Archive of Our Own

Ed tugs at a lock of his hair that’s drifted over his shoulder as he looks around the bar, assuming an absent-minded expression. His third drink of the night is in front of him— something odd and fruity that he’s been poking at with his straw for the past ten minutes— but he doesn’t really feel like drinking any more. He’s already pleasantly buzzed, but he’s also bored, and getting drunk won’t help with the boredom.

It’s Friday night and Ed is drinking alone, which would be pathetic, except that he literally doesn’t give a shit. He hasn’t had to pay for a drink all evening, courtesy of Winry’s ‘dumb blond’ routine. She’d taught him it when he was eighteen on the condition that he’d stop complaining about how expensive going out with her was. (She’d been using it for years on unsuspecting customers who would try to weasel their way out of paying her entirely reasonable prices. All it takes is a smile, a little absent blinking to convince them that you’ve got nothing going on behind the eyes, and they’re falling all over themselves to ‘take care’ of you, by which Ed means ‘exploit as much as possible.’ After that, it’s easy to get them to do things for you. As long as they think they’re in control, they won’t even realize you’re manipulating them.)

Ed doesn’t necessarily like pretending to be a vapid idiot, but at least pretending to be a vapid idiot gets him free drinks. If he goes out acting like his normal self he inevitably either insults someone, or leaves someone confused and mildly annoyed when they ask him what his job is and he launches into the minutia of whatever the details of his latest commissioned array are. And he has to pay for his own drinks.

Ed stretches lazily, pretending not to notice the five-odd people focused on where his shirt has ridden up. There are a few decent prospects— a pretty brunette who’s been glancing at him every so often, the nice-looking blond guy at the table near the door, who bought him a drink, and the girl with bright purple hair in the corner (she doesn’t seem too interested, actually, but Ed is willing to fake some charm just to know how she got her hair that way; no way it’s just dye, she must be using alchemy).

He swallows the rest of his drink, intending to go talk to the girl with purple hair, when the door swings open. Ed’s gaze darts up, evaluating the person who’s just stepped through the doorway, and he’s so glad he did.

The man that comes through is kind of a fucking knockout— dark hair, dark eyes, clever looking fingers and very pink lips— but it’s not just that. He’s clever, so clever as to be able to hide it almost entirely. He’s somehow managing to make every sweep of the bar with his eyes look casual— as though he’s not checking for available exits— and he’s got his hands in his pockets in such a determinedly casual way that Ed is sure there’s some sort of weapon in there. This man is very attractive, and probably very dangerous. The girl with purple hair will have to wait.

He catches the man’s eye. Please be interested in men, he pleads to himself, or at least be someone who has a few and stops pretending they’re not. There’s a flash of curiosity that goes through his dark eyes and he comes over and sits next to him.

Of course, it’s at that moment that Ed realizes exactly who the man is: Major General Mustang— Flame Alchemist, Hero of Ishval, and absolutely 100% involved in the coup that took Bradley down. (Of course, officially, there was no coup, only an attempted coup that accidentally left Bradley dead, and Mustang, Major General (now bona fide General) Armstrong, and General (now Fuhrer) Grumman racing to find justice for his murderer. It turned out that his most fanatical supporters— the especially nasty warmongering ones— had assassinated him. Real convenient for Grumman, since he was the next in charge with them gone.)

Well shit, he thinks. Teacher would probably kill him on the spot for even considering sleeping with a General. But... Mustang is attractive, though the papers don’t do him justice, and Ed can probably steal some silverware on the way out in the morning.

Ed turns to him, leaning his chin on his hands. “What’s a nice guy like you doing in a place like this?”

Mustang cocks an eyebrow, looking Ed up and down, and Ed tries his best not to shiver. This is going to be fun.

“Al!” Ed bursts into their apartment, still in his clothes from the night before.

Al, as is his tradition on Saturday mornings, is sitting in his dressing gown, drinking jasmine tea and reading the newspaper. “Hm?” He looks up, taking in Ed’s mussed hair, day-old clothes, and neck covered in bite marks, and tries very hard not to look amused.

“I slept with Major General Mustang.”

Al raises his eyebrows. “A dog of the military? Really, brother?”

Ed groans. “You absolutely cannot tell anyone.”

Al mentally makes a note to ‘accidentally’ drop it into a conversation with Teacher. He’s missed her, but he’s too busy to make the trip to Dublith to see her. It would be perfect if she came to Central to beat Ed up for his indiscretion, then he could visit with her without missing class. Besides, she won’t hurt Ed that badly. She can be understanding where hormones are involved, and from what he’s seen of the man, the General is fairly attractive.

“Well,” Al says, “at least it was a one-time thing, right?” He looks over at Ed, expecting a resigned nod before he turns the conversation to breakfast.

Ed does not give him a resigned nod.

“I stayed,” Ed says, “for breakfast.”

“That’s just common courtesy,” Al says, desperately hoping that it was, in fact, just common courtesy, and Ed had decided to be polite for the first time in his life.

“No,” Ed groans, “you don’t understand. I was trying to leave, but he asked me to stay for breakfast, so I dropped the dumb blond act—”

Al frowns, he’s never been a fan of Ed pretending to be less clever than he is just to seduce people (for whatever the given measure of ‘seduce’ is when it comes to Ed).

“—and he liked it.”

Al blinks. “You are rather entertaining.”

“Al,” Ed says, as if Al isn’t understanding the gravity of the situation, which, to be fair, Al might not be. Then again, Ed’s idea of what merits concern and what doesn’t is so far removed from the normal human scale that Al could be entirely correct in ignoring Ed’s newest crisis. “I explained his array to him, told him that it was inefficient, and he liked it.”

“Well,” Al says, trying to process the fact that Ed’s... directness has, for once, actually endeared him to someone (well, someone other than Teacher and Winry, who are not, pardon his language, paragons of sanity or normalcy), “his array could be more efficient.”

“Well, yeah, duh, he’s losing too much power because he’s building it for control, not efficiency. He’s got an extra matrix that he’s just using to help channel it, but it’s acting as a bottleneck, so if he just removed it he’d have the ability to do it much faster.”

Al raises his eyebrows. “I know.”

Ed groans yet again. “Yeah, I know you know. We did it together.” Their Teacher had once had them analyze the available arrays of every single state alchemist and edit them until they met her standards. “I even used your shortcut for that one equation. Y’know, for the secondary impacts of transmutation on air currents when you’re adjusting for time?”

Al makes a vague sound of acknowledgment. That does sound like him. Ed had never had the patience for the nitty-gritty of theoretical equations to project aftermath.

“Al,” Ed says, looking horrified, “he kept up. And he actually listened to me, and then asked for my opinion.”

“Did you give it to him?”

Ed blinks. “Of course not. He works for the military.”

Al breathes a sigh of relief. Teacher might have actually killed him for that one. Sleeping with officers is one thing, giving them alchemical knowledge is another.

“So, what’s the problem?”

Ed sinks into the couch, kicking off his shoes. “He asked me to come over next week, and I agreed.”

“Cancel,” Al says like it’s the obvious solution, because it really is quite obvious.

“I don’t want to,” Ed whines, “He has a copy of Mann’s treatise on symbology as a function of form.”

Al tries his best not to raise an eyebrow. Ed wouldn’t go back for Mann, which means the sex must be so far beyond good that Al really, really, doesn’t want to think about it. Ed’s standards for second encounters are pretty high. “Mann is an idiot.”

“Yes,” Ed says, covering his face with his hands, “but he has a first edition. With notes.”

Al perks up. Maybe his comment on the sex was unwarranted. “What sort of notes?”

“Annotations by Ayers. On how wrong Mann is.”

Al’s eyes gleam. “Seduce him. Marry him. Whatever it takes. I want to see that.”

Ed gives him a totally undeserved look of disgust. “You’re useless.”

“Brother, he has a rare copy of a rare book. Surely some mediocre sex is worth a look.” Al looks at him happily. “And Teacher won’t even kill you for it!” She’d probably give Ed a pat on the back for it, in truth. Exploiting a military officer to obtain access to rare alchemical knowledge? She might be proud enough to cry.

Ed looks up at the ceiling. “This feels wrong.”

“Exploiting him for his access to rare books or the fact that you slept with someone from the military?”

Ed gives him an annoyed look. “Both. Besides, it wouldn’t be an equivalent exchange. What would he be getting out of it?”

“Sex,” Al points out, perfectly reasonably.

“Yeah,” Ed says, “Problem is, the sex is good, so I also get something out of that.”

Al rolls his eyes. “Not all life is governed on principles of equivalent exchange.”

“Has anyone told you that you are freakily immoral?”

Al grins. “Teacher. After I paid off the police for your underage drinking.”

“I’m going to go to sleep,” Ed announces, “and then I’m going to call Mom, since she’s apparently the only person in this family with any sort of moral compass left.”

Al rolls his eyes. “He’s a military officer, Ed. It’s hardly taking candy from a baby. It’s more like taking candy from an evil landlord who is exploiting the candy store owner.”

Ed grunts, though Al can’t tell whether it’s in agreement or disagreement. He watches Ed stomp upstairs, leaving his boots on the floor next to the sofa. Al sighs, and turns back to his (now much cooler) tea, and the article he’d been reading on Amestris’s latest serial killer.

Trisha is sitting in the garden, paging through a mystery novel. She’s read it before and is skipping all the boring bits, only reading the mysterious and weirdly romantic encounters with the shadowy figures.

“Trisha, darling?” Comes Hohenheim’s voice from inside. “Ed is on the phone.”

She sighs, she’d just been getting to the good part. Well, one of the good parts, seeing as that’s all she’s reading. And since it’s not Sunday, Ed isn’t just calling to check in on her, which she thoroughly enjoys, even if he is a bit too worried about her health. She hasn’t been sick in years; her husband sees to that himself.

“I’ll be right in.” She marks her place carefully and sets the book down under the window sill calmly. f it were urgent, Hohenheim would sound significantly more panicked. Even with years of experience, he has a hard time figuring out how to comfort an anxious Ed.

He’s waiting next to the phone, making awkward small talk with Ed. She coughs slightly, and his face melts with relief. He and Ed are useless with each other unless they’re talking alchemy. They’re so similar it hurts.

“Hello Ed,” Trisha says, picking up the phone, “what’s wrong?”

“Why do you just assume something’s wrong?” Ed sounds defensive.

“Because,” Trisha says, trying to hold back the amusement in her voice, “you only ever call on Sundays.”

Ed huffs. Trisha can practically hear him swearing to be more unpredictable. Honestly, sometimes she wonders if he’ll ever get over his oddly adolescent desire to be entirely erratic.

“Okay,” Ed says, “so I slept with someone last night.”

Trisha manages to keep from laughing, but only just. If Ed is calling to talk to her about a sexuality crisis, he is in the wrong place. She lets Izumi handle that sort of thing for a reason. (That reason being that Ed turns red whenever his mother tries to talk about sex with him. For some reason, the concept of Izumi having sex does not terrify and embarrass him as much as the thought of Trisha having sex. Then again, most of Izumi’s stories involve being blind drunk and getting into a fight that eventually turned into sex, which Ed doubtlessly finds more accessible than Trisha’s humdrum housewife stories. Oh, the things she could tell him, though... But she’d never do it, not even if someone got her very drunk. She likes having the aura of mystique around her past before Hohenheim. Besides, if she told him anything, the rumors would stop, and she rather enjoys the whispers about her having seduced the entire senior class.)

“Yes, dear?” Trisha says.

“And he has a really awesome collection of rare books.”

Trisha holds back a snort. Is he trying to get her approval? She doesn’t care for rare books— at least not as much as he does. Then again, very few people care for rare books as much as he does.

Perhaps he’s trying to come out to her— trying to gauge her reaction by dropping in a male pronoun. That would be hilarious and a little sad. She’s known since he was fourteen and she caught him staring at Tommy Breckner with the same sort of look on his face that Al still gets when he looks at Winry.

“And Al says I should keep having sex with him so I get access to his library for both us.”

Oh. Now that is interesting.

“Do you not want to keep having sex with him?” Trisha asks.

Hohenheim must have heard her, because she hears a choking sound from the next room. Honestly, men. It’s just sex. Ed is twenty-two. What does her husband think Ed does on Friday nights? Play parcheesi with a book club?

“Uhhhh,” Ed says, “I think I do? It’s pretty good.” She can hear the frown in his voice. “That’s not the problem though.”

“Oh?” She asks. Is he about to ask her about her lack of reaction to his partner being male? Trisha frowns, already starting to format her response in her head.

“He’s military,” Ed hisses like it’s a dirty word, which, to be fair, it kind of is, at least in Izumi’s household. Trisha has a laxer approach; she certainly doesn’t approve of the military, but her first instinct isn’t to punch an officer on sight.

“Oh dear,” Trisha says. “Well, you know, some people only go into the military to support their family, or to pay for university, it’s possible that—”

“He’s a Major General,” Ed says flatly, cutting her off.

“I see,” she says, trying for inscrutable but landing more on the side of ‘well, shit.’ “I suppose that’s why Al suggested using him for his library.”

Ed grunts. “Yup.”

Trisha stays silent, waiting for him to continue.

“...so, do I do it?”

Oh, Ed. He’s such a sweetheart, even if he tries to pretend that he’s not. He’s so afraid of doing the wrong thing and hurting someone’s feelings— even when that someone is purportedly a (probably heartless and definitely immoral) military officer— that he’s calling his mother for her advice.

“Well,” Trisha says, calling on her long years of practice to cultivate the equanimity in her voice, “It’s not wrong, morally speaking, if that’s what you’re thinking. If it’s just casual sex—” Again, another choking noise from the next room. She’s going to have to talk to her husband about this after she’s done with Ed “—then there’s nothing wrong with also using his library, so long as you still want to have sex.”

“But it’s not equivalent,” Ed says, sounding so very, very, concerned that she can’t decide if she wants to smile or sigh.

“Ed, love. You’re not the only one who gets to decide if things are fair. If he’s alright with it, I’m sure it’s fine.” Trisha very carefully does not mention the fact that she doesn’t think it matters if he’s alright with it. He’s a high-ranking officer. He could probably stand to be taken advantage of by a young, enterprising character like Ed. It builds character.

Hm. Actually, speaking of generals... who could Ed have possibly slept with? Most Major Generals are in their sixties. She can only think of one off the top of her head who isn’t and he’s... She pales. Oh, Ed. Not him.

“Alright, Mom,” Ed says, sounding relieved. “Thanks.”

She can hear him moving to hang up. “Wait—”

“Yeah?” Ed sounds confused.

“Ed,” she says, as cautiously and delicately as she can, “just remember that people who have served in the military... well, there’s a reason Izumi is so suspicious of them, and it’s not just that the military as a whole is a blight on the nation. Often, they’re corrupt, or... corrupted on a personal level as well.”

“Right.” Ed sounds even more confused than he did.

“Just do your research, dear,” Trisha says.

“I always do,” Ed sounds deeply affronted, which is a good sign. He’ll be alright, probably, and if he’s not... well, she has a husband who can most certainly save her from a military firing squad, if need be. “I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?” Ed says softly.

“Or perhaps Monday?” Trisha offers. Just because his concern about not being predictable is ridiculous doesn’t mean she won’t indulge it, so long as it stays harmless.

“Yeah,” Ed says, and she can hear the smile in his voice. “Maybe Monday.”

Trisha smiles.

“Love you.”

“I love you too.”

Roy has no idea why he invited Ed over again. It’s completely out of character for him. He doesn’t date, unless it’s with one of his aunt’s women, and those aren’t as much dates as they are covert operations, which, granted, are fun, but not necessarily romantic. There is, of course, the occasional outing with some socialite or another— he has to, or people will start noticing that the women he goes out with are part of a rotating cast— but it’s hardly a real date. A real date would require that he’s actually interested in the person across from him, which doesn’t happen. Instead, he smiles, brings them flowers, and proceeds to contemplate stabbing himself with a fork for the next four hours just so he can escape the boredom and go home and read a novel.

He’d just intended to get a drink, stare at a wall morosely and curse the fact that all his friends are workaholics and therefore unable to stop him from being a workaholic, and go home and read until he fell asleep. Instead, he’d done... well, not that.

Ed was— is, if Roy is going to be seeing him again— a sight: golden hair and almost hypnotic golden eyes, with long expanses of smooth, tanned skin that lead down to— Roy feels his mouth grow dry. This is absolutely not the time to start fantasizing about Ed’s d— Anyways.

But Roy is used to attractive people. He works with Olivier Armstrong, and he’s never slept with her. (His survival instincts are too finely honed to ever try. He’s rather attached to his... appendages, thank you very much, and Olivier always has a weapon on her.) So Ed shouldn’t have been a problem. Except that he was.

Roy had walked into the bar, marked that Ed existed and was attractive, and had fully intended to go sit in a corner and engage in a fit of melodrama. (It had been a while since he’d had one of those, and he’s far past due.) But then he’d noticed Ed looking at him— or, no, not at him, but at his actions, cataloguing them as something beyond the absentmindedness that they were designed to emulate— and he had been intrigued. There was a split second where Ed had caught his eye, and he’d seen a flash of something sharp and clever before Ed had re-assumed the vaguely ditzy expression that he’d been wearing when Roy had walked in. And Roy— sue him— is a curious creature, so he’d gone over to investigate.

Ed had been delightful. Not because of his empty comments and his incredible bone structure, but because Roy had kept getting these flashes of intelligence from behind his mask— something assumed in the way he’d bitten his lip, something false in the way he’d grinned at Roy, naïve and eager. Ed had been playing a game that Roy was all too familiar with, and he was a very good player. But Roy was better.

He’d taken Ed home, had some very good sex, and watched Ed the entire time for signs of the mask breaking. (It had only happened once: when Ed had flipped both of them over with control that hinted at a barely concealed strength, and smirked at Roy’s stunned expression in a wolfish manner.) He’d fallen asleep, making sure he had a knife within reach, but the night had passed without event. And then, when morning came...

Ed had dropped the act, clearly expecting Roy to be affronted. In the space of half a second, Roy had watched him transform himself from a naïve, wide-eyed, pretty thing to a (admittedly still gorgeous) clever man with a razor-sharp wit and a plethora of cutting remarks. Roy had nearly given up on getting Ed to drop the act by that point, figuring that his ever-present paranoia might have gotten him to overestimate Ed’s cleverness, but then Ed had insulted him, revealed that he had known who Roy was since the beginning (which Roy had actually guessed at, so point Mustang), and told him that his array was shit. Roy had invited him for breakfast and spent the entirety of it watching Ed break down his array and produce ridiculously complex equations of the top of his head to explain how, exactly, Roy’s array was shit. It was glorious.

Maes, if he ever finds out, is never going to let him live this down.

‘All this time,’ Roy can imagine him saying, ‘when I’ve been trying to set you up with nice girls, I’ve been wondering why you never took to them. It’s all so clear. You just want to be talked down to. I should have tried to pay Hawkeye to go out with you years ago.’

Roy shivers involuntarily. Maes is too clever for his own good and the good of the people around him. Fuck, he’ll probably figure it out this afternoon, just from the slight frown Roy will have when he picks Elicia up, or something like that.

The thought of Hughes’ inevitable jokes is almost enough to kill his anticipation of his and Ed’s next meeting. Almost, because he really wants to see if he can get Ed to give up how he’s supposed to fix his array without completely upsetting the second matrix and taking years to develop new equations, and also because it had been really good sex, especially in the morning when Ed hadn’t been bothering to pretend that he wasn’t extremely aggressive and very clever.

Ugh. When did his life get like this, and what did he do to deserve it?

Ed has spent four days determinedly not being nervous. He’s just... cautiously anticipatory, which is entirely reasonable, because he’s planning to use a high-ranking military officer for his collection of rare books and (admittedly super enjoyable) sex. Besides, the guy is clearly fucking insane. No one in their right mind listens to the array they’ve staked their career on being insulted, and then get so turned on they have sex on the kitchen table with the person who insulted it. Ed has a perfectly good reason to be nerv— cautiously anticipatory.

Ed frowns, steels his nerves, and then knocks on Roy’s door, crosses his arms, and waits.

It’s a nice house with a small yard, neither of which Ed noticed last time he was there. There are a few flower beds dotted here and there, and a hedge that comes up to waist height. It’s perfectly manicured and utterly devoid of personality. The man is a general, after all. He can probably afford someone to take care of his lawn for him.

The door opens, and Ed turns back around.

“I hope you don’t expect me to tell you how to fix your array,” Ed says before Roy can get a word in edgewise, “because there’s no way that’s happening. My teacher would kill me.”

Roy frowns. “You still have a teacher?”

Oh shit, he must be trying to do the math on Ed’s age. Ed gleefully watches him get more and more worried for a few seconds before deciding to give in and save him from his (apparently) rapidly spiraling inner monologue.

“Ex-teacher,” Ed clarifies, “she hasn’t really been my teacher in almost ten years.”

“Oh.” Roy noticeably brightens at the implicit confirmation that he didn’t sleep with someone just barely old enough to drink. “She hates the military, then?”

Ed makes a so-so gesture with his hand. “Something between hate and despise with every fiber of her being.” He narrows his eyes, meeting Roy’s in a challenge. “I’m not too big a fan, either.”

Roy snorts. “That’s entirely fair. I can’t say the same, though; it is my job after all.”

Ed hears the subtext. ‘I can’t say the same, because that would get rid of my plausible deniability.’

He grins. Maybe Roy isn’t so bad for a general. “You gonna let me in?”

Roy opens the door fully, ushering Ed in. “Did you want a tour? You didn’t really get to look around much last time.”

Ed snorts. “I’m good.” He cocks his head, looking at Roy. “I believe I was promised rare books?”

Roy raises his eyebrows in a way that’s meant to look disapproving, but Ed can tell that he’s secretly amused. Perks of having a mom like Trisha; you learn real fast when a raised eyebrow means ‘you are in so much trouble’ and when it means ‘you are in so much trouble, but what you did was so hilarious that I’m not actually mad.’

Ed smiles blithely at him, and Roy snorts.

“Let’s go.”

Roy guides the two of them into a study. It’s nice— dark wood bookshelves, a desk, a few cushy armchairs. The far wall is covered in glass, protecting the books behind it.

Ed’s eyes light up. He strolls across the room eagerly, eyes alighting on at least three different titles he and Al have tried to find at one point or another. “Can I see the Mann?”

Roy blinks in confusion. “Why?” What he means, of course, is ‘why would you want to?’

Ed grins. “Oh, good, you think he’s an idiot too. I’m interested in the annotations.”

“Ayers?” Roy asks rhetorically, unlocking the glass case, “Why?”

“Long standing argument. My brother thinks that Ayers’ later work on recreation of dead cell components is totally unfounded, so he doesn’t bother trying to use his structural theory for transmutation circles for biological alchemy unless I make him use it. I’m sure that there’s something that explains the jump he makes— which totally makes sense—” he glares at Roy, daring him to argue otherwise, “but my brother refuses to believe me without reason.”

“Is that reason a complete lack of proof?” Roy asks innocently.

Ed scowls at him. Maybe Roy is actually a dick and Ed’s been blinded by his extensive book collection and very nice, uh... yeah. “Just give me the book.”

Roy rolls his eyes, but carefully takes out the slim volume and deposits it on his desk. “Why would the proof be in an annotation in Mann?”

“I’ve looked everywhere else that makes sense, and Mann’s fourth chapter has a long bit about the circle being a symbol in itself, and thereby divisible as one would a component part, which is just a terrible idea for biochemical alchemy, unless you want an explosion. Everyone knows that there are Ayers annotations for this treatise, so he probably writes out the proof in the margins of that bit, given that his whole structural theory is about splicing mini circles together to be more efficient.”

Roy blinks, processing Ed’s deluge of information. “Okay,” he says, a smile beginning to grow on his face, “I want to see this. Let’s find it.”

Ed returns home in possession of notes that will win him his argument, and several new mouth-shaped bruises below his collarbone.

They soon fall into a rhythm; Ed comes over two or three times a week where they spend a few hours hunting down obscure pieces of knowledge in Roy’s (sadly mostly untouched) collection, annoying each other, and then having sex.

Roy figures out that Ed uses insults as terms of endearment about a week in, and so he’s politely flattered when Ed starts calling him a bastard. It doesn’t hurt that it was entirely merited, as he’d received the appellation after making several pointed comments about Ed’s short temper.

Roy is, unfortunately, absolutely delighted by this turn of events, which means that Maes is catching on in a big capacity. Roy has been refusing to tell Maes who it is because he has some self-preservation instincts, and Maes is likely to interrogate Ed at the slightest opportunity. Maes has, in return for Roy’s reticence, taken to threatening him with a tail. He hasn’t actually done it yet, but Roy has asked Ed to sneak in anyways. He’s lucky Ed thinks the entire thing is hilarious or he might have had to answer some very difficult questions about why exactly he’s scared of his best friend.

Maes is, of course, very grumpy about this turn of events, which means that he makes pointed comments about it whenever they’re in a room together. Which is deeply unfortunate, because they work together.

“Have you found a catchy name for your serial killer yet?” Roy asks him, strolling into Hughes’ office.

Hughes frowns. “We’re working on it. What do you think of ‘The Alchemist Slayer?’

“Too long,” Roy says, “and not nearly catchy enough.”

Hughes sighs. “That’s what everyone’s been saying.” His gaze sharpens as he looks Roy up and down. “You seem like you had fun last night,” he says sourly.

“How can you always tell?” Roy complains.

“I’ll tell you if you tell me who it is,” Hughes offers.

Roy snorts. “Your bargaining is getting worse by the day. Are you sure we should have you on this case?”

Hughes casts him a hurt and totally faked look. Roy stares back, unperturbed.

“Is he at least worth isolating your best friend and causing him to doubt his own value in your life?” Hughes had figured out that it was a man approximately three seconds after Roy had met him the Saturday afternoon after the first encounter. Apparently, Roy has a different set of tells for men. He really doesn’t want to know how Maes figured that out.

“No,” Roy says, “if that were actually happening. You’re just too nosy to admit that I’m entitled to my privacy.”

“It’s a matter of security!” Hughes says, managing to pull off ‘selflessly concerned for his friend’s safety’ very well for someone lying through his teeth.

Roy gives him an unimpressed look. “He’s not a security threat. He’s not even a security risk. I doubt he knows how to throw a punch.”

Hughes breaks. “Please, Roy! I’m dying over here. Hawkeye won’t say anything and she won’t let me get people to stake out your house.”

Roy makes a mental note to give Riza an extra nice holiday bonus. “That’s because she knows that you’ll scare him off.”

“If he can be scared off by me, then he’s not worth your time.”

Roy rolls his eyes. “He’s not a fan of the military.”

Hughes quirks an eyebrow. “Oh? Maybe he’s just using you for sex, then. You should let me know so I can check him out.”

Roy rolls his eyes. If Ed is using him for something, it’s his library, not the sex. Besides, if Ed really were just using him, Roy doubts he’d bother explaining any part of his research. Ed isn’t the sort of person who bothers explaining his thought process to people he doesn’t like.

Hughes huffs. “Why did you come to visit, if not to torture me?”

“Your serial killer,” Roy says quickly, knowing that Hughes will start to show him pictures if he doesn’t answer quickly enough, “We need to keep the histories of the alchemists he’s killed quiet long enough for Grumman’s new bill to be passed in parliament.”

“Military suppression of the press?” Hughes says with a smile. “Really, Roy, you’re becoming more and more corrupt by the day.”

“The bill is to demand civilian and military investigation into journalists’ disappearances and murders,” Roy says pointedly, “I’m just trying to avoid negative PR for Grumman until it’s passed. After that, the papers are free to publish every single one of the alchemists’ crimes.”

“Not crimes,” Hughes says bitterly, “Bradley-era wartime permissions, remember?”

Roy grimaces. “Exactly.”

“If I keep the stories silent, will you tell me who it is?”

Roy glares at him. “You’ll keep your job, how’s that for a deal?”

“Yeesh,” Hughes says, “touchy.”

Roy sighs and turns to leave.

“I’ll find him eventually, Roy,” Hughes calls after him.

“Just do your job, Hughes,” Roy responds, not turning around.

The door shuts behind him and he breathes a sigh of relief. Hughes hadn’t tried to show him pictures even once. Like hell he’s going to tell him who Ed is; his new obsession is practically a get out of jail (well, pictures, but the two are essentially the same thing when it comes to Hughes) free card for Roy.

Al frowns, pressing the lockpick a little more firmly until he hears the last click. Finally, it comes, and he slips in the window. Trust the military to put locks on windows in their library. Trust the military to put subpar, easily pickable locks on windows in their library.

He doesn’t make a habit of this; Al tends to leave the dangerous and ill-thought-out plans to Ed. Still, this is really his only option. He can’t get into the first branch otherwise, barring signing up as a dog of the military, which he’ll die before he ever does. (He’s not exaggerating, either. Teacher would literally kill him before he could get his pocket watch.) And he needs to get in here, because all civilian records on the ‘Hero of Ishval’ have mysteriously disappeared, and all the military ones are restricted.

He still doesn’t approve of Mustang. Nothing Ed has said has changed that, besides perhaps the few times he’s mentioned Mustang saying something that could be interpreted as anti-military. Ed’s no sucker— if he were being conned or taken advantage of, he would know it— but he is kinder than Al. Oh, Al brings home homeless kittens and nurses them back to health, but it’s not hard to care about a homeless kitten. They’re cute and innocent. But Ed cares about everyone, even the people foolish enough to try to mug him. That’s everyone’s fundamental mistake when they meet the Elric brothers: they assume that Al is kind, and Ed isn’t even nice. The truth of it is very different. Al is nice— he’s always polite, and he cares for people in the general sense, especially the helpless and weak— but he's not kind. Ed is the kind one.

(It’s why he and Winry get on so well. They both have this tendency to see the best in people, even people who are trying to put a knife between their ribs. Al doesn’t do that; he withholds judgement until he has enough data, but after that, his verdict is final, whether it be good or bad. He believes in second chances in a sort of general sense, but he doesn’t believe in giving them to people who you know will squander the opportunity.)

So Al is wary of Ed getting hurt, especially since his latest foray into romance has led him to someone who can’t possibly be worthy of him. But Al is a scientist; he’ll withhold judgement until he has a larger set of data to work with than ‘seems to be a decent alchemist’ and ‘was part of a military coup.’ (He does actually think the coup was a good idea— Bradley needed to go— but he’s still not sure how many of the people involved are just opportunistic vultures, and how many genuinely thought Bradley was a warmongering xenophobe who needed to be gotten rid of.)

He pads down the halls, backtracking and getting lost several times. (Maybe the locks at the windows are bad for a reason; who needs security when the person breaking in won’t be able to find anything?) He’s not looking for the official records, because those will probably be protected as well and Al doesn’t fancy a stint in jail because he couldn’t disarm an alarm quickly enough. What he is looking for is the newspapers. Civilian libraries weren’t allowed to keep their copies for their records after the war was over; the only place left with any is the first branch. (Well, he’s sure he could find some in the library of a mid-sized town that the military had forgotten to check, but he doesn’t fancy spending weeks searching for a town when the information is right there in Central.)

He stumbles into the right room eventually. The papers themselves, though covered in dust, don’t seem to be protected, and they’re organized by date going back forty years. God, Al loves libraries. So much knowledge available at the tips of his fingers.

He closes the door behind him, turns on a lamp, and starts working backward from the end of the war. He’ll find something eventually, he knows it. No one is made a war hero for standing to the side. Mustang is guilty of something, and he’s going to make sure that Ed knows before he can go and get his heart broken.

Ed likes Roy. Like, really likes him, not that he’d ever tell him that. It would go straight to his ego if Ed said it, and if Roy isn’t smart enough to figure it out anyways, then that’s his own damn fault.

He’s caught himself mentally going over their encounters too many times to count in the past month. At first, when he’d just been thinking about Roy’s eyes or that thing that he does with his tongue, it had been fine. That’s well-established territory: have good sex, save the memory for later. Then it had lapsed into thinking about Roy making a very clever comment on angular adjustment for extending transmutative range, or the dubious veracity of Pearson’s “studies,” or his stupid fucking pun about Wattson and electrical currents and the way he’d looked so damned smug after he’d said it, like he’d fucking invented space travel or something instead of making a terrible joke. Which, okay, Ed sort of gets thinking about that, because the first had been clever and awesome, the second had been true and awesome, and the third had been stupid and terrible but Ed had ended up in stitches anyways at Roy’s dumbass expression. So, like, logically speaking, it makes sense.

Until yesterday, which had started out with Roy making several comments about Ed barging into his house and nearly ripping the doorknob off with at least one gratuitous use of ‘fly off the handle,’ and then had devolved into making out on his couch, and then having sex on his couch and ordering takeaway, and then having sex on his bed and arguing some more until their takeaway got there, and then eating and arguing, and then falling asleep with Roy’s head on his chest and Ed’s arm wrapped around him.

And they hadn’t even gone into the study once.

Ed didn’t even slip out this morning. It had been Roy who’d woken him up by getting dressed and going into work like, way too early. But he’d given Ed this look, like Al sometimes gives Winry, like he was so sure that Ed should slot into his life like that but still couldn’t believe that it was real, and Ed hadn’t looked away, or called him an asshole, or an idiot, or a bastard, he’d just sort of softened around the edges until he was sure he was going to melt into Roy’s bed and never emerge.

Ed is pretty sure he can’t ever tell anyone about that, except maybe his mom, because he thinks she would get it— like, get it get it— and she wouldn’t make a single joke or rude comment about it being Roy fucking Mustang who had turned him into this sludgy inside-out mess.

The worst fucking part is that he wants it to happen again. He wants to go right back to Roy’s house and be there when he gets home and maybe not even fucking talk or argue— which doesn’t happen often, but it’s weirdly nice when it does— but just, like, be there and look at Roy like he’s melting and have Roy look back at him like he wants to melt too.

Which is, objectively, a pretty disgusting simile, but Ed doesn’t really mind so long as it’s with Roy.

Holy fuck. He sounds like a sappy idiot. Seriously, what is happening to him? Did his brain leak out some time between the intellectual debates and the mind-blowing sex, or has it just decided to make an exception for gooey love stuff where Roy is concerned? Either way, Ed is definitely fucked. So, so, fucked.

(The thing is, he doesn’t really care.)

“Have a nice time with your boyfriend?” Al asks, paging through the newspaper. Ed has just busted in the door in the same clothes as yesterday.

Al watches as Ed flushes bright red, and he grins.

“He’s not—”

Al raises an eyebrow. “Are you going to tell him that?”

Ed groans. “No. Yes. Why do you make my life so hard?”

“Because I care about you,” Al says matter-of-factly.

He didn’t approve of Mustang in the first place. Nothing he’d found had changed that. That said, Ed likes him. A lot. And that counts for quite a bit with Al, which means that he’s going to have the ‘your lover is an awful person’ talk sooner or later. Given Ed’s lack of outright denial at Mustang being his boyfriend, it’s going to be now. Better to rip off the bandage and all.

Ed sighs. “Alright, spill. What’s wrong?”

Al frowns. “Has he told you what he did in Ishval?”

“Not really,” Ed says, “but it’s also not a super fun topic, so I’m not bothered.”

Al grimaces. “Maybe you should be.” He passes Ed a copy of a newspaper from fifteen years ago that he’d gotten out of the library last night. He wasn’t technically supposed to borrow it, but he wasn’t technically supposed to be in the library at all, so in for a cenz, in for a stone. The headline reads ‘State Alchemists Invaluable in Taking Ishvalan Capital.’ “Read it.”

Ed takes the paper obligingly, going paler and paler as he skims the first few paragraphs. Al had had much the same reaction. It’s not... nice to imagine, even in the abstract, and about someone Al has no real positive feelings towards. He can’t imagine what it’s like for Ed.

“Is it true?”

Al nods, watching Ed’s face drop with a resigned sort of sadness. “I checked it against everything I could find.”

Ed tosses aside the newspaper and collapses on the couch next to Al. “A couple weeks ago, when I called her, Mom told me to be careful, and do my research. I guess this is what she meant.”

“Do you know what you’re going to do?”

Ed leans back, tipping his head over the top of the couch. He lets out a long breath. “I could disappear, I guess. He’d get the picture after I didn’t show up.”

Al blinks. Ed has come up with many, many, terrible ideas over the course of his life, but that is one of his worst. Ed seems to realize this after a moment, because he sighs.

“I guess that’s a coward’s way out. I just... don’t want to talk to him about it and ruin it.” He huffs. “Which wouldn’t even ruin it, because I won’t be able to stop thinking about it unless we talk, but I’m not going to see him again for another two days, and I really, really, don’t want to talk about it.”

Al sets aside the day’s newspaper, gets up, and starts making tea. Ed slumps into where Al had been sitting, kicking off his boots before he puts them on the couch when Al gives him a severe look.

“Is it a dealbreaker?” Al asks, keeping his voice even. This is why he had gotten up to make tea. If Ed were able to see his face, he’d see Al’s expression screaming ‘IT SHOULD BE!!!!’ and he’d drop Mustang, no questions asked. But, well, Mustang makes Ed happy, and Ed deserves to be happy, even if it’s with him.

“It should be, shouldn’t it?” Ed wonders aloud, clearly cottoning on to Al’s train of thought. “But... I don’t know. He really hates the military, even though he never says it outright. Sometimes I’ll just say something and he gets this look, like if he could burn it to the ground and never look back, he would.” Ed sighs. “I think... I think I have to ask him about it.”

Al smiles sadly, staring at the kettle. Ed, always so willing to believe the best in people even when proven wrong. There’s no one in the world that deserves him.

“I’ll talk to him Thursday,” Ed says. “I’m going over then anyways and this way he won’t have a warning.”

Al nods grimly, and turns the kettle off. It hadn’t even begun to boil. He turns around, and looks at Ed.

“Your check for the soil analysis array came in the mail,” he says for lack of a better topic.

“Hm?” Ed opens his eyes. “Oh, good.”

“We have enough money to manage for another four months,” Al says, “so if you want to do some non-commission work, then you should go for it.”

“Thanks,” Ed says, a little bit of relief creeping into his tone.

Al immediately feels guilty. He hadn’t asked Ed to support him; he hadn’t needed to. Ed had come with him to Central, tested out of what classes he could and bullied his way out of the ones he couldn’t, written a brilliant senior thesis, and gotten his degree in less than a year. Then he’d started on commission work to pay their debts, and hasn’t stopped in the past three years. It’s a living— a good one— but Al knows that it bores Ed, not that Ed will ever admit it.

“I’m going to go to sleep,” Ed says with a yawn.

“Alright,” Al says, “I’ve got lab until eight. I’ll pick something up on the way home.”

He watches Ed stumble up the stairs, not moving until he hears the door to Ed’s room shut. Then, Al folds the newspaper that he’d ‘borrowed’ and hides it in the false bottom of the silverware drawer until he can come back for it later.

He looks at the clock. Shoot. He’s running late.

Roy isn’t a good person; he has no illusions about that. He’s done good things, sure, most notably getting Bradley booted out of office and helping Grumman reinstate parliament, but you can’t put the good against the bad and expect them to balance out. He could save one thousand lives— one million— and it still wouldn’t balance out a single life he’s taken. Things like redemption and absolution are for people that didn’t willingly help commit genocide.

Roy isn’t a good person, but Ed thinks he is.

At first, Roy had assumed that Ed was the sort of person who didn’t particularly care about his various war crimes. It’s not like they had been a secret during the war, after all. The papers may not have come out and written ‘Flame Alchemist Slaughters 50 Innocents this Weekend,’ but anyone with the least bit of critical reading skills knew exactly what his ‘heroism’ entailed. He’d continued assuming that until the third hour of the second time Ed had been over at his house, when Ed had briefly gotten distracted and started ranting about Bradley-era alchemic permissions relating to chimeras with a fervor that impressed even Roy, who had dealt with the whole Shou Tucker incident a few years back. People who get that upset about chimeras don’t tend to look on war criminals favorably.

It had been... shocking to realize that Ed wasn’t quite old enough to remember what had happened during the Ishvalan war, let alone old enough to have been reading newspapers with the critical eye that Roy might expect from him now. It had been even more shocking to come to the realization that this was something Ed was going to find out about sooner or later, and that Roy really wanted it to be later.

It’s cliché, of course, and he’ll die before he tells Maes this, but having Ed next to him at night is an unlooked-for and unprecedented comfort. It’s not even the warm body— Roy can have those when he wants with just the least bit of effort— it’s the knowledge that it’s Ed, who seems brilliant and good in a way Roy hasn’t seen in a long time.

Maybe he’s projecting. It’s been just over a month, and Ed comes over three times a week. That’s, what, 80 hours spent (awake) in Ed’s company? Less, if you subtract the time Ed had been pretending to be a bit of an airhead. Still, Roy had once spent a month seeing Havoc three times a week and it had inspired nowhere near the level of admiration he has for Ed. Maybe it’s just something about Ed. He’s open, honest to a fault, and has no problems telling Roy where to shove it. It’s hard for Roy to believe that he’s projecting when Ed has proven his brilliance over and over (and fuck but Roy is never going to have confidence in his own genius ever again. Ed isn’t inhumanely good at alchemy, but he’s good enough that Roy doubts he could ever catch up, even if he dropped everything to study and Ed kept up his current routine) and has routinely railed against everything from the state of educational programs (abysmal) to hospital funding (awful) to tax incentives for military contractors (so fucked up, like, what the fuck Roy).

Last night, Roy had turned over in bed to see Ed splayed out against his sheets like some sort of golden statue, and his first thought hadn’t even been to eye Ed’s naked back or speculate about how early he’d have to get up to get another round in without being late. He’d just reached over and curled himself into the curve of Ed’s body, breathed in the scent of his citrus shampoo, and thought ‘I understand why Maes praises domesticity so much.’ The worst part was that when he’d woken in the morning, the thought hadn’t faded.

In short, Roy is whipped, and it’s a matter of time before Ed finds out about what he did in Ishval and he gets dumped. He’s not going to lie to himself; he probably deserves it. That still doesn’t make the thought any more palatable.

Ed doesn’t sleep.

He’s exhausted. He’d been up late doing research the night before last, and then later doing “research” last night, and been up at seven because Roy had to go in to work and Ed wanted to get home and change clothes before Al could give him a discerning look (not that Ed has ever managed it before; Al seems to have an instinct for catching Ed as he walks in the door).

And now his not-boyfriend is a mass murderer. Or, well, Roy has been a murderer for years, and Ed’s only finding out about it now. He should really listen to his mom more. (He’d just assumed that she’d meant for him to go look up cases where civilians had slandered/been murdered by their military counterparts so he’d be ready if the law came a-knocking (which he had done at length. Turns out that he’d probably have to run away to Xing if that ever happened, or he might ‘mysteriously disappear.’ He’d sort of been relying on the fact that Roy got a tight look on his face whenever he brought up journalists or military detractors ‘disappearing’ under Bradley, and so seemed very unlikely to put a hit out on Ed.))

He turns over, grimacing at the sick feeling in his stomach that hasn’t gone away since Al had handed him that paper, and gets up.

Unbeknownst to Al, he’s already been working on an independent project for a few weeks. Roy’s library is full of old books on elemental transmutation (or at least what used to be called elemental transmutation before the periodic table had been invented. Once that had happened, everything having to do with the four ‘elements’ had fallen out of favor, except as symbols for grounding complex arrays.) Ed had been itching to come up with something ever since he cracked open the volume on elemental water.

Ed grabs his notebook, turns to the section he’s been using for this project, and sketches out a circle. It’s simple, just a component part he’s formed out of three old arrays he’d found (thank you Ayers for figuring out how to do that without making anything blow up)— but this is the thirtieth attempt, which is a lot, especially for Ed, who is a genius whose method is ‘slap it together and see if it works.’

But this is complicated— far more complicated than anything he’s attempted thus far— because it’s not just an array, it’s a counter-array.

The thing about alchemy is that you can almost always undo it, barring death or chimeras or anything to do with soul alchemy (thanks, dad, for that lovely lecture. nightmares about human transmutation as a nine-year-old were exactly what he needed), but undoing the effects of an array isn’t the same as countering the array itself. Anyone can undo alchemical damage, provided they aren’t an idiot and have a copy of the original array and a spare grease pencil handy. It’s the law of the conservation of mass; if it still exists (which it has to) then you can rearrange it.

But undoing an array means that the damage is already done. Countering it, on the other hand...

You have to account for every stage of it— every point at which you might counter it— and that’s just the beginning. You can’t just fix the damage that’s already happened, because then the damage keeps happening and entropy takes over and you’re trying to manage way too much energy just to keep the reaction under control. You have to neutralize the energy, combat the intent.

You need to understand exactly how the array you’re countering works— exactly how the science behind it was formed, exactly how and why the symbology was conceived. You need to take the structural matrix, turn it on its head, and still be able to manage the energy.

This had started out as an errant project— a way for Ed to prove to himself that he’s better than anything the military can put together, that he can take down whoever he needs to take down.

Now, though, it’s different. This is something that has to exist. The world can’t afford to not have it.

Ed sits back and looks at his thirtieth version for the sixth component circle of his counter-array. The final array isn’t done yet, not by a long shot, but when it is, he’ll have one of the most powerful weapons in Amestris: the antidote to Roy’s flame.

Trisha is frowning at her gardenias.

They’re wilting in the heat— dying, actually— but she’s too stubborn to admit that she’s failed. Ironically, her husband is the one with the green thumb, despite the fact that he’d grown up in the desert and she’d grown up in the green hills of Resembool.

She’s done everything her gardening book said: water frequently, make sure they get direct sun for 6-8 hours, use two inches of fertilizer, etc. Well, she waters them when she remembers, they’re sort of in the shade because of the way the house is situated, she never actually fertilized them, and she didn’t read far enough to figure out what, exactly, ‘etc.’ was. Still, she’d tried. It’s utterly unfair, and also totally her own fault, and she’s absolutely going to go get her husband to fix them using alchemy.

(He’d always flinched away from using alchemy for such mundane things at the beginning— always fretted that he would need it later for some unknown, nebulous, threat— but the only threat there could have been died in the circle at Xerxes, caught in its own array, and he had been the sole survivor: the Philosopher of the Desert. After he’d had to start healing her periodically— fixing all the cells that were degenerating and attacking themselves— he’d gotten more used to it. The day he’d found his first gray hair, he’d figured out how to get rid of what was keeping him alive, keeping him from aging. Now, he makes amphitheaters in the hills and builds statues in the town square, and tears them down again, and then builds them up. And, she hopes, fixes her gardenias.)

“Trisha?”

She turns around, and her husband is standing right there. “Oh, good. I need you to fix these gardenias.”

He looks down at the gardenias and frowns, eyebrows drawing together in the way that means he doesn’t understand how she managed to do so much damage in the space of six weeks. “Edward is calling.”

“On a Wednesday?” Trisha frowns. After his Monday call, Ed had resumed calling her every Sunday. So much for his short-lived crusade to adopt some inconsistency.

Her husband shrugs.

Trisha scrunches her face up contemplatively. “Alright.” She starts to go inside, but turns back after a moment to give him a kiss on the cheek.

He smiles at her, warm and kind, with love bleeding out of every pore, and then raises his hands to her face and kisses her for real. Trisha melts into it; even after twenty-seven years, he still brings her to her knees. She’d be scared except that she knows that he’ll always be there to pick her up. He had promised not to leave, after all, and Van Hohenheim keeps his promises.

“Ed,” she murmurs after a minute, regretfully extricating herself from his embrace. He catches her hand and gives her one more kiss on the forehead before she goes inside.

She’s still grinning when she picks up the phone. Then she hears Ed, and her grin drops.

“Mom?” Ed asks, sounding so much like the four-year-old who had come to her to fix butterflies’ wings and made them houses out of leaves when she said she couldn’t

“Yes, love?” she says, channeling every bit of the love that she feels for him and Al every day into her voice. It’s not as good as a hug, but it’ll have to do for now.

“Al did my research for me.”

She blinks, confused for a second, before she remembers their last off-schedule conversation. “Oh, sweetheart...”

There’s a hitch in his breath on the other end of the line, and Trisha knows that if Ed were the sort of person who cried, he would be crying right now.

“I don’t know what to do,” he says plaintively. “He’s not— you know, in person— but he still...”

She sighs— a gentle frustrated thing, born of the inevitability of having someone you love be hurt by something you can’t do a damn thing about. “You care about him?” She asks, though it’s not really a question, not with the way he’s talking.

“I—” Ed starts. “I like being around him. He just— you know.”

She does, really, and that’s the awful thing. What is it with the Elrics and falling in love with mass murderers? Not that it’s the same thing— her husband had been tricked, and Mustang chose to do it, even if he was somewhat forced into it.

But... her husband hadn’t just been tricked. He’d known what the array would do, in part. He’d been willing to sacrifice his life and the lives of some slaves, just not his entire country. Maybe he and Mustang are more similar than they seem.

“Last time I saw him—” Ed says, breath hitching again in the worst way, “I mean— you know how you sometimes look at dad, and he looks at you?”

“Oh,” Trisha says, because when she’d said ‘falling in love,’ she had only really meant the ‘falling’ part. But Ed isn’t quite falling anymore.

If it were some other person, she might be comforted by the quick fall— the jump from tentative acquaintance to serious lover— but Ed doesn’t work like that. Oh, if he’s lucky he might break out of the infatuation, manage to shake the chemical cocktail in his brain that’s telling him to stay, but it won’t do a damn thing about everything underneath it. Ed doesn’t give up his heart easily; when he does, it’s to someone he believes he can trust. Even if the infatuation is stripped away, there will still be layers and layers of fondness and respect beneath it. Even if Ed falls out of love as quickly as he fell into it, he’ll still care.

“I can’t... forgive him,” Ed says, like it’s breaking his heart, “I don’t even want to.”

“Good,” Trisha says brusquely, because this, at least, she knows something about, “You shouldn’t forgive him. What he did was wrong. That doesn’t mean you can’t—” love “ —care about him anyways.”

“But he’s a murderer.” Ed’s voice is flat, too flat for him to be anything but horrified.

She sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose. “So is your father.”

There’s a pause on the other end as Ed tries to process what she’s said. “But he was tricked,” Ed says, though he doesn’t sound like he believes it.

“Yes,” Trisha agrees, “and no.” She sighs again. “He didn’t want to sacrifice the country— he didn’t know that that’s what would be sacrificed— but he knew that lives would be taken. He helped create the array, knowing full well that his and every other person in the palace’s lives would be forfeit.”

“But that’s different,” Ed says, “he was giving up his own life too. He thought it was noble.”

She frowns. “And your Mustang didn’t?”

“I... don’t know,” Ed says. “He says he wants to help people— I think that’s why he joined in the first place— but he couldn’t have kept thinking that he was helping— not after he killed so many people.” Ed sighs. “I need to talk to him.”

Trisha smiles sadly and nods before she realizes that Ed can’t see her. “You do.”

Ed sighs again. “Thanks, mom.”

“Of course,” Trisha says, “and if things don’t go well, I’m always happy to call Izumi so she and I can deface his house together.”

Ed snorts, soundly weakly amused. “Thanks.”

“Of course,” she says. “Don’t hesitate to call again.”

Ed makes a vague sound of affirmation.

“Alright. I love you.”

“Love you too.”

Ed knocks on Roy’s door carefully. He’s thought out a million versions of this conversation— asked a million variations of the same question. He still doesn’t know what to do.

Roy opens the door, and Ed knows that whatever he’s feeling is showing on his face (though god knows he can’t figure out what, exactly, that is. Some mix of guilt and desire and an odd sense of betrayal, probably, but everything is too mixed together for him to even begin to be able to parse out). He doesn’t look Roy in the eyes— he doesn’t think he can— he just exhales slowly, and opens his mouth to speak.

“Why are you still in the military?” Ed asks hollowly, because it’s easier than asking ‘Why did you kill children?’ or ‘Why didn’t you try and stop them?’ And Ed isn’t a coward, okay— he never goes for the easy path, except now he is going for the easier path and it’s because he doesn’t think there’s an answer that Roy can give him to those questions that will satisfy him enough to stay.

Ed knows Roy enough by this point to know that Roy’s first instinct to his question should be to throw out some stupid line about career obligations, but Roy just looks at him with those strange, sad, dark eyes. He knows what Ed’s question really means; he knows what Ed isn’t asking.

“Are you breaking up with me?” Roy asks. His face is a mask; Ed knows him well enough to know that that means that he is feeling something, and is feeling it strongly enough that he doesn’t want anyone to know, but Ed doesn’t know him well enough to know what the something is.

“Should I?” Ed retorts, not breaking eye contact.

“Probably,” Roy says, inscrutable.

Ed doesn’t do anything— doesn’t let out a controlled sigh, or bite his lip, or shift an inch. There is a second part of this equation, one that Roy isn’t revealing the answer to. “Do you want me to?”

Roy blinks, and then guilt overcomes his face. “No.”

Oh, Ed thinks.

“Then maybe not,” Ed says.

Roy frowns and opens the door enough for Ed to come inside. Ed doesn’t take off his shoes. Roy doesn’t move out of the hallway.

The door shuts behind them with a click.

“There’s no excuse,” Roy says. “There’s nothing I can say.”

And this isn’t a fucking test, okay? Ed didn’t come here with a list of right answers and wrong answers. He’s not ticking boxes off as Roy says things. But there’s been two moments now that have made the tight ball of anger in Ed’s chest shrink.

“No,” Ed says, “there isn’t.”

There is a pause where Roy looks at him, back to being empty and inscrutable, and Ed looks back, not bothering to be blank, or empty, or anything but the tangled mess of emotions he can’t even begin to sort out.

“All laws that go through parliament have to be signed by the Fuhrer,” Roy says, “even the ones with no bearing on the military. Especially the ones with a bearing on it.” Roy voice is quiet, hard, but the anger isn’t directed at Ed. “There is no way to dismantle it from the outside.”

This is different. This is not Roy hinting at disagreeing with the military’s foreign policy and skirting around his disapproval of its treatment of journalistic integrity. This is treason, spoken openly, blindly, with no idea who Ed might go to with it.

How much must Roy care to risk this? How much must Roy trust Ed to tell him this secret— to give Ed the key to his own destruction in the hopes that he does not use it?

“So you stayed,” Ed says, exhaling. “After the war, you stayed.”

Roy nods. “But I stayed during the war too.”

“I know,” Ed says, mouth strangely dry.

A flash of surprise and fear races through Roy’s eyes. “I'm not blameless. I'm not good.”

Ed looks at him, considering. “I don’t expect you to be.”

Roy blinks, confusion making itself known in the wrinkle of his brow, the crease at the corner of his mouth.

“I mean,” Ed says, “I don’t expect you to be good. Not after what you did. Just... I think you need to be better now. I think,” he says, stepping forward and looking at Roy, eye to eye, “you are better now.”

That’s all there is to it, really. Ed can’t forgive Roy— it’s not his crime to forgive, and even if he could, he wouldn’t. It’s unforgivable and irreparable. But doesn’t it matter that Roy is trying now? Doesn’t it matter that he’s using his life to stop it from happening again?

“You don’t have proof of that,” Roy says. “You’ll never be able to have proof of that.”

“It’s a leap of faith,” Ed says, “and it’s mine to make.”

“Okay,” Roy says numbly, “okay.”

“Do you want me to stay?” Ed asks, and he means ‘Do you want me to stay right now?’ but he also means ‘Do you want me to stay until the end?’

“Yes,” Roy says, “I’d like that.”