FMA -- To Make the Sun Shine
Title: To Make the Sun Shine
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: alt!Roy/Ed
Rating: R
Word Count: 18,044 (9,650 in this portion)
Warnings: language; explicit sexual activity; this is why I don't write historical fiction; friends don't let friends do dramatic irony; major spoilers for '03/CoS
Summary: Light never lasts in London, does it? He, of all people, ought to know better than to believe in something good.
Author's Note: Writing the same fic I always write, but backwards, makes it super-creative, right? Almost as creative as the liberties I took by being absolutely shit at research, ahahaha.
How could you be the one if you’re not the same?
- “Ghost Lights” - Woodkid -
TO MAKE THE SUN SHINE
He’s sitting in the window of his cafe-not his by ownership, of course; his by habit alone-when he looks up from the rippling surface of his tea and…
It can’t be possible.
Not by happenstance-not by unlikely coincidence after all the searching. Not on the street, two sips into a cup of tea, three rescued crumbs into a madeleine-
He’s up from his chair and out the door; the bell jingles, and he cries, “Edward!”
His hands are shaking; the hairs at the nape of his neck are prickling like a cold breath’s passed across his skin. This is terribly melodramatic, but he can’t help it. Oh, Lord, for a second eye; for a second chance-
A part of him thought it was more likely that he was wrong. A part of him thought that, statistically speaking, the number of young men displaced and wandering is more than high enough to guarantee that several of them should have hair the color of goldenrods in Provence. Mathematically, one of those might well have irises that are not brown, are not green, are not ever unsurprising. The odds are that it should be someone else.
But they both turn at the sound of his voice-the tall boy with the short brown hair, and… Edward.
Ten years. Ten years later, he is willowy but powerful; the lines of his body are graceful and strong; the gold hair trails halfway down his back now, twisting like a ribbon, gleaming in the light. Ten years later, he is unmistakably the same, undeniably himself, and unspeakably beautiful.
Ten years later, he is freezing in his tracks like he’s seen a ghost. A bad ghost; there are no whimsical Dickensian visitors here; there is no warmth to the recognition in those incredible eyes.
At this rate, Ray would rather be a stranger.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I suppose it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?” He tries for an apologetic laugh. “Do you remember? Up in Camden, years ago-I was only doing psychiatry then, and your father convinced you to come see me about all of your terribly vivid dreams.”
Edward used to dream about a world with magic, which he could harness using his hands-and they weren’t just any hands; the magic world’s Edward had one arm made of metal, and a leg to match. The projection wore his hair long, which Ray speculated, as tactfully as possible, was a subconscious wish of Edward’s to tap into his anima, into the feminine power of his psyche, to complement the dream boy’s masculine athletic strength.
The unsettling thing about the dreams was not the detail in and of itself, but the logical consistency. They always sounded more like actual anecdotes than they did like the figments and fragments conjured by an unconscious mind. Edward was brilliant-far more than just brilliant; staggering, intimidating, ferociously intelligent and fiercely curious about everything under the sun-but he wasn’t brilliant enough to imagine painstakingly logical fantasy worlds in his sleep.
But there’s no time for that now. It’s too late, and Ray’s done his time thinking back on everything from every angle.
“How is Professor Hohenheim, by the way?” he asks.
Edward draws a breath in sharply and slowly lets it out. “He’s dead.”
Ray wants to say How? When? Why?, but those aren’t questions you ask anymore.
“I’m so sorry,” he says instead.
It doesn’t matter how many-every time an acquaintance vanishes from the face of the planet, he feels the resonation of the loss. There’s a pull from the vacuum; a strain; a deprivation. Quicksand. He has to reimagine every Friday morning, rewrite every memory of Hohenheim standing by the window, gently silhouetted by the feeble sunlight leaching through the fog. Every moment where they overlapped is different now-an extinguished existence unravels backwards, ghosting back across every surface that it touched.
It’s strange, really, that anyone can have any past left at all. Half the world is dead; they should all be unwound.
Edward smiles faintly. “Thanks.”
His voice is wrong. His voice is-wrong. What’s changed?
“I shouldn’t keep you,” Ray says, and there’s a… veiled… quality to Edward’s bright eyes that makes him hesitate. “It feels like it’s been a lifetime-I didn’t mean to interrupt; I could hardly believe I was seeing you.” He shouldn’t say it, but what if he never gets another chance? “I-looked for you. Afterwards.” After it was over, and I came home, he can’t say, because pieces of him will fight in France as long as he lives. “I couldn’t find a record anywhere; I thought…”
“Ended up in Germany,” Edward says. His voice is a bit tight, a bit hoarse, a bit… cautious. “I mean-eventually. Munich. To study.”
“Ah,” Ray says.
“Rocketry,” Edward says, helplessly. “Look, I’m sorry; if-if I’d known you were trying to find me-us-I… would’ve… reached out, or-something.”
The accent.
Edward is speaking like an American.
“It’s just wonderful you’re all right,” Ray says. The longer he stands here, the worse it feels. There’s a shadow on Edward now. Maybe it’s on all of them; maybe it’s the weight of the sheer emptiness, but it feels like a harrowing pressure on Ray’s chest to see it in a boy who used to be so light. “I’ll let you two go back to your business; I’m terribly sorry. It’s good to see you.”
He holds out his hand.
“You, too,” Edward says.
And then the hand that clasps Ray’s is not ordinary-it’s not even flesh, not even skin, no bone, no muscle; it’s cold, and unyielding. It’s… metal. Steel. Incredibly sophisticated, with articulated fingers, with grooves and curves and absolute authenticity.
It’s impossible.
And as the two boys’ backs move away down the pavement, Ray thinks…
No.
The long yellow ponytail, the cat’s eyes, a metal arm-
No.
He didn’t look quite as old as he ought to have been; he didn’t know the first thing about their shared history, but he knew Ray’s face-
No.
But perhaps stranger things have happened. Perhaps he should have learnt to stop asking anything in this world to make sense.
Perhaps-
Sitting down at the same little table, turning an absent gaze through the same broad window, wrapping his hands around another warm cup of the same damn tea-it doesn’t seem like it ever happened. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe he’s just nursed this ritual for so long that it’s finally started to crack his mind right down the center. Maybe the theory is wrong, and repetition isn’t soothing; it’s destructive, like waves wearing boulders down to dust.
Wishful thinking, is the idiom. Projection, is the term.
Is he capable of such a staggeringly vivid hallucination? It’s plausible, isn’t it? That he would draw some detail from the past and extrapolate it wildly to try to force the fantasy to manifest?
He’s done stranger. He’s thought worse. If some of his trench-mud dreams were visible, were broadcast, were inked out on his skin-they’d lock him in a room with padded walls, and the Thames could have the key.
He draws a deep breath, lets it out, and takes a sip of tea. It’s all right. He’s grounded. He’s functioning, at least; all of his systems are in motion, and he’s got one foot planted relatively solidly on the safe side of the precipice. The open air doesn’t own him yet.
As a gesture of good faith, he spreads the newspaper out on the tabletop and makes a concerted effort to care about the rows of stamped-in letters. Liza keeps trying to redirect his attention to the puzzles instead of the world news; mostly likely she thinks it will be healthier. But then, life’s unhealthy-there’s no avoiding it, is there?
Someone slides into the seat beside him.
Ray looks up-goes still.
It’s Edward-that is, not-Edward. Not-quite. Not-in-the-slightest; not-at-all.
“Hey,” Edward says. “Sorry. It’s just… Al figured you’d be here-‘clearly such a creature of habit nuns are green with envy’ is what he said, actually; he’s such a smartass sometimes-and he said I should come by. He said it’d be good for closure.” He pushes his hair back from his face with his left hand and smiles ruefully. “To be honest, I dunno who the closure’s supposed to be for.”
Oh, Lord. This is the moment of truth.
“Al,” Ray says slowly. He watches out of the corner of his eye, tries to see everything, which is much harder now than it was back when he had two eyes to work with. “Is that your-friend?”
None of the teashop employees are looking at him like he’s gone mad and started talking to thin air.
Oh, Lord. He was half-hoping he was starkers. It might very well be easier than this.
“My brother,” Edward is saying, with an odd, fiercely warm sort of light to his eyes. “He’s the b-”
“You’re real,” Ray says, somewhat faintly. “You exist.”
Edward stares at him for a moment, and then he looks down at his gloved right hand and curls it into a fist on the tabletop.
“Yeah, well,” he says. “Don’t seem to be able to stop-not for lack of trying. Occasionally I even think I deserve to keep at it.”
“I’m sorry,” Ray says. “That’s not what I meant. It’s only that-you were someone else’s dream.”
“About that.” Edward folds his hands now, and-surely it’s medically and mechanically impossible, for metal things to be so intricate and so precise. It can’t be anything from this world, can it? It simply cannot, and when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable… “You-knew the other… Edward?”
“He was my patient,” Ray says. “Before the War.” It’s always a capital letter, in his head. It’s always three letters and a deluge of glass-shard memories and mortar-bursts of pain.
Those same eyes on him, angled, suspicious. “Patient in what? You keep saying ‘dreams’.”
“I was a psychiatrist,” Ray says, turning the teacup. Handle towards his chest; handle away. “Somewhat inadvertently I ended up specializing in dreams and the subconscious. Yours-well, Edward’s, that Edward’s-were extraordinary. I had hypotheses about them.”
“Did you,” Edward says, fingers knitting tight.
“None like this,” Ray says.
“Yeah.” Edward smiles, thinly. “Blew my mind the first time I wound up here.”
“I can imagine,” Ray says. If this is merely an extension of a day-old phantasmagoria-if he’s dreaming, if it’s all a terrible capricious game put on by his wracked and shaken brain-well, there’s no real harm in playing along. “How did you, if you don’t mind my asking?”
Edward blinks at him; the flash of a grin is like a signal flare in darkness-too bright, and only a glimmer of the story told. “Jesus. You’re polite. Wasn’t expecting that.” The last of the smile fades. “Eh. It’s a long story. Stupid story. Dunno if you’d believe it. Did Edward ever tell you about alchemy?”
“As much as he could,” Ray says. “Even between the two of us, I don’t think we could have hoped to understand it from the outside, peering in. On the best nights, his dreams were still… indistinct. We had to piece them back together before we could even speculate.”
Edward looks at the tabletop for a long moment. He rubs at a nick in the wood with his fingertip, over and over.
“You really…” He clears his throat. “You really-cared about that kid.”
“I did,” Ray says. It does not escape him that this Edward refers to the other Edward (to his Edward; but he mustn’t even think it-) exclusively in the past tense. “We spent a lot of time together, and he shared a great deal of himself with me.”
Edward fidgets with his gloves and then folds his hands in his lap, only then to press them together between his knees and draw his legs in until there’s no more space for them to move. “What happened?”
“I had a bit of medical training,” Ray says. “It wasn’t the primary focus of my degree, but it was more than most people have. Men younger than I were dying in droves, so I enlisted to be a medic.”
“Oh,” Edward says. “Oh, shit.”
“That sums it up rather succinctly, to tell the truth,” Ray says.
Edward shakes his head-an acknowledgment, not a denial. His hair flutters, and his eyelashes dip, and he is distressingly beautiful in the pale morning light. “It’s… okay, it’s not funny, but I used to know someone… like you. Soldier, too. Only when he was on the front lines, he wasn’t saving people; he was a killing machine.”
Ray almost wants to say I lacked what I would classify as machinelike efficiency when it came to that, but you don’t talk about scrabbling and slipping in the mud, trying to jam a bayonet blade into a German boy’s throat, in the middle of a coffee shop.
He could swear he sees it, though-the pulse of empathy. Has Edward killed before? Lord. Life is making monsters of them all.
“I did what I could,” he says instead.
Edward leans his torso in towards the table, and his half-laced boots hike up onto the rung of his chair. He never stops moving, does he? “So, um… what are you up to now?”
“It’s something of a combination practice,” Ray says. “Psychiatry and physiology united, I suppose. Most of my patients are veterans. I think there’s a lot more to say about shell shock than anyone is willing to discuss.”
Edward swallows twice, opens his mouth, closes it, swallows again, and looks intently at the table. “How weird are you willing to get?” he asks.
“I beg your pardon?” Ray says.
“Al says sometimes that I should see a shrink,” Edward says, eyes tracking past a crumpled napkin and up to the glare of light on the window. “Maybe it should be you.”
“You should see a therapist,” Ray says. “Not a shrink. I’m afraid you don’t need any shrinking.”
Edward stares at him for a long moment, open-mouthed for the duration this time. Then his eyes-fill, flood; then he’s shoving his chair back right as the waiter approaches, darting past an entering patron, blasting out the door-
“I’m so sorry,” Ray says, fighting out his pocketbook, fumbling for the coins- “You’ll have to forgive him; he’s been through a lot-” That’s half again the cost, but to hell with it; he slaps the money down on the tabletop and hastens for the door- “Cheers, so sorry; until tomorrow, then-?”
He takes off running, and it’s not fair, really, that every muscle of his body should be so tight with terror, that his heart should be pounding so hard. He doesn’t know Edward-not this Edward. He wouldn’t even know the other one, the real one, after ten damn years of the whole world suffering at once.
But he doesn’t have to run far. Edward’s just around the corner, a few steps into the alley, leaning against the wall of the building and making a truly horrendous sound of sobbing laughter into his hands.
“Edward,” Ray says softly, and he reaches out slowly-no sudden movements, no startlement-to touch the left forearm, just lightly.
Edward flinches away, or as far away as he can go against a brick wall. Ray shifts more towards Edward’s left side, further from the street; it’s best to give him an avenue to escape, best not to corner him here.
“It wasn’t a guy l-like you,” Edward chokes out, breaths rattling, his mouth half-grimace and half-grin. “He was you-the you on my s-s-side, just like you h-had your Ed here. He always used to d-do that-call me sh-short, only underhanded, puns and sh-shit; he’d never just s-s-say it.” He draws a deep, albeit quavering, breath and scrubs the back of his left hand across his eyes. “Only not the last time. He knew it was, too. I ribbed him and shit, and he let it go. Al thinks-I dunno. It doesn’t matter; it’s too late. And I didn’t have the fucking guts to say goodbye, because that would’ve made it real, and I thought I was losing Al, too; I couldn’t face the thought…” He lowers his arms and flattens both palms on the wall behind him. With the fingers of the left, he picks at the protruding corner of a brick. “Your Edward’s dead,” he says, tilting his head back until Ray actually checks to see if the dull gray of the sky has changed. “’S my fault. Usually is. The fucking bombings. But I don’t think he felt it; I felt it. S’fucking horrible. But killing’s worse. Dying’s sort of-quiet. Killing someone, you get this hurricane in your head.”
There’s currently a void in Ray’s. Words. There must be words somewhere. There must be words and gestures and expressions he can offer to this red-eyed, wet-faced young man with a tempest inside of him.
“Can you come in Friday morning?” he asks, gently. He notices that his own hands are hovering halfway to Edward’s shoulders and lowers them slowly. “No charge. We’ll just-do a consulting, shall we? See how it goes?”
Liza’s going to kill him. The books are enough of a trial to balance as it is; they can’t afford to give out charity.
Edward smiles at him, lopsidedly. “S-sure. Friday’s fine. I teach on Thursdays. Where’s your place?”
“I have a card,” Ray says, and of course his pockets hide them all as he starts patting about. “It’s just a little ways up Brick Lane. Ten on Friday? Eleven?”
“Split the difference,” Edward says. “Ten-thirty.”
Blessedly, Ray’s fingers light on cardstock delving into the pocket in his waistcoat. Why did he even put a card there? “Here-you’ll want to hop off at Aldgate East and head to your right on Whitechapel. Osborn turns into Brick Lane before too long, and it’s on the right.”
Edward takes the card with his left hand and studies it with an absolute focus that is rare and-remarkable.
Liza is definitely going to kill him.
“All right,” Edward says. “Ten-thirty. If Al doesn’t bury me first.” He glances up. “Kidding. I’m just in for a lot of significant looks, is all.” He tucks the card into his trouser pocket and pushes his hand in after it. “Hey, um… thank you. By the way. For… yeah.”
“Certainly,” Ray says. “I’ll see you Friday, then.”
“Right,” Edward says, and then he hesitates, and then he makes fine use of that street-side egress Ray left.
Liza is going to chop Ray into pieces small enough to scatter to the wind.
“Breathe in,” Ray says. Kain obliges, but he’s slouching like a chastened child. “Sit up a bit straighter?”
“Sir,” Kain says, snapping to attention, and then he blinks owlishly. His eyes look naked when the spectacles are pushed up into his hair. “…oh. I’m sorry.”
“No, no, not at all,” Ray says softly. “Just breathe deeply. That’s right.”
He gives Kain’s heart a few more thumps to impress him, but the rhythm’s stable.
“Sounds good,” he says, setting the stethoscope aside and taking up his well-abused clipboard instead. “Anything feel off? Toothache, backache…?”
“Headaches again,” Kain says, rubbing at the side of his neck. He looks tiny on the patient table, but he always has to be specifically instructed to climb down and put his shirt back on and sit in the armchair; he pays for these sessions and still hates to impose. “I think it’s this new radio job-I’m so worried it’ll fall through that I just…” He makes a helpless face and hunches his shoulders to demonstrate.
“If they’ve any brains in their heads at all,” Ray says, jotting it down, “they’ll chain you to a chair in there so they can keep you forever.” He moves over towards the armchairs and attempts to look uncritically expectant. “How have the dreams been this week?”
Kain, bless him, takes the hint and slides down, collecting his clothing as he goes. “About the same. I had the one where I was a bloodhound again, but this time I caught him, and I hamstrung him with my teeth.” Kain’s superiors were not sympathetic to his delicate psychological state. Most of them died in Belgium, but they usually die again at Kain’s hands while he sleeps. “Not sure that’s actually possible; I’m not sure how much force a dog’s jaw…”
Ray twirls his pencil. “How did it feel? Catching him. Digging in like that.”
Kain sighs as he drops into the chair across from Ray. “Satisfying. But even at the time, I thought… a part of me thought, This isn’t fair; he doesn’t deserve this for how he was to me. It was vicious, too-visceral, very… lots of blood, lots of shreds of him. I woke up not too long after I brought him down, but he was screaming, begging, you know; lots of… his voice kept going hoarse; when I first sat up, I thought, That’s really strange, that I’d imagine that so realistically, but mostly I just felt… tired. Resigned, I think. Part of me didn’t want to hurt him, but the part that was already moving was too powerful to stop.”
“Let’s go back a bit,” Ray says. “He didn’t deserve it?”
Kain gives him a shaky smile. “To be mutilated and devoured by a dog version of one of his soldiers? Can’t say I’d wish that on anyone.”
“The particulars are morbid,” Ray says, all hail the understatement; “but I think the concept… At the time, he was destroying you, and you couldn’t fight back. This time, you’re on the attack. He’s the one running scared.”
Kain is quiet for a moment. “I… suppose.”
“Did you resent him, while it was happening?” Ray asks. “Did you feel that strongly, but you were… leashed? Muzzled? You were restrained, because he was a superior officer, and you wanted to obey orders, but you also wanted to make him understand?”
Kain shifts in the chair, toying with the yet-untucked hem of his shirt. “I don’t-remember. Maybe. Yes.”
“Try to remember,” Ray says gently. “Try to remember how it was then.”
“He kept on saying I was a coward,” Kain says, fingertips skating up and down the arm of the chair. “He’d say I should snap out of it; I was just too weak, or… unfocused. Unmanly. I’ve forgotten half of his phrases; they started to… roll off… after a while. It was getting harder and harder to think back then, in any case; I barely heard him sometimes. I used to think-what if there wasn’t something wrong with me? What if ordinary people felt like this, too, all the time, every day, and each morning they just got up and went about their business? And if they did, then it was only my weakness after all. I was so scared I’d find out it was. But sometimes I remembered-being here, being home, before. Being all right. Sometimes I could think very rationally about how I hadn’t always felt so numb and wild at turns, and then I’d think… I ought to see if somebody could set me right again.”
Ray’s scribbling madly to keep up. “That’s good. That’s excellent, Kain. But it wasn’t just you, was it?”
“No.” A faint smile. “I almost cried, when I stepped into Craiglockhart-with relief, I mean. Because I wasn’t alone.”
“That,” Ray says. “Remember that.” He turns a page, smoothes it. “Any other violent episodes?”
“Not anywhere outside of dreaming,” Kain says. “The… anxiety’s getting worse, though, I think. At the radio job. I think it’s just because… I want to do so well, and I’m on edge waiting for something to go wrong. I have this awful feeling like I’m going to ruin it, and there’s nothing I can do. This-impending… doom. Dread. Inevitability. Do you know that one?”
“I do,” Ray says. “Quite well.”
He files his notes once Kain goes-shirt still untucked, hat in hand, but looking a little more alive. There’s a brisk knock on the open door. “Doctor?”
Impending doom has ceased to pend: Liza only ever calls him Doctor when she’s angry.
“Yes?” he asks, as innocently as he’s capable of.
“Why do you have an unlabeled hour marked out on your calendar on Friday morning?”
He considers the phrasing, but quickly; to hesitate is to admit to guilt. “There’s someone I need to see.”
“Doctor,” Liza says, slower and with even more of her patented You are a record-setting imbecile tone, “I’m going to have to sign this individual in. Playing at keeping a secret is a tremendous waste of both of our time.”
Ray’s collar itches. He looks out the window, down towards the street; imagines the worn boots; imagines one foot metal and one foot warm.
“Did I ever tell you about Edward?” he asks.
Silence. To dumbfound Liza is something of an art form.
“I don’t believe so,” she says eventually. “Someone from before, or after?”
Everything in their personal timelines is defined like B.C. and A.D., the ancient and the new-before the War touched them; and after, when they were owned, and found, and so far gone.
Liza’s grandfather had been close to a man close to Churchill; she’d begged for a chance to demonstrate how she could shoot. They sent her to Arras. She ended up on Ray’s table with a bullet in her side, and once he’d removed it, she never left his.
“He was a patient before I left,” Ray says. The echo in his head, of the same voice-lower, coarser, older, but the same. The words he can’t quite silence-Your Edward’s dead. “He’s… a different person now, you might say. I saw him in the street the other morning and thought I was losing my mind once and for all.”
Liza looks at him for a long moment and then lowers her gaze to the schedule log in her hands, making a swift notation. “But how would we tell the difference?”
“I walked into that,” Ray says.
“You marched,” Liza says. “With great fanfare. Heymans’s appointment started two minutes ago, so we might just see him within the hour. Shall I hound him for his payment, or would you like to do the honors?”
“I know how much you enjoy making meaningful gestures with the letter opener,” Ray says.
Liza smiles, thinly but genuinely, which is one of life’s small and invaluable victories.
Friday. Ten-twenty-five. He’s not coming, is he?
Ten-twenty-eight. He’s not coming.
Ten-thirty.
Ten-thirty-two.
Ten-thirty-three.
Ray scrubs a hand down his face; he avoids the patch on instinct now. Edward is just some boy-some other-world’s mirror-image of his. Well, presuming that he’s not a raving lunatic who thinks he can perform alchemy, and has used some sort of psychotic genius to construct himself a mechanical arm to suit the story.
The problem is that magic is more plausible.
Ray’s head hurts.
Ten-thirty-five.
What a miserable fool he is, to hang his hopes on less than half a chance-to bank on pennies, to try rappelling with a length of thread. What is it about him that’s drawn to emotional self-destruction? Does he think he deserves it? Is this some sad, sad variation on survivor’s guilt? I may have lived, but at least I’m incapable of being happy. Well, fine. Lovely. That’s a class act.
He grinds a knuckle into his eye, blinks hard, and hunkers down to focus on which snippets of Sigmund he should quote to Heymans next week.
The door opens downstairs.
“Oh,” the voice says. “Oh. Um-hi. Good morning. I’ve… got an appointment.”
“Good morning,” Liza says, placidly for someone who’s almost certainly attempting to bore through Edward’s skin with the force of her gaze. “What’s your name?”
“Ed Elric. Should be ten-thirty. I mean-he said it was okay. I could come back another time if it’s not.”
“No, you’re listed here,” Liza says. “He’s expecting you. Let me walk you up?”
Lord have mercy.
“Sure,” Edward says, faintly audible over the deliberate scrape of the chair. “Thanks.”
As predicted, Liza gives Ray a look that could melt bone as she holds the door for… Edward. Not-Edward. The miracle.
“Give me a shout if you need anything,” Liza says.
“Thank you,” Ray says.
Edward sidles in, and Liza’s gaze makes Ray’s stomach lining peel and curl like old wallpaper, and then the door swings shut.
“Hey,” Edward says. He lingers by the doorway; Ray’s nearly sitting on the windowsill.
“Good morning,” he says.
“Sorry I’m late,” Edward says. “Somebody told me I should go by the church instead, and I got turned around.”
“That’s quite all right,” Ray says.
“So,” Edward says. “Raymond. Raymond Mustang.”
Ray blinks. He’d been trying to busy his hands with the clipboard; trying not to think too much; this was a terrible idea; why wasn’t he thinking too much then, when he suggested it? “…yes?”
“It’s just that m-the-guy I knew, he was… Roy.” Edward smiles slightly, gesturing unhelpfully towards his own face. “Same eye, though. Weird how some things diverged and some didn’t. And his patch was this big, honkin’, dramatic-ass thing, ’cause he’s-he was-just-like that.”
“Were you drawn to the drama?” Ray says.
Edward grins, wolfishly, and that is a dangerous expression if Ray’s ever seen one, with any number of eyes. “Boy. You don’t waste time.”
“Time is money, isn’t it?” Ray asks. “Your money, in this case.”
Edward’s grin curves like a cutlass. “Thought I was getting in for free.”
“Just this once,” Ray says.
“All right,” Edward says. “Then I owe you one favor back.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” Ray says.
“It’s equivalent,” Edward says, and there are shards of broken promises in that smile.
Ray’s going to have to delve into that, isn’t he?
“Have a seat,” he says, gesturing to the table.
Edward swings himself up onto it so smoothly that he barely crinkles the paper-he’s accustomed to this. He’s used to hiking his weight up onto awkward surfaces to be examined. There’s an amused sort of resignation to the cant of his shoulders; the way he swings his legs; the way he arches an eyebrow and tilts his head slowly to the side.
“Shall we start with the basic vitals?” Ray asks.
“I can tell you now,” Edward says, “that I’m definitely alive.” He reaches for the buttons of his waistcoat all the same, only then to pause just as his fingers begin to curl. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?”
“As long as you are,” Ray says, despite the temptation to wring his hands and wail, Ready for what?
Edward draws a breath, lets it out slowly, squares his shoulders, peels off his gloves, and deftly unfastens all of the buttons of the waistcoat, immediately followed by all of the buttons on his shirt. There’s a sliver of pale flesh and an angry gleam of scar tissue, and then he’s shrugging off both articles as one.
Ray is-speechless.
And numb, and paralyzed-his hands clench around the clipboard, which is a godsend, since only that instinct stops him dropping the whole thing to the floor.
He can still think-but only barely, and the entirety of his brain is consumed with wonder. There are no gears. There are no pistons. There is no steam; there is no fuel; there is no power source. It is not electric. It is not motorized. It is not… possible.
Edward drums his metal fingertips on the edge of the table-the sound that results is an almost-musical pinging. The whole false limb shifts so subtly as he moves; every piece is perfectly aligned, and the caliber of functionality-the versatility-the capability and the sheer finesse-
“I apologize,” Ray says, sounding weak to his own ears. “I don’t believe I was ready after all.”
Edward smiles thinly. “If I had a couple quid for every time I heard that, I could buy enough chocolate not to give a shit anymore.” He leans down and rolls up the bottom of his left trouser leg-more incredibly intricate steel. “I’ve got lots of souvenirs,” he says. He sits back and presses a fingertip down midway along his thigh. “Goes up to here, by the way, so you might wanna try the reflex test on the other one.”
“This world of yours,” Ray says through the vertiginous spinning of his own head. “Is this ordinary there?”
“Yes and no,” Edward says. The line of his shoulders loosens-just a fraction, but it counts. “Automail’s… I mean, it’s not common, but it’s normal. Mine’s the best, though, ’cause my mechanic was the best. This stuff’s so durable you wouldn’t believe it, and she had to guess the proportions after not seeing me for two years. Pretty damn brilliant if you ask me.”
“That’s extraordinary,” Ray says. He edges closer, sets the clipboard down, angles his hand in a way that’s meant to be imploring. “May I-?”
“Sure, yeah,” Edward says, but Ray doesn’t miss the half-second’s hesitation before he holds out the metal arm.
Ray takes it gently in both hands, not trusting himself to speak, hardly trusting himself to believe. It’s plated down from the shoulder; there are bare wires underneath-the elbow joint is a marvel in and of itself; to have so much inconceivable magnificence in one place-
Ray runs his fingertips very slowly up the grooves of the forearm, and then back down. There are nicks and scratches everywhere in the steel, some of them so jagged he has to wonder what was done with this construction.
And the hand. Its proportions are nearly identical to the left one; that a mass of metal, interconnected, could be so powerful-Ray thinks his heart may just leap out of his chest and land in the curve of those fingers.
(Would it be so bad? the part of him he tried to outrun asks softly. It hounded him in foxholes; it wriggled through him when the shell casings showered down. They say there are no atheists on battlefields; Ray’s not sure of that, but he suspects there are no liars. He’s been running since he came back-no more echoes of his own voice against the dripping walls of trenches-but here he stands, half-bent towards metal miracles, and it’s caught him at last. Would it really be so awful? Would they make so poor a cage? You’ve craved a cradle for that heart since the moment you recognized your own mortality. Why not this one? Why not now?)
“Amazing,” Ray says. “This is amazing.”
“It doesn’t freak you out?” Edward asks slowly, and it doesn’t escape Ray’s notice that the boy’s eyes are intently watching his face.
“Not especially,” Ray says. “It does baffle me quite a bit. How are you operating it? I’ve never seen a prosthetic that responds.”
“That’s automail for ya,” Edward says. He extends his fingers fully and wriggles them; the tips brush Ray’s wrist. “I never paid too much attention to the details, but it’s wired to my nerves. I actually have trouble moving it if I think about it too much, but if I just pretend it’s a normal arm, it receives and interprets all the same impulses from my brain.”
“This could change the world,” Ray says as he lowers his own hands to let go.
Edward shrugs-with the metal shoulder, of course. Just to obliterate another small portion of Ray’s brain. “Change, yeah. Save, no. I mean, you lot’ve got all kinds of things my world didn’t have.” He looks towards the window, clenching both hands around the edge of the examining table. “I’d trade the automail back for alchemy in a second, anyway. It’s not… I mean, sound body is great, but alchemy was kind of… my soul. A lot of it, anyway. And I’m okay; I’m coping, sure-I’m about a billion times better with Al here-but it’s like… it’s like if you were an artist, and you woke up one morning, and you couldn’t draw. Not that you didn’t want to; not that you didn’t remember how-you just couldn’t. The capacity was gone.” He sighs and tosses his head, flinging his hair out of his face. “Plus the automail’s a bitch to maintain sometimes-everybody always asks what smells like machine oil, for starters; and in winter I get these aches and chills, and in summer it swells until I want to chop it off.”
“Oh,” Ray says.
Edward grins, weary but genuine. “Yeah. ‘Oh’.”
“I think I’m missing a great deal of the story,” Ray says, taking up the stethoscope and trying not to think too much about the contours of Edward’s uncovered body. “Perhaps I can convince you to tell me most of it. First I’ll need you to sit up straight and breathe deeply, however, if you don’t mind…?”
“Sure thing, Doc,” Edward says.
He’s not sitting straight, though-not quite. Ray logs that mentally as he counts the beats and watches the secondhand on his wristwatch.
“I’m going to need your blood pressure, too,” he says as he jots the tally down-it’s a bit faster than he expected, given Edward’s size. Could that be related to the metal limbs somehow? But oughtn’t his heart beat slower, then, since there’s less blood to move, and less cumulative distance for it to travel? “All the basics, so that over time we have data for comparison.”
“You seem pretty confident that I’m coming back,” Edward says, offering his left arm for the cuff.
“I live in hope,” Ray says, and tucks the disc of the stethoscope in beneath the cuff’s edge. “Bear with me.”
Edward watches in what Ray can already tell is uncharacteristic quietude.
Silence-sound-silence.
“You’re a bit high,” Ray says as he unwinds everything and jots the numbers down. “Not enough that I’d be concerned, but it’s worth noting.” He pauses. “Would you mind hopping down for a moment and taking off your shoes?”
Edward obliges. “Can’t get over you asking instead of ordering.”
Ray pauses again. “Is this to do with the other…”
“The other you?” Edward asks. He picks at the laces of his boots and toes them off. Without them, Ray can clearly see that Edward’s default is to put his weight on the balls of his feet-it’s a fighting stance. “Yeah. He was my superior officer.” He wrinkles his nose at Ray’s expression. “I joined the military when I was twelve. I had a good reason. Namely, uh, needing the resources. And the cash. It was a good reason at the time.”
“I see,” Ray says. He doesn’t, of course, but it’s polite. “Will you… bend over forward for me? As far as you can. Keep your back straight, and put your palms together, if you would.”
He knew this would not be especially kind to either of them, but he did not anticipate just how difficult it would be to resist the impulse to run his hands over the curve of Edward’s extremely shapely rear.
And, for his part, Edward makes a faint sound-some amalgam of pain and frustration as he tries to shift his shoulders to make his arms hang evenly.
“That’s fine,” Ray says, gently, reining himself in; he doesn’t have a choice. “Just stay right there for me.”
“Well, I’m not doin’ it for me,” Edward mutters.
Ray swallows. It’s obvious; it’s agonizingly obvious. There’s no need whatsoever to reach out and lay his fingertips on either side of Edward’s spine and trace its terrible curve all the way from the wispy pale gold hairs at the nape of his neck down to the waist of his trousers.
And Ray does it anyway. Because hell might just be worth it, now.
Edward has beautiful skin and beautiful bones and is so misaligned that Ray’s back throbs at the sight of it.
“How heavy is the arm?” Ray asks.
He’s still standing behind a bent-double Edward Elric-expanses of bare flesh, the ripple of his ribs beneath his skin, the fall of hair, the positively exquisite ass, the vulnerability and its implication of trust-
“Dunno exactly,” Edward says. “Heavy. Why? ’S my back all fucked up?”
“That’s one way of putting it,” Ray says. “The doctor’s version is that you have fairly severe scoliosis.”
“Shit,” Edward says. He straightens slowly; Ray backs away. He stretches, both hands braced on his hips-and, contorted spine or no, arching his back like that… Ray’s pulse is slamming in his throat and his ears and everywhere. “Figures. I think Winry mentioned something about that, y’know, early on, but… well.” He lifts his hands and smiles at them, wryly. “This was supposed to be temporary.”
Ray stays out of reach, for both of their safety, and gestures grandly to the armchairs. “I think there’s a lot more of this story to tell.”
Edward slides smoothly back into his clothes, and Ray is torn between missing the intimacy and admiring the show.
“Maybe,” Edward says. “Can’t start from the start, though. We’re gonna have to work up to that.” He collapses into the armchair sideways, legs splayed over the side. “Uh, let’s see… well, when we crashed back into Munich-me and Al, I mean-my only friend had been shot dead trying to help me do right by people in another universe, and I’d never even gotten to tell him I was coming back. I never even said goodbye.” He runs the left hand through his hair. “Jesus, I never do. There’s never time, or I don’t know, or… Maybe Al’s on to something about closure.”
“When you say ‘never’,” Ray says, smoothing down a blank sheet of paper on his clipboard, “how many experiences of loss does that entail?”
Edward sighs, tilting his head back; the ponytail slithers down over the arm of the chair. “Shit. I am gonna have to start from where it started.” He swallows, and his eyes slant sideways towards Ray, and then he clears his throat. “My… father… left. When I was really small; Al was just a baby. And he had his reasons, I guess, and not all of them were even shitty reasons, in the end, but-I didn’t even really understand. I just saw what it did to our mom. And then…” He draws his right knee up against his chest and hooks his arm around it. The flexibility is remarkable, and the fidgeting is like a poker tell. “She… died. There was nothing we could do; we were just kids, but… Shit. This is so weird; I don’t…”
“You’re doing very well,” Ray says softly.
Edward spares him a dubious look before he returns to frowning at the open air. “The thing… is… there’s stuff you’re not supposed to do, with alchemy. Stuff that’s off-limits-taboo, y’know. But smart kids… there’s this special kind of arrogance kids have, and smart kids-they just think the whole world’s at their fingertips for free.” He licks his lips. “Only it’s not free. See, we figured-we thought the reason it was forbidden was that nobody else was good enough to do it right.” Molten eyes, wormwood smile. “That’s not why.” He strikes his metal hand against his metal knee, and the steel rings. “This is why.”
“You thought you were going to get your mother back?” Ray asks slowly.
Edward’s metal fingertips drag along a seam of the chairback. “Instead we killed her twice.” His eyes widen, slightly, and his breathing quickens at an alarming rate. “Oh, holy shit. There was-there was this girl, this little girl we couldn’t… and then Hughes. And then-oh, God-” He covers his face with both hands; his shoulders tremble. “-Greed-and then the others-and-her-and-” His arms cross over his knees, and he buries his face in them. “And Al said Teacher’s dead, and I saw my dad die-after all that, the fucking bastard had to go and… and Alfons, and I just… it just doesn’t ever fucking stop, does it?”
“I’m afraid not,” Ray says.
“Jesus,” Edward mutters, raking his left hand through his hair. “Let’s… not… start there. Once I get going, I just keep thinkin’ of more, and…” He straightens up in the chair and takes several deep breaths. Ray sits very still. “Anyway, so… Al’n I… crashed back into Munich, and Alfons was already gone. We figured… why not see what else was out there, right? Since we had nothing really anchoring us in Germany anymore. So we tagged along with our Romani friend and just… went with it. We just went. And it was really great for a while, but eventually we started to get… tired. Tired of being hungry, and cold, and getting glared at by the cops. Tired of not being able to afford new shoes and shit. So we said goodbye-that time I did, see-and wandered back over this way and… here we are.”
“You said that you teach?” Ray asks.
“Physics and chemistry,” Edward says, calmly, without so much as a modicum of pride. “Aerospace engineering stuff, too, when they’ll let me-that was what Alfons did, so it’s like… holding onto him, I don’t know. Anyway, I had a couple old recommendation letters I was hanging onto, and once I got my foot in the door, in interviews I would just start writing out equations and shit and explaining things the faculty didn’t really understand, and UCL offered to make me a lecturer, and then they said they’d take Al, too, so… that’s what we do.”
“Do you enjoy it?” Ray asks.
“Indoctrinating a bunch of snot-nosed little shits who don’t understand the value of critical thinking?” Edward asks, grinning. “S’all right. There are enough of ’em, you know, who remind me why I love science, ’cause you see how their eyes light up when they just get it. That’s what you have to aim for. And sometimes I can buy a bunch of cake and bribe Al into helping me mark the exams.”
“Doesn’t he have his own?” Ray asks, this time out of most-likely-misplaced curiosity.
“Yeah,” Edward says. “But I can usually talk him into it, because he knows I’ll just pass ’em all indiscriminately if I get too sick of the whole thing or run out of time. Anyway, it’s… fine. Hard science is okay, I guess. Numbers and stuff.”
“Rather than-alchemy?” Ray asks.
“Yeah,” Edward says again. He starts to say more, and then he hesitates, metal fist clenching and unclenching slowly where it perches on the armrest of his chair. He swallows, looking out the window intently. “Can I tell you something?”
“Of course you can,” Ray says. “That’s exactly why we’re here.”
“Alchemy,” Edward says slowly. “It’s… different. It’s got a hell of a lot of chemistry in it, obviously, because you have to be able to identify component parts pretty much on sight; and it’s got a lot of physics and engineering and stuff, too, because you have to understand how things work in order to put them back together right. But it’s… more than that. More than them. Alchemy has a part of you in it, in a way no regular equations-on-paper science does. If your equation works, it works; but even a perfect array can go haywire in the wrong hands. And I was…” He smiles slightly. “Well, hell, I was damned good at it. No one would ever argue with that. It kind of completed me, I guess-made me feel useful, and helpful, and whole, and… and maybe you’d say it was a crutch, and Al and I did kind of bury ourselves in it, y’know, trying to look forward, trying to believe in something, but… this world’s sciences are cold. Alchemy you could love. And I gave it up to get here.”
Ray doesn’t dare to twitch his pen. “Do you regret that?”
“No,” Edward says, calm and immediate. “I did it for the right reason. And then I got Al back in the bargain. It was gonna be for him in the first place, really-to keep him safe.” He lifts his right arm and spreads the fingers. “This was for him, too. Al always comes first, and I never look back. That’s not even a question. It’s just… a fact. You regret decisions; you can’t regret a fact.”
“Do you regret settling here?” Ray asks.
Edward’s eyes fix on him for a moment, and then their focus slides sideways to the window again. “Sometimes. London’s… grimy, y’know. Busy. Full. Loud. But it’s weird, ’cause all you have to do is walk a block or two away from a main road, and then that changes, and it’s these quiet houses and little gardens and churches and stuff. I don’t know. Sometimes it’s kind of exciting, and sometimes it’s so claustrophobic I want to scream.” He scratches under the band of his ponytail with a fingernail, making a face as he does. “It’s okay. Al and I do okay. Al’s happy. That’s all that matters.”
“How about you?” Ray asks softly.
“I’m fine,” Edward says. “I stay occupied. That’s the trick, you know; you keep your hands moving and your brain full, and you don’t have much time to think about the things you want, or miss, or… whatever.”
“Is that enough for you?” Ray asks.
Edward grins humorlessly. “Do I have a choice?”
“There’s always a choice,” Ray says.
The grin tilts a little. It’s starting to look ever so slightly deranged. “You think I could choose to be happy?”
Ray resists the urge to write Mayday in large letters on his page of notes. “That isn’t what I said. I meant that there is always an option to accept the status quo, or to change the situation. If you feel that you’re settling for a life which is not ‘enough’, there are going to be opportunities to alter it. Taking those opportunities likely would not be easy, but they certainly exist.”
Edward fishes his gloves out of his waistcoat pocket and puts them on. He tugs them carefully into place, adjusting all the seams. Only when he’s fussed with them for almost a minute does he speak.
“I told you,” he says. “I’m fine.” He crosses his legs at he knee, swinging his right foot; he looks like a young lion in repose. “You could come to one of my lectures, y’know. They’re Tuesdays and Thursdays at ten. I dunno, do you do that? Observe your specimens in their natural habitat? I’ll buy you lunch afterwards, if you want. Seems only fair.”
Ray does not ‘do that’. His heart is straining against the confines of his ribcage and hurling itself against the walls in an attempt to escape.
“I have a number of appointments on Thursdays,” he says. “But Tuesday would be quite nice.”
This grin is genuine. “All right.”
“Where on the campus are they held?” Ray asks, pen poised and ready.
“Give it here,” Edward says, motioning for the pad of paper. “I’ll draw you a map.”
On Monday night, he dreams of holding a shadow in his arms-and then the shadow is a young man cut out of darkness and solidifying into warmth. It’s this Edward, the new Edward-his sharp yellow eyes and smooth silver arm, but with the short, feathery hair that belonged to the boy.
“Who was my favorite poet?” Edward asks.
“Keats, I think,” Ray says. “I’m not quite sure, to be honest. You were more interested in the periodic table than in pentameter.”
“At least I got that right,” Edward says, nestling closer, skimming the cold metal fingers up Ray’s bare side. “Was I interested in you?”
“You were so young,” Ray says, leaning in to bury his face in Edward’s soft hair. “I don’t know.”
“Must’ve been,” Edward says, and there’s something… rising… from his hair-a mist; a faint golden-brown miasma- “Must be.”
“Mustard,” Ray says blankly. “Mustard gas.”
“Sorry,” Edward says as the blisters blossom across Ray’s skin.
Edward’s map turns out to be spectacularly unhelpful, but with a combination of intuition and inquiry, Ray manages to find his way to the appropriate auditorium with a few minutes to spare.
He sits in the back corner of the top row and settles just in time for Edward to blast in like an avenging whirlwind, loose papers scattering in his wake. He’s brighter, cheerier, livelier than Ray expected-he looks like he wants to be here; like he’s enjoying it. He greets several of the students in the front rows familiarly, leaning on their desks, before he tosses his satchel onto the podium, saunters up to the blackboard, and rolls up his left sleeve. He smiles at the chalk for a moment as he rolls it between the pad of his thumb and the first finger of his bare left hand, and then he launches into a lecture so enthused it’s almost an assault on the senses.
Ray doesn’t know enough about advanced chemistry to follow the equations or their explanations, but he knows enough about people to be enraptured by Edward’s voice and movement and body language.
A tall, slender figure slides into the seat beside his. Ray glances over, and it’s Al-the brother.
“He’s really something, isn’t he?” Al says without taking his eyes off of the heedless explosion of energy at the chalkboard.
“He is,” Ray says slowly.
“How much did he tell you?” Al asks, resting his chin on the heel of one hand.
“More than I thought I could believe,” Ray says.
Al smiles at that. “He trusts you.”
“I find myself trusting him, too,” Ray says. “It’s…”
Al flicks back a drifting lock of his own hair. “Uncanny?”
“Unprecedented,” Ray says. “I’m not in the habit of believing everything I hear.”
“How much have you told him?” Al asks.
That’s an odd turn for the interrogation to take. “I beg your pardon?”
“About yourself,” Al says. “The hard truths, the secrets, the buried things. He’ll retch up his guts for you, but if you don’t give back, he’ll think you’re not interested. It’s…” He smiles again, all enigma this time. “An exchange.”
Ray watches Edward scraping numbers out across the chalkboard-swift, deft slashes of white. “I see.”
“Did he tell you about Roy?” Al asks.
“He mentioned him,” Ray says. “Relatively often, usually in reference to a manner in which I was different from him.”
“That’s good,” Al says. He purses his lips and taps a finger on his chin. “Well, I think it’s good. What do you think?”
“I think I will never be in danger of conflating him with the Edward that I knew,” Ray says. “I’m not yet sure he’ll feel the same about me.”
“You’re quick, Doctor,” Al says, knitting both hands under his chin this time. “I’m not sure, myself. We’ll have to wait and see.”
Ray has never been fond of waiting-but the slow unfurling of a human mind, and a human heart? That he lives for.
With the lecture concluded, Edward shoos the students out the door-pausing, of course, to answer several questions in enthusiastic detail, with a few wild gesticulations for good measure-and then races up the aisle to Ray’s and Al’s little roost.
“Hey, kid,” he says to Al, touching the boy’s shoulder, and only after they’ve shared a smile does he turn a blinding grin on Ray. “You showed up.”
Ray imagines the litany of lies and failures that must have bred that mistrust. “I did,” he says. “And I’m very glad. For all of your mixed feelings on the matter, I think you’re quite suited to teaching.”
“Yeah, well,” Edward says, ducking too late to hide the rush of pink to his cheeks. “I’m starving, c’mon. Al, what do you want for lunch?”
Ed commences galumphing, and Al casts Ray an amused look much too old for his face before moving sedately after. “I was thinking we should go to the place that does the sandwiches.”
And it’s curious, Ray thinks, because the pair of brothers has such a strange symbiosis-the longer they’re together, the more they open outward. But he sorts through the data, as he oohs and aahs at the travel stories, laughs genuinely at the shenanigans, tries not to get too trapped in Edward’s gold ore eyes-and he remembers that their parents were both gone when they were children. This, the solidarity, the synchronicity, is the most reliable thing they’ve ever had. The closer they are, the more inclusive they can be, because it’s not just that they make each other comfortable: they make each other safe. They are one another’s home.
He hardly notices the food, which must mean it’s at least not bad, though his standards, in a post-trench-rations life, are not what once they were. It’s difficult to pay attention to much of anything but the way that Edward is grinning at him-so warmly and so intently, like this small wrought-iron bistro chair between two boys from another universe is where he belongs.
Perhaps it’s mad, but he’s almost starting to believe it.
PART II
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: alt!Roy/Ed
Rating: R
Word Count: 18,044 (9,650 in this portion)
Warnings: language; explicit sexual activity; this is why I don't write historical fiction; friends don't let friends do dramatic irony; major spoilers for '03/CoS
Summary: Light never lasts in London, does it? He, of all people, ought to know better than to believe in something good.
Author's Note: Writing the same fic I always write, but backwards, makes it super-creative, right? Almost as creative as the liberties I took by being absolutely shit at research, ahahaha.
How could you be the one if you’re not the same?
- “Ghost Lights” - Woodkid -
TO MAKE THE SUN SHINE
He’s sitting in the window of his cafe-not his by ownership, of course; his by habit alone-when he looks up from the rippling surface of his tea and…
It can’t be possible.
Not by happenstance-not by unlikely coincidence after all the searching. Not on the street, two sips into a cup of tea, three rescued crumbs into a madeleine-
He’s up from his chair and out the door; the bell jingles, and he cries, “Edward!”
His hands are shaking; the hairs at the nape of his neck are prickling like a cold breath’s passed across his skin. This is terribly melodramatic, but he can’t help it. Oh, Lord, for a second eye; for a second chance-
A part of him thought it was more likely that he was wrong. A part of him thought that, statistically speaking, the number of young men displaced and wandering is more than high enough to guarantee that several of them should have hair the color of goldenrods in Provence. Mathematically, one of those might well have irises that are not brown, are not green, are not ever unsurprising. The odds are that it should be someone else.
But they both turn at the sound of his voice-the tall boy with the short brown hair, and… Edward.
Ten years. Ten years later, he is willowy but powerful; the lines of his body are graceful and strong; the gold hair trails halfway down his back now, twisting like a ribbon, gleaming in the light. Ten years later, he is unmistakably the same, undeniably himself, and unspeakably beautiful.
Ten years later, he is freezing in his tracks like he’s seen a ghost. A bad ghost; there are no whimsical Dickensian visitors here; there is no warmth to the recognition in those incredible eyes.
At this rate, Ray would rather be a stranger.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I suppose it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?” He tries for an apologetic laugh. “Do you remember? Up in Camden, years ago-I was only doing psychiatry then, and your father convinced you to come see me about all of your terribly vivid dreams.”
Edward used to dream about a world with magic, which he could harness using his hands-and they weren’t just any hands; the magic world’s Edward had one arm made of metal, and a leg to match. The projection wore his hair long, which Ray speculated, as tactfully as possible, was a subconscious wish of Edward’s to tap into his anima, into the feminine power of his psyche, to complement the dream boy’s masculine athletic strength.
The unsettling thing about the dreams was not the detail in and of itself, but the logical consistency. They always sounded more like actual anecdotes than they did like the figments and fragments conjured by an unconscious mind. Edward was brilliant-far more than just brilliant; staggering, intimidating, ferociously intelligent and fiercely curious about everything under the sun-but he wasn’t brilliant enough to imagine painstakingly logical fantasy worlds in his sleep.
But there’s no time for that now. It’s too late, and Ray’s done his time thinking back on everything from every angle.
“How is Professor Hohenheim, by the way?” he asks.
Edward draws a breath in sharply and slowly lets it out. “He’s dead.”
Ray wants to say How? When? Why?, but those aren’t questions you ask anymore.
“I’m so sorry,” he says instead.
It doesn’t matter how many-every time an acquaintance vanishes from the face of the planet, he feels the resonation of the loss. There’s a pull from the vacuum; a strain; a deprivation. Quicksand. He has to reimagine every Friday morning, rewrite every memory of Hohenheim standing by the window, gently silhouetted by the feeble sunlight leaching through the fog. Every moment where they overlapped is different now-an extinguished existence unravels backwards, ghosting back across every surface that it touched.
It’s strange, really, that anyone can have any past left at all. Half the world is dead; they should all be unwound.
Edward smiles faintly. “Thanks.”
His voice is wrong. His voice is-wrong. What’s changed?
“I shouldn’t keep you,” Ray says, and there’s a… veiled… quality to Edward’s bright eyes that makes him hesitate. “It feels like it’s been a lifetime-I didn’t mean to interrupt; I could hardly believe I was seeing you.” He shouldn’t say it, but what if he never gets another chance? “I-looked for you. Afterwards.” After it was over, and I came home, he can’t say, because pieces of him will fight in France as long as he lives. “I couldn’t find a record anywhere; I thought…”
“Ended up in Germany,” Edward says. His voice is a bit tight, a bit hoarse, a bit… cautious. “I mean-eventually. Munich. To study.”
“Ah,” Ray says.
“Rocketry,” Edward says, helplessly. “Look, I’m sorry; if-if I’d known you were trying to find me-us-I… would’ve… reached out, or-something.”
The accent.
Edward is speaking like an American.
“It’s just wonderful you’re all right,” Ray says. The longer he stands here, the worse it feels. There’s a shadow on Edward now. Maybe it’s on all of them; maybe it’s the weight of the sheer emptiness, but it feels like a harrowing pressure on Ray’s chest to see it in a boy who used to be so light. “I’ll let you two go back to your business; I’m terribly sorry. It’s good to see you.”
He holds out his hand.
“You, too,” Edward says.
And then the hand that clasps Ray’s is not ordinary-it’s not even flesh, not even skin, no bone, no muscle; it’s cold, and unyielding. It’s… metal. Steel. Incredibly sophisticated, with articulated fingers, with grooves and curves and absolute authenticity.
It’s impossible.
And as the two boys’ backs move away down the pavement, Ray thinks…
No.
The long yellow ponytail, the cat’s eyes, a metal arm-
No.
He didn’t look quite as old as he ought to have been; he didn’t know the first thing about their shared history, but he knew Ray’s face-
No.
But perhaps stranger things have happened. Perhaps he should have learnt to stop asking anything in this world to make sense.
Perhaps-
Sitting down at the same little table, turning an absent gaze through the same broad window, wrapping his hands around another warm cup of the same damn tea-it doesn’t seem like it ever happened. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe he’s just nursed this ritual for so long that it’s finally started to crack his mind right down the center. Maybe the theory is wrong, and repetition isn’t soothing; it’s destructive, like waves wearing boulders down to dust.
Wishful thinking, is the idiom. Projection, is the term.
Is he capable of such a staggeringly vivid hallucination? It’s plausible, isn’t it? That he would draw some detail from the past and extrapolate it wildly to try to force the fantasy to manifest?
He’s done stranger. He’s thought worse. If some of his trench-mud dreams were visible, were broadcast, were inked out on his skin-they’d lock him in a room with padded walls, and the Thames could have the key.
He draws a deep breath, lets it out, and takes a sip of tea. It’s all right. He’s grounded. He’s functioning, at least; all of his systems are in motion, and he’s got one foot planted relatively solidly on the safe side of the precipice. The open air doesn’t own him yet.
As a gesture of good faith, he spreads the newspaper out on the tabletop and makes a concerted effort to care about the rows of stamped-in letters. Liza keeps trying to redirect his attention to the puzzles instead of the world news; mostly likely she thinks it will be healthier. But then, life’s unhealthy-there’s no avoiding it, is there?
Someone slides into the seat beside him.
Ray looks up-goes still.
It’s Edward-that is, not-Edward. Not-quite. Not-in-the-slightest; not-at-all.
“Hey,” Edward says. “Sorry. It’s just… Al figured you’d be here-‘clearly such a creature of habit nuns are green with envy’ is what he said, actually; he’s such a smartass sometimes-and he said I should come by. He said it’d be good for closure.” He pushes his hair back from his face with his left hand and smiles ruefully. “To be honest, I dunno who the closure’s supposed to be for.”
Oh, Lord. This is the moment of truth.
“Al,” Ray says slowly. He watches out of the corner of his eye, tries to see everything, which is much harder now than it was back when he had two eyes to work with. “Is that your-friend?”
None of the teashop employees are looking at him like he’s gone mad and started talking to thin air.
Oh, Lord. He was half-hoping he was starkers. It might very well be easier than this.
“My brother,” Edward is saying, with an odd, fiercely warm sort of light to his eyes. “He’s the b-”
“You’re real,” Ray says, somewhat faintly. “You exist.”
Edward stares at him for a moment, and then he looks down at his gloved right hand and curls it into a fist on the tabletop.
“Yeah, well,” he says. “Don’t seem to be able to stop-not for lack of trying. Occasionally I even think I deserve to keep at it.”
“I’m sorry,” Ray says. “That’s not what I meant. It’s only that-you were someone else’s dream.”
“About that.” Edward folds his hands now, and-surely it’s medically and mechanically impossible, for metal things to be so intricate and so precise. It can’t be anything from this world, can it? It simply cannot, and when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable… “You-knew the other… Edward?”
“He was my patient,” Ray says. “Before the War.” It’s always a capital letter, in his head. It’s always three letters and a deluge of glass-shard memories and mortar-bursts of pain.
Those same eyes on him, angled, suspicious. “Patient in what? You keep saying ‘dreams’.”
“I was a psychiatrist,” Ray says, turning the teacup. Handle towards his chest; handle away. “Somewhat inadvertently I ended up specializing in dreams and the subconscious. Yours-well, Edward’s, that Edward’s-were extraordinary. I had hypotheses about them.”
“Did you,” Edward says, fingers knitting tight.
“None like this,” Ray says.
“Yeah.” Edward smiles, thinly. “Blew my mind the first time I wound up here.”
“I can imagine,” Ray says. If this is merely an extension of a day-old phantasmagoria-if he’s dreaming, if it’s all a terrible capricious game put on by his wracked and shaken brain-well, there’s no real harm in playing along. “How did you, if you don’t mind my asking?”
Edward blinks at him; the flash of a grin is like a signal flare in darkness-too bright, and only a glimmer of the story told. “Jesus. You’re polite. Wasn’t expecting that.” The last of the smile fades. “Eh. It’s a long story. Stupid story. Dunno if you’d believe it. Did Edward ever tell you about alchemy?”
“As much as he could,” Ray says. “Even between the two of us, I don’t think we could have hoped to understand it from the outside, peering in. On the best nights, his dreams were still… indistinct. We had to piece them back together before we could even speculate.”
Edward looks at the tabletop for a long moment. He rubs at a nick in the wood with his fingertip, over and over.
“You really…” He clears his throat. “You really-cared about that kid.”
“I did,” Ray says. It does not escape him that this Edward refers to the other Edward (to his Edward; but he mustn’t even think it-) exclusively in the past tense. “We spent a lot of time together, and he shared a great deal of himself with me.”
Edward fidgets with his gloves and then folds his hands in his lap, only then to press them together between his knees and draw his legs in until there’s no more space for them to move. “What happened?”
“I had a bit of medical training,” Ray says. “It wasn’t the primary focus of my degree, but it was more than most people have. Men younger than I were dying in droves, so I enlisted to be a medic.”
“Oh,” Edward says. “Oh, shit.”
“That sums it up rather succinctly, to tell the truth,” Ray says.
Edward shakes his head-an acknowledgment, not a denial. His hair flutters, and his eyelashes dip, and he is distressingly beautiful in the pale morning light. “It’s… okay, it’s not funny, but I used to know someone… like you. Soldier, too. Only when he was on the front lines, he wasn’t saving people; he was a killing machine.”
Ray almost wants to say I lacked what I would classify as machinelike efficiency when it came to that, but you don’t talk about scrabbling and slipping in the mud, trying to jam a bayonet blade into a German boy’s throat, in the middle of a coffee shop.
He could swear he sees it, though-the pulse of empathy. Has Edward killed before? Lord. Life is making monsters of them all.
“I did what I could,” he says instead.
Edward leans his torso in towards the table, and his half-laced boots hike up onto the rung of his chair. He never stops moving, does he? “So, um… what are you up to now?”
“It’s something of a combination practice,” Ray says. “Psychiatry and physiology united, I suppose. Most of my patients are veterans. I think there’s a lot more to say about shell shock than anyone is willing to discuss.”
Edward swallows twice, opens his mouth, closes it, swallows again, and looks intently at the table. “How weird are you willing to get?” he asks.
“I beg your pardon?” Ray says.
“Al says sometimes that I should see a shrink,” Edward says, eyes tracking past a crumpled napkin and up to the glare of light on the window. “Maybe it should be you.”
“You should see a therapist,” Ray says. “Not a shrink. I’m afraid you don’t need any shrinking.”
Edward stares at him for a long moment, open-mouthed for the duration this time. Then his eyes-fill, flood; then he’s shoving his chair back right as the waiter approaches, darting past an entering patron, blasting out the door-
“I’m so sorry,” Ray says, fighting out his pocketbook, fumbling for the coins- “You’ll have to forgive him; he’s been through a lot-” That’s half again the cost, but to hell with it; he slaps the money down on the tabletop and hastens for the door- “Cheers, so sorry; until tomorrow, then-?”
He takes off running, and it’s not fair, really, that every muscle of his body should be so tight with terror, that his heart should be pounding so hard. He doesn’t know Edward-not this Edward. He wouldn’t even know the other one, the real one, after ten damn years of the whole world suffering at once.
But he doesn’t have to run far. Edward’s just around the corner, a few steps into the alley, leaning against the wall of the building and making a truly horrendous sound of sobbing laughter into his hands.
“Edward,” Ray says softly, and he reaches out slowly-no sudden movements, no startlement-to touch the left forearm, just lightly.
Edward flinches away, or as far away as he can go against a brick wall. Ray shifts more towards Edward’s left side, further from the street; it’s best to give him an avenue to escape, best not to corner him here.
“It wasn’t a guy l-like you,” Edward chokes out, breaths rattling, his mouth half-grimace and half-grin. “He was you-the you on my s-s-side, just like you h-had your Ed here. He always used to d-do that-call me sh-short, only underhanded, puns and sh-shit; he’d never just s-s-say it.” He draws a deep, albeit quavering, breath and scrubs the back of his left hand across his eyes. “Only not the last time. He knew it was, too. I ribbed him and shit, and he let it go. Al thinks-I dunno. It doesn’t matter; it’s too late. And I didn’t have the fucking guts to say goodbye, because that would’ve made it real, and I thought I was losing Al, too; I couldn’t face the thought…” He lowers his arms and flattens both palms on the wall behind him. With the fingers of the left, he picks at the protruding corner of a brick. “Your Edward’s dead,” he says, tilting his head back until Ray actually checks to see if the dull gray of the sky has changed. “’S my fault. Usually is. The fucking bombings. But I don’t think he felt it; I felt it. S’fucking horrible. But killing’s worse. Dying’s sort of-quiet. Killing someone, you get this hurricane in your head.”
There’s currently a void in Ray’s. Words. There must be words somewhere. There must be words and gestures and expressions he can offer to this red-eyed, wet-faced young man with a tempest inside of him.
“Can you come in Friday morning?” he asks, gently. He notices that his own hands are hovering halfway to Edward’s shoulders and lowers them slowly. “No charge. We’ll just-do a consulting, shall we? See how it goes?”
Liza’s going to kill him. The books are enough of a trial to balance as it is; they can’t afford to give out charity.
Edward smiles at him, lopsidedly. “S-sure. Friday’s fine. I teach on Thursdays. Where’s your place?”
“I have a card,” Ray says, and of course his pockets hide them all as he starts patting about. “It’s just a little ways up Brick Lane. Ten on Friday? Eleven?”
“Split the difference,” Edward says. “Ten-thirty.”
Blessedly, Ray’s fingers light on cardstock delving into the pocket in his waistcoat. Why did he even put a card there? “Here-you’ll want to hop off at Aldgate East and head to your right on Whitechapel. Osborn turns into Brick Lane before too long, and it’s on the right.”
Edward takes the card with his left hand and studies it with an absolute focus that is rare and-remarkable.
Liza is definitely going to kill him.
“All right,” Edward says. “Ten-thirty. If Al doesn’t bury me first.” He glances up. “Kidding. I’m just in for a lot of significant looks, is all.” He tucks the card into his trouser pocket and pushes his hand in after it. “Hey, um… thank you. By the way. For… yeah.”
“Certainly,” Ray says. “I’ll see you Friday, then.”
“Right,” Edward says, and then he hesitates, and then he makes fine use of that street-side egress Ray left.
Liza is going to chop Ray into pieces small enough to scatter to the wind.
“Breathe in,” Ray says. Kain obliges, but he’s slouching like a chastened child. “Sit up a bit straighter?”
“Sir,” Kain says, snapping to attention, and then he blinks owlishly. His eyes look naked when the spectacles are pushed up into his hair. “…oh. I’m sorry.”
“No, no, not at all,” Ray says softly. “Just breathe deeply. That’s right.”
He gives Kain’s heart a few more thumps to impress him, but the rhythm’s stable.
“Sounds good,” he says, setting the stethoscope aside and taking up his well-abused clipboard instead. “Anything feel off? Toothache, backache…?”
“Headaches again,” Kain says, rubbing at the side of his neck. He looks tiny on the patient table, but he always has to be specifically instructed to climb down and put his shirt back on and sit in the armchair; he pays for these sessions and still hates to impose. “I think it’s this new radio job-I’m so worried it’ll fall through that I just…” He makes a helpless face and hunches his shoulders to demonstrate.
“If they’ve any brains in their heads at all,” Ray says, jotting it down, “they’ll chain you to a chair in there so they can keep you forever.” He moves over towards the armchairs and attempts to look uncritically expectant. “How have the dreams been this week?”
Kain, bless him, takes the hint and slides down, collecting his clothing as he goes. “About the same. I had the one where I was a bloodhound again, but this time I caught him, and I hamstrung him with my teeth.” Kain’s superiors were not sympathetic to his delicate psychological state. Most of them died in Belgium, but they usually die again at Kain’s hands while he sleeps. “Not sure that’s actually possible; I’m not sure how much force a dog’s jaw…”
Ray twirls his pencil. “How did it feel? Catching him. Digging in like that.”
Kain sighs as he drops into the chair across from Ray. “Satisfying. But even at the time, I thought… a part of me thought, This isn’t fair; he doesn’t deserve this for how he was to me. It was vicious, too-visceral, very… lots of blood, lots of shreds of him. I woke up not too long after I brought him down, but he was screaming, begging, you know; lots of… his voice kept going hoarse; when I first sat up, I thought, That’s really strange, that I’d imagine that so realistically, but mostly I just felt… tired. Resigned, I think. Part of me didn’t want to hurt him, but the part that was already moving was too powerful to stop.”
“Let’s go back a bit,” Ray says. “He didn’t deserve it?”
Kain gives him a shaky smile. “To be mutilated and devoured by a dog version of one of his soldiers? Can’t say I’d wish that on anyone.”
“The particulars are morbid,” Ray says, all hail the understatement; “but I think the concept… At the time, he was destroying you, and you couldn’t fight back. This time, you’re on the attack. He’s the one running scared.”
Kain is quiet for a moment. “I… suppose.”
“Did you resent him, while it was happening?” Ray asks. “Did you feel that strongly, but you were… leashed? Muzzled? You were restrained, because he was a superior officer, and you wanted to obey orders, but you also wanted to make him understand?”
Kain shifts in the chair, toying with the yet-untucked hem of his shirt. “I don’t-remember. Maybe. Yes.”
“Try to remember,” Ray says gently. “Try to remember how it was then.”
“He kept on saying I was a coward,” Kain says, fingertips skating up and down the arm of the chair. “He’d say I should snap out of it; I was just too weak, or… unfocused. Unmanly. I’ve forgotten half of his phrases; they started to… roll off… after a while. It was getting harder and harder to think back then, in any case; I barely heard him sometimes. I used to think-what if there wasn’t something wrong with me? What if ordinary people felt like this, too, all the time, every day, and each morning they just got up and went about their business? And if they did, then it was only my weakness after all. I was so scared I’d find out it was. But sometimes I remembered-being here, being home, before. Being all right. Sometimes I could think very rationally about how I hadn’t always felt so numb and wild at turns, and then I’d think… I ought to see if somebody could set me right again.”
Ray’s scribbling madly to keep up. “That’s good. That’s excellent, Kain. But it wasn’t just you, was it?”
“No.” A faint smile. “I almost cried, when I stepped into Craiglockhart-with relief, I mean. Because I wasn’t alone.”
“That,” Ray says. “Remember that.” He turns a page, smoothes it. “Any other violent episodes?”
“Not anywhere outside of dreaming,” Kain says. “The… anxiety’s getting worse, though, I think. At the radio job. I think it’s just because… I want to do so well, and I’m on edge waiting for something to go wrong. I have this awful feeling like I’m going to ruin it, and there’s nothing I can do. This-impending… doom. Dread. Inevitability. Do you know that one?”
“I do,” Ray says. “Quite well.”
He files his notes once Kain goes-shirt still untucked, hat in hand, but looking a little more alive. There’s a brisk knock on the open door. “Doctor?”
Impending doom has ceased to pend: Liza only ever calls him Doctor when she’s angry.
“Yes?” he asks, as innocently as he’s capable of.
“Why do you have an unlabeled hour marked out on your calendar on Friday morning?”
He considers the phrasing, but quickly; to hesitate is to admit to guilt. “There’s someone I need to see.”
“Doctor,” Liza says, slower and with even more of her patented You are a record-setting imbecile tone, “I’m going to have to sign this individual in. Playing at keeping a secret is a tremendous waste of both of our time.”
Ray’s collar itches. He looks out the window, down towards the street; imagines the worn boots; imagines one foot metal and one foot warm.
“Did I ever tell you about Edward?” he asks.
Silence. To dumbfound Liza is something of an art form.
“I don’t believe so,” she says eventually. “Someone from before, or after?”
Everything in their personal timelines is defined like B.C. and A.D., the ancient and the new-before the War touched them; and after, when they were owned, and found, and so far gone.
Liza’s grandfather had been close to a man close to Churchill; she’d begged for a chance to demonstrate how she could shoot. They sent her to Arras. She ended up on Ray’s table with a bullet in her side, and once he’d removed it, she never left his.
“He was a patient before I left,” Ray says. The echo in his head, of the same voice-lower, coarser, older, but the same. The words he can’t quite silence-Your Edward’s dead. “He’s… a different person now, you might say. I saw him in the street the other morning and thought I was losing my mind once and for all.”
Liza looks at him for a long moment and then lowers her gaze to the schedule log in her hands, making a swift notation. “But how would we tell the difference?”
“I walked into that,” Ray says.
“You marched,” Liza says. “With great fanfare. Heymans’s appointment started two minutes ago, so we might just see him within the hour. Shall I hound him for his payment, or would you like to do the honors?”
“I know how much you enjoy making meaningful gestures with the letter opener,” Ray says.
Liza smiles, thinly but genuinely, which is one of life’s small and invaluable victories.
Friday. Ten-twenty-five. He’s not coming, is he?
Ten-twenty-eight. He’s not coming.
Ten-thirty.
Ten-thirty-two.
Ten-thirty-three.
Ray scrubs a hand down his face; he avoids the patch on instinct now. Edward is just some boy-some other-world’s mirror-image of his. Well, presuming that he’s not a raving lunatic who thinks he can perform alchemy, and has used some sort of psychotic genius to construct himself a mechanical arm to suit the story.
The problem is that magic is more plausible.
Ray’s head hurts.
Ten-thirty-five.
What a miserable fool he is, to hang his hopes on less than half a chance-to bank on pennies, to try rappelling with a length of thread. What is it about him that’s drawn to emotional self-destruction? Does he think he deserves it? Is this some sad, sad variation on survivor’s guilt? I may have lived, but at least I’m incapable of being happy. Well, fine. Lovely. That’s a class act.
He grinds a knuckle into his eye, blinks hard, and hunkers down to focus on which snippets of Sigmund he should quote to Heymans next week.
The door opens downstairs.
“Oh,” the voice says. “Oh. Um-hi. Good morning. I’ve… got an appointment.”
“Good morning,” Liza says, placidly for someone who’s almost certainly attempting to bore through Edward’s skin with the force of her gaze. “What’s your name?”
“Ed Elric. Should be ten-thirty. I mean-he said it was okay. I could come back another time if it’s not.”
“No, you’re listed here,” Liza says. “He’s expecting you. Let me walk you up?”
Lord have mercy.
“Sure,” Edward says, faintly audible over the deliberate scrape of the chair. “Thanks.”
As predicted, Liza gives Ray a look that could melt bone as she holds the door for… Edward. Not-Edward. The miracle.
“Give me a shout if you need anything,” Liza says.
“Thank you,” Ray says.
Edward sidles in, and Liza’s gaze makes Ray’s stomach lining peel and curl like old wallpaper, and then the door swings shut.
“Hey,” Edward says. He lingers by the doorway; Ray’s nearly sitting on the windowsill.
“Good morning,” he says.
“Sorry I’m late,” Edward says. “Somebody told me I should go by the church instead, and I got turned around.”
“That’s quite all right,” Ray says.
“So,” Edward says. “Raymond. Raymond Mustang.”
Ray blinks. He’d been trying to busy his hands with the clipboard; trying not to think too much; this was a terrible idea; why wasn’t he thinking too much then, when he suggested it? “…yes?”
“It’s just that m-the-guy I knew, he was… Roy.” Edward smiles slightly, gesturing unhelpfully towards his own face. “Same eye, though. Weird how some things diverged and some didn’t. And his patch was this big, honkin’, dramatic-ass thing, ’cause he’s-he was-just-like that.”
“Were you drawn to the drama?” Ray says.
Edward grins, wolfishly, and that is a dangerous expression if Ray’s ever seen one, with any number of eyes. “Boy. You don’t waste time.”
“Time is money, isn’t it?” Ray asks. “Your money, in this case.”
Edward’s grin curves like a cutlass. “Thought I was getting in for free.”
“Just this once,” Ray says.
“All right,” Edward says. “Then I owe you one favor back.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” Ray says.
“It’s equivalent,” Edward says, and there are shards of broken promises in that smile.
Ray’s going to have to delve into that, isn’t he?
“Have a seat,” he says, gesturing to the table.
Edward swings himself up onto it so smoothly that he barely crinkles the paper-he’s accustomed to this. He’s used to hiking his weight up onto awkward surfaces to be examined. There’s an amused sort of resignation to the cant of his shoulders; the way he swings his legs; the way he arches an eyebrow and tilts his head slowly to the side.
“Shall we start with the basic vitals?” Ray asks.
“I can tell you now,” Edward says, “that I’m definitely alive.” He reaches for the buttons of his waistcoat all the same, only then to pause just as his fingers begin to curl. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?”
“As long as you are,” Ray says, despite the temptation to wring his hands and wail, Ready for what?
Edward draws a breath, lets it out slowly, squares his shoulders, peels off his gloves, and deftly unfastens all of the buttons of the waistcoat, immediately followed by all of the buttons on his shirt. There’s a sliver of pale flesh and an angry gleam of scar tissue, and then he’s shrugging off both articles as one.
Ray is-speechless.
And numb, and paralyzed-his hands clench around the clipboard, which is a godsend, since only that instinct stops him dropping the whole thing to the floor.
He can still think-but only barely, and the entirety of his brain is consumed with wonder. There are no gears. There are no pistons. There is no steam; there is no fuel; there is no power source. It is not electric. It is not motorized. It is not… possible.
Edward drums his metal fingertips on the edge of the table-the sound that results is an almost-musical pinging. The whole false limb shifts so subtly as he moves; every piece is perfectly aligned, and the caliber of functionality-the versatility-the capability and the sheer finesse-
“I apologize,” Ray says, sounding weak to his own ears. “I don’t believe I was ready after all.”
Edward smiles thinly. “If I had a couple quid for every time I heard that, I could buy enough chocolate not to give a shit anymore.” He leans down and rolls up the bottom of his left trouser leg-more incredibly intricate steel. “I’ve got lots of souvenirs,” he says. He sits back and presses a fingertip down midway along his thigh. “Goes up to here, by the way, so you might wanna try the reflex test on the other one.”
“This world of yours,” Ray says through the vertiginous spinning of his own head. “Is this ordinary there?”
“Yes and no,” Edward says. The line of his shoulders loosens-just a fraction, but it counts. “Automail’s… I mean, it’s not common, but it’s normal. Mine’s the best, though, ’cause my mechanic was the best. This stuff’s so durable you wouldn’t believe it, and she had to guess the proportions after not seeing me for two years. Pretty damn brilliant if you ask me.”
“That’s extraordinary,” Ray says. He edges closer, sets the clipboard down, angles his hand in a way that’s meant to be imploring. “May I-?”
“Sure, yeah,” Edward says, but Ray doesn’t miss the half-second’s hesitation before he holds out the metal arm.
Ray takes it gently in both hands, not trusting himself to speak, hardly trusting himself to believe. It’s plated down from the shoulder; there are bare wires underneath-the elbow joint is a marvel in and of itself; to have so much inconceivable magnificence in one place-
Ray runs his fingertips very slowly up the grooves of the forearm, and then back down. There are nicks and scratches everywhere in the steel, some of them so jagged he has to wonder what was done with this construction.
And the hand. Its proportions are nearly identical to the left one; that a mass of metal, interconnected, could be so powerful-Ray thinks his heart may just leap out of his chest and land in the curve of those fingers.
(Would it be so bad? the part of him he tried to outrun asks softly. It hounded him in foxholes; it wriggled through him when the shell casings showered down. They say there are no atheists on battlefields; Ray’s not sure of that, but he suspects there are no liars. He’s been running since he came back-no more echoes of his own voice against the dripping walls of trenches-but here he stands, half-bent towards metal miracles, and it’s caught him at last. Would it really be so awful? Would they make so poor a cage? You’ve craved a cradle for that heart since the moment you recognized your own mortality. Why not this one? Why not now?)
“Amazing,” Ray says. “This is amazing.”
“It doesn’t freak you out?” Edward asks slowly, and it doesn’t escape Ray’s notice that the boy’s eyes are intently watching his face.
“Not especially,” Ray says. “It does baffle me quite a bit. How are you operating it? I’ve never seen a prosthetic that responds.”
“That’s automail for ya,” Edward says. He extends his fingers fully and wriggles them; the tips brush Ray’s wrist. “I never paid too much attention to the details, but it’s wired to my nerves. I actually have trouble moving it if I think about it too much, but if I just pretend it’s a normal arm, it receives and interprets all the same impulses from my brain.”
“This could change the world,” Ray says as he lowers his own hands to let go.
Edward shrugs-with the metal shoulder, of course. Just to obliterate another small portion of Ray’s brain. “Change, yeah. Save, no. I mean, you lot’ve got all kinds of things my world didn’t have.” He looks towards the window, clenching both hands around the edge of the examining table. “I’d trade the automail back for alchemy in a second, anyway. It’s not… I mean, sound body is great, but alchemy was kind of… my soul. A lot of it, anyway. And I’m okay; I’m coping, sure-I’m about a billion times better with Al here-but it’s like… it’s like if you were an artist, and you woke up one morning, and you couldn’t draw. Not that you didn’t want to; not that you didn’t remember how-you just couldn’t. The capacity was gone.” He sighs and tosses his head, flinging his hair out of his face. “Plus the automail’s a bitch to maintain sometimes-everybody always asks what smells like machine oil, for starters; and in winter I get these aches and chills, and in summer it swells until I want to chop it off.”
“Oh,” Ray says.
Edward grins, weary but genuine. “Yeah. ‘Oh’.”
“I think I’m missing a great deal of the story,” Ray says, taking up the stethoscope and trying not to think too much about the contours of Edward’s uncovered body. “Perhaps I can convince you to tell me most of it. First I’ll need you to sit up straight and breathe deeply, however, if you don’t mind…?”
“Sure thing, Doc,” Edward says.
He’s not sitting straight, though-not quite. Ray logs that mentally as he counts the beats and watches the secondhand on his wristwatch.
“I’m going to need your blood pressure, too,” he says as he jots the tally down-it’s a bit faster than he expected, given Edward’s size. Could that be related to the metal limbs somehow? But oughtn’t his heart beat slower, then, since there’s less blood to move, and less cumulative distance for it to travel? “All the basics, so that over time we have data for comparison.”
“You seem pretty confident that I’m coming back,” Edward says, offering his left arm for the cuff.
“I live in hope,” Ray says, and tucks the disc of the stethoscope in beneath the cuff’s edge. “Bear with me.”
Edward watches in what Ray can already tell is uncharacteristic quietude.
Silence-sound-silence.
“You’re a bit high,” Ray says as he unwinds everything and jots the numbers down. “Not enough that I’d be concerned, but it’s worth noting.” He pauses. “Would you mind hopping down for a moment and taking off your shoes?”
Edward obliges. “Can’t get over you asking instead of ordering.”
Ray pauses again. “Is this to do with the other…”
“The other you?” Edward asks. He picks at the laces of his boots and toes them off. Without them, Ray can clearly see that Edward’s default is to put his weight on the balls of his feet-it’s a fighting stance. “Yeah. He was my superior officer.” He wrinkles his nose at Ray’s expression. “I joined the military when I was twelve. I had a good reason. Namely, uh, needing the resources. And the cash. It was a good reason at the time.”
“I see,” Ray says. He doesn’t, of course, but it’s polite. “Will you… bend over forward for me? As far as you can. Keep your back straight, and put your palms together, if you would.”
He knew this would not be especially kind to either of them, but he did not anticipate just how difficult it would be to resist the impulse to run his hands over the curve of Edward’s extremely shapely rear.
And, for his part, Edward makes a faint sound-some amalgam of pain and frustration as he tries to shift his shoulders to make his arms hang evenly.
“That’s fine,” Ray says, gently, reining himself in; he doesn’t have a choice. “Just stay right there for me.”
“Well, I’m not doin’ it for me,” Edward mutters.
Ray swallows. It’s obvious; it’s agonizingly obvious. There’s no need whatsoever to reach out and lay his fingertips on either side of Edward’s spine and trace its terrible curve all the way from the wispy pale gold hairs at the nape of his neck down to the waist of his trousers.
And Ray does it anyway. Because hell might just be worth it, now.
Edward has beautiful skin and beautiful bones and is so misaligned that Ray’s back throbs at the sight of it.
“How heavy is the arm?” Ray asks.
He’s still standing behind a bent-double Edward Elric-expanses of bare flesh, the ripple of his ribs beneath his skin, the fall of hair, the positively exquisite ass, the vulnerability and its implication of trust-
“Dunno exactly,” Edward says. “Heavy. Why? ’S my back all fucked up?”
“That’s one way of putting it,” Ray says. “The doctor’s version is that you have fairly severe scoliosis.”
“Shit,” Edward says. He straightens slowly; Ray backs away. He stretches, both hands braced on his hips-and, contorted spine or no, arching his back like that… Ray’s pulse is slamming in his throat and his ears and everywhere. “Figures. I think Winry mentioned something about that, y’know, early on, but… well.” He lifts his hands and smiles at them, wryly. “This was supposed to be temporary.”
Ray stays out of reach, for both of their safety, and gestures grandly to the armchairs. “I think there’s a lot more of this story to tell.”
Edward slides smoothly back into his clothes, and Ray is torn between missing the intimacy and admiring the show.
“Maybe,” Edward says. “Can’t start from the start, though. We’re gonna have to work up to that.” He collapses into the armchair sideways, legs splayed over the side. “Uh, let’s see… well, when we crashed back into Munich-me and Al, I mean-my only friend had been shot dead trying to help me do right by people in another universe, and I’d never even gotten to tell him I was coming back. I never even said goodbye.” He runs the left hand through his hair. “Jesus, I never do. There’s never time, or I don’t know, or… Maybe Al’s on to something about closure.”
“When you say ‘never’,” Ray says, smoothing down a blank sheet of paper on his clipboard, “how many experiences of loss does that entail?”
Edward sighs, tilting his head back; the ponytail slithers down over the arm of the chair. “Shit. I am gonna have to start from where it started.” He swallows, and his eyes slant sideways towards Ray, and then he clears his throat. “My… father… left. When I was really small; Al was just a baby. And he had his reasons, I guess, and not all of them were even shitty reasons, in the end, but-I didn’t even really understand. I just saw what it did to our mom. And then…” He draws his right knee up against his chest and hooks his arm around it. The flexibility is remarkable, and the fidgeting is like a poker tell. “She… died. There was nothing we could do; we were just kids, but… Shit. This is so weird; I don’t…”
“You’re doing very well,” Ray says softly.
Edward spares him a dubious look before he returns to frowning at the open air. “The thing… is… there’s stuff you’re not supposed to do, with alchemy. Stuff that’s off-limits-taboo, y’know. But smart kids… there’s this special kind of arrogance kids have, and smart kids-they just think the whole world’s at their fingertips for free.” He licks his lips. “Only it’s not free. See, we figured-we thought the reason it was forbidden was that nobody else was good enough to do it right.” Molten eyes, wormwood smile. “That’s not why.” He strikes his metal hand against his metal knee, and the steel rings. “This is why.”
“You thought you were going to get your mother back?” Ray asks slowly.
Edward’s metal fingertips drag along a seam of the chairback. “Instead we killed her twice.” His eyes widen, slightly, and his breathing quickens at an alarming rate. “Oh, holy shit. There was-there was this girl, this little girl we couldn’t… and then Hughes. And then-oh, God-” He covers his face with both hands; his shoulders tremble. “-Greed-and then the others-and-her-and-” His arms cross over his knees, and he buries his face in them. “And Al said Teacher’s dead, and I saw my dad die-after all that, the fucking bastard had to go and… and Alfons, and I just… it just doesn’t ever fucking stop, does it?”
“I’m afraid not,” Ray says.
“Jesus,” Edward mutters, raking his left hand through his hair. “Let’s… not… start there. Once I get going, I just keep thinkin’ of more, and…” He straightens up in the chair and takes several deep breaths. Ray sits very still. “Anyway, so… Al’n I… crashed back into Munich, and Alfons was already gone. We figured… why not see what else was out there, right? Since we had nothing really anchoring us in Germany anymore. So we tagged along with our Romani friend and just… went with it. We just went. And it was really great for a while, but eventually we started to get… tired. Tired of being hungry, and cold, and getting glared at by the cops. Tired of not being able to afford new shoes and shit. So we said goodbye-that time I did, see-and wandered back over this way and… here we are.”
“You said that you teach?” Ray asks.
“Physics and chemistry,” Edward says, calmly, without so much as a modicum of pride. “Aerospace engineering stuff, too, when they’ll let me-that was what Alfons did, so it’s like… holding onto him, I don’t know. Anyway, I had a couple old recommendation letters I was hanging onto, and once I got my foot in the door, in interviews I would just start writing out equations and shit and explaining things the faculty didn’t really understand, and UCL offered to make me a lecturer, and then they said they’d take Al, too, so… that’s what we do.”
“Do you enjoy it?” Ray asks.
“Indoctrinating a bunch of snot-nosed little shits who don’t understand the value of critical thinking?” Edward asks, grinning. “S’all right. There are enough of ’em, you know, who remind me why I love science, ’cause you see how their eyes light up when they just get it. That’s what you have to aim for. And sometimes I can buy a bunch of cake and bribe Al into helping me mark the exams.”
“Doesn’t he have his own?” Ray asks, this time out of most-likely-misplaced curiosity.
“Yeah,” Edward says. “But I can usually talk him into it, because he knows I’ll just pass ’em all indiscriminately if I get too sick of the whole thing or run out of time. Anyway, it’s… fine. Hard science is okay, I guess. Numbers and stuff.”
“Rather than-alchemy?” Ray asks.
“Yeah,” Edward says again. He starts to say more, and then he hesitates, metal fist clenching and unclenching slowly where it perches on the armrest of his chair. He swallows, looking out the window intently. “Can I tell you something?”
“Of course you can,” Ray says. “That’s exactly why we’re here.”
“Alchemy,” Edward says slowly. “It’s… different. It’s got a hell of a lot of chemistry in it, obviously, because you have to be able to identify component parts pretty much on sight; and it’s got a lot of physics and engineering and stuff, too, because you have to understand how things work in order to put them back together right. But it’s… more than that. More than them. Alchemy has a part of you in it, in a way no regular equations-on-paper science does. If your equation works, it works; but even a perfect array can go haywire in the wrong hands. And I was…” He smiles slightly. “Well, hell, I was damned good at it. No one would ever argue with that. It kind of completed me, I guess-made me feel useful, and helpful, and whole, and… and maybe you’d say it was a crutch, and Al and I did kind of bury ourselves in it, y’know, trying to look forward, trying to believe in something, but… this world’s sciences are cold. Alchemy you could love. And I gave it up to get here.”
Ray doesn’t dare to twitch his pen. “Do you regret that?”
“No,” Edward says, calm and immediate. “I did it for the right reason. And then I got Al back in the bargain. It was gonna be for him in the first place, really-to keep him safe.” He lifts his right arm and spreads the fingers. “This was for him, too. Al always comes first, and I never look back. That’s not even a question. It’s just… a fact. You regret decisions; you can’t regret a fact.”
“Do you regret settling here?” Ray asks.
Edward’s eyes fix on him for a moment, and then their focus slides sideways to the window again. “Sometimes. London’s… grimy, y’know. Busy. Full. Loud. But it’s weird, ’cause all you have to do is walk a block or two away from a main road, and then that changes, and it’s these quiet houses and little gardens and churches and stuff. I don’t know. Sometimes it’s kind of exciting, and sometimes it’s so claustrophobic I want to scream.” He scratches under the band of his ponytail with a fingernail, making a face as he does. “It’s okay. Al and I do okay. Al’s happy. That’s all that matters.”
“How about you?” Ray asks softly.
“I’m fine,” Edward says. “I stay occupied. That’s the trick, you know; you keep your hands moving and your brain full, and you don’t have much time to think about the things you want, or miss, or… whatever.”
“Is that enough for you?” Ray asks.
Edward grins humorlessly. “Do I have a choice?”
“There’s always a choice,” Ray says.
The grin tilts a little. It’s starting to look ever so slightly deranged. “You think I could choose to be happy?”
Ray resists the urge to write Mayday in large letters on his page of notes. “That isn’t what I said. I meant that there is always an option to accept the status quo, or to change the situation. If you feel that you’re settling for a life which is not ‘enough’, there are going to be opportunities to alter it. Taking those opportunities likely would not be easy, but they certainly exist.”
Edward fishes his gloves out of his waistcoat pocket and puts them on. He tugs them carefully into place, adjusting all the seams. Only when he’s fussed with them for almost a minute does he speak.
“I told you,” he says. “I’m fine.” He crosses his legs at he knee, swinging his right foot; he looks like a young lion in repose. “You could come to one of my lectures, y’know. They’re Tuesdays and Thursdays at ten. I dunno, do you do that? Observe your specimens in their natural habitat? I’ll buy you lunch afterwards, if you want. Seems only fair.”
Ray does not ‘do that’. His heart is straining against the confines of his ribcage and hurling itself against the walls in an attempt to escape.
“I have a number of appointments on Thursdays,” he says. “But Tuesday would be quite nice.”
This grin is genuine. “All right.”
“Where on the campus are they held?” Ray asks, pen poised and ready.
“Give it here,” Edward says, motioning for the pad of paper. “I’ll draw you a map.”
On Monday night, he dreams of holding a shadow in his arms-and then the shadow is a young man cut out of darkness and solidifying into warmth. It’s this Edward, the new Edward-his sharp yellow eyes and smooth silver arm, but with the short, feathery hair that belonged to the boy.
“Who was my favorite poet?” Edward asks.
“Keats, I think,” Ray says. “I’m not quite sure, to be honest. You were more interested in the periodic table than in pentameter.”
“At least I got that right,” Edward says, nestling closer, skimming the cold metal fingers up Ray’s bare side. “Was I interested in you?”
“You were so young,” Ray says, leaning in to bury his face in Edward’s soft hair. “I don’t know.”
“Must’ve been,” Edward says, and there’s something… rising… from his hair-a mist; a faint golden-brown miasma- “Must be.”
“Mustard,” Ray says blankly. “Mustard gas.”
“Sorry,” Edward says as the blisters blossom across Ray’s skin.
Edward’s map turns out to be spectacularly unhelpful, but with a combination of intuition and inquiry, Ray manages to find his way to the appropriate auditorium with a few minutes to spare.
He sits in the back corner of the top row and settles just in time for Edward to blast in like an avenging whirlwind, loose papers scattering in his wake. He’s brighter, cheerier, livelier than Ray expected-he looks like he wants to be here; like he’s enjoying it. He greets several of the students in the front rows familiarly, leaning on their desks, before he tosses his satchel onto the podium, saunters up to the blackboard, and rolls up his left sleeve. He smiles at the chalk for a moment as he rolls it between the pad of his thumb and the first finger of his bare left hand, and then he launches into a lecture so enthused it’s almost an assault on the senses.
Ray doesn’t know enough about advanced chemistry to follow the equations or their explanations, but he knows enough about people to be enraptured by Edward’s voice and movement and body language.
A tall, slender figure slides into the seat beside his. Ray glances over, and it’s Al-the brother.
“He’s really something, isn’t he?” Al says without taking his eyes off of the heedless explosion of energy at the chalkboard.
“He is,” Ray says slowly.
“How much did he tell you?” Al asks, resting his chin on the heel of one hand.
“More than I thought I could believe,” Ray says.
Al smiles at that. “He trusts you.”
“I find myself trusting him, too,” Ray says. “It’s…”
Al flicks back a drifting lock of his own hair. “Uncanny?”
“Unprecedented,” Ray says. “I’m not in the habit of believing everything I hear.”
“How much have you told him?” Al asks.
That’s an odd turn for the interrogation to take. “I beg your pardon?”
“About yourself,” Al says. “The hard truths, the secrets, the buried things. He’ll retch up his guts for you, but if you don’t give back, he’ll think you’re not interested. It’s…” He smiles again, all enigma this time. “An exchange.”
Ray watches Edward scraping numbers out across the chalkboard-swift, deft slashes of white. “I see.”
“Did he tell you about Roy?” Al asks.
“He mentioned him,” Ray says. “Relatively often, usually in reference to a manner in which I was different from him.”
“That’s good,” Al says. He purses his lips and taps a finger on his chin. “Well, I think it’s good. What do you think?”
“I think I will never be in danger of conflating him with the Edward that I knew,” Ray says. “I’m not yet sure he’ll feel the same about me.”
“You’re quick, Doctor,” Al says, knitting both hands under his chin this time. “I’m not sure, myself. We’ll have to wait and see.”
Ray has never been fond of waiting-but the slow unfurling of a human mind, and a human heart? That he lives for.
With the lecture concluded, Edward shoos the students out the door-pausing, of course, to answer several questions in enthusiastic detail, with a few wild gesticulations for good measure-and then races up the aisle to Ray’s and Al’s little roost.
“Hey, kid,” he says to Al, touching the boy’s shoulder, and only after they’ve shared a smile does he turn a blinding grin on Ray. “You showed up.”
Ray imagines the litany of lies and failures that must have bred that mistrust. “I did,” he says. “And I’m very glad. For all of your mixed feelings on the matter, I think you’re quite suited to teaching.”
“Yeah, well,” Edward says, ducking too late to hide the rush of pink to his cheeks. “I’m starving, c’mon. Al, what do you want for lunch?”
Ed commences galumphing, and Al casts Ray an amused look much too old for his face before moving sedately after. “I was thinking we should go to the place that does the sandwiches.”
And it’s curious, Ray thinks, because the pair of brothers has such a strange symbiosis-the longer they’re together, the more they open outward. But he sorts through the data, as he oohs and aahs at the travel stories, laughs genuinely at the shenanigans, tries not to get too trapped in Edward’s gold ore eyes-and he remembers that their parents were both gone when they were children. This, the solidarity, the synchronicity, is the most reliable thing they’ve ever had. The closer they are, the more inclusive they can be, because it’s not just that they make each other comfortable: they make each other safe. They are one another’s home.
He hardly notices the food, which must mean it’s at least not bad, though his standards, in a post-trench-rations life, are not what once they were. It’s difficult to pay attention to much of anything but the way that Edward is grinning at him-so warmly and so intently, like this small wrought-iron bistro chair between two boys from another universe is where he belongs.
Perhaps it’s mad, but he’s almost starting to believe it.
PART II