FMA -- Like Whiskey

[tierfal]

Title: Like Whiskey
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: girl!Roy/girl!Ed
Rating: R
Word Count: 8,440
Warnings: language, dramaaaaaa, assorted sexytalk, relatively tactful sex, major spoilers for Brotherhood
Summary: Ed's spent the last year learning that nothing's better than not-enough - and then the bitch walks in, with that same old mouth full of all new lies.
Author's Note: And on your right, Tierfal finally made it to the Femmeslash February party, almost late and with clothing askew. >__> For those of you who are waiting for the Genderswap Fic of Doom, hopefully this will whet your appetite: these are the same basic characters in a much more canon-ish version of their universe. Since the GFoD is entirely from Roza's POV, I wrote Ed for this one… even though the song that inspired it by randomly leaping into my head (the very start, that is, of "Yoü and I") is much more of Roza's angle on the whole thing. tl;dr: I don't have a clue what's going on in my brain anymore, and I'm incapable of writing anything short. XD


LIKE WHISKEY
Whatever else you can say about East City folks-and you can say a metric shit-ton or two, since they’re too stuck-up to be real hicks and too fucking bigoted to be yuppies-they know how to drink.  No goddamn martinis, no fourteen-ingredient cocktails, no fuckin’ around.  And Ed appreciates that.

Then again, Teacher probably didn’t intend, when she taught the Elric sisters hand-to-hand, foot-to-foot, knee-to-groin, and every applicable variation thereupon, that Ed would end up mostly using those skills to put a stop to barfights between drunk assholes four times her perfectly-normal size.  Then again, then again…

Teacher probably didn’t intend a hell of a lot of things.  Teacher probably didn’t intend for Ed to be the greatest fuck-up in all of human history, for one; and it’s not like any of that was Teacher’s doing.  It’s just Ed.  This apple fell a long way from all of the trees that tried to nurture it, and it is rotten to the fucking core.

But Al’ll be back from Xing soon, so that’s good.  Al’ll have stories to tell, and her eyes will light up olive-tinted gold, and she’ll be all healthy and tanned from the stupid desert, and she’ll glow so bright that Ed will forget they’re sitting in a dim, grimy, shitty bar in the outskirts of East City that’s owned by a flat-chested blonde has-been with no fucking future anywhere else, either.

But she has that.  She fucking has that.  This place, these walls, these stained tables, this scratched counter, this well-trod-on floor-it’s all hers.  It’s not much, but she owns it, and she’s made it damn dependable for what it is.  Nobody is ever going to take that away.

And, apparently, nobody is ever going to take away the fucking bloodstain from the nose of the douchewad whose face she slammed into the bar last night when he tried to get handsy, since it will not come out of the fucking wood grain.

The front door opens when she’s got her fingernail deep in a groove in the lacquer to pick out little flecks.  This is so fucking unsanitary.  She could get fucking diseases doing this.  If Dickbrain McGee thinks she kicked his ass last night, he’s got another thing coming after this shit.

“We’re goddamn closed,” she calls in the direction of the doorway-shaped square of light, “or can’t you fuckin’ read?”

“I’m perfectly literate,” says the voice that makes Ed’s breath quicken, makes her heart tighten, makes her skin heat, makes her hands go still and then begin to tremble.  “Though I do tend to have trouble following the rules.”

Ed’s heart jumps up into her throat and starts scrabbling around like a gremlin-like it’s trying to escape, and… well, fuck, she can’t blame it.

She doesn’t want to look, but her head jerks up, and her eyes flick over, and then it’s just too damn late, like it always is with Roza fucking Mustang.

The past five years of Ed’s life have hinged on this woman, and the last two revolved around her. The first of those years-of the years where Roza was lodged in Ed’s heart like a splinter, and her gravity made the universe turn-was the one spent building a cataclysmically all-consuming romance. The first year was the one Ed poured into an affair that started out indescribably intoxicating and then gradually went sour and came back up as bile.

The second of those years was constructed around the absence, skirting the chasm, papering over the lack. The second year was the one spent fighting daily to be all right.

Roza fucking Mustang tore Ed’s whole world apart, and here she is to tramp all over the taped-together pieces.

If nothing else-and most likely there is nothing else-the bitch has come back to her old stiletto-stomping grounds in fine form and high style.  She’s wearing a tailored white blouse, a narrow black silk scarf, dark-wash jeans too tight to leave much of anything to even the most fervent imagination, and tall red pumps solid enough to smack somebody with.  Always with the heels, like she needs to loom higher, like she needs to look more aggressive, like she needs to have pointier feet.  Always with the heels, and always with the maddening way they make her legs go on for miles-

For bonus points, she’s wearing her favorite stupid fucking black trenchcoat hanging from her shoulders.  Ed tried once to find the pins inside it that hold it to her shirtsleeves but came up empty. Is it magnets? Double-sided tape?

Roza looks like a fucking vision, is the point.  She looks like a tall (tall, tall, smooth- and endless-legged) drink of water in the desert.  She looks like a model; she looks like an angel; she looks like a queen.  Ed can just smell the sweat and perfume in the lining of that coat, can feel the wool against her cheek, can hear the way the corners snap in the gust of air cast by a door slamming shut.

“Colonel,” Ed says, “get out.”

Roza cocks her hip, and her blouse shifts to show just a sliver of ivory above the waist of her jeans, and Ed almost blows a blood vessel and hates everything.  “I’m pleased to report that I’m a Major General now.”

Ed’s knuckles kind of ache from the way she’s clenched her fingers around the dishrag.  “You’ve been a major, general pain in the ass for years; what else is new?”

Fuck how the lines of Roza’s hips and shoulders settle differently when her mood changes.  Fuck how she still makes short hair look boyish and buoyant and goddamn sexy.  Fuck how Ed notices all of that shit, even now, even after two fucking years of striving to forget everything about the stupid woman, even after swearing off heartbreak and happiness in the same fucking breath.

“A hell of a lot is new,” Roza says.

Look busy.  Look bored.  Fuck her; fuck her-not literally, oh, shit; don’t think about her shoulders, don’t think about her breasts, don’t think about the perfect curve from her ribs to her hip-

Ed manages to hang the dishrag on the hook on her second try-it’s just damned lucky she doesn’t have the metal hand anymore; it used to rattle like a motherfucker when it started to shake.

She makes sure to look real fucking interested in straightening all the whiskeys so that the labels face front and clears her throat.  “Where’s your-” She almost says retinue, then almost says fan-club, then almost says posse.  “-team?”

“Central,” Roza says.  That’s the Neutral Voice, which is close to but not quite the Pacifying Voice.  “I’m on leave-or couldn’t you tell from my extremely chic plainclothes ensemble?”

The bitch.  The bitch.  What the hell right does she have to talk like they’re… well, anything? They’re not. They’re nothing; they’re not a thing anymore.

“Figured maybe you were just desperate for attention,” Ed says, and it gets tangled up in the knot in her throat and slides out even snider than she intended.

The bitch steps in and pushes the door closed behind her-without being invited, thank you.

“I didn’t come all this way to be looked at,” Roza says. At Ed’s raised eyebrows-no, stop looking at her, you dumb shit; that’s how she gets you-the bitch smiles, so completely unrevealingly that she should really help Al teach a class on the art of the poker face. “I came to see you.”

“You’ve seen me,” Ed says, turning her back again. Fuck, that mouth, those lips, that tongue-her knees are going jellied just remembering, and she can’t make the flood of thoughts and sounds and images stop. “What the hell do you want?”

Roza’s heels click slowly across the floor, and Ed doesn’t look. The coat flaps softly, and Ed doesn’t look. A chair stutters a bit on the hardwood, because Major General Roza Mustang wouldn’t scrape it, and Ed… gives in and braces herself and turns.

Roza is sitting backwards in one of the crappy old chairs, with those nigh-on-immeasurable legs angled out on either side, her arms folded on the back. She’s leaning forward just enough for her cleavage to press against the slats, and Ed’s mouth goes instantaneously dry.

“A lot of things have changed, Ed,” Roza says. “And some things haven’t when I was gambling that they would.”

Ed makes her voice work. She’s done harder shit than this. “Could you go talk fucking riddles somewhere else? I’ve got a bar to run, and I open in an hour, and I’ve still got stock to unload, and I’ve gotta fix the dartboard again, ’cause my fucking asshat patrons keep treating it like it’s made of steel-”

Roza smiles again. There’s no getting around it; she has the best mouth of anybody on the planet. It’s smooth and plump and red and soft and just the right kind of wet and warm-

“Let me help,” Roza says. “I know a thing or two about tending a bar, after all.”

No, Ed thinks. No, no, no, and fuck no, and hell no; bitch, please, you’re out of your goddamn mind.

“Fine,” her mouth says. “Don’t expect to get paid.”

…fuck.

Somehow, between the time the doors open and the next chance Ed gets to loo… notice without any intention of letting her gaze linger, a few of the buttons on Roza’s blouse come undone. She’s quick about slinging drinks across the counter; Ed’ll give her that, but her sudden popularity probably has more to do with the artfully-framed boobs than it does with her skill as a barkeep.

And Ed’s not jealous. Nope. Not of the bitch, having everybody’s eyes on her agonizingly fan-fucking-tastic figure; not of the drooling men who keep shamelessly slurring through the pickup lines as Roza refills their drinks and pockets their cash.

In fact, Ed’s delighted. The whole place is humming, but nobody’s wasted and belligerent yet, and with another set of hands at the bar, she can actually keep an eye on things without compromising the quality of the service. It’s pretty awesome. It’s great. Yeah. It’s really great.

So why does she just want to sit down and fucking cry?

She can’t quite stop herself from eavesdropping the next time Roza’s leaning over the counter to talk to one of the dutifully tippling locals. It’s not like it’s Ed’s fault that drunk-ass douchewaffles don’t know how to keep their voices down; and neither is it her fault that Roza Mustang’s breasts, well-displayed, are a thing of legend, and for good reason.

“No,” Roza is saying, very calmly, “but thank you. Look at me, look at my face-I said no.”

Clearly not her first drunken harasser, then. Ed jumps up onto the stepstool (fuck shelf designers with something very uncomfortable) and snatches another half-dozen pint glasses. Thinking about it, though, Roza’s probably gotten way more than her share of obnoxious, self-righteous, chauvinistic propositions and whatever.

Just then, the guy tries to tuck a hundred-cen note into Roza’s shirt, and before Ed can either blink or drop all the glassware and deck him, Roza is dealing him a brutally sharp backhand.

“I am not for sale,” she says, loud enough for half the room to hear.

The hubbub rises again after an awkward pause, and Ed sets the glasses on the counter and mutters just under her breath, “Then why the fuck are you here?”

Ten minutes to two in the morning: the homestretch of homestretches. The golden hour of victory gleams on the horizon, and they creep towards the end of an unusually smooth night-no particularly raucous singing, no altercations, no injuries; even the dartboard seems to have escaped unscathed. A hymn and some hallelujahs may be in order.

At nine minutes to two in the morning. Bill Weltz asks for a brand Ed knows he hates, won’t be coaxed out of it, pays, takes a sip, chokes, roars, and dives for her.

With alchemy, she’d have him in a cage made of floorboards in four seconds flat. But she doesn’t have alchemy anymore. She doesn’t have jackshit.

Honestly, it’s kind of amazing that a guy Bill’s size can make it over the counter so fast, but Ed’s seen alcohol inspire people to do some pretty unbelievable things, so she’s prepared for it-which, on top of her being almost-sober and six times faster than a drunk moron, means advantage Elric.

She’s almost pinned Bill to the floor when he gets a weird second wind and catches her right wrist and twists it, and in slipping away and darting back, she stumbles over the stepstool-and then he’s grabbing her ankle somehow, and she’s windmilling her ams as she swings towards the edge of the bar-

Then there’s glass all over the counter where she just hit her head hard, and her cheek stings like a bitch, and she’s really regretting the two shots she knocked back an hour ago when Roza started making eyes at Peter Whatsisface’s wife.

“All right,” a very authoritative and very familiar voice says. “Everybody out, or your asses are on fire.”

There’s a bit of an exodus at that, and some of Bill’s least-shitty friends haul him up and away in record time. Ed presses the heel of her hand at her face and draws it back bloody, but she’s still missing some puzzle piece in the sequence of events that ought to explain this. She doesn’t have time to sort it out before Roza is laying one hand gently on her shoulder and raising the other to touch her face, and that’s not fair-

“Ed,” Roza says softly, and her fingertips are so smooth and cool as they turn Ed’s chin just a little.  “Edwina, sweetheart, let me see your eyes-anything blurry?  Are you dizzy at all?”

Ed tries to say Don’t you fucking touch me like you care, but what comes out is “Leggo, I’m not concussed.”

Roza’s hand lingers against her skin for another moment, and the bitch’s eyes are like black holes; Ed’s getting drawn in, dragged in, devoured, and there’s nothing she can do-Roza’s always like that, isn’t she?  She’s a fucking magnet and a fucking lightning rod and a fucking hurricane, and she doesn’t even try to apologize for the long trail of damage in her wake.

Ed reaches up, scrabbles for a grip on the edge of the counter, and heaves herself to her feet.  The right one wobbles, but the automail holds firm; bless fucking Winry and her sadomasochistic perfectionism.

“Just because I’m not in your stupid gang anymore,” she says-and the heels must be killing the bitch, but Roza rises gracefully; it’s not even rising so much as ascendance, “doesn’t mean I can’t still take a goddamn punch.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a freakin’ business to run.”

She steps around the bitch, hefts the cash register drawer in both arms, detours to lock and then bolt and then bar the front door, and takes the night’s gleanings down the back hall to the little office (which also has its own bathroom that nobody is allowed to vomit in or piss all over the walls of, thank higher power of choice).  She settles at the desk and starts sorting out the monetary gains, and she’s a good ways into a multitasking daydream about engineering a machine that could categorize and count money and also take a proportion of the month’s property taxes out of each daily total when… the bitch strolls in.  Ed is extremely offended for a moment before remembering that she locked the doors with the bitch inside, so this is entirely her own fault.

…maybe she’s a little concussed after all.

Roza stops two heel-clicking steps inside the doorway and goes still.  Her hands twitch at her sides; slowly she curls her fingers into loose fists.  Ed noticed earlier that she still gets her nails done-whatever stupid manicure it is that she always liked, where it’s just clear nail polish and then a white stripe along the end, which seems like the dumbest waste of acetate in the universe.  It sums the bitch up, though, doesn’t it?  Constructing something obviously fake to look more too-shiny-perfect?

Except Roza’s not looking at her fingernails-for once.

“You kept the couch,” she says.

One thousand, three hundred, and eleven cens and counting.  “Yeah,” Ed says carefully, glancing over-the bitch is looking at it like it’s changed from faded, squashy leather to flashing neon on paisley or some shit.  “I wasn’t gonna buy a whole new couch just because…”

…shit.

Roza’s eyes are fucking impossible to read-as always-when they flit to Ed’s face.  “Just because we had sex all over this one?”

Shit.

No, this is fine.  This is okay.  Ed’s a goddamn motherfucking adult, and she can speak rationally about the past with an ex-girlfriend-she can even do it without her heart seizing up and dying in the middle of her chest. Of course she can.

She irons the quaver out of her voice.  “And… under it.  Once.”

“That was your fault,” Roza says.

“It was your fault,” Ed says, “for breaking the no tickling rule and forcing me to find an escape.  Besides, you loved it.”

“I will concede that point,” Roza says, and her smile is playful, but it doesn’t reach her eyes.

Ed sits there for a second with money in her hands and a lump in her throat and hates, hates, hates the awkwardness.  They were a lot of things, many of those things pretty shitty in the long run, but they were never quiet.  They were two of a kind, cut from the same damned cloth-which was an aggressive, angry, rampaging fabric, apparently-and they were never ill at ease.

Roza’s gaze settles just a little lower than Ed’s eye.  “We should take care of that.”

Oh, right.  She’s bleeding or whatever.  “It’s not a big deal.”

Roza gives her the Disapproving Face, and Ed bites down hard on the automatic Fuck you that jumps into her mouth.

“At the very least,” Roza says, “let’s clean it.  Do you have any alcohol?”

It’s Ed’s turn to don a scathingly sardonic facial expression.

Roza grimaces back.  “I mean an alcohol-based disinfectant, and you know it.”

“I dunno what I have,” Ed says.  “Try the fucking cabinet if you care so much.”

Roza’s eyes do that polished-ebony-gleam thing that means she’s thinking something fucking unfathomable, and then she turns and stalks into the bathroom.

Ed has to get rid of her. Ed has to get the bitch out of here, and soon, because her hands have started shaking where she’s stacking all the wrinkled bills, and her heart’s beating like a rabbit’s, light and insanely quick. Seems appropriate to feel like hunted prey-you can’t fight Roza fucking Mustang, and apparently you can run all you want, but you’ll never really get away.

Speaking of the top of the food chain, Roza reemerges from the bathroom squinting at the small print on some little silver tube. “I can’t tell if this has expired. You would think they’d want to make it very clear that the efficacy of the medicine would be compromised after a certain point; I’ll add that to the list of regulations to draft in some mythical future when I have the time.”

“How the hell’d you find me?” Ed asks.

Roza looks up and blinks. How the fuck does she always get her mascara to look all thick and luscious instead of like clumpy dreck? “Alison told me, of course.”

It sort of had to be Al, but hearing it still lands like a cold stone in the pit of Ed’s stomach. “Fuck. That little traitor. After everything I’ve done-”

“She said you’d say that,” Roza remarks, unscrewing the cap on the tube and sniffing at it gingerly. “She asked that I promise you that she always has your best interests at heart, and it’s merely that you and she have different ideas of how your best interests manifest.”

Ignoring that sampling of typical tripe, Ed tries to remember what she might have done to Al that was legitimately emotionally injurious-enough to merit this caliber of retaliation. Did she insult the cat again? It’s not her fault the cat is uglier than sin; she shouldn’t be punished for stating a fact.

Except it can’t be that. The appropriate vengeance for hurting the cat’s precious feelings is filling the sugar bowl with salt; or writing the words I malign defenseless kitties on Ed’s forehead while she’s sleeping; or sending a huge, exciting-looking package that contains absolutely nothing but a giant wad of bubble wrap and packing peanuts.

Al doesn’t even talk about Roza, when they get the chance to talk. Al says delicately that everyone was very healthy and hale when last she stopped in Central. Al does not ask if Ed has ‘found anyone new’, because Al knows there isn’t anyone; Al knows you don’t just step out the door and ‘find’ the kind of love that lights up your soul and then burns you down to bones and ash. Al knows you don’t just suddenly stop feeling broken and start wanting to try your luck with self-destruction again. Al knows you don’t crave new lacerations when the first ones finally start healing over.

Roza’s fingertips are razorblades, and she’s standing in Ed’s sanctum.

“It’s not a big deal,” Ed says.

“You are,” Roza says.

The laugh starts as a jolt behind Ed’s ribs and stutters its way out into the air edged with hysteria like pale lace.

“You are,” Roza says, and she sounds almost… defiant. “Why are you-for fuck’s sake, Ed, you didn’t cease to be you when you gave up alchemy; why do you think-”

“Look around you,” Ed says. “This is what I fucking amount to, all right? I peddle alcoholism. The end. I used to dam rivers and damn leaders, and now I sell whiskey. And you know what? That’s fine. That’s great. That is fucking hunky-dory until you walk in here and ask me to be some shit I’m not anymore. I’m not a soldier. I’m not a hero. And I’m not your fucking girlfriend.”

Roza stops breathing for five full seconds-Ed counts.

“Sometimes,” the bitch says, in a voice so small she sounds ten years younger and afraid, “I miss you so much it makes me sick. It actually makes me nauseous-can you believe that? I just think about you, and it’s like I’m dying. It’s like I’m dead already, and I had that solitary year to experience sunlight and temperature and color and taste, and then I gave it up. And knowing that I did it willingly makes me physically sick.”

Ed gets up and crosses the room to put the couch between them, because she needs a barrier; she needs a bastion; she needs a wall.

“Don’t you spew that shit at me,” she says to Roza’s bottomless eyes. “Don’t you dare pretend that you weren’t poison-I’m long since done trying to figure out the rules to your fucking games, and you are not gonna sweep back in here and play all nicey-nice and trick me into being your fucking fool again.”

Roza’s hand spreads on the back of the couch. Her hands are almost as miraculous as her mouth.

“It’s not a game,” she says. “I understand what I did to you now; my therapi-”

Ed couldn’t hold back the words if she tried: “You got a shrink?”

The right corner of Roza’s lips lifts humorlessly. “Two and a half months ago, Major Hawkeye had to catch my wrist and deprive me of my glove in order to prevent me from charbroiling a lieutenant-colonel who said something crude to me in the cafeteria. When we were alone, the major noted that the combination of work-related stress and emotional tension had begun to make me lose control, and that our plan for the future allowed room to alleviate only one of those factors. He insisted; I resisted; he insisted with a firearm; I made an appointment.” She swallows, fingers pressing into the couch, and tries at a lighter smile. “I don’t lie on a settee and discuss the metaphorical implications of my dreams, Ed. It’s really just that the doctor acts as an impartial observer or a devil’s advocate as the situation requires, and he helps me to reason out my feelings before they get the better of me.”

The couch between them somehow stretches a million miles, and at the same time Ed could swear she feels Roza’s breath against her face. The double-time drumbeat of her heart in her ears is getting distracting.

“So the fuck what?” she says. “Does he pat you on the back and offer tissues and tell you that your childhood is what fucked you up so much that you have a compulsion to fuck with everybody else?”

“No,” Roza says. “It’s not self-congratulatory in the slightest, and it’s not a place for justifications. He has forced me to face something that I’d been running from a long time.”

And then Roza Mustang hesitates.

“This promotion,” she says, “was… empty. I was unaffected-I was numb. I knew rationally that it was important, and that it was a triumph and a stepping stone and another piece of my plan falling into place, but I felt nothing. And Doctor Pribor helped me to realize why.”

Ed won’t take that bait, and while the bitch waits for her to bite, she’ll try really hard to master the art of incinerating someone by glaring at them until they ignite.

“Ed,” Roza says, slowly, softly. “Everything I do is meaningless if I can’t share it with you.”

Ed forces her voice to function. “Bullshit.”

Roza moves around the back of the couch-just one step closer, and Ed holds her ground.

“It’s not,” the bitch says. “I was scared, Ed. I was scared of failing you, and I took the fear out on you, which guaranteed that I had failed well before we started to fall apart.”

“Get out of my bar,” Ed says, “get off of my property, and get the fuck away from my life.”

Roza’s fingers start to grip the couch. She chipped one of her nails pretty bad doing some real work tonight, and a knife of vindictive satisfaction stabs through Ed’s chest at the thought that she put a blemish in Roza’s fucking flawless veneer.

“Edwina,” Roza says. “After this I will ask nothing else of you for the duration of both of our lives, but-please, just listen.”

“I’ve heard every permutation of all of your shit,” Ed says, but her voice does a weird, stupid tremble-thing, because Roza’s eyes are so fucking deep right now; you could swim in them; you could curl up and settle down and stay safe forever.

“You owned me,” Roza says. “From the instant you let me in, I was yours-and that was terrifying. To be so completely beholden to someone, to be so irrevocably tangled in another person’s world… I take pride in my independence. You know that. Suddenly the entire design of the universe had changed; you changed it. You changed everything. And you were so overpoweringly wonderful that I immediately started to make contingency plans for the day that something went wrong.”

Roza takes another step closer along the back of the couch, and Ed edges around the armrest to maintain the space between them.

“I’m real fucking ecstatic that this Pribor guy’s helped you develop self-awareness,” Ed says. “If that’s everything, try not to let the door hit you on your way out.”

“I demanded that you trust me,” Roza says, just like she didn’t hear, which is fucking typical; “and gave you nothing to believe in. I picked you apart and then shut you out so you couldn’t do the same to me. I made excuses. I found faults. I persecuted you daily. I held you at arm’s length and expected you to love me on faith alone. And when I realized that all of the shit I had piled on you amounted to too much to forgive, I pushed you away before you could reject me as the liar and the tormentor that I was. I told myself I’d always known that I couldn’t have the things I really wanted-that the world doesn’t work that way. I told myself there was no point trying to be more for you, because it would never come together, and we would never be all right. I told myself anything but that I was terrified of giving you and showing you everything of myself and discovering that it wasn’t enough. It was better to be someone you hated that to come to terms with the fact that I was less than you deserved.”

Roza takes another step nearer, and Ed moves around the arm of the couch-and then further, along the cushions almost to the opposite end from where she started, because fuck it. Fuck it all, if Roza keeps standing around talking all this fucking drivel, Ed’ll leave, and the bitch can just tell it to the wall.

“You think,” Ed says, watching Roza’s mask-face carefully, “that if you package it all up in neat little words and tie a fucking bow on top, you can make any of it okay?”

If nothing else, the bitch stays still this time. Her stupid-gorgeous, smooth, white throat works slowly, and her fingers undulate on the couch leather like she’s playing an imaginary piano scale. Her eyes… her eyes despair. Her eyes are desolate, and decimated, and Ed wants so fucking badly to love her just to make it stop, but there’s no going back from here. That ship’s sails are way past the horizon; that bridge is fucking cinders.

“No,” Roza says quietly. “Of course not. My acti-what I did to you was… unconscionable. I can’t… make that right. It can’t be undone. But I do… hope… I want you to know-I want you to understand that it was never about… you. It was never anything you lacked. It was the opposite, really; it was that you were so much, and I was too weak to rise to meet your potential, so I tried to break you down to make you something I could handle. I never… wanted… to hurt you. I know that doesn’t solve anything; I know intentions are irrelevant, but-”

Ed doesn’t think she can feel her toes. “Get to the fucking point, Mustang.”

“I always loved you,” Roza says. “I loved you more than I could bear, and it was just too hard. If I’d known what I stood to lose, I would have fought forever-but I didn’t know, and I didn’t fight, and I failed. I failed myself, and I failed you, and I cut you deeper than I wanted to admit I knew.”

Ed’s voice wobbles. “Get to the fucking point.”

Roza looks up from a long study of the couch-black diamond eyes, big and wet and beautiful.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“You’re lonely,” Ed says.

Her skin stings; her throat squeezes; her whole skeleton aches. And she keeps it together, because she’s been through so much worse-she eats shit like this for breakfast. For all she cares, Roza Mustang can jump off a fucking skyscraper and bleed out on the pavement and die there, smashed to goo and gasping; at least that way she’ll never touch Ed Elric more softly than anyone ever has; she’ll never break Ed’s fucking heart with forevers that turn so fucking false-

“I’m not lonely,” Roza says. “Lonely is needing someone-anyone, human contact. I need you.”

“Like fuck you do,” Ed says, and her voice doesn’t just wobble this time; it cracks straight down the middle register. She can’t quit now-she has to get the bitch away, no matter the fucking cost. “You need to get laid. And you need to get the fuck out of my fucking bar.”

“Ed,” Roza says, leaning forward over the back of the couch-no, no, way too close- “I need you. I need you tossing and turning at three in the morning. I need your hair in the shower drain. I need you cleaning out the pantry like a plague of locusts.” Her voice softens; her eyes are so warm- “I need you to call me out on my hypocrisy. I need you to smile when you open your eyes and see me lying next to you in the morning. I need you to criticize my taste in curtains. I need you to get fascinated with the pattern on my underwear when I’m trying to interest you in what’s beneath it. I need you to send me all the way to the gates of heaven with an orgasm and hold me while I come back down. I need the way you only giggle when you’re overtired. I need the way you chatter about your sister. I need the way you rescue spiders in the house because you refuse to kill them. I need the way you make me accountable when I’m out of line. I need the way you used to see more in me than I have ever seen in myself, and I need the things that your faith inspired me to do-”

Ed’s legs finally give out, and she manages to direct her fall onto the couch. If she’s really lucky, it’ll even look like she just felt like sitting.

Too bad she’s never really lucky.

“Just shut up,” she says. “Just shut the fuck up and leave me alone.”

“Ed-” Roza is scrambling around the far end of the couch and sitting on the other cushion; Ed tenses, but the bitch doesn’t try to touch her, so there’s no need to tear those goddamn manicured fingers off just yet. “You always said that I needed to learn real selflessness-that I needed to learn how to hunger for something, and about how there are things in life that can blot your pride out so completely that it feels like it was never there. You always said I needed to learn how to beg, and for that I needed to find something important enough to me that I’d grovel for it.”

She slides off of the couch and gets down on her knees on the hardwood, and Ed’s heart pretty much grinds to a halt.

“I found something,” Roza says. “And I’m begging now. Please, Ed-we were happy once; I made you happy once; I’d die to do it again, and this time I understand that that’s how it should be.” Two fingertips brush against Ed’s right knee and then settle there-a faint pressure, a light touch, but urgent. “I won’t ask for promises; you don’t owe me anything, but-Ed, please, just… come back. Come home. Give us both a second chance at everything we wanted and could have had if I hadn’t been so…” Her hands settle on Ed’s knees; are those actually tears in her eyes, or has she figured out how to fake that, too? “All I ask is that we try. I swear to you that this time I won’t fuck it up.”

Ed wants to prod the little silver sparks of wetness in Roza’s eyelashes to see if they’re real.

“Get out,” Ed says-or, more accurately, a voice that doesn’t really sound like hers and doesn’t really feel like it originated from anywhere inside her chest says. “I’m not buying what you’re selling, and you’re on private property, and fuck you.”

“Please,” Roza says.

“I don’t even care,” Ed says; keep it together, Elric, “about all of your fucked-up neuroses and all the stupid mindgames and all of your self-destructive psychological shit. That’s yours to carry. And it wouldn’t even matter, ’cause I made mistakes, too-like taking ‘no’ for an answer when you were only saying it to fuck with me, and we both knew it. If I hadn’t taken shit from you, you wouldn’t’ve given as much; I know that. We could’ve fixed each other, maybe. But all of that wouldn’t even matter now, when we’ve got the hindsight and we know better and all that shit.”

Roza’s grip tightens, and Ed’s right leg starts to tingle with the crazy lightning of that woman’s touch.

“Except,” Ed says, distinctly, battling the swell of emotion about to drown her heart and lungs and vocal cords, “that you didn’t know where to stop. You didn’t know when to put all the shit aside. I don’t care that you were a shitty girlfriend, but you were a shitty person, Roza fucking Mustang, and that I can’t forgive.”

Roza… swallows. She shudders once-a weird little ripple through her shoulders (milky-white and fine-boned and so exquisite, like carved marble against the sheets-). She blinks, and it takes Ed a second to realize that the gleaming line down her cheek is the trail of a tear.

That can’t be fake. That has to be fake. How-?

Fuck it-Roza is done with; the past is gone; Ed has to get rid of the bitch, and that means spitting all these little glass-shard words out if it’s the last fucking thing she does.

“When I needed you the most,” Ed says, “when I needed you to have my back, you kicked me out on my ass.”

In the silence, Roza’s breath hitches softly. Her eyes widen, and then they crinkle at the corners, and they start searching Ed’s face like there are any fucking answers left.

Don’t you play fucking stupid, Ed thinks; her heart keeps slamming to punctuate every single word. You’ve got ten thousand faces, but that one never fit you, and you know it, and it’s insulting that you’d even try.

“You want me to spell it out?” Ed asks. There-the anger starts to bloom orange and red in the pit of her stomach, and it spreads through her veins and lifts her body and lends her the force of the fury that she was counting on. “You told me to leave. Al went to Xing, and all I asked for was somebody who’d just fucking decide I was worth sticking around for, but you-you looked me in the fucking eye and told me to leave. You have no fucking right to sit there and tell me that you didn’t mean it, that you need me, that you-whatever the fuck else you’ve got saved up to talk pretty about. I asked for human fucking decency, and you turned me away. You can’t take that shit back.”

Roza’s hands slide off of Ed’s knees (no, but-bring them back-) and drop limply to the floor. Roza just stares, blinks, stares and blinks, blinks and stares, and the shining droplets steamroll her eyeliner, one smudged little river at a time.

“But I didn’t,” Roza says. “I never-I was far too much of a coward ever to put the idea in your head concretely, because you would have taken me up on it, and I would never have risked-”

“You,” Ed says, and the anger’s alight now, searing, coursing, scalding; “you said-you said, ‘Go. Go on and go. It’s what you really want, isn’t it? So go.’ You fucking uttered those words to my fucking face, and don’t you dare tell me differen-”

“Al,” Roza says with half a voice.

She doesn’t even sound like herself, and that-well, fuck everything, but Ed can’t just shout that down; it wouldn’t be… fair. It wouldn’t be fair, whatever the hell that even means anymore.

“What in the ever-loving crap about her?” Ed asks.

“I meant Al,” Roza says. Curled up on the floor like that, with her makeup fucked and her eyes huge and her hands trembling, she looks really… small.

Ed swallows and rummages for a last flare of rage in her gut, but it’s all gone; her body is empty and cavernously cold. “What in the ever-loving crap did you mean about Al, then, saying something li-”

“I thought you’d want to go with her,” Roza says. “I was-I didn’t want you to; I didn’t want to be alone; I didn’t want you to find someplace better and someone better, someone who knew what you were and treated you that way, but… I thought… the Elrics. I thought you-wouldn’t want to be apart from her; I thought that you were… asking for my approval, when you mentioned it, and I-I didn’t think I deserved to have a say regardless, but I thought it was what would be best for you, and I spent the whole day working up the courage, and then in that one moment, I did the right thing-”

“You told me to leave,” Ed says in a voice that seems to echo in her head, because those words still have power, don’t they? They still have the power to make this Roza’s fault; it’s Roza’s fault; it’s Roza’s fault they crashed and burned and scarred like this; it’s Roza’s fault that laughing feels like coughing and happy couples make Ed sick to her stomach and soft light at dawn makes her so, so sad-

“No,” Roza says, and that noise is either a sob or a very mangled, very helpless sort of chuckle, and Ed doesn’t know which would be worse. “I told you to go-to go with Alison, because she loves you singlemindedly and unconditionally, and I’d been clawing at you trying to pin you down so that I wouldn’t have to face myself in the mirror alone. She was more to you than I was, and that was right; that was how it was meant to be, and for once I could see very clearly that what loving you meant in that moment was to forget myself and to push you towards the one person who would always care for you wholly. You’d just-you were mourning the loss of your alchemy, you were talking about feeling trapped, you were wandering the house like a ghost with a rather appalling eye for interior design, and I thought maybe, maybe, if I let go of you long enough for another adventure, you’d want to come back.”

“You told me-” Ed says, and the rest grows prickly insect legs and sticks.

Roza starts laughing and crying in earnest at the same time, and the sound is horrible, and she looks like shit, and Ed loves her so much it feels like an ulcer.

“Oh, God,” the bitch says thickly. “I was inconsolable. I was hilarious, really. When you packed up and walked out, I spent an hour just standing in the foyer in absolute denial, and then I went into the kitchen and downed an inordinate quantity of whiskey and called Rian at the office and wept. He and the rest of the team came and picked me up and began what was supposed to be an effort to get me to eat and theoretically feel better, which instead resulted in me getting spectacularly drunk and dragging them all along the river walk at two in the morning. That lasted the better part of an hour, during which time I apparently tried to fling myself into the water at every opportunity and improvised a fairly impressive sonnet about how I deserved to die at the bottom of a river, muddy and soggy and abandoned or something to that effect. Rian actually filled out the paperwork that night for a transfer to any unit that wasn’t run by a petulant child, but when I went in the next morning and worked a full day despite having been up the entire night crying and vomiting at turns, he relented. And he let me light the forms on fire, and then we shared a box of chocolates, because he, too, is a hundred-thousand times better than I deserve-”

Ed is ten seconds and one traitorous eyelash from crying too, which is stupid, because they can’t change it even if it never should’ve happened; that’s the first real lesson she ever learned as an adult. And… and fuck, too late; there are tears. “H-how the hell d-do you improvise a s-s-sonnet?”

Roza wipes her eyes on the back of her hand and summons a watery laugh. “I wish I remembered. I could sell my drunken poetry under a pen-name.”

Ed scrubs her face with her sleeve. No point pretending it’s anything other than what it is. And… well, no point pretending that they’re anything other than what they are.

“So,” she says in more of a mumble than she’d like, from behind the safety of her forearm. “What now?”

Roza sniffs delicately, dabs at her smeared mascara, looks at Ed, and smiles.

“You are so damn beautiful,” she says. “I should have told you every day, every minute, every time I looked at you and felt grateful that you existed, let alone that you’d come close to me.”

Nobody can make Ed’s whole body go from zero to throbbing like Roza Mustang. “You-shut the fuck up. You’re full of shit. You’re just saying that ’cause you know I’m still pissed as fuck, and I have every right-”

“It’s the truth,” Roza says, rising fluidly onto her knees now, spreading her hand on Ed’s right ankle and dragging it slowly up Ed’s calf, up Ed’s thigh- “I worship you. I should have told you that every time I kissed you, every time our eyes met, every time your energy made me feel lighter, every time you drew a breath. I mean it.” Smoothly she stands; she shifts in closer between Ed’s knees; her hand slides up over Ed’s hip, up Ed’s side, along Ed’s ribs. “Believe me,” Roza murmurs, and how in the hell does the smudged makeup just make her eyes look smoky? How in the hell can she be so close, so real, so staggeringly irresistible-so compelling that the answering pulse in Ed’s body just will not be denied? “I can show you.”

“Yeah?” Ed asks, breathlessly it has to be admitted. “Show me what?”

“How good it can be,” Roza says, damp mouth against Ed’s throat, Ed’s jaw, Ed’s ear. “How good I can make you feel when I’m not trying to possess you-when all I want is to please you until you can’t take any more.”

“Are we having makeup sex?” Ed asks. If her voice squeaks, it is not her fucking fault, because Roza fucking Mustang’s thumb just grazed over her breast.

“That depends,” Roza says. “Do you think we can make up?”

“I think I really, really need you to fuck me,” Ed says over the pounding of her heart in every square centimeter of her skin. “So I figure we might as well try to make up while we’re at it.”

If nothing else-and there is, of course, so terribly much more-the bitch is a sex goddess.

Ed didn’t forget, obviously; she couldn’t make herself forget Roza’s bedroom eyes and bedroom fingers when she tried, but it did all fade a little over a long year of trying to do anything except remember. As she’s fast discovering, the details that did slip beyond recollection were a tragic loss.

Roza doesn’t seem to have forgotten a damn thing, either. Roza knows exactly where to kiss, exactly where to pinch, exactly where to rub, twist, press, lick, suck, push, ohfuck-

Sound stops, and Ed’s vision whites out, and she comes with her back arching and her toes curling and her head back and her mouth dry-with a whimper like a prayer on her lips, with the creak of the couch under her jolting hips, with three of Roza’s fingers in her deep and Roza’s thumb on her clit and the tip of Roza’s tongue tracing sigils on her chest-

This is the best sort of brokenness. And Roza’s arm settles around her, soothing, gentle, and the two of them fit together like they were designed for this moment all along.

It’s not just that they fit, though, is it? It’s more than that-they overlap. They overflow. They melt together at the edges, and they merge. They’re two facets of one gemstone, and when the light glances through them, they are prismatic; they are transcendent; they are inextricable.

Letting go of Roza was more, for Ed, than just losing a lover-it meant excising a part of herself. It was a rush amputation with a rusty blade. Hasn’t she sacrificed enough pieces of herself? Can’t she keep this one?

She wants to.

She has to.

And maybe, just maybe, she will.

“Huh,” Ed says, struggling to make her lungs work normally again. She can’t seem to get enough air; it’s probably because she’s only breathing goddamn Roza. “You think… I mean, you think it’s sort of true? That whole bullshit thing about how love conquers all?”

“Of course it is.” Roza laces their fingers together and looks at their twined hands like knuckles are a whole new kind of miracle. “The question isn’t what love is capable of. The question…” She shifts to settle in closer against Ed’s shoulder, running the fingers of her free hand slowly through Ed’s hair. “The question is whether we are capable of conquering ourselves-the failings and the hangups and the many, many fears-in order to love so devotedly that we cannot be stopped.”

Ed swallows and squeezes her hand. It’s still there. It seems to be solid, down to the chipped nail polish and the rough fingertips where the ignition gloves have worn at the intricate little whorls of Roza’s prints.

“Do you think we can do that?” Ed asks. “You and me-you think we can?”

Roza smiles at her, and it’s the one smile without sarcasm-the one smile like a sunburst. “I don’t know,” she says. She pushes Ed’s hair back and kisses her forehead and smiles a little more. “Let’s find out.”