FMA -- Thermodynamics (Part II)
Title: Thermodyanmics (2/2)
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Ed
Rating: R/NC-17/whatever
Word Count: 13,200
Warnings: language; explicit pr0nz; worst title ever? maybe; major spoilers for '03/CoS
Summary: Roy pines, and perseveres, and the rewards are greater than he ever dared to dream of.
Author's Note: Venture no further without having read Part 1!
THERMODYNAMICS (2/2)
Funny, how the cold doesn’t seem to make the slightest difference when there’s a fever pounding through his every vessel, bright in every searing drop of blood-Roy climbs up over Ed, knees planted on either side of his perfect hips, and drags both hands slowly down his sides; every last damn rib is a blessing he never thought he’d get to touch. All of this-he lost all of this not once, but twice, against a bloody sunset and above a city torn to smoking shreds-but here they are, and everything he’s suffered through to get here, every moment, is more than justified when Ed grins at him like he was worth the wait.
Philosophy aside, however, this particular occasion raises a slightly more pertinent concern:
“Good Lord,” he says, trying to sift through the layers of flannel and fleece. “Are you sure you’re really under there?”
Ed’s laugh could save a lesser sinner all alone. “Back the fuck up, Mustang-who the hell are you calling so small you drop a blanket on him, and he disappears?”
“Mmm,” Roy says, ducking to mouth upward along the lines of Ed’s beautiful throat, flicking the tip of his tongue against the jugular as he goes. “I was thinking more along the lines of you fitting into the weave of the knit and slipping through the holes.”
Ed tries to look scandalized, but the laugh starts as a glimmer in his eyes and resonates down through his chest, and then it’s bubbling up from his lungs like fine champagne, and Roy could drink him in forever.
Roy fights his way through one long row of tiny shirt buttons-how in the world did Ed do these up with his metal hand?-only to be met with the thick gray cable-knit of another sweater underneath.
Ed’s grin broadens, and the mischief in his eyes is intoxicating. “Told you,” he says.
“You did,” Roy says. “Which doesn’t make it any less inconvenient.” He slips his hands under Ed’s shoulder-blades, which is a unique sort of pleasure even with all of the innumerable articles of clothing in the way. “Up-”
“Not your damn dog, Mustang,” Ed says, but there’s no venom in his voice, and he twists his torso in some inconceivable, too-mesmerizing way until he’s sitting upright, and he clasps his hands together at the back of Roy’s neck. “Keep talking like that, and you’re gonna get bit.”
“Is that meant to deter me?” Roy asks. For all his protests, Ed obligingly raises both arms as Roy starts peeling everything off of him, as fast as he can manage without endangering the world’s most indisputably beautiful hair or its single most precious face. “It sounds rather appealing, to tell the truth.”
“You’re sick,” Ed says, slightly muffled by a particularly persistent swathe of fabric clinging to his frame. Roy can’t exactly fault it for its priorities; if he was a sweater, he’d do the same. “You’re lucky I like it.”
“I’m lucky in general,” Roy says, carefully tugging a collar loose from his ear.
Ed snickers. “Pretty sure I’m the one in a general.”
Roy kisses butterfly-light at the ridges of his throat to make him wriggle. “But I’m the one getting lucky.”
“Oh, lay off,” Ed says, fighting free of his woolly confines to give Roy a glare along with the patented pout this time. “Like you’re not the most eligible bachelor in the entire fucking country right now.”
“You have an odd definition of the word ‘eligible’,” Roy says. “And of the word ‘bachelor’.”
“You have an odd definition of the word ‘fuck me until I can’t fucking walk tomorrow, ’cause I don’t wanna go anywhere anyway, and Al won’t be here to judge me’,” Ed says, with another of those grins like a slice of moonlight. “Here’s a hint-usually there’s a lot less talking and shit.”
Part of Roy would like to point out that the phrase in question is quite a bit more than a single word. A significantly larger and more persuasive part of him just wants to follow the instruction.
“Also,” Ed says as Roy pushes him down onto his back, tangling the bulk of the fabric around his wrists and kissing down his breastbone so that his back arches like a longbow, “fuck you; my definition of ‘bachelor’ is perfectly fucking correct. Unless you got married on me while I was gone, in which case you’re not gonna be a non-bachelor for long, anyway, ’cause you’re gonna be a corpse.”
“I see,” Roy says, despite the fact that all he can see from here is vast-well, not especially vast-expanses of beautiful skin nicked everywhere with pink and silver scars. “I subscribe to a slightly looser understanding-”
“Yeah, I’d say you’re ‘slightly loose’,” Ed cuts in, but his attempts to free his hands from the mass of clothes and blankets do not succeed, so Roy wins that round.
Roy clears his throat, which makes Ed grin, and then nips right above Ed’s hipbone, which makes Ed moan softly and flush down to his collarbones.
“I define the word more as a matter of not being taken,” Roy says. “Which… not being taken with someone; not being taken in and taken over; and given that I spectacularly fail at meeting those criteria, I don’t consider myself a bachelor in the least.”
Ed finally manages to extract his left hand, and he drapes his forearm over his eyes like Roy won’t see him smiling if he can’t see Roy. “Oh, gross. Fine time to take up semantics, Mustang.”
“You started it,” Roy says.
“I did not,” Ed says, and the full-bodied writhe he employs trying to wrench his automail hand out from the blankets obliterates any chance Roy had at a rebuttal, because his mind goes white. “That’s more like it,” Ed says, sitting up again to fist both hands in the front of Roy’s uniform and drag him down onto the bed again. “You’re about a thousand times cuter with your mouth shut.”
“Oh?” Roy says. He leans in, lips parted, and slips his tongue in next to Ed’s, and Ed makes a noise that sounds rather a lot like concession.
He can’t, however, deny the appeal of dispensing with the conversations for a moment.
“Roll over,” he says when they draw back.
Ed gives him a look like he’s threatening one of Alphonse’s kittens with a blunt object.
“Poor choice of words,” Roy says. “I meant-”
“No,” Ed says, “poor choice of tone.” He scoots further up the foot of the bed and settles back, shrugging his shoulders in more comfortably against the nest of fabric Roy unearthed him from, and offering up a lazy smirk. “If you wanna give me orders, give me orders. Don’t half-ass it.”
“I have a better idea,” Roy says.
Ed’s eyebrow arches.
Roy grabs him by the beautiful hips and flips him over, earning a startled yelp and a breathtaking cascade of golden hair. Before Ed can start struggling in earnest to get out from under him, Roy presses his right knee in between Ed’s legs and the knuckles of his right hand into the scar tissue right where it meets Ed’s shoulder-blade.
“Ohfuck,” Ed says-or, rather, gasps, and nothing fires sparks down Roy’s spine and kindles them to flaring in the pit of his stomach quite like that indescribably exquisite sound.
For the moment, though, he kneads at the knots in Ed’s back with as much strength as he can leverage, drawing forth a series of progressively louder, more emphatic, and more pornographic groans punctuated by the occasional high, desperate whimper. Slowly, he starts to shift his knee to rub in time with the hardest pressure of the massage.
“You’re-” Ed’s breath hitches, catches, shudders free. “You’re-r-right-”
“Mm?” Roy asks, leaning down, parting Ed’s hair over the back of that beautiful neck, brushing his lips over the upper ridges of vertebrae.
“Th-” Ed tries to clear his throat, makes a weak noise, and then makes a distressed noise about the weakness. “This-is-”
“Yes?” Roy breathes into his hairline.
“A f-fucking great idea-” He grits his teeth audibly, swallowing most-but not all-of a soft cry as Roy grinds his knuckles and his knee in simultaneously. “-you… bastard.”
“That’s a high compliment,” Roy says, keeping his voice as light and casual as he can bear even as his guts roil and his groin throbs and his head whirls with the sheer proximity of Ed, with the sheer potential of where they are; “coming from you.”
“Fuckin’-hell, Roy-” Ed buries his face in the blankets, both feet scrabbling for purchase on the sheets; Roy sets his free hand on the back of his waist to pin him down. “You could talk ’til f-fuckin’ Doomsday and still be standing there like, ‘And another thing.’”
“Likely verbatim,” Roy says, dragging just his fingertips down over the curve of Ed’s ass. It is, without a doubt, the loveliest he has ever laid eyes on-and he’s examined perhaps more than his share. “I imagine I’d have quite a few protests on that particular occasion.”
A dry, desperate sob of a breath jars out of Ed’s chest, half-muffled in the blankets. “Enough fucking teasing, Roy; come on; s’been seven fucking weeks in a climate too cold to take care’f myself without thinking I’ll get fucking frostbite-”
Roy bends to set his mouth against the side of Ed’s neck, silken hair slithering as Ed’s shoulders stiffen, as the muscles of his back ripple under Roy’s hands, as his heartbeat hammers against Roy’s lips-
“Hush,” Roy says, and his voice stays softer than the mattress underneath, but it is unmistakably a command.
He can hear Ed swallowing hard, and the writhing body beneath his stills but for one last twitch and one more shaking breath.
“On your knees,” he says, and the tail end of a gasp escapes Ed’s throat; Roy eases off to kneel over his ankles as he hikes himself up onto his knees and his elbows, body arcing up to meet Roy’s fingertips when they run feather-lightly through a segment of gold hair and then trace down Ed’s spine all the way to his tailbone, where Roy… stops. “Arm out,” he says.
Instantly, Ed extends his left arm straighter than a rod. God, that’s good; God, that feels like… Getting that response, that immediate obedience, from the searing comet of stubborn brilliance that is Edward Elric-it’s like learning flame alchemy all over again, to have that much control over such raw power and potential-
And in the realm of the less philosophical and rather more physical, Roy will gladly die before he passes up an opportunity to smack that incredible ass with the flat of his hand.
“The other arm,” he says, letting just a trace of a growl into his voice.
Ed whines softly-a noise of instinct, a primal noise, resonating in the back of his throat and rattling free. He props himself up on his left arm and carefully unfolds the right, stretching it out slowly. The metal gleams, and if Roy’s not mistaken, the fingertips are trembling just a touch. Cold radiates steadily off the steel, which is… the whole point, really.
Roy leans in close to breathe into Ed’s ear.
“Don’t move,” he says. “Do you trust me?”
Ed presses his face into his forearm, and the curtain of smooth hair hides his expression, but the choked intensity of his voice is enough. “You know I f-fucking do.”
Roy kisses the shell of his ear, the back of his neck, the largest ribbed scar on his left shoulder. He stretches over to reach into the nightstand drawer for two objects-the first he drops to the blankets for now; Ed’s eyes must dart to it; the muscles of his back jolt and then somehow tighten even more.
But the lubricant can wait. At the moment, Roy’s pulling on his glove.
“Stay absolutely still,” he says. “You hear me?”
Ed nods without lifting his head, and Roy sweeps his hair meticulously out of the way, guiding it down over the safer shoulder, carding his fingers through.
Then he aligns his body with Ed’s, sets his gloved hand directly above the innermost edge of the automail, and snaps his fingers once.
Flame engulfs Ed’s automail arm down to the tips of the fingers-a flash of bright gold fire to match his eyes; too cool to melt any wires beneath the casing, too cool to singe the metal, too cool to hurt him in any way that Roy can think of. With a single delicate twirl down the shining metal, the wisps of flame are gone again, like they never were-just enough heat and just enough time to warm the steel, to smother the chill that had been seeping from it to spread in gooseflesh ripples down Ed’s side.
“Oh, fuck,” Ed says, voice so tight and low and rough that Roy’s guts seize in answer-but there’s no pain in it. For once, for a change, he’s done something good with the curse he’ll wear as a mantle until he dies.
Ed’s twisting over, grabbing the front of his uniform with both hands, tearing the catches loose-
“You bastard,” he says. “You know alchemy gets me so fucking hot-”
“Believe it or not,” Roy says, catching his right wrist-warm still, but not nearly enough to burn him, or to endanger Ed’s skin where the metal joins-and holding it aside before it shreds the hard-earned medals, scrabbling like that. “That wasn’t my primary motivation, unless you mean it entirely literally.”
Ed rolls his eyes, left hand battling avidly with Roy’s shirt buttons, but his breathing hasn’t slowed. “You know what I fucking mean.”
“Mm,” Roy says, leaning in to mouth under his ear, exhaling deliberately on the damp trails, cherishing the way Ed’s jaw clenches under the ministrations; “and you know that I only provoke you because you’re so beautiful when you’re mad.”
“You’re a fucking dick,” Ed says, somewhat belied by the enthusiasm with which he is kissing at Roy’s newly-revealed collarbones.
“I’ll show you a…” His voice vetoes the motion and fails before he can force it to make the sounds. “…I can’t,” he manages. “I can’t say it. It’s too much.”
Ed laughs and shoves playfully at Roy’s chest-open-handed, with hardly any force; Roy knows full well that Ed could send him over the edge of the bed in one move without breaking a sweat. “You suck.”
“Happy to do that as well,” Roy says. “Would y-”
“You’re so distractible,” Ed says, snatching Roy’s shirt again and returning to the last of the buttons blocking his way. “No fuckin’ wonder Major Hawkeye’s always on your ass.”
“Shall I get on your ass?” Roy asks. Ed tries to swallow another laugh-Roy can see it jittering in his chest-only for the remnants of it to emerge as a snort. “Besides, ‘distractible’ isn’t a word. I looked it up on a particularly offensive occasion when Maes accused me of having the attention span of a sick gnat, as well as several other choice strains of libel-”
“You would,” Ed says. He slings his lithe body so fast sometimes Roy can barely even see it move-his legs shift out sideways and then beneath him, and he rises up to his knees to push the uniform jacket from Roy’s shoulders as one heavy tangle of wool. His hands dart almost compulsively up over the exposed skin of Roy’s stomach, his chest, his throat; then down again, fingertips sliding back and forth along the lines of his ribs. His softer set of fingertips creeps back up to the thick white mark cocked like a crooked grin just above Roy’s left collarbone. “Still pissed about this one.”
“I’m not,” Roy says. “By all rights, I shouldn’t have survived.”
“No rights about it,” Ed mutters. His gaze flicks to the eyepatch. “Don’t even get me started on that shit.” He growls low in his throat, and sparks trill from the back of Roy’s neck all the way to the base of his spine. “Fuck me.”
“A fine idea,” Roy says.
Ed’s eyes widen-if he wasn’t fighting hard to suppressing his viciously effective defensive instincts every time his adrenaline surges inside the walls of this house, Roy would be a man-shaped pile of thoroughly-beaten pulp by now, and the extra quarter-second while he forces himself to hesitate is the only reason Roy can ever press his advantage.
He thinks too, sometimes, that a part of Ed may just like losing when it’s safe.
In any case, Roy isn’t going to pass up this precious fraction of a moment-he catches Ed’s gorgeous hips in both hands, levies his weight, and tosses Ed up further towards the head of the bed.
The twice-over savior of all known universes, who has (so Alphonse says; Ed’s given no indication but a few bouts of half-coherent babbling when the last cobwebby threads of the nightmare haven’t torn away) died twice and come back kicking, tumbles glorious ass over metaphorical teakettle and yelps loudly as he lands.
“Fuckin’ warn me before you do that!” he howls, flailing an arm out to grasp the headboard as he tries to right himself.
Roy’s on him, and no amount of damage to his depth perception could keep him from tugging the glove off with his teeth-Ed’s breath hitches again-and then fixing his hands on the fly of Ed’s extremely fetching slate-gray trousers. “Where’s the fun in that?”
Ed snarls, but he’s not exactly pulling away. “Fun for who?”
“For whom,” Roy says.
“Fuck your shit!”
“It’s just grammar, my dear heart.”
“Fuck your grammar!”
“Please accept my sincerest apologies for any and all implications of condescension,” Roy says.
Ed glares down at Roy, although the flush high in his cheeks makes it evident that he hasn’t failed to notice that Roy has parted the fly of his trousers and is pausing with parted lips a grand total of three inches away from his fairly evident erection.
“Less talk,” Ed says, “more acti… awwfuck-”
Roy wraps his mouth around Ed’s rapidly hardening cock and tries not to grin as he feels Ed’s blood sing in answer-is there anything on this planet, in this life, quite as satisfying as weakening the mismatched knees of a younger lover in the warm safety of one’s own bed? The fabric in the way is a distraction, however; he draws back long enough to hook all of his fingers into the elastic of Ed’s waistband, and he drags both trousers and underwear down to the knees in question and then off altogether, pitching them over the side of the bed without a second glance. A faint, cataclysmically needy whine slithers out of Ed’s throat, and he tilts his head back, hips jerking, at the sudden chill and the deprivation both. Roy doesn’t have the heart to leave him like that-or the balls, really; his are already aching; the heat and pressure are getting to be unbearable, and every hitch of Ed’s hips makes it worse.
He digs his fingers into Ed’s thighs and lowers his head again, sneaking glances at Ed’s face up through his hair as he lathes and favors slowly, slowly, so deliberately that the groan in Ed’s throat shakes violently on its way out.
Ed’s metal fingers curl into his hair and grip so hard that his scalp stings-and then the fist loosens slightly, at the same moment that Ed looses a ragged breath; the pain dulls to a gentle prickling that’s actually rather pleasant, if you’re of the sick sort of mind that Roy has been for as long as he can recall. That doesn’t mean he can let that gesture go unaddressed-he drags one hand up Ed’s skin to the crease of his thigh and smoothes the other underneath until he reaches the back of the automail knee, using the leverage to hike it over his shoulder and hold it there. Ed’s heel swings against his bare back-frigidly cold-and the fingers tighten in his hair until he can hear the knuckles creak.
“Fuck’s sake, Roy,” Ed forces out. “Y-you always gonna welcome me home like this?”
Roy would cut his heart out and serve it with caviar if Ed called it home every time.
He draws back to respond, running the pad of his thumb up the underside of Ed’s slick, straining cock to ameliorate the loss of heat and friction, although Ed chokes on a soft sigh all the same.
“Yes,” he says. “Unless I can think of something better.”
Ed grins at him, cheeks stained, hair wildly scattered, flyaways sticking in the slight gleam of sweat across his forehead.
“It doesn’t get much better than this,” he says.
After all the things he learned and gleaned and fought through in that other place, on the other side-all the scraps and morsels of languages Roy’s tongue can’t even fathom, muttered out the corner of his mouth at Al; all the scars and welts and the stories buried silent underneath them; all the newer, deeper shadows in his eyes; all the long, long hesitations at the precipice every time Roy offered up a fraction of himself in hopes of an equivalent exchange-
How is it possible that he doesn’t know better?
Coming back once, Roy could understand-back to this world, back to friends and family and the bright-lit magic that’s always made him whole; back to the unspoken, unplumbed potential of the static lightning every time their breath met in the air.
But once the forks of electricity had left their tracks and tendrils burnt into his skin-once he’d sifted through the rubble for the remains of the man who used to be Roy Mustang; once he’d turned up the relics of a life that could have mattered-
Why in the hell does he come back now?
These are the iron-clad questions, crossing and crisscrossing into latticeworks and fine-wrought gates, that bar Roy’s brain from sleeping, most nights-these and the others, the more familiar, the comfortably cruel and recognizable. These and the endless clumps of bloodstained sand.
Ed is a young god in his element, older and wiser and more beautiful than ever, smarter by some miracle, and significantly more sedate. Anyone with a thought in their head and a modicum of good taste would drop to their knees for a chance at what Roy’s claiming here.
Certainly, he was appealing once-before the crimping white hairs, before the crow-foot lines at the edges of his solitary eye. Before his life slipped from his grasp, and the whole world flooded past him, and he drowned in snowdrifts daily but somehow didn’t quite elect to die.
But he’s always been putrid at the core-always been rank, fragmented, and past salvation-and Ed’s never put much stock into appearances or pretty little lies.
That’s part of what makes this so damned important-so much more than just sex, even sex with someone he loves more than mere words can hope to encapsulate. Ed doesn’t trust what he sees anymore, after monsters with familiar faces and heaven knows what hells in the other place-and he’s never cared to listen to poetry or promises or any of the tripe.
He trusts what he feels. This is the best, the truest way to worship him.
Ed tries to disentangle his hand from Roy’s hair, but one of the knuckles snags. He’s grinning again. He doesn’t have the slightest idea what his smile is capable of.
“What?” he asks. “What are you getting hung up on?”
“You,” Roy says. “More specifically, how devastatingly beautiful you are.”
The flush staging a slow coup of his skin deepens. “Oh, shut it. And fuck me. Like, now.”
“Difficult to argue with that,” Roy says, trailing his fingertips over Ed’s hipbones, up his sides.
“Yeah,” Ed says. “You’re probably gonna try anyw-hmmm.”
One of Roy’s many prided talents has, historically, been kissing fast and hard and well and thoroughly, and he doesn’t seem to have lost his touch. Ed finally works the automail loose from Roy’s hair and cups it under his jaw instead-the metal’s cool, but the icy bite is gone from the steel, and it’s a pleasant contrast now to the heat of the air between them.
The transcendent pleasure of meeting Ed’s mouth merits volumes of poetry, but Roy can never find sufficient words. Ed’s incredible at this, of course; he’s incredible at everything; he kisses single-mindedly, wholeheartedly, with everything that’s in him; tongue, teeth, cold-cracked lips, and so much of his soul in every last damn gasped-out breath-
Roy grasps his hips and drags him down away from the headboard, thrilling in the way his hair spills out behind him all over again, liquid gold flowing loose-Ed’s startlement segues into a twist of a hungry grin, and he hooks both legs around the small of Roy’s back, crossing his ankles to lock the two of them in position.
“You know I like it when you get aggressive?” he asks.
“The thought had occurred to me,” Roy says. His hands never listen to his brain where Ed’s involved; they’re roving up and down without his permission, smoothing over skin and bone and all the exquisite muscle shifting underneath; perhaps he needs to know, to prove, that this is real, after all those years of hollow wanting, to assuage the self-consuming void that he became. It’s amusing, in its way, that his famous willpower fails so utterly when faced with Ed and Ed alone.
Ed’s grin is bright and mischievous and unrepentant. “You’re pullin’ out all the stops tonight, aren’t you? Alchemy, the alpha male shit-”
“If you don’t like it,” Roy says, running his hands up the backs of Ed’s thighs and over the indescribably luscious curve of his ass, “stop me.”
Ed arches his back and bites down hard on his bottom lip, eyes fluttering closed, and God- “Never said th-that. Never said a-anything like… that.”
Roy kisses his knees in turn, murmuring into the skin of the right, “Forgive me.”
Ed’s shoulders roll; his hair shimmers as he turns his head, throat working. “What I d-did say was-”
“Fuck you, ‘like, now’,” Roy says. “I remember.”
Ed laughs breathlessly, chest jumping, left hand snatching for fistful of Roy’s hair and then smoothing it out again just as quickly. “You are so f-fucking contrary I dunno how you survive.”
That’s rather simple-Roy survives for moments like this. For the chance to look at Edward Elric, sprawled out and riled up and waiting for him to deliver satisfaction in due time.
Or in extremely overdue time, most likely, the way Ed sees it.
Roy reaches back for the abandoned tube of lubricant he retrieved from the nightstand with the glove and then flung aside.
“Are you ready?” he asks, leaning in to drag his mouth up along Ed’s jawline, wanting to taste his answer; needing to know, down to the bones and the blood and the high note of a heartbeat-
“Fucking yes already,” Ed says, rather cavalierly ignoring gravity long enough to writhe up and nip Roy’s ear. “You and your fucking foreplay fetish, I swear; we could’ve done it four times by now-”
“Four seems a bit steep,” Roy says. “No more than three and three-quarters, surely.”
Ed presses his lips together, trying to scowl instead of laughing. He is always too beautiful to make sense in this miserable universe, but never more than when he’s high on endorphins and tangling his warm body tightly around Roy’s.
“Yes, darling,” Roy says to the unspoken command, kissing the tip of Ed’s nose to drive the endearment home. He’s never claimed to be anything other than a bastard, after all.
As Ed starts grinding his teeth on the coarse beginnings of his pet name rant, Roy uncaps the tube and slicks his fingers thoroughly, committing his full attention to the process-other than the mandatory portion of it still and always dedicated to Ed, which alerts him to the way the prospective tirade dies instantly on Ed’s faint out-breath.
In the name of getting on with it-in order to get off; isn’t language grand?-Roy meets Ed’s eyes as best he can with one alone and grazes his first fingertip down Ed’s perineum to his entrance. Both sets of Ed’s toes curl against Roy’s back, and Ed catches his lower lip between his teeth, and is there anything in the immense potential of a human lifetime that can measure up to this?
Roy’s whole circulatory system seems to contract as he pushes his fingertip in-wet heat and tight muscle and the promise of so much magnificence to come; there are tiny preemptive sparks in his stomach, seething upward, tingling in his lungs, tickling his heart, as though it needs to jump faster, as though it can stand to. His hands aren’t unsteady; it’s the rest of the world that’s shaking around him.
“Relax,” he says.
“I fucking know,” Ed says, jaw clenched. “S’just been fucking forever-”
Roy has had some time to commune with the concept of eternity. Seven weeks doesn’t even cast a shadow on the wall.
“Relax,” he says again, softer, lower, but with that specific undertone of absolute authority that always makes Ed’s pupils dilate instantly until they’ve almost blotted out the gold.
“Fuck,” Ed gasps out, right on cue, fingers twitching on the sheets, and then he fixes his bottom lip between his teeth again and bites down hard. He squeezes his eyes shut, sweat beading on his forehead, shimmering on his jawline; his throat works, his eyelashes quiver, his hands curl-
He breathes out, slowly, and his body sinks back onto the bed, and it’s still indescribable-the slick tight-heat around Roy’s fingertips, the dizzyingly tantalizing promise of what’s to follow-but there’s a little more give, a little less pulsing desperation, and he presses his finger gently deeper, further, in-
“Missed you,” Ed whispers. It’s almost unvoiced, almost indistinguishable, almost possible for Roy to think he’s merely imagined-almost possible to ignore.
“And I you,” he says, leaning in to murmur it into the skin of Ed’s throat, drawing his mouth up to the tender skin beneath Ed’s ear, kissing the lobe, nipping the shell. “More than there are words for.”
Ed writhes underneath him, both hands latching onto his shirt buttons again, and he finds that he hardly cares if this particular piece of clothing gets destroyed. In fact, he wouldn’t mind framing the shreds up on his wall-Yes, hello, welcome to my lovely home; oh, that, above the couch? Yes, that’s documented proof that I fuck Edward Elric on the regular. Would you like to see the kitchen?
“S-somehow I get the feeling,” Ed grinds out, “that that’s still not gonna shut you u-fuck, Roy-”
There are many, many advantages to having a long-term lover as staggeringly beautiful and shamelessly vocal as Edward. One of them is that Roy knows-as a matter of mathematical angles and measured distance; and in his guts and his blood and his bones-exactly how high to lift Ed’s hips off of the mattress, and exactly how far to plunge his finger in. Ed’s body convulses as he crooks it, straightens it, soothes, caresses, pushes hard-
“F-fuck’s s-s-sake-”
If Roy believed in anything, this is how he’d pray.
Linen rips at what feels like the seam, and Ed laughs breathlessly as buttons rain down on his chest.
“S-sorry-”
Roy licks across Ed’s collarbone and down the line of pink-pale scarring at the automail join. “I’m not.”
He gives his finger another twist to prove it, and Ed’s head drops back; wisps and flyaways cling to the sweat at his hairline, tangling against each other, darkened from bright gold to a warm honey brown. His body undulates off the bed, and he jerks his hips against Roy’s hand, striving for more pressure, more depth, more heat-
That’s a noble quest if Roy’s ever seen one.
He draws his hand back, slicks his second finger again-Ed’s always so damn greedy for it, when they’re like this, melting at the edges in the safety of the sheets, but the last reserves of Roy’s well-touted self-control won’t let him indulge the impulse to forget the caution and just take.
That said, it would require a rather stronger man than he to resist the impulse to drag his tongue up Ed’s gorgeous cock when the boy arches his back at the loss of the sensation and scrabbles for purchase with both heels.
The sound that trembles out of Ed’s throat combines the best parts of laughter and a moan. “God, you fucking t-tease-”
“Guilty as charged,” Roy says.
But he drives his fingers in harder this time, which is perhaps the single most wonderful apology he’s ever had to make.
He pumps and presses with two until Ed’s whimpers almost break to sobs, and then he adds a third, and then-
Twin slivers of yellow, and a flash of a grin.
“C’mon, Mustang,” Ed gets out, breath hitching, chest heaving, hair spilled out-grander than any halo, any aura, anything. “You gonna do it or not, General?”
The brat knows all his weak points-every soreness, every fault, every messy-knitted scar-and targets with no mercy. Someday Roy might just muster the audacity to complain.
But not tonight.
Tonight he shoves his trousers down with all of the dexterity he has left, cups one hand under Ed’s incomparable ass to lift his hips, and lines them up-and-
God-
If burying himself to the hilt in another human being has ever felt this good, let him be struck down the second that this ends-
On second thought, let this never end.
Ed spits a few more curses; shuddering on their heels is another laugh. He wraps his left hand around the back of Roy’s neck, curls the right arm around the small of Roy’s back-and the cool metal against the hot sweat with the linen of his shirt between is transcendent, is transformative-
Ed’s mouth drags up Roy’s jaw. “So f-fucking-good-”
“I know you are,” Roy says.
Ed’s fingers twist into his hair and tug gently. “B-bastard-”
“And to think,” Roy says, “all yours.”
Ed draws back just far enough to glower at him. “Th-think about that a damn fucking lot, ac-” Roy rolls his hips; Ed’s eyelids flutter. “…tual… ly.”
Roy leans in to kiss the gasp off of his lips, but Ed’s grip on his hair tightens, holding him back.
“Hang on,” Ed gets out. “Haven’t seen you in seven fucking weeks; I wanna see you.”
Perhaps it should be unsettling, to understand so well-to know what that means well before Ed’s metal hand clasps a tighter fistful of his shirt; well before the softer fingers shake themselves free of his hair and slide up underneath the bottom edge of the eyepatch; well before light little fingertips dapple upward over the wreck of Roy’s tortured eye socket and then draw the whole patch off over his head; well before Ed half-folds it and sets it on the nightstand like it’s just another object, useful but without significance, like it doesn’t matter, not in any way that counts-
“Better,” Ed says, and he wraps his legs around Roy’s hips and crosses his ankles, and his toes curl against Roy’s back as he shifts-which, incidentally, sends spears of searing pleasure up Roy’s spine, and volcanic heat courses through to every last damn capillary in his frame.
Then Ed twists up and kisses over the snarled web of white where the eye used to be.
“Okay,” he says, dropping to the bed again, snapping his hips up with a wolfish grin as he goes. “Now you can fuck me ’til I scream.”
Roy’s mouth goes slightly dry-which makes it a profitable opportunity to lick his lips, so in the end he counts it as a victory.
“I’d be delighted,” he says.
“I bet you would,” Ed says, and he snickers at Roy’s scowl.
But not for long.
Is it strange, given how they began? Is it strange, when their interactions once revolved around snarling anger and bottomless frustration, when they both struck as viciously as they were able as a smokescreen for the instinctive trust-is it strange that now they move together like two halves of one being? Is it strange that they exist now in perfect complement, down to the last gouged mark, scars matching up like mirror images on their skin?
And move they do-slow at first, savoring every twinge of muscle, every surge of swelling joy-every spike of ecstasy shudders through the pair of them, almost at once-blood beating, breath mingling, sweat mixing, hips crashing, hearts slamming, hands roving, every nerve down to the fingertips alight-
Roy’s whole body throbs like one open wound-but so beautiful, so fucking sweet-and Ed’s fingers dig into his shoulders, scrabbling, as he angles towards Ed’s prostate and drives hard-
The gasp tearing out of Ed rattles through both of them-gale-force, lightning-bright, illuminating. “Holyfuckingshit-Roy-”
Even if Roy wasn’t several worlds away from coherence, he doesn’t think there’s really much of an answer to that-except the one word, the most important that perhaps he’s ever uttered.
He buries his face in Ed’s sweat-matted hair and breathes deep.
“Edward,” he says.
“Fuck,” Ed says again-Roy used to fear he’d tire of that syllable, of the sharpness, of all the little casual obscenities, but like everything else, they just feel reassuring these days. “H-hang on-”
There’s no time to wonder before Ed’s tightening his legs around Roy’s waist-God, the twitch of the muscles in his thighs against Roy’s hips; no heaven another man’s imagined could live up to this-and using his weight to flip them over in one swift motion.
Edward Elric is stunning from any angle, in any light, with any twist of feeling on his features, but this Ed-lit faintly from behind, hair spilt loose and nearly glowing, fixed above him with both palms planted on Roy’s chest, cheeks flushed, eyes bright, laughing breathlessly-might just be Roy’s single favorite permutation.
Ed leans down, pressing their foreheads together, and threads the fingers of his left hand into Roy’s hair. He closes his eyes, and he smiles, and he rolls his hips so slow.
When Roy hisses through clenched teeth and tries to buck out from underneath him, Ed laughs, sits back, and jolts his hips down once-just once, just a split-second of mind-splintering perfection-and then folds his body down to bite Roy’s bottom lip, worrying it between his teeth before drawing himself up again with a smirk Roy never should have taught him how to make his own.
“Brat,” Roy fights out.
“Bastard,” Ed says, and it leaves his lips sounding like a benediction.
Roy puts both hands on his waist, pulling him down and arching up to meet him, and Ed chokes on the next smartass remark. He flashes the second most devastating of all his grins-lesser only than the one that doesn’t touch the corners of his eyes, that leaves the cold and sadness curling in them even as he forces out the smile-and hitches his body in closer, closer, tighter-hotter-better into Roy’s-
“All right,” he says.
But it’s so, so, so much more than that.
Roy’s guts twist; his blood races-Ed’s hands skate up either side of his ribcage, cool-warm; Roy fists one hand in the silk trailing down his shoulder-blades, tugs to tilt Ed’s head back, licks up the lines of sweat collecting on the ridges of his throat-
Ed moves like a wave, like a snake, like the breath of God, like a ripple of absolution-his back arches, his knees shift, his fingers flicker down over Roy’s chest; he presses forward, rocks back, folds in until their collarbones meet, swings his weight back again, somehow sinking lower still on Roy’s cock-
Roy claws his fingers deeper into Ed’s hair, hauls him down to crush their mouths together, tastes the back of Ed’s tongue, swallows down the noise of need-
He fits his other hand into the narrow space between them and curls his fingers around Ed’s cock, tunnels them, strokes once, twice-
The supernova in him starts as starlight-pale warm, expanding; blazing red; then searing white; then-
“Shit,” Ed chokes out.
Roy tightens his grip just slightly, and the veins pulse underneath his fingertips-wet heat splatters between them, and that oughtn’t-
Should that seem hopelessly intimate-immensely erotic, indescribable, overpowering-?
Ed nestles his face into the side of Roy’s neck, whimpers, jimmies his hips in hard-his body tightens, and the single hard, heavy shiver that runs through him shakes Roy’s spine from end to end, and-
Oh-
It takes Roy several moments of focused concentration to blink the lights out of his eyes. Ed huffs half a laugh, climbs off of him, wobbles, glares at his own wrist like it’s betrayed his trust, and drops down on the bed. He stretches out on his back and cycles his right shoulder, then the left. Roy gravitates towards the warmth.
Silence reigns for a long moment before the fizzing contentment coalesces into a rumble in his chest.
“Mmm,” he says. There is no better cradle in the world for his face than Ed’s bicep on one side and a down pillow on the other.
“Hey,” Ed says, prodding at his shoulder with his automail index finger. “No sleeping.”
“Slave-driver,” Roy says.
“Can it,” Ed says. “You and I both know you always bitch the next morning if we fall asleep with fluids and shit everywhere. And I can still feel the fucking train grime, so-c’mon.”
“You let me have sex with you while you were still train-grimy?” Roy mumbles. “Shame.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Ed says. “I would’ve showered when I got in, but I wanted to jump your bones the second you finally dragged your fine ass through the door.”
There’s a glow in Roy’s chest that is less ego than insurmountable love-although there is a bit of both.
“You’re forgiven,” he says.
“Good,” Ed says. “Come on, you lazy bastard. I’ll let you wash my hair.”
Roy forces his heavy eyelids up again. “Good heavens. Why didn’t you say so?”
“’Cause you never pull out the artillery ’til after the little guns misfire,” Ed says. He shouldn’t know that; shouldn’t think like that-he shouldn’t have to. Roy reaches out to stroke a fingertip along the crescents underneath his eyes. “So-shower.”
“Shower,” Roy says. “You may have to carry me.”
“Well,” Ed says, “you got me up the stairs. Equivalent exchange.”
“I love you,” Roy says.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Ed says. “I just told you-equivalent exchange.”
If snow falls forever on Central City, Roy hardly cares; with Edward’s smile back in it, the world will never look bleak again.
Roy reaches out to smooth a wayward lock of damp gold hair back into place. “I should have known.”
“Yeah,” Ed says. “You should’ve. ’Cause it ain’t about to change.”
“You have such a gift for phrasing.”
“Fuck you.”
“I believe you just did,” Roy says. “I thought it was wonderful.”
Ed rolls his eyes so hard that Roy’s remaining one aches sympathetically.
“All right, Mustang,” Ed says, squirming towards the edge of the bed, stepping down, and reaching back with both hands. “Shower. Then sleep. Then we kick tomorrow’s sorry ass.”
Roy has relied on his talent for an iron-fisted control of his own expressions his entire life-a poker game played out every moment of every day, with the stakes higher than most men can imagine.
But when it comes to Ed-and it always comes to Ed; the roads all lead back home-he simply can’t stop himself from smiling back.
He takes the offered hands and holds on tight.
“That sounds like an excellent plan,” he says.
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Ed
Rating: R/NC-17/whatever
Word Count: 13,200
Warnings: language; explicit pr0nz; worst title ever? maybe; major spoilers for '03/CoS
Summary: Roy pines, and perseveres, and the rewards are greater than he ever dared to dream of.
Author's Note: Venture no further without having read Part 1!
THERMODYNAMICS (2/2)
Funny, how the cold doesn’t seem to make the slightest difference when there’s a fever pounding through his every vessel, bright in every searing drop of blood-Roy climbs up over Ed, knees planted on either side of his perfect hips, and drags both hands slowly down his sides; every last damn rib is a blessing he never thought he’d get to touch. All of this-he lost all of this not once, but twice, against a bloody sunset and above a city torn to smoking shreds-but here they are, and everything he’s suffered through to get here, every moment, is more than justified when Ed grins at him like he was worth the wait.
Philosophy aside, however, this particular occasion raises a slightly more pertinent concern:
“Good Lord,” he says, trying to sift through the layers of flannel and fleece. “Are you sure you’re really under there?”
Ed’s laugh could save a lesser sinner all alone. “Back the fuck up, Mustang-who the hell are you calling so small you drop a blanket on him, and he disappears?”
“Mmm,” Roy says, ducking to mouth upward along the lines of Ed’s beautiful throat, flicking the tip of his tongue against the jugular as he goes. “I was thinking more along the lines of you fitting into the weave of the knit and slipping through the holes.”
Ed tries to look scandalized, but the laugh starts as a glimmer in his eyes and resonates down through his chest, and then it’s bubbling up from his lungs like fine champagne, and Roy could drink him in forever.
Roy fights his way through one long row of tiny shirt buttons-how in the world did Ed do these up with his metal hand?-only to be met with the thick gray cable-knit of another sweater underneath.
Ed’s grin broadens, and the mischief in his eyes is intoxicating. “Told you,” he says.
“You did,” Roy says. “Which doesn’t make it any less inconvenient.” He slips his hands under Ed’s shoulder-blades, which is a unique sort of pleasure even with all of the innumerable articles of clothing in the way. “Up-”
“Not your damn dog, Mustang,” Ed says, but there’s no venom in his voice, and he twists his torso in some inconceivable, too-mesmerizing way until he’s sitting upright, and he clasps his hands together at the back of Roy’s neck. “Keep talking like that, and you’re gonna get bit.”
“Is that meant to deter me?” Roy asks. For all his protests, Ed obligingly raises both arms as Roy starts peeling everything off of him, as fast as he can manage without endangering the world’s most indisputably beautiful hair or its single most precious face. “It sounds rather appealing, to tell the truth.”
“You’re sick,” Ed says, slightly muffled by a particularly persistent swathe of fabric clinging to his frame. Roy can’t exactly fault it for its priorities; if he was a sweater, he’d do the same. “You’re lucky I like it.”
“I’m lucky in general,” Roy says, carefully tugging a collar loose from his ear.
Ed snickers. “Pretty sure I’m the one in a general.”
Roy kisses butterfly-light at the ridges of his throat to make him wriggle. “But I’m the one getting lucky.”
“Oh, lay off,” Ed says, fighting free of his woolly confines to give Roy a glare along with the patented pout this time. “Like you’re not the most eligible bachelor in the entire fucking country right now.”
“You have an odd definition of the word ‘eligible’,” Roy says. “And of the word ‘bachelor’.”
“You have an odd definition of the word ‘fuck me until I can’t fucking walk tomorrow, ’cause I don’t wanna go anywhere anyway, and Al won’t be here to judge me’,” Ed says, with another of those grins like a slice of moonlight. “Here’s a hint-usually there’s a lot less talking and shit.”
Part of Roy would like to point out that the phrase in question is quite a bit more than a single word. A significantly larger and more persuasive part of him just wants to follow the instruction.
“Also,” Ed says as Roy pushes him down onto his back, tangling the bulk of the fabric around his wrists and kissing down his breastbone so that his back arches like a longbow, “fuck you; my definition of ‘bachelor’ is perfectly fucking correct. Unless you got married on me while I was gone, in which case you’re not gonna be a non-bachelor for long, anyway, ’cause you’re gonna be a corpse.”
“I see,” Roy says, despite the fact that all he can see from here is vast-well, not especially vast-expanses of beautiful skin nicked everywhere with pink and silver scars. “I subscribe to a slightly looser understanding-”
“Yeah, I’d say you’re ‘slightly loose’,” Ed cuts in, but his attempts to free his hands from the mass of clothes and blankets do not succeed, so Roy wins that round.
Roy clears his throat, which makes Ed grin, and then nips right above Ed’s hipbone, which makes Ed moan softly and flush down to his collarbones.
“I define the word more as a matter of not being taken,” Roy says. “Which… not being taken with someone; not being taken in and taken over; and given that I spectacularly fail at meeting those criteria, I don’t consider myself a bachelor in the least.”
Ed finally manages to extract his left hand, and he drapes his forearm over his eyes like Roy won’t see him smiling if he can’t see Roy. “Oh, gross. Fine time to take up semantics, Mustang.”
“You started it,” Roy says.
“I did not,” Ed says, and the full-bodied writhe he employs trying to wrench his automail hand out from the blankets obliterates any chance Roy had at a rebuttal, because his mind goes white. “That’s more like it,” Ed says, sitting up again to fist both hands in the front of Roy’s uniform and drag him down onto the bed again. “You’re about a thousand times cuter with your mouth shut.”
“Oh?” Roy says. He leans in, lips parted, and slips his tongue in next to Ed’s, and Ed makes a noise that sounds rather a lot like concession.
He can’t, however, deny the appeal of dispensing with the conversations for a moment.
“Roll over,” he says when they draw back.
Ed gives him a look like he’s threatening one of Alphonse’s kittens with a blunt object.
“Poor choice of words,” Roy says. “I meant-”
“No,” Ed says, “poor choice of tone.” He scoots further up the foot of the bed and settles back, shrugging his shoulders in more comfortably against the nest of fabric Roy unearthed him from, and offering up a lazy smirk. “If you wanna give me orders, give me orders. Don’t half-ass it.”
“I have a better idea,” Roy says.
Ed’s eyebrow arches.
Roy grabs him by the beautiful hips and flips him over, earning a startled yelp and a breathtaking cascade of golden hair. Before Ed can start struggling in earnest to get out from under him, Roy presses his right knee in between Ed’s legs and the knuckles of his right hand into the scar tissue right where it meets Ed’s shoulder-blade.
“Ohfuck,” Ed says-or, rather, gasps, and nothing fires sparks down Roy’s spine and kindles them to flaring in the pit of his stomach quite like that indescribably exquisite sound.
For the moment, though, he kneads at the knots in Ed’s back with as much strength as he can leverage, drawing forth a series of progressively louder, more emphatic, and more pornographic groans punctuated by the occasional high, desperate whimper. Slowly, he starts to shift his knee to rub in time with the hardest pressure of the massage.
“You’re-” Ed’s breath hitches, catches, shudders free. “You’re-r-right-”
“Mm?” Roy asks, leaning down, parting Ed’s hair over the back of that beautiful neck, brushing his lips over the upper ridges of vertebrae.
“Th-” Ed tries to clear his throat, makes a weak noise, and then makes a distressed noise about the weakness. “This-is-”
“Yes?” Roy breathes into his hairline.
“A f-fucking great idea-” He grits his teeth audibly, swallowing most-but not all-of a soft cry as Roy grinds his knuckles and his knee in simultaneously. “-you… bastard.”
“That’s a high compliment,” Roy says, keeping his voice as light and casual as he can bear even as his guts roil and his groin throbs and his head whirls with the sheer proximity of Ed, with the sheer potential of where they are; “coming from you.”
“Fuckin’-hell, Roy-” Ed buries his face in the blankets, both feet scrabbling for purchase on the sheets; Roy sets his free hand on the back of his waist to pin him down. “You could talk ’til f-fuckin’ Doomsday and still be standing there like, ‘And another thing.’”
“Likely verbatim,” Roy says, dragging just his fingertips down over the curve of Ed’s ass. It is, without a doubt, the loveliest he has ever laid eyes on-and he’s examined perhaps more than his share. “I imagine I’d have quite a few protests on that particular occasion.”
A dry, desperate sob of a breath jars out of Ed’s chest, half-muffled in the blankets. “Enough fucking teasing, Roy; come on; s’been seven fucking weeks in a climate too cold to take care’f myself without thinking I’ll get fucking frostbite-”
Roy bends to set his mouth against the side of Ed’s neck, silken hair slithering as Ed’s shoulders stiffen, as the muscles of his back ripple under Roy’s hands, as his heartbeat hammers against Roy’s lips-
“Hush,” Roy says, and his voice stays softer than the mattress underneath, but it is unmistakably a command.
He can hear Ed swallowing hard, and the writhing body beneath his stills but for one last twitch and one more shaking breath.
“On your knees,” he says, and the tail end of a gasp escapes Ed’s throat; Roy eases off to kneel over his ankles as he hikes himself up onto his knees and his elbows, body arcing up to meet Roy’s fingertips when they run feather-lightly through a segment of gold hair and then trace down Ed’s spine all the way to his tailbone, where Roy… stops. “Arm out,” he says.
Instantly, Ed extends his left arm straighter than a rod. God, that’s good; God, that feels like… Getting that response, that immediate obedience, from the searing comet of stubborn brilliance that is Edward Elric-it’s like learning flame alchemy all over again, to have that much control over such raw power and potential-
And in the realm of the less philosophical and rather more physical, Roy will gladly die before he passes up an opportunity to smack that incredible ass with the flat of his hand.
“The other arm,” he says, letting just a trace of a growl into his voice.
Ed whines softly-a noise of instinct, a primal noise, resonating in the back of his throat and rattling free. He props himself up on his left arm and carefully unfolds the right, stretching it out slowly. The metal gleams, and if Roy’s not mistaken, the fingertips are trembling just a touch. Cold radiates steadily off the steel, which is… the whole point, really.
Roy leans in close to breathe into Ed’s ear.
“Don’t move,” he says. “Do you trust me?”
Ed presses his face into his forearm, and the curtain of smooth hair hides his expression, but the choked intensity of his voice is enough. “You know I f-fucking do.”
Roy kisses the shell of his ear, the back of his neck, the largest ribbed scar on his left shoulder. He stretches over to reach into the nightstand drawer for two objects-the first he drops to the blankets for now; Ed’s eyes must dart to it; the muscles of his back jolt and then somehow tighten even more.
But the lubricant can wait. At the moment, Roy’s pulling on his glove.
“Stay absolutely still,” he says. “You hear me?”
Ed nods without lifting his head, and Roy sweeps his hair meticulously out of the way, guiding it down over the safer shoulder, carding his fingers through.
Then he aligns his body with Ed’s, sets his gloved hand directly above the innermost edge of the automail, and snaps his fingers once.
Flame engulfs Ed’s automail arm down to the tips of the fingers-a flash of bright gold fire to match his eyes; too cool to melt any wires beneath the casing, too cool to singe the metal, too cool to hurt him in any way that Roy can think of. With a single delicate twirl down the shining metal, the wisps of flame are gone again, like they never were-just enough heat and just enough time to warm the steel, to smother the chill that had been seeping from it to spread in gooseflesh ripples down Ed’s side.
“Oh, fuck,” Ed says, voice so tight and low and rough that Roy’s guts seize in answer-but there’s no pain in it. For once, for a change, he’s done something good with the curse he’ll wear as a mantle until he dies.
Ed’s twisting over, grabbing the front of his uniform with both hands, tearing the catches loose-
“You bastard,” he says. “You know alchemy gets me so fucking hot-”
“Believe it or not,” Roy says, catching his right wrist-warm still, but not nearly enough to burn him, or to endanger Ed’s skin where the metal joins-and holding it aside before it shreds the hard-earned medals, scrabbling like that. “That wasn’t my primary motivation, unless you mean it entirely literally.”
Ed rolls his eyes, left hand battling avidly with Roy’s shirt buttons, but his breathing hasn’t slowed. “You know what I fucking mean.”
“Mm,” Roy says, leaning in to mouth under his ear, exhaling deliberately on the damp trails, cherishing the way Ed’s jaw clenches under the ministrations; “and you know that I only provoke you because you’re so beautiful when you’re mad.”
“You’re a fucking dick,” Ed says, somewhat belied by the enthusiasm with which he is kissing at Roy’s newly-revealed collarbones.
“I’ll show you a…” His voice vetoes the motion and fails before he can force it to make the sounds. “…I can’t,” he manages. “I can’t say it. It’s too much.”
Ed laughs and shoves playfully at Roy’s chest-open-handed, with hardly any force; Roy knows full well that Ed could send him over the edge of the bed in one move without breaking a sweat. “You suck.”
“Happy to do that as well,” Roy says. “Would y-”
“You’re so distractible,” Ed says, snatching Roy’s shirt again and returning to the last of the buttons blocking his way. “No fuckin’ wonder Major Hawkeye’s always on your ass.”
“Shall I get on your ass?” Roy asks. Ed tries to swallow another laugh-Roy can see it jittering in his chest-only for the remnants of it to emerge as a snort. “Besides, ‘distractible’ isn’t a word. I looked it up on a particularly offensive occasion when Maes accused me of having the attention span of a sick gnat, as well as several other choice strains of libel-”
“You would,” Ed says. He slings his lithe body so fast sometimes Roy can barely even see it move-his legs shift out sideways and then beneath him, and he rises up to his knees to push the uniform jacket from Roy’s shoulders as one heavy tangle of wool. His hands dart almost compulsively up over the exposed skin of Roy’s stomach, his chest, his throat; then down again, fingertips sliding back and forth along the lines of his ribs. His softer set of fingertips creeps back up to the thick white mark cocked like a crooked grin just above Roy’s left collarbone. “Still pissed about this one.”
“I’m not,” Roy says. “By all rights, I shouldn’t have survived.”
“No rights about it,” Ed mutters. His gaze flicks to the eyepatch. “Don’t even get me started on that shit.” He growls low in his throat, and sparks trill from the back of Roy’s neck all the way to the base of his spine. “Fuck me.”
“A fine idea,” Roy says.
Ed’s eyes widen-if he wasn’t fighting hard to suppressing his viciously effective defensive instincts every time his adrenaline surges inside the walls of this house, Roy would be a man-shaped pile of thoroughly-beaten pulp by now, and the extra quarter-second while he forces himself to hesitate is the only reason Roy can ever press his advantage.
He thinks too, sometimes, that a part of Ed may just like losing when it’s safe.
In any case, Roy isn’t going to pass up this precious fraction of a moment-he catches Ed’s gorgeous hips in both hands, levies his weight, and tosses Ed up further towards the head of the bed.
The twice-over savior of all known universes, who has (so Alphonse says; Ed’s given no indication but a few bouts of half-coherent babbling when the last cobwebby threads of the nightmare haven’t torn away) died twice and come back kicking, tumbles glorious ass over metaphorical teakettle and yelps loudly as he lands.
“Fuckin’ warn me before you do that!” he howls, flailing an arm out to grasp the headboard as he tries to right himself.
Roy’s on him, and no amount of damage to his depth perception could keep him from tugging the glove off with his teeth-Ed’s breath hitches again-and then fixing his hands on the fly of Ed’s extremely fetching slate-gray trousers. “Where’s the fun in that?”
Ed snarls, but he’s not exactly pulling away. “Fun for who?”
“For whom,” Roy says.
“Fuck your shit!”
“It’s just grammar, my dear heart.”
“Fuck your grammar!”
“Please accept my sincerest apologies for any and all implications of condescension,” Roy says.
Ed glares down at Roy, although the flush high in his cheeks makes it evident that he hasn’t failed to notice that Roy has parted the fly of his trousers and is pausing with parted lips a grand total of three inches away from his fairly evident erection.
“Less talk,” Ed says, “more acti… awwfuck-”
Roy wraps his mouth around Ed’s rapidly hardening cock and tries not to grin as he feels Ed’s blood sing in answer-is there anything on this planet, in this life, quite as satisfying as weakening the mismatched knees of a younger lover in the warm safety of one’s own bed? The fabric in the way is a distraction, however; he draws back long enough to hook all of his fingers into the elastic of Ed’s waistband, and he drags both trousers and underwear down to the knees in question and then off altogether, pitching them over the side of the bed without a second glance. A faint, cataclysmically needy whine slithers out of Ed’s throat, and he tilts his head back, hips jerking, at the sudden chill and the deprivation both. Roy doesn’t have the heart to leave him like that-or the balls, really; his are already aching; the heat and pressure are getting to be unbearable, and every hitch of Ed’s hips makes it worse.
He digs his fingers into Ed’s thighs and lowers his head again, sneaking glances at Ed’s face up through his hair as he lathes and favors slowly, slowly, so deliberately that the groan in Ed’s throat shakes violently on its way out.
Ed’s metal fingers curl into his hair and grip so hard that his scalp stings-and then the fist loosens slightly, at the same moment that Ed looses a ragged breath; the pain dulls to a gentle prickling that’s actually rather pleasant, if you’re of the sick sort of mind that Roy has been for as long as he can recall. That doesn’t mean he can let that gesture go unaddressed-he drags one hand up Ed’s skin to the crease of his thigh and smoothes the other underneath until he reaches the back of the automail knee, using the leverage to hike it over his shoulder and hold it there. Ed’s heel swings against his bare back-frigidly cold-and the fingers tighten in his hair until he can hear the knuckles creak.
“Fuck’s sake, Roy,” Ed forces out. “Y-you always gonna welcome me home like this?”
Roy would cut his heart out and serve it with caviar if Ed called it home every time.
He draws back to respond, running the pad of his thumb up the underside of Ed’s slick, straining cock to ameliorate the loss of heat and friction, although Ed chokes on a soft sigh all the same.
“Yes,” he says. “Unless I can think of something better.”
Ed grins at him, cheeks stained, hair wildly scattered, flyaways sticking in the slight gleam of sweat across his forehead.
“It doesn’t get much better than this,” he says.
After all the things he learned and gleaned and fought through in that other place, on the other side-all the scraps and morsels of languages Roy’s tongue can’t even fathom, muttered out the corner of his mouth at Al; all the scars and welts and the stories buried silent underneath them; all the newer, deeper shadows in his eyes; all the long, long hesitations at the precipice every time Roy offered up a fraction of himself in hopes of an equivalent exchange-
How is it possible that he doesn’t know better?
Coming back once, Roy could understand-back to this world, back to friends and family and the bright-lit magic that’s always made him whole; back to the unspoken, unplumbed potential of the static lightning every time their breath met in the air.
But once the forks of electricity had left their tracks and tendrils burnt into his skin-once he’d sifted through the rubble for the remains of the man who used to be Roy Mustang; once he’d turned up the relics of a life that could have mattered-
Why in the hell does he come back now?
These are the iron-clad questions, crossing and crisscrossing into latticeworks and fine-wrought gates, that bar Roy’s brain from sleeping, most nights-these and the others, the more familiar, the comfortably cruel and recognizable. These and the endless clumps of bloodstained sand.
Ed is a young god in his element, older and wiser and more beautiful than ever, smarter by some miracle, and significantly more sedate. Anyone with a thought in their head and a modicum of good taste would drop to their knees for a chance at what Roy’s claiming here.
Certainly, he was appealing once-before the crimping white hairs, before the crow-foot lines at the edges of his solitary eye. Before his life slipped from his grasp, and the whole world flooded past him, and he drowned in snowdrifts daily but somehow didn’t quite elect to die.
But he’s always been putrid at the core-always been rank, fragmented, and past salvation-and Ed’s never put much stock into appearances or pretty little lies.
That’s part of what makes this so damned important-so much more than just sex, even sex with someone he loves more than mere words can hope to encapsulate. Ed doesn’t trust what he sees anymore, after monsters with familiar faces and heaven knows what hells in the other place-and he’s never cared to listen to poetry or promises or any of the tripe.
He trusts what he feels. This is the best, the truest way to worship him.
Ed tries to disentangle his hand from Roy’s hair, but one of the knuckles snags. He’s grinning again. He doesn’t have the slightest idea what his smile is capable of.
“What?” he asks. “What are you getting hung up on?”
“You,” Roy says. “More specifically, how devastatingly beautiful you are.”
The flush staging a slow coup of his skin deepens. “Oh, shut it. And fuck me. Like, now.”
“Difficult to argue with that,” Roy says, trailing his fingertips over Ed’s hipbones, up his sides.
“Yeah,” Ed says. “You’re probably gonna try anyw-hmmm.”
One of Roy’s many prided talents has, historically, been kissing fast and hard and well and thoroughly, and he doesn’t seem to have lost his touch. Ed finally works the automail loose from Roy’s hair and cups it under his jaw instead-the metal’s cool, but the icy bite is gone from the steel, and it’s a pleasant contrast now to the heat of the air between them.
The transcendent pleasure of meeting Ed’s mouth merits volumes of poetry, but Roy can never find sufficient words. Ed’s incredible at this, of course; he’s incredible at everything; he kisses single-mindedly, wholeheartedly, with everything that’s in him; tongue, teeth, cold-cracked lips, and so much of his soul in every last damn gasped-out breath-
Roy grasps his hips and drags him down away from the headboard, thrilling in the way his hair spills out behind him all over again, liquid gold flowing loose-Ed’s startlement segues into a twist of a hungry grin, and he hooks both legs around the small of Roy’s back, crossing his ankles to lock the two of them in position.
“You know I like it when you get aggressive?” he asks.
“The thought had occurred to me,” Roy says. His hands never listen to his brain where Ed’s involved; they’re roving up and down without his permission, smoothing over skin and bone and all the exquisite muscle shifting underneath; perhaps he needs to know, to prove, that this is real, after all those years of hollow wanting, to assuage the self-consuming void that he became. It’s amusing, in its way, that his famous willpower fails so utterly when faced with Ed and Ed alone.
Ed’s grin is bright and mischievous and unrepentant. “You’re pullin’ out all the stops tonight, aren’t you? Alchemy, the alpha male shit-”
“If you don’t like it,” Roy says, running his hands up the backs of Ed’s thighs and over the indescribably luscious curve of his ass, “stop me.”
Ed arches his back and bites down hard on his bottom lip, eyes fluttering closed, and God- “Never said th-that. Never said a-anything like… that.”
Roy kisses his knees in turn, murmuring into the skin of the right, “Forgive me.”
Ed’s shoulders roll; his hair shimmers as he turns his head, throat working. “What I d-did say was-”
“Fuck you, ‘like, now’,” Roy says. “I remember.”
Ed laughs breathlessly, chest jumping, left hand snatching for fistful of Roy’s hair and then smoothing it out again just as quickly. “You are so f-fucking contrary I dunno how you survive.”
That’s rather simple-Roy survives for moments like this. For the chance to look at Edward Elric, sprawled out and riled up and waiting for him to deliver satisfaction in due time.
Or in extremely overdue time, most likely, the way Ed sees it.
Roy reaches back for the abandoned tube of lubricant he retrieved from the nightstand with the glove and then flung aside.
“Are you ready?” he asks, leaning in to drag his mouth up along Ed’s jawline, wanting to taste his answer; needing to know, down to the bones and the blood and the high note of a heartbeat-
“Fucking yes already,” Ed says, rather cavalierly ignoring gravity long enough to writhe up and nip Roy’s ear. “You and your fucking foreplay fetish, I swear; we could’ve done it four times by now-”
“Four seems a bit steep,” Roy says. “No more than three and three-quarters, surely.”
Ed presses his lips together, trying to scowl instead of laughing. He is always too beautiful to make sense in this miserable universe, but never more than when he’s high on endorphins and tangling his warm body tightly around Roy’s.
“Yes, darling,” Roy says to the unspoken command, kissing the tip of Ed’s nose to drive the endearment home. He’s never claimed to be anything other than a bastard, after all.
As Ed starts grinding his teeth on the coarse beginnings of his pet name rant, Roy uncaps the tube and slicks his fingers thoroughly, committing his full attention to the process-other than the mandatory portion of it still and always dedicated to Ed, which alerts him to the way the prospective tirade dies instantly on Ed’s faint out-breath.
In the name of getting on with it-in order to get off; isn’t language grand?-Roy meets Ed’s eyes as best he can with one alone and grazes his first fingertip down Ed’s perineum to his entrance. Both sets of Ed’s toes curl against Roy’s back, and Ed catches his lower lip between his teeth, and is there anything in the immense potential of a human lifetime that can measure up to this?
Roy’s whole circulatory system seems to contract as he pushes his fingertip in-wet heat and tight muscle and the promise of so much magnificence to come; there are tiny preemptive sparks in his stomach, seething upward, tingling in his lungs, tickling his heart, as though it needs to jump faster, as though it can stand to. His hands aren’t unsteady; it’s the rest of the world that’s shaking around him.
“Relax,” he says.
“I fucking know,” Ed says, jaw clenched. “S’just been fucking forever-”
Roy has had some time to commune with the concept of eternity. Seven weeks doesn’t even cast a shadow on the wall.
“Relax,” he says again, softer, lower, but with that specific undertone of absolute authority that always makes Ed’s pupils dilate instantly until they’ve almost blotted out the gold.
“Fuck,” Ed gasps out, right on cue, fingers twitching on the sheets, and then he fixes his bottom lip between his teeth again and bites down hard. He squeezes his eyes shut, sweat beading on his forehead, shimmering on his jawline; his throat works, his eyelashes quiver, his hands curl-
He breathes out, slowly, and his body sinks back onto the bed, and it’s still indescribable-the slick tight-heat around Roy’s fingertips, the dizzyingly tantalizing promise of what’s to follow-but there’s a little more give, a little less pulsing desperation, and he presses his finger gently deeper, further, in-
“Missed you,” Ed whispers. It’s almost unvoiced, almost indistinguishable, almost possible for Roy to think he’s merely imagined-almost possible to ignore.
“And I you,” he says, leaning in to murmur it into the skin of Ed’s throat, drawing his mouth up to the tender skin beneath Ed’s ear, kissing the lobe, nipping the shell. “More than there are words for.”
Ed writhes underneath him, both hands latching onto his shirt buttons again, and he finds that he hardly cares if this particular piece of clothing gets destroyed. In fact, he wouldn’t mind framing the shreds up on his wall-Yes, hello, welcome to my lovely home; oh, that, above the couch? Yes, that’s documented proof that I fuck Edward Elric on the regular. Would you like to see the kitchen?
“S-somehow I get the feeling,” Ed grinds out, “that that’s still not gonna shut you u-fuck, Roy-”
There are many, many advantages to having a long-term lover as staggeringly beautiful and shamelessly vocal as Edward. One of them is that Roy knows-as a matter of mathematical angles and measured distance; and in his guts and his blood and his bones-exactly how high to lift Ed’s hips off of the mattress, and exactly how far to plunge his finger in. Ed’s body convulses as he crooks it, straightens it, soothes, caresses, pushes hard-
“F-fuck’s s-s-sake-”
If Roy believed in anything, this is how he’d pray.
Linen rips at what feels like the seam, and Ed laughs breathlessly as buttons rain down on his chest.
“S-sorry-”
Roy licks across Ed’s collarbone and down the line of pink-pale scarring at the automail join. “I’m not.”
He gives his finger another twist to prove it, and Ed’s head drops back; wisps and flyaways cling to the sweat at his hairline, tangling against each other, darkened from bright gold to a warm honey brown. His body undulates off the bed, and he jerks his hips against Roy’s hand, striving for more pressure, more depth, more heat-
That’s a noble quest if Roy’s ever seen one.
He draws his hand back, slicks his second finger again-Ed’s always so damn greedy for it, when they’re like this, melting at the edges in the safety of the sheets, but the last reserves of Roy’s well-touted self-control won’t let him indulge the impulse to forget the caution and just take.
That said, it would require a rather stronger man than he to resist the impulse to drag his tongue up Ed’s gorgeous cock when the boy arches his back at the loss of the sensation and scrabbles for purchase with both heels.
The sound that trembles out of Ed’s throat combines the best parts of laughter and a moan. “God, you fucking t-tease-”
“Guilty as charged,” Roy says.
But he drives his fingers in harder this time, which is perhaps the single most wonderful apology he’s ever had to make.
He pumps and presses with two until Ed’s whimpers almost break to sobs, and then he adds a third, and then-
Twin slivers of yellow, and a flash of a grin.
“C’mon, Mustang,” Ed gets out, breath hitching, chest heaving, hair spilled out-grander than any halo, any aura, anything. “You gonna do it or not, General?”
The brat knows all his weak points-every soreness, every fault, every messy-knitted scar-and targets with no mercy. Someday Roy might just muster the audacity to complain.
But not tonight.
Tonight he shoves his trousers down with all of the dexterity he has left, cups one hand under Ed’s incomparable ass to lift his hips, and lines them up-and-
God-
If burying himself to the hilt in another human being has ever felt this good, let him be struck down the second that this ends-
On second thought, let this never end.
Ed spits a few more curses; shuddering on their heels is another laugh. He wraps his left hand around the back of Roy’s neck, curls the right arm around the small of Roy’s back-and the cool metal against the hot sweat with the linen of his shirt between is transcendent, is transformative-
Ed’s mouth drags up Roy’s jaw. “So f-fucking-good-”
“I know you are,” Roy says.
Ed’s fingers twist into his hair and tug gently. “B-bastard-”
“And to think,” Roy says, “all yours.”
Ed draws back just far enough to glower at him. “Th-think about that a damn fucking lot, ac-” Roy rolls his hips; Ed’s eyelids flutter. “…tual… ly.”
Roy leans in to kiss the gasp off of his lips, but Ed’s grip on his hair tightens, holding him back.
“Hang on,” Ed gets out. “Haven’t seen you in seven fucking weeks; I wanna see you.”
Perhaps it should be unsettling, to understand so well-to know what that means well before Ed’s metal hand clasps a tighter fistful of his shirt; well before the softer fingers shake themselves free of his hair and slide up underneath the bottom edge of the eyepatch; well before light little fingertips dapple upward over the wreck of Roy’s tortured eye socket and then draw the whole patch off over his head; well before Ed half-folds it and sets it on the nightstand like it’s just another object, useful but without significance, like it doesn’t matter, not in any way that counts-
“Better,” Ed says, and he wraps his legs around Roy’s hips and crosses his ankles, and his toes curl against Roy’s back as he shifts-which, incidentally, sends spears of searing pleasure up Roy’s spine, and volcanic heat courses through to every last damn capillary in his frame.
Then Ed twists up and kisses over the snarled web of white where the eye used to be.
“Okay,” he says, dropping to the bed again, snapping his hips up with a wolfish grin as he goes. “Now you can fuck me ’til I scream.”
Roy’s mouth goes slightly dry-which makes it a profitable opportunity to lick his lips, so in the end he counts it as a victory.
“I’d be delighted,” he says.
“I bet you would,” Ed says, and he snickers at Roy’s scowl.
But not for long.
Is it strange, given how they began? Is it strange, when their interactions once revolved around snarling anger and bottomless frustration, when they both struck as viciously as they were able as a smokescreen for the instinctive trust-is it strange that now they move together like two halves of one being? Is it strange that they exist now in perfect complement, down to the last gouged mark, scars matching up like mirror images on their skin?
And move they do-slow at first, savoring every twinge of muscle, every surge of swelling joy-every spike of ecstasy shudders through the pair of them, almost at once-blood beating, breath mingling, sweat mixing, hips crashing, hearts slamming, hands roving, every nerve down to the fingertips alight-
Roy’s whole body throbs like one open wound-but so beautiful, so fucking sweet-and Ed’s fingers dig into his shoulders, scrabbling, as he angles towards Ed’s prostate and drives hard-
The gasp tearing out of Ed rattles through both of them-gale-force, lightning-bright, illuminating. “Holyfuckingshit-Roy-”
Even if Roy wasn’t several worlds away from coherence, he doesn’t think there’s really much of an answer to that-except the one word, the most important that perhaps he’s ever uttered.
He buries his face in Ed’s sweat-matted hair and breathes deep.
“Edward,” he says.
“Fuck,” Ed says again-Roy used to fear he’d tire of that syllable, of the sharpness, of all the little casual obscenities, but like everything else, they just feel reassuring these days. “H-hang on-”
There’s no time to wonder before Ed’s tightening his legs around Roy’s waist-God, the twitch of the muscles in his thighs against Roy’s hips; no heaven another man’s imagined could live up to this-and using his weight to flip them over in one swift motion.
Edward Elric is stunning from any angle, in any light, with any twist of feeling on his features, but this Ed-lit faintly from behind, hair spilt loose and nearly glowing, fixed above him with both palms planted on Roy’s chest, cheeks flushed, eyes bright, laughing breathlessly-might just be Roy’s single favorite permutation.
Ed leans down, pressing their foreheads together, and threads the fingers of his left hand into Roy’s hair. He closes his eyes, and he smiles, and he rolls his hips so slow.
When Roy hisses through clenched teeth and tries to buck out from underneath him, Ed laughs, sits back, and jolts his hips down once-just once, just a split-second of mind-splintering perfection-and then folds his body down to bite Roy’s bottom lip, worrying it between his teeth before drawing himself up again with a smirk Roy never should have taught him how to make his own.
“Brat,” Roy fights out.
“Bastard,” Ed says, and it leaves his lips sounding like a benediction.
Roy puts both hands on his waist, pulling him down and arching up to meet him, and Ed chokes on the next smartass remark. He flashes the second most devastating of all his grins-lesser only than the one that doesn’t touch the corners of his eyes, that leaves the cold and sadness curling in them even as he forces out the smile-and hitches his body in closer, closer, tighter-hotter-better into Roy’s-
“All right,” he says.
But it’s so, so, so much more than that.
Roy’s guts twist; his blood races-Ed’s hands skate up either side of his ribcage, cool-warm; Roy fists one hand in the silk trailing down his shoulder-blades, tugs to tilt Ed’s head back, licks up the lines of sweat collecting on the ridges of his throat-
Ed moves like a wave, like a snake, like the breath of God, like a ripple of absolution-his back arches, his knees shift, his fingers flicker down over Roy’s chest; he presses forward, rocks back, folds in until their collarbones meet, swings his weight back again, somehow sinking lower still on Roy’s cock-
Roy claws his fingers deeper into Ed’s hair, hauls him down to crush their mouths together, tastes the back of Ed’s tongue, swallows down the noise of need-
He fits his other hand into the narrow space between them and curls his fingers around Ed’s cock, tunnels them, strokes once, twice-
The supernova in him starts as starlight-pale warm, expanding; blazing red; then searing white; then-
“Shit,” Ed chokes out.
Roy tightens his grip just slightly, and the veins pulse underneath his fingertips-wet heat splatters between them, and that oughtn’t-
Should that seem hopelessly intimate-immensely erotic, indescribable, overpowering-?
Ed nestles his face into the side of Roy’s neck, whimpers, jimmies his hips in hard-his body tightens, and the single hard, heavy shiver that runs through him shakes Roy’s spine from end to end, and-
Oh-
It takes Roy several moments of focused concentration to blink the lights out of his eyes. Ed huffs half a laugh, climbs off of him, wobbles, glares at his own wrist like it’s betrayed his trust, and drops down on the bed. He stretches out on his back and cycles his right shoulder, then the left. Roy gravitates towards the warmth.
Silence reigns for a long moment before the fizzing contentment coalesces into a rumble in his chest.
“Mmm,” he says. There is no better cradle in the world for his face than Ed’s bicep on one side and a down pillow on the other.
“Hey,” Ed says, prodding at his shoulder with his automail index finger. “No sleeping.”
“Slave-driver,” Roy says.
“Can it,” Ed says. “You and I both know you always bitch the next morning if we fall asleep with fluids and shit everywhere. And I can still feel the fucking train grime, so-c’mon.”
“You let me have sex with you while you were still train-grimy?” Roy mumbles. “Shame.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Ed says. “I would’ve showered when I got in, but I wanted to jump your bones the second you finally dragged your fine ass through the door.”
There’s a glow in Roy’s chest that is less ego than insurmountable love-although there is a bit of both.
“You’re forgiven,” he says.
“Good,” Ed says. “Come on, you lazy bastard. I’ll let you wash my hair.”
Roy forces his heavy eyelids up again. “Good heavens. Why didn’t you say so?”
“’Cause you never pull out the artillery ’til after the little guns misfire,” Ed says. He shouldn’t know that; shouldn’t think like that-he shouldn’t have to. Roy reaches out to stroke a fingertip along the crescents underneath his eyes. “So-shower.”
“Shower,” Roy says. “You may have to carry me.”
“Well,” Ed says, “you got me up the stairs. Equivalent exchange.”
“I love you,” Roy says.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Ed says. “I just told you-equivalent exchange.”
If snow falls forever on Central City, Roy hardly cares; with Edward’s smile back in it, the world will never look bleak again.
Roy reaches out to smooth a wayward lock of damp gold hair back into place. “I should have known.”
“Yeah,” Ed says. “You should’ve. ’Cause it ain’t about to change.”
“You have such a gift for phrasing.”
“Fuck you.”
“I believe you just did,” Roy says. “I thought it was wonderful.”
Ed rolls his eyes so hard that Roy’s remaining one aches sympathetically.
“All right, Mustang,” Ed says, squirming towards the edge of the bed, stepping down, and reaching back with both hands. “Shower. Then sleep. Then we kick tomorrow’s sorry ass.”
Roy has relied on his talent for an iron-fisted control of his own expressions his entire life-a poker game played out every moment of every day, with the stakes higher than most men can imagine.
But when it comes to Ed-and it always comes to Ed; the roads all lead back home-he simply can’t stop himself from smiling back.
He takes the offered hands and holds on tight.
“That sounds like an excellent plan,” he says.