t tell if he should’ve had more wine, or less of it.

He loves Roy.  He hates how much he does—how deep it runs, how easy it is, how well they fit together in spite of all the reasons that it probably shouldn’t work.  It does.  They’re not even trying very hard.  It’s perfect.

He can’t fuck it up.  Not for something little.  Not for something stupid.  Not for something that he doesn’t even need.

Not for something like the fact that he wants to fuck Roy.  That’s what it is.  That’s the simplest distillation of all of the nebulous half-impressions.  The more he thinks about it, the more he’s sure.

But he can’t—say that.  He can’t suggest it.  They fuck the way they fuck, and it’s really great, and he loves it—he does.  It makes him feel hot and shimmeringly sated and ecstatic with the power they both have over each other in moments like that, when they’re both stripped down to nothing.  The balance of it makes his head spin.  It’s good.  It’s really good.  There’s nothing wrong.

Which makes him feel even worse about it.  Why does he even want that when everything’s so damn excellent in the first place?  What difference would it make?  He’s not stupid enough to think that relative positions during sex say jackshit about the character of a human being.  It’s just motion.  It’s a means to an end, and the objective is a closeness built in physicality to match the emotional one.  That’s the difference between this and all the fucking flings.  This has something to tie that to.  This has significance.  This is part of something.

And it’s great the way it is.

He just… wants.  He does.  He can’t shake it.  He looks at Roy, at every fucking curve and angle of him, at all of the breath-snagging beauty in every last line, and thinks—

Mine, mostly.  He thinks about proving it.  He thinks about how fucking gorgeous Roy would look underneath him, riled up and falling apart.  He thinks about how good he wants to make that feel.

He draws a deep breath and lets it out slow, and very carefully lifts his hand.  He strokes his fingertips lightly back and forth across Roy’s forearm where it lies over his chest.  Maybe that’ll make whatever dream Roy’s having a tiny bit more pleasant.  Maybe that will impart it on him without intruding—maybe that will whisper to him, wordlessly, that he’s safe, and appreciated, and fucking loved.

Ed has pieced together enough of the unsaid scraps and implications to know that that’s unusual, for Roy.  He hasn’t experienced it very many times before.  There was Hughes, by the sound of it, and obviously his team would die for him and vice versa, but this whole thing is still extremely special for him.  Ed loves whole-hearted, headfirst.  No prisoners, no reservations, no second guessing, no second chances.  He holds his nose and jumps, and he’s all in.

Ed wants to give that to Roy.  Ed doesn’t ever want him to have a reason to doubt it.  Ed wants him to know that they’re all right, whether or not Ed is squirreling away some stupid little quibbles about the details.

He closes his eyes and tries to differentiate layers in the darkness on the insides of his eyelids.  He needs to sleep.  Today was one hell of a day, and tomorrow will be another.  Endless circles.  Sounds familiar.

He can’t change any of it now—not tonight.  Not by agonizing.  The only thing he can do is sleep on it, and get up tomorrow, and do his damn best all over again.

Sometimes powerlessness can be weirdly kind of comforting.

Chapter 2

Notes:

Sorry this took a while – I was so, so stuck on the last part of this fic. I chipped away at it a few hundred words at a time ever since posting this part, though, and finally tied it up (into, uh, a nice little 18K monstrosity of mostly porn that may need to be two chapters, but I haven't figured that out yet) about a week ago, so the rest will be on the way much faster than this part. OTL Thank you for sticking it out with me! ♥

…seriously, though. Anyone who ever tells you that writing isn't just a matter of sheer pigheaded willpower is trying to sell you a writing book.

Side note: yes, I decided partway through that Aerugo gets to be Fantasy Italy and did not even pretend to care about accuracy or research or any of that stuff. Working on this around everything else that has been going on almost killed me as it was. :')

Chapter Text

The scream wakes him, and then the sound of breaking glass flings him up out of the bed.

He hears the sheets whipping back and a creak of springs from Roy’s side of the mattress as he staggers forward and shoves his feet into his boots.  He has just oriented himself in the unfamiliar room well enough to direct a run towards the door when Roy mutters something that sounds an awful lot like “Maybe it’s going to collapse a little sooner than I thought.”

The scream had to have come from the next room, at that volume, which means another guest or diplomat in peril first thing in the goddamn morning, which means…

Well, what that means is more Roy’s pay grade than Ed’s, but in a matter of moments he finds himself pounding on the door next to theirs and shouting “Hello?  Are you okay?” in any case.

The woman who yanks it open doesn’t look any peachier than Ed had hoped: she rattles something off in Aerugan that’s also above his pay grade, but the pointing towards the shattered window—and at the figure sprinting off across the lawn—does the rest.

“Ah, hell,” Ed says.

“Ed,” Roy says from behind him as Ed crosses the fancy little rug—not quite as annoying as the carpets, but in a similar category, all told—in three swift strides and peers down over the broken edge of the lowest windowpane.  “Wait—”

“It was my mother’s,” the woman says, wretchedly, and Ed glances back just long enough to see her wringing the hem of her silk robe as her eyes fill.  “The necklace, that he took, it—”

Ed plants his right hand on the stretch of sill marred by the fewest spiky shards, and jumps.

Ostentatious buildings make the best playgrounds: the second floor has big stone decorative awnings over all of the windows, just like their level does, so Ed lands handily on the one directly underneath.  Good job he got his damn shoes on, though he kind of wishes he’d slept in a shirt.  At least he does have pants.  That would have created a whole new set of problems.

He makes quick work of the leap to the gutter, glancing over his shoulder to watch the culprit pelt off across the wide lawn towards the gardens.  He and Roy got a tour of those yesterday.  There’s a damn hedge maze.  Ed is going to whup this guy if the son of a gun runs into a hedge maze at the ass-crack of dawn to avoid capture after stealing somebody’s shit.

Swinging off the gutter ushers Ed swiftly down to the first floor, where some more molding and a bit of statuary ease his passage the rest of the way down to the grass.  Dew squelches under the treads of his boots.

“Be careful,” Roy’s voice calls, and Ed spares just a second to look up in his direction and salute.

He doesn’t need to wait for Roy to roll his eyes, though, since he can imagine that in perfect clarity.

He’d thought, even at the time, that the tour gave them a big advantage.  Knowing the field improves your gameplay even when you don’t know what game it is just yet.

He cuts across the lawn at a diagonal—the way the thief went will bring him right up against the sheer stone wall at the edge of the gardens, which would prove much more challenging to climb than the side of the building did.  If the thief has the means to scale it, Ed will see a figure scuttling up like a lizard as soon as he’s made it over the hilly part of the grass.  If the thief doesn’t, and can’t—which Ed suspects is more likely, since he himself would have broken in by way of the extremely insecure front gate—it will force them deeper into the garden, and Ed will cut them off at the maze.

It’s chillier out here than he was counting on.  The grass is slick.  It’s a good thing that he’s kept up running semi-recreationally, or he’d probably be out of practice chasing down criminals at unholy hours.

He hopes Roy has calmed the lady down.  He also hopes they get some brownie points for this.

Ed can just see a flicker of dark hair and dark clothes—which doesn’t seem especially well-suited to an early morning break-in, but maybe larcenists have a uniform—disappearing past the gate into the garden.  He picks up the pace a little more, racing over the slick grass with all the momentum that he dares, and vaults over the ornate marble bench that looms up ahead of him.  That lands him right in between some rose bushes, and he has to dodge around several others to reach the path again—but even with the zigzagging, he’s lopped a nice corner of the route right off and saved himself what might amount to just enough time.

The little shit slammed the garden gate shut behind them, so Ed jumps over that, too.  The impact of landing on the cutesy cobblestone path makes his right knee ache something awful, but it’s the principle of the thing.

He pauses to get his bearings near the big marble fountain carved to look like a mermaid lovingly cradling a dolphin in her arms, which made Roy bite his lip so hard trying not to laugh that he almost drew blood.  Ed listens carefully, trying to ignore the sound of his own breathing—more labored than he’d like.  Maybe he’s getting out of shape.  Maybe—

Motion draws his eye just in time for another glimpse of a sleeve near the entrance to the hedge maze, and Ed takes off after it.  The fountain keeps on burbling in all of its bizarre merriment, quieter by the moment, and Ed wonders when this thief is going to get a clue.

Too late, probably.  That’s usually how it goes.

Ed gives the idiot about a minute to wind their way deep into the maze—enough time to turn a half a dozen corners, if you run like you want to get away.

Then Ed jogs over to one of the fancy urns with extra decorative flowerpots on top, which makes for a passable improvised stepladder to help him clamber up on top of the nearest hedge.

The hedges have grown densely thick over the years, and what must be a fleet of gardeners trim them so neatly that they look more geometric than some of the stone walls, but Ed still has to watch his footing.  If he stays in one spot for more than a fraction of a second, the automail starts to sink in, and twigs start snapping like firecrackers under his weight.

It’s not the first time he’s sprinted full tilt across something that he shouldn’t ever have tried to climb on, though, and he doubts that it will be the last.

The hedges cushion his strides in a way that warps his balance, but he has to dedicate as much attention as he can to ambient noises, and to watching for the erstwhile escapee—the combination of attention-splitting nonsense makes him feel giddy.  It’s like old times, running on rooftops, ducking bullets, backflipping centimeters clear of certain death.  He probably shouldn’t love it.  He probably shouldn’t love a lot of things.

Probably doesn’t usually stop him before it’s too late.

He veers around another turn, then jumps a corner, and in the air he swears he can see—

Momentum is a pain in the ass to come by at a time like this, when his footing doesn’t give him any leverage, but he’s never been the kind of beggar to try to pick and choose.

He leaps across an open corridor of the maze to land atop the opposite wall.

The horrified disbelief on the face of the thief, turned up towards him in helpless dismay, makes that last stunt worth all of the little scratches burning on his right ankle and then some.  The thief looks about Ed’s age.  He should know better.  Then again, a lot of people should know a lot of things they don’t.

“’Mornin’, asshole,” Ed says, and jumps down on top of him.

He aims it more like a tackle than an outright squash, since an automail limb to the skull could crack the bone right open.  That was never the plan.

Unsurprisingly, the thief doesn’t seem to like the plan much more than he would have liked the squashing, and makes one last bid for freedom, shoes squealing on the wet stones as he shoves Ed off of him—they ended up tangled together in yet another decorative flowerbed.  Ed miscalculated that landing just enough to make himself see a couple stars.  Fortunately, nobody but this jerk saw him partly fail at falling, but it buys the guy another second to start scrambling away.

Ed sighs with what remains of his breath after the embarrassing self-winding, claps his hands together, and presses them to the ground.

The cobblestones writhe, roil, seethe like whitewater, and then slither up to loop around the screaming thief’s unsuspecting wrists.  He thrashes violently and tries to hurl himself forward despite the durability of his new confines, which are also dragging him down to the ground.  In the end, he succeeds only in flinging a huge hunk of gold and gemstones out of his bag, sending it skittering across the paving.

The guy is spitting things at Ed in Aerugan—probably swear words and some choice observations about Ed’s parentage, so Ed really wishes he could devote more brainpower to remembering the specific sounds.  He’ll ask Roy later.  He’d be willing to bet that Roy learned some profane phrases on the side just to be able to teach them to him.  Roy’s thoughtful like that.

In the meantime, Ed crosses over and carefully picks up the necklace.  He instinctively examines it for damage, despite the obvious fact that hack-job reparative alchemy would be the best that he could offer if one of the giant, extremely sparkly emeralds had somehow cracked.  The gold filigree twirling everywhere around the huge green stones doesn’t even look dented, though, so maybe he and this imbecile will both get to survive this entire episode.

He moves to slide it into his pocket, remembers that he’s wearing pajama pants that don’t have any pockets, and hangs it around his neck for safekeeping instead.  There.  Fashion.  He has aesthetically peaked.

He picks up the thief’s bag and slings it over his shoulder, and then he crouches down in front of the culprit, who is wriggling around on the ground like a hogtied rabbit.  Ed would have been out of those stone cuffs and halfway up the wall by now.  Is it this guy’s first day on the job, or what?

He looks younger than Ed thought before.  He has one of those off-putting little goatees with an isolated patch of fuzz right under his lower lip.  He’s still going off on some furious tangent in Aerugan, likely related to Ed’s face and/or the legality of renovating the pavement to capture a criminal.

He sort of has a point there.  Ed considers his options, and then reaches out and grabs the guy’s belt buckle, which at least quells the ranting in favor of some stunned-silent disbelief.

“Sorry,” Ed says, undoing it and pulling the belt free.  “You didn’t really leave me with a whole lot of choices, okay?”

The thief cowers away from the light of the alchemy, which suits Ed fine, since it makes it easier to switch out the stone cuffs for a new pair of leather ones.  Ed puts the pavement back as carefully as possible and then brushes some dirt over the faint transmutation marks.  Nobody’ll notice unless they faceplant in the center of the hedge maze, at which point they’ll probably have bigger problems.

Ed gets up to his feet, grabs onto the center of the cuffs to haul his captive up with him, and tries to reorient himself against the layout of this thing that stuck a little in his head when he could see it from above.  It sort of looked like an array.  He couldn’t help remembering.

“C’mon,” he says, tugging, and the guy must realize that the game is up, because he comes along without too much more indistinguishable whining.




A modest little crowd has gathered on the lawn outside by the time Ed and his unwilling companion tromp back over.  Roy looks decidedly smug until he notices Ed wearing the world’s most unignorable piece of statement jewelry, at which point he looks equal parts decidedly fond and decidedly like he’s trying not to laugh.

The three guardsmen nearby look less amused, even when Ed hands the thief’s bag off to one of them who’s just standing there gaping.  At least it’ll give him something to do.

The same goes for their primary host, Marquess Eloni, and the Amestrian ambassador—Ed doesn’t know who dragged her out of bed, but she doesn’t look thrilled about that either.  The woman whose gargantuan heirloom Ed just risked life and limb—or two of the limbs, at least—to retrieve, at least, looks appropriately grateful and relieved.

With her glasses on, and her hair wrapped up in a bun at the top of her head, wearing a silk scarf fixed around her neck by a huge, shiny brooch, she also looks… different.

She looks, in fact, like the spitting image of one of the photos near the top of the cheat sheet.

“You’re—” Ed swallows, hastily reels his brain back in by force, tries to slow down his breathing and the gallop of his heartbeat, and sweeps a shaky little bow.  Bows are stupid.  He hopes the thought mostly counts.  Roy tried to teach him how to do it properly, and he just about fell over.  Roy seemed to think that that was cute at the time, but it sure as fuck isn’t now.

Also, the motion makes the giant-ass necklace swing forward and smack against the underside of Ed’s chin, which hurts like hell.

For people this high on the sheet, you’re supposed to trot out some fancy little Aerugan phrases.  Trying to articulate words in a foreign language while standing shirtless on damp grass before having had a drop of coffee, however, is making Ed regret a significant number of his life choices up until now.

“Duchess Molodea,” he manages.   “It’s…” He can’t remember how to express that it’s an honor in Aerugan, so he hopes that the helpless speechlessness sort of gets the point across.  He tries to start lifting the necklace off to hand it to her before he’s fully upright, which is a mistake—his metal fingers clink loudly against the gold chain, and he manages to get it hopelessly tangled in his hair, and he’s only distantly aware of the guardsmen taking hold of the handcuffs and muttering something to the thief.  At least someone’s having a worse morning than he is.

He hopes they don’t do anything drastic to the guy, though.  As far as crimes go, stealing an heirloom from the country’s single richest widow is not only relatively low-impact in terms of ruining someone’s life, but also ballsy as hell.  Unfortunately, Ed doesn’t imagine that “Have you considered the sheer stones on this guy?” is going to hold up particularly well in court.

“Please,” Molodea says, before Ed can even struggle with trying to suggest that in a language that he can barely deliver pleasantries in.  “There is no need to stand on ceremony.”

The necklace is completely stuck in Ed’s fucking hair.  Panic starts to rise in his throat and choke the last of his Aerugan right out of him, but Roy steps forward smoothly before it strangles him.  Roy’s hand clasps very gently around his left wrist, meaningful for a single moment so that Ed drops his hand, and then Roy’s clever fingers are carefully extracting the necklace from his hair without so much as a wayward tug.  Ed doesn’t even know how he can do that.  Roy’s always had a knack for dexterity that blows Ed’s mind, but stuff like this—

Having Roy’s fingertips flirting with his skin, even in a context as colossally unsexy as this one, makes his scalp tingle.  Roy has such an extra-delicate touch when it comes to things like this that it makes Ed’s voice crawl down into the pit of his stomach and purr.

“You have done me such a great service, Major Elric,” Molodea is saying.  The thief has taken up muttering loud enough that the lead guard yanks on the handcuffs and starts dragging him away.  “How can I possibly repay you?  You must let me do something.”

Ed stares at her while Roy eases a little more hair free of where it stuck in the necklace clasp.  “Oh.  That’s… you really don’t have to.  It’s fine.  I’m just glad I could help, Ma’am.  I was just in the right place at the right time, is all.”

Molodea shares a glance with Roy, which Ed is sure he doesn’t like, even though Roy is still wearing a sort of neutral beatific expression familiar from a lot of the meetings with top-shelf diplomats.  The objective is to look pleasant and open-minded without betraying the fact that he’s extremely tickled by everything that’s being said, the bastard.

“Major Elric is well-known for selfless acts of charitable derring-do,” Roy says, which is a load of horseshit if Ed’s ever heard it.  Which he has.  Roy holds out the liberated necklace.  “We’re delighted we could be of service, Your Grace.  May we walk you back to your rooms?”

Molodea accepts the necklace from Roy with a care that verges on ceremonial.  She undoes the clasp, secures it around the back of her neck, lays the giant stones down on top of her silk scarf, and pats them gently.

“You are terribly kind, Vice Chancellor,” she says.  “But I believe I need to… what is the phrase?  Offer a statement, I believe.  I will see you again today, though, I hope?”

Roy’s bow is much more appealing than Ed’s, not least because it makes his ass look especially fine.  That’s not even fair.  “That is my sincerest wish.”

They part without too much more nonsense, and Ed waits until they’re about to reach the doorway—by which time everyone outside here will have stopped listening for their voices, and before anyone inside will know to start—before he mutters, “I don’t like this.  Did they set us up?”

“I’m not quite sure yet,” Roy says, remarkably cheerfully considering the circumstances.  “But if they did, I think you passed the test with flying colors, which is only going to work in our favor.”

At least that explains the cheerfulness thing.

The walk back up to their room takes significantly longer than just jumping out the window.  Ed isn’t sure whether he should regret that or not.  He solved the problem, obviously, but the vast majority of people at the level of Roy and Molodea and the brass tend to prioritize method over results.  If you don’t solve the problem the way they want you to, in perfect step and impeccable style, dotting every I and wearing tailored clothes, then what you accomplish doesn’t count for much.

Roy seems pleased, though, and in addition to being the important thing, that’s a good sign.  If Roy thought that Ed had landed them in a heap of trouble by trying to do the right thing in the wrong way, his smugness factor wouldn’t be soaring quite so far off the charts.

“Hey,” Ed says when Roy, upon letting them in, immediately flings himself back down on the bed.  “You’ve got a meeting at nine.”

“Plenty of time,” Roy says, with his eyes fixed firmly on Ed instead, who is nowhere near the clock.

“Bet there’s not,” Ed mutters, going over to their luggage to paw through his bag.  “Just let me get a shirt on—”

“Do you have to?” Roy asks.  A skeptical glance confirms that he’s still lolling around on the rumpled sheets.  “The view is even nicer when you don’t.”

Ed hauls a new shirt out of the bag and starts wrangling it over his head.  “Thought we were here to secure some sort of an international alliance, so future generations won’t have to live under the looming specter of retaliatory war.  But I guess if you just wanna lie around and hit on me instead—”

“Multitasking,” Roy says, grinning like a cat.

Bastard’s too damn cute for either of their own good.  Ed eyes him.  “You could at least make yourself useful and find me some damn coffee, y’know.”

“‘Useful’?” Roy says, and somehow the grin gets even wider and even worse.  “There are very few activities in the vast span of human achievement that rival watching you dress, Ed.”

Roy hung both their uniforms in the bathroom so that the shower steam would help with the inevitable wrinkles.  Ed has to admit that he is lazy-as-in-smart sometimes, instead of the usual lazy-as-in-lazy shit.  Ed goes in search of his pants.  “Is one of them watching me undress?”

Roy laughs, which makes Ed’s right-foot toes curl.  “Vice Chancellor Mustang abstains from comment.”

“Judiciously,” Ed says.

Respectfully,” Roy says.  The sheets rustle while Ed trades his pajamas out for the state-sanctioned murderer clothes.  “It isn’t even eight yet.  You know we’d have time to—”

“Coffee first,” Ed says, louder this time.  He fusses with the buttons on his cavalry skirt so that he can keep his head lowered, and Roy won’t see him flushing like a kid.  “If there’s still time after that, then… I dunno.  Things might happe—”

Roy is out the door like a shot.

Ed allows himself one big sigh and sits down to review their notes for the nine o’clock.




A blowjob from a master of the craft—during coffee, no less—really has a way of starting the day out on the right foot.  Ed had thought that Roy meant fucking like proper-fucking.  It still comes as a surprise every time that Roy doesn’t seem to expect that, and it’s even stranger, to Ed’s mind, when he invests primarily in Ed’s enjoyment.  Sometimes he doesn’t even seem to care if he gets any, as long as Ed benefits.

Turning that over a little, it’s probably a bad reflection on Ed’s exes as much as it’s a good reflection on Roy, but it takes some getting used to, is all.

The bottom line, though, is that Ed’s still riding the orgasm endorphin high when they reach the umpteenth overly fancy office where Roy’s first meeting is going to be.  Yet another guard in gold-trimmed livery opens the door, and Ed makes eye contact with Roy and then moves to stand on the far side.

“Ah!” a voice calls from within.  “Vice Chancellor Mustang and—Major Elric, isn’t it?  Come in, come in!”

Ed makes eye contact with Roy again, this time in shock instead of as a silent Go get ’em, tiger.

Roy, in emblematic Roy style, doesn’t even look surprised, but does look terrifically pleased with himself.

Ed’s willing to bet that he knew that this was going to happen, and deliberately didn’t say anything just so that he could see the look on Ed’s face right now.




Word travels fast around this damn building.  Ed imagines the gossip slithering along the obnoxious carpet, parting the fibers like the body of a tiny snake.  People he’s never seen before keep greeting him and inviting him to sit in on their meetings with Roy, like he’ll jump out of a window and save their heirlooms as soon as they’ve acknowledged his existence.  It’s kind of a pain in the ass, actually—not so much literally, since most of them have extremely cushy armchairs, but because he has to pay attention to the mind-numbingly boring back-and-forth political bullshit instead of catching a nap in any of the cushy chairs in question.  This is Roy’s gig.  Ed is a million times better at helping Roy separate the wheat from the chaff when they debrief after the fact than he is at pretending to be interested in the endless nonsense that gets said in real time.  Sitting there and smiling as neutrally as possible when all he wants is to go back to their room and shove Roy up against a wall and lick the skin over his ribs is not exactly the reward that these people seem to think it is.

Still, he tries to feel grateful.  It’s a pretty big deal that they’re giving him the time of day, let alone offering him a seat in the room.

Unsurprisingly, he spends a lot of the time of day they’ve given him watching Roy some more—and this is almost worse than at dinner, when Roy could be boisterous and bright and loquacious.  Roy in a meeting, focused in on a goal and driving the conversation towards it so subtly that his adversary doesn’t even realize that they’ve already lost, is a whole different level of gorgeous.  He’s charming and suave and thoughtful at turns, giving and taking, baiting and reeling, making it all look so natural that Ed almost forgets the plans they made for each individual diplomat they wanted a commitment from.  Roy’s hands move smoothly, and his shoulders are set at an easy angle, and he smiles swiftly but blinks slowly, eyelashes heavy on his skin.  The way his mouth moves is mesmerizing.  He had it around Ed’s dick two hours ago—Roy was sucking him off.  Ed.  And it sure as fuck looked like he was enjoying it, for the parts that Ed could see when he wasn’t tipping his head back to pant at the ceiling or twisting his fingers in Roy’s hair.

The hair is still sticking up a little in the back where Ed grabbed it.  Roy noticed in the mirror before they left, and smirked, and said “I dare them to ask.”

Ed wants to tie him to the headboard of the bed.  Ed wants to push him to the precipice so many times he forgets everything except the sensation.  Ed wants to know him from the inside out.

Now that he’s sober again, he can pick it apart a little better.  It’s not a power thing—not quite, anyway.  It’s not about claiming Roy, or owning him, or warning him that it won’t be like this with anybody else.

Roy already knows that.

Ed has seen the way Roy looks at him sometimes—especially when he doesn’t realize that Ed’s aware, or awake.  There is a towering affection to it, and a sense of puzzlement, and a lot of surprise.

And there’s a little bit of fear.

Roy doesn’t fall in love easy.  He protects himself too well for that.  Ed showed up and smashed his way in and settled down and waited over a decade for their planets to align, and now they’re orbiting each other like there wasn’t ever any other choice.  Like this was always coming.  Like this was always the course of things, the truth of things, even when it hadn’t happened yet.

Roy is scared of how deep it runs, and how much it is.  Roy is scared of the fact that it feels so simple, and it works so well.  Roy is waiting for the other shoe to fall.  Roy is bracing himself for the day he blows it, and helplessly hoping for minimal casualties in the collapse.

Ed is, too.

But when he’s thinking—when he’s looking, when he’s watching, when he’s rational—he recognizes that Roy’s in this for the long haul, just like he is.  They balance each other.  They’re equally fucked.

So what it comes down to is that Ed doesn’t want to rail Roy to prove a point, because there’s nothing left to prove.  There’s nothing left to lose.  Ed wants to rail him because it would feel really fucking good, for both of them—he knows it.  And because every time Roy tilts his head and says something that sounds perfectly innocent but is carefully calculated to get him what he wants, he is so goddamn hot that it makes Ed’s guts throb like an open wound.  Like a burn setting in.

Once they’ve finished the last damn meeting and retreated to their room for a break before some afternoon coffee thing, the first thing Roy does is collapse dramatically on the bed again.  He looks so cute when he gets all cozy with the pillow like that that Ed can’t even hold him against it properly.  They have almost a solid hour before the coffee thing starts.  Roy’s going to put all the wrinkles back into his uniform.

Maybe that’s deliberate, because he wants Ed to stroke both hands down his thighs again in another desperate attempt to smooth them out.

Ed sometimes wishes Roy would just say what he wants, but it’s distinctly possible that that makes Ed the universe’s single most majestically-sized hypocrite nowadays.

Ed takes out his notes and a pen and sits down in the armchair.  The one upshot of him having to sleepwalk through all of those meetings is that he knows a lot of the results without Roy having to spell them out one target at a time.

“You kinda killed it today,” he says.  The qualifier is unnecessary, but Roy’s ego doesn’t need the help.  Riza had a pulled-aside talk with Ed one time, right after Roy won the Vice Chancellor seat by a landslide that surprised no one except for his idiot opponents, about trying to help Roy maintain a healthy sense of humility and keep their collective eyes on the prize.  “Let’s see.  The Minister of Educational Affairs loves that exchange program idea.  I’m gonna check that off.  Minister of Foreign Affairs liked that, too—I’m making a note.  Big objective for her was the treaty draft, though, and I’m checking that right the fuck off.”  Roy was an absolute fucking word wizard on that one, but Ed can feel the gratification radiating off of him from here, so better not to belabor it.  “Should I do a half or a quarter of a checkmark for the Minister of Defense on that one?  We should get that guy’s personal address.  Send him chocolates or some shit.  Butter him up.”

“You can just call it a bribe,” Roy says, and Ed hates that the smirk alone is a work of art.  “They’re not as bothered about that sort of thing around here.”  He stretches extravagantly.  At least he kicked his boots off before he sprawled all over the bed.  “It’s so satisfying to check things off after a long day.”

Ed gives him a look.  “I’m gonna tell you something that’ll blow your mind.  You get to check off lots of stuff when you actually get things done.”

Roy grins.  Shameless.  “Whatever you say, Riza Junior.”

Ed is never sure whether he should wear his shitty office nickname with open pride; or whether it’s a sign that he’s finally caved to the crushing pressure of the military hierarchy, and he should hurl himself off of a cliff.  “You started it.”

Roy grins wider.  Is shamelesser a word?  “I usually do.”

Ed manages to spin the pen over his knuckle and roll his eyes at the same time without accidentally combining those two in a way that ends in a hospital visit.  Today’s going pretty swimmingly, all things considered.  “You planning to start helping, or are you going to take a nap?”

Roy holds an arm out and wriggles his fingers.  “Come here.  We’ve been working like dogs all day.  We deserve a reprieve.”

Ed pens a fastidious little checkmark next to Roy’s scribbled summary of the tariff plan, to log the fact that the Minister of Trade loved it, and sets a question mark next to the checkmark, because Foreign Affairs was less thrilled with that one.  There are a shit-lot of wheedling letters in their future.  He has a premonition of a hand cramp.  They’re supposed to get a full-scale committee meeting tomorrow—maybe they can resolve at least a few of these when they have all of their targets in the same place.  “I’m finishing this while I still remember the answers.  You’re going to get free coffee soon.  How much does the Council Speaker’s opinion actually matter?”

“More than I’d like,” Roy says.  “Enough that we should bribe him, too.  Believe it or not, free naps with my devastatingly attractive boyfriend are even better than free coffee.”

“Naps are always free,” Ed says, keeping his head lowered in the desperate hope that his bangs might hide the blood rushing to his cheeks.  Roy just says that kind of shit like it doesn’t even matter.  “Do we have a budget line yet for bribing half of the Aerugan ministers, or what?”

“Mm,” Roy says.  “I’ll talk to Grumman.  Could you make a note of that?”

Ed writes out bribes in his best cursive at the bottom of the page and dots the I with a little heart.  “I’m not sure I like where this is headed.”

“Trust me,” Roy says, which is a cheap shot, and he knows it.  “I have it all under control.”  He lifts his arm again and flails his fingers even harder this time.  “Please come here?”

He looks so pitiful with his lower lip sticking out like that that Ed can’t hold out anymore.  He skims the rest of their notes just in case, but most of the remaining annotations are either pretty straightforward, or were answered in a meeting dramatic enough that he’s not liable to forget the outcome any time soon.  He sets the pages and the pen aside, pulls his boots off, and climbs up next to Roy.

Roy immediately wraps all four limbs around him like an extremely affectionate monster from the deep.  Now they’re both going to have wrinkles everywhere.

“Better?” Ed asks.

Perfect,” Roy says.




Free coffee is still great even when the whole fancy-schmancy salon room, complete with obnoxious carpet, starts mobbing Roy to try to monopolize him.

It’s arguably a good thing for a lot of reasons.  The fact that so many people so high up on the cheat sheet want Roy’s attention is a pretty self-evident positive, and the fact that he’s charmed the pants and petticoats off of a significant number of the less-political members of the nobility after a dinner or two is also a plus.

From another angle, the fact that all eyes are on Roy means that no eyes are on Ed, and that gives him a chance to take more of a breather than he expected right now.

He couldn’t find a good time during their meeting with the trade minister to interject that they should really set up some sort of coffee arrangement.  The shit here is to die for—strong and deep but never bitter, with chocolaty undertones.  Barely even needs sugar, although that never exactly hurts.  Helps keep you awake for longer, too.

Watching Roy sip the first cup of the stuff was an unmitigated joy.  Ed hasn’t figured out yet how to tell him stuff like that—or if it’s even worth trying.  Is it redundant to say Seeing you happy makes me feel like my chest is going to explode to someone who knows you’re completely wrecked for anybody else now that you’ve dated them?  Ed’s standards were so low before that it always felt like some incongruous novelty, but these days…

Well.  These days Ed gets to watch Roy work the room, occasionally raising a little white cup that he’s polluted with cream to his lips to punctuate a particularly clever comment, and half the people hanging off of his every word just swoon.  Ed doesn’t blame them.

So much of Roy’s power comes from the way he holds himself—the conduct, the composure.  It doesn’t originate in appearance alone.  He’s a looker, sure, but when someone’s just gorgeous, you glance once and then look away.  People stare at Roy, openly, for long stretches.  Even Ed has to stop and watch him in wonderment an inordinate amount of the time.  People just can’t get enough of him.  That’s different.  And it’s dizzying.  Every eye in the room is on Roy Mustang right now.

Except two, apparently, unless Duchess Molodea can move silently across the room and drop down into the chair next to Ed without looking where she’s going.

He wouldn’t put it past her.

Especially not with the knowing expression that she’s giving him as he startles hard and guiltily focuses on her instead of Roy.

“You know,” she says, setting her elbow on the arm of the chair and arching an eyebrow at him, “I have been around longer than I would prefer to admit.  I’ve seen the way that these things go.  That man?  He is mad about you.  Whatever it is that you want—ask for it.  Take it.  Tell him.  He’s at your feet.”

Ed’s tongue feels numb, but apparently it’s developed a mind of its own despite the frenetic buzzing of his nerves.  “I don’t… know what…”

She winks at him.  Heat floods his cheeks.  That obvious, by the looks of it.  Fuck.

“Of course not,” she says.  “How is your coffee?”

“Great,” Ed gets out.

“Wonderful,” she says, and the way she smirks behind the rim of her cup reminds Ed way too much of Madame Christmas.




“This,” Roy says, “is a lot nicer than last night.”

Ed just nods.  His mouth is full, and Roy already knows that he agrees with that anyway.  They’re standing on a pretty bridge over a pretty canal, eating too many servings of some ungodly breaded, fried meat thing on a skewer that Roy dared Ed to buy from a sketchy-looking street vendor, which just so happens to taste like heaven.  There’s a wrought-iron fence running most of the way along the edge of the canal, and this must be a touristy area or an extension of the government quarter, because there are flowering vines winding all over it, turning pink and purple blossoms up towards the last of the fading sunlight.  The sunset dapples rosy tones all over the pale marble.  The water laps gently, serenely, against the sides of the canal, and Ed’s still wired from the good coffee, and Roy is leaning on the railing of the bridge directly beside him, letting their shoulders and their elbows brush.  He looks like a million fucking cens.  And he looks happy.

Ed is, too, in that throat-stopping, chest-bursting way that makes him nervous at the same time.  Nobody should ever feel this good, let alone him.  It feels like he’s getting away with something.  Surely something has to go wrong soon.  That’s how the universe works.  That’s what life is.

Little yellow lights are coming on along the canal—a couple of streetlamps, and smaller lamps in people’s windows, and lights inside cafés.  The last frets of the sunlight glint on the water.  People are laughing quietly at one of the restaurants on the street below them, off to the rightward side of the bridge.  Roy’s shoulders are relaxed.  The way he’s leaned down makes his spine arc like a bent bow.  Ed decides that Roy’s eyes look like banked coals, and then narrowly resists the urge to throw himself off of the bridge for even thinking that.

Maybe it’s all right, though, to take this moment as it is.  Maybe they’re far enough from all of the mistakes, all of the failures, all of the old wrongs they never righted—maybe they’re far enough, now, from the world Ed knows, that they can have this.  Just this once.  Maybe the past can’t reach them here.

Roy is turning the little stick from his last skewer over and over with his fingertips as he looks out across the canal.  After a couple of seconds, his eyes shift sideways—to Ed, who has now been clearly caught out enjoying the view of him more than the strikingly scenic vista.  There’s not really too much that’s more damning than that.

“Do you want dessert?” Roy asks.

Fuck.  Ed loves him.  Tiptoeing around it doesn’t change a goddamn thing.

He loves Roy so much, in fact, that he even swallows the food in his mouth before he answers.

“Of course I want dessert,” he says.  “Later’s fine.  I think I saw an ice cream place right after we left.  We could just stop on the way back.”

That’s easier than saying I don’t really want to leave yet.  Roy is smart enough to hear that part of it anyway, whether Ed says it or not.

By the softness of his smile, it came through just fine.  The smile twists into something a little more mischievous after a couple of seconds, though, and then he gestures down to one of the sleek little boats being guided along the canal by an enterprising oarsman, with some lovey-dovey couple snuggled up together in the back.

“In the meantime,” Roy says, “how about a stirringly romantic gondola ride?”

Ed feels himself flushing a little bit all over again at just the thought of the two of them curled up together like that, where anyone could see them, and everyone would know.

Besides—realistically speaking, they’d probably start roughhousing as a joke, take it too far on accident, and end up flipping the boat.

Ed makes a face at Roy, hoping it conveys as much of that as possible.  “How about you eat my entire ass, Mustang?”

“Right here?” Roy asks, airily.  “It’s awfully public, but I’ll try anything once.”

Ed opens his mouth to volley something back, but the rejoinder sticks.  It takes him two tries to swallow it.

Now or never, no guts no glory—all that shit that stupid people say because they’ve never really had anything to lose.

Ed looks Roy in the eyes, which have widened slightly—it’s barely perceptible, because Roy always plays this stuff so close to the chest, but Ed’s gotten too damn good at watching him to miss it.

“Do you mean that?” Ed says.  Every single word feels heavy on its way off of his tongue.

Roy searches his face for a long few seconds before the slow smile starts.

And then Roy’s eyebrow arches a little, and Ed knows that he means it, and that they’re both just… sunk.  Like a tipped-over gondola.

“For you,” Roy says, “yes.  I do.”

Ed keeps both eyes on him, trying to monitor every part of his face at once.  “Are you sure?”

Roy turns all the way towards him—away from the breathtaking sunset and the scenery, away from the whole rest of the world.  Roy drops the little skewer stick in his hand—just lets the fuck go of it.  Roy Mustang littering isn’t something that Ed even knows how to process, and it’s all that he can do to keep staring instead of passing out on the spot.

Roy’s hands lift smoothly and settle themselves gently on either side of Ed’s jaw.  His thumbs stroke up over Ed’s cheekbones, just once.

“I’m sure,” Roy says.  “I was brought up in a brothel, don’t forget.  I am very open-minded.”

Ed pushes his tongue against the back of his teeth and tries to find some trace of doubt in it—in the expression, in the touch, in Roy’s eyes.

There isn’t any.  Not that he can see.

Roy will be able to feel his cheeks heating up for the millionth time today.  You probably shouldn’t be allowed to sleep with people if you can’t even talk about it without feeling shy and stupid half the time.

Maybe that’s all the more reason that Ed has to get it out.  Maybe this is some kind of a turning point.  Maybe this is one of the hooks inside him that his brain has snagged on, and maybe he can pull it free.

“I wanna fuck you,” he says.  Forcing his voice to form the words comes easier than he expected, but it feels so weird to hear them coming out of himself that he’s not completely sure he’s occupying his own skin.  “I mean—if you’re okay with it.  Only if—”

Roy kisses him.  And then kisses him again.  And again, and again, separating them out with gasps of air and then pressing back in deep and warm and desperate until Ed loses track of time and space and every thought he’d had before—every trace of expectation.

“God,” Roy says, almost under his breath, drawing back and leaning his forehead on Ed’s and closing his eyes.  “I thought you’d never ask.”

It takes Ed a second to reorient his brain and swallow down the Never mind and the Just an idea and the Not a big deal lodged halfway up his throat.

“Oh,” he manages, which is better than he expected.  “Uh.  Really?”

“Ed,” Roy says.  He opens his eyes again, but just a sliver, and the heat of them— “With the way you look at me sometimes, I can’t believe you haven’t just bent me over the kitchen table at home by now.”

Ed’s guts throb.  “I’m pretty sure that can be arranged.”

Roy’s slow grin redoubles the beat of Ed’s blood searing through him.  “I’m pretty sure neither of us wants to wait that long.”

Ed feels slightly dizzy.  “This is even better than ice cream.”

“Come on, then,” Roy breathes, eyes mostly mischief—except, of course, for the ember of unadulterated sex.

Ed fumbles for Roy’s wrist to start dragging him bodily in the direction of the embassy, but before he can grasp it, Roy is saying “Oh” and ducking down and picking up the discarded skewer stick.

He straightens again, looking around them.  “Is there someplace I can throw this… what are you laughing at?”

“Nothing,” Ed says, which is a lot easier to get out around the last of the snickering than I think I’m the luckiest fucking guy alive.

Chapter 3

Notes:

…haha. Hi. Editing is hard, fill in your own porn joke! (You get "fill in" for free)

Would like to make the world's biggest shout-out to Maeve, who was incredibly patient while I muddled my way through this fic. I hope it's everything you wanted! ♥

And to you, dear reader, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for sticking it out with me. ♥

Chapter Text

The walk back to the embassy feels like it takes forever, and also like it disappears in a blur of wrought iron streetlamps reflected in the rippled water of the canals.

Ed’s heart pounds, and his guts warm and writhe and curl and simmer.  His mind keeps spinning, flicking through images faster by the moment, one possibility sliding heedlessly into the next.  He didn’t even let himself think about it concretely enough to fantasize in detail, because… well, because that felt unfair, really, and like a violation of Roy’s trust, somehow.  But now

Now he’s wishing that he’d thought about it a whole hell of a lot more.  Now he’s wishing that he had a plan, instead of all these guilty half-thoughts and quarter-ideas winding in frantic circles and burning in his brain.

Then again, maybe it’s a good sign.  He’s always done all of the important things in his life by jumping directly into the deep end, holding his nose and hoping for the best.

The giddy, disbelieving part of him—which is currently big enough to blot out the vast majority of the other parts—wants to run the whole damn way back, blast the doors open, and race right up the stairs.  Maybe they could reverse the morning’s break-in and climb up through their own window to save some time.  He’s going to fuck Roy.  He’s going to fuck Roy tonight.  There should be bells ringing, and confetti—celebration in the streets.  The whole damn world should know.

Obviously that’s not an option, but in his head, this feels like a holiday and a revelation.  They haven’t even started yet, and he can already feel his skin thrumming, and his blood running hot.

They walk back at a leisurely pace, of course—the sort of measured stroll that Roy has perfected over the years.  Ed has a tendency to get distracted after a few careful steps, walk too fast for a while and start to outpace him, and then notice and slow down.  He’s so hummingly hyper-aware right now that he doesn’t seem to be having that problem tonight.  His body just wants to be as close to Roy’s as possible, and nothing in the universe can distract him.  All his thoughts are Roy, and all the heat is Roy, and everything in him is united in the need to make this happen, and make it absolutely fucking amazing.

The fact that Roy is walking significantly faster than usual helps, too.

Roy’s hand keeps drifting up and grazing Ed’s back, which is dangerous—anyone could see them like this.  Then again, Ed supposes that if Molodea already saw it, and seems to be rooting for them, maybe they don’t have to worry quite so much.  Maybe it can be different—just this time.  Just this trip.  Just this once.

Ed roots around in what remains of his cohesive emotions underneath the tremblingly intense desire and determines that it doesn’t really matter.  What they have, and what they have had—yesterday, tomorrow, any time—has worked.  It’s gotten them here.  If neither of them is dissatisfied, then why should they waste time thinking about what other people have, and wondering what other people think is ordinary?

Roy leads them in through the front doors, like some kind of legitimate politician with a reputation or some shit, and deliberately slows down his strides.  The gleam in his eye and the faint hint of a flush rising to his cheekbones—visible even in the dim light from the artsy yellow wall-sconce crap they do around here—betrays how much he’s struggling with it, though.  Ed’s pulse beats.  That’s about the hottest fucking thing that he can think of: Roy wanting this so bad that he’s barely staying in control.

Ed has to bite down hard on the tip of his tongue when he sees a shadow coalescing into another evening wanderer in one of the halls.  At least it isn’t anyone he recognizes, since he’s pretty sure he’d die.  Roy offers a very convincing calm-sounding greeting, and Ed plasters on a smile that hopefully looks more unassuming than utterly strained, and Roy shoots him a glance as soon as they’ve passed the unsuspecting citizen.  Roy’s eyes are overflowing with the mischief now.  He loves this shit.  Is that masochism or exhibitionism in this case?

That doesn’t matter too much either.  They’re one flight of stairs and half a hall away from their room, and then—

“Hmm,” Roy says, trying to make it sound casual.  “Molodea said her hearing isn’t what it used to be.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about that,” Ed says.

Roy will, though, and that sinks into Ed’s stomach with a glacial sort of certainty.  Are they even capable of doing this quietly?  He’s nervous enough as it is, underneath the dizzy rush of want.  If he has to monitor their collective volume the entire time—

As they approach their room, though, he can see a spill of moonlight from the next doorway down.  The door is open.

He glances at Roy and then moves forward silently, steps light and swift with his weight on the balls of his feet.  He pauses with his shoulder pressed to the edge of the doorway for a long second, listening intently, and lifts both hands to press his palms together.

Then he swings around the doorway to step into the room, and—

Finds it entirely empty.  Any trace of a cherished royal family member has completely vanished.

“Huh,” he says.  “We were set up.”

The whisper of Roy’s shoes on the carpet warns him, at least.  “There are worse things.”

Ed gives the empty room another onceover to make sure it really is empty.  He wouldn’t put anything past people in this place.  “Guess so.”

“There are also better things,” Roy says, and Ed can hear the grin in his voice even before turning around and getting to see it curve in the moonlight.  “Perhaps we should try out a few of those.”

“‘Perhaps’?” Ed says, letting the fingertips of his left hand catch against Roy’s shirt and graze his chest in the process of walking past him.  “When was the last time you heard someone use the word ‘perhaps’ in conversation and then get laid?”

“Hmm,” Roy says, dutifully trailing him.  “If memory serves, sometime last week.”

Ed makes what probably amounts to a pretty feeble effort at glaring at him while unlocking the door.  His hands still aren’t steady.  This is Roy.  It’ll be fine.  It’ll be better than fine.  It always is.

He shoves the door open, leaning back out of the way for the count of one long second, and then peers in.  When nothing moves, he reaches his right hand in first and flicks on the lights.  When nothing moves after that, he steps in and starts checking the corners.

Roy closes the door behind them and locks it, which isn’t protocol, and Ed looks up from inspecting the space behind the bed to tell him so—

And Roy plants both hands on his chest and shoves him up against the wall.

Ed bares his teeth on instinct.  It is, in fact, absolute crap that the full assortment of Roy’s smug expressions look so damn good on him.  He abuses that.  He’s made a career out of abusing it, and the least he could do would be to stop bludgeoning Ed with it at every last damn opportunity, when Ed already has to contend with all of his other equally gorgeous fucking faces.

“The fuck, Roy?” he manages, grabbing two fistfuls of the front of Roy’s shirt.  Roy lets him shift the balance of their weight—lets him push off of the wall and flip their positions, pressing Roy back against the wall instead, leaning in and over him while he just grins.  “Are you trying to provoke me on purpose?”

The grin only widens.  Nobody’s eyes hold heat like Roy’s.  “Is it working?”

“Depends,” Ed says, hearing the edge of a growl underscoring his own voice.  “What are you trying—”

Roy’s smile twists extremely sly as he hikes his hips out, grinding them against Ed’s.

All Ed’s done is press him up against the wall, and he’s already hard.

Ed’s heartbeat skitters, and his groin throbs, and the heat of Roy’s body seeps into his.

“You’re enjoying this,” Ed says.  Even speaking the words aloud, even with the proof pressing against his hip, it’s difficult to believe it.

“Of course I am,” Roy says, eyelids low, with that hint of a purr that always makes Ed’s spine tighten and his breath stick and his skin tingle everywhere.  Pure sex.  “It’s my turn to be the mouthy brat, and for you to shut me up.”

Ed’s pulse quickens.

Is that fucked up?

Too late.

He lays the tip of his left index finger against the top button of Roy’s shirt and pushes it inward as hard as he dares.

“You’re not capable of shutting up,” he says.

Roy tilts his head back.  Mischief and defiance.  He could have Ed at his feet—he could have anyone.

But he chose this.  This is what he wants.

“Guess you’ve got your work cut out for you,” he says.

A part of Ed wants to say something pithy about how Roy doesn’t know a whole lot about work.

But the rest of him—the vast majority—just wants to fuck Roy into the mattress.

Roy is still smirking at him.

Ed curls both hands in the front of Roy’s shirt again, which gives him the perfect amount of leverage to swing them both sideways and shove Roy down on the bed.

The way Roy’s hair bounces chokes the breath right out of him, but Roy doesn’t miss a damn beat before stretching both arms up over his head and arching his back, watching Ed through his eyelashes like—

Well.  Like he really wants to get railed, effective as immediately as possible.

Ed doesn’t get too many chances to grant wishes.

He climbs up over Roy, settling one knee on either side of the bastard’s hips—which are and always have been too perfect altogether, dramatic scar tissue be damned—and leans down to try to kiss the stupid smirk off of his face.

The results of that endeavor are usually mixed, since Roy’s smirk tends to start to dissolve into laugher once he realizes what Ed’s doing, which technically fulfills the objective, but doesn’t really count.  Ed’s always weak for Roy’s laugh, but he doesn’t want to be weak right now—he wants to be in control.

He fixes his right forearm directly on top of Roy’s collarbones to pin him down on the bed and starts undoing shirt buttons with his left hand.

Roy arches his back higher, heels settling on the edge of the mattress to give him enough leverage to push his hips directly up into Ed’s again.  Smarmy fucking bastard goes back to smirking while he does it, so Ed just hauls his shirttails free from his belt and rips the rest of the buttons open.

One of them pings off of the lamp.  Ed has a distant, hazy premonition of some unlucky cleaner finding it on the floor someday.  At least there are a lot of innocent explanations for that.

There are no innocent explanations for the way he leans down again and bites Roy’s bottom lip while he undoes Roy’s belt.  He needs both hands for it, and the buckle clinks so loud, so much, against his fingers that it sounds like a warning, like alarm bells, like—

Roy bites his lip right back.

“Stop thinking,” Roy breathes, eyelashes rising so slowly that Ed can’t help it if he marvels a little bit.  “I love you.  Just move.”

Ed presses his forehead to Roy’s for a second and squeezes his eyes shut.  He doesn’t really have time to deal with the first part of that if he intends to follow through with the second.

“Rain check,” he says.

Roy kisses him, softly and without a trace of expectation.

Hearing it said doesn’t change the fact that he already knew, anyway.

The only thing it changes in this moment is that it makes it all a little bit… easier.  It means that there’s a little less to lose.

He nips his way back into the kiss and starts working Roy’s pants down off of those terrible, terrible hips while he does it.

Roy really enjoys foreplay, to the point of occasionally claiming that it can be as good as the sex itself—which is obviously untrue, but presumably only necessary to proclaim because Ed’s usually in such a damn hurry that it must look like he’s trying to get it all over with.  Which he’s not.  But Roy’s very specific brand of extremely attentive teasing and slow-burning hands have made it evident that it can at least be pretty fucking great in its own right, and Ed wants to do this the way that Roy will want to feel it.

He sits back, ignoring how Roy tries to rub their dicks together for more friction even as he moves, and plants his hands on Roy’s newly-bared thighs to hold him still.  He didn’t get too far with the pants, so they’re still around Roy’s knees, but there’s something kind of hot about that, too—about not being able to wait long enough to see it through.  He figures Roy will be more interested in Ed slowly kissing his way up Roy’s stomach to his breastbone anyway.

He figured right.

The giddy novelty of having permission to put his hands and his mouth all over every inch of Roy Mustang still hasn’t worn off.  He hopes it never does.  He hopes it feels this special and significant every single time, no matter how many that turns out to be.  The cauterization scar looks like a horrid mirror image of the one he’s got, and there are more of them, here and there, but mostly there’s just Roy, just skin and heat and the way his muscles jump with trying not to squirm when Ed brushes his lips extra lightly over the ticklish spot under the awning of his ribs.

Completely unsurprisingly, Roy’s a total sucker for all of the schmoopy shit.  His breath sighs out of him in one sweet surge of contentment as Ed kisses across his collarbones.  He makes a softer noise, from deeper in his chest, with a trace of a rumble underneath it, as Ed tracks his way back with more than a hint of teeth.

That’s not enough this time.  Ed works his way up Roy’s throat, alternating lips and teeth, forcing Roy’s head back, and drags both hands down his chest.

He curls all of his fingers into the waistband of Roy’s boxers but doesn’t pull on them yet.

Having Roy stretched out underneath him like this—pliant, writhing, eager—makes his nerves jump and his brain spark like a shot of adrenaline in the neck.  On the topic of necks, he breathes out along Roy’s before nibbling his way up to Roy’s ear.  He tightens the grip of his fingers, and Roy’s hips push up into him slightly—instinct, impulse—before they drop to the mattress again.

“I was thinking,” Ed says, softly, before he can think it through, “that if you really want this, maybe I should make you earn it.”

Roy’s hands dart to him without an instant’s hesitation and slide slowly up his thighs.  The widening grin casts all-new sparks into Roy’s eyes.  “I’d be delighted,” he says.  “Did you have something in mind?”

Ed doesn’t get enough time to recognize the roaring white blank that his brain draws, let alone to panic about it.

Roy’s fingers curl around the backs of his thighs and haul him forward.  He automatically shifts his weight so that he won’t put a metal knee into the side of Roy’s head, for fuck’s sake, and once he realizes that Roy has pulled him so far up that his ass is settled on Roy’s sternum, and his dick is—

“I have a suggestion,” Roy says, and he looks so goddamn smug as his fingers deftly unzip Ed’s jeans that Ed’s breath sticks somewhere near the base of his lungs and won’t come loose.

“How about,” Roy says, giving the zipper one last sharp tug before he slides his right hand directly into Ed’s pants, “if I whet your appetite?”

Ed’s attempt to swallow mostly feels like gulping down a full-grown tumbleweed, so he hopes his expression helps to reinforce the answer.

“Head from Roy Mustang twice in one day,” he manages to rasp out around the twigs of the thing.  “I must be doing something right.”

“Or someone,” Roy says, shifting his shoulders and easing Ed’s already-way-too-hard cock out of the terrible confines of his jeans.  “I live to please.”

“Like fuck you do,” Ed says.

Roy laughs even as he draws Ed’s dick into his mouth, and the way the resonation of it in his throat fucking vibrates

Maybe Like fuck is the whole point.  Roy fucks like he was born to it.

And that’s why they’re here—now, like this, tonight.  Because Ed wants to give some of that back.

Also because Roy is just too fucking hot and too fucking skilled for his own damn good: the pressure of his tongue is perfect, and this has got to be the only time in his life when he really manages to seal his lips.

It’s worth the wait, though.

Roy pulls Ed’s knees further forward, so vigorously that Ed barely has time to angle them so that he won’t bash the metal one into Roy’s skull—which apparently isn’t a concern for Roy right now, because he’s too preoccupied with taking Ed in all the way to the back of his throat.

The heat of his mouth is so intense that the first instant feels almost unbearable, but then Ed’s blood beats so fiercely in answer that it ignites his skin from the inside.  Roy has such a pretty mouth.  His eyes fall most of the way shut, and his eyelashes cast faint, fanned shadows on his cheeks, and his hair slithers back off of his forehead.  Ed’s guts are molten, and his blood keeps singing through him faster by the second, but he can’t help staring.  Roy’s just—gorgeous.  He’s stunning.  He has one of the most staggeringly beautiful faces that Ed has ever seen in his entire life, and right this minute, Ed is seeing it between his own thighs as its owner sucks him off.

When he had colossally guilty dreams about this as a teenager—which was more often than he’s ever quite admitted to Roy—he never imagined that it would be half as good as it actually is.

Roy’s combination of a remarkable intuition for other people’s emotions and an attentiveness to reactions make him just as brilliant in bed as he is in the damn boardroom, and a lot more fun.  When Ed’s breath sticks in his throat, Roy somehow takes him in deeper, which chokes it out of him all at once.  When Ed arches his back, clenches his jaw, and closes his eyes to try to fight himself under control—this is fucking delicious, and he could go another round immediately after, because just the thought of having Roy’s bare ass in front of him, angled up and waiting, just his

But he wants this to last.  He wants to drag Roy through all the fucking foreplay shit that both of them can stand, and then he wants to fuck Roy until neither of their knees work, and the whole world’s hazy at the edges.

Ed knows damn well that this isn’t a comfortable position for wrapping your tongue around somebody’s dick, but that weirdly makes it feel even better—the implications of that small sacrifice.  He bites down hard on his bottom lip and opens his eyes so that he can slide his left hand under the back of Roy’s neck to help support him.  That feels fucking excellent in its own right, anyway—sliding his fingers through Roy’s hair, the warmth of his skin and his scalp.  The way his eyelashes rise just a little, and their gazes meet, and the spit-slicked corners of Roy’s mouth turn up into a smile around Ed’s cock.

“You’re—” Ed hauls a breath in and tries to let it out slow.  “—somethin’ fuckin’ else.  You know that?”

Roy’s mouth curves higher still, and his eyes glimmer, and Ed’s guts burn.  His cock throbs so hard Roy must be able to taste it.

“Mmm,” Roy murmurs, which really only makes it so much better, and so much worse.

Ed likes looking at him from this angle.  Ed likes looking at him from pretty much every angle, but sitting on his chest and slowly fucking into his mouth, with the pressure mounting in him so high that he can hear the roar of it like a distant tidal wave, takes the goddamn motherfucking cake.  Roy looks so fucking serious about it, as if that mouth wrapped around Ed’s cock, teemingly hot and so fucking wet, with that tongue pushing up to make the suction even tighter, could be anything but fucking perfect.  As if this could go wrong.  As if Ed’s not discovering new levels of ecstasy he never even dreamed of at this very fucking moment, and clinging to his sense of himself as he rocks his body back and forth.  Watching his cock side past Roy’s lips is the sort of religious experience he could get behind.

Honestly, he could get behind any and every part of Roy.  It’s just that lately he has a specific one in mind.

At this rate, though, Roy is going to make getting to that part a challenge all on its own.  The contrast of the searing heat of his mouth on Ed’s dick and the cool sweep of his hair across Ed’s fingers, plus the playful glint in his fucking eyes, which have hardly strayed from Ed’s face for a single second—

Ed thought for a long time that sex and love existed in two separate universes—that they probably overlapped for some people, sure, but that they were, at the end of the day, extricable and distinct.

Not with Roy.  Not with someone who puts so much goddamn devotion into every single act.

Roy tilts his head differently on the next upstroke, which sends a roll of smoldering pleasure up Ed’s spine, like the antithesis of a shiver—and then settles back, withdrawing his gorgeous mouth, and blinking languidly up at Ed.  His tongue moves agonizingly slowly across his upper lip, and the thought of him savoring the taste of Ed’s skin and sweat and pre-cum almost makes up for how fucking cold it is all of a sudden now that Ed’s wet cock is completely unattended.

Roy breathes on it deliberately, the bastard.

“Take your hair down,” he says.

Awfully fucking bossy for someone with his head between Ed’s legs right now.

“Why?” Ed says, mustering a scowl for the sake of argument.  He’s going to do it anyway.  The whole point is making sure that Roy enjoys this, but that sure as hell doesn’t mean that he can’t be a shithead about it.  “So that we have to scrub a bunch of cum out of it later when we both just want to pass the fuck out?”

Roy looks so utterly debauched with his hair ruffled and his mouth swollen and a hot flush riding high in his cheeks that the pout he puts on makes Ed start grinning even before the petulant little “Yes.”

The jump of the laugh inside his ribcage and the ongoing feverish throb of his cock fit together so uncannily beautifully that Ed doesn’t understand why he’s never met anyone else who deliberately tries to make him laugh during sex.  He shifts back, leans down, and nips Roy’s pushed-out bottom lip, grinning wider at the way that Roy’s smile breaks through the fake discontentment.

“Fine,” Ed says.  “You do it.”

Roy’s soft sigh of sheer bliss makes his skin tingle, and then the way Roy’s hands slide slowly up over his ass before dragging up along his sides, then his shoulder-blades, to bury themselves in his hair makes him ache.  Somebody needs to get fucked more or less immediately, or Ed will fucking combust, and he can’t imagine that ending too well.

Roy’s fingertips catch one of the coils of the elastic band holding Ed’s hair back and start drawing it out—a long, slow pull, at first; and then, as it tangles in the tail, a series of smaller tugs that set his scalp on fire.

Fingernails scraping gently over his head always soothes something on a visceral level that Ed can’t even control, but the juxtaposition of that sensation against the throbbing of his cock is something else altogether.  Roy, of course, is gazing up at the fall of Ed’s hair and carding his fingers through it like they’ve got all the time in the world, and there was never anything else that is arguably more important going on.

Extremely laboriously, Ed clambers free of the peaceful wonder of scalp-scratching from someone you love and clears his throat.

Roy grins.  The double bastard.

“Forgive me,” Roy says, with more than a hint of a purr in it.  “The world’s finest activities deserve one’s full attention.”

“Joke’s on me, I guess,” Ed says, making a face at him, “since I thought we were fucking, and that was enough to keep you interested, but I guess—”

Roy laughs again, brightly, and Ed fakes a growl and leans down and kisses the shivering breath of it right out of his mouth.  Roy’s tongue tastes salty after his previous preoccupation, and Ed shifts back further without breaking the kiss so he can curl both of his hands around Roy’s hipbones. 

One of the first times they really went at it, he accidentally left a bunch of red marks with the fingers of the automail from gripping Roy’s arms and thighs too tight.  He was fucking mortified, for starters, and deeply afraid that he’d left bruises, and started apologizing so fast that he tripped all over every word.  By the time he’d managed to string a recognizable sentence together, Roy had started twisting around to look at them all in the bathroom mirror.  Ed, three inches and a place to kneel away from groveling outright, had dragged his humiliated soul over, and started the appeal again, and belatedly realized that the light in Roy’s eyes wasn’t dismay or suppressed indignation.

It was delight.

Roy likes it when Ed leaves him with a couple souvenirs.

These days, Ed knows exactly how hard to hold on to leave nice little thank-you notes that fade demurely after a couple of days.

He runs the tip of his metal thumb slowly and firmly and reverently around the jut of the bone in Roy’s left hip, and he can feel that Roy is trying not to shiver.

“Right,” he says.  “Where were we?”

Roy smiles up at him, looking so pleased—with himself, as always, but also just in general—that Ed’s heart wobbles.  “My favorite place in the world.”

“You’re already in my pants,” Ed says, grinding his ass down on Roy’s dick as a timely reminder.  “Isn’t it a little late for the flattery shit?”

“Possibly,” Roy says, but he does have to grit his teeth for a second when Ed presses down hard.  “But it’s never too late for the truth.”

He probably means it.  Roy talks a lot at times like this, but Ed can’t think of an occasion where he said something that he didn’t stand by later.

Much later, sometimes, when they went so long that their joints weren’t up to standing for several hours at least.

Ed plans to make tonight one of those times, which makes now a pretty good opportunity to slide his left hand down over Roy’s pelvis and palm his cock meaningfully through his boxers.

That makes Roy gasp a breath in, tilt his head back, and squeeze his eyes shut, which sends another hot thrill running through Ed’s guts so fast that it leaves him dizzy.

I have a suggestion,” Ed says, and this time his grip wrings a half-smothered groan out of Roy.  “Involves both of us shutting the fuck up.”

Roy pushes his hips up into Ed’s hand.  The flash of his grin makes Ed’s blood sing.  “At least you’re—equitable—about it—instead of just telling—me to—shut the fuck u—”

Ed squeezes hard enough to earn himself an outright moan this time.  “Don’t push your luck.”

The playful affronted look Roy gives him makes feel so much at once that he doesn’t know where the hell to start.  Roy’s cheeks are pink, his hair’s a mess, sweat gleams on his forehead, his open shirt lies crumpled on the bed around him, and Ed’s got a handful of his hard cock.  How the fuck are you supposed to handle getting everything you want?

“Luck?” Roy says.  Ed has to admit that Roy has always been remarkably good at failing to get memos.  “Surely you recognize pure, unadulterated skill when you s—ahh.  Fuck.”

Ed recognizes pure, unadulterated sex when he sees it, and that’s what Roy’s radiating more than anything else.  Ed can’t let himself get too caught up in it, though, or he’ll get distracted just fucking marveling at how much he wants to bite Roy’s collarbones and suck on his earlobes and breathe against every last centimeter of his skin.  The way Roy’s shoulders shift is a declaration of war against Ed’s self-control.

They’re shifting now, because Ed just clamped his hand a little tighter around Roy’s dick, in a way that he knows will ride the spindly borderline between nerve-sparking pleasure and actual pain.

Roy laughs, slightly giddily, eyes shut for the space of an instant—which is long enough for Ed to lean in and kiss his eyelids, one by one.  It feels weirdly kind of… reckless.  He tends to fumble with affectionate gestures and cutesy shit and all of the tangled-up trappings of romance that define it in other people’s eyes, but this… feels right.  Roy’s eyelashes are soft and silken, and the way he catches his lip with his teeth to try to deemphasize the delight in his own damn smile makes Ed think he must be worried that Ed won’t try anything like that again if he makes a big deal about it.

If the bastard likes that shit so much, he could’ve just asked.

Ed grazes his mouth over Roy’s, savoring the chance to steal his breath directly, and waits until Roy’s eyelids part a sliver.

“Clothes off,” Ed says.

“You are,” Roy murmurs, with the curl of another grin betraying him, “extremely bossy when you want to be.”

“What I want to be is irrelevant,” Ed says, nudging his nose against Roy’s cheek and squeezing with his left hand until Roy gasps again.  “I want you to be naked.”

“I find it very relevant,” Roy says, but before Ed can give him any further shit about procrastinating, he’s started one of those whole-body shimmies that makes Ed’s mouth go immediately dry, apparently in an effort to contort himself enough to reach his boxers.  Ed has to let go of his cock to give him access to the waistband, which is a crying shame, or possibly a weeping one, depending on how well he did his work.

Ed’s pulse hammers in his throat as he sits back, and Roy scoots upward far enough to work his way out of his boxers and the slacks still lingering around his knees.  Tearing the uniform trousers off of him is uniquely satisfying in its own way, but these cling to his hips and his thighs tighter, and he doesn’t even fuck around—he rolls his underwear all the way down to his knees to join them.

Ed’s breath feels scaldingly humid and too big for his chest.  He can take it from here.  Grabbing two fistfuls of Roy’s pants on his first try takes some concentration, but hauling them off makes his guts burn so beautifully that he doesn’t fucking care. He doesn’t care if he looks stupid, or too eager—if he looks desperate.  He is.

Roy’s cock is so thick and red and slick already that it makes his mouth water.  He shoves the clot of unwanted clothing off the bed and runs the fingertips of his left hand feather-lightly up the underside, and the whine that leaves Roy’s throat makes his dick throb twice as hard as Roy’s just jumped at the gentle contact.

“And you,” Roy says, rolling his shoulders, eyes half-lidded and feverishly bright, “call me a tease.”

“You are a tease,” Ed says.

Roy twists his hips.  Half of his everyday movements are provocative on accident; when he’s trying, he’s like a forest fire.  “Pot, kettle.  What’s your point?”

Ed wants to lick slowly all the way down to the base, quick short strokes, and then swallow him in and fully appreciate the thick coils of the coarse black hairs around it.  There are more than a couple of white ones, now, which he’s positive that Roy has also noticed.  Ed happens to think they’re fucking sexy, but he hasn’t figured out how to say it yet.

Rain check for all that shit, too.

“Fucking you stupid is the point,” he says, “last time I checked.”

Roy lifts his chin.  Total fucking coquetry.  Ed doesn’t even want to know where he picked that up.

All right, he wants to know a little.  Just not now.

“By all means,” Roy says, tipping his thighs wide open, and no power in the world could stop Ed’s dick from leaking a little bit at the sound and sight and shamelessness of that.

There’s lube somewhere, there’s always lube somewhere, Roy is practical and resourceful in equal measure when it comes to this shit, but Ed can’t handle another goddamn second of waiting after that.  He drags his tongue up the length of the first two fingers of his left hand, which makes Roy’s breath catch, and then spends a bit more time wetting the tip of the second one, which wouldn’t be so goddamn challenging if his insides weren’t lit up and thrumming like a city power station.  He flexes his fingers.  Roy makes a soft noise of utterly unmistakable anticipation and lifts his hips right the fuck up off the mattress.

“Shit,” Ed says, in spite of the way that the breath in his lungs just turned to steam.  “If you wanted it that bad, you could’ve said.”

Roy grins at him, eyes alight.  Always burning, with him—always so ferociously alive.  Ed has seen the handful of pictures of the days in Ishval, and the time after, and he’s seen the shadow that dims and devours Roy Mustang when the nightmares hang too heavy, but this…

This is the real Roy.  This is the true breadth of him.  He’s vibrant and vivid and mischievous and too-smart and too-warm and too-loving and just so alive.

And Ed can’t fucking wait to get inside him.

“Should be a crime, honestly,” Ed says, running his tongue slowly back up the length of his fingers just to watch Roy watch him.  “Going around looking like you do.”

“Lots of things that should be crimes aren’t,” Roy says, remarkably equably considering how intently his eyes are trained on the progress of Ed’s tongue.  “And vice versa.  And I don’t normally go out in public looking quite this.”

Ed lowers his hand and drags his wet fingertips up the underside of Roy’s straining cock.  “Good?”

Roy throws his head back, panting, and then laughs softly.  “I—suppose?”

Ed takes his sweet fucking time smearing pre-cum around in abstract little swirls, and the tip of Roy’s cock trembles, and he can see the muscles in Roy’s abs tightening in response.  Good is just about the world’s biggest understatement.  He looks like heaven, and like sin.

Ed lifts his hand again and fastidiously licks his fingers clean.  Tastes fine when you’re used to it.  You wouldn’t make it into an ice cream flavor, or anything, but it’s so damn satisfying that it makes up for its own shortcomings.

He’ll have to turn that one into a joke later.

Once he’s done wrecking the shit out of the love of his life, anyway.

Roy’s breathing quickened at just the sight of Ed cleaning pre-cum off his fingers, so Ed takes a little more time lathing them thoroughly after that.

The utterly enraptured little smile Roy musters does terrible things to Ed’s heart and predictable things to his dick.  “Does this make us partners in crime, then?”

“Probably,” Ed says.

He takes a deep breath, tries not to make it obvious that he’s holding it, and lowers his hand to press his fingertips in against Roy’s asshole.  He should’ve read up.  Or practiced.  At least he paid a shit-lot of attention to this every time before.

At least he knows not to be intimidated by the initial tightness, which would otherwise make this seem physically impossible.  At least he knows not to worry about the fact that Roy’s breath catches for a second as he presses just the tip of his first finger in, and slides it rightward slowly, and then back to the left, smoothing it along the circumference.  This is a brave new fucking world.  Roy’s breath leaves him in a contented little sigh, and his shoulders shift on the mattress as he resettles himself, making his muscles relax.

Ed can feel it, too—but the slight ease of the tightness doesn’t change a damn thing about the intensity of the heat, and his whole body fucking burns for that.  He wants it.  He wants everything.

But he’s got to take it one step at a time.

At the moment, he’s got to take it one finger at a time.

Which is challenging, actually, because he can’t stop watching Roy’s face as he slides the first one gently back and forth.  Ed knows that that shit feels good, that it plays on nerves that resist at first and then go fucking wild for the attention.  He knows that the sensation of someone’s finger dipping in and out satisfies something deep and primal, and you get over the weirdness of the intrusion a hell of a lot faster than you expected, because your body overrides your brain.

Roy doesn’t look like he needs a couple minutes of cautious ministrations to get used to it.

Roy looks like he’s already having the time of his fucking life.

Sweat glimmers on his throat, and his chest sinks and rises slowly, and his cock trembles.  He has his head tilted back, and periodically he twists his hips to try to coax Ed’s finger in deeper, and that—

Well.  Shit.  Give the man what he wants.

On the next push, Ed works his forefinger in, too, sliding them more slowly, trying to give Roy’s perfect ass sufficient chance to adjust.  It’s all give and take, with this.  With everything.

Roy draws a deeper, sharper breath this time, but his hips don’t twist, and his fingers don’t clench in the sheets.

Still—

“You okay?” Ed asks, and his voice sounds lower than he expected—thicker.  Hoarser, too.

“Mmm,” Roy says, casting a look at Ed through his eyelashes that is just—pure fucking sex.  No mercy, no prisoners.  “I’d say ‘yes’ if that wasn’t understating matters so much.”

Clearly Ed needs to finger-fuck him a lot harder if he still has the capacity to say things like that.

Which settles it rather nicely, all things considered.

“Hold that thought,” Ed says.  He withdraws his fingers slowly—regretting every second and every centimeter, because his dick aches in anticipation of what his fingers have been miming, and the heat and the pressure together are fucking superlative, and having the simple joy of seeing so much of Roy’s bare skin at once on top of all the rest of it—

He hauls the drawer of the nightstand open with his right hand, more than a little bit harder than strictly necessary.  Lube.  Gotta be lube here somewhere.  There’s always lube, because Roy packed more than they could possibly use in four days without pulling muscles they’d have a tough time explaining, and he always stashes it someplace that you can reach it from wherever you’re going to want some, because he is a strategic genius in all the ways that count—

“Next one down,” Roy says.  Ed glances at him.  No damn way he can see where Ed’s hand is.  Looking at him is it’s own reward, though: he looks indolent and dazed and hungry all at once.

Ed smacks the first drawer shut and opens up the second.

Sure enough, this time, he’s greeted by an unassuming tube, the sight of which alone makes his blood beat faster.  Roy only ever buys nice stuff—a kind that goes on smooth and smells all right without ever overwhelming you with perfume.

He forces himself to take a deep breath as he uncaps it.  He learned the hard way—in pretty much every sense of the word—that the automail is useless with this stuff.  

“Don’t worry about it,” Roy says, folding one arm behind his head like a goddamn pinup model again.

Excuse me?” Ed says, giving him a quick glare for good measure.  “How long has it been since you did this?”

Roy grins at him.  Fucking shameless.  “A… while.”

“‘A while’,” Ed says, so slowly and pointedly that Roy starts to laugh.  Ed keeps the glare pinned on Roy, sliding his fingertips against each other to try to coat them.  “If these diplomats see you limping tomorrow, they’re all going to assume that either I fucked you stupid, or I beat you up.  Neither of those is exactly what you’re going for.”

Roy bites his lip coyly, which doesn’t quite suppress another grin.  “Let them talk.”

No,” Ed says.  He dumps some more lube on his fingers, partly just to give himself something to focus on that isn’t the knee-melting heat of Roy’s eyes fixed on him.  “I’m here to protect you, dumbass.  Including from yourself.”  He chances another look.  “You must be seriously damn high on endorphins right now to even say something that.  Are you—okay?”

He’s not sure if the renewed laughter is a good sign or a bad one, but at least that’s familiar ground.  There’s been precious little of that lately.

“Ed,” Roy says, with the amusement still glimmering too-bright in both eyes, “my sweet, my dear, my darling, my most deeply-cherished—would you please put your fingers back in me before I find out if it’s possible to die of deprivation?”

“You can’t,” Ed says, smoothing lube down over his knuckle with the pad of his thumb and trying not to get distracted by the sheer absurdity of existence.  “Trust me.”

“I’d hate to risk it,” Roy says, and he draws his right knee in and braces his heel on the edge of the mattress, which frames his cock like even more of a work of art than usual, and that smirk

“Hypocrite,” Ed forces out, sounding distant to his own ears.  “Keep telling me to cultivate patience and then—and then this shit.”

“Mmm,” Roy says, rolling his shoulders.  “Punish me.”

When lube drips through his fingers and pools frigidly on his thigh, Ed realizes that he just squeezed the shit out of the tube with his right hand.

That’ll have to be good enough.

He can’t even growl out a good Fucker, because Roy will say something like Fuckee, I hope, and then Ed will laugh and lose his nerve all over again.

He needs those nerves.  He wants to feel this in every single last fucking one.

So he shuts his mouth before he regrets it, and leans back in over beautiful, terrible, torturous Roy, and presses his slick fingers back in.

Roy tips his head back, eyes sliding shut, and bites his lip and sighs and rolls his hips in a way that turns Ed’s guts into another forest fire—all ferocious heat and insurmountable destruction.

He pushes deep with his fingers, and his skin tingles fiercely with the anticipation of how that tight heat will feel on his throbbing, aching, desperate dick.  Odds are looking high that it simply doesn’t get any better than that.

He tries to ease the third finger in slowly and carefully in spite of the prominent challenges to his small motor skills.  His hand wants to shake—his whole fucking body wants to shake.  His guts are throbbing, he’s so hard none of the blood in his body is willing to make the perilous journey all the way upward to his brain—

“Ed,” Roy says, gently enough that there isn’t any choice except to glance up at him.  Something’s wrong.  Ed fucked it up already, and— “Relax.”

He works his jaw for a second and makes himself take a breath before he says: “Shouldn’t that be my line?”

Roy reaches up and brushes Ed’s hair back from his face, which has—utterly implausibly—never gotten any less transcendent.

“It’s just me,” Roy says, softly.  “It’s still just me.”

Ed musters a scowl.  Roy brings it out in him.  “You’ve never been ‘just’ anything a single day in your life.”

The way Roy smiles at him—softly, warmly, undemanding, unrepentant—makes his guts melt and his heart thrum.

“Tonight I am,” Roy says.  “Tonight I’m just yours.”

Kissing him is like giving in to gravity, every single time.  It’s so easy.  It feels inevitable.  The world wraps its arms around you and drags you down to somewhere that you’re safe.  Somewhere you belong.

The best part is that Ed doesn’t have to stop exploring all the wonders of Roy’s mouth while he pushes his fingers in deep—and then deeper still, so that Roy moans into the kiss and hooks his left leg around the small of Ed’s back to try to pull him in and force his fingers further still—

He crushes his lips against Roy’s for another beautiful second and then pulls back, gasping in some oxygen.  He has to think.  He has to stay on top of this.

Well.  Literally.

Roy watches him intently from lazy, half-lidded eyes as he draws his fingers out.  Between the wet red lips and the hopelessly disheveled hair and the sinful little sprawl, Roy still looks like he’s already been fucked, which somehow makes it hotter.

Ed tries to ground himself.  When he thought about this—when he let himself think about this, in guilty little snatches in between much simpler thoughts—he had a particular vision a couple of times.

Roy said he wants this.  Roy gave him what more or less sounds like blanket permission.

Ed curls his right hand into the trailing tail of Roy’s shirt where it still hangs open off of his shoulders, grabbing a full fistful.

“Get on your hands and knees,” he says.

There’s a moment of heart-stopping terror before the sly smile unfurls slowly on Roy’s face, and he rolls his shoulders and then his hips.  Bastard knows exactly what he looks like.  He knows exactly what he does.

But at least what he doesn’t do tonight is argue: instead, he rolls over more gracefully than he has any goddamn right to, plants his open palms on the tangled sheets, and shifts his knees beneath him.

His gorgeous bare ass and equally gorgeous bare thighs framed by the loose tails of the wrinkled shirt almost make Ed pass out on the spot.

Is this legal?  Well—on second thought, Ed doesn’t want to know the particulars on that topic in Aerugo.  He didn’t run across anything definitive in his habitual investigation of cultural and conversational taboos, and sometimes it’s better not to know for sure.  And to just… not get caught.

Besides, even if this isn’t outlawed, it shouldn’t be allowed.  How is a human being’s constitution supposed to hold up to this?

His hand is wet with lube and spit for starters, but he just can’t help it: he runs his fingertips down over the swell of Roy’s ass and trails them downward, letting them linger along the crease of Roy’s thigh.

“Ed,” Roy says, sounding more than a little strained.  “My sweet.  My dear.  My darling.”

Ed squeezes.  Gently.  For now.  “Who do you think is in charge here?”

“You’ve always been in charge,” Roy says, deliberately arching his spine to tilt his ass at an even more devastating angle.  “I live in your thrall.  I subsist for the whisper of your whims.  I am a beggar at the best of times.  Would you please fuck me, for heaven’s sake?”

Heaven hasn’t ever done shit for Ed, obviously, but there isn’t much left that he wouldn’t do for Roy’s sake, and right about now that seems to amount to the same thing.

Speaking of mounting, he takes one more deep breath, steadies his knees on the mattress underneath him, and picks up the lube again.

Pouring more into the palm of his left hand feels obscene enough on its own even before he wraps his hand around his dick, and it drips out between his fingers.  Fuck this bed, apparently, in the interests of fucking Roy.

He’s glad that he left it kind of cold this time, because it takes the edge off of the maddening sensitivity of his skin, his nerves, his blood, the burn of all of it clenching in his guts.

He breathes out a heartfelt “Fuck” more to make Roy shiver than anything else—and it works, which is heady as all fucking hell.  He’s not used to having this kind of power, let alone feeling safe enough to try to use it.

He reaches out to graze his wet hand over Roy’s ass again, dipping the tip of his thumb back in.  Roy makes a noise of desperation through clenched teeth.  His fingers curl into the sheets.  Ed might die.

But not before he gets to experience this at least a little bit.

“All right,” he gets out, setting the fingertips of his right hand as delicately as he can on the base of Roy’s spine as he retracts the more tractable one.  “All right.”

He curls his left-hand fingers around his cock again to steady it as he shifts forward, swallows one last time, and presses the head of his dick in against Roy’s ass.

The initial resistance makes him think—wildly, heedlessly—that he must somehow have done something wrong, must have missed something, must—

But then the muscle gives, and his cock slides, and the lube eases him in, and oh, holy fucking hell is it—

Everything.  Impossibly hot and tight and close and intimate, and it registers in his brain with a rattling shock that this—

This is it.

And then it’s just so fucking good that it’s all he can do to survive the sensation of burying his dick in Roy and not dying on the spot.  No space for thought, for contemplation, for anything cute or extraneous.  Just this.  This.  Brain-breakingly intense and so perfect words couldn’t even hope to measure up, too much and too good and too overwhelming to begin to encapsulate.

His hips hitch forward on instinct to push him the rest of the way in—all the fucking way in—and everything coalesces to feeling.  All of it collapses—shrinks.  Everything throbs.

He just—swims in it for a second.  The sheer, unthinkable, unimaginable, indescribable glory of it.  He could drown.  He could.  The thought makes his guts hotter, makes him ache harder, makes his blood spin through his system faster still.

But there are other things he needs to do first.  And they’re important.

He surfaces back into fuller consciousness again and drags in a deep breath.  His hand feels a thousand miles away as he splays his fingers—wet as they still are—very gently on the small of Roy’s back.

“You okay?” he manages, which he thinks is noteworthy and praiseworthy and pretty impressive all around.

Roy releases a shaky breath that shivers through both of them.

“Yes,” he says.  The hint of strain in his voice does weird things to Ed’s chest, and weirder things to the rest of him—it’s hot.  It’s hot because he put it there, because he hauled Roy Mustang to the very edge and dangled him over it and has the power to keep doing that for as long as he can stand.  “Thank you.  I would be measurably better, however, if you would, very kindly, go ahead and fuck me, significantly harder than you think I can—”

Ed can’t help curling his fingers around Roy’s hip and driving himself in a little deeper.

Ed’s body knows what it wants to do next.  Ed’s body knows what to do with the warm, welcoming frame set underneath him, and his body tilts itself forward and wraps his hands around Roy’s hipbones and moves.

Burning is too slow to describe the way the pleasure courses through him: it doesn’t smolder, it explodes.  It bursts in him everywhere at once, so ferociously intense that it borders on unsustainable, that it makes his knee weak and his spine tight and clenches hot and tightly in his guts.  It’s perfect.  Roy’s perfect.  Drawing his hips back and dragging his dick halfway out and then driving it back in to the impossibly welcoming heat—

“Fuck,” he chokes out.  “You—you’re—”

Roy just says, “Harder,” and Ed’s brain more or less up and breaks.

“How,” he manages, “the hell can you be even more demanding when you’re not in charge?”

The breath that leaves Roy next rushes back through him, too.  “I suspect that’s a question that the brass ask themselves every day.”

Ed finds himself laughing—because it’s Roy.  Because it’s still Roy, because it was only ever Roy, because Roy loves him more than is rational or reasonable or safe for either of them.  Because it’s Roy, and Roy wants this for both of them every bit as much as he does.

He shifts his knees—every single movement, every single motion, fractionally changes the way that his cock slides inside of Roy, inside of Roy, and sends more lightning out through him—and then carefully leans forward and kisses Roy’s spine right at the nape of his neck.  The way Roy’s hair parts over the back of his neck like spilt ink always makes Ed dizzy, and just now he feels drunk on it.  On all of this.

“Hold your horses,” he says.  “Bet you’ve never heard that one before.”

He can feel the laugh shaking Roy’s lungs where his chest presses against Roy’s back.  Roy used the same damn complimentary shampoo that he did this morning, but the smell of Roy’s hair still makes his heart squeeze and his cock throb harder.

In the interest of not torturing either of them any longer, though, he fixes his hands back on Roy’s hips for leverage and slowly, slowly pulls almost all the way out.  Air feels cold.  He supposes everything in the world is going to feel lousy compared to being in Roy.

So he slams his cock back in.

There’s something primally pleasing about the slap of his hips against the meat of Roy’s ass, and the soft groan that leaves Roy’s mouth makes his molten guts sear even hotter.  He didn’t think they could—didn’t think that he could feel anything more, that this could get any stronger or compel him any faster or blossom through him with still more force, but somehow—

He sinks in again, and again, and again, deeper and deeper, trying to savor the incomparable inflammatory feeling of sheathing himself in someone warm and willing that he fucking loves.  That he wants, in every way that’s possible.  Hearing his own breath rasp in and out of him makes him want to shiver, but there isn’t time, because he has to keep this going, has to keep up with his own racing heartbeat, swifter by the second, desperate, has to ram in harder to try to quell the ache building in between his hips.  Has to put every last fragment of himself into this, has to make every single movement count

With every thrust, he thinks it can’t get any better—thinks the next one will surely rupture something in him, push his blood through him so damn fast that he passes out—

But the next one drags a ragged “Oh, fuck” out of Roy’s throat.  Which makes Ed’s guts clench—which almost sends him right over the edge all on its own.

But not quite.

Good to know where the sweet spot is—he’s got plans for that, vaguely, in some nebulous heat-shimmer half-thoughts floating through the background of his brain.  Most of it is just… red.  Just heat and velvet darkness.

He aligns his chest on Roy’s back again and rolls his hips much slower, grinding in instead of driving, and the faint whine Roy makes tastes like triumph.

The whine Roy makes when Ed wraps his left hand around Roy’s weeping cock is much less faint by far.

Ed just sways their joined bodies back and forth as slowly as he can stand while he starts pumping Roy’s dick with a firm grip.  Fucking godsend that his palm’s still slick enough from the lube to let him up the tempo without having to spit into his hand.

“You are,” Roy gasps out, but the way his spine arches and his cock strains and his shoulders tremble belies the petulance he puts into his tone; “extraordinarily bad at following instructions.”

“Yeah,” Ed breathes into his ear.  It’s close and cute and tinged red.  He nips the shell and then kisses it and then tunnels his hand tighter.  “But you like it.”

Roy just barely bites back a curse before hot cum spills over Ed’s fingers, and Roy’s ass tightens around him so violently that for a second the world goes opal, and he can’t see

Gravity hauls at him with ravenous force, but it just feels like his heels are still planted on the firm side of the precipice, and he’s meant to be in control of this, and he leans back and holds on and holds himself together—

And breathes—

And the pearlescence fragments into interlocking prisms of stained glass, and then the colors wash back into white, and then—

Roy, beautiful Roy, beneath and around him and so fucking gorgeous past speech, thought, comprehension, hangs his head, and his elbows quake.

“Fuck,” he whispers, and Ed’s hand is still wrapped around his slick, softening cock, and the words for the That was definitely the objective joke won’t come.

Roy sure fucking did, though.

Ed’s dick throbs harder at the thought.

But it’s—that’s fine.  He breathes deeper still this time and starts to shift his weight back and pull out to finish quick so they can discuss this thing, and he can make sure Roy’s okay both physically and—

“Don’t you dare,” Roy says, twisting just far enough to eye him over one delicious shoulder.  “Not your first time, Ed.”

The multiple breaths don’t seem to have helped.  Could have to do with the fact that his blood’s running so hot that his ears might be steaming.

“Okay,” he says, carefully.  Safer than You’re too fucking good to me, which Roy won’t believe no matter how many times it’s true.  

Ed blinks, feels the sweat settling and prickling hot on his collarbones and in his hair, which is dangling everywhere and catching Roy’s eye for good measure, which… yeah.  Yeah, that sounds about right.

He releases Roy’s cock so that he can smooth both hands over Roy’s hips and then up the small of his back, slowly tracing the outline of the unfaded angry red scar tissue with the fingertips of his left hand.

“Okay,” he says, with more of his voice behind it.  He pushes at Roy’s hips this time, trying to turn him over.  “But I wanna see you.”

The sound Roy makes this time burrows right into the base of Ed’s spine and spits fire through his entire abdomen.

But there isn’t time to cherish it, because Roy is twisting around and away, visibly struggling to keep himself balanced with the way all his joints are shaking.  Ed feels dizzy, elated, and so, so powerful.

Then he feels cold, because Roy just dislodged his cock.  It seems impossibly heavy.  The obscene shine of the lube slathered all over it makes his guts clench again, and it hasn’t stopped throbbing urgently, and he really doesn’t know how it can get any better from here.

Until Roy sprawls on his back, braces his elbows underneath him against the pillows, and lifts his hips invitingly.

That’s better.  That’s incomparable.

Ed plants his right hand over Roy’s shoulder, safely cushioned by the pillows, and curls the left around Roy’s arm before he can help himself—pinning Roy in place to lean in and kiss him, hard and heavy and meaningful.  Trying to say everything at once by saying nothing at all.  Trying to make him understand how much this is, how much it means.  It changes nothing but deepens, strengthens, intensifies everything that already was.

Roy rises up against him, fingers curling in against his scalp, teeth catching around his bottom lip, and pulls him in closer by the grip in his hair, so he knows that at least some part of the message went through.

Roy’s other hand sweeps down his spine and then squeezes his ass in an encouraging way.  Ed never dreamed that life would come to this.  His dreams were always far too realistic.

Regrettably, he has to separate his mouth from Roy’s for a second so that he can direct his attention downward.

Roy settles one hand on Ed’s hip and wraps the other around his cock to start stroking before he’s even figured out the logical next step.  Hormones fuck with his head so bad, and endorphins are worse, and Roy is in a category by himself.

Speaking of which: Roy’s hand on his hip departs and returns with the lube without Roy ever taking his eyes off of Ed’s face.  Ed can barely even fucking see for panting and sweating and struggling to hold himself together while Roy’s fingers are caressing him like this—how the fuck can he stay so coherent?

Doesn’t matter much.  Works out well.  They complement each other that way, too.

He forces himself to swallow even though his mouth went dry when it parted from Roy’s, and drier still when Roy’s hands laid themselves on him like this.  Always does.

“So—how do you… are you gonna be okay?”

Roy blinks at him, so serenely that it verges on laziness.  Bastard is so lucky that he’s hotter than the lowest ring of hell, and a million times more enticing.

“Yes,” he says.  He grins at Ed’s scowl and grabs Ed’s right wrist, drawing it forward to position Ed’s automail hand under Roy’s thigh.  Cautiously, Ed pushes it up a little, working towards guiding Roy’s leg up over his shoulder.  It’s not going to be comfortable, though, on top of metal—but Roy suggested it himself, so— “I’m not as flexible as you are, of course,” Roy is saying, which is no surprise at all given that he proved that even the apocalypse won’t shut him up; “but I’ll most likely live.”

“What kind of odds do you think we’re talking about?” Ed says.  It’s just like Roy to act high and mighty with splattered cum still drying on his abs.  “It’d be a really awkward inquest if you died.”

“Come on,” Roy says, tilting his hips in a way that makes Ed’s guts drop all over again.  “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

You,” Ed chokes out—which is a sufficiently complete sentence with Roy, given how much he likes to finish them all regardless of who started them.

Ed draws one more deep breath, leans his forehead against Roy’s, and strokes his fingertips slowly down Roy’s chest and over his stomach.  He drags them outward along the inside of Roy’s other thigh where it still rests on the now thoroughly rumpled sheets, with Roy’s knee hooked around him.  They don’t usually call a time-out in the middle of actively screwing.  Having a second to catch his breath and focus in on just how appetizing Roy is, how dizzyingly appealing limned with sweat and smeared with lube, how supremely fine and utterly fuckable—

Roy’s cock is hardening again at just the touch.

Which makes Ed’s throb harder.

Roy tips his head back, eyes sliding mostly shut, and his lips curve into a wicked little smile as he breathes against Ed’s mouth.

“Me,” he says.

Ed slides his fingers down to press the tips against Roy’s asshole again, but it’s still as wet and hot and pliant as he’d hoped.  Roy makes a soft murmur that sends a whole new wave of electricity through him, makes his  insides tighten and his cock jump and everything in him shiver all over again.

He wraps his hand around his cock again, and Roy hikes his hips up to make it easier for him to angle himself and then sink right back in.

At another time, he might feel self-conscious of the volume and the depth of the moan that rattles its way out of him, but just now he can’t give a fuck.  Roy leans up just far enough to kiss his lower lip, and he draws back and presses in again and sees stars.  Whole universes—twining, twirling, meshed and gleaming constellations.  Unfathomable worlds.

Roy’s palm spreads itself on the back of his neck, fingers tangling in his hair.  Roy pulls gently on the point of leverage—encouraging him closer, deeper, kissing him again.  Roy’s free hand finds its way back to his ass and coaxes much less ambiguously, and Ed can’t help succumbing to the rhythm of it—the uneven symphony of their gasped breaths and banging heartbeats and the whisper of the sheets and the creak of his metal knee and the soft, wet sound when their hips meet, harder and firmer and better every single fucking time.

Roy must be agonizingly oversensitive by now—Ed wants to ask, but just keeping his brain inside his skull feels like the challenge of the century, and every glimpse of the flush in Roy’s cheeks and on his chest, the sweat glistening on his arms and glazing his collarbones and darkening his hairline chases any hope of words out of Ed’s lungs and fills them up with steam instead.

Roy’s cock has thickened in between them, swinging heavily every time they crash in close, and the faint groan he makes when Ed grazes his fingers through another round of pre-cum beading at the tip—

Ed needs more.  He needs all of it.  He needs to have this, as much and as good and as fast as he can get—

Roy nudges his nose at Ed’s jaw, smudging sweat, and murmurs only “Yes.”

How does he always know?

Stupid—asking questions when you wouldn’t change a damn iota of the answer anyway.

Ed buries his face in the side of Roy’s beautiful neck and slams his cock in hard—the supernova spin of orgasm starts to sear at the insides of his eyelids, but he hasn’t finished yet, not yet, he wants—

The strangled cry that wrings itself from Roy’s throat as Ed drives right into his fucking prostate, and then hauls back and hits it again.

A shadow of Roy’s voice in his ear as Roy’s fingers curl tighter in his hair until the tingling registers over the roar of cresting ecstasy rising in him, drowning every other thought— “Ed—Ed, you—”

Ed tunnels his hand around Roy’s cock again and strokes just once.

He doesn’t know who comes first, or if their bodies both give out and give over at the precise same instant, or if it just feels simultaneous because it lasts so fucking long

It feels like waves and waves—pummeling him, burying him, light and unimaginable colors and the shattering of his last resistance into endless shards—

And—

Spiraling down from a hurricane of screaming glory so immense he barely could sustain it, barely could believe himself—

And feeling—

Very—

Floaty.  Faint.  Weak-kneed, jelly-limbed, dazed and dizzy and impossibly sated.

Good.  So good.  So good.

His blood feels like syrup.  He surfaces back into himself and finds Roy already kissing him—sweet and light and so playful that he chases Roy’s mouth on instinct the second that he tries to pull away, and they both start laughing, and…

And holy fucking shit.

His joints feel wobbly, and his limbs seem so distant that it takes him several seconds of concerted effort just to pull out of Roy and then collapse to the mattress without jabbing a metal elbow into anybody’s kidney region in the process.

Roy has already started petting his hair by the time he realizes his mistake.

“Damn it,” he manages with the vestiges of his voice.  He tries to wedge his arms underneath himself.  He can do it.  Has his torso always been this fucking heavy?  Al’s wrong, he’s gargantuan.  Everybody knows that.  “We… gotta go clean up.  We’ve got to.”

“Says who?” Roy murmurs into Ed’s left shoulder.  He’s twirling the hair already.  Fuck.  “I’m not an expert in the laws around here—”

“Liar,” Ed says.

Roy clears his throat.  “—but I’m fairly sure it isn’t writ into the constitution that we have to leap out of bed after what was, quite frankly, the most spectacular sex in… possibly ever… and dive directly under the shower stream in the hopes of salvaging some sheets that are probably past hope anyway.”

Ed got stuck on the ever part for too long to interrupt at the point where he could’ve said I clearly didn’t fuck you hard enough if you can still talk like a thesaurus collector.  “We’re guests, Mustang.  How do you know they’re past hope, anyway?  You part-timing as the Laundry Alchemist?  You keep a vial of borax in your pocket in case of emergencies?”

Roy snickers, the bastard.  He hasn’t stopped playing with Ed’s hair, which means he hasn’t started playing fair.  “I don’t precisely see you jumping up and running for the bathroom, my dearest love.”

Ed squeezes his eyes shut and winds that back up.  Roy knows that he runs on spite and concentrated caffeine, which means that Roy just pushed him towards it on purpose.  If Roy just tried to provoke him into doing the thing he said he’d do but wasn’t doing yet, then Roy must agree that it’s necessary but also not want to move a damn muscle right now.

Right?

This is why Ed lets Roy do the stupid fucking politics.

He sighs, grabs Roy’s arm to still the very underhanded hair business, kisses Roy’s wrist right where his beautiful radial artery joins his beautiful hand, and then laboriously rolls over until he’s close enough to slide himself off of the bed.

“C’mon,” he says.  “The sooner we get this over with, the sooner we can sleep.”

“You drive a hard bargain,” Roy says, grinning at him.  Ed dares to sneak a glance, and the sprawling out like a porn model is even worse than he’d feared.  How has anybody ever survived dating this bastard before?  Maybe they didn’t.  Maybe Riza helped him hide the bodies.  “I would know.”

Ed holds both hands out and wiggles his fingers.  “Come on.  You’ll get your damn exchange.”

“Well,” Roy says, and at least even he can’t make scooting to the edge of the bed look particularly sexy, “when you put it like that…”




Completely unsurprisingly, Roy spends more of the time in the shower running his fingers through Ed’s hair than he does interacting with cleaning agents in any meaningful way, but he makes up for it by doing a remarkably thorough job of toweling Ed’s automail off afterwards.  The warm water on top of the post-orgasm crash has left Ed about on the verge of swaying on his feet, but Roy wraps one towel neatly around each of their waists and starts digging another one methodically into every single crevice of the metal.  He gets streaks of grease all over it.  Winry would weep with pride.

Roy puts his pajama pants on after that, which is always something of a disappointment even though they’re cute on him.  Fair’s fair, so Ed throws some boxers on and then musters up one more transmutation for the night.

Al came up with this one after Mom died—it does some extremely clever component separation to corral all of the detritus away from the fibers of the sheets.  He explained it to Izumi on their first laundry day at the Curtises’, and the look she gave him guaranteed that neither of them tried it for as long as they stayed in her house.

It’s damn handy when you just want to faceplant on a soft bed and sleep like the fucking dead, though.  Ed is going to have to come up with a way to thank Al for it without telling him the whole reason it was necessary.

Dropping onto a cleaner, drier, not-even-slightly-squidgy mattress proves that it was worth the trouble, though.

Roy lies down next to him.  Ed chews on the inside of his cheek for a second.  Are they going to have to talk about it?  Maybe they should.  This is probably the sort of thing you’re supposed to debrief, pun only partially intended.  You should analyze it enough together to determine what worked and what didn’t and what should be changed the next time to better maximize the satisfaction of both parties, and—

Roy is playing with his hair again.

“It’s gonna dry funny,” Ed says, since at least stupidity is preferable to silence.  “It’ll look like I have a hornet nest on my head.  I’m never gonna make it into any cheat sheets at this rate.”

“I’ll cheat your sheet,” Roy says.

Ed looks at him.

Roy blinks.  He shrugs.  He plays with Ed’s hair some more.  “You miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take,” he says, as if that helps at all.  “You’ll look fine.  You always do.  People will probably swoon if it’s a little wavy.”

“By ‘people’,” Ed says, “do you mean ‘you’?”

“My egotism is unparalleled,” Roy says, calmly.  “As is your hair.”  Ed really, really didn’t fuck him hard enough.  “Rest assured that you have not borne more than a passing resemblance to insect lodgings in as long as I have known you.”

“Gee,” Ed says.  It’s difficult to pretend to be annoyed when Roy looks sleepy and contented and is still studiously focused on twisting sections of his hair up like little ropes.  “Thanks.”

“Always,” Roy says.  He very carefully guides all of Ed’s hair up and clear of the ridges of the automail and spreads it across the pillow.  When he’s smoothed it all out evenly, he rolls onto his back, folds his hands on his chest, and stares at the ceiling.

Are they supposed to talk about it now?  Ed can’t think of anything to say except We should do that again, if you want.  He thinks they may have already established that part.  Roy doesn’t fuck around much anymore—not with him, not about this.  Roy doesn’t keep things from him.  Roy doesn’t lie.

Maybe he does, though, when it’s really important.  Maybe they just haven’t stumbled into anything big enough to lie about until now.  Maybe Roy is gathering up all the right words like poisoned flowers, and Ed’s about to get a face full of the bouquet.

Or maybe Roy is wrinkling his nose up overstatedly the way he usually does when he’s silently bemoaning some minor inconvenience.

Hell,” Roy says.

Ed nudges him with the soft elbow.  He’s been good.  “Don’t go weak on me now, Mustang.”

“Fair,” Roy says.  “Fuck.”

“Better,” Ed says.  “What?”

Roy lays his arm over his eyes.  “I want room service.  So bad.  Cake, ideally.  Do you want cake?  Or a hamburger.  Bread and grease.  Fuck.”

“Eh,” Ed says.  He has to bite down on the inside of his lip to contain the giddy laugh that tries to shiver up out of him.  “It’s not like there’s any chance they’ve got better buns than you do.”

Roy is laughing almost too hard to tackle him to the bed and kiss him until he can’t breathe.




Ed scowls at his reflection in the mirror.  “Are you ready for me to say ‘I told you so’?”

“Perpetually,” Roy says, coming up behind him.  He can still smile smugly over Ed’s shoulder too easily—while making eye contact in the mirror, no less—but the dirty cheater has got his boots on already.  At least it’s a little harder for him these days when he doesn’t.  “I think it’s cute.”

Ed makes another halfhearted attempt at squishing down a weird crimpy-wavy bit of his hair with the palm of his left hand.  “You would.”

Roy catches his wrist, steals the tie that he’d snapped around it for safekeeping while he bemoaned his existence, guides his hand out of the way, and gently starts shepherding all of his hair up into a ponytail, smoothing it down as he goes.  “Surely I’m entitled.”

“You’re definitely that,” Ed says.  He fights the urge to fidget.  Roy’s so careful that he knows that nothing would get tugged wrong and end up hurting, but it would be sort of rude.  Maybe a moment when he’s a captive audience isn’t the best to say something that’s nagging at him in a weird way, but the captive thing is a two-way street, and Roy’s fingernails dragging slowly across his scalp make him feel blissful and brave.  “Hey.  You’re not even… y’know.  Limping.”

“Nope,” Roy says.  He ties off a perfect ponytail, because of course he does; and then runs his fingers through the tail, leans in, and kisses the back of the crown of Ed’s head.  “A challenge for you for next time, my dear.”

Ed’s skin tingles everywhere.

“Huh,” he says.  “Okay.”




Ed turns his coffee cup slowly around in between his hands, pressing the palm with nerves against the warmth of the side.  He doesn’t want it to look like he’s uneasy, because that’s exactly what he is.

Roy, of course, is up out of his chair, warmly greeting every mucky-muck that comes through the doors by name and remembering details they shared about their families and kids.  Ed needs to start taking coded notes in the meetings so that he can help keep track of that stuff and add it to their records as they go.  Make the cheat sheet a living document that incorporates new information.  There’s always another way to give yourself an edge.

He always just assumed that morning meeting coffee would be the same everywhere in the whole damn world, but it’s different here—they have a huge, fancy pot with engravings, and a dude in livery standing there straight-backed and square-shouldered who pours it into your shitty paper cup like it’s the solemnest duty he’s ever been assigned.  The paper cups are the same, at least functionally.  The coffee is better, though.  Maybe Amestris should think about a minister of meeting coffee improvement.  They’d probably end up forming a committee to decide the responsibilities of the new minister, which would then spend five years of taxpayer funds sitting on their asses pretending to draft up a job description only to hire the cousin of somebody’s friend, and then…

People start sitting down around the table with their own unimpressive cups in hand.  Ed’s brain obligingly matches the names and positions to their faces—Julian Filoli, Minister of Trade, supportive of the tariff proposal, huge Vice Chancellor Roy Mustang fan; Elena Edola, Minister of Foreign Affairs, moderate Roy fan, less thrilled about the tariffs but interested in the student exchange program, deeply invested in the treaty no one thought Roy could pull off; Petra Cordova, Minster of Educational Affairs, would follow Roy to the far reaches of the planet, let alone advocate for the student exchange; Humberto Ivro, Minister of Defense, not yet sold on either Roy’s charm or the treaty, but overall pretty open-minded considering the history; Carlo Rias, Council Speaker, who is transparently jealous of Roy’s prettiness on top of being hung up on the history, too…

It occurs to Ed that he actually does know nearly as much as Roy does about all of the government officials parking their overly-important asses around this table.

It occurs to Ed that he knows far more about them than any of them know about him.

It occurs to him that each of those things is a form of power in its own right.

Roy sits down gracefully, and then less-gracefully stares at the coffee cup in front of him, which Ed got made up just the way he likes it, nasty cream and all.  Roy gets the little soft smile, and then glances at Ed sideways with it.  Ed shrugs, but it’s too late.  This won’t look like a lackey thing to anyone who’s paying close attention.

There’s a lot of other things to pay attention to, at least, as the others all get settled in their seats and greet each other in Aerugan and start picking at their fancy complimentary breakfasts.

Filoli—Trade—apparently isn’t too hungry, because he jumps right into rehashing all of Roy’s plans and proposals.

Except—

That this guy is droning on and on about how this alliance will benefit the Aerugan royalty and the Amestrian government, how groundbreaking and prestigious it is, how the ‘people’ will be in awe and fall into line.  Roy is shifting his weight in his seat, and his fingers curl slowly around his coffee cup, making the silvered scar across the back of his hand gleam in the light.  He’s going to say something.  He’s not going to be able to help himself.  He’s going to jeopardize the fragile balance of the political bullshit that he’s spent this entire trip meticulously arranging by speaking truth in the face of unearned power.

Unless Ed does it first.

Filoli starts in on how this sacred commercial union will revitalize the economic viability of the Aerugan royal family, which definitely sounds like a them problem, and Ed doesn’t even realize until it’s too late that he’s the one who just cleared his throat.

“Excuse me,” he says when every eye in the room snaps over to him.  At least he’s used to that.  In a weird way, it feels better when he brought it on himself than when it’s for something he didn’t have much control over, like the automail.  “Sorry.  Just… aren’t you kind of looking at it backwards?”

Unsurprisingly, Julian stares at him like he coagulated his way upright from a puddle of gutter slime just in time to speak.

“Hear me out,” Ed says.  Maybe they will, maybe they won’t, but this is his one shot to back up the huge amount of painstaking work that Roy has poured into this—the late nights and the translated newspapers and the drafted pitches and the backup plans and all the agonizing and the endless rounds of practice with the cheat sheet and the countless hours lost in thought.

Roy wants this to work.  Roy needs this to work.  The brass still clinging on to just enough scraps of power to spread substantial misery won’t humor a dangerously progressive Vice Chancellor with too many second chances, no matter how much the public fawns over his pretty-boy charm.

“Seems to me,” Ed says, forcing himself to talk slow while thinking fast, “that the problem isn’t the ideas.  The ideas themselves are good—I think we all agree on that.  The problem is that it’s not anybody in this room that you have to convince of that.  It’s the ones out there.”

He points towards the window with the automail finger.  People tend to pay a little more attention.

“The ones who are gonna be the most affected,” he says, “and the ones you need the buy-in from the most—there are tons of people living near the border, right?  Those are the ones who are going to do the actual trading, deal with the tariffs, actually see all this stuff in action first.  And those are the people who still remember that we just got out of a war.  Those are the people whose kids or parents or cousins died at the front.  Those are the people whose farms got shelled, or whose houses got leveled—the people whose lives haven’t ever and won’t ever be the same.  And you’re asking them to forget that any of that ever happened and shake hands with the enemy just because it’s good for the government.”

The room is very quiet.  Somebody should slurp their coffee to break the tension or something.

Nobody does.

Ed takes a deep breath and sits back in his chair, bracing his metal palm against the edge of the table.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he says.  “I think you can do it.  I think we can do it.  And I think we should.  I think it’s about damn time we worked on trying to heal this whole place, as much as that’s possible at this point.  But that means the hard part is still to come, because you have to sell this to them.  You have to prove to them that this is more beneficial to them than holding on to the things they saw and the things they know.  You have to make it matter.  You have to make it good for them in ways that are concrete and immediate and impossible to miss.  Like—this student exchange program thing?  It’s great.  I would’ve signed up.  But I’m an idiot.  You aren’t trying to convince people like me.  The people who need to think it’s great are the ones who are about to land in a foreign country that was trying to wipe their existence off the map fewer than five years ago, and are about to end up at a university where they don’t speak the language and aren’t even remotely familiar with the local area and don’t know a single other human being.  The handful of people like me who think that sounds like an adventure aren’t the ones you want to take it—you want scholars, right?  That’s most scholars’ nightmare.  You have to promise them a place to live and a cushion to land on and low-stakes ways to learn and catch up and get acclimated and make new scholar friends.  Otherwise, they bail early and come home miserable, and the whole thing falls apart, no matter how good an idea it was.  All of this is gonna be like that.  You can’t force people to do what seems good for the country.  That’s how we got into this whole mess in the first place, isn’t it?”

He can practically feel Roy working feverishly to try to contain the smug-ass grin right next to him, but everyone else looks like a particularly startled statuary menagerie.

“I mean,” Ed says, because the stone’s rolling, and it’s not like he can put it back, “yeah.  You could just jack up the taxes on Cretan textiles and call it a day.  Or you could raise them just a little bit, and all of you start wearing Amestrian wool around everywhere you go and talking about how it’s great, and facilitate a supply line to get your factories and your merchants and whoever else the best stuff, really quickly.  Make it so that they actually are getting a good deal.  Otherwise… well.  People can get really spitefully creative when they feel like their hands are tied.  Trust me on that.”

The silence makes Ed want to fidget his way right out of existence, but he knows that he can’t afford to do that without undermining the impact of everything he said.  And what he said is true, whether or not it’s palatable.  He made them hear it.  That’s the important thing.

Elena Edola—Foreign Affairs, who has watched Roy with a notable degree of suspicion since the moment he arrived—flicks her gaze from Ed to Roy and back, and then raises an eyebrow.  Ed thinks this is the first time he’s seen her smile.

“Thank you, Major Elric,” she says.  “Candor can be something of a lost art in rooms like this.  Vice Chancellor, I don’t imagine you’d be willing to lend him to us as an envoy—but on the off-chance you’d consider it, I think I have to ask.”

Roy’s fingers curl very slowly around the coffee cup even though his smile hits the perfect balance for cordial neutrality.  “I’m afraid he’s at the core of our operations back home, as probably doesn’t seem surprising anymore.  But we’ll certainly be in touch.  Perhaps we can return the favor, and invite you all to stay in Amestris for a while very soon.”

“And dress us in the finest Amestrian wool, I hope,” Elena says, but she’s still smiling, and the rest of the room is still so quiet that she must have more sway here than either he or Roy fully recognized.  Which probably means that Ed can finally relax.

“But of course,” Roy says, all velvet.  “Only the best for our dearest friends.”

The look she gives Roy makes it clear that she knows exactly what he’s doing, but she’s decided that she doesn’t mind.  Ed’s going to have to check into the family trees a little closer: she has got to be related to Riza.




One thing that Ed was not expecting to have to deal with on their way out—after laboriously convincing their fancy limo driver that he is, in fact, perfectly capable of and more than willing to heft their luggage into the trunk, no less—is Lady Moloda drifting out onto the drive to see them off, surrounded by a retinue, with the mid-morning light almost blinding where it gleams off of that damn necklace.

Ed still thinks he wore it more memorably, even if it wasn’t exactly a fashion show.

Roy, of course, doesn’t even seem surprised to see her.  He could stand to warn a guy about all these psychic visions of future diplomatic nonsense every once in a while.

That’s a conversation Ed can work up to another time, though.  For now, he gets to lean back against the car with his arms folded—and then abruptly straighten up and try to look attentive and assiduously non-confrontational when he realizes what he’s doing—and watch Roy chat and charm and spin all the PR that Moloda can handle.  Mesmerizing.

Roy must be yearning for the nice bed at home and the prospect of an uneventful takeout dinner holed up with their mismatched plates and no other company except the radio nearly as much as Ed is, because this feels like a much briefer farewell than the usual brouhaha.  There’s some talking and some nodding and some laughter and a moderate amount of graceful gesturing, but he wraps it up quick.  Before Ed knows it, Roy and Moloda are doing that bizarre polite society clasped-hands-fake-cheek-kisses thing, and then Moloda is wishing Roy well and ushering him back over to the car.

As Roy climbs in, and Ed stands there trying to figure out what the hell might be appropriate to say, or if he should bow, or if he should just book it, she looks him right in the eye.

She smiles.

“Look after him,” she says.  “The pretty, ambitious ones never quite seem to know how much danger they’re in, from others and themselves.”

Roy knows.  Roy knows way too well.

But Ed can’t help smiling back and saying “I’ll do my best, ma’am” anyway.

He’d say that there are a lot of weirdos involved in the Aerugan government, but given that he’s a representative of the Amestrian one these days, that doesn’t seem particularly fair.

“Everything all right?” Roy asks as the driver guides them smoothly out onto the road, and Moloda and her sparkly necklace and her raised hand disappear from the mirrors as they move away.

“Y’know,” Ed says.  He nudges Roy’s arm with his elbow, which is highly insubordinate behavior, but slightly less obvious than grabbing for his hand.  “I think it is.”

“Good,” Roy says, and nudges back.




The stupid limo—which really ought to have fancier carpeting on the floor, to coordinate even better with the overall theme—deposits them at the Fotset train station.  The driver tries to get out and escort them and carry their luggage, and only concedes to drive away after Roy cheerfully offer-threatens to tip him like a normal cab.

The scheduling left them with several minutes to stand around the train station before they have to board.  The chance to acquire more coffee is good.  The chance to think about this place… isn’t.  Ed can’t help thinking about Fuery and thousands others like him who stepped down off of a train onto this fucking concrete, not knowing if they were ever coming back.  He can’t help thinking about all the ones who didn’t.  He can’t help layering the could-have-beens and weres on top of what’s in front of him, until what he sees is half a dozen platforms packed with ghosts.

That’s the point of it, though, isn’t it?  That’s the point of everything Roy is, and does, and loses sleep for.  The point is trying to make sure that it never happens again.

People are petty and possessive and protective by nature.  They’re terrified of losing what they have and being seen for what they are, so they try to gouge people’s eyes out and cut people down to make themselves feel higher.  It makes sense, from an evolutionary point of view.  You have to preserve what’s yours before anything else.

But that’s why so many people accept the big atrocities.  They’re used to dealing out the little ones themselves, and it doesn’t feel so different at the start.

Roy’s shoulder collides with his, which isn’t a coincidence—the only times Roy does things like that on accident are when he’s tipsy or so tired that he might as well be—and then Roy raises an inquiring eyebrow when Ed glances up.

Ed was probably glaring at the ground, which isn’t very fair, since the ground was never the problem.  The ground is just dirt.  It’s the invisible lines that people use to divide it that are at fault.

Fault—earthquake joke.  Roy would like that, if Ed could articulate it right, but his thoughts are too tangled, and the important thing is spelling out that Roy didn’t do anything wrong.

“Just thinking,” he says.

Roy smiles.  “Should I try that sometime?”

“Maybe,” Ed says.  “We oughta see if we can get you some training wheels first, just in case.”

Roy’s grin makes him feel a little stabler, and then their train starts pulling up, and then he has to focus on not saying anything overly smartassed about the sheer profligacy of first class in front of the train attendant.  They tend to remember things like that.

Regrettably, too, the extravagant car has its advantages: first and foremost, seats that don’t make your ass ache; narrowly second, that it’s empty, which means that as soon as the train starts moving, Roy vacates the bench across from Ed and sits directly next to him instead.  He wastes no time before slouching down in his seat, snuggling up with Ed’s left shoulder, closing his eyes, and smiling like a contented cat.

“I’m waking you up in an hour,” Ed says.  “Otherwise you’re not going to be able to sleep tonight.”

“This is why we need a democracy,” Roy says, adjusting Ed’s coat to cushion the shoulder bars better.  “The world is full of tyrants.”

“What’s that?” Ed says.  He can’t help glancing around out of the corner of his eye just to make sure nobody’s watching before he strokes a hand over Roy’s hair.  “I couldn’t hear you over the sound of my rampant megalomania.”

Roy is grinning.  Ed can feel it more than he can see it, which is, deeply unfortunately, secondary to his main concern:

“Fuck,” he says.  “I’m even starting to sound like you.”

At least Ed is pretty sure that he could never say “Tragic” quite so smugly even if he tried.




The advantage of spending the vast majority of the day on a train is that it’s extremely easy to justify getting way too damn much takeout on your way home from the station.

The disadvantages are, obviously, pretty much everything else.

They shed the uniform jackets on the floor of the foyer, which they’re both going to regret tomorrow, and take the food to the couch, which commences a rousing game of curry-spill chicken with the universe.  Ed fully expects to lose, but that’s what alchemy is for, and Roy is so damn cute when he eats too fast and gets curry smudged on his face that Ed would still play this game even if he had to wash it out by hand.




Walking up the stairs together in spite of their different stride lengths, with Roy’s arm still looped around the small of his back, is a logistical pain in the ass.  Worth it, though.

Roy is so damn observant that Ed knows he has to come up with a plausible reason for why he’s half-smiling at the unlit landing at the top of the stairs.  “You know what the bedroom needs?”

“A bigger bed,” Roy says.

“No,” Ed says, meaning it.  It’s hard enough to find Roy in the one they’ve got sometimes, in the middle of the night when Ed just needs to make sure that he’s still breathing.

“A bigger bathtub?” Roy says.

“Yes,” Ed says.  “But also no.”

It is truly, indescribably ridiculous and twice again as wonderful that Roy apparently understood that.  “All right,” he says as they top the stairs.  “What does it need?”

Ed flings the door open, flicks the lights on, and gestures grandly.

“A carpet with a pattern of your face on it,” he says.  “Or maybe just one giant face, as a centerpiece.  With a bunch of little flame designs around it.  When do you think is the soonest we could expect to get that installed?”

He isn’t terribly surprised when Roy shoves him down onto the definitely-big-enough bed.

Roy’s going to be surprised when Ed temporarily transmutes them some sexy new flooring in celebration of a certain Vice Chancellor’s next birthday, though.

And there are quite a few other surprises that they both might discover in the meantime, Ed hopes.  That sounds pretty damn good.




As it turns out, another disadvantage is that if your diplomatic assignment concluded on a weekday, you have to get up early the next day to go back to regular work, and you feel like the train ran over you.  More than once.

Fuck,” Ed says, as clearly as possible when the intense gravity of the pillow has not yet released his face.

Instants after the diabolical alarm has been silenced, Roy’s fingers dance down Ed’s back in what he seems to think is an encouraging sort of way.  “Good morning, beautiful.”

“It’s not,” Ed tells the pillow, which is probably more receptive to reason at this point.

They both know that Ed will feel significantly more optimistic about the prospect of existence after a hot shower and twenty-odd ounces of coffee, but apparently Roy is marginally too merciful this morning to point it out.  Or maybe he’s just really enjoying running his hand up and down Ed’s spine.

“Back to the grind, I suppose,” he says.

Ed attempts to mash his face into the pillow hard enough to make today not exist.  “I’ll show you ‘the grind’.”

“Is that a promise?” Roy asks, but then he’s getting up to poach as much hot water as he thinks he can get away with before Ed uses up the rest.




Maybe the real reason that they keep promoting Roy is that his bullshit generators don’t suffer anywhere near as much as you would expect when he’s exhausted.  That could be more of a reflection on the staggeringly low threshold of bullshit quality expected by his colleagues, rather than any real accolade for Roy, but the bottom line is that Ed’s just damn glad he’s not the one stuck in a meeting after yesterday.  He’s having trouble stringing sentences together, let alone sitting through the degree of close encounters of the governmental kind where Roy usually doodles to stay awake.

Jean—Ed’s brain still wants to call him Havoc sometimes, but now that they’re all closer-knit than ever, he insisted, and Ed’s manners and mannerisms went to war—waits a grand total of twenty seconds after Roy and Riza walk out the door before he leans in and grins.  “So?  How was it?  Pretty fun, huh?”

For a long and terrible second, Ed, in the merciless throes of under-caffeination, thinks that Jean must be talking about—and that he therefore must somehow know about—the sex.

Ed feels like he just aged half a decade in a single instant of bright white panic.  It’s like the fucking Gate all over again.

“Uh,” he manages.  Hopefully Jean will attribute any hoarseness to the ‘fun’, whatever he thinks that was.  “It was okay, I guess.  Mostly just a lot of talking.”

“Chief seemed to be in good spirits,” Heymans says, tipping his pencil in the direction of the door as if any of them needs a visual aide.  Ed tries very, very to look very, very neutral.  He has no idea why Roy might be in a pleasant mood.  He couldn’t possibly imagine.  What an impregnable mystery.  Maybe they’ll never know.  “Guess things must’ve gone well with all the ministers as far as those plans we worked out.”

“Yeah,” Ed gets out.  “You know how he is.”

Kain is watching him closely.  “How did they—what’s that called?  Receive you?”

“It was okay,” Ed says, which sounds really noncommittal, but he’s not sure how else to say it.  “Most of their politicians are just politicians, and most of their royalty are just rich people.  Not that different from here.”

He knows that what Kain’s really asking is What do you think are the chances for a real peace, and he hopes he got the gist of the answer through.

Jeez.  He really is spending too much time with Roy.

Royalty, huh?” Jean says, leaning his chin on his hand and gazing into the middle distance.  “Were there princesses?  Were they hot?  I bet they were total babes.”

Ed blinks at him for a second.

Then Ed reaches down into his bag, pulls out the cheat sheet, and wordlessly lays it on the table.

“Oh,” Jean says.

“This,” Vato says, leaning in so quickly that Jean has to scramble out of the way, “is brilliant.  May I assist you with expanding it?”

“That’d be great, actually,” Ed says, and he can tell that both Heymans and Kain heard the rest of that—the At the rate that things are going, I’m pretty sure we’re going to need it.




Roy swans back in after the meeting with Riza rolling her eyes in his wake, which means that the doodling-and-bullshit mission was inordinately successful.

“Here,” Roy says, so blithely that Ed is immediately suspicious, and drops a sealed envelope into his hands.  “I thought I’d try my hand at a cheat sheet.”  Ed picks it up, trying to eye him and slide a metal fingertip underneath the envelope flap at the same time, and Roy’s grin quirks so wide and mischievous that he freezes on instinct.  “You… may not want to open it right now.”

Ed feels his cheeks and throat going hot.  Did Roy just hand him smutty pictures or something?  When would he even have time to get those?

“Do you ever work?” Ed asks.

“You wound me,” Roy says, jaunting into his office and beaming from the doorway, “Riza Junior, my sweet.”

Ed mimes throwing a pencil at his head, Roy mimes ducking, Roy closes the door, and Ed considers that bullet narrowly dodged.

At least, he does until Riza Senior very loudly and pronouncedly says, “How many times do I need to ask you to stop calling him that, sir?”, and Roy calls back, “Apparently, at least one more!”

Ed figures, though, that Roy probably already knows that if he ever says it while they’re fucking, Ed will get up and go pack his bags, so that’s all right.

The morbid curiosity is killing him, which was probably half of Roy’s intention in the first place.  There are worse things than falling into one of his traps, though.  It’s safe to say at this point that Ed wound up with a phenomenal boyfriend by falling into the last one.

He slips the envelope into his pocket during a moment when everyone else is preoccupied, waits a couple minutes, and then excuses himself for a bathroom break.

He makes a swift trip to the slightly further one, which tends to see less use, and checks around to make sure the place is empty before he opens the evil little envelope at last.

Roy has graced a piece of military letterhead with an incredibly lousy doodle of a smiling face with dark hair cozied up with a smiling face with a light-colored ponytail.  They’re surrounded by mostly lopsided little hearts, underneath which he has written Fuck me again soon, please XOXO and an even worse doodle of a horse.

Ed is going to kill him as soon as he’s done laughing so hard that the bathroom walls echo with it.