FMA -- Heartbeat, Part 2 (1/2)
Title: Heartbeat
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Ed
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 47,200 (16,200 this part)
Warnings: language; post-BH AU; emetophobic parties beware; depictions of anxiety and depression (including dark intrusive thoughts); very much unwanted touches
Summary: Ed makes the mistake of waiting on goddamn tenterhooks for something to change - and then, naturally, something does.
Author's Note: This is the chapter where all the bad shit happens. Part of why it's long is because I tried to include a little of the stuff-getting-better part… and then I swear to you, on all that is fluffy and/or holy, that it gets a lot better still after this. ♥
HEARTBEAT
PART 2 (1/2)
On Thursday night, Al’s sitting on the floor in front of their coffee table at home working on a love letter to Winry-the phone bills were getting hilariously astronomical on both sides, and Al was stricken with guilt at the prospect that Ed was helping to fund the cost on this side, and the Atelier Garfiel was eating the expense on the other end of the line.
Meanwhile, Ed’s got a good sprawl going on the couch as he attempts to pin his attention on a book that doesn’t really deserve it. He’d find a better one, but he doesn’t really want to get up, and the newspaper is just too… loud. Too sensationalist. And there’s a chance of Roy getting smeared in it.
After concluding the mushy magnum opus with an extremely dramatic sweep of his pen, Al turns to Ed-seizing the opportunity presented by how damn distracting his sign-offs are, the clever little shit; they always make Ed look up.
“Are you sure about this whole date thing?” Al asks.
Ed sort of figured it’d be this old song and dance.
It’s-nice, though. It’s nice that Al’s worried about him. It’s nice that Al cares.
“Yeah,” Ed says.
“Are you sure you’re sure?” Al asks. “Because-I mean, you can change your mind, if you want. He’ll understand.”
“If he’d ever said I had to,” Ed says, “there’s no fucking way I’d be doing it.”
Al pauses. “Good point.” His forehead furrows again, matched by a disgustingly adorable little wrinkle to his nose. His expressions were slightly uncanny when he first got the face back; he always seemed to be trying just a tiny bit too hard to telegraph an emotion. “But you know that it’s your choice, right? There’s no obligation to go just because you feel like it’s-some kind of rite of passage, or like it makes you more of an adult, or…”
Ed really didn’t want to have this conversation, and the stones ricocheting down the cold well in the pit of his stomach are why.
He leans his head back over the couch arm and closes his eyes. “Like it’ll make me fuckin’ normal, you mean?”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Al says, so vehemently that Ed cracks an eye open before he can stop himself. There’s a different facial expression to go with this one-an equally adorable, screwed-up, hard-eyed, mule-stubborn frown. “That’s why I don’t want you to talk yourself into doing anything you don’t want to. What you want is different from what a lot of people want-but so what? That’s fine. That’s okay. I just want you to know it’s okay. I want you to feel okay.”
Ed takes a slow, deep breath. Then he follows it up with a slower, deeper one. Then he puts on a little smile, because Al is just so fucking wonderful, and that’s something worth smiling about.
“I’m fine,” he says. “I feel fine. It’s just that I can’t know the full range of what I do want until I create opportunities for things I might not, right?”
Al nose-wrinkles just a touch harder. “That’s… Brother, dating isn’t supposed to be a game of psychological chicken.”
Ed tries to trot out the reckless grin. “Since when have I ever done anything the way it’s supposed to be done?”
Al folds both arms on the couch cushion near Ed’s feet and rests his chin on them, looking over at Ed sidelong.
“Also a good point,” he says. He smiles, lifting one hand to scrub it back through his hair, and all the pale gold strands catch the light. “Well-if anything goes weird, you can always bail. And if you call me, I’ll come meet you, wherever you are. Okay?”
Ed… doesn’t like the sound of that-the sound of if anything goes weird. What the hell does that mean?
But Al offered it as part of an act of generosity, so that’s how Ed’s going to have to receive it.
“Okay,” he says. “You’re the best, you know that?”
“If you start that,” Al says, “we’re going to get into an infinite feedback loop, and you’ll never get to go on your data date at all.”
Ed makes an amendment: “You’re the best except when you say shit like ‘data date’, you know that?”
Al laughs, so the world can keep on turning.
Later, as he lies in bed with midnight creeping up, Ed’s brain keeps turning over the words. His stomach just keeps-turning.
If anything goes weird, he can cut and fucking run.
Except he can’t-can he? He couldn’t do that to Roy. In those precious few unguarded fucking moments, Roy looked at him like he was a code so beautiful he put every other cipher man had ever made to shame.
Roy’s really looking forward to this.
But then that’s the fucking question, isn’t it? Exactly what is Roy looking forward to, and what’s he looking for?
He knows, obviously-knows how Ed is; knows who Ed is. And it sounds like he knows better than to think that you can trick somebody into it or train them out of it or treat them the same until they believe it-a deep part of Ed knows that with a ringing sort of certainty. The rest of him is reassured by the fact that Hawkeye would have Roy’s balls nailed onto the corkboard in the office if he’d ever tried to pull some shit like that, so it must be true.
But Roy might want to-touch him. Right? At least… little stuff, almost more in the realm of gestures than actual contact. That’s a lot of what goes on, isn’t it? Ed’s seen way more than he’d like of the stuff Al and Winry do when they’re around each other-small things; practically unconscious; they’ll touch each other’s knees and arms, and Winry’s always fluffing Al’s hair, and he has a habit of twirling his fingers in along the part of hers that always curls at the bottom. People on the street are constantly holding hands and grazing their fingers across the smalls of each other’s backs and shit.
That doesn’t sound so bad. He knows-whatever Al says about his incredible powers of obliviousness and self-deception, he knows-that he’s fortified his own personal boundaries into stone fucking walls over the past few years. In the throes of that paralyzing fear of sick violation in the course of shit that other people think is ordinary-in the blind, desperate, tremulous desire to try to stave off any advances at all before they develop into something that will bring the gut-wrenching terror back-he’s compensated by pushing all of it as far away as he can manage.
He knows that’s counterproductive, if not outright dumb. He knows nobody ever broadened their horizons by closing their eyes, and he knows that’s what science is all a-fucking-bout-that it’s hypocritical on top of being hyper-sensitive or whatever. He knows that it’s not possible to shut himself up in an airtight box where nobody will ever hurt him on accident, and that any attempt is doomed to fail, and that the effort will make the trauma all that much more acute when it inevitably crashes in.
At least he’s aware of it-that’s supposed to count for something. At least he knows that he’s done this much of it to himself.
But that leaves him with two days-not even two days; forty-odd hours-to undo as much of it as he can. To talk himself down so he won’t flip the fuck out and hurt Roy’s feelings in the process of trying to protect his own.
So he needs to think about it-realistically.
Roy might want to touch him.
He could handle that. If it’s just the kind of thing Al and Winry do in public all the time, it wouldn’t be that big a deal-it wouldn’t be that big a difference. None of the three of them have ever been too afraid of expressing affection physically-at least not historically, or anything; and for fuck’s sake, Ed had to shed some of that to be able to stand all of the up-close-and-personal automail repairs.
If Roy just touches his arms, for instance, that’d be-that’d just be normal. The significance might be slightly different, sure, but the sensation would be familiar, so Ed just… wouldn’t care. Yeah. He just won’t care. Shoulders, biceps, forearms-whatever. Nothing loaded there. So that will-that would-be fine. If that’s what Roy wants. If that’s what he’s inclined to.
Hands are a little more… personal. Is Roy going to want to hold hands or some shit? Is that a first-date thing? Or does it have to wait until you’ve been out with someone more than once? This is the first time in his fucking life that Ed has wished he’d paid more attention to all of the schmoopy-swoony bullshit Al and Winry kept dumping out all over the known universe when they first started dating. Is there a standard metric for hand-holding? Is it expected? Is he going to look like a cold fish or a prude or some other fucking thing? Is he going to make Roy look bad if he looks like that? Is Roy going to look like he-what, turns people off, or something, just because Ed’s not turned on?
He’s… just going to have to cross that possibly-already-on-fire bridge when he comes to it. Or maybe run the other direction when he sees the plumes of black smoke in the distance or something. Whatever. It’ll be fine. He’ll manage.
So that’s okay, but what if-
What if Roy wants to get, like, close?
What if Roy wants to do that graze-the-hand-along-the-waist thing Winry does with Al every two seconds when he tucks his shirt in? That might be okay. As long as it doesn’t tickle or anything. And as long as it’s not a surprise. There would be two or three layers of clothes in the way anyway, so it wouldn’t even be as directly skin-to-skin as hand-to-arm or hand-to-hand or something. That’d be fine-provided that it didn’t startle him and make him jump out of his fucking skin, which would probably send the wrong fucking message. Maybe he should pre-game and get a little tipsy or something so that he loosens up. Or take some cough medicine. Or-
What if Roy wants to touch his face?
That’d… Maybe that would be okay. It doesn’t sound bad-doesn’t give him that visceral, gut-wrenching no feeling-as he’s thinking about it. It’s not like it’s something you’d do for very long anyway, right? It’s not like there’s anything to do. You would just sort of… brush your hand against someone’s cheek or jaw or something, purely to make a point that you like the arrangement of their features or whatever the fuck, and then that’d be that. It’s not like someone would sit there and draw out a fucking map with their fingertip or something. X marks the fucking spot or whatever.
So probably that would be fine, too.
And everybody talks about Roy like he’s some kind of dashing, rakish sex god or some shit-well, the switchboard women do, quietly, punctuated by lots of giggling and stuff-but if there’s one thing that Ed’s really learned by now, it’s that Roy is actually a big fucking dork, and the rest of it is smoke and mirrors and swirly capes (or coats) to keep the hounds off of his trail.
And he’s been acting especially dorky about this whole… thing. It’s not unreasonable to take that as an indication that he’s more nervous than he’d ever let on, right? There’s definitely a correlative relationship there; any more definitive conclusions would be a stretch, but maybe… Maybe he’ll be really invested in making sure that Ed’s okay. Maybe he won’t ask for anything more than that.
But what if he does?
What if he wants to-kiss or something?
The implication Ed gets from all of the tragically inevitable but blessedly brief encounters with literature on the subject-as well as more than a few of Al’s little happy-sigh sessions-is that the whole experience is fucking transcendent and whatever shit.
But it also sounds… wet. Sort of-slimy, maybe. Saliva isn’t exactly high on Ed’s list of bodily fluids to distribute into other people’s mouths. Not that he has any bodily fluids that he’s itching to dole out, but-
There it is. There’s the sick fucking lurch of his stomach, so hard and so fast that it feels like the rest of his body’s going with it-like he’s falling straight through the mattress; straight through the bedframe; straight through the floor. Like the sharp, sudden pull of the lead weight in the pit of his guts is going to drag him down forever.
The guys at the office would have a lot to say-and a lot of winking to do-about his bodily fluids.
He rolls over and buries his face in the pillow. His right shoulder throbs a little, just for good measure. He deserves that; he probably should’ve just swallowed his fucking pride and stood on a chair when he was putting the dishes away instead of straining it. He should know better by now.
And he should know better than to think this thing is going to work.
Even if Roy’s careful-even if he’s a million times more considerate than anybody normal would ever expect to have to be-how fucking long is it going to last? Even if the little stuff, and the small touches, and the rest of it isn’t too bad, there’s going to be a point where their fucking goals diverge. There’s going to be a point where Ed, as is, as offered, is not enough.
There’s going to be a point where Roy wants shit Ed doesn’t know how to give him. There’s going to be a point where he wants shit Ed can’t give-or that he can, maybe, but that he’d fucking hate and fail at and never understand-
So what the fuck does Ed think he’s doing, pretending like it’s worth a trial flight when the whole thing is guaranteed to crash and burn?
It’s just a waste of everybody’s time. Roy needs someone who’s on the same page-someone who can give back the same shit he’s giving; someone who has all the traits and truths and capabilities he’s looking for.
Someone who’s like him.
Someone who’s whole.
Eventually, Roy’s going to want sex.
Right?
That’s how it works-that’s how people work; that’s what people do. Roy can talk until he’s blue in the face about compatibility and conversation and how it’s not necessary or whatever shit he wants, but the bottom line is that if it’s an impulse for the vast majority of the human race, someone who feels it is, over time, going to miss it if they can’t get it from someone who doesn’t get the urge.
The thought starts out as a wisp of a whisper in Ed’s brain.
Would it be so bad?
Maybe he could fake it.
Maybe he could pretend, for Roy’s sake-for his own; for the sake of having something, having someone; for the sake of not being fucking alone all the time and banging his fists on the glass watching people on the other side going around like their lives have meaning. And what if that’s the difference, underneath it all? What if it really is just as fucking simple as being loved?
But that’s bullshit. That can’t be right. Hawkeye has more gravitas and dignity and self-assertion than anyone he’s ever met; Hawkeye is a fucking pillar. Hawkeye doesn’t need it. Which means it must be possible to make do and unequivocally succeed without.
Which all circles back to the same damn point:
There’s something wrong with him.
He’s stranded somewhere in the fucking middle between wanting all this shit, in a blurry-abstract emotional sense; and lacking the mental and physical and psychological capacity to follow through the whole way and do it right.
If, by some unlikely twist of chance, this whole thing works out for a while, eventually Roy’s going to start to crave that shit whether either of them likes it or not.
It’s not like it’s-a big deal. It’s not like it’s personal. It’s just like if Ed was a vegetarian, and Roy stopped eating meat in solidarity with him, or something-it wouldn’t be that Roy couldn’t still like it; just that they couldn’t eat it together, and a day would come where Roy just had such a huge, toothy, salivating fucking hankering for a good steak-
That either Ed would have to give that to him, or he’d have to get it somewhere else.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
Maybe-
Except it makes his whole fucking stomach tighten up and twist just to think about-yeah, Roy’s got nice fucking collarbones; yeah, they look good framed by the edges of his shirt, gleaming with a thin sheen of sweat; yeah, sometimes Ed’s thoughts drift to whether his ribs would flatter harsh sunlight the same fucking way-
But the thought of getting naked with-
The thought of being bared to that hungry gleam that gets into his gorgeous eyes-
The thought of his hands smoothing over Ed’s skin, fingertips in places no one else has ever fucking touched, ever fucking seen-
That strikes a chord of panic in him so deep he fucking shudders with the resonation of it, and his whole body wants nothing more than to curl in tight and protective around himself.
It just-
It just sounds bad, made a dozen times worse by the weight of the fucking expectation-by the ten-, the hundred-thousand tiny little comments people make every fucking day that just assume that it’s part of the human experience; that it’s part of what makes you human; that carnality is a criterion for empathy and understanding, and-
The idea of someone’s hands on his-hips or his waist or his inner fucking thigh sounds like fucking torture, sounds like an invitation to fucking misery, sounds like disaster, sounds like-
He tries to focus on the specificity-on the fact that it wouldn’t just be some disembodied appendages; it’d be Roy’s hands. Roy’s hands are fucking extraordinary; he knows that all too goddamn well. And Roy would be careful-right? Gentle and shit. Roy would be talented-if even the dimmest, blurriest impression of the rumors is to be believed, he’s like some kind of fucking miracle.
Isn’t a miracle what Ed needs?
Well.
What he needs is some goddamn sleep, but apparently that’s out of the fucking question.
He rolls onto his back again, stares up at the ceiling, and then shifts enough to glare over at the window. Fucking cities and shit-there’s so much stupid light everywhere. So many streetlamps; so many storefronts; so much neon. It’s great when you’re walking around alone and would rather not feel like you’re about to get swallowed by the unfriendly fucking dark-or like it’s liable to spit out another unkillable monstrosity of claws and hate and teeth. It’s not so great when you’re trying to get some fucking sleep, and the blinds just aren’t good enough; or when you want to remember that the universe has fucking stars.
There’s something about starlight that’s purer-colder, crisper, cleaner; the paleness of it makes it less… obtrusive. Less demanding, somehow. Not like this artificial orange-yellow shit that trails you everywhere; clinging to the undersides of clouds when the sky’s cast over, glowing at every corner, pouring out of every window, seeping in between the slats across his window and laying stripes along the bed.
It’s been a long time since he missed home.
But he just wants all of this fucking nonsense to stop-just for a minute; just long enough for him to catch his breath. Just long enough to reorient himself in a world that’s carried on around him so intently that it’s constantly pulling further onward and leaving him behind. It’d be one thing if it’d just fucking abandon him and get it over with, but it keeps dragging on his skin and his hair and his clothes like little black hands-like it wants him, expects him, to follow.
It’s his own damn fault, if you think about it. He wasted all that time you’re supposed to spend learning how to live-dumped it into alchemy and arcana; filled his brain with little factoids instead of studying the patterns of human beings so that he knew how to act like one when all the quests were over. He should’ve known. He should’ve thought. He should’ve realized that the world wasn’t going to change when he finally laid the biggest wrong to rest. He should’ve realized it was still going to kick his fucking ass at every opportunity. He should’ve realized it was never, ever going to get easier-just different. Just differently hard.
It’s not that it’d be easier in Resembool-not that it’d be all that much better; not that he’d be any better.
But it’d be quiet. And the light wouldn’t burn from the darkness on every side.
Al’s voice shakes him from a soundless pit of fragile sleep, dragging him upward through a sticky torpor. “Brother, you’re still here?”
Ed winches one crusty eye open and offers a pearl of exquisite wisdom: “Nngh?”
It is then that his crusty eye registers the intensity of the light in the room.
In the first instant, he knows that he’s seriously fucking late.
In the second, he looks at the clock and knows exactly how seriously fucking late he is.
There are a lot of words he could say that begin with F. The one that comes out is “Figures”-which is somewhat surprising, given the usual usage proportions of his vocabulary, but nonetheless reasonably apt.
Al makes a tiny, disgustingly adorable little Eep noise as Ed tries to fling himself out of the bed. ‘Tries’ is the operative word: a very well-intentioned bit of momentum gets diverted by the way his automail leg tangles in the sheets and accordingly lands him spread-eagled on the floor.
“Let me help, Brother!” Al says. “What do you need?”
Ed’s first thought is Bacon, which is less bizarre than it could be, considering that his brain’s probably just given up today for lost. Bacon certainly wouldn’t hurt matters at this point.
“Clothes,” he says when the mutinous organ in question settles the fuck down. “Boots? Jacket’s by the door, the-”
“On the coatrack,” Al says. “Got it!”
A brief flurry of wild activity follows, and what follows that is Ed stumbling out the door with his hair half up-just the top layer pulled back with a band snapped around it, because there wasn’t time to navigate steel palm plates around the whole ponytail, but he’d faceplant on the sidewalk in an instant if it was free to dangle in his face.
Some people would probably reason that late is late is late, but Ed’s temporal reality doesn’t function quite like that, so even though it’s hopeless, he takes the stairs up to HQ at a run and hits the halls at a fast walk-the latter only because crashing headlong into a fucking major general at this point wouldn’t do any favors for this stupid day.
He bangs into the office sixteen minutes after eight, which is pretty impressive given that he was dead to the world until seven fifty, and his and Al’s place is a full two miles away.
Then again, being dead to the world sounds preferable to being here right now, with everybody’s fucking eyeballs on him.
“Sorry,” he blurts out, which is more difficult than he’d like with the way he’s panting from the jog. “Overslept.”
“Whoa,” Breda says.
“Are you okay?” Fuery asks.
Ed isn’t sure who to stare back at. Maybe he should rotate. Everybody can have a five-second window, and then he’ll start over.
“Yeah,” he says. “Why?”
Havoc clears his throat. “Your…” He makes a really ambiguous gesture around the level of his ear. After the entirety of the allotted five seconds, Ed figures out that that’s probably supposed to be a way of indicating hair.
Apparently the world has granted him one small blessing today: Mustang’s not here to participate in the peanut gallery just yet.
“I was in a rush,” Ed says. He glances over at Hawkeye. “Is it, like-non-regulation, or-?”
It’s funny, in retrospect-sad-funny; sfunny?-how few fucks, aerial or otherwise, he used to give about that kind of shit.
There’s just so much more at stake now. And so much staking him down-so much to lose; so much pinning him underneath the thousand tiny weights of the endless fucking rules.
“No,” Hawkeye says slowly. “It’s fine. Just-unusual, for you.”
He shuffles his feet for a second and then decides fuck this standing-here-getting-stared-at business and crosses over to drop into his regular seat. “I can fix it later.”
Falman taps the bottom edge of a stack of papers sharply on the tabletop to align them. “It makes you look startlingly reminiscent of several famous paintings by the seminal portrait artist Paolo Bettoni of characters from Xerxesian myth.”
It’s Ed’s turn to stare stupidly at someone, which he supposes is nice for a change. “I-what?”
Falman blinks serenely. “It makes you look startlingly remini-”
“I heard you,” Ed said. “It was a surprised ‘what’. I just left the ‘the fuck’ part off because it seemed more professional.”
The good news is, apparently he’s brilliant today.
“Aw, crap,” Havoc says. “Does somebody have an art book?”
“Not here,” Fuery says.
“Can you draw one from memory?” Havoc asks Falman.
“Get Armstrong,” Breda says. “He could.”
“Perhaps we can enrich Major Elric’s art history education later,” Hawkeye says, “and focus on our work for now?”
There’s a moment where they all instinctively make eye contact. When she uses collective pronouns and a rhetorical question, they’re in pretty deep shit.
“You betcha, Major Hawkeye,” Havoc says, hastily shuffling files.
“Teacher’s pet,” Breda mutters.
“Some of us,” Havoc says, “have hot fiancées to get home to, so the last thing we want is extra work as punishment for slacking off.”
Breda just looks at him, taps a pen twice, and then looks down at the form in front of him.
Ed knows that fucking feeling. He knows You’re my favorite person, and all I want is for you to be happy, whatever that means-but godfuckingdamn, I wish it didn’t have to be because your favorite person is starting to be somebody else.
He kind of wants to say something-or maybe write a note, so that nobody ends up in the crosshairs of the Hawkeye glare for unwarranted chitchat-but his brain is foggier than fall mornings in the hills back home, and the words just won’t arrange themselves nicely in his head.
He doesn’t get a chance to fumble his way through and figure something out, because that’s the moment Roy chooses to saunter in.
“Good morni-” He glances towards Ed, and he blinks twice in rapid succession and breathes in the middle of the syllable he’d been speaking. He manages to produce the rest of it without sounding especially perturbed, and the startlement vanishes from his face as immediately as it had arrived. “-ng, everyone.”
Is this about the fucking hair?
Ed is never leaving it like this again.
Roy proceeds on into his office with no noticeable loss of either pomp or circumstance, so Ed tries to shake off the nagging feeling that he somehow did something wrong and forces himself to think about requisition forms and shit.
It’s just-hair.
For fuck’s sake.
He keeps expecting Roy to-react. Say something, do something. Gaze at him in rapture, maybe. Isn’t that what people do to demonstrate attraction? Roy’s probably subtler than that, but he should at least be clearing his throat, or sneaking looks, or… something.
But he hasn’t.
So maybe the real reason he tripped over his greeting was because Ed’s hair looks like shit.
It’s probably just a big fucking rat’s nest mess anyway; that’s more likely.
Fucking whatever. Ed’ll just leave it that way. Maybe people will leave him alone.
The clock hands creep towards lunchtime, and stupid-ass thoughts keep climbing the walls of Ed’s skull, and does it ever fucking stop, or do you have to die to catch a break?
He’s not sure he wants to know the answer to that.
The cafeteria has long since earned the hard-won title of Worst Place in HQ, which is really saying something considering how much Ed hates this whole fucking place some days.
The cafeteria, however, goes the whole fucking way-it takes no prisoners and spares no expenses, except of course for the kinds of expenses that would purchase edible ingredients or competent cooks or benches that aren’t so unrelentingly uncomfortable that you just want to bolt down the shitty food and be done with it.
On second thought, maybe that sort of makes the seating an advantage.
Whatever.
The food-“food”-is, as always, shit.
And the crush of people’s arguably worse.
Ed ekes out an empty table end where no one’ll be bashing their elbow into his-he vaguely remembers that being less of a problem back when he could use his right hand for forks and other small-motor shit. He needs the solitude, though, to try to use Al’s latest research notes to distract himself from the ungodly assault on his tastebuds.
He’s only just settled and smacked the notebook down next to his tray when footsteps stop on the opposite side of the table instead of continuing by.
Motherfucker.
More than a little grudgingly, but fucking beholden to the rules about society and behavior and chain of command and all the fucking rest, he looks up.
“Ed!” Suzy Leighton says. Pink blooms around her cheekbones. “I mean-Major Elric.”
“You better not call me that,” he says, making sure to smile in case his tiredness makes it sound threatening or something. He jabs his fork towards his food for good measure. “I’m close enough to throwing up already.”
She wrinkles her nose, but in a way that’s much more sympathetic than disgusted. “The chicken is always… an adventure. But-hi! I haven’t seen you down here in a while.”
He thinks it’s probably kindest not to mention that their first encounter all those freaking years ago is most of the reason for that. “Yeah, I… mostly try to get the hell out of this place while I have the chance, y’know. But I was so late this morning I forgot to bring food or cash, so…” Waving the fork could catapult adventure-chicken everywhere, so he tries to be careful in gesturing around himself with it. “Here we are, I guess.”
“Here we are,” Suzy says. “Hey, you, um-you mind if I sit here?”
High on the list of things he simply cannot understand-which admittedly is expanding at the same approximate rate and scope as the universe-is the way some people come to work and then seek out other human beings during their only opportunities to be alone.
“Um,” he says. “Sure, yeah.” Language is always kind of a piece of shit, but especially when his brain is oatmeal after a night of vigorous not-sleeping. “I mean-no, I don’t mind.”
Suzy just sort of small-talk-bulldozes right through his awkwardness, though, which he supposes counts as a good thing. “So how’ve you been?” she asks. She looks faintly… relieved. Like she really wants to sit with him-or maybe really doesn’t want to sit with someone else. “It’s been… pretty much forever.”
He’s seen her here and there and waved or said hello and stuff maybe a dozen times in the intervening years, but she’s right-they haven’t had an actual conversation since the first time.
Which is what makes it a ridiculous prospect from the get-go that they could catch up over lunch hour when they never really knew each other to start with.
Is this the sort of thing that regular people have normalized?
Fuck.
“Uh,” Ed says. “I’ve been-okay, I guess. Busy. How are you?”
She smiles, sighs, and then shrugs-the latter two without losing the first, which is sort of impressive, actually.
“A little overwhelmed,” she says. “Oh! I got promoted! Twice!” She points to the markings on her shoulder and her chest, which proudly display… “Corporal now. My mom was so excited.”
“Hey,” Ed says, forcing enthusiasm into his voice, because she deserves some. “That’s fucking great. Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” she says, beaming at him. “It’s really-it’s just so cool to feel like I’m actually getting somewhere. Like I’m actually making a difference.”
Didn’t he feel that way, once?
Wasn’t there a time in his life where all of this shit mattered?
Lately fucking nothing ever does.
“Yeah,” he says. “That’s awesome. So what’ve they got you doing now?”
“I’m in Intelligence,” she says. She hasn’t even touched her food, which is probably the wiser choice, all things considered. “It’s really interesting so far-there’s so much going on; it’s l-”
“What have we here?” a low voice asks, and a shadow flicks across the tabletop, and a weight slides onto the end of the bench, settling a little too close on Ed’s left-
And Suzy scrambles to jump up out of her seat and-salute?
“Sir!” she says.
Shitfuck.
Ed twists around, trying to balance the screeching panic in his animal brain with his rational sense of how weirdly his body’s weighted; maybe he can get his left leg over the side of the bench without injuring the officer who just dropped onto it next to him, and then he can sort of hop over the bench itself to get both feet on the floor, because saluting while straddling the cafeteria bench probably counts as insubordination under one clause or anoth-
“At ease,” the newcomer says-to Ed, first, and then he tilts his head just slightly to flick his gaze at Suzy. “Please, enjoy your lunch.”
The hammering in Ed’s chest cavity doesn’t get a break, because he’s learned to make zeroing in on either the shoulder marks or the color bar an instinct.
Dude’s a colonel.
Fuck.
He’s probably a little bit older than Roy. Ed can be a crap judge of that sort of thing, which Al attributes to him being far too focused on the innumerable tasks at hand-and on judging yourself-to develop metrics for gauging others, but this guy’s got dark hair succumbing to little flecks of peppery-gray all over, and light green eyes that are seriously sharp despite the fine lines at the corners. The beard confounds the age guess a little; it’s going whitish faster than the hair, but Ed feels like that’s sort of normal, and in any case it’s trimmed neater than HQ’s front lawns, and probably most people would say this guy is gorgeous.
He’s also way too close.
“Good afternoon,” the colonel says to Ed-again, for the record, from way too close. “At least, I believe it’s afternoon. Major Elric, isn’t that right?”
“Yeah,” Ed says in answer to… both, or something.
Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Suzy sitting back down slowly, but he doesn’t want to look away from the superior officer to shoot her a reassuring glance or anything. He’s not sure what he’d be reassuring her about, anyway; it just sort of seems necessary for some reason.
“Martin Verso,” the guy says.
Ed’s brain spins. The guy’s knee is two inches away from his-and it’s Ed’s metal one, sure, but it’s like the proximity is fucking electric; he can feel it-
“Nice to meet you,” he says. “…sir.”
The guy smiles, makes a V-shape under his chin with his index finger and his thumb, and twists both fingers together as he strokes them down along his beard. It’s weirdly mesmerizing.
“Pleasure’s mine,” he says. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Ed tries to make the smile look natural. “If that were true, you prob’ly wouldn’t want to sit near me.”
“No?” Verso asks, and his grin has this quirk in it that’s just… There’s something- “By the sound of it, you have always been a magnet for scandal, but I can handle a bit of that.”
…what?
“Oh,” Ed says, which is a step up from his initial instinct to get defensive, because-well, what the fuck? “I guess it was kind of touch-and-go a lot when I was out on assignments more. I mean-not that I was responsible for any, like, property damage or anything, but sometimes it sort of… happened. In the course of duty. Y’know.”
He looks over at Suzy, who’s been awfully quiet. She’s currently sort of mushing her vegetables with the tines of her fork and spreading them around, and she glances up at him and then back down at her food.
Ed vaguely remembers the name Verso-which must mean the guy’s important. Hazy little puzzle pieces are shifting around in his brain as some of the initial muddle of emotions subsides-Verso’s the head of something, isn’t he? Is he Suzy’s boss? That would explain her reaction, wouldn’t it?
Fuckin’ fantastic. Basically confessing that he’s the uncrowned king of semi-accidental destruction to one of the people who’s kind of in charge around here while his sort-of-friend has to sit there silently sounds like great lunchtime conversation.
Verso doesn’t seem bothered by it, though, which is… weird. Normally the brass or anybody with aspirations to bronzeness turns their nose the fuck up at the likes of Ed as soon as they catch wind of his history of bending every rule he could get between his hands.
“Sometimes,” Verso says, and there’s something about this version of the smile that Ed doesn’t like, “extraordinary measures are necessary-in the course of duty, you know.”
Isn’t that… exactly what Ed just said?
“Right,” he says, which seems noncommittal enough.
“My understanding is that that’s your specialty,” Verso says. “Going to extremes. Doing whatever it takes.”
Verso’s knee is close enough to Ed’s now that it’s bumped against his once. The guy has turned his whole torso towards Ed, which could be the reason for the knee-jostling shit. He has one elbow on the table, and he just set the other hand on the bench between them, fingers splayed out so that the tip of his index finger sits a grand total of two centimeters away from the edge of Ed’s cavalry skirt.
“Um,” Ed says. He stares at Verso’s hand for a second before realizing that that’s a really stupid idea and shifting the stare up to his own plate-which is marginally less stupid. Unrelated to the more pressing concern of what the fuck he’s supposed to do here, the food, which was unappetizing before, looks inedible now. “I guess so.”
He chances a glance. Verso just keeps on smiling. The dude’s face must hurt. “That’s how you’ve come this far, isn’t it? How you’ve risen so spectacularly high?”
Is he calling Ed… tall?
Well, shit, that changes things, doesn’t it?
“It’s not like I did it alone or anything,” Ed says. “People’ve been really-supportive. Mostly, for me anyway, it seems like if you’re good to people, they’re good back.”
He believes that-he does. He has to. Equivalent exchange; it works, doesn’t it? If he just keeps fucking trying, something’s got to go right. It’s a sound principle, because it’s about conservation of matter and equal and opposite forces, and that shit’s just physics; you can’t fight that. Or you can, if you want to, but you sure as shit can’t win.
Except Verso-
Laughs, kind of low, kind of deep.
“I know precisely what you mean,” he says.
That’s a fucking relief; half the time Ed feels like he’s speaking in fucking tongues these days.
“It’s like Suzy was saying,” Ed says, tipping his head towards her and shooting her a smile. Trying to reel her back into the conversation is what Al would do, and in the rare moments when Ed’s feeling up to trying to be like Al, he sort of has to run with it. “It’s really important to feel like all the sacrifices are paying off.”
He hopes he didn’t misrepresent what she’d been talking about, because she doesn’t exactly look thrilled that he’s drawn attention to her. Shit. Did he do something w-
The tug on his hair seems so incongruous that he almost bats his hand backwards towards his ear on instinct-a couple strands could’ve caught on the star-shaped pin on his shoulder, or in the wings of a big-ass fucking insect, or-
But for one reason or another, the way Suzy’s mouth sets in a line while her eyes widen makes him-
Pause.
And turn.
And realize that Verso just twirled a finger into his fucking hair.
At which point Ed’s brain just-
Quits. It fucking quits. His whole head echoes with the wordless roar of a white void, and he stares, fucking dumbstruck, at Colonel Verso’s face.
Verso looks-amused. But only a little. Like this is such a small diversion; like the blurry swathe of blue sleeve hedging the side of Ed’s vision is so completely fucking negligible; so triflingly ordinary-
Is it?
Is this, like-okay to people who aren’t all fucked-up-twisted inside about touching and hands and implications the way that Ed is?
He wants to look over at Suzy to use her expression as a reference point, but he can’t fucking move. He can’t process this; he can’t understand; and if the comprehension won’t come, his stubborn-ass brain insists that they should sit here, staring at the available evidence, until some kind of a conclusion surfaces from in amongst the muck.
His heart beats in his ears, and then Verso’s fingertips chase it-two of them, just the pads, soft-warm and feather-light, sweeping around the shell, so that his loose hair ripples over the man’s wrist and then slips back into place as the hand-
Withdraws.
Settles again on the bench between them.
Did that happen?
Maybe Ed fucking imagined it; maybe-
Maybe he’s getting fucking feverish from thinking so goddamn hard about Roy’s hands, and anybody who gets within two feet of him might as well be touching him; maybe he’s inventing this whole fucking scenario out of some half-baked, sleep-deprived notion of trying to practice-
Or maybe, now that the idea’s in his head, he’s just so fucking desperate to get somebody’s hands all over him that he’s casting anyone that he can find into the role and letting his sick fucking mind run rampant with the thought.
Maybe this is what he wanted-maybe this is what he wanted all along, and his singular capacity for hard-headed denial shoved it behind layers and layers of stubborn refutation and swept them shut every time he tried to wonder.
Maybe he wants some stranger to…
Did he invite this?
He’s still staring stupidly into Colonel Verso’s jade-green fucking eyes. He’s probably blinking; he’s probably breathing-but mostly he’s just staring; mostly he’s a fucking statue, crack-riven marble all the way down except the little segment of skin on his thigh that can just sense the heat of Verso’s hand so close-
Their whole conversation washes back over him; the words froth up, hissing; what did he say, exactly? What did he say that would’ve provoked-
Oh-fucking-
Everything that Verso said-all of it could have been-
But he didn’t realize-
He didn’t mean-
He hears himself dragging in a rattling breath. His mouth must’ve fallen open; he’s been staring slack-jawed like a fucking idiot all this time. He snaps it shut, tries to swallow-tries again, and then a third time, but it sticks. Everything feels sticky-everything feels slow and groggy and prickly and unsteady, and his whole body’s quicksand except the acid in his stomach sublimating so fast he can taste the bile in the back of his throat.
He didn’t mean for any of it to sound like-
He was just trying to have a fucking conversation; he was just trying to be polite and pass himself off as anything other than an abject social failure for once in his stupid fucking life-
“Good heavens,” Verso says, and the hand between them lifts again, and Ed’s whole body jerks backwards-away-
But all Verso does is wave it gingerly in front of Ed’s face in a Hello, anybody home? sort of way.
“Are you all right?” Verso asks. “I didn’t mean to startle you. It’s just that you have such beautiful hair; I could hardly help myself.”
Ed opens his mouth, but you can’t say Maybe you should try not fucking touching people if you didn’t ask to a superior officer. You can’t fucking say that to anyone in supposedly-fucking-civil public setting like this; you can’t-
Do anything.
You just have to take it.
Ed chokes down the spit, and the bile, and the things he wants to sling out with all the spite he can muster.
“I-” he manages. Not much left in him after that, all fucking told. “Thank-you.”
“Surely I’m not the first person who’s told you that,” Verso says. “If I am, I guarantee I’m not the first one to think it.”
Ed scrabbles around in his lungs and his brain, but neither of them yields up anything he can work with. “Well-”
“You don’t dye it, do you?” Verso asks. “Tell me you don’t. You can’t possibly; look at the roots.” He grins, like there’s nothing weird at all about gazing intently at somebody’s fucking scalp over the lunch table with your hand practically nudging up against their leg. “Ah, but you’re an alchemist,” Verso goes on. “You could make it terribly convincing, couldn’t you?”
What the fuck is that even supposed to mean? “Um,” Ed says. He chances a glance over at Suzy again; right as he turns, she looks down at the contents of her plate and starts poking them again. “No, it’s… it just grows that way. I, um-listen, I need to-g-”
“Does the carpet match the curtains?” Verso asks.
Ed’s voice dies in his mouth-dies, and rots, and crumbles to ashes all in a matter of a moment.
This guy is-
Right this fucking second, this guy is-
Thinking about him-
Naked, stripping him fucking bare in imagination-
Tearing off every last defense he’s got and treating it like some kind of clever fucking joke-
Ed’s blood turns to gasoline-floods everywhere just beneath his skin, choking fumes rising in a sick miasma in his lungs, and the gleam in Verso’s eyes strikes a fucking match-
And this isn’t the rushing, trembling almost-good heat of a phoenix shedding feathers and emerging from the night.
This is charcoal and withered veins-this is instant fucking incineration.
If the fire doesn’t kill him, the humiliation will.
How could he not have known-?
And he is so fucking helpless-so fucking violated while some guy he’s exchanged half a dozen words with sits there smugly envisioning him divested of every last defense, pried open and laid bare and so fucking vulnerable-transforms him with the mere fucking mention of that imaginative power; unravels him with nothing but the words-
And Suzy has no choice to think it either, now that it’s right there in the fucking open, so he might as well be naked sitting at this fucking table in the middle of the fucking cafeteria-it might as well be true-
How fucked up is it that someone like Verso can change what he is just by speaking a raunchy-ass fucking thought about him aloud?
Ed’s stomach bottoms the fuck out, rebounds off of the floor or something, and twists up again, folding in on itself, tighter and tighter until it’s crushing the rest of his organs, and he’s liable to suffocate where he fucking sits; there’s got to be something-
He used to have a smart answer to everything. He used to generate snark and rancor on the fly, with enough volume to make up for a lack of wit-
“Oh, look at you,” Verso says delightedly. The hand darts up again, and Ed’s just fast enough to recoil before the backs of the knuckles graze against his flaming cheek. “What? Don’t be shy.”
Ed’s not sure how to say I’m not fucking shy; I can’t decide whether I want to die or to murder you to a superior officer without getting his ass court-martialed before he’s even had the chance to punctuate it with some violence.
The whole world is a fucking minefield when you have to play the chess game-it’s not just here at headquarters; it’s not just under the eyes of the brass and their million little spies. It’s everywhere, because any ambitious reporter could snap a photo of you falling-down drunk. Any passerby could cook up a story about how you socked them in the street if you jostle your shoulder against their arm too hard. Anything can happen, and anyone can destroy you, and you just have to keep biting your tongue until the blood in your mouth drowns whatever self-endangering shit you planned to say.
Nobody warned him about that part.
Maybe Roy protected him for too long-because that’s part of what sending him out there was about, which is obvious in retrospect. Part of it was to free him for his own quest; part of it was to keep him out from under anybody else’s thumb; part of it was that he was goddamn good at solo missions, and he brought back results and then jaunted off again before he could interfere with any of Roy’s business.
But part of it was about casting him far enough away that he could offend anyone he wanted without catching any flack, and that meant he never had to learn how to tread so softly that he wouldn’t trip over a trigger.
Ed’s not sure he’s ever seen someone who looked more like a rigged explosive than Colonel Martin Verso.
If Roy had enough clout to get away with unleashing him at that rank, what the fuck might this guy manage while people looked the other way?
Ed has to get the fuck out of here before he either hits this fucker or throws up on the front of that clean-pressed uniform. He’s figured that much out-when a situation starts to get too delicate for his clumsy fucking skills, the best solution is to extricate himself before he breaks something Roy will have to fix.
That’s fine. He’s fine. It’ll be fine.
The deep, shuddering revulsion swelling in the core of him is just going to have to wait.
“I, um,” he says. “I think I-better-”
Excuse. What’s his excuse? Where’s he running off to in the middle of fucking lunch-well, “lunch”, based on the contents of his plate-that’s so plausibly fucking urgent?
“Oh,” Suzy breathes, and he seizes on the sound and looks at her; maybe she’ll save him; maybe-
“Sorry to interrupt,” Roy’s voice says from right fucking behind Ed’s shoulder, and he startles so hard he bangs his right knee on the underside of the table, and pins and needles burst outward from the point of impact. “Afternoon, Colonel; Corporal-may I borrow Major Elric from you?”
[Part 1, 2/2]
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Ed
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 47,200 (16,200 this part)
Warnings: language; post-BH AU; emetophobic parties beware; depictions of anxiety and depression (including dark intrusive thoughts); very much unwanted touches
Summary: Ed makes the mistake of waiting on goddamn tenterhooks for something to change - and then, naturally, something does.
Author's Note: This is the chapter where all the bad shit happens. Part of why it's long is because I tried to include a little of the stuff-getting-better part… and then I swear to you, on all that is fluffy and/or holy, that it gets a lot better still after this. ♥
HEARTBEAT
PART 2 (1/2)
On Thursday night, Al’s sitting on the floor in front of their coffee table at home working on a love letter to Winry-the phone bills were getting hilariously astronomical on both sides, and Al was stricken with guilt at the prospect that Ed was helping to fund the cost on this side, and the Atelier Garfiel was eating the expense on the other end of the line.
Meanwhile, Ed’s got a good sprawl going on the couch as he attempts to pin his attention on a book that doesn’t really deserve it. He’d find a better one, but he doesn’t really want to get up, and the newspaper is just too… loud. Too sensationalist. And there’s a chance of Roy getting smeared in it.
After concluding the mushy magnum opus with an extremely dramatic sweep of his pen, Al turns to Ed-seizing the opportunity presented by how damn distracting his sign-offs are, the clever little shit; they always make Ed look up.
“Are you sure about this whole date thing?” Al asks.
Ed sort of figured it’d be this old song and dance.
It’s-nice, though. It’s nice that Al’s worried about him. It’s nice that Al cares.
“Yeah,” Ed says.
“Are you sure you’re sure?” Al asks. “Because-I mean, you can change your mind, if you want. He’ll understand.”
“If he’d ever said I had to,” Ed says, “there’s no fucking way I’d be doing it.”
Al pauses. “Good point.” His forehead furrows again, matched by a disgustingly adorable little wrinkle to his nose. His expressions were slightly uncanny when he first got the face back; he always seemed to be trying just a tiny bit too hard to telegraph an emotion. “But you know that it’s your choice, right? There’s no obligation to go just because you feel like it’s-some kind of rite of passage, or like it makes you more of an adult, or…”
Ed really didn’t want to have this conversation, and the stones ricocheting down the cold well in the pit of his stomach are why.
He leans his head back over the couch arm and closes his eyes. “Like it’ll make me fuckin’ normal, you mean?”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Al says, so vehemently that Ed cracks an eye open before he can stop himself. There’s a different facial expression to go with this one-an equally adorable, screwed-up, hard-eyed, mule-stubborn frown. “That’s why I don’t want you to talk yourself into doing anything you don’t want to. What you want is different from what a lot of people want-but so what? That’s fine. That’s okay. I just want you to know it’s okay. I want you to feel okay.”
Ed takes a slow, deep breath. Then he follows it up with a slower, deeper one. Then he puts on a little smile, because Al is just so fucking wonderful, and that’s something worth smiling about.
“I’m fine,” he says. “I feel fine. It’s just that I can’t know the full range of what I do want until I create opportunities for things I might not, right?”
Al nose-wrinkles just a touch harder. “That’s… Brother, dating isn’t supposed to be a game of psychological chicken.”
Ed tries to trot out the reckless grin. “Since when have I ever done anything the way it’s supposed to be done?”
Al folds both arms on the couch cushion near Ed’s feet and rests his chin on them, looking over at Ed sidelong.
“Also a good point,” he says. He smiles, lifting one hand to scrub it back through his hair, and all the pale gold strands catch the light. “Well-if anything goes weird, you can always bail. And if you call me, I’ll come meet you, wherever you are. Okay?”
Ed… doesn’t like the sound of that-the sound of if anything goes weird. What the hell does that mean?
But Al offered it as part of an act of generosity, so that’s how Ed’s going to have to receive it.
“Okay,” he says. “You’re the best, you know that?”
“If you start that,” Al says, “we’re going to get into an infinite feedback loop, and you’ll never get to go on your data date at all.”
Ed makes an amendment: “You’re the best except when you say shit like ‘data date’, you know that?”
Al laughs, so the world can keep on turning.
Later, as he lies in bed with midnight creeping up, Ed’s brain keeps turning over the words. His stomach just keeps-turning.
If anything goes weird, he can cut and fucking run.
Except he can’t-can he? He couldn’t do that to Roy. In those precious few unguarded fucking moments, Roy looked at him like he was a code so beautiful he put every other cipher man had ever made to shame.
Roy’s really looking forward to this.
But then that’s the fucking question, isn’t it? Exactly what is Roy looking forward to, and what’s he looking for?
He knows, obviously-knows how Ed is; knows who Ed is. And it sounds like he knows better than to think that you can trick somebody into it or train them out of it or treat them the same until they believe it-a deep part of Ed knows that with a ringing sort of certainty. The rest of him is reassured by the fact that Hawkeye would have Roy’s balls nailed onto the corkboard in the office if he’d ever tried to pull some shit like that, so it must be true.
But Roy might want to-touch him. Right? At least… little stuff, almost more in the realm of gestures than actual contact. That’s a lot of what goes on, isn’t it? Ed’s seen way more than he’d like of the stuff Al and Winry do when they’re around each other-small things; practically unconscious; they’ll touch each other’s knees and arms, and Winry’s always fluffing Al’s hair, and he has a habit of twirling his fingers in along the part of hers that always curls at the bottom. People on the street are constantly holding hands and grazing their fingers across the smalls of each other’s backs and shit.
That doesn’t sound so bad. He knows-whatever Al says about his incredible powers of obliviousness and self-deception, he knows-that he’s fortified his own personal boundaries into stone fucking walls over the past few years. In the throes of that paralyzing fear of sick violation in the course of shit that other people think is ordinary-in the blind, desperate, tremulous desire to try to stave off any advances at all before they develop into something that will bring the gut-wrenching terror back-he’s compensated by pushing all of it as far away as he can manage.
He knows that’s counterproductive, if not outright dumb. He knows nobody ever broadened their horizons by closing their eyes, and he knows that’s what science is all a-fucking-bout-that it’s hypocritical on top of being hyper-sensitive or whatever. He knows that it’s not possible to shut himself up in an airtight box where nobody will ever hurt him on accident, and that any attempt is doomed to fail, and that the effort will make the trauma all that much more acute when it inevitably crashes in.
At least he’s aware of it-that’s supposed to count for something. At least he knows that he’s done this much of it to himself.
But that leaves him with two days-not even two days; forty-odd hours-to undo as much of it as he can. To talk himself down so he won’t flip the fuck out and hurt Roy’s feelings in the process of trying to protect his own.
So he needs to think about it-realistically.
Roy might want to touch him.
He could handle that. If it’s just the kind of thing Al and Winry do in public all the time, it wouldn’t be that big a deal-it wouldn’t be that big a difference. None of the three of them have ever been too afraid of expressing affection physically-at least not historically, or anything; and for fuck’s sake, Ed had to shed some of that to be able to stand all of the up-close-and-personal automail repairs.
If Roy just touches his arms, for instance, that’d be-that’d just be normal. The significance might be slightly different, sure, but the sensation would be familiar, so Ed just… wouldn’t care. Yeah. He just won’t care. Shoulders, biceps, forearms-whatever. Nothing loaded there. So that will-that would-be fine. If that’s what Roy wants. If that’s what he’s inclined to.
Hands are a little more… personal. Is Roy going to want to hold hands or some shit? Is that a first-date thing? Or does it have to wait until you’ve been out with someone more than once? This is the first time in his fucking life that Ed has wished he’d paid more attention to all of the schmoopy-swoony bullshit Al and Winry kept dumping out all over the known universe when they first started dating. Is there a standard metric for hand-holding? Is it expected? Is he going to look like a cold fish or a prude or some other fucking thing? Is he going to make Roy look bad if he looks like that? Is Roy going to look like he-what, turns people off, or something, just because Ed’s not turned on?
He’s… just going to have to cross that possibly-already-on-fire bridge when he comes to it. Or maybe run the other direction when he sees the plumes of black smoke in the distance or something. Whatever. It’ll be fine. He’ll manage.
So that’s okay, but what if-
What if Roy wants to get, like, close?
What if Roy wants to do that graze-the-hand-along-the-waist thing Winry does with Al every two seconds when he tucks his shirt in? That might be okay. As long as it doesn’t tickle or anything. And as long as it’s not a surprise. There would be two or three layers of clothes in the way anyway, so it wouldn’t even be as directly skin-to-skin as hand-to-arm or hand-to-hand or something. That’d be fine-provided that it didn’t startle him and make him jump out of his fucking skin, which would probably send the wrong fucking message. Maybe he should pre-game and get a little tipsy or something so that he loosens up. Or take some cough medicine. Or-
What if Roy wants to touch his face?
That’d… Maybe that would be okay. It doesn’t sound bad-doesn’t give him that visceral, gut-wrenching no feeling-as he’s thinking about it. It’s not like it’s something you’d do for very long anyway, right? It’s not like there’s anything to do. You would just sort of… brush your hand against someone’s cheek or jaw or something, purely to make a point that you like the arrangement of their features or whatever the fuck, and then that’d be that. It’s not like someone would sit there and draw out a fucking map with their fingertip or something. X marks the fucking spot or whatever.
So probably that would be fine, too.
And everybody talks about Roy like he’s some kind of dashing, rakish sex god or some shit-well, the switchboard women do, quietly, punctuated by lots of giggling and stuff-but if there’s one thing that Ed’s really learned by now, it’s that Roy is actually a big fucking dork, and the rest of it is smoke and mirrors and swirly capes (or coats) to keep the hounds off of his trail.
And he’s been acting especially dorky about this whole… thing. It’s not unreasonable to take that as an indication that he’s more nervous than he’d ever let on, right? There’s definitely a correlative relationship there; any more definitive conclusions would be a stretch, but maybe… Maybe he’ll be really invested in making sure that Ed’s okay. Maybe he won’t ask for anything more than that.
But what if he does?
What if he wants to-kiss or something?
The implication Ed gets from all of the tragically inevitable but blessedly brief encounters with literature on the subject-as well as more than a few of Al’s little happy-sigh sessions-is that the whole experience is fucking transcendent and whatever shit.
But it also sounds… wet. Sort of-slimy, maybe. Saliva isn’t exactly high on Ed’s list of bodily fluids to distribute into other people’s mouths. Not that he has any bodily fluids that he’s itching to dole out, but-
There it is. There’s the sick fucking lurch of his stomach, so hard and so fast that it feels like the rest of his body’s going with it-like he’s falling straight through the mattress; straight through the bedframe; straight through the floor. Like the sharp, sudden pull of the lead weight in the pit of his guts is going to drag him down forever.
The guys at the office would have a lot to say-and a lot of winking to do-about his bodily fluids.
He rolls over and buries his face in the pillow. His right shoulder throbs a little, just for good measure. He deserves that; he probably should’ve just swallowed his fucking pride and stood on a chair when he was putting the dishes away instead of straining it. He should know better by now.
And he should know better than to think this thing is going to work.
Even if Roy’s careful-even if he’s a million times more considerate than anybody normal would ever expect to have to be-how fucking long is it going to last? Even if the little stuff, and the small touches, and the rest of it isn’t too bad, there’s going to be a point where their fucking goals diverge. There’s going to be a point where Ed, as is, as offered, is not enough.
There’s going to be a point where Roy wants shit Ed doesn’t know how to give him. There’s going to be a point where he wants shit Ed can’t give-or that he can, maybe, but that he’d fucking hate and fail at and never understand-
So what the fuck does Ed think he’s doing, pretending like it’s worth a trial flight when the whole thing is guaranteed to crash and burn?
It’s just a waste of everybody’s time. Roy needs someone who’s on the same page-someone who can give back the same shit he’s giving; someone who has all the traits and truths and capabilities he’s looking for.
Someone who’s like him.
Someone who’s whole.
Eventually, Roy’s going to want sex.
Right?
That’s how it works-that’s how people work; that’s what people do. Roy can talk until he’s blue in the face about compatibility and conversation and how it’s not necessary or whatever shit he wants, but the bottom line is that if it’s an impulse for the vast majority of the human race, someone who feels it is, over time, going to miss it if they can’t get it from someone who doesn’t get the urge.
The thought starts out as a wisp of a whisper in Ed’s brain.
Would it be so bad?
Maybe he could fake it.
Maybe he could pretend, for Roy’s sake-for his own; for the sake of having something, having someone; for the sake of not being fucking alone all the time and banging his fists on the glass watching people on the other side going around like their lives have meaning. And what if that’s the difference, underneath it all? What if it really is just as fucking simple as being loved?
But that’s bullshit. That can’t be right. Hawkeye has more gravitas and dignity and self-assertion than anyone he’s ever met; Hawkeye is a fucking pillar. Hawkeye doesn’t need it. Which means it must be possible to make do and unequivocally succeed without.
Which all circles back to the same damn point:
There’s something wrong with him.
He’s stranded somewhere in the fucking middle between wanting all this shit, in a blurry-abstract emotional sense; and lacking the mental and physical and psychological capacity to follow through the whole way and do it right.
If, by some unlikely twist of chance, this whole thing works out for a while, eventually Roy’s going to start to crave that shit whether either of them likes it or not.
It’s not like it’s-a big deal. It’s not like it’s personal. It’s just like if Ed was a vegetarian, and Roy stopped eating meat in solidarity with him, or something-it wouldn’t be that Roy couldn’t still like it; just that they couldn’t eat it together, and a day would come where Roy just had such a huge, toothy, salivating fucking hankering for a good steak-
That either Ed would have to give that to him, or he’d have to get it somewhere else.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
Maybe-
Except it makes his whole fucking stomach tighten up and twist just to think about-yeah, Roy’s got nice fucking collarbones; yeah, they look good framed by the edges of his shirt, gleaming with a thin sheen of sweat; yeah, sometimes Ed’s thoughts drift to whether his ribs would flatter harsh sunlight the same fucking way-
But the thought of getting naked with-
The thought of being bared to that hungry gleam that gets into his gorgeous eyes-
The thought of his hands smoothing over Ed’s skin, fingertips in places no one else has ever fucking touched, ever fucking seen-
That strikes a chord of panic in him so deep he fucking shudders with the resonation of it, and his whole body wants nothing more than to curl in tight and protective around himself.
It just-
It just sounds bad, made a dozen times worse by the weight of the fucking expectation-by the ten-, the hundred-thousand tiny little comments people make every fucking day that just assume that it’s part of the human experience; that it’s part of what makes you human; that carnality is a criterion for empathy and understanding, and-
The idea of someone’s hands on his-hips or his waist or his inner fucking thigh sounds like fucking torture, sounds like an invitation to fucking misery, sounds like disaster, sounds like-
He tries to focus on the specificity-on the fact that it wouldn’t just be some disembodied appendages; it’d be Roy’s hands. Roy’s hands are fucking extraordinary; he knows that all too goddamn well. And Roy would be careful-right? Gentle and shit. Roy would be talented-if even the dimmest, blurriest impression of the rumors is to be believed, he’s like some kind of fucking miracle.
Isn’t a miracle what Ed needs?
Well.
What he needs is some goddamn sleep, but apparently that’s out of the fucking question.
He rolls onto his back again, stares up at the ceiling, and then shifts enough to glare over at the window. Fucking cities and shit-there’s so much stupid light everywhere. So many streetlamps; so many storefronts; so much neon. It’s great when you’re walking around alone and would rather not feel like you’re about to get swallowed by the unfriendly fucking dark-or like it’s liable to spit out another unkillable monstrosity of claws and hate and teeth. It’s not so great when you’re trying to get some fucking sleep, and the blinds just aren’t good enough; or when you want to remember that the universe has fucking stars.
There’s something about starlight that’s purer-colder, crisper, cleaner; the paleness of it makes it less… obtrusive. Less demanding, somehow. Not like this artificial orange-yellow shit that trails you everywhere; clinging to the undersides of clouds when the sky’s cast over, glowing at every corner, pouring out of every window, seeping in between the slats across his window and laying stripes along the bed.
It’s been a long time since he missed home.
But he just wants all of this fucking nonsense to stop-just for a minute; just long enough for him to catch his breath. Just long enough to reorient himself in a world that’s carried on around him so intently that it’s constantly pulling further onward and leaving him behind. It’d be one thing if it’d just fucking abandon him and get it over with, but it keeps dragging on his skin and his hair and his clothes like little black hands-like it wants him, expects him, to follow.
It’s his own damn fault, if you think about it. He wasted all that time you’re supposed to spend learning how to live-dumped it into alchemy and arcana; filled his brain with little factoids instead of studying the patterns of human beings so that he knew how to act like one when all the quests were over. He should’ve known. He should’ve thought. He should’ve realized that the world wasn’t going to change when he finally laid the biggest wrong to rest. He should’ve realized it was still going to kick his fucking ass at every opportunity. He should’ve realized it was never, ever going to get easier-just different. Just differently hard.
It’s not that it’d be easier in Resembool-not that it’d be all that much better; not that he’d be any better.
But it’d be quiet. And the light wouldn’t burn from the darkness on every side.
Al’s voice shakes him from a soundless pit of fragile sleep, dragging him upward through a sticky torpor. “Brother, you’re still here?”
Ed winches one crusty eye open and offers a pearl of exquisite wisdom: “Nngh?”
It is then that his crusty eye registers the intensity of the light in the room.
In the first instant, he knows that he’s seriously fucking late.
In the second, he looks at the clock and knows exactly how seriously fucking late he is.
There are a lot of words he could say that begin with F. The one that comes out is “Figures”-which is somewhat surprising, given the usual usage proportions of his vocabulary, but nonetheless reasonably apt.
Al makes a tiny, disgustingly adorable little Eep noise as Ed tries to fling himself out of the bed. ‘Tries’ is the operative word: a very well-intentioned bit of momentum gets diverted by the way his automail leg tangles in the sheets and accordingly lands him spread-eagled on the floor.
“Let me help, Brother!” Al says. “What do you need?”
Ed’s first thought is Bacon, which is less bizarre than it could be, considering that his brain’s probably just given up today for lost. Bacon certainly wouldn’t hurt matters at this point.
“Clothes,” he says when the mutinous organ in question settles the fuck down. “Boots? Jacket’s by the door, the-”
“On the coatrack,” Al says. “Got it!”
A brief flurry of wild activity follows, and what follows that is Ed stumbling out the door with his hair half up-just the top layer pulled back with a band snapped around it, because there wasn’t time to navigate steel palm plates around the whole ponytail, but he’d faceplant on the sidewalk in an instant if it was free to dangle in his face.
Some people would probably reason that late is late is late, but Ed’s temporal reality doesn’t function quite like that, so even though it’s hopeless, he takes the stairs up to HQ at a run and hits the halls at a fast walk-the latter only because crashing headlong into a fucking major general at this point wouldn’t do any favors for this stupid day.
He bangs into the office sixteen minutes after eight, which is pretty impressive given that he was dead to the world until seven fifty, and his and Al’s place is a full two miles away.
Then again, being dead to the world sounds preferable to being here right now, with everybody’s fucking eyeballs on him.
“Sorry,” he blurts out, which is more difficult than he’d like with the way he’s panting from the jog. “Overslept.”
“Whoa,” Breda says.
“Are you okay?” Fuery asks.
Ed isn’t sure who to stare back at. Maybe he should rotate. Everybody can have a five-second window, and then he’ll start over.
“Yeah,” he says. “Why?”
Havoc clears his throat. “Your…” He makes a really ambiguous gesture around the level of his ear. After the entirety of the allotted five seconds, Ed figures out that that’s probably supposed to be a way of indicating hair.
Apparently the world has granted him one small blessing today: Mustang’s not here to participate in the peanut gallery just yet.
“I was in a rush,” Ed says. He glances over at Hawkeye. “Is it, like-non-regulation, or-?”
It’s funny, in retrospect-sad-funny; sfunny?-how few fucks, aerial or otherwise, he used to give about that kind of shit.
There’s just so much more at stake now. And so much staking him down-so much to lose; so much pinning him underneath the thousand tiny weights of the endless fucking rules.
“No,” Hawkeye says slowly. “It’s fine. Just-unusual, for you.”
He shuffles his feet for a second and then decides fuck this standing-here-getting-stared-at business and crosses over to drop into his regular seat. “I can fix it later.”
Falman taps the bottom edge of a stack of papers sharply on the tabletop to align them. “It makes you look startlingly reminiscent of several famous paintings by the seminal portrait artist Paolo Bettoni of characters from Xerxesian myth.”
It’s Ed’s turn to stare stupidly at someone, which he supposes is nice for a change. “I-what?”
Falman blinks serenely. “It makes you look startlingly remini-”
“I heard you,” Ed said. “It was a surprised ‘what’. I just left the ‘the fuck’ part off because it seemed more professional.”
The good news is, apparently he’s brilliant today.
“Aw, crap,” Havoc says. “Does somebody have an art book?”
“Not here,” Fuery says.
“Can you draw one from memory?” Havoc asks Falman.
“Get Armstrong,” Breda says. “He could.”
“Perhaps we can enrich Major Elric’s art history education later,” Hawkeye says, “and focus on our work for now?”
There’s a moment where they all instinctively make eye contact. When she uses collective pronouns and a rhetorical question, they’re in pretty deep shit.
“You betcha, Major Hawkeye,” Havoc says, hastily shuffling files.
“Teacher’s pet,” Breda mutters.
“Some of us,” Havoc says, “have hot fiancées to get home to, so the last thing we want is extra work as punishment for slacking off.”
Breda just looks at him, taps a pen twice, and then looks down at the form in front of him.
Ed knows that fucking feeling. He knows You’re my favorite person, and all I want is for you to be happy, whatever that means-but godfuckingdamn, I wish it didn’t have to be because your favorite person is starting to be somebody else.
He kind of wants to say something-or maybe write a note, so that nobody ends up in the crosshairs of the Hawkeye glare for unwarranted chitchat-but his brain is foggier than fall mornings in the hills back home, and the words just won’t arrange themselves nicely in his head.
He doesn’t get a chance to fumble his way through and figure something out, because that’s the moment Roy chooses to saunter in.
“Good morni-” He glances towards Ed, and he blinks twice in rapid succession and breathes in the middle of the syllable he’d been speaking. He manages to produce the rest of it without sounding especially perturbed, and the startlement vanishes from his face as immediately as it had arrived. “-ng, everyone.”
Is this about the fucking hair?
Ed is never leaving it like this again.
Roy proceeds on into his office with no noticeable loss of either pomp or circumstance, so Ed tries to shake off the nagging feeling that he somehow did something wrong and forces himself to think about requisition forms and shit.
It’s just-hair.
For fuck’s sake.
He keeps expecting Roy to-react. Say something, do something. Gaze at him in rapture, maybe. Isn’t that what people do to demonstrate attraction? Roy’s probably subtler than that, but he should at least be clearing his throat, or sneaking looks, or… something.
But he hasn’t.
So maybe the real reason he tripped over his greeting was because Ed’s hair looks like shit.
It’s probably just a big fucking rat’s nest mess anyway; that’s more likely.
Fucking whatever. Ed’ll just leave it that way. Maybe people will leave him alone.
The clock hands creep towards lunchtime, and stupid-ass thoughts keep climbing the walls of Ed’s skull, and does it ever fucking stop, or do you have to die to catch a break?
He’s not sure he wants to know the answer to that.
The cafeteria has long since earned the hard-won title of Worst Place in HQ, which is really saying something considering how much Ed hates this whole fucking place some days.
The cafeteria, however, goes the whole fucking way-it takes no prisoners and spares no expenses, except of course for the kinds of expenses that would purchase edible ingredients or competent cooks or benches that aren’t so unrelentingly uncomfortable that you just want to bolt down the shitty food and be done with it.
On second thought, maybe that sort of makes the seating an advantage.
Whatever.
The food-“food”-is, as always, shit.
And the crush of people’s arguably worse.
Ed ekes out an empty table end where no one’ll be bashing their elbow into his-he vaguely remembers that being less of a problem back when he could use his right hand for forks and other small-motor shit. He needs the solitude, though, to try to use Al’s latest research notes to distract himself from the ungodly assault on his tastebuds.
He’s only just settled and smacked the notebook down next to his tray when footsteps stop on the opposite side of the table instead of continuing by.
Motherfucker.
More than a little grudgingly, but fucking beholden to the rules about society and behavior and chain of command and all the fucking rest, he looks up.
“Ed!” Suzy Leighton says. Pink blooms around her cheekbones. “I mean-Major Elric.”
“You better not call me that,” he says, making sure to smile in case his tiredness makes it sound threatening or something. He jabs his fork towards his food for good measure. “I’m close enough to throwing up already.”
She wrinkles her nose, but in a way that’s much more sympathetic than disgusted. “The chicken is always… an adventure. But-hi! I haven’t seen you down here in a while.”
He thinks it’s probably kindest not to mention that their first encounter all those freaking years ago is most of the reason for that. “Yeah, I… mostly try to get the hell out of this place while I have the chance, y’know. But I was so late this morning I forgot to bring food or cash, so…” Waving the fork could catapult adventure-chicken everywhere, so he tries to be careful in gesturing around himself with it. “Here we are, I guess.”
“Here we are,” Suzy says. “Hey, you, um-you mind if I sit here?”
High on the list of things he simply cannot understand-which admittedly is expanding at the same approximate rate and scope as the universe-is the way some people come to work and then seek out other human beings during their only opportunities to be alone.
“Um,” he says. “Sure, yeah.” Language is always kind of a piece of shit, but especially when his brain is oatmeal after a night of vigorous not-sleeping. “I mean-no, I don’t mind.”
Suzy just sort of small-talk-bulldozes right through his awkwardness, though, which he supposes counts as a good thing. “So how’ve you been?” she asks. She looks faintly… relieved. Like she really wants to sit with him-or maybe really doesn’t want to sit with someone else. “It’s been… pretty much forever.”
He’s seen her here and there and waved or said hello and stuff maybe a dozen times in the intervening years, but she’s right-they haven’t had an actual conversation since the first time.
Which is what makes it a ridiculous prospect from the get-go that they could catch up over lunch hour when they never really knew each other to start with.
Is this the sort of thing that regular people have normalized?
Fuck.
“Uh,” Ed says. “I’ve been-okay, I guess. Busy. How are you?”
She smiles, sighs, and then shrugs-the latter two without losing the first, which is sort of impressive, actually.
“A little overwhelmed,” she says. “Oh! I got promoted! Twice!” She points to the markings on her shoulder and her chest, which proudly display… “Corporal now. My mom was so excited.”
“Hey,” Ed says, forcing enthusiasm into his voice, because she deserves some. “That’s fucking great. Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” she says, beaming at him. “It’s really-it’s just so cool to feel like I’m actually getting somewhere. Like I’m actually making a difference.”
Didn’t he feel that way, once?
Wasn’t there a time in his life where all of this shit mattered?
Lately fucking nothing ever does.
“Yeah,” he says. “That’s awesome. So what’ve they got you doing now?”
“I’m in Intelligence,” she says. She hasn’t even touched her food, which is probably the wiser choice, all things considered. “It’s really interesting so far-there’s so much going on; it’s l-”
“What have we here?” a low voice asks, and a shadow flicks across the tabletop, and a weight slides onto the end of the bench, settling a little too close on Ed’s left-
And Suzy scrambles to jump up out of her seat and-salute?
“Sir!” she says.
Shitfuck.
Ed twists around, trying to balance the screeching panic in his animal brain with his rational sense of how weirdly his body’s weighted; maybe he can get his left leg over the side of the bench without injuring the officer who just dropped onto it next to him, and then he can sort of hop over the bench itself to get both feet on the floor, because saluting while straddling the cafeteria bench probably counts as insubordination under one clause or anoth-
“At ease,” the newcomer says-to Ed, first, and then he tilts his head just slightly to flick his gaze at Suzy. “Please, enjoy your lunch.”
The hammering in Ed’s chest cavity doesn’t get a break, because he’s learned to make zeroing in on either the shoulder marks or the color bar an instinct.
Dude’s a colonel.
Fuck.
He’s probably a little bit older than Roy. Ed can be a crap judge of that sort of thing, which Al attributes to him being far too focused on the innumerable tasks at hand-and on judging yourself-to develop metrics for gauging others, but this guy’s got dark hair succumbing to little flecks of peppery-gray all over, and light green eyes that are seriously sharp despite the fine lines at the corners. The beard confounds the age guess a little; it’s going whitish faster than the hair, but Ed feels like that’s sort of normal, and in any case it’s trimmed neater than HQ’s front lawns, and probably most people would say this guy is gorgeous.
He’s also way too close.
“Good afternoon,” the colonel says to Ed-again, for the record, from way too close. “At least, I believe it’s afternoon. Major Elric, isn’t that right?”
“Yeah,” Ed says in answer to… both, or something.
Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Suzy sitting back down slowly, but he doesn’t want to look away from the superior officer to shoot her a reassuring glance or anything. He’s not sure what he’d be reassuring her about, anyway; it just sort of seems necessary for some reason.
“Martin Verso,” the guy says.
Ed’s brain spins. The guy’s knee is two inches away from his-and it’s Ed’s metal one, sure, but it’s like the proximity is fucking electric; he can feel it-
“Nice to meet you,” he says. “…sir.”
The guy smiles, makes a V-shape under his chin with his index finger and his thumb, and twists both fingers together as he strokes them down along his beard. It’s weirdly mesmerizing.
“Pleasure’s mine,” he says. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Ed tries to make the smile look natural. “If that were true, you prob’ly wouldn’t want to sit near me.”
“No?” Verso asks, and his grin has this quirk in it that’s just… There’s something- “By the sound of it, you have always been a magnet for scandal, but I can handle a bit of that.”
…what?
“Oh,” Ed says, which is a step up from his initial instinct to get defensive, because-well, what the fuck? “I guess it was kind of touch-and-go a lot when I was out on assignments more. I mean-not that I was responsible for any, like, property damage or anything, but sometimes it sort of… happened. In the course of duty. Y’know.”
He looks over at Suzy, who’s been awfully quiet. She’s currently sort of mushing her vegetables with the tines of her fork and spreading them around, and she glances up at him and then back down at her food.
Ed vaguely remembers the name Verso-which must mean the guy’s important. Hazy little puzzle pieces are shifting around in his brain as some of the initial muddle of emotions subsides-Verso’s the head of something, isn’t he? Is he Suzy’s boss? That would explain her reaction, wouldn’t it?
Fuckin’ fantastic. Basically confessing that he’s the uncrowned king of semi-accidental destruction to one of the people who’s kind of in charge around here while his sort-of-friend has to sit there silently sounds like great lunchtime conversation.
Verso doesn’t seem bothered by it, though, which is… weird. Normally the brass or anybody with aspirations to bronzeness turns their nose the fuck up at the likes of Ed as soon as they catch wind of his history of bending every rule he could get between his hands.
“Sometimes,” Verso says, and there’s something about this version of the smile that Ed doesn’t like, “extraordinary measures are necessary-in the course of duty, you know.”
Isn’t that… exactly what Ed just said?
“Right,” he says, which seems noncommittal enough.
“My understanding is that that’s your specialty,” Verso says. “Going to extremes. Doing whatever it takes.”
Verso’s knee is close enough to Ed’s now that it’s bumped against his once. The guy has turned his whole torso towards Ed, which could be the reason for the knee-jostling shit. He has one elbow on the table, and he just set the other hand on the bench between them, fingers splayed out so that the tip of his index finger sits a grand total of two centimeters away from the edge of Ed’s cavalry skirt.
“Um,” Ed says. He stares at Verso’s hand for a second before realizing that that’s a really stupid idea and shifting the stare up to his own plate-which is marginally less stupid. Unrelated to the more pressing concern of what the fuck he’s supposed to do here, the food, which was unappetizing before, looks inedible now. “I guess so.”
He chances a glance. Verso just keeps on smiling. The dude’s face must hurt. “That’s how you’ve come this far, isn’t it? How you’ve risen so spectacularly high?”
Is he calling Ed… tall?
Well, shit, that changes things, doesn’t it?
“It’s not like I did it alone or anything,” Ed says. “People’ve been really-supportive. Mostly, for me anyway, it seems like if you’re good to people, they’re good back.”
He believes that-he does. He has to. Equivalent exchange; it works, doesn’t it? If he just keeps fucking trying, something’s got to go right. It’s a sound principle, because it’s about conservation of matter and equal and opposite forces, and that shit’s just physics; you can’t fight that. Or you can, if you want to, but you sure as shit can’t win.
Except Verso-
Laughs, kind of low, kind of deep.
“I know precisely what you mean,” he says.
That’s a fucking relief; half the time Ed feels like he’s speaking in fucking tongues these days.
“It’s like Suzy was saying,” Ed says, tipping his head towards her and shooting her a smile. Trying to reel her back into the conversation is what Al would do, and in the rare moments when Ed’s feeling up to trying to be like Al, he sort of has to run with it. “It’s really important to feel like all the sacrifices are paying off.”
He hopes he didn’t misrepresent what she’d been talking about, because she doesn’t exactly look thrilled that he’s drawn attention to her. Shit. Did he do something w-
The tug on his hair seems so incongruous that he almost bats his hand backwards towards his ear on instinct-a couple strands could’ve caught on the star-shaped pin on his shoulder, or in the wings of a big-ass fucking insect, or-
But for one reason or another, the way Suzy’s mouth sets in a line while her eyes widen makes him-
Pause.
And turn.
And realize that Verso just twirled a finger into his fucking hair.
At which point Ed’s brain just-
Quits. It fucking quits. His whole head echoes with the wordless roar of a white void, and he stares, fucking dumbstruck, at Colonel Verso’s face.
Verso looks-amused. But only a little. Like this is such a small diversion; like the blurry swathe of blue sleeve hedging the side of Ed’s vision is so completely fucking negligible; so triflingly ordinary-
Is it?
Is this, like-okay to people who aren’t all fucked-up-twisted inside about touching and hands and implications the way that Ed is?
He wants to look over at Suzy to use her expression as a reference point, but he can’t fucking move. He can’t process this; he can’t understand; and if the comprehension won’t come, his stubborn-ass brain insists that they should sit here, staring at the available evidence, until some kind of a conclusion surfaces from in amongst the muck.
His heart beats in his ears, and then Verso’s fingertips chase it-two of them, just the pads, soft-warm and feather-light, sweeping around the shell, so that his loose hair ripples over the man’s wrist and then slips back into place as the hand-
Withdraws.
Settles again on the bench between them.
Did that happen?
Maybe Ed fucking imagined it; maybe-
Maybe he’s getting fucking feverish from thinking so goddamn hard about Roy’s hands, and anybody who gets within two feet of him might as well be touching him; maybe he’s inventing this whole fucking scenario out of some half-baked, sleep-deprived notion of trying to practice-
Or maybe, now that the idea’s in his head, he’s just so fucking desperate to get somebody’s hands all over him that he’s casting anyone that he can find into the role and letting his sick fucking mind run rampant with the thought.
Maybe this is what he wanted-maybe this is what he wanted all along, and his singular capacity for hard-headed denial shoved it behind layers and layers of stubborn refutation and swept them shut every time he tried to wonder.
Maybe he wants some stranger to…
Did he invite this?
He’s still staring stupidly into Colonel Verso’s jade-green fucking eyes. He’s probably blinking; he’s probably breathing-but mostly he’s just staring; mostly he’s a fucking statue, crack-riven marble all the way down except the little segment of skin on his thigh that can just sense the heat of Verso’s hand so close-
Their whole conversation washes back over him; the words froth up, hissing; what did he say, exactly? What did he say that would’ve provoked-
Oh-fucking-
Everything that Verso said-all of it could have been-
But he didn’t realize-
He didn’t mean-
He hears himself dragging in a rattling breath. His mouth must’ve fallen open; he’s been staring slack-jawed like a fucking idiot all this time. He snaps it shut, tries to swallow-tries again, and then a third time, but it sticks. Everything feels sticky-everything feels slow and groggy and prickly and unsteady, and his whole body’s quicksand except the acid in his stomach sublimating so fast he can taste the bile in the back of his throat.
He didn’t mean for any of it to sound like-
He was just trying to have a fucking conversation; he was just trying to be polite and pass himself off as anything other than an abject social failure for once in his stupid fucking life-
“Good heavens,” Verso says, and the hand between them lifts again, and Ed’s whole body jerks backwards-away-
But all Verso does is wave it gingerly in front of Ed’s face in a Hello, anybody home? sort of way.
“Are you all right?” Verso asks. “I didn’t mean to startle you. It’s just that you have such beautiful hair; I could hardly help myself.”
Ed opens his mouth, but you can’t say Maybe you should try not fucking touching people if you didn’t ask to a superior officer. You can’t fucking say that to anyone in supposedly-fucking-civil public setting like this; you can’t-
Do anything.
You just have to take it.
Ed chokes down the spit, and the bile, and the things he wants to sling out with all the spite he can muster.
“I-” he manages. Not much left in him after that, all fucking told. “Thank-you.”
“Surely I’m not the first person who’s told you that,” Verso says. “If I am, I guarantee I’m not the first one to think it.”
Ed scrabbles around in his lungs and his brain, but neither of them yields up anything he can work with. “Well-”
“You don’t dye it, do you?” Verso asks. “Tell me you don’t. You can’t possibly; look at the roots.” He grins, like there’s nothing weird at all about gazing intently at somebody’s fucking scalp over the lunch table with your hand practically nudging up against their leg. “Ah, but you’re an alchemist,” Verso goes on. “You could make it terribly convincing, couldn’t you?”
What the fuck is that even supposed to mean? “Um,” Ed says. He chances a glance over at Suzy again; right as he turns, she looks down at the contents of her plate and starts poking them again. “No, it’s… it just grows that way. I, um-listen, I need to-g-”
“Does the carpet match the curtains?” Verso asks.
Ed’s voice dies in his mouth-dies, and rots, and crumbles to ashes all in a matter of a moment.
This guy is-
Right this fucking second, this guy is-
Thinking about him-
Naked, stripping him fucking bare in imagination-
Tearing off every last defense he’s got and treating it like some kind of clever fucking joke-
Ed’s blood turns to gasoline-floods everywhere just beneath his skin, choking fumes rising in a sick miasma in his lungs, and the gleam in Verso’s eyes strikes a fucking match-
And this isn’t the rushing, trembling almost-good heat of a phoenix shedding feathers and emerging from the night.
This is charcoal and withered veins-this is instant fucking incineration.
If the fire doesn’t kill him, the humiliation will.
How could he not have known-?
And he is so fucking helpless-so fucking violated while some guy he’s exchanged half a dozen words with sits there smugly envisioning him divested of every last defense, pried open and laid bare and so fucking vulnerable-transforms him with the mere fucking mention of that imaginative power; unravels him with nothing but the words-
And Suzy has no choice to think it either, now that it’s right there in the fucking open, so he might as well be naked sitting at this fucking table in the middle of the fucking cafeteria-it might as well be true-
How fucked up is it that someone like Verso can change what he is just by speaking a raunchy-ass fucking thought about him aloud?
Ed’s stomach bottoms the fuck out, rebounds off of the floor or something, and twists up again, folding in on itself, tighter and tighter until it’s crushing the rest of his organs, and he’s liable to suffocate where he fucking sits; there’s got to be something-
He used to have a smart answer to everything. He used to generate snark and rancor on the fly, with enough volume to make up for a lack of wit-
“Oh, look at you,” Verso says delightedly. The hand darts up again, and Ed’s just fast enough to recoil before the backs of the knuckles graze against his flaming cheek. “What? Don’t be shy.”
Ed’s not sure how to say I’m not fucking shy; I can’t decide whether I want to die or to murder you to a superior officer without getting his ass court-martialed before he’s even had the chance to punctuate it with some violence.
The whole world is a fucking minefield when you have to play the chess game-it’s not just here at headquarters; it’s not just under the eyes of the brass and their million little spies. It’s everywhere, because any ambitious reporter could snap a photo of you falling-down drunk. Any passerby could cook up a story about how you socked them in the street if you jostle your shoulder against their arm too hard. Anything can happen, and anyone can destroy you, and you just have to keep biting your tongue until the blood in your mouth drowns whatever self-endangering shit you planned to say.
Nobody warned him about that part.
Maybe Roy protected him for too long-because that’s part of what sending him out there was about, which is obvious in retrospect. Part of it was to free him for his own quest; part of it was to keep him out from under anybody else’s thumb; part of it was that he was goddamn good at solo missions, and he brought back results and then jaunted off again before he could interfere with any of Roy’s business.
But part of it was about casting him far enough away that he could offend anyone he wanted without catching any flack, and that meant he never had to learn how to tread so softly that he wouldn’t trip over a trigger.
Ed’s not sure he’s ever seen someone who looked more like a rigged explosive than Colonel Martin Verso.
If Roy had enough clout to get away with unleashing him at that rank, what the fuck might this guy manage while people looked the other way?
Ed has to get the fuck out of here before he either hits this fucker or throws up on the front of that clean-pressed uniform. He’s figured that much out-when a situation starts to get too delicate for his clumsy fucking skills, the best solution is to extricate himself before he breaks something Roy will have to fix.
That’s fine. He’s fine. It’ll be fine.
The deep, shuddering revulsion swelling in the core of him is just going to have to wait.
“I, um,” he says. “I think I-better-”
Excuse. What’s his excuse? Where’s he running off to in the middle of fucking lunch-well, “lunch”, based on the contents of his plate-that’s so plausibly fucking urgent?
“Oh,” Suzy breathes, and he seizes on the sound and looks at her; maybe she’ll save him; maybe-
“Sorry to interrupt,” Roy’s voice says from right fucking behind Ed’s shoulder, and he startles so hard he bangs his right knee on the underside of the table, and pins and needles burst outward from the point of impact. “Afternoon, Colonel; Corporal-may I borrow Major Elric from you?”
[Part 1, 2/2]