FMA -- Summer
Title: Summer
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Characters/Pairing: Ed, Hawkeye, Roy (and kinda a tiny bit Roy/Ed)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 11,830
Warnings: language, lots of Unhappy, post-Brotherhood AU with spoilers
Summary: People mean well, mostly, but he's alone in this - right?
Author's Note: ………so! Um. This is a sequel to Void - you can read it on its own if you want, but that probably contextualizes it better! And all of the warnings/tags/please-tell-me-if-I'm-out-of-line stuff from that fic apply here as well. More of this segment later this week if I can get myself not to hate it; and then there will be at least one additional part… someday. I am bad at deadlines. I am bad at a lot of things. [Click for ramble.]
Also: I am sincerely sorry I didn't reply to all of the comments and/or messages about the prior fic - I hope everyone who left one knows they are welcome to drop me a line anytime, anywhere; I'm really crap at responding when I get busy or overwhelmed (which is all the time), but I always, always care, and I am always happy to listen if you need somebody to talk to. ♥
Please take note that this and the remaining stories in this 'verse are all set a long while after the previous one - three or four years post-Brotherhood, probably? It's an AU as far as the Brotherhood ending is concerned, in more ways than just the basic premise: I also couldn't bear to take alchemy away from Ed when he was already feeling like this. Although I did leave him still stuck with the automail arm, because I'm an asshole.
One last thing: when I'm writing demi!Ed in any capacity (this was really pronounced on le blog too if you follow that), there's this sort of interim period in my head where he really sort of starts to destroy himself while no one is watching, and it changes his character pretty substantially. So he might seem kind of OOC, I guess?, but it's the result of the extrapolations I made behind the scenes. Or, more accurately, it's a largely unintentional side effect of those extrapolations, because he just throws this shit at me, and I write it down and shake my head a lot. >____> Anyway, if he seems a little less… Ed, you're not alone in noticing that. And everyone and their mom is going to talk about it over the course of the next several thousand words. Please don't leave me nasty comments about him being out of character and me ruining the franchise, is what I'm saying, because I am legitimately too emotionally fragile for that shit right now what who said that
…it also occurs to me that I should probably warn for a touch of vulgarity in the early dialogue in this part. And some very dark Ed's-internal-monologue thoughts. Stay safe, frands. ♥
how I long for the autumn-
sun keeps burning me
every stone in this city
keeps reminding me
can you protect me
from what I want?
the love I let in,
it left me so lost
Mother
make me
make me a big, tall tree
so I can
shed my leaves and let it blow through me
Mother
make me
make me a big, gray cloud
so I can rain on you things I can’t say out loud
- “Mother” - Florence + the Machine -
SUMMER
[PART I]
Ed has hated summer for as long as he can…
Well. No. He’s hated summer since the automail.
Before that, it was a damned relief-no schoolwork mucking up his head; no mess of facts and figures and details he was supposed to memorize and regurgitate, crawling into the crevices between the sigils and the lines that he wanted to be keeping in his brain. No struggle to relate to children who talked about their fathers, who went home and played with toys, who fought their way syllable by syllable through books with more words than pictures. No enforced deference to grownups who ranted at him for falling asleep after a night of learning things that mattered, like that was some kind of fucking crime.
With Teacher, the summer hardly mattered; the whole year was a blurry stretch of sparring and sweat and cramped text and diagrams and practice and practice and practice regardless of the weather-though he remembers thinking it was unholily hot; remembers instructions to drink more water than he ever would have imagined necessary if he hadn’t already been thinking… If he hadn’t already known…
Water-thirty-five liters; carbon-twenty kilograms-
But the automail was when predictions of summer heat changed from a minor inconvenience to a premonition of excruciating pain.
The whole fucking dumbass “wool uniform with undershirt in all seasons, on all occasions, no exceptions, only doom” directive is not fucking helping matters, either.
Winry always says “Just keep it covered, you moron; I’ll-work on it,” and bites her lip when she sees the places that the metal’s burnt his skin. He knows she means it-honestly, it’s gotta be worse for the people in Rush Valley than it is for him here, so he’s glad they’re her priority, more or less. He’s also secretly glad that those guys’ll be her guinea pig, so to speak. He knows that he’ll be one of the first to benefit if she figures out something awesome and finds a way to implement it; and he knows that that’s just a matter of time.
Al doesn’t say anything. Al just looks at him, mouth clamped shut, lips pressed in a thin line, eyes shadowed and narrowed and sad, and Ed knows that guilt so fucking intimately that he can feel the edge of it against his throat. He knows that no matter how many times he says I don’t care, it’s all right, it’s fine, it’s really nothing, look at what we got for what I paid, everything is fine, Al, nothing in the universe will dull that blade. They were both supposed to get back to the way they were before-back to their bodies, back to rights. Al didn’t want it just to be him-Al’s too damn good to be able to forget what Ed lost that night, no matter how much time passes with him here, and whole, and living the way humans are meant to, with fingertips and nerves and eyes and eardrums and tastebuds galore.
Al just looks, and says nothing, and refuses to forget.
And Ed loves him for that so much that it hurts more than the heat ever will. It’s thick and heavy in the center of his chest, but fucking hell, it’s beautiful.
Anyway.
Summer.
Automail.
Uniforms.
Fucking atmospheres of hot air pouring out of Havoc’s mouth across the table as the clock hand drags towards five.
“I don’t even want to tell you about the sex,” he says, dreamily, which is about the most obvious lie Ed has heard in his life since that time when Al was four and covered in frosting and cake crumbs and kept repeating Wasn’t me. “Not because it’s not amazing, ’cause it is, but-just-it’s so special. It’s like it’s-sacred or something. I don’t want to talk about it, ’cause then it won’t be all just ours anymore. You know?”
“As always,” Breda says, rolling his pen slowly across the desktop, monitoring its progress intently as he nudges it along, “you’re doing an exemplary job of not talking.”
“Thanks,” Havoc says. “It’s just-I get it now. It’s past words, is the thing. Love is. God. I think I’m gonna marry her.”
“And relinquish your membership to the Pathetic Bachelors Club?” Breda asks. “Damn it, Jean; you’re our poster boy. You can’t quit.”
“Get bent,” Havoc says contentedly.
“You were less annoying when you were in love with the Car,” Breda says.
The Car is something of a myth: up until he started dating Rebecca, Havoc talked about nothing except the antique (his word of choice was “classic”) roadster he’s been laboriously fixing up despite a pronounced lack of practical knowledge about the whole process. Ed has never figured out whether or not the Car actually exists-as far as he can tell, no one’s ever seen it, and Havoc has always brushed off all of Ed’s suggestions of calling Winry for some professional advice. It’s perfectly possible the Car is complete bullshit, and Havoc just wanted a manly hobby to talk about at length to demonstrate his coolness; but Havoc has never seemed to Ed like the type to invent something like that. Ed’s settled on the likelihood that the Car does, in fact, reside in the driveway and garage of Havoc’s little townhouse, but that he’s exaggerating hugely about the progress he’s made on it, because he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing.
“On the upside,” Breda says, turning the pen precisely one-hundred and eighty degrees and starting to roll it back towards himself, “if you can convince a chick as bangin’ as Rebecca to put up with your crap for more than a week at a stretch, there must be hope for the rest of us.”
Ed would honestly like to know what the denotation of bangin’ is. What differentiates bangin’ from ordinary hot? Is it functionally a synonym of foxy, or is it more connotative of physical attributes alone, whereas foxy is predicated on a specific attitude?
Somebody needs to write this shit down. The data’s all anecdotal, and Ed sucks at linguistics.
He also sucks at focusing on a huge-ass pile of fucking requisition forms when the heat is seeping into the meat of his brain and cooking it from the inside while his dumbass coworkers ascend to all-new heights of objectifying women and shit.
He taps the eraser of his pencil slowly on the next yawning, gaping, endless blank line. What the fuck is he supposed to write there, again? Fucking… shit. Even the pencil looks like it’s sweating. Maybe that’s his sweat. From his hand. Running down the pencil. That’s disgusting. Hopefully it’s actually sweat in his eyelashes distorting his fucking vision, which is also disgusting, but not quite as bad.
…gross. Sweat in his eyelashes. That’d explain the faint burning sensation in his eyes. Fucking saline everywhere. This is a travesty. They should just shut the whole fucking building down and ship everybody to the snow when it gets this fucking hot; no one’s going to get any work done like this.
“Aren’t you shacking up with Sheska now?” Breda says, rotating his pen in Fuery’s direction.
At a glance, it’s hard to tell if Fuery blushes, or it’s just a sunburn setting in. “That’s-we’re not-there’s no shacking. In any direction.”
“What a curious idiom,” Falman says. He looks the least drained and pale and sweaty and heat-deadened of any of them: he isn’t slouching or outright lolling or lying directly in the path of the struggling metal fan and drooling about Rebecca Catalina. His hair is kind of drooping, though. “If anything, it should refer to cohabitation alone, rather than being a euphemism for coitu-”
“Okay,” Breda says. “Jean’s out. Kain’s accounted for. Vato, all you need is some girl who’s a walking encyclopedia. Or a walking book of questions, since you’ve got all the answers.”
“Hmm,” Falman says.
It feels like Ed’s breath turns to steam before he drags it back up his throat; he swears he can almost hear the steel of his shoulder creaking as it expands; it’s a constant prickle-burn on the edges of his unscarred skin. His blood is sort of squidge-crawling through his veins; he can feel his heartbeat throbbing slowly in his swollen-ass fingertips, in his sweaty fucking palms, right up until-
“Ed, though,” Breda says.
And his heart starts to race, and his thoughts start to stick, and his guts start to churn.
Don’t. Just leave it; just don’t.
Breda’s looking at him-watching him, like he’s a fucking sideshow-and rolling the pen back and forth. “Ed’s harder.”
Havoc snickers. “Bet he is.”
“Shut up,” Breda says to Havoc, still looking at Ed-immovable, unrelenting. “’Cause the problem is, there aren’t too many girls your age who’d get you. Who’d get the whole, y’know… lifelong-quest-and-unending-sacrifice thing. Are there? Hell, not too many people at all.”
All the ambient shifting and throat-clearing and paper-shuffling just-stops. Everything except the furious blatblatblat of Ed’s pulse in his fucking head and the rhythmic creak of the suffering fan goes still.
And the door to Mustang’s little corner office is wide fucking open to try to coax some of the miserable dead air back and forth, and-
And Ed wants to-go. To crawl in a hole and maybe stop existing for a while. Just, like, a day or two. And only if it’s cool in there. If it’s not, he’ll go-wherever. Anywhere. Anywhere in the fucking world but here.
“But I think you kinda know that,” Breda says, picking up the pen and setting it on its end, eyes fixing on him, and Ed can’t breathe, can’t move, can’t think through the humming in his skull and the leaden shroud of the impenetrable heat. “I think it factors into your weird… insecurity thing. The whole ‘Well, yes, I’m a genius, obviously, but I’ve got all this guilt and all this automail, so other than my intellect, I think I’m worthless, and no one’s ever gonna care.’”
The fan rattles.
Ed’s heart beats in his temples, in his knuckles, in the slick of sweat at the back of his knee and in his toes-which are curling instinctively, down in the sauna contained inside his fucking boot.
“Which is a cop-out,” Breda says. “The fact that letting people in is tough is what makes it worth doing; usually you know that better than anybody. But with this, you get all hung up on your inexperience and crap like you’re the only one on the planet who hasn’t had the time to figure out dating, and that’s shameful or whatever-but it’s not. If it was complicated, Jean couldn’t do it. I think you’re just overanalyzing the whole thing and getting caught up in the emotional part when it’s really way simpler than that, and it’d click for you if you could just relax.”
Breda sits back in his chair, taking the pen with him; he folds his arms and then points the tip of the pen right at the center of Ed’s forehead, like he’s solved every last equation in the universe.
“I think,” he says, matter-of-fucking-factly, “that we just need to get you laid.”
There has to be a way out of this.
There has to be some kind of an escape route, some kind of a back door he can kick through and flee from, some kind of a-
Some-
Just-
It’s too fucking hot to fish a coherent sentence out of the cesspool of his thoughts, let alone a fucking comeback, let alone a snarl or a dismissal or a rebuttal or anything that’d shut Breda up and dim that light of triumph in his eyes like he just reached into the core of Ed’s fucking body and tore out the truth of him-
And he almost-
-did.
But-
Ed likes girls. He likes the way some of them wave their hands when they talk; he likes the way some of them outline their eyes and shit, and it exaggerates their expressions when they get all excited. He loves the way Winry screeches like a fucking barn owl when she sees a new tool she wants-once his ears stop ringing, anyway. He likes Paninya, and Sheska, and Rosé, and Lieutenant Ross; he really likes Major Hawkeye. He likes Rebecca, too, which is part of what makes it so fucking uncomfortable when Havoc talks about her all the time, because it feels like gossiping behind her back even though he’s practically reciting long-ass odes to every feature that she’s got.
But he doesn’t want any of them to-like-touch-him, or… anything. He doesn’t find a girl’s mouth as interesting as what it says. He doesn’t find their hands as interesting as what they do-Winry has cracked, smudged fingernails underscored with grease because she’s fucking brilliant with those hands; because she rebuilds lives with them. That’s fucking beautiful, but it isn’t-like-‘hot’. It just… is. It’s a fact. She is a human being with a remarkable skill, same as him, same as anyone.
Her eyes are a really pretty color of blue-not even like a bright summer-sky-blue; it’s darker than that; it’s that first moment when the horizon starts melting into purple as the sun goes down. It’s a deep water blue. Like sapphires. Like shadows on the snow.
Al asked him, once, the other week, in a casual voice, over breakfast, before he’d had much coffee, probably hoping he wouldn’t remember afterward-“Do you ever dream about Winry, Brother?”
He said, “Yeah, sure, sometimes. Do you?”
He didn’t say I dreamed the other night that she was making us a new Mom out of automail, and I kept saying she should stop, and she kept saying ‘I’m trying to help,’ and right when she finished, its eyes lit up red, and it said ‘Ed-ward’ just like Nina did right at the end, and I couldn’t stop screaming-
But when I woke up, I couldn’t breathe to scream, and I couldn’t move to turn the fucking light on, and I guess it was stupid, but I thought it would be over when we got you back-I thought we would set that one thing right again, and all the rest would fall back into place.
And that was stupid, wasn’t it?
He knows that what Al was really asking was “Do you ever dream about having sex with Winry, Brother?”, and the answer to that is that just thinking about her that way makes him sick to his stomach, because it feels like a betrayal-of her; of how great she is; of the simple fact that she’s a human being who has a body, but it’s so much less than who she is; of the less-simple fact that so many people probably take one look at her and do all kinds of fucked-up shit to her inside their heads because she looks like that, because she’s pretty and all curvy and whatever shit-
And the whole things stirs up this fucking whirlpool in the pit of his stomach, and his guts twist tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter until he thinks he’s going to cough them up in one big mass of blood and dreck and viscera, and that’ll be the end of it-the end of him.
He doesn’t want to get laid.
And he damn fucking sure doesn’t want his fucking coworkers to try to make it happen to him.
For him.
Whatthefuckever.
“I think you need to get a fucking life,” he says.
Too far. He can see it instantly-Breda’s eyes widen a little and then narrow. The guy was only trying to be nice; he was just offering to do Ed a solid, as far as he’s concerned, and who the fuck is this condescending asshole kid to respond to that with-?
“Are you scared?” Breda says. “Seriously, it’s not that big a deal. And it doesn’t have to be a disrespectful thing if you’re upfront about it, and everybody knows what’s going on. You find a chick who’s cool with that, and you get your dick wet-”
No. No, fuck, mayday, stop this shit-
“-and it’s great, and it’s over before you know it, and then you’re a man.”
Because you can’t be, without it-isn’t that right? You can’t be a person. You can’t be whole. Isn’t that what it comes down to? If you don’t dream about pretty girls naked, you’re some kind of fucking alien, and nobody wants anything to do with your shit.
Just the mere abstract fucking thought of the slide of flesh makes Ed’s stomach drop so hard and so fast that his eyes unfocus, and his banging heart leaps up and stops his throat.
Ha. Bangin’. Maybe that’s what it’s supposed to mean. Maybe people are supposed to have that effect on you-make your organs jump around in your chest cavity and block your airways and shudder there. Maybe that’s what it’s about.
He hates it. It hurts.
“That’s enough,” Hawkeye says in the bullwhip-voice, and it cuts straight through the thick heat of this horrible fucking room. “All of you are dismissed.”
Ed’s eyes are responding to his efforts to move them-nothing else is, but eyes are a start. He darts them towards the clock above the file cabinets; it’s four minutes to five. Maybe the heat’ll break when the sun goes down, in another… what? Two hours? Three? Maybe he can go home and lie in a cold bath and pretend he’s dead.
The intrusiveness of that thought startles him awake.
He keeps-thinking-that kind of shit. Lately. Since… pretty much just since he stopped moving. Since he got Al back, and he didn’t have to drive himself so doggedly that there wasn’t time to think anymore. Since he started to find just enough hours left over after work to qualify as spare, more or less. Since he started to have the leeway to sit and really observe all of the people around him; since he started to feel Al drifting off towards all those Normal Life things Ed would’ve died in a second all along to give him.
Since fulfilling his life’s entire goal left him feeling grateful and relieved and completely fucking empty.
Since he noticed that even the people he loves the most don’t really understand him anymore.
It’s not that they don’t make sense-they do; it does; it’s all perfectly fucking logical, especially from an evolutionary point of view.
It’s just that he’s on the other side of a fucking chasm from them, and it’s way too far to jump, and what if falling’s worse than being left behind?
Don’t think about it. Just-don’t. Better if-better just not to. At all. Slam the door, flip the deadbolt, draw the blinds.
But right now-for once, or at least for the first time in a long-ass while-he’s not moving fast enough. In the two full seconds he spends rooted to the chair, everybody else scrambles to grab up their belongings and makes a fucking break for the door. That says a thing or two about the power of the word ‘dismissed’ jackknifing off the right tongue, but holy hell, two seconds flat, and then it’s just-
Him.
And Hawkeye.
And…
He has to shift forward in the seat to put his feet on the ground-which is just bad fucking design, all right, not, y’know, anything else-in order to get the leverage to scoot his chair back, and that kills another three-quarters of a second, and out of the corner of his eye he sees Mustang’s silhouette sauntering through the doorway and pulling out another of the chairs.
He could just shove all the sheets of paper into a mound and then run. But they’re from different files, and he’d just be fucking over his tomorrow-self, and it’s not like-
Well, shit. It’s not like he can’t handle Mustang; what the hell is there to be afraid of?
’Cause he knows, somehow, at a deep level, with a feeling like a tightening right underneath his sternum, that Hawkeye wasn’t mad at him.
So it’s just-Mustang.
And Mustang ain’t shit.
Still, there’s-a faint touch, just a flutter of something like… what? Trepidation?
Because Mustang just gets people. Mustang reads people like most people read newspaper headlines-quick and fucking easy, skimming for the relevant information, and if he’s interested, he’ll look further, or else he can chuck them aside.
Ed honestly doesn’t know how much the bastard’s figured out. He’s not a fucking moron-or at least not about shit that involves sticking his stupid nose into the private lives of his employees-so he must know something’s… wrong. Fucked-up. Weird. About Ed. Something extra-fucking-special; something in this arena, the whole sex-love-romance-dating hellhole-thing. He must have noticed the… what? The way Ed avoids those kinds of questions like they’re a fucking contagion? The way he tenses every time the stupid banter starts? The way he never, ever, ever brags about his plans on any given Friday night?
He’s tried. He’s tried to keep it under wraps, or at least out of the fucking spotlight; he’s hedged and dodged and outright fucking lied to try to hide it. But Mustang’s not stupid, and they’ve been snarking at each other since Ed was a kid, and…
And shit. Shit. Mustang sits down and crosses his legs at the knee before Ed can convince his own fucking asshole joints to hold his weight and help him stand.
[PART II]
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Characters/Pairing: Ed, Hawkeye, Roy (and kinda a tiny bit Roy/Ed)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 11,830
Warnings: language, lots of Unhappy, post-Brotherhood AU with spoilers
Summary: People mean well, mostly, but he's alone in this - right?
Author's Note: ………so! Um. This is a sequel to Void - you can read it on its own if you want, but that probably contextualizes it better! And all of the warnings/tags/please-tell-me-if-I'm-out-of-line stuff from that fic apply here as well. More of this segment later this week if I can get myself not to hate it; and then there will be at least one additional part… someday. I am bad at deadlines. I am bad at a lot of things. [Click for ramble.]
Also: I am sincerely sorry I didn't reply to all of the comments and/or messages about the prior fic - I hope everyone who left one knows they are welcome to drop me a line anytime, anywhere; I'm really crap at responding when I get busy or overwhelmed (which is all the time), but I always, always care, and I am always happy to listen if you need somebody to talk to. ♥
Please take note that this and the remaining stories in this 'verse are all set a long while after the previous one - three or four years post-Brotherhood, probably? It's an AU as far as the Brotherhood ending is concerned, in more ways than just the basic premise: I also couldn't bear to take alchemy away from Ed when he was already feeling like this. Although I did leave him still stuck with the automail arm, because I'm an asshole.
One last thing: when I'm writing demi!Ed in any capacity (this was really pronounced on le blog too if you follow that), there's this sort of interim period in my head where he really sort of starts to destroy himself while no one is watching, and it changes his character pretty substantially. So he might seem kind of OOC, I guess?, but it's the result of the extrapolations I made behind the scenes. Or, more accurately, it's a largely unintentional side effect of those extrapolations, because he just throws this shit at me, and I write it down and shake my head a lot. >____> Anyway, if he seems a little less… Ed, you're not alone in noticing that. And everyone and their mom is going to talk about it over the course of the next several thousand words. Please don't leave me nasty comments about him being out of character and me ruining the franchise, is what I'm saying, because I am legitimately too emotionally fragile for that shit right now what who said that
…it also occurs to me that I should probably warn for a touch of vulgarity in the early dialogue in this part. And some very dark Ed's-internal-monologue thoughts. Stay safe, frands. ♥
how I long for the autumn-
sun keeps burning me
every stone in this city
keeps reminding me
can you protect me
from what I want?
the love I let in,
it left me so lost
Mother
make me
make me a big, tall tree
so I can
shed my leaves and let it blow through me
Mother
make me
make me a big, gray cloud
so I can rain on you things I can’t say out loud
- “Mother” - Florence + the Machine -
SUMMER
[PART I]
Ed has hated summer for as long as he can…
Well. No. He’s hated summer since the automail.
Before that, it was a damned relief-no schoolwork mucking up his head; no mess of facts and figures and details he was supposed to memorize and regurgitate, crawling into the crevices between the sigils and the lines that he wanted to be keeping in his brain. No struggle to relate to children who talked about their fathers, who went home and played with toys, who fought their way syllable by syllable through books with more words than pictures. No enforced deference to grownups who ranted at him for falling asleep after a night of learning things that mattered, like that was some kind of fucking crime.
With Teacher, the summer hardly mattered; the whole year was a blurry stretch of sparring and sweat and cramped text and diagrams and practice and practice and practice regardless of the weather-though he remembers thinking it was unholily hot; remembers instructions to drink more water than he ever would have imagined necessary if he hadn’t already been thinking… If he hadn’t already known…
Water-thirty-five liters; carbon-twenty kilograms-
But the automail was when predictions of summer heat changed from a minor inconvenience to a premonition of excruciating pain.
The whole fucking dumbass “wool uniform with undershirt in all seasons, on all occasions, no exceptions, only doom” directive is not fucking helping matters, either.
Winry always says “Just keep it covered, you moron; I’ll-work on it,” and bites her lip when she sees the places that the metal’s burnt his skin. He knows she means it-honestly, it’s gotta be worse for the people in Rush Valley than it is for him here, so he’s glad they’re her priority, more or less. He’s also secretly glad that those guys’ll be her guinea pig, so to speak. He knows that he’ll be one of the first to benefit if she figures out something awesome and finds a way to implement it; and he knows that that’s just a matter of time.
Al doesn’t say anything. Al just looks at him, mouth clamped shut, lips pressed in a thin line, eyes shadowed and narrowed and sad, and Ed knows that guilt so fucking intimately that he can feel the edge of it against his throat. He knows that no matter how many times he says I don’t care, it’s all right, it’s fine, it’s really nothing, look at what we got for what I paid, everything is fine, Al, nothing in the universe will dull that blade. They were both supposed to get back to the way they were before-back to their bodies, back to rights. Al didn’t want it just to be him-Al’s too damn good to be able to forget what Ed lost that night, no matter how much time passes with him here, and whole, and living the way humans are meant to, with fingertips and nerves and eyes and eardrums and tastebuds galore.
Al just looks, and says nothing, and refuses to forget.
And Ed loves him for that so much that it hurts more than the heat ever will. It’s thick and heavy in the center of his chest, but fucking hell, it’s beautiful.
Anyway.
Summer.
Automail.
Uniforms.
Fucking atmospheres of hot air pouring out of Havoc’s mouth across the table as the clock hand drags towards five.
“I don’t even want to tell you about the sex,” he says, dreamily, which is about the most obvious lie Ed has heard in his life since that time when Al was four and covered in frosting and cake crumbs and kept repeating Wasn’t me. “Not because it’s not amazing, ’cause it is, but-just-it’s so special. It’s like it’s-sacred or something. I don’t want to talk about it, ’cause then it won’t be all just ours anymore. You know?”
“As always,” Breda says, rolling his pen slowly across the desktop, monitoring its progress intently as he nudges it along, “you’re doing an exemplary job of not talking.”
“Thanks,” Havoc says. “It’s just-I get it now. It’s past words, is the thing. Love is. God. I think I’m gonna marry her.”
“And relinquish your membership to the Pathetic Bachelors Club?” Breda asks. “Damn it, Jean; you’re our poster boy. You can’t quit.”
“Get bent,” Havoc says contentedly.
“You were less annoying when you were in love with the Car,” Breda says.
The Car is something of a myth: up until he started dating Rebecca, Havoc talked about nothing except the antique (his word of choice was “classic”) roadster he’s been laboriously fixing up despite a pronounced lack of practical knowledge about the whole process. Ed has never figured out whether or not the Car actually exists-as far as he can tell, no one’s ever seen it, and Havoc has always brushed off all of Ed’s suggestions of calling Winry for some professional advice. It’s perfectly possible the Car is complete bullshit, and Havoc just wanted a manly hobby to talk about at length to demonstrate his coolness; but Havoc has never seemed to Ed like the type to invent something like that. Ed’s settled on the likelihood that the Car does, in fact, reside in the driveway and garage of Havoc’s little townhouse, but that he’s exaggerating hugely about the progress he’s made on it, because he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing.
“On the upside,” Breda says, turning the pen precisely one-hundred and eighty degrees and starting to roll it back towards himself, “if you can convince a chick as bangin’ as Rebecca to put up with your crap for more than a week at a stretch, there must be hope for the rest of us.”
Ed would honestly like to know what the denotation of bangin’ is. What differentiates bangin’ from ordinary hot? Is it functionally a synonym of foxy, or is it more connotative of physical attributes alone, whereas foxy is predicated on a specific attitude?
Somebody needs to write this shit down. The data’s all anecdotal, and Ed sucks at linguistics.
He also sucks at focusing on a huge-ass pile of fucking requisition forms when the heat is seeping into the meat of his brain and cooking it from the inside while his dumbass coworkers ascend to all-new heights of objectifying women and shit.
He taps the eraser of his pencil slowly on the next yawning, gaping, endless blank line. What the fuck is he supposed to write there, again? Fucking… shit. Even the pencil looks like it’s sweating. Maybe that’s his sweat. From his hand. Running down the pencil. That’s disgusting. Hopefully it’s actually sweat in his eyelashes distorting his fucking vision, which is also disgusting, but not quite as bad.
…gross. Sweat in his eyelashes. That’d explain the faint burning sensation in his eyes. Fucking saline everywhere. This is a travesty. They should just shut the whole fucking building down and ship everybody to the snow when it gets this fucking hot; no one’s going to get any work done like this.
“Aren’t you shacking up with Sheska now?” Breda says, rotating his pen in Fuery’s direction.
At a glance, it’s hard to tell if Fuery blushes, or it’s just a sunburn setting in. “That’s-we’re not-there’s no shacking. In any direction.”
“What a curious idiom,” Falman says. He looks the least drained and pale and sweaty and heat-deadened of any of them: he isn’t slouching or outright lolling or lying directly in the path of the struggling metal fan and drooling about Rebecca Catalina. His hair is kind of drooping, though. “If anything, it should refer to cohabitation alone, rather than being a euphemism for coitu-”
“Okay,” Breda says. “Jean’s out. Kain’s accounted for. Vato, all you need is some girl who’s a walking encyclopedia. Or a walking book of questions, since you’ve got all the answers.”
“Hmm,” Falman says.
It feels like Ed’s breath turns to steam before he drags it back up his throat; he swears he can almost hear the steel of his shoulder creaking as it expands; it’s a constant prickle-burn on the edges of his unscarred skin. His blood is sort of squidge-crawling through his veins; he can feel his heartbeat throbbing slowly in his swollen-ass fingertips, in his sweaty fucking palms, right up until-
“Ed, though,” Breda says.
And his heart starts to race, and his thoughts start to stick, and his guts start to churn.
Don’t. Just leave it; just don’t.
Breda’s looking at him-watching him, like he’s a fucking sideshow-and rolling the pen back and forth. “Ed’s harder.”
Havoc snickers. “Bet he is.”
“Shut up,” Breda says to Havoc, still looking at Ed-immovable, unrelenting. “’Cause the problem is, there aren’t too many girls your age who’d get you. Who’d get the whole, y’know… lifelong-quest-and-unending-sacrifice thing. Are there? Hell, not too many people at all.”
All the ambient shifting and throat-clearing and paper-shuffling just-stops. Everything except the furious blatblatblat of Ed’s pulse in his fucking head and the rhythmic creak of the suffering fan goes still.
And the door to Mustang’s little corner office is wide fucking open to try to coax some of the miserable dead air back and forth, and-
And Ed wants to-go. To crawl in a hole and maybe stop existing for a while. Just, like, a day or two. And only if it’s cool in there. If it’s not, he’ll go-wherever. Anywhere. Anywhere in the fucking world but here.
“But I think you kinda know that,” Breda says, picking up the pen and setting it on its end, eyes fixing on him, and Ed can’t breathe, can’t move, can’t think through the humming in his skull and the leaden shroud of the impenetrable heat. “I think it factors into your weird… insecurity thing. The whole ‘Well, yes, I’m a genius, obviously, but I’ve got all this guilt and all this automail, so other than my intellect, I think I’m worthless, and no one’s ever gonna care.’”
The fan rattles.
Ed’s heart beats in his temples, in his knuckles, in the slick of sweat at the back of his knee and in his toes-which are curling instinctively, down in the sauna contained inside his fucking boot.
“Which is a cop-out,” Breda says. “The fact that letting people in is tough is what makes it worth doing; usually you know that better than anybody. But with this, you get all hung up on your inexperience and crap like you’re the only one on the planet who hasn’t had the time to figure out dating, and that’s shameful or whatever-but it’s not. If it was complicated, Jean couldn’t do it. I think you’re just overanalyzing the whole thing and getting caught up in the emotional part when it’s really way simpler than that, and it’d click for you if you could just relax.”
Breda sits back in his chair, taking the pen with him; he folds his arms and then points the tip of the pen right at the center of Ed’s forehead, like he’s solved every last equation in the universe.
“I think,” he says, matter-of-fucking-factly, “that we just need to get you laid.”
There has to be a way out of this.
There has to be some kind of an escape route, some kind of a back door he can kick through and flee from, some kind of a-
Some-
Just-
It’s too fucking hot to fish a coherent sentence out of the cesspool of his thoughts, let alone a fucking comeback, let alone a snarl or a dismissal or a rebuttal or anything that’d shut Breda up and dim that light of triumph in his eyes like he just reached into the core of Ed’s fucking body and tore out the truth of him-
And he almost-
-did.
But-
Ed likes girls. He likes the way some of them wave their hands when they talk; he likes the way some of them outline their eyes and shit, and it exaggerates their expressions when they get all excited. He loves the way Winry screeches like a fucking barn owl when she sees a new tool she wants-once his ears stop ringing, anyway. He likes Paninya, and Sheska, and Rosé, and Lieutenant Ross; he really likes Major Hawkeye. He likes Rebecca, too, which is part of what makes it so fucking uncomfortable when Havoc talks about her all the time, because it feels like gossiping behind her back even though he’s practically reciting long-ass odes to every feature that she’s got.
But he doesn’t want any of them to-like-touch-him, or… anything. He doesn’t find a girl’s mouth as interesting as what it says. He doesn’t find their hands as interesting as what they do-Winry has cracked, smudged fingernails underscored with grease because she’s fucking brilliant with those hands; because she rebuilds lives with them. That’s fucking beautiful, but it isn’t-like-‘hot’. It just… is. It’s a fact. She is a human being with a remarkable skill, same as him, same as anyone.
Her eyes are a really pretty color of blue-not even like a bright summer-sky-blue; it’s darker than that; it’s that first moment when the horizon starts melting into purple as the sun goes down. It’s a deep water blue. Like sapphires. Like shadows on the snow.
Al asked him, once, the other week, in a casual voice, over breakfast, before he’d had much coffee, probably hoping he wouldn’t remember afterward-“Do you ever dream about Winry, Brother?”
He said, “Yeah, sure, sometimes. Do you?”
He didn’t say I dreamed the other night that she was making us a new Mom out of automail, and I kept saying she should stop, and she kept saying ‘I’m trying to help,’ and right when she finished, its eyes lit up red, and it said ‘Ed-ward’ just like Nina did right at the end, and I couldn’t stop screaming-
But when I woke up, I couldn’t breathe to scream, and I couldn’t move to turn the fucking light on, and I guess it was stupid, but I thought it would be over when we got you back-I thought we would set that one thing right again, and all the rest would fall back into place.
And that was stupid, wasn’t it?
He knows that what Al was really asking was “Do you ever dream about having sex with Winry, Brother?”, and the answer to that is that just thinking about her that way makes him sick to his stomach, because it feels like a betrayal-of her; of how great she is; of the simple fact that she’s a human being who has a body, but it’s so much less than who she is; of the less-simple fact that so many people probably take one look at her and do all kinds of fucked-up shit to her inside their heads because she looks like that, because she’s pretty and all curvy and whatever shit-
And the whole things stirs up this fucking whirlpool in the pit of his stomach, and his guts twist tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter until he thinks he’s going to cough them up in one big mass of blood and dreck and viscera, and that’ll be the end of it-the end of him.
He doesn’t want to get laid.
And he damn fucking sure doesn’t want his fucking coworkers to try to make it happen to him.
For him.
Whatthefuckever.
“I think you need to get a fucking life,” he says.
Too far. He can see it instantly-Breda’s eyes widen a little and then narrow. The guy was only trying to be nice; he was just offering to do Ed a solid, as far as he’s concerned, and who the fuck is this condescending asshole kid to respond to that with-?
“Are you scared?” Breda says. “Seriously, it’s not that big a deal. And it doesn’t have to be a disrespectful thing if you’re upfront about it, and everybody knows what’s going on. You find a chick who’s cool with that, and you get your dick wet-”
No. No, fuck, mayday, stop this shit-
“-and it’s great, and it’s over before you know it, and then you’re a man.”
Because you can’t be, without it-isn’t that right? You can’t be a person. You can’t be whole. Isn’t that what it comes down to? If you don’t dream about pretty girls naked, you’re some kind of fucking alien, and nobody wants anything to do with your shit.
Just the mere abstract fucking thought of the slide of flesh makes Ed’s stomach drop so hard and so fast that his eyes unfocus, and his banging heart leaps up and stops his throat.
Ha. Bangin’. Maybe that’s what it’s supposed to mean. Maybe people are supposed to have that effect on you-make your organs jump around in your chest cavity and block your airways and shudder there. Maybe that’s what it’s about.
He hates it. It hurts.
“That’s enough,” Hawkeye says in the bullwhip-voice, and it cuts straight through the thick heat of this horrible fucking room. “All of you are dismissed.”
Ed’s eyes are responding to his efforts to move them-nothing else is, but eyes are a start. He darts them towards the clock above the file cabinets; it’s four minutes to five. Maybe the heat’ll break when the sun goes down, in another… what? Two hours? Three? Maybe he can go home and lie in a cold bath and pretend he’s dead.
The intrusiveness of that thought startles him awake.
He keeps-thinking-that kind of shit. Lately. Since… pretty much just since he stopped moving. Since he got Al back, and he didn’t have to drive himself so doggedly that there wasn’t time to think anymore. Since he started to find just enough hours left over after work to qualify as spare, more or less. Since he started to have the leeway to sit and really observe all of the people around him; since he started to feel Al drifting off towards all those Normal Life things Ed would’ve died in a second all along to give him.
Since fulfilling his life’s entire goal left him feeling grateful and relieved and completely fucking empty.
Since he noticed that even the people he loves the most don’t really understand him anymore.
It’s not that they don’t make sense-they do; it does; it’s all perfectly fucking logical, especially from an evolutionary point of view.
It’s just that he’s on the other side of a fucking chasm from them, and it’s way too far to jump, and what if falling’s worse than being left behind?
Don’t think about it. Just-don’t. Better if-better just not to. At all. Slam the door, flip the deadbolt, draw the blinds.
But right now-for once, or at least for the first time in a long-ass while-he’s not moving fast enough. In the two full seconds he spends rooted to the chair, everybody else scrambles to grab up their belongings and makes a fucking break for the door. That says a thing or two about the power of the word ‘dismissed’ jackknifing off the right tongue, but holy hell, two seconds flat, and then it’s just-
Him.
And Hawkeye.
And…
He has to shift forward in the seat to put his feet on the ground-which is just bad fucking design, all right, not, y’know, anything else-in order to get the leverage to scoot his chair back, and that kills another three-quarters of a second, and out of the corner of his eye he sees Mustang’s silhouette sauntering through the doorway and pulling out another of the chairs.
He could just shove all the sheets of paper into a mound and then run. But they’re from different files, and he’d just be fucking over his tomorrow-self, and it’s not like-
Well, shit. It’s not like he can’t handle Mustang; what the hell is there to be afraid of?
’Cause he knows, somehow, at a deep level, with a feeling like a tightening right underneath his sternum, that Hawkeye wasn’t mad at him.
So it’s just-Mustang.
And Mustang ain’t shit.
Still, there’s-a faint touch, just a flutter of something like… what? Trepidation?
Because Mustang just gets people. Mustang reads people like most people read newspaper headlines-quick and fucking easy, skimming for the relevant information, and if he’s interested, he’ll look further, or else he can chuck them aside.
Ed honestly doesn’t know how much the bastard’s figured out. He’s not a fucking moron-or at least not about shit that involves sticking his stupid nose into the private lives of his employees-so he must know something’s… wrong. Fucked-up. Weird. About Ed. Something extra-fucking-special; something in this arena, the whole sex-love-romance-dating hellhole-thing. He must have noticed the… what? The way Ed avoids those kinds of questions like they’re a fucking contagion? The way he tenses every time the stupid banter starts? The way he never, ever, ever brags about his plans on any given Friday night?
He’s tried. He’s tried to keep it under wraps, or at least out of the fucking spotlight; he’s hedged and dodged and outright fucking lied to try to hide it. But Mustang’s not stupid, and they’ve been snarking at each other since Ed was a kid, and…
And shit. Shit. Mustang sits down and crosses his legs at the knee before Ed can convince his own fucking asshole joints to hold his weight and help him stand.
[PART II]