FMA -- Spectra (Part II)
Title: Spectra
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Ed
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 16,200 (4,500 this chapter)
Warnings: language; ALL OF THE SPOILERS for '03/CoS
Summary: A prism with three faces. (Colorblindness/soulmates AU.)
Author's Note: When I die, bury me in CoS Roy and Al interactions. Bury me deep. Also, regarding things I suck at explaining in the body of the fic: Panda's second epic gif set is critically important context for this part. So, like… pay attention to it, so I don't have to write better. :'D
SPECTRA
PART 2
To say that it’s a phone call he doesn’t want to make is understating matters. This is well beyond the pale of quotidian procrastination; this is a conversation that Roy has put off for two solid years.
It ought to be time now, whether he likes it or not. He’s not in North City especially frequently-more often they send the supplies up to him, by way of either a courier or a well-meaning former subordinate, depending on who’s available.
The line rings-once, twice, echoing towards a third. Then it catches, and he forces himself to breathe out slow.
“Hello?” Gracia says, sounding tinny and distant and utterly unchanged.
None of it really changed when he abandoned it-none of the important things; none of the important lives are less without him in them. That’s part of what makes it so damn hard to care.
They went on without him. They’re probably better off.
“It’s me,” he says, and a considerable portion of him wants to apologize-for disturbing her; for imposing; for the fact that he still exists. Exists is the only word for it; lives is too generous, and he’s been past generosity since long before he dragged his miserable body all the way out here.
She’s quiet for a long moment. He doesn’t blame her. What is there to say?
“What can I do for you?” she asks at last, sounding completely unperturbed-whether because she really is or because she ironed the surprise out of her voice in the interval he can’t derive.
“Nothing,” he says. “Nothing at all. I just wanted to see how you and Elysia were doing.”
“We’re fine,” she says. “And you’d have heard by now if we weren’t, and you know it, which means that you’re looking for something, and I’m the only person you think can give it to you.” She hums almost inaudibly-a tiny tuneless noise half under her breath. “You also called while Elysia’s in school, which means you don’t want her to hear whatever you want me to say.” There’s a faint smile in her voice. “So what can I do for you, Roy?”
He forgets, sometimes-how damn smart she is.
But not for very long.
“When Maes died,” he says, “the-color. It went away.”
Silence.
There’s a faint buzz down the phone line, and then she takes a breath.
“Yes,” she says.
“And it never came back?” he asks.
She’s quieter for longer this time.
He listens to his pulse in his ears-gaining speed; growing louder; battering at every last crumbling wall of his defenses.
Anyone else would have asked-by now, if not before-why he’s posing cruel questions for no apparent purpose.
“No,” she says. “It didn’t.”
The pattering of his heartbeat turns to thunder.
She deserves to know, deserves to hope, as much as anyone-more than most. One of the boys she took in like an adopted son is missing, presumed dead; and the other doesn’t know her anymore.
She deserves to know. She loved him, too.
“It’s Ed,” Roy says. “He’s alive. He has to be alive.”
“What?” she says, and then- “Oh, God. Roy.”
Far, far too smart.
They both know that’s one of the things Hughes loved her for the most.
“Everyone says he just disappeared,” she says.
“I know,” he says. He does. He knows every square centimeter of the antiquated temple; knows every tormented block of the city underneath. He knows that there is something living in the shadows. He knows that the Philosopher’s Stones scattered in the water there are a startling magenta-pink.
“He wouldn’t leave Al,” Gracia says. “Wouldn’t leave him like this, I mean-alone, without any of the answers. He must-do you think he made some sort of an exchange that cost his memories, too? Maybe he didn’t know who he was anymore; maybe he up and left; maybe…” She makes a soft, dry noise-something like a laugh. “I suppose you’ve already considered all of this.”
“I’ve had time to think it over,” he says.
Hughes had cried-he had turned up at Roy’s door at one in the morning, eyes sparkling with the wet already, and when Roy grabbed his elbow and hauled him in and asked him what the hell was wrong, the first breath that shook loose of him was a sob. He just kept smiling.
Nothing’s wrong-oh, my God; it feels like nothing’s ever going to be wrong again. Roy, it’s real. All of it’s real; everything they say-the colors, Roy-
It took ten minutes and a cup of tea to calm him down enough to be coherent. Roy thought he was drunk.
No. Roy hoped, Roy prayed, that he was drunk, because if he was telling the truth-
We were at dinner, right? And we both reached for our drinks at the same time, and our hands brushed, and-Roy, I can’t describe it. It is past words; it’s-colors. The color thing. Her eyes are green, Roy-same color as trees and fields and emeralds and all these things I never… Everything is so much deeper when there’s color in it-so much more. The world is so fucking beautiful, Roy. She’s so beautiful. It feels like I’m dreaming, but I swear to God I’ll die if I wake up now; I can’t lose this-I can’t lose her; her eyes are green, Roy-
Roy had believed in it when he was young, with the kind of unthinking, optimistic credence most children give to fairy tales. And he’d tried-he’d gathered every wisp of purity left in him, and he’d tried-to keep believing as the years went on.
When he met Maes, he gave up. Because their elbows touched, and nothing happened; Roy waited, and watched, and wanted. Because the rest of the pretenses gave way to something raw and real and absolutely breathless, and Roy’s fingertips tracked every inch of that man’s skin-and nothing happened.
He was in love. He felt it, knew it, in his chest and his guts and the framework of his bones; he was captivated and possessed, and there was nothing left to sacrifice; this was what they talked about.
So evidently they were wrong. Evidently it was all a lot of hyped-up, spun-out, romanticized nonsense conjured by old folks who wanted to justify the tumults of their marriages over time.
Evidently they were wrong, and it didn’t happen like that, and Roy mapped and memorized every line of Maes Hughes’s body in ordinary black and white.
Except-
Except.
Her eyes are green, Roy-there aren’t words for it; you can’t encapsulate something like this-God, I hope you get to feel it, Roy; I hope you get this, too-
And it figures, doesn’t it? He always thought the punishment was that he’d never have it-that the very capacity had been torn away; that he’d burned it out of the core of himself with all the rest of his humanity, and the opportunity was gone forever.
But this fits better-this makes more sense. This is a more appropriate twist of vengeance from the universe. Tasting the potential for a single, stunning, transcendent fraction of a moment only to have it torn away-
To have to live with the possibilities of what they could have had; to know some infinitesimal sliver of a chance still lingers for redemption, as long as the colors cling to every surface other than the snow-
To have the gift of partnership-of acceptance-placed gently in his open hands, and then to have it snatched out and flung into the ether just before he drew his fingers closed.
To be told There is someone who will always fight for you; and then to hear the whisper: But he’s gone.
Gracia sighs quietly, and he wonders how long he’s been silent on the phone. “What are you going to do?”
He was a commander, once-a leader; a vanguard; he made snap decisions without hesitation, and he never looked back.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I’ve been corresponding with Alphonse. He has quite a few ideas, some of which are staggeringly brilliant, and some of which are borderline unhinged.”
There’s a little smile in her voice again. “Edward would be proud.”
Edward would be scared.
Edward would be terrified of what Alphonse Elric, determined and alone, has the power to become.
She doesn’t need protection, but it’s not his place to disabuse her, and it’s not the time. “I’ll let you know if we come up with anything better than a list of ‘maybe’s.”
“Please do,” she says. She hesitates, and her voice softens slightly. “It’s good to hear from you, Roy.”
It’s kind of her to say that, despite the fact that it would probably be better for everyone if he had died on the Führer’s front stairs.
But Gracia Hughes is the sort of person who understands that spilling new blood doesn’t wash out any of the stains that set before.
“You, too,” he says.
It stays so damn pale up here for so many weeks on end that it’s a good thing he has to keep the fire lit to survive; it reminds him that gold exists.
He tries to lie very still-on his side, facing the fireplace, with his eye most of the way shut. That’s when the tips of the flames’ fingers look the most like the color of Ed’s hair.
Beautifully ironic, isn’t it? Mere minutes after he started to see the world for real, he had that ability reduced by half.
He peels off the patch to sleep, up here, in the safety of solitude. No one but the medical staff has ever seen him without it-not even Riza, though she tried to prevail on him with logic for weeks on end. She’s likely right: her encounter with the initial damage, soaked in his blood and Selim’s, probably eclipses any horror that the knitted remnants might instill in someone with a weaker constitution.
All the same.
All the same, it’s not even what it looks like so much as what it means.
That’s one of the things that’s such a damn relief up here: no one sees him, so what he looks like has become functionally irrelevant. It’s a shame, too, given his talent for turning other people’s observation of him into an exquisitely pointed sort of power, but ever since this…
Removing it, cavalierly, like it’s just another item of clothing to be shucked aside at night-that’s a bitter, petty, desperate little feature of the fantasies alone. He knows full well that he couldn’t bear to chance Ed cringing at the sight of him.
But in the little, idle dreams-
As he lies awake and listens to his dogged heart still beating, watching the clever acrobatics of the flames-
He imagines just… dropping it-on the nightstand, to the floor. Eschewing everything it fucking stands for, and rolling over, and burying his face in the flood of Ed’s bright gold hair and breathing deeply-
He barely ever thinks about the sex-just the skin. Just running the palm of his hand slowly up and down Ed’s bare side; just warmth and scars and ribs. Just folding in against him, settling close around the curve of his body-hooking an arm around him, knitting his own fingers with the cool metal ones splayed out on the sheet-
And maybe Ed would mutter something about him being sappy; maybe there would be some sleepy plays at protesting; maybe Roy would nip his ear as a gentle reprimand and brush kisses down the side of his neck to apologize-
One touch.
One fucking touch was all they got-all they ever had; maybe all they ever will.
He’s not stupid enough to think that it’s not fair. On the contrary, this might just be the single fairest consequence equivalent exchange has ever meted out.
That doesn’t make it easy.
That doesn’t kill the fucking pain.
If Ed were here; if Ed were anywhere; if Ed…
If Ed were his, he might just have the strength to try to make up for the rest of it.
If Ed was in his reach, life might just be worth suffering.
The next time he’s in North City, he has a telegram.
It’s a matter of deeply-ingrained habit to check at the office, but there’s almost never anything waiting-he’s the embodiment of out of sight, out of mind as far as the brass are concerned; the less they acknowledge his survival, the less they have to face the fact that there was something for him to survive. It’s better to forget that he exists-better to pretend he never did. Better to assume he’ll waste away up here, slowly, one frostbitten finger at a time, and sink into the snow.
Most days, he’d welcome it.
He draws off his gloves, and the woman behind the desk glances at the braided bracelet on his left wrist. Elysia made it for him-with the wide-eyed solemnity of a serious child, she told him that it was a friendship bracelet, to help remind him that no matter how far from home he ranges, as long as there’s love in his heart, he’s not alone.
It’s red and yellow, not that she would know. He knotted it on so tight it’s never slipped, and there’s not enough light up here to make it fade.
The woman at the desk hands him the slip of paper, and she smiles.
“Came in last week,” she says.
He makes his mouth smile back, and then he steps away towards the window to read it.
ATTN Private R Mustang, c/o North City telegram office
FOUND SOMETHING STOP. WILL VISIT BY END OF MONTH STOP. STAY WARM STOP. -A.E.
He pockets the half-sheet of cardstock, thanks her, and crosses the office to the bank of telephones. He thumbs in his change, dials the direct line, steels his nerves, and waits.
“Office of Lieutenant-Colonel Riza Hawkeye,” Maria Ross’s voice says crisply.
“It’s me,” he says. “Is she available?”
“For you,” Ross says, “I think so.”
A part of him always wondered-always feared, he should say; no shame in admitting it. A part of him always feared that her feelings towards him were a wretched mirror image of the ones he’d had for Hughes.
She cares about Ed as much as any of them, but it feels like you’ve been cheated-when someone else sweeps in with promises of colors and what used to be a myth, and all of the devotion that you’ve gathered up and poured out of your soul ceases all at once to matter.
There’s static on the line, and then it settles, and then her voice-unerringly collected, as always; like the hounds of hell slavering on her very heels couldn’t hope to earn a scream. “Sir?”
“You don’t report to me anymore,” he says.
“I’m poignantly aware of that, sir.”
They both know that he’s the greatest disappointment in the whole of her life. They both know that she thinks he’s a coward for giving up. They both know that a part of her loves him like a brother, maybe more; and that a part of her wishes he’d died that night before he could do this to her, to all of them, to the country that he pledged his life to.
But he knows that there’s only so much that a man can carry before something in him breaks.
“I got a telegram from Alphonse,” he says. “He said he found something.”
So much silence on these phone calls-it’s a criminal waste of change.
“We haven’t seen him,” she says. We in this context would refer not just to the team, but to the larger network of informants she inherited from him. “I don’t imagine he specified what he found.”
“Vague and/or deliberately misleading telegrams are an Elric tradition,” Roy says.
The breath she lets out sounds almost like the second-cousin of a laugh. “True.”
They both know she thinks he’s a little bit mad-or that he might as well be.
They both know she thinks the bullet grazed his brain in such a way that it jarred a few things out of order, and one of those things was his retinal nerves. They both know she thinks he’s invented every color that he believes he’s seen since the moment in the basement where the world went dark.
She could be right.
She’s always been the realist, between them.
“If you see him before I do,” he says, “drop me a line.”
There was a time when the two of them were incapable of being awkward.
It’s funny, how much life is like an avalanche-if you lose a piece that’s large enough, the balance shifts, and all the others start to slip away.
Somehow he always thought she’d stay-always thought she’d be stable just beside him, no matter how many times he let her down.
That’s why he doesn’t deserve her, really.
“Certainly, sir,” she says.
He pauses. He doesn’t want to push the line; he doesn’t want to scrape a razor blade across a wound that might well still be bleeding. But at the same time, all those years of cooperation and camaraderie haven’t just disappeared, and he genuinely wants to know.
“How are you?” he asks.
“Swamped,” she says. “It’s remarkable how much paperwork there is even when you do it on time.”
“Part of why I never did it on time,” Roy says. “It was an impossible task regardless.”
“I think impossible is a bit of a stretch,” she says.
He smiles slightly. That sounds more like her. “How’s Hayate?”
“Spoiled rotten,” she says. “Lieutenant Ross is a sucker.”
He hears a distant protest that might just be “I heard that!”
“All he has to do is look at her, and she melts,” Riza says. “It’s a travesty. Military discipline gone out the window.”
“Tragic,” Roy says.
“She’s telling me I have a meeting,” Riza says. “Which could be a lie for revenge, but I’m not sure if it’s worth the risk either way.” It’s her turn to hesitate. “Don’t be a stranger.”
“Thank you,” he says. “I’ll be in touch.”
Is it still a lie if his intentions are decent at the time?
He knows the answer to that.
He hangs up the phone, and then he makes his way through the dusted snow towards the general store. If he stops in at North City’s solitary sweet shop to buy a dozen of the caramels that Alphonse likes on the government’s dollar-
Well. They bought his youth, and his faith, and his allegiance, and they ground it all into the mud. They can spare a couple cens for candy.
Alphonse is an Elric echo-an imprint of Ed, like a woodcut; the shape’s identical, but the details smear. He arrives at midnight, and the lamps inside the cabin spill out on a coat the color of bloodstains on the sand. His hair is darker than his brother’s-cinnamon, not sheaves of wheat. The gray-brown eyes aren’t quite as old as Ed’s were, but they’re getting there.
“Hello,” the boy says. “Sorry, I left later than I meant to.”
Fortunately, every time someone’s in danger of confusing one Elric for the other, Alphonse identifies himself with a polite apology.
“Quite all right,” Roy says. “Just come in before you get hypothermia.”
“I haven’t been out that long,” Alphonse says, shuffling in. He brushes snow off of his sleeve with the hand not burdened by a suitcase which looks much too familiar, and the airy comment is more than a bit belied by the purple tinge to his lips and the detectable chattering of his teeth. Roy shuts the door behind him, plants a hand on the center of his back, and propels him bodily over towards the fire.
The thunk of his suitcase on the floorboards speaks volumes-or, more likely, speaks of volumes, crammed in so close their spines are liable to split.
“Thank you,” Alphonse says as Roy lifts the snow-dampened coat off of his shoulders and hangs it on one of the hooks by the stove. There’s a thick fleece lining to it now, as there appears to be to the gloves he’s peeling off as he crouches down in front of the fireplace. He spreads his hands out towards it. “Did you hear?”
Regardless of the precise topic of the question, Roy knows the safe bet for the answer: “Probably not.”
Alphonse looks at him for a second, and Roy takes back what he thought about the eyes.
“Teacher died,” Alphonse says.
“I’m so sorry,” Roy says. He knows how precious little the inane expressions of sympathy actually matter, but it’s better than nothing.
Alphonse shrugs slightly, turning towards the fire again and chafing his hands together. “I’m mostly worried about Sig. Mason said he’ll look after him, and I’m going to try to call every week or so, but he’s taking it…” He winces. “I suppose he’s taking it about as well as you’d expect.”
A part of Roy wants to ask if the Curtises had it-the connection; the colors; the bond.
But a part of him has come to believe that it is, in a lot of ways, more admirable for two people to choose each other every single day of their lives if nothing metaphysical compels them.
“But in a way, that’s why I’m here,” Alphonse says. “She made me swear once that I would never set foot in Dante’s house. Now that she’s gone, I didn’t figure that promise held anymore.”
One of the curious things about the Elric brothers was always the contrast-the balance. Everyone Roy knew assumed that Alphonse was the gentler of the two-that the weak spot for small animals and the desperate striving to stay human in an armored cage somehow proved that he was soft straight through. Ed’s explosive fits of anger fooled a lot of people into believing his bravado-into accepting that the shortness extended to his temper, and his patience, and the capacity of his heart, not just his size.
Roy saw it differently.
Roy knew that Ed was putting on a persona, exaggerating his idiosyncrasies, to keep the whole world at a distance-just like Roy had been doing for so many years that it was hard to tell what was mask and what was matter.
Roy knew that underneath the genuine sweetness and the compassion for all living beings, Alphonse was the ruthless one.
Roy knew Ed would die for his brother, but Alphonse would kill for Ed.
And now the younger Elric is trekking resolutely down a different track-solitary, single-minded, without Ed to moderate his pace.
“So I went,” Alphonse says. He settles cross-legged and cracks open the suitcase; as Roy had presupposed, it’s overflowing with dusty books. Alphonse stares down at them for a second, and then he looks up at Roy. “It’s an incredible resource. I found things no one else in this country is likely to have-things no one else in this world is likely to know.”
He grazes his fingertips over the cover of one of the dozen selected tomes, and the silence stretches perilously thin.
“But that house,” he says. “It shouldn’t… exist. It’s a bad place-a wrong place. Too much has happened; too much has been done. Terrible things. They’re embedded. Ingrained. It’s in the walls. You can hear it when you stay still.”
Roy has known a place or two like that.
Alphonse draws a breath, holds it, and lets it out slowly as a sigh. “When Brother gets back-”
There it is-sentence constructions that won’t brook the conditional tense. The Elric certainty. It’s a trademark, like a tattoo. After we’ve executed the improbable with impunity, here’s my plan for what’s next.
“-we should inventory the books,” Alphonse is saying, stroking the one under his hand again. “We should keep anything we think is useful. And then we should burn that place to the ground.”
Roy hasn’t spent much time piecing together that quadrant of the puzzle, but he knows enough-enough to guess at what Alphonse might have seen.
“What did you find?” he asks, gesturing towards the books.
Another deep breath, and then a reckless Elric grin, because knowledge is power, and Alphonse hasn’t accumulated enough for it to betray him yet.
“All kinds of stuff,” Alphonse says. “Apocrypha about all of the taboos-there’s so much in here about this… Gate thing. The portal of Truth. Brother’s notes were steeped in that.” He traces a fingertip along the imprinted letters of the title. “I think… I’m starting to think there’s a-duality. Of some kind. A syzygy.” He drums his fingertips on the book cover, and his eyes go hazy as he stares at-or, rather, through-the wall. “All of the verbiage: ‘gate’, ‘portal’-those are doors. And there’s something on both sides of a door. With the right impetus, you can pass through.” His fingers tap faster. “But that’s rare, because it’s difficult-because there’s a toll to pay for that, too, and usually it’s blood.”
Roy wishes it was a question, and he wishes he sounded incredulous. That’s a side effect of the Elric brothers: you start to trust the nonsense they come up with, because they might well make it plausible after a while.
“You think Ed slingshotted himself through,” Roy says, “when he tried to give his life up to bring you back.”
Alphonse nods once. “Maybe it’s more apt to think of it like-a mirror. Anyone who attempts human transmutation arrives at the Gate. Teacher did; she didn’t like to talk about it, especially since she had an idea why I was asking, but I know that much. So any alchemist who doesn’t respect the laws can see it, but most of them get reflected back, so to speak-they stay on this side. It takes an immense amount of force to break through it instead, but if you do…” He chews on his lip, tilts his head, and glances up at Roy. If puppies were capable of ferocious feats of logic… “I think that’s what I’m dreaming about-the other side. It’s all analogues. There’s a boy there who looks a lot like me, although he’s older, and Ed’s met lots of other people who are nearly identical to the ones we have here. Either the fates of the two sides are somehow tied, or they diverged from a common origin extremely recently.” He worries his bottom lip harder between his teeth. “So the real question is-how do we leverage enough power to pull Ed back?”
“That sounds like a dangerous prospect,” Roy says.
The real danger is the gleam in Alphonse Elric’s eye as he smiles grimly back.
“Yeah,” he says. “It does, doesn’t it?”
[Part III]
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Ed
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 16,200 (4,500 this chapter)
Warnings: language; ALL OF THE SPOILERS for '03/CoS
Summary: A prism with three faces. (Colorblindness/soulmates AU.)
Author's Note: When I die, bury me in CoS Roy and Al interactions. Bury me deep. Also, regarding things I suck at explaining in the body of the fic: Panda's second epic gif set is critically important context for this part. So, like… pay attention to it, so I don't have to write better. :'D
SPECTRA
PART 2
To say that it’s a phone call he doesn’t want to make is understating matters. This is well beyond the pale of quotidian procrastination; this is a conversation that Roy has put off for two solid years.
It ought to be time now, whether he likes it or not. He’s not in North City especially frequently-more often they send the supplies up to him, by way of either a courier or a well-meaning former subordinate, depending on who’s available.
The line rings-once, twice, echoing towards a third. Then it catches, and he forces himself to breathe out slow.
“Hello?” Gracia says, sounding tinny and distant and utterly unchanged.
None of it really changed when he abandoned it-none of the important things; none of the important lives are less without him in them. That’s part of what makes it so damn hard to care.
They went on without him. They’re probably better off.
“It’s me,” he says, and a considerable portion of him wants to apologize-for disturbing her; for imposing; for the fact that he still exists. Exists is the only word for it; lives is too generous, and he’s been past generosity since long before he dragged his miserable body all the way out here.
She’s quiet for a long moment. He doesn’t blame her. What is there to say?
“What can I do for you?” she asks at last, sounding completely unperturbed-whether because she really is or because she ironed the surprise out of her voice in the interval he can’t derive.
“Nothing,” he says. “Nothing at all. I just wanted to see how you and Elysia were doing.”
“We’re fine,” she says. “And you’d have heard by now if we weren’t, and you know it, which means that you’re looking for something, and I’m the only person you think can give it to you.” She hums almost inaudibly-a tiny tuneless noise half under her breath. “You also called while Elysia’s in school, which means you don’t want her to hear whatever you want me to say.” There’s a faint smile in her voice. “So what can I do for you, Roy?”
He forgets, sometimes-how damn smart she is.
But not for very long.
“When Maes died,” he says, “the-color. It went away.”
Silence.
There’s a faint buzz down the phone line, and then she takes a breath.
“Yes,” she says.
“And it never came back?” he asks.
She’s quieter for longer this time.
He listens to his pulse in his ears-gaining speed; growing louder; battering at every last crumbling wall of his defenses.
Anyone else would have asked-by now, if not before-why he’s posing cruel questions for no apparent purpose.
“No,” she says. “It didn’t.”
The pattering of his heartbeat turns to thunder.
She deserves to know, deserves to hope, as much as anyone-more than most. One of the boys she took in like an adopted son is missing, presumed dead; and the other doesn’t know her anymore.
She deserves to know. She loved him, too.
“It’s Ed,” Roy says. “He’s alive. He has to be alive.”
“What?” she says, and then- “Oh, God. Roy.”
Far, far too smart.
They both know that’s one of the things Hughes loved her for the most.
“Everyone says he just disappeared,” she says.
“I know,” he says. He does. He knows every square centimeter of the antiquated temple; knows every tormented block of the city underneath. He knows that there is something living in the shadows. He knows that the Philosopher’s Stones scattered in the water there are a startling magenta-pink.
“He wouldn’t leave Al,” Gracia says. “Wouldn’t leave him like this, I mean-alone, without any of the answers. He must-do you think he made some sort of an exchange that cost his memories, too? Maybe he didn’t know who he was anymore; maybe he up and left; maybe…” She makes a soft, dry noise-something like a laugh. “I suppose you’ve already considered all of this.”
“I’ve had time to think it over,” he says.
Hughes had cried-he had turned up at Roy’s door at one in the morning, eyes sparkling with the wet already, and when Roy grabbed his elbow and hauled him in and asked him what the hell was wrong, the first breath that shook loose of him was a sob. He just kept smiling.
Nothing’s wrong-oh, my God; it feels like nothing’s ever going to be wrong again. Roy, it’s real. All of it’s real; everything they say-the colors, Roy-
It took ten minutes and a cup of tea to calm him down enough to be coherent. Roy thought he was drunk.
No. Roy hoped, Roy prayed, that he was drunk, because if he was telling the truth-
We were at dinner, right? And we both reached for our drinks at the same time, and our hands brushed, and-Roy, I can’t describe it. It is past words; it’s-colors. The color thing. Her eyes are green, Roy-same color as trees and fields and emeralds and all these things I never… Everything is so much deeper when there’s color in it-so much more. The world is so fucking beautiful, Roy. She’s so beautiful. It feels like I’m dreaming, but I swear to God I’ll die if I wake up now; I can’t lose this-I can’t lose her; her eyes are green, Roy-
Roy had believed in it when he was young, with the kind of unthinking, optimistic credence most children give to fairy tales. And he’d tried-he’d gathered every wisp of purity left in him, and he’d tried-to keep believing as the years went on.
When he met Maes, he gave up. Because their elbows touched, and nothing happened; Roy waited, and watched, and wanted. Because the rest of the pretenses gave way to something raw and real and absolutely breathless, and Roy’s fingertips tracked every inch of that man’s skin-and nothing happened.
He was in love. He felt it, knew it, in his chest and his guts and the framework of his bones; he was captivated and possessed, and there was nothing left to sacrifice; this was what they talked about.
So evidently they were wrong. Evidently it was all a lot of hyped-up, spun-out, romanticized nonsense conjured by old folks who wanted to justify the tumults of their marriages over time.
Evidently they were wrong, and it didn’t happen like that, and Roy mapped and memorized every line of Maes Hughes’s body in ordinary black and white.
Except-
Except.
Her eyes are green, Roy-there aren’t words for it; you can’t encapsulate something like this-God, I hope you get to feel it, Roy; I hope you get this, too-
And it figures, doesn’t it? He always thought the punishment was that he’d never have it-that the very capacity had been torn away; that he’d burned it out of the core of himself with all the rest of his humanity, and the opportunity was gone forever.
But this fits better-this makes more sense. This is a more appropriate twist of vengeance from the universe. Tasting the potential for a single, stunning, transcendent fraction of a moment only to have it torn away-
To have to live with the possibilities of what they could have had; to know some infinitesimal sliver of a chance still lingers for redemption, as long as the colors cling to every surface other than the snow-
To have the gift of partnership-of acceptance-placed gently in his open hands, and then to have it snatched out and flung into the ether just before he drew his fingers closed.
To be told There is someone who will always fight for you; and then to hear the whisper: But he’s gone.
Gracia sighs quietly, and he wonders how long he’s been silent on the phone. “What are you going to do?”
He was a commander, once-a leader; a vanguard; he made snap decisions without hesitation, and he never looked back.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I’ve been corresponding with Alphonse. He has quite a few ideas, some of which are staggeringly brilliant, and some of which are borderline unhinged.”
There’s a little smile in her voice again. “Edward would be proud.”
Edward would be scared.
Edward would be terrified of what Alphonse Elric, determined and alone, has the power to become.
She doesn’t need protection, but it’s not his place to disabuse her, and it’s not the time. “I’ll let you know if we come up with anything better than a list of ‘maybe’s.”
“Please do,” she says. She hesitates, and her voice softens slightly. “It’s good to hear from you, Roy.”
It’s kind of her to say that, despite the fact that it would probably be better for everyone if he had died on the Führer’s front stairs.
But Gracia Hughes is the sort of person who understands that spilling new blood doesn’t wash out any of the stains that set before.
“You, too,” he says.
It stays so damn pale up here for so many weeks on end that it’s a good thing he has to keep the fire lit to survive; it reminds him that gold exists.
He tries to lie very still-on his side, facing the fireplace, with his eye most of the way shut. That’s when the tips of the flames’ fingers look the most like the color of Ed’s hair.
Beautifully ironic, isn’t it? Mere minutes after he started to see the world for real, he had that ability reduced by half.
He peels off the patch to sleep, up here, in the safety of solitude. No one but the medical staff has ever seen him without it-not even Riza, though she tried to prevail on him with logic for weeks on end. She’s likely right: her encounter with the initial damage, soaked in his blood and Selim’s, probably eclipses any horror that the knitted remnants might instill in someone with a weaker constitution.
All the same.
All the same, it’s not even what it looks like so much as what it means.
That’s one of the things that’s such a damn relief up here: no one sees him, so what he looks like has become functionally irrelevant. It’s a shame, too, given his talent for turning other people’s observation of him into an exquisitely pointed sort of power, but ever since this…
Removing it, cavalierly, like it’s just another item of clothing to be shucked aside at night-that’s a bitter, petty, desperate little feature of the fantasies alone. He knows full well that he couldn’t bear to chance Ed cringing at the sight of him.
But in the little, idle dreams-
As he lies awake and listens to his dogged heart still beating, watching the clever acrobatics of the flames-
He imagines just… dropping it-on the nightstand, to the floor. Eschewing everything it fucking stands for, and rolling over, and burying his face in the flood of Ed’s bright gold hair and breathing deeply-
He barely ever thinks about the sex-just the skin. Just running the palm of his hand slowly up and down Ed’s bare side; just warmth and scars and ribs. Just folding in against him, settling close around the curve of his body-hooking an arm around him, knitting his own fingers with the cool metal ones splayed out on the sheet-
And maybe Ed would mutter something about him being sappy; maybe there would be some sleepy plays at protesting; maybe Roy would nip his ear as a gentle reprimand and brush kisses down the side of his neck to apologize-
One touch.
One fucking touch was all they got-all they ever had; maybe all they ever will.
He’s not stupid enough to think that it’s not fair. On the contrary, this might just be the single fairest consequence equivalent exchange has ever meted out.
That doesn’t make it easy.
That doesn’t kill the fucking pain.
If Ed were here; if Ed were anywhere; if Ed…
If Ed were his, he might just have the strength to try to make up for the rest of it.
If Ed was in his reach, life might just be worth suffering.
The next time he’s in North City, he has a telegram.
It’s a matter of deeply-ingrained habit to check at the office, but there’s almost never anything waiting-he’s the embodiment of out of sight, out of mind as far as the brass are concerned; the less they acknowledge his survival, the less they have to face the fact that there was something for him to survive. It’s better to forget that he exists-better to pretend he never did. Better to assume he’ll waste away up here, slowly, one frostbitten finger at a time, and sink into the snow.
Most days, he’d welcome it.
He draws off his gloves, and the woman behind the desk glances at the braided bracelet on his left wrist. Elysia made it for him-with the wide-eyed solemnity of a serious child, she told him that it was a friendship bracelet, to help remind him that no matter how far from home he ranges, as long as there’s love in his heart, he’s not alone.
It’s red and yellow, not that she would know. He knotted it on so tight it’s never slipped, and there’s not enough light up here to make it fade.
The woman at the desk hands him the slip of paper, and she smiles.
“Came in last week,” she says.
He makes his mouth smile back, and then he steps away towards the window to read it.
ATTN Private R Mustang, c/o North City telegram office
FOUND SOMETHING STOP. WILL VISIT BY END OF MONTH STOP. STAY WARM STOP. -A.E.
He pockets the half-sheet of cardstock, thanks her, and crosses the office to the bank of telephones. He thumbs in his change, dials the direct line, steels his nerves, and waits.
“Office of Lieutenant-Colonel Riza Hawkeye,” Maria Ross’s voice says crisply.
“It’s me,” he says. “Is she available?”
“For you,” Ross says, “I think so.”
A part of him always wondered-always feared, he should say; no shame in admitting it. A part of him always feared that her feelings towards him were a wretched mirror image of the ones he’d had for Hughes.
She cares about Ed as much as any of them, but it feels like you’ve been cheated-when someone else sweeps in with promises of colors and what used to be a myth, and all of the devotion that you’ve gathered up and poured out of your soul ceases all at once to matter.
There’s static on the line, and then it settles, and then her voice-unerringly collected, as always; like the hounds of hell slavering on her very heels couldn’t hope to earn a scream. “Sir?”
“You don’t report to me anymore,” he says.
“I’m poignantly aware of that, sir.”
They both know that he’s the greatest disappointment in the whole of her life. They both know that she thinks he’s a coward for giving up. They both know that a part of her loves him like a brother, maybe more; and that a part of her wishes he’d died that night before he could do this to her, to all of them, to the country that he pledged his life to.
But he knows that there’s only so much that a man can carry before something in him breaks.
“I got a telegram from Alphonse,” he says. “He said he found something.”
So much silence on these phone calls-it’s a criminal waste of change.
“We haven’t seen him,” she says. We in this context would refer not just to the team, but to the larger network of informants she inherited from him. “I don’t imagine he specified what he found.”
“Vague and/or deliberately misleading telegrams are an Elric tradition,” Roy says.
The breath she lets out sounds almost like the second-cousin of a laugh. “True.”
They both know she thinks he’s a little bit mad-or that he might as well be.
They both know she thinks the bullet grazed his brain in such a way that it jarred a few things out of order, and one of those things was his retinal nerves. They both know she thinks he’s invented every color that he believes he’s seen since the moment in the basement where the world went dark.
She could be right.
She’s always been the realist, between them.
“If you see him before I do,” he says, “drop me a line.”
There was a time when the two of them were incapable of being awkward.
It’s funny, how much life is like an avalanche-if you lose a piece that’s large enough, the balance shifts, and all the others start to slip away.
Somehow he always thought she’d stay-always thought she’d be stable just beside him, no matter how many times he let her down.
That’s why he doesn’t deserve her, really.
“Certainly, sir,” she says.
He pauses. He doesn’t want to push the line; he doesn’t want to scrape a razor blade across a wound that might well still be bleeding. But at the same time, all those years of cooperation and camaraderie haven’t just disappeared, and he genuinely wants to know.
“How are you?” he asks.
“Swamped,” she says. “It’s remarkable how much paperwork there is even when you do it on time.”
“Part of why I never did it on time,” Roy says. “It was an impossible task regardless.”
“I think impossible is a bit of a stretch,” she says.
He smiles slightly. That sounds more like her. “How’s Hayate?”
“Spoiled rotten,” she says. “Lieutenant Ross is a sucker.”
He hears a distant protest that might just be “I heard that!”
“All he has to do is look at her, and she melts,” Riza says. “It’s a travesty. Military discipline gone out the window.”
“Tragic,” Roy says.
“She’s telling me I have a meeting,” Riza says. “Which could be a lie for revenge, but I’m not sure if it’s worth the risk either way.” It’s her turn to hesitate. “Don’t be a stranger.”
“Thank you,” he says. “I’ll be in touch.”
Is it still a lie if his intentions are decent at the time?
He knows the answer to that.
He hangs up the phone, and then he makes his way through the dusted snow towards the general store. If he stops in at North City’s solitary sweet shop to buy a dozen of the caramels that Alphonse likes on the government’s dollar-
Well. They bought his youth, and his faith, and his allegiance, and they ground it all into the mud. They can spare a couple cens for candy.
Alphonse is an Elric echo-an imprint of Ed, like a woodcut; the shape’s identical, but the details smear. He arrives at midnight, and the lamps inside the cabin spill out on a coat the color of bloodstains on the sand. His hair is darker than his brother’s-cinnamon, not sheaves of wheat. The gray-brown eyes aren’t quite as old as Ed’s were, but they’re getting there.
“Hello,” the boy says. “Sorry, I left later than I meant to.”
Fortunately, every time someone’s in danger of confusing one Elric for the other, Alphonse identifies himself with a polite apology.
“Quite all right,” Roy says. “Just come in before you get hypothermia.”
“I haven’t been out that long,” Alphonse says, shuffling in. He brushes snow off of his sleeve with the hand not burdened by a suitcase which looks much too familiar, and the airy comment is more than a bit belied by the purple tinge to his lips and the detectable chattering of his teeth. Roy shuts the door behind him, plants a hand on the center of his back, and propels him bodily over towards the fire.
The thunk of his suitcase on the floorboards speaks volumes-or, more likely, speaks of volumes, crammed in so close their spines are liable to split.
“Thank you,” Alphonse says as Roy lifts the snow-dampened coat off of his shoulders and hangs it on one of the hooks by the stove. There’s a thick fleece lining to it now, as there appears to be to the gloves he’s peeling off as he crouches down in front of the fireplace. He spreads his hands out towards it. “Did you hear?”
Regardless of the precise topic of the question, Roy knows the safe bet for the answer: “Probably not.”
Alphonse looks at him for a second, and Roy takes back what he thought about the eyes.
“Teacher died,” Alphonse says.
“I’m so sorry,” Roy says. He knows how precious little the inane expressions of sympathy actually matter, but it’s better than nothing.
Alphonse shrugs slightly, turning towards the fire again and chafing his hands together. “I’m mostly worried about Sig. Mason said he’ll look after him, and I’m going to try to call every week or so, but he’s taking it…” He winces. “I suppose he’s taking it about as well as you’d expect.”
A part of Roy wants to ask if the Curtises had it-the connection; the colors; the bond.
But a part of him has come to believe that it is, in a lot of ways, more admirable for two people to choose each other every single day of their lives if nothing metaphysical compels them.
“But in a way, that’s why I’m here,” Alphonse says. “She made me swear once that I would never set foot in Dante’s house. Now that she’s gone, I didn’t figure that promise held anymore.”
One of the curious things about the Elric brothers was always the contrast-the balance. Everyone Roy knew assumed that Alphonse was the gentler of the two-that the weak spot for small animals and the desperate striving to stay human in an armored cage somehow proved that he was soft straight through. Ed’s explosive fits of anger fooled a lot of people into believing his bravado-into accepting that the shortness extended to his temper, and his patience, and the capacity of his heart, not just his size.
Roy saw it differently.
Roy knew that Ed was putting on a persona, exaggerating his idiosyncrasies, to keep the whole world at a distance-just like Roy had been doing for so many years that it was hard to tell what was mask and what was matter.
Roy knew that underneath the genuine sweetness and the compassion for all living beings, Alphonse was the ruthless one.
Roy knew Ed would die for his brother, but Alphonse would kill for Ed.
And now the younger Elric is trekking resolutely down a different track-solitary, single-minded, without Ed to moderate his pace.
“So I went,” Alphonse says. He settles cross-legged and cracks open the suitcase; as Roy had presupposed, it’s overflowing with dusty books. Alphonse stares down at them for a second, and then he looks up at Roy. “It’s an incredible resource. I found things no one else in this country is likely to have-things no one else in this world is likely to know.”
He grazes his fingertips over the cover of one of the dozen selected tomes, and the silence stretches perilously thin.
“But that house,” he says. “It shouldn’t… exist. It’s a bad place-a wrong place. Too much has happened; too much has been done. Terrible things. They’re embedded. Ingrained. It’s in the walls. You can hear it when you stay still.”
Roy has known a place or two like that.
Alphonse draws a breath, holds it, and lets it out slowly as a sigh. “When Brother gets back-”
There it is-sentence constructions that won’t brook the conditional tense. The Elric certainty. It’s a trademark, like a tattoo. After we’ve executed the improbable with impunity, here’s my plan for what’s next.
“-we should inventory the books,” Alphonse is saying, stroking the one under his hand again. “We should keep anything we think is useful. And then we should burn that place to the ground.”
Roy hasn’t spent much time piecing together that quadrant of the puzzle, but he knows enough-enough to guess at what Alphonse might have seen.
“What did you find?” he asks, gesturing towards the books.
Another deep breath, and then a reckless Elric grin, because knowledge is power, and Alphonse hasn’t accumulated enough for it to betray him yet.
“All kinds of stuff,” Alphonse says. “Apocrypha about all of the taboos-there’s so much in here about this… Gate thing. The portal of Truth. Brother’s notes were steeped in that.” He traces a fingertip along the imprinted letters of the title. “I think… I’m starting to think there’s a-duality. Of some kind. A syzygy.” He drums his fingertips on the book cover, and his eyes go hazy as he stares at-or, rather, through-the wall. “All of the verbiage: ‘gate’, ‘portal’-those are doors. And there’s something on both sides of a door. With the right impetus, you can pass through.” His fingers tap faster. “But that’s rare, because it’s difficult-because there’s a toll to pay for that, too, and usually it’s blood.”
Roy wishes it was a question, and he wishes he sounded incredulous. That’s a side effect of the Elric brothers: you start to trust the nonsense they come up with, because they might well make it plausible after a while.
“You think Ed slingshotted himself through,” Roy says, “when he tried to give his life up to bring you back.”
Alphonse nods once. “Maybe it’s more apt to think of it like-a mirror. Anyone who attempts human transmutation arrives at the Gate. Teacher did; she didn’t like to talk about it, especially since she had an idea why I was asking, but I know that much. So any alchemist who doesn’t respect the laws can see it, but most of them get reflected back, so to speak-they stay on this side. It takes an immense amount of force to break through it instead, but if you do…” He chews on his lip, tilts his head, and glances up at Roy. If puppies were capable of ferocious feats of logic… “I think that’s what I’m dreaming about-the other side. It’s all analogues. There’s a boy there who looks a lot like me, although he’s older, and Ed’s met lots of other people who are nearly identical to the ones we have here. Either the fates of the two sides are somehow tied, or they diverged from a common origin extremely recently.” He worries his bottom lip harder between his teeth. “So the real question is-how do we leverage enough power to pull Ed back?”
“That sounds like a dangerous prospect,” Roy says.
The real danger is the gleam in Alphonse Elric’s eye as he smiles grimly back.
“Yeah,” he says. “It does, doesn’t it?”
[Part III]