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Roy opens his eyes.
Like many of his choices, it is a mistake.
He closes them again, making a valiant effort not to acknowledge the spear of inconceivable excruciation that just lanced into his brain by way of his eye sockets.
Despite his best efforts, he thinks he might whimper. Undignified in the extreme.
It occurs to him, once the wave of chagrin has receded far enough to see the shifting sand of reason, that he should ensure that he is not in any danger more immediate than the danger of the headache splitting his skull open down the center and spilling his moderately important brains all over the floor.
He raises his eyelids very, very slowly and very, very carefully this time—just enough to admit a sliver of light, and to allow an attempt to perceive his surroundings.
It’s a bit anticlimactic. He appears to be in the hospital.
But he is now just awake enough—and just un-agonized enough—to realize that he has a larger problem than the question of why his cranium is trying to kill him much more avidly than usual.
He doesn’t know how he got here.
He doesn’t remember any events that would precipitate this situation in any meaningful way.
He does hazily recall the status quo—toiling away at his thankless, grueling life mission from behind a desk and occasionally from behind an upraised glove; summoning Fullmetal and his recently-recovered brother out of retirement for the occasional contract job when his staff can’t handle the esoterica; collecting intel from the extremely successful information gathering business that Chris and Jean and Rebecca have established; maintaining a reputation as the single most annoying officer who ever accidentally got wrapped up in a coup and must have tripped and fallen into efficiency while Grumman masterminded the enterprise. It is not exactly a simple life. He is not exactly a simple man. But the wheels are turning, and the world is, and he does still have enough enemies that it’s perfectly possible that some hired thug slammed a crowbar into the back of his head as he stepped out into the backalley behind Chris’s new place. He keeps telling her that it’s poorly lit. Maybe now she’ll believe him.
He can’t think of a more plausible way that he’d end up like this, with an incident-shaped gap in his recollection, no less. A car accident severe enough to shake his skull would have left him with bruises, at the very least. Other than the splitting headache, he feels… fine. Tired. At little creakier than he ought to, all things considered, but waking up in a hospital bed always makes his skin crawl a bit and leaves his bones longing for some motion. Unfortunately it’s unlikely that anyone saw who hit him. He hopes he wasn’t carrying too much cash. He—
A nurse strides in, looking down at a clipboard, and then glances up and stops short as she sees that he’s looking back. She smiles broadly.
“General!” she says. “Thank goodness. Let me go get him—he just stepped out for a second to make a call.”
Oh, dear.
All of Roy’s recent experiences seem a bit hazy, but there is a substantial difference between banged up enough brain matter to lose last week and four out of the five years of my current career plan have apparently vanished into the void.
As heartbreaking as it is even to think the words, Roy Mustang should not be a general.
Not yet.
The nurse has taken his stunned silence as something more suitable—whether it seemed like weary bewilderment or speechless joy is less important than the fact that she’s swept out of the room without waiting to verify either one.
Roy hopes that the he the nurse referred to isn’t Grumman—or whoever General Mustang might report to now. Roy might throw up if Grumman hobbles his way in through the door and starts leering knowingly for reasons that Roy can’t even begin to guess.
His best hope, from the likely candidates, would be Breda. He needs someone who can help him think his way out of this. He also needs someone who will be exasperated, rather than panicked, by another Mustang Brand Crisis; and who will thus be twice as motivated to resolve it as expediently as possible.
He hopes Breda still works for him.
How much time has disappeared?
He looks down at his right palm, flexing his fingers. The saber scar has faded—not insignificantly, at that. The tendons feel more responsive. His original knee-jerk estimate of four years seems quite low compared to—
He looks down at his left hand.
He is wearing a ring.
That’s—
Strange.
That’s—
A complication.
Roy, of course, despises any and all complications that aren’t of his own making.
Far, far too much must have changed in the past few years if he somehow managed to get stupid enough to marry someone.
This advent raises altogether too many questions for a man to have to cope with while his head is still actively trying to explode.
Maybe she’s rich. Maybe it’s political—pure convenience. Maybe he’s engineered some arrangement that doesn’t interfere with any of the work, and doesn’t feed the ravening guilt.
Maybe he was coerced. Maybe he was drugged. Maybe—
He only recognizes the breathtaking demigod who saunters through the door as Edward Elric because the hair hasn’t changed a whit.
“Your timing,” Ed says, shaking his head so that the silken gold ponytail ripples, like a sunbeam glancing off a waterfall, both of his hands shoved deep into the pockets of a remarkably unassuming—but terribly flattering—pair of brown slacks. Roy can tell from the way he holds his right shoulder that he still hasn’t returned his arm to its original state—which makes Roy’s chest clench more violently than he would have expected. He always just… relied on it. He always thought that nothing in the universe could keep Ed from an objective. He rested some of the weight of his psyche on that trust.
The rest of Ed—
Roy’s updated guess must have been closer. Ed is in his twenties. Ed may be imbibing directly from some sort of altered fountain of youth that’s more of a fountain of unspeakable gorgeousness.
“I get it,” Ed is saying, while striding directly towards Roy’s bedside—no hesitation whatsoever—to lean in far too close and peer into his eyes. “Me running out onto insane missions where I knew I was going to land you with a pile of paperwork back in the day is behind at least a third of your sexy gray hairs—”
There is so much wrong with that sentence that Roy’s mind whites out.
“—but can we call a truce, here?” Ed asks. “Hightailing it off to pick a fight with a Cretan warlock-slash-warlord while I was on shift was dumb as fuck, Roy.”
Meeting his bizarrely soft glare is the extent of what Roy can manage with the sound of his name in Ed’s voice echoing around in his head.
Ed sighs, extracts his left hand from his pocket, and gently presses the back to Roy’s forehead.
He’s wearing a ring that looks staggeringly similar to the one on Roy’s finger.
“Oh,” Roy says.
Which certainly does not make him look any less dumb as fuck.
Ed’s eyes narrow. He takes one step back, lowering his hand slowly as if he’s dealing with a wild animal that he initially mistook for tame.
Which isn’t that far from the truth.
Roy hopes that he can blame any and all unhinged and unhelpful reactions on the head trauma and whatever the hell else this ‘warlord’ perpetrated on him that wiped out a decade of his memory in one fell swoop.
The flicker of distress that crosses Ed’s expression before a guarded neutrality obscures it makes Roy’s guts drop.
It’s terrible.
Seeing him unhappy feels so profoundly wrong that it resonates in Roy’s chest and rattles him like an earthquake. It is fundamentally unacceptable. Ed can’t be unhappy—Roy can’t bear it. He won’t allow it. He certainly won’t be the cause.
Which leaves him with something of a challenge.
Ed knows the person that he is now better than he currently knows himself.
He needs to convince someone that he’s apparently married to, who has experienced ten full years of interpersonal interactions that he can’t draw on, that everything is fine.
He can unspool all of the mind-bending implications of the situation later.
At this precise moment, he has one task, and one only. Fortunately, it’s a Roy Mustang specialty:
Damage control.
And lying. He’s very good at lying.
All the best falsehoods cloak themselves in shades of truth.
“I’m sorry,” he says, letting the exhaustion drag at his voice and the pain in his head prickle underneath it. “I’m—it’s all—” He draws a deep breath and raises both hands to scrub them down his face, then reaches the right towards Ed.
He doesn’t quite know why he did that.
It just—it feels right. There’s muscle memory. His body recognizes Ed. It smells him, senses him, settles into his presence, and instinctively wants him close.
It is uncanny how swiftly the streak of panic subsides when Ed takes Roy’s hand in both of his. It shouldn’t even feel good—the metal is as cold as he ever hazarded to guess, and the seams between the segments are hardly gentle.
But his brain knows what his mind doesn’t.
All right, then.
He had better not foul this up.
He looks into Ed’s eyes and forces himself to breathe steadily. Which makes his head throb.
“I don’t know what happened in Creta,” he says. Ed’s strikingly beautiful eyes widen slightly, and then they start to narrow, and his grip on Roy’s hand tightens. “I don’t know what they did. I can’t even remember getting there.” He wouldn’t stage a dangerous venture out of the blue, so unfortunately he can’t claim that he doesn’t remember why if he wants to convince Ed to fill that in, too—there must have been signs and plans trailing much further back. “I’m—going to need your h—”
“Oh, we are going back tomorrow,” Ed says, a hint of a snarl putting a feral gleam into his eyes as his grasp on Roy’s hand continues to intensify until Roy’s fingers tingle. “And I’m going to kick ass until we get answers. Just like old times.”
Roy—
Just wants to keep that spark alive.
“Perhaps we can negotiate,” Roy says.
“I’ll negotiate, all right,” Ed says, delightedly. “I’ll negotiate my foot so far up their asses that they’ll be spitting shoelaces.” Ed’s hand shifts around his, the fingertips of the left pressing to Roy’s radial artery. Ed’s eyes go slightly distant, focusing on thin air. “You’re the one who always says to negotiate from a place of strength. ‘Real or perceived’, I think your bullshit was.” They does sound like Roy’s style. Ed’s eyes pin him again, sharpening. “You’re fast.”
Roy blinks at him.
“And quiet,” Ed says, eyes narrowing, “which is a relief, don’t get me wrong, but you’re—”
“I’m fine,” Roy says, lightly. “It’s the headache. Whatever they did to me seems to have separately bruised every individual brain cell.”
“All three of them,” Ed mutters, but his eyes drift back down to Roy’s hand, and he squeezes it slowly. “They—shit.” He exhales, less than steadily. “Normally when somebody dumps a body in front of a major government building to send a message, the body doesn’t wake up.” He swallows, with no small amount of effort. “I thought—you were dead.”
If Roy is indeed a general, and indeed the kind who can go gallivanting off on apparently unsuccessful international expeditions on an ill-fated whim, it would cause far too significant a diplomatic crisis to kill him.
But he knows.
He knows that people aren’t logical.
He knows that people are so frequently inhuman that there’s no accounting for what depths of cruelty they might be capable of.
He knows that Ed has lost too many people to sustain even a rational sort of hope in a moment like that.
And by the way that Ed looks at him—
By the affection, underneath the amusement—a fondness so deep and so established that the indulgence looks comfortable and cemented—
By the fact that he evidently knows what Roy’s resting heart rate is supposed to be—
It must have been a hell of a morning.
Or afternoon.
Or whatever damn time it is—the curtain diffuses the sunlight enough that Roy can’t gauge it, besides which he doesn’t have the slightest idea what season it is right now.
He doesn’t know anything.
Except that Ed is his lifeline.
And Ed is in pain.
He breathes out slowly and wraps both hands around Ed’s left, marveling a little at how easily their fingers fit together. It’s strange that it probably doesn’t seem strange to the man whose skin he’s borrowing.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
Ed snorts, but weakly. “It’s not your fault.”
“May I have that in writing?” Roy asks. “Or possibly as a wall mural?” At least that gives the next snort some more vigor. “I’m—I shouldn’t have—I dove into something I knew was dangerous. And I made you worry. I should be sorry for that much.”
Ed rolls his eyes. “Feel free to apologize for natural disasters while you’re at it.”
Roy makes an attempt to look as solemn as possible. “I sincerely regret my involvement in any and all major earthquakes, hurricanes, and landslides.”
Ed raises an eyebrow. “No word on the fires, huh?”
“Hedging my bets,” Roy says.
It’s—
Bizarre.
It’s so much fun.
If this is how their interactions unfold after a near-death experience, Roy can only imagine how absurd and in-sync they are under ordinary circumstances.
The only question then is how long it took them to whittle down the old animosity and forge the metal of the hard-won trust into something shining.
Well—there’s a related secondary question about how Roy tricked someone who has aged as stunningly beautifully as Ed to settle for committing to the likes of him. And there’s a tangential question about how the hell they—or someone—shifted national law enough that they could do this in the first place.
Ed’s eyes narrow again as Roy sits there silently getting overwhelmed by the endless possibilities of the time unknown; and also by the terrifying question he doesn’t want an answer to, which is how well he’s aged in comparison. It must not be too dire. The nurse had the look in her eye, and Ed could have anyone, ergo—
“Hey,” Ed says, casually. “Do you think General De Miers might be involved?”
Roy—
Scours his surviving memory banks. The name doesn’t ring a bell, but there have always been enough military men buoyed so quickly through the ranks by sheer nepotism that someone from another command could have skipped several rungs within ten years.
“I wouldn’t rule it out,” he says slowly.
Ed looks at him for a long moment, unmoving—something flickers in his eyes and then is gone again.
But if it was a stupid suggestion, Ed wouldn’t have brought it up. His instincts about people—
Ed smiles. Roy’s heart slows. This is wild. It’s like he’s having half of an out-of-body experience.
“Well,” Ed says, voice going slightly, strangely brittle for a fraction of a second before it evens out, “anyway—let’s see how soon we can jailbreak you, here, and—”
The nurse returns, bearing a white coat, a stethoscope, and a leather briefcase. “Dr. Elric, did you…?”
“Leave those by the phone?” Ed says, grinning sheepishly. “Yeah. Want to get back to work? Not really.” He gently shakes Roy’s hands off of his to hold both out to her. “Thanks.”
Roy fights very hard to suppress any outward indication of the surprise.
It makes sense.
That’s the single most bewildering thing about this excessively bewildering situation—it all makes sense.
Ed stands, shouldering the coat on and tugging the lapels into place before he accepts his accoutrements from the nurse. He offers Roy a quiet little smile that makes him look older and younger at once. “Don’t get into any trouble. Last I heard, they were insisting on a couple more hours of observation before they’ll let me liberate you.”
“Even though you could take better care of me at home,” Roy says. Letting instinct speak for him seems to produce more natural responses.
That makes Ed smile a tiny bit wider, and then hold a finger up in front of his lips. “Careful, Mustang. We’re outnumbered.”
“Say no more,” Roy says.
Ed blinks at him, completely calmly. “‘No more’.”
The nurse actually sighs.
Ed is smirking as he strides out, fast enough that the white coat swirls behind him.
The nurse looks at Roy.
He looks evenly back.
She sighs again.
So that went well.
True to his word, Ed comes back a few mere hours later to collect Roy.
Roy did not, of course, have it in him to wait idly—he convinced the nurses to bring him the biggest backlog of recent newspapers that they could find, and he pieced together as much of the environment that he’s living in as possible. Ed takes one look at him stranded in a sea of newsprint—squinting, in a considerable amount of despair, at some of the smallest text—and hands him a bundle that appears to be clothes he wouldn’t mind overmuch being caught dead in.
And then they’re off.
Ed gives him a look of pure venom as he moves towards the driver’s side of the car—whether for his own safety or for Ed’s, because Roy is such a pathetically mediocre driver, he can’t be sure.
But at least some things have stayed the same.
He also still lives in the same house.
But it looks so different that he hardly recognizes it from the inside.
There are pictures on the walls. There are scuffs on the baseboards and coats on the rack and dishes in the sink.
Roy is grateful that Ed insisted on picking up some takeout on the way, purportedly on the grounds that “I don’t want you burning down the kitchen trying to cook when you’re still seeing double,” even though Roy explained it was single and a half at worst. The extra effort sounds exhausting, and he’d run the risk of searching the wrong locations for things that he and Ed moved years ago.
As it is, it’s nearly impossible to focus on eating—he keeps getting distracted by the changes to the house, the changes to Ed, the way Ed’s eyes follow him like he’s as precious and fragile as a pearl underfoot.
Roy waits until Ed looks mostly finished before setting his fork down. He recognizes distantly that he should probably have more of an appetite. “Can you fill me in on what I was talking about right before I left for Creta?”
“You didn’t tell me you were leaving,” Ed says, sounding less than indulgent this time. “But they’ve just crowned a new prince. You think he’s probably all right, but you’re not in love with his advisor, who’s got a little of that classic evil ambitious wizard potential-power-grab thing going on. Definitely somebody I would have thrown a boulder at if you’d sent me to deal with it a couple years ago.”
Roy lets himself grimace. “It sounds like that’s what I should have done instead.”
Ed swallows a smile with some difficulty. “Couldn’t’ve gone worse, is all I’m gonna say.”
“Boulder diplomacy,” Roy says. “Nice ring to it.”
“Nice rock to it,” Ed says.
That’s settled, then. Roy is going to get this back if it kills him.
He hopes it won’t, though.
Lying in bed next to Edward Elric is… somewhat more difficult to get used to.
Trying to fumble through a nightly routine and make it look rote while assiduously not counting the gray hairs he can make out in the mirror—they are not, in fact, ‘sexy’; they are, in fact, tragic—was bad enough. With any luck, Ed will attribute his general dazedness to the head trauma and the hospital hangover.
But now they’re just… here. Comfortably. Ed is wearing flannel pajamas with thin vertical stripes that try valiantly, and fail spectacularly, at making him look taller. Roy is staring up into the dark.
Does Ed snore? Does he snore? Does Ed kick? Surely he would have semi-permanent bruises up and down his shins—he would have noticed that. Does he still get swallowed whole by the hell of the old Ishval dreams? Does he still dream about Hughes? Does he still dream about the white void and the being-shaped emptiness wearing his eyes? Does—
“Roy,” Ed says, very calmly.
The way he always says it—the way he wraps his tongue around the R and uncoils the remainder like a ribbon and a bullet trajectory at once—makes Roy’s head feel hollow, and his heart feel overfull.
Roy doesn’t even know what to call him. Ed doesn’t feel personal enough, but it’s the only thing he can be sure is safe.
He settles, strategically, on a sleepy-sounding, noncommittal “Mm?”
“Shut your brain up,” Ed says.
Roy smiles in spite of himself. “I am trying.”
“Try harder,” Ed says.
Roy sputters. “There’s—a lot to think about “
“Put it on the nightstand,” Ed says, “and go to sleep. Our train is at the ass-crack of dawn, and you’re already a mess.”
Perhaps the plan is working, if it can even be called a plan, and Ed is attributing the discrepancies in Roy’s behavior to the injury.
“That,” Roy says, “I will concede. Are you warm enough?”
Ed pauses, and then he releases a breath just too brief to be a sigh.
“Yeah,” he says. “Thanks.” He reaches over with his left hand and pointedly pulls the blanket up over Roy’s mouth. “Sleep.”
“All right,” Roy says. They must have some sort of pattern that they usually follow, but there’s no chance he’ll guess it on his own. “Goodnight, Ed.”
“G’night, Roy,” Ed mumbles.
That will have to be enough.
Roy does not feel like death warmed over the next morning.
He feels like death flash-frozen, partially defrosted, and then forcefully smashed down on the pavement.
On the platform, Ed drags him up to one of the frontmost passenger cars, and a very small fraction of his brain is distantly pleased to see that the quality of the train seats has improved over the missing decade—the cushions are much nicer, and they’re increased the legroom. Whoever was responsible for that should be awarded with a handsome medal. He hopes that it was him.
In the meantime, though, the way that the motion of the train redoubles the nausea means that he may throw up on the lovely new seats. That would be less commendable.
Ed rubs gentle circles on his back with the left hand, which is much easier to accomplish because Roy has curled up in something close to the fetal position, with his head cradled in his hands to block the evil light and try to minimize the movement.
“Relax,” Ed says, which is very funny. Hilarious, even. “Your constituency will just think you partied too hard.”
“Not an ideal outcome,” Roy manages.
“Yeah,” Ed says. He pauses to scratch idly at the back of Roy’s neck for a second, which would be quite cute under circumstances where everything was not so utterly and completely shit. “We could always say you got mauled by a bear.”
“Mauled how?” Roy says.
“Exactly,” Ed says. “They should see the other guy. Other… mammal. Whatever.”
Roy partially chokes on a laugh, and partially chokes on the bile. “I’m not… The populace can be credulous, but I’m not entirely sure…”
Wait.
Ed said ‘constituency’.
For one thing, it’s a word he must have picked up from Roy.
For another, significantly more important thing—
Does that mean—
Is there voting?
Has he—
Oh, dear.
He was right, last night, but he can’t even revel in it.
There is a lot to think about.
It’s also strange, in a way, that he never considered the fact that a long-term partner would eventually hone the dubious privilege of his continued presence into an unfortunate ability to read his mind, as the act of thinking makes everything noticeably worse.
Ed hands him a small metal bucket moments before he really, really needs it.
Roy doesn’t know where it came from, but he is not stupid enough to question the particulars. Feeling like death unceremoniously destroyed remains a trial that he supposes he deserves, in a cosmic sort of way. This is going to be a very long train trip indeed.
But at least Ed starts very gently stroking at his hair.
With half an hour of train-bound purgatory left to go, Ed takes out a map of the Cretan capital city that is blanketed in annotations—the notes are primarily Roy’s handwriting, with a few in Riza’s, but quite a lot of them are Ed’s.
At least that lets Roy guess at answers to questions that he couldn’t ask: first and foremost, why Ed is carrying an ordinary pocketwatch but constantly giving Roy surprisingly solid diplomacy advice. It would, obviously, be a blatant violation of the fraternization strictures if his spouse reported to him directly, but there’s nothing set in stone that could stop his department from buying hours from a consultant with connections. For all Roy knows, Ed might have a more permanent position under someone else, and just offer Roy’s squad services as needed. Around his main job as a physician, that is. Evidently not much has changed about his propensity for biting off more than he can chew.
Riza’s still with Roy’s team. That’s a positive sign for his overall principles, and a tremendous personal relief.
And Roy has evidently been to Creta many times—enough to have transcribed detailed observations and various comments on some of the major players.
He tries to make skimming as many of those as he can look as much like a cursory review as possible. He sure as hell hopes they don’t run into anyone except the person responsible for this. Conducting oneself with foreign heads of state is complicated enough when you do know who the hell they are.
Ed, at least, seems to have set this up to be relatively quiet. Roy got the sense yesterday that they were both envisioning a subtle, targeted strike and a smidgeon of revenge, but he doesn’t know how much he can count on any of his impressions. His mind is in the wrong era, and his brain is still a jumbled heap.
“Based on what little you said before you fled Amestris like a diplomatic bat out of diplomatic hell,” Ed says, calmly, flattening out the map again, “it sounded like there was trouble with some sort of fringe group that Chancellor Orloth was not-especially-secretly supplying with arms. And spells. Or whatever.” He traces a line along the edge of the foothills of the mountain range. “My understanding is that they hang out about here.”
“In a giant gulch where no one can hear you scream?” Roy asks.
“We have a winner,” Ed says.
“Charming,” Roy says, “if a bit cliché.”
Ed shrugs, folding the map. The train is slowing down. Roy hopes his stomach takes better to stable ground after all of this abuse. “Don’t think this Orloth dickhead pays them enough to be original.”
Roy convinces his beleaguered eyes to focus on the platform as the train brakes squeal. “Perhaps this can be solved with bribes instead of bloodshed.”
“How much persuasion did you bring in cash?” Ed asks.
Roy looks at him.
Ed looks back.
At least Roy’s stomach has settled enough for a sigh. “Intimidation it is.”
“Goody,” Ed says.
The trolley is better than the train. The cab is better than the trolley. Roy can’t tell if this is confirmation bias in action, or if he’s just gradually recovering from the side effects of whatever misery was perpetrated on him. In either case, he feels very nearly awake and alert by the time they reach the end of the roadways, and Ed tips their cabbie generously and tells him something in Cretan that makes him laugh.
Roy suspects that he should probably understand that. Even if he doesn’t conduct his business here in the native language, he would be at an immense disadvantage if he didn’t know what people were saying when they didn’t think he could translate.
So he smiles in what he hopes is a convincing way, and then he and Ed shoulder on the inconspicuous packs that match their inconspicuous clothes, and they set off on what would be a rather pleasant hike if it wasn’t for every single surrounding circumstance.
A little winding walkway takes them through the foothills, narrowing into a slightly perilous path cut into the face of the cliffside. It turns out that the gulch consumes “Hellooooooo”s and laughter as well as screams.
Is this something they do often? Ed seems even calmer and more comfortable than usual—and that’s the part, really, that keeps preoccupying Roy the most.
Ed has changed, while still retaining so much of the delight and ferocity that always made him burn so bright. He’s settled into himself. He’s shed enough of the shame and guilt to stand taller, to move slower—he isn’t running, anymore. He isn’t trying desperately to stay one step ahead of a starving world that seeks to swallow him whole.
He’s happy.
Roy doesn’t know how much of that he can take credit for—the he that he ought to be, that is. The he that he became, somewhere in the midst of what he’s missing.
But he must at least have helped it along. He and Ed fit together so easily—in the course of both the ordinary domestic evening they had last night and the somewhat less ordinary launch of an investigative and/or revenge mission in the heart of a foreign power—that Roy can only imagine that they’ve grown in around each other. The support and camaraderie and affection are all so painfully obvious that—
“I told the cabbie it was your money,” Ed says, as idly as he would to describe the weather that they’re both experiencing right now. “So he could have more if he wanted.” His boots crunch on the gravel of the uneven path. Roy blinks at him. He glances up. His face stays very still. “You always say ‘I made that money fair and square,’ and then I say ‘He’s in government’, and you say ‘Maybe not fair, but definitely rectangular’.”
Roy’s feet stop moving.
His heart almost joins them, but fortunately it seems to know what’s best for it.
Ed halts much more gracefully, then turns on his heel. The dust grinds. His hands stay loosely hooked into the straps of his backpack, the metal one gleaming. His eyes are unreadable, but not narrowed—guarded, but not hostile.
Yet.
“You need to level with me,” Ed says. “Otherwise, if we get in there, and I expect you to know things that you don’t remember, we’re gonna be fucked.”
Roy makes himself breathe deeply. Ed hasn’t pushed him off of the cliff. Any reaction less severe than homicide he can probably work with.
“That was a last-ditch confirmation, wasn’t it?” he gets out. “In the cab. You already knew.”
Ed shrugs, higher on the left than the right. “General Dimitrius Artorius Overlordton D’Leuge De Miers is the straw-man imaginary general that we make fun of at home,” he says. “You’re going to love his stupid voice as soon as you remember how to do it.” He frowns. “And the first five minutes in the hospital was by far the longest you’d gone without calling me ‘darling’ in six or seven years.”
“Fuck,” Roy says, before he can help it.
Ed shrugs again, but his eyes stay hard. “Tell me why you lied.”
Roy swallows. It occurs to him that he’s lucky—lucky that Ed recognizes enough of him not to have pinned him to a wall with the automail blade at his throat, trying to slice out an imposter he won’t find.
Nowhere to run, now.
Nowhere to hide.
And nothing to lose.
“You looked so happy to see me,” Roy says, and it—hurts. That doesn’t belong to him.
But he wants it to.
“I didn’t want to take that away from you,” Roy says. “I—felt it. Some of it. Enough of it. Enough that the thought of hurting you was unbearable.”
Ed sighs, softly, which slithers through Roy’s chest like a winter wind. Ed starts walking again.
And Roy follows.
“It was kind of you not to tear me to pieces,” he manages.
Ed looks at him for a long, long second—utterly unyielding.
“You’re definitely Roy,” he says, which makes Roy’s heart swell. “Nobody else could fake your exact combination of suave and completely lame.” That’s… less reassuring, but Ed is tightening his grip on the straps of his pack, hefting it higher, and starting down a steeper section of the path. “You’re just not my Roy.”
“Not yet,” Roy says.
He can see the corner of the smile. “That’s more like it.”
“Your Roy,” Roy says, trying not to be jealous of himself. “Would he warn you that the vertigo hasn’t fully gone away, and there’s a not-insignificant chance he’ll do a header if this route gets any more challenging?”
Ed snorts, shooting him a glance. “He would’ve told me after he hit the ground.”
Roy winces.
“I’m kidding,” Ed says. “You’re forty now, idiot. Or thirty-nine for the second time, if they ask you. You trust me with that shit.”
Before Roy can try to explain that thirty-nine-again is the new twenty-nine-again, Ed is dropping to one knee.
Regrettably, it appears to be to investigate a cluster of odd-looking rocks on the path, rather than to propose to Roy to reestablish their marriage here and now.
Ed scoops the shiny slivers and blobs up out of the grit and holds his palm out to Roy. They are indubitably the product of sudden flame hitting the sand.
Roy looks further down the cliff face they’ve been creeping alongside—sure enough, there are several darker streaks on the rock that he, at least, can instantly identify as char.
“Well,” he says. “We’re clearly headed in the right di—”
Ed grabs a fistful of the front of his shirt—dirt and flame-glass crush into the fabric and skitter down his skin.
Ed hauls him to the dust of the path instants before a too-bright bolt of concentrated energy lances through the precise place that he was standing, smashes into the cliffside, and explodes.
Roy tries to say “Oh” and finds that he doesn’t have the breath.
Somehow, Ed musters an emphatic, albeit slightly wheeze-edged “Fuck” while dragging them both upright and off at a run.
Ed also miraculously summons sufficient breath for a somewhat unnecessary “Come on, come on—”
Another burst of unnatural lightning ruptures the cliff just ahead of them.
It’s a good damn thing that whoever is trying to kill them is such a lousy shot.
And then Ed does something that should probably be impossible for a dozen disparate reasons—which certainly isn’t unprecedented, but still constitutes a significant surprise.
In lunging forward, he does not release his vise grip on Roy’s wrist.
Instead, he squeezes so hard that Roy instinctively spreads his fingers, fighting for enough spare breath for a gasp.
Ed slaps his other palm against Roy’s free hand.
The energy courses right through Roy—vast and splendid, staggeringly bright, with the force and size and sweeping finality of a tidal wave.
It almost lifts him off of his feet.
Not to be outdone, Ed actually does lift him off of his feet—and hurls him forward, out and up above the path.
Such it is that Roy is in the air, heart in his throat, at the moment that Ed slams both of his now-empty hands against the cliff face.
The first brick-shaped step, streaked all over with alchemy marks, still swathed in a stark turquoise glow, barely extends out underneath Roy’s foot in time.
But he gets his heel on it, and then his weight on it, and he shifts without thinking to jump for the next one.
Ed whips them out of the wall in perfect sequence with Roy’s steps, and Roy can hear him scrambling up after—both of them ducking, dodging, and leaping to avoid the hellish hail of bolts hurled at them as they race across the world’s most terrifying makeshift staircase. Roy does not look down. Roy does not look down.
He does dart one desperate glance sideways—to pinpoint the source of the vicious projectiles.
Two can play.
Keeping his steps aligned with the new stairs as they form and balancing his weight with nearly no margin for error monopolizes almost every scrap of his attention.
But he doesn’t have to think for this.
He smacks his palms together and swings his shoulders just far enough to scrape one of the metal buckles on his pack against the rock.
Which strikes a spark.
He doesn’t have to look away. He doesn’t have to miss a step. He doesn’t—fortunately—have to plummet to his death.
The narrow stream of fire unfurls like a ribbon of concentrated wrath.
The scream doesn’t fulfill him. It makes his skin crawl. He didn’t send enough heat or volume to be fatal—just enough to burn someone’s hands too badly for them to conjure up any more mischief. The sound of agony given voice lands in his guts like a stone all the same.
But the bolts stop.
And that means that they don’t have to run quite as fast, and they don’t have to dodge, which frees up just enough of Roy’s beleaguered brain to remind him to scan ahead.
“There,” he tries to call back. “On the map, there was—”
“I know,” Ed says.
Ed slaps the cliff face once more—drawing out eight more jagged little bricks that are just long enough, and just close enough together—and then Roy finds himself stumbling into the mouth of a cavern in the rock.
Ed jumps up beside him and smacks the cliff again sharply. All the steps start to recede.
“Nice negotiating,” Ed says.
Roy eyes him. “It’s more difficult to negotiate when you’re dead.”
Ed swings around to peer into the darkness of the cave beyond, but not before Roy glimpses the smirk.
“This thing link up with their evil underground lair or whatever?” Ed asks.
“The map didn’t say,” Roy says. “But I can’t imagine why I’d have marked it at all if it didn’t.” He points to the wooden ladder bolted to the cliff face down below. “Or why they’d have that.”
Ed considers it. “Huh. Fair.” He turns to Roy. “Okay. Light up my life already.”
Roy blinks.
Then snaps his fingers.
Sustaining a lantern-worthy flame above his hand feels even easier now than it ever did—muscle memory again. He’s spent another ten years striving to find ways to use it as something other than a murder weapon. He’s had another ten years of trying to become something more.
It seems like he’s succeeding.
No damn time to lose.
The cavern leads them down a narrow, winding passage—mostly pitch dark, but with occasional pockets of utterly unexpected breathtaking splendor. One smaller cave that splits off of the side of the pathway is open at the top—which lets the sun and water through, such that it hosts a tiny lake, vastly verdant, overrun with flowers of a dozen colors and an entire ecosystem of tiny creatures, the crystal-clear water dripping and burbling and rippling. Roy and Ed both stand for a few seconds and stare at that one.
There’s also a side cave containing so many bats that the rustling of their wings sounds like ocean waves, and the shuffling of their tiny, furry forms is mesmerizing.
Well, it is to Roy.
“Come on,” Ed says, grabbing his sleeve and hauling him past the opening. “The Heebie Jeebie Express has left the station.”
“I think they’re majestic,” Roy says, though he doesn’t fight it because he’d lose.
Ed shoots a glance at him and doesn’t let go. “You would.”
As the passage starts to spiral deep beneath the mountain, they encounter more and more of Orloth’s… underlings? Roy doesn’t know whether lackey or henchman better encapsulates the expected job responsibilities these days.
More important than the specifics of their job titles, however, is staying out of their line of sight.
The second time that Ed slams him up against a wall to press them both into the shadows, Roy waits until the duo of ne’er-do-wells has proceeded further down their patrol route before whispering “Bit forward of you, Mister Elric.”
“Doctor,” Ed mutters.
Roy stares at him.
Ed blinks back.
“What?” he says. “You started it.”
Roy resists the urge to rub his forehead. “I started it with throwing titles around, or I compelled you to pursue a career in medicine?”
“You’re a busy man,” Ed says, and then he darts down into the next of the intertwining passageways that riddle the rock like a rabbit warren this far down.
Roy reassures himself with the hope—the vital hope, the powerful hope, the almost-guarantee—that he’ll find out soon enough.
They creep further in and down, in and down, following the tunnels, dodging the… employees? Perhaps Roy should be more charitable. Times are tough everywhere. Probably. Not everyone gets to choose their profession.
“Where are we going?” Roy whispers after yet another close call where they just managed to duck around a corner before someone spotted the gleam of torchlight off of the buckles on their packs.
Ed glances at him. “How should I know? I’m following you.”
Roy stares back. “You’re in front.”
Ed wrinkles his nose. “You’re a general. You specialize in leading from the back.”
Roy opens his mouth to express one of about three dozen reasons why that’s not fair.
“You,” someone says.
He and Ed both look up.
It’s a slender woman with her hair tied back, brandishing a scimitar with evident expertise.
She is looking at Roy with undisguised disdain.
Roy has no idea who she is.
“Um,” he attempts. “Good afternoon.”
Ed says something so faint that it’s nearly inaudible, but Roy would bet the proverbial farm that it’s a “Fuck.”
Roy doesn’t know what the fuss is about. This is much more direct.
“Is Chancellor Orloth around?” he asks. “I’d really like to—”
The woman glowers at Ed, though she keeps the sword pointed at Roy—which means that she doesn’t know who Ed is. “You said no one knew where you were!”
Roy blinks. “And you believed me?”
Ed snickers, which clearly does not endear him to their latest adversary. “Yeah, if you took anything this guy said under duress at face value, that’s on you, honestly.”
She bares her teeth, focusing on Roy again. “Why shouldn’t I just kill you right now and save us all a lot of bullshit?”
“For the same reason you didn’t last time,” Roy says, patiently, moving his hands into his pockets so slowly that she won’t register the motion in the dark. “Injuring me sends a message. Killing me is a declaration of war. It’s a war you would lose with a new prince already sitting uneasily on the throne. I doubt we would even need State Alchemists.”
Her lip curls. “You talk about your paid magicians like they’re some apocalyptic force, but they’re never on the battlefield. Are they just some scary story you tell your children?”
Ed laughs so dryly that it seems to take her by surprise.
Roy just smiles. “I only need a few moments of the chancellor’s time.”
The woman stares at him, and then at Ed again, and then at him again.
She may not even realize that the indecision is a concession. If she’s vacillating, they’ve already won.
“Please?” Roy says.
“Pretty please?” Ed says.
Her expression of tumultuous uncertainty gives way to disgust.
She lowers the sword, spins on her heel, and beckons.
“I hate you,” Ed mutters out of the corner of his mouth.
Roy raises his left hand, letting the ring glint in the flickering torchlight. “Obviously not.”
Ed scoffs, and Roy slips his hands back into his pockets.
Orloth, who is currently occupying a throne made of wood carved to look like bone, does not look pleased to see them.
That’s all right. Roy didn’t come here to please him.
Roy is also going to have a few choice observations to share with the new prince once they get to the surface. He imagines that that’s part of why Orloth saw fit to try to silence him the first time.
“Why,” Orloth says to the woman, “did you bring him down here?”
The woman shrugs. “They were halfway already, my lord.”
Roy’s notes did not mention Orloth being a lord, legally speaking.
He files that one away, too.
Orloth looks at him like he’s dogshit, which is somewhat funny insofar as he seems to think that it will have a humbling effect. He has clearly never met any other members of the Amestrian Military.
“So you crawled right back,” Orloth says. “Reeks of desperation, doesn’t it?”
“I have a diplomatic proposition for you,” Roy says.
Orloth sneers.
Roy draws out the new gloves, which he could see at a single glance are the realization of an old idea that he does remember.
A few of the lackeys take a step back as he draws the gloves on. They must be better-read, or possibly just less arrogant, than their ringleader.
The gloves are unmarked, and longer in the wrists than the ones he used to wear. He can feel from the way the material snags on his fingertips that he judged it right.
He claps his hands together to activate the array, calling up the most familiar and elegant form of brutality out of the endless variety that he’s borne witness to.
Instead of parting his hands again, he slides the right straight up and the left directly down—striking the gloves against each other.
He doesn’t have to take his eyes off of Orloth. He can feel the sparks.
And then he can feel the heat—as the flame engulfs both of his hands, but the gloves preserve him from the burns.
He cycles the oxygen around and around his curled fingers to bolster the crackling fireballs that now surround his fists.
“If you return my memories intact,” Roy says, “I won’t reduce you to a particularly revolting streak of ash. How’s that?”
Orloth starts to lift his hand—heavy as it is with so many sparkling rings—presumably to signal to his best-armed guards to put several holes through each of them.
He hasn’t even managed to bend his elbow before Ed has dropped to the ground, palms splayed, and shouted, “Left!”
Which leaves Roy with the right.
He fixes the array in his mind—carving it into his consciousness just like he cut it into the back of his hand; drawing it out in the damp sand of the beach that his thoughts wash up against. He burns it into the dark.
Some dozen filaments of flame simultaneously seek out every pair of hands clasped around a gun. In the instant that those find their targets, before the screaming even starts, Roy canvasses the remaining adversaries, shifting his attention to the ones with less-effective projectiles—the spears and bows and knives. They don’t get time to heft them.
Swords next. The woman they met before clutches the hilt of hers a little tighter, but it’s too late.
Roy imagines that her opinion on State Alchemists may have changed.
In the meantime, Ed has summoned so many massive pillars of jagged rock that he’s nearly reconfigured the entire cave.
The first set of pillars were all small and narrow—blunt-edged but slender enough to move impossibly swiftly, the better to smash the weapons out of some fifteen pairs of hands all in a single instant. Likely they shattered some bone, too, but Roy gets the feeling that the Cretan government might not take umbrage at the condition of the wrists that he and Ed serve up for handcuffs.
The second set of pillars were an Elric specialty: broad enough to elevate an individual, shooting high enough in a matter of moments to eliminate any rational option of jumping down. Ed has even kindly elevated Orloth’s minions to different levels, so that they can’t hope to leap from one platform to the next and rejoin forces, and can’t even really communicate. It’s a sophisticated touch.
Roy turns to Orloth again. He makes the flame ripple over the backs of his hands, then uncoil up along his fingers as he flexes them meaningfully.
“Perhaps I should rephrase that,” Roy says. “Give my memory back.”
He ushers the flames out and up, letting them sear hot and high, gnawing through the air, smoke rising from his hands. The heat bathes his face. The light of it must be incredible.
“Now,” he says.
Orloth gapes at him, face lit a flickering red. He is sweating.
He is also scrambling down off of the chair.
“I didn’t—it was my traitor of a second-in-command who actually cast the spell on you; I would never disrespect such a noble, venerable—”
The woman who menaced them with the scimitar, who is currently cradling her lightly-toasted right hand, stares at him in open-mouthed disbelief. “Exfuckingscuse me?”
Ed stands, pauses, claps, drops to one knee, taps the floor, and summons up a stone fist that socks the underside of the chin of the shadowy figure creeping up behind him. The guy goes down like a sack of bricks. Ed stands again, brushing off his shirt, and scowls at Roy. “She did it? We could’ve sorted this out in the hallway, Mustang.”
Roy gives him a look. “Exactly how was I supposed to know, my dear?”
Something in Ed’s eyes—brightens.
Odd.
Roy makes himself look past Ed’s arresting little smile to track the progress of Orloth’s ungainly attempt to sneak around the back of his extremely ugly chair. Roy lets him scurry around to the far side before unfurling a little jet of flame directly in front of him to send him scampering back.
“Well?” Roy says to the woman. “I imagine some sort of immunity deal might be on the table. It’s the best you’re going to get.”
Her grimace makes it clear that she’s considered that much already.
Ed sighs, claps his hands together, and kneels again to touch the floor. Even as another huge stone hand scoops Orloth up in a pinched pair of fingers and dangles him by his ostentatious cape, Ed gets up, rubbing his back. “Getting too old for this shit,” he says. He turns to the woman. “Can you make this quick? We skipped breakfast. Hurt a hair on his idiot head, and I’ll put your legs on your face and your face on your ass; that goes double for dickwad over there; blah, blah, blah, or else. Any questions?”
The woman glares mightily at Orloth and then steps towards Roy, who has to extinguish his hands to let her move in close.
“You covered it,” she says.
She mutters something. Her eyes glow a fascinating poison-green. Her fingertips do, too, and she taps them against Roy’s forehead with just enough force that he instinctively recoils.
That is, perhaps appropriately, all he remembers.
He wakes up.
He rolls over.
He throws up.
“Cute,” Ed says, but Roy can hear it, now—the deep, thick, heavy current of the fear.
“Darling,” Roy says, shoving himself up on his forearms.
“What?” Ed says.
“Darling,” Roy says again, curling his tongue around the consonants as he tries to sit upright, and the world spins. “Darling, darling, darling.” He swallows. Unsurprisingly, it tastes like bile. “I’m making up for lost time.”
Ed grins like summer and sublimity.
“Shut the fuck up,” he says.
It’s—strange.
But it’s wonderful.
It’s like sinking into a hot bath after a long slog through frigid rain.
Roy has come home.
To himself.
To the life they’ve given each other, to the towering sanctuary they’ve painstakingly built, to the world that’s so much gentler just on the basis that they exist it in it together—just because they’re standing side by side.
“Do you have a mint?” Roy asks. “My mouth is disgusting, but if I don’t kiss you immediately, I may die.”
“Not after all that fucking work, you won’t,” Ed says, and he curls both hands so tightly into Roy’s hair that it hurts. A lot.
Roy would take it a thousand and ten times out of a thousand.
“I have been known to demonstrate the occasional touch of contrariness,” Roy says.
“I said,” Ed says, voice thickening noticeably, “shut up.”
“If I actually did for a single second,” Roy says, “you’d know for sure that I was fake.”
Ed will have ensured that they’re safe, but Ed also won’t begrudge him a double-check.
The woman who deprived him of the best years of his life and then not-especially-kindly restored them is now also dangling from a giant stone fist. There are a few other haphazard bowls and cages containing the rest. Breaking this place apart again will be something of a major geological project.
But that’s someone else’s problem now.
“You’re the worst,” Ed says, wrapping an arm around Roy’s shoulders to drag him up to a sitting position.
“Thank you,” Roy says. “I practice.”
“Practice this,” Ed says, gripping Roy’s sleeve with the metal hand and Roy’s ear with the left, the better to drag him into a bruising kiss that must taste absolutely intolerable.
Sure enough, Ed draws away after an uncharacteristically brief scattering of seconds, tongue out in a much less appealing way than it could be.
“Augh,” Ed manages. “You were right.”
“May I have that in writing?” Roy asks.
“Fuck, no,” Ed says. He casts a glance around at their assorted captives. “Anybody got some gum or something?”
The silence resonates.
Ed sighs.
Then he tightens his grip on Roy’s ear and drags him in again.
“You,” Ed says, breath ghosting over Roy’s still very disgusting mouth, “had better marry me all over again for this.”
“Yes, Doctor Elric,” Roy says.
Prince Leremain remembers Roy. It is indescribably wonderful that Roy now remembers him, too.
Leremain is extremely interested to hear more about why his erstwhile advisor hasn’t made it to the palace today, and why he was apparently quite late and somewhat out of breath two days ago.
Leremain also remembers their bargain, which involved Roy digging into the persistent and peculiar questions surrounding Orloth’s shadier connections—a spot of extracurricular investigations, if one is so inclined—in exchange for some favorable treaty terms.
“You are something else,” Ed mutters from near Roy’s shoulder. He hasn’t ranged more than about six inches from it since Roy woke up again.
Roy is something else—something new. Roy is more appreciative than ever, and more aware of just how lucky he’s become. It’s harder to see it from the top of the slope when it’s a gradual climb, but when life hurls you into an entirely different frame of reference, it is terrifically easy to recognize how far you’ve really come.
Roy will not be going back.
The next person who tries to mess with his mind or his memory will find out exactly how much he’s willing to do to protect it.
Ed climbs up to sit on the back of the armchair that Roy selects in Leremain’s parlor while they hash out a few more of the details. Roy’s head is starting to feel more like a balloon than a properly-assembled cranium again.
“You must be exhausted,” Leremain says, which sets him squarely ahead of every other monarch that Roy has met so far, given that he apparently has the emotional intelligence of at least a small child, and possibly a scrap of mercy to go with it. “Let’s adjourn until this afternoon, at the earliest. Is there anything I can do for you for now?”
Roy is, frankly, stunned that Ed’s stomach doesn’t start growling like a tiger right on cue.
“What’s the best place close by for a late breakfast?” Roy asks. Leremain blinks. Roy smiles. “And do you happen, Your Highness, to have a mint?”