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It was Thursday.
The Elric brothers had gone to headquarters so that Ed could deliver his report, and while he was doing so, Alphonse had the chance to catch up on the office gossip. It had been slow recently, it would seem, because there was really only one bit of gossip to be had: that Alex Louis was looking for someone to take the great Armstrong name, but was having a hard time finding a suitable lady.
It wasn’t quite as juicy as Al had hoped, honestly, after months away from Central. Regardless, once they had returned to the dorm, he dutifully relayed it to his brother as Ed took off his rain-soaked coat and hung it on the hook on the door. Ed had expressed in what Al thought a rather mean-spirited fashion that he was not surprised. Al had tried to defend the major by pointing out that of the choice of Armstrongs, Alex was probably about as good as it got.
Then Edward had inadvertently handed Al a much bigger, much juicier bit of information.
“No fucking way, are you kidding me? With the muscles and the crying and all the...sparkling? You’d have to be out of your mind to jump at the chance to go through that on a daily basis. I’d take the youngest one any day, even if she is a girl!”
Alphonse immediately whipped his head up to look at his brother, which meant he caught the moment that Ed realized what he had just said.
He froze, golden eyes going wide. Al could see his profile, but he didn’t turn, didn’t move at all, so Al stepped forward so he could see his face fully.
“‘Even if she is a girl?!’” he repeated in a strangled squawk of shock.
“That’s not what I meant. Just forget it!” Ed snapped, waving his hand dismissively as he moved to the desk and plopped down into the chair.
“Forget it?!” Al followed his brother, who finally threw him an annoyed glance. He picked up his pen and worried it back and forth in agitation as he spoke.
“It just...it just didn’t come out like—I’m just saying the major is not the type to have mass appeal in the romance department, okay?”
Alphonse ignored this statement to pursue the much more important matter at hand.
“‘Even if she is a girl?’ Are you saying you’re not…normal?”
Ed sputtered in outrage.
“Fuck off! You’re not normal, either!”
“Oh, yes I am, thank you very much!” Al shot back, hands on his hips.
Edward just looked at him, and he tried to amend that before his brother could say anything. “I mean besides being a seven-foot-tall empty suit of armor with the voice of a 10-year-old, and besides the alchemical genius thing, you know what I mean!” He threw up his hands. “I don’t want to have sex with men! ”
“Well I do, alright?!” Ed gritted it out between clenched teeth, dropping his eyes back to his fidgeting hand as his face started to get pink with embarrassment. “End of fucking discussion!”
“Wait a minute, wait just one minute,” Al gasped, pointing a leather finger at his brother. “Don’t tell me that’s why you’re at Colonel Mustang’s house all the time!”
Edward flushed dark red and turned his face the other way.
“Are you kidding me?! He’s like, twenty years older than you are!”
“He is not, he’s 14 years older than I am—“
“Oh, so that’s okay?! Forget that he’s your boss and that there are rules and—“
“It’s not like—” Ed slapped his pen down on the desktop and violently kicked both feet on the floor, pushing the chair back from the edge of the desk. “Goddamn it, this has nothing to do with what we were talking about! I wasn’t going to tell you about this!”
“Well then when was I going to find out, huh?! When I see him walking down the aisle at your wedding?!” It was such an absurd idea that Al felt the need to press both hands to his helmet. But now there was something else in Ed’s expression, not only embarrassment.
“No, it’s not—it’s not like that, he’s not… he’s not like that.”
Al lowered his hands, looking at his brother, who was trying desperately to scowl hard enough to cover up anything else.
And then, suddenly, the chaos in Al’s brain disappeared. As if with a click of a button, their sexes and the age difference and the power difference and the rules, and society and propriety and the way they had been raised, all of it, ceased to matter at all, because his brother was hurting. His jaw was set and he was glaring at the ground on the other side of the desk as hard as he could, shoulders tense and fists clenched.
“You mean…he doesn’t return your feelings.”
“Of course he doesn’t,” Ed spat. “It’s not even…. He’s straight.”
Al realized he knew this hurt, he had known this hurt in his brother for a long time—had caught glimpses of it as Ed stomped down the sidewalk toward headquarters, as he stared out the window when he was supposed to be reading. He had just never known it had a name. But it did, and now Alphonse knew that the name of this particular pain in his brother’s heart had been Mustang.
Al knelt down on one knee beside Ed, letting one large black hand settle on his back, gently, trying to comfort.
“This has nothing to do with the fact that Armstrong can’t get a date, anyway,” Ed growled. “The point is that you gotta have a damn specific type to fancy the major.”
Al agreed, willing to let the point go for the moment. After another few seconds of silence, he asked, lightly, “What do you do when you’re there?”
Ed gave a shrug and shook his head. Fine droplets of rainwater fell from his still-wet hair, beading on the leather of his pants and soaking into the paper of the notes spread out over the wood of the desk.
“Nothing, just…I usually go over there to complain about something and he lets me sit around and bullshit.” Ed swallowed. “Drink coffee or whatever. I don’t know why he lets me. I don’t know why he doesn’t throw me out.” He was silent for a long moment, then gave a snort. “Probably just pity. He probably thinks I don’t have anyone else…that he’s just replacing my father.”
Al let his hand move up and down his brother’s back soothingly. Ed’s shoulders relaxed a little, the scowl fading, and he moved his hands from where they were clenched on his knees and crossed them over his chest instead.
“But that’s okay. I’m not…I don’t expect anything from him. He lets me talk at him and he doesn’t throw me out, and that’s something. That’s something he gives me, you know, and he doesn’t have to. That’s enough, that’s…that’s more than enough for me.”
This wasn’t something that could be solved with enough determination, or with alchemy, or with the Philosopher's Stone. There was nothing Al could do about this hurt in his brother.
“You’re crying.”
Edward looked at him and raised an eyebrow. “I’m not.”
“It’s okay to cry, if you want, Ed. If I had a body, I think I might be crying.”
Al saw his brother’s face change, then, as he looked back at him. A few flickers of guilt, and then in his eyes emerged something darker, something deeper, more intense than even the long-harbored hurt whose name Al now knew. His eyes burned into Al’s with something he had seen so many times; something that had lived in Edward for longer, the name of which Al had always known. As always, Alphonse felt the dread that accompanied its appearance well up in his non-existent stomach.
“Forget about it, Al. It doesn’t matter. None of that matters.” Ed put his right hand to the back of Al’s helm where his neck would be, metal to metal, and brought their faces within inches of each other, never damping his gaze.
“It means nothing,” he whispered fiercely, that light making his eyes shine. “The only thing that matters is getting your body back. And I will. I will, no matter what.”
Alphonse wanted to cry.