Work Text:
Roy’s done with the day’s appointments but hasn’t yet left for home by the time six o’clock rolls around, which is what allows Edward Elric to shoulder his door in, slope uninvited into his inner office and flump heavily into his couch.
“Ugh,” he says, one eloquent syllable of consummate disgust. It’s probably not good for either of them that Roy lets him get away with using that as a greeting. “Mustang. Teach me something.”
This is not the first time in the past several years that Ed has shown up in Roy’s office uninvited and started conversations like they’ve never stopped, but it has been a few months since his last visit. “Teach you… what, exactly?”
Ed makes an annoyed sound and kicks his legs up onto the coffee table, sprawling out like a bad-tempered puddle in black leather. “I don’t care. Anything. Something I don’t already know.”
Roy watches him for a moment longer, but Ed just continues to pout at the ceiling. Part of Roy wants to reign in some of the blatant entitlement, to time and attention and space inside others’ spaces, but then again, it’s not like the brat hasn’t earned it. “And what brought on this particular quest for knowledge.”
Ed huffs irritably, his bangs briefly fluffing up from his face. “Y’know how sometimes you look around, and you’re the smartest person in the room?”
“Mm,” Roy says, because it pays to neither confirm nor deny.
“Y’know how it sucks?”
Roy blinks slowly at the sprawl of Elric sulking up his couch. Usually being the smartest person in the room means Roy’s not about to die and fell his friends with him. For Edward, though, he can see how the perspective might be somewhat different. “Is that so,” he says, more of a verbal placeholder than a response.
Ed clearly doesn’t need him to participate in this stage of the conversation, however. “This fucking sucks, Mustang. I’m doing the whole university thing to learn, that’s the whole fucking point, and it’s just - I even did the smaaaart thing, I didn’t roll up to the registrar like hi, I’m Ed Elric, make me your latest celebrity student and put me with all those snotty graduates taking turns losing eyebrows in the chem labs. People don’t even know I’m an alchemist. And what did that get me? I took a midterm today, Mustang. Microbiology. It was supposed to be hard. The entire test was just memorization.”
“Not everyone has the retentive skill you do,” Roy says with some mildness. Yes; this would be Edward’s problem. “And quite a lot of subject mastery rests on learning things by heart.”
“It’s not just that, it’s - I went and looked up all the bio courses, I thought okay, I just need a more advanced class, right? Like, I was reading Cormon and Telovsky and Kari when I was nine, okay? The newest book on the whole bio syllabus across all the courses is fucking Zhixan, and I read her last year. They really aren’t doing anything interesting anywhere besides the medical research labs, and immunology shit is Al’s thing, not mine.” Ed kicks his legs huffily against the sofa, a gesture Roy last saw on Black Hayate trying to get a bone out of the crease of his dog cushion. “And don’t even get me started on the students.”
“Every one a beacon of intellectual superlacy, surely.”
“Half of them don’t even read the books! And it’s not just that - it’s all kinds of stuff. It’s like - they’re like kids. I dated this guy for three minutes and I had to teach him how to mop his floor.” Ed scrubs his hands over his face. “Wah wah, I’m tooooo smaaaart, I’m better than everyone. I sound like an asshole.”
“Never stopped you before,” Roy observes.
“Shut up, I’m complaining here. Everyone fucking hyped this shit up for me, you know? And Al loves it, he started a whole cat club with the veterinary people. I can’t even join the martial arts team ‘cuz I got automail. Like I don’t know how to kick and not break someone’s arm.”
Roy sits back in his chair. “There’s nothing at all there that interests you?”
Ed shrugs moodily into the battered couch cushions. “There’s some good stuff in the libraries, but I’m not going to university for the libraries. I’m supposed to be ‘ among my peers’.” He sneers at the ceiling, hands flopping back down from their sarcastic air quotes. “If I can fuckin’ find any.”
“I hear the mathematics department earned their reputation.”
Ed snorts. “That shit’s only fun as thought exercises. They’re not like, developing anything. Besides, the math kids don’t like me. They think I drink blood and mug people for fun.”
“I cannot imagine what might have given them that idea.”
“Hey, fuck you, I was nice. I don’t walk into a daycare and start kicking children, I know how to behave myself.” Ed sinks deeper into the couch. “They’re all pals with the alchemy department anyway.”
Roy doesn’t need to ask about the alchemy department. Civilian alchemists - especially academics - can identify State Alchemists on sight, the way little furry things living in leaf mold instinctively recognize the shape of a predator. It doesn’t matter that he no longer has his state license; if Ed goes knocking on those departmental doors he’ll be lucky to only get the cold shoulder. More likely they’ll all slap off the lights and slam the blinds and hide behind the couches until he goes away. It’s been five years since Bradley’s fall, but there’s still no love lost between the military and Amestrisan academia.
And so Ed is here, having crossed the city to leave Central U’s sprawling green campus and return to the hallowed halls of jackboot headquarters. “You want me to teach you something.”
“Yeah.” Ed lifts his head after a moment of Roy’s silence, then huffs at Roy’s raised eyebrows and drops his head back again. “You have more experience,” he says, surprisingly ungrudging.
Which, well. Roy supposes that is the politest way to acknowledge that they both know that in, say, ability to calculate square roots in one’s head, Ed is smarter. Ed rolls his head side to side against the couch, huffing again, then sits up like it’s costing him money. “C’mon. I know you know stuff. I wanna learn something this month that isn’t from me reading a book.”
Roy considers this, then opens a drawer and digs around until he finds the spare coil of shoelaces that’d been left over from when he had to purchase a pair of dress shoes because a meeting ran long and he hadn’t had the time to go home and change. Ed’s sitting up straight now, paying attention, then standing up and walking over to the desk when it becomes clear Roy isn’t going to stand. “Watch closely,” Roy says, separating the shoelaces, and then starts folding.
Ed does watch closely, the familiar ditch of concentration growing between his brows. He watches very closely indeed as Roy twists the loops of shoelace around each other, ties the knot, and then fluffs it all out: a perfect eight-loop bow, slightly anemic from the thinness of the shoelaces but perfectly tied all the same. He holds it up. Ta-da.
Ed stares at the bow, then at Roy’s total lack of expression, then bursts out laughing. “You fucking asshole,” he hoots. “What the fuck, oh my god. You’re such a bastard. Fuck, oh, man - here, gimme that shoelace. Show me again.”
It’s not a wholly unexpected outcome. Roy shows him again. “Why do you even know this,” Ed says halfway through, squinting at his own loops. Then, “Wait, are these those giant ribbon bows Elysia wears?”
“Yes.” Gracia had taught Roy, as part of his conscription as an extra pair of hands in the Hughes household. “I suppose I must admit the effect is more impressive when there’s satin and pink polka dots involved.”
“Yeah, if you tried to put this sad noodle in her hair she’d riot.” Ed’s tongue sticks briefly between his teeth as he ties the knot, as focused as Roy’s ever seen him transmuting. “Hah! Got it.”
“Congratulations,” Roy tells him, unraveling his own bow and coiling up the shoelace. “You have a new skill.”
“Fuck yeah I do.” Ed returns his own shoelace to Roy’s desk, propping his hip on the edge. “Here, I’ll teach you something too. Equivalence.” He holds his arms out demonstratively, elbows bent and palms facing Roy. “Take your fingers, bend ‘em back. Come on, do it.”
Roy eyeballs him, then sets the shoelaces down and copies Ed’s hands, albeit with some care: his metacarpals aren’t what they used to be, before Bradley so enthusiastically rearranged them. “Good,” Ed says. “Hold like that for thirty seconds - minimum, it takes that long for the tendons to get the message. Then the other way - like this. Pull back towards your chest. This is gonna feel weird, you’re gonna feel it up here, next to your elbow. Are you feeling it?”
“I’m feeling it.” Roy increases the pressure slowly, because he’s well past the age when his joints are unwavering supporters of whatever he decides to do with his body.
“Great, do that like three times a day, alternate hands so you get two minutes each. It helps your whole forearm and hand, keeps your wrists and stuff from locking up.” Roy releases the stretch as Ed does, watching him, and Ed shrugs. “I figure you got your own PT and all, but - I see you rubbing your hands sometimes. Scar tissue’s a bitch.”
“Ah.” It’s become an absent habit. Roy makes a mental note to train himself out of doing it anywhere someone can see. If Ed has noticed, doubtlessly others have. “Thank you.”
“Yeah.” Ed knocks his knuckles twice on Roy’s desk, kind of absentmindedly, and then pushes off. “Well, thanks, bastard. Now I can go back to the big bright world of higher education and really show them who’s boss.”
Roy watches Ed go. He has an unaffected swagger that began born of his automail and grew as he did, shoulders broadening and chest deepening out, muscle thickening all down his arms. His boots are less buckled and spiked these days but still heavy, his belt still a workmanlike confection of thick leather and studded steel. His braid is shorter than it used to be. There’s a knife under his shirt, at the base of his spine.
“Edward.”
“What?”
“Try some arts classes. You may find they offer fresher experiences than your biology track, even if it doesn’t end up to your taste.”
“Art classes?” Ed stays half-turned in the doorway, head cocked, not dismissing outright. “Like what?”
“Portraiture. Dance. Creative writing.” Roy replaces the shoelaces in the drawer, sliding it shut. “I hear poetry is very popular.”
“Hah!” It’s genuine amusement, even if not more than a piece of laugh. “Yeah, okay. Old man. I’ll write you a poem.”
“I look forward to it,” Roy says gravely. “Now get out of my office. Brat.”
“Bastard,” Ed says, grinning, and then he’s gone.