Chapter Text
Ed just… isn’t going to think about it. Yeah. That’s the plan.
It’s not exactly multi-variable calculus, but it’ll do. Probably. He hopes. It’ll certainly be better than nothing. Just declaring that you have an objective can qualify as a plan-of-sorts if you fixate on it hard enough. He’s gotten through half of his life so far on that premise.
Today will just be a perfectly normal day. That’s the safest reaction, and the best revenge.
The revenge part doesn’t even sound particularly appealing. He doesn’t want revenge. He isn’t angry; he’s just… tired. He’s just tired of trying, and hoping, and being wrong.
But he’s not going to think about that.
He makes himself climb out of bed, and then hitches up his pajama pants and circles his right shoulder. Positive thinking. He doesn’t feel hungover at all—that would make all of this shit a million times worse. He lost some sleep, obviously, but nothing beyond the pale for the jacked-up, question-mark-ridden tic-tac-toe board that passes for his schedule. Today’s going to be more regimented: coffee, breakfast, Gatorade, Mountain Dew, lab, math, lasers. Then he’ll be fine. He’ll be better than fine.
He brushed his teeth twice last night, but he can still taste maraschino cherries. It’s probably the luckiest break of his life that he’s only a little bit nauseous. He shouldn’t have…
He’s not thinking about it.
He picks up his phone, opens his bedroom door as quietly as possible, and pads down the hall. It’s not exactly early, so Al’ll be up, but on the off-chance that certain people have suddenly decided to develop lives of their own instead of obsessing over the grimy details and gory failures of his—
Al is sitting on the floor in front of the couch, with a plate of store-brand rip-off Eggos set on the coffee table before him so that he can watch the news while he eats. Ed doesn’t know how Al can stand that shit—the news, not the waffles. The waffles are fine. The news they make extra depressing on purpose to keep you hooked, like heroin, because it sells ads better that way.
Ed probably shouldn’t talk, though. He gets half of his ‘news’ from links on Reddit.
“Hi, Brother!” Al says brightly. “How are you feeling?”
Winry is sitting at Al’s desk, doing a puzzle. Ed didn’t know they had a puzzle. She’s smirking down at it, and Ed knows for sure that they didn’t have an amusing puzzle, which gives him a half-second to brace himself for what’s coming next: “You sure were out late last night. Did you have—” She looks up for an evocative and unnecessary eyebrow waggle. “—fun?”
“Go drink some water, Brother,” Al says, in a voice that’s half-pleading, half-soothing, and a hundred percent Mom. Ed’s heart scrunches up and twists itself tight. Al starts blinking at him. Al always very carefully cuts his Megg-Os into quarters and eats the pieces like pizza, and it’s always the highlight of his weekend mornings, but Ed’s expression is making him put down the waffle-slice in his hand. “Ed, are you okay?”
“Whoa,” Winry says. “Too much fun. Dish already.”
“Nothing to serve,” Ed says, forcing his feet to move and propel him over into the kitchenette so that he can pour the damn coffee and get this show on the road. “Went to that party I texted Al about. Two of Roy’s friends got engaged. Everybody’s hair looked terrible.”
“Except yours,” Al says.
Ed pours, dumps a heaping spoonful of sugar into his mug, and starts stirring a little harder than might be strictly necessary. “Including mine.”
Al crams an entire quarter of the Megg-O in his mouth and says, though it, something that sounds like “How dare you.”
Winry leans forward so fast that she almost falls out of her chair. “It can’t have looked too bad. You just slept on it, and it’s not a perfect orphanage for abandoned rats, so you must not’ve teased it last night.” Her eyes light up. Ed hates everything so much, but mornings the most. “Maybe you were saving the teasing for something else, hmm?”
The coffee is still too hot to chug, but Ed risks sipping it. The act of consuming coffee makes him feel a little bit more human right off the bat. It’s all pretty Pavlovian, but he doesn’t really mind. The smell alone makes the world seem marginally less shitty. He’ll take that.
He scrounges for words that will get the point across without making them pity him. “That’s… It didn’t… work.” He looks into his coffee mug and gestures vaguely with his right hand. “I made it completely unequivocal to him that I wanted… y’know, something—different—and… he said that he didn’t want to talk about it. So I tried again, and he said that he just wanted things to keep going the way they’ve been going.” He stirs his coffee again, even though it probably doesn’t need it. “Which is fine. That’s his prerogative. That’s what I signed up for.”
There is a very long silence, which he spends in a very particular agony, but once this part is over, they’ll all pick themselves up and dust themselves off and carry on. Al and Winry will find something else to get excited about. Ed will recopy some of his lab notes in marginally neater handwriting as a favor to his future self. Maybe the student bookstore on campus is hiring. They’ll probably pay minimum, but he’s likely to have lots of downtime.
“Brother,” Al says, slowly, “did he say that?”
Ed chances a glance at him. Al mostly looks like he’s thinking intently, rather than like he’s going to fly into a baking fury, finally best the macarons, and then drive Winry’s car directly to Roy’s house and hurl a stand mixer through the front window.
Ed takes a deep breath. Al loves him too much. That’s why Al tries so hard to believe that things are better than they are.
“Contrary to popular opinion,” Ed says, “I actually can take a hint. I’m not a total social flake.”
“Stop the presses,” Winry says. “You can what?”
Al waves the next quarter of Megg-O at her urgently before she really gets rolling. “I know that, Brother—I mean it. But I also know that because of who you are, you sometimes hear what you’re afraid that someone would say, rather than what they actually said.”
Ed rubs his eyes one at a time with the knuckles of his left hand. “It wasn’t subtle, Al. He said he’ll pay me more to compensate me for the extra trouble of my own fuckin’ stupidity until I can find some other job.”
There is an even longer silence.
Ed stirs his coffee some more, sips it, and tries—yet again, because persistence has to pay off eventually, doesn’t it?—to think about something else.
Like… the universe. Yeah. The impossible vastness of the infinite reaches of space. Endless other solar systems spinning in the silence of the vacuum; unimaginable planets; twinned stars burning and turning in complement like the celestial analogue of him and Al. That’s nice to think about. Somewhere out there—at a distance of a magnitude greater than his tiny meat brain can conceptualize, in a direction he can’t begin to fathom—a billion-billion coincidental collisions of atoms have dragged an inconceivably gigantic mirror of the two of them into being. There’s a comfort in that. The universe finds balance. Equations level out. Gravity keeps them all twisting through the darkness one instant at a time. If he hasn’t found the perfect place within it yet—if some days he feels like one of the puzzle pieces that Winry has relegated to the other side of the table to punish them for not fitting where she thought they would—then that’s fine. There are an incredible number of places. The universe creates innumerable combinations. Ed will keep looking. He’ll keep trying. It’ll be all right.
He glances up. Al and Winry are still staring at him. Winry has a puzzle piece suspended between her thumb and her index finger. Ed vaguely remembers that he had been having a conversation with them, and had just paraphrased Roy.
Al’s eyes narrow.
“What,” Al says, “a fucking idiot.”
“Al!” Ed says, and Winry says, “Hey, I was gonna say that,” and Al pushes his plate with the remaining half of his Megg-O across the table and gets to his feet.
Ed hates just to think it, but Al looks really tall when he draws himself up to his full height and points an accusatory finger like this.
“I’m serious,” Al says. “This isn’t just about the fact that you’re my brother, and I think you’re the best person in the world and deserve to be the happiest person in it too. This is also about the fact that he talked about you like he also thinks you’re the best person in the world, so if he would turn around and say that to you, he must not even know what he feels. So he’s a fucking idiot.”
Ed feels like he’s falling down a well. “Al.”
“Hey,” Winry says. “Let Al say ‘fuck’.”
“No,” Ed says, faintly.
“I’m going to kick his sorry butt,” Al says.
Winry’s delight makes the falling sensation much worse. “I’ll help!”
“Y’all,” Ed says, even more faintly. “It’s not… he’s allowed to just… not want something. The world doesn’t revolve around me.”
“Sometimes it should,” Al says. “His should. And if he’s dumb enough to pass that up, giving him a serious butt-kicking would be a public service.”
“He only has one world,” Ed says. He looks at the coffee, which at least is not actively judging his life choices or making nonsensical generalizations. “And it already revolves around his dog, so… I mean, just from an astrophysical perspective—”
“Brother,” Al says.
“It’s okay,” Ed says, curling his fingers a little tighter around the handle on his coffee mug. They picked this one up at a conference—it’s got the Amestrian Physical Society logo on the side. Intentionally or otherwise, the A and the P in the logo both end up looking a little bit like ears on a cat that got on the wrong side of Picasso, so he and Al went around the convention center fastidiously picking up all of the free swag that they could get their hands on. They’d had the time of their damn lives: some travel grants from the department had paid for the whole trip, both of their presentations had gone really well, and the quest for tchotchkes felt like a scavenger hunt. They wrapped all the fragile stuff as carefully as they could with clothes before they crammed it all into their tiny bags. They cried laughing when Izumi noticed how bulgingly full Ed’s backpack was on the shuttle back to the airport, and she calmly informed him that abducting famous physicists to take home was frowned upon and would probably get his society membership revoked.
Life is good sometimes—a lot of the time. Life is good as a baseline. Being alive is good. They’ve gotten this far. They’ve done better than Ed ever dared to dream of, when they were kids. He wasn’t even sure back then that they were going to survive, and they’ve done so much more than that. They’ve built something. They’re going somewhere. They’ve published papers, they’ve discovered things, they’ve made the very structure of the universe shiver. Elric and Elric. This is only the beginning, and it’s already so much.
Life is good. It is okay. The way that Ed feels right now will pass. Feelings are temporary. He’ll get through this. He always does.
“Seriously,” he says, running his left thumb over the top of the logo. “It’s not that big a deal. It’s not like it was some sort of grand romance or some shit.”
Al folds his arms across his chest, hikes up his shoulders, and scowls. That pose hasn’t changed a whit since he was eight—since he was four.
That’s the thing, really: Ed’s heart is so full already that this can’t hurt for long.
“It could have been,” Al says.
Lots of things could have been. Lots of things aren’t.
“It’s not like I really have time for that anyway,” Ed says, trying to force his voice to sound cheerful, which is particularly hard when he’s only had about four sips of coffee so far. “Speaking of which—I think I’m gonna grab a shower and then go in to lab today. Do you wanna come?”
“No, thanks,” Al says, perfectly deadpan. “I’m pretty sure you’re old enough to shower on your own now.”
Ed attempts to make the glare a good one. Al does about as well with the shit-eating grin in return.
“Nah,” Al says after Winry has finished sighing very loudly at both of them. “I’m working on the figures for my poster for that poster session—”
“That’s an entire month away,” Ed says.
“Twenty-six days,” Al says. “Hardly a month. Anyway, Win’s going to help me jazz up my graphs and make them pretty, so we’ll probably stay in.”
“Okay,” Ed says. “Make sure to dot all your Is with hearts after you prettify the data. Gotta get the full effect.”
Al smiles at him innocently. “If you think that I’m above putting a glitter finish on the entire poster just to make you regret saying that, you should probably think again.”
“Are you kidding?” Ed says. He shuffles the morning agenda around in his head. He can get something to eat on the way into lab so that Al won’t waste any more time trying to fix his life up around him. “I’d love that. Anything that makes people pay more attention to your poster is aces in my book. Once they notice you, they’re gonna start throwing postdoc offers at you and shit.”
“Hopefully not literally,” Al says. “I imagine that’s a big pile of paperwork to hurl at somebody’s head.”
This has always been enough, and it always will be.
It’s actually a good thing that Al didn’t want to come with, because Ed’s car is still at Roy’s place. He’s going to have to go retrieve it at some point, obviously, but… not… just yet.
He didn’t feel up to begging Winry to borrow her car, which he’d be worried about denting in the parking lot of doom anyway. At least it’s not too hot yet, so it’s a decent morning for a bike ride a little longer than he would have liked.
He was also hoping that the time alone, with some clean air and a few exercise endorphins and the modified left-side pedal that plays nicer with his knee, might help to clear his head.
It doesn’t.
But that’s all right.
So maybe Ed’s a little bit of a masochist. It’s arguable. Most things are arguable, if you try hard enough and believe in yourself and stretch the meanings of a couple of words here and there.
Ed likes being in lab on weekends, though, especially when he’s the only one in lab on weekends. Sometimes it feels a little eerily quiet, but usually the silence helps him concentrate. Labmates—especially ones as fucking brilliant and also brilliantly funny as Al—are great for bouncing ideas off of and talking through things with and watching your experiments for you while you sprint to the bathroom, and all of those things are critical to research progress, but a little bit of isolation sometimes works wonders for Ed’s brain, too. It lets him really zero in on his thoughts without any distractions, until the rest of everything blurs and fades, and it’s just him and the science. Time always gets away from him. He’s learned the hard way that he needs to set a four-hour alarm when he gets to the building, so that he’ll at least stand up and stretch and drink some water. The automail sometimes locks up if he doesn’t, and the rest of his body punishes him for the dehydration either way.
His alarm went off for the first time around one o’clock, and he shook himself as it jarred him out his bubble of concentration. He’d probably looked like Sonja after getting splashed that time they hung out by the pool, but he isn’t going to think about that. The important thing was that he finished his thought and took a break, which even included eating the lunch that Al and Winry had made him pack—which he did while wandering up and down the empty halls, thinking about how he would set up a scientific journal library if he got a tenure-track faculty position someday. He’d have to set up an organizational system of some kind so that he would know which ones people had checked out, but he could probably convince Winry to code something for him for free.
When his thoughts started to edge away from rosy science-library-themed imaginings and towards less-rosy real-life shit, he made a beeline right back for the lab. He knows his limits. He knows when it’s time to lock things up in the repression box and tie a couple belts around it to hold it shut.
He set another four-hour alarm when he sat back down, in the last few instants of self-awareness before he let himself sink back into the science. It’s much better here. Things make a whole hell of a lot more sense.
His focus consumes him again, and he loses track of all the measly little minutiae like the passage of time and the existence of a world outside of this windowless basement room. He likes it when he and Al get to hang out in the open lab area upstairs, too, but for the times when he really just wants to, pun intended, laser-focus… Nothing beats this. Nothing is better. He’s up there somewhere, drifting in a sky full of hypotheticals, and he never has to come down.
A knock on the door drags him back to Earth sometime later. He doesn’t know how long, exactly, but his alarm hasn’t gone off yet.
Lab people usually just barge in regardless of the large Sharpie-lettered “KNOCK FIRST OR ELSE” sign that he and Al eventually got permission to put up on the door—sometimes they mosey on in even when the Laser in Use light is also glowing, because apparently they want to die or ruin experiments or both. The housekeepers tend to be the only ones who bother knocking. Maybe Paul, who’s the weekend guy, remembered that he’d left the door open last night and wants to be sure he’s not disturbing anyone.
“Just a second!” Ed calls, and he scribbles out the last of his thought and then hastens over to the door to pull it open so that the poor dude won’t have to wait to do his job until Ed’s entitled ass has finally sauntered over the—
From the other side of the threshold, Roy is looking back at him—right hand raised with the fingers curled, like he froze solid after he moved to knock.
Ed stares at him.
Roy stares back.
Ed’s brain just sort of… fizzles. It was trying to think about numbers and angles and refractions and theoretical possibilities bound up in mathematical laws, and then it was trying to think about something sufficiently pleasant and normal-sounding to ask Paul about his daughter to be nice. It can’t switch gears again this fast. It’s just grinding. The motor’s spewing smoke.
Roy lowers his hand. Then he clears his throat.
“Al,” Roy says. “He… said there was… Well.” He blinks, and he swallows. “All he said was that I should come here, actually, now that I think about it. It was only ever… heavily implied… that there was something wrong.”
Ed’s brain is still working on processing the fact that Roy is here—Roy makes no fucking sense out of context. They’ve only ever met in one of two physical locations. This isn’t the café or Roy’s damn doorstep. Is he even allowed to be here?
Wait, that’s…
Ed looks at both of Roy’s hands in turn this time. There isn’t a recognizable teleportation device in either of them. All the entry doors are locked up tight on weekends to prevent randos from wandering in and attempting to do science without a permit.
Ed scrapes up some fraction of his voice. “How did you even get in?”
Roy swallows again, not that Ed is unreasonably attentive to his throat even at the best of times, or anything. It’s a beautiful throat, leading to beautiful collarbones, a dizzyingly appealing proportion of which are visible because Roy is wearing a V-neck T-shirt today, because evidently Roy came here to murder him.
At least that’s a relief.
“Al wrote in his text that there was a Knox Box with building keys for the maintenance crew,” Roy says, which is a pertinent reminder that they are, in fact, having a conversation; and that Ed was not, in fact, put on this planet specifically to appreciate Roy’s excruciatingly jumpable bones. “And he told me the keypad code to get in, and which key I should take to get the door open, which in retrospect is… somewhat disconcerting, since he probably shouldn’t know all of that. I put it back right away in case someone else needs it, though. I—”
Roy’s eyes are so… fucking… gorgeous. He looks unsettled. He looks startled and shy and off-kilter and like he needs a hug.
It’s good, too, that his eyes are so pretty, because Ed cannot—cannot—afford to look at his mouth. Not after last night.
It’s pathetic, isn’t it? They made up the lie together, one little bit of fakery at a time. Ed helped construct it with his own two hands. He helped build the bullshit right in.
And he still believed it, for a minute. He still thought he had a snowball’s fucking chance.
His mouth feels so damn dry. He should’ve set that hydration alarm way earlier. “Where’s Sonja?”
“Um,” Roy says, looking faintly chagrined. “Sitting and staying under that administrator’s desk out in the foyer. I hope that’s all right. I didn’t want to leave her in the car, but bringing her into a lab area didn’t seem like a good idea either, so…”
“Yeah,” Ed says. “That was a good call. Definitely not very safe for her back here.”
So they’ve answered all of the important parts of the How, which just leaves…
Fucking everything.
Ed tries to force his brain to slow down and back up. His brain is helpfully fixating on the V-neck. Why has he never seen Roy in a V-neck before? It’s black. Roy’s got dark-wash blue jeans on with it. No jacket. He’s wearing the green and black slide sandals that he keeps near the front door for stepping out to water plants and shit.
Al texted him. Al texted Roy and told him to come here, to the empty lab, having ‘heavily implied’ that Ed needed some unspecified sort of help that supposedly Al himself couldn’t offer.
And Roy dropped everything and fucking ran out the door.
Why the fuck would he do that if it was just…?
A regular, relatively decent person would ask for details or preemptively call an ambulance and put some real damn shoes on before they jumped into the car. A regular, relatively decent person would ask what was wrong. A regular, relatively decent person would ask how they could help, rather than kinda-sorta breaking into a restricted research building to turn up.
The only thing that makes sense—
But it isn’t possible that Ed was wrong. He was a little bit tipsy, sure, but he replayed every single fucking word of those fucking conversations in his head last night until he knew them all backwards, forwards, sideways, and upside-down. There wasn’t anything to misinterpret. He didn’t mishear. He didn’t misunderstand.
Roy is just standing there, two and a half steps away, still looking shocked and lost and utterly fucking delicious.
He can’t not know. Ed grabbed him and tried to suck on his tongue while he was wearing tie-dye and the world’s single dweebiest pair of shorts; he can’t not know.
Roy swallows again. He starts to curl his fingers, which makes Ed glance down at his hands again, which—it almost looks like they’re shaking. That can’t be—
“I’m sorry,” Roy says. His voice sounds so light that it almost registers as cheerful, but the attempt at a smile is an abject failure. “I’ll just—I think I’ve been had. I’ll get out of your hair. I’m sorry I interrupted. You were probably right on your way to another stroke of genius, and I’ve set physics back ten years by being such a—” He clears his throat, presses his lips together, and looks at the wall next to the door. Both fists are clenched up so tight now that his nails must be digging into his palms. “Never mind. I remember how I came in. I hope you—”
Ed’s phone alarm sings out from his pocket, which startles them both so much that they jump.
Ed lets himself whisper “Shitfuckingfucker” under his breath as he fumbles for his phone. He’s used to the right hand feeling like it belongs to someone else, sometimes, but getting this treatment from the left is a top-ten anime betrayal.
By the time he’s managed to silence the damn thing, Roy has pushed both hands into the pockets of his jeans and cleared his face again. Ed holds the phone up and halfheartedly waves it a little.
“Sorry,” he says. “That was—that’s my reminder to take a break.”
Roy does a lot better at the fake smile this time. “Any chance that you’re headed to the surface? I might have… slightly exaggerated… about remembering how I got here.”
It’s fine. Ed can handle this.
“No worries,” he says. “It’s a maze. C’mon, let’s go make sure Sonja doesn’t think you abandoned her to the laser geeks.”
Roy says, softly, “We’d better.”
It’s well past five, and it’s not like Ed’s going to be able to slot himself back into the same groove now anyway. He steps back into the room, shuffles all of his notes into his backpack, slings it over his shoulder, and joins Roy in the hallway this time. He turns out the lights and pulls the door shut.
“Great,” he says. What’s one more lie?
Roy is emanating a weird, edgy kind of energy as they walk—the only other time that Ed’s felt something like this off of him was when they were starting to leave the party last night.
It feels like the skin-crawling late nights when Al was in the hospital, and like finals week back when Ed’s whole future hung on a couple of exams. It feels like ants under the skin and the air crackling with unsent lightning and lying in bed staring at the dark ceiling, desperately trying to make enough contingency plans to still the spiral of the thoughts.
Roy keeps his hands in his pockets.
His voice sounds very steady as he comments on some of the signage that they pass, most of which warns people not to act incredibly dense around dangerous science stuff. Ed opens his mouth to remind Roy that it’s truly amazing how stupid smart people can be, and then closes it again. Feels too close to home right now.
Ed hates the cramped little cement-walled zombie-movie stairwell, and his left knee hates it too, but it’s better than marinating in the awkwardness while they wait for the elevator. He holds the door for Roy, who murmurs “Thank you” like a gentleman and then starts on up.
Rookie mistake: Ed now has to look at Roy’s ass all the way up this lousy, good-for-nothing flight of stairs. Even in the flickery fluorescent lighting, surrounded by chilly concrete, it is absolutely worth pretending not to gaze at.
Why couldn’t Roy have been some self-important shithead millionaire with a god complex and a mean streak? Why couldn’t he have been so condescending and obnoxious that his hotness was completely irrelevant? Ed got fucking played by the universe with this one. This is what he gets for trying to make “easy” money. Now he’s easy for Roy, and Roy doesn’t even give a shit.
Except—
Hell, maybe Roy just missed being on campus—he used to go to school here, too. Maybe Roy just felt like getting out of the house. Maybe Al heavily implied way too well, and it sounded like Ed was dying, and Roy didn’t want to have to deal with a seriously uncomfortable police inquest. There are a lot of possible reasons for Roy to show up here at the drop of a hat. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.
Yeah.
They come up into the wide-windowed entryway, and Ed has to squint at the sudden flood of sunshine. At least all of the beams are starting to twist towards that softer sort of gold light that you get around sunset, but there are definitely some disadvantages to holing yourself up in the basement all day.
A plaintive half-howl greets them the instant that Roy starts across the floor towards Claudia’s desk. Claudia has a trio of cats named after the Three Musketeers, so hopefully she’s not allergic to dog dander, and hopefully her squad of feline swashbucklers won’t hold it against her if she comes home tomorrow night with some foreign white fur stuck to her shoes. Maybe Ed will write her an apology note just in case.
“I’m sorry, darling,” Roy is saying. Sonja pokes her head out around the edge of the desk, watching his hands, and only comes bounding towards them at full speed after Roy beckons to her. She skids to a stop moments before she collides with Roy’s knees and starts bouncing in circles around the pair of them, alternating between panting and some little whuffs. “I promise I wasn’t going to leave you at the mercy of the postdocs.”
“Postdocs would probably just use her as a pillow,” Ed says. She slows down enough for him to skim his left hand along her back. “Hey, girl. It’s okay, girl. Honestly, I think every postdoc I’ve ever met just wants a nap.”
Roy crosses the rest of the way to Claudia’s desk and picks up the bag leaned against the side—which is, if Ed’s not mistaken, Sonja’s park bag. It’s one of those mass-produced swag backpacks with the needle company’s logo embroidered on the front. Roy keeps emergency snacks and a couple of toys and an extra leash in it; it hangs by the front door so that he can grab it on their way out.
The only conclusion Ed can draw from the presence of it is that Roy was prepared to be here for long enough that Sonja might miss a meal.
Lots of possible reasons, though. Lots of them.
“Where’d you park?” Ed says. At least they don’t enforce that shit on weekends—tickets are forty-five bucks. Maybe that doesn’t matter much to Roy, in a mathematical way, but it’s the principle of the thing.
Roy, who has been attempting to shoulder the bag on and stroke Sonja’s head enough to calm the hello-my-human frenzy at the same time, looks up and blinks. He gestures out the front windows at the little lot in front of the portables, which seem to have become permanent enough to belie their own name. “Just across the way. Is that…?”
“Yeah,” Ed says. His bike is one of only three locked outside that doesn’t have a warning from the transportation cops threatening to appropriate it if it sits there unattended for another month. “’Course.”
Roy straightens up, pauses for another second, and then leads the way out the front doors. Out of force of habit, Ed pats his badge in his back pocket as he steps through, just before the doors automatically lock again behind them.
Roy looks up and down the little road like he’s seeing the place for the first time. “It’s… changed a lot, hasn’t it? Is there anywhere you’d recommend that I can let her run around for a bit? I think I scared her with how fast we were leaving the house.”
He says it matter-of-factly, not like he’s trying to make Ed feel bad about something that Ed didn’t even do, but the guilt starts to simmer anyway.
Ed gives in to the urge to put his hands into his pockets. It’s his turn, isn’t it? “Um… there’s a pretty nice lawn on the other side of the engineering quad.” He has to take his left hand back out of his pocket to point, which is about what he deserves at this point. “The undergrads prefer to go sit in the fountains, so there’s usually not too many people around.”
Roy’s gaze follows the direction of Ed’s arm, while Roy’s hand keeps idly scratching behind Sonja’s ears. Sonja looks up at Ed in a way that feels expectant, like she can’t wait for him to come play with them. He knows that he’s anthropomorphizing, but he can’t help it, and he really can’t help the fact that it hurts.
Getting hurt makes him extra stupid. He’s a glutton for fucking punishment. What else is new?
“I can walk you over,” he says.
Roy turns towards him. Ed’s guts drop right the fuck out of him: the warm yellow fading light kisses Roy’s cheekbones and paints his jawline and makes his eyes look molten. He is fucking breathtaking. He looks like Renaissance art. He looks like a sleepy daydream. He looks like home.
Ed’s lucky. He’s lucky that he made it this far. He’s lucky that he didn’t make it worse. He’s lucky that Al cares enough to try to ‘help’ or whatever that was, even if it doesn’t change anything. He’s lucky that Roy’s too decent to take advantage, or string him along, or mock him for it. He’s lucky that he respects himself just a fraction too much to beg. He’s lucky that he knows that he’ll get past this with some distance and some time.
“All right,” Roy says. “Thank you.”
“Sure,” Ed says.
It’s not very far, but it is a little tricky to find the place, since it’s around a sharp corner, hidden halfway behind one of the buildings. The walk along the paved avenue to reach it is mostly unshaded—Roy keeps shepherding Sonja over into the shadow of the bushes along the edge of the walkway to protect her paws. Even with the sun going down, it’s still hot enough out here that they both retreat under the cover of the trees at the edge of the lawn as soon as they reach it.
Roy swings the park bag down and retrieves a tennis ball from it, which Sonja greets with a delighted little wail.
“Yes,” Roy says seriously. “Awoo-woo.” He holds the ball up where she can see it, lets her prance around in anticipation for a few seconds, and then winds up and throws.
Sonja goes off like a shot as the ball sails through the air. It barely has time to hit the grass and rebound twice before she snatches it up in her teeth and comes tearing back towards them.
Roy holds his hand out as she approaches, and she dutifully deposits the slobbery tennis ball into his palm. “Thank you, beautiful,” he says, and then he twists his perfect torso and hurls it out into the air again.
Ed should leave.
His feet don’t want to move.
This feels like his last chance—something in the silence, something in the resignation radiating off of both of them. Something in the cautious courtesy. This feels like the end.
He takes a deep breath and tries to make himself say Okay, see ya, and nothing comes out.
He’s always been a useless little shit when it really counted, hasn’t he?
Sonja comes streaking back, panting up a storm. Roy throws the ball again.
And then Roy says, very softly, “I’ve been thinking.”
Figures. Ed should’ve run when he had the fucking chance.
“I don’t want you to feel obligated,” Roy says, eyes trained on Sonja as she catches up with the ball’s trajectory again, “to do anything else like what you did last night. I don’t—expect that. But I don’t want you to be uncomfortable, and I think… Well, I’ve clearly made it that, and… how about if I just send you a lump sum to tide you over for a while? No strings attached. You don’t have to do anything for it.”
It’s nice. It’s nice that he’s working so hard to try not to be an asshole about it. Ed has to focus on that part. Ed has to isolate the part of himself that keeps screaming at the top of his lungs that Roy should just—pretend, just try, just let it keep going even if they both know it’s bullshit. Ed will play along; he’ll be so good; he’ll be cute and funny and sexier than he ever was before; he’ll fake it; he’ll be whatever the fuck Roy likes the best if they can just—
Not—
Stop.
If he can just keep seeing this stupid, stupid bastard for a little while longer. Just a month, a week, a day. As long as it’s not over. Not yet. Just not yet.
But he doesn’t need it. This isn’t life and death. He’ll survive. That’s the only important thing.
He tries to choke out something along the lines of You don’t have to buy me off, you did right by me, because that’s the truth. He can’t get out a single sound of it. His breath gets stuck, then the words get stuck. He tries to force his heart back down into his chest where it belongs.
“I’m sorry,” Roy says, even softer this time. “I realized too late that I never… I haven’t said that in so many words. I’m sorry. I never intended to put you in a position like this, but I should have known.” He laughs, low and dry. “Fuck me and my bullshit—I did know. I should have seen it coming from the very start, but I knew it soon enough that I could have done something. Said something. Anything. But by the time it was too much to pretend to ignore, I was just too scared of losing you, and I kept telling myself that I could control it, and…” Sonja comes trotting up again, and he gently works the tennis ball out of her mouth. He twists it around in his fingers for a few seconds this time before he throws it. “And… I’m sorry. I won’t bore you with the baggage. The bottom line is that it’s still my fault. And I’m sorry that I fucked it up for both of us.”
Ed’s eyes are glued to Roy’s hands, which have dog spit and bits of tennis ball fluff on them, and which are twined around each other tightly for a second before he lowers them to hang at his sides.
The bottom just fell out of the entire fucking universe. Ed feels entitled to a little bit of ocular dysfunction.
Above the nearer hand, Roy’s chest rises and falls, releasing a quiet sigh. “Anyway. I… know that’s not worth a whole lot, in the…” He swallows audibly and tries to laugh again, but it comes out sounding strangled. “In the face of the rest of it, but… I hope it’s better than nothing. I—”
“What?” Ed croaks out.
“Ed,” Roy says, and he sounds pained now, and Ed’s heart feels like it’s shriveling; “you are the most extraordinary person that I’ve ever met. It’s just… it wouldn’t be right to—no matter how we approached it, there’d be pressure on you to do things or agree to things that you don’t want, and…” The strain wins out, and his voice starts to weaken. “To be perfectly honest, I think that pretending that it was something that it wasn’t would eventually tear me apart, so all things considered—”
Ed’s brain flips feverishly through the memories that he’s been revisiting and reliving and repeating all day. Every single thing that Roy said—every thing that Ed almost said, but didn’t—all the sentences he only finished in his head—
It feels like he just stepped on the tines of a rake and slammed the handle into his own forehead hard enough to summon stars.
Nothing that Roy just said now makes any goddamn sense unless everything that Roy said yesterday—
“Roy,” Ed rasps out, staring at the hollow of those perfect collarbones while the entire world spins so fast that he doesn’t think gravity will hold him down, “what the fuck?”
Roy’s right hand rises unsteadily. It’s still visibly sticky with dog-ball residue, but Roy lifts it higher and pushes it back through his hair, which draws Ed’s gaze up with it to his face.
Roy sets his jaw and squeezes his eyes shut for a long second, and Ed’s whole body goes leaden.
Last night, they both had it backwards, because they both thought it was impossible that—
“I’m sorry,” Roy says, prickly now, sharp-edged, because he really thinks— “I know that you—I realize that it puts you in a difficult financial situation, but I told you, I’ll give you whatever you think is appropriate. I don’t care. I can just keep subsidizing you for a while if you need me to. I don’t—”
“No,” Ed says.
Roy’s eyes open, and he turns, and the sheer amount of naked fucking hurt in his face in that first split-second makes Ed feel like he just got on the wrong end of a wrecking ball.
“Just take what you want, Ed,” Roy says, and he’s trying for steely and cold again, but it comes out ragged. “I can’t do this shit again. I don’t care. It doesn’t—”
“No,” Ed says, and the way that Roy’s jaw tightens feels like falling onto concrete, which is why he doesn’t have a choice. He can’t be too scared. He has nothing left to lose. “Because I’m the one who’s in love with you, you fucking asshole.”
At least Roy doesn’t look broken anymore.
He looks completely blindsided and incredibly confused, but that’s a substantial improvement.
A very loud and very plaintive whine draws Ed’s attention down to Sonja, who has returned with the tennis ball. Roy remains statue-still, so Sonja turns her pleading eyes on Ed. He holds his hand out.
The right one.
Sonja deposits the dirt-spattered, slobber-streaked ball in his automail palm.
Winry’s going to murder him in cold blood in front of witnesses.
Hopefully he can at least convince her to wait long enough for him to deal with Roy’s sudden-onset catatonia.
The distraction makes him forget to modulate his movements, and he flings the ball way too hard, releasing it too high and with enough momentum to send it soaring out towards where the grass ends, and the piping-hot pavement picks up again.
“Shit,” he says. He cups both hands around his mouth and calls “Sorry, girl!” after Sonja as she pelts off after it.
His heart keeps pounding in his ears even as she howls her indignation at the ball, scrambles onto the pavement, and manages to catch it on the third bounce.
He clenches his teeth, sets his shoulders, and slowly turns back towards Roy.
Roy is staring at him like they both saw the same ghost. And maybe it was a hot ghost.
Roy swallows, and draws a breath, and hesitates.
“Ed,” he says, very slowly and very delicately, “are you—”
Ed has had about enough of this fucking day, and about enough of dancing the fuck around it.
He reaches out, curls his left hand around the back of Roy’s neck, drags Roy down towards him, and kisses the stupid bastard with everything he’s got.
He’s got a lot, as it turns out. It takes a while.
But Roy kisses even better when he’s sober, and the way that his hands settle cautiously on Ed’s hips sends fucking lightning up Ed’s spine, and when he tilts his head just right and runs his tongue over Ed’s and slowly pulls him in closer—
Ed could do this for literally ever. He could die here. He could starve. He wouldn’t mind.
Except that something nudges at his knee, which makes him startle all over again, and Roy draws back, and they both look down to see Sonja nosing at Roy’s knee next. When she notices that she has their attention again, she spits the ball out on the ground, awoo-woos, and gazes up at them expectantly, tongue lolling out.
Ed repurposes his death-grip on Roy’s shoulder into some reassuring patting.
“Good talk,” he says. “Hey. Um.” He bends down and scoops the ball up in his right hand again, since murdered is murdered, and he can’t make it worse. “That thing you said. A couple things you said. About baggage, and about not doing this shit again. Should I… do you want to talk about that?”
He throws the ball, less recklessly this time. Sonja races after it.
“Oh,” Roy says. He sounds more like himself, albeit a slightly dazed version. “No.” He drops down onto the grass and draws his knees up to his chest. “Sit down.”
“Fuck,” Ed says. He tamps down the impulse to panic. “‘Sit down’ baggage?”
“It could probably go either way,” Roy says. He picks at a blade of grass next to his left sandal. “I’m just getting tired.”
“Hell,” Ed says, dropping down next to him. Configuring the automail knee in a comfortable way sometimes takes some finagling. “Me, too. Are you sure you wanna talk about it now?”
“No,” Roy says again, “but we probably should. It’s better to get it out of the way.” He pauses, glancing over. “It’s… not on LinkedIn. Maes and Riza know most of it.”
Ed tries to make his face look gentle and open and accepting instead of low-key terrified. If this is a caliber of secret better-protected than Roy’s whole military service thing, it must be on the sordid side of unexpected, right?
Roy looks over, and his mouth twists slightly, so Ed must have failed at the face-thing. “It could… wait.”
Ed eyes him. “Are you sure about that?”
“No,” Roy says. He sighs, ruffling a hand through his hair more vigorously this time. Ed can’t tell if it’s sweat or dog drool that makes it stick up a little bit after he’s lowered his hand. It’s weirdly sort of cute, but it’s also ridiculous, and if they’re actually going to be… if they’re… if…
Ed’s not going to let his guy-he-makes-out-with-at-parties-and-on-the-lawn-behind-the-electrical-engineering-building go around not realizing that he looks ridiculous, is all. Roy would hate that. Ed doesn’t want him to get home and look in a mirror and feel like a dork—a dork whose makeout-guy doesn’t care about him enough to help him fix his hair.
“Hang on,” Ed says. He bites his tongue, gathers his guts, leans over, reaches out, and smoothes the ornery upflick of hair down a little. Roy’s eyelashes are so fucking close. Ed’s heart goes haywire even though there are zero threats to his life or livelihood at this particular moment, which is a totally irrational physiological reaction. The damn thing is clearly defective.
The gesture makes Roy smile a little bit, though, even after Ed sits back, so at least there’s that.
Sonja pads over, panting about as hard as it is probably possible to pant with a tennis ball filling up most of your mouth. She graciously bleaughs the ball down in front of Roy’s feet.
“Thank you, darling,” Roy says, burying his hand in her fur to rub at her neck. “Why don’t we take a little break and have some water? Do you want some water? Here.”
He extracts a little silicon dog bowl and a two-liter bottle of water from the park bag, because of course he does. Ed should probably consider himself lucky that there isn’t a little white napkin in there, which Roy could drape over his arm like a sommelier while he pours the water for Princess Fuzzy Butt.
Sonja doesn’t wait for Roy to finish filling the bowl before she dives for it and starts lapping wildly. Ed’s pretty sure that she’s splashing more water out of the bowl than she’s actually drinking, which makes it an extremely ineffective hydration method, practically speaking, but she looks like she’s enjoying the hell out of herself. The grass probably needs to get watered anyway.
Ed wraps his arms around his knees and takes a deep breath. Did all of this just happen? If he was dreaming, Sonja probably wouldn’t be splattering brand-name bottled water on his shoes.
Given the usual tenor of his dreams—that is, surreally bizarre for a while before they tip over a cliff into unspeakable tragedy—there’s a simple way to check.
Ed takes his phone out, manages to convince the damn thing to accept his thumbprint on his third try, taps over to his text log with Al, and types in What have you done.
“Go easy on him,” Roy says, perfectly calmly, like it’s normal for him to know exactly what Ed is doing when he can’t see the screen. Sonja has slopped most of the water out over the edges of the bowl, so she lays down and rests her head on her paws, and Roy starts stroking her ears. “He was trying to help.”
Ed makes a face at him. “Whose side are you on?”
“The side that has the most dogs,” Roy says. He shifts to settle cross-legged so that he can fluff the fur on Sonja’s cheeks more easily. “Which is probably my own side, come to think of it.”
Ed opens his mouth to ask why Roy hasn’t gotten a second dog when he loves the first one more than the entire universe, and then shuts his mouth again in the nick of time. It’s a valid question, but—especially if they’re, y’know, making out in multiple places now—he’d really like to get to see Roy sometimes. Preferably in places other than the park, on occasion. It would be ideal not to have to excavate him from underneath several inches of accumulated fur every time.
His phone pings.
Al has written only the words Well, did it work?
Ed swipes up, swipes again, swipes a third time, and opens his phone camera.
“C’mere,” he says, which is a little bit unnecessary given that he’s scooting towards Roy as he says it.
“What are we doing?” Roy asks, leaning his head very gently against Ed’s, and that’s… shit. Jesus. That’s a lot of things, come to think of it. “Are we reprimanding, or more like grudgingly fond?”
Ed had Roy pegged for an only child, but maybe that was premature. “Either one works.”
Roy frowns very deeply. Ed sticks his tongue out. Sonja shoves herself into the frame right as he pushes the shutter button, so he ends up with a photo of blurry white and gray, with two idiots starting to laugh in the background.
He also ends up with fur in his mouth, but it sounds like maybe he should start getting used to that.
He sends it to Al as is. Hopefully it’ll confuse the meddling little shit for at least thirty seconds before it amuses the hell out of him, and he gets all smug.
Roy plants his hands on the dirt behind him and stares up at the trees for a few seconds before he tilts his gaze towards Ed. The corner of his mouth turns up so subtly that Ed’s not sure if he realizes it. That is also a lot of things.
“Dinner?” Roy says.
“Definitely one of my favorite mid-evening meals,” Ed says.
Roy blinks at him, placidly.
Ed blinks back, not very placidly at all. “We… can’t exactly… go… out. Not… I mean, not somewhere… nice.” Fuck. “Not that—I mean, not that I, like, expect us to go somewhere nice. We don’t have to. They probably don’t even serve Mountain Dew at fancy restaurants. Do they?”
“Usually not,” Roy says, “the absolute heathens.” The smile widens a little bit. “I had a slightly different idea, actually.”
Ed opens his mouth to say Are we finally having fucking bathtub sex? and then closes it instants before disaster again. “Okay. What?”
Roy’s eyebrow arches. Bastard is so fucking hot. Ed just wants to pin him to the grass and lick him. Even the parts that Sonja licked first. “Have you ever been to the drive-in?”
Ed needs to text Al again. Maybe Winry. He is once more seriously doubting the reality of all of this.
“We have a drive-in?” he says, as if he has ever had the clout or the money or the wherewithal to claim some part of this city as his. “Where?”
“Oh,” Roy says. “Well, that… sort of spoils the answer to the next question, which was going to be ‘Have you ever been to the drive-in in a convertible?’”
Ed reaches out and scrubs his hand through the mass of fluff on Sonja’s back. Her tongue comes back out, and her tail whaps against the grass. “What is this ‘fun’ business of which you speak?”
Roy smiles—at him. Directly at him. No ducking, no aiming it into the middle distance, no bitten lips or darting eyes. Right at him. It’s electrifying. “Perhaps we had better find out.”
Roy drives a Camry hybrid for errands and park runs. Ed can’t tell exactly how much of that is Roy’s particular, peculiar brand of too-rich-to-give-a-shit, and how much of it is the equally peculiar tendency to give too much of a shit, because he doesn’t want anybody on the street to see him as some pompous moneybags motherfucker.
To be fair, pragmatically speaking, it does make a lot of sense to lug the giant shedding machine of an occasionally muddy dog around in a car that costs less. If the backseat gets to a point where Roy doesn’t want to clean it—or pay someone else to—he can just buy another Camry without a second thought.
It occurs to Ed, as they detach the front tire and wrangle his souped-up-garage-sale-find bike into the trunk, that this is a different world now even from the last one. It’s completely different to be on his proverbial knees, performing in the center ring of a tiny circus to garner decent pay and better tips, than it is to be dating somebody with more money than they know what to do with.
That’s going to have its own set of problems, isn’t it? If Roy just, like, up and pays off one of Ed’s bills, or some huge chunk of Al’s tuition, or buys Ed a new bike with a bunch of shiny shit and fancy dials and special features that Winry would be disassembling for hours—that’s not the same as Ed having earned it, no matter how flimsy the application of ‘the arrangement’ sometimes was. That would be a favor. That would be a gift.
Ed isn’t very good with gifts.
As Roy fires up the Camry, very gently pushes Sonja’s head down so that he can look over her and out the rear window to back up, and pulls out of the little parking lot, though, Ed considers that maybe—maybe—he can just cross that damn bridge when he comes to it.
Roy pauses at the driveway out of the parking lot to lower the back window far enough for Sonja to stick her head out, and then they’re off. On a… date.
Is this a date? Have they officially leapt the linguistic chasm now? A movie at some mythical drive-in sure sounds like a date, albeit one better-suited to the year 1958. Maybe the convertible that Roy referenced doubles as a time machine. Maybe he only intends to date Ed in alternate temporal realities, so it isn’t happening in this one. Maybe—
“Are you okay?” Roy asks.
“No idea,” Ed says. Several of the overly-curated campus flowerbeds flicker by out the window. “You?”
“Hang on,” Roy says. They pull up to a red light at the intersection of one of the major campus byways and one of the roads at the border. Roy keeps his left hand on the wheel and his foot on the brake as he leans across the center console, threads his right hand into Ed’s hair, and kisses him soundly again.
The part of Ed that does not want to take his eyes off of a stoplight for a goddamn second is duly overwhelmed by the part of him that just wants to sink into this moment and savor it forever. Roy’s mouth is so warm and so gorgeous and so wet and—
Not that wet.
He reels back as Sonja’s whiskers tickle at his cheek, already laughing as he swipes at the streak of dog spit on his jaw. She makes an indignant hrrff noise to make sure that they realize how deeply offended she is that she doesn’t get stoplight kisses, too.
Roy grabs his movie star sunglasses up from the cupholder and fits them on before the light turns green. Those and the grin together make him look like a fucking dream.
“How’s that?” Roy asks. “Better?”
“Maybe,” Ed says, patting the side of Sonja’s neck. “But we should probably do it a couple more times just to be sure. ’Cause. Y’know. Data. Replicable results. Science.”
“Right,” Roy says. “Science.”