FMA -- A Wicked Game: Part 2
Title: A Wicked Game - Part 2
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Ed, Winry/OC, Maes/Gracia, Ling/everyone he can get his hands on
Rating: R
Word Count: 60,300 (8,900 this chapter)
Warnings: language; shenanigans; semi-explicit sexual material; frank discussion of mental illness; modern AU
Summary: Roy has lucked into the all-expenses-paid vacation of his dreams - all he has to do is convince a bunch of happy couples that he's head-over-heels in love with Ed Elric. What could possibly go wrong?
Author's Note: This HTML thing is a pain in the A HREF.
A WICKED GAME - PART 2
His eyes pop open ten minutes to six. They staunchly refuse to be shut again, even after some very vigorous mental coaxing and a few attempted bribes.
Morning it is, then.
Ed is snoring quietly; Roy will have to heckle him about it later. By the light of his phone screen he picks out some clothes for today-his sweatshirt is missing, presumed abandoned in the bathroom because Ed is a paragon of class and considerateness.
What’s the agenda for today? Is there an agenda, or are they all just going to descend into a lawless wasteland of mid-twenties laziness without consequences? Should he be dressing for boating, hiking, or lying around on the beach getting sand in his shorts? Are there any other things to do? He should have brought a book. He should have brought several books. He should have bought more clothes, nice clothes, the kind of clothes that rich kids’ eyes will gloss over because they’re acceptable-not a couple pairs of jeans and some slightly threadbare khakis and the terrible powder blue polo shirt Riza sent because it has a tiny horse embroidered on the chest instead of an alligator. He should have found a way to afford nice clothes. He should have held up a J. Crew. He should have gone into engineering. He should have spent that windfall award money on a pile of lottery tickets instead of his medication. He should have stayed in the lab where he belongs.
Speaking of his medication, where the fuck is it?
Holding his phone aloft like the Phial of Galadriel, he paws through his supremely inadequate raiment, but the sinking feeling in him already knows. He left it. He probably left it on the bathroom sink in his hurry to be early to the meeting spot, not that Sara and her green BMW were there until fifteen minutes after the agreed-upon time-
He left it. Shit.
It’s all right. It’s all right; he’ll be okay. This surge of panic is temporary; the rattling of his heart against his ribs is purely psychosomatic; his body chemistry can’t have adjusted yet. He’s forgotten far longer than this before, on busy mornings; there have been nights he didn’t sleep, and his whole composition was out of whack. It’s all right. He’ll be fine. It’s just five days. Five measly little days. He’s stubborner than his stupid, stupid brain. He’ll beat it. He’ll wait it out. Five days is barely a blip in the course of a lifetime.
Oh, God. He’ll never be able to do this. There’s just no way. He left it; how could he be so fucking dumb-?
He puts his phone down on the floor, curls his hands around the zippered edge of the suitcase, closes his eyes, and breathes. One breath at a time. Just get to the next one. That’s not so hard.
He sidles into the bathroom, quietly closes the door, splashes some cold water on his face, and looks up at himself in the mirror.
Just the next breath. That’s all. It’s not so bad.
There’s a guy in the kitchen who isn’t one of the guests. He looks like a ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ contestant, down to the white chef’s attire and the expression of inexorable world-weariness.
“Hey, man,” he says as Roy pauses in the doorway. “I’m Chad.”
“Hi,” Roy says slowly.
“I’m the new chef,” Chad says. “The chef from yesterday quit. Something about ‘overbearing entitlement’, I think he said. Can I make you some pancakes?”
Roy thinks of the way that pastries which get separated from the herd near Ed’s lab bench disappear without a trace. “I’ll take a couple upstairs. Do you mind if I make coffee?”
“Not at all, not at all,” Chad says, opening the refrigerator. “Make yourself at home. Coffee’s in that cabinet above the machine. Any food allergies?”
“Don’t think so,” Roy says. “Thank you for asking.” There’s a light roast and a dark roast. Does Ed have a preference? Ed’s only criterion for coffee drinkability seems to be existence. Well, hell, Roy likes light, and Ed will just have to deal with it; he’d have to be an ingrate to complain about room service.
Jesus, it’s whole bean, and it smells like caffeinated heaven. Roy savors the scent for a moment and then starts casting about for a grinder.
“You been here long?” Chad asks.
“Since yesterday afternoon,” Roy says. “It’s really… nice.”
His vocabulary doesn’t activate until a critical threshold of coffee consumption has been reached. Usually it’s two cups.
“Yeah,” Chad says. “Hey, you want blueberries? Chocolate chips?”
“I think he’d like chocolate,” Roy says, finding the grinder tucked behind the toaster oven. “Thank you.”
The quality of the silence has changed. He looks over and finds Chad staring at him.
“What’s wrong?” he manages as his heart takes up pounding itself against his breastbone to the old, familiar rhythm-Don’t look at me; don’t see me; don’t find the sickness; don’t figure out the shame-
“Oh,” Chad says. “Uh. Nothing. It’s just-you don’t… look… gay. That’s all.”
The one upside is that the vise-grip of terror around his heart disintegrates to make room for the rage.
“Is that so,” Roy says. “Tell me, then, Chad-how am I supposed to look?”
Chad swallows. “I don’t know. Like… you… I guess. I don’t know. I’ll just… chocolate chips, right?”
“Yes,” Roy says. “Thank you.” He pours in a small flood of coffee beans, jams the lid on the grinder, and slams his hand down on the button.
It’s not the most dramatic comeback one could make in a kitchen, but it’ll have to do.
Clearly, Roy missed his calling: he should have been a waiter. He manages to balance the unevenly-weighted tray on one hand in order to flail around to grasp the doorknob, and then he backs in without spilling a drop of coffee or syrup.
“Rise and shine, beautiful!” he says.
Ed’s head lifts from the pillow. From within the massive corona of frizzy hair, a pair of puffy eyes blink owlishly; if Roy’s not mistaken, there is a trail of drool on Ed’s chin.
“…beautiful on the inside!” he amends.
“F’k’you,” Ed mumbles. He drags his sleeve across his mouth and then starts scrubbing at his eyes with the heels of both hands. “…time s’it?”
Oops. “Uh… six-forty-five.”
Ed collapses back onto the bed. “Think you missed the point of a fuckin’ vacation. Fuckin’ Roy.”
A part of Roy thinks he should probably be proud that his given name has been elevated to the status of an insult. “I brought you pancakes. And coffee.”
One of Ed’s eyes cracks open and fixes on him. “Why?”
Roy sets the tray down on Ed’s nightstand. “Because… it’s a nice thing to do?”
The second eye opens a fraction. “You make ’em?”
“The homophobic resident chef did,” Roy says. “I did make the coffee. I brought sugar; I know you have some conspiracy theory about how milk is somehow out to get you or something.”
Both eyes narrow until they’re almost closed again. “Can’t believe you remember that.”
“You ranted for a quarter of an hour,” Roy says. “It made an impression.”
“Can’t believe you brought me breakfast,” Ed mumbles. “S’for show, though, right? So everyone’d see you bein’ all romantic and shit.”
Roy pauses. “Oh,” he says. “I should have thought of that.”
Ed stares at him.
“It’s a nice thing to do,” Roy says. “That’s all.”
“You’re fuckin’ weird,” Ed says.
“For being nice?” Roy asks.
Ed nods about as sagely as one can while one’s head is still mostly on the pillow, and one’s hair is an uproariously hilarious disaster.
Half an hour later-of which about six minutes were spent eating, and twenty-four were reserved for detangling-Ed’s hair is trailing down over the arm of the downstairs couch on which he’s draped himself like a swooning maiden in a Renaissance painting. “What do people even do this early in the morning when they don’t have lab?”
Roy happens to think that lazing around in someone else’s beautiful sitting room in one of the day’s first sunbeams, skimming through a newspaper with no intention of accomplishment whatsoever is the best thing one could possibly be persuaded to do on a lab-less morning, but he doesn’t imagine Ed will be impressed by some vague gesturing to the room at large.
“You could see if there’s anything on TV,” he says.
“At seven on a Tuesday morning?” Ed asks. “Gee, pretty sure my two choices are Botox-faced douchepickles with ugly ties talking seriously about all the terrible shit happening in the world, or Dora the Explorer.”
“We could learn Spanish,” Roy says. “That wouldn’t be so bad.”
“No one learns Spanish at seven in the morning on Tuesday on vacation.”
“We might start a trend.”
Ed starts laughing. It’s the high, helpless laugh that makes his eyes crinkle up at the corners. “You are so damn weird, you know that?”
“I’ve been told,” Roy says.
Ed yawns cavernously. “What else are you supposed to do with mornings? We did sleeping. We did breakfast. We did coffee. We did brushing teeth and shit. At what point does it stop being the morning and just start being the day?”
“I’m afraid my schedule didn’t leave time for a double-major in philosophy,” Roy says.
“Why are you reading that crap, anyway?” Ed says, waving his whole arm at the newspaper. “It’s all so fucking depressing. I usually let Al filter my news. He just sends me the stories about animals at the zoo making unlikely friends and shit. And cat videos. It’s a hell of a lot better that way.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Roy says. “It gives me some perspective.” He turns a page. “And there are comics at the end.”
“Perspective is overrated,” Ed says. “Most things are. Anything good going on?”
“Not really,” Roy says.
“Does your phone get internet?” Ed asks. “Maybe there’s some Al Channel news.”
Roy fishes it from his pocket and tosses it towards the couch, which is perhaps the most trusting thing he has done in the past year. There’s something about the way Ed can be simultaneously naïvely hopeful and utterly misanthropic that he identifies with strongly, and it just makes him feel… safe.
Strange thought, but it can’t be retracted now.
“You left yourself logged in,” Ed says. “Don’t be surprised if you have a status about how fucking awesome I am next time you go on. Yo, who the hell is this chick in your pictures? Are you cheating on me? I’m your fake boyfriend, for fuck’s sake; have some respect.”
“That’s Riza,” Roy says.
“I really like this one of you both totally deadpan with noodles hanging out of your mouths. Holy shit, is this you and her at prom? You look, like, twelve.”
“I thought you were checking the Al Channel,” Roy says.
“C’mon,” Ed says. “If I was actually your boyfriend, I would’ve stalked the fuck out of your Facebook. It’s research. Is this that other friend you were talking about? With the wedding? Oh, wow, she’s… real pretty. She looks nice.”
“Gracia?” Roy says. “She is. She’s lovely. She used to bake cookies for me during finals, in part because she knew I’d forget to eat otherwise.”
“I gotta get somebody like that,” Ed mutters, gazing at the screen of Roy’s phone. “Somebody who cooks. Well, somebody who cooks who’s not in France. Al cooks.”
“Al is apparently perfect,” Roy says. “Pity the two of you are related.”
He deserves the middle finger he receives.
“Whoa!” Winry’s voice says from the doorway. “Not okay, Edward Elric!”
“It’s all right,” Roy says. “It’s how he shows affection.”
“Well, yeah,” Winry says, coming over to lean against the back of the couch Ed’s claimed. She’s wearing pink plaid pajama pants, a matching tank top, bedhead, and the smudges of yesterday’s eyeliner, and she is, quite frankly, heartbreakingly cute. “But that doesn’t make it okay.”
“Fuck off, Win,” Ed says.
“She’s just trying to help, baby,” Roy says.
“He’s just cranky because he didn’t get enough beauty sleep,” Winry says. “I mean, gosh, Ed, I’ve never seen you up and presentable this early. Are you feeling okay?”
She puts a hand on his forehead, which Ed promptly swats away. “Fuck off, Win!”
She folds her arms on the back of the couch and frowns at him. “Really, though.”
“It’s not my fault,” Ed says, scowling at her. “Somebody brought breakfast at the crack of fucking dawn. And it’s not like you can not drink coffee when it’s in front of you, and then I was sort of awake, and what are you smiling about?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” Roy cuts in. “I felt I shouldn’t have to suffer alone, and you looked far too peaceful. It was the only solution.”
“You are a shit,” Ed says.
“I love you, too, baby,” Roy says.
Ed looks startled and almost betrayed for a split-second before his face closes off completely. Guilt seethes like forked lightning through the center of Roy’s chest, but there’s no time to say anything before Winry is sighing contentedly.
“You two are so married,” she says.
Ed’s face returns to absolute normalcy in an instant, and then he drags his hand down over it. “Jesus, Winry.”
“Just ‘Winry’ is fine,” she says.
Ed gives Roy a Do you see what I put up with look. Roy sends back Oh, you poor thing; let me play you a lament on the world’s tiniest cello, since you’ve worn out the violin.
“Oh, Lord,” Winry says. “You don’t even have to talk anymore? You guys are disgusting.”
“I resent that,” Roy says.
“Since when are guys disgusting?” a voice mumbles from the hall. Treavisor comes stumbling in, and Winry’s face brightens.
“Hi, you,” she says, crossing the room again to put an arm around him.
“Your pajamas match,” Roy says, pointing. “Exactly how are we the disgusting couple?”
“Because I said so,” Winry says, hugging Treavisor happily.
“She’s always right,” Treavisor says.
“Dude,” Ed says. “She’s going to walk all over you if you keep treating her like that.”
“Just ’cause she’d rather get covered in motor oil than have a tea party doesn’t mean she’s not a princess,” Treavisor says, gazing down into Winry’s eyes.
“Sweetie,” Winry says, voice quavering.
Surreptitiously Roy darts a glance at Ed, who looks about as awkward as he feels. Ed catches his eye and gives him an unmistakable For the love of God, fucking do something!
“Ah,” Roy says, “will you excuse us? We’re going to take a hike. Literally. We’ll see you later, then? All right. Come on, Ed; the trails won’t blaze themselves.”
“You’re such a fucking nerd,” Ed says, hastening over and latching on to the hand Roy holds out.
“Mea culpa,” Roy says.
“You bet your ass it’s your culpa,” Ed says.
Fortunately, escaping out of the living room onto the deck leads directly onto one of the trails. Unfortunately, Roy is starting to worry that he will have to be pried off of this property at the end of the week, because he never wants to leave.
“What the hell are you so happy about?” Ed asks as they crest the first hill, and greenery spills out before them-a whole valley of evergreen; the air is crisp and biting, magnificently infused with the pines.
“This,” Roy says.
Ed looks it over, fidgeting with the too-long ends of the sleeves of Roy’s borrowed sweatshirt, which was recently recovered from wherever he left it. “I guess that is pretty nice.”
“Do you still have my phone?” Roy asks. “I want to send Riza a picture.”
“Nah,” Ed says. “Threw it behind me with the Grenade App open to distract Winry and her boytoy while we made a run for it.” He hands it over, and Roy closes his life story à la Facebook and taps over to the camera. “That thing have GPS?”
“Yes,” Roy says, capturing the moment to the best of his meager artistic ability. “Why? You think we’re going to get lost?”
“I think it’s highly plausible,” Ed says.
“We’re on a trail,” Roy says. “If we turn around, we eventually end up where we started.”
“You clearly don’t believe in randomly-generating wormholes,” Ed says.
“Neither do you,” Roy says, tucking his phone back into his pocket and starting down.
“You clearly haven’t figured out yet that I’m a shitty luck charm,” Ed says.
“You don’t believe in luck, either,” Roy says.
Ed growls. “You clearly don’t realize I’m a shit-getting-fucked-up magnet.”
“You don’t understand magnetism,” Roy says. “Boy, I could do this all day.”
“Hike?” Ed asks. “Or be a dick?”
“I do so love to multitask,” Roy says.
“This is stupid,” Ed says after another mile or so.
“Playing casino games without a basic understanding of probability is stupid,” Roy says. “This is fun.”
“I can’t believe you,” Ed says. “I always assumed you were allergic to sunlight or some shit. You never go outside.”
“This isn’t outside,” Roy says. “This is Nature.”
“Well, nature is too fucking warm, and I think I’ve got a hole in my sock.”
“It’s not nature; it’s Nature.”
“…the fuck, Roy.”
“You have to capitalize the N.”
“…I repeat: the fuck, Roy.”
“Such language.” He manages to stop reveling in the majesty of the wilderness for long enough to glance at Ed. “You know, you might not be too warm if you took off the sweatshirt. Which is, for the record, my sweatshirt. Which you’ve probably made more sweat than shirt by now.”
Ed turns away, scowling. “Well-fuck you. You look like a fucking dumbass.”
Roy does not look like a dumbass. Roy looks like a perfectly reasonable, intelligent individual who, upon exercising enough to raise his body temperature, removed the Oxford shirt he was wearing over a T-shirt and tied the former around his waist.
“It’s just because-” Ed’s mouth stays open another moment, and then it snaps shut.
Roy despises that the same curiosity which makes him a fine, upstanding young scientist compels him to play ball every time Ed gets coy. “Because what?”
“It’s like I said.” Ed cradles his right arm to his chest with the left. “A lot of surgeries. Two at the time, and then another one a couple years later, and then another one last year. It’s a lot of scar tissue. It grosses people out.”
“It won’t gross me out,” Roy says. “I begged my high school biology teachers for extra dissections.”
Ed’s smile is shaky but genuine. “You’re twisted up on the inside somewhere, Mustang.”
Roy wishes that was funny.
Ed draws a deep breath, sighs it out, sets his jaw, and unzips Roy’s hoodie. It comes off, although not without a fight; Ed pulls both sleeves all the way inside-out. But then he’s just standing there, with it balled up in his hands, in a faded black T-shirt and his faded black jeans, and his right forearm is riddled with thick white scars.
“Guess that’s fair,” Ed says. “Since I’m all torn up on the outside.”
“It’s not so bad,” Roy says. “Let me see.”
“Nah,” Ed says, half-shrugging; he drapes the sweatshirt over the scarred arm to carry it and starts off on the path again. “How much further do we have to go before you get your Nature fix?”
“Hard to say,” Roy says. “I’m a junkie.”
“Stranded in the woods with the likes of you,” Ed says. “Jesus, this is like a horror movie. Are there wolves?”
“The total number of wolves in the state of California is zero,” Roy says.
“What about zoos?” Ed asks.
“The total number of wolves outside of captivity in the state of California is zero,” Roy says.
“That’s real comforting,” Ed says. “Here, why don’t you take the lead, Nature Freak?”
“That’s Mr. Nature Freak to you,” Roy says, stepping past him.
“There must be something carnivorous and angry,” Ed says. “Winry’d never take us somewhere safe.”
“There’s a minute possibility of mountain lions,” Roy says. “But they’re mostly nocturnal, and they’re not especially aggressive, and they don’t normally perceive humans as prey.” The crunching footsteps beside him stop, and he stumbles and then turns. “What?”
“You’re horrible,” Ed says faintly.
“I’m honest,” Roy says. “Is that horrible?”
“Sometimes,” Ed says. “You could’ve just said there were coyotes or some shit.”
“There are probably some of those, too,” Roy says, starting uphill again. Riza was incalculably better to hike with. She didn’t say much, didn’t ask much, didn’t slow him down.
That’s unfair. Ed’s wearing a prosthesis. Roy really shouldn’t be setting the pace; he should subtly let Ed do it and try to appreciate his company.
But he’s just so tired-tired of faking excitement for Winry, faking normalcy for Ed, faking completeness for the entire world. There’s a voice in him that’s always gasping for air to scream with, which no amount of smothering will quell; there’s a streak of undying panic in him that’s always rising towards the surface; but nobody wants to look or listen-and why should they? What entitles him to even a moment of their brief little lives or a fragment of their half-assed sympathy?
He’s on his own. He’s always on his own; he should be used to it by now; he should be picking himself the fuck up and getting the fuck over it.
And if Ed says one more thing about how stupid Nature is-his solitary joy in the present universe-
The heavy-booted footsteps are catching up to him again, and then, as he attempts to glare holes into the trail in front of him, they’re scuffling close.
“Wait-Roy-Roy-”
Roy whirls on him. “What? Look, Ed, I’m trying, okay? I am trying to enjoy this so much that I don’t think about all the wasted lab time, or all the things I should have said, and I keep trying to bail you out every time you put your stupid foot in your stupid mouth just because you’re playing some overblown defensive game-and the least you could do is treat me like a human being instead of telling me every five minutes that I’m fucked up, which I know, by the way, so it’s not news to anyb-”
“Roy,” Ed says-and good heavens, his eyes are so wide they could probably hold galaxies, and his face is ashen, and he’s pointing over Roy’s right shoulder.
The remaining pieces of that rant-and they were legion-wither and die in Roy’s mouth. Slowly, slowly, he turns around.
There is a cougar on the path, ten, maybe twelve feet from where they stand.
Roy’s first thought is that it may be the most beautiful animal he’s ever seen. It’s sleek and powerful, built low and strong like a sports car, with startling blue eyes and a touch of gray-brown in the face to temper the smooth pale beige fur everywhere-like a Siamese cat, just a hint of delicacy. But there’s nothing delicate about the coiled muscles underneath; nothing delicate about the way the long tail sways back and forth, the better to mark this specimen a full eight feet from nosetip to the end of that tail; nothing delicate about the fierce intelligence and the unwavering attention to the two foolish little people tromping through its territory.
Roy’s second thought is Oh, shit.
“Okay,” he says, without much help from his suddenly arid esophagus. “Okay, just… stay calm. I’m going to back away towards you, and then we’re going to do that thing where we make a lot of noise, and it decides we’re not worth eating.”
“No fucking way,” Ed says. “We’re getting the fuck out of here.”
“No,” Roy says, maintaining eye contact with the massive creature that might enjoy killing him as he takes one cautious step backward, then two. His knees appear to have transformed themselves into chocolate pudding while he was speaking. “If we run, we’re acting like prey, and its chase instincts might kick in. That’s how a lot of mountain lion attacks happen.”
“You don’t know shit!” Ed says. “You said they were nocturnal!”
“They are nocturnal!”
“Tell it to that guy!”
“Fine, I will!” Roy glares at the mountain lion. “Go back to sleep; you’re defying your instincts!”
The cougar’s ears swivel back and then swing forward again. Roy has no idea what that means, but he’s willing to bet it’s not My stars, good sir, you’re quite correct! I’ll just slink back to my proper breed characteristics now, cheerio, terribly sorry to interrupt.
“Oh, my God,” Ed says through what can only be described as hysterical laughter. It’s sort of bubbling and dribbling out of him against his will, by the sound of it; Roy thinks involuntarily of vomit. “Oh, my God, you’re fucking crazy. I’m fucking crazy. The cat is fucking crazy. We’re all gonna die. What a way to go.”
“We’re not going to die!” Roy says. “And I’m not crazy!”
The mountain lion looks distinctly unamused now. Or perhaps that’s the crazy talking.
“Roy,” Ed says. His voice trembles, and the pine needles whisper, and then there’s a faint fingertip’s pressure against Roy’s arm. “I’m not going without you, but Jesus fuck, we should run, okay?”
“That’s a really bad idea,” Roy says.
“So is standing here making conversation with an apex predator,” Ed says. “It doesn’t even count as conversation, ’cause he’s not answering.”
“Maybe he’ll leave,” Roy says.
“Maybe he won’t,” Ed says. The fingers curl into the back of Roy’s T-shirt. “Come on, Roy. I’d sure as hell rather die running. On the count of three.”
“No,” Roy says.
“One.”
“Nooooooo.”
“Two.”
“Ed-”
“Three-come-on-you-fucker-”
As with pulling him back up onto the dock, Roy discovers that Ed is staggeringly strong for his size, and it’s only some expert stumbling and a bit of blind luck that prevents him from getting a faceful of pine needles and a back full of cougar claws-and then they’re careening down the hill, veering almost immediately off of the trail-
“Where are you going?” Roy howls.
“Away!” Ed howls back.
“We’re going to get lost!”
“At least we’re not getting devoured!”
“Ed!”
“What?”
Roy has expended the last of his extra breath, and the rest has to be dedicated to sprinting, or he might add “Before we die, I just wanted to tell you that your hair is stunning” or something. He really needs to prepare some brilliantly poetic last words, whether or not anyone will be around to record them for posterity. It’s the principle of the thing.
He doesn’t think he can hear mountain lion paws pounding the ground behind them, thundering ever closer, poising to pounce and sink its fearsome teeth into the juncture of his shoulder and his neck in order to snap his spine, but it’s difficult to hear much of anything over the racket that he and Ed are making, so it’s perfectly possible that he’s about to die.
There’s an odd moment of clarity in his head: I really did give it everything I had. It wasn’t bad. I could have done better, and I could have been more, and I would have liked to know what it’s like to wake up and feel right, but it wasn’t bad, all things considered. I did okay.
Then there’s another odd moment, this time of disbelief: Holy crap, Ed is faster than me on a mechanical knee.
But all of the recreational jogging around campus while he waits for gel to set, or for simulations to load, or for data to process, or for his whizzing-screaming-sobbing-spinning brain to quiet down has paid off. His lungs are burning, and his heart is a mad drummer with no rhythm bound poorly to his flaming veins, but he’s holding steady, and it’s almost… great. The adrenaline and the incredulity and the panic and the long, wordless wail of his better judgment in his head-it’s invigorating. And, hell-running for your life is pretty damn good cardio.
But then he has a third odd moment, as Ed drops to the ground-no, he doesn’t drop; he flings both arms out and plants his hands on the thick, dark, mossy fallen tree splayed out across their sad excuse for an escape route. And he vaults off of it and spirals in the air like a fucking pinwheel and soars several feet ahead and then lands like a goddamn butterfly and keeps running. Roy’s sweatshirt goes fluttering away and snags on a tree branch.
So this time the clarity is: Oh, sweet holy fuck!, and the result is that Roy trips over the log and slams into the ground at what feels like a thousand miles an hour, the better to fill his open mouth with molding pine needles and bury his face in a small but ambitious bramble.
This is it. Next will be the low, resonant growl; then the soft sounds of a huge, lean animal’s paws in the underbrush. Then the moist breath on the back of his neck, then the claws in his bare arm, then the agony as the canines pierce his skin, his jugular, his windpipe-and then the rest is silence. Some creep from lab will hit on Riza at his closed-casket funeral, and there will be nothing he can do about it. She’ll go to jail for murder. Aunt Chris will console Maes and Gracia as the cops lead her away, and everyone will forget they’re at a funeral in the first place, and the news story will go from Promising Young Scientist Mauled by Mountain Lion to Attractive Young Helicopter Pilot Imprisoned for Homicide, and someone will ask in a very loud voice if there’s food. It’ll probably be Ed.
“Oh, my God, you suck,” Ed says from close to Roy’s ear. An insistent finger prods his shoulder several times. “Get up, asshole. If you’re unconscious, there’s no way I’m carrying your fat ass back to civilization.”
“’M not fat,” Roy says. It comes out more like Mm nff ffft, due to the mouthful of dead foliage.
“Yeah, well, you’re fatheaded. I think we lost the giant cat from hell. Get up already. Did you hurt yourself?”
Roy finds his arms about where he left them and pushes himself upright. He spits out a disturbing quantity of leaves, which is an experience that he hopes he will never have to repeat.
“Only my dignity,” he says.
“Your what?” Ed asks, smirking a little. He sits back and takes his left shin in both hands, carefully laying his leg out flat. “So… million-dollar question. How do we get back?”
Roy looks back the way he thinks they came. He looks the way they were headed. He looks left. He looks right. Everything appears to be more or less completely identical. “I have no idea.”
Ed grimaces. “We’re lost.”
Roy rubs at his stinging cheek and draws his palm back with little speckles of blood all over it. “I told you we’d get turned around if we left the trail.”
“Fuck you,” Ed says. “I told you so first.”
At least that distracts Roy from the fact that he’s bleeding from the face and probably contracting at least four viral infections even as he blinks. “What?”
“When you were taking that picture to show your girlfriend, a-”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“-nd you said we wouldn’t.”
“If we stayed on the trail,” Roy says.
Ed rolls his eyes. “What-the-fuck-ever. Get out your phone; we can Google Map our way back to civilization.”
By some miracle, it stayed in Roy’s pocket the whole way, and he somehow didn’t land hard enough to shatter the screen.
But miracles only go so far.
“No service,” he says.
“Motherfucking son of a bitch,” Ed says through clenched teeth. “Who’s your service provider? If we make it out of here alive, I’m firebombing one of their stores.”
“No, you’re not,” Roy says, getting to his feet, brushing himself off, and going to collect his dramatically-abandoned hoodie. “It’s not quite ten in the morning, so that way-” He points in the general direction at which the sun is angled. “-must be east.”
Ed clambers up slowly, eyeing him the whole way. “What about the moss on the trees thing?”
“Debunked.”
“Doesn’t your stupid phone have a compass, or something?”
“It only works when you have 3G,” Roy says.
Ed stares at him. Roy stares back.
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Ed says.
“It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever had to say,” Roy says.
Ed pushes his hair back off of his forehead. “Fuck. Okay. Well. That’s east. Which way do we need to go?”
Roy taps hopelessly at the phone, well aware that he can’t summon a signal by force of will. “I… think we were staying on the north side of the lake.”
“You ‘think’,” Ed says slowly. “Like you ‘thought’ mountain lions were nocturnal.”
“They are!” Roy says. “They’re crepuscular, actually; they come out at dawn and at dusk, and I don’t see you doing anything except bitching at me when I try to give us something to work with, and for all I care, you can die of exposure.”
“Or starvation,” Ed says, shoving his hands into his pockets and gazing skyward. “Maybe both at once.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Roy says. He starts storming off in a northerly direction; at least he’ll die closer to the cabin. “I’m not sharing my Altoids with you anyway.”
“You’re the worst fake boyfriend ever,” Ed says, running a few steps to catch up.
“How dare you,” Roy says, but he can’t muster up much venom.
“I’m starving,” Ed says.
“You’re starving?” Roy asks. “You inhaled three pancakes. I watched you. Although I almost blinked and missed it.”
“That was a long time ago,” Ed says.
Roy holds a springy branch out of the way for him and disdains himself for it. “Well, the faster we go, the sooner we get back to food.”
“Thanks,” Ed says of the branch. Roy disdains himself slightly less. “Hey, you know what I really, really want?”
“The Spice Girls,” Roy says.
“No,” Ed says. “Cake.”
“I want a girl with a short skirt and a long jacket,” Roy says.
“…what?”
“It’s a Cake song.”
“…what?”
“This is terrible,” Roy says. “Pop culture references are my superpower, and you’re immune to them.”
“The only pop I’m interested in is the kind you can drink,” Ed says, “because I’m starving.”
“Me, too,” Roy says.
They crunch through the needles in silence for a while.
“Chocolate cake,” Ed says.
“Chocolate fondue,” Roy says.
“Chocolate-chip cookie dough,” Ed says. “Fuck the salmonella risk. Whole fucking bowl. Gimme a spoon. I live dangerously.”
“Chocolate-chip cookie dough in chocolate fondue,” Roy says.
“Witchcraft,” Ed says. “Doesn’t exist.”
“It does.”
“It does not.”
“I’ll take you there,” Roy says. “If we survive.”
“Fuck this,” Ed says. “I’m surviving if it kills me.”
“Good idea,” Roy says.
“Oh, God,” Ed says. “I’m dying. It’s over. Go on without me. Remember me. Leave cupcakes on my grave. Tell Al I love him. Tell Winry I love her most of the time. If my fucking dad comes to my funeral, punch his fucking lights out.”
“Okay,” Roy says.
“I’m serious,” Ed says. “The least you could do is sound depressed.”
“Do I not sound depressed?” Roy asks.
“If you die first, I’m resorting to cannibalism,” Ed says. “Your sacrifice will not be in vain.”
“What’s that?” Roy asks, pointing to a smudge of grayish something at the bottom of the hill.
“Hunger hallucinations,” Ed says.
“No,” Roy says, “that’s-a parking lot, come on-”
“It’s made of cement; it’s not going anywh-”
“There’s a taxi!”
Apparently, Roy’s tortured, unfed body has a bit of running left in it-just enough to race down the last of the hill waving both arms and skid to a stop a few feet from the cab idling at the lot entrance. There’s a road, and it’s paved, and it’s a taxi, and they’re going to live.
Very, very slowly, the cab driver rolls the window down. Roy’s a little offended until he catches a glimpse of his bloody, dirt-smudged face in the side mirror and remembers that he just ran over here at top speed, flailing the whole way.
“Hi,” he says, trying not to sound any worse than he looks. “Do you take debit cards?”
The driver is a blond guy with an unlit cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. Wordlessly, he shakes his head.
“Shitfuck,” Roy says.
“Nice,” Ed says, coming up behind him.
Roy grinds his teeth. “I mean-um-how far could you take us for…” He pulls out his wallet and opens the cash pocket. “…five dollars?”
“And twenty cents?” Ed says.
The taxi driver stares at them for another moment. Then he points to the curve in the road about a quarter-mile down.
“I think that’s worthy of a ‘fuckshit’,” Ed says.
“Shut up,” Roy says. He looks at his sad, lonely little five-dollar bill and then at the cabbie. “Hey, for five bucks, could we use your GPS for a minute?”
“Don’t be a dumbass!” Ed says, elbowing him. “Five bucks could get us, like, sixteen packs of ramen! See if your phone’s working first.”
Roy takes it out. He has two bars of signal. His heart leaps, and he thumbs the Google Maps icon, and then…
The battery dies.
“I hate my life,” he says.
“I hate your life, too,” Ed says. He turns to the taxi driver. “Yo, my friend’ll totally pay you when we get there. You can hold this asshole hostage while I go in and get her, if you want.”
“We’re trying to get to 421 Blue Springs Road,” Roy says. “I promise we’re not creepy woods dwellers who kill people.”
Ed elbows him harder this time. “That’s exactly what creepy woods dwellers who kill people would say!”
The taxi guy’s eyes narrow a little, and then he taps at his Garmin for a few very long seconds. The cigarette bobs up and down.
“Pretty posh part of town,” he says at last.
“Yes,” Roy says desperately. “Yes, it is. Reputable.”
The cabbie eyes them for another moment, and then he jerks a thumb at the backseat. “Get in.”
Ed grabs the front of Roy’s shirt, lays a wet, smacking kiss on his cheek, grabs his sweatshirt away from him, and opens the car door. “I’m never going anywhere with you again,” he says.
Roy rubs the saliva off of his skin and goes around to the other side. “Fair enough,” he says.
“What happened to you?” Winry gasps as Roy steps in and closes the door.
“Extreme hiking,” Roy says. “It’s the next big thing.”
Winry does not seem to appreciate his classy and refined sense of humor.
Ed positions himself partway in front of Roy, which is… interesting. “Look, I’ll pay you back for the taxi, Win.”
“That’s not what I mean!”
“Chill out,” Ed says. “We didn’t have to go all Donner Party. Not even a little bit. Hey, is there food?”
Winry turns her horror full-force on Roy. “What happened to your face?”
“That’s not nice,” Ed cuts in. “It’s not his fault; he was just born ugly.”
Roy loops an arm around Ed’s neck and wordlessly ruffles his hair until it is an absolute rat’s nest, ignoring the screaming, the writhing, and the pounding on his chest. It’s only when Ed tries to bite him that he lets go.
Winry’s horror has become unmitigated mortification.
“We’re just hungry,” Ed says.
Treavisor puts a hand on Winry’s shoulder. He seems to be attempting to draw her away from the madmen. “Maybe you should, uh…” He gestures to Roy’s cheek. “…some… hydrogen peroxide or… something.”
“Food first,” Roy says.
“Now you’re makin’ sense,” Ed says.
“This is boring,” Ed says.
They tore through several Chad-made sandwiches with a celerity that Roy is beginning to regret, after which Ed followed Roy aimlessly while he cleaned himself up and plugged his phone in to charge. Ed continued to follow aimlessly as Roy selected one of the eighteen indistinguishable Tom Clancy books from the shelves in the living room and stationed himself in a deck chair under an umbrella on the beach.
“So go ride a jet-ski,” Roy says. It’s what everyone else is doing, but, despite all of the giddy laughter wafting back over the waves, Roy thinks he can be satisfied with vicarious thrills for a while.
“Can’t swim,” Ed says in a low voice. “Remember?”
“Oh,” Roy says. “Right. Sorry.”
“You are not.”
“I am.” He looks around for something to mark the book with; he can’t bear to dog-ear pages. “Do you want me to get a deck of cards?”
“What is this,” Ed says, “1925?”
“I don’t think they’d be nearly as accepting of a homosexual couple if this was 19-”
“There’s an Xbox inside.”
“I didn’t come all this way to sit inside and play Xbox.”
“Of course not,” Ed says. “You came all this way to be wrong about mountain lions and then read one of those books people buy at airports because they don’t have a choice.”
“That’s right,” Roy says. “Why do I have to go with you? You can play Xbox by yourself if you want.”
“Isn’t that the point of being in a relationship?” Ed asks. He’s still wearing his Docs, and he’s recovered his red sweatshirt, which some household service wraith washed, dried, and left folded on their bed. “Always having somebody to do stuff with?”
“Yes and no,” Roy says.
“I’d forgotten how fucking helpful you can be.”
Roy gives up and puts the book down. He hasn’t been able to retain anything he’s read for about three pages anyway. “So are you a gymnast, or what?”
Ed blinks at him.
“Earlier,” Roy says. “You did an unbelievable backflip… thing. That’s why I fell.”
Ed scowls. “What, so it’s my fault you took a bite out of a briar patch?”
“That’s not what I meant,” Roy says. To say that Ed is exasperating is tantamount to mentioning offhandedly that the Pacific is damp. “I was contextualizing.”
Ed frowns a little deeper and nudges a toe at the sand. “Well… yeah. Used to be. Sort of.” He folds his arms on the arm of Roy’s chair and sets his chin on them. This puts his face about two inches from Roy’s chest, which is more than a bit discomfiting, but Ed doesn’t even seem to notice. “I was into it as a kid, and then after the car and the leg and stuff, I thought… well, everyone kept encouraging me to try to pick it up again. So I did, y’know, after the bulk of the PT and stuff, and I was pretty good.”
“You’ve got to be Olympic quality,” Roy says.
“Paralympics,” Ed says, disinterestedly. “Except they don’t offer any of my stuff. It would’ve been too expensive anyway. I don’t care. I don’t have time. And I’m not jonesing for glory or whatever, so what difference does it make?”
“Recognition makes a huge difference,” Roy says.
Ed looks up at him.
Roy looks back.
Roy reaches out and taps his nose.
“Boop,” Roy says.
“I fucking hate you,” Ed says.
“Movie night!” Winry crows.
“Not evil witch,” Roy murmurs to Ed. “Ringleader of a demon circus.”
Ed’s eyes light up-it’s curious; Roy’s seen the effect on other people, but no one’s expression simply illuminates quite like Ed’s does. “That’s pretty good.”
“There’s pizza!” Winry says. “And popcorn! And candy! And soda! And if everyone’s not sugar-high and stupid by midnight, we’re doing it wrong!”
“That sounds like it has virtually no potential for disaster,” Roy says-quietly, because he doesn’t want to get a fatal can of soda thrown at his head so soon after escaping his demise in the wilderness.
Ed snickers.
“Stop colluding, you two,” Winry says, glaring over at the loveseat Roy cleverly staked out as soon as she started rounding up the group. “I swear, you guys make my teeth hurt. Ed, this whole pizza is for you, but you should probably share with Roy.”
“Aw, jeez, Win,” Ed says, looking touched and delighted as he scampers over and takes the box from her. “You got the Ed Special!”
Roy opens his mouth to ask and then remembers in the nick of time that a boyfriend ought to know. “Let me grab a slice before you eat it all, baby,” he says.
“I guess I can probably spare one,” Ed says, returning to their couch with a spring in his step. He cracks open the box, and Roy squares his shoulders, reaches in, catches up a piece of pizza, and refuses to hesitate before taking a bite.
Turns out the Ed Special is pineapple, sausage, and heaps of jalapeño.
“I’ll be fine,” he wheezes for the third time. Ed continues to attempt to pry his way through the lock on the bathroom door. “Ed-it’s fine; I just don’t have tastebuds of steel like you apparently do.”
“It’s my fault,” Ed says. “Open the door.”
“It is not. And no.”
“Why, are you barfing? I can handle barf. I raised Al, pretty much. He barfed a lot as a kid. Don’t tell him I told you that. He used to get carsick. What the hell are you doing in there?”
“I’d just rather the general populace didn’t see me with my eyes watering,” Roy says.
“Don’t worry about that,” Ed says. “Winry’s putting on ‘Gladiator’. Everybody cries at the end of ‘Gladiator’. It’s like a Turing test. Proves you’re human.”
“I’m also scouring my tongue with my fingernails,” Roy says. “It’s a bit undignified.”
“Aw, jeez,” Ed says. Something collides repeatedly with the door. Roy suspects it’s Ed’s forehead. “I should’ve warned you. I just thought… you could handle it. I mean, you handled a fucking cougar in your face; I thought jalapeños would be, like, whatever.”
“It’s not your fault,” Roy says.
“Yes, it is,” Ed says.
“I should have known better than to take a bite without looking,” Roy says. “Especially when it comes to the preferred pizza of someone who I’ve seen literally eating hot sauce for breakfast.”
“It’s nutritious,” Ed says.
“Punching holes in your stomach lining is generally not considered healthful,” Roy says.
“But it’s all peppers and shit,” Ed says. “That’s vegetables. Besides, spicy stuff is good for your metabolism. Scientific fact.”
“At least that explains why you can eat like a pack of wolves without putting on an ounce of fat,” Roy says.
“Yeah, well,” Ed says. “How’s your tongue? They’re gonna start soon, and I’m not going back in there without you.”
“Who plays ‘Gladiator’ at a party, anyway?” Roy asks.
“Winry thinks Russell Crowe is dreamy,” Ed says. “C’mon. I’ll get you a soda.”
“I don’t need a soda,” Roy says, spitting in the sink one last time before he opens the door. “I need a lobotomy.”
Ed, mostly in shadow but for the faintest gleam of light from down the hall, looks like pyrite incarnate as he smiles.
“Don’t you dare,” he says. “You’re gonna do great things with that brain.”
“We’ll see,” Roy says.
Ed seizes his arm and aggressively links their elbows in order to tow Roy back to the living room. “Yeah. We will.”
True to Ed’s prediction, everyone in the room seems to get something itchy in their eye as ‘Gladiator’ winds to a symphonic close. Several of the guys grow extremely interested in the ceiling, although it appears to be so bright that they can’t look at it without blinking profusely.
Ed, who is using his hoodie sleeves to clear the mysterious dampness in his eyelashes, sniffles and looks at Roy’s dry cheeks.
“Aw, shit,” he says. “I knew it was too good to be true. You’re a cyborg. Fuck.”
“It’s sad,” Roy says, “but this is what he’s been holding out for, too. I think it comes as a relief. He’s done what he meant to, and now he can rest.”
It doesn’t hurt that he’s seen this movie twelve times. Or that it’s just so strange how well he and Ed fit together on the couch-perhaps Ed doesn’t know that, if he’s never had a relationship. Perhaps he thinks that human beings always slot together like they were cut to match-that shoulders’ breadths always fit neatly in an arm’s length; that arms always hook and wrap snugly around waists; that fingers always fill each other’s spaces. Perhaps he doesn’t have any grounds for comparison, and that’s why he’s not distracted by how easily their bodies align. Perhaps he simply doesn’t know that this is extraordinary.
Perhaps he also doesn’t know that staring into someone’s ear canal in company is considered a bit gauche.
“Uh,” Roy says. “See anything you like?”
“I’m looking for the cyborg parts,” Ed says.
“You say the sweetest things,” Roy says.
“Russell Crowe is such a beefcake,” Winry sighs happily. She gazes up at Treavisor. “He’s almost as hot as you, babe.”
“Eew,” Ed says.
Winry takes a moment to stick her tongue out at him before she hops up and goes over to start opening the cabinets of the entertainment center. “What else does everybody wanna see? And what else did your parents leave us, babe?”
“I don’t know,” Treavisor says. “‘Casablanca’, probably.”
Roy loves ‘Casablanca’. The room at large does not need to have that ammunition against his manhood, however.
“Hey!” Winry says. “‘Mulan’!”
“Oh, shit,” Ed says.
“What’s wrong with ‘Mulan’?” Roy asks. “It’s kind of cute.”
“Did you bring earplugs?” Ed asks.
“What?” Roy says. “No.” A dreadful prospect dawns. “Do they-please tell me they don’t-”
“I hope you’ve got cyborg ear-closers hidden under there somewhere,” Ed says.
The nostalgia sing-along goes about as tunefully as Roy feared in his deepest, darkest nightmares. His ears are still ringing when the credits roll, and everyone leaps up in bizarre unison to race for the restrooms. Ed considers their-well, his-empty popcorn bowl and reaches down to switch it out for the mostly-full one belonging to the couple that was sitting on the floor.
“You know,” he says, crunching his way through at such tremendous speed that it’s a wonder he can talk at all, “I thought for the longest time that ‘kernel’ and ‘colonel’ were the same thing. So, like, people would talk about colonels in the military, and I’d be like, ‘Boy, kernels are small; those must be the little pipsqueak guys who have to carry everybody else’s guns.’” He chews reflectively. “You know what this needs?”
“Jalapeños?” Roy hazards.
Ed stops chewing long enough to stare at him. “We gotta stop spending time together,” he says. “You’re starting to read my mind.”
“Think of a random word,” Roy says.
“Botulism,” Ed says.
“You weren’t supposed to say it,” Roy says. “I was going to guess.”
“Oh,” Ed says. “Well, while we’re on the subject-wanna talk about botulism?”
“Not especially,” Roy says.
“You’re no fun,” Ed says.
“I beg to differ,” Roy says. “I think I’m extremely fun.”
“You probably think Boggle and a glass of wine is the recipe for the perfect night,” Ed says.
“That’s absurd,” Roy says. “Scrabble is vastly superior.”
Ed snickers. “Okay, drunk Scrabble sounds… kinda fun.”
“Drunk strip Scrabble,” Roy says.
Ed’s pupils dilate, and his cheeks go pink, and this close up he’s sort of mesmerizing.
Before Roy can qualify that he’s never actually played drunk strip Scrabble and just assumes from all available evidence that it would be a rollicking good time, the couple whose popcorn Ed stole wanders back in, joined at the mouth like a pair of fish, and settles on their chosen spot of carpet again. When they come up for air, Roy sees that it’s the girl who was wearing brown pigtails yesterday and the guy who was Jack Black during the icebreaker and failed to respond to any of the ‘School of Rock’ quotes.
“Hey,” the girl says. “Didn’t we have some popcorn left?”
“I thought we did,” the guy says.
Ed glances sidelong at Roy. Roy looks back.
“You must have eaten it all,” they say in unison.
They look at each other again.
“Jinx,” they say at once.
Roy blinks at Ed. Ed blinks back.
“Fuck,” they both say.
“Whoa,” says the girl.
“You guys totally practiced that,” the guy says.
“We did not,” Ed says. “He’s integrating me into the cyborg hive-mind-against my will, by the way. You have to save me before it’s too late.”
Roy pats Ed’s head. “Resistance is futile, dear.”
“You are such a nerd,” Ed says.
“Who is more nerdy?” Roy asks. “The nerd, or the nerd who follows his references?”
“Oh, my God,” Ed says.
[PART 1] [PART 3]
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Ed, Winry/OC, Maes/Gracia, Ling/everyone he can get his hands on
Rating: R
Word Count: 60,300 (8,900 this chapter)
Warnings: language; shenanigans; semi-explicit sexual material; frank discussion of mental illness; modern AU
Summary: Roy has lucked into the all-expenses-paid vacation of his dreams - all he has to do is convince a bunch of happy couples that he's head-over-heels in love with Ed Elric. What could possibly go wrong?
Author's Note: This HTML thing is a pain in the A HREF.
A WICKED GAME - PART 2
His eyes pop open ten minutes to six. They staunchly refuse to be shut again, even after some very vigorous mental coaxing and a few attempted bribes.
Morning it is, then.
Ed is snoring quietly; Roy will have to heckle him about it later. By the light of his phone screen he picks out some clothes for today-his sweatshirt is missing, presumed abandoned in the bathroom because Ed is a paragon of class and considerateness.
What’s the agenda for today? Is there an agenda, or are they all just going to descend into a lawless wasteland of mid-twenties laziness without consequences? Should he be dressing for boating, hiking, or lying around on the beach getting sand in his shorts? Are there any other things to do? He should have brought a book. He should have brought several books. He should have bought more clothes, nice clothes, the kind of clothes that rich kids’ eyes will gloss over because they’re acceptable-not a couple pairs of jeans and some slightly threadbare khakis and the terrible powder blue polo shirt Riza sent because it has a tiny horse embroidered on the chest instead of an alligator. He should have found a way to afford nice clothes. He should have held up a J. Crew. He should have gone into engineering. He should have spent that windfall award money on a pile of lottery tickets instead of his medication. He should have stayed in the lab where he belongs.
Speaking of his medication, where the fuck is it?
Holding his phone aloft like the Phial of Galadriel, he paws through his supremely inadequate raiment, but the sinking feeling in him already knows. He left it. He probably left it on the bathroom sink in his hurry to be early to the meeting spot, not that Sara and her green BMW were there until fifteen minutes after the agreed-upon time-
He left it. Shit.
It’s all right. It’s all right; he’ll be okay. This surge of panic is temporary; the rattling of his heart against his ribs is purely psychosomatic; his body chemistry can’t have adjusted yet. He’s forgotten far longer than this before, on busy mornings; there have been nights he didn’t sleep, and his whole composition was out of whack. It’s all right. He’ll be fine. It’s just five days. Five measly little days. He’s stubborner than his stupid, stupid brain. He’ll beat it. He’ll wait it out. Five days is barely a blip in the course of a lifetime.
Oh, God. He’ll never be able to do this. There’s just no way. He left it; how could he be so fucking dumb-?
He puts his phone down on the floor, curls his hands around the zippered edge of the suitcase, closes his eyes, and breathes. One breath at a time. Just get to the next one. That’s not so hard.
He sidles into the bathroom, quietly closes the door, splashes some cold water on his face, and looks up at himself in the mirror.
Just the next breath. That’s all. It’s not so bad.
There’s a guy in the kitchen who isn’t one of the guests. He looks like a ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ contestant, down to the white chef’s attire and the expression of inexorable world-weariness.
“Hey, man,” he says as Roy pauses in the doorway. “I’m Chad.”
“Hi,” Roy says slowly.
“I’m the new chef,” Chad says. “The chef from yesterday quit. Something about ‘overbearing entitlement’, I think he said. Can I make you some pancakes?”
Roy thinks of the way that pastries which get separated from the herd near Ed’s lab bench disappear without a trace. “I’ll take a couple upstairs. Do you mind if I make coffee?”
“Not at all, not at all,” Chad says, opening the refrigerator. “Make yourself at home. Coffee’s in that cabinet above the machine. Any food allergies?”
“Don’t think so,” Roy says. “Thank you for asking.” There’s a light roast and a dark roast. Does Ed have a preference? Ed’s only criterion for coffee drinkability seems to be existence. Well, hell, Roy likes light, and Ed will just have to deal with it; he’d have to be an ingrate to complain about room service.
Jesus, it’s whole bean, and it smells like caffeinated heaven. Roy savors the scent for a moment and then starts casting about for a grinder.
“You been here long?” Chad asks.
“Since yesterday afternoon,” Roy says. “It’s really… nice.”
His vocabulary doesn’t activate until a critical threshold of coffee consumption has been reached. Usually it’s two cups.
“Yeah,” Chad says. “Hey, you want blueberries? Chocolate chips?”
“I think he’d like chocolate,” Roy says, finding the grinder tucked behind the toaster oven. “Thank you.”
The quality of the silence has changed. He looks over and finds Chad staring at him.
“What’s wrong?” he manages as his heart takes up pounding itself against his breastbone to the old, familiar rhythm-Don’t look at me; don’t see me; don’t find the sickness; don’t figure out the shame-
“Oh,” Chad says. “Uh. Nothing. It’s just-you don’t… look… gay. That’s all.”
The one upside is that the vise-grip of terror around his heart disintegrates to make room for the rage.
“Is that so,” Roy says. “Tell me, then, Chad-how am I supposed to look?”
Chad swallows. “I don’t know. Like… you… I guess. I don’t know. I’ll just… chocolate chips, right?”
“Yes,” Roy says. “Thank you.” He pours in a small flood of coffee beans, jams the lid on the grinder, and slams his hand down on the button.
It’s not the most dramatic comeback one could make in a kitchen, but it’ll have to do.
Clearly, Roy missed his calling: he should have been a waiter. He manages to balance the unevenly-weighted tray on one hand in order to flail around to grasp the doorknob, and then he backs in without spilling a drop of coffee or syrup.
“Rise and shine, beautiful!” he says.
Ed’s head lifts from the pillow. From within the massive corona of frizzy hair, a pair of puffy eyes blink owlishly; if Roy’s not mistaken, there is a trail of drool on Ed’s chin.
“…beautiful on the inside!” he amends.
“F’k’you,” Ed mumbles. He drags his sleeve across his mouth and then starts scrubbing at his eyes with the heels of both hands. “…time s’it?”
Oops. “Uh… six-forty-five.”
Ed collapses back onto the bed. “Think you missed the point of a fuckin’ vacation. Fuckin’ Roy.”
A part of Roy thinks he should probably be proud that his given name has been elevated to the status of an insult. “I brought you pancakes. And coffee.”
One of Ed’s eyes cracks open and fixes on him. “Why?”
Roy sets the tray down on Ed’s nightstand. “Because… it’s a nice thing to do?”
The second eye opens a fraction. “You make ’em?”
“The homophobic resident chef did,” Roy says. “I did make the coffee. I brought sugar; I know you have some conspiracy theory about how milk is somehow out to get you or something.”
Both eyes narrow until they’re almost closed again. “Can’t believe you remember that.”
“You ranted for a quarter of an hour,” Roy says. “It made an impression.”
“Can’t believe you brought me breakfast,” Ed mumbles. “S’for show, though, right? So everyone’d see you bein’ all romantic and shit.”
Roy pauses. “Oh,” he says. “I should have thought of that.”
Ed stares at him.
“It’s a nice thing to do,” Roy says. “That’s all.”
“You’re fuckin’ weird,” Ed says.
“For being nice?” Roy asks.
Ed nods about as sagely as one can while one’s head is still mostly on the pillow, and one’s hair is an uproariously hilarious disaster.
Half an hour later-of which about six minutes were spent eating, and twenty-four were reserved for detangling-Ed’s hair is trailing down over the arm of the downstairs couch on which he’s draped himself like a swooning maiden in a Renaissance painting. “What do people even do this early in the morning when they don’t have lab?”
Roy happens to think that lazing around in someone else’s beautiful sitting room in one of the day’s first sunbeams, skimming through a newspaper with no intention of accomplishment whatsoever is the best thing one could possibly be persuaded to do on a lab-less morning, but he doesn’t imagine Ed will be impressed by some vague gesturing to the room at large.
“You could see if there’s anything on TV,” he says.
“At seven on a Tuesday morning?” Ed asks. “Gee, pretty sure my two choices are Botox-faced douchepickles with ugly ties talking seriously about all the terrible shit happening in the world, or Dora the Explorer.”
“We could learn Spanish,” Roy says. “That wouldn’t be so bad.”
“No one learns Spanish at seven in the morning on Tuesday on vacation.”
“We might start a trend.”
Ed starts laughing. It’s the high, helpless laugh that makes his eyes crinkle up at the corners. “You are so damn weird, you know that?”
“I’ve been told,” Roy says.
Ed yawns cavernously. “What else are you supposed to do with mornings? We did sleeping. We did breakfast. We did coffee. We did brushing teeth and shit. At what point does it stop being the morning and just start being the day?”
“I’m afraid my schedule didn’t leave time for a double-major in philosophy,” Roy says.
“Why are you reading that crap, anyway?” Ed says, waving his whole arm at the newspaper. “It’s all so fucking depressing. I usually let Al filter my news. He just sends me the stories about animals at the zoo making unlikely friends and shit. And cat videos. It’s a hell of a lot better that way.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Roy says. “It gives me some perspective.” He turns a page. “And there are comics at the end.”
“Perspective is overrated,” Ed says. “Most things are. Anything good going on?”
“Not really,” Roy says.
“Does your phone get internet?” Ed asks. “Maybe there’s some Al Channel news.”
Roy fishes it from his pocket and tosses it towards the couch, which is perhaps the most trusting thing he has done in the past year. There’s something about the way Ed can be simultaneously naïvely hopeful and utterly misanthropic that he identifies with strongly, and it just makes him feel… safe.
Strange thought, but it can’t be retracted now.
“You left yourself logged in,” Ed says. “Don’t be surprised if you have a status about how fucking awesome I am next time you go on. Yo, who the hell is this chick in your pictures? Are you cheating on me? I’m your fake boyfriend, for fuck’s sake; have some respect.”
“That’s Riza,” Roy says.
“I really like this one of you both totally deadpan with noodles hanging out of your mouths. Holy shit, is this you and her at prom? You look, like, twelve.”
“I thought you were checking the Al Channel,” Roy says.
“C’mon,” Ed says. “If I was actually your boyfriend, I would’ve stalked the fuck out of your Facebook. It’s research. Is this that other friend you were talking about? With the wedding? Oh, wow, she’s… real pretty. She looks nice.”
“Gracia?” Roy says. “She is. She’s lovely. She used to bake cookies for me during finals, in part because she knew I’d forget to eat otherwise.”
“I gotta get somebody like that,” Ed mutters, gazing at the screen of Roy’s phone. “Somebody who cooks. Well, somebody who cooks who’s not in France. Al cooks.”
“Al is apparently perfect,” Roy says. “Pity the two of you are related.”
He deserves the middle finger he receives.
“Whoa!” Winry’s voice says from the doorway. “Not okay, Edward Elric!”
“It’s all right,” Roy says. “It’s how he shows affection.”
“Well, yeah,” Winry says, coming over to lean against the back of the couch Ed’s claimed. She’s wearing pink plaid pajama pants, a matching tank top, bedhead, and the smudges of yesterday’s eyeliner, and she is, quite frankly, heartbreakingly cute. “But that doesn’t make it okay.”
“Fuck off, Win,” Ed says.
“She’s just trying to help, baby,” Roy says.
“He’s just cranky because he didn’t get enough beauty sleep,” Winry says. “I mean, gosh, Ed, I’ve never seen you up and presentable this early. Are you feeling okay?”
She puts a hand on his forehead, which Ed promptly swats away. “Fuck off, Win!”
She folds her arms on the back of the couch and frowns at him. “Really, though.”
“It’s not my fault,” Ed says, scowling at her. “Somebody brought breakfast at the crack of fucking dawn. And it’s not like you can not drink coffee when it’s in front of you, and then I was sort of awake, and what are you smiling about?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” Roy cuts in. “I felt I shouldn’t have to suffer alone, and you looked far too peaceful. It was the only solution.”
“You are a shit,” Ed says.
“I love you, too, baby,” Roy says.
Ed looks startled and almost betrayed for a split-second before his face closes off completely. Guilt seethes like forked lightning through the center of Roy’s chest, but there’s no time to say anything before Winry is sighing contentedly.
“You two are so married,” she says.
Ed’s face returns to absolute normalcy in an instant, and then he drags his hand down over it. “Jesus, Winry.”
“Just ‘Winry’ is fine,” she says.
Ed gives Roy a Do you see what I put up with look. Roy sends back Oh, you poor thing; let me play you a lament on the world’s tiniest cello, since you’ve worn out the violin.
“Oh, Lord,” Winry says. “You don’t even have to talk anymore? You guys are disgusting.”
“I resent that,” Roy says.
“Since when are guys disgusting?” a voice mumbles from the hall. Treavisor comes stumbling in, and Winry’s face brightens.
“Hi, you,” she says, crossing the room again to put an arm around him.
“Your pajamas match,” Roy says, pointing. “Exactly how are we the disgusting couple?”
“Because I said so,” Winry says, hugging Treavisor happily.
“She’s always right,” Treavisor says.
“Dude,” Ed says. “She’s going to walk all over you if you keep treating her like that.”
“Just ’cause she’d rather get covered in motor oil than have a tea party doesn’t mean she’s not a princess,” Treavisor says, gazing down into Winry’s eyes.
“Sweetie,” Winry says, voice quavering.
Surreptitiously Roy darts a glance at Ed, who looks about as awkward as he feels. Ed catches his eye and gives him an unmistakable For the love of God, fucking do something!
“Ah,” Roy says, “will you excuse us? We’re going to take a hike. Literally. We’ll see you later, then? All right. Come on, Ed; the trails won’t blaze themselves.”
“You’re such a fucking nerd,” Ed says, hastening over and latching on to the hand Roy holds out.
“Mea culpa,” Roy says.
“You bet your ass it’s your culpa,” Ed says.
Fortunately, escaping out of the living room onto the deck leads directly onto one of the trails. Unfortunately, Roy is starting to worry that he will have to be pried off of this property at the end of the week, because he never wants to leave.
“What the hell are you so happy about?” Ed asks as they crest the first hill, and greenery spills out before them-a whole valley of evergreen; the air is crisp and biting, magnificently infused with the pines.
“This,” Roy says.
Ed looks it over, fidgeting with the too-long ends of the sleeves of Roy’s borrowed sweatshirt, which was recently recovered from wherever he left it. “I guess that is pretty nice.”
“Do you still have my phone?” Roy asks. “I want to send Riza a picture.”
“Nah,” Ed says. “Threw it behind me with the Grenade App open to distract Winry and her boytoy while we made a run for it.” He hands it over, and Roy closes his life story à la Facebook and taps over to the camera. “That thing have GPS?”
“Yes,” Roy says, capturing the moment to the best of his meager artistic ability. “Why? You think we’re going to get lost?”
“I think it’s highly plausible,” Ed says.
“We’re on a trail,” Roy says. “If we turn around, we eventually end up where we started.”
“You clearly don’t believe in randomly-generating wormholes,” Ed says.
“Neither do you,” Roy says, tucking his phone back into his pocket and starting down.
“You clearly haven’t figured out yet that I’m a shitty luck charm,” Ed says.
“You don’t believe in luck, either,” Roy says.
Ed growls. “You clearly don’t realize I’m a shit-getting-fucked-up magnet.”
“You don’t understand magnetism,” Roy says. “Boy, I could do this all day.”
“Hike?” Ed asks. “Or be a dick?”
“I do so love to multitask,” Roy says.
“This is stupid,” Ed says after another mile or so.
“Playing casino games without a basic understanding of probability is stupid,” Roy says. “This is fun.”
“I can’t believe you,” Ed says. “I always assumed you were allergic to sunlight or some shit. You never go outside.”
“This isn’t outside,” Roy says. “This is Nature.”
“Well, nature is too fucking warm, and I think I’ve got a hole in my sock.”
“It’s not nature; it’s Nature.”
“…the fuck, Roy.”
“You have to capitalize the N.”
“…I repeat: the fuck, Roy.”
“Such language.” He manages to stop reveling in the majesty of the wilderness for long enough to glance at Ed. “You know, you might not be too warm if you took off the sweatshirt. Which is, for the record, my sweatshirt. Which you’ve probably made more sweat than shirt by now.”
Ed turns away, scowling. “Well-fuck you. You look like a fucking dumbass.”
Roy does not look like a dumbass. Roy looks like a perfectly reasonable, intelligent individual who, upon exercising enough to raise his body temperature, removed the Oxford shirt he was wearing over a T-shirt and tied the former around his waist.
“It’s just because-” Ed’s mouth stays open another moment, and then it snaps shut.
Roy despises that the same curiosity which makes him a fine, upstanding young scientist compels him to play ball every time Ed gets coy. “Because what?”
“It’s like I said.” Ed cradles his right arm to his chest with the left. “A lot of surgeries. Two at the time, and then another one a couple years later, and then another one last year. It’s a lot of scar tissue. It grosses people out.”
“It won’t gross me out,” Roy says. “I begged my high school biology teachers for extra dissections.”
Ed’s smile is shaky but genuine. “You’re twisted up on the inside somewhere, Mustang.”
Roy wishes that was funny.
Ed draws a deep breath, sighs it out, sets his jaw, and unzips Roy’s hoodie. It comes off, although not without a fight; Ed pulls both sleeves all the way inside-out. But then he’s just standing there, with it balled up in his hands, in a faded black T-shirt and his faded black jeans, and his right forearm is riddled with thick white scars.
“Guess that’s fair,” Ed says. “Since I’m all torn up on the outside.”
“It’s not so bad,” Roy says. “Let me see.”
“Nah,” Ed says, half-shrugging; he drapes the sweatshirt over the scarred arm to carry it and starts off on the path again. “How much further do we have to go before you get your Nature fix?”
“Hard to say,” Roy says. “I’m a junkie.”
“Stranded in the woods with the likes of you,” Ed says. “Jesus, this is like a horror movie. Are there wolves?”
“The total number of wolves in the state of California is zero,” Roy says.
“What about zoos?” Ed asks.
“The total number of wolves outside of captivity in the state of California is zero,” Roy says.
“That’s real comforting,” Ed says. “Here, why don’t you take the lead, Nature Freak?”
“That’s Mr. Nature Freak to you,” Roy says, stepping past him.
“There must be something carnivorous and angry,” Ed says. “Winry’d never take us somewhere safe.”
“There’s a minute possibility of mountain lions,” Roy says. “But they’re mostly nocturnal, and they’re not especially aggressive, and they don’t normally perceive humans as prey.” The crunching footsteps beside him stop, and he stumbles and then turns. “What?”
“You’re horrible,” Ed says faintly.
“I’m honest,” Roy says. “Is that horrible?”
“Sometimes,” Ed says. “You could’ve just said there were coyotes or some shit.”
“There are probably some of those, too,” Roy says, starting uphill again. Riza was incalculably better to hike with. She didn’t say much, didn’t ask much, didn’t slow him down.
That’s unfair. Ed’s wearing a prosthesis. Roy really shouldn’t be setting the pace; he should subtly let Ed do it and try to appreciate his company.
But he’s just so tired-tired of faking excitement for Winry, faking normalcy for Ed, faking completeness for the entire world. There’s a voice in him that’s always gasping for air to scream with, which no amount of smothering will quell; there’s a streak of undying panic in him that’s always rising towards the surface; but nobody wants to look or listen-and why should they? What entitles him to even a moment of their brief little lives or a fragment of their half-assed sympathy?
He’s on his own. He’s always on his own; he should be used to it by now; he should be picking himself the fuck up and getting the fuck over it.
And if Ed says one more thing about how stupid Nature is-his solitary joy in the present universe-
The heavy-booted footsteps are catching up to him again, and then, as he attempts to glare holes into the trail in front of him, they’re scuffling close.
“Wait-Roy-Roy-”
Roy whirls on him. “What? Look, Ed, I’m trying, okay? I am trying to enjoy this so much that I don’t think about all the wasted lab time, or all the things I should have said, and I keep trying to bail you out every time you put your stupid foot in your stupid mouth just because you’re playing some overblown defensive game-and the least you could do is treat me like a human being instead of telling me every five minutes that I’m fucked up, which I know, by the way, so it’s not news to anyb-”
“Roy,” Ed says-and good heavens, his eyes are so wide they could probably hold galaxies, and his face is ashen, and he’s pointing over Roy’s right shoulder.
The remaining pieces of that rant-and they were legion-wither and die in Roy’s mouth. Slowly, slowly, he turns around.
There is a cougar on the path, ten, maybe twelve feet from where they stand.
Roy’s first thought is that it may be the most beautiful animal he’s ever seen. It’s sleek and powerful, built low and strong like a sports car, with startling blue eyes and a touch of gray-brown in the face to temper the smooth pale beige fur everywhere-like a Siamese cat, just a hint of delicacy. But there’s nothing delicate about the coiled muscles underneath; nothing delicate about the way the long tail sways back and forth, the better to mark this specimen a full eight feet from nosetip to the end of that tail; nothing delicate about the fierce intelligence and the unwavering attention to the two foolish little people tromping through its territory.
Roy’s second thought is Oh, shit.
“Okay,” he says, without much help from his suddenly arid esophagus. “Okay, just… stay calm. I’m going to back away towards you, and then we’re going to do that thing where we make a lot of noise, and it decides we’re not worth eating.”
“No fucking way,” Ed says. “We’re getting the fuck out of here.”
“No,” Roy says, maintaining eye contact with the massive creature that might enjoy killing him as he takes one cautious step backward, then two. His knees appear to have transformed themselves into chocolate pudding while he was speaking. “If we run, we’re acting like prey, and its chase instincts might kick in. That’s how a lot of mountain lion attacks happen.”
“You don’t know shit!” Ed says. “You said they were nocturnal!”
“They are nocturnal!”
“Tell it to that guy!”
“Fine, I will!” Roy glares at the mountain lion. “Go back to sleep; you’re defying your instincts!”
The cougar’s ears swivel back and then swing forward again. Roy has no idea what that means, but he’s willing to bet it’s not My stars, good sir, you’re quite correct! I’ll just slink back to my proper breed characteristics now, cheerio, terribly sorry to interrupt.
“Oh, my God,” Ed says through what can only be described as hysterical laughter. It’s sort of bubbling and dribbling out of him against his will, by the sound of it; Roy thinks involuntarily of vomit. “Oh, my God, you’re fucking crazy. I’m fucking crazy. The cat is fucking crazy. We’re all gonna die. What a way to go.”
“We’re not going to die!” Roy says. “And I’m not crazy!”
The mountain lion looks distinctly unamused now. Or perhaps that’s the crazy talking.
“Roy,” Ed says. His voice trembles, and the pine needles whisper, and then there’s a faint fingertip’s pressure against Roy’s arm. “I’m not going without you, but Jesus fuck, we should run, okay?”
“That’s a really bad idea,” Roy says.
“So is standing here making conversation with an apex predator,” Ed says. “It doesn’t even count as conversation, ’cause he’s not answering.”
“Maybe he’ll leave,” Roy says.
“Maybe he won’t,” Ed says. The fingers curl into the back of Roy’s T-shirt. “Come on, Roy. I’d sure as hell rather die running. On the count of three.”
“No,” Roy says.
“One.”
“Nooooooo.”
“Two.”
“Ed-”
“Three-come-on-you-fucker-”
As with pulling him back up onto the dock, Roy discovers that Ed is staggeringly strong for his size, and it’s only some expert stumbling and a bit of blind luck that prevents him from getting a faceful of pine needles and a back full of cougar claws-and then they’re careening down the hill, veering almost immediately off of the trail-
“Where are you going?” Roy howls.
“Away!” Ed howls back.
“We’re going to get lost!”
“At least we’re not getting devoured!”
“Ed!”
“What?”
Roy has expended the last of his extra breath, and the rest has to be dedicated to sprinting, or he might add “Before we die, I just wanted to tell you that your hair is stunning” or something. He really needs to prepare some brilliantly poetic last words, whether or not anyone will be around to record them for posterity. It’s the principle of the thing.
He doesn’t think he can hear mountain lion paws pounding the ground behind them, thundering ever closer, poising to pounce and sink its fearsome teeth into the juncture of his shoulder and his neck in order to snap his spine, but it’s difficult to hear much of anything over the racket that he and Ed are making, so it’s perfectly possible that he’s about to die.
There’s an odd moment of clarity in his head: I really did give it everything I had. It wasn’t bad. I could have done better, and I could have been more, and I would have liked to know what it’s like to wake up and feel right, but it wasn’t bad, all things considered. I did okay.
Then there’s another odd moment, this time of disbelief: Holy crap, Ed is faster than me on a mechanical knee.
But all of the recreational jogging around campus while he waits for gel to set, or for simulations to load, or for data to process, or for his whizzing-screaming-sobbing-spinning brain to quiet down has paid off. His lungs are burning, and his heart is a mad drummer with no rhythm bound poorly to his flaming veins, but he’s holding steady, and it’s almost… great. The adrenaline and the incredulity and the panic and the long, wordless wail of his better judgment in his head-it’s invigorating. And, hell-running for your life is pretty damn good cardio.
But then he has a third odd moment, as Ed drops to the ground-no, he doesn’t drop; he flings both arms out and plants his hands on the thick, dark, mossy fallen tree splayed out across their sad excuse for an escape route. And he vaults off of it and spirals in the air like a fucking pinwheel and soars several feet ahead and then lands like a goddamn butterfly and keeps running. Roy’s sweatshirt goes fluttering away and snags on a tree branch.
So this time the clarity is: Oh, sweet holy fuck!, and the result is that Roy trips over the log and slams into the ground at what feels like a thousand miles an hour, the better to fill his open mouth with molding pine needles and bury his face in a small but ambitious bramble.
This is it. Next will be the low, resonant growl; then the soft sounds of a huge, lean animal’s paws in the underbrush. Then the moist breath on the back of his neck, then the claws in his bare arm, then the agony as the canines pierce his skin, his jugular, his windpipe-and then the rest is silence. Some creep from lab will hit on Riza at his closed-casket funeral, and there will be nothing he can do about it. She’ll go to jail for murder. Aunt Chris will console Maes and Gracia as the cops lead her away, and everyone will forget they’re at a funeral in the first place, and the news story will go from Promising Young Scientist Mauled by Mountain Lion to Attractive Young Helicopter Pilot Imprisoned for Homicide, and someone will ask in a very loud voice if there’s food. It’ll probably be Ed.
“Oh, my God, you suck,” Ed says from close to Roy’s ear. An insistent finger prods his shoulder several times. “Get up, asshole. If you’re unconscious, there’s no way I’m carrying your fat ass back to civilization.”
“’M not fat,” Roy says. It comes out more like Mm nff ffft, due to the mouthful of dead foliage.
“Yeah, well, you’re fatheaded. I think we lost the giant cat from hell. Get up already. Did you hurt yourself?”
Roy finds his arms about where he left them and pushes himself upright. He spits out a disturbing quantity of leaves, which is an experience that he hopes he will never have to repeat.
“Only my dignity,” he says.
“Your what?” Ed asks, smirking a little. He sits back and takes his left shin in both hands, carefully laying his leg out flat. “So… million-dollar question. How do we get back?”
Roy looks back the way he thinks they came. He looks the way they were headed. He looks left. He looks right. Everything appears to be more or less completely identical. “I have no idea.”
Ed grimaces. “We’re lost.”
Roy rubs at his stinging cheek and draws his palm back with little speckles of blood all over it. “I told you we’d get turned around if we left the trail.”
“Fuck you,” Ed says. “I told you so first.”
At least that distracts Roy from the fact that he’s bleeding from the face and probably contracting at least four viral infections even as he blinks. “What?”
“When you were taking that picture to show your girlfriend, a-”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“-nd you said we wouldn’t.”
“If we stayed on the trail,” Roy says.
Ed rolls his eyes. “What-the-fuck-ever. Get out your phone; we can Google Map our way back to civilization.”
By some miracle, it stayed in Roy’s pocket the whole way, and he somehow didn’t land hard enough to shatter the screen.
But miracles only go so far.
“No service,” he says.
“Motherfucking son of a bitch,” Ed says through clenched teeth. “Who’s your service provider? If we make it out of here alive, I’m firebombing one of their stores.”
“No, you’re not,” Roy says, getting to his feet, brushing himself off, and going to collect his dramatically-abandoned hoodie. “It’s not quite ten in the morning, so that way-” He points in the general direction at which the sun is angled. “-must be east.”
Ed clambers up slowly, eyeing him the whole way. “What about the moss on the trees thing?”
“Debunked.”
“Doesn’t your stupid phone have a compass, or something?”
“It only works when you have 3G,” Roy says.
Ed stares at him. Roy stares back.
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Ed says.
“It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever had to say,” Roy says.
Ed pushes his hair back off of his forehead. “Fuck. Okay. Well. That’s east. Which way do we need to go?”
Roy taps hopelessly at the phone, well aware that he can’t summon a signal by force of will. “I… think we were staying on the north side of the lake.”
“You ‘think’,” Ed says slowly. “Like you ‘thought’ mountain lions were nocturnal.”
“They are!” Roy says. “They’re crepuscular, actually; they come out at dawn and at dusk, and I don’t see you doing anything except bitching at me when I try to give us something to work with, and for all I care, you can die of exposure.”
“Or starvation,” Ed says, shoving his hands into his pockets and gazing skyward. “Maybe both at once.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Roy says. He starts storming off in a northerly direction; at least he’ll die closer to the cabin. “I’m not sharing my Altoids with you anyway.”
“You’re the worst fake boyfriend ever,” Ed says, running a few steps to catch up.
“How dare you,” Roy says, but he can’t muster up much venom.
“I’m starving,” Ed says.
“You’re starving?” Roy asks. “You inhaled three pancakes. I watched you. Although I almost blinked and missed it.”
“That was a long time ago,” Ed says.
Roy holds a springy branch out of the way for him and disdains himself for it. “Well, the faster we go, the sooner we get back to food.”
“Thanks,” Ed says of the branch. Roy disdains himself slightly less. “Hey, you know what I really, really want?”
“The Spice Girls,” Roy says.
“No,” Ed says. “Cake.”
“I want a girl with a short skirt and a long jacket,” Roy says.
“…what?”
“It’s a Cake song.”
“…what?”
“This is terrible,” Roy says. “Pop culture references are my superpower, and you’re immune to them.”
“The only pop I’m interested in is the kind you can drink,” Ed says, “because I’m starving.”
“Me, too,” Roy says.
They crunch through the needles in silence for a while.
“Chocolate cake,” Ed says.
“Chocolate fondue,” Roy says.
“Chocolate-chip cookie dough,” Ed says. “Fuck the salmonella risk. Whole fucking bowl. Gimme a spoon. I live dangerously.”
“Chocolate-chip cookie dough in chocolate fondue,” Roy says.
“Witchcraft,” Ed says. “Doesn’t exist.”
“It does.”
“It does not.”
“I’ll take you there,” Roy says. “If we survive.”
“Fuck this,” Ed says. “I’m surviving if it kills me.”
“Good idea,” Roy says.
“Oh, God,” Ed says. “I’m dying. It’s over. Go on without me. Remember me. Leave cupcakes on my grave. Tell Al I love him. Tell Winry I love her most of the time. If my fucking dad comes to my funeral, punch his fucking lights out.”
“Okay,” Roy says.
“I’m serious,” Ed says. “The least you could do is sound depressed.”
“Do I not sound depressed?” Roy asks.
“If you die first, I’m resorting to cannibalism,” Ed says. “Your sacrifice will not be in vain.”
“What’s that?” Roy asks, pointing to a smudge of grayish something at the bottom of the hill.
“Hunger hallucinations,” Ed says.
“No,” Roy says, “that’s-a parking lot, come on-”
“It’s made of cement; it’s not going anywh-”
“There’s a taxi!”
Apparently, Roy’s tortured, unfed body has a bit of running left in it-just enough to race down the last of the hill waving both arms and skid to a stop a few feet from the cab idling at the lot entrance. There’s a road, and it’s paved, and it’s a taxi, and they’re going to live.
Very, very slowly, the cab driver rolls the window down. Roy’s a little offended until he catches a glimpse of his bloody, dirt-smudged face in the side mirror and remembers that he just ran over here at top speed, flailing the whole way.
“Hi,” he says, trying not to sound any worse than he looks. “Do you take debit cards?”
The driver is a blond guy with an unlit cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. Wordlessly, he shakes his head.
“Shitfuck,” Roy says.
“Nice,” Ed says, coming up behind him.
Roy grinds his teeth. “I mean-um-how far could you take us for…” He pulls out his wallet and opens the cash pocket. “…five dollars?”
“And twenty cents?” Ed says.
The taxi driver stares at them for another moment. Then he points to the curve in the road about a quarter-mile down.
“I think that’s worthy of a ‘fuckshit’,” Ed says.
“Shut up,” Roy says. He looks at his sad, lonely little five-dollar bill and then at the cabbie. “Hey, for five bucks, could we use your GPS for a minute?”
“Don’t be a dumbass!” Ed says, elbowing him. “Five bucks could get us, like, sixteen packs of ramen! See if your phone’s working first.”
Roy takes it out. He has two bars of signal. His heart leaps, and he thumbs the Google Maps icon, and then…
The battery dies.
“I hate my life,” he says.
“I hate your life, too,” Ed says. He turns to the taxi driver. “Yo, my friend’ll totally pay you when we get there. You can hold this asshole hostage while I go in and get her, if you want.”
“We’re trying to get to 421 Blue Springs Road,” Roy says. “I promise we’re not creepy woods dwellers who kill people.”
Ed elbows him harder this time. “That’s exactly what creepy woods dwellers who kill people would say!”
The taxi guy’s eyes narrow a little, and then he taps at his Garmin for a few very long seconds. The cigarette bobs up and down.
“Pretty posh part of town,” he says at last.
“Yes,” Roy says desperately. “Yes, it is. Reputable.”
The cabbie eyes them for another moment, and then he jerks a thumb at the backseat. “Get in.”
Ed grabs the front of Roy’s shirt, lays a wet, smacking kiss on his cheek, grabs his sweatshirt away from him, and opens the car door. “I’m never going anywhere with you again,” he says.
Roy rubs the saliva off of his skin and goes around to the other side. “Fair enough,” he says.
“What happened to you?” Winry gasps as Roy steps in and closes the door.
“Extreme hiking,” Roy says. “It’s the next big thing.”
Winry does not seem to appreciate his classy and refined sense of humor.
Ed positions himself partway in front of Roy, which is… interesting. “Look, I’ll pay you back for the taxi, Win.”
“That’s not what I mean!”
“Chill out,” Ed says. “We didn’t have to go all Donner Party. Not even a little bit. Hey, is there food?”
Winry turns her horror full-force on Roy. “What happened to your face?”
“That’s not nice,” Ed cuts in. “It’s not his fault; he was just born ugly.”
Roy loops an arm around Ed’s neck and wordlessly ruffles his hair until it is an absolute rat’s nest, ignoring the screaming, the writhing, and the pounding on his chest. It’s only when Ed tries to bite him that he lets go.
Winry’s horror has become unmitigated mortification.
“We’re just hungry,” Ed says.
Treavisor puts a hand on Winry’s shoulder. He seems to be attempting to draw her away from the madmen. “Maybe you should, uh…” He gestures to Roy’s cheek. “…some… hydrogen peroxide or… something.”
“Food first,” Roy says.
“Now you’re makin’ sense,” Ed says.
“This is boring,” Ed says.
They tore through several Chad-made sandwiches with a celerity that Roy is beginning to regret, after which Ed followed Roy aimlessly while he cleaned himself up and plugged his phone in to charge. Ed continued to follow aimlessly as Roy selected one of the eighteen indistinguishable Tom Clancy books from the shelves in the living room and stationed himself in a deck chair under an umbrella on the beach.
“So go ride a jet-ski,” Roy says. It’s what everyone else is doing, but, despite all of the giddy laughter wafting back over the waves, Roy thinks he can be satisfied with vicarious thrills for a while.
“Can’t swim,” Ed says in a low voice. “Remember?”
“Oh,” Roy says. “Right. Sorry.”
“You are not.”
“I am.” He looks around for something to mark the book with; he can’t bear to dog-ear pages. “Do you want me to get a deck of cards?”
“What is this,” Ed says, “1925?”
“I don’t think they’d be nearly as accepting of a homosexual couple if this was 19-”
“There’s an Xbox inside.”
“I didn’t come all this way to sit inside and play Xbox.”
“Of course not,” Ed says. “You came all this way to be wrong about mountain lions and then read one of those books people buy at airports because they don’t have a choice.”
“That’s right,” Roy says. “Why do I have to go with you? You can play Xbox by yourself if you want.”
“Isn’t that the point of being in a relationship?” Ed asks. He’s still wearing his Docs, and he’s recovered his red sweatshirt, which some household service wraith washed, dried, and left folded on their bed. “Always having somebody to do stuff with?”
“Yes and no,” Roy says.
“I’d forgotten how fucking helpful you can be.”
Roy gives up and puts the book down. He hasn’t been able to retain anything he’s read for about three pages anyway. “So are you a gymnast, or what?”
Ed blinks at him.
“Earlier,” Roy says. “You did an unbelievable backflip… thing. That’s why I fell.”
Ed scowls. “What, so it’s my fault you took a bite out of a briar patch?”
“That’s not what I meant,” Roy says. To say that Ed is exasperating is tantamount to mentioning offhandedly that the Pacific is damp. “I was contextualizing.”
Ed frowns a little deeper and nudges a toe at the sand. “Well… yeah. Used to be. Sort of.” He folds his arms on the arm of Roy’s chair and sets his chin on them. This puts his face about two inches from Roy’s chest, which is more than a bit discomfiting, but Ed doesn’t even seem to notice. “I was into it as a kid, and then after the car and the leg and stuff, I thought… well, everyone kept encouraging me to try to pick it up again. So I did, y’know, after the bulk of the PT and stuff, and I was pretty good.”
“You’ve got to be Olympic quality,” Roy says.
“Paralympics,” Ed says, disinterestedly. “Except they don’t offer any of my stuff. It would’ve been too expensive anyway. I don’t care. I don’t have time. And I’m not jonesing for glory or whatever, so what difference does it make?”
“Recognition makes a huge difference,” Roy says.
Ed looks up at him.
Roy looks back.
Roy reaches out and taps his nose.
“Boop,” Roy says.
“I fucking hate you,” Ed says.
“Movie night!” Winry crows.
“Not evil witch,” Roy murmurs to Ed. “Ringleader of a demon circus.”
Ed’s eyes light up-it’s curious; Roy’s seen the effect on other people, but no one’s expression simply illuminates quite like Ed’s does. “That’s pretty good.”
“There’s pizza!” Winry says. “And popcorn! And candy! And soda! And if everyone’s not sugar-high and stupid by midnight, we’re doing it wrong!”
“That sounds like it has virtually no potential for disaster,” Roy says-quietly, because he doesn’t want to get a fatal can of soda thrown at his head so soon after escaping his demise in the wilderness.
Ed snickers.
“Stop colluding, you two,” Winry says, glaring over at the loveseat Roy cleverly staked out as soon as she started rounding up the group. “I swear, you guys make my teeth hurt. Ed, this whole pizza is for you, but you should probably share with Roy.”
“Aw, jeez, Win,” Ed says, looking touched and delighted as he scampers over and takes the box from her. “You got the Ed Special!”
Roy opens his mouth to ask and then remembers in the nick of time that a boyfriend ought to know. “Let me grab a slice before you eat it all, baby,” he says.
“I guess I can probably spare one,” Ed says, returning to their couch with a spring in his step. He cracks open the box, and Roy squares his shoulders, reaches in, catches up a piece of pizza, and refuses to hesitate before taking a bite.
Turns out the Ed Special is pineapple, sausage, and heaps of jalapeño.
“I’ll be fine,” he wheezes for the third time. Ed continues to attempt to pry his way through the lock on the bathroom door. “Ed-it’s fine; I just don’t have tastebuds of steel like you apparently do.”
“It’s my fault,” Ed says. “Open the door.”
“It is not. And no.”
“Why, are you barfing? I can handle barf. I raised Al, pretty much. He barfed a lot as a kid. Don’t tell him I told you that. He used to get carsick. What the hell are you doing in there?”
“I’d just rather the general populace didn’t see me with my eyes watering,” Roy says.
“Don’t worry about that,” Ed says. “Winry’s putting on ‘Gladiator’. Everybody cries at the end of ‘Gladiator’. It’s like a Turing test. Proves you’re human.”
“I’m also scouring my tongue with my fingernails,” Roy says. “It’s a bit undignified.”
“Aw, jeez,” Ed says. Something collides repeatedly with the door. Roy suspects it’s Ed’s forehead. “I should’ve warned you. I just thought… you could handle it. I mean, you handled a fucking cougar in your face; I thought jalapeños would be, like, whatever.”
“It’s not your fault,” Roy says.
“Yes, it is,” Ed says.
“I should have known better than to take a bite without looking,” Roy says. “Especially when it comes to the preferred pizza of someone who I’ve seen literally eating hot sauce for breakfast.”
“It’s nutritious,” Ed says.
“Punching holes in your stomach lining is generally not considered healthful,” Roy says.
“But it’s all peppers and shit,” Ed says. “That’s vegetables. Besides, spicy stuff is good for your metabolism. Scientific fact.”
“At least that explains why you can eat like a pack of wolves without putting on an ounce of fat,” Roy says.
“Yeah, well,” Ed says. “How’s your tongue? They’re gonna start soon, and I’m not going back in there without you.”
“Who plays ‘Gladiator’ at a party, anyway?” Roy asks.
“Winry thinks Russell Crowe is dreamy,” Ed says. “C’mon. I’ll get you a soda.”
“I don’t need a soda,” Roy says, spitting in the sink one last time before he opens the door. “I need a lobotomy.”
Ed, mostly in shadow but for the faintest gleam of light from down the hall, looks like pyrite incarnate as he smiles.
“Don’t you dare,” he says. “You’re gonna do great things with that brain.”
“We’ll see,” Roy says.
Ed seizes his arm and aggressively links their elbows in order to tow Roy back to the living room. “Yeah. We will.”
True to Ed’s prediction, everyone in the room seems to get something itchy in their eye as ‘Gladiator’ winds to a symphonic close. Several of the guys grow extremely interested in the ceiling, although it appears to be so bright that they can’t look at it without blinking profusely.
Ed, who is using his hoodie sleeves to clear the mysterious dampness in his eyelashes, sniffles and looks at Roy’s dry cheeks.
“Aw, shit,” he says. “I knew it was too good to be true. You’re a cyborg. Fuck.”
“It’s sad,” Roy says, “but this is what he’s been holding out for, too. I think it comes as a relief. He’s done what he meant to, and now he can rest.”
It doesn’t hurt that he’s seen this movie twelve times. Or that it’s just so strange how well he and Ed fit together on the couch-perhaps Ed doesn’t know that, if he’s never had a relationship. Perhaps he thinks that human beings always slot together like they were cut to match-that shoulders’ breadths always fit neatly in an arm’s length; that arms always hook and wrap snugly around waists; that fingers always fill each other’s spaces. Perhaps he doesn’t have any grounds for comparison, and that’s why he’s not distracted by how easily their bodies align. Perhaps he simply doesn’t know that this is extraordinary.
Perhaps he also doesn’t know that staring into someone’s ear canal in company is considered a bit gauche.
“Uh,” Roy says. “See anything you like?”
“I’m looking for the cyborg parts,” Ed says.
“You say the sweetest things,” Roy says.
“Russell Crowe is such a beefcake,” Winry sighs happily. She gazes up at Treavisor. “He’s almost as hot as you, babe.”
“Eew,” Ed says.
Winry takes a moment to stick her tongue out at him before she hops up and goes over to start opening the cabinets of the entertainment center. “What else does everybody wanna see? And what else did your parents leave us, babe?”
“I don’t know,” Treavisor says. “‘Casablanca’, probably.”
Roy loves ‘Casablanca’. The room at large does not need to have that ammunition against his manhood, however.
“Hey!” Winry says. “‘Mulan’!”
“Oh, shit,” Ed says.
“What’s wrong with ‘Mulan’?” Roy asks. “It’s kind of cute.”
“Did you bring earplugs?” Ed asks.
“What?” Roy says. “No.” A dreadful prospect dawns. “Do they-please tell me they don’t-”
“I hope you’ve got cyborg ear-closers hidden under there somewhere,” Ed says.
The nostalgia sing-along goes about as tunefully as Roy feared in his deepest, darkest nightmares. His ears are still ringing when the credits roll, and everyone leaps up in bizarre unison to race for the restrooms. Ed considers their-well, his-empty popcorn bowl and reaches down to switch it out for the mostly-full one belonging to the couple that was sitting on the floor.
“You know,” he says, crunching his way through at such tremendous speed that it’s a wonder he can talk at all, “I thought for the longest time that ‘kernel’ and ‘colonel’ were the same thing. So, like, people would talk about colonels in the military, and I’d be like, ‘Boy, kernels are small; those must be the little pipsqueak guys who have to carry everybody else’s guns.’” He chews reflectively. “You know what this needs?”
“Jalapeños?” Roy hazards.
Ed stops chewing long enough to stare at him. “We gotta stop spending time together,” he says. “You’re starting to read my mind.”
“Think of a random word,” Roy says.
“Botulism,” Ed says.
“You weren’t supposed to say it,” Roy says. “I was going to guess.”
“Oh,” Ed says. “Well, while we’re on the subject-wanna talk about botulism?”
“Not especially,” Roy says.
“You’re no fun,” Ed says.
“I beg to differ,” Roy says. “I think I’m extremely fun.”
“You probably think Boggle and a glass of wine is the recipe for the perfect night,” Ed says.
“That’s absurd,” Roy says. “Scrabble is vastly superior.”
Ed snickers. “Okay, drunk Scrabble sounds… kinda fun.”
“Drunk strip Scrabble,” Roy says.
Ed’s pupils dilate, and his cheeks go pink, and this close up he’s sort of mesmerizing.
Before Roy can qualify that he’s never actually played drunk strip Scrabble and just assumes from all available evidence that it would be a rollicking good time, the couple whose popcorn Ed stole wanders back in, joined at the mouth like a pair of fish, and settles on their chosen spot of carpet again. When they come up for air, Roy sees that it’s the girl who was wearing brown pigtails yesterday and the guy who was Jack Black during the icebreaker and failed to respond to any of the ‘School of Rock’ quotes.
“Hey,” the girl says. “Didn’t we have some popcorn left?”
“I thought we did,” the guy says.
Ed glances sidelong at Roy. Roy looks back.
“You must have eaten it all,” they say in unison.
They look at each other again.
“Jinx,” they say at once.
Roy blinks at Ed. Ed blinks back.
“Fuck,” they both say.
“Whoa,” says the girl.
“You guys totally practiced that,” the guy says.
“We did not,” Ed says. “He’s integrating me into the cyborg hive-mind-against my will, by the way. You have to save me before it’s too late.”
Roy pats Ed’s head. “Resistance is futile, dear.”
“You are such a nerd,” Ed says.
“Who is more nerdy?” Roy asks. “The nerd, or the nerd who follows his references?”
“Oh, my God,” Ed says.
[PART 1] [PART 3]