[FIC] No Dominion (Fullmetal Alchemist)

[prodigy]

Damn, I'm finally finished with this behemoth. You know, every time I have to code a longer fic with italics I wind up promising myself I am never putting italics in a fic again. Then I go and forget.

Title: No Dominion
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Characters/Pairing: Maes Hughes/Roy Mustang
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Maes Hughes wakes up a changed man. Roy Mustang isn't careful what he wishes for.
Wordcount: ~17800
Notes: This is an AU fic based on the 2003 anime's premise for the creation of homunculi, with episode 25 as the canon turning point, so definitely spoilers for FMA in general. Also contains some violence and other creepy/dark content. Can also be found at AO3.

***

“Who lived,” you ask, “in the house that burned?”

The neighbor shrugs and squints at you askance. An old man. “Some kind of State Alchemist,” he says, digging his spade into the tiny plot of dirt in front of his brownstone. “You know how they are. Government’s taking a bloody chance keeping them on in the first place anyway. You know what I’m saying, is,” he lowers his voice and his chin, “no one was surprised.”

Liar, you think. But you smile anyway -- after all, if you have one calling it is smiling no matter if someone has got a fucking cannon to your head -- and run a hand through your hair. It’s itchy inside your stolen coat. You’re pretty sure you look like someone who exposes himself to children at train stations.

“Yeah, so I hear,” you say, sunny. “Honestly, I agree, I mean, it’s all kind of unnatural, you know -- always thought there was something odd about them all, though it’s an awful sacrifice they’re making,” you throw in a little patriotism, “I guess your neighbor made an awful sacrifice himself, didn’t he?”

The old man is warming up. Of course he is. In about thirty years of kissing ass, you’ve never met anyone who didn’t respond to the same ol’ same ol’. Well, you’ve never met anyone aside from Roy Mustang, anyway.

He pushes his spade into the ground again. “Poor kid,” he says.

Kid.

“Yeah?” You idly push the word around a little with your tongue.

The neighbor frowns. “Yeah,” he said. “You know, I never expected that out of him. Just between you and me,” he raises his eyebrows, “he always seemed like the type where if he snapped, he’d take it out on everybody else, not himself.”

That makes you smile. Actually, he would’ve preferred hearing that.

“Real oddball, that one?” you probe further, kicking at a pebble and giving him your best plaintive nonthreatening grin. It’s working. Of course it’s working. It’s always working.

“Oh, kept to himself mostly,” he allows, “but if you asked me to pick someone who might try to kill themselves --”

Time stops.

“Try?”

“Yeah,” says the neighbor, giving you a strange look. And there you go, wearing out your welcome already. It’s not easy being you right now! People ought to know. “He got a discharge once he was out of the hospital, lives away from Central now -- hey, weren’t you looking at houses around here or something?”

But you’re not listening. “Yeah,” you say, looking at the sunset horizon over the buildings as you straighten up, “oh, yeah --”

Your coat really itches. It’s starting to drive you crazy. Otherwise you’re feeling okay, though. But you’re getting kind of distracted now.

“With my, uh, wife,” you say, thinking about the nearest major train station, “and my daughter. Hey, do you know where he moved to? Your officer?”

“Colonel,” the neighbor corrects you.

“Colonel. Him.”

“Colonel Roy Mustang,” he goes on, “was his name, actually. Hard to forget.”

You reach under your coat to scratch your skin through your bloodstained uniform and your fingers brush the bullet hole, frayed and scorched, in your shirt. And the smooth skin underneath. Go figure. It really is a world of miracles you live in. You, Maes Hughes, always were kind of the last one to believe it.

“Colonel Roy Mustang,” you repeat, smiling again, injecting a little embarrassment into the smile. You tilt your head. Just a little longer now. “There’s a name. I’m surprised I never heard of him. You know, my wife bakes things, she’s big into bringing stuff to injured vets -- do you remember where it is he lives now?”

***

When you get to the rather obviously named country town of Greene, you have an address written on a scrap of paper, tucked inside your stinky coat. And let’s be honest, it’s a stinky coat. You stink. You’re smeared with dried blood and your sweat -- or are you, have you even been sweating? -- and your hysterical vomit when you thought Roy Mustang died in the ashes of his burnt-out house, which, come to think of it, you’re also smeared with. Other than that, you’ve splashed your face with some basin water since then, but you’re starting to look like a homeless crazy with your stubble out of control. And frankly, that’s better all around at the moment.

With your arms inside the coat, you knock on the door and wait for some kind of catastrophe -- the wrong address, or Lieutenant Hawkeye, or something.

Roy opens the door just a crack, shadowed in the darkness of his front entryway. You can barely see him at all. It strikes you somewhere in the slowness of your heart that you have no trouble recognizing him anyway -- that’s new, you think, before now he’s always just been, well, Roy, someone you know, someone you really know, but someone. Now you know by the way he hitches his breath that it’s Roy. You know by the shape of his black hair. You know by the curve of his bare thumb and middle finger on the doorframe. You don’t even wonder if you’re reading too much into it. You know.

You actually just stare at him and you’re aware of how much like shit you look right now. Neither of you says anything. The address slip is still crumpled up in your hand.

Then you have a stupid idea, and reach into your pocket for your glasses, and put them on again. Your vision blurs.

“There,” you say with a thready smile. “Okay. Is that better?”

For what it’s worth, Roy doesn’t stand there gaping like someone at a traffic collision. He doesn’t sound strangled or hoarse, either. He just sounds like Roy. Which in its way is a little disappointing. Would it kill him to be a little shocked?

“Maes,” he says, flatly, which is of course the only way he ever says your name, “I doubt I have to tell you that you’re supposed to be dead right now.”

“Um.” You make a face. “Yeah, I think I heard something about that.”

Roy still doesn’t crack the door open any further, which -- just means he’s not a fool, you realize. “How long have you been awake and walking around?”

Roy’s got a flash of white under his shirt, you notice. White’s not usual. “Uh,” you say, distracted, “about two weeks? Since the day after my funeral, I think. You know, I was kind of expecting something more along the lines of ‘oh my God,’ or ‘oh my God, Maes,’ or ‘Maes? Maes? Is it really you?’ or, I don’t know, some more Roy-ish version of that -- but I guess I can’t really --”

The click of a pistol is unmistakeable. So is the sound of Roy speaking through his teeth. “Major Hughes,” he says, “answer me one more question.”

You don’t raise your hands. Partly it’s because you’re surprised, of course. And you don’t really want him to shoot you. But you would listen to his gravelly threats all day, you think, just sit around and let him snarl his demands all he likes -- God, it’s like water on a really hot day -- two weeks skulking around with bums and petty theft and being alone, yeah, a really hot day. And really cold water. Really cold water. So threaten me all you like, you think, Roy, threaten me until the cows come home, because I’m pretty sure it’s been two thousand weeks since I’ve heard your voice at all.

But there’s the possibility that out of his -- uh, entirely reasonable -- fear that you’re not you, he might actually shoot you. And that would be a pain.

So you say, “I will. Ask me.”

“Where did you wake up?”

You swallow a knot in your throat and you shrug your coat off both shoulders in one smooth motion. It falls to the walkway by your feet. There you are, standing in the sunlight in your disgusting-smelling uniform: the one that smells like you died in it. With the dark rent in the front that indicates that you did.

“In your house,” you say. “Your burning house. Roy,” your voice catches like his hasn’t -- “I thought you were dead.”

That’s what crumples him. He staggers and catches himself on the doorframe, shaking, his crying coming out some kind of dry cough. His knuckles are white. And you’re sorry. You’re really sorry. You don’t know if there’s anything that makes you feel like a shittier person than knowing you’ve made Roy, of all people, break down. But instead of letting him have his space this time, you cross the threshold and catch him, wrap your arms around him in a tight brother’s hug. He doesn’t return it, but lets you. Or perhaps it’s that he lets you, but doesn’t return it.

He chokes out his words while you squeeze his stupid bony frame so hard it seems like it’s gonna break. There’s something off about his skin, too. But goddamn it all to hell if you care.

“I thought,” says Roy, clenching his fingers in the fabric of your shirt, “I thought -- it hadn’t -- worked.”

You lock your arms a little painfully tighter. He doesn’t squirm and you let him go, push him to arm’s length and look at him anew. He’s wearing all his clothes, with some bandages underneath, and he has all his arms and legs and fingers. But the disfigurement caused by widespread burns is unmistakeable -- on his neck, licking his face, and all over his hands. His crippled, inflexible hands. You’re staring like an idiot now, like an insensitive moron, but it’s because you understand. It almost knocks you over, understanding.

“Roy,” you say, though you knew the answer and now you just know it for sure: “You really went through with it?”

He doesn’t say anything.

You’re still kneeling on the floor, blinking, but you take his hand on impulse; he’s surprised and it makes him shiver with discomfort, so you just strengthen your grip to hold him still while you trace the pattern of his burned hand. You let him go again when he blanches, feeling bad again. Guilt stabs at you a few seconds later than it used to, it seems like. But you’re you. You look like you. You sound like you. All that’s missing -- all that’s missing -- all that’s missing is your life.

You crumple a little yourself without realizing. There is a cold heaving wind in your lungs: you just have to breathe to get it out, but your breathing is heavy and you slump all the way forward, bury your face in his lap. Your grip is viselike on the fabric of his sleeves. “I’m okay,” you inform him muffledly, though you don’t bother to put on a brave face about it. “I’m okay. I’m fine. God. I just -- shit. If I knew you were going to go through with this, brother, I would’ve made sure to die in -- more -- unsalveageable -- pieces.”

“Shut up,” says Roy into your greasy hair.

“Roy -- God, Roy -- fuck, you’re not going to --” you can’t quite spit it out, “you’re not going to --” -- leave me here, are you?

Roy’s still. Then he coughs out a last defiant sob and his voice is back to normal again, with his composure. It’s kind of a shame. It’s not every day you’ve gotten to see Roy Mustang brought this low. But it’s awful, you’d never let anyone do it to him, you know. You’d never let anyone do it to him.

“Don’t flatter yourself. I’m not going to kill myself on your account. God, I can’t believe you believed that.”

That’s cute. But you close your eyes and look and feel a bit cored and shellshocked, anyway -- and most damningly you don’t say anything. You’ve never tried that before. You’ve always wondered what that will do.

After a long half-minute Roy folds like a prisoner under interrogation, collapses straight forward with his chin in your hair. He smells clean, tidy, nothing like you. You could remember how that smells for the rest of your unnatural life. You’re not quite sure why that occurs to you now. He’s also warm. If you listen very closely you can almost hear his heartbeat. It’s racing and the hairs on his arms are standing on end, too, so he’s uncomfortable -- but here he is anyway.

“It’s all right,” he says in a monotone. The color in his voice is gone -- with his Alchemist’s watch, his uniform. His life. That’s one thing you have in common. You and him, him and you.

You have each other.

“It’s all right,” he says again and strokes your hair mechanically with his ruined hand. “I didn’t bring you back from the bloody dead so I could not look out for you, Maes Hughes. Don’t be an idiot.”

He sounds weary. You smile into his shoulder and listen to his heartbeat.

***

You take a bath. You watch him pour you both glasses of gin in the kitchen and follow the new dexterity of fingers that can’t snap any more. That’s Roy for you, more determination contained in his person than in a bloodhound on a trail. And you listen to his story.

He’s all walls again. If being disfigured and stripped of his watch has wounded his pride, he’s not showing it. When he talks he sounds like he’s briefing you on something.

You don’t look down. He doesn’t look up.

“It was too easy,” he says, matter-of-fact, sliding you the glass. “The mystery has finally been solved.”

“What mystery?”

“How Edward Elric ever managed this.”

You smile. “Well, he had Alphonse Elric to help him,” you point out. “You just had yourself. I think. There’ve got to be limits to what Lieutenant Hawkeye will help you with, right?”

Roy doesn’t acknowledge that one at all. “Alphonse Elric was a boy,” he says. “Is a boy. And if you add up their ages at the time,” he wrinkles his nose, “they were still younger than me.”

“A nice boy,” you note, drumming your fingers on the table. “They both are.”

He glances at the ceiling.

“Ed’s just troubled!” You laugh and pick up your glass, though -- for a moment here you could pretend everything was normal between the two of you. Friends. Before Ishbal, before Gracia, before life got in the way. “You should cut him a bit more slack. When you see him again. Look -- you know they’ve got to let you back in, there’s no one else can do your job properly without going entirely mad. You know they will.”

You believe that as you say it, but the levity’s gone -- while you contemplate the bottom of your glass and he adds to his, you know reality’s been invited back into Roy’s clean little country kitchen. Just like the kitchen you grew up with. That seems like a very long time ago. Now here you are, a dead man and a criminal, working out what to do with yourselves. It strikes you as a little funny that once, back in Ishbal, you really did believe your lives couldn’t get any more unbelievable. But that was then. This is now. And your glasses -- your very own glasses, the ones that save you from blind-as-a-bat -- are giving you a headache.

He breaks the momentary silence, also staring at his glass. What you both hope to find there, you’re not sure. It occurs to you that the two of you have had a lot of conversations addressed to liquor. “You can’t go back to Central,” he says. “You know too many people there.”

That’s true. Curse your own compulsion to chat up every person waiting next to you at the bloody market.

“Lieutenant Hawkeye’s got her hands full with my old personnel.” He seems to be thinking aloud now. “Originally I thought Lieutenant Havoc could take over if she -- well.” His hands are restless, swirling the liquid around in the glass. They don’t quite close all the way to grip it. “I suppose I’ll have to go back to see her and the others in the city if they’re wondering after my well-being. Do you know,” Roy raises his eyebrows, “how much more work I seem to have to do whenever you’re around?”

You make another face. “Are we factoring in how much more fun you seem to have whenever I’m around too?”

“No.” He softens a little, though, when he looks at you. The scars on his face are attractive enough, you think, apropos to nothing -- ‘disfigurement’ is the wrong word. How does one disfigure Roy Mustang, anyway?

But the source of his sudden awkwardness is clear enough when he says, gruffly: “You know that your wife and daughter --”

“Yes,” you say to the gin. “I know.”

He nods. You both look at other things for a little bit. Isn’t that what friendship is all about?

“Look,” you glance back and smile at him, “alchemical abominations can’t be choosers, right?”

That almost makes him smile too. You raise your glass high; “I’d like to propose a toast,” you say. “To life, Roy?”

He toasts you like an automaton and knocks back half his glass. “To life,” he says, but his brow has darkened. You wait for him to say whatever’s on his mind.

Roy drinks the rest of his gin and looks at you squarely for the first time since you’ve sat down. He’s leaning against the counter and his gloves are nowhere to be seen. He looks skinny, but you don’t know if that’s because he’s lost weight since the transmutation or because now you’re so used to seeing him layered in his State Military blues. In any case, you smile back at him and tilt your head to one side; some kind of joke-flirtatious icebreaker lingers on your tongue, but it doesn’t seem like the time. Only after this does he speak again, and this time addressed not to you or liquor or ceiling but some presence nowhere to be found here, maybe inside his own head.

“It was almost like it was too easy, though,” he murmurs, “wasn’t it?”

You have nothing to say to that, but when you set your glass down and Roy turns his back to refill his (who cares what he says, he has a problem), his hand twitches and he nearly drops it. Nearly, but you catch it in your free hand Your heart doesn’t even skip a beat. Your hand is there before the clear alcohol splashes your skin, easy for your reflexes, but it takes him another moment before he reacts, by blinking.

You wink and give it back to him. “Careful,” you say.

He nods and looks down.

***

In front of the mirror the next morning you shave, with one of Roy’s white towels over your shoulder, and immediately nick yourself. “Damn,” you mutter, squinting at yourself -- two weeks schmoo weeks, face it, old man, you’re out of practice. There’s a spot of blood on your crystal-clear reflection. Yup, that’s you, all right. Maes Hughes, the one who wrote down MACE HUGHES on a form in the Academy and actually got it stitched into his first dress uniform. It stole a laugh from Roy. You wouldn’t spend so much of your time stealing those if he didn’t make them so hard-won.

Elysia, you think, will be in school soon enough. And sooner or later she’ll forget her father. if every child who lost her father in infancy mourned him forever, there would be a hell of a lot more mourning in the world. And if her mother knows what’s good for them, she’ll remarry. Someday for a pretty fifteen-year-old, the fact she once had a biological father will be a distant memory. Ten years probably won’t afford you or Gracia the same courtesy.

Ten years. That’s ten years more than the shapeshifter was gonna afford you. You live in a world of miracles.

The cut’s stopped bleeding already. You blink. For some reason you put your hand on your sternum, as if to verify your heart’s still pumping there. It is.

Of course. You run your fingers over your smooth face again and turn up no blood, even when you look at the finest details in your reflection. Your glasses are back on the end-table. “Okay, then,” you say aloud and shrug and finish shaving. Of course it is. You’re Maes Hughes, after all, and God damn everything, you’re alive.

***

You’re like a stray dog that lives behind his house. You sleep on the couch, in part because Roy doesn’t have a spare bedroom and in part because he doesn’t want people asking after his new housemate. So like a dog you find yourself keeping time by your master -- but anyone would, cooped up in here, it’s not just you -- and you watch him get up, lock his bathroom door for a shower and a shave, read the paper, enjoy his peaceful morning. During it all words are bursting out of you, but you keep them in, for the most part. You know he likes his silence. You know he likes his space. You know.

Watching him, though, isn’t noisy or obnoxious. So Roy Mustang crosses his right leg over his left. Roy Mustang doesn’t drink until the sun is wavering in the sky, but always has his first before it’s down. Roy Mustang leaves the house to get groceries and do other errands he doesn’t tell you about. Roy Mustang always locks the door when he comes home before he greets you with the same even, “Hello, Maes.”

“Hi,” you say, leaning backwards over the couch and waving instead of sitting up. “You give ‘em hell today, soldier?”

“Yes, I gave Mrs. Morrison who runs the grocery hell,” Roy rolls his eyes but smiles at you. His teeth are so white. “What’ve you been up to?”

You hold the paper up. “You know it! Crosswords to solve and Amestris to save.”

Nevertheless, by your count, he’s taken an extra ten or fifteen minutes just to go to the grocery. No one takes ten or fifteen extra minutes at the grocery. Least of all Colonel Roy Mustang.

Is he avoiding you? You wonder. You wouldn’t exactly blame him if so -- he’s a solitary man, likes his time alone, isn’t getting a lot of it with you both sharing a house meant for one. He’s been gracious enough not to complain, anyway, beyond his silence and curt avoidance; still, the question plagues you. Is-he-avoiding-me, like some kind of song stuck in your head, is-he-avoiding-me-is-he-avoiding-me-is-he-avoiding-me-is-he-avoiding-me --

“Hey,” you say suddenly, smiling a little too hard, “I’m going to go stretch my legs in the garden -- you can have the run of the house, Roy, is that okay?”

Roy frowns and glances at you. The scars on his face and neck have got to scare the numbskulls in some out-of-the-way hole like Greene, you know, never mind that he’s a brooding suicidal State Alchemist on honorable discharge. But they don’t know the sacrifices he’s made. They don’t know anything. That’s okay, he has you, and you know he’s handsome.

“You don’t have --”

“Oh, I want to!” You sound like a parrot. “Look, I get antsy too! Cabin fever. You know how it is. I’ll just go sit on the back porch.” You gesture with your thumb, standing up already. The forgotten crossword flutters to the ground. “Just for a few hours. I’ll be back to sleep.”

Roy narrows his eyes in obvious confusion and for a brief moment you wonder if you’ve misstepped, which is okay, because you’ll fix that too -- but you haven’t, because he just looks a little taken aback and says, “Okay.” Then he draws in a breath and adds an awkward, officious, “Be careful no one sees you.”

“I won’t run off,” you assure him, grinning for no real reason. You’re giddy. Hell if you know why. Oh, well, you’re used to being giddy. You’re a giddy kind of person. “I’ll let you be until sundown, all right?”

He blinks. “O -- kay?”

“Okay,” you chirp, ending this ‘okay’-themed conversation, and you walk around the sofa to go outside but as you do you can’t control yourself, sometimes you’re a little bad, you put your arm around his shoulders and squeeze. To your relief, he looks a little embarrassed and ducks his head but smiles falteringly back. His teeth are so blindingly white. You grin, knowing you’re no comparison, and let him go and walk out -- playing in your head is the looping record of, he’s not mad at me, he’s not mad at me, he’s-not-mad-at-me-he’s-not-mad-at-me. It almost carries you through the buzzing of the backyard wasps and the agonizingly slow burn of time.

***

“A monster,” you tell him with your head in the grass the next day, watching the fireflies circle. “Something that took on the shapes of other people. I’ve never seen anything like it. I thought I killed it, was the thing -- I was trying to call you. On the telephone. Almost made it, you know.”

He looks at the stars. “Is that what alchemy’s capable of? Perhaps Fullmetal had the right idea about us.”

“Enough about Fullmetal,” you laugh, bat your hand, and the lights scatter. “Why so much Fullmetal on your mind?”

Roy frowns. “He’s my ward,” he says after a moment’s thought. “I’ve every right to worry about him.”

Not that you’d ever cast aspersions on Roy’s concern for teenage delinquents under his technical supervision, but you of all people know when a man is lying, and the Flame Alchemist is what is technically referred to as a fucking terrible liar. For some reason only you and Lieutenant Hawkeye have ever figured this out, though. Oh, well. “I’m sure he’s fine,” you say brightly. “He’ll appreciate you eventually, you know. You did everything for him. One day you’ll be invited to his wedding!”

Roy sighs, put-upon, and flops back onto the grass. But that’s a half-smile, you’re sure of it. You forget about his preoccupation with Ed Elric. “You and weddings,” he says.

“Don’t look like that,” you punch him, lightly, in the arm. He winces. Maybe not lightly. You’re sorry. “I’m sure you’ll have one someday. Hope isn’t lost.”

“Yes, it is,” he snaps, and you leave the subject alone.

Yes, it is, you know. What a shame.

***

The next days are happy. He feels bad, you can tell, but you’re happy. He feels bad, but he feels good about you. You’re an excellent houseguest. You’ve never felt better in your life. Everything seems arranged in your favor: you cut yourself shaving again and the bleeding doesn’t last, you never trip over anything in the night.

When he sends you to the basement to pick up a flashlight you happily oblige, or try, anyway, as one step underground drags you into a horrible wave of nausea -- “ack,” you say and nearly trip down the stairs but that Roy catches you. You forget the nausea as soon as he does: the grip of his skinny arm as he drags you upright feels like a firebrand shoved directly up the back of your shirt, with no pain. He doesn’t let go of you, either, until you find your footing. You could probably find your footing a little faster.

“Hughes,” he says, alarmed -- in danger it’s always been surnames for you two -- “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” you say, blinking. You are, too. You just weren’t a moment ago. That’s a little funny. But you breeze past it like you’re deep under cover. “I think I just need some fresh air.”

The funny thing is, you don’t even mean it that way. But Roy sucks in a breath -- the look on his face for a half-second has got to be guilt, and you’re sorry -- and says, “I suppose people in Greene don’t really know what Major Hughes looked like. It’s not really fair to keep you cooped up here like this.”

“I think I love you,” you say brightly.

Roy favors you with a bracing smile and leaves you in the audacity in which you’ve just taken some serious fucking refuge. But he’s sincere about outside: tomorrow he gives you a key.

***

For once, you take your time with Greene. You walk down the streets with your hands in your pockets. Two or three teenagers stare at you, but you smile at them and they shuffle off. You wave at a little girl with a tricycle. She’s not very pretty, which helps. You stroll along the train tracks until they lead you to the trestle over the river, where you take off your shoes and dip your toes in and wait for the mosquitoes to bite you. But none even land on your skin, and you slip back into your shoes and head back into town for a peach from a fruit stand.

You lean against a fountain. It’s all fresh, and very cold.

The bugs leave you alone.

The trouble with small towns is that you can either be private or you can find things out, but not both. Central is perfect for someone like you; it’s like never stepping in the same stream twice, change out of your uniform and you can talk to anyone and it’ll never get back to anyone else. Here, if you start asking questions about Roy Mustang, it’ll get around that you’re The One Asking Questions About Roy Mustang. And you don’t want that. Especially since you’re fairly sure they’re discussing whether you’re his brother or lover.

The peach is a little blander than you remember. Across the fountain someone’s watching you -- a young woman, no older than twenty-one.

You remember the mole on Second Lieutenant Ross’s face.

She’s pretty. Petite, like Gracia. You remember Second Lieutenant Ross’s throat the second after you slashed it. You remember the gun in Gracia’s petite hand.

The woman -- girl -- looks abashed; you smile and glance away to indicate you’re not intent on anything threatening. Which you’re not. This is Greene. You just got your ticket to roam around. You’re going to be good. You just can’t help it if your hand wanders for a knife you no longer have -- a knife, you know, you no longer need.

The girl goes away eventually, sparing you her slim shoulders and frame upon which it was too easy to superimpose your wife’s image. While you finish your peach, a swollen and confused mosquito lands on your arm. Then it’s a bloody spot, before it notices anything. You flick away the red droplet, toss away the peach pit and go home.

***

Roy’s chopping up something to pan-fry it. By the looks of it, last night’s vegetables. He really is a bachelor.

“I never knew you were a chef,” you quip as you try to hang a ladle from your nose.

He confiscates the ladle without even looking at you. “Let’s just say that I like my cooking,” he says evenly, “better than I like your cooking. Maes, where did you even find this thing? Wash this,” and he hands the ladle back to you with a shake of his head.

“The ladle drawer. Where the ladles live,” you say, amiably, but before he can look up and glare you’re a good sport and take it over to the sink for a cursory scrub. Though you really don’t think your nose is that filthy. “My cooking’s mortally wounded, you know. What would you know about my cooking? When’s the last time you ate my cooking?”

“When’s the last time you cooked anything?”

“Exactly,” you say as you dry and put away the ladle, and stand there like you’re waiting for a doggie biscuit.

Roy gives you a sideways glance, eyebrows raised. If you didn’t know better, you’d be pretty sure that was his deadpan-not-going-to-laugh face right there. “I don’t even have to comment,” he apparently has to comment, and goes back to chopping.

You’re not used to seeing his hands bare. That’s the jarring thing, actually, more than the scars. More than the mottled network of crippled skin that covers his hands like the gloves used to. He pinches the knife between his fingers with a certain determination, but his hands shake and he’s doing a clumsy job of it. The knife is sharp. His skin, like the rest of him, is brittle. You’ve never noticed how brittle before. You of all people know how fast a knife goes through human skin, and now you imagine the channels of blood just bursting to get out underneath.

The knife quivers. You’re behind him and you close your hand around his to take the knife away. He looks startled -- which is funny, because he’s not really a startleable person, you gave him enough warning, didn’t you? -- and you smile at him and duck your head, nonthreatening, that’s what your commander always told you in Intel, nonthreatening, easy, Roy Mustang, easy, nothing to fear from you. You’re not a threat.

“Allow me,” you say, raising your eyebrows. “Colonel.”

He stares. He doesn’t let go of the knife. There’s something very chill about the pin-straight set of his spine, and his voice, but it’s -- not dismissive. “I outrank you, Major.”

For once you don’t let go either. You do lift a finger in the universal gesture for yes, but. “Not any more, you don’t,” you point out.

The two of you stare at each other for a very long moment, during which you could almost swear the skin of his hand burns.

You decide to break the silence. It’s just sort of something you do, silences, the breaking thereof. “Come on, Roy,” you say a little plaintively with the same grip on his hand, which he still hasn’t shaken off, “humor me this once, would you? I do like to entertain some kind of delusion that I’m useful around here. Not everyone can be an alchemist. And anyway, you know me, I was always knives.”

That does the trick. He lets go of the knife and you let go of his hand, and step away from the circle of warmth around his body. He sighs and gives a reluctant smile, and says a bit brusquely, “Fair enough,” which you should probably count as a victory. But he avoids your eyes for one reason or another as you set about dicing the vegetables a bit faster, and you avoid his for a while as you do your damnedest to pretend the strength of the grip you had on his hand was normal.

***

While he’s out you go through his things. You’ve searched enough bedrooms in your career to know how to put things back in order when you’re done. His gloves are folded in the bottom drawer; his spare gun rests in the top one, unloaded, you’re not sure what he’s thinking there actually. A lot of paperwork. Some letters from Lieutenant -- oh, is it Captain now? -- Hawkeye. A letter signed by everyone else that you’re pretty sure Lieutenant Havoc had to pen. Pencils, pens, a mathematical compass, red and white chalk. No watch. Monochromatic clothing, bless his boring heart. A letter from the doctor. His uniform. Your uniform hat. A picture of him and you.

You wonder that the Elrics haven’t written, but maybe even the Elrics are old enough to know what would constitute insult to injury. His bed smells like him -- like smoke and ash. You make it again after you’re done lying on it. Not to worry, you know what you’re doing.

***

When you knock on his door in the night you aren’t yourself. You know, because when he opens the door, yourself plans I can’t sleep either and some more bullshit. Yourself is going to witter on until he feels bad for you or is too awake to go back to bed and, either way, decides to keep you grouchy company. Because you don’t have anything to do in the morning. Because you’re lonely. Because the monsters in your closet are coming to get you, Mummy, so please read just one more bedtime story.

Roy blinks at you, but he’s not groggy. He’s wearing all his clothes, too, just rumpled.

“The light was on in your room,” you say without looking away from him.

He looks back at you. “Go back to bed.”

“Can’t,” you say. “Gets in my eyes.”

You really must not be yourself, because whatever it is in your face, he lets you in. For some reason he closes the door behind you, but you don’t comment. You close doors too. You’re both in the habit of closing doors. It’s a happy and naive soldier, and definitely one who’s never been to Ishbal, who’s comfortable with an open door. And you wouldn’t be Roy Mustang’s best friend if the two of you didn’t tend to lose your innocence at the same time.

His room is stark and a little messy, like his rooms always are, the rooms that belong to someone that doesn’t expect anyone else to see the inside of them. It doesn’t look very lived-in, save a basket of laundry. The desk lamp is on, and he was reading something. This time you don’t bother to see what.

When you close the space between you he doesn’t look surprised. When you raise your hand to his face you almost feel on trial under the weight of his dark eyes. More tension is strung tight in his spine, you think, than in anything he could possibly say to you right now. But he doesn’t move away.

There’s nothing here to drown out your voice: no city taxis, no mumbling neighbors and the crackle of their radios.

“You look,” you say, “like you think I’m going to give you an order, Colonel.”

Roy is fair. Roy’s eyebrows are very dark, all the darker on the fairness of his face; your coloration has ever been the only way in which you look alike, boyish him and gangly you, but it’s enough for people to ask. Roy’s expression is shadowed a little by it at the moment, as is the unreadable low tone in which he answers: “I’m not a Colonel. And your being a Brigadier General is predicated on your being dead. We’re not soldiers any more, Maes.”

You let that one lie and instead brush his hair away from his eyes with the backs of your knuckles. The furthest-up scar is on the tip of his cheekbone and it marbles his skin. He lets you.

In the silence, it’s he who eventually breaks and breaks it; Roy looks away and then back at you, and says this time, “Are you going to give me an order?”

You’re quiet. He looks at you and you remember the lengths you’ve gone to, the ridiculous, pathetic lengths, to get Roy Mustang to look at you, or what you’re doing at the moment, or in your direction. Maybe on some other day you’d wonder what the fuss was all about. Maybe in some previous lifetime. You wonder now how a starving man like you went so long in between it happening.

When you lay your hand flat on his face he closes his eyes and you’re not sure if that’s a thrill of excitement or discontent it causes you. But you take the opportunity to beep him on the nose. That makes him open his eyes.

He blinks and you know for a wild-eyed moment that he’s gone to wondering if you’re mocking him, which is a clear flash of panic on his face. His pride is a brittle thing, is Roy’s, especially now. You know for that moment you have him in the palm in your hand.

“Stand easy,” you say, and you ruffle his hair before you kiss him.

You’re gentle. You both are. Gone are the days of ridiculous schoolboy if-you’re-rough-you’re-not-a-child, you’re both too old to wonder if you’re children any more and the prospect of being children isn’t half so ugly as it used to be -- you’re more than resigned to being men. So you take your time of it, you kiss him, you tilt his chin up with your hand when you sit down on the edge of the bed, you unbutton his shirt and hang it on the bedpost. You lose a little bit of gentlemanly composure after that, but oh, well, you’re not a saint, now are you, and who would expect you to be? You’ve waited a while. You’ve waited a real -- fucking -- while.

When you take him to bed you are a little too overwhelmed to think about things, but you can see what remaking you from the dead has done to him in full now -- there are strips torn straight out of his body like they’d gone to feed some hungry animal. You can tell he doesn’t like to be undressed; he closes his eyes in grim self-consciousness when you kiss him on the chest, over a swathe of scar tissue; and, you’ve got to admit, it inflames you just a little more, because he still lets you. This is the proof of his suffering. This, painted over his chest, is his entire life given up for your entire life. Everything he’s sacrificed is here for you to touch and you realize with cold certainty in your chest that, all on your account, it makes him miserable.

It makes you smile.

When you take him to bed you lace your fingers together and bury your mouth in his hair. When you’re finished you lie apart just to let the heat rise, but you close your eyes anyway. You’re you. You really shouldn’t lack for sweet nothings.

“I’m sorry,” you say.

What surprises you the most tonight is that he just shifts his weight enough to wrap his skinny arm around you, to draw your head in and down so it’s resting on his chest. Like you would do with your daughter when she had a nightmare. And he strokes your hair, too, with a shaky hand. He does reply, eventually.

“It’s all right.”

He doesn’t even know what you’re talking about, you think. He thinks you mean his scars. He doesn’t have the faintest fucking clue about everything you have to be sorry about.

“I am,” you say dully, but you don’t resist. “I’m sorry. I mean it.”

“I know,” he says. “I know you are. It’s all right.” His breathing shakes too. “It’s all right.”

***

In the morning, though, you wake up before he does and scuttle downstairs and make scrambled eggs. If there’s one thing a father should know how to cook, it’s scrambled eggs. In fact, you’re pretty sure that for a man getting out of bed with a new lover, rule #1 is fix some scrambled eggs before you blow it, moron. You’d slap together some pancakes too if you had the fixings, but this time you just pop in some toast and stir the eggs like you’re making a bomb and are on the verge of planning how to take it all up on a tray when he comes downstairs with messy hair and pauses to blink at you.

“Morning, sunshine!” you call up to him. “You know, I know you hate hearing this, but hold still and watch this --”

Roy stares. “Maes, what are you --”

And just like that the toast is on a plate, the eggs are on another, you’ve got the skillet and the spatula in either hand and are posing like a circus seal. Easy-peasy. Normally you bank on failing adorably in these cases, but you’re not going to look a gift breakfast in the mouth right now. “Alakazam,” you say.

Roy stares.

“What are you waiting for? A magician,” you inform him, “does not reveal his secrets. Ever.”

He laughs and shakes his head disbelievingly; your deadpan actually sucks, so you grin back at him; he goes all the way downstairs and scratches the back of his neck, still shaking his head. “You’re so embarrassing,” he says and bumps your shoulder with his head as he walks up to you. You ruffle it and kiss him on the forehead. He shakes his head one more time. “Is that all for me?”

“God no.” You make a face. “Some of it’s for me, you greedy bastard. Actually, about 60% of it.”

“You don’t even pay me rent,” he accuses and steals a bite of the eggs and you laugh and put him in a quickly-eggy headlock, while he swears and you both snicker like teenagers and you’re drunk as hell on one revelation from on high: it’s not awkward, it’s not awkward, it’s not awkward it’s not awkward, hey, world, stop the presses, because the sun is shining and the grass is growing and it’s not awkward between you and Roy Mustang. In this moment you’re sure you have nothing to worry about. In this moment you’re sure everything’s going to be okay. In this moment -- and for you nowadays moments are very very long -- you’re sure you have everything you could possibly want.

He disentangles himself while you finish giggling and bring the food over to the table, where you both settle down to eat. Or he does, anyway. You settle down to watch him eat for a moment.

It must be a good mood he’s in, because he smiles back at you again and then looks down at his plate for a while.

Maybe you’ve got a few things left to want.

“I can pay rent, you know,” you interrupt, digging your fork into your food. “Or work around the --”

“What?” Roy glances back at you. “I don’t -- it’s fine, I was joking.”

“I know!” You did, but. “I know. But if you ever need me to.”

“I know,” he says.

“I mean it.”

“I know,” he says again, looking away while he eats. That bugs you. Always has. You have a lot of things left to want.

You both finish eating in peace, though, and he breaks the silence again this time -- which means you were quiet! Which means you weren’t annoying him! -- with a subdued, “I’m not going to kick you out, you know.”

“You can’t,” you reply, not as lighthearted as it was in your head: “You break it, you buy it, right?”

He reaches over to brush your face with the back of his hand. You catch his hand and he gives you a funny unreadable look. It bothers you, so you lean over to kiss him -- your best friend, your only friend, your maker upon this world -- and you’re not in the mood to let him go for a little while, so you don’t break it or release the grip you have on his hair until you well and feel like it, after you know he’s uncomfortable and surprised. Then you let him go roughly and smile at him, admire his flush and his taken-aback blinking, and muss his hair affectionately.

“You’re distracting me from my breakfast,” you say, and then: “I love you, Roy Mustang. You don’t have to confirm or deny. I just figured I’d get that out there.”

He, for the record, is pretty amazing at being awkward. “Okay?”

“You bought it,” you say, and smile at him like you’re the one saying it’s okay this time. Because it is okay. And he did.

***

You shower and get ready for the day. Not before you have him again on the bed, in the daylight, twice as fast and half as gentle. You’re not as nice. He’s not as quiet. It is the sweetest thing you can remember, and it occurs to you before your mind takes a leave of absence that you should be able to remember many more things at all. But you don’t care. There’s some unfamiliar bliss for you. His skin, after all, holds a lovebite like a sheet of white paper, and you don’t care at all.

When you’re both dressing, his eyes travel to your back and his fingers linger at the base of your spine. They’re cold. That must be the chill you feel.

“That tattoo,” he says casually, “do you know when you got it?”

You shrug, and his hand off with it: “It must have been a secondary effect of your transmutation.” You stare straight ahead. “Hell, I don’t know. Do I look like an alchemist to you?”

“No.” Roy lets go and puts on a smile, a cool one. A professional one, if you didn’t know any better. He buttons up his own shirt. “Forget it. It doesn’t matter.”

***

There are times when you can pretend you’re not both committing a crime: some times more than others. In the park near the square with the fountain there’s a swingset; you buy both of you ice cream cones and sit down. Roy ignores everyone else; he’s used to the wide berth the families give him. You’re not so much. But it gives you both some privacy, anyway.

“How far are we taking this?” you muse, scuffing your shoes against the ground. “You and me?”

He decapitates his ice cream with his teeth. “How do you mean?”

You thread your fingers through the chains, wonder how and when it is you got so awkwardly tall for a swingset. “You know,” you lick another fraction of the strawberry-flavor away, “when you go back to Central. And everything you’re doing.”

Quiet reigns in the little park. It occurs to you how long you’ve lived in Central after all. Before Greene, you never knew how quiet quiet could get.

Roy shakes his head. “There’s no place for me there any more,” he says, but even he sounds uncertain of it.

You let him speak his piece anyway.

Roy shakes his head again and glances at you, looking away immediately. His scars characterize his facial expressions all a little bit harsher. It’s not his fault. “I’m a liability and a cautionary tale,” is all he says. “And you’re illegal.”

“That’s bullshit, Mustang,” you inform your ice cream cone.

“It’s what?”

“Is there some other word that rhymes with bullshit?” You tuck your feet up off the ground. “You remember how you were gonna perform human transmutation because you’re an idiot, but you decided not to, and then you figured if you couldn’t bring the Rockbell family back from the dead you’d bring Amestris back? And I swore you some kind of crappy version of a loyalty oath? Saying I’d help you? Well,” you kick him in the shoe and set yourself to swinging, “I guess it’s still gonna be Amestris. Country’s not fixing itself.”

He broods on that one for a little bit with his remaining scoop of pistachio. Swinging is apparently too fun for him. “I did perform it,” he points out with a grim smile. “I am an idiot.”

“Oh, that doesn’t count,” you retort and elbow him on your next trajectory.

More silence courtesy Greene. Thanks.

“I’m not the Rockbells.” You kick the ground for momentum. “You still have to follow up on half that bargain.”

“Maes Hughes,” he sounds incredulous, “are you guilt-tripping me?”

“Yeah,” you say, stopping yourself with your feet and feeling the dull shock of the impact; “Yeah, I am.”

Roy rolls his eyes.

“But I wouldn’t have to if someone didn’t insist on being such a lazy son of a bitch!”

Roy punches you in the arm. Healing or no healing, you forgot that when he actually punches you it actually hurts, goddamn it. “Ow,” you make your feelings known and grab the chain of his swing, but he’s laughing and then you’re laughing, funny how that infection always spreads. You fake-hit him back and then mess up his hair under your arm like he’s your little brother while he pleads for mocking mercy under the unbearable terribleness of your tortures, and you threaten to actually try, and he tells you to bring it on, but you’re feeling pretty good because somewhere in there you are pretty sure he gave in.

You say when you’re calmed down and most of your hairs are back in place on your heads: “I meant it, you know. I’m with you.”

His head is on your shoulder now. He closes his eyes. “I believed you,” he answers.

“And now?”

“I believe you,” says Roy after a moment. “I didn’t think you meant something else.”

“I didn’t mean something else,” you say, getting ice cream on both your noses as you lean over to kiss him in the open air. “I’m with you. Until you’ve put your ugly black couch in the Capitol Building, you know. Until the very end of me and you.”

***

The next day Roy goes out for flour. He comes back limping, with a bloody mouth.

You sit at his feet to patch him up, to put ice to the swelling in his knee and clean out his scrapes. He has a cloth to his mouth and is staring expressionless at the opposite wall. You kiss him on the shin and make a sad face. You wait.

“Boys,” he says eventually. “Some local brats with nothing better to do. I guess they don’t like me.”

Two or three teenagers stare at you, but you smile at them and they shuffle off.

“What happened?”

“I just told you what happened.” He sounds dull, unburnished, which is the worst thing. “I’m a cripple faggot from Central. I can’t circle up fast enough to make a difference any more. The family trees grow a little too close together around here. They roughed me up. Next time,” his fingers clench as far as they can when the peroxide stings, and you squeeze his hand, “I’ll take the long way home. Nothing else for it.”

Poor Roy. His pride’s injured so much worse than his body, you can tell: he’s just a little banged up, not much worse than you both got on a hard day at the Academy, but it’s been a long time since anyone’s picked a fight with Roy Mustang and not had to answer for it. The pain you hear through his teeth is the pain of having the flame so out of reach. You feel it too. He’s a State Alchemist. The State Alchemist, though they’d never admit it now. Two months ago people were afraid to burn his coffee.

You glance down at his feet as you tie the dressing tight. “I’m sorry,” you say. “You know how kids are. This is why it’s good Ed has Al to keep him on the straight and narrow. Or, um, what passes for the Elric straight and narrow. Little punks -- could probably use a lesson, but what can you do?”

“We were never like that,” says Roy.

“No,” you agree, “but I said kids, not us.”

He doesn’t reply to that. You kiss him on the knee this time and he gives you a quizzical blink, complete with blush. How that doesn’t turn you on is a testament to the sorry state you’re both in. It really hurts your heart, though, the whole situation; it’s not even something you can get angry about. So you redirect yourself to finishing up as erstwhile medic and ask, “You think anything would come of talking to their parents?”

“Gossip,” Roy practically spits, and that’s the end of that.

You’re quiet until you’re done. Once you are, you hoist yourself up to sit next to him on the sofa and put your arm around his shoulders. He’s not as yielding as he might be in a better mood, but you tug him closer and he relents a little and leans on you. “Look --” you begin, leaving off for a moment as you consider what to say. “Look, take the long way home from now on, okay? I don’t want to order you around, but I’m worried about you. Hell, we can do errands together. I don’t really think three dropouts are going to pick a fight with both of us. If nothing else, I’ll distract them with my bright plumage while you draw your circle.” You stroke his hair. “It’ll blow over. If it doesn’t we can deal with it then. Okay?” What you’re really trying to not-say is --

“I’m not going to pick a fight with them, Maes,” says Roy wearily. “I’m 29 years old.”

“Okay.” You ruffle his hair agreeably and give him a peck on the cheek to indicate you’re happy with him. He doesn’t respond, except in straightening to sit up again. So you give it a little time for tactfulness before you add, quietly, as an afterthought: “Y’know, they’re just kids, a lot of problems can get turned around if you just take the wind out of people’s sails -- I’m pretty good with this, I think, do you think I should talk to them maybe?”

“No.” Roy squints at you. “That’s a terrible idea. I hope you never bring it up again.”

“Okay,” you agree with a shrug and not so much as a melodramatic pout, raising your hands in surrender. “You know these people better than I do. I won’t.”

***

You find them by the river, kicking around a ball. Which is stupid because their ball might fall in, and you’re half-tempted to tell them so. But they might think you’re being sarcastic, instead of giving them some perfectly sincere concerned-citizen advice, so you slide your hands into your pockets instead and announce your stroll down the bank with some loud I’m-not-sneaking-up-on-you whistling,

It’s dusk and the biting insects haven’t begun to circle.

They draw together in suspicion at the sight of you and your tonedeaf whistling. They’ve got a little fishing rowboat with poles in it off to one side, you notice. Practically a dinghy. Well, it’s probably a rowboat by Greene standards. By the looks of them they’re gearing up to jump you, so you stop a roomy distance off and quit the soundtrack and raise both your hands a little, palms-out: “Hey, settle down,” you say, easy. “Relax. I’m seriously not here to beat you guys up. Please don’t kill me pre-emptively, all right?”

Despite the please, you know what to project -- ease, comfort, a lack of concern. These three things have gotten you far in life. Already they’re looking at each other and they’re wondering if they can take you: you’re not an injured alchemist carrying his groceries, and furthermore, you went looking for them. That’s the math they need to do to figure out they don’t want to get into a fight with you. Of course, lots of people aren’t so good with math, you can’t always count on pragmatism -- but these eye you up, and then each other, and then you, and they don’t look about ready to swagger over and start any problems. So it just remains for them to decide if they need to fight you. And that’s where nonthreatening comes in.

Thirty-odd years on this earth. One true calling. You smile. “I know what happened with my friend,” you say. “Take it easy, okay?”

One of them, the tallest, ventures a guarded reply: “What do you want, fairy?” He’s really young. No more than sixteen, all of them. Just stupid kids.

“To talk,” you say, coming closer, but you pause and wait for their hackles to fall a little before you cross all the way into conversational range for all three of them on the edge of the river.

You make a bit of a sad face and duck your head in a universal sign for plaintiveness. You keep your face that way, which means the oldest one is still too puzzled to look scared until you have both of your hands around his throat.

They’re really slow to react. Just stupid kids, like you thought. Soldiers would’ve fired on you by now -- in this case, their friend’s head is already underwater before the next two think to fight you, and they don’t even scream, proving that from Ishbal to Greene civilians are still fish in a barrel. But they’re very, very slow. Their friend panics and gulps water and soon his head is lolling facedown unconscious in it -- poor kid, well, at least that one’s fast -- before either of the other two land a blow on you, and the thing is, even flailing madly, even in the closest of close range, they don’t. You step on the back of the drowning one so no one has the bright idea of hauling him out.

The youngest one nearly flings himself into your arms in terror and animal rage. He lands a hit, and it hurts, even, but you punch him once and he drops like a six-year-old child: seems like he weighs about as much as one, too, or maybe that’s just you now. He’s about as easy to drown as the other one. His friend yells at you hoarsely and pulls at your arms and claws at you with about as much avail.

Now it’s just you two. The boy you’re holding is trembling like a leaf, poor kid. It does make you sorry to see. He looks like he’s about to have the bright idea of screaming -- “Shh,” you say gently, closing your hand around his windpipe.

“Why?” he chokes out, and not just because he can only half-breathe. He’s bug-eyed. “What are you doing?”

“I’m sorry it had to come to this,” you answer with a shrug, figuring you owe the kid that much; his friends are both dead now, anyway, or near it. “I didn’t want there to be any kind of a big deal, though. It’s not really a good idea for me to cause problems.”

He tears up. Well, everyone does before they die, sooner or later. Everyone dies stained with their own blood, sweat and tears. You did. “What?” is all he can manage.

“I’m sorry,” you say again, sympathetically.

Great, now he’s figured out begging. “Please --”

“For what it’s worth, I think you should breathe in a lungful once you’re underwater,” you suggest, dropping him to the muddy bank and kneeling down next to him. “This can be painful, but that will make it go a lot faster. Shh. It’s all right. It’ll be fine.”

He doesn’t take your advice. You have to hold him down thrashing for an unpleasantly long time while he holds his breath stubbornly -- which, to be fair, you would’ve done, so you can’t really blame him, but -- so it’s nice he doesn’t bother trying to burble out any noise, would’ve wasted his air. Honestly, if he were older or you were different, he might’ve stood a chance this way. However, he’s not and you’re not. So he really should have listened to you. It makes you a little sad to see his face turn purple as he panics and seizes up and then finally his body takes a gulp of water for him, and it’s over. His corpse is going to look ugly tomorrow -- that’ll be awful for his mother. Poor thing.

The sun goes down all the way by the time you overturn their boat and set it to floating, lonely, near their sodden bodies; it’ll all float downstream, you know. Everything floats downstream, really. All the better for their fishing accident. The bugs come out, and they take as little interest in you as you know they will. All you can see are the little lights of the fireflies, bobbing over the river. Roy likes those. That reminds you, you’re nearly out of milk.

***

When you kiss him tonight you’re tender, but you hold him tight. When you make love to him you smell like the river. So do your dreams, soon enough. If you still have dreams. You don’t know. You can’t say.

***

When Roy finds out you expect a few different things of him. You expect him to lose his temper, you expect him to scream himself hoarse. It turns out you don’t expect to come home with the mail under one arm and find him sitting at the kitchen table, a bottle and glass in the other chair and a rough transmutation circle in chalk all but finished on the table top.

He has the chalk in one hand. You close the door with your free hand. He just looks at you. As an afterthought, you lock it. He just looks. You should probably put down the mail. So you put down the mail.

“So,” he addresses you, “answer me a question.”

You sidle into the kitchen to see if he reacts badly to that. He doesn’t, so you lean against the kitchen counter and cock your head at him. “Sure?” you say eventually.

Roy smells like gin. You can tell from here. Sweat and gin. He’s flushed, too, which does not stop him pouring himself more gin shaky and one-handed. He takes another long drink before he talks again and does not look concerned. The chalk is white in his hand, and that hand is still.

“When you woke up the first time,” he says in a voice as dry and cracked as the tile floor, “what do you remember?”

You try and think of ways to sidestep this, eyeing the transmutation circle as you do. You’ve been around a lot of Roy’s circles, but hell if you can tell them apart. It’s not his flame circle, that much you can tell. Aside from that, it’s all alchemy to you. “I don’t know,” you say with a frown. “I don’t know. It’s all kind of hazy now -- your house was half destroyed. I don’t know, its like it’s --”

“Really?” There is a sardonic weight to his words that is not the liquor. “Three weeks ago? You always had a sharp memory, Hughes. Going senile this young?”

“Roy --” You turn your mouth upside down in discomfort, lean further back on the counter. “Come on --”

The chalk hovers over the circle. “Answer me.”

“There --” you stall for time as you spin your words in your head, eyes flickering between circle and Roy’s face, “There was a man. I wasn’t really -- when I woke up. There was a man, I met a man.”

Now, you’re intel, so you know better than to let people get away with sentence fragments, but it’d be nice if drunk Roy didn’t. Too bad. “You weren’t really...?” he prompts you, crisp in the way that only men giving orders or trying not to slur speak.

“I wasn’t really feeling well --”

“You weren’t really feeling well?” he repeats in disbelief, unfocused gaze boring into you.

“Roy --”

“Not the end of your sentence. Finish it.”

“I wasn’t really myself,” you blurt out. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Roy -- could you just say something? I’m sorry.”

Roy lifts his head a little more and you can see the hollow redness of his eyes. He hasn’t been drinking long enough for that. “I don’t care,” he says. “Go on.”

So what do you say to that? You do.

“I woke up in your house,” you say, amazed that you sound so calm as you balance on your palms and wonder if he’s going to kill you, “but I wasn’t -- I was badly hurt, I wasn’t even. Wasn’t even recognizable, I don’t think I could even talk. It was nighttime, I stumbled out, I think I must have hid somewhere -- I don’t know, I was in a lot of pain. I was confused. I thought I was still dying. I --” -- didn’t know I was me, you know as the proper ending to that sentence, but as it turns out you’re well enough capable of censoring your pathetic nattering. So you trail off.

You look down. “I met a man,” you say.

Roy coughs and sniffles, like he’s coming down with something, and slams back the rest of his drink.

“I met a man --” You glance at him. “I don’t know what he looks like. That is the honest truth, I -- wasn’t together. He fed me something which -- helped me, put me back together.”

Trust Roy, of course, to squint and rub his head and examine his empty glass and come up with the only question left that matters at all. “Did he say anything to you?”

You consider lying to him. Sometimes it’s better that way. You prefer to omit, but this time you know there is no ‘omit’ option, just lying or not lying -- and you look at him, red-rimmed and hoarse.

“He said,” you say, “that it was all right, they always make us and leave us behind.”

Roy doubles over and you almost move to help him, but what he doubles over with is an ugly sob that wracks his body. You keep your distance and he looks at you wild-eyed, like an injured dog. In that moment you’re pretty sure he might kill you. Instead he chokes on another sob and you feel like you’re going to peel off your own skin seeing him like this; his chalk hand is trembling, so you focus on that before he suddenly bursts out with something through his teeth. “Did you kill them? The boys?”

“Roy --”

“You killed them. You murdered them. I -- I’m such,” he sounds thunderstruck, “a fucking -- fool --”

“I’m sorry,” you nearly screech, which gets his attention; you don’t want to look at him right now, though, or hear anything he has to say to you, so childishly you put your hands over your ears. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I just wanted to -- I’m sorry --”

He buries his face in his arms.

“I’m sorry,” you say again, with little care for what you sound like. “I know -- I -- I don’t know. I’m sorry. It’s my fault, I’m sorry. I love you.”

“No. Shut up,” he snarls. “Shut the fuck up.”

“I love you,” you say, “and I’m sorry, and I --”

Roy breaks down and cries. Into the fabric of his white shirt, which already smells like gin, and blurring the edges of his transmutation circle with his sleeves. Without thinking you move over to pull up the chair and sit next to him. He doesn’t recoil, or move at all. You can’t handle just watching this, his thin body shaking. Before you know it you’re putting your arms around him, like you would -- and tucking his head under your chin, like you would -- and stroking his hair, like you would, and the whole time he lets you. He just lets you. He might as well be a ragdoll, a big gin-stained ragdoll. All his strings cut. There’s the last of his fight gone. You wince and start to spool together something to say, something to make him feel better, allay all the misery you’re causing him just a little bit.

“Shut up,” he says, muffled. “Stop crying. You don’t have to cry.”

Like it’s you that’s crying and he with his arms around you. You close your eyes, though, and bury your face in his hair.

“I love you,” you offer.

He doesn’t answer.

***

You sleep on the couch. Or try.

***

Tomorrow doesn’t go so well. This time you go upstairs to find Roy seated at his desk with his legs crossed and his gun trained on your chest.

You risk a glance around. There’s the telephone, the receiver off its hook and lying on the desk like a dead animal. Ah.

He gestures with the barrel. “The phone doesn’t seem to be working,” he says.

“I didn’t know you telephoned Lieutenant Hawkeye,” you edge back gingerly to lean against the doorframe, “on Mondays.”

It’s like he hasn’t heard you. “It doesn’t seem to be connected. I can’t dial anything, not even the operator.”

“Technology, huh?”

His aim is wavering a little in his unsteady grip -- he’s smart enough to hold it with both hands -- but it’s not wavering so much that he couldn’t hit you standing five feet away from him. Damn. He really is serious. He looks it, too; gone is the drunken discombobulation, he looks bloodshot and hungover and quite ready to pull that trigger if you make any sudden moves. What a soldier Roy is. You do love him. You’ve got enough common sense not to smile, so you just carefully lower your hands and wait for him to say anything.

This is definitely a predicament.

Roy clears his throat. He does, however, still sound hoarse. “Who are you?”

You wonder what he wants out of your answer: some admission that you’re not who you claim to be? “I don’t know what to say,” you give as your truthful answer. “I’m the same person that I was yesterday. That I was six months ago. I don’t know what proof to offer you. Ask me something only I would know. Something else. Go ahead. You want me to talk about our memories?” You swallow down a knot in your throat. “Do you?”

He hasn’t come up with an answer for that. But he doesn’t lower the pistol either. Which is stupid. Roy’s a State Alchemist, not Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye. However, as you’ve noted, it doesn’t take a sharpshooter of Riza Hawkeye’s caliber to hit a stationary man on the other side of the room.

“The time,” you say, “when I got the Academy to sew the wrong thing into my uniform -- I wore that for a month. Remember?”

Roy raises his free hand to cut you off, expression still steely and unmoved by any of this. Nevertheless, it must have had some kind of effect, because he drops the subject and changes tack. “You disconnected the telephone line,” he says.

Okay, you sort of hate obvious statements. You feel bad for every time you’ve said them during an interrogation. What are you supposed to say back? ‘Yup, that was me?’

“I didn’t want you to do anything rash,” you say with a shrug, glancing away.

Roy’s brow darkens with anger and in his voice you can hear a gathering storm: “Excuse me?”

“Well, you did,” you point out.

The barrel is so round. You’ve never had so much time to admire the business end of one before.

“You wouldn’t have found out,” you say with eyebrows raised, “unless you were planning on doing something rash. You can’t do that, Roy. You know that. Come on. I believe in you, but even I wouldn’t let you back into the military if you had the horrible sense to openly confess to human transmutation. And once the horse is out of the barn, you know how it is --”

He interrupts you in a low voice: “You’re not Maes Hughes.”

You wince. “I thought we were done with that subject.”

“You’re not Maes Hughes,” he says again, like he’s trying to convince someone.

“Roy --”

Roy pulls the trigger. How about that.

Gunshots are loud, it’s your least favorite thing about them. You hear the crack before you feel the impact, which isn’t very high-caliber but has no trouble splintering through your ribcage either. It’s a little funny, thinking about this, thinking oh, that must be your lung it hit, but you’re not sure. You stagger and catch yourself on the doorframe and close your eyes briefly against the splitting pain. You think you can feel the wind inside your body. But there’s no wind, you’re indoors. You know you can feel the spill of your blood down your nice blue shirt, somewhere in between the pain, and it all seems to take forever. He’s probably staring at you, but for once in a blue moon you’re not paying attention to him.

Then you feel the agonizing knitting-together of your flesh and your body expelling the bullet, a messy endeavor, that ends in the plink of the wet metal on the wooden floor. Color returns to your face, and finally to your head. You don’t feel any more pain.

“Sorry,” you say, spitting blood into your hand and grimacing. “I didn’t want you to do that.”

He’s frozen in place, like a statue with a gun.

You walk up to him, hoping he won’t fire again, and he doesn’t -- though he stands up as you approach and puts the barrel between you like it’s a sword. You make a face, a face you think sufficiently communicates how much you don’t want this whole sequence of actions to have to take place. But you cross the room anyway; “Roy,” you say with a frown, looking him in the eye, “put that down. That was loud already. You don’t want the neighborhood to hear.”

He doesn’t, but you were expecting that.

You close your hand over the barrel and then yank it away from him before he can panic and pull the trigger again; he tries to grab it back but his hand moves about a thousand times slower than yours, so before he knows it you’ve got it in both hands and are emptying the rounds out from the chamber. They all rattle out onto the floor and he grabs for the gun again, desperate: “Roy,” you say a bit more severely and pull the gun loose again, violently, and you didn’t mean for it to be violently and you’re sorry that he stumbles but this is all getting a bit much; “Knock it off, Roy. Roy. Calm down.”

He doesn’t, but you toss the empty gun to the floor with a clatter anyway. You grab him by the shoulders and hold him, which prompts him to speak up finally: “Get your hands off me,” is what he chooses to grace you with, and he struggles.

He does struggle. He struggles valiantly. You push him back into the wall next to his desk while he tries to kick you, and manages to kick you, and then tries to kick you in the groin but for your foresight to move. You’re not trying to fight him, you only want to calm him down -- and you’re just about tearing up with frustration, because you know grappling him isn’t the way to go about it, but you can’t have him run off or find something else to hurt you with or cause a scene or do something else that’ll ruin things for both of you -- for him -- and you’re sorry. You thought the sight of him sad because of you made you sorry. You’d actually like it back now, compared to the sight of him terrified.

“Let go of me,” he shouts.

“Stop it,” you say. “Stop it. I’m not going to hurt you. Stop it.”

“No --”

“Roy,” you say, sounding tired, because you already are. There is only one way this is going to end. Sooner or later he’ll catch on to that too. Until then -- “Roy. Be reasonable.”

***

To his credit, Roy is a soldier, and a soldier adapts to the battle he thinks he’s fighting. He’s reasonable. Eventually. He gives you frostbite with the cold shoulder he’s adopted, but he’s reasonable. He draws himself up to his highest and fixes you with the full bore of his burning, self-possessed contempt, but he’s reasonable. You give him his space. Of course, you’re stung, especially as he moves to walk past you without brushing you and refuses to look you in the eye or call you by name. But you know better than to expect too much, and Roy -- oh, Roy. Well. Roy, he can be a little stubborn.

You wait. You’ve already spent what feels like a lifetime waiting for Roy Mustang.

He gets a little better, except when you’re cooking and he tries to stab you with a steak knife when your back is turned. It’s still not fast enough to catch you. “Roy, could you really knock it off?” you ask with a frown as you snap the knife in two.

He tries to skewer you with a letter opener when you sit next to him to watch him work at his desk. You grab his arm and he narrows his eyes at you. You shake your head: “Please. Stop it. You’re not getting anywhere, but it’s still not escaping my notice that you’re trying to kill me.”

He does, actually, or at least he doesn’t make any more attempts by nightfall, but he doesn’t talk to you more than he has to and he doesn’t look at you and he never says your name, which is maybe the worst thing. His lip is healing, though. That’s okay, you think; if he hates you and his lip is healing, then that’s okay.

He brushes his teeth with you leaning against the counter next to him. When he’s done you reach over and pluck the tube of toothpaste from the counter. You hold it up. “No transmutation circles for you when you’re in the loo,” you say a little dolefully. “I know you, you resourceful bastard.”

He snorts -- his first expression of amusement all day, and it’s not a pretty one -- and meets your eye, briefly, in the mirror. “Are you afraid of me?”

“No,” you say, looking away. “I miss you.”

He has nothing to say to that, but he looks up when you step out of the bathroom and leave him alone to wash up and change, closing the door behind you to wash up and change. If he has a retort to that you can’t hear it over the running water. But you think you would have been able to hear it.

***

In the middle of the night he comes downstairs. You wonder if it’s to try and kill you again. But wordlessly he takes your hand and you both go up to the bedroom. He stands there in the middle of the floor with his head bowed and his hair just shy of brushing your neck.

On some comforting impulse you reach to pull him closer. Instead he takes a step back and, with shaking hands, unbuttons the top buttons of his shirt. He shrugs it off and waits there in the gloom for you with steady, impassive eyes. You ought to be surprised, you imagine, but you’re not.

After all, you know there was absolutely nothing else for him to do.

***

He is dull and exhausted in the morning, like he didn’t get enough sleep. You do up his buttons for him and kiss him on the cheek. He doesn’t respond to that, but when you say, “Are you hung over again?” it provokes a tired smile.

That’s promising -- so you duck your head into his field of vision and wave your hand. “Hey, wake up, Colonel,” you say with a mock-severe look. “You okay? Do we need to send you back to bed?”

“I’m fine,” he answers you as he ties his tie without looking. “Can a man get dressed in silence any more?”

“With me around?” You yawn. “Are you kidding me?”

He rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling, this time with a bit more heart in it. “Come to think of it, I’m not even sure why I asked that question,” and when you lean in hopefully he kisses you first. This is a kiss you don’t hold for very long -- not that you’re not hungry for it, not that the prospect of him showing affection for you again doesn’t make you want to drag that kiss out like you’re starving and then have your fill on the bed again because you fucking are -- but it all feels fragile and you can’t frighten it away again. He smiles again, reassuringly, once you break it. You are already grinning. Probably like a puppy dog. Oh, well.

He’s tired all day, so you try to take in stride his listlessness and the pale greyness of his smiles. At least he’s smiling at all. And he laughs and play-grapples with you when you stick a candy wrapper in his hair.

On the back porch in the evening you catch him staring out over the fireflies and the lights of the neighboring houses. You give him a hug from behind and rest your head on his shoulder. I love you, you think, but you don’t want to wear it out.

“Do you know,” he says, “why they promoted you to Brigadier General after your death?”

Idly you think about it, and kiss him on the neck while you’re at it. He turns his head aside to let you; something about that strikes a note of discord, something a little disturbing. But you forget, and you kiss him again. “Not really,” you say with a equable shrug. “I don’t think they sent me a copy of that memo.”

Roy laughs, low and composed. “They could finally declassify the nature of your work, Major,” he says. “Not all of it. But where you worked and what you did -- promoting you as fast as you deserved would have called too much attention to you. I know you know that -- but I thought you might be interested,” he draws in a breath, “in the official acknowledgement. Your family must be proud.”

“Maybe,” you answer with a glance to the sunset. “I couldn’t really say.”

Something about that makes him go quiet and turn his face away again. You wait.

He says eventually: “It’s a pity. I could have used a Brigadier General.” Just as unease is welling in you that you haven’t done well to please him in this conversation, he glances back and smiles -- hell, he winks, charmingly enough, and bumps your heads together. “Well, I’ve got you.”

“And I’m not going anywhere,” you point out with a little smile of your own.

It’s strange, the little hitch in his voice before this one too. That quiet again. But he takes a deep breath and pre-empts you on the next kiss, and you forget. “I know,” he says. “I wouldn’t ask you to.”

***

You always wake early. By the crack of dawn tomorrow morning Roy’s gun is at the bottom of the river: and with it, the prospect of Central or the State Military, or so it feels. You’ve promised him you’re going to support him until he gets there, and you mean it -- someday he’ll go back. Someday when they need him. And they’ll need him. Roy Mustang is the best thing to ever happen to this godforsaken country: they needed him before he ever wanted them. You mean it! You do.

But today you’re making scrambled eggs again, with cheese this time! And he likes those. And he’s forgiven you. So it can wait.

While you’re out the downstairs piping springs a leak and Roy goes to fix it -- “Don’t we have a plumber?” you call down to the basement while the stove heats up.

“Costs money!” comes the muffled response.

“Roy, you realize fixing pipes is what plumbers do for a living -- as in, I’m pretty sure that they could do it faster --”

“It’s fine!”

“Men,” you call back, grinning in defeat, and then go back to your eggs. You’re done pretty fast, but it’s a few minutes longer before he emerges with a handful of grimy tools, looking nonplussed. Instead of asking for help, though (perish the thought) he leaves them upstairs and goes back down again. Not being one to come between a masc- and his masculine pride, you corner him into eating and steal a kiss and then sit down and do the crossword while he fusses with plumbing. It probably takes him longer because he’s injured, you know, but probably all the more reason he doesn’t want help. It takes him some more trips up and down, each trip up accompanied by some sort of complaint about plumbing, during which you finish almost the entire crossword.

You’re stuck on “Government fixing,” 11 letters down, when he calls it a day and sits down next to you. It’s just as well, as you’re tired and stir-crazy -- you feel dizzy from lethargy and obviously lost your concentration a while ago on the crossword, signified by a little furrow on your forehead and some circular doodling in the margin.

He must spot it, too, because he sits down next to you at the table and squeezes your hand. He looks sorry. Roy spends more time sorry about things than he usually admits, but he’s not one for looking sorry. “I’ll call the plumber,” he says.

“Sure,” you say, wondering idly if he’s going to bring up the loss of his gun but imagining not -- “Hey, it’s fine. Don’t make that face.” You smile. So does he, sort of. “That’s still that face. I’m sure you could have fixed it.”

“Actually, I’m pretty sure I just made it worse,” he says with a frown and transfers his attention to the crossword. You keep it there until dinnertime.

***

If you could say one thing for Roy Mustang -- okay, you could say a lot of things for Roy Mustang. One thing you could say for Roy Mustang is that he doesn’t fuck around when he has something to do. At dinnertime you cook, still feeling tired and hungry and severely out-of-sorts, and while you’re sauteing the mushrooms he wraps his arm around you from behind, kisses you on the mouth when you turn your head, and stabs you in the back.

It’s a difficult place to stab someone. You’re the one to know. It’s not a very long knife he’s using -- the big steak knives are still in the drawer -- you know because while you stagger and drop back against him, knotting up in pain, you don’t black out. You’re honestly just bewildered: before anything else you could be thinking, before anything else, before you’re even holding in a hiss of pain, you’re thinking, shit, how didn’t you catch that?

You remember the pain of being shot. Stabbed is worse, no trauma of impact to dull the piercing cold. But as he drags you to your feet you feel your flesh struggle to knit itself together around the knife, and can’t -- you’re not bleeding out, you’re conscious and not blurring, but it’s like the tissue is spasming in confusion.

To be fair to yourself, you do have the presence of mind to yank the knife out and stab it against the kitchen counter until the impact bends it. As if this didn’t just happen, he shoulders your weight by pulling one of your arms over his shoulder; in his other hand he’s got something else, though, and you also have the presence of mind to smack it out of his hand. Even like this you’re faster than him. Something shatters on the floor.

He sounds detached. “Do you know what that was?”

You don’t. You don’t answer -- squint to try to focus your eyes. It occurs to you you’re missing your glasses. But you’ve always been missing your glasses.

“Your blood,” Roy is saying, “what of it I could preserve from your body. From Maes’s body, anyway. I used it to make you the first time around -- do you know I didn’t even know I left it down there? But it had to be something, didn’t it?”

You cough -- now you’re seizing up -- but can’t think of anything to say. You’re in too much pain to read his tone, or what’s on his face, or to focus on anything but the words he’s saying. As your head slouches against his chest he breaks off what he was saying before to bring his face closer to yours and stroke your hair. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

Your back tries to heal itself again in a different way. He grabs something off the blurry countertop and you wonder what it is, if he’s going to try and hit you with it, but instead he uncorks it and dumps it over you. It feels like an acid rain of agony when it hits the wound in your back -- burning the open puncture down to your spine, or so you feel when you white out in pain. The mushrooms are cooking, though. You can smell them.

***

Pain blurs time for you, drags you in and out of consciousness as you’re aware Roy’s taking you somewhere, step by laborious step. The humid night air sits heavy on your eyelids and hot around the coat that’s now around your shoulders. That must be Roy’s doing. Clever boy. Your progress is stilted, or maybe it just feels that way because you’re focused on not being sick to your stomach and seeing what’s in front of you -- fighting him seems like it’d earn you a second’s freedom and a bunch of stumbling around vomiting, at best, so you let it be and close your eyes.

Sooner or later he sits you both on dirty ground and sits next to you. You have a moment to take your bearings and you’re feeling a little better in the back: like you’re winning the war of healing just a little bit. Then he hands you your glasses and you fumble to put them back on.

Blood is soaking the back of your shirt. You can feel it cool in the night air. There’s something colder too, though, and you breathe it in -- alcohol. He dumped alcohol down your shirt. How about that.

You squint over at him. He’s sitting with his legs crossed a few feet away from you, in his crisp dress blues and his stiff white gloves. At the moment he’s occupied checking the time on a pocketwatch. He glances up when you stir, gives you a dark-eyed once-over that you know is to ascertain whether you’re in any shape to attack him, and then looks back at the watch. When he speaks up it’s like he’s not addressing you, but the hands of the clock, which in the twilight grey you’re a little too far away to make out. But you can recognize when someone is quoting something. Particularly with Roy. It’s always in that sharp verbatim way that indicates he’s just read it.

“And so when they slew the creature it was though they slew a man -- yet it shook itself into a thousand pieces and the pieces went to black blood and then the soil, as if God’s law had mended itself, as though the Circle had come unbroken. And no sign remained.”

Putting aside your bleary puzzlement at Roy’s newfound interest in Amestrian religious apocrypha, you cough and find your voice. “Roy,” you say, incredulous, “are you planning to set me on fire?”

He doesn’t answer you for a while. As your eyes come back into focus through your spectacles you can see that his are bloodshot and red. But though his fingers don’t close all the way to grasp the timepiece, he’s very still. “Do you think I’d dump a half-bottle of gin on you and drag you all the way out here just to set you on fire?””

There are train tracks a few yards away from both of you -- so that’s where you are. You place the location and look around instead of answering his question, which seems rhetorical and also kind of difficult, because if the answer wasn’t yes you wouldn’t have asked the first question in the first place, obviously.

Roy thinks that one over with all the urgency of a funeral director, then sets his watch down. “How obsessed,” he says after a pause, dry, “with fire,” he rummages for something at his belt, “do you think I am?”

Despite everything, you are kind of on the verge of an awkward heartbroken laugh. “Pretty obsessed, honestly.”

What he produces is a hip flask. His hip flask, specifically, which he’s been out of the habit of keeping at his hip for a while now. As you watch he uncaps it with clumsy starchy-gloved fingers and tips his head back to swill.

The stars are wheeling dangerously overhead and the trees are threatening to swallow the skyline. You push yourself to sit up a little more and wince. “Are you actually getting wasted on gin before you kill me? I mean, I’d actually like to know, because that’s just kind of embarrassing and would make me sad.”

“No,” Roy contradicts you sharply. He seals the flask again and snorts. “I’m --” He breaks off with a laugh, sort of a horrified one, like even he can’t believe he’s laughing right now. “I --”

You giggle. In your defense, you’re sprawled out by the railroad bleeding to death out your back because the love of your life just goddamn shanked you and you smell like gin so it’s really hard not to.

“Shut up,” he says immediately, laughing more with that horrified look on his face. He puts a hand to his own forehead. “I -- do you think the last thing I want to taste in this goddamned world is gin?”

In the ensuing silence he uncrosses his legs and pulls his knees up so he can hunch forward with his head in his arms. His flask is still in his hand. He has his chin on his knees and he’s looking at you.

“This is the best burgundy I own,” he states. “No. I am getting drunk on expensive wine before I kill you. I’ve been drinking. So have you,” he notes with a wide gesture, blinking. “So have you. You can smell it on you. Anyone can. It’s a goddamned shame -- it’s a goddamned shame what happens to stupid drunks sometimes -- don’t you think?”

“Roy --”

“Maes Hughes died with honor. Months ago.” He looks even more red-eyed when he’s cross and giving you a face that says so. “Maes Hughes was a Brigadier General. Roy Mustang is going to end his own life and it’ll be neater for him and the lodger he didn’t have that he did. So that’s what this is.” Roy holds up the flask.

Well, he’s got you there.

“So, anyway, like I said.” Roy grimaces and takes another drink and makes a face at you. “You died with honor. I’m dying with burgundy.”

You understand, suddenly. The tracks are right there and if you tried to run you wouldn’t get far in this condition, even if your body is slowly stitching itself back into immortality: slowly. The idea isn’t even provoking an emotional reaction from you, just the slow dreamy thoughts of pragmatism -- what, if anything, can you do about it? Right now you would just like to put your head in Roy’s lap and tell him you’re sorry, or hear him say he’s sorry. Something about sorry. It sounds soothing, but it’s not going to save your life right now.

But it shakes itself out of you anyway, almost in a convulsion. “I love you,” you say.

He sounds dry and tired, of this battle and every battle. “You’re not him,” he says simply.

“I’m me,” you’re surprised, a little, at the crack in your voice -- you were always so -- levelheaded -- “I don’t know what else to tell you. I can’t be anything but me. I am me. I love you. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” he cuts in, looking at his watch again. “I -- am sorry, you know.” Now you can just about smell the wine on him, which still puts him a notch classier than you -- and makes you sad. “I know that you. I know I have all the responsibility in this.”

“Roy, I love you,” you plead again, on deranged dizziness-swimming impulse, “and for God’s sake if you ever loved me at all --”

“Shut your goddamned mouth. I don’t want to hear that.”

“Roy, please --”

He nearly chokes on a very wretched cough, or the remnants of his last gulp of wine. “Maes Hughes,” he says suddenly. “Who do you love most in this whole world?”

All that bubbles to mind is the truth. “You,” you say, and wonder at how pathetic your voice is coming out again. “Please don’t make me repeat this whole line of conversation any more. It makes me sound like a lovesick girl from a play.”

“Wrong,” Roy says tightly -- and as you stare at him in bewilderment he goes on: “Do you even remember your daughter any more? Or can I even call her your daughter?”

“Roy stop it.”

That one hits him like a whipcrack while you curl up a bit yourself and nurse your wound and your panic -- all you can think of is that you’ve run out of ways to please him and everything you do makes him angrier any more, including your affection. How badly you’ve failed. In the middle of that, maybe against his better judgment, he moves closer to you and the bloodied, vulnerable shell that he’s put you in for the time being. When you don’t respond or look at him he sighs and leans his head against you, not so much the repentant dog as the guilty cat in this scenario. And given how much that warms your still somewhat shock-laced heart, you give him a few moments of that before you reach and lock your hands around his wrists.

You don’t have your strength. Not your real strength. You expect to have to try this time when he struggles. But he doesn’t struggle, just looks down at your hands and up at you. He’s so close, you know. His eyes are half-lidded. You could kiss him unwilling.

“Go ahead,” he says. “You’ll just hurt yourself if you try to force me to go anywhere. Hell or high water, you are making your train, you know.”

One thing you are good at is smiling like a hopeful puppy. You cash in all your chips this time. “I’m not going anywhere,” you say.

His eyes blink up at you again. “Aren’t you?”

“No,” you say, resolute. “You said together, right? You wanted to go together?”

A flicker of warmth crosses his face. “I did say something like that.”

“All right.” You muster your bravest face, which is pretty damn brave, if you do say so yourself -- after all, you are Brigadier General Maes Hughes, and you are pretty sure they finally promoted you for the strength of your brave faces. “Would it make you happy?”

Something resembling tired relief is pulling at the edges of Roy’s expression, and you know that you know him. You know that right at this moment nothing would make him happier than your compliance in the chosen manner of his death. You wonder if he has it in him to articulate that, though; and you know it must be important that he manages to nod, a little constrained, and answer a quiet, “It would. It really would.”

You bow your head and transfer your hands to his hands, through his gloves, and wait.

“Very soon now,” he says.

The significance of everything you’ve said isn’t lost on you, though. You did say it, after all. So you spare him the chatter this time and listen for the far-off foghorn of a train coming over the hills.

You hear it. You wait a little longer, until you can see the pinprick of the light, and then stand up and haul him to his feet -- he’s in his uniform, and you’re in the uniform coat you came in with, which puts you both in some sort of sad State Military tableau, really, if you picture it. The pain in your back has ebbed, but not wholly, and your strength’s not come back. That’s fine. As you look over your shoulder you hear him say, kind of hoarsely: “I love you.”

Your smile at that one is genuine: because it is half-hearted and bitter. “You don’t have to say that,” you say.

When the light grows and deepens you touch your forehead to his for a moment. It requires bending your head. Your heights have never matched. But your glasses are still on and you’d like to remember this. “Roy,” you say. “Elysia was always a good baby, do you know? Didn’t cry that much at night, loved people. I bet she’ll turn out to be a great kid. And Gracia, Gracia won’t have any problems finding new friends or anyone to date, not even with Elysia -- they’re both really great. I know I go on about how adorable they both are,” you take a deep breath, “but the truth is, they’re really great people even without my patronizing daddy-bullshit.”

He’s silent and you know he’s listening to the train. But he’s probably listening to you too.

“Hawkeye,” you say. “She’s a hell of a soldier, but she’s no revolutionary without a leader to follow. I hope she’ll be okay. I think so, you know?”

Roy’s glance flickers sideways, towards the sounding horn, and then back to you in brief puzzlement. “I think she’ll be fine,” he says.

“Yeah, so do I,” you agree, holding him at half-arm’s length, half-hearted and bitter again. “So do I.”

You look at him. Roy Mustang in his uniform and his gloves, the most goddamn beautiful person you’re pretty sure you’ve ever seen. All the more so when you haven’t seen him like that in a while. It just reminds you that he looks a million times better this way and you’re not sure how he stood to be out of it. So you kiss him, a normal kiss -- for you, anyway, and you don’t even drag it on too long because you’re kind of both in a hurry -- and have a little fun with it before you break off and muss his hair and look him in the eyes again. The train honks again. If this were a station you’d be standing near the edge of the platform so you were ready to get on. But there’s no platform and it’s not slowing down to let you on.

“Roy,” you say with raised eyebrows. “You’ve got to know by now, brother. My life does not actually center entirely around making you happy.”

And with that you shove him hard in the chest, with all your standing momentum. He crashes back and stumbles, because mortal or not, the fact is, you are stronger than him.

He catches his balance as you take your final few steps backwards and you can see the whites of his eyes when he calls you something he hasn’t called you in a handful of days. “Maes --”

“I love you,” you say, with a little crease of a smile, like it’s the last thing on your mind. But it’s not. It’s just a better thing to say. The light and the noise of the engine engulfs you, but the last thing on your mind would’ve been, I’m sorry. You look at Roy until you can’t see him any more. You are sorry, though. You’re sorry.