FMA -- Diplomatic Excursions and Other Ways to Die: Part I, Chapter 1
Title: Diplomatic Excursions and Other Ways to Die, Part I, Chapter 1
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Characters/Pairing: Roy/Ed, featuring Al/cats and Hawkeye/BAMFery (with past Ling/Ed and implied Al/Winry)
Rating: R (NC-17 by the standards of people who have standards)
Word Count: 53,700 (9,000 this chapter)
Warnings: language and more language, violence/mild gore, explicit sex, major spoilers for Brotherhood
Summary: Conceptually, attending Emperor Ling's coronation celebration is simple enough. In practice, it involves far too much trekking, yearning, bleeding, burning, hoping, running, and dodging of diplomatic catastrophes for Roy's tastes.
Author's Note: I… don't even know where to start with this damn thing. XD Okay, that's a lie: I want to start by groveling at the feet of the inimitable bob_fish, who not only provided the breathtaking art that inspired this thing to spiral out of control in the first place, but who also gave the very rough draft an absolutely invaluable beta read and did an unbelievably fabulous extra illustration. *___* eltea gave it a fantastic gamma read, because I am spoiled rotten - both of you get all of my ♥s forever. Any and all remaining issues (and they are legion) are entirely due to the fact that I am frazzled, IRL!swamped, and just generally a crappy writer. :D This story had some very promising ambitions, a few of which it lived up to, many of which it fell short of… Please enjoy with several grains of salt. ♥; Aaaaaaand… [clicky for the spoilery circumstances of the AU!]I totally forgot to spell this out in the fic: Hoho made the trade for Al's body, which means Ed still has his alchemy and the automail arm. (And his incredibly foul mouth, but that's a given.)
DIPLOMATIC EXCURSIONS AND OTHER WAYS TO DIE
PART I: XING
Chapter 1
When they’ve been dragged up to the highest room and hurled on the floor, and the door has been slammed, and they’ve both levered themselves awkwardly up to sit despite the impressive iron stocks around their wrists, Ed scoots backwards unabashedly until his spine hits Roy’s and says, “This is your fault.”
Roy can feel Ed’s heartbeat through both of their skins, both of their muscles; he can feel the rhythm settling into his bones. “And how, exactly, have you arrived at that fine and well-researched concl-”
“Because I wanted to stay with Al and Captain Hawkeye and Ling’s guy, but no, you said we’d get there faster if we just popped off and set out by ourselves-”
Roy does not say I have not had a moment alone with you since before we stepped onto the first train, and parts of me I did not know could dry out are parched and cracking.
He does not say I very much needed to usher you up hills and ladders ahead of me so that I could gaze longingly at your beautiful ass without commentary.
He does not say The way ‘Ling’s guy’ looks at you makes my stomach acid boil, and the fumes were asphyxiating me.
He clears his throat. “Surely you were every bit as weary as I was of the navigational incompetence.”
It’s a boring lie, but Ed is too wholly guileless with those he trusts to anticipate an ulterior motive. It also doesn’t hurt that he’s barely even listening.
“-so when we get back, I’m telling Al to kick your ass for this.”
Roy’s jaw is aching with what is going to be a terribly unsightly new bruise, and his bottom lip is split towards the right side. He smiles anyway, simply because Edward Elric lacks the capacity for doubt.
“When we get back,” he says, “that sounds fair.”
If they get back, Ed will go on looking about himself wide-eyed and smiling and fascinated and free, and Roy will wonder just how long he has left. Someday soon Ed is going to realize that there’s nothing tethering him in the kennel anymore, and when that day comes, he will be over the fence and gone. It’s funny, in an awful kind of way, that the world is not big enough to hold the smallest miracle Roy has ever touched.
…it’s the dehydration. Surely it’s the dehydration. Intoxication makes him bitter, and dehydration makes him melodramatic.
Damn his weak, sad little soul. He tilts his head back a fraction-not enough to brush Ed’s; that might just set him off and start him babbling out everything that’s swirling in his chest.
But then he squints. And then he makes out the mark scrawled on the ceiling.
“Wait,” he says.
“Nah,” Ed says. “I was just thinking of jumping up and throwing myself out the window, thanks.”
“This building,” Roy says, straining to look harder, but he must be right, “the people we’re dealing with-this is the Hua Wei.”
Silence. For a moment Roy is almost stupid enough to try to crane his neck around to see Ed’s face.
“The Hua Wei,” he says again. “They’re a fringe group. Different religion, speak a different dialect, don’t believe in empire as a method of government.”
“Huh,” Ed says. “How do you know all that stuff?”
“Because when I heard we were going to Xing,” Roy says, “I researched. Honestly, with all of the reading you do, it is incomprehensible to me that there’s anything you don’t kn-”
“You can’t research a country,” Ed says. “Not in any way that matters-you can’t find out what people are like from a book, and the politics are always changing, and you never know what the air’s like until you’re breathing it. Whereas alkahestry-that shit I researched. That’s just fact. And hang on, how do you even know?”
Roy has to raise both hands and the stocks between them in order to point. “It’s written up there.”
“Hang on,” Ed says. “You can read fucking Xingese?”
“A bit,” Roy says, which is understating matters somewhat. “The written characters are more or less consistent throughout the country, but the dialects vary broadly. My mother spoke one of the northern variants, but I learned imperial Xingese.”
“First of all,” Ed says, “what the fuck?”
“I’m in a position of diplomatic power, Fullmetal; it was only logical to brush up once Xingese royalty started pouring into Central Ci-”
“Second of all,” Ed says, “what the fuck? You mean you’ve been making Ling and everybody talk to you in Amestrian this whole time without them knowing you can understand what they say to each other?”
Roy opens his mouth and then closes it. There is a pause.
“You bastard,” Ed says-but if Roy’s not mistaken, there’s a tone of admiration to it.
“I prefer the term ‘strategist’,” Roy says. “All right, let’s… see…”
“See what?”
“You are insufferable when you’re bored.”
“Al switches between ‘intolerable’, ‘infuriating’, and ‘demonic’, but I guess ‘insufferable’ works too.”
Roy deems that rising to that is unwise and, with a great deal of difficulty and some highly undignified grunting and gritting of teeth, plants one of his fettered hands on the dusty floor and levers himself up to his knees. The balance is all wrong, and it’s hard to concentrate through the throbbing in his head, but he tries to put a mental wall between himself and the myriad distractions as he bends and starts dragging the first two fingers of his right hand through the dust.
Ed shifts, and Roy can feel the weight of his gaze. “What are you doing? That’s not an array. And swords made of dust really suck; I’ve tried that.”
“It’s the pictogram for ‘peace’,” Roy says. “Although technically I believe it’s more accurately translated as ‘non-hostility’-‘truce’, I suppose. And this…” He tries to keep his lines sharp and graceful, which is a bit of a challenge when it feels like he’s scraping the skin off of his fingertips, and his instinct is to jerk his hand away. “…means ‘talk’-the noun, like ‘conversation’. Like ‘parley’.”
Ed is quiet for a moment. Roy doesn’t quite dare to glance back. “You really think they’re gonna buy that?”
“It can’t hurt to try,” Roy says-which of course is a lie, but a lie that’s pleasant and useful.
“Okay,” Ed says as Roy sits back, attempting to figure out how to wipe his fingers on his trouser leg around the obstructive stocks. “Now what?”
“Now we wait.”
“Are your plans always this shitty?”
“Usually.”
He wishes he could say it started here in Xing. He wishes he could say it started at the train station, moments before their departure, when Ed turned and bared his face to the first swell of dawn above the skyline, and the feeble light struck sparks in his hair, and Roy’s stomach dropped out. He wishes he could say it started at Ed’s birthday party, when the newly-minted seventeen-year-old watched Roy ostentatiously lighting candles sans array, rolled his eyes, huffed a sigh, and then favored his commander with one glimpse of a soft and almost affectionate smile.
But it started on the Promised Day. It started when Roy burst into the room where he’d incinerated the homunculus Lust-heart racing, thoughts roiling, adrenaline electric in his veins-and found it full of all-new monsters; with Riza at his heels and his fingers poised, he felt adequate to the task, at least. It started when the grotesque figures shifted aside, and Ed spun to face the door, every line of his body burning with the fight. It started when Ed’s eyes found Roy’s, and the viciousness melted instantaneously into relief and a fragment of something like delight, and a part of Roy whispered, That. That is what I want.
There wasn’t time to contemplate it before the deluge, but the words had crystallized, and they couldn’t be broken apart.
After the absolute consumption of the rage when Envy fell into his grasp-Envy, the worm that had murdered the best man Roy had ever met; the sharp-toothed slug that had pried away the cleanest and kindest and safest thing in Roy’s life and smiled dashing it to the ground-there was no room for anything but the terror for Riza, and then there was the sudden and impenetrable darkness. And then there was the end of it, of all of it-skittering and stumbling down along a trajectory he couldn’t see or slow or influence but for hurling flame into the dark. And then there was the promise of light, of distinction, of the power of observation restored, never again to be taken for granted.
And then there was time to wonder just how long it had been since Fullmetal had been a child.
It was like waking from a nightmare-or a drunken blackout, but Roy was going to stick with the nobler simile for as long as he could get away with it-when the bandages fell away, and their absence made a difference. The room came into focus; the ambient whiteness almost blinded him again; Riza was at his elbow, grinning, and had she always been that beautiful?
It was bizarre and kind of unsettling to need to have events that he had participated in described to him, but nothing seemed terribly important now, weighed against how staggeringly fortunate they’d been. There had been casualties, yes, but no cataclysm. Whatever happened from here, Roy would rest in the knowledge that he was quite possibly the luckiest man alive.
When Fullmetal arrived-dragging his feet, reluctant to be anywhere but Alphonse’s bedside-Roy ordered him to take a full month’s leave. There were a number of excellent reasons that the Fullmetal Alchemist should take a break: someone would need to care for Alphonse constantly; until Miss Rockbell could build a new arm from scratch and stop beating the boy with a wrench for his recklessness, he was oh-so-literally short-handed anyway; he’d just lost his father to the rule of exchange that governed every aspect of his life.
It was an entirely logical decision. And Roy wouldn’t have to look at him with new eyes and fight the urge to marvel.
Two weeks later, Ed stormed into Roy’s office with a shining replacement arm and slammed his watch down on Roy’s desk.
It seemed terribly typical for him to be sweeping out of the military the same way he burst in-eyes blazing, shoulders squared, with the braid slung over his shoulder.
And Roy thought, I will write you sardonic letters; I will demand that you come out for drinks when ‘the team’ misses your vitality; I will stop myself just before I start standing under your bedroom window to watch you comb out your hair and was terrified by his conviction.
“To hell with your leave,” Ed said. “Give me something to do.”
Roy choked on ‘While I can’t in good conscience say that your service was exemplary, it was nonetheless astonishingly excellent in a unique and more or less commendable way’. “Y-what?”
Ed heaved a histrionic sigh. “Al’s already trained his cat to bring him the newspaper-don’t ask me how-and I’ve read every book in the house at least twice, and Al throws shit at me when I pace around the living room, and the only other people I know are all here, and I’m going insane. So give me something. I don’t even care what.”
Roy knew it was a stopgap measure at best-a very small dam against a very large river-but he set Major Elric mostly to researching. If Roy kept him occupied in the libraries and doing odd jobs around the city, Ed was close to his brother, and he was theoretically staying out of trouble. One day the dam would crumble, but perhaps…perhaps by then Roy would have dug a canal. Perhaps Roy would have directed the sheer power of that current away from himself, and perhaps he would not drown.
Thus it was that Roy Mustang treaded water for a year. For a year, Ed investigated minor crimes in the city and threatened small-time miscreants with increasingly outlandish punishments; for a year, Ed was unsettlingly obedient and quietly content; for a year, Ed changed out the picture of Alphonse on his desk (which he used as a chair and a filing cabinet) every time his restored brother gained a few more pounds. For a year, Roy handed him distractions and did not touch him; for a year, Roy let him disdain uniforms not because the waistcoat became him so breathtakingly but because it ‘couldn’t hurt to have a plainclothes major’; for a year, Roy smiled faintly when Edward Elric’s back was turned. For a year, he kept both of them safe from each other and from themselves, and Ed was none the wiser.
And then came the letter on fine parchment that reeked of sandalwood.
“What are they saying?” Ed mutters.
“I can’t understand them,” Roy says. He’s trying to focus on the intonations and expressions instead of on the warmth of Ed’s left arm brushing his right. “Regional dialects aren’t like accents, where the pronunciation only changes marginally; they’re drastically different.”
“Could you be any more useless?” Ed asks.
“I suppose if I gave it my best effort and truly believed in myse-”
“Oh, shut up.”
Before they can get any more high-quality bickering in, the discussion above them stops. The men in the coarse robes set their dark eyes on Roy, who holds his breath and straightens his spine and tries to project calm rationality without looking weak.
He earns a sharp knee to the face for his trouble.
Reading up, Roy thought the Hua Wei were enthralling. He is currently revising his opinion of them.
At least they know how to make an exit, though; the robes swish and snap and churn up the dust.
Ed scoots over and sets his mismatched hands against Roy’s chest to steady him-as much as the stocks allow-when Roy sits up and sways a bit. Ed leans in too close to examine Roy’s petulantly-bleeding nose, and Roy narrowly manages not to gasp and choke and spray blood all over the boy’s distressingly arresting face.
“It’s not broken,” Ed says. “Which is a good thing; I don’t think you could stand to get much uglier.”
“I beg your pardon,” Roy says.
Ed grins. This close, pinioned, with the cool fingers and the warm ones pressing into his chest, Roy almost has to look away. “Good, I don’t think there’s any head trauma. Damn, that was a shitty plan.”
“Thank you for the revelatory wisdom of your hindsight.” Roy tries to raise his own hands to negotiate wiping his nose around the stocks, and there is a moment of frozen awkwardness before Ed withdraws. Then Roy is smearing blood all over his face and hands, and this is familiar territory. “Your turn to generate unspeakable brilliance, then.”
“I’m good for that,” Ed says.
“I’m aware,” Roy says.
Ed looks at Roy’s filthy hands, and then at his slightly-less-filthy ones. He flexes his fingers. And then the corners of his lips curl. “I think I have an idea.”
Roy is not sure he likes the sound of that.
“Just when you think a guy can’t get any more arrogant,” Ed said from his sprawl on the couch with his hands behind his head, “he gets to be emperor of a giant country, and you’re royally fucked.”
“Language,” Roy said disinterestedly, passing a signed report back to Riza.
“Oh, do forgive me, sir. He gets to be emperor, and you are magisterially fornicated with.”
“Don’t be crude, Brother,” Alphonse said, and Roy could have kissed him. With Ed in obliteration range, he would not have survived the endeavor, but the intention stood.
“I don’t see why we have to go,” Ed said, scrubbing at his eyes with his flesh hand. “Al’s still not really up for that kind of traveling, and you’re within spitting distance of your promotion, and it’s not like we’re Xingese citizens, so what the hell do we care about Ling’s big, fancy, I’m-the-emperor-now-ha-ha-you-peons party?”
Roy folded his hands and waited until Ed glanced over at him. “It’s the diplomatic opportunity of a lifetime, Fullmetal.”
“If these are the kinds of opportunities you live for,” Ed said, “your life must suck.”
“Brother,” Al said, and the two syllables conveyed encyclopedias of exasperation.
“Think about it,” Roy said. It was the only challenge Ed never turned down. “He has an informal allegiance with a ranking member of the Amestrian military-that is, you-and is extending that connection to an individual who may very well dictate foreign policy within a matter of years-that is, me.”
“At which point you get your five hundred cens back,” Ed said. “So why don’t you go to his stupid party? I’ll stay here and not bust my ass catching trains and sweating out my own weight in the desert.”
“You’re the liaison,” Roy said. “You are my ticket to an alliance that none of my competitors will ever be able to touch. Besides, isn’t he your friend?”
“I’m sick of being your ticket,” Ed muttered. “And I’m a better friend when I’m long-distance, not that it’s any of your damn business. And do you even know how far Xing is? And how different it is? We can’t just wander over and say ‘hi’ and start redeeming imperial approval, you know.”
“I know,” Roy said-mildly, despite how startling it always was when Ed’s maturity stabbed straight through his compulsive rejection of authority. “I did actually think this through. It’s a lot of time for the captain and myself to be away, but I believe that the benefits of becoming an individual to the primary power in Xing-not just a title and a name-will be more than worth the effort.”
“Worth it for you, maybe,” Ed said. “Are you looking at the larger resource exchange here?”
“Yes.”
Ed’s frown deepened into a scowl. “Are you looking at what a huge pain in my ass this is gonna be?”
Roy smiled thinly. “And here I thought you would be grateful for a reprieve from all of the menial labor.”
“You talk like this is a vacation,” Ed said. “This is not going to be a vacation.”
“But it’s a holiday in Xing,” Roy said.
Even Riza sighed at that wordplay.
“This is a little experimental,” Ed says. “And by that I mean that no one’s ever done it, and a million things could go wrong, and there’s a very minor possibility that we could die.”
“Wonderful,” Roy says.
“However,” Ed says, “if we’re gonna get out of here, we should try it before you lose any more blood and end up totally useless, and I’m pretty sure I’ve figured it out in theory.”
“You always know exactly how to reassure my troubled heart,” Roy says.
“Just trust me,” Ed says. “I am a genius.”
“I’m aware of that.” Roy shifts forward and, after a bit of ungainly maneuvering, manages to sit with his legs crossed, facing the boy who may momentarily lead him to his doom. “If you weren’t, I’m fairly sure we’d both be dead by now.”
Ed attempts-unsuccessfully-to suppress a grin. “You better dial back the optimism, General, or I’m gonna have to start calling you a ‘Roy of sunshine’.”
“You wouldn’t,” Roy says.
“I would,” Ed says.
“Then I suppose I’ll have to trust you,” Roy says.
Ed’s grin widens. He hefts the stocks around his wrists, raises his arms, and opens both his hands.
Roy takes a deep breath, sets his jaw, and presses his filthy palms to Ed’s.
He had anticipated something-a rush of energy, a tingle of power.
It isn’t a tingle. It’s a tidal wave.
He jerks away so violently that he loses his balance and tumbles backwards onto the unforgiving floor. He can just barely brace himself on his elbows with the stocks obstructing his movement, so it’s from an embarrassed sprawl that he stares up at Ed in amazement and a little bit of fear.
“All the time,” he says. “You keep that in you all the time.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Ed says a little too quickly, his eyes a little too sharp. “Part of it-I mean, probably not a whole half, because you’re so useless-but a lot of it’s yours. That’s how it works. Or that’s how I theorized it’d work.”
“I’ve only dabbled in hands-free alchemy,” Roy says. “I’ve practiced my array extensively, and after some thought I fixed the wobbling leg of my desk in the office. I can’t control that kind of power, Ed.”
“You don’t have to,” Ed says, working his way rapidly from startlement to a scowl to a glower. “I’ll do it, and I’ll work out the array-you just sit still and think about the components of iron and let me run it through you. It’s just closing the circuit, okay? And then the lightbulb goes on. Simple.”
“Nothing is ever simple with you,” Roy says.
“Bullshit,” Ed says. “I’m easy.”
Roy pauses.
Ed blinks.
“Oh, fuck you,” he says. “Sit up and stop being such a goddamn violet, and I’ll get us out of here.”
“Such a what?” Roy asks, struggling to follow the part of those instructions that made a lick of sense. If nothing else, the combination of malnourishment and endless shackled sit-ups will probably help to make up for all of the addictively delicious mooncakes he snuck during the ceremonies.
“Violet,” Ed is saying. “It’s-a thing we used to say at home. Y’know, like ‘shrinking violet’. Because they’re so flimsy and shit. Some asshole said it to Al at school once, and I punched him and got suspended. Point is, you’re being one. C’mon, we don’t have all day.”
“I think violets are lovely,” Roy says as he works his way upright at last, steels himself, and offers his hands.
“I’ll bet you do,” Ed says, and claps his hands to Roy’s.
The swell of pure and absolute potential almost bowls him over again, but this time he leans into it instead of away. Ed’s eyes light, and their joined hands spark, and every ounce of Roy’s blood that didn’t dribble out his nose starts to surge and sing. He tries-he tries-to think of nothing but pale light and clear lines and iron, iron, iron; molecules of metal that oxygenate red-
It’s difficult to think of anything but how breathtaking Ed is in his element.
But that makes it easier, somehow, to feed the power back to him, to circulate it, to guide the raging current from Ed’s warm hand through the center of his own chest and back out into the cold-elegant automail, because Roy will give him everything if he’ll just keep looking like that-
Ed’s eyes gleam, and he grins wildly-heedless, flushed-and gasps out, “Oh, hell, yes,” and then-
-peels his palms away from Roy’s and flattens them on the front of the stocks.
The light is briefly blinding, and then chunks of iron are raining into Roy’s lap.
A rather sizable one hits him in a very unfortunate place.
Roy cringes despite the way it makes his split lip sting-and then he cringes because it makes the split lip sting; focusing on that pain is so, so much better than the alternative.
“You could have broken the lock,” he grits out.
Ed blinks. “Oh. Huh. Guess so.” He watches blankly as Roy curls up around himself a little and then begins feebly massaging at his wrists. “Sorry.”
“Never mind,” Roy manages. “It’s that sort of a day.” He tries to meet Ed’s gaze and finds it hazy. “Are you… all right?”
Ed looks down at his shackled hands. “Yeah. I just… I didn’t think it’d feel like that.”
Roy hesitates. “Like what?”
“Good,” Ed says. “Really, really… good.” He swallows. Several wisps of hair have escaped from his ponytail to flirt with his throat. “It’s just… I mean, I can’t help thinking, sometimes, that if I just had enough power, I could fix everything. I could make everything great, make it the way I wanted it, set everything right. And then I realize that’s probably what the homunculus thought he was doing, at the start.”
“If you can recognize the danger of power,” Roy says, “you’re already safe from your ambitions.”
Ed turns a wry gaze on him. “You’re one to talk. How long ’til the Royvolution?”
Roy lets the smirk unfurl slowly. “Don’t get short with me-or can’t you help it?”
Ed growls in the back of his throat, and Roy forgets the pain for a moment as his groin throbs for a different reason.
Before Roy can despair too much, Ed shoves his own bound, mismatched hands forward. “Equivalent goddamn exchange, Mustang; let me out.”
“So demanding,” Roy says. He presses his palms together, focuses intently on decomposition, leans forward, and touches the lock on Ed’s stocks.
“Motherfucker,” Ed says, apparently just in general, as he throws them open, tosses them aside, and starts kneading at his left wrist with his metal fingers. “Ow. Damn it.”
That can’t be helping matters; Roy reaches for his arm. “Let me-”
“C’mon,” Ed says, leaping to his feet. Some days Roy swears the boy is made of elastic and sheer pigheadedness. Ed crosses to one of the windows, circling his left wrist. “How high up are w… aw, shit. I officially hate these guys.”
“Officially?” Roy says, clambering to his feet with a great deal less gusto. “I’ll make sure to have it noted in your file.”
“Shut up,” Ed says, leaning out. The wind catches his hair; Roy’s stomach somersaults less-than-gracefully. “So… how do you feel about rappelling without a harness?”
Roy starts collecting the pieces of the stocks so that they can be reconstructed into cord. “I imagine you probably don’t care how I feel about it as long as I hush up and do it.”
Ed flashes him a terrible, terrible grin.
By the third day of caravanning through the desert, Roy had a dehydration headache, several saddle sores, and a fierce desire to kill most of his companions.
“Hey, Colonel-I mean, Brigadier General-International Relations,” Ed said. “I expect you to put a fucking railroad here the second we get back.”
“Do I look like I’m enjoying this?” Roy asked.
Ed assessed him, eyes bright in the shadow of his cloak. Roy had to admit that they were obscenely lucky the previous emperor had elected to die in the dead of winter; the nights were indescribably cold, but at least no one had passed out from heatstroke. They’d all nonetheless been advised to keep their hoods up against the vicious combination of wind and sand and sun.
“You always enjoy other people’s pain,” Ed decided.
Alphonse stretched his slender arms above his head. “I’m sorry, Brigadier General; Brother’s acting childish because he didn’t sleep well last night.”
“It’s fine,” Roy said, which was not true and never had been and likely never would be. Rationally, he knew that Ed meant those sorts of jibes in jest, but it was still difficult to hear himself accused of sadism by the one person who honestly seemed to believe that he wasn’t monstrous.
“Sir,” Riza said in as much of an undertone as equine travel allowed, “think of the hot bath waiting for you when we arrive.”
Roy made a genuine effort to do so-except that he was still thinking about Ed, and the two thoughts converged, and then he was thinking of Ed in a hot bath, lounging against the side, surrounded by pearly bubbles and wreathed in steam, hair soaked and wet skin gleaming, setting a smoldering gaze on Roy and purring, If you don’t hurry up, it’ll be cold before we’re done.
As Roy discovered, there were few things in the world less enjoyable than trying to combat an erection while riding a horse.
Whether or not Ed cares, Roy feels that rappelling without a harness is fucking terrifying.
“Man up!” Ed shouts from the ground, which looks very, very, very distant and very, very, very hard.
Roy needs to focus on the facts. It is a fact that this transmutation-marked cord supported the weight of Ed including automail and saw him safely down. It is a fact that the wind is buffeting Roy’s body, but not so vigorously that he’s losing his grip. It is a fact that, despite the multiple blows to the head and the blood loss, he has not yet felt his consciousness skittering away from him, ergo the medical likelihood is that he won’t black out with fifty feet of open air remaining.
It is a fact that he can do this. It is a fact that he really ought to, in a hurry, if he wants to get out of this godforsaken place alive. It is a fact that Ed is waiting for him at the bottom.
Clearly, then, this is one of those occasions that calls on his deepest reserves of willpower. That’s all it is: one more test of will; one more bauble on the endless chain; one more footprint to press into the muddied ground; one more rung on the ladder he’s clung to since he was barely old enough to understand his own insignificance. And he’s going to get through it one gesture at a time-hand over hand over sore and dirt-and-blood-streaked hand.
He needs to think of anything but the gaping openness below him, yawning hungrily, waiting for him-waiting for the littlest loss of traction, the slightest slip. He ought to give Ed some credit; this rope is really rather elegant for something alchemically thrown together from bits and pieces of iron. Very thin, very even, very strong. So strong. Strong enough to hold him; all he has to do is hold on.
All he has to do is hold on, bracing the soles of his feet against the crunching, pockmarked stones of the tower wall. All he has to do is dig his toes into the crumbling mortar and release one hand and then clasp it around the rope a little lower; and then again; and then again. Two inches at a time; that’s all it takes. Hand over hand over hand over hand.
Damn it, he’s so exhausted. He knows it’s only going to hit him harder when-if, if, if-they dart off to safety; the adrenaline is still shimmering through his whole body, and he’s giddy with it, pulsating, vibrant, bright. If he falls, he dies; isn’t that delightfully simple? Life hasn’t been this black and white for years. If he falls, he splatters to pulp at Ed’s feet-and hasn’t the poor young man been through enough? Roy had better not fall. There’s so much left to do. He’d better keep holding tight, one hand cramping around the cold metal rope, and then the other, and then the first again. He’d better keep forcing his fingers to curl until they ache. He’d better keep letting the friction scald his palms every time he scrabbles to nudge his toes into a niche in the wall. He’d better keep living, whatever it takes.
It’s funny how alike he and Ed are when it comes to this strange inner tempest of self-loathing and determination and guilt. It’s funny how they’ve both deliberately set their standards for atonement far out of their reach, and the impossibility is the very thing that drives them. It’s funny how they fight like a pair of feral cats, when at the core they see perfectly eye-to-eye.
Figuratively, anyway; literally, Ed has to look up.
Perhaps… that’s the thing. Perhaps they’re staring each other in the face, and that’s why they step on each other’s toes.
Roy could do with a new set of toes in any case; he’s abusing the current model. His hands have started to shake when they’re not clasped around the cable, and his shoulders are burning, and the race of his blood highlights every last little wound he’s collected in the past two days; his jaw and his lip and his biceps and his sinuses and his spine and his feet all trill and pound to the rhythm of his heartbeat.
He can’t look down; his whole skull will swing sideways, and he’ll panic. He looks at the wall, and then he looks outward, to the left. He’s lower than the treetops now. He might even survive if he fell from this distance, depending on how he landed. He’s almost there.
Everything throbs. Surely he’s not too old for this?
“Don’t be such a violet!” Ed is shouting, which is stupid; they can’t afford to alert the Hua Wei. Then again, maybe Ed’s already sealed all of the doors to the tower shut with alchemy and trapped the enemy inside. It’s what Roy would do, were he young and talented and brilliant and astonishingly gorgeous in the sunlight. Astonishingly gorgeous in any light. Astonishingly gorgeous all the time.
Roy closes his eyes and presses his forehead to the jagged contours of the stone. He takes a deep breath, possibly inhaling asbestos that will mold in his lungs and kill him someday. Then he opens his eyes, which are a bit clearer for the reprieve, and keeps going-hand over hand over hand.
A single man dressed in pale yellow met them just before Roy was forced to conclude that their guide was a hack and/or that the desert went on forever. The man clasped his hands in that almost Ed-ish way and bowed; their hack-guide slipped down off of his horse-that the bastard could still move after all this made Roy want to cry endlessly foul-and strode over to start discussing the weather and the length of the journey and the amusement of traveling with inexperienced foreigners. He sounded a little too impressed with how well Riza had taken to this very specific sort of torture; Roy was going to have to keep an eye on him.
“Welcome,” the man in yellow said in Amestrian to the party at large as Roy pried his tormented body from the saddle. “And, well, come.”
He looked terribly pleased with himself. And he was sort of devilishly attractive when he looked terribly pleased. And he couldn’t have been much older than Ed, and from the folds of his cross-body robe Roy could see that he was tall and whip-thin and wiry, and…
And Roy really was far enough gone to be sizing up a total stranger as a competitor for Ed’s attention.
It had been much too long a day spent on a goddamn horse to deal with that maturely, so he gave it a tremendous mental shove and tried to walk rather than stagger over and return the bow impeccably.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Brigadier General Mustang?” the young man asked, and that grin-it seemed to be permanent; and it seemed to be mocking Roy, just too lightly to protest. “And the Captain Hawkeye.” Roy hadn’t even heard her footsteps in the sand-their guide was right, of course; she adjusted so smoothly to the new environment that it verged on preternatural. “And the brothers Elric.”
“It’s very nice to meet you,” Alphonse said.
“S’up,” Ed said.
The young man bowed again. “My name is Qiang Yao. Please consider me your humble servant. If you will follow me, just over this ridge is the town of Suzhao, where all of our hospitality will be at your command.”
Roy wasn’t sure quite what sort of hospitality to expect from the borderlands of Xing, and he tried to keep his hopes in check.
As it turned out, he needn’t have bothered.
The bath alone was enough to make him seriously consider becoming an expatriate. The bathtub was almost more like a small well-wide-mouthed and cylindrical and shallow, large enough for him to spread all of his aching limbs without quite touching the heated stones that lined the bottom and set the whole surface to steaming. They’d poured in oils, too; one had to be mint, and one smelled a bit like tangerine, and there was a hint of something floral, and the rest he couldn’t fathom.
The particulars couldn’t have mattered less; the overall effect was one of curling, mingling scents-sharp spices and gentler tones from the fruit and the flowers; it was soothing and refreshing and rejuvenating all at once.
And the soap stung like a bitch in the saddle sores. Roy made a valiant effort to luxuriate in the heat and fragrance anyway-Qiang had said that it was traditional for the most acclaimed individual to take his leisure first; for courtesy’s sake, Roy had attempted to demur, whether or not every jarred cell in his sand-scoured body was wailing We haven’t been clean in days. But then Riza had very subtly nudged him forward with a very subtle elbow to the ribs, and Ed had said “You probably stink the most anyway,” and Roy had remembered that his relative rank and prestige were not exactly an issue for any of the present company. In addition, he really wanted a fucking bath.
When at last it felt like there was only a small castle’s worth of sand clinging to his person, he dragged himself out of the Pool of Wonder and Sanity, wrapped himself in the provided towel, and began to make his way back out to the lounge where he’d left his luggage and therefore his clean clothes.
He hadn’t even made it out of the bathhouse before he’d been waylaid by two slender Xingese girls who pinned him down on a padded table and started kneading at his back.
Roy had had a dream like this once. Except in the dream they hadn’t set more warm, smooth stones on each side of his spine and pressed sharp knuckles into the knots in muscles he hadn’t known he possessed. And it had ended a bit differently, although this experience similarly concluded much too soon.
They still wouldn’t let him leave-when he finally fought for balance upon climbing off of the table, they offered him a pair of pale linen trousers and a dark blue robe, and they sat him down on a painted star within a circle, and in fifteen glowing seconds, the sores were healed.
There was-he thought as he dressed himself and bowed and bowed again and staggered out to the lounge and said “Move” and dropped facedown onto the couch that had previously been occupied by the Elrics-an increasing danger of Roy Mustang deserting the Amestrian military altogether and staying here until he died or ran out of money for massages.
“Huh,” Ed said when a few moments passed and Roy only breathed deeply. “Did they drug you?”
“This is not a chemical high, Fullmetal,” Roy said into the couch cushion. “This is bliss like you have never experienced. This is the new standard for contentment in your life.”
“That sounds like a challenge,” Ed said. “And like they slipped you something.”
Roy managed to raise a hand and point the way he’d come. “Go. That is an order.”
The silence was slightly odd, but Roy couldn’t quite muster the strength to raise his head and look when all of his muscles had turned to beautiful, quivering jelly beneath his softened skin.
“I dunno,” Ed said slowly. “I don’t really-I don’t like people-I don’t like strangers touching me.”
What a wonderful couch this was. “Their names are Bai and Shu. Now you’re acquainted.”
It was strange how Ed’s body language was so pronounced that the air changed when he bristled. “Fuck you, Musta-”
“Brother,” Al cut in, “I’ll go with you. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before-” Oh, for the love of caffeinated beverages; just like that, Roy was thinking about Ed naked, wet, dripping, white towel slipping from his narrow hips. “-and it’ll be nice to watch what they do so I can decide whether I feel up to all of it.”
“Fine,” Ed said. “Thanks, Al. C’mon. General High and Not-So-Mighty is probably gonna end up in a lazy-coma anyway.”
After the door had slammed behind them (and Al had squeaked “Sorry!”), Roy flailed an arm around a little. He succeeded in turning his head on the couch cushion just as an attendant scurried over and bowed.
“He hates needles,” Roy said. He’d learned the Xingese word just in case; he added it and reaped a very gratifying look of perfect comprehension. “Spare the acupuncture, perhaps?”
Another bow; more scurrying; Roy relaxed wholly again and bit back a moan.
“Ah,” Riza said. The nearest armchair creaked as she sat. One of several holsters did not creak as she drew one of the four firearms on her person and quite unnecessarily checked the ammunition.
“Am I that obvious?” Roy asked in the clearest possible mumble.
“I’m afraid so, sir.”
“So Alphonse knew before I did, and Ed hasn’t the foggiest hint of a clue?”
“That would be my guess.”
“Well,” Roy said, “shit.”
He’s getting close-he’s getting tantalizingly close-he’s getting closer-and then his feet touch ground.
He almost doesn’t believe it at first. It was starting to feel like he’d be descending forever-like he’d hang in limbo for the rest of his life, hand over hand over hand until his wrists gave out, and he plummeted.
He turns. He blinks. He steadies himself with one hand on the wall, not that he ever wants to touch that thing again.
“That,” Ed says, “is the slowest I have ever seen anyone flee for their life.”
“Wait until you get old,” Roy says. “You’ll crawl onto my doorstep crying for forgiveness for all of the terrible things you’ve said to me.”
Ed snickers, claps, touches the cable, and has it coiled around his right forearm by the time Roy’s stopped shielding his eyes. “Good damn luck getting me to crawl to you for anything, Mustang.”
Across the floor-no, across the bed-Roy doesn’t care where; doesn’t care why, though he has his preferences-bare back, shoulders rolling, hair draping into his eyes, the sheets pooling before his knees, the mattress dimpling under the weight of his hands as he moves like a cat, and his eyes are so hungry-
There really isn’t time to think about that.
Roy looks back at the tower. He thinks he recalls doors once existing where there is now a stretch of blank wall decorated with transmutation marks.
“We’ll see,” he says. “Shall we go?”
Ed hefts the coil of rope up onto his left shoulder-to balance, perhaps? It’s a wonder his spine hasn’t contorted with the weight of his automail over ti…
His spine. Roy would lick his spine, taste the bulb of every vertebra-
“Need to figure out where the fuck we’re going before we go,” Ed says.
Roy looks around and focuses on the trees this time, rather than on his dangling-from-the-rope height relative to them. “I’m not familiar with this building as a landmark, but most of the literature says that the Hua Wei consider Lin Tu Forest one of their sacred spaces. It’s one of the oldest and best-preserved pieces of wilderness in the region, in large part because they defend it so viciously, despite its being located only thirty miles east of the capital.” When he stops staring at the trees, Ed is staring at him. “What?” He almost adds Is there something on my face? before remembering that he’s covered in grime and blood, which would make that a fairly stupid question.
“It’s really weird,” Ed says, “how you can take a beating like that, and then climb down all goddamn-violet-slow, and I know you haven’t eaten in, like, two days either… and you still talk like a textbook.”
“I take international relations very seriously,” Roy says. He does not say The only thing I take more seriously are carnal relations.
Ed eyes him. “Right. Well…” He swivels on his metal heel, glancing at the angle of the sun and the lichen on the trees, and then starts off at more of a stomp than really a stride. “Westward ho.”
Roy is so damn tired he could lie down and fall asleep on gravel, but even now he’d follow that swinging gold ponytail anywhere.
“Quite,” he says, and they’re on their way.
It took another three days of travel to reach the capital-but at least the second leg took place largely in covered carts and carriages, with frequent stops for food and stretching. It was a different world than the desert, and Roy found this world much more amenable.
“If we actually get there before we all die of old age,” Ed said the final afternoon, laid out bonelessly on the carriage seat opposite Roy and Riza, his head in Alphonse’s lap, “I’m gonna punch Ling in the face. Right-handed. You just watch me.”
Roy watched Riza watching out the window, which was greatly preferable to imagining his and Alphonse’s positions switched so that he could drag his fingers through Ed’s hair. “That will be an excellent way to thank him for the considerable resources he’s expended to facilitate our comfort.”
Ed scowled. “He wouldn’t have to ‘facilitate our comfort’ if he hadn’t demanded we haul our asses all the way out here. Whose side are you on, anyway?”
“My own,” Roy said. “As always.”
“Fine,” Ed said. “You can just stay over on your side while I beat the crap out of Ling.”
“Standing by while you decked the emperor of Xing would be a bit detrimental to my foreign policy plans.”
“Then act like you’re trying to help him, and I’ll deck you, too. It’ll look real heroic.”
Roy set an elbow on the windowsill and looked out at the houses set into the hills-pale spots in the verdure like raindrops caught in the warm yellow light. “If I have to pull rank to prevent you from instigating a diplomatic catastrophe, I will. If I have to tie you to a pillar outside the palace to prevent you from instigating a diplomatic catastrophe, I can do that, too.”
He shouldn’t have gone there even as a hyperbolic hypothetical, but it was too late to take it back.
“None of that will be necessary,” Alphonse said, patting Ed’s shoulder. “Brother knows that Lan Fan will humiliate him thoroughly again if he tries to do anything untoward to Ling.”
“I won that fight, you traitor,” Ed said. “Despite the fact that she cheated with a grenade and ninja skills and secretly being a girl.”
“We’re on her territory now,” Alphonse said. “You’re too smart to try anything.”
Ed glared up at him, rather unconvincingly. “I hate it when you make it so that I either have to agree with you or announce that I’m stupid.”
Alphonse grinned.
And, naturally, was right.
Roy hadn’t spent much time with Ling-spare hours, really, in the safe house and the forest around it, most of which had been spent tenaciously fighting for their lives, not making conversation. It had been enough time to take in a young man who reminded him of Ed and of himself: poised, quick, sharp-eyed, smart-mouthed, calculating, and mischievous. Very likely that was why Ling had riled Ed so easily and with so much gusto: the young then-prince would clearly make either a powerful ally or a legitimate threat, and he was determined to provoke Ed as much as possible while they sorted out which it was.
The next time Roy had encountered him, he had been a homunculus, and Roy hadn’t been able to see him in any case.
This time, the boy was a king.
Roy hardly approved of monarchy for obvious reasons, but he could appreciate that Xing was a vastly different country with a vastly different history and a vastly different way of life. Xing had barely even brushed shoulders with Amestris over the centuries while Xerxes had worn away between them; if Xing’s unique and storied history had selected feudalism as its preferred method of rule-and, more significantly, if feudalism was working-then Roy was in no position to pass judgment. He knew government in Amestris from the inside out. In Xing, he was a stranger. He was a tourist. He was a mote of dust set against this nation’s antiquity.
Qiang had ensured that they were all dressed finely and traditionally, which lent some credibility to the three shocks of yellow hair that the Yao clan’s current representative was ushering into the emperor’s palace. For all that Roy blended in marginally better than his captain and the last stock of Xerxes, he could still feel his skin prickling with the weight of other people’s eyes as Qiang quite cheerfully led them up an endless set of stairs and into an entrance hall like an opera house. There were eyes everywhere-tapestry eyes in impossibly fine thread; eyes of statues and carvings fixed unblinking on his back; eyes sharply outlined in red and black kohl, half-hidden by careful swoops of inky hair or ornate sleeves or open fans. The emperor of Xing knew how to make an impression.
Roy glanced at Riza to his right as they walked the endless thick carpet towards a staggeringly regal throne. Anyone who had not been observing the nuances of her shoulders for over a decade would not recognize their tightness-although whether it was in answer to the challenge, in preparation for a fight, or because the holsters didn’t sit quite right under her borrowed raiment Roy couldn’t determine from a single look.
He slanted his gaze back at Ed and Alphonse. The younger Elric looked positively delighted-like his birthday had come early and coincided with the solstice, and a storm had given way to a pair of rainbows just as all of his friends arrived to shower him with gifts. He was trying to look at everything, and his eyes were so bright and his smile so wide that Roy couldn’t help wondering if, in a life of his own choosing, he would have become nomadic voluntarily.
And Ed… looked like he was walking to the gallows.
Roy faced front, clearing and re-clearing his expression of anything other than calmness tempered with appropriate awe and underpinned by unshakable dignity. It was a reasonably involved poker face; it required a bit of concentration. But it didn’t need enough to stop him thinking.
What was Ed afraid of? Actually, that was a stupid rhetorical question to himself inside his head; the only thing Edward Elric was afraid of was losing people close to him. Ed had explored every shade and nuance of wariness, circumspection, anxiety, sullenness, and rage, but fear he reserved for the greatest of personal tragedies-of which, of course, he’d had his share.
What, then, had piqued Ed’s nerves enough to make him overcompensate with that hunched-shouldered glower?
Did this have something to do with that bizarre statement about long-distance friendships? Roy hadn’t had a chance at the time to analyze the absurdity of it; Ed was a dynamo, and his power was most concentrated up close. He was a naked star in the night, down to the inescapable drag of his gravity and the likelihood of incineration if you gave in to it.
Then again, Roy couldn’t exactly count himself one of Ed’s friends. An ally, yes; a mentor, if you tilted your head just the right way; a collaborator and a conspirator and a pain in the ass, certainly. Far from a friend. It was-strange, and slightly destabilizing, to think so suddenly that there was a large portion of Ed’s life and heart and universe to which Roy had no access simply because of the terms and circumstances of their acquaintance. There were things in the way. He was cut off, for someone’s safety, for both of theirs, perhaps. Given Ed’s habit of all-or-nothing ultimatums in every aspect of his existence, Roy didn’t imagine that would ever change.
And now Brigadier General Roy Mustang of the Amestrian Military was standing in front of the emperor of Xing, trying to envision a world where he and Ed were perfect strangers who passed in the street, or both reached for a newspaper, or collided in a cafe. Ed spilled his coffee all down the front of Roy’s uniform, and Roy very nearly lit him on fire right then and there, except that then he saw Ed’s eyes and couldn’t seem to locate his tongue, let alone a scathing reprimand to utter with it.
Mustang, Roy’s internal Führer monologue said slowly, you are hereby ordered not to fuck this up like an unbelievable idiot.
Roy swallowed. Sir.
He looked up at the boy on the throne, met the trace of amusement in the dark eyes, and bowed.
Ling’s headpiece alone looked like it weighed more than Alphonse, and Roy didn’t even want to think about the robes. Nonetheless, the moment he blinked, Ling had bounded off of the chair and was flinging both arms around Ed and pounding him on the back.
“I’d somehow forgotten how much I missed your frowny face!” the emperor of Xing was saying warmly. “Don’t make me pinch your cheek to get a smile, Ed; you know I will!” He gripped Ed’s shoulders, grinning borderline-maniacally, and turned to Alphonse. Somehow his eyes lit up even more. “Look at you!” Roy blinked again, and Ling was pumping Al’s hand. “You should give that brother of yours some growing lessons!”
“He should whaaaaaat?”
At least now Ed was himself again.
[Part I, Chapter 2]
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Characters/Pairing: Roy/Ed, featuring Al/cats and Hawkeye/BAMFery (with past Ling/Ed and implied Al/Winry)
Rating: R (NC-17 by the standards of people who have standards)
Word Count: 53,700 (9,000 this chapter)
Warnings: language and more language, violence/mild gore, explicit sex, major spoilers for Brotherhood
Summary: Conceptually, attending Emperor Ling's coronation celebration is simple enough. In practice, it involves far too much trekking, yearning, bleeding, burning, hoping, running, and dodging of diplomatic catastrophes for Roy's tastes.
Author's Note: I… don't even know where to start with this damn thing. XD Okay, that's a lie: I want to start by groveling at the feet of the inimitable bob_fish, who not only provided the breathtaking art that inspired this thing to spiral out of control in the first place, but who also gave the very rough draft an absolutely invaluable beta read and did an unbelievably fabulous extra illustration. *___* eltea gave it a fantastic gamma read, because I am spoiled rotten - both of you get all of my ♥s forever. Any and all remaining issues (and they are legion) are entirely due to the fact that I am frazzled, IRL!swamped, and just generally a crappy writer. :D This story had some very promising ambitions, a few of which it lived up to, many of which it fell short of… Please enjoy with several grains of salt. ♥; Aaaaaaand… [clicky for the spoilery circumstances of the AU!]I totally forgot to spell this out in the fic: Hoho made the trade for Al's body, which means Ed still has his alchemy and the automail arm. (And his incredibly foul mouth, but that's a given.)
DIPLOMATIC EXCURSIONS AND OTHER WAYS TO DIE
PART I: XING
Chapter 1
When they’ve been dragged up to the highest room and hurled on the floor, and the door has been slammed, and they’ve both levered themselves awkwardly up to sit despite the impressive iron stocks around their wrists, Ed scoots backwards unabashedly until his spine hits Roy’s and says, “This is your fault.”
Roy can feel Ed’s heartbeat through both of their skins, both of their muscles; he can feel the rhythm settling into his bones. “And how, exactly, have you arrived at that fine and well-researched concl-”
“Because I wanted to stay with Al and Captain Hawkeye and Ling’s guy, but no, you said we’d get there faster if we just popped off and set out by ourselves-”
Roy does not say I have not had a moment alone with you since before we stepped onto the first train, and parts of me I did not know could dry out are parched and cracking.
He does not say I very much needed to usher you up hills and ladders ahead of me so that I could gaze longingly at your beautiful ass without commentary.
He does not say The way ‘Ling’s guy’ looks at you makes my stomach acid boil, and the fumes were asphyxiating me.
He clears his throat. “Surely you were every bit as weary as I was of the navigational incompetence.”
It’s a boring lie, but Ed is too wholly guileless with those he trusts to anticipate an ulterior motive. It also doesn’t hurt that he’s barely even listening.
“-so when we get back, I’m telling Al to kick your ass for this.”
Roy’s jaw is aching with what is going to be a terribly unsightly new bruise, and his bottom lip is split towards the right side. He smiles anyway, simply because Edward Elric lacks the capacity for doubt.
“When we get back,” he says, “that sounds fair.”
If they get back, Ed will go on looking about himself wide-eyed and smiling and fascinated and free, and Roy will wonder just how long he has left. Someday soon Ed is going to realize that there’s nothing tethering him in the kennel anymore, and when that day comes, he will be over the fence and gone. It’s funny, in an awful kind of way, that the world is not big enough to hold the smallest miracle Roy has ever touched.
…it’s the dehydration. Surely it’s the dehydration. Intoxication makes him bitter, and dehydration makes him melodramatic.
Damn his weak, sad little soul. He tilts his head back a fraction-not enough to brush Ed’s; that might just set him off and start him babbling out everything that’s swirling in his chest.
But then he squints. And then he makes out the mark scrawled on the ceiling.
“Wait,” he says.
“Nah,” Ed says. “I was just thinking of jumping up and throwing myself out the window, thanks.”
“This building,” Roy says, straining to look harder, but he must be right, “the people we’re dealing with-this is the Hua Wei.”
Silence. For a moment Roy is almost stupid enough to try to crane his neck around to see Ed’s face.
“The Hua Wei,” he says again. “They’re a fringe group. Different religion, speak a different dialect, don’t believe in empire as a method of government.”
“Huh,” Ed says. “How do you know all that stuff?”
“Because when I heard we were going to Xing,” Roy says, “I researched. Honestly, with all of the reading you do, it is incomprehensible to me that there’s anything you don’t kn-”
“You can’t research a country,” Ed says. “Not in any way that matters-you can’t find out what people are like from a book, and the politics are always changing, and you never know what the air’s like until you’re breathing it. Whereas alkahestry-that shit I researched. That’s just fact. And hang on, how do you even know?”
Roy has to raise both hands and the stocks between them in order to point. “It’s written up there.”
“Hang on,” Ed says. “You can read fucking Xingese?”
“A bit,” Roy says, which is understating matters somewhat. “The written characters are more or less consistent throughout the country, but the dialects vary broadly. My mother spoke one of the northern variants, but I learned imperial Xingese.”
“First of all,” Ed says, “what the fuck?”
“I’m in a position of diplomatic power, Fullmetal; it was only logical to brush up once Xingese royalty started pouring into Central Ci-”
“Second of all,” Ed says, “what the fuck? You mean you’ve been making Ling and everybody talk to you in Amestrian this whole time without them knowing you can understand what they say to each other?”
Roy opens his mouth and then closes it. There is a pause.
“You bastard,” Ed says-but if Roy’s not mistaken, there’s a tone of admiration to it.
“I prefer the term ‘strategist’,” Roy says. “All right, let’s… see…”
“See what?”
“You are insufferable when you’re bored.”
“Al switches between ‘intolerable’, ‘infuriating’, and ‘demonic’, but I guess ‘insufferable’ works too.”
Roy deems that rising to that is unwise and, with a great deal of difficulty and some highly undignified grunting and gritting of teeth, plants one of his fettered hands on the dusty floor and levers himself up to his knees. The balance is all wrong, and it’s hard to concentrate through the throbbing in his head, but he tries to put a mental wall between himself and the myriad distractions as he bends and starts dragging the first two fingers of his right hand through the dust.
Ed shifts, and Roy can feel the weight of his gaze. “What are you doing? That’s not an array. And swords made of dust really suck; I’ve tried that.”
“It’s the pictogram for ‘peace’,” Roy says. “Although technically I believe it’s more accurately translated as ‘non-hostility’-‘truce’, I suppose. And this…” He tries to keep his lines sharp and graceful, which is a bit of a challenge when it feels like he’s scraping the skin off of his fingertips, and his instinct is to jerk his hand away. “…means ‘talk’-the noun, like ‘conversation’. Like ‘parley’.”
Ed is quiet for a moment. Roy doesn’t quite dare to glance back. “You really think they’re gonna buy that?”
“It can’t hurt to try,” Roy says-which of course is a lie, but a lie that’s pleasant and useful.
“Okay,” Ed says as Roy sits back, attempting to figure out how to wipe his fingers on his trouser leg around the obstructive stocks. “Now what?”
“Now we wait.”
“Are your plans always this shitty?”
“Usually.”
He wishes he could say it started here in Xing. He wishes he could say it started at the train station, moments before their departure, when Ed turned and bared his face to the first swell of dawn above the skyline, and the feeble light struck sparks in his hair, and Roy’s stomach dropped out. He wishes he could say it started at Ed’s birthday party, when the newly-minted seventeen-year-old watched Roy ostentatiously lighting candles sans array, rolled his eyes, huffed a sigh, and then favored his commander with one glimpse of a soft and almost affectionate smile.
But it started on the Promised Day. It started when Roy burst into the room where he’d incinerated the homunculus Lust-heart racing, thoughts roiling, adrenaline electric in his veins-and found it full of all-new monsters; with Riza at his heels and his fingers poised, he felt adequate to the task, at least. It started when the grotesque figures shifted aside, and Ed spun to face the door, every line of his body burning with the fight. It started when Ed’s eyes found Roy’s, and the viciousness melted instantaneously into relief and a fragment of something like delight, and a part of Roy whispered, That. That is what I want.
There wasn’t time to contemplate it before the deluge, but the words had crystallized, and they couldn’t be broken apart.
After the absolute consumption of the rage when Envy fell into his grasp-Envy, the worm that had murdered the best man Roy had ever met; the sharp-toothed slug that had pried away the cleanest and kindest and safest thing in Roy’s life and smiled dashing it to the ground-there was no room for anything but the terror for Riza, and then there was the sudden and impenetrable darkness. And then there was the end of it, of all of it-skittering and stumbling down along a trajectory he couldn’t see or slow or influence but for hurling flame into the dark. And then there was the promise of light, of distinction, of the power of observation restored, never again to be taken for granted.
And then there was time to wonder just how long it had been since Fullmetal had been a child.
It was like waking from a nightmare-or a drunken blackout, but Roy was going to stick with the nobler simile for as long as he could get away with it-when the bandages fell away, and their absence made a difference. The room came into focus; the ambient whiteness almost blinded him again; Riza was at his elbow, grinning, and had she always been that beautiful?
It was bizarre and kind of unsettling to need to have events that he had participated in described to him, but nothing seemed terribly important now, weighed against how staggeringly fortunate they’d been. There had been casualties, yes, but no cataclysm. Whatever happened from here, Roy would rest in the knowledge that he was quite possibly the luckiest man alive.
When Fullmetal arrived-dragging his feet, reluctant to be anywhere but Alphonse’s bedside-Roy ordered him to take a full month’s leave. There were a number of excellent reasons that the Fullmetal Alchemist should take a break: someone would need to care for Alphonse constantly; until Miss Rockbell could build a new arm from scratch and stop beating the boy with a wrench for his recklessness, he was oh-so-literally short-handed anyway; he’d just lost his father to the rule of exchange that governed every aspect of his life.
It was an entirely logical decision. And Roy wouldn’t have to look at him with new eyes and fight the urge to marvel.
Two weeks later, Ed stormed into Roy’s office with a shining replacement arm and slammed his watch down on Roy’s desk.
It seemed terribly typical for him to be sweeping out of the military the same way he burst in-eyes blazing, shoulders squared, with the braid slung over his shoulder.
And Roy thought, I will write you sardonic letters; I will demand that you come out for drinks when ‘the team’ misses your vitality; I will stop myself just before I start standing under your bedroom window to watch you comb out your hair and was terrified by his conviction.
“To hell with your leave,” Ed said. “Give me something to do.”
Roy choked on ‘While I can’t in good conscience say that your service was exemplary, it was nonetheless astonishingly excellent in a unique and more or less commendable way’. “Y-what?”
Ed heaved a histrionic sigh. “Al’s already trained his cat to bring him the newspaper-don’t ask me how-and I’ve read every book in the house at least twice, and Al throws shit at me when I pace around the living room, and the only other people I know are all here, and I’m going insane. So give me something. I don’t even care what.”
Roy knew it was a stopgap measure at best-a very small dam against a very large river-but he set Major Elric mostly to researching. If Roy kept him occupied in the libraries and doing odd jobs around the city, Ed was close to his brother, and he was theoretically staying out of trouble. One day the dam would crumble, but perhaps…perhaps by then Roy would have dug a canal. Perhaps Roy would have directed the sheer power of that current away from himself, and perhaps he would not drown.
Thus it was that Roy Mustang treaded water for a year. For a year, Ed investigated minor crimes in the city and threatened small-time miscreants with increasingly outlandish punishments; for a year, Ed was unsettlingly obedient and quietly content; for a year, Ed changed out the picture of Alphonse on his desk (which he used as a chair and a filing cabinet) every time his restored brother gained a few more pounds. For a year, Roy handed him distractions and did not touch him; for a year, Roy let him disdain uniforms not because the waistcoat became him so breathtakingly but because it ‘couldn’t hurt to have a plainclothes major’; for a year, Roy smiled faintly when Edward Elric’s back was turned. For a year, he kept both of them safe from each other and from themselves, and Ed was none the wiser.
And then came the letter on fine parchment that reeked of sandalwood.
“What are they saying?” Ed mutters.
“I can’t understand them,” Roy says. He’s trying to focus on the intonations and expressions instead of on the warmth of Ed’s left arm brushing his right. “Regional dialects aren’t like accents, where the pronunciation only changes marginally; they’re drastically different.”
“Could you be any more useless?” Ed asks.
“I suppose if I gave it my best effort and truly believed in myse-”
“Oh, shut up.”
Before they can get any more high-quality bickering in, the discussion above them stops. The men in the coarse robes set their dark eyes on Roy, who holds his breath and straightens his spine and tries to project calm rationality without looking weak.
He earns a sharp knee to the face for his trouble.
Reading up, Roy thought the Hua Wei were enthralling. He is currently revising his opinion of them.
At least they know how to make an exit, though; the robes swish and snap and churn up the dust.
Ed scoots over and sets his mismatched hands against Roy’s chest to steady him-as much as the stocks allow-when Roy sits up and sways a bit. Ed leans in too close to examine Roy’s petulantly-bleeding nose, and Roy narrowly manages not to gasp and choke and spray blood all over the boy’s distressingly arresting face.
“It’s not broken,” Ed says. “Which is a good thing; I don’t think you could stand to get much uglier.”
“I beg your pardon,” Roy says.
Ed grins. This close, pinioned, with the cool fingers and the warm ones pressing into his chest, Roy almost has to look away. “Good, I don’t think there’s any head trauma. Damn, that was a shitty plan.”
“Thank you for the revelatory wisdom of your hindsight.” Roy tries to raise his own hands to negotiate wiping his nose around the stocks, and there is a moment of frozen awkwardness before Ed withdraws. Then Roy is smearing blood all over his face and hands, and this is familiar territory. “Your turn to generate unspeakable brilliance, then.”
“I’m good for that,” Ed says.
“I’m aware,” Roy says.
Ed looks at Roy’s filthy hands, and then at his slightly-less-filthy ones. He flexes his fingers. And then the corners of his lips curl. “I think I have an idea.”
Roy is not sure he likes the sound of that.
“Just when you think a guy can’t get any more arrogant,” Ed said from his sprawl on the couch with his hands behind his head, “he gets to be emperor of a giant country, and you’re royally fucked.”
“Language,” Roy said disinterestedly, passing a signed report back to Riza.
“Oh, do forgive me, sir. He gets to be emperor, and you are magisterially fornicated with.”
“Don’t be crude, Brother,” Alphonse said, and Roy could have kissed him. With Ed in obliteration range, he would not have survived the endeavor, but the intention stood.
“I don’t see why we have to go,” Ed said, scrubbing at his eyes with his flesh hand. “Al’s still not really up for that kind of traveling, and you’re within spitting distance of your promotion, and it’s not like we’re Xingese citizens, so what the hell do we care about Ling’s big, fancy, I’m-the-emperor-now-ha-ha-you-peons party?”
Roy folded his hands and waited until Ed glanced over at him. “It’s the diplomatic opportunity of a lifetime, Fullmetal.”
“If these are the kinds of opportunities you live for,” Ed said, “your life must suck.”
“Brother,” Al said, and the two syllables conveyed encyclopedias of exasperation.
“Think about it,” Roy said. It was the only challenge Ed never turned down. “He has an informal allegiance with a ranking member of the Amestrian military-that is, you-and is extending that connection to an individual who may very well dictate foreign policy within a matter of years-that is, me.”
“At which point you get your five hundred cens back,” Ed said. “So why don’t you go to his stupid party? I’ll stay here and not bust my ass catching trains and sweating out my own weight in the desert.”
“You’re the liaison,” Roy said. “You are my ticket to an alliance that none of my competitors will ever be able to touch. Besides, isn’t he your friend?”
“I’m sick of being your ticket,” Ed muttered. “And I’m a better friend when I’m long-distance, not that it’s any of your damn business. And do you even know how far Xing is? And how different it is? We can’t just wander over and say ‘hi’ and start redeeming imperial approval, you know.”
“I know,” Roy said-mildly, despite how startling it always was when Ed’s maturity stabbed straight through his compulsive rejection of authority. “I did actually think this through. It’s a lot of time for the captain and myself to be away, but I believe that the benefits of becoming an individual to the primary power in Xing-not just a title and a name-will be more than worth the effort.”
“Worth it for you, maybe,” Ed said. “Are you looking at the larger resource exchange here?”
“Yes.”
Ed’s frown deepened into a scowl. “Are you looking at what a huge pain in my ass this is gonna be?”
Roy smiled thinly. “And here I thought you would be grateful for a reprieve from all of the menial labor.”
“You talk like this is a vacation,” Ed said. “This is not going to be a vacation.”
“But it’s a holiday in Xing,” Roy said.
Even Riza sighed at that wordplay.
“This is a little experimental,” Ed says. “And by that I mean that no one’s ever done it, and a million things could go wrong, and there’s a very minor possibility that we could die.”
“Wonderful,” Roy says.
“However,” Ed says, “if we’re gonna get out of here, we should try it before you lose any more blood and end up totally useless, and I’m pretty sure I’ve figured it out in theory.”
“You always know exactly how to reassure my troubled heart,” Roy says.
“Just trust me,” Ed says. “I am a genius.”
“I’m aware of that.” Roy shifts forward and, after a bit of ungainly maneuvering, manages to sit with his legs crossed, facing the boy who may momentarily lead him to his doom. “If you weren’t, I’m fairly sure we’d both be dead by now.”
Ed attempts-unsuccessfully-to suppress a grin. “You better dial back the optimism, General, or I’m gonna have to start calling you a ‘Roy of sunshine’.”
“You wouldn’t,” Roy says.
“I would,” Ed says.
“Then I suppose I’ll have to trust you,” Roy says.
Ed’s grin widens. He hefts the stocks around his wrists, raises his arms, and opens both his hands.
Roy takes a deep breath, sets his jaw, and presses his filthy palms to Ed’s.
He had anticipated something-a rush of energy, a tingle of power.
It isn’t a tingle. It’s a tidal wave.
He jerks away so violently that he loses his balance and tumbles backwards onto the unforgiving floor. He can just barely brace himself on his elbows with the stocks obstructing his movement, so it’s from an embarrassed sprawl that he stares up at Ed in amazement and a little bit of fear.
“All the time,” he says. “You keep that in you all the time.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Ed says a little too quickly, his eyes a little too sharp. “Part of it-I mean, probably not a whole half, because you’re so useless-but a lot of it’s yours. That’s how it works. Or that’s how I theorized it’d work.”
“I’ve only dabbled in hands-free alchemy,” Roy says. “I’ve practiced my array extensively, and after some thought I fixed the wobbling leg of my desk in the office. I can’t control that kind of power, Ed.”
“You don’t have to,” Ed says, working his way rapidly from startlement to a scowl to a glower. “I’ll do it, and I’ll work out the array-you just sit still and think about the components of iron and let me run it through you. It’s just closing the circuit, okay? And then the lightbulb goes on. Simple.”
“Nothing is ever simple with you,” Roy says.
“Bullshit,” Ed says. “I’m easy.”
Roy pauses.
Ed blinks.
“Oh, fuck you,” he says. “Sit up and stop being such a goddamn violet, and I’ll get us out of here.”
“Such a what?” Roy asks, struggling to follow the part of those instructions that made a lick of sense. If nothing else, the combination of malnourishment and endless shackled sit-ups will probably help to make up for all of the addictively delicious mooncakes he snuck during the ceremonies.
“Violet,” Ed is saying. “It’s-a thing we used to say at home. Y’know, like ‘shrinking violet’. Because they’re so flimsy and shit. Some asshole said it to Al at school once, and I punched him and got suspended. Point is, you’re being one. C’mon, we don’t have all day.”
“I think violets are lovely,” Roy says as he works his way upright at last, steels himself, and offers his hands.
“I’ll bet you do,” Ed says, and claps his hands to Roy’s.
The swell of pure and absolute potential almost bowls him over again, but this time he leans into it instead of away. Ed’s eyes light, and their joined hands spark, and every ounce of Roy’s blood that didn’t dribble out his nose starts to surge and sing. He tries-he tries-to think of nothing but pale light and clear lines and iron, iron, iron; molecules of metal that oxygenate red-
It’s difficult to think of anything but how breathtaking Ed is in his element.
But that makes it easier, somehow, to feed the power back to him, to circulate it, to guide the raging current from Ed’s warm hand through the center of his own chest and back out into the cold-elegant automail, because Roy will give him everything if he’ll just keep looking like that-
Ed’s eyes gleam, and he grins wildly-heedless, flushed-and gasps out, “Oh, hell, yes,” and then-
-peels his palms away from Roy’s and flattens them on the front of the stocks.
The light is briefly blinding, and then chunks of iron are raining into Roy’s lap.
A rather sizable one hits him in a very unfortunate place.
Roy cringes despite the way it makes his split lip sting-and then he cringes because it makes the split lip sting; focusing on that pain is so, so much better than the alternative.
“You could have broken the lock,” he grits out.
Ed blinks. “Oh. Huh. Guess so.” He watches blankly as Roy curls up around himself a little and then begins feebly massaging at his wrists. “Sorry.”
“Never mind,” Roy manages. “It’s that sort of a day.” He tries to meet Ed’s gaze and finds it hazy. “Are you… all right?”
Ed looks down at his shackled hands. “Yeah. I just… I didn’t think it’d feel like that.”
Roy hesitates. “Like what?”
“Good,” Ed says. “Really, really… good.” He swallows. Several wisps of hair have escaped from his ponytail to flirt with his throat. “It’s just… I mean, I can’t help thinking, sometimes, that if I just had enough power, I could fix everything. I could make everything great, make it the way I wanted it, set everything right. And then I realize that’s probably what the homunculus thought he was doing, at the start.”
“If you can recognize the danger of power,” Roy says, “you’re already safe from your ambitions.”
Ed turns a wry gaze on him. “You’re one to talk. How long ’til the Royvolution?”
Roy lets the smirk unfurl slowly. “Don’t get short with me-or can’t you help it?”
Ed growls in the back of his throat, and Roy forgets the pain for a moment as his groin throbs for a different reason.
Before Roy can despair too much, Ed shoves his own bound, mismatched hands forward. “Equivalent goddamn exchange, Mustang; let me out.”
“So demanding,” Roy says. He presses his palms together, focuses intently on decomposition, leans forward, and touches the lock on Ed’s stocks.
“Motherfucker,” Ed says, apparently just in general, as he throws them open, tosses them aside, and starts kneading at his left wrist with his metal fingers. “Ow. Damn it.”
That can’t be helping matters; Roy reaches for his arm. “Let me-”
“C’mon,” Ed says, leaping to his feet. Some days Roy swears the boy is made of elastic and sheer pigheadedness. Ed crosses to one of the windows, circling his left wrist. “How high up are w… aw, shit. I officially hate these guys.”
“Officially?” Roy says, clambering to his feet with a great deal less gusto. “I’ll make sure to have it noted in your file.”
“Shut up,” Ed says, leaning out. The wind catches his hair; Roy’s stomach somersaults less-than-gracefully. “So… how do you feel about rappelling without a harness?”
Roy starts collecting the pieces of the stocks so that they can be reconstructed into cord. “I imagine you probably don’t care how I feel about it as long as I hush up and do it.”
Ed flashes him a terrible, terrible grin.
By the third day of caravanning through the desert, Roy had a dehydration headache, several saddle sores, and a fierce desire to kill most of his companions.
“Hey, Colonel-I mean, Brigadier General-International Relations,” Ed said. “I expect you to put a fucking railroad here the second we get back.”
“Do I look like I’m enjoying this?” Roy asked.
Ed assessed him, eyes bright in the shadow of his cloak. Roy had to admit that they were obscenely lucky the previous emperor had elected to die in the dead of winter; the nights were indescribably cold, but at least no one had passed out from heatstroke. They’d all nonetheless been advised to keep their hoods up against the vicious combination of wind and sand and sun.
“You always enjoy other people’s pain,” Ed decided.
Alphonse stretched his slender arms above his head. “I’m sorry, Brigadier General; Brother’s acting childish because he didn’t sleep well last night.”
“It’s fine,” Roy said, which was not true and never had been and likely never would be. Rationally, he knew that Ed meant those sorts of jibes in jest, but it was still difficult to hear himself accused of sadism by the one person who honestly seemed to believe that he wasn’t monstrous.
“Sir,” Riza said in as much of an undertone as equine travel allowed, “think of the hot bath waiting for you when we arrive.”
Roy made a genuine effort to do so-except that he was still thinking about Ed, and the two thoughts converged, and then he was thinking of Ed in a hot bath, lounging against the side, surrounded by pearly bubbles and wreathed in steam, hair soaked and wet skin gleaming, setting a smoldering gaze on Roy and purring, If you don’t hurry up, it’ll be cold before we’re done.
As Roy discovered, there were few things in the world less enjoyable than trying to combat an erection while riding a horse.
Whether or not Ed cares, Roy feels that rappelling without a harness is fucking terrifying.
“Man up!” Ed shouts from the ground, which looks very, very, very distant and very, very, very hard.
Roy needs to focus on the facts. It is a fact that this transmutation-marked cord supported the weight of Ed including automail and saw him safely down. It is a fact that the wind is buffeting Roy’s body, but not so vigorously that he’s losing his grip. It is a fact that, despite the multiple blows to the head and the blood loss, he has not yet felt his consciousness skittering away from him, ergo the medical likelihood is that he won’t black out with fifty feet of open air remaining.
It is a fact that he can do this. It is a fact that he really ought to, in a hurry, if he wants to get out of this godforsaken place alive. It is a fact that Ed is waiting for him at the bottom.
Clearly, then, this is one of those occasions that calls on his deepest reserves of willpower. That’s all it is: one more test of will; one more bauble on the endless chain; one more footprint to press into the muddied ground; one more rung on the ladder he’s clung to since he was barely old enough to understand his own insignificance. And he’s going to get through it one gesture at a time-hand over hand over sore and dirt-and-blood-streaked hand.
He needs to think of anything but the gaping openness below him, yawning hungrily, waiting for him-waiting for the littlest loss of traction, the slightest slip. He ought to give Ed some credit; this rope is really rather elegant for something alchemically thrown together from bits and pieces of iron. Very thin, very even, very strong. So strong. Strong enough to hold him; all he has to do is hold on.
All he has to do is hold on, bracing the soles of his feet against the crunching, pockmarked stones of the tower wall. All he has to do is dig his toes into the crumbling mortar and release one hand and then clasp it around the rope a little lower; and then again; and then again. Two inches at a time; that’s all it takes. Hand over hand over hand over hand.
Damn it, he’s so exhausted. He knows it’s only going to hit him harder when-if, if, if-they dart off to safety; the adrenaline is still shimmering through his whole body, and he’s giddy with it, pulsating, vibrant, bright. If he falls, he dies; isn’t that delightfully simple? Life hasn’t been this black and white for years. If he falls, he splatters to pulp at Ed’s feet-and hasn’t the poor young man been through enough? Roy had better not fall. There’s so much left to do. He’d better keep holding tight, one hand cramping around the cold metal rope, and then the other, and then the first again. He’d better keep forcing his fingers to curl until they ache. He’d better keep letting the friction scald his palms every time he scrabbles to nudge his toes into a niche in the wall. He’d better keep living, whatever it takes.
It’s funny how alike he and Ed are when it comes to this strange inner tempest of self-loathing and determination and guilt. It’s funny how they’ve both deliberately set their standards for atonement far out of their reach, and the impossibility is the very thing that drives them. It’s funny how they fight like a pair of feral cats, when at the core they see perfectly eye-to-eye.
Figuratively, anyway; literally, Ed has to look up.
Perhaps… that’s the thing. Perhaps they’re staring each other in the face, and that’s why they step on each other’s toes.
Roy could do with a new set of toes in any case; he’s abusing the current model. His hands have started to shake when they’re not clasped around the cable, and his shoulders are burning, and the race of his blood highlights every last little wound he’s collected in the past two days; his jaw and his lip and his biceps and his sinuses and his spine and his feet all trill and pound to the rhythm of his heartbeat.
He can’t look down; his whole skull will swing sideways, and he’ll panic. He looks at the wall, and then he looks outward, to the left. He’s lower than the treetops now. He might even survive if he fell from this distance, depending on how he landed. He’s almost there.
Everything throbs. Surely he’s not too old for this?
“Don’t be such a violet!” Ed is shouting, which is stupid; they can’t afford to alert the Hua Wei. Then again, maybe Ed’s already sealed all of the doors to the tower shut with alchemy and trapped the enemy inside. It’s what Roy would do, were he young and talented and brilliant and astonishingly gorgeous in the sunlight. Astonishingly gorgeous in any light. Astonishingly gorgeous all the time.
Roy closes his eyes and presses his forehead to the jagged contours of the stone. He takes a deep breath, possibly inhaling asbestos that will mold in his lungs and kill him someday. Then he opens his eyes, which are a bit clearer for the reprieve, and keeps going-hand over hand over hand.
A single man dressed in pale yellow met them just before Roy was forced to conclude that their guide was a hack and/or that the desert went on forever. The man clasped his hands in that almost Ed-ish way and bowed; their hack-guide slipped down off of his horse-that the bastard could still move after all this made Roy want to cry endlessly foul-and strode over to start discussing the weather and the length of the journey and the amusement of traveling with inexperienced foreigners. He sounded a little too impressed with how well Riza had taken to this very specific sort of torture; Roy was going to have to keep an eye on him.
“Welcome,” the man in yellow said in Amestrian to the party at large as Roy pried his tormented body from the saddle. “And, well, come.”
He looked terribly pleased with himself. And he was sort of devilishly attractive when he looked terribly pleased. And he couldn’t have been much older than Ed, and from the folds of his cross-body robe Roy could see that he was tall and whip-thin and wiry, and…
And Roy really was far enough gone to be sizing up a total stranger as a competitor for Ed’s attention.
It had been much too long a day spent on a goddamn horse to deal with that maturely, so he gave it a tremendous mental shove and tried to walk rather than stagger over and return the bow impeccably.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Brigadier General Mustang?” the young man asked, and that grin-it seemed to be permanent; and it seemed to be mocking Roy, just too lightly to protest. “And the Captain Hawkeye.” Roy hadn’t even heard her footsteps in the sand-their guide was right, of course; she adjusted so smoothly to the new environment that it verged on preternatural. “And the brothers Elric.”
“It’s very nice to meet you,” Alphonse said.
“S’up,” Ed said.
The young man bowed again. “My name is Qiang Yao. Please consider me your humble servant. If you will follow me, just over this ridge is the town of Suzhao, where all of our hospitality will be at your command.”
Roy wasn’t sure quite what sort of hospitality to expect from the borderlands of Xing, and he tried to keep his hopes in check.
As it turned out, he needn’t have bothered.
The bath alone was enough to make him seriously consider becoming an expatriate. The bathtub was almost more like a small well-wide-mouthed and cylindrical and shallow, large enough for him to spread all of his aching limbs without quite touching the heated stones that lined the bottom and set the whole surface to steaming. They’d poured in oils, too; one had to be mint, and one smelled a bit like tangerine, and there was a hint of something floral, and the rest he couldn’t fathom.
The particulars couldn’t have mattered less; the overall effect was one of curling, mingling scents-sharp spices and gentler tones from the fruit and the flowers; it was soothing and refreshing and rejuvenating all at once.
And the soap stung like a bitch in the saddle sores. Roy made a valiant effort to luxuriate in the heat and fragrance anyway-Qiang had said that it was traditional for the most acclaimed individual to take his leisure first; for courtesy’s sake, Roy had attempted to demur, whether or not every jarred cell in his sand-scoured body was wailing We haven’t been clean in days. But then Riza had very subtly nudged him forward with a very subtle elbow to the ribs, and Ed had said “You probably stink the most anyway,” and Roy had remembered that his relative rank and prestige were not exactly an issue for any of the present company. In addition, he really wanted a fucking bath.
When at last it felt like there was only a small castle’s worth of sand clinging to his person, he dragged himself out of the Pool of Wonder and Sanity, wrapped himself in the provided towel, and began to make his way back out to the lounge where he’d left his luggage and therefore his clean clothes.
He hadn’t even made it out of the bathhouse before he’d been waylaid by two slender Xingese girls who pinned him down on a padded table and started kneading at his back.
Roy had had a dream like this once. Except in the dream they hadn’t set more warm, smooth stones on each side of his spine and pressed sharp knuckles into the knots in muscles he hadn’t known he possessed. And it had ended a bit differently, although this experience similarly concluded much too soon.
They still wouldn’t let him leave-when he finally fought for balance upon climbing off of the table, they offered him a pair of pale linen trousers and a dark blue robe, and they sat him down on a painted star within a circle, and in fifteen glowing seconds, the sores were healed.
There was-he thought as he dressed himself and bowed and bowed again and staggered out to the lounge and said “Move” and dropped facedown onto the couch that had previously been occupied by the Elrics-an increasing danger of Roy Mustang deserting the Amestrian military altogether and staying here until he died or ran out of money for massages.
“Huh,” Ed said when a few moments passed and Roy only breathed deeply. “Did they drug you?”
“This is not a chemical high, Fullmetal,” Roy said into the couch cushion. “This is bliss like you have never experienced. This is the new standard for contentment in your life.”
“That sounds like a challenge,” Ed said. “And like they slipped you something.”
Roy managed to raise a hand and point the way he’d come. “Go. That is an order.”
The silence was slightly odd, but Roy couldn’t quite muster the strength to raise his head and look when all of his muscles had turned to beautiful, quivering jelly beneath his softened skin.
“I dunno,” Ed said slowly. “I don’t really-I don’t like people-I don’t like strangers touching me.”
What a wonderful couch this was. “Their names are Bai and Shu. Now you’re acquainted.”
It was strange how Ed’s body language was so pronounced that the air changed when he bristled. “Fuck you, Musta-”
“Brother,” Al cut in, “I’ll go with you. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before-” Oh, for the love of caffeinated beverages; just like that, Roy was thinking about Ed naked, wet, dripping, white towel slipping from his narrow hips. “-and it’ll be nice to watch what they do so I can decide whether I feel up to all of it.”
“Fine,” Ed said. “Thanks, Al. C’mon. General High and Not-So-Mighty is probably gonna end up in a lazy-coma anyway.”
After the door had slammed behind them (and Al had squeaked “Sorry!”), Roy flailed an arm around a little. He succeeded in turning his head on the couch cushion just as an attendant scurried over and bowed.
“He hates needles,” Roy said. He’d learned the Xingese word just in case; he added it and reaped a very gratifying look of perfect comprehension. “Spare the acupuncture, perhaps?”
Another bow; more scurrying; Roy relaxed wholly again and bit back a moan.
“Ah,” Riza said. The nearest armchair creaked as she sat. One of several holsters did not creak as she drew one of the four firearms on her person and quite unnecessarily checked the ammunition.
“Am I that obvious?” Roy asked in the clearest possible mumble.
“I’m afraid so, sir.”
“So Alphonse knew before I did, and Ed hasn’t the foggiest hint of a clue?”
“That would be my guess.”
“Well,” Roy said, “shit.”
He’s getting close-he’s getting tantalizingly close-he’s getting closer-and then his feet touch ground.
He almost doesn’t believe it at first. It was starting to feel like he’d be descending forever-like he’d hang in limbo for the rest of his life, hand over hand over hand until his wrists gave out, and he plummeted.
He turns. He blinks. He steadies himself with one hand on the wall, not that he ever wants to touch that thing again.
“That,” Ed says, “is the slowest I have ever seen anyone flee for their life.”
“Wait until you get old,” Roy says. “You’ll crawl onto my doorstep crying for forgiveness for all of the terrible things you’ve said to me.”
Ed snickers, claps, touches the cable, and has it coiled around his right forearm by the time Roy’s stopped shielding his eyes. “Good damn luck getting me to crawl to you for anything, Mustang.”
Across the floor-no, across the bed-Roy doesn’t care where; doesn’t care why, though he has his preferences-bare back, shoulders rolling, hair draping into his eyes, the sheets pooling before his knees, the mattress dimpling under the weight of his hands as he moves like a cat, and his eyes are so hungry-
There really isn’t time to think about that.
Roy looks back at the tower. He thinks he recalls doors once existing where there is now a stretch of blank wall decorated with transmutation marks.
“We’ll see,” he says. “Shall we go?”
Ed hefts the coil of rope up onto his left shoulder-to balance, perhaps? It’s a wonder his spine hasn’t contorted with the weight of his automail over ti…
His spine. Roy would lick his spine, taste the bulb of every vertebra-
“Need to figure out where the fuck we’re going before we go,” Ed says.
Roy looks around and focuses on the trees this time, rather than on his dangling-from-the-rope height relative to them. “I’m not familiar with this building as a landmark, but most of the literature says that the Hua Wei consider Lin Tu Forest one of their sacred spaces. It’s one of the oldest and best-preserved pieces of wilderness in the region, in large part because they defend it so viciously, despite its being located only thirty miles east of the capital.” When he stops staring at the trees, Ed is staring at him. “What?” He almost adds Is there something on my face? before remembering that he’s covered in grime and blood, which would make that a fairly stupid question.
“It’s really weird,” Ed says, “how you can take a beating like that, and then climb down all goddamn-violet-slow, and I know you haven’t eaten in, like, two days either… and you still talk like a textbook.”
“I take international relations very seriously,” Roy says. He does not say The only thing I take more seriously are carnal relations.
Ed eyes him. “Right. Well…” He swivels on his metal heel, glancing at the angle of the sun and the lichen on the trees, and then starts off at more of a stomp than really a stride. “Westward ho.”
Roy is so damn tired he could lie down and fall asleep on gravel, but even now he’d follow that swinging gold ponytail anywhere.
“Quite,” he says, and they’re on their way.
It took another three days of travel to reach the capital-but at least the second leg took place largely in covered carts and carriages, with frequent stops for food and stretching. It was a different world than the desert, and Roy found this world much more amenable.
“If we actually get there before we all die of old age,” Ed said the final afternoon, laid out bonelessly on the carriage seat opposite Roy and Riza, his head in Alphonse’s lap, “I’m gonna punch Ling in the face. Right-handed. You just watch me.”
Roy watched Riza watching out the window, which was greatly preferable to imagining his and Alphonse’s positions switched so that he could drag his fingers through Ed’s hair. “That will be an excellent way to thank him for the considerable resources he’s expended to facilitate our comfort.”
Ed scowled. “He wouldn’t have to ‘facilitate our comfort’ if he hadn’t demanded we haul our asses all the way out here. Whose side are you on, anyway?”
“My own,” Roy said. “As always.”
“Fine,” Ed said. “You can just stay over on your side while I beat the crap out of Ling.”
“Standing by while you decked the emperor of Xing would be a bit detrimental to my foreign policy plans.”
“Then act like you’re trying to help him, and I’ll deck you, too. It’ll look real heroic.”
Roy set an elbow on the windowsill and looked out at the houses set into the hills-pale spots in the verdure like raindrops caught in the warm yellow light. “If I have to pull rank to prevent you from instigating a diplomatic catastrophe, I will. If I have to tie you to a pillar outside the palace to prevent you from instigating a diplomatic catastrophe, I can do that, too.”
He shouldn’t have gone there even as a hyperbolic hypothetical, but it was too late to take it back.
“None of that will be necessary,” Alphonse said, patting Ed’s shoulder. “Brother knows that Lan Fan will humiliate him thoroughly again if he tries to do anything untoward to Ling.”
“I won that fight, you traitor,” Ed said. “Despite the fact that she cheated with a grenade and ninja skills and secretly being a girl.”
“We’re on her territory now,” Alphonse said. “You’re too smart to try anything.”
Ed glared up at him, rather unconvincingly. “I hate it when you make it so that I either have to agree with you or announce that I’m stupid.”
Alphonse grinned.
And, naturally, was right.
Roy hadn’t spent much time with Ling-spare hours, really, in the safe house and the forest around it, most of which had been spent tenaciously fighting for their lives, not making conversation. It had been enough time to take in a young man who reminded him of Ed and of himself: poised, quick, sharp-eyed, smart-mouthed, calculating, and mischievous. Very likely that was why Ling had riled Ed so easily and with so much gusto: the young then-prince would clearly make either a powerful ally or a legitimate threat, and he was determined to provoke Ed as much as possible while they sorted out which it was.
The next time Roy had encountered him, he had been a homunculus, and Roy hadn’t been able to see him in any case.
This time, the boy was a king.
Roy hardly approved of monarchy for obvious reasons, but he could appreciate that Xing was a vastly different country with a vastly different history and a vastly different way of life. Xing had barely even brushed shoulders with Amestris over the centuries while Xerxes had worn away between them; if Xing’s unique and storied history had selected feudalism as its preferred method of rule-and, more significantly, if feudalism was working-then Roy was in no position to pass judgment. He knew government in Amestris from the inside out. In Xing, he was a stranger. He was a tourist. He was a mote of dust set against this nation’s antiquity.
Qiang had ensured that they were all dressed finely and traditionally, which lent some credibility to the three shocks of yellow hair that the Yao clan’s current representative was ushering into the emperor’s palace. For all that Roy blended in marginally better than his captain and the last stock of Xerxes, he could still feel his skin prickling with the weight of other people’s eyes as Qiang quite cheerfully led them up an endless set of stairs and into an entrance hall like an opera house. There were eyes everywhere-tapestry eyes in impossibly fine thread; eyes of statues and carvings fixed unblinking on his back; eyes sharply outlined in red and black kohl, half-hidden by careful swoops of inky hair or ornate sleeves or open fans. The emperor of Xing knew how to make an impression.
Roy glanced at Riza to his right as they walked the endless thick carpet towards a staggeringly regal throne. Anyone who had not been observing the nuances of her shoulders for over a decade would not recognize their tightness-although whether it was in answer to the challenge, in preparation for a fight, or because the holsters didn’t sit quite right under her borrowed raiment Roy couldn’t determine from a single look.
He slanted his gaze back at Ed and Alphonse. The younger Elric looked positively delighted-like his birthday had come early and coincided with the solstice, and a storm had given way to a pair of rainbows just as all of his friends arrived to shower him with gifts. He was trying to look at everything, and his eyes were so bright and his smile so wide that Roy couldn’t help wondering if, in a life of his own choosing, he would have become nomadic voluntarily.
And Ed… looked like he was walking to the gallows.
Roy faced front, clearing and re-clearing his expression of anything other than calmness tempered with appropriate awe and underpinned by unshakable dignity. It was a reasonably involved poker face; it required a bit of concentration. But it didn’t need enough to stop him thinking.
What was Ed afraid of? Actually, that was a stupid rhetorical question to himself inside his head; the only thing Edward Elric was afraid of was losing people close to him. Ed had explored every shade and nuance of wariness, circumspection, anxiety, sullenness, and rage, but fear he reserved for the greatest of personal tragedies-of which, of course, he’d had his share.
What, then, had piqued Ed’s nerves enough to make him overcompensate with that hunched-shouldered glower?
Did this have something to do with that bizarre statement about long-distance friendships? Roy hadn’t had a chance at the time to analyze the absurdity of it; Ed was a dynamo, and his power was most concentrated up close. He was a naked star in the night, down to the inescapable drag of his gravity and the likelihood of incineration if you gave in to it.
Then again, Roy couldn’t exactly count himself one of Ed’s friends. An ally, yes; a mentor, if you tilted your head just the right way; a collaborator and a conspirator and a pain in the ass, certainly. Far from a friend. It was-strange, and slightly destabilizing, to think so suddenly that there was a large portion of Ed’s life and heart and universe to which Roy had no access simply because of the terms and circumstances of their acquaintance. There were things in the way. He was cut off, for someone’s safety, for both of theirs, perhaps. Given Ed’s habit of all-or-nothing ultimatums in every aspect of his existence, Roy didn’t imagine that would ever change.
And now Brigadier General Roy Mustang of the Amestrian Military was standing in front of the emperor of Xing, trying to envision a world where he and Ed were perfect strangers who passed in the street, or both reached for a newspaper, or collided in a cafe. Ed spilled his coffee all down the front of Roy’s uniform, and Roy very nearly lit him on fire right then and there, except that then he saw Ed’s eyes and couldn’t seem to locate his tongue, let alone a scathing reprimand to utter with it.
Mustang, Roy’s internal Führer monologue said slowly, you are hereby ordered not to fuck this up like an unbelievable idiot.
Roy swallowed. Sir.
He looked up at the boy on the throne, met the trace of amusement in the dark eyes, and bowed.
Ling’s headpiece alone looked like it weighed more than Alphonse, and Roy didn’t even want to think about the robes. Nonetheless, the moment he blinked, Ling had bounded off of the chair and was flinging both arms around Ed and pounding him on the back.
“I’d somehow forgotten how much I missed your frowny face!” the emperor of Xing was saying warmly. “Don’t make me pinch your cheek to get a smile, Ed; you know I will!” He gripped Ed’s shoulders, grinning borderline-maniacally, and turned to Alphonse. Somehow his eyes lit up even more. “Look at you!” Roy blinked again, and Ling was pumping Al’s hand. “You should give that brother of yours some growing lessons!”
“He should whaaaaaat?”
At least now Ed was himself again.
[Part I, Chapter 2]