Chapter Text
Pauses rattle on about the way
that you cut the snow-fence, braved the blood,
the metal of those hearts
that you always end up pressing your tongue to.
How your body still remembers things you told it to forget, how those furious affections followed you.
—watermark, the weakerthans
I.
If nothing bad ever happened to a person, they might operate under the implicit assumption that bad things happened to other people—they’d read about war, death and famine, ten-car pile-ups and tsunamis, and think, that’s not my life. But Roy Mustang was an orphan who had been at the front lines of war and on bad days swore he could still smell singed flesh, so he operated under the assumption that bad things happened to him, always, specifically. He knew he could live his life with constant vigilance, but it wouldn’t always be enough.
He heard that the Cumulonimbus Alchemist had been seen in the city. The Cumulonimbus Alchemist was a rogue state alchemist turned madman, as far as anyone was concerned—a man who’d become disillusioned with Amestris’ military state and vanished after a bloody firefight with Central soldiers, one of whom was Roy, and now appeared only occasionally in the countryside to make hail the size of baseballs rain from the sky. So when Roy heard that he was spotted in Central, and was told not to worry too much about it, he thought: I’m sure I’ll see him eventually.
Ed had never heard of the Cumulonimbus Alchemist. His reign of terror was brief and happened when Ed was two years old, and no one talked about him much after that because it was easier to write the man off as a nutcase than admit he might return someday and they’d have a terrorist on their hands. And even if he had heard of him, he would have been just as surprised when Roy Mustang ran smack into him on the sidewalk on his way to headquarters at the crack of dawn, soaking wet on a sunny day.
Ed staggered back, grabbing Roy’s coat. “Jesus, watch your—Colonel?”
“Fullmetal,” Roy breathed. He was sopping from his head to his feet, hair plastered across his forehead and dripping with rain. “Run, go, you can’t—”
“What—”
There was a ear-splitting crack and the air around them turned unbearably dry and cold, and Ed straightened up in time to catch an icicle like a railroad spike off his automail arm. The Cumulonimbus Alchemist was standing on a cloud like a campy cartoon character, an old, haggard man with shoddy clothes and bright red, weather-beaten cheeks.
“What did you do?” Ed yelled at Roy over his shoulder; Roy shoved him.
“Nothing, go! Run, get to headquarters, we can—”
Cumulonimbus twisted icicles out of the air with a flick of his wrist and a crackle of energy, freezing the moisture in the air around him, and shot them at Ed and Roy. Ed clapped his hands and pulled a rock wall from the sidewalk. He could feet Roy’s wet fist in the back of his jacket.
“Oh my God, you’re soaked! You’re useless!”
“I’m aware, Fullmetal,” Roy snarled in his ear. “If you can hold him off—”
“We’ve gotta draw him out of the city!” Ed took off running and Roy stumbled after him in his squelching shoes.
“We’re downtown, there’s no way we can get him that far out!”
“He’s gonna kill someone!”
“He’s gonna kill me if we don’t—” An icicle whizzed past Ed’s head and, he assumed, past Roy’s behind him. He grabbed onto a traffic signpost, pulled, and transmuted it into a spear. He screeched to a stop and turned around and Roy all but barrelled into him as he chucked the spear at the other alchemist, who swerved easily out of its way.
Roy looked over his shoulder and Ed saw that he was bleeding from a gash under his ear.
“Shit, let’s—” There was another thunderous crack and the sky above them brewed with black and blue clouds like towers of smoke and it began to rain in an otherworldly downpour, as if a dam had been broken; in seconds, water was gushing down the street knee-high. “—Get to higher ground before we drown.”
Ed spun on his heel and sprinted down the street, his lungs burning with every breath as if it were forty below. He heard Roy behind him but didn’t turn around, heard the telltale crack and whip of icicles but didn’t stop to fight. He lost his footing in his waterlogged boots and rain chased them down the street like a mobile river, clouds building in towers above them. His hair slapped across his face and he impatiently shoved it back.
“It’s too flat,” Roy panted from behind him. “We have to fight back, he could drown us where we stand!”
Ed vaulted over a low wall and charged into a lot where a new complex was being put up and the soil was loose with rubble and mud. He spun around; Roy looked half dead, blood running down the side of his face, the other side blooming in a dark bruise that wasn’t there a moment ago. The old man stood defiantly on his cloud ten paces behind them and conjured a wall of icicles that hurtled towards them; Ed pulled a wall from the ground under them and sprang back. He grabbed the back of Roy’s coat, dragged him closer, then pressed his palms to the ground. They rose on a pillar twenty feet above street level, leaving the river behind.
Cumulonimbus rose on his cloud to meet them and snarled, “You fucking military dogs, think you can just get out of everything! Think the government’s always got your fucking back! What about when it's not enough?”
“Go away!” Ed screamed. “You crazy old fuck!”
Clouds grew taller and darker over their heads. “Mustang fuckin’—fuckin’ drove me out of this city, I’m not gonna—think you're so much better than me!”
Ed knew the telltale signs of brewing lightning in clouds, the glint and flashes of internal light. As the first bolts struck their platform, he used the iron in the stones under them to pull two metal poles out of the rock to act as lightning rods. Lightning struck them and Ed felt his pulse leap at the proximity to such immense energy and Roy, next to him, sucked in a loud breath. Ed steadied himself on his knees, too nervous to stand so high above ground. He started lowering their pillar closer to the earth and the cloud Cumulonimbus stood on grew tall and black, blistering with energy. Ed put up a curved wall at their feet to divert some of the water and stop them from getting whisked away.
“It's okay,” Ed said, more to himself than anything. “If the lightning rods stay, we’re okay.”
“Put us back down!” Roy yelled through the needling rain. “We’re too vulnerable up here!”
“Fucking pompous kid!” the old man shouted, and the clouds all around them grew thick and black.
“I was just going for breakfast!” Ed howled. “This is all your fault! Where’s Lieutenant Hawkeye?”
Roy shouted back, “I don’t know! She’s not my bodyguard!”
“Isn’t she?”
Roy’s hand closed around his forearm. The pillar under their feet reached the ground again just as the air around them started to twist and churn into a cyclone, whipping wind and rain hard enough to burn.
“Run!” Roy yelled again. “He's not after you, get help, I can handle this!”
“He's gonna kill you!” Ed screeched. “You're fucking useless in the rain and you know it, just let me—”
The downpour started again. It drenched them from a foot above their heads, rain like a waterfall gushing in their eyes and noses and mouths, like being waterboarded, and Ed choked for air. He heard loud, maniac laughter through the pounding of blood in his ears. Roy’s hand was like a vice around his wrist and the old man kept screaming and cackling and the rain got worse and worse, clouds surrounding them like a swirling fog until they could hardly see.
“Let me think!” Ed shouted to Roy, garbled through the never-ending downpour. “I—there’s gotta be something—he’s taking moisture from the air—clouds—”
He gasped and ducked his head to suck in a breath. He shook Roy’s hand off, clapped and pressed his gloved palms to the earth. Nothing happened.
“Shit!” he gasped, coughing and sputtering on rain. “Uh—fuck, fuck—”
He did it again, but this time there was a blue flash in a neat arc around the Cumulonimbus Alchemist and just like that, the rain stopped and the cloud under his feet disappeared; Roy fell to his knees, hacking up water. Cumulonimbus choked and looked at his hands, shook his wrists, confused, and it was enough time for Ed to charge at him, wind his arm back and knock him out with a single metal fist to the jaw. He collapsed in the mud, out cold. He looked more like a sad, old man than the imposing figure he had a moment ago.
Ed staggered back to where Roy was coughing up water and sat hard in the mud next to him to try to catch his breath.
“Jesus Christ, I thought I was going to die,” Roy panted. “What did you do?”
Ed closed his eyes. “Got rid of the oxygen in the air around him so he couldn’t make clouds. It was only for a second, but I tried to pull iodargyrite from the ground—it’s like silver iodide, they use it for cloud seeding. I thought if I could get that I could oversaturate the air and make him run out, but there wasn’t anything like that around here. I don’t know.”
“Fullmetal, that’s genius.”
"I should’ve thought of it earlier.”
“No, I’m serious, you—you saved me, I thought—”
“It’s nothing. It’s not your fault you’re impotent in the rain.”
When he opened his eyes, Roy had sat up and was very, very close, with panic and awe written all over his face.
He said, “You brilliant, brilliant, beautiful—”
He grabbed Ed’s face and kissed him.
It was hard and quick, physical and unthinking. Ed fisted his hands in the front of Roy’s jacket and he was there and then it was over and Roy was inches away from him, out of breath and wild-eyed like Ed had never seen.
“—boy,” Roy finished, tellingly. Ed stared at his mouth, slack-jawed.
“What?”
“You're brilliant.”
“You said—”
“I don't—”
They met halfway and kissed again. Their noses hit and Roy turned his head. Ed’s first instincts were simple and primal: Fight. Punch. Bite. Run. Bite. Kick. Yell. Shout. Scream. Run. Run. Run.
They quickly gave way to more complicated thoughts: This is some mind-control alchemy, he’s insane. He’d never. I'm a boy. He's a man. He's a Colonel. He's THE Colonel. My Colonel. He’s always been here. He'd NEVER. He’s always…
The thoughts trailed off. They faded again into an uncomplicated, body-based pattern: Melt. Melt. Melt.
The kiss was long enough for Ed to pass through all these stages, a different kiss than the first one, which was just a smack of mouths. In the end, he couldn't do anything but hold still. Roy's lips slid against his and his eyes fell shut. He could hear him breathe, smell him, feel the pads of his thumbs against his cheeks, and it was like drowning. Slowly, Roy’s lips left his and Ed sat there, soaked through and struck dumb, speechless for maybe the first time in his life. Rain dripped through his eyelashes and he didn't blink. Roy had never been so close. He looked both older and younger than Ed had always figured, still baby-faced at thirty-something, or so Ed ballparked, but with these fine lines at the edges of his eyes and mouth that Ed found upsettingly, nonsensically charming. He couldn't tell if this affection was something he felt automatically in the wake of being kissed, or if it was something he'd always felt and had beaten down with the same bullheadedness that he beat down anything that wasn't necessary. Suddenly, Roy Mustang meant something separate from Colonel, and Ed wasn't sure if he liked it. This wasn't where he thought he'd be when he woke up this morning.
Fight. Punch. Bite. Yell. Run. Melt. Run. Melt. Melt.
“Jesus,” Roy whispered.
Ed barely stopped himself from saying Jesus isn’t gonna help you now.
He felt powerful in a way he never had before, and not just because Roy couldn't torch him in the rain. Roy was looking at his mouth. Heat licked up towards his belly from the soles of his feet. He felt sick and excited and panicky, endlessly and guiltily proud. Roy was still holding onto him. He smelled like blood and aftershave and snuffed-out birthday candles.
Ed wasn’t in the business of taking things for himself; doing things for the greater good was less messy than acting in self-interest, and he’d learned his lesson the first time. But sitting there in the rubble and rain next to a beautiful older man whom he could trust—at least a little, he thought—he wanted to want. He wanted to be stupid.
He tugged on Roy’s jacket and pressed his lips to his, clumsy and earnest. Roy made a quiet noise in his throat and kissed him back, dug his hands into his hair and ruined his braid. The first kisses had been spur of the moment slips, but this one was planned. Ed’s heart thundered so fast he felt dizzy, syrupy and slow, letting his fingers run up Roy’s lapels. When he touched Roy’s neck and felt him shiver, he pulled off his wet gloves and touched him with his bare hands, one clammy and hot, one freezing cold. Nothing felt real. The crumbling wall of rock he’d pulled from the earth shielded them on most sides from rain and prying eyes and there was no one around to see him on his back, Roy braced over him and buzzing uncontrollably with the thrill of being alive.
Ed had thought about sex only abstractly up until that moment. He knew a lot about sex in the same way that he knew a lot about astrophysics: for the sheer pleasure of knowing, and the thought that it might come in handy. At the end of the day, he knew as much about human bodies as he did about heavenly bodies, which is to say that he could draw you some pretty neat diagrams, but if asked to provide any practical information, he would have to admit that he'd never been to the moon.
He took Roy’s hand in his, slid it down his stomach and pushed it between his legs.
Roy bit his lip hard enough to sting. He ground the heel of his palm against him and Ed choked on his breath and let his wrist go to fumble with his pants. The clink of his belt buckle was the loudest thing either of them had ever heard. Roy dragged his mouth up Ed’s jaw and Ed’s toes curled inside his boots. He prayed that Roy didn’t say anything—didn’t check in and ask him if this was okay, because it was, but he wouldn’t know how to say that—and bucked his hips up into his hand and hoped that was enough of a yes. Roy kissed him again, a searing and needy kiss, pushy, and Ed drew his legs up. He lifted his butt and Roy pushed his pants and boxers down around his thighs.
Ed clapped his hands together and pressed them against the dirt and rock structure that curved above his head as Roy moved down his body and between his legs. In a flash of blue, the curved wall grew until it touched the ground behind Roy, creating a private, sealed cave that smelled earthy like peat and dirt.
Roy spoke and Ed could feel his breath on his dick. Embarrassingly hard.
“Your skin buzzes when you do that,” he whispered, “like standing next to a generator.”
Before Ed could say anything, Roy took him in his mouth. Ed’s boots scrabbled in the dirt and his brain fizzed out white, pure, unthinking, and he held his breath to keep from spewing prayers to a God he didn’t believe in. He rested a shaking hand in Roy’s hair and fisted the other in the shoulder of his jacket and nothing in his life had ever felt as good as the wet heat of Roy’s mouth on him. He couldn’t string thoughts together and didn’t have the vocabulary to describe any of it anyways, every word he knew now limited to fuck fuck shit oh my God. He whined, lifted his hips off the ground and came, just like that. In his head, it felt like the glorious crooning of angels, violins and a well-stocked brass section, but in reality, he was sure it was embarrassing; the whole thing had taken less than a minute if he was being generous, his automail fingers snagged in Roy’s hair and they were lying in a man-made dirt cave in the middle of the city, but it felt overwhelming and endless and unbearable in the best kind of way.
Roy sat up on his elbows. Ed could hear him breathing hard in the dark, the swishy rustle of his uniform fabric. He thought: this isn’t real because I died trying to save him and this is the stupidest, most specific post-death dream imaginable. His nerves were still thrumming with pleasure when Roy let him go. There was no space to sit up.
“We’ll run out of air in here,” Roy said. His voice was low and steady and not mad, but different. Understandably. “Can you let me out?”
“Yeah. Yes. I. Sure.”
Ed tugged his pants up, clapped his hands and made the wall recede until it disappeared into the ground. His body was burning hot and the rain running from his hair felt like ice. Roy hadn’t stood up; Ed stared at the muddy knees of his uniform trousers and his scuffed boots. He tried to work up the courage to look him in the eye but his mind was a churning word-salad of uncertainty and confusion and lust and a thousand things he didn’t know how to describe, and he didn’t want to see how Roy was looking at him. Think, think, think! He screamed to himself. There has to be a right way to handle this!
He looked up anyways.
Roy’s hair was pushed back and sticking up on the one side. His mouth was red from kissing and sucking and he was staring at Ed with a look he couldn't place. The blood from his cut ear mixed with rainwater and ran rose-pink down the side of his neck.
“I…”
“Colonel!” A man’s voice echoed off the walls of the nearby hollowed-out building. Ed scrambled back and fell in a puddle, and then there were footfalls all around them and a group of soldiers thundered down the street.
—
Roy had his minor wounds treated. He didn’t speak much and it kept raining all day after that, like something in the atmosphere had changed. He kept touching his mouth. He answered questions posed to him in his debrief with one or two word answers and didn’t mention Ed more than he had to. If his lips were red, no one thought to mention it.
He didn’t know what to do with himself when he was released. He went back to his apartment and changed into clean slacks and a shirt. He brushed his teeth. That evening, he made a hot toddy with an extra slug of whiskey, sat in his study and tried to read a book that had been recommended to him by a superior officer whom he was trying to impress, a weepy doorstop of a novel about a dysfunctional Victorian family. He made it through half a chapter before he stood, went to his desk and called Riza.
“Lieutenant,” he said when she picked up. “I’m sorry to call so late.”
She nearly interrupted him. “Are you in any danger?”
“No, no. I’m—I don’t suppose you’re free for a few minutes tonight. It’s for personal reasons, I’m afraid.”
She hesitated. She came over the line metallic and far away when she spoke, but her voice was warm. “Of course, sir. I have to take Hayate for a walk in a moment, but I should be free by the time you get here, if you’re at home.”
Roy had always found comfort in Riza’s small apartment. It was sparse, but somehow so imbued with the feeling of her that it was one of his favourite places to be, there with her heavy, practical dinnerware, well-chosen books and the faint smell of perfume and dog kibble. Riza answered the door in a big oxford and slacks, Hayate curled around her legs.
“Colonel.” She stepped out of the way to let him in. He shook the rain from his jacket and hung it on the rack by the door. “I’m going to admit up front, I have no idea what this is about.”
“It’s… I don’t know.”
Riza looked at him for a long, silent moment. He was so mentally exhausted that he felt like his face might drip off if he let it. Sympathy was blatant in Riza’s expression, but it didn’t bother him.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked.
“Sure, thanks.”
“Sit.”
He sat at the table and watched her putter around the kitchen, boiling water and getting two mugs. She kept her tea bags in a sealed glass jar on the counter. He regretted coming. He couldn't tell if he was overreacting or underreacting, and both were bad.
“This… might sound overly sentimental, but are we friends?” he asked.
With the water set to boil, she took a seat across from him and again, she waited a long time before speaking.
“Of course we are. I will always be your friend, regardless of our relationship in a professional capacity.”
“I want you to understand, like always, that the moment you stop believing in me, I want you to leave my side. I can't think of anything worse in the entire world than you feeling any sort of obligation to stay here as my… my compatriot, and friend.”
She nodded seriously; he could tell that much without looking directly at her, which he couldn't do. “Always, sir.”
“Please don't call me sir here. I know it's a reflex, but—”
“Roy,” she said softly, heartbreakingly sincere. “What's going on?”
She’d seen him manic and broken but he didn't want her to see him like this, so unsure of himself that he couldn't exist in his own skin, with guilt stabbing him like a knife in between his ribs when he breathed. He couldn’t stand losing her, but the thought of keeping her under false pretenses—knowing that he’d done something over which she’d revoke friendship if she knew—was unbearable.
“I kissed Edward,” he said, more quietly than he'd ever spoken to her before.
“Edward… Hertzmann? In signal corps, on the third—”
“Elric,” he said. The surname hung heavy between them like it had hung between so many others before them. “But thank you for trying.”
He stared at his hands like they were the only interesting thing he'd ever seen. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them and colourful spots danced across Riza’s folded fingers, across the tabletop from his own. He heard the slow, deep breath she took.
“Today?”
Roy nodded. “Or he kissed me, I don't know.”
He couldn’t tell her the whole truth. There was a mistake, a kiss, and then there were multiple kisses, a series of increasingly bigger mistakes leading to a quick, messy blowjob, a trembling hand combing through his hair, boots digging into his back.
Riza said, “You understand that you can't blame him. If he did… instigate… that he's—”
“I know what he is,” Roy snapped, and then folded. “I’m sorry.”
The heating kettle pinged as its metal expanded. Hayate’s nails clicked on the floor.
“Why?” Riza asked.
“I don't know. It was just—you heard about today? The Cumulonimbus Alchemist? I thought I was going to drown, and Edward was there—I honestly thought I was going to die, and he… saved me, I suppose.”
“You kissed him in gratitude?”
Roy didn't say anything.
“Are you attracted to him?” she asked.
Roy picked at his thumb nail. Riza waited and waited and he didn't look up.
“Roy—may I call you Roy?”
“You already did.”
“May I keep calling you Roy?”
“Of course you can.”
“Roy. I’ve been your friend for many, many years, and we’ve—we’ve been through everything together, and I think… I'm not sure what to say.”
Roy scrubbed a hand over his face. “Understandable. Neither am I.”
“If you don't mind me asking, is this… is this something you've known?”
Roy didn't have to think for long. “I think so, yes. I mean, about…” He wanted to say that he was talking about Edward being Edward, a man, and not about how old he was, which neither of them could bear to bring up after Riza’s first aborted attempt. It was painful and humiliating and nothing Roy was ready to discuss; he wasn't quite old enough to be Ed’s father, but he was twice his age. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I came, I know there’s nothing—”
“Roy,” Riza said again, “it’s fine. Please. If nothing else, I’m glad that you trust me, although I don’t know how much help I can be.”
“I don’t know that there’s anything you can do.”
They sat in mutually agreed upon silence. Roy tried to slow his heart from its wild staccato of a beat. Riza stood up, went to the kettle, then turned back around.
“I trust that, if nothing else, you learn from your mistakes. And you look… safe, in any case,” she said.
“Safe?”
“I mean I’m glad you aren’t more badly injured. I can only assume that Edward… did what he does. Hit you and screamed and possibly transmuted your shoes into something unpleasant.”
Roy didn’t mean to laugh. It was hoarse and tired and the furthest thing from amused. He ran his hands through his hair and left them there, holding his head.
“That would have been nice.”
“He wasn’t angry?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“You don’t mean…”
The kettle started howling. Riza snapped the stove off and lifted the kettle to a different element, then turned her bright eyes back on Roy. He rubbed a hand over his jaw and fixed his gaze on the tarnished brass kettle, gushing steam into the room.
“He kissed me back.”
—
For Ed, all things in life could be divided neatly into two categories: things that were right, and things that were wrong. Things that were always right included himself, and things that were always wrong included murder, and every other possible occurrence could be placed exclusively into one of those two categories.
What happened with Roy necessitated the creation of a third category which, after some deliberation, Ed called Confusing Mistakes.
Assigning blame made him feel better about things, but he didn’t know whose fault this was. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was messy and weird and when he thought about it his stomach knotted up in a way that he really, really wasn’t used to, but it wasn’t bad, and he didn’t regret it. Even as he walked home in the rain afterwards and Roy was escorted to the military hospital, he thought, that was not a bad experience. At the same time, it was a mistake. It wasn’t the time or the place and Roy didn’t look happy about it afterwards, not even a little. Ed knew a lot of things, but he didn’t know anything about making out or blowjobs or men in general. He couldn’t think his way out of it, so he hated it. He hated feeling like there was anything in life that he didn't understand, and he didn't understand Roy.
Roy. He rolled the name around in his head. Roy Mustang.
“Roy,” he said out loud, testing out the word like a secret. “Mustang.”
He was alone in the long, tiled bathroom in the barracks of Central, looking into a steamy mirror smudged clear by his palm. He shook his head hard. “Colonel,” he said, with gusto. He couldn't remember a time that Roy had ever called him by his given name and he’d return the favour.
He headed back to his dorm with his towel slung over his shoulder. Al wasn’t in yet, but he said earlier that he was working on something and Ed was happy with that. He climbed into bed, top bunk, and tried to read, but he couldn’t concentrate. It felt like there were still hands around his hip bones and grabbing the backs of his thighs. He tongued the sore spot on his lower lip where Roy bit him and wished that there was anyone in the world he could tell about this without risking their respect or feeling like an uncomfortable burden. No one would believe him, anyways. He dropped his book over his face and resigned himself to his new life under the weight of this secret: he’d travel the countryside and take up smoking, play the harmonica and speak only in monosyllabic grunts, and when he was an old man holed up in a wine-soaked bar, he’d let slip to a stranger buying him beer that he’d spent his whole life chasing the high of his first blowjob when he was sixteen.
After a few weeks, he’d be able to look at Roy again, he was sure. They’d get back to normal. It would be awkward and he’d have to practice not fidgeting, but in the grand scheme of life, he figured, this was a speed bump. A hiccup. A passionate, awkward blowjob in the heat of the moment. One that Roy must have been eager to forget about, Ed told himself.
Al burst in the door and it slammed so loudly against the adjacent wall that Ed screamed, shot up and banged his head against the ceiling.
“Enter normally!” he howled, holding his head. His book had tumbled to the floor and he gestured at it. “Fix it, pick that up, the spine’ll crack.”
“There’s no time, Brother, I—oh, fine, it’s a library book.” Al snatched up the book and handed it back up to the top bunk. He brandished a stack of papers in Ed’s face. “I spent all day down in the labs and there was this nice old man who told me all these things, I took so many notes my hand would hurt if it could and oh my God, Brother, you will not believe where we get to go!”
Ed blinked. “Go?”
“Well, obviously I want your input, but I really don’t think I’m wrong about this one and with things getting so tense here, politically, I feel like maybe it’s a good time to get out of here for a little while and we’re at a bit of a dead end here anyways, not to be rude, so—”
“Go where?”
“I haven’t bought train tickets yet because I wanted to talk to you, and it would be a train and then a boat and then a lot of hiking, but you’re nothing if not up for everything, so I spoke to the lady down at the station and she has a couple tickets on hold for us if we want them, first thing tomorrow, and—oh, God, we have so much packing to do, I’m so excited! We’ll send a letter to the Colonel and his men, they’ve been so nice to us and I feel bad just leaving like—”
Ed swung his bare feet over the side of the bed, bapped Al in the shoulder and laughed. “God, now you’re getting me excited, would you calm down for a minute? What are you talking about, where are we going?”
Al whirled around and shoved his stack of papers into Ed’s hands. “Canitova.”
—
Two weeks passed after the Cumulonimbus Alchemist was apprehended and neither of the Elric brothers had been to headquarters. This wasn’t out of the ordinary—they showed up loudly and suddenly, like party noisemakers—and Roy did his best not to think about it. He’d feel worse about being the reason for Ed’s absence if there were any leads for him in Central, which there weren’t, and if Ed didn’t tote chaos around with him on every visit, which he did.
Ed’s absence was easy, but everything else was hard. Roy didn’t speak to Riza about him again. He slept poorly and avoided socializing, tried and failed not to be crushed under the enormity of what he’d done. He replayed every second of it in his head; Ed’s face in his hands, his coarse, glossy hair, his grabby hands and choked-back swears. The damp, claustrophobic darkness and the smell of earth and peat. Guilt sounded like the clink of metal fingers in his hair. It tasted bitter and bleachy in the back of his throat.
Roy went a month without saying Ed’s name or title out loud to anyone, not bringing him up once even in casual conversation. It wasn’t difficult to do because despite what it felt like sometimes, the world didn’t revolve around Edward Elric, or, not often.
And then it was early autumn, and the Elric brothers still hadn’t returned.
The days were getting shorter and Roy peeled himself out of bed before the sun rose and made it into his office with ten minutes to compose himself before a meeting over coffee with Brigadier General Harrogate. He slicked his hair back and took his coffee black as a power move. He had a reuben for lunch from a new truck down the street from headquarters, and it wasn’t the best but it wasn’t awful, either. It was Havoc’s comment that he had inhaled the sandwich that made him think of Ed.
Riza was out of the room. Roy drew a long line in the margin of a report he was studying as he said, carefully, “It’s been quiet around here, hasn’t it? The Elric brothers must be due for a visit soon. I think they can sense when things are running too smoothly without them.”
Falman said, “I don’t imagine they’d be back this soon, Colonel. The trip to the coast alone could have taken this long if they went through Creta, and—well, now that I think about it, I’m not sure how long the crossing itself would take.”
“I’ll look it up,” Fuery chimed in.
Roy sat up. “The crossing?”
“Yes, sir. Of the ocean.”
Roy dropped his pen.
“Please tell me you know there’s an ocean on the other side of Creta,” Havoc drawled. “You’re gonna be a terrible Fuhrer if you don’t know geography outside Amestris. They’ll call you out on that real quick.”
“Of course I know there’s an ocean there,” Roy snapped, “I didn’t—”
“Oh, you didn’t hear about the kids,” Breda said. Roy hoped everyone missed his wince at kids. “Yeah, Lieutenant Samson heard from Major Kaufman, who was chatting up one of the chicks from the library, that Ed and Al are in Canitova. Or on their way there, anyways.”
Roy’s first thought was: Oh my God, I scared him off the continent.
“For research purposes?” he asked.
“What else? I don’t know the specifics. Some kinda lead, an old scientist out there who’s got… something. I have no idea, to be honest. I imagine we’ll get at least one poorly-penned postcard from Elric the Elder in the next couple of years.”
Havoc scoffed. “You know he won’t write. It’ll be from Alphonse.”
Years. Roy sucked his teeth.
“They’ll be lucky if they don’t get eaten by a bear,” Breda said. “From what I’ve heard, the colonies are still pretty backwater.”
“Under development,” Fuery chided. “They’re homesteaders, they’re carving a new frontier in the name of—”
“Yeah, yeah. Well, if anyone can survive the wilderness, though, it’s those two, eh? Drop ‘em in the middle of anywhere and they’ve got it covered.”
“Yes,” Roy said slowly. He flipped through the remaining pages of his report; fourteen and a half. He was more exhausted than he’d been a moment ago. “I’m sure they do.”