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“Edward?”
Roy almost hadn’t answered the door. It was late, almost verging on too late, and he couldn’t imagine what would be urgent enough to draw someone to his doorstep without first trying the phone. He’d been readying himself for bed and had it not been for the fact that the interloper had elected to continuously bang on the door after a short pause during which Roy couldn’t even imagine the world’s fastest sprinter making it to the door in time, he’d have been content to ignore whoever it was. When the door swung open to reveal one Edward Elric, the aforementioned impatience suddenly made sense.
“Hey,” Ed said, pushing past Roy unceremoniously and starting off down his hallway. “You got a library in here?”
It took Roy’s tired brain a moment to catch up, and it took another moment entirely for his body to get on board enough for him to take off down the hallway, just barely managing to catch up to Ed as he stumbled upon the study. “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded as Ed crossed the narrow room and began collecting a seemingly random assortment of books, content for the moment to ignore him. Satisfied with his bounty, he turned his attention to Roy’s desk and started rifling through the center drawer. Roy made it over from the door in record time and slammed the drawer shut, just narrowly missing Ed’s fingers as he came away with a stack of paper and a pencil.
It wasn’t that he was unhappy to see Ed. He was more than a little irritated, if unsurprised, by the late-night appearance and the liberties he was taking with Roy’s space and property, but he wasn’t unhappy. In fact, there was a part of him, a part he’d been working diligently to crush and suppress and bury too deep to resurface, that was perhaps a little too pleased to see him. The years following The Promised Day had been good to Ed, adulthood taking and reshaping the round, childish features into something striking, and Roy hadn’t failed to notice. The fire that burned in Ed, vivacious and bright, was unchanged and still so compelling, perhaps even more compelling now that it was matched with Edward’s maturity. He was beautiful and so, so alive.
Roy was so, so lost.
“What the hell, bastard, you coulda broken my hand!” Ed exclaimed, spinning in a flurry of yellow and red to face Roy angrily.
Well, his intermittent maturity, anyway.
Of the two of them, Ed was hardly in a position to demand answers. “What are you doing here?” Roy asked again, now that he had the younger man’s (seemingly) undivided attention, working to keep his tone as even as possible. “It’s nearly midnight, you realize, and I don’t recall inviting you in.”
Ed huffed in annoyance, shifting his weight from his automail leg to his flesh one. “Relax. I’m only here to establish an alibi.”
‘Relax’ and ‘Edward Elric in need of an alibi’ didn’t even orbit the same sun and Roy thought it entirely possible that he was having a heart attack. He took a moment to steady himself, reminding himself that he was no longer the boy’s commanding officer and that Edward was an adult, responsible for his own behavior, before hazarding a response. “An alibi,” he repeated weakly. “What have you done?”
Ed huffed again, tossing his head to clear his bangs from his eyes and pushing past Roy to deposit his hefty stack of books and stationery on the little coffee table in front of the small sofa in the corner. “Don’t blow a fuckin’ gasket, it’s not like I killed anyone.” He sank down to the floor in front of the sofa and grabbed for the pencil. “I’m just here to establish reasonable doubt that I could have possibly been in the apartment when someone, probably the cat, I don’t know, knocked the flour bin off of the counter and exploded it all over the kitchen floor. And the cat. And maybe the cat managed to track it all over the living room.”
The tightness in Roy’s chest eased a little bit. He remembered the sort of ‘accidents’ Edward had been responsible for and a little bit of flour was barely a drop in the bucket of possibilities, even without alchemy to aid him. “The cat exploded flour all over itself?”
“The one did it to the other. I don’t know. Don’t ask me. I wasn’t there, remember?” Ed slapped his hand down on the paper and drew an enviable perfect circle around his fingers. Satisfied, he flipped open the book nearest to him, fluttering through the pages for a moment until he found an array and then set to work transcribing it.
“What are you doing now?” Roy had meandered over to the back of the sofa and leaned over to catch a glimpse of Ed’s work.
“Helping you with research, like I have been all night. Try to keep up.” Ed was scribbling furiously, copying the elements of the array with a stunning accuracy that, not for the first time, both infuriated and mildly terrified Roy.
He leaned down further, squinting (because of the lighting, of course, and not his eyes, no matter what certain subordinates had to say about it,) at the open book. “We’re researching basic earth transmutation?”
Ed’s hand paused on the paper and he blinked down at it as if actually seeing it for the first time. “Uh, yeah. You know. Military bullshit.”
“Military bullshit,” Roy repeated flatly. “You plan to return home with a handful of arrays meant to transmute dirt into jacks that you have supposedly been working on for hours, tell Alphonse that I needed it for a military project, and expect him to believe you?”
“Well fuck, when you put it like that…” Ed said, scowling down at the paper. “Shit. I have to rethink this.”
Roy came around the side of the sofa and started collecting the books scattered across the top of the table. “I thought you worked better under pressure.”
“Yeah, well, there’s pressure and then there’s pressure. Al may look like all sweet and innocent but don’t be fooled. He’s terrifying.” Ed rubbed at his forehead, watching Roy’s back as he replaced the books on the shelves. “I gotta think of something.”
Roy slid the last book into place and turned back around. “Is it impossible that you were just here to catch up?”
Ed’s snort was anything but graceful. “Mustang, please. We’ve never gotten along.”
“No, we haven’t,” Roy agreed with just a touch of regret. “Which, I suppose, begs the question of what you’re even doing here in the first place.”
“’Cause Al won’t immediately assume you’re lying for me.” This was said with an air of obviousness, as if Roy were an idiot for not having dedicated a fair portion of his evening to considering all the different ways in which Edward Elric might find to weasel out of cleaning up a mess in his own kitchen. “’Specially if you tell him I was here all night.”
“All night,” Roy repeated blandly. “When is Alphonse due home?”
“His train comes in at seven tomorrow morning so sometime after that I guess,” Ed said with a careless shrug. He settled against the back of the sofa and yawned.
“And your plan is to outlast him by staying here. All night.”
“Pretty much.”
Roy had to resist the urge to bury his face in his hands in sheer hopeless frustration. He settled for rubbing at his temples, even as his tired heart soared at the idea of having him under his roof for an entire night. He very decidedly pushed it away. “You know, most people would ask permission or at least call ahead before inviting themselves for a sleepover.”
Ed waved a dismissive hand. “I knew you’d be good for it. You owe me.”
“I owe you?”
“Yeah,” Ed said, a touch of aggression lacing his tone. “You owe me. Three weeks ago, Havoc’s birthday party at The Silver Ivy, you remember. Or maybe you don’t. Wouldn’t surprise me.”
Roy wracked his brain, searching desperately for the threads of memory. He could recall sitting down with Havoc and the rest of the team at The Silver Ivy and the warm, pleasant surprise he’d felt when the Elric brothers walked in, a flash of something else when Ed had settled in across from him, a few easy drinks, and then just… flashes. Breda and Havoc laughing at his expense, amber in a glass, amber spilled across a table, amber splashed across the floor in a dash of shattered crystal, amber eyes staring out from Ed’s flushed face. There was a cab ride, a stumble up the stairs, a flash of golden hair, the white expanse of his sheets… and then absolutely nothing.
“Edward,” Roy managed in a vague approximation of a calm and clear voice. “Did we… I mean, we didn’t…” Surely fate wouldn’t be so cruel as to orchestrate an encounter only for Roy to forget it, to leave Ed without follow up, thinking God knew what about him in the aftermath, hating him when Roy didn’t even have the luxury of hating himself.
Ed snorted. “Fuck no, you sick bastard. Not for your lack of tryin’, but you were so out of it that I think you’d have taken your coat rack to bed if you’d’ve bumped into it. You were so drunk you smashed a glass on the floor when you tried to stand up and the bartender made it pretty clear that you were gonna get thrown out if you didn’t leave on your own. Al had already left so I was the only one sober enough to coax your stupid ass into a cab and get you home.”
“But I didn’t—“
“No, dumbass,” Ed said, rolling his eyes. “You might’ve manhandled me a little bit but you’re not the first drunk idiot to try to cop a feel on me and I’m sure you won’t be the last. You’re a menace more than anything. D’you remember spouting poetry at me? You kept trying to find a rhyme for ‘gold’ and all you could come up with was ‘mold’ and I’m no master of literature, Mustang, but I gotta tell you, that’s the most pathetic attempt at a poem I’ve ever heard.”
Roy was rarely brought low enough to flush in embarrassment but the thought of drunkenly composing bad poems about the shine of Edward Elric’s hair in his presence was enough to do it. “Have you told anyone else about this?”
“Nah, I figure Breda an’ Havoc have enough material from the bar for at least the next two or three months.” He yawned again and rubbed at his eyes. “’s late. You gonna put me up or not?”
Ed was right, Roy did owe him. “You can have the sofa in the living room. I’ll get you some bedding.”
He padded out into the hallway and up the stairs to the linen closet outside of his bedroom and began rifling through it, taking the moment of peace to thank whatever gods actually existed, if any at all, that he hadn’t actually crossed any lines when Edward had brought him home. Alcohol was a poor excuse for bad behavior and he never would have forgiven himself if he had done anything to break the elder Elric’s trust in him.
He finished gathering the bedding and turned, nearly running head on into the aforementioned elder Elric. How he’d managed to creep silently up the notoriously creaky stairs with a metal leg was anyone’s guess.
“While we’re on the subject of things you said while you were drunk,” Ed began, and Roy sent a silent curse to the gods he’d just thanked. “I’ve been wondering something.”
“Ed,” Roy said with a sigh, shifting the weight of the blankets from one arm to the other. “My state of intoxication at the time is no excuse, but I am very, very sorry for anything inappropriate I might have said to you. It wasn’t my intention to make you uncomfortable.”
“I’ve been wondering,” Ed said again, more firmly this time, “about the efficacy of alcohol as a truth serum.”
Roy frowned. “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”
“People are more honest when they’re drunk, jackass.” Ed said impatiently. “Lowered inhibitions n’all that. So I was wondering whether or not all that stuff you said was true.”
They were very quickly verging on dangerous territory, and, worse, with almost no memory of the event, Roy didn’t even know the extent of it. “I suppose that depends entirely on what I said,” he said carefully.
Roy didn’t quite miss the subtle pink tint that had crept up on Ed’s cheeks. “You said some shit about, um, how you think I’m beautiful like, like I’m some kind of fuckin’ girl or something and… and you kept talking about how much you… how much you’ve always… wanted. Um. Wanted me.”
The universe, it seemed, had been conspiring to ruin his evening from the very beginning. All he’d wanted was a quiet night in and a solid eight hours of sleep hopefully uninterrupted by nightmares but even that had, apparently, had been too much to ask. Instead, he was staring down a flustered Edward Elric, barefoot, clad only in his pajamas and weighed down by an armful of blankets. He’d stared the Truth in the eye at the Gate, stared down death across battlefields and across the grounds of Central Command, but those terrors didn’t hold a single flame against staring down into those liquid-golden eyes that were staring up at him with unabashed determination even in the face of his own embarrassment and uncertainty.
He shifted the blankets in his arms again, taking the moment of distraction to collect his thoughts. God knew he needed more than a moment, but he’d take what he could get. “I don’t know what you’re expecting to hear.”
“The fucking truth would be nice,” Ed said furiously. “People don’t talk like that. People don’t… people don’t say the kind of shit you said to me if they don’t…”
“Don’t what, Edward?”
“Don’t mean it. Even if they’re drunk, or concussed or fuckin’ dying. People don’t just say things like that unless they mean it. I want to know if you meant it.”
They were at a crossroads, Roy knew, and the path they would take depended entirely on him. It would be easy to crush this here, to deny everything and divert Ed’s attention to something else and let this be just another hiccup in their hiccup-filled past and live with his infatuation tucked in the same quiet little box he kept it in. After all, the risk was substantial. Ed was asking Roy to lay himself bare, with no guarantee that he wouldn’t suffer for it, with no guarantee he would return the favor. It was one-sided, and maybe Ed knew that. Maybe Ed needed to see if he’d do it. And really, that’s what it came down to, wasn’t it? It came down to Ed, and what Ed deserved, what he was owed.
He owed Ed honesty.
Maybe, for once, Roy owed it to himself, too.
“It sounds to me,” he began quietly, “like you already know the answer.”
Ed stared at him, hard and appraisingly, for a long moment. “Put those back,” he said, gesturing at the blankets. “I’m not sleeping on the fucking couch.” With that, he flounced off into the bedroom, leaving Roy flabbergasted in the hallway.
He stood frozen for a long moment before just dropping the blankets in front of the open linen closet, unmindful of the mess and the lights left on downstairs, and followed.
Evidently he’d been standing in the hallway longer than he’d thought. Ed was currently standing in a puddle of his own clothes, having replaced them with one of Roy’s worn academy t-shirts and a pair of his pajama pants. They were over-long and slipping off of his hips, leaving the barest, tantalizing hint of the curve of his hip bone under tanned skin, but he wore them like he belonged in them.
“We’re not having sex,” he announced, climbing into the bed.
Roy could only stand and watch, still a little bit shocked at the turn the night had taken. He couldn’t have even dreamed this up.
“Edw—“ he attempted.
“Shut the fuck up and come to bed,” Ed interrupted, settling against the pillow (on Roy’s side, he couldn’t help but note,) and drew the blanket up. “Come on, bastard. I know you’re tired.”
Roy was tired, and any argument he could think to bring up dissipated under the weight of it and, as he climbed into the wrong side of the bed next to Ed, he couldn’t even bring himself to think of why it might be a bad idea.
As soon as he’d gotten settled, he found his arms suddenly full and for a moment his poor heart stuttered in his chest, dangerously close, he thought, to stopping. Ed was pressed against him, head resting against his shoulder, and Roy allowed himself to relax, to bury his nose in that golden halo of hair, to tighten his arms around the younger man and revel in the solid warmth of him. The part of him that wanted to question, to demand answers and figure out where they stood and what the hell Ed was thinking had taken leave for the moment. He was content to let himself enjoy it. Ed had clearly come to some decision, and there would be time in the morning.
The morning, when Alphonse would return from his trip.
“What are you going to tell your brother?” Roy asked in a quiet murmur against Ed’s hair.
“’Mmh gonna figure it out in the morning,” Ed mumbled sleepily, shifting his cheek against Roy’s shoulder.
Roy brought a hand up to smooth over Ed’s hair, hardly daring to believe he would be allowed to do so. The slip of hair under his hand was bliss, surreal and glorious and better than he’d ever let himself imagine it would be.
“Hey, Mustang.” He stilled his hand in Ed’s hair. He’d known it was too good to be true. But then Ed was tilting his head up and brushing a messy kiss against Roy’s lips. “’M glad you meant it, cause I. Um. I kinda’ve been wantin’ you too.”
It took him a moment to take his breath back after having it stolen away from him so suddenly.
“We can discuss it more in the morning,” he promised softly, tightening his arms around Ed in imitation of the tightness in his chest. “For now, this is… more than I ever could have asked for.”
Roy could feel Ed’s smile against his shoulder through his shirt. “G’night Roy.”
His name on Ed’s lips was a benediction. “Goodnight, Ed.”
And it really, really was.