FMA -- Summer (Part II)
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: You have no idea how dumb my browser is being right now. OH SHIT IT HEARD ME
SUMMER
[PART II]
So they’re just-sitting. The two of them. And Hawkeye’s standing. And it’s silent. Which is-fine.
Mustang reaches out-it’s getting really, really fucking hard to tell how much of the slowness of things is the heat, and people actually feeling all lazy and shit; and how much is Ed’s brain rocketing through thoughts like a fucking freight train going downhill with no goddamn brakes-and picks up one of the files someone abandoned in the mad rush for freedom.
“If it makes you uncomfortable,” Mustang says, gaze panning down the page, “I can tell them to stop.”
He doesn’t mean tell.
He means order.
He means I can use my position of power to alter the overall personality of this team if it would help your panicked little animal brain rest easier.
It’s-a nice-thought.
It really is.
But it’s not that simple.
Ed tries to clear his throat. There’s too much fucking heat in it-too much humid air; he can’t tell what’s saliva and what’s sweat.
“They’d wanna know why,” he says. “They’d-I mean, they’d do it, I guess. Probably. They’d be… cool about it. But they’d wanna know why. So it’s-it’d be-easier to-not.”
Mustang’s gaze lifts to glance at him, and he looks away. Safer to admire the fucking file cabinets. He never noticed before that the labels don’t match at all. Must’ve been handwritten by half a dozen different employees or something. Makes sense. You can’t just-expect the same person to be available whenever a cabinet needs to get labeled, and Mustang didn’t even have this room until a couple years ago, although it’s practically fucking impossible to imagine someone else prowling around a space that he’s claimed so damn entirely that the very fucking walls just about breathe out his na-
In his peripheral vision, a Hawkeye-shaped shadow steps forward and pulls out the chair right across from him.
Fucking trapped. He should’ve known better. He should’ve run.
He should’ve-
“Edward,” Hawkeye says, and maybe it’s the military training, maybe it’s the manners his mother taught him, but his eyes snap to her whether he likes it or not; “have you ever experienced sexual attraction?”
The fan creaks, but the air’s not moving. Nothing is, except his feeble fucking heart slamming itself against his ribcage, twirling up his throat.
How can she-?
So fucking clinical, just like that-fucking scientific, out loud, like it’s just-
Like it’s not even a secret; like-
The back of his neck burns; his face, his throat, the skin all down his chest-all of it, fucking aflame with the heat and the horror and the disbelief, and she just-said that. Like it doesn’t even matter; like she wasn’t cutting to the fucking heart of him and dragging it out on display with the hot blood gushing on her fucking hands, like-
Like it’s just a normal fucking question. Like she’s waiting for an answer. Like she expects one. Like he owes her that much, after all the times she’s had his back; like he owes her the fucking truth.
He does. When you think about it. When you think about equivalency.
He swallows, and it sticks-his mouth feels dry; his whole head feels arid, hollow, echoey, strafed with ribbons of the ever-unfurling heat.
“I-dunno,” he says. Like spitting fucking nails-fucking knives. Shards and broken pieces-pottery that spent the whole day baking in the evil fucking sun. “I don’t-think-so.” He can feel Mustang’s eyes on him like a pair of fucking pistol barrels. Without them, would it be a damn relief? Hawkeye’s face isn’t giving him much to go on, but it’s kind of-soft. For her, anyway. Her gaze on him. No fucking judgment in it; he’d know; he’d feel it. “I mean, I never… but you can’t prove a fucking negative.”
“You don’t have to,” she says. “You don’t have to prove anything.”
She and Roy exchange glances, and then-
It’s weird. It’s weird and uncanny; Ed can tell on a fundamental level-by instinct-that they’ve stopped being two officers, ceased to be commander and subordinate, and resumed a connection that stays suspended when they are.
They’re just two people now-two people who go a long way back, and have a lot in common, and understand each other without words.
“There’s a name for us,” Hawkeye says. “It’s ‘asexual’.” Mustang shifts, and Hawkeye’s mouth quirks. “Or,” she says, “if you find someday that there are circumstances under which you might feel that-there are other words. It’s a spectrum. Like light.”
“Or a scale,” Mustang says, with the biggest cheesy grin Ed’s ever seen on another human being, and- “Like pH.”
And what the fuck? Is he-he’s trying to be nice. He’s trying to be cutesy and funny and diffuse the tension, because…
Because he wants Ed to feel better.
That has to be it.
There isn’t any other explanation that makes the variables add up; he must-
Just-
Care.
Ed’s head spins so hard he might as well be drunk off his ass right now. It’s too much all at once; too much information to process, doled out in half a dozen fucking sentences in sequence, and he doesn’t know where to start analyzing it and breaking it down into pieces he can understand.
Hawkeye-
Is like him, maybe even more like this than he is; there are other people who-
And Roy Mustang actually gives a shit-
And-
They know. Both of them, they know; they know about him, they know what’s in him, what’s lacking in him, and they don’t… mind. They get it, or at least Hawkeye does, and Mustang’s trying to.
They don’t think he’s a huge fucking freak with nothing but pieces missing-nothing but shit that’s not there; nothing but a conglomeration of the edges of the holes. Nothing but fucking emptinesses stitched together, with a little steel on the side.
They don’t think there’s something wrong with him.
And-
How could there be? How could this be wrong if Hawkeye’s like this, too? Hawkeye’s pretty much the coolest, smartest, most shit-together-having person he’s ever met; if she’s-if she doesn’t-
He looks at her. And then he looks at Mustang. And then he looks at her again, and the words all stick and jumble in his throat until the letters and the syllables are meaningless, and it’s all just gibberish clogging up his airway, and he drops his gaze to the tabletop, but he wishes he could tell her-
Everything. The depths of the loneliness and the heights of the fear and the dizzying ricochets between them; the faint but unshakable sense that he’s slowly but surely being left behind by everyone he’s ever loved.
And that’s the even more amazing thing.
If she’s like this, too, then she probably already knows.
A thin layer of sweat fucking trembles on the back of his neck-like a coating, like somebody slathered it there, magma dripping slowly down his spine. He stares at his hands-fucked-up, mismatched, eternally wrong, like the rest of him. Ill-fitting. Only ever halfway to human.
The particular rustle of limp, damp, heavy fabric tells him Mustang’s shifted just slightly.
“It was a bit inconvenient,” he says, and his tone is-what? Light? Pleasant? Conversational? Like he’s trying to tug all the right wires to defuse the tension mingled with the stifling fucking heat in this room; like he’s trying to make Ed feel… safe. Comfortable. At-home.
He of all people ought to understand the fundamental problem with the last one. You don’t get to come home when you burned it down and gave it up; you don’t get to close the door somewhere and let the weight of the world slide off your shoulders for a while. You don’t get a place when you fuck your first one up that bad.
And lately Ed doesn’t have the people anymore.
“I believe I missed out on quite a lot of dates around that time,” Mustang is saying in Hawkeye’s direction, “because everyone assumed that you and I were romantically involved simply because we spent so much time together.”
“My heart bleeds for your sacrifices,” Hawkeye says, so drily the weather should be taking notes.
Roy laughs-softly, gently, and it doesn’t even sound like him; there’s no venom or acid or ulterior-motive-bastardliness in it anywhere. He’s just-a guy. Just a man. Just a human being who happens to have a uniform on today, just a person, with a big maelstrom of turmoils and triumphs underneath the skin.
Ed is-
-safe here.
For the first time in a long time, he is sitting in a room with two people who get it and don’t mind-
It’s fucking dizzying. Like falling off a fucking cliff and feeling the wind dragging through his hair, hauling on his clothes, scuffing at his skin, but he hasn’t hit the ground yet, and what if it’s not as bad as-?
He swallows hard-once, twice, three times, willing enough of the precious little moisture in the room to collect in his mouth so he can speak.
Part of him doesn’t want to break the spell. Part of him doesn’t want to remind Mustang that he’s still Major Elric, still the token smartass kid, still the naïve little mascot whether or not he’s barging through the streets in a red coat like a knight’s escutcheon, brighter than a bloodstain. What if this whole nice-thing is just another of the endless fronts, and it cracks through and shatters and slips away? What if Mustang’s just waiting for Ed to let his guard down, and that’s when the knives’ll come out? What if it’s just a long game to make him even more vulnerable before the cruel shit-?
But he wouldn’t.
Not really. Not Mustang. He’s an asshole, but he’s not… bad.
And even if he was, he wouldn’t dare pull that kind of shit in front of Hawkeye.
She’s the one who moves her hand on the table, like maybe she’d reach out to touch Ed’s arm if it wasn’t so fucking hot. “Are you all right, Edward?”
“Yeah,” he says, which is a fucking lie, and probably they all know it. “Just-”
They wait. Both of them. For him to figure out what he wants to say. Like they care, like they want to know, like they respect him, and-
Part of him sort of knew they did-for his competence, and his intellect, and his power.
But it’s a different thing to be sitting here with his ribcage pried right open, bleeding out his secrets. It’s a different thing for them to respect the worst part of him, the broken shit, the big fat fucking mess that’s underneath.
It’s different for them to still care when he’s not good at this shit at all.
And he owes it to them, for that, to dredge up something halfway coherent, doesn’t he?
“I didn’t-” He tries to clear his throat. “I didn’t know there were enough of-” Us. “-enough people like-” Me. “-that-for there to be a… whole… category, I guess.”
He risks a glance up at Hawkeye’s face, and she smiles at him, kind of gently.
“I didn’t either for a long time,” she says. “I was fortunate enough to have people around me who didn’t try to change me either way.”
His heart beats quick and hard in his temples, one-two-one-two, and he can feel the sweat snaking through his hair-damp-hot trails on his scalp, and everything is horrible when it’s this hot, but if he doesn’t ask the real questions now, he might never get the chance.
Edward Elric doesn’t back down from a challenge, right?
He’s famous for this.
He’s also famous for being under Mustang’s eyes and thumb and patronage, and right now he can feel that the first is true.
He holds his head up even though it’s fucking heavy with the heat and the sweat and the swimming, churning, densely-tangled revelations. “Did you ever-fake it?”
Hawkeye pauses-she does that a lot, actually, he’s noticed; it’s her way of regrouping before she responds, and figuring out how to arrange her thoughts in the most efficient way before she articulates them. Sometimes, depending on the situation, he also suspects she might be counting down from ten trying to suppress the urge to beat one of her coworkers around the head with a blunt object, but in any case it’s one of the innumerable tiny things that make her pretty great.
This pause is long, though, which must mean she really has to think it over.
Shit.
She must sense that he regrets even fucking asking, too, because she offers him another little smile.
“I wouldn’t say that I ‘faked’ it,” she says. “I trusted the validity of my feelings too much to lie to myself or anyone else. But I did… try. To act ‘normal’ in a controlled situation, to see if that might… awaken something.” She sits back in her chair slightly; she’s still confidently upright-all sharp, clean lines-but the military posture has relaxed into something a hell of a lot friendlier, and it’s staggering, what a fucking difference that makes, even here, in the same damn office with the same damn people and the same damn shit to hide. “I suppose testing it that way is sort of expected in a household where science is the only religion you’ve ever learned.” She arches an eyebrow at him. “I imagine you know a thing or two about that.”
Ed tries to smile. It’s better than I fucking tried, Major, I fucking tried so hard to make myself feel anything but sick and fucked up and past hope and past help, and this is the first time in five years that I haven’t thought I was the only one there is who’s ever been this way.
Mustang heaves one of his best histrionic sighs, which startles Ed into glancing at him, not least because he’s breathing a ton of hot air out into the room, as usual. He’s got one elbow on the table to rest his chin on his fist, and his expression is half ruefulness and half stoic resolve, and he looks like an idiot and an oil painting and a guy you might have the sudden impulse just to talk to if you saw him hanging around the bar. Like he knows a couple things, at least, and he’d make you laugh while he invented a couple more.
“It was a tremendous blow to my teenaged dignity,” Mustang says, and he can’t mean- “Not to be able to convince someone to be interested in me, but once I struggled past the injury enough to recognize that it had never been about me, I think we were both better for it. And I know that we were closer than we would have been if it had somehow worked.”
“Well,” Hawkeye says, “‘closer’ in a manner of speaking.”
Mustang actually-
-snorts.
Like a fucking nerd.
Better yet, like a nickering friggin’ horse.
Then he half-turns to look at her, and it’s-
More than just amused, more than just fond or affectionate or whatever shit.
He looks at her like she’s the most important person in the fucking world at this instant, regardless of what she does or doesn’t feel.
A spear like lightning edged with ice-hot-cold sudden comprehension, shredding his stomach lining, jagged edges carving through his flesh, ramming right into the base of his spine so that his whole body startles hard.
That’s what he wants.
He wants to matter.
And maybe it’s the most pathetic thing in the entire fucking universe, but he wants to matter to somebody, and he wants to know it, because they look at him like that.
It’s fucking greedy, too-selfish and way past stupid. Because he matters to Al and Win, obviously, and Al especially gives him a look a hell of a lot like that sometimes.
But they’re family. They’re blood. They’re stuck with him, and maybe they’re okay with that, but they didn’t choose him. They didn’t pluck him out of the endless swirl of human souls wriggling through the world and say This one’s special-this one’s mine.
He shouldn’t care. It’s so fucking dumb; he’s no stranger to getting a grand total of zero of the things he wants for his own self, and that’s fine. Wanting and needing are two different categories, and one you take care of, and one you push aside most of the time. That’s fine. Whatever. He’s used to it.
It’s just that the world is so fucking big and so fucking hollow, and some part of him is positive that if someone looked at him like that, it’d feel a little smaller and a little fuller and a little more safe.
It’s fine.
He can take care of himself; he always has.
“The point is,” Hawkeye says, jarring him out of the plume of steam clouding around his writhing thoughts, “everything that you feel-or don’t, or can’t feel-is completely valid.”
“And scientifically viable,” Mustang says, shifting in his chair again. He switches which leg he’s got slung over the opposite knee and then looking like he regrets the concentration of body heat.
Hawkeye smiles slightly. “As I mentioned-there’s nothing to prove. There’s nothing you have to prove. There are no criteria, and there is no checklist, and there is nothing missing from you. You are who you are, precisely how you are, and that’s enough for anyone who matters.”
“People struggle to understand it,” Mustang says, disassembling his histrionic chin-on-hand slump long enough to gesture towards the larger table and its empty chairs. “I did, for a while. But… Edward.”
Mustang never calls him that.
And it’s funny how the laser eyes are always, always too-intense, but just this once they’re not too warm.
“I know that ordinarily your principle of existence is ‘do what needs to be done and fuck anybody who disagrees’,” Mustang says, which… sounds about right, actually.
Except that he’s not done.
“But I also know that when you believe that you’ve done something wrong,” Mustang says, “or that you’re not trying hard enough, or in one manner or another that the insufficiency is something that comes from within you-that’s when you get merciless, and you start to punish yourself. And it’s extraordinary, in a way, because you never treat anyone else like that. You are the only person you can’t forgive.”
He sits up, and forward, and fixes the laser eyes on Ed’s, and holy shit, they’re like molten obsidian and a sea of ink, and Ed could drown and die in there, but some part of him is sure the well would feel like silk on every centimeter of his skin.
“Please,” Mustang says. “Please remember that this is not your fault-not anyone’s fault; there is no ‘fault’, because there’s nothing wrong with you.”
Ed’s never seen him like this-never seen him this earnest about anything; never seen the way the planes of his face look when he’s overflowing with good intentions; never seen this kind of fire in him, pouring off of him in waves so warm it’d be stifling even if the air around them wasn’t dragging with the heat.
His brain won’t take in any of it-just won’t. The wheels are spinning, but the boiling sun warped all the gears, and the belts just turn and turn, and nothing moves, and nothing catches, and he can’t bring himself to comprehend the concept that Roy Mustang-
-likes-
-him.
As a human being.
Roy Mustang thinks he’s valuable, more or less; for his own sake, not just because of alchemy and intellect and all the reasons that he’s useful. But as a person. Apparently.
Roy Mustang thinks he’s a valuable person and wants him to be happy.
How the hell is he supposed to process that?
It’s all he can do to try to choke down the knot of disbelief and bewildered gratitude that’s clogging up his throat for long enough to say something-anything; he’s been staring like a fucking bug-eyed amphibian for about a year already.
“Okay,” he gets out.
Mustang has the grace to look faintly chagrined, although the touch of pink in his cheeks could very well be the miserable fucking heat instead of embarrassment over hurling something like that in Ed’s face out of the fucking blue.
“Good,” Hawkeye says, calm as you please, and that actually kind of confirms it, in a way, because she only ever rescues Mustang when he needs it, so she must’ve sensed sheepishness on him, too. She reads him easier than anyone. Ed’s gotten better at it over the years, but she pretty much wrote the user’s manual, and as far as he’s concerned, what she says goes. “Edward,” she says, and his attention snaps back to her like it’s magnetized, and she’s got the whole world charged with leylines to her fingertips. “I’d like you to take this.” With the characteristic machine-like efficiency, she selects a sheet of paper from her clipboard, smoothes it out, catches up an abandoned pen, and writes. “It’s my telephone number at home. Memorize it instead if you’d prefer, but if there is ever a time you need something-including something such as a reassurance of doubt-I want you to call me.”
She folds the paper twice, neat and clean and fastidious as ever, and holds it out to him.
“Any time, day or night,” she says. She tilts her head towards Mustang. “He already does.”
“Guilty,” Mustang says.
Hawkeye smiles again. “We’re on your side.”
Ed’s arms feel heavy; his sleeves feel sodden; his brain feels unhooked, unhinged, and unstable in the extreme. But he reaches up and takes it, even though it feels like he must be putting sweat-mark fingerprints all over it-even though he ruins everything he touches, and he’d be shocked if this was an exception.
Mustang pushes his chair back and stands. “Let me go bring the car around; it’d be criminal to make either of you walk home in this heat, and I don’t have time for the court-martial.”
Ed grasps around in the tornado inside him for a normal reaction. “Anything to avoid paperwork, huh?”
Mustang flashes him the brightest devil-may-care grin. “Precisely.”
He saunters out the picture of the debonair young general, but the way he shuts the door really quietly belies that more than he probably thinks.
[PART III]
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: You have no idea how dumb my browser is being right now. OH SHIT IT HEARD ME
SUMMER
[PART II]
So they’re just-sitting. The two of them. And Hawkeye’s standing. And it’s silent. Which is-fine.
Mustang reaches out-it’s getting really, really fucking hard to tell how much of the slowness of things is the heat, and people actually feeling all lazy and shit; and how much is Ed’s brain rocketing through thoughts like a fucking freight train going downhill with no goddamn brakes-and picks up one of the files someone abandoned in the mad rush for freedom.
“If it makes you uncomfortable,” Mustang says, gaze panning down the page, “I can tell them to stop.”
He doesn’t mean tell.
He means order.
He means I can use my position of power to alter the overall personality of this team if it would help your panicked little animal brain rest easier.
It’s-a nice-thought.
It really is.
But it’s not that simple.
Ed tries to clear his throat. There’s too much fucking heat in it-too much humid air; he can’t tell what’s saliva and what’s sweat.
“They’d wanna know why,” he says. “They’d-I mean, they’d do it, I guess. Probably. They’d be… cool about it. But they’d wanna know why. So it’s-it’d be-easier to-not.”
Mustang’s gaze lifts to glance at him, and he looks away. Safer to admire the fucking file cabinets. He never noticed before that the labels don’t match at all. Must’ve been handwritten by half a dozen different employees or something. Makes sense. You can’t just-expect the same person to be available whenever a cabinet needs to get labeled, and Mustang didn’t even have this room until a couple years ago, although it’s practically fucking impossible to imagine someone else prowling around a space that he’s claimed so damn entirely that the very fucking walls just about breathe out his na-
In his peripheral vision, a Hawkeye-shaped shadow steps forward and pulls out the chair right across from him.
Fucking trapped. He should’ve known better. He should’ve run.
He should’ve-
“Edward,” Hawkeye says, and maybe it’s the military training, maybe it’s the manners his mother taught him, but his eyes snap to her whether he likes it or not; “have you ever experienced sexual attraction?”
The fan creaks, but the air’s not moving. Nothing is, except his feeble fucking heart slamming itself against his ribcage, twirling up his throat.
How can she-?
So fucking clinical, just like that-fucking scientific, out loud, like it’s just-
Like it’s not even a secret; like-
The back of his neck burns; his face, his throat, the skin all down his chest-all of it, fucking aflame with the heat and the horror and the disbelief, and she just-said that. Like it doesn’t even matter; like she wasn’t cutting to the fucking heart of him and dragging it out on display with the hot blood gushing on her fucking hands, like-
Like it’s just a normal fucking question. Like she’s waiting for an answer. Like she expects one. Like he owes her that much, after all the times she’s had his back; like he owes her the fucking truth.
He does. When you think about it. When you think about equivalency.
He swallows, and it sticks-his mouth feels dry; his whole head feels arid, hollow, echoey, strafed with ribbons of the ever-unfurling heat.
“I-dunno,” he says. Like spitting fucking nails-fucking knives. Shards and broken pieces-pottery that spent the whole day baking in the evil fucking sun. “I don’t-think-so.” He can feel Mustang’s eyes on him like a pair of fucking pistol barrels. Without them, would it be a damn relief? Hawkeye’s face isn’t giving him much to go on, but it’s kind of-soft. For her, anyway. Her gaze on him. No fucking judgment in it; he’d know; he’d feel it. “I mean, I never… but you can’t prove a fucking negative.”
“You don’t have to,” she says. “You don’t have to prove anything.”
She and Roy exchange glances, and then-
It’s weird. It’s weird and uncanny; Ed can tell on a fundamental level-by instinct-that they’ve stopped being two officers, ceased to be commander and subordinate, and resumed a connection that stays suspended when they are.
They’re just two people now-two people who go a long way back, and have a lot in common, and understand each other without words.
“There’s a name for us,” Hawkeye says. “It’s ‘asexual’.” Mustang shifts, and Hawkeye’s mouth quirks. “Or,” she says, “if you find someday that there are circumstances under which you might feel that-there are other words. It’s a spectrum. Like light.”
“Or a scale,” Mustang says, with the biggest cheesy grin Ed’s ever seen on another human being, and- “Like pH.”
And what the fuck? Is he-he’s trying to be nice. He’s trying to be cutesy and funny and diffuse the tension, because…
Because he wants Ed to feel better.
That has to be it.
There isn’t any other explanation that makes the variables add up; he must-
Just-
Care.
Ed’s head spins so hard he might as well be drunk off his ass right now. It’s too much all at once; too much information to process, doled out in half a dozen fucking sentences in sequence, and he doesn’t know where to start analyzing it and breaking it down into pieces he can understand.
Hawkeye-
Is like him, maybe even more like this than he is; there are other people who-
And Roy Mustang actually gives a shit-
And-
They know. Both of them, they know; they know about him, they know what’s in him, what’s lacking in him, and they don’t… mind. They get it, or at least Hawkeye does, and Mustang’s trying to.
They don’t think he’s a huge fucking freak with nothing but pieces missing-nothing but shit that’s not there; nothing but a conglomeration of the edges of the holes. Nothing but fucking emptinesses stitched together, with a little steel on the side.
They don’t think there’s something wrong with him.
And-
How could there be? How could this be wrong if Hawkeye’s like this, too? Hawkeye’s pretty much the coolest, smartest, most shit-together-having person he’s ever met; if she’s-if she doesn’t-
He looks at her. And then he looks at Mustang. And then he looks at her again, and the words all stick and jumble in his throat until the letters and the syllables are meaningless, and it’s all just gibberish clogging up his airway, and he drops his gaze to the tabletop, but he wishes he could tell her-
Everything. The depths of the loneliness and the heights of the fear and the dizzying ricochets between them; the faint but unshakable sense that he’s slowly but surely being left behind by everyone he’s ever loved.
And that’s the even more amazing thing.
If she’s like this, too, then she probably already knows.
A thin layer of sweat fucking trembles on the back of his neck-like a coating, like somebody slathered it there, magma dripping slowly down his spine. He stares at his hands-fucked-up, mismatched, eternally wrong, like the rest of him. Ill-fitting. Only ever halfway to human.
The particular rustle of limp, damp, heavy fabric tells him Mustang’s shifted just slightly.
“It was a bit inconvenient,” he says, and his tone is-what? Light? Pleasant? Conversational? Like he’s trying to tug all the right wires to defuse the tension mingled with the stifling fucking heat in this room; like he’s trying to make Ed feel… safe. Comfortable. At-home.
He of all people ought to understand the fundamental problem with the last one. You don’t get to come home when you burned it down and gave it up; you don’t get to close the door somewhere and let the weight of the world slide off your shoulders for a while. You don’t get a place when you fuck your first one up that bad.
And lately Ed doesn’t have the people anymore.
“I believe I missed out on quite a lot of dates around that time,” Mustang is saying in Hawkeye’s direction, “because everyone assumed that you and I were romantically involved simply because we spent so much time together.”
“My heart bleeds for your sacrifices,” Hawkeye says, so drily the weather should be taking notes.
Roy laughs-softly, gently, and it doesn’t even sound like him; there’s no venom or acid or ulterior-motive-bastardliness in it anywhere. He’s just-a guy. Just a man. Just a human being who happens to have a uniform on today, just a person, with a big maelstrom of turmoils and triumphs underneath the skin.
Ed is-
-safe here.
For the first time in a long time, he is sitting in a room with two people who get it and don’t mind-
It’s fucking dizzying. Like falling off a fucking cliff and feeling the wind dragging through his hair, hauling on his clothes, scuffing at his skin, but he hasn’t hit the ground yet, and what if it’s not as bad as-?
He swallows hard-once, twice, three times, willing enough of the precious little moisture in the room to collect in his mouth so he can speak.
Part of him doesn’t want to break the spell. Part of him doesn’t want to remind Mustang that he’s still Major Elric, still the token smartass kid, still the naïve little mascot whether or not he’s barging through the streets in a red coat like a knight’s escutcheon, brighter than a bloodstain. What if this whole nice-thing is just another of the endless fronts, and it cracks through and shatters and slips away? What if Mustang’s just waiting for Ed to let his guard down, and that’s when the knives’ll come out? What if it’s just a long game to make him even more vulnerable before the cruel shit-?
But he wouldn’t.
Not really. Not Mustang. He’s an asshole, but he’s not… bad.
And even if he was, he wouldn’t dare pull that kind of shit in front of Hawkeye.
She’s the one who moves her hand on the table, like maybe she’d reach out to touch Ed’s arm if it wasn’t so fucking hot. “Are you all right, Edward?”
“Yeah,” he says, which is a fucking lie, and probably they all know it. “Just-”
They wait. Both of them. For him to figure out what he wants to say. Like they care, like they want to know, like they respect him, and-
Part of him sort of knew they did-for his competence, and his intellect, and his power.
But it’s a different thing to be sitting here with his ribcage pried right open, bleeding out his secrets. It’s a different thing for them to respect the worst part of him, the broken shit, the big fat fucking mess that’s underneath.
It’s different for them to still care when he’s not good at this shit at all.
And he owes it to them, for that, to dredge up something halfway coherent, doesn’t he?
“I didn’t-” He tries to clear his throat. “I didn’t know there were enough of-” Us. “-enough people like-” Me. “-that-for there to be a… whole… category, I guess.”
He risks a glance up at Hawkeye’s face, and she smiles at him, kind of gently.
“I didn’t either for a long time,” she says. “I was fortunate enough to have people around me who didn’t try to change me either way.”
His heart beats quick and hard in his temples, one-two-one-two, and he can feel the sweat snaking through his hair-damp-hot trails on his scalp, and everything is horrible when it’s this hot, but if he doesn’t ask the real questions now, he might never get the chance.
Edward Elric doesn’t back down from a challenge, right?
He’s famous for this.
He’s also famous for being under Mustang’s eyes and thumb and patronage, and right now he can feel that the first is true.
He holds his head up even though it’s fucking heavy with the heat and the sweat and the swimming, churning, densely-tangled revelations. “Did you ever-fake it?”
Hawkeye pauses-she does that a lot, actually, he’s noticed; it’s her way of regrouping before she responds, and figuring out how to arrange her thoughts in the most efficient way before she articulates them. Sometimes, depending on the situation, he also suspects she might be counting down from ten trying to suppress the urge to beat one of her coworkers around the head with a blunt object, but in any case it’s one of the innumerable tiny things that make her pretty great.
This pause is long, though, which must mean she really has to think it over.
Shit.
She must sense that he regrets even fucking asking, too, because she offers him another little smile.
“I wouldn’t say that I ‘faked’ it,” she says. “I trusted the validity of my feelings too much to lie to myself or anyone else. But I did… try. To act ‘normal’ in a controlled situation, to see if that might… awaken something.” She sits back in her chair slightly; she’s still confidently upright-all sharp, clean lines-but the military posture has relaxed into something a hell of a lot friendlier, and it’s staggering, what a fucking difference that makes, even here, in the same damn office with the same damn people and the same damn shit to hide. “I suppose testing it that way is sort of expected in a household where science is the only religion you’ve ever learned.” She arches an eyebrow at him. “I imagine you know a thing or two about that.”
Ed tries to smile. It’s better than I fucking tried, Major, I fucking tried so hard to make myself feel anything but sick and fucked up and past hope and past help, and this is the first time in five years that I haven’t thought I was the only one there is who’s ever been this way.
Mustang heaves one of his best histrionic sighs, which startles Ed into glancing at him, not least because he’s breathing a ton of hot air out into the room, as usual. He’s got one elbow on the table to rest his chin on his fist, and his expression is half ruefulness and half stoic resolve, and he looks like an idiot and an oil painting and a guy you might have the sudden impulse just to talk to if you saw him hanging around the bar. Like he knows a couple things, at least, and he’d make you laugh while he invented a couple more.
“It was a tremendous blow to my teenaged dignity,” Mustang says, and he can’t mean- “Not to be able to convince someone to be interested in me, but once I struggled past the injury enough to recognize that it had never been about me, I think we were both better for it. And I know that we were closer than we would have been if it had somehow worked.”
“Well,” Hawkeye says, “‘closer’ in a manner of speaking.”
Mustang actually-
-snorts.
Like a fucking nerd.
Better yet, like a nickering friggin’ horse.
Then he half-turns to look at her, and it’s-
More than just amused, more than just fond or affectionate or whatever shit.
He looks at her like she’s the most important person in the fucking world at this instant, regardless of what she does or doesn’t feel.
A spear like lightning edged with ice-hot-cold sudden comprehension, shredding his stomach lining, jagged edges carving through his flesh, ramming right into the base of his spine so that his whole body startles hard.
That’s what he wants.
He wants to matter.
And maybe it’s the most pathetic thing in the entire fucking universe, but he wants to matter to somebody, and he wants to know it, because they look at him like that.
It’s fucking greedy, too-selfish and way past stupid. Because he matters to Al and Win, obviously, and Al especially gives him a look a hell of a lot like that sometimes.
But they’re family. They’re blood. They’re stuck with him, and maybe they’re okay with that, but they didn’t choose him. They didn’t pluck him out of the endless swirl of human souls wriggling through the world and say This one’s special-this one’s mine.
He shouldn’t care. It’s so fucking dumb; he’s no stranger to getting a grand total of zero of the things he wants for his own self, and that’s fine. Wanting and needing are two different categories, and one you take care of, and one you push aside most of the time. That’s fine. Whatever. He’s used to it.
It’s just that the world is so fucking big and so fucking hollow, and some part of him is positive that if someone looked at him like that, it’d feel a little smaller and a little fuller and a little more safe.
It’s fine.
He can take care of himself; he always has.
“The point is,” Hawkeye says, jarring him out of the plume of steam clouding around his writhing thoughts, “everything that you feel-or don’t, or can’t feel-is completely valid.”
“And scientifically viable,” Mustang says, shifting in his chair again. He switches which leg he’s got slung over the opposite knee and then looking like he regrets the concentration of body heat.
Hawkeye smiles slightly. “As I mentioned-there’s nothing to prove. There’s nothing you have to prove. There are no criteria, and there is no checklist, and there is nothing missing from you. You are who you are, precisely how you are, and that’s enough for anyone who matters.”
“People struggle to understand it,” Mustang says, disassembling his histrionic chin-on-hand slump long enough to gesture towards the larger table and its empty chairs. “I did, for a while. But… Edward.”
Mustang never calls him that.
And it’s funny how the laser eyes are always, always too-intense, but just this once they’re not too warm.
“I know that ordinarily your principle of existence is ‘do what needs to be done and fuck anybody who disagrees’,” Mustang says, which… sounds about right, actually.
Except that he’s not done.
“But I also know that when you believe that you’ve done something wrong,” Mustang says, “or that you’re not trying hard enough, or in one manner or another that the insufficiency is something that comes from within you-that’s when you get merciless, and you start to punish yourself. And it’s extraordinary, in a way, because you never treat anyone else like that. You are the only person you can’t forgive.”
He sits up, and forward, and fixes the laser eyes on Ed’s, and holy shit, they’re like molten obsidian and a sea of ink, and Ed could drown and die in there, but some part of him is sure the well would feel like silk on every centimeter of his skin.
“Please,” Mustang says. “Please remember that this is not your fault-not anyone’s fault; there is no ‘fault’, because there’s nothing wrong with you.”
Ed’s never seen him like this-never seen him this earnest about anything; never seen the way the planes of his face look when he’s overflowing with good intentions; never seen this kind of fire in him, pouring off of him in waves so warm it’d be stifling even if the air around them wasn’t dragging with the heat.
His brain won’t take in any of it-just won’t. The wheels are spinning, but the boiling sun warped all the gears, and the belts just turn and turn, and nothing moves, and nothing catches, and he can’t bring himself to comprehend the concept that Roy Mustang-
-likes-
-him.
As a human being.
Roy Mustang thinks he’s valuable, more or less; for his own sake, not just because of alchemy and intellect and all the reasons that he’s useful. But as a person. Apparently.
Roy Mustang thinks he’s a valuable person and wants him to be happy.
How the hell is he supposed to process that?
It’s all he can do to try to choke down the knot of disbelief and bewildered gratitude that’s clogging up his throat for long enough to say something-anything; he’s been staring like a fucking bug-eyed amphibian for about a year already.
“Okay,” he gets out.
Mustang has the grace to look faintly chagrined, although the touch of pink in his cheeks could very well be the miserable fucking heat instead of embarrassment over hurling something like that in Ed’s face out of the fucking blue.
“Good,” Hawkeye says, calm as you please, and that actually kind of confirms it, in a way, because she only ever rescues Mustang when he needs it, so she must’ve sensed sheepishness on him, too. She reads him easier than anyone. Ed’s gotten better at it over the years, but she pretty much wrote the user’s manual, and as far as he’s concerned, what she says goes. “Edward,” she says, and his attention snaps back to her like it’s magnetized, and she’s got the whole world charged with leylines to her fingertips. “I’d like you to take this.” With the characteristic machine-like efficiency, she selects a sheet of paper from her clipboard, smoothes it out, catches up an abandoned pen, and writes. “It’s my telephone number at home. Memorize it instead if you’d prefer, but if there is ever a time you need something-including something such as a reassurance of doubt-I want you to call me.”
She folds the paper twice, neat and clean and fastidious as ever, and holds it out to him.
“Any time, day or night,” she says. She tilts her head towards Mustang. “He already does.”
“Guilty,” Mustang says.
Hawkeye smiles again. “We’re on your side.”
Ed’s arms feel heavy; his sleeves feel sodden; his brain feels unhooked, unhinged, and unstable in the extreme. But he reaches up and takes it, even though it feels like he must be putting sweat-mark fingerprints all over it-even though he ruins everything he touches, and he’d be shocked if this was an exception.
Mustang pushes his chair back and stands. “Let me go bring the car around; it’d be criminal to make either of you walk home in this heat, and I don’t have time for the court-martial.”
Ed grasps around in the tornado inside him for a normal reaction. “Anything to avoid paperwork, huh?”
Mustang flashes him the brightest devil-may-care grin. “Precisely.”
He saunters out the picture of the debonair young general, but the way he shuts the door really quietly belies that more than he probably thinks.
[PART III]