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Roy has honed his skill for making deliberate actions look accidental into a bayonet, but even he couldn’t fake it for the duration of a wedding in front of all of his closest friends. Especially not a wedding with an open bar.
He is happy for Falman—extremely happy. Falman’s happiness has been strangely, seepingly contagious for the past year, which has made sulking into something of a trial. Roy has succeeded anyway, of course, because he is nothing if not a conqueror of absurd challenges, but it didn’t come as easily as it would have without the subtly uplifting ambient pleasantness of a friend first and employee second stumbling into the prime of his own life.
Maybe Roy will stumble into his, one of these days.
But probably not before he finishes this round of free whiskey.
Ed is dancing with Elysia. Avoiding him outright would have made it obvious, which would have made it awkward; and the people who have gathered here today to celebrate Falman and Sheska, separately and together and both at once, deserve better. Roy smiled and said hello and asked how things were and held a hand up and made some comment about a centimeter or two before looking down at the heels of Ed’s dress shoes and saying “Ah” as significantly as possible. Al gave him a poisoned smile that he probably merited. But Ed just smirked and arched an eyebrow and shrugged and walked away, hands in his pockets and shoulders loose, and that felt a thousand times worse.
Ed twirls Elysia so that her fluffy pink skirt flares, and his hair is falling out around his face. His cheeks are pink. His eyes are too bright to look at. He keeps laughing. She must be telling him all the stories about school, about her friends, about roller-skating and hiding in the bushes to photograph the birds and all of the million little adventures. Ed’s eyes have a way of doing that. You want to tell him everything.
Sometimes you’re smart enough to stop yourself.
Sometimes you’re not.
Roy looks down into the twirl of amber and ice. Slowly, he turns the glass, twisting it through the pool of its own condensation. Drinking alone at weddings makes one look phenomenally pathetic. He has about another minute, maybe one and a half, in which he can sell this as sitting down for a breather while he picks up another drink—after that, if he doesn’t rejoin the crowd and recommence rejoicing, he’s sold himself out for a sap.
He draws a deep breath, plasters on the smile, smooths down the edges, cradles the glass loosely between his fingers, stands, and turns back towards the room.
Al is standing so close that he startles backwards and bangs his spine into the edge of the bar.
Al smiles. It’s ice all the way through.
“You know,” Al says, chilly and cheerful, and Roy would speak his own last rites if he had any prayers to offer, “the worst thing is that he doesn’t even hold it against you.”
Roy blinks. He was quite sure that he knew the topic of the impending conversation—or perhaps impending monologue, since he might not, in fact, be permitted to contribute—but now…
Al’s smile quirks up higher at the corners. His eyes are polished topaz, cut to facets.
“I do, though,” he says. “I don’t buy the ‘We made some bad choices and had a good weekend, and that’s enough’ bullshit for a single minute. And I don’t think you do, either. Which is why you’re going to go outside right now, and you’re going to apologize to him with every last ounce of sincerity left in your cowardly little soul. And then you’re going to explain to him why you were so irredeemably wrong to treat him like garbage, and how misguided that was, and how utterly stupid someone would have to be not to see how much he’s worth and worship at his feet. Just for starters.”
Roy opens his mouth.
Al reaches out, plucks the whiskey from his hand, drains it, and puts it back.
Roy closes his mouth again.
Al jerks a thumb over his shoulder at the double doors of the rear exit, which are propped open a crack. “That way.”
Roy rummages. There is some voice in here after all. “I don’t—I never thought—”
“I know,” Al says, looking him in the eyes. “That’s why you’re still in one piece. But he doesn’t know that. Which you’re going to fix. Now.”
Roy clears his throat. He would love to wash the nettles down with some whiskey, but this amber-eyed demon has appropriated his entire supply and will probably break all of his fingers if he goes back to the bar for another dose.
“I’ll try,” he says.
Al takes the glass from his frozen hand again, and then points towards the door. He smiles, mercilessly. “I suspect that you’ll do better than that.”
Roy’s feet move. At least some part of him is invested in the continued, unbroken survival of his fingers. The rest of him is spikes and smoke and lead.
Perhaps the worst part—or the strangest, or the hardest—is that he wants to talk to Ed. He wants to find out how things are, how they’ve been, how the world turns in Ed’s corner of it. What the universe looks like. What’s wrong, what’s right, what’s interesting, what’s outside the windows of wherever he lives now. What the new scars came from, whether the old ones have silvered over yet. All of it. Everything.
He’s started a dozen letters and crumpled every last one of them, with the exceptions of the ones he simply burned to ash. He can feel the unsent words, every letter like a curl of filigree cold against his skin. He has built himself a cage from them, or possibly a suit of armor.
The left-side door is propped open by the imposition of a good-sized rock. Roy spreads his hand in the center of it and pushes it far enough to slide his body through the gap.
He turns instinctively towards his left—towards the place that the shadow of the open door will fall, towards the place protected by it. The place that someone would choose without thinking when their life had taught them how to hide.
Ed is leaning back against the brick wall, arms folded over his chest. Roy misses his forearms, his collarbones, his throat—and his mouth, second only to his eyes. His laugh. The gasps, the indrawn half-breaths, the scoffs, the snickers. The staggeringly calm way that he dismantles other people’s arguments, the agony of how his entire face lights up at the prospect of discovery.
Ed is forcing his shoulders to relax as Roy moves around the edge of the door. He glances over, arching an eyebrow, and half-smiles.
Maybe Roy misses his mouth the most, but that’s like missing the sky without considering the sun. His mouth and his eyes and his hands and his hair and his voice all exist in such faultless complement, such inimitable balance—when alchemy speaks of a perfect being, of transcendence, of everything in place—
Well. The philosophers probably didn’t weigh the sheer sublimity of having Ed’s mouth around your cock while you’re leaned against the shower wall in an overpriced hotel room, with your fingers buried in his hair and his eyes burning into yours.
But they should have.
Roy has weighed it more often than he’d like to admit. Some of the letters led with it, until he’d thought through the difference between convenience and availability. Happening to be at Ed’s fingertips when there wasn’t anyone else in the city that either of them knew was one thing. An open offer was another altogether.
Roy lets the door swing shut behind him.
“Let me guess,” Ed says, and his eyes lift to the moon half-wreathed in pewter clouds. It looks like it’s trying to pull free. “Al.”
“Al,” Roy says.
“Let me guess,” Ed says, drumming the soft—so soft, too soft—fingertips of his right hand against the brick wall, following an aimless tempo only he can hear. “He thinks we should have a good, old-fashioned heart-to-heart.”
Roy wishes he had three more whiskeys in him, but given how floatingly distant his head feels as it is, perhaps it’s for the best. It is unsustainably surreal—to be here, now, after a year of almost sending all the letters, of almost picking up the phone. Of almost turning up on the doorstep, of almost begging Al or Winry for undeserved help. Of planning out the conversation that they’re about to have, and then backing away.
It was for the best. That’s what he always circles back to, closing the circumference of the array. Ed is better off without him. This is only the apology for what was done, and what was left unfinished and unexplained. The rest of it dies with him. It has to.
Roy takes a breath and tries to reel his brain back in. All it wants to think about is how the moonlight kisses the bridge of Ed’s nose and spills itself heedlessly down his hair. He made a mess of his ponytail dancing, and the brick behind him is snagging all the flyaways. Roy’s brain wants to bury both hands in it. Roy’s brain remembers how impossibly beautiful it feels.
“I think he’s right,” Roy makes himself say. “We never… talked about it. Any of it.”
“Because there’s nothing to talk about,” Ed says, casually, but the shrug betrays him—it’s too much. It’s telegraphing. “We just happened to need a distraction at the same time. We were both looking for another rule to break. What’s so wrong with that?”
Nothing would have been wrong with that, if that had been the truth of it.
“You already said everything that needs to be said,” Ed says. His fingertips pause against the brick. His jaw works, and he forms his mouth into another smile. “It was a mistake. We were in the wrong place at the wrong time—or one was right, and the other was wrong. Doesn’t matter much. It happened, and now it’s over.”
“Still,” Roy says, with what remains of him.
“You don’t have to bullshit me,” Ed says, gaze rolling slowly over to him, simmering so low that Roy barely has to suppress a shiver. “I made my peace with it.”
“That’s probably for the best,” Roy says, woodenly, for all that he does mean it. “But I’ve… been finding… that despite sincere efforts to change, I’m… not much good at peace.”
“Fuck off,” Ed says, beaming at him.
Circular. Somehow it always is. Somehow they always end up here.
Roy had only taken five steps into the gleaming marble foyer of the South City Palace Hotel—which meant that he’d already passed half a dozen signs for the First Annual Alchemical Research Conference and Exhibition, but that he was not yet remotely prepared to see Edward Elric, tanned and twenty-one and terrifyingly beautiful for both, lounging on one of the red leather couches like it had been constructed specifically to frame his indolence.
Ed had wasted a grand total of zero seconds with formalities, familiarities, or greetings: “Oh, fuck off. You know this city at all? This joint is sold out. Which I guess is a good thing, conceptually, but it means I gotta try my luck with a room some other place.”
Roy’s mouth had wasted zero seconds waiting for his brain, and had come right out with: “You can stay with me. They let me put it on my research budget.”
Ed had smirked. Roy should have known it then. “What the hell do you have a research budget for?”
“Room service, apparently,” Roy had said.
And Ed had said, “Neat.”
They’d attended a truly inordinate number of lectures together, a handful of which had proved so mind-numbingly advanced that Roy had dozed off with his head on Ed’s left shoulder. The naps wouldn’t have been quite as necessary if they hadn’t spent nearly every unscheduled minute fucking on and against every single surface in the hotel room, including several of the vertical ones. They’d bickered amicably about virtually everything—the science and the scientists and the state sponsorship and the conference logo and the sheets on the bed, which didn’t see much use. Ed had been breathtaking and insatiable and utterly, utterly untamed, and the singularity of him had torn Roy’s reservations into shreds. He’d lain awake with Ed nestled in against his shoulder and stared at the darkness that concealed the ceiling and tried to find an answer to any of the hundred-thousand questions, and the pale streaks of the dawn had found him empty-handed.
Monday morning, they’d walked to the train station together, languid in the heat, so slowly that it had felt like a helplessness dream. Roy’s skin had been buzzing with the weight of Ed’s fingerprints, his mouth had been alive with the taste of the last kiss over their slovenly suitcases. It had tasted of the room service breakfast—cold scrambled eggs and mediocre muffins, not-so-promptly delivered to the door just in time to wolf down before letting the heavy door fall shut and lock them out this time.
“So,” Ed had said, so perfectly calmly—still a vision even in the weak light, even with the sweat clinging too close for eight thirty in the goddamn morning, even when Roy’s insides were a knot of terror and disbelief and desperation. “Is this a thing, or was it a fling?”
It was the question that Roy had been too much of a coward to ask for fifty-odd hours of unimaginable bliss. It was the question he hadn’t even been brave enough to ask himself.
All he’d known for sure was that he wanted it. He wanted more. He wanted things he had no right to—things he knew damn well that he would destroy. Things that people like him didn’t have, and couldn’t have, for everybody’s safety.
It had been too hot to feel cold. He’d just felt like he was drifting. He’d just felt like the ground had fallen away.
“I don’t know,” he’d said. They had had two different train tickets in their hands—two different platforms. Ed had been headed to Resembool. He hadn’t said why, or who or what was waiting for him there, and Roy hadn’t had the guts to ask that question, either.
Roy had known a few things. He’d known that Ed was not the sort of man he was—that Ed, if he had really wanted this, would have said something before it came to the crossroads. He’d known that Ed didn’t experience the towering twin fears of failure and rejection that had frozen Roy’s tongue so many times. He’d known that Ed had already half-answered the question by waiting to ask until now.
He’d known that Ed—newly twenty-one and absolutely incandescent, effortlessly captivating rooms full of notable alchemists while wearing ripped-up jeans and a T-shirt speckled with coffee stains like abstract art, without even noticing what he’d done—had had a future.
And Roy had known that he shouldn’t be in it. He’d known that he would make it harder—make it worse. He’d known that Ed would rise higher and move freer and do better if this was discrete, and discreet, and dead.
He’d known that Ed would be happier if Roy Mustang, resurrected from the past for two and a half days of giddy dalliance in this strange, isolated other-world, had been promptly re-interred in the mausoleum of Ed’s memory now that it was done.
So when Ed had tilted his head to the side, sending a gold ripple over his forehead, and arced an eyebrow up—waiting for more, and for more than Roy had known how to give him—Roy had said, “I’m not sure it would be a good idea to make this into a habit.”
Ed had looked at him, levelly. He’d blinked once. And then he had said, “All right.”
And Roy had stood very still and suffocated in the heat.
Ed’s face had split with the same grin that had done Roy in at the beginning—the fearless challenge laced with mischief, underpinned with genuine delight. Everything about Ed had always been genuine. That was the greatest danger of him.
“Sure was a hell of a lot of fun, though,” Ed had said. “Didn’t figure you understood the meaning of ‘fun’. Shows you what I know.”
“A lot,” Roy had said, since he hadn’t had a choice.
Ed had rolled his eyes, and then the grin had come right back. “Cool. Okay. See you next year?”
And Roy had said, “I’m looking forward to it,” which had already been a lie.
The next conference is scheduled for the end of the month, which Roy has been dreading and anticipating with equal and equally self-destructive fervor. He concocted an endless assortment of wild fantasy scenarios in which their paths crossed, and they both forgot the behests of their respective better judgments, and they reenacted the original indiscretion. In every one, he convinces himself that he could work up the courage this time.
And then Falman and Sheska beat him to the punch, which landed squarely in the area of his kidneys. Lower, possibly. Hurts like hell.
“It’s too bad I don’t smoke,” Ed says. Roy blinks at him, but he hasn’t stopped smiling idly at the sky. “Standing outside doing nothing is weird, but standing outside smoking is kinda dramatic.” He shifts away from the wall, undulating like a ripple in the water, and Roy has been dying in the desert for eleven months. He strikes a pose with his arm raised and his first two fingers extended, supporting an imaginary cigarette. “Would it make me look better?”
At least the desert analogy explains why Roy’s throat is so dry. “That isn’t possible.”
Ed darts a glance at him. “Pretty sure I just told you not to bullshit me.”
“You didn’t tell me,” Roy says. “It was a suggestion.”
The red shirt clings to Ed’s shoulders, and the black slacks cling to his ass, and Roy wants to grab him by the cute black suspenders and…
Roy wants a lot of things.
Ed rolls his eyes.
Roy has spent too long learning why he has to do this—why he has to say it. Why he has to peel back the armor and gather up what’s left of who he was, once, and who he could be. He has to take the leap of faith. He has to act like someone brave enough to be in love with Edward Elric if he ever wants it to be true.
He takes a breath. They’re only words. They’re so much easier than the silence. The worst that can happen already has.
“There has not been a day in the past year,” Roy says, slowly, forcing the words off of his tongue one syllable at a time, “that I haven’t thought about you. Not a single one.”
Ed is quiet for a long second, staring at the sky.
Then the smirk uncoils again.
“Just in general?” he says. “Or specifically naked?”
Al was right. Ed can’t see it. Ed doesn’t believe him.
“Both,” Roy says.
Ed snorts. The gently sloping hill ahead of them leads down to a picturesque little tree line that probably explodes with roses in the spring. Ed’s eyes are trained on it, and it’s hard to blame him.
Roy has nothing left to lose, does he? A vacuum can hardly get any emptier.
“I mean it,” he says, for all the good that that will do with Ed, who knows better than to believe a promise made in desperation. “The only thing I did that weekend that I’ve regretted for an instant was letting you walk away.” He can do better. He has to. “Making you walk away. And I have regretted that for so many instants that I lost count a very long time ago.”
Ed glances at him, guarded and skeptical, and that might be the worst of it. When they’d fallen into each other, back then—there hadn’t been any time to raise the walls, to practice the words. No hiding. Too damn hot to waste any energy on holding back. All the mistrust had melted away. They skipped past that part.
And now they’ve circled right back to it, to make up for time Roy never mourned as lost.
“It was just a weekend,” Ed says, evenly. “It was a one-time thing. It was just because we didn’t know anybody else there.”
“Except Alex,” Roy says, with a tongue like concrete and the hands to match. He can’t lift them. If only—
What? If only he could let them speak instead?
“Except Alex,” Ed says. Alex had seen it. Anyone who had known the both of them would have. “Lightning doesn’t strike twice.”
“Are you sure?” Roy asks. “You are taller now. South City is somewhat famous for its summer storms. We could stand out in the center of a field.”
Even in the moonlight, Ed’s eyes are so intense that the hairs prickle deliciously at the back of Roy’s neck. This is what he wants—craves, covets, dreams of. This is what he looked for in so many other people and never found.
“You can go back in now,” Ed says, slowly. “Tell Al you tried, but I’m just too stubborn, and all we did was fight like the old days, but you gave it your best shot. He’d believe you.”
In a strange and backwards and utterly infuriating way, it is terribly kind of Ed to try to offer him a way out.
“Would you do it again?” Roy asks. “If you had another chance, and you knew what you know now, would you still have done it?”
Ed’s eyes narrow, and his mouth twists, and Roy could kiss him for a year and never tire of it. “Already told you. It was fun. That doesn’t mean—”
“Then let’s do it again,” Roy says. His fingertips tingle, and his heart hums in his ears. “This weekend, next weekend, when the damn conference is on. Whenever you want to. Soon. Tomorrow. Now.”
Ed stares at him, mouth very slightly open, and other than the shock he looks as delectable as ever. “You—”
Roy’s brain spins. “This isn’t a game. It’s not a joke. I meant what I said. I was a fucking idiot not to buy a ticket for your train and go with you wherever you were headed. I was a fucking idiot not to call you the next day and beg you for another try at that stupid conversation. I was a fucking idiot for not having started it twelve hours before and asked you to come visit me as soon as you could stand it. It wasn’t—”
He takes one step closer. These shoes pinch a bit. The bite of the whiskey still simmers dully in the back of his throat. Breathing seems to take a lot out of him, and give him very little back.
“It wasn’t you,” he says. “How the hell could it be? Or maybe it was. Maybe it was the fact that you were somehow, so immediately everything I’d ever wanted, and I was so scared of ruining it later that I did the only thing that I could think of and ruined it before I’d had a chance to admit how much it was.”
Ed swallows. His eyes are better than the stars: brighter, closer, never muted, never cold.
“Fuck off,” he says, half-voiced and hoarse with it. His right hand rises, wavers, reaches out— “Prove it.”
Roy can’t help himself—not now, not in the midst of all of it, not after holding his breath for so, so long.
He grabs Ed’s hand like it’s a spar in a shipwreck, and then Ed’s wrist, and then his fingers know their way up the strong forearm and the mouth-watering bicep to the intersecting pearl-pink and stark red scars on the perfect shoulder. From there to his neck, his jaw, his ear, his cheekbone—
Ed leans into the touch, and Roy’s heart tries to dive out of his chest and hurl itself directly into Ed’s ribcage.
He remembers Ed’s ribs in intricate detail. He spent a lot of time with them.
Ed’s eyes stay cautious and keep searching Roy’s face even as Roy steps in, and in again, and glides his fingertips up into the wispy, soft hairs at Ed’s temple.
“If this turns out to be some kind of a prank,” Ed says, slowly, “and Havoc’s waiting in the bushes to say ‘Gotcha’ or someth—oh.”
Roy’s expression must be betraying some fraction of how violently his guts just dropped.
Ed grins, slightly ruefully—and then lifts his hand to lay it over Roy’s, holding Roy’s fingers against his skin, which makes up for… quite a lot.
“Okay,” Ed says. “Never mind. What were you gonna say?”
No more waiting. No more strategizing. No more copping out.
“That I missed you,” Roy says. He strokes the pad of his thumb across Ed’s cheek, marveling at the way the moonlight mingles with the amber in his eyes. “So much. So badly. An absolutely obscene amount. Every time I had nearly talked myself into believing that it had all been a dream, I’d go home and take out my lecture programs. I think I’ve memorized the things you wrote. Well—the ones that I could read, anyway.”
Ed grins with rather less rue this time around. “Shut up. My handwriting is great now. All loopy and fancy and legible and shit. Didn’t I draw one of the professor guys as a penguin?”
“He deserved it,” Roy says. He lifts his other hand and settles it close against the side of Ed’s neck. Another way to feel the warmth of him, the life of him. “That suit was a travesty.”
Ed hasn’t stopped smiling. There’s a shyness to it—rooted in a disbelief, perhaps, that would mirror what’s been seething through Roy’s veins. Was that it? Was that all that it took? Was that all that it ever needed? What the hell has he been doing for a year when he could have had this for such minimal cost?
Ed’s shoulders shift, and his elbows bend, and his hands settle on Roy’s waist. Roy’s entire spine feels electric.
“I can’t believe you kept that,” Ed says.
“The sardonic scribbled commentary of a genius?” Roy says, pitching his voice towards idle amusement even as the heat of Ed’s palms ignites his skin all over. “Yes, what a strange and inexplicable souvenir.”
Ed grins again. That was part of it—perhaps the largest part. A This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about in Edward Elric’s noticeably more decipherable hand means a whole lot more than any laundry list of degrees and accolades and publications.
But the sweeter part was what had made Roy take it out so many times that the folds were fraying. The sweeter part was the fact that Ed had claimed he didn’t want a copy of the program when they entered, and then changed his mind as soon as they had passed the ushers, which naturally meant that he was “stuck” sitting next to Roy. The sweeter part was that Roy had stolen his pen and written back It’s very charitable of you not to stand up and shout that at him, and Ed had written Unlike SOME people I DO know how to shut up sometimes, and Roy had written Perhaps you can shut me up later, to which Ed had written only Deal.
That part had proved that he hadn’t had an ordinary weekend with an unusual hotel roommate and simply invented the rest.
He’d wondered, more than once.
Ed is trying to read behind Roy’s eyes. There’s a particular scrunch to his nose when he does it, and a twist to his mouth. His fingers tighten just a little in Roy’s shirt, and Roy wants to shed it for him—here, now, anywhere, any time. Anything he could ask for.
“Are you sure about this?” Ed says. “With all your shit you’ve got going on—you’re making progress. You’ve gotta be careful.”
“I’m sure,” Roy says, closing the last of the distance left, pressing their chests together and curling his fingers in Ed’s impossible, incomparable, hauntingly unparalleled hair, “that I don’t want to miss you anymore. The rest of it I don’t give much of a fuck about just now.”
The grin is back. That was what he was hoping for. It still slices into him and guts him effortlessly, but that’s what he was hoping for, too.
“Now you’re talkin’,” Ed says, squeezing both hands in on either side of Roy’s waist, and oh, hell, the light in his eyes—an endless, slogging year of striving to recreate the image of it was nowhere near enough. Ed tips his head back, rolling his shoulders under Roy’s hands, and unfurls a smirk Roy never should have taught him how to use. “I’ve got a couple suggestions of things you could give a fuck about.”
Roy can feel the grin pulling at his mouth in the same instant that he registers the words themselves. His body knows what it wants, too.
He leans in and lets his eyelashes fall low—but doesn’t close his eyes just yet. This sort of dream has escaped him before.
“I was hoping you’d say that,” he murmurs, and Ed tilts his face up higher, darting the tip of his tongue across his bottom lip—
And kissing him is everything.
Roy doesn’t know how long it is before he breathes, and all that he breathes in is Ed. This is how he wants the world to end. This is what forever ought to feel like, if you could ever begin to hope to deserve it.
Ed doesn’t play coy and doesn’t take prisoners: he hooks his left arm around Roy’s waist, and his right hand walks itself up Roy’s back to reach his hair and grab a whole fistful of it. His mouth is ten times hotter and wetter than the humid night, and several million times more appealing.
He uses his teeth as much as his tongue, and his tongue like a bludgeon. It’s less affection than attack, less give and take than just giving in—like he couldn’t stop it if he tried or help himself if he wanted to.
Roy sympathizes.
Roy strives to meet him with equal and opposite and unmitigated force, and it’s less a kiss than a collapse of the floodgates, and everything he’s held back and hung onto for the whole damn miserable year—
He realizes too late to change it that his grip on Ed’s hair could probably make vises boil with envy, but since his blood took up bubbling the instant that Ed’s mouth met his, he thinks he’ll beat them to the point of sublimation. Every gasp of Ed’s breath, every shift of his lips, every soft noise resonating from the back of his throat—
His fingers clench in the back of Roy’s shirt, the better to haul Roy in and slam their hips together.
Ed’s already halfway hard, and the gratified, needy little moan that leaves his mouth and winds its way directly into Roy’s when their bodies collide makes Roy’s knees feel like butter. His cock throbs, and his heart hammers in his throat so violently that he has to draw back to fight in some air that isn’t borrowed from Ed’s lungs at dizzyingly close proximity.
It’s like the first time—like the first kiss in the too-white, too-big hotel room, with the vast expanse of the bed lingering so meaningfully just behind them. It’s the same desperate, self-sustaining hunger, sated and emptied in the same exhale. It’s the same landmine passion blasting through the inhibitions like they never were. Shrapnel and shreds of all the Maybes and the Shouldn’ts and the Won’ts.
Roy spends two full seconds gazing down into Ed’s starlight-speckled molten eyes, letting his fingertips range down Ed’s cheeks and his jaw and his throat.
Then Roy dives back in and tries for drowning.
Ed’s hips hitch against his again, harder this time—shameless, fearless, ferociously demanding. Roy missed that, too. Ed isn’t afraid of what he wants. He’s not afraid to share it.
Roy is.
Roy wants everything.
He pushes Ed back against the brick—careful of the precious head, less careful of the precious shoulders—and molds his body in against the writhing, too-warm form he’s dreamed of, guiltily, for so many months that it felt like an unconquerable fever. For so long that the wanting just became a part of him.
But now he can have it, too.
Ed is grinning up at him, and the shock has faded or dissolved or crumpled somewhere in the overlap between the kisses. All that remains is exactly what Roy remembers—the sheer joy of him, the boundless love of living, with an edge of recklessness that kicks you like whiskey in the back of the throat.
Ed rolls his hips to grind their cocks together, and Roy sees a whole new set of stars.
He was so stunning, a year ago, in tattered jeans and grease-stained T-shirts and briefly a battered hoodie when the weather cooled a fraction on the second night, that having to cope with him now, in these clothes, is frankly quite unfair. Roy’s whole body is going haywire, to say nothing of his soul.
That provocation can’t exactly go unanswered, so he leverages his grip on Ed’s hair to tilt Ed’s head back again, the better to kiss him harder than before. The first one was I’m sorry, I missed you. This is I’ll make sure you never want to leave again.
Ed rises into it readily, although not without an entirely merciless nip to Roy’s lip to make it clear that he heard the message, and he knows the gambit. By the way he soothes the bite with a swift kiss and the swiftness with a softer one, however, Roy musters more than a bit of hope that perhaps he doesn’t mind.
The way his left hand promptly settles on Roy’s ass and pulls him in closer doesn’t hurt that theory overmuch.
Roy is so starved for him that Ed could set his terms with the sky as the limit, but he won’t. It’s Ed. He won’t ask for much except the minimum, and Roy will give him undiluted devotion.
Starting with a harder grasp on his hair, a deeper kiss, and Roy’s spare hand between them to palm gently but unequivocally at Ed’s dick.
The soft laugh against his mouth says Took you long enough so loudly that Ed doesn’t have to. The fingertips of Ed’s right hand sweep through Roy’s hair, over the curve of his ear, down the side of his neck, and linger over his sweat-damp collarbones for a tantalizing instant before they range lower.
Much lower.
They settle on his belt, peacefully. They wait there, posing the question despite the pertinent detail that Roy just wrapped his hand around the shaft of Ed’s cock through his slacks and squeezed.
He manages to pry his mouth just far enough from Ed’s to murmur, “Yes, already,” which only makes Ed laugh a little harder.
It’s Ed, isn’t it? The faint jingle of his belt buckle being undone by someone else’s fingers wouldn’t make his blood beat this hot, this fast, this hard in his throat for anyone else. It’s Ed. It’s his intensity, his earnestness—the way that there’s an innocence even to his wicked, satisfied, lip-biting, sharp-eyed grin, because Ed does nothing for himself, and everything for love.
Including shoving his hand down into Roy’s trousers and tunneling his fingers tightly around Roy’s cock. Apparently. God, that’s good.
“Mm,” Roy chokes out, mostly just because unnecessary commentary invariably makes Ed work even harder to shut him up. “That’s—lovely.”
“You fucker,” Ed breathe-laughs, leaning in close enough that it ghosts across Roy’s face. It’s so damn sticky out here that that should feel disgusting, but Roy’s skin is tingling everywhere, and his guts are tight, and his heart is soaring, and Ed’s hand is on his cock— “I know you didn’t forget the ‘no talking’ rule that fast.”
Roy rubs the heel of his hand against Ed’s erection, savoring the faint gasp he gets when he curls his fingers in underneath. “I suspect that we need to renew the contract.”
Ed’s right hand migrates up from Roy’s ass to the small of his back, drags him in so fiercely that it nearly smashes both of their hands in the impact of their pelvises, and then merrily walks its way up his spine to tug at his hair again. It’s hellish and transcendent and feels the way that ozone tastes, and Roy wouldn’t trade it for the vast universe on a silver plate.
“One day,” Ed murmurs right against his lips, which in itself is teasing in the extreme, “you’re gonna wake up with my signature tattooed on your upper thigh.”
Roy doesn’t quite dare to close his eyes in case this disappears. “On the back, I hope.”
“Of course on the fucking back,” Ed says, running his fingertips along the length of the underside of Roy’s dick so feather-lightly that it is truly unjust. “Why would I want the front? I mean, I do want the front, but it’s obviously not as intima—”
The door swings open, hinges squealing, and Roy’s brain instantaneously shuts itself off.
“Hey, Ed!” Winry’s voice calls, bright and clear like a pealing bell, and a pale blonde ringlet that’s starting to sag with the humidity sparks in the starlight. “They’re about to cut the c—”
She stares at them. They stare back. Roy supposes that it could be worse: his pants aren’t around his knees. His hand is positioned in a way that shields Ed’s extremely obvious erection from the eyes of the childhood best friend. It’s dark. It’s a wedding. He suffered for this.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Winry says, slapping one hand over her eyes and waving the other at them in a way that will, unfortunately, neither wipe them from existence nor erase this image from her memory. “When the hell am I gonna learn?”
“Next time,” Ed says, slightly faintly, but with a laugh building up behind it like a thundercloud. “Believe in yourself.”
“Shut up,” Winry says, feeling for the door with the hand that she’d previously designated for waving, so that she won’t have to lower the other one. “I expect you to pay me what I owe Al. If you need me, I’ll be halfway into a bottle of gin.”
“Rum might do it faster,” Roy says.
“Thanks for the tip,” Winry says, grasping the edge of the door and holding on like it’s a lifeline.
There is a silence.
“No,” she says. “I will not. I will not hand you a ‘tip’ joke. Fuck you, Ed. Not especially good to see you, Roy. Get your clothed asses in there before they cut the cake, or so help me, I will acquire the cake knife, and you won’t like where it’s going. ’Bye.”
The lace hem of her pretty sundress vanishes around the edge of the door, and it swings shut behind her, banging against the rock still valiantly filling in for a doorstop.
A new silence stretches for one heartbeat, followed by another.
Then Ed starts snickering.
At Roy’s expression, he just grins wider, and worse. “If I’d gotten money every time she’s killed the mood, I’d be able to buy you as many drinks as you probably want right now.”
“Hopefully,” Roy says, “you’d also be able to pay my medical bills if she attempts to remove anything with that cake knife that I’d rather keep.”
Ed strokes his fingers over the length of Roy’s cock one more time before withdrawing his hand. He keeps his expression pointedly calm, but the faint moonlight doesn’t quite mask the pink in his cheeks, and the buckle rattles considerably as he tries to re-secure Roy’s belt. “I’ll protect you. I want all of that shit intact.”
Roy pretends very hard that his hand wasn’t just groping Ed’s groin while he uses it to push Ed’s hair back tenderly instead. “How long are you in town?”
Ed wrinkles his nose. “Only until tomorrow morning. Winry’s got appointments in the afternoon.”
Roy must look as disappointed as he feels, which means that he is spectacularly losing his touch.
But it also means that his heart gathers up its broken wings as Ed starts to grin at him again, and that feels so fine that he almost can’t begrudge the fall.
“But, y’know,” Ed says, casually, reaching up to adjust Roy’s collar. “I went ahead and registered for that alchemy conference again, but the hotels looked like even more of a racket this year, so I didn’t get one. I was thinkin’ maybe I’d just show up and hope that I ran into somebody I knew there who might put me up in their room for a couple of nights.”
“Hmm,” Roy says. He straightens Ed’s suspenders. The hair is hopeless. “Sounds like a bit of a long shot. But maybe you’ll get lucky.”
Ed smirks up at him. “Maybe I will.”
Roy simply can’t help grinning back.
The door swings open again, admitting Winry, this time with her hand already hovering over her eyes.
“There’s cake, you degenerates,” she says. “Are you coming, or not? Oh, fuck—wait—don’t answer that.”
Ed’s laugh still makes Roy’s whole chest burn low and warm and wonderful.
He’ll never get that year back.
But damn if he isn’t looking forward to making up for lost time.