FMA -- Sappily Ever After
Title: Sappily Ever After
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Ed
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 12,400
Warnings: language, nauseating quantities of schmoop, lots and lots of sexytalk, AU but with major spoilers for Brotherhood
Prompt: Roy/Ed wedding. And everything is fluffy and everyone lives happily ever after *___*
Summary: Ed and Roy are going to get married. At least theoretically speaking…
Author's Note: MERRY EXTREMELY LATE CHRISTMAS, paranormalpanda! ♥♥♥ To show you how much I love you, I broke my brain dedicating more thought to my OTP's fictional wedding in the past month and a half than I have done to my IRL wedding over the last year. :'D Mega-thanks to the inimitable Phindus, who very kindly helped me brainstorm hilarity for this fic and accordingly received a ridiculous cameo. *brofist* ♥ I'm so sorry for the massive delay; Edblog pretty much assassinated my productivity on real fic, but fortunately I discovered a new unrepentant OTP fluff anthem, which helped a little. ;A; I hope it's worth the wait!! ♥♥♥
SAPPILY EVER AFTER
Ed drums his metal fingers on the table and pointedly narrows his eyes.
Nothing.
He sits back in his chair, crosses his arms, and looks down his nose.
Still nothing.
He heaves a deep sigh, clears his throat, and then coughs into his right fist (it’s more sanitary that way).
Roy looks up from drawing extremely detailed designs in his garlic mashed potatoes with the tines of his fork. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” Ed says. “Are you?”
Roy blinks at him, all melt-your-kneecaps suavity and innocence. “Of course. Is something wrong?”
“Kinda,” Ed says slowly. “You tell me. You’re never this quiet. And you’re just playing with your food, and not in the cat way. And you’ve got this little frown line right here-” He draws an imaginary counterpart between his own eyebrows. “-like you always do when you’re worried about something.”
Roy smiles at him, warmly, and sets his elbows on the tabletop, the better to knit his hands together and rest his chin on top of them. “Have I told you lately that I love the way you notice things like that?”
Ed’s blood quickens every time Roy says the L-word in his stupid, amazing velvet voice. It’s actually kind of horrible, because all Roy ever has to do is gaze at him intently and murmur it, and Ed’s just… gone. Sunk. Royally fucked, you might say.
“Not, like, lately-lately,” he mumbles. “Anyway, what are you worried about? Is it work? You want me to go around ‘accidentally’ crushing metal railings in front of certain people again?”
“Much as the property damage was more than worth it on that occasion,” Roy says, “it did leave me with a rather unpalatable pile of paperwork, and I don’t think matters are up to that point just yet.”
“Okay,” Ed says. He twists his hands together under the table to stop himself from fidgeting-sure, he can part some of the Mustang smoke and mirrors by now, but Roy’s always been able to read his tells like an ABCs book. “So what is it?”
Roy lowers his hands to the table again, running his fingertips along the edge, smoothing wrinkles out of the tablecloth. He flattens them on either side of his plate, bows his head, closes his eyes, and goes still for a long moment. Then he looks up, half-smiling, and it seems like he’s searching Ed’s face for something, like he’s almost-scared?
Roy Mustang doesn’t do scared. Roy Mustang is the scariest thing in the country these days, by the standards of rational people as well as his political opponents. Roy does wary, and cautiously uncertain, but he doesn’t do scared.
What the hell is this?
Ed’s brain is moving at a hundred-thousand miles a minute; his heart pounds as Roy’s lips part, and a freezing shard of genuine terror lances up his spine-what if they’re over? What if this is Roy wetting his lips to ask for time off, which they both know means a breakup, severance, separation, a chasm cleaved between them that they can try to bridge and cover up, but that will never fit together quite the same?
What if it’s not even that? What if Roy’s bored, and it’s finished?
But it seemed like it was going so well. They don’t even really fight anymore; sometimes they play-fight over stupid shit like leaving wet towels in weird places, which actually sort of became a game of hiding them in unlikely spots where Roy would find them before long so that they never molded but were still extremely unpleasant, and the noise of sheer distress he made when he opened the kitchen cabinet the other day had Ed in stitches, and then Roy was trying so hard not to laugh that there were actually tears in his eyes, and is it just too much? Ed tries not to ask for anything unreasonable; he tries not to be a burden; but this is the course of his life, isn’t it? When he loves something with his whole heart and soul, he always smothers it, somehow, and he always ends up here.
Roy opens his mouth, and Ed braces himself. He won’t shout. He won’t cry. They’re in a public place, and if it’s the last sad, tiny tribute he can make to all the fucking wonderful shit they’ve had over the last couple years, he won’t embarrass Roy in a restaurant.
Couldn’t he have done this at home? Couldn’t he have spared them both the agony of other people’s eyes in a moment like thi-
“Ed,” Roy says, “do you want to get married?”
Ed’s brain, which one might recall had sixteen-hundred-miles-per-second speed, slams into a brick wall. It then falls over, lies very still, and makes a weak sort of moaning sound.
He thinks his eyelids, at least, are still operating normally, given that he seems to have blinked a dozen times in the silence.
Roy’s face crumples and then closes up, and Ed thinks No, no, wait, but he can’t seem to locate his lungs.
“We certainly don’t have to,” Roy says, quickly, smoothly, in a boardroom-placation sort of voice. It’s one of his automatic tones; it’s one of the ways he protects himself. “I just thought-well, I was honestly just thinking of the terminology, if you can believe it; I just-the other day, I found myself thinking, ‘You know, Ed really is my better half, and wouldn’t it be nice…’, and… but of course it’s not necessary; I just thought… What we have now is perfect, and I wouldn’t change a thing about it-I only-thought-just as a suggestion. That’s all. Never mind. Would you like dessert? Silly question; of course we’ll have dess-”
“Just no fucking military wedding,” Ed says. He has successfully recovered his voice, which had darted down below his stomach somewhere; his heart turned up in his throat, and the stupid thing won’t budge. “And I don’t want any weird people to be there. And we have to have a really good cake.” He tries to stop listening to the strange squishing sound that his blood makes rushing through his ears like that and pay attention to the rather fetching combination of bewilderment and burgeoning hope spreading over Roy’s face like a slow sunrise. “What else happens at weddings? I’ve never even been to one. I’m not wearing a dress. Isn’t there a dress? If you want a dress, you can wear the dress; that’d be pretty great.”
Roy blinks so many times it looks a little like when he flutters his eyelashes, which he does pretty much every time Ed’s mad at him, which is frustrating as hell, because even when Ed’s worked up a really good rage, it pretty much disintegrates after that. “You… want me to wear a dress?” He shakes his head slightly, clearing his throat. “You-want to get married. You want to get married to me.”
“Nah,” Ed says. “To the waiter. I want you to officiate, though, Führer Mustang. I said nobody has to wear a dress. Why are we even talking about this?”
“An excellent question,” Roy says.
Ed keeps his mouth firmly shut, directing all possible brainpower to the problem of processing that this is even happening. When he thinks he’s coming to terms with the concrete reality of marrying Roy, he takes a breath.
“So… how do you want to go about the whole… thing?” he asks.
Roy grimaces slightly. “It is a fairly big thing, isn’t it?”
“It doesn’t have to be a big thing,” Ed says. “I mean, for starters, we’ve got, like, one parent between the two of us, so it shouldn’t be too hard to keep the guest list to a single page.”
The grimace deepens. “We’re… going to have to send invitations. We’re going to have to pick a date. And a venue. And flowers. And food.”
“Dibs on the food,” Ed says.
Roy rubs at his temples with both hands. “Perhaps we should delegate this.”
“We can’t delegate our wedding, you lazy shit,” Ed says, maybe a teensy bit too loud.
The waiter who had just ghosted up to their table freezes like he’s been caught in the headlights of a speeding train. “I-pardon the-interruption. I-dessert?”
“Yes, please,” Roy says, taking the promisingly large menu out of the guy’s unmoving, half-extended hand. “Thank you.” He opens it, raises an eyebrow, and passes it over to Ed. There’s, like, eight pages. Jackpot. “And that’s ‘Führer Lazy Shit’ to you, dear.” He turns to the waiter and unleashes the Super Charming Smile of Doom. “Might I have a cup of tea, please? Anything that’s not too terribly potent-surprise me.”
The waiter nods helplessly and then remembers to fish out his notepad and scribble something down.
“Do I have to pick one?” Ed asks.
“Yes,” Roy says calmly. “I don’t want the sugar high hitting you at two in the morning again.”
“It happened once,” Ed says.
“And you were rambling about trigonometry until four-thirty,” Roy says, folding his hands into the endgame configuration-tragically, Ed knows all the variations by heart now. “I suspect you will live to see tomorrow if you only have one dessert.”
“But you’re not sure,” Ed says.
Roy gives him an imperious look undermined by the beginnings of a grin. “You may order one dessert. When you’re finished, if you find yourself still teetering on the brink of starvation, you may order one more.”
“Fucking dictator, this one,” Ed says to the waiter, gesturing with his thumb. “I didn’t vote for him.”
The waiter stares at him in terrified disbelief and swallows audibly. “I… did…”
“What a fine, intelligent young man,” Roy says. “Why don’t you give him your dessert order, Edward?”
“Everything sounds good,” Ed says. He hands the menu back. “Surprise me, too?”
“Sure,” the waiter says faintly. “Of course. I’ll… be right back with those. Are you still working on the plates?”
Ed’s has, like, three crumbs left on it. Roy’s is practically full.
“I’m quite finished, thank you,” Roy says.
When the waiter vanishes with them, Ed frowns across the table. “If your stomach growling wakes me up tonight, I’m gonna kick you.”
Roy meets his scowl with a blissful sort of smile. “I’ll try to eat something when we get home. I was so sick with nerves I couldn’t bear it.”
Ed wrings his napkin a little bit under the table to keep his hands occupied. “But-why? I mean, shit, what did you think I was gonna say?”
“Forever is a long time,” Roy says softly. “Forever with me might well sound like an interminable prison sentence to some.”
“I dunno,” Ed says. “I think just about anybody’d jump at the chance of you and chains and a whole lot of alone time.”
Roy reaches his left hand across the table, and Ed grabs it tightly with his.
“I believe we can arrange for that, too,” he says.
“Awesome,” Ed says.
Ed raises a hand in greeting to all of the usual suspects as he weaves through the outer office, and then he knocks on Roy’s door. “It’s me.”
“Come in.”
Ed opens the door and slips inside. The Führer of Amestris is leaned back so far in his chair that even Ed’s unpracticed mechanical know-how can tell that the axle’s in danger, with his feet propped up on his desk and his legs crossed at the ankles, toying contemplatively with a small silver slinky.
“Gee,” Ed says. “I’m so glad the country is in such good hands.”
“You seemed to think they were perfectly adequate last night,” Roy says, grinning with just the slightest hint of heat.
Ed tries to suppress the blush and fails. “Well-you-anyway. I called Winry. And I’m still a little deaf in my right ear from the screaming, so talk at this side. And she told me I should go get this, ’cause it’s the ‘definitive’… thing.”
Roy raises an eyebrow. “All… right.”
Ed unrolls the magazine he’s had tucked under his arm, tears off the newspaper he bought specifically to wrap it in so no one would see the humiliating fucking cover, and holds it out, bracing himself for catastrophe.
Roy relinquishes his position of consummate procrastination in order to lean forward and take it. “Ah. Modern Wedding.”
“Everything in there is insanely fucking expensive,” Ed says, “but I figure we could probably alchemize just about all of it from cheaper materials, or whatever.” He shifts his weight, crumpling the last shreds of the newspaper in his metal hand. “I dunno. What do you think?”
Roy flips through the magazine. His eyebrow stays firmly arched halfway up his forehead. “I think the two of us may be ever-so-slightly ill-suited to the project of decorating for an event.”
Ed can’t help that he deflates a little. “I was thinkin’ the same thing.”
Roy puts the magazine down and folds his hands over it, looking at Ed with an unsettling little gleam in his eye. “I was also thinking I should grow some facial ha-”
“No,” Ed says.
“Just a mustache, perha-”
“No.”
“Just a slender little one right here; it’d be very distingui-”
“Yo,” Ed says. “Try it and see how much sex you get between now and death-do-us-part.”
“It’s very much in style,” Roy says, working up to a pretty solid pout. “Carefully cultivated, it adds an air of refinement to any attire, and I would like to feel as confident as possible on the most important day of my life.”
Ed’s got eight or nine four-letter words rolling around in his mouth at the start of that, but then they all turn to dust. “Wait a second, what-what about your swearing in, and…?”
Roy smiles and spreads his hands to indicate the office. “However significant it may be, all of this is temporary. You and I are not.”
Ed has a little something in his eye. It may be a piece of railroad track, or possibly a hunk of quarry rock. “Okay. But I’m still putting my foot down on fuzzy face.”
Roy sighs feelingly. “The compromises I make for love are astounding.” He flips open the magazine again and gets this adorable kind of puzzled look. “I feel the only appropriate thing for me to do is to wear my dress uniform, but what would you like to wear?”
“I dunno,” Ed says. “Pants, at least. I’m supposed to wear a tux or something, right?”
“There’s no ‘supposed to’,” Roy says. “We can call the shots as much as we like.”
“Yeah,” Ed says, “but if we don’t start somewhere, we’ll never pick anything. So… you and I are in black and white and then blue and gold, I guess.”
“Red,” Roy says, smiling at him again, which will never stop making Ed’s whole chest warm up. “You have to have some red on you. It is absolutely your color.”
“Okay,” Ed says. He shoves his hands in his pockets and goes to peer at the magazine upside-down. “But we’re supposed to figure out a, like, theme color, right? So… red and blue make… purple.”
“Surely we can have multiple theme colors,” Roy says. “Why not red and yellow, then?”
“You’re not even going to be able to see me against the décor if we do that,” Ed says.
“Hm,” Roy says.
“Fuck,” Ed says.
They stare at the magazine a little. Who arranges these dumbass photo shoots anyway? The whole thing’s so wispy and fluttery and contrived it makes Ed feel like punching a unicorn.
“Shit,” Roy says.
“Yeah,” Ed says.
“Ed,” Roy says, meeting his eyes, “I’m serious. We should delegate this to someone who will actually be able to plan and successfully execute a complicated event in the time frame we’ve set.”
Hawkeye steps in without knocking before Ed can even open his mouth to protest. “I have Alphonse Elric waiting outside,” she says. She nods to the magazine. “Why don’t you let us take that off your hands before you hurt yourselves?”
“I am not delegating our fucking wedding!” Ed says.
“Of course you’re not,” Al says, sidling in with his biggest, brightest, most heart-melting smile. “You’re just letting somebody else handle the icky little details that would frustrate you so much they might ruin the whole thing. It’s still yours and Roy’s, and you can still make all the real choices, and it’ll still reflect everything you want it to be. You’ll just feel better about it from start to finish. That’s all.”
Al should hypnotize people.
…well, he should charge for it, since he already does.
“I guess…” Ed says weakly. “I guess you could… take… some of it… off our hands… I mean… Roy’s awfully busy, too, so…”
“Exactly,” Al chirps, slinging an arm around his shoulders. “Come on, Brother. Captain Hawkeye and I will take care of all of the nitty-gritty stuff, and you won’t have to worry about anything except showing up and eating cake.”
With the last of his power, Ed withholds concession for one more question: “Is it gonna be good cake?”
“The best,” Al says.
“All right,” Ed says, handing Al the magazine, giving Roy an over-the-shoulder wave, and starting for the door. “You guys do your thing.”
“Yes, sir,” Al and Hawkeye say at once.
“Ahem,” Roy says.
Ed gets caught up in a contractor project for Lieutenant-Colonel Ross; and then it rains for about ten billion years, and he holes up in Central’s biggest library and learns semaphore, sign language, basic Cretan, and that people write fiction about flying machines; and then Al’s doing some really interesting plant-alchemy stuff that he wants to check out; and then he finishes that paper he started two months ago on how Xerxesian architecture reflects alchemical geometry, even though he really doubts anyone in their right mind will ever want to read it.
The night that he spent half the afternoon on the phone with the Publisher Guy-who has a name, which is on a card somewhere; and who has some weird idea in his head that saying “But you’re the Fullmetal Alchemist” counts as an argument for why people will read something when it is actually just a statement of fact-he collapses in bed next to Roy and doesn’t hold back the giant sigh of relief.
Roy strokes his hair back and then raises an eyebrow at him. “Do you realize,” he says, “that we’re getting married in three days?”
Somewhere in amongst all of the interesting stuff, Ed vaguely remembers trying on clothes and shrugging about flowers and colors and shit.
“Uh,” he says. “Are you sure?”
Roy laughs softly instead of wringing Ed’s neck, which is sort of why Ed wants to marry him in the first place. “Positive.”
“Oh,” Ed says. “Are we going on a honeymoon?”
“There’s a major tariff bill going to the Senate in a week,” Roy says, “and I’d like to be on the floor.” He tucks a lock of hair behind Ed’s ear and then follows its length all the way down Ed’s neck to his collarbone. “But I was thinking we could take day or two, at least-there’s a lake just a few hours out where we could be very alone indeed, and Captain Hawkeye is the only one who knows I’m considering it.”
Ed isn’t especially fond of lakes, cabins, or the prospect of several hours of Roy’s driving, but he is very enamored of the thought of a couple days of getting Roy all to himself somewhere there wouldn’t be any chance of reporters hearing them get it on.
“That sounds really nice,” he says. He prods Roy’s chest with his softer index finger. “And you really need a break.”
“Guilty as charged,” Roy says.
Ed nestles in close to press their chests together and settles his face in against Roy’s throat.
“Jeez,” he says. “Three days?”
“Yes.”
“When the fuck did that happen?”
“I wish I knew.”
“You sure you wanna be stuck with me forever?”
“Rarely have I been surer of anything in my life.”
Ed kicks him in the shin-very, very gently. “You’re such a sap.”
“Which is, of course,” Roy says, “why you are stuck with me.”
“Aw, shit,” Ed says. “Shut up and go to sleep.”
“I love you, too,” Roy murmurs, and he can probably feel Ed’s face getting all hot against his skin.
Ed’s wedding day (seriously, what the fuck) dawns with a torrential downpour.
“Well,” Roy says, gazing out the window over the rim of his coffee cup, hair all sleep-tousled, eyes all blurry and smudged. They should just get married with him looking like that and then have sex on the altar.
…that’s just Ed’s morning brain talking. Logically he knows that having sex in front of your wedding guests is really bad form.
Roy saunters over to where Ed is lingering by the stove, a safe distance from the dastardly damp-cold waiting just past the windowpane. Roy’s mouth brushes over Ed’s forehead, and he automatically rises into the touch.
“I suppose it wouldn’t suit us if it wasn’t interesting,” Roy says.
“That’s a nice way of saying ‘What a fucking disaster’,” Ed says.
Roy grins. “I am the country’s foremost diplomat, you know.”
They get showered and then get dressed, which is sort of, but not totally, weird; and Roy manages to prevent Ed from strangling himself with the red tie that wants nothing more than his untimely demise; and then Roy turns up the biggest goddamn umbrella Ed’s ever seen, and they make a break for the car. As they drive, in between bouts of fearing for his life as the rain makes Roy swerve even more than his regular old incompetence does, Ed sits there and tries to come to terms with it.
He’s getting married.
He’s getting married to Roy Mustang, who runs the country-or at least Hawkeye lets him and everybody else think so.
He’s getting married to Roy Mustang right now, today, and then he will be a married person; he will be a husband or a partner or a huspartner or something, and he will be moving into an entirely different category of life experience; and he will, definitively, once and for all, belong to the man seated beside him.
It’s extremely surreal, and at the same time, it doesn’t feel strange at all.
Roy looks really fucking good in that stupid hat. His general sexiness, in fact, is so distracting that it’s making it very difficult for Ed to pay attention to what Al is saying.
“…managed to save the trellis,” Al sighs, gesturing, and Ed looks over for the first time at a strikingly beautiful wrought-iron arch completely covered in fire lilies. “I suppose there’s no harm doing it here in the hall-we can just use the reception chairs, after all, if we move the tables aside…”
“It’s great, Al,” Ed says, and if his voice quavers a tiny bit, it’s just nerves, whether or not Roy puts a hand on his shoulder and squeezes gently like maybe it’s something else. “I mean, it’s-this place looks fucking amazing. You guys are awesome. We’re so… we’re really lucky to have you. That’s all.”
Al flings both arms around him, and they cling to each other and suffer from a mild case of nerves together for a long moment before they part.
“Okay,” Ed says, taking deep breaths. “This is easy. We can just use alchemy to make the floor rise to a sharp angle in the middle, and all the tables will just slide out of the way. That’s what we’re going for, right? Like, an aisle or something?”
Al and Hawkeye very slowly turn towards each other. They seem to be holding up a very detailed conversation despite the fact that neither of them has uttered a word, which is damn creepy.
“Brother,” Al says in an extremely pleasant voice, “why don’t you look around and see some of the other interesting things we put together for today?”
“Well, I wanna help move stuff,” Ed says.
“That’s what groomsmen are for,” Al says. “You and Roy just relax. We’ll take care of everything. No floors need to get alchemically rearranged so dramatically that we lose our deposit. Okay?”
Ed starts to say something about how he isn’t little and therefore should inspire much larger amounts of faith, but right then Roy takes his left elbow-gently, but with the slightest hint of… other stuff. Strength. Possessiveness. That sort of thing. And Ed sort of loses his whole train of thought, somewhere out on a dark siding at an abandoned station in the rain, and doesn’t especially miss it.
“Whoa,” Ed says as his eyes light on a wide, glass-topped counter that’s been installed against the far wall. “What the hell is that?”
“My mother’s wedding gift to us,” Roy says, steering him over, sounding amused and exasperated and rather fond all at once. “She is supplying and staffing the open bar, because, and I quote, ‘Anyone watching you fawn over that kid for a whole night is going to need a stiff drink’.”
“You don’t fawn,” Ed says. He plops down on one of the bar stools and spins around experimentally. Great axle on this thing.
“Thank you,” Roy says, stepping behind the counter and sorting through the offerings. “That’s what I said.”
“Dote, maybe,” Ed says. “Develop all-new smooshy pet names because the canon of existing ones is insufficient to describe your smooshiness.”
Roy folds his arms on the bar and grins. “Did you know it’s illegal to defame the Führer?”
“Not anymore,” Ed says. “You struck that down, remember?”
“Shit,” Roy says. “You’re right. This-this-is my reward for championing democracy. Someday they’ll write a tragic opera about me.”
“I’ll make sure to sit in the front row and laugh uncomfortably loudly,” Ed says.
“Can I get you a drink, my dear?” Roy says. “Not least with the goal of shutting you up?”
“Please,” Ed says. “I think Al’s gonna ban me from my own wedding if I keep fidgeting.”
“Scotch cures the fidgets,” Roy says, hefting a bottle.
“Bullshit,” Ed says.
“Of course,” Roy says. “But delivered with such panache that you wanted to believe it, if only for a moment.”
“I’ll give you that one,” Ed says.
“Anything worth doing,” Roy says, setting his hat down on the countertop, “is worth doing with style.”
Ed’s about to argue with that-and he’s got enough points to the contrary that he could probably kill enough time to get them all the way into the start of the ceremony with the rant-but then Roy’s spinning the bottle and flipping it and tossing it from behind his shoulder to catch it in his other hand and twirling a gleaming crystal glass he summoned from nowhere, and then he’s whipping amber liquid into it and slinging it down the tiny bar to Ed.
“Aw, shit,” Ed says, hearing his own breath catch in his throat. He pushes the drink out of the way-with his left hand, trying to be relatively careful, as much as his animal brain will allow-and then fists both hands in the front of Roy’s uniform and drags him in close- “Take me now, Mustang, shit-”
Roy breathes a soft, hot laugh against his lips, winding a few fingers into his hair, curling them tight, and using the leverage to tilt his head back just a little, just barely exposing his throat- “Hold that thought until tonight.”
Ed says something to the effect of “Gnnnghhh.”
“Oh! You’re just in time!” Al is calling to someone across the room. Ed thinks there will always be a thread between his heart and Al’s-a thousand threads, really, from his heart to every part of Al, every piece, every trait, every action. A burst of filaments like spiders’ silk, stretching from his soul out to that bright-eyed, smiling boy, so that every movement Al makes tugs on him and tows him towards that light. He could zero in on Al in a crowd of millions. He went to hell and back-more than once-and he’d do it again without a thought. “Come on in!”
The rest of Roy’s team look, Ed has to admit, snappy as hell in their tuxes as they file in. Fuery’s pushing a huge gramophone, and none of the others have come empty-handed, either; Falman is carrying a box of records, and Havoc and Breda have their arms full of gauzy red and yellow fabric.
“Wait,” Ed says. “You’re going to mummify us and bury us in a ditch? Some wedding present.”
“Damn,” Breda says. “Should’ve known he’d figure it out. Quick, before the Führer gets his gloves on.”
Roy goes over to the nearby cart stacked with trays of gleaming silverware and selects a few very sharp-looking pieces. “Why dirty my gloves when there are so many dessert forks to eviscerate you with?”
“Boys,” Hawkeye says, “we only have two hours before guests are due to start arriving. I humbly suggest that we save all evisceration and related instances of gory violence for after the reception.”
Havoc sighs, plops his load of fabric down one of the chairs, and stretches his arms as high over his head as the structured shoulders of the tux will allow. “Man, weddings are way more fun when everybody’s trying to murder everybody else. You should’ve seen my cousin’s-I thought there was gonna be a bloodbath. Becky and I were just hiding in the corner with some hors d’oeuvres, constantly reassuring each other that we both were packing heat.”
“You brought guns to a wedding?” Fuery asks, staring.
Havoc opens his mouth, but before he can say anything, Hawkeye sets a stepladder in front of him. “Fortune,” she says, “favors the prepared. Even at weddings.”
“Especially at weddings,” Havoc says. “After all, Becky and I first started talking-like really talking-back when Lieutenant-Colonel Yevin invited us both to-”
“We know,” everyone in the room says in impeccable unison.
“Okay,” Havoc says, rubbing at the back of his neck. “Jeez.”
“Perhaps,” Hawkeye says, “we should focus on the wedding at hand?”
Of all of the innumerable things that Ed admires about Hawkeye, perhaps the single most impressive is her uncanny ability to command immediate action with what is ostensibly just a suggestion.
In mere moments, the whole team is unfolding ladders and clambering up them, trailing the rolls of fabric. Mere moments after that, the first billowing sheet has been secured to the ceiling-looped, by the looks of it, through a tiny hook on one of the beams. The whole thing quickly becomes a ruthlessly efficient operation: Breda relocates the ladder; Havoc clambers up; Fuery doles out several feet of fabric; and Falman hands it up to Havoc. Hawkeye stands a little ways aside and indicates where the ladder should go so that they’re distributed evenly along the ceiling. Ed can’t bring himself to do much of anything except watch in awe as they blitz the whole damn room.
“How come they’re never this good when they’re doing what you tell ’em?” he asks Roy.
“I’m sorry,” Roy says. “My administration advises me not to discuss internal affairs with members of the public.”
“Members of the public?” Ed says. “Just see if you get laid tonight, talking like that.”
“I’m fairly confident I will,” Roy says. “You tend to be very… suggestible after champagne.”
There’s a long pause. Ed can feel the heat climbing in his face.
“You mean ‘easy’,” Ed says. “You mean I’m easy when I’m drunk.”
“That’s not what I said,” Roy says.
“Fucking politicians,” Ed says.
“Hopefully you’ll only be fucking one tonight,” Roy says.
As much as Ed ever hates that Roy is such a goddamn word weasel, he sort of can’t help but get drawn into the charm.
“Yeah, well,” he says, “you’re gonna have to earn it.”
Roy’s grin makes his blood quicken. “I intend to.”
“Brother!” Al calls from where he’s dragging tables around on the other side of the room. “Start on the silverware! And do it right!”
“Okay, jeez!” Ed shouts back. Al should know way better than to think he’d forget how to set a table after all the times they fought over who got to do it for Mom, anyw… “What the hell is this?”
There’s a big basket of regular silverware, and a smaller basket where half of the utensils’ handles end in little stamped-in flame arrays, and the other half end in flamels.
“Those are for your table,” Al says. “The rest are rented, but those I bought and customized myself, so you can keep them.”
Ed is not going to cry. Ed is not going to cry.
“Thank you, Alphonse,” Roy says, touching Ed’s shoulder very gently in the way that means I will cover and distract everyone for as long as you need; take your time, and in that moment Ed loves him so ferociously that it makes the sting of tears a little worse. “That’s very kind of you.”
Ed pulls himself together and grabs a fistful of forks from the bigger basket. “You’re such an overachiever, Al.”
“You’re only going to get married once,” Al says calmly. “I want it to be perfect.”
Ed focuses very intently on the silverware, and if Roy hovers a bit closer by his shoulder than is strictly necessary to assist him, no one makes any comments.
[PART II]
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Ed
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 12,400
Warnings: language, nauseating quantities of schmoop, lots and lots of sexytalk, AU but with major spoilers for Brotherhood
Prompt: Roy/Ed wedding. And everything is fluffy and everyone lives happily ever after *___*
Summary: Ed and Roy are going to get married. At least theoretically speaking…
Author's Note: MERRY EXTREMELY LATE CHRISTMAS, paranormalpanda! ♥♥♥ To show you how much I love you, I broke my brain dedicating more thought to my OTP's fictional wedding in the past month and a half than I have done to my IRL wedding over the last year. :'D Mega-thanks to the inimitable Phindus, who very kindly helped me brainstorm hilarity for this fic and accordingly received a ridiculous cameo. *brofist* ♥ I'm so sorry for the massive delay; Edblog pretty much assassinated my productivity on real fic, but fortunately I discovered a new unrepentant OTP fluff anthem, which helped a little. ;A; I hope it's worth the wait!! ♥♥♥
SAPPILY EVER AFTER
Ed drums his metal fingers on the table and pointedly narrows his eyes.
Nothing.
He sits back in his chair, crosses his arms, and looks down his nose.
Still nothing.
He heaves a deep sigh, clears his throat, and then coughs into his right fist (it’s more sanitary that way).
Roy looks up from drawing extremely detailed designs in his garlic mashed potatoes with the tines of his fork. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” Ed says. “Are you?”
Roy blinks at him, all melt-your-kneecaps suavity and innocence. “Of course. Is something wrong?”
“Kinda,” Ed says slowly. “You tell me. You’re never this quiet. And you’re just playing with your food, and not in the cat way. And you’ve got this little frown line right here-” He draws an imaginary counterpart between his own eyebrows. “-like you always do when you’re worried about something.”
Roy smiles at him, warmly, and sets his elbows on the tabletop, the better to knit his hands together and rest his chin on top of them. “Have I told you lately that I love the way you notice things like that?”
Ed’s blood quickens every time Roy says the L-word in his stupid, amazing velvet voice. It’s actually kind of horrible, because all Roy ever has to do is gaze at him intently and murmur it, and Ed’s just… gone. Sunk. Royally fucked, you might say.
“Not, like, lately-lately,” he mumbles. “Anyway, what are you worried about? Is it work? You want me to go around ‘accidentally’ crushing metal railings in front of certain people again?”
“Much as the property damage was more than worth it on that occasion,” Roy says, “it did leave me with a rather unpalatable pile of paperwork, and I don’t think matters are up to that point just yet.”
“Okay,” Ed says. He twists his hands together under the table to stop himself from fidgeting-sure, he can part some of the Mustang smoke and mirrors by now, but Roy’s always been able to read his tells like an ABCs book. “So what is it?”
Roy lowers his hands to the table again, running his fingertips along the edge, smoothing wrinkles out of the tablecloth. He flattens them on either side of his plate, bows his head, closes his eyes, and goes still for a long moment. Then he looks up, half-smiling, and it seems like he’s searching Ed’s face for something, like he’s almost-scared?
Roy Mustang doesn’t do scared. Roy Mustang is the scariest thing in the country these days, by the standards of rational people as well as his political opponents. Roy does wary, and cautiously uncertain, but he doesn’t do scared.
What the hell is this?
Ed’s brain is moving at a hundred-thousand miles a minute; his heart pounds as Roy’s lips part, and a freezing shard of genuine terror lances up his spine-what if they’re over? What if this is Roy wetting his lips to ask for time off, which they both know means a breakup, severance, separation, a chasm cleaved between them that they can try to bridge and cover up, but that will never fit together quite the same?
What if it’s not even that? What if Roy’s bored, and it’s finished?
But it seemed like it was going so well. They don’t even really fight anymore; sometimes they play-fight over stupid shit like leaving wet towels in weird places, which actually sort of became a game of hiding them in unlikely spots where Roy would find them before long so that they never molded but were still extremely unpleasant, and the noise of sheer distress he made when he opened the kitchen cabinet the other day had Ed in stitches, and then Roy was trying so hard not to laugh that there were actually tears in his eyes, and is it just too much? Ed tries not to ask for anything unreasonable; he tries not to be a burden; but this is the course of his life, isn’t it? When he loves something with his whole heart and soul, he always smothers it, somehow, and he always ends up here.
Roy opens his mouth, and Ed braces himself. He won’t shout. He won’t cry. They’re in a public place, and if it’s the last sad, tiny tribute he can make to all the fucking wonderful shit they’ve had over the last couple years, he won’t embarrass Roy in a restaurant.
Couldn’t he have done this at home? Couldn’t he have spared them both the agony of other people’s eyes in a moment like thi-
“Ed,” Roy says, “do you want to get married?”
Ed’s brain, which one might recall had sixteen-hundred-miles-per-second speed, slams into a brick wall. It then falls over, lies very still, and makes a weak sort of moaning sound.
He thinks his eyelids, at least, are still operating normally, given that he seems to have blinked a dozen times in the silence.
Roy’s face crumples and then closes up, and Ed thinks No, no, wait, but he can’t seem to locate his lungs.
“We certainly don’t have to,” Roy says, quickly, smoothly, in a boardroom-placation sort of voice. It’s one of his automatic tones; it’s one of the ways he protects himself. “I just thought-well, I was honestly just thinking of the terminology, if you can believe it; I just-the other day, I found myself thinking, ‘You know, Ed really is my better half, and wouldn’t it be nice…’, and… but of course it’s not necessary; I just thought… What we have now is perfect, and I wouldn’t change a thing about it-I only-thought-just as a suggestion. That’s all. Never mind. Would you like dessert? Silly question; of course we’ll have dess-”
“Just no fucking military wedding,” Ed says. He has successfully recovered his voice, which had darted down below his stomach somewhere; his heart turned up in his throat, and the stupid thing won’t budge. “And I don’t want any weird people to be there. And we have to have a really good cake.” He tries to stop listening to the strange squishing sound that his blood makes rushing through his ears like that and pay attention to the rather fetching combination of bewilderment and burgeoning hope spreading over Roy’s face like a slow sunrise. “What else happens at weddings? I’ve never even been to one. I’m not wearing a dress. Isn’t there a dress? If you want a dress, you can wear the dress; that’d be pretty great.”
Roy blinks so many times it looks a little like when he flutters his eyelashes, which he does pretty much every time Ed’s mad at him, which is frustrating as hell, because even when Ed’s worked up a really good rage, it pretty much disintegrates after that. “You… want me to wear a dress?” He shakes his head slightly, clearing his throat. “You-want to get married. You want to get married to me.”
“Nah,” Ed says. “To the waiter. I want you to officiate, though, Führer Mustang. I said nobody has to wear a dress. Why are we even talking about this?”
“An excellent question,” Roy says.
Ed keeps his mouth firmly shut, directing all possible brainpower to the problem of processing that this is even happening. When he thinks he’s coming to terms with the concrete reality of marrying Roy, he takes a breath.
“So… how do you want to go about the whole… thing?” he asks.
Roy grimaces slightly. “It is a fairly big thing, isn’t it?”
“It doesn’t have to be a big thing,” Ed says. “I mean, for starters, we’ve got, like, one parent between the two of us, so it shouldn’t be too hard to keep the guest list to a single page.”
The grimace deepens. “We’re… going to have to send invitations. We’re going to have to pick a date. And a venue. And flowers. And food.”
“Dibs on the food,” Ed says.
Roy rubs at his temples with both hands. “Perhaps we should delegate this.”
“We can’t delegate our wedding, you lazy shit,” Ed says, maybe a teensy bit too loud.
The waiter who had just ghosted up to their table freezes like he’s been caught in the headlights of a speeding train. “I-pardon the-interruption. I-dessert?”
“Yes, please,” Roy says, taking the promisingly large menu out of the guy’s unmoving, half-extended hand. “Thank you.” He opens it, raises an eyebrow, and passes it over to Ed. There’s, like, eight pages. Jackpot. “And that’s ‘Führer Lazy Shit’ to you, dear.” He turns to the waiter and unleashes the Super Charming Smile of Doom. “Might I have a cup of tea, please? Anything that’s not too terribly potent-surprise me.”
The waiter nods helplessly and then remembers to fish out his notepad and scribble something down.
“Do I have to pick one?” Ed asks.
“Yes,” Roy says calmly. “I don’t want the sugar high hitting you at two in the morning again.”
“It happened once,” Ed says.
“And you were rambling about trigonometry until four-thirty,” Roy says, folding his hands into the endgame configuration-tragically, Ed knows all the variations by heart now. “I suspect you will live to see tomorrow if you only have one dessert.”
“But you’re not sure,” Ed says.
Roy gives him an imperious look undermined by the beginnings of a grin. “You may order one dessert. When you’re finished, if you find yourself still teetering on the brink of starvation, you may order one more.”
“Fucking dictator, this one,” Ed says to the waiter, gesturing with his thumb. “I didn’t vote for him.”
The waiter stares at him in terrified disbelief and swallows audibly. “I… did…”
“What a fine, intelligent young man,” Roy says. “Why don’t you give him your dessert order, Edward?”
“Everything sounds good,” Ed says. He hands the menu back. “Surprise me, too?”
“Sure,” the waiter says faintly. “Of course. I’ll… be right back with those. Are you still working on the plates?”
Ed’s has, like, three crumbs left on it. Roy’s is practically full.
“I’m quite finished, thank you,” Roy says.
When the waiter vanishes with them, Ed frowns across the table. “If your stomach growling wakes me up tonight, I’m gonna kick you.”
Roy meets his scowl with a blissful sort of smile. “I’ll try to eat something when we get home. I was so sick with nerves I couldn’t bear it.”
Ed wrings his napkin a little bit under the table to keep his hands occupied. “But-why? I mean, shit, what did you think I was gonna say?”
“Forever is a long time,” Roy says softly. “Forever with me might well sound like an interminable prison sentence to some.”
“I dunno,” Ed says. “I think just about anybody’d jump at the chance of you and chains and a whole lot of alone time.”
Roy reaches his left hand across the table, and Ed grabs it tightly with his.
“I believe we can arrange for that, too,” he says.
“Awesome,” Ed says.
Ed raises a hand in greeting to all of the usual suspects as he weaves through the outer office, and then he knocks on Roy’s door. “It’s me.”
“Come in.”
Ed opens the door and slips inside. The Führer of Amestris is leaned back so far in his chair that even Ed’s unpracticed mechanical know-how can tell that the axle’s in danger, with his feet propped up on his desk and his legs crossed at the ankles, toying contemplatively with a small silver slinky.
“Gee,” Ed says. “I’m so glad the country is in such good hands.”
“You seemed to think they were perfectly adequate last night,” Roy says, grinning with just the slightest hint of heat.
Ed tries to suppress the blush and fails. “Well-you-anyway. I called Winry. And I’m still a little deaf in my right ear from the screaming, so talk at this side. And she told me I should go get this, ’cause it’s the ‘definitive’… thing.”
Roy raises an eyebrow. “All… right.”
Ed unrolls the magazine he’s had tucked under his arm, tears off the newspaper he bought specifically to wrap it in so no one would see the humiliating fucking cover, and holds it out, bracing himself for catastrophe.
Roy relinquishes his position of consummate procrastination in order to lean forward and take it. “Ah. Modern Wedding.”
“Everything in there is insanely fucking expensive,” Ed says, “but I figure we could probably alchemize just about all of it from cheaper materials, or whatever.” He shifts his weight, crumpling the last shreds of the newspaper in his metal hand. “I dunno. What do you think?”
Roy flips through the magazine. His eyebrow stays firmly arched halfway up his forehead. “I think the two of us may be ever-so-slightly ill-suited to the project of decorating for an event.”
Ed can’t help that he deflates a little. “I was thinkin’ the same thing.”
Roy puts the magazine down and folds his hands over it, looking at Ed with an unsettling little gleam in his eye. “I was also thinking I should grow some facial ha-”
“No,” Ed says.
“Just a mustache, perha-”
“No.”
“Just a slender little one right here; it’d be very distingui-”
“Yo,” Ed says. “Try it and see how much sex you get between now and death-do-us-part.”
“It’s very much in style,” Roy says, working up to a pretty solid pout. “Carefully cultivated, it adds an air of refinement to any attire, and I would like to feel as confident as possible on the most important day of my life.”
Ed’s got eight or nine four-letter words rolling around in his mouth at the start of that, but then they all turn to dust. “Wait a second, what-what about your swearing in, and…?”
Roy smiles and spreads his hands to indicate the office. “However significant it may be, all of this is temporary. You and I are not.”
Ed has a little something in his eye. It may be a piece of railroad track, or possibly a hunk of quarry rock. “Okay. But I’m still putting my foot down on fuzzy face.”
Roy sighs feelingly. “The compromises I make for love are astounding.” He flips open the magazine again and gets this adorable kind of puzzled look. “I feel the only appropriate thing for me to do is to wear my dress uniform, but what would you like to wear?”
“I dunno,” Ed says. “Pants, at least. I’m supposed to wear a tux or something, right?”
“There’s no ‘supposed to’,” Roy says. “We can call the shots as much as we like.”
“Yeah,” Ed says, “but if we don’t start somewhere, we’ll never pick anything. So… you and I are in black and white and then blue and gold, I guess.”
“Red,” Roy says, smiling at him again, which will never stop making Ed’s whole chest warm up. “You have to have some red on you. It is absolutely your color.”
“Okay,” Ed says. He shoves his hands in his pockets and goes to peer at the magazine upside-down. “But we’re supposed to figure out a, like, theme color, right? So… red and blue make… purple.”
“Surely we can have multiple theme colors,” Roy says. “Why not red and yellow, then?”
“You’re not even going to be able to see me against the décor if we do that,” Ed says.
“Hm,” Roy says.
“Fuck,” Ed says.
They stare at the magazine a little. Who arranges these dumbass photo shoots anyway? The whole thing’s so wispy and fluttery and contrived it makes Ed feel like punching a unicorn.
“Shit,” Roy says.
“Yeah,” Ed says.
“Ed,” Roy says, meeting his eyes, “I’m serious. We should delegate this to someone who will actually be able to plan and successfully execute a complicated event in the time frame we’ve set.”
Hawkeye steps in without knocking before Ed can even open his mouth to protest. “I have Alphonse Elric waiting outside,” she says. She nods to the magazine. “Why don’t you let us take that off your hands before you hurt yourselves?”
“I am not delegating our fucking wedding!” Ed says.
“Of course you’re not,” Al says, sidling in with his biggest, brightest, most heart-melting smile. “You’re just letting somebody else handle the icky little details that would frustrate you so much they might ruin the whole thing. It’s still yours and Roy’s, and you can still make all the real choices, and it’ll still reflect everything you want it to be. You’ll just feel better about it from start to finish. That’s all.”
Al should hypnotize people.
…well, he should charge for it, since he already does.
“I guess…” Ed says weakly. “I guess you could… take… some of it… off our hands… I mean… Roy’s awfully busy, too, so…”
“Exactly,” Al chirps, slinging an arm around his shoulders. “Come on, Brother. Captain Hawkeye and I will take care of all of the nitty-gritty stuff, and you won’t have to worry about anything except showing up and eating cake.”
With the last of his power, Ed withholds concession for one more question: “Is it gonna be good cake?”
“The best,” Al says.
“All right,” Ed says, handing Al the magazine, giving Roy an over-the-shoulder wave, and starting for the door. “You guys do your thing.”
“Yes, sir,” Al and Hawkeye say at once.
“Ahem,” Roy says.
Ed gets caught up in a contractor project for Lieutenant-Colonel Ross; and then it rains for about ten billion years, and he holes up in Central’s biggest library and learns semaphore, sign language, basic Cretan, and that people write fiction about flying machines; and then Al’s doing some really interesting plant-alchemy stuff that he wants to check out; and then he finishes that paper he started two months ago on how Xerxesian architecture reflects alchemical geometry, even though he really doubts anyone in their right mind will ever want to read it.
The night that he spent half the afternoon on the phone with the Publisher Guy-who has a name, which is on a card somewhere; and who has some weird idea in his head that saying “But you’re the Fullmetal Alchemist” counts as an argument for why people will read something when it is actually just a statement of fact-he collapses in bed next to Roy and doesn’t hold back the giant sigh of relief.
Roy strokes his hair back and then raises an eyebrow at him. “Do you realize,” he says, “that we’re getting married in three days?”
Somewhere in amongst all of the interesting stuff, Ed vaguely remembers trying on clothes and shrugging about flowers and colors and shit.
“Uh,” he says. “Are you sure?”
Roy laughs softly instead of wringing Ed’s neck, which is sort of why Ed wants to marry him in the first place. “Positive.”
“Oh,” Ed says. “Are we going on a honeymoon?”
“There’s a major tariff bill going to the Senate in a week,” Roy says, “and I’d like to be on the floor.” He tucks a lock of hair behind Ed’s ear and then follows its length all the way down Ed’s neck to his collarbone. “But I was thinking we could take day or two, at least-there’s a lake just a few hours out where we could be very alone indeed, and Captain Hawkeye is the only one who knows I’m considering it.”
Ed isn’t especially fond of lakes, cabins, or the prospect of several hours of Roy’s driving, but he is very enamored of the thought of a couple days of getting Roy all to himself somewhere there wouldn’t be any chance of reporters hearing them get it on.
“That sounds really nice,” he says. He prods Roy’s chest with his softer index finger. “And you really need a break.”
“Guilty as charged,” Roy says.
Ed nestles in close to press their chests together and settles his face in against Roy’s throat.
“Jeez,” he says. “Three days?”
“Yes.”
“When the fuck did that happen?”
“I wish I knew.”
“You sure you wanna be stuck with me forever?”
“Rarely have I been surer of anything in my life.”
Ed kicks him in the shin-very, very gently. “You’re such a sap.”
“Which is, of course,” Roy says, “why you are stuck with me.”
“Aw, shit,” Ed says. “Shut up and go to sleep.”
“I love you, too,” Roy murmurs, and he can probably feel Ed’s face getting all hot against his skin.
Ed’s wedding day (seriously, what the fuck) dawns with a torrential downpour.
“Well,” Roy says, gazing out the window over the rim of his coffee cup, hair all sleep-tousled, eyes all blurry and smudged. They should just get married with him looking like that and then have sex on the altar.
…that’s just Ed’s morning brain talking. Logically he knows that having sex in front of your wedding guests is really bad form.
Roy saunters over to where Ed is lingering by the stove, a safe distance from the dastardly damp-cold waiting just past the windowpane. Roy’s mouth brushes over Ed’s forehead, and he automatically rises into the touch.
“I suppose it wouldn’t suit us if it wasn’t interesting,” Roy says.
“That’s a nice way of saying ‘What a fucking disaster’,” Ed says.
Roy grins. “I am the country’s foremost diplomat, you know.”
They get showered and then get dressed, which is sort of, but not totally, weird; and Roy manages to prevent Ed from strangling himself with the red tie that wants nothing more than his untimely demise; and then Roy turns up the biggest goddamn umbrella Ed’s ever seen, and they make a break for the car. As they drive, in between bouts of fearing for his life as the rain makes Roy swerve even more than his regular old incompetence does, Ed sits there and tries to come to terms with it.
He’s getting married.
He’s getting married to Roy Mustang, who runs the country-or at least Hawkeye lets him and everybody else think so.
He’s getting married to Roy Mustang right now, today, and then he will be a married person; he will be a husband or a partner or a huspartner or something, and he will be moving into an entirely different category of life experience; and he will, definitively, once and for all, belong to the man seated beside him.
It’s extremely surreal, and at the same time, it doesn’t feel strange at all.
Roy looks really fucking good in that stupid hat. His general sexiness, in fact, is so distracting that it’s making it very difficult for Ed to pay attention to what Al is saying.
“…managed to save the trellis,” Al sighs, gesturing, and Ed looks over for the first time at a strikingly beautiful wrought-iron arch completely covered in fire lilies. “I suppose there’s no harm doing it here in the hall-we can just use the reception chairs, after all, if we move the tables aside…”
“It’s great, Al,” Ed says, and if his voice quavers a tiny bit, it’s just nerves, whether or not Roy puts a hand on his shoulder and squeezes gently like maybe it’s something else. “I mean, it’s-this place looks fucking amazing. You guys are awesome. We’re so… we’re really lucky to have you. That’s all.”
Al flings both arms around him, and they cling to each other and suffer from a mild case of nerves together for a long moment before they part.
“Okay,” Ed says, taking deep breaths. “This is easy. We can just use alchemy to make the floor rise to a sharp angle in the middle, and all the tables will just slide out of the way. That’s what we’re going for, right? Like, an aisle or something?”
Al and Hawkeye very slowly turn towards each other. They seem to be holding up a very detailed conversation despite the fact that neither of them has uttered a word, which is damn creepy.
“Brother,” Al says in an extremely pleasant voice, “why don’t you look around and see some of the other interesting things we put together for today?”
“Well, I wanna help move stuff,” Ed says.
“That’s what groomsmen are for,” Al says. “You and Roy just relax. We’ll take care of everything. No floors need to get alchemically rearranged so dramatically that we lose our deposit. Okay?”
Ed starts to say something about how he isn’t little and therefore should inspire much larger amounts of faith, but right then Roy takes his left elbow-gently, but with the slightest hint of… other stuff. Strength. Possessiveness. That sort of thing. And Ed sort of loses his whole train of thought, somewhere out on a dark siding at an abandoned station in the rain, and doesn’t especially miss it.
“Whoa,” Ed says as his eyes light on a wide, glass-topped counter that’s been installed against the far wall. “What the hell is that?”
“My mother’s wedding gift to us,” Roy says, steering him over, sounding amused and exasperated and rather fond all at once. “She is supplying and staffing the open bar, because, and I quote, ‘Anyone watching you fawn over that kid for a whole night is going to need a stiff drink’.”
“You don’t fawn,” Ed says. He plops down on one of the bar stools and spins around experimentally. Great axle on this thing.
“Thank you,” Roy says, stepping behind the counter and sorting through the offerings. “That’s what I said.”
“Dote, maybe,” Ed says. “Develop all-new smooshy pet names because the canon of existing ones is insufficient to describe your smooshiness.”
Roy folds his arms on the bar and grins. “Did you know it’s illegal to defame the Führer?”
“Not anymore,” Ed says. “You struck that down, remember?”
“Shit,” Roy says. “You’re right. This-this-is my reward for championing democracy. Someday they’ll write a tragic opera about me.”
“I’ll make sure to sit in the front row and laugh uncomfortably loudly,” Ed says.
“Can I get you a drink, my dear?” Roy says. “Not least with the goal of shutting you up?”
“Please,” Ed says. “I think Al’s gonna ban me from my own wedding if I keep fidgeting.”
“Scotch cures the fidgets,” Roy says, hefting a bottle.
“Bullshit,” Ed says.
“Of course,” Roy says. “But delivered with such panache that you wanted to believe it, if only for a moment.”
“I’ll give you that one,” Ed says.
“Anything worth doing,” Roy says, setting his hat down on the countertop, “is worth doing with style.”
Ed’s about to argue with that-and he’s got enough points to the contrary that he could probably kill enough time to get them all the way into the start of the ceremony with the rant-but then Roy’s spinning the bottle and flipping it and tossing it from behind his shoulder to catch it in his other hand and twirling a gleaming crystal glass he summoned from nowhere, and then he’s whipping amber liquid into it and slinging it down the tiny bar to Ed.
“Aw, shit,” Ed says, hearing his own breath catch in his throat. He pushes the drink out of the way-with his left hand, trying to be relatively careful, as much as his animal brain will allow-and then fists both hands in the front of Roy’s uniform and drags him in close- “Take me now, Mustang, shit-”
Roy breathes a soft, hot laugh against his lips, winding a few fingers into his hair, curling them tight, and using the leverage to tilt his head back just a little, just barely exposing his throat- “Hold that thought until tonight.”
Ed says something to the effect of “Gnnnghhh.”
“Oh! You’re just in time!” Al is calling to someone across the room. Ed thinks there will always be a thread between his heart and Al’s-a thousand threads, really, from his heart to every part of Al, every piece, every trait, every action. A burst of filaments like spiders’ silk, stretching from his soul out to that bright-eyed, smiling boy, so that every movement Al makes tugs on him and tows him towards that light. He could zero in on Al in a crowd of millions. He went to hell and back-more than once-and he’d do it again without a thought. “Come on in!”
The rest of Roy’s team look, Ed has to admit, snappy as hell in their tuxes as they file in. Fuery’s pushing a huge gramophone, and none of the others have come empty-handed, either; Falman is carrying a box of records, and Havoc and Breda have their arms full of gauzy red and yellow fabric.
“Wait,” Ed says. “You’re going to mummify us and bury us in a ditch? Some wedding present.”
“Damn,” Breda says. “Should’ve known he’d figure it out. Quick, before the Führer gets his gloves on.”
Roy goes over to the nearby cart stacked with trays of gleaming silverware and selects a few very sharp-looking pieces. “Why dirty my gloves when there are so many dessert forks to eviscerate you with?”
“Boys,” Hawkeye says, “we only have two hours before guests are due to start arriving. I humbly suggest that we save all evisceration and related instances of gory violence for after the reception.”
Havoc sighs, plops his load of fabric down one of the chairs, and stretches his arms as high over his head as the structured shoulders of the tux will allow. “Man, weddings are way more fun when everybody’s trying to murder everybody else. You should’ve seen my cousin’s-I thought there was gonna be a bloodbath. Becky and I were just hiding in the corner with some hors d’oeuvres, constantly reassuring each other that we both were packing heat.”
“You brought guns to a wedding?” Fuery asks, staring.
Havoc opens his mouth, but before he can say anything, Hawkeye sets a stepladder in front of him. “Fortune,” she says, “favors the prepared. Even at weddings.”
“Especially at weddings,” Havoc says. “After all, Becky and I first started talking-like really talking-back when Lieutenant-Colonel Yevin invited us both to-”
“We know,” everyone in the room says in impeccable unison.
“Okay,” Havoc says, rubbing at the back of his neck. “Jeez.”
“Perhaps,” Hawkeye says, “we should focus on the wedding at hand?”
Of all of the innumerable things that Ed admires about Hawkeye, perhaps the single most impressive is her uncanny ability to command immediate action with what is ostensibly just a suggestion.
In mere moments, the whole team is unfolding ladders and clambering up them, trailing the rolls of fabric. Mere moments after that, the first billowing sheet has been secured to the ceiling-looped, by the looks of it, through a tiny hook on one of the beams. The whole thing quickly becomes a ruthlessly efficient operation: Breda relocates the ladder; Havoc clambers up; Fuery doles out several feet of fabric; and Falman hands it up to Havoc. Hawkeye stands a little ways aside and indicates where the ladder should go so that they’re distributed evenly along the ceiling. Ed can’t bring himself to do much of anything except watch in awe as they blitz the whole damn room.
“How come they’re never this good when they’re doing what you tell ’em?” he asks Roy.
“I’m sorry,” Roy says. “My administration advises me not to discuss internal affairs with members of the public.”
“Members of the public?” Ed says. “Just see if you get laid tonight, talking like that.”
“I’m fairly confident I will,” Roy says. “You tend to be very… suggestible after champagne.”
There’s a long pause. Ed can feel the heat climbing in his face.
“You mean ‘easy’,” Ed says. “You mean I’m easy when I’m drunk.”
“That’s not what I said,” Roy says.
“Fucking politicians,” Ed says.
“Hopefully you’ll only be fucking one tonight,” Roy says.
As much as Ed ever hates that Roy is such a goddamn word weasel, he sort of can’t help but get drawn into the charm.
“Yeah, well,” he says, “you’re gonna have to earn it.”
Roy’s grin makes his blood quicken. “I intend to.”
“Brother!” Al calls from where he’s dragging tables around on the other side of the room. “Start on the silverware! And do it right!”
“Okay, jeez!” Ed shouts back. Al should know way better than to think he’d forget how to set a table after all the times they fought over who got to do it for Mom, anyw… “What the hell is this?”
There’s a big basket of regular silverware, and a smaller basket where half of the utensils’ handles end in little stamped-in flame arrays, and the other half end in flamels.
“Those are for your table,” Al says. “The rest are rented, but those I bought and customized myself, so you can keep them.”
Ed is not going to cry. Ed is not going to cry.
“Thank you, Alphonse,” Roy says, touching Ed’s shoulder very gently in the way that means I will cover and distract everyone for as long as you need; take your time, and in that moment Ed loves him so ferociously that it makes the sting of tears a little worse. “That’s very kind of you.”
Ed pulls himself together and grabs a fistful of forks from the bigger basket. “You’re such an overachiever, Al.”
“You’re only going to get married once,” Al says calmly. “I want it to be perfect.”
Ed focuses very intently on the silverware, and if Roy hovers a bit closer by his shoulder than is strictly necessary to assist him, no one makes any comments.
[PART II]