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Roy—the other Roy, the Roy of bullets instead of bones—had been… less a mistake than a miscalculation. Good intentions have never done a damn thing for Ed. You’d figure that he’d have learned by now. He doesn’t think that trying matters anymore. He doesn’t think that there’s enough good left to gather up and carry.
If Ed had had a couple of marks for every time that Alfons had told him to go to bed instead of sitting in the disintegrating chesterfield in the front room, writing notes on top of his notes, then they probably could have afforded a new armchair, at least. He’d wanted to know, and not wanted to know, and failed over and over to stop himself from thinking about it.
The first time that he’d passed through, the Gate had deposited his consciousness directly into an existing analogue of his physical form. It had put his soul into the closest available vessel to the one he’d had on the other side. This implied a lot of things—that there were links between them, that their starkly divergent histories were somehow tied a fixed distance apart, facilitating so many of the same features even though the distinct events should have pushed them progressively further away. Threads on a corkscrew, maybe. Sides of a coin.
The second time, he’d brought his own body with him, because the first one had already been dead.
Hohenheim hadn’t said much about that. Probably didn’t even care. It was sort of sick that he’d taken up playing house with some English orphan he didn’t even know in any case. Ed hadn’t asked for the details. He didn’t want to know.
He’d thought maybe he was starting to understand it, though, towards the end—the way that this place drained you, the way it bled you out and ground you down, the way it leached the color from you day by day and smothered every single gasp of joy. He was starting to see the sense of taking any solace you could get. Hanging on to some almost-family member who gave a shit if you lived or died was better than nothing at all.
The point was that Ed had spun out a whole hell of a lot of theories about the people in this place, and about the shadowed semicircles where this world merged momentarily with the one that had chewed him up and spat him here.
The one that he wanted back regardless. The one that he wanted to be in, no matter how many times he’d felt its teeth sink into him, and his blood had welled hot.
This world didn’t mess around with teeth in any case—it just drowned you so slowly that you forgot how it had ever felt to breathe.
Hohenheim had mentioned, once, offhandedly, that this world’s Ed’s parents had been dead before he’d landed here. He’d said he’d found a photo of them—the spitting image of him and Trisha, younger and happier, out in a field somewhere with the wind in their hair. He said he’d burned it.
Logically enough, then, Ed’s working theory—untestable, unprovable, unshakable; a trail of thoughts with their own gravity, hauling on him every time he let himself slow down—was that there was only metaphysical space for one version of a person in each world. If you crammed two souls in, one would displace the other, which was why he’d gained control of the other Ed’s body that first time.
The one he’d killed.
He wondered, sometimes—a lot of times, many times, most nights—whether Al had tried to follow him, and the transmutation had fizzled as a result. He just hoped it hadn’t backfired, hoped it hadn’t rebounded, hoped it hadn’t dealt more damage. He hoped, he hoped, he hoped.
He tried to hope that Al hadn’t even attempted it. He tried to hope that Al was too happy to research it in the first place, let alone to take the risk. He tried to hope that no one missed him much at all.
He’d been playing with the arrays again just before Alfons had dragged him out to the bar with the guys, where he’d dutifully sat and smiled and acted about as normal as he could pass for, in a place like this. In a distant way, he appreciated that they never gave him too hard a time about how shit he was at faking nice. He just sort of felt like everyone’s weird cousin. Oh, yeah, that’s Ed. He’s just… like that. Smart, though, if you can get him to stick to the physics! Have you seen the new prototype plans yet?
He’d seen the new prototype plans. Alfons was right. The fuel wouldn’t work—or it would, maybe, but it wasn’t optimized, and it wasn’t safe. Still too reactive. If they’d had, say, a combustion array—a way of cycling the material through and extracting only the most useful components, like sifting out grain and discarding the chaff, which could have been accomplished fairly handily by—
And then he’d fumbled for the sigil in his brain.
Where was it? What was it? He knew these. He knew them all. Was it possible that the connection to his own memories was dwindling somehow? Was it possible that the knowledge he’d had that was tied to Amestris was more difficult to access here, and the longer he was away—the further he was from its source—the more tenuous his grasp on alchemy would become?
The thought streamed through him, ice-cold and unrepentant. He couldn’t forget. He couldn’t.
If he lost that—the memories, the truth, the alchemy—then he’d just be some crazy bastard stranded on the streets of Munich. He’d just be a shell.
He’d wanted that, sometimes. Too late not to admit it. He’d wanted to give up. It was all so fucking hard—the clinging on, the perseverance, the endless lighting and relighting of the dimming, dimming hope. What difference did it make? He might never make it out of here. He might never make it home. It might just be this graying wash of misery for far too many more years, and then the end. Why fight it? Why try so hard to hold on to all of it when he could have let it go?
Not tonight, though. Later. Later had gotten him through an awful lot of things. He just had to keep on muddling through the now.
He’d breathed out. He’d looked at the condensation dripping down the sides of his glass. He’d tried to tune into the conversation, but they were talking about one of those uniquely German things their mothers had all done when they’d been children, and they all talked faster and less distinctly when they were drunk.
He’d looked idly out over the rest of the barroom.
And he’d seen Roy.
He’d heard his heartbeat in his ears. At least that meant that his cardiovascular system still existed, given that he couldn’t feel any other part of himself—not his body, not his face, not his hand. Dead numb.
Then the pins and needles.
Roy had had papers spread out across a table in the back corner—barely lit, but there had been no fucking mistaking it. His hair had gotten slightly longer. His hands—left one pushed up into it, cushioning his cheek as he scribbled with the right—had been unmistakable.
Ed had stared in sheer disbelief for the better part of a minute, likely.
And then he’d decided.
Ed had had maybe a little more ethanol in him than was strictly necessary. These German guys put it away, and he wasn’t stupid enough to try to keep up, given the body mass concerns at play, but even just being sociable tended to leave him much more suggestible than one might hope.
Maybe he would have second-guessed himself if he’d been sober.
Maybe he was just too damn tired for most first guesses, let alone the second ones.
Which was fine. Mostly. Maybe. Sometimes the direct approach worked better than any of the alternatives.
He’d stood up from his barstool, crossed the floor, and sat down at perhaps-Roy’s table, right across from him. And he’d stared.
Perhaps-Roy had stared very levelly back.
Ed had leaned in and lowered his voice. “Hey. Did you die to get here?”
Perhaps-Roy had blinked, tilted his head, and then started smiling—big and bright and genuine, in a way that made him look so utterly unlike Roy in any possible capacity that Ed wondered if he was hallucinating after all.
“Not that I know of,” he’d said, “but if that’s a rather roundabout way of asking if I fell from heaven, I’d certainly believe you as an angel, so it’s possible I did.”
Ed’s face had ignited, and he’d flung himself back in the chair like he could physically distance himself from the words enough to somehow erase them. Surely he was due for a fucking miracle right about now. “I—no, I—thought you were someone—else.”
Not-Roy had arched an eyebrow, which would have been familiar if it hadn’t been so amused. “Someone lucky enough to know you?”
Ed had swallowed. His head had swum with the combination of the alcohol kicking in and the embarrassment taking him out at the knees. He’d nodded. Escape routes. There had to be at least one.
“Well,” Not-Roy had said. “Now I’m lucky enough to know you, too.” He’d held out a hand. “Roy Mendel. No relation to the biologist.”
Ed had stared at him for a second, but New-Roy had just… smiled. Like it was ordinary. Like he hadn’t cared about a single other thing in that instant except maintaining Ed’s attention. Like there hadn’t been a single other thing in the miserable world that mattered.
Ed had reached out his right hand and shook.
Roy’s—not-Roy’s, but so close, so alike, so alive—eyes had flicked down to it, but the rest of his face hadn’t changed.
“Ed.” The word had scraped up his throat. “No relation to anyone you’ve ever heard of, let alone met.” He’d extracted his hand, glancing down at the papers as he withdrew it. “Chemist?”
“That’s the idea,” Roy had said.
“The ‘idea’?” Ed had spat back at him. “What the hell does that mean? Are you, or are you not?”
Roy—not-Roy, not-quite-Roy, a man who smiled easily and laughed easier still and winked without a trace of mercy and set Ed’s face aflame—had been a journalist in England during the war. Ed had swallowed the spiky possibility that he might have met Hohenheim after all, which had immediately won the dubious honor of the strangest thought of the night.
Well—the second-strangest.
Not-Roy had wanted to do something, change something, make something, and found himself fancying science. He’d liked the maths, the thermodynamics, the barely-contained chaos. He’d liked shifting the state of matter and reworking its composition. He’d liked kindling it.
“But I’m self-taught,” not-Roy had sighed, without a trace of malice in the melodrama. “A friend is letting me stay with him in town for a while, but I’m not getting my hopes up that they’re liable to let me in.”
And Ed’s rat bastard traitor of a mouth had said, “I’ll help you.”
This world’s Roy had been a liar, just like Ed’s—protective lies, preventative lies, words woven in concentric circles as a barrier to keep things locked outside, but the intentions didn’t make them true.
Ed hadn’t had much time to offer him, after the rocket work and the digging through the archives of the libraries, the calculations and the ink-bleeding question marks that smudged across the page.
Roy hadn’t asked for much. Roy had taken what he had to give. Somehow that had made it harder.
He’d said he was staying with a friend: there was never a trace of anyone else’s activity in the apartment where they met, where Ed sketched out molecular structures and drew the bonds as little dotted lines between one compound and the next. He never saw another person there.
Roy hadn’t been lying about loving chemistry. It didn’t come easily to him, oddly enough, but his dogged adoration made Ed so deeply homesick that it roiled like nausea, rolled like thunder. This world’s Roy could twist thin air into a perfect sentence, into a solid case, into a clause so gorgeously pervasive that it took your breath away, and then how could you hope to argue?
Ed had shown him how the names always corresponded to the atoms, to the bonds; how the rules had been written around the curve of the universe.
Roy had shown him how to snag the reader’s interest with the first half of a sentence, so that they slid well into the second half before they could pull their skin or clothes or their attention free. Roy had shown him how to tape a note to the underside panel of a desk drawer so that no one would stumble on it if they didn’t already know where to look. Roy had shown him how to fire a pistol. Roy had shown him how much beauty you could wring out of the weak, pale sunlight that filtered through the smoke and clouds and sifted down through the grimy windowpanes to dance along the corner of his smile.
Ed had known that Roy wasn’t here to get into the university and study with the chemists. Ed hadn’t been able to find it in himself to care. Ed hadn’t told him anything that he couldn’t have gleaned from hanging around outside the workshop, from listening on the streets, from loitering at the bar. Ed hadn’t known anybody else’s secrets anyway—just his own, and the universe’s. Just the ones that couldn’t change a thing.
That had been fine.
That had been enough.
Right up until the day he’d straggled over after a long night of tinkering with the ignition mechanisms for the engines, a long night of staring up at the smoke-choked sky at the faint impressions of the stars, and Roy had been pacing back and forth avidly enough to leave a track of muddy footprints on the floor.
He hadn’t even managed to get the key back into his pocket before Roy had crossed to him and wrapped both arms around him tight enough to squeeze his next breath out of his lungs.
“The Thule Society caught on faster than I expected,” Roy had said. His voice had been too calm—even, smooth, level, and slightly dazed. Distant. Idly conversational. “I have to go. Now. Tonight. I should have—”
“I’m coming with you,” Ed had said.
Roy had laughed, leaned his forehead down on Ed’s, closed his eyes, breathed deep. “No,” he’d said, softly, but with that iron underneath that Ed remembered far too well from Amestris. From the end of things. “That’s the whole point, Ed. You need to have never known me—we never even talked. If they think you’re involved—”
“I won’t slow you down,” Ed had said. None of it had felt real. The worst things, the hardest things, usually didn’t. They unfurled, at merciless speed, and they swept you along before you even knew which way was up. “I can take care of myself.”
“I know,” Roy had said, opening his eyes again. Ed hadn’t asked how he’d known. They hadn’t ever talked much about that. Maybe he’d just been able to see it, in the shadows and the shapes of things, in the way that Ed had moved and the way he’d flinched when other people did. Ed had seen it in him, after all. Sometimes liars knew more truth than anyone. “But it’s easier to make one man disappear than two.”
At Ed’s expression, he’d smiled, and the sadness in it was the kind that locked the gate behind the heartbreak. No equivocating. No going back.
Ed had had to look away from his eyes—too deep, too dark, too warm. Too much regret.
There had already been a bag slung down on the couch, packed full of papers and fuck knew what else. It was the notes and the photographs that he needed to take out of the country with him. It was those that would get him killed.
“I’ll find you,” Roy had said. He’d leaned down again, kissed Ed’s forehead, then his cheekbone, then his mouth. “I’ll get a message to you. One way or another.”
Liar.
Ed had said, “All right.”
He’d gathered up the bag, stood up straighter, trotted out another smile. It had cracked. He’d kissed Ed again, harder, messy, desperate, with the terror bleeding through, and then he’d whispered “I was lucky to know you,” and then he’d been gone.
Ed had let himself back into the apartment the next night, but—even expecting the worst—he’d barely recognized the trampled, mangled chaos that remained. They’d turned everything over, torn up the carpets, gutted the stuffing from the couch. Every drawer gaping open and emptied, like broken jaws. The table where they’d sat with their knees touching, sometimes, to lean their heads together close above Ed’s notes, had been tipped over, legs smashed to shards. They’d shredded the curtains.
He’d drifted through it like a ghost. He’d stopped at the desk. He’d adjusted the topmost drawer, pushing it a little ways back in onto the tracks, and then reached underneath.
Barely a scrap of paper, plain white.
It wasn’t your fault x
He’d been a liar since the start.
Ed has always told himself that Roy can’t be dead—the first Roy, the real Roy, the Roy in Amestris who dragged him back to life. Al didn’t die to allow Ed to meet Alfons—he would know if Al had died, because he would feel it, from a thousand universes away. So Roy wouldn’t need to die in order to precipitate Ed having met his double. It would require far too much energy transfer, and far too many manipulated coincidences. It doesn’t make sense.
Telling himself—reminding himself, reprimanding himself, screaming in his own head to try to make himself believe it—is one thing.
Seeing Roy is another.
This doesn’t feel real, either. It sort of feels like a sick joke, emphasis on the sick—on the twist of his guts in him, on the way his heart tries to shake its way out of his chest.
Ed can’t decide if it’s a good thing that Roy looks different, with the eyepatch, with his hair longer on that side.
It’s all too much to take in, let alone to judge—an Al who doesn’t know him, who loves an outline of an image turned to myth; the tired resignation in Winry’s eyes; a Roy who is and isn’t and is the one he left behind.
He has a plan. He’s going back. It’s the only sure bet—the only guarantee. The only way to keep these fuckers far away from the wilting remnants of his family tree. The only way to finish this.
But when he sees Roy—his Roy, the one who saved him and destroyed him—
His Roy. The one who kept the promise. The one who came back.
A plan is only as good as your ability to keep to it.
A plan is only as powerful as your will.
Ed has a will like tempered iron. Roy has always been a furnace and an anvil.
The wind howls like a thing alive, this high up—it tears at his clothes, hauls at his hair, whips his skin. It tugs at the tails of Al’s red coat like a needy child. Was his that gaudy? Was it always so bright? He fought like hell to be unforgettable.
The wind toys with Roy’s hair like the laws of physics still don’t apply to bastards equilaterally. And the way Roy looks at him—
None of the universe’s rules should have allowed that.
He’s impervious to them.
And he knows.
He knows that Ed has lived the last three years for this moment—for the chance to see them breathing.
He knows that Ed will wrap it up and give it back.
He says “I always knew you were alive” instead of I always knew you were an idiot.
But he knows, too, that there are leaps you have to take alone. There are demons that simply can’t be vanquished if there’s someone at your side. The monsters that you fed are yours to starve again. Funny, how life still moves in circles. Funny, how Ed thought he understood that shape.
He claps his hands together, and the lightning courses through him like the first breath of life, like the first surge of rain, like the shiver of a heartbeat after hibernation.
He trails his fingertips along the razor edges of the blade he draws out from the grille of his forearm, and he heads into the ship.
He shouts “Don’t follow me!” over his shoulder, but the wind rips the words away from his mouth so fiercely that he doesn’t know if they can hear.
He’s always wondered what it costs to move through the Gate if you don’t have anything to give—if it doesn’t even know you, and doesn’t even try to negotiate. If you force your way through. If you’re looking for more than an answer, and asking for more than a trade.
Eckhardt leers more than she smiles, a facsimile of satisfaction. The gleaming black dreck drapes like a mantle and clings like an exoskeleton. He can’t tell if it’s holding her upright, dragging her down, or consuming her completely. Maybe it’s all of them.
“Ah, yes,” she says, in flat-voiced German, and the hungry glint in her eye implies a fraction of her that hasn’t drowned. The Gate isn’t greedy. The Gate isn’t cruel. “Hohenheim’s brat. What do you think your blood could buy?”
She reaches behind herself—motions jerky, awkward, clumsy, like the impulses in her muscles and the cage of ooze don’t quite agree—to draw her sidearm, but Ed knows this game. Sure, it’s been a while, but you don’t forget the rules.
Parts of the console behind her spark and flare, hissing and steaming, but Ed can’t quite catalogue what the Gate destroyed before he ducks behind a spar of displaced metal to evade the bullets. One punches through the makeshift shield, three inches from his eye, and buries itself in the wall behind him.
Takes at least two to play this one, but what she doesn’t realize is that this is the first time in years that he’s had an advantage.
He has to get her away from the controls. He has to let the ship continue drifting, heedless and hulking in the air, far enough that she can’t target Central. And then he needs to steer it back into the portal.
Or blow it up.
It’s been a long damn time since he got to make something shitty just explode.
He slides lower behind the flimsy barrier, ignoring the way the jagged metal scrapes his back, and presses his palms together as he moves. It feels so damn good that a part of him screams, and a part of him shatters, and a part of him can’t help crying. He’s been powerless for so, so long. He’s been worse than ordinary—less than mundane—because he remembered who he used to be. He knew what he’d been capable of, and what had been taken from him—taken back. Torn out, hacked loose, blood and gristle and everything that had made him special and useful and important, everything that had ever put his fate into his own hands, dead and gone and scratched right out of history. In a world where alchemy had never existed, all his sacrifices—all the failures, all the darkness, all the death—were just some children’s story nobody believed.
But he’s here, now.
He’s back.
He’s more than what he was, and nearly everything that he was meant to be.
No more hiding.
He twists around and smacks his hands against the metal, liquefying it for a single second before he sends it streaming towards her—aiming for the gun.
She hisses through her teeth, jumps back and to the side, and the seething dark mass rushing and receding across her skin lends her uncanny speed and grace.
Doesn’t matter. Ed’s still controlling the spike of silver he drew from. He sends it veering after her, chasing his original target, and focuses on the sigils whipping through his overeager mind. Faster, sharper, free—
His concentration wavers in the face of the bursting swell of sheer joy. Blood sprays out from the back of her hand, and a cry escapes her as the steel spear slams her gun into the console hard enough to dent the casing deep.
Russet light glows—close in against her body, first, stemming from near her heart, and then surging out through the black muck like a red dawn breaking.
Alchemy. The Gate gave her alchemy in return for her soul.
Poetic, if you think about it.
She fumbles for something to put her hands on—for a place to pour the seething energy—and grabs onto the console behind her. The red deepens, carnelian flooding out of the widening, gaping holes in the steel as she burns through it like acid, flinging vicious knives in Ed’s direction, hardly even bothering to aim.
His instincts haven’t failed him—haven’t left, haven’t died, like so much of the rest of him did over there. Maybe it’s having the automail back. Maybe it’s seeing Al, and Roy, and Winry, and Sheska, and this skyline; maybe it’s breathing this air. Maybe it’s just Amestris. Maybe he’s always been stronger here, in the world that made him, in the one where he belongs.
He twists, dives, ducks, backflips and handsprings cleanly clear of the projectiles. The wind wails outside the walls, the floor jolts, Eckhardt starts raving, voice rising towards a fevered pitch—but Ed feels stabler and more grounded and more real than he has in years.
Maybe Earth was strangling him so slowly that he barely even noticed how little he’d learned to breathe.
None of that, here.
No second guessing. No silence, and no sublimation. No more ghosts.
Eckhardt keeps pouring energy into everything around her—alchemy radiating outward like a fast-moving, swiftly-killing sickness, illuminated all around her. Newborns scream from the depths of their lungs because they have no other method of communication. Flailing desperation is the only thing they’ve got.
Her voice stays strangely level, almost uninterested, as the rant turns to this place—to the question of its defenses, to the strength of its citizens, to the danger of its magic. To how she’s going to wipe it out, raze it to the ground, rebuild it in her own image on the charred foundations.
Hunger for power leaves people starving for scraps. Anyone who has anything becomes a threat. The ravenousness consumes them from the inside; the serpent gnaws its own tail; Eckhardt came to conquer, but she can’t leave anything intact. People crave power over other human beings only when they can’t make anything else. Only when they’re so insecure that they have to climb on top of others to feel significant. Only when the salt of the blood they spill to drink just leaves them thirstier than they were before.
Same old song and dance. Same old weapons. Same old words.
Eckhardt summons her fledgling alchemy again, condensing red light around her right arm, and the molten ooze solidifies into a gleaming black blade, like an obsidian broadsword melded to her skin. Her mouth stretches into a rictus grin, eyes narrowing, and he can see her weight shifting before she launches herself towards him.
He’d bet all the flimsy paper notes stockpiled underneath his mattress back in Munich that she studied with the finest fencing instructors Berlin had to offer, and that she was a star pupil full of discipline to hone her natural ferocity.
It doesn’t matter if he’s right, because the money isn’t worth the paper that it’s printed on.
And it doesn’t matter if she blew them all away, in some high-ceilinged studio, wielding some silver sword with the inlaid filigree on the hilt curled delicately inward to protect her hand.
Battles aren’t like class.
No one can teach you to survive.
This new automail that Winry’s worked on is lighter even than the original model, to say nothing of the heavy, clunky makeshift miracles that Hohenheim had built for him. He can move so fast, now, that he might as well be flying.
Eckhardt might just wish he was.
She swipes with the wide new blade as she dives at him, but he dodges it easily, dropping to the deck and rolling on his shoulder well beneath the arc of her arm. His momentum slings him upright before she’s even finished the swing, and he dances around behind her and cartwheels easily clear of her next foray as she whirls on him again.
People who want you dead focus on your torso—on your ribcage and your head. They want the finality. They want the satisfaction. They want it to be quick and definitive and undeniable. They don’t seem to realize that taking someone out at the knees, or at the hamstrings; or cutting for their nerves and their arteries instead of stabbing for their vitals, will buy you all the time you could ever need. They don’t seem to understand how much easier it is to wear someone down, to wait them out—to wait for them to make a mistake.
In the course of ducking and weaving and dodging, Ed rakes his blade across the small of Eckhardt’s back, and then slashes a bleeding line down her left arm. Maybe he’ll do the tendons in one ankle next and see if she changes her mind about surrender when the corporeal shadows of the Gate are the only thing that can support her weight.
Maybe he can still save her.
Maybe he can still save all of them.
He drives her back towards the console again, sparks spitting from every clash of her arm-bound blade on his. Suffused by the black miasma, she has the strength advantage, but he has very little experience picking on someone his own size. Compared to seven feet of indefatigable steel, her snarling rage and increasingly reckless blows and parries aren’t particularly impressive. Each time he blocks an assault—meeting the edge of her blade with his—he drops his arm and slips away so swiftly that her momentum hurls her forward, which serves the dual purposes of undermining her balance and obliterating her already tenuous composure.
She chases him with a determination verging on rabidity, so he leads her right back over to the controls. He darts around her, pausing just long enough to clap his hands together and graze the fingertips of his left hand against the tails of her long coat—transmuting the fine wool into a matted mess that tangles around her ankles, which buys him a few seconds to look out the glass and gauge the distance back to the portal.
But apparently not as many seconds as he thought.
He jumps back just fast enough, just far enough that her blade hums through the air centimeters from the top button of his waistcoat—so close to slicing him straight open that the rank smell of tainted ozone burns his sinuses as he scrambles further back.
She bares her teeth. He draws a breath. She works her jaw, and the blade starts to melt back into the black ooze.
This isn’t a surrender—that much he can tell. She’s changing tactics, not giving up.
“Last chance,” he says. “Go home. Go back. Leave this world alone.”
“And waste its potential?” she says. “This is the moment. You pin them when they’re weak.”
Ed takes one step back, and another. He’s faster than she is, but he can’t begin to guess what the Gate’s horrific alchemical power will let her arm herself with next.
Ed looks Echkardt in the eyes—as much as he can. As much as they’re visible around the undulating oily black starting to consume her. As much as they’re still hers.
“You killed him,” he says, keeping his voice level and his blade high. “Mendel. The journalist. Didn’t you?”
She smiles. No pity in it. No humor, no satisfaction. A muscle movement. A residue.
“What do you think?” she says.
She was a person. That’s the part to remember—she was a human being, built from the same damn dust. All of the worst things in the world, in any world, in every life, are done by people. All of those things are choices.
There’s always a next choice.
There’s always another chance.
But it’s too late for her.
He claps his hands together and touches the blade on his arm, melting it back into the grille. “Y’know, I helped design this.”
A sneer, no more convincing than the smile. Playacting by the essence of the Gate, by the concentration of the parts of her she couldn’t overcome. The black ooze churns around her left arm, and chrome gleams in the gaps. Gun barrels—more than one.
“Light, but durable,” Ed says. He presses his hands together, crouches down, sweeps one palm above the floor. “Steel and aluminum alloys, mostly.”
He looks at her, one more time.
The hulking gun emerges from the dreck. Her eyes are dead.
“Needed to be strong, though,” he says. “To withstand the heat, to cross the barriers.”
She ratchets one of the barrels back and levels the whole contorted arm at him—a mockery, or possibly a warning, of what his looks like with the knife along the back.
He touches his left palm to the steel panel underneath his feet.
“You might even call it ‘fullmetal’,” he says.
The metal ripples—immediately around his fingertips at first, like he tapped the surface of a liquid, but then the energy streams across the reinforced steel panels of the flooring, melting and swirling around her feet only to coagulate into a series of strips. The ribbons twine up and cinch in close around her: legs first, fixing her feet to the floor like a statue bound to its pedestal, utterly unmovable.
The flash of terror in her face for a single second looks sickeningly human, but the guttural scream of rage that follows tips the scales.
He presses his whole down palm flat on the churning steel of the deck.
A dozen other metal tendrils wind around her, mimicking a maypole, a bridal veil, streamers falling up. She levels the gun on him again, snarling something in German that he can’t distinguish past the ringing song of the steel slicing through the air, but a panel of it wraps around her arm before she can fire and snaps it in against her side.
And then all of the steel solidifies.
The roar of fury that escapes her makes his ribs shake.
He stands up. He watches her for two long seconds—the writhing, the straining—and listens to the hiss of her voice, less coherent by the instant.
He steps around her to the battered console, dragging his left hand along it. It’s not the ship’s fault. You can’t blame a human being for aiming skyward. They always want to fly.
He wrenches what’s left of the steering column to point the ship back towards the portal. He welds it in place with another touch of alchemy. He double-checks the angle.
And then he walks away.
Al yells something at him before he even emerges from the mess—when his shadow appears in the sharp-toothed wound in the wall, most likely, before he staggers over the threshold and kneels down to press his palms to the platform.
One stride carries him to the other side of the seam before it splits.
After all that, it’s just one step—one footfall separating Earth and Amestris. One heartbeat.
Roy’s arm releases Al, who barrels across the platform so fast that Ed has no choice except to move towards him—to meet the hug head-on, lifting Al in both arms and using his momentum to spin them around to where they collided, since otherwise they’d both go flying off the platform and plummet to their deaths. Which would be pretty anticlimactic, all things considered.
He glimpses Roy—this Roy, his Roy, the Roy—over Al’s far too red shoulder. One elegant hand lifts, the fingers touch, and a glorious plume of flame erupts behind the ship, hot air ushering it towards its humming, seething, sickly-glowing destination.
So that’s that.
Al and Winry and even Gracia just keep crying, but he can’t find any tears for them. He doesn’t trust it enough to sink into relief. In the unlikely event that he doesn’t wake up in Munich, maybe it’ll be easier tomorrow. Maybe he’ll be able to believe it.
Gracia is no stranger to the state of shock when the whole world shakes on its axis, and most of it comes down around your ears. She poured him an extremely capacious glass of brandy and gave Al a warning look the instant he opened his mouth to ask to try.
Ed’s sitting with it—with most of it; he gulped some down and let it sizzle down the back of his throat like honeyed lava—on her couch, partly in the dark. Everyone else has gone to bed.
Everyone except Roy, who’s sitting next to him.
“I don’t know what to do about Al,” Ed says, keeping his voice low. Thin walls. And it shakes less that way.
“The same thing you’ve always done about Al,” Roy says, with a hint of a smile in his voice that makes Ed eye him. “Love him with everything you’ve got regardless of the specific shape he takes.”
Ed breathes deep. He tips the glass back and forth a couple times. He curls and uncurls his fingers, savoring how cleanly and smoothly and easily the joints move, how minutely they respond. “I don’t have much left.”
“I know,” Roy says, softly, and Ed thinks… he does. Ed thinks he means it. Ed thinks he sees. Ed thinks maybe they’re more alike now than they ever were, for better or worse or both. “Take your time. You have it now. Everyone here will close ranks around you and wall you off from the rest of the world until you’re ready for it.”
In the course of a single whirlwind of an evening, Ed has only cobbled together a fraction of the story from this side. “Is that what they did for you?”
“Sort of,” Roy says.
Ed eyes him harder.
Roy smiles. It’s like all the crinkles and all the light concentrate in the one eye, now. It’s almost too much to look at.
“Take it slow,” Roy says. “You’re still in shock.”
That sounds about right, all things considered, for the immovable heaviness of things, the distance of sensations, the eddying circles of his thoughts. He keeps trying to move and finding his own nerves unresponsive. He keeps trying to think through the mire.
“Don’t I outrank you now?” he asks.
“Nice try,” Roy says, pleasantly. “You haven’t been reinstated.”
Ed elbows him, gently, with the metal. “It’s not like I ever listened to you anyway.”
Roy elbows back. “Good point.”
Ed looks at him. All the edges are sharper, all the shadows are deeper—in his eye, under it, the way he holds his shoulder, the angle of his smile. He’s a killer, a liar, and a fraud. He’s a miracle-worker and a murderer—just like Ed.
He’s only ever been a human being. He’s only ever had two hands to build with, to work from, to use to try.
He arches his eyebrow when Ed’s gaze doesn’t waver.
“Hey,” Ed says. “Are you ticklish just…” He sweeps the metal fingertip up behind his own right ear. “Here?”
The even gaze bottoms out into a stare.
Then Roy’s eye narrows, and Ed can almost see the thoughts flicking, flashing, sparking back and forth. Gears turning would be too rote and far too slow. Roy Mustang doesn’t think mechanically. He thinks like music.
Al said he dreamed through Alfons’s eyes. Winry said he and Roy were both digging like they’d never reach the bottom, and like they’d never stop.
The way that single so-dark eye lights up when Roy puts it together makes Ed’s guts curl the same way that they always have.
“Well,” Roy says, slowly, “that’s hardly fair.”
Ed sips his pity brandy, knowing damn well that it won’t hide the grin. “Tough shit, Mustang.” He glances sideways. “North, huh?”
“As good a place as any,” Roy says. “And as bad.”
Bullshit. But poker’s more fun when he doesn’t have a tell. “What were you doing up there?”
“Killing time,” Roy says, and the eyebrow lifts again. “Waiting.”
Ed drinks. “For what?”
Roy pries the glass out of his hand and drinks deep. “This,” he says. He hands it back. “You.”
Ed is going to be so pissed when he wakes up tomorrow above a flower shop, below a smoke-streaked sky.
“Worth it?” he asks.
Roy takes the glass again and drains it. He smiles—the little one. The smile that’s careful, and afraid.
“Every minute,” he says.
“Keep your voice down,” Winry says.
Ed’s not sure if it’s the volume, the unfamiliarity, or the irony that brings him shudderingly into consciousness. He cracks an eye open. It’s not as bright as he was afraid of. It must be way too fucking early, a theory supported by how crusty his eyes feel and the fact that his head seems to be full of agitated steel wool. There might be a tiny creature hammering at his brain stem from the inside. He’s leaned on something warm, his neck hurts like all fucking hell, and he might throw up if he smells food before he’s had a shower, but his spine isn’t throbbing like it normally does first thing in the morning.
They shouldn’t have finished that brandy. They shouldn’t have shifted gradually closer on poor Gracia’s unsuspecting couch. They shouldn’t have stayed up so long that the hands of the clock on the mantel blurred into incomprehensible undesirability. They shouldn’t have talked until Ed’s throat felt raw, and his mouth felt dry, and Roy had run out of lies.
It’s a good damn thing they did.
He manages to get his eye open a little further. Faint yellow morning light, filtering through the pale curtains to spill across the furniture and paint it all pastel. Even his grimy, ash-streaked Germany clothes look sort of softened underneath its auspices.
He works on the other eye and tries to turn far enough to glower weakly at Winry and whoever she was talking to.
Trying to turn alerts him to the fact that the warm thing he’s leaned against is Roy’s shoulder.
Wakefulness washes over him in much the same way that cold horror usually does, complete with seething foam and gritty sand and rank-smelling little chunks of kelp. The light from the window touching Roy’s wrinkled white shirt makes it look almost luminescent. The cream-colored skin of his throat—paler than it was, before, he’s had time to notice now—is worse. He kept fingering the buttons at his collar last night, acting like it was the brandy, or the conversation, or anything except an uncertain compulsion to bare his vitals and not be bitten. They’ve both bled too much. They’ve both spilled too much. They’re both too tired for teeth.
Ed lets his eyes range over the torturously familiar lines of his jaw and his nose, the concentrated temptation of his mouth always rose-petal soft right up until it isn’t. Slumped shoulders, and that too-wide eyepatch, and his artfully disheveled hair.
The good news is that Ed didn’t drool on him.
The bad news is that Ed drawing back in disbelief just nudged him awake.
It is an indescribable joy to get to blame something on Winry for the first time in three fucking years.
Ed tries to glare over at her and keep his eyes on Roy at the same time, which is about as successful as he expected. She has both hands pressed over her mouth to try not to laugh, and Al’s whole face is red.
Roy’s face, on the other hand, crumples as he becomes aware of how much pain he must be in from the combination of the cataclysmic sleeping position and having Ed’s weight on his arm all damn night long.
Maybe it’s a good thing they were up so late. If they’d gotten a few more hours of sleep, Roy’s arm might just have called it quits altogether in the interim, and then they would match a bit too well.
Roy looks at Ed first.
Ed’s not sure there are words for it. He’s even less sure that he’d want to find them if there were.
Then Roy looks over at the guilty parties lingering in the doorway to the hall where they must have fallen asleep in the graciously offered beds last night like normal people. Roy smiles. He raises an eyebrow. He kind of looks like shit, but also like everything Ed was holding out for all this time.
“Good morning,” he says.
Ed looks at the way the yellow light strikes gold in Winry’s hair, at the way it turns Al’s copycat ponytail to a twirl of caramel. He looks at Roy’s too-beautiful hand, ungloved, pressed in between his hip and Ed’s, and all the faint scars that arc across the back of it like stark white comets. He looks at the framed photos of Hughes and Elicia up above the fireplace. He looks at the empty glass on the table, and the grime under his left-hand fingernails, and the perfect articulation of the fingers on the right.
Apparently Winry wasn’t satisfied with dragging him out of the blissful oblivion of unconsciousness: she also has to take the words right out of his mouth.
“It is,” she says. “Isn’t it?”