FMA -- On Ne Joue Jamais Avec Les Coeurs
Title: On Ne Joue Jamais Avec Les Coeurs
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: alt!Roy/Ed
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,885
Warnings: language, tactful sex, major spoilers for Conqueror of Shamballa
Summary: Ed falls in love with the Frenchman, which is a magnificent mistake.
Author's Note: "A sequel to Seulement?" you say. "But you swore you wouldn't write more," you say. Ah, but my dear reader, by the time I was finished thinking about how I shouldn't write this, I'd already written most of it in my head. So I followed through-for you, dear reader. And in order not to go crazy, I guess… XD
ON NE JOUE JAMAIS AVEC LES COEURS
Ed despises the phrase ‘playing hard to get’. He’s not ‘playing hard to get’. He’s not a thing to be gotten; and he’s not being difficult just because he’s discerning; and for fuck’s sake, he’s not playing. This is not a game. This is his life, or what passes for it these days. He is not trifling with this shit; it is not a toy.
He’s not playing. He’s evaluating. He is conducting a thorough scientific examination process. He’s experimenting.
“You’re vetting him,” Al says idly, turning the page of the newspaper, which had a header with too many scrolls and not enough skulls, and that’s about as far as Ed got with all the French.
“Of course I am,” Ed says. “How the hell else am I supposed to know if he means it?”
“Trust,” Al says, gaze skimming down the tiny lines of text.
“You know what ‘trust’ sounds like?” Ed asks. “‘Triste.’”
Ed’s not going to be sad in any language-not if he can stop it before it even starts. Keep your head down, keep your hopes down; that’s how you survive in this world.
“The paper’s good,” Al says. “Fairly balanced. Well-edited, well-arranged. Are you scared, Brother?”
“Every fucking day,” Ed says.
Al doesn’t look up. “Are you scared of him?”
“Yeah,” Ed says after a minute, since trying to lie to Al is like trying to make a candle flame light a cathedral. “Maybe-not of what he is so much as… what he might turn me into.”
So Ed stays just out of range, to see if this man will reach for him. You can’t measure attraction with a ruler, but you can measure twelve inches of space between your left shoulder and his right arm; you can estimate the number of snowflakes that flit down and melt into his scarf during the forty-five seconds before his even steps bring him two inches closer. You can’t put compatibility under a microscope, but you can tally the number of times you smile on days you see him and days you don’t. You can’t chart commitment, but you can hold back, and hold back, and time with a pocket-watch the finite quantity of minutes he’s willing to wait.
He isn’t rich, but he touches Ed’s forearm and insists on paying for the nice dinners in little bistros on sidestreets only he seems to know. He is-so French-ly-unflappable, unfazed, always ready with a snap-quick smile, but when he’s waiting under streetlamps or sitting outside bustling cafés, when he hasn’t seen Ed yet, he is so quietly pensive that Ed knows there’s more. He isn’t ostentatious, but he’s expansive. He is breathtakingly graceful and so gracious that Ed understands why cordial is also a type of alcohol. He isn’t Roy Mustang, but he smirks, and he swaggers, and he loves the sound of his own voice.
The crap bell for their crap flat trills (crappily), and he’s at the door with roses-yellow and white. He fingers one of the petals in a way that makes Ed’s throat stick, and he murmurs, “So difficult, to find the right color this season.”
“You don’t have to bring me stuff,” Ed says. “I don’t need stuff.”
“‘Need’,” he says. “It is a silly word, ‘need’. What you ‘need’ to subsist, well-that is only water, and food, and air, yes? But what you need to live-that is different every day; and sometimes it is nothing, and sometimes it is all the world.” He takes Ed’s left hand, wraps it around the papered, ribboned stems; that smile makes the cartilage in Ed’s knees go the way of snowflakes on skin. “I do not ‘have’ to,” he says, “and you do not ‘need’. But I am selfish, Edward, and if I give-how do you say-tokens, reminders, objects, stuff… then you will see them, and your thoughts will turn to me. You have the most extraordinary thoughts. Je regrette that I am so weak as to wish so desperately to be in them.”
After Ed has spent a full quarter-hour sitting helplessly at the kitchen table with a bouquet of roses in his hands, Al kisses his temple, calls him an idiot, and goes out into the snow to buy a vase.
The problem is that he does not know René Moreau. He was only beginning to know Roy Mustang-only beginning to understand the wisps and currents of something greater than respect between them-the first time he tore himself away. And he felt it at the back of his throat and the front of his chest the second time, but the lives of so many ingrates were just too heavy to be exchanged for what he wanted and what he could have had. Ed is a scientist. He doesn’t trade for guesses; he needs guarantees.
The problem is there’s no such thing.
The problem is the spark of more-than-mischief in René’s two perfect, bright-dark eyes. It makes Ed want to drag him closer, and it makes Ed want to shove him and run.
“Nope,” Al says. “You’re going.”
“But I don’t-”
“Yes, you do.”
“You don’t even know what I was going to s-”
“Yes, I do.”
“You’re the worst br-”
“No, I’m not.”
“This is going to be a disas-”
“No,” Al says, grinning, “it’s not.”
They go dancing.
They go dancing, and René’s eyes are beautiful black wells, and curiosity has drowned a lot of cats.
Ed keeps waiting for something to go horribly, horribly wrong. Europe is different-what happens behind closed doors in Amestris is kind of nobody’s business except the people who closed the door. Sometimes there are some wrinkled noses and shaken heads and clicked tongues, but mostly it’s just not that big a deal.
Not like here, where the Hawkeye in Czechoslovakia had to bust her ass just to be allowed to hold a gun. Hawkeye without a gun is like a sky without stars in it; it’s like a city without people; it’s like a nine-course dinner of empty plates. This world flings open locked doors and punishes people for what’s inside.
So they’re going to get caught, right? Any second now some policeman is going to wedge his nightstick between them and pry them apart. Will it just be a fine? Jail time, maybe? Toe chopped off or something? Jesus fuck, Ed only has five toes to lose.
After the first hour of tensed anticipation, he’s almost starting to think it would be worth it. René Moreau is not Roy Mustang; René Moreau does not care who’s watching. René Moreau does not care what people think, and he doesn’t care to change what they’re thinking. René Moreau has his arm around Ed’s waist and Ed’s cold-metal hand wrapped up in his like there’s nothing wrong with it; René Moreau is whispering You dance like a rabbit, and you look like an angel; forgive me if I’m confused, and his warm wine-breath tingles against Ed’s ear.
“I don’t know the song,” Ed says.
“What difference does it make?” René asks, and there’s the smile again, and again, and again- “Ah, perhaps I am unusual. I do not care what kind of music, what category, as long as I can hear the love in it. All music is love, I think; and all love is music.”
“And all Frenchmen are fucking crazy,” Ed says.
René Moreau is not Roy Mustang; René Moreau laughs with his whole body and possibly his whole heart.
Well, whatever. Sometimes you have to get someone naked to get to know them.
That’s another stupid French word-connaître. To know as in to be acquainted with; and to know as in to understand knowledge of; and to know as in to fuck.
And to believe. To surmise something, with an element of doubt. I believe it’s supposed to snow today. I believe I’ve figured out what you meant by ‘need’. I believe those are my trousers you’re removing.
…all right, bad example; there’s not a whole lot of doubt about that.
René draws a hand slowly down each of Ed’s legs as though they’re identical-as though one of them isn’t a piece of machinery more advanced than anything on this planet, even its precious firearms.
“You are sure,” he says. He kisses the inside of Ed’s right ankle, then the left. “You are sure that this is what you want?”
Some people-and they’d have to be stupid people, but stupid people are still people, unfortunately-might think putting out this early makes Ed a bad role model. It’s not really their fault, because they don’t know that Ed’s way beyond that now. He has killed and died for Al. He’d do it again. Besides, Al doesn’t give a shit about petty things like when it’s appropriate to strip down and get lost in somebody. Al just wants Ed to be happy.
Right now, he believes he is.
“I’m sure,” he says.
René grins so bright it’s blinding.
When Ed struggles groggily out of a dream about an avalanche of crumpled rocketry diagrams, René is sitting on the edge of the bed with his left arm settled on his raised knee and the sheets tangled around his waist. In the pale light of morning, he is pure black-and-white. The place Ed accidentally bit his gorgeously strong shoulder looked purple under the lamp last night; now it’s a mottled spot of gray. He’s gazing at nothing at all, at the middle distance, at the empty air; he looks like he should be smoking, but he’s not. The fingertips of his lowered right hand move slowly back and forth along a fold in the sheet.
Ed swallows until he thinks his voice won’t stumble. “You okay?”
“Mostly, yes,” René says. He half-turns and half-smiles. His eyes focus on Ed, and they soften, and Ed’s stomach rather uncooperatively turns to goo. “Most days, yes. Most nights… I am not. Last night I was, but it seems the dark can only be… how do you say? Postponed.”
He lies down like a panther, but his touch is kitten-light as he traces around the edge of the automail.
“You have seen your share of violence, no? But somehow I think… you did not see the war.” His jaw shifts; his eyes and then his fingers track down the silvery scars on Ed’s chest. “I was a journalist then. It is-I wanted to show people the world as I saw it, to make them understand how very simple it all was. It seemed very simple, to me, and I thought I must be the only one wise enough to know that simplicity. I thought it was my-how do you say-my duty to share the way I saw. And so I went, with my pencil and my notes, and… well. You have read Hemingway?”
Ed shakes his head and clears his throat. René’s fingertips pause in gliding down the individual arcs of his ribs.
“I did-I saw a little bit of the war,” Ed says. “Just a… fragment, really. Of the bombings in London. It’s complicated how, but it was… different than the stuff I’d seen before. A different kind of destruction.”
René is quiet for a long moment, and his fingers wander over to the grooves in the automail arm. His eyes flick over the scrapes and scratches that even Al’s persistence can’t buff out.
“Yes,” he says. “Every kind is different, I think. And the war, more than any before, it… took things. It took lives, yes, so many, too many-but it also took something else. The English have borrowed our words-‘a certain je ne sais quoi’. Sometimes I think that what it took was hope. Sometimes I think it was sanity. Often I think it was innocence. I was innocent, then; I was more than innocent; I was… what do you say?”
“Naïve,” Ed says.
“Ah, oui,” René breathes. “C’est notre mot encore. I find it troublesome, speaking of this, no matter the language. But somehow it is easier with you.” He drags a fingertip up the forearm of the automail. “I think it is because I believe that you have been beaten many times, mon garçon d’acier, but you have never broken.”
“Can’t,” Ed says. “Don’t have time. Too much shit to do.”
“Yes,” René says, and the corners of his eyes crinkle with his smile before it fades. “In any case, I was different, after this different kind of destruction. But we do what we must to make things feel real again, yes? We watch the sun come up each morning as though nothing has changed; still we must eat and breathe and work and love. We must do these things all the more because so many that used to no longer can. We must live for them as well as for ourselves, no?”
“In a way they’d approve of,” Ed says.
René settles down with his chin against Ed’s left shoulder and spreads his hand over Ed’s heart.
“I did not know then,” he says, “but I know now, what journalism truly is. It is not explaining these things that every person must learn alone. It is much broader than that. It is to have one’s finger on the pulse of the world. It is to know what will happen before anything has happened at all.”
He kisses Ed’s shoulder-soft, wet, warm mouth; Ed’s well-acquainted with it now, and it’s everything he’s never felt good enough to ask for.
“There will be another war,” René says. “Even wider. Even worse. And we will leave, Edward-you and I and dear Alphonse; we must leave Paris, leave France, leave all Europe if we can.”
Ed learned a lot of things in Germany. He’s known this a long time-in his stumps, in the severed bones.
“Yeah,” he says. “Al and I’ve done a lot of that. A lot of leaving.” He hesitates, raises his right hand, hesitates again, and brushes gently at René’s dark hair. “Have you?”
“No,” René says, and his mouth curves, but his eyes don’t brighten. “It will not be easy, I know. I love this city as I love a coat worn so many times it feels like part of my shoulders, no? I love it as I love the first sip of wine, when all of the flavors are absolutely new. I love it as I love the way your body is extraordinary to match your mind.” He trails a finger up Ed’s sternum and twists it into a lock of hair; he tugs gently; this smile is genuine. “But it will be here when we return, no? It will still be Paris. And you and I will find a way to love its scars.”
Last night Ed found a narrow one just above René’s left eyebrow. It’s strange to be able-to be encouraged-to just… touch.
René kisses at his wrist as he grazes the automail thumb carefully over the white mark.
“There is a long time still,” René says, and the man has impossible timing, because the sun rises with his grin. “For now, I make breakfast and feed you until you are so heavy you cannot leave, and I keep you in my bed forever. Yes?”
“Yes, please,” Ed says.
When Ed staggers back into the flat just before two in the afternoon-hair in disarray, clothes wrinkled almost beyond recognition, right knee still wobbly underneath him-and collapses into one of the kitchen chairs, Al merely blinks, clears his throat, and sips his coffee.
“Fuck,” Ed says.
“Evidently,” Al says.
Ed startles at that, but then he sees that behind the rim of the coffee cup, Al is struggling to keep his mouth in a thin line instead of bursting into laughter.
“Hey,” Ed says. “Did you know that in this country, nobody gives a fuck if you dance with another guy?”
Al’s eyebrows quirk upward, and the grin breaks out slowly but inescapably, and it lights up the whole room. “You don’t say.”
The next time’s even better. Ed’s head buzzes, and his skin tingles, but his heart’s pounding too hard for him to pass out.
“Wow,” he says. “You… wow.”
“I ‘wow’?” René murmurs into the skin of Ed’s chest, nuzzling at his collarbone. “I do not know this word, ‘wow’. What does it mean, that I ‘wow’?”
Ed tries not to snicker and succeeds; tries not to squirm and fails. “Shut the fuck up.”
“‘Wow’ is ‘shut the fuck up’,” René muses, eyes sparking with that heart-stopping half-stifled glee, and his voice vibrates straight through Ed’s whole skeleton. “What a remarkable language, your English.”
“Shut up,” Ed says, trying not to flush too hot as René shifts that long, lithe, extremely fuckable body over his. The sheets ripple down from around René’s hips; Ed can’t help reaching up and putting his hands on them. “Or-whatever. Tais-toi. Are you happy now?”
“Yes,” René says, with that smile. “I am happy. I have not been happy like this in a very long time. I think I know why. Do you?”
“The hell are you on about?” Ed asks.
René grimaces. “So elegant, your English. I must train you to speak only French.”
Ed bares his teeth right back. “Just try it, and you’ll see what kinda dog you’re dealing w-”
René’s frown splits into another of those friggin’ radiant grins, and the rest of Ed’s tirade dies in his throat and dissolves into fairy dust.
René leans down, eyes sliding shut, and touches his irresistible mouth to Ed’s ear.
“This is why I am happy,” he whispers. “Je t’aime, mon petit.”
Everything in Ed grinds to a complete halt for a full second, and then his heart stutters back into motion.
“I’d love you, too,” he’s saying before he can think, “if you didn’t deliberately push my buttons, you bastard-”
He’s raised his hands to René’s chest to pretend to shove him off, and the laughter pours down through him until his ribcage overflows.
“Perhaps that is why you love me,” René says, ducking to kiss his cheek, his jaw, his chin. “Because I know exactly…” There is a warm hand settling on Ed’s waist. “…where…” It’s sliding lower, sliding back- “…to push.”
“Oh, God,” Ed says.
“That is very flattering.”
“Shut up.”
Fuck whoever invented mornings. The first thing Ed’s aware of is the block-of-marble fact that he has to drag his ass out of this soft, warm cocoon of a bed out into the cold in order to go pace the confines of a building for eight hours, producing intellectual energy for people who couldn’t understand it well enough to appreciate it even if they wanted to.
The second thing Ed’s aware of is René Moreau’s extremely heavy arm slung low across his waist. The third thing is René Moreau’s quiet, rhythmic snore.
He lies very still for a while, listening to René breathe, memorizing the way another human body shifts gently against his. He considers the way the sheets move; the way the sunlight slips through the window and crawls across the floor; the way warmth blossoms where skin meets. He catalogues the little scars and tiny moles and blemishes on René’s shoulder; he counts eyelashes; he carefully frees his half-numbed arm enough to stroke his flesh fingers through the thick, dark hair.
René makes an odd noise in the back of his throat, and his eyelids rise. His eyes start out hazy and then sharpen, and when they focus on Ed, he smiles.
“Bonjour,” he murmurs, and his gritty sleep-voice makes Ed’s spine prickle deliciously. The weight of his arm lifts, and his fingertips skate over Ed’s face. “You slept well, I hope?”
“Fine,” Ed says. René’s fingers ghost along his lips. “Um-great.”
“‘Great’.” René pauses, hand settled against Ed’s chest, and looks at the ceiling while he turns the word over a few times. “I do not like ‘great’. It is too harsh, too… sudden. Gray-tuh. This is not a word for what you like. It should be a soft word, no? A loving word. And is there not also ‘grate’? Aha. ‘Great’ is grating.”
He beams down at Ed. Ed’s been getting Al to teach him how to keep a straight face, just for moments like this.
“Great job,” Ed says.
René makes a sound of immense distress and flops down across Ed’s body. “It is agony,” he says, “to be in love. And yet I would not trade it for sky and stars and a thousand second chances.”
Ed musses up his hair a little more. He’s just got-really, really nice hair, is all. “I dunno if that’d be equivalent anyway. All that stuff is pretty conceptual.”
René rolls his beautiful eyes. “There is no poetry in your beloved soul, mon petit.”
“I hope not,” Ed says. “Poetry’s supposed to stay in books, where it belongs.” He feels the blood rising in his cheeks and is powerless to stop it. “Do you have to call me that?”
“Yes,” René says, grinning again, so at least there’s that. “It is a joke, do you see? Because you are petit, you are small, you are little and bright-and yet this love for you is so large. You fit into my arms so easily, but this love for you is bigger than my life. You-” Hot kisses up Ed’s throat; his breath stutters hard. “-are my little… everything. No?”
“Yes,” Ed gasps out.
When Ed hauls himself back to the flat after a rigorous day of gazing dewy-eyed at plans like some stupid schoolgirl, he finds Al stretched out on the couch, hugging a textbook.
This isn’t an unprecedented state of affairs by any means, but he pauses in the process of unwinding his scarf, just to be sure. “You okay, Al?”
“Better than okay,” Al says, and Ed’s heart flaps strong white wings. “I love this city, Brother. It has an endless supply of wine and cheese and chocolate and coffee and books and words… And I have friends, and you’re in love, and it’s snowing. And I never want to leave.”
“Then let’s not,” Ed says, slinging the scarf over the back of a chair. “Let’s just… stay.”
Something flickers in Al’s eyes. “You-mean it?”
“Yeah,” Ed says. “Paris. Why the hell not?”
“You mean besides the fact that you think wine tastes like, direct quote, ‘week-old cat piss with a hint of rotten fruit’-”
Ed is slightly touched that Al remembers that rant so clearly.
“-and besides the fact that you refuse to read French; and besides the fact that you think the Tower is ‘compensating for something’, which, honestly, you of all people should underst-”
“Yes,” Ed says loudly. “Besides all that shit. Jeez, Al.” He heads over to the couch, and Al shifts his unreasonably long legs out of the way so Ed can drop down next to him. “Paris,” he says. “Pourquoi pas?”
Al grins, grins even wider, and puts his textbook down to hug his brother instead.
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: alt!Roy/Ed
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,885
Warnings: language, tactful sex, major spoilers for Conqueror of Shamballa
Summary: Ed falls in love with the Frenchman, which is a magnificent mistake.
Author's Note: "A sequel to Seulement?" you say. "But you swore you wouldn't write more," you say. Ah, but my dear reader, by the time I was finished thinking about how I shouldn't write this, I'd already written most of it in my head. So I followed through-for you, dear reader. And in order not to go crazy, I guess… XD
ON NE JOUE JAMAIS AVEC LES COEURS
Ed despises the phrase ‘playing hard to get’. He’s not ‘playing hard to get’. He’s not a thing to be gotten; and he’s not being difficult just because he’s discerning; and for fuck’s sake, he’s not playing. This is not a game. This is his life, or what passes for it these days. He is not trifling with this shit; it is not a toy.
He’s not playing. He’s evaluating. He is conducting a thorough scientific examination process. He’s experimenting.
“You’re vetting him,” Al says idly, turning the page of the newspaper, which had a header with too many scrolls and not enough skulls, and that’s about as far as Ed got with all the French.
“Of course I am,” Ed says. “How the hell else am I supposed to know if he means it?”
“Trust,” Al says, gaze skimming down the tiny lines of text.
“You know what ‘trust’ sounds like?” Ed asks. “‘Triste.’”
Ed’s not going to be sad in any language-not if he can stop it before it even starts. Keep your head down, keep your hopes down; that’s how you survive in this world.
“The paper’s good,” Al says. “Fairly balanced. Well-edited, well-arranged. Are you scared, Brother?”
“Every fucking day,” Ed says.
Al doesn’t look up. “Are you scared of him?”
“Yeah,” Ed says after a minute, since trying to lie to Al is like trying to make a candle flame light a cathedral. “Maybe-not of what he is so much as… what he might turn me into.”
So Ed stays just out of range, to see if this man will reach for him. You can’t measure attraction with a ruler, but you can measure twelve inches of space between your left shoulder and his right arm; you can estimate the number of snowflakes that flit down and melt into his scarf during the forty-five seconds before his even steps bring him two inches closer. You can’t put compatibility under a microscope, but you can tally the number of times you smile on days you see him and days you don’t. You can’t chart commitment, but you can hold back, and hold back, and time with a pocket-watch the finite quantity of minutes he’s willing to wait.
He isn’t rich, but he touches Ed’s forearm and insists on paying for the nice dinners in little bistros on sidestreets only he seems to know. He is-so French-ly-unflappable, unfazed, always ready with a snap-quick smile, but when he’s waiting under streetlamps or sitting outside bustling cafés, when he hasn’t seen Ed yet, he is so quietly pensive that Ed knows there’s more. He isn’t ostentatious, but he’s expansive. He is breathtakingly graceful and so gracious that Ed understands why cordial is also a type of alcohol. He isn’t Roy Mustang, but he smirks, and he swaggers, and he loves the sound of his own voice.
The crap bell for their crap flat trills (crappily), and he’s at the door with roses-yellow and white. He fingers one of the petals in a way that makes Ed’s throat stick, and he murmurs, “So difficult, to find the right color this season.”
“You don’t have to bring me stuff,” Ed says. “I don’t need stuff.”
“‘Need’,” he says. “It is a silly word, ‘need’. What you ‘need’ to subsist, well-that is only water, and food, and air, yes? But what you need to live-that is different every day; and sometimes it is nothing, and sometimes it is all the world.” He takes Ed’s left hand, wraps it around the papered, ribboned stems; that smile makes the cartilage in Ed’s knees go the way of snowflakes on skin. “I do not ‘have’ to,” he says, “and you do not ‘need’. But I am selfish, Edward, and if I give-how do you say-tokens, reminders, objects, stuff… then you will see them, and your thoughts will turn to me. You have the most extraordinary thoughts. Je regrette that I am so weak as to wish so desperately to be in them.”
After Ed has spent a full quarter-hour sitting helplessly at the kitchen table with a bouquet of roses in his hands, Al kisses his temple, calls him an idiot, and goes out into the snow to buy a vase.
The problem is that he does not know René Moreau. He was only beginning to know Roy Mustang-only beginning to understand the wisps and currents of something greater than respect between them-the first time he tore himself away. And he felt it at the back of his throat and the front of his chest the second time, but the lives of so many ingrates were just too heavy to be exchanged for what he wanted and what he could have had. Ed is a scientist. He doesn’t trade for guesses; he needs guarantees.
The problem is there’s no such thing.
The problem is the spark of more-than-mischief in René’s two perfect, bright-dark eyes. It makes Ed want to drag him closer, and it makes Ed want to shove him and run.
“Nope,” Al says. “You’re going.”
“But I don’t-”
“Yes, you do.”
“You don’t even know what I was going to s-”
“Yes, I do.”
“You’re the worst br-”
“No, I’m not.”
“This is going to be a disas-”
“No,” Al says, grinning, “it’s not.”
They go dancing.
They go dancing, and René’s eyes are beautiful black wells, and curiosity has drowned a lot of cats.
Ed keeps waiting for something to go horribly, horribly wrong. Europe is different-what happens behind closed doors in Amestris is kind of nobody’s business except the people who closed the door. Sometimes there are some wrinkled noses and shaken heads and clicked tongues, but mostly it’s just not that big a deal.
Not like here, where the Hawkeye in Czechoslovakia had to bust her ass just to be allowed to hold a gun. Hawkeye without a gun is like a sky without stars in it; it’s like a city without people; it’s like a nine-course dinner of empty plates. This world flings open locked doors and punishes people for what’s inside.
So they’re going to get caught, right? Any second now some policeman is going to wedge his nightstick between them and pry them apart. Will it just be a fine? Jail time, maybe? Toe chopped off or something? Jesus fuck, Ed only has five toes to lose.
After the first hour of tensed anticipation, he’s almost starting to think it would be worth it. René Moreau is not Roy Mustang; René Moreau does not care who’s watching. René Moreau does not care what people think, and he doesn’t care to change what they’re thinking. René Moreau has his arm around Ed’s waist and Ed’s cold-metal hand wrapped up in his like there’s nothing wrong with it; René Moreau is whispering You dance like a rabbit, and you look like an angel; forgive me if I’m confused, and his warm wine-breath tingles against Ed’s ear.
“I don’t know the song,” Ed says.
“What difference does it make?” René asks, and there’s the smile again, and again, and again- “Ah, perhaps I am unusual. I do not care what kind of music, what category, as long as I can hear the love in it. All music is love, I think; and all love is music.”
“And all Frenchmen are fucking crazy,” Ed says.
René Moreau is not Roy Mustang; René Moreau laughs with his whole body and possibly his whole heart.
Well, whatever. Sometimes you have to get someone naked to get to know them.
That’s another stupid French word-connaître. To know as in to be acquainted with; and to know as in to understand knowledge of; and to know as in to fuck.
And to believe. To surmise something, with an element of doubt. I believe it’s supposed to snow today. I believe I’ve figured out what you meant by ‘need’. I believe those are my trousers you’re removing.
…all right, bad example; there’s not a whole lot of doubt about that.
René draws a hand slowly down each of Ed’s legs as though they’re identical-as though one of them isn’t a piece of machinery more advanced than anything on this planet, even its precious firearms.
“You are sure,” he says. He kisses the inside of Ed’s right ankle, then the left. “You are sure that this is what you want?”
Some people-and they’d have to be stupid people, but stupid people are still people, unfortunately-might think putting out this early makes Ed a bad role model. It’s not really their fault, because they don’t know that Ed’s way beyond that now. He has killed and died for Al. He’d do it again. Besides, Al doesn’t give a shit about petty things like when it’s appropriate to strip down and get lost in somebody. Al just wants Ed to be happy.
Right now, he believes he is.
“I’m sure,” he says.
René grins so bright it’s blinding.
When Ed struggles groggily out of a dream about an avalanche of crumpled rocketry diagrams, René is sitting on the edge of the bed with his left arm settled on his raised knee and the sheets tangled around his waist. In the pale light of morning, he is pure black-and-white. The place Ed accidentally bit his gorgeously strong shoulder looked purple under the lamp last night; now it’s a mottled spot of gray. He’s gazing at nothing at all, at the middle distance, at the empty air; he looks like he should be smoking, but he’s not. The fingertips of his lowered right hand move slowly back and forth along a fold in the sheet.
Ed swallows until he thinks his voice won’t stumble. “You okay?”
“Mostly, yes,” René says. He half-turns and half-smiles. His eyes focus on Ed, and they soften, and Ed’s stomach rather uncooperatively turns to goo. “Most days, yes. Most nights… I am not. Last night I was, but it seems the dark can only be… how do you say? Postponed.”
He lies down like a panther, but his touch is kitten-light as he traces around the edge of the automail.
“You have seen your share of violence, no? But somehow I think… you did not see the war.” His jaw shifts; his eyes and then his fingers track down the silvery scars on Ed’s chest. “I was a journalist then. It is-I wanted to show people the world as I saw it, to make them understand how very simple it all was. It seemed very simple, to me, and I thought I must be the only one wise enough to know that simplicity. I thought it was my-how do you say-my duty to share the way I saw. And so I went, with my pencil and my notes, and… well. You have read Hemingway?”
Ed shakes his head and clears his throat. René’s fingertips pause in gliding down the individual arcs of his ribs.
“I did-I saw a little bit of the war,” Ed says. “Just a… fragment, really. Of the bombings in London. It’s complicated how, but it was… different than the stuff I’d seen before. A different kind of destruction.”
René is quiet for a long moment, and his fingers wander over to the grooves in the automail arm. His eyes flick over the scrapes and scratches that even Al’s persistence can’t buff out.
“Yes,” he says. “Every kind is different, I think. And the war, more than any before, it… took things. It took lives, yes, so many, too many-but it also took something else. The English have borrowed our words-‘a certain je ne sais quoi’. Sometimes I think that what it took was hope. Sometimes I think it was sanity. Often I think it was innocence. I was innocent, then; I was more than innocent; I was… what do you say?”
“Naïve,” Ed says.
“Ah, oui,” René breathes. “C’est notre mot encore. I find it troublesome, speaking of this, no matter the language. But somehow it is easier with you.” He drags a fingertip up the forearm of the automail. “I think it is because I believe that you have been beaten many times, mon garçon d’acier, but you have never broken.”
“Can’t,” Ed says. “Don’t have time. Too much shit to do.”
“Yes,” René says, and the corners of his eyes crinkle with his smile before it fades. “In any case, I was different, after this different kind of destruction. But we do what we must to make things feel real again, yes? We watch the sun come up each morning as though nothing has changed; still we must eat and breathe and work and love. We must do these things all the more because so many that used to no longer can. We must live for them as well as for ourselves, no?”
“In a way they’d approve of,” Ed says.
René settles down with his chin against Ed’s left shoulder and spreads his hand over Ed’s heart.
“I did not know then,” he says, “but I know now, what journalism truly is. It is not explaining these things that every person must learn alone. It is much broader than that. It is to have one’s finger on the pulse of the world. It is to know what will happen before anything has happened at all.”
He kisses Ed’s shoulder-soft, wet, warm mouth; Ed’s well-acquainted with it now, and it’s everything he’s never felt good enough to ask for.
“There will be another war,” René says. “Even wider. Even worse. And we will leave, Edward-you and I and dear Alphonse; we must leave Paris, leave France, leave all Europe if we can.”
Ed learned a lot of things in Germany. He’s known this a long time-in his stumps, in the severed bones.
“Yeah,” he says. “Al and I’ve done a lot of that. A lot of leaving.” He hesitates, raises his right hand, hesitates again, and brushes gently at René’s dark hair. “Have you?”
“No,” René says, and his mouth curves, but his eyes don’t brighten. “It will not be easy, I know. I love this city as I love a coat worn so many times it feels like part of my shoulders, no? I love it as I love the first sip of wine, when all of the flavors are absolutely new. I love it as I love the way your body is extraordinary to match your mind.” He trails a finger up Ed’s sternum and twists it into a lock of hair; he tugs gently; this smile is genuine. “But it will be here when we return, no? It will still be Paris. And you and I will find a way to love its scars.”
Last night Ed found a narrow one just above René’s left eyebrow. It’s strange to be able-to be encouraged-to just… touch.
René kisses at his wrist as he grazes the automail thumb carefully over the white mark.
“There is a long time still,” René says, and the man has impossible timing, because the sun rises with his grin. “For now, I make breakfast and feed you until you are so heavy you cannot leave, and I keep you in my bed forever. Yes?”
“Yes, please,” Ed says.
When Ed staggers back into the flat just before two in the afternoon-hair in disarray, clothes wrinkled almost beyond recognition, right knee still wobbly underneath him-and collapses into one of the kitchen chairs, Al merely blinks, clears his throat, and sips his coffee.
“Fuck,” Ed says.
“Evidently,” Al says.
Ed startles at that, but then he sees that behind the rim of the coffee cup, Al is struggling to keep his mouth in a thin line instead of bursting into laughter.
“Hey,” Ed says. “Did you know that in this country, nobody gives a fuck if you dance with another guy?”
Al’s eyebrows quirk upward, and the grin breaks out slowly but inescapably, and it lights up the whole room. “You don’t say.”
The next time’s even better. Ed’s head buzzes, and his skin tingles, but his heart’s pounding too hard for him to pass out.
“Wow,” he says. “You… wow.”
“I ‘wow’?” René murmurs into the skin of Ed’s chest, nuzzling at his collarbone. “I do not know this word, ‘wow’. What does it mean, that I ‘wow’?”
Ed tries not to snicker and succeeds; tries not to squirm and fails. “Shut the fuck up.”
“‘Wow’ is ‘shut the fuck up’,” René muses, eyes sparking with that heart-stopping half-stifled glee, and his voice vibrates straight through Ed’s whole skeleton. “What a remarkable language, your English.”
“Shut up,” Ed says, trying not to flush too hot as René shifts that long, lithe, extremely fuckable body over his. The sheets ripple down from around René’s hips; Ed can’t help reaching up and putting his hands on them. “Or-whatever. Tais-toi. Are you happy now?”
“Yes,” René says, with that smile. “I am happy. I have not been happy like this in a very long time. I think I know why. Do you?”
“The hell are you on about?” Ed asks.
René grimaces. “So elegant, your English. I must train you to speak only French.”
Ed bares his teeth right back. “Just try it, and you’ll see what kinda dog you’re dealing w-”
René’s frown splits into another of those friggin’ radiant grins, and the rest of Ed’s tirade dies in his throat and dissolves into fairy dust.
René leans down, eyes sliding shut, and touches his irresistible mouth to Ed’s ear.
“This is why I am happy,” he whispers. “Je t’aime, mon petit.”
Everything in Ed grinds to a complete halt for a full second, and then his heart stutters back into motion.
“I’d love you, too,” he’s saying before he can think, “if you didn’t deliberately push my buttons, you bastard-”
He’s raised his hands to René’s chest to pretend to shove him off, and the laughter pours down through him until his ribcage overflows.
“Perhaps that is why you love me,” René says, ducking to kiss his cheek, his jaw, his chin. “Because I know exactly…” There is a warm hand settling on Ed’s waist. “…where…” It’s sliding lower, sliding back- “…to push.”
“Oh, God,” Ed says.
“That is very flattering.”
“Shut up.”
Fuck whoever invented mornings. The first thing Ed’s aware of is the block-of-marble fact that he has to drag his ass out of this soft, warm cocoon of a bed out into the cold in order to go pace the confines of a building for eight hours, producing intellectual energy for people who couldn’t understand it well enough to appreciate it even if they wanted to.
The second thing Ed’s aware of is René Moreau’s extremely heavy arm slung low across his waist. The third thing is René Moreau’s quiet, rhythmic snore.
He lies very still for a while, listening to René breathe, memorizing the way another human body shifts gently against his. He considers the way the sheets move; the way the sunlight slips through the window and crawls across the floor; the way warmth blossoms where skin meets. He catalogues the little scars and tiny moles and blemishes on René’s shoulder; he counts eyelashes; he carefully frees his half-numbed arm enough to stroke his flesh fingers through the thick, dark hair.
René makes an odd noise in the back of his throat, and his eyelids rise. His eyes start out hazy and then sharpen, and when they focus on Ed, he smiles.
“Bonjour,” he murmurs, and his gritty sleep-voice makes Ed’s spine prickle deliciously. The weight of his arm lifts, and his fingertips skate over Ed’s face. “You slept well, I hope?”
“Fine,” Ed says. René’s fingers ghost along his lips. “Um-great.”
“‘Great’.” René pauses, hand settled against Ed’s chest, and looks at the ceiling while he turns the word over a few times. “I do not like ‘great’. It is too harsh, too… sudden. Gray-tuh. This is not a word for what you like. It should be a soft word, no? A loving word. And is there not also ‘grate’? Aha. ‘Great’ is grating.”
He beams down at Ed. Ed’s been getting Al to teach him how to keep a straight face, just for moments like this.
“Great job,” Ed says.
René makes a sound of immense distress and flops down across Ed’s body. “It is agony,” he says, “to be in love. And yet I would not trade it for sky and stars and a thousand second chances.”
Ed musses up his hair a little more. He’s just got-really, really nice hair, is all. “I dunno if that’d be equivalent anyway. All that stuff is pretty conceptual.”
René rolls his beautiful eyes. “There is no poetry in your beloved soul, mon petit.”
“I hope not,” Ed says. “Poetry’s supposed to stay in books, where it belongs.” He feels the blood rising in his cheeks and is powerless to stop it. “Do you have to call me that?”
“Yes,” René says, grinning again, so at least there’s that. “It is a joke, do you see? Because you are petit, you are small, you are little and bright-and yet this love for you is so large. You fit into my arms so easily, but this love for you is bigger than my life. You-” Hot kisses up Ed’s throat; his breath stutters hard. “-are my little… everything. No?”
“Yes,” Ed gasps out.
When Ed hauls himself back to the flat after a rigorous day of gazing dewy-eyed at plans like some stupid schoolgirl, he finds Al stretched out on the couch, hugging a textbook.
This isn’t an unprecedented state of affairs by any means, but he pauses in the process of unwinding his scarf, just to be sure. “You okay, Al?”
“Better than okay,” Al says, and Ed’s heart flaps strong white wings. “I love this city, Brother. It has an endless supply of wine and cheese and chocolate and coffee and books and words… And I have friends, and you’re in love, and it’s snowing. And I never want to leave.”
“Then let’s not,” Ed says, slinging the scarf over the back of a chair. “Let’s just… stay.”
Something flickers in Al’s eyes. “You-mean it?”
“Yeah,” Ed says. “Paris. Why the hell not?”
“You mean besides the fact that you think wine tastes like, direct quote, ‘week-old cat piss with a hint of rotten fruit’-”
Ed is slightly touched that Al remembers that rant so clearly.
“-and besides the fact that you refuse to read French; and besides the fact that you think the Tower is ‘compensating for something’, which, honestly, you of all people should underst-”
“Yes,” Ed says loudly. “Besides all that shit. Jeez, Al.” He heads over to the couch, and Al shifts his unreasonably long legs out of the way so Ed can drop down next to him. “Paris,” he says. “Pourquoi pas?”
Al grins, grins even wider, and puts his textbook down to hug his brother instead.