Fullmetal Alchemist 1. Chapter 1

Four months. It had been four months since mysterious black ships had emerged from an alchemic abyss and unleashed a storm of death and destruction onto Amestris. Four months since Edward Elric, the state alchemist who had been missing for more than two years and presumed dead, had appeared in Central, right on the tails of the strange machines. The siege hadn't even lasted a day, but even now Central was still in the intermediate stages of repair and reconstruction. Roy Mustang had petitioned to be reinstated as General, and he was successful, but had to fulfill a probationary period of nine months first. So for three months, he had slaved away in a small division of East HQ as a standing warrant officer. Now he was beginning his final term as a full Colonel before hopefully moving back up to his rank of three years ago.

He'd been issued a different office in Central Headquarters, as another Colonel was now occupying his old one. This one was smaller and more sparsely furnished, but it contained an almost exact replica of his old mahogany desk, as well as two sofa benches and a coffee table.

He missed his old team. They had all been transferred to other regions or promoted during his absence, and now the only familiar face he saw on a regular basis was Fullmetal's. He'd been entrusted with the task of getting his delinquent maverick "back in shape" for doing military work once again, but it had turned out that there wasn't much training he had to do. Edward had slipped back into the rhythm of military life as easily as if he'd never left in the first place.

As he was mulling over all the drastic changes that had happened in his life in the space of a few months, a sharp rap from the door interrupted his train of thought. He beckoned for the knocker to come in, and was assailed by his two tall brunettes and one short, pudgy middle-aged man, raining letters and forms and documents down on him.

The two brunettes were friends who'd climbed the ranks by each others' side, which showed in their comfortable camaraderie with each other, and the pudgy man was a kind fellow who enjoyed flirting clumsily with the two women and making them laugh. There was also a quiet, bookish man who was skinny enough to join the pudgy one in a comedy duo, and a man with black sideburns and a bright red goatee that made him easily distinguishable in a crowd of blue uniforms. Roy didn't dislike them, but it wasn't quite the same.

One thing that he fell back into easily was the familiar bustle of office life, which in his mind stood in stark contrast against a freezing outpost in the middle of nowhere.

It was nice to be back behind a desk again.

~o0{}0o~

It occurred to him a few days later that there was another dichotomy present in his life. Roy wasn't the only one to have chosen a more normal lifestyle - Ed, instead of roaming, had temporarily settled down in Central, and asked to be given assignments that let him stay there. When Roy had offhandedly asked him why, he'd simply said, "Al is going to enlist."

It was a day like any other: Roy was buried in a mountain of paperwork, and Ed had dropped in several days late for debriefing, as was his tendency. But today their conversation had taken an unusual turn when Ed actually responded seriously to a question Roy asked him, instead of with his usual sarcasm or flippancy.

Roy shifted to attention in his seat.

"Nothing I say will convince him not to," Ed continued. "He says he wants to help me pull some of the weight."

Ed was trailing off absentmindedly, and Roy, guessing that he was only thinking out loud, listened quietly. They had never really shared details about their personal lives with each other before.

"His skills are pretty much equal to mine, if not greater, so I doubt there's any chance that he'll fail. But he insists on studying anyway. He says it's not a good idea to get overconfident."

So he'd suppressed his visceral urge to travel in order to oversee his brother's training. _Interesting, _Roy thought, but not surprising.

At that point, Roy decided that it was time to refocus, and he pulled his subordinate back to earth to discuss his latest case, which was one of a traumatised boy who was the sole eye-witness to a stabbing and a kidnapping. On the assumption that the auditory cue would reel him back in, Roy prodded the shortest stack of papers on his desk. "This report is only half-finished."

Ed turned to look at him, and he seemed to turn his attention on the task at hand once again.

"I know," he sighed, dragging his hand down his face. He was sitting hunched over on the couch in front of Roy's desk, looking quite exhausted. "I'll get you the other half when my charge actually starts cooperating with me."

"Fair enough. What seems to be the problem?"

Under his breath, Ed muttered, "Babysitting is not a mission, is what the problem is."

"_Edward_."

Ed looked up at the ceiling. "He's paranoid that if he tells me anything, the _big scary men_ will come after him, too."

"You were assigned to this mission because you're the youngest military officer in Central, closest in age to the boy, and seeing as how he's apparently developed a fear of adults after the kidnapping, we thought he would be more forthcoming with you. Use your youth to your advantage."

Ed glared at him. "Yeah, thanks for the advice, real helpful. Maybe I can bond with him over comic books and action figures – although, they'd have to be tested to his precise safety specifications first, just in case one of them were to contain a bomb." He shook his head in annoyance. "To be honest, the kid's more of a pain than I probably was at that age."

Roy tucked his smile into his pocket. If only Ed knew how wrong he was.

He cleared his throat, switching to business mode again in a blink. "Find out what he knows. Kidnap victims who aren't found after the first forty-eight hours are seldom found at all. Go, Fullmetal. You're dismissed."

And so that was the extent of any real communication he had with other humans for the day. Ed left, and Roy returned to climbing his mountains of paper.

Roy didn't expect to hear about that case again, except to receive word that it had been closed and that he should file a missing persons report, but at six AM that next morning he received a call directing him to an old broken-down factory in the slums of the city, more than thirty miles away from when the kidnapper had last been sighted.

Due to a vehicle crash late the previous night, a major road two blocks from his apartment had been blocked, so he was the last to arrive at the scene, which he was haphazardly parked at nearly an hour later by a sleepy cab driver.

As industrial suburban architecture went, the factory was run-of-the-mill fare. Concrete walls, peeling grey and white paint, iron pipes and bars, broken glass. None of that interested him. He looped around to the side of the building, where he could hear movement and voices, and stumbled across a motley group of emergency respondents, military men, and people from the press. He scanned the area to locate the detective at the head of the case, stepping straight through the boundaries separating the eager reporters with flashing cameras from everyone else.

The man was nowhere to be found, but Roy spotted Fullmetal sitting against the wall of the building, in a _tête-à-tête_ with another boy of similar size and shape - Alphonse. When he came nearer he saw that Ed was bleeding from at least one stab wound to the side; his shirt was ripped and his cheek was swollen, most likely a souvenir from his encounter with the kidnapper. Ed seemed to be in shock still. His brother, who was spotless in comparison, was kneeling in front of him, performing emergency first aid on his wounds and fretting over him, concern written all over his face. They seemed to be arguing, but it wasn't the angry or caustic kind of argument; from the pleading tone in Al's voice, he was clearly trying to convince Ed of something, while Ed looked unfocused and unresponsive.

To his right, a gaunt face stared out at him through the bars at the rear of a truck, and to his left, a little girl was being laid out on a stretcher by a pair of medics.

"I can't wait to hear the story behind all this," Roy remarked, mostly to himself.

Ed, meanwhile, was in a familiar state of numbness. Shock. That was one thing that never changed. He had died twice already and yet he was sure that he would never be used to seeing the eyes of Death, no matter how many times Death stared him in the face.

When Roy met up with the two brothers, he greeted the younger brother warmly. Al went to help load the stretcher into a paramedic vehicle, and Roy was left standing over his subordinate with his arms crossed, waiting. The first thing that Edward said was, "I got into…a bit of a scuffle."

_Understatement of the century,_ Roy thought.

"What happened to your alchemy?"

In response, Ed held up a mess of crushed metal, which, upon closer examination, turned out to be his right hand, chopped off cleanly from the wrist.

"Winry's gonna kill me," was the only comment he made on it.

Roy sighed and rubbed his temple. He could already feel a headache coming on. "Alright, Fullmetal, what happened here?"

"That's...sort of a long story. I'll have to tell you later because the paramedics are going to cart me off to the hospital in a moment." He winced, but Roy was unsure if it was from the pain or the mere thought of having to go to a hospital. "Anyway, the girl's pretty beaten up, but alive."

"But she is alive." That was the important thing.

"Yeah," Ed breathed, and it came out more like a sigh of relief than a word.

"Where's your kid?"

"Kid? Oh. He's, uh..." Ed turned to the ambulance, where the girl in the stretcher was being strapped in and tended to. Inside the vehicle, the troublesome little boy with the tuft of ruddy red hair whom he'd familiarised himself with over the past week was laughing over a colouring book and chatting profusely at his barely-conscious friend.

Roy couldn't help but be reminded of another feisty young child he knew, and smiled down at Ed once he turned away from the ambulance.

"Good work," he said approvingly.

Immediately after he spoke the thought crossed his mind that maybe he shouldn't have, because Ed looked rather startled, unused as he was to compliments from his boss. And that couldn't be good for circulatory shock.

"Uh, th-thanks."

Roy straightened his face. "Go get cleaned up. Now_._"

"Yeah."

Ed was still too shaken to argue with him like usual, so for once in his life he let himself be manhandled and taken away without a fight.

~o0o~

The story behind it all, once Roy had found someone who was stable enough and who had the time to relate it to him, had turned out as he'd expected: After Ed had wrangled some information out of the kid, he'd gone and investigated on his own, and when he picked up the trail of his target, he'd gone in to face him alone.

Roy didn't get the details until later on, though, and when he did finally get them, his anger lead him out of the HQ, through the city, and into the emergency ward of Central Hospital, Floor A.

There he let his poise and mask of disciplined composure slip away and his temper loose. After all those years he had spent waiting and grieving over him, was Fullmetal going to continue to throw his life away at every given opportunity?

As soon as he entered Ed's room, he slammed the door closed behind him, scaring the nurse waiting behind the door.

"You idiot," he growled, without preamble. "State alchemist or not, how could you have gone in there without telling anyone first? That madman could have _killed_ you! You read the case file; you knew that he was dangerous and you knew what he could do. Did you even stop and think of _calling for backup_ for a second - " As Roy railed at his officer, a part of him couldn't help but notice how small and vulnerable he looked sitting under the blankets in that rickety cot, in a thin hospital gown, and with bandages covering far more of him than Roy had expected. He was even paler than usual, and weariness lined his young face. This only made him angrier. He didn't want to feel pity, or sympathy; not when Ed had intentionally brought this on himself with his own foolish impudence.

After he'd stopped, Roy had expected him to argue, to retaliate, but instead Edward looked up at his boss blankly, as if he'd never been so chastised before.

There was a long, uncomfortable silence in which Roy's angry words hung in the air between them, and then Ed finally found his voice again.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly."You're right, I shouldn't have gone after him alone."

He sighed and closed his eyes. "I guess having to face Winry with this wrecked arm is an adequate punishment."

He seemed so sincere that there was no doubting his contrition. It was disarming, and Roy was speechless for a moment.

When Roy didn't reply, Ed went on, "I'm just relieved that I got there in time. I mean...I don't exactly have a good track record with little girls."

Roy had opened his mouth to say something when the nurse whom he'd slammed a door into just minutes ago tapped on the door once and let herself in. Glowering at Roy – he realised that she'd probably heard every single word – she asked him in tight tones if he would please leave, as he was disturbing her patient. Roy was about to object, wanting to talk more with Ed, but thought better of it and turned to leave instead.

He watched his charge out of the corner of his eye as he left the room, trying to reconcile this Edward with the one he remembered. Roy wasn't the only one who had changed over the past two years. What had happened to the hotheaded little boy he had once known?

.

~o0o~

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**A/N: **This story is a commission from a friend of mine, who challenged me to write a Roy/Ed story where Roy and Ed are actually in character. So that will be my goal with this piece. (Feel free to let me know after each chapter if I succeeded.) Also, I know stories that reverse the canon ending to get a 'happier' result are usually considered bad form, but that was kind of necessary in order for this to be a non-pedophilic Roy/Ed fic, so.

Hope you enjoyed! New chapter next week. :)

~Vina


	2. Chapter 2

If there was one thing Roy Mustang didn't do often, it was making a fool of himself. And he had done so spectacularly in the hospital.

Roy had plenty of time to mull over his outburst and Ed's response to it over the next few weeks. Outside of what was necessary for their work, his lieutenants spoke very little to their stern-looking superior with the black eyepatch, and so he spent much of his time at work alone in his office, scraping his pen across a sheet of paper to the faint background noises of birds and wind whistling and the occasional footsteps in the hall outside his door, with nothing but his own thoughts for company.

There were many of them, and very few were pleasant. Once, he'd even found himself absently wishing that Hughes would call him to prattle on about Elysia, just so he could hear a friendly, familiar voice, but then he had felt something twist painfully inside and remembered that Hughes was dead. The fact that he had forgotten at all, even for a moment, horrified him in a way he couldn't explain.

He had briefly considered taking a trip to the hospital, just to apologise to that nurse.

When Ed rushed back from Resembool to attend the trial two weeks after he'd left Central, Roy was the last to find out about it, as usual. He'd handed management of the case over to the head detective, so he hadn't even planned on going to the trial. They had no use for him there, and he had other work to do.

On that day, he'd been busy filling in for another Colonel who was ill, and training new recruits; with such a high-profile case, there was plenty of media coverage, so Roy figured that he wouldn't even have to ask someone about the trial. He could just get the news from the papers the day after.

As it turned out, he didn't even have to go that far. The day that the verdict was announced was the same day that Ed was scheduled to come in and receive his next assignment, and so Roy got a firsthand recount of the results.

He was given little to no warning of his subordinate's arrival. At three-fifteen, fifteen minutes before Ed owed him a visit, the doors to his office were unceremoniously thrown open, and Ed stomped inside.

''He's getting off on an insanity plea,'' Ed spat, slamming the doors closed behind him. Roy lifted his head from the report he had been reading.

Ed had barely given his superior a second to process this before he stormed on, ''Did you hear what happened? That bastard is going to get two years in a cushy asylum instead of the decade behind cold hard bars that he deserves.''

Roy sighed. Ed had caused him to lose his place on the page.

''I wouldn't call the Central Penitentiary Facility For The Insane a 'cushy' place,'' he said, ''but that's the system for you.''

''But why? Don't they see that he's just faking it to get an easier sentence?"

From what he knew about the man, Roy wasn't so sure. But it was pointless to start an argument with Ed about it.

''We have no way of proving that. And without proof our hands are pretty much tied."

Ed sat down hard on the sofa, letting the words sink in. Roy could almost see the war of emotions that was raging on in his head; frustration, helplessness, outrage, and guilt. He watched each one pass over Ed's face, watched his fists clench into the faux leather of the armrest. There were some traits in people, Roy thought, that didn't change with age.

''You should've seen the act he put on while he was on the stand,'' Ed said bitterly. ''He seemed pretty sane while he was methodically going after me with a knife, but as soon he got up there he was rambling and raving like a lunatic. And Sasha...she was almost killed by that monster, and after all this he isn't even going to pay for it." He breathed out, trying to regain his composure. "If only there was something I could do...''

"I'm afraid there isn't."

There was a moment of silence in which Roy thought his subordinate was starting to calm down, and he waited patiently, his pen scratching across the paper in front of him as he marked revisions in the relocation request for a group of displaced citizens from a shelter in the east side of the city. With a last flourish, he signed his name and then placed the request on top of the tower of papers that were balanced precariously at the edge of his desk.

''I saw the marks on her neck when I rescued her."

Roy glanced up; Ed was glaring at the grain of the table in front of him, as if he could somehow bore holes through it if he stared hard enough.

"They were bruises in a finger pattern, definitely a sign of strangulation, and her right cheek was swollen instead of her left because he's left-handed. She was lying tied up her left side, and it looked like she'd been stuck in that position for a while, which means that she didn't fall; she was beaten.''

Roy arched an eyebrow. If he was to go by what Ed's recently submitted report had described, Ed had only caught a split-second's glimpse of the hostage before his target had ambushed him.

He watched his subordinate carefully, thinking. Ed's eyebrows were drawn together and his mouth was was set in a tight line, a clear expression of how powerless he probably felt. Something about it pulled at his heart.

"Listen to me, Fullmetal," he said, "and I'll tell you what you can do." Once he'd wrested Ed's attention away from the table, he went on, "You can keep working for the military, doing as much good as you can, and not beat yourself up over what you can't do."

"Yeah?" Ed countered. "And what happens when he's released? What if we can't get to him before it's too late next time?"

"Then you get up and move on. If you're still in active duty, you catch him again, and make sure he stays behind bars this time."

In a gentler tone, he added, "You can't save everyone, Edward. It's an unfortunate truth, but it's one you'll have to learn to accept, if you're going to live with yourself afterwards." Roy declined to mention that he himself wasn't convinced of it, much of the time. When Ed didn't reply, he turned back to his work. He checked the current construction material stock list, marked off items one by one on a supply request, and then scribbled 'approved' with his signature on the bottom.

The next envelope in his inbox was an official order by the Council of Representatives, issued to the Fullmetal Alchemist, under the command of Colonel Roy Mustang.

_Perfect,_ Roy thought. _Something to get his mind off this dead-end case._

"Speaking of soldiering on, I have your next assignment."

With a hint of apprehension, Ed pulled himself off the sofa and walked up to his superior's desk. Roy handed him a sheet of paper. "You're to help rebuild the collapsed sewer lines on the west side of the city."

He didn't expect Ed to complain at being given such a menial task, and Ed didn't. He only quipped, "Sounds pleasant," before taking the order and raking it over with his gaze. His eyes darted back and forth across it for less than minute before he set it down and looked back at Roy again. "Are you going to lecture me now about how this kind of work is just as important as saving little girls?"

Roy's eyes flicked up to him briefly. "I'm not going to explain something you should already know."

The corner of Ed's mouth curled up. "Right." Ed turned to leave, and made it halfway across the room before he paused and said, "Colonel?"

"Mm?" Roy grunted.

"Thanks for the... reminder. I need to hear that, sometimes."

Roy was impassive. "You can thank me by not getting yourself nearly killed again."

Ed gave him a lopsided grin. "I'll try my best, sir," he said, and left.

~o{}o~

Shadows were falling over the city as Roy set off for home that evening. He'd managed to get a hold of Havoc and Breda, and they'd gone out for a beer together after work.

He had tried not to let it upset him, the extent to which his friends had moved on while he'd been busy wallowing in guilt. Jean had a steady girlfriend now whom he was crazy about. He was thinking of proposing, so he'd spent most of the evening peppering Roy and Heymans with questions about what kind of ring they thought he should buy, and what kind of gimmick he should use to surprise her. Heymans, meanwhile, was expecting his first child.

It had been weeks since he'd seen Riza. He needed to call her again, so they could -

The sound of a familiar voice caught his attention. On the side of the road to his left, a wrought-iron gate stood open, and a winding path lead to a classic mansion-style building with three floors and ivy trailing over the brickwork on the outside. The fence encircled the outside to create a yard that wasn't huge, but still large by city standards.

I can afford a distraction, he thought. After all, he didn't have anyone waiting for him at home like his friends did.

As he moved closer to the house, he could see that the inside had been completely rebuilt, and that some of the furniture had even been replaced. It was still missing a few outer walls and a front door, though. A figure clad in black and bright yellow was working a hammer over the roof tiles, while another figure in brown was looking up at him.

The one on the ground had a long blond ponytail that swished back and forth as he moved. Roy watched as Ed slapped his hands on the concrete, using the detritus that someone had gathered into a pile to raise the outside wall of the house.

"Thanks, Edward!" The man on the roof called. "Can you do that one next?" He pointed to the decorative panel separating the gardens in the back from the backyard of the property adjacent to it.

"I'm on it." Ed walked up to the crumpled slab, which appeared to be green and crafted of some strange, unfathomable material. He studied it for a moment with his chin propped on his hand. When he came across the split in the slab where it had broken in three pieces, he peered into a crevice, and a look of comprehension dawned on his face. Roy could have sworn he heard Ed murmur _Alkali granite_ before he clapped his hands.

"Ricardo!" he called, once his transmutation was complete. "Anything else you need help with?"

The man – Ricardo – stopped briefly to look at Ed's work, and grinned appreciatively. "No, that's good enough for today. Thanks, man!"

Ed brought his hand to his forehead in a mock salute and flashed Ricardo a slanted grin. That was when Ricardo noticed the figure in the blue uniform standing on the pavement below. Ed followed his line of sight and spotted Roy standing on the sidewalk. "Hey, Colonel. Didn't expect to see you here."

"Evening, Fullmetal." Roy gestured toward the abode in progress. "Got a little distracted, did we now?"

"Nah, I finished with the tunnels a few hours ago. I was just helping this guy rebuild the retirement home where his grandmother lived before the attack." He looked back as he was leaving and smiled at the construction worker, who was now edging down a ladder to the second floor fire escape. The man released his grip on the ladder for a second to wave at Ed before throwing his hand back on it to avoid falling off, and Ed chuckled.

"I'm surprised," Roy said mildly, as the two of them exited the front gates a minute later.

"How come?" Ed returned, just as casually.

"Knowing you, I'd expected someone covered in sewer sludge and crumbs of cobblestone and cement. I've been waiting all day for an incident report to come knocking on my door."

Ed smiled. "By that logic, you should be covered in ink and paper cuts. But you're not, 'cause you probably slacked off all day, right?"

"Maybe I'm just better at keeping my hands clean than you are."

"Yeah, you're certainly better at getting other people to do your dirty work for you."

Roy smiled back. It was nice, just ambling side by side, enjoying their repartee. They traded a few more insults before falling silent; Ed walked then with his hands in pockets, strolling down the streets with Roy as the odd silhouettes of incomplete buildings bent and stretched and intensified. The neighbourhood was quieter than usual, with only a few denizens roaming the sidewalks and alleys. Their silence now was one that was considerably awkward, and Roy wondered why Ed was following him for a second before he realised that his apartment was, for this stretch of the distance, in the same direction as Ed and his brothers'. So they really had no choice but to walk together.

Roy decided that he'd had enough of silence for the day. "You don't look like someone who's been doing construction work all day," he said to his companion. "Aren't you exhausted?""

"Not at all," Ed replied. "Metal and gears don't tire." He raised his right hand and watched the mechanical joints work as he opened and closed his fist.

"You know, maybe it's not so bad that I'm stuck with these," he said, grinning. "They do have their advantages."

Stuck with them?

Roy extended an arm to block Ed from the road. A car whooshed past them as he said, "So I take it you've given up on regaining your original limbs?"

Ed nodded. "It isn't worth the price. But..." His expression turned more serious. "Given the chance, I would still willingly give up my last arm to get Al's memories back. Hell, I'd give up my alchemic abilities forever, if that's what it took. Al knows enough alchemy for the both of us."

"Fullmetal," Roy began, with a warning in his tone. "You aren't - "

"I know, I know." Ed waved him off. "Don't worry, I'm done chasing the Stone."

They crossed the road. "Then why are you still here?"

"What do you mean?"

"After you were cleared of all charges pertaining to the Liore incident, you could've failed the re-certification test and been freed from your higher-ups wouldn't have questioned the deteriorated state of your abilities after two years of disuse. So why didn't you? You've always hated being the military's lapdog, and you shouldn't need our special resources if you're not after the Philosopher's Stone anymore."

Ed shrugged. "Al and I need the money," he tossed out. He tried to seem nonchalant, but the sombre expression on his face betrayed him.

He looked down at his hands, careworn and mismatched in front of him, and said, "Besides, after all the deaths I've caused, I thought I should work off some of my debt to society."

Roy nodded solemnly. He knew that feeling of obligation all too well. "Trust me, I understand."

Ed looked up. Roy was gazing back at him dolefully, with the slightest of smiles. "For my part in Ishval, and my failure to save Selim Bradley three years ago, I could never make amends." He tilted his head up towards the sky. "And Hughes..."

"Yeah, Hughes..."

There was a pause in which the two of them looked at each other in perfect understanding. Roy had the feeling that something had changed, and that things were going to be different between the them from now on.

He also knew exactly what Maes would want him to do, if he was still alive. In his mind's eye, he could see his late friend adjusting his glasses, looking sidelong at him, nudging at him to say what was on his mind.

"Edward."

Something in Roy's voice made Ed turn towards him.

Roy looked him in the eye. "I'm sorry I yelled at you at the hospital. That was inconsiderate of me, especially considering the state you were in."

Better late than never, he thought. Ed gave him a tiny smile, and then shook his head. "It's nothing," he assured him. "Forget about it."

A reply that most people would have been relieved to get, but something about it bothered Roy. The way he was so quick to forgive, and his expression, it was almost like -

"You think you deserved it."

Ed flinched.

"Didn't I?" he said softly.

A small, intrinsic part of Roy wanted to say _Yes, you kind of did, _but he just couldn't bring himself to do so, and he was left speechless once again. Had he changed from his old self at all? It was one thing to be appropriately firm, and quite another to be cold to someone he cared about.

Roy told him, "No. You made a mistake, but nothing so severe that you deserved to be yelled at while you were so badly injured. I let my emotions get the better of me, because I was afraid that - " He cut himself off before he said too much.

"Afraid of what?" Ed asked cautiously.

Roy paused at a stop sign, halting abruptly in his walk. Across the street from this intersection was the entrance to his apartment. He could do one of two things here: prevaricate and then make an easy escape, or actually answer the question.

He couldn't meet Ed's eyes while speaking, but he did speak the truth.

"I was afraid that you would never stop throwing yourself into life-threatening situations, and that someday I was going to lose you again."

He set off across the street then, leaving Ed standing on the curb. If Ed said anything in reply, he didn't hear it.

Once he got to the other side, Roy watched Ed's back as he walked away. When Ed was out of sight, Roy took out his wallet and regarded the single picture sitting in the photo slot for a very long time.

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~o{}o~

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A/N:

I know, a lot of chitchat. I'm sorry if it's boring, but I tried D: Anyway, you can expect new chapters weekly, or biweekly at the longest; I have most of this story already written out, so I'm definitely going to finish it. It'll just take some time to turn each part into something that's actually coherent.

~Vina


	3. Chapter 3

"I was such an ass when I was thirteen," Ed was saying with a grin, as he thumbed through a wrinkled, faded report. The handwriting was uneven and barely legible, but he had little trouble deciphering it.

"Most boys are, at that age," Roy noted.

"That's true, but listen to this: 'In my examination of the substance, alchemic modifications I performed revealed the electrostatic potential of the polyatomic ions in the compound mentioned in paragraph five, and I was able to apply them in a protonation to create the conjugate acid necessary for the main experiment. Would explain further but I do not believe the reviewer of this piece has the capacity to understand.' I think this was after you told me that I had to be 'more comprehensive' in my reports."

"Ah, yes," he said lazily. As Ed was reading out loud, the memory of rolling his eyes at those particular documents had made it to him through the intervening years. "Most teenage boys are insufferable by virtue of just being teenage boys; I had the privilege of having to deal with one who was also a prodigy."

"There's something you can brag to your coworkers about in the future." Ed said jokingly. "Tell 'em how you survived dealing with a prodigal ass for four years."

"Only four years?" Roy drawled.

"Only four," Ed told him firmly.

It was one of those long days where the characters inked on the paper in front of him were not being computed in his brain, and he read the same paragraph over and over while Ed sat a few feet away and flipped through folders as if he had a photographic memory.

Ed had made it his personal mission lately to dig up as many files as he could on his own adventures from ages twelve to sixteen. Every week, he would visit the Central HQ's records and pull a couple out for viewing. Instead of squatting in the storage room or going for a walk down to the library, though, he would take them to Roy's office and they would chat in between lines of reading. It pleased Roy, even if they spent most of the time doing their customary sniping at each other.

"Al is going to love this," Ed remarked, as he skimmed over the rest of the report with a fond look. "This morning, he was telling me how entertaining my old reports were to read, even if he couldn't remember any of what I talked about." His face fell slightly at the last words. It was a slight change, almost imperceptible, but not to those few who were practised at reading his expressions.

"You need to value the ten years you have between you," Roy reminded him, for what might have been the tenth time.

"I do value them," he said. He turned a page. "Especially now..."

Roy gave up on his reading and slid a form across his desk. The most he could do while preoccupied with other thoughts like this was filling in boxes with names, dates, and addresses; simple tasks that didn't require much concentration to complete.

"Most children can build a solid foundation of memories in ten years, though." Roy's pen paused at an empty box marked _DD/MM/YY._ "I doubt Elysia will remember much of her father after a couple more."

And there he was again, back to depressing thoughts instead of realism. He must have taken more of the frigidity of the north with him here than he'd expected.

It was a struggle, but even if he could never get out of this pit and stay out of it, maybe he could at least find a way to bear it. At least he had Ed, who understood him, and responded calmly without batting an eye, where another person might have gaped at him in horror and rushed to cajole him with empty reassurances. With him, Roy could speak his mind, at least.

"She'll have her mother to remind her," Ed pointed out. "And you."

Roy gave him a little smile. "I suppose she will."

"How are you coping with it?" Ed asked. He didn't need to clarify what 'it' was.

Their conversations had a good balance. There was the sniping, and then there was that.

Over the days and weeks since the case of the Amter Street serial kidnapper had been closed, and since their talk on the twilight streets of Central, the shift Roy had been anticipating had unfolded itself. It had been a gradual thing, but they had soon found themselves talking more and more about their personal lives, when before their exchanges were centered exclusively around work. Ed talked about Al constantly; Al's current subject of study, Al's progress, and how proud he was seeing how Al's skills had advanced while he was gone. When he wasn't overworking himself contributing to the reconstruction efforts, or monitoring his brother's studying, he was finding files to bring to him in hopes of sparking some memories.

Each time Al showed a flash of recognition, it gave him hope. Eventually it had lead him to theorise that it was the soul that carried a person's memories, not the brain. The analogy he made was that the brain was just the storage facility, the biological file cabinet, and he was convinced that Al's memories were buried in his psyche somewhere. He would do whatever he could to help excavate them.

"Al told me this morning that there's some contamination in the water supply of one of the southern blocks," Ed was saying to him. "Is that true?"

"I think so. I heard about that yesterday; they're working on isolating the source of the spill as we speak."

"How is Central still having these problems? It's been months."

"These are the kinds of things that tend to happen after a natural disaster, Fullmetal. It's probably going to continue until the city has been completely reestablished."

Ed nodded. "There was also a security breach in the restricted section of the library a few days ago. When I went there yesterday one of the staff told me that some blueprints for a government-operated facility were stolen, although I didn't catch the name of the place." He pushed his bangs out of his eyes, drawing Roy's attention to his face.

Sometimes, as Ed spoke, Roy would catch himself studying the curve of his cheekbones, the sharp plane of his nose, and the other contours of his visage, all of which had changed significantly since he was sixteen. Ed was usually smooth-shaven, but like Roy, every once in a while other things would get in the way and he would forget. Along with the easy cadence of his voice, and all that long hair that was always neatly tied back into a ponytail, Ed's appearance became a pleasantly familiar sight.

"We're short on personnel," Roy said. "So the people managing desk jobs are more likely to be pulled out first, and there won't be as many eyes on the lookout for intruders. In fact, I think - "

A rap on the door sounded through the room.

Roy let the pen drop from his hand. "Come in."

It was his second lieutenant, Marcel Brookefield. Portly and ruddy-faced as ever, the man appeared in the doorway and seemed to become nervous as his eyes found his boss. Roy was used to seeing this change in countenance whenever he came within a twenty feet radius of this lieutenant. He didn't know what that said about him, the fact that he made the members of his new team nervous on a daily basis. Especially since he had not been particularly harsh or icy towards them, as some commanding officers were.

Brookefield bit his lip and made to step in closer, but then he noticed Ed sitting on the sofa, and his face brightened.

"Hello, Mr. Elric, sir." The lieutenant stood up straight, saluting the less intimidating superior. "How's the paperwork coming along?"

"It's as exciting as ever," Ed said tiredly, returning the salute with a brief tap of his hand against his forehead. The practiced smile that Ed used when talking to most people other than his brother manifested on his face. "How's that backflip you were telling me about last time?"

"It's going great! I didn't even fall on my face last time - "

"Lieutenant," Roy interrupted. "Is there something you need to tell me?"

His assistant was immediately back to being wooden again, with his arms glued to his sides.

"Forgive me, Colonel," he said stiffly. "I just came in to remind you that it's almost four o'clock."

Roy usually kept his pocket watch in the breast pocket of his uniform; it was there today, so he pulled it out. He flipped it open, glanced at it and sighed.

"I have a meeting in five minutes, so I'd better get going," he told Ed, before getting up from his chair. "Come back tomorrow; I have something for you."

~o{}o~

"What do you mean, you don't have a new assignment for me?" Ed asked him exasperatedly, when he returned to the office the next day.

Roy was rummaging through the drawers of his desk, cursing as the folder he was looking for continued to elude him. "If you'll recall, I said that I had something for you, but not that it was another assignment."

"Well, what is it then?"

"Be patient. I'm looking for it."

A faded greyscale corner peeked out a him from the edge of a manila file folder at the very bottom of one of his top drawers. Roy tugged at it and an entire newspaper came out attached. He handed it to Ed, who shot him a confused expression.

"A section of _Central Times_ from six years ago," Ed murmured, as he took note of the date on the paper. "Why are you giving me this?"

"Take a look at the second page. I think you'll find that it's worth a read."

Ed folded the page back and found the title of interest. "_Alchemist Sets Fire Station on Fire," _he read aloud. Recollection dawned on him, and he covered his face with one hand in embarrassment, unable to keep the sheepish smile away. "I can't believe you dug this up. I was happy to have forgotten about it a long time ago."

"I would imagine," Roy said with amusement. "You failed to give me a report on that mission because of outstanding circumstances, so it wouldn't be in the records, or if it is, it'll be buried underneath the reports that do exist. I thought it was memorable enough to be worth the effort to find."

"So that I can show it to Al?"

"Exactly."

He shook his head in wonder. "Where did you even get this?"

"Us higher-ups have our ways," Roy answered elusively.

"Well, thank you." He pretended to peer into Roy's face with suspicion, but he was still smiling. "Let me guess. There's something you want in return, right?"

"Just your company for a while." Roy tapped the side of the grey porcelain cup on his desk with a knuckle. "Care for a cup of coffee?"

"Sure."

As Ed sat down with another mug, it struck Roy how bizarrely domestic this whole scene appeared: Ed reading the news with a steaming cup of coffee in hand, exchanging thoughts with Roy as he tried to focus on overdue papers. They could almost be family members doing their morning routine, instead of two soldiers at work in a military base.

In one way, this day was no different than the one before it. Roy was still inattentive, and when his companion became engrossed in his paper and stopped talking to him, his eyes drifted around the room, seeking distraction. There was a rustle that drew his gaze to the floor behind the sofa; Ed's overcoat, which he had hung over the back of the sofa, had slipped off and landed in a heap on the wooden boards.

When he brought it to Ed's notice, Ed leaned over the back of the sofa, picked it up, and put it on instead of rehanging it. After thanking Roy he turned away and immersed himself back in the article, and Roy's attention was left to wander again. After a minute, it came to fall on the rest of Ed's outfit, an assortment of brown and white which was markedly different from the attire that the rest of the force wore.

According to what he'd told Roy, when Ed had been recertified, he'd discovered that the standard military uniform was slightly too loose for him even in its smallest size, so he'd opted to just wear his own clothes as he always had. The red cloak with the Flamel's Cross insignia on the back had been permanently discarded, though, in favour of a simple suede coat, a vest, trousers, and a white linen shirt. Ed wore versions of this set with slight variations, but these particular garments seemed to be his favourites.

Before Ed had to leave again, Roy's curiosity got the best of him, and he inquired, "Why do you always wear the same outfit?"

The question caught his subordinate by surprise. "This?" he asked. He looked down at himself. "My father gave it to me, when I arrived in the other world. I suppose you could say it's all I have left of him." He smiled, but there was a touch of sadness to it. "And besides, I like it. Isn't that reason enough?"

It was a game effort, but his attempt at skirting around his grief didn't go over Roy's head.

Yet another loss, Roy had thought, when he'd first gotten the news of Hohenheim's death. After Ed returned and they'd had time to reconvene, everyone had been given a short, to-the-point explanation of where the hell Ed had been for two years. Their happiness at getting their friend, colleague, and brother back, however, had been dampened by this sobering news – you really had to wonder how many loved ones someone could lose before spiraling down into a deep void of depression.

Gloomy flashbacks aside, Roy had to admit, silently, that it lent as much sophistication and maturity to his appearance as any military uniform would.

"Are you sure you're alright? You can talk to me, you know."

"I know." That smile again. "But there's nothing to talk about." He was at the door, but paused with his hand on the doorknob. "He sacrificed himself so I could be here right now. I figure I should just make the best of it."

~o{}o~

That evening, Roy was back to roaming the streets again, although he had to do it alone this time. Havoc, Braeda and Hawkeye were all busy tonight and had declined to come here with him. Riza couldn't have even if her schedule had been free of previous engagements; she was being sent to Eastern Command and her train was leaving tonight. It had crossed his mind a few times to call Falman or Fuery, but Roy didn't even know where either man was currently stationed. They had lost touch after Roy had resigned as General.

He swerved to the right to avoid an oncoming cyclist. The light was fading, and with half of his field of vision missing, he always had to exercise more caution than the average person to avoid being run over on these streets.

The day after he had left Ed standing on the sidewalk in front of his apartment at dusk, he had taken a visit to see Elysia and her mother. A few days later he'd gone again, and another time a few days after that, and now he was coming in every Wednesday and Friday evening after work to spend time with Elysia, to watch her play with dolls and doodle in colouring books. Usually, these visits would lighten his day, but during his last one, he and Gracia had been reminiscing about her late husband, and Elysia had asked him, "Did Daddy always wear glasses?"

It hadn't been completely out of the blue. They had been looking at a framed picture of Hughes in his uniform, pushing his spectacles up. Roy had told the girl that yes, he had, although he would take them off briefly when he was being very serious. Elysia's next question had been "Was he serious a lot?" and he'd replied as cheerfully as before, but inside her words had struck a melancholy chord. He couldn't stand to think that his best friend's darling daughter could forget such basic things about her father.

Roy himself didn't remember anything from before six years of age, and it saddened him inexorably to see how in a couple of years, Elysia might forget her father completely. It had been the only thing on his mind lately, and there was no reprieve for it. There was nothing that could make it better.

He turned back to what Ed had told him in the office today, that he should make sure to stick around to commemorate his fallen comrade. It was a nice sentiment, but the more he mulled it over, the more he was convinced that it was going to be impossible. He couldn't revive what was dead; without the man himself hanging around, keeping Maes' memory alive in his daughter's mind seemed like a monumental task.

Three dirt-laden steps nestled in the side of a restaurant building took him down, into an old haunt that was only known by word of mouth on the streets. It wasn't in the public registry, because it wasn't officially a bar. It was more of a private enclosure where people went to be anonymous, to forget, or so word on the street went. Forgetting wasn't his prerogative, though. He was interested in it because it was a place where he could let his uniform dissolve away and just be a normal man. There was little possibility that anyone would recognise him in this side of the city.

Dim orange light and the smell of cheap cigarettes greeted him once he got past the doorman and stepped inside. The room was slightly smaller than the cafeteria room in his office building, with dark floors and furnishings the colour of coffee beans. Couches and love-seats were artfully arranged around the room to form neat circles along the perimeter. Roy chose a seat at the counter far from any other patrons and ordered a few shots of whiskey.

While he waited for his drink, he allowed himself to relax, exhaling slowly, and took in his surroundings.

There wasn't much to see. The occupants of the room were all male, dressed in drab or nondescript clothing, and many of their faces were hidden by the shadows of their hats. Everyone was either huddling with a friend or keeping to themselves.

In one smoky corner of the bar, two men were tangled on a sofa with their faces locked together, moving slowly. It took him a moment to register what was going on, but as he looked around, he saw a few other, similiar forms in the same positions, each of them coalescing and syncretising into one, and understood.

He'd unwittingly walked into a gay bar - typical. At least no one was hitting on him, or seemed to want to; the eyepatch must have scared any potential risk takers off, although he thought he could see a few men here and there sneaking looks at him. They turned away immediately when he returned their glances, and he settled back into his little niche on the bar stool. He didn't feel up to flirting with anyone tonight, anyway.

Watching the lovers in the corner writhing and squirming, he realised how long it had been since he'd been intimate with someone, and how much longer still since he'd been with another man. He'd had very few thoughts about sex during his self-imposed exile in the north.

It occurred to him suddenly that if he were to kiss another man again, the one whom he would mind kissing the least right now was, in fact, Ed.

As soon as the idea planted itself in his mind, it began to take root and grow, and it was impossible to stop. He could picture Ed clearly in his mind: a study in shades of gold, amber, ochre, and beige. The fire in his eyes that was always there, looming in the background and waiting for a reason to flare up again, no matter how discouraged or despondent he got.

Roy's imagination took this vivid picture and began affixing to it what it might feel like to kiss Ed: how he would taste, how his lips would feel, how skilled he may or may not be…probably not, but there was no way to know for certain.

As he pondered over the question of what kissing Ed would be like, the very last thing that he was chagrined to discover was how much he curious he truly, honestly, was about the answer.

He closed his eyes. No. He had to clear his mind of these illicit thoughts. He couldn't be having them now, not when this closeness and friendship he had with Ed was still so fresh and new. Not even after, because afterwards they would be coworkers still, and not to mention in different ranks. Not ever.

His surroundings were useless for distraction. As he swirled the honey-like liquid in his shot glass around in circles, listening to the ice cubes clinking, he was only reminded of the colour of Ed's eyes.

Sighing, he rubbed his face, concluding resignedly that this was nonsense was all in a day's hyperactive musings. He hadn't even touched his drink yet, and he was thinking things that he wouldn't normally be thinking even when he was at his most inebriated. He needed to place himself in someone else's company, or there was no telling what other crazy, intractable ideas his brain would cook up.

Slapping a few bills on the counter, he removed himself from his seat and went to find a phone.

.

~o{}o~

.

In the ensuing week, Roy received seven more minor assignments of the same variety as Ed's last one to give to his officers, and two of them he had forwarded to Ed. That had made five for Ed in the past month so far, and they had all been right there in Central. No doubt Liore had their own problems, but being a smaller locality with a lesser population, they were having an easier time recovering than the country's capital city. If there was anything in their lives that evinced how thinly spread the officers of Central were, though, it was that an alchemist of Ed's reputation and calibre was running around doing grunge work. Roy would probably have been doing the same, but the skill of being able to start a fire with a snap had very few applications in construction work. He was better put to use as an administrator, and he didn't mind that.

Conversing with Ed and watching him read reports instead of doing his paperwork had almost become a routine for him when they met up, now. Today he was thinking that Ed's coat may not have been washed since its last use, because there were some long strands of what appeared to be brown fur dusting the front.

"Did your previous mission require you to go wrestling wild animals?" Roy asked him, ending their brief silence.

"What?"

Roy gestured to his shirtfront.

"Oh, it's just cat hair," he said.

Roy raised an eyebrow at him.

"They're from Al's cats," he explained, chuckling. He brushed them away, but not with any sign of annoyance; he seemed almost halcyon instead. With a daydreamy look, he went on, "When his pets were climbing all over me this morning, he told me he remembered something about a cat that he wanted to have once that we had to give away." His eyes shimmered with hope. "I can bring his memories back. I'm sure of it now."

Squinting thoughtfully at Ed and his sureness of himself, Roy retraced his own assessment of his subordinate from the night at the bar, and found it to be accurate. Eyes of gold, heart of gold, and the fire of his unflinching strength. Though his own dabblings in metallurgy had not been too extensive, even Roy knew that those last two combined were finer than any mineral could ever be.

He stopped short. Cat hair and shades of gold? When had he started noticing these things? When had he started _thinking_ these things?

The exact time and place he couldn't quite pinpoint, but he supposed the better question would be why, not when.

_Am I actually..._

He knew the answer without having to finish thinking the question. He knew it, and he couldn't rationalise it or try to explain it away, not even to himself.

It came to his attention that he was sitting there like an idiot, staring at Ed with his jaw slack, so he closed his mouth and snapped back to his work. Ed, as blissfully oblivious as ever, was smiling and asking him what was wrong. The smile had a different quality to it now, with the newfound knowledge that Roy had to go with it. It made him a little brighter, as if he was a star drawing everything towards his light, and it was a little more difficult for Roy to meet his eyes.

"Do I have more fur on my back or something?" Ed prodded. "Colonel? What's wrong?"

Roy cleared his throat. "Nothing. It's nothing," he said dismissively. But as the words tumbled out, he couldn't help thinking that they had come out a little less smoothly than they should have, and that they had a fraction less confidence behind them than they usually would have. And why was Ed peering at his face, looking at him as if he could read every thought that was racing through his mind? He was digging his own grave.

.

~o{}o~

.

A/N:

Notes on characterisation: I'm portraying Roy as a of lonely war vet kind of figure, and Ed as just a really nice, seemingly-normal-on-the-surface guy – albeit one who's intelligent, quite emotional, prone to sarcasm (note his exchanges with Fritz Lang), etc - because if you pay attention to their interactions with the other characters in Conqueror of Shamballa, that's what they come across as. I'm basing Roy and Ed's behaviour here on how they acted in CoS.

It should go without saying, but thanks to everyone who reviewed so far. However short or long they are, reading a review brightens my day. :)

~Vina


	4. Chapter 4

There were certain boundaries that one simply didn't cross in professional environments. As a rising commander, Roy had always done well at maintaining these boundaries, but it was already too late when he realised that he was far into the wrong side of one, and that, of all people, he'd gone there for Ed.

He wasn't supposed to feel attracted to one of his subordinates, but then, he had done quite a few things that he wasn't supposed to have done. Compared to assassinating his country's head of state, wanting to kiss Edward Elric was barely even a misdemeanor. Or at least that was what he would tell himself with great derision, as he gazed out his window into an empty courtyard and obstinately avoided his paperwork. Hawkeye wasn't there to threaten him with her gun, and she might never be again, so he would have to find some other motivation for himself. But not today.

"Excuse us, sir," a muffled voice said, emanating from the direction of his office doors. His first lieutenant, Thaddeus Ogden, had a warm and smooth baritone that put Roy at ease when he spoke.

"May we come in?"

Roy swivelled his chair around. "Yes, come in."

The issue stretched beyond just the crime of fraternisation. His job required him to keep some distance between himself and his subordinates so that he could always remain objective, capable of making important decisions in the event of an emergency, and it was inevitable that this was going to compromise that.

If this litany in his head wasn't enough, every memory of Ed and their relations from when they had first met had replayed in his mind over the past few days, in an endlessly demeaning film strip of reasons why him feeling this was ridiculous: Ed at eleven, lying one-armed and one-legged in a cot with his shoulder wrapped in white gauze, while Roy looked on with clinical detachment. Ed over a year later, shaking with grief, tears running down his face as Roy seized his wrist and berated him in harsh tones devoid of any kind of compassion; it went on and on from there.

Brookefield came in on Ogden's heels, scuttling like a crab on his short legs. They stood at each other's sides just inches from Roy's desk, and the comedy duo vibe came into effect, despite the grave expressions they were trying to appropriate.

"Colonel, we have something important to tell you," Ogden said. "Sir? Are you listening?"

Ed couldn't possibly feel the same way. Why would he? Sure, they were friends now, but for years before there had hardly been anything but animosity between them. There wasn't a doubt in his mind that Ed could never think of him as anything other than his commanding officer and friend. He never spoke about any possible romantic interests, or any attraction he had to another person, and to all appearances he seemed practically asexual. Roy knew that he wasn't only from picking up on subtle clues throughout the years.

Worse was that what he was seeing in Ed now was the same thing he had trouble seeing in himself now - beauty, of more than one nature. And once he'd started to see it, he couldn't unsee it, or remember why he hadn't before. He had to have been blind.

"What is it?" Roy said impatiently. He reached for his coffee mug.

"Sir, we're sorry to disturb you, but we just got an important call regarding something that you probably want to hear about."

All doubts aside, after his epiphany in the office that day, it hadn't taken long for him to decide that fighting his feelings was a stupid thing to do. He'd accepted his concupiscence for an inferior officer fourteen years his junior just as easily as he'd accepted the fact that he was probably never going to work with his old team again. He was a grown man, experienced and mature, not a boy on the brink of puberty struggling with his first crush.

Besides, as long as he kept everything inside the confines of his head, there would be no consequences to endure. No one was ever put on trial for their thoughts.

The two men standing before Roy glanced at each other. Their boss had something on his mind and didn't want to be disturbed; that much was clear. But if they kept stalling like this, it would likely only serve to irritate him further. Giving his partner a minute nod, Brookefield elected himself to be the one to drop the bomb.

"Alaric Matthias disappeared from his holding in Central Penitentiary just half an hour ago," Brookefield said.

Roy froze with his drink halfway to his mouth. "_What?" _

"Mr. Alaric Nathaniel Matthias," Brookefield recited. "Put on trial for kidnapping, assault and battery three weeks ago, and sentenced to two years with indefinite release in Central Penitentiary For The Ins- "

"I know who he is," Roy snapped. "But that facility hasn't had a break-out in over twenty years, so you better start explaining, Lieutenant."

Picking up on his friend's anxiety, Ogden took over, saying, "We don't yet know, sir. Security has the asylum in lockdown and the immediate surrounding area has also been closed off. They've called a squad in, but there's no sign of him or his accomplice, and they're not even sure if he's still there."

Roy abandoned his drink. "I see," he said brusquely. He got up from his seat and grabbed his jacket.

"You're going after him?" Ogden again.

"That's right. There's no way in hell that we're going to let him escape again, especially not after what he did to Fullmetal." Roy took off on a brisk walk towards the door, his voice a low growl in his throat. "Lieutenant Ogden, call the asylum to let them know that we're coming, and then both of you holster your weapons and come with me outside. The facility is in the southwest institutional district, only a couple miles from here."

"Yes, sir," Ogden said.

"Ah, y-yes, sir," Brookefield fumbled, once again on his partner's heels as the three of them left Roy's office.

The path they had to take out of the building was long, much too long, and Roy was tapping his foot restlessly by the time Ogden and Brookefield finally clambered into their car and Ogden started the engine. Roy fired off directions at Ogden, and they were on their way.

He watched houses and sidewalks blur through the window as he simmered, arms crossed. He was absolutely certain now that the blueprints that had been stolen from the government library over a week ago had been that of the Central Penitentiary. It was the only explanation. The asylum was one of only three in all of Amestris, and the largest, and it was a highly secure facility with a good reputation. There was no way to successfully break in or out of the place, unless you had something to give you an edge, like a map that showed every window, door and passageway, and an extremely sharp mind. Whoever they were dealing with was not to be taken lightly.

He could only hope that the news of this wouldn't spread too quickly. The last thing he needed was for Ed to somehow catch wind of it, and then go on a rampage after the man. Luckily, he wasn't scheduled to come in and receive his next assignment for a few days, so he probably would not be walking the halls of Central Command today, privy to the gossip of the officers there.

Fifteen minutes later, Odgen said, "We're here, sir."

Ogden had parked in the street next to the asphalt path leading up to the main gates, and as they rushed out of the car and up the path, the asylum edged into view.

There was nothing stereotypical about Central Penitentiary. It wasn't ominous or gloomy–looking, blanketed in thorny undergrowth, or looming above them to the backdrop of a dark grey sky. There were guards posted outside the main entrance, but the entrance and the fencing connected to it were not cold wrought-iron bars, but solid stone walls, speckled black like quail eggs. Stone was unlikely to rust, of course, and the smooth surface was useless for providing footholds for climbing. The asylum was surrounded on one side by dense deciduous forest and on the other by a factory, and resembled a cross between an industrial building and a giant, sprawling townhouse.

Beyond the gates there was cleanliness and trimmed green lawns, and there would have been peace too, if it weren't for the groups of armed soldiers standing around and all the shouting that was going on.

"I need to speak with the highest-ranking officer present here," Roy told one of the soldiers, and was directed to a hulk in a blue uniform, who appeared to be around his age.

The man saw them heading towards him and bodily blocked them from side gate that exited into the forests. Roy's lieutenants stood a safe couple of feet behind him, leaving him to deal with the chief alone.

"Roy Mustang," the man said over the din, deliberately rolling the name off his tongue.

He'd only spoken three syllables, but Roy could make out the undisguised contempt in his tone, and in the narrowing of his eyes. This soldier obviously knew Roy, or at least about him, although Roy didn't recognise him at all.

"Yes, that's me," he returned. He flicked a glance at the stars and stripes on the man's uniform. "Have we met before, Lieutenant Colonel?"

Rather than answering, the man seemed to bristle at the question. "Why are you here, Mustang?"

Roy kept his face blank and replied calmly, "One of my men was directly involved in the court case of Alaric Matthias. I came to make sure that he doesn't try to stick his nose in."

"If you mean Fullmetal, he isn't here," the lieutenant said, clearly indifferent and not going to be bothered to check. "So I suggest you leave. This is outside of your jurisdiction, probationer."

Behind Roy, Brookefield and Ogden were standing straight with their expressions carefully empty of emotion, pretending inattention. An absolute stranger was giving their commander a hard time, and they didn't know why, but it only took a moment for Roy to figure it out. This lieutenant colonel was one of the men who'd held a grudge against him before, for stealing a girlfriend or prospective girlfriend away, or something along those lines.

_How droll, _Roy thought. The man had probably had an aneurysm when he found out that Roy had been disfigured and then demoted to the bottom ranks.

"You can't order me to do that," Roy said flatly. They were wasting time, previous seconds in which their fugitive could be vanishing into the frontier and out of their grasps forever. "Despite my recent shortcomings, I still outrank you."

With that, he sidestepped the lieutenant colonel and walked away.

His newly restored military career, he thought, wasn't looking good so far: many of the other soldiers who hadn't been his friends with him before either hated him or were wary of him. And he still had several months left before his probationary hearing.

"I'm taking my men into the forest with me," Roy called, just before going out of earshot. "And the men you have stationed in that area are going under my command. If you don't like it, take it up with someone who outranks _me_ when we aren't in the midst of an security breach." He drew an ignition glove out of his pocket and pulled it on, marching resolutely towards the side gate.

A few seconds later they were making their way into the cover of the trees, their boots crunching into the leaves, twigs, and other debris that littered the forest floor. Rays of light speared through the canopy and provided them with just enough light to not blunder and trip on something.

As they trekked farther in, they met up with members of the squad that Ogden had mentioned. Roy exchanged a few words with each one, getting a sense of their strategy and correcting it when needed. Then he ordered Ogden to join them, and set off with Brookefield, whom he knew to be a good marksman. Brookefield could provide backup with his guns if Roy's alchemy failed him.

Now for the difficult part: the actual hunt. With no leads to guide them, and such a wide terrain to encompass, it was going to be more like groping around in the dark.

Roy had heard about the portable two-way radio transceivers that experts in the west were working on developing; if only he could get his hands on at least two of the things, he thought, this would be so much easier. Without something like that, they would have to rely on signal shots to communicate with each other, since the forest was in the way and each soldier could only see his own partner.

Moist earth and the scent of autumn decay filled his nose, and the cacophony of wild animals and the wind his ears. The fresh, cool air out here was this mission's only saving grace. Otherwise, it wouldn't be much of an improvement from the staring out an office window that he had previously been doing.

After hiking for about ten minutes, Roy told his lieutenant to stop and rested himself against a tree trunk. They'd seen nothing of interest so far, and it was time for a break.

Every minute, he could spot a different pair of heavily padded black uniforms creeping their way in and out of his sights. After five minutes, he hoisted himself up, ready to get on the move again, when another passing soldier caught his eye, one that stuck out from the rest: a short blond cloaked in dark brown, pressed against the bole of a old maple with a handgun cocked in his left hand instead of a sniper rifle. The long hair would have indicated a female officer, but there was no mistaking the outline of the body for female.

Roy fought the urge to groan out loud. Usually, he would be pleased to see this subordinate, but on this day it was the one thing that he had fervently hoped would not happen.

Ed saw him out of the corner of his eye, and did a double-take. He let his arms fall slightly and his grip on the gun to relax, and hopped his way over the sloping, uneven ground, and around the tree roots and boulders thrusting out of it, to reach Roy. Roy could identify him from a mile away just by way he moved: those fluid, lithe motions spoke of the hidden muscle and sinew underneath his vague clothing, and the lean frame that he had imagined running his hands over one too many times.

"Seems like we both had a similiar idea," Ed commented, when they'd come within speaking distance of each other.

Roy nodded briskly. "Who told you?"

"I heard someone talking about it as I was on my way to your office. Wasn't someone I knew."

"Alright," he said grudgingly. Of course he would choose this exact hour to make an impromptu visit to Roy's office. "But are you sure you should be here?

"Why shouldn't I?" Ed asked him defiantly. "Do you think I'm _scared _of that bastard?"

Roy let out a small sigh. "I didn't say that." He was angry, which could potentially be worse. At least if he was scared, he would be more likely to stay out of harm's way.

Or maybe not. Knowing him, fear of the psychopath who had sent him to the hospital just a few weeks ago would probably have made no difference whatsoever in his choices or actions. It was a characteristic that was equal parts admirable and frustrating.

"Fullmetal, stay out of this," Roy demanded. "He's probably got it out for you for testifying against him, and you coming here is just inviting disaster."

"I can't just leave," Ed said tightly, frowning. "Besides, weren't you the one who told me that I should catch him again if he commits another crime?"

"I meant that you should _arrest _him again if he commits another crime _after he's released_. Not if he escapes." Next time, he would be more specific. "Leave," Roy said vehemently, fighting the keep any pleading notes from entering his tone. Maybe he was being overprotective, maybe not. All he knew for sure was that he didn't want to see that nutcase lay another finger on Ed, and definitely not another blade. "That's an _order,_ Edward."

Ed shook his head and turned away. "I'm sorry, but I'm gonna have to disobey you this time."

Of course that wouldn't have worked.

"Listen to me _- " _Roy began, incensed, but Ed was already zipping away through the trees, leaving nothing behind but the faint flapping sound produced by the tail of his coat.

Brookefield, who had been standing there awkwardly the whole time watching them squabble, coughed to get Roy's attention and then requested instructions. Roy heaved a sigh and told him to join the rest of the sniper squad, and resigned himself to tailing his errant state alchemist.

When Ed noticed him following, he called out, "Wouldn't we cover more ground if we split up? Or are you going to babysit me now?"

''Given the mess he made of you last time, I wouldn't be so sure that you don't need it," Roy shot back.

Really, he was spending more time here arguing with people than doing what he came to do.

"Fine," Ed muttered. Then, "I'm looking for signs of someone on the move. The other soldiers have mostly stayed in the same positions since they came in, so any destruction left in the wake of someone running should lead us to him."

He took off again. Roy followed close behind, watching his back for him, and prepared himself for a very long and boring walk.

They had been trekking through the forest for almost half an hour when Ed finally found a sign. All of the disturbances in the brush or trees that they'd encountered so far had been other soldiers, with whom they had exchanged a crisp salute and updates before parting.

"He's here." Ed was crouched over a set of imprints in the dry mud caked between two rows of trees, touching the dampness of one with a finger. "These footprints are fresh, and the pattern doesn't match the standard issue military boots."

"I'd wonder why he would linger so long here, but the truth of the matter is that he's trapped," Roy said. "The Lieutenant Colonel has his troops scouring the area, and Matthias can't go back to into the city. He'd be recognised instantly."

He wanted to add "We'll catch him for sure" to that, but in this untamed environment with so many potential cubbyholes, he couldn't make such a promise with any amount of certainty.

Ed returned to his survey of the area, and Roy studied the wildlife. He was already bored out of his mind, and had been since before ten minutes were up; he really envied Ed's focus sometimes.

The woody plants scraping the sky all around them blocked out any sign of the industrial and correctional institutions that they bordered. If the two of them weren't tracking down a criminal, this place, sequestered away from the civilization that was so close to it, could be a peaceful bay of quiet and solitude.

A zephyr brushed his hair and whistled into his ears. Another one played with Ed's long tresses, whisking them up dramatically and tossing them like ribbons. His eyes had been keen and sharp the whole time, consistently analysing everything they took in, and as Roy watched him the words whispered through his mind without his consent.

_He's stunning. _

Roy bit down on the thought and forced himself to focus. In his abstraction, he'd lost awareness of his surroundings, which was precisely what he should not be doing.

_This, _he told himself severely, _i__s exactly why romance is prohibited in the workplace._

His luck must have been at its worst that day, because it was in that very moment of diversion that the bushes nearest to him began to rustle violently. Roy only pivoted in time to see an indistinct white figure leap out, a smear of light against the dark foliage.

"Edward!" he yelled on impulse.

He was a second too late. Ed had barely turned around in response when, quick and deadly as a viper, the figure hurled itself at him, slamming into him and tackling him to the ground in a tangle of limbs. The only sound Ed had time to make was a sharp and panicked intake of breath, before his assailant – now that Roy could see his face, he could see that it was Matthias - forced him into a hold with both arms twisted behind him.

Matthias hunkered over with one knee digging into Ed's back, holding the smaller man's head against the ground in a headlock. Ed, apparently deciding that it was a waste of energy, had already given up on resisting, and was just grimacing as he began waiting in his uncomfortable position for something that would give him a chance to get away.

Roy knew from reading his profile that Alaric Matthias was dangerous, but he hadn't seen it for himself until now. He'd never even glimpsed the man in real life before, but now, trapped in his thrall, he could see exactly what might fool someone into being lured into a trap by him.

From the exterior, Matthias didn't exude any aura of malice or give any sign of his true nature. He seemed the picture of an ordinary man: average height, neither fat or thin, and sporting a head of tousled chestnut hair. Brown eyes, and a shadow of stubble on his chin. He was wearing a plain white hospital gown, with no pockets or tight waistbands or other places that could possibly be used to conceal items, but had somehow gotten his hands on a pair of leather boots. From inside one of them, he pulled out a sleek streak of silver that was tipped with red. It couldn't be anything but blood – had he used it to cut someone?

More to the point, Roy thought furiously, _Where the hell did he get a knife?_ It didn't look transmuted, and if the weapon didn't come from the man's accomplice, and he sincerely hoped that it had, then he was going to have a word with the asylum's guards after this was over.

"Hello, Elric." Matthias's voice was a sibilant hiss, reinforcing the image of the huge viper chimera that Roy had first taken him for. He laid the knife delicately against Ed's throat. "Come to play with me some more?"

There was something else that was unusual about his words. Matthias spoke the official Amestrian tongue, but his accent didn't sound like it came from anywhere in the country. Roy filed that tidbit of information away in his memory, and then raised his hand to fire a signal shot in the sky. The explosion looked and sounded like a firework, flashy enough to catch the attention of every sniper in the cordoned vicinity. Soon Roy could hear crackling sounds moving towards them, gradually getting louder, and he was sure he could see a few black shadows surrounding them already.

"Hold your fire! Shoot only as a last resort!" Roy shouted, his voice booming into the wilderness. It was standard procedure, but he wasn't going to risk someone slipping up and forgetting.

Meanwhile, Matthias was still whispering in Ed's ear. "This is a familiar position, isn't it?" he was saying. The words were a jeer, but his tone wasn't taunting or vicious; it was matter-of-fact, almost emotionless, which somehow made them more disturbing, and nothing had changed in his expression while Roy had been calling in his troops.

"Go to hell," Ed spat.

"Let him go, Matthias," Roy said, brandishing his gloved right thumb and index finger. "Or I can burn the skin off your hands, if you'd rather."

It was a well-orchestrated bluff, delivered with utter conviction, but it was a bluff nonetheless. He wouldn't risk harming Ed, not when Matthias was in such close proximity to him.

A week before, he might have steeled his confidence in his own abilities and gone ahead with it.

"Don't," Ed strained to say. "He has a counter-array carved into his hand that will - "

"Shut up!" Matthias yelled, right into his captive's ear. Ed winced and closed his mouth. "I may be trapped in a world that I don't belong in, but that doesn't mean I'm going to let you people imprison me further while I'm here." He pressed the knife harder into Ed's skin. "Call off your men off, or I'll kill this boy."

When Roy stared him down unflinchingly, and everyone else remained silent, he cocked his head, tittered, "Don't believe me?" and swiped the blade; a thin, perfectly straight red line etched its way across Ed's neck.

Ed only glared sidelong daggers at him, eyes blazing. There wasn't even the slightest trace of fear present in his expression, and a kind of pained mix of affection and admiration clinched in Roy's chest at the sight of it.

"Don't you care about your officer, _Colonel?_" Matthias sneered.

_I do. More than any of you will ever know, _Roy thought, but out loud he said, "You have three seconds to let go of him, convict, or I'll put you up in flames. Three."

"That idiot girl didn't know anything," Matthias ranted. "She can't do nada to help me get home. The whole thing was pointless. _Pointless!"_

"Two."

"_After all the trouble I went to acquire her!_" Matthias yelled. "_Useless! And now look where it's gotten me!"_

"One."

Roy snapped his fingers, and a burst of fire whooshed into existence behind Matthias's back, the flames licking and catching on his thin gown. A hoarse scream ripped out of the man's throat; Roy knew that it felt excruciating, but he also knew that it wouldn't be enough to cause anything but some minor burns. It was, however, enough to get him to loosen his hold on Ed slightly so that Ed had some freedom to move.

Not wasting a single second, Ed wrenched his arms free, clapped his hands, and planted them firmly on Matthias's sides. All the hidden snipers within fifty feet watched with their mouths hanging open as the white fabric of their mark's prison attire twisted and morphed and reformed into two binds, one around his wrists and one around his ankles. His headlock on Ed loosened, and Ed used the opportunity to tug himself out of it and quickly backpedal away. Matthias tried to stand, but teetered and wobbled on his bound feet and landed with a resounding thump on the ground, throwing up a cloud of fine dust.

"It's over, Matthias," Roy declared.

"You've got me," Matthias grunted. "I surrender." Then he flailed his legs, throwing off a boot, and stuck out a bare toe, swiping it in quick strokes across the dirt.

_A transmutation circle,_ Roy realised, a split second after Ed evidently did, as he'd clapped his hands again and smoothed his automail into a sword in between one blink and another.

A spike of earth shot up from the ground between Matthias's feet, slicing a neat path through his bindings. There was a glint of steel, and both the convict and the officer moved almost too fast to track. The man on the ground moved to the attack, and the one standing slid into a defensive stance, his right arm raised protectively against his chest.

The snipers saw this and reacted. Several gunshots pierced the air at once, and every single one found their target: Red stains blossomed across Matthias's right arm and the right side of his chest, clearly visible against the white cotton of his top. He staggered for a moment, his breath coming in short gasps, before crumpling to the ground again.

Ed was staring, stricken, at the leaves from which the barrel of a smoking rifle was poking out, as the soldier who'd been behind the gun emerged from the bushes.

"Why did you - You didn't have to shoot him!"

Roy ignored him and knelt with one knee on the brush where Matthias had fallen. He pushed the straggly hair aside to feel for a pulse along the side of his neck; it was weak, but it was definitely there, and the man himself had definitely been incapacitated.

When he got up and turned around to signal an all-clear and order someone to call medical personnel, Ed was still arguing with the shooter, although he had come to his fallen attacker's side to check his breathing and pulse as well. With a grunt, he heaved the man onto his other side to use gravity to his advantage and slow the blood flowing out of his wounds. His hands were already drenched in it.

The sniper was a little distraught at being chewed out by a superior officer for doing his job. "With all due respect, sir," he was saying, with an beseeching note in his voice, "he could've killed you."

"I had it under control!"

_Famous last words,_ Roy thought grimly.

"Please, sir - " The rest of his squad had filed out already, but he was still standing there, gesticulating frantically while Ed shouted back at him over his shoulder, his hands busy applying pressure to Matthias's wounds.

Roy was watching all of this through his peripheral vision as he kept an eye out for incoming people. After a couple minutes, more uniforms arrived, and Roy beckoned them in. He explained the situation to the staff of the penitentiary and directed the medics to the scene of the crime.

First aid kits clicked open and directions flew back and forth, and Ed backed off, but he knelt within their circle as if he was one of them, watching them work.

"Is he going to make it?" he asked them worriedly.

"We can't be sure at this point," the sole woman in the group said, in detached tones. "He's lost a lot of blood."

In the subsequent silence, Roy thought he could hear the anguished wail of a woman crying amidst the shrieking of birds. It was a wild and feral sound that echoed into him from the depths of the forest, although it was probably just his imagination.

.

~o{}o~

.

As a form of revenge for wresting his control away from him, the lieutenant colonel who'd been in charge of the asylum had had all the paperwork for the entire Matthias incident transferred over to Roy, claiming that Roy would be able to offer a more detailed and accurate report on it, since he'd actually witnessed the whole scene as well as its aftermath.

It had taken him all morning to complete, and short of flinging all the papers off his desk in frustration, he'd thought about handing all the work over to his subordinates and lazing around for the rest of the day, or perhaps just taking a four-hour lunch break.

He didn't have to wait long for Ed to arrive.

Most people knocked and waited for Roy's approval before entering his office, but Ed always just burst through the doors and started talking with preamble. Today, as he closed the doors behind him, Roy could see that his collar fastened even higher up than usual, likely to hide the bandages around his neck from the prying eyes of outsiders. His face was bare, though, and crusted with drying scabs and rough patches.

Roy knew what he was going to ask, but waited for him to say the words anyway.

"Did he make it?"

Roy gave him a single nod. "He's stable right now. I just called to ask the same question five minutes ago."

What was unmistakably relief washed over Ed's features. He plopped himself on the sofa, in his usual corner next to one of the armrests, and Roy had a sudden feeling of déjà vu, although he didn't find the irony in this situation the least bit humourous.

"Thanks," Ed breathed. "I hate him for what he did to Sasha, but I didn't want him to _die._"

"I understand," Roy said softly. He shuffled Matthias's case file and his own reports into order. "Fullmetal, do you remember what you told me about the library? I've also received confirmation that the plans that were stolen from there a few weeks ago were those of the penitentiary."

Ed's eyes widened. "His accomplice took them so he could plan Matthias's escape."

"Yes. And whoever he is, he's still at large, and we don't know a thing about him. None of the soldiers I've questioned remember seeing anyone suspicious; in fact, most of them didn't see anyone at all."

"And he still has confidential files in his possession," Ed said through his teeth. "So is that it? He's just going to walk free?"

"If he tries this again, we're definitely not going to let him slip through our hands a second time," Roy said. He paused. The next piece of information he was going to divulge was even less pleasant, but it had to be given. Carefully, he continued, "There's something else you might want to know. The blows that Matthias took to the upper arm shattered the bone, and the doctors couldn't save the arm. They had to amputate it today."

Amputation was how grievous injuries were often treated on the battlefield, so it Roy hadn't been blindsided or perturbed by the news, but Ed, he was...different.

He watched for a reaction. Before, Roy would have kept such information from him, just as he had stashed away the news about the death of their mutual friend, but he wasn't going to compromise Ed's faith in him now. Ed was probably going to hear about it eventually, anyway, and he would rather it be from his mouth now, instead of twisted and perverted from the mouth of some random person on the streets later.

Ed gave him the same stricken look he'd had when he first realised that his fugitive had just been shot. He turned to the coffee table, breathing in and out slowly as his eyes fell on it.

"I can sympathise," he said, finally. Crossing his left arm over his chest, he lightly touched the place where bone met steel in his right shoulder.

"He put you in the hospital for three weeks, and you were raging at me earlier about how he got off too easily, but now you feel sorry for him."

"Yes."

"You're incorrigible."

Ed gave him a one-shouldered shrug and no response.

And a rarity, Roy thought, and for the first time began to consider what he'd told himself was impossible that morning the day before. Everything Ed had showed him so far, every perfection and flaw and pitfall, amounted to something that he was loathe to let slip away, so he made a mental note to think it over and weigh his options later. If he'd learned anything from all the fumbling he'd been doing during their mission, it was that keeping it all in his head was going to be nothing but a pipe dream.

"Is he going to be fitted with automail?" Ed asked him absently, like an afterthought.

"That I don't know. I doubt that he'd be able to pay for it, though, seeing as he's been out of work for months."

Ed turned away and back to his own thoughts. "Okay," he mumbled. "Thanks for telling me this." His eyes fell and stayed then on the documents laid out in front of him, which he'd probably left on the table yesterday, but Roy could tell he wasn't really reading it.

He sighed. "Ed, come here."

"Why?"

"Just come."

Ed went to stand before Roy's desk.

"Look me in the eye. Do you remember what I told you, after the trial was concluded?"

"Yeah," Ed replied wearily, like a student who'd been forced to study the same material over and over. "You told me to move on, to keep helping people as much as I could and to not lose too much sleep over the people I can't help."

"That's right. And now you're going to do it again. Got it?"

"Yes, sir." If he was the type to roll his eyes, he probably would have done it then. "You know that I know this lesson better than anyone, anyway."

"If I remember correctly, you thanked me for the reminder that time."

He leaned forward onto his hands, which were touching Roy's desk, and gazed down at them, tracing the whorls and grooves in the wood with a finger.

"You called me 'Ed'," he observed. A corner of his mouth was curled up. "Did you realise?"

Roy thought back over the last minute.

"I didn't realise, no," he said. And just in case his subordinate was under any illusions otherwise, he added sternly, "But it seems that I did accidentally refer to you by that informal nickname. Don't get used to it."

There was a possibility that he would have to take that back later on, but it always better to be insured.

Something akin to a smirk was growing on Ed's face, and Roy had a premonition of what he was going to say next. Before his officer could open his mouth, Roy tacked on, "And don't even _think_ about calling me by my first name."

"Now, why would I ever want to do that?" Ed cracked. He met Roy's gaze steadily, with a challenge in his voice and the smirk on full display.

Head-on like that, it was hopeless. Roy's breath caught, and he allowed himself, for the briefest of moments, to get lost in the light of Ed's eyes. The scrapes and scratches marring his fair skin didn't change a thing, he determined. Even roughed up like this, Ed was the kind of beautiful that he could never tire of looking at.

They were so close to each other, now. If he reached out to grab Ed's collar, Roy could have pulled him in for a kiss. He wanted nothing more in this sliver of time than to kiss the smug grin off his subordinate's face and reduce him to nothing but a flushed, breathless, and pliant boy of eighteen in his arms. Again he was caught in the fantasy of soft lips and static shock racing through him from the places where they would touch, and it took all of his self control to pull away, to stop himself from being tempted to make it a reality.

So maybe he wouldn't be always be able to keep his head straight while making decisions that directly involved this boy. It was a damn good thing, then, that Ed could take care of himself.

"You shouldn't," Roy said, once he'd put a safe amount of distance between Ed's face and his. "Now, if you're done sulking, I need to get back to work."

.

~o{}o~

.

A/N:

Unfortunately for Roy, the first walkie-talkies were invented in the mid-twentieth-century, a couple years past the setting of canon. In the real world they were first used seriously for WW2. (Different sources will say different things, but most of them agree that, naturally, they were developed for military use.)

The last time I wrote something longer than 5,000 words, the whole writing and editing process in its entirety took almost three months. This chapter, though, is approaching _7,000_ words, and it's unbetaed, and I wrote it in about three _weeks..._ e_o …so I hope it didn't suffer on the quality front because of that... |'D

Anyway, thanks for all the lovely constructive reviews guys! (I intended to reply to them, but life just keeps getting in the way...you know how it is.) I feel oh so very lucky to get this kind, although reviews of all kinds are of course welcome. ;} (I love you all. :-)

~Vina


	5. Chapter 5

"Stop fidgeting." Alphonse Elric was chiding his brother, a strip of fresh gauze draped over one hand. "It's not like I'm going to give you a shot."

Ed was sitting next to him on their couch, only partly clothed; Al had insisted he wait to put on his long-sleeved shirt so that its collar wouldn't get in the way while he redressed the wound on his brother's neck.

"But it's already closed up," Ed said. "I don't see why I need it." He winced as Al dabbed an antiseptic on his face. They really needed to invest in some of that new germicide he'd heard of, the one that apparently didn't sting when used – benzalkonium chloride, was the name of the efficacious compound, he remembered. Although, Al would probably accuse him of being a baby for suggesting it when they already had something that worked perfectly well.

"Do you really want to walk around Central with a gash on your neck like that?" was Al's next treatise.

Ed's blanch said _no,_ even if his voice didn't. Just the prospect of the stares that he would draw was terrifying.

"It wasn't even that deep," he groused instead, not looking at his brother. The stubborn set of his mouth was the closest thing to his old childish petulance that Al had seen in his face since they'd been reunited.

"It needed _stitches_," Al retorted. "You're just saying that because you're embarrassed that he got the better of you."

"Yeah, you see right through me, Al," he grumbled. "Are you done yet?"

Al was rubbing the alcohol into his neck now, making sure it soaked through the surgical threads. He then finished binding it and taped it closed. "Yep. All done."

He drew away, and Ed reached up and gingerly touched his handiwork. The wrapping was smooth and seamless, and just snug enough to keep foreign matter out without constricting his movement.

"Thanks," Ed told him, his joints creaking as he stood up. One of Al's ginger tabbies rubbed up against his legs; he patted her down the side. As he fastened the top of his shirt up, he said, "So, how's the latest chapter coming along?"

"Great!" Al exclaimed. "I feel like all this knowledge has been in the back of my mind the whole time." He got up and moved into the kitchenette to start the breakfast fire. One of their frying pans clanked onto the stove, and next to it a pot for boiling.

"That's because it has been," Ed said quietly. Al didn't hear him.

The kitchen filled with Al's chatter as he relayed to his brother the interesting things he'd learned the previous day. His enthusiasm reminded Ed of himself when he was younger and everything was still new and exciting to him, and, rather than annoying him, listening to Al explain things he already knew made his heart swell. Of all the little endearing things that Al did, though, the best was when he would wear a white apron while cooking, like their mother had.

He also had their mother's eyes, and it wasn't just the colour or shape. Al's eyes were kind and sweet and open, and when Ed looked into them, he saw everything that was worth living for in the world.

Al was growing, too, shooting up like the lightening rod they had pierced Eckhart's ship with together. The two of them were matched in height now, despite the five year age difference between their bodies. The twin ponytail was long gone, however. When his little brother no longer had any need to keep his memory alive by emulating his appearance, he'd cast Ed's old red coat away and cropped his hair, fashioning it into a modern style. Ed couldn't care less what he looked like, but it sometimes reminded him uncomfortably of Alfons Heiderich.

Thankfully, all he had to do to dispel that ghost was to look into his brother's eyes.

"Don't forget," Al called, over the whirring noise of the stove fan, "You have to remind me to remove the stitches later. Since you _refuse_ to go to the hospital."

"Yeah, yeah, I know." When it came down to it, it would probably be Al reminding _him_, not the other way around.

He found his vest, and was buttoning it up as he sat down. Al set a steaming plate of breakfast foods in front of him, and lowered himself into the chair on the opposite side of the table.

"It's delicious," Ed told him as he dug in. "Thank you."

"Don't be silly, brother," Al scolded. "You don't need to thank me."

Ed grinned down at his eggs. Quibbling with Al over their dining table: definitely the best way to start his day.

"Right," he said.

~o{}o~

It was drizzling outside when he made his way down the outside steps of their apartment, and the icy autumnal air smarted even worse than the antiseptic had in his cuts. It was a welcome distraction from the pain in his arm and leg; he had woken up that morning with an ache in his stumps, as he often had when there was a change in barometric pressure. Different kinds of pain were easier to ignore than others.

Because of the overcast sky, the entire city looked like it was rendered in shades of grey, and a fine mist was already settling over his hair. It hadn't occurred to him to bring an umbrella out, but he wasn't turning back again now. Ignoring the fetid odours rising from the pavement, he manoeuvred the scrap of paper that was in his pocket out and set off in the direction of the address printed on it.

He managed to squeeze some reconstruction work in before the visit that he was planning to take to Central Command. The friends and acquaintances of Ricardo Havier were also asking favours from him now, on Ricardo's recommendation. Several of them had even offered to pay him for it, but he just waved each of them off every time, shaking his head with a smile. Such minutiae was only the smallest of means by which he paid off his debt to this city and its inhabitants, little by little.

Cooking wasn't his forté, so sometimes, when Al didn't feel up to doing it for them, he would stop by one of the diners near their duplex building and have breakfast there. Most of the waitors and waitresses in those places recognised him now, and would chat with him while he ate, on mornings when they weren't too busy.

A cashier in one restaurant who had been particularly friendly with him had a sister who had been in labour for hours upon hours yesterday, and was just recovering from a difficult birth. As he was headed for the military headquarters, he made a detour to drop in and ask her how her newborn nephew was faring.

"He's healthy and kicking, thank goodness," she said to him, demonstratively holding a hand to her heart.

"See? I told you they'd be fine."

The cashier laughed. "Thanks for stopping by, Edward." The doorbell jingled, then, and her next clientele came in; Ed's signal to move on.

Roy was speaking to Brookefield when Ed turned the doorknob to his office and swung the door open. He caught a glimpse of a small white rectangle in Roy's hand before it disappeared, stowed away in one of the breast pockets of Roy's uniform. Judging from the expressions on his superior's and Brookefield's faces, Ed had a hunch of what it could be.

"Was he one of your friends?" Brookefield's hushed tones only confirmed Ed's suspicions.

It had to be the photo that Ed knew his boss kept in the uppermost drawer of his office desk. There was only one, and the portrait could only be of one person.

"I don't see how that's any of your business," Roy said irritably. Then he demanded, "What were you doing rifling through my things?"

"I was looking for a pen..."

"And it didn't occur to you to just _ask_ for one?"

"I'm sorry, sir. I didn't mean to see it."

Roy let out a long-suffering sigh. "Just don't do it again," he said tersely.

"I promise I won't, sir!" Brookefield sprung into an eager salute. After he lowered his hand, he continued to stand there in rigid silence, but there was something else in his expression, something new. Apprehension was being edged out, softened by something akin to sympathy.

He was still obviously uncomfortable, though. Ed decided to bail him out.

"Marcel," Ed broke in. "Why don't you go check on Laurel and Katya – ah, Lieutenants Stamos and Stratovich. I think they're having trouble with one of the file cabinets."

Brookefield jumped at the excuse to leave, and was out of their way within seconds, bounding out the door. It was understandable. The two women in Roy's team were sweet to Ed as well; they doted on him and treated him like a brother, and he wouldn't have balked at a chance to be in their company either, if a steely superior was the other option.

When Brookefield closed the door, Ed asked, "How'd the meeting go?"

"They warned me to avoid playing the maverick again," Roy said. "That my career was already on thin ice as it was. Nothing I haven't heard before."

As far as they knew, this whole business was a result of the lieutenant colonel at the asylum exacting further revenge on Roy. Taking him up on the offhand offer he'd made, the man had reported him to the higher-ups for insubordination, which resulted in the disciplinary meeting that Roy had been summoned to this morning.

In a way, Ed was lucky that he only had to answer to his colonel. Roy had to answer to the oligarchy itself. An assembly of the most powerful men in Amestris would sit around a table to impartially comment on the fate of Roy's military career, whenever he was unlucky enough to be caught in a parapraxis.

"How are Mrs. Hughes and Elysia doing?" Ed questioned next.

Roy smiled, knowing what he was trying to do, but not minding one bit. "The new school year started for Elysia last week. Naturally, she's already the most popular girl in the class. Her charisma must be genetic..."

As he listened to Roy, Ed seated himself on the couch and prepared to sort through the pile of documents on the coffee table, occasionally dropping a word or two in. The file that he had left behind the last time he visited was probably buried under the stack of miscellaneous papers that was dumped there by one of Roy's lieutenants.

Their conversation faded into silence. Roy was squinting suspiciously at a letter from his inbox, while Ed was having no luck finding his newspaper clipping. He was angling himself over the edge of the table to search for any stray documents that might drifted underneath, when he saw Roy's eyes on him out of the corner of his vision.

Lately, he had been noticing Roy gazing at him sometimes, quietly pensive, when he was busy reading or studying something. No doubt Roy thought that he didn't notice, but he did, and it scared him. He didn't have the faintest clue what his boss might be thinking, and it took all of his willpower to keep himself from visibly squirming or fidgeting under the scrutiny.

"Fullmetal?"

Ed jolted upright, almost banging his knee on the corner brace. "Y-yeah?"

"How would you like to have a drink with me after work? Or perhaps something to eat?"

Ed tried his best not to stare. "You want me to go on an...outing with you?"

_Outing?_ Such an awkward, formal word. But he didn't know what else to call it, not when he and Roy were the only parties involved.

Roy nodded. "I want the opportunity to talk to you outside the office."

Ed tilted his head to one side, looking at him thoughtfully. "Are you a different man without the uniform?"

"There's only one way to find out." He clicked his watch open and glanced at it. "I have orders to report for training at one, so I don't have time to talk right now. Meet me at the intersection of fourteenth and twenty-seventh, at six PM tonight?"

~o{}o~

Next, he went back to the church.

He travelled back through the secret passageway, down, down down into the abyss. The vast cavern in the depths of the earth, where the ruins of his father's legacy lay. He'd walked this path so many times before that he didn't even have to think to find his way along it any more. His feet lead him down it intuitively, without any need for further guidance from his brain.

The air here was musty and stale, as if it had gone untouched for millenia. He could swear there was some mineral dust imbued in it, tingling in his nose and throat. Dead silence and a quiet chill permeated his senses. There was grey, so much grey everywhere, and not just in the common material that formed the buildings. The place was like a ghost town, a life-sized relic of times long passed, and the spectres of all the people his father and Dante had slaughtered were almost perceptible here, if not in form then in the holes they left behind: a stool with carving paraphernalia scattered around it here, a half-painted wall there. Walking past this desecration each week should have been enough to make him wonder how he could still love his father, but it wasn't.

The first thing that he looked for when he got to his destination was the rock formation that reminded him of an extrusion of raw quartz jutting out from the walls of a mine, or maybe stalagmites from the floor of a cave. They were striated pillars that radiated outwards from a common center, and over their top faces lay the shattered remnants of the array that had opened a portal between worlds. Each surface held a piece of it. They were dispersed through the space like a spilled jigsaw puzzle.

The whole exhibit looked exactly the same as it had when he'd last left it. Still inactive, of course.

He ran his hand down one of the stone columns, feeling the channels of prismatic cleavage under his fingertips. Neat, even stria - it was Al's work.

Circling the sculpture to find the shortest pillar, he brushed his fingers against the faded array on the top; the black lines that constituted it were completely barren of the soul-spark of alchemy, as they should be. That sensation, the flow of crackling blue light, was as familiar to him as the breath in his own lungs, so he could know for sure that it was absent from the broken circle.

In another time, he might have been bitter at feeling obligated to guard this gate, this enigmatic higher power that had taken so much away from him, but now he just accepted it with a sort of forlorn resignation. Since he hadn't personally crossed back over to close it, he couldn't be sure if it had been closed or not on the other side.

Not so far away from him, the empty, mangled hulls of a few of Eckhart's ships lay dispersed around the city like enormous, dead black cockroaches, their engines as dead as their last occupants. Almost all of the men who had journeyed to this world with her had made their grave here, in the country they had intended to conquer.

He sometimes dreamt of their world, visions of its future, a bleak and desecrated place where the entire continent - no, the entire _world_, was ravaged by war, millions upon millions of lives lost. He saw what would happen to Noah and her people in that future, and there was no apology he could make to her that would ever serve to be enough. She couldn't hear him, anyway.

~o{}o~

The hospital was one of the buildings he passed on his way home every day. Not entirely on a whim, he stood at the entrance of it, debating with himself over whether or not it was a bad idea to go in. In the end he decided to go for it, and pushed open the door.

"You do know who he is?" one of the secretaries asked him with a questioning look, when he made it to the visitor's desk. Ed flashed his pocket watch at her and she understood immediately.

An attendee helped him find the room he was looking for, and even knocked for him and called a heads-up through the door that a visitor was going to come in.

There were also two guards present outside the door, rather unnecessarily, but it just went to show how harshly the asylum's wardens had probably been castigated after the incident. As unlikely as it was that Matthias would make another escape in his current condition, the backlash from his last attempt would have been enough that they wouldn't take any more chances.

One of the guards gave him a nod and a reassurance that he would be there if Ed encountered any trouble. Grasping the unlocked door handle firmly, Ed took a deep breath and stepped across the threshold.

Crisp air and the smell of disinfectants hit him the moment he entered the room. The only occupant of it was lying limply in bed, staring out the window with an empty, dead expression. Matthias had always appeared deceptively nonthreatening, but now he was also pale and atrophied-looking like most emergency room patients tended to be, the IV tubes in his wrists like extraneous veins leeching the colour out of his face.

"Matth - Alaric," Ed amended, "Sorry if I'm intruding, but I want to talk to you about something."

"Come to wound me further?" Matthias hadn't turned to face his visitor, and Ed detected nothing but hostility in his voice. He also noticed the pinched look in his face that suggested that he was in pain still, and decided that diplomacy was the best way to go.

"I never wounded you in the first place," he pointed out.

"What do you want?"

"Just to talk to you, as I said." He settled himself onto the stool on the left side of the bed. "Listen...what you're going through right now, I've been there before. I may not be able to restore your lost limb, or anything like that, but I can help you brace yourself for the trials to come."

Matthias didn't say anything, but turned to look at him with apprehension.

"You'll experience phantom pains for a while," Ed told him. "It'll feel like it's coming from your missing arm. And you'll want to – to move your arm, to massage it to ease the pain, but of course you can't." When Matthias only scoffed at him, he added, "Take it from someone who knows." Ed pulled back his sleeve, raising his prosthetic hand for Matthias to see.

"You'll have to learn how to do things with only your left hand. Buttoning your shirts and brushing your teeth and stuff like that will be frustrating at first, but the knowledge of how to do it is in already in your head. All you have to do is learn to apply it with a different implement."

He pulled his sleeve back up, making sure it went over the edges of his glove. He leaned forward in his seat with his hands on his knees and continued, "If you ever have the money, I also know a good automail engineer that I can refer you to."

Matthias's intensifying scowl told him that he had probably overstayed any welcome he may have had, but he was determined to at least finish what he was saying.

"Rockbell Automail, in the town of Resembool," he forged on. "It's in the southeast. Have you heard of it?"

"Get out," Matthias said, his voice trembling.

Ed guessed that that was a 'no'. He bowed his head to the man and left without another word.

~o{}o~

Ed's polishing cloth squeaked as he rubbed it restlessly back and forth over his forearm plate, which was already clean enough to eat off of. He'd just been working machine oil into the joints of his arm and leg, and taking his time to flex them afterwards and make sure the operation was as fluid as it should be. With the chaos of the past few days, he hadn't had the time to properly maintain his automail, but now that he'd finished doing so, he had nothing to distract him from his own unease.

"What should I wear?" he said suddenly.

His little brother, who was in the living room, peered at him over a stack of textbooks, confused. "What's wrong with what you have on?"

"Nothing, but..." He threw the cloth down and padded into the bathroom, studying himself in the overhanging mirror with his hands braced on the counter. "I feel like I should change into something else, maybe something more casual."

Al buried his nose back into his book. "Just go as yourself."

The figure in the mirror in front of him looked the same as it always did, day after day. His appearance was nothing to him but the avatar that his conscious mind operated, and a comfortable constant in his life, and he had never really considered it in an aesthetic sense before. Judgemental words like 'handsome' or 'average' felt strange next to 'I am' on his mental tongue. He didn't think of himself in such ways. He was just Edward Elric, older brother of Alphonse Elric; no more, no less.

"What's that supposed to mean?" he said finally. He couldn't be anyone but himself, and had never wanted to be, as far as he could remember.

Two of the three kittens that Al had rescued from an animal shelter litter were cuddled together in Al's lap, and he was stroking their ears as he read. Maybe if Ed borrowed them from him, their purring would induce the same kind of calm. He could certainly benefit from some calming.

"I mean that you shouldn't worry so much," Al said. "It's just a get-together with a friend, isn't it? Why are you so nervous?"

"I wish I knew," Ed muttered at his reflection.

Nights in Central were a medley of bustling people, dim streetlamps, and unyielding traffic. It was 6:15 pm by the time he set out. He'd been so busy floundering in his apartment that he'd forgotten the time, so now he was speed walking briskly through the throngs of people, trying to make up for the lost minutes.

At their preordained intersection, he spotted Roy sitting at an outdoor café table, looking as coolly handsome as ever in a steel grey two-piece suit and a white shirt.

"I'm glad you spared me the embarrassment of being stood up," Roy said with good-natured humour as Ed approached. Despite what he was saying, he showed no sign of disconcertion at Ed's lateness. "I was about to drag myself home in shame."

Ed winced slightly. "Sorry about that. I got held up." He turned to peer down the row of shops on the block, and was about to ask which one they were headed for, but was diverted by the warm weight of Roy's arm across his shoulders.

"Come sit with me," Roy said, and lead him out of the al fresco area and through the doors of the establishment next door, into a world of lambent orange light and rowdy groups of drunk men. The smell of beer, sweat and perfume wasn't as bad as it had been in the some of the bars he'd been to in Germany, which was good because he wasn't sure if he could stand staying here for very long if it was, not even for Roy.

They took seats next to each other at rough wooden stools next to the counter, away from any clouds of smoke, and Roy raised a hand to beckon the bartender towards them.

"Colonel Mustang!" the bartender whooped, sliding across to them. "Haven't seen you in a while." He noticed Ed sitting next to him, and added, "Haven't seen him at all before. Who's your friend?"

"This is Edward, one of my officers," said Roy. "Ed, say hello." His subordinate narrowed his eyes at him for a second, peeved, and he smirked.

"I'm Alfred," the man told Ed. "Nice to meet you, son."

"Likewise," Ed replied, extending an arm to shake his hand.

He looked at both of them then. "What can I get you?"

"Vodka," Roy said. "The usual."

"I'll just share a little with you, if you don't mind," Ed added. Roy nodded his assent to the bartender. After the man left, he shot a glance at Ed.

"I don't usually do this," Ed explained quietly, in response to his unspoken question. "I hate what this stuff does to my head. I can't think clearly."

"That's the whole point of drinking," Roy said with a laugh. "To be able to stop thinking for a while."

"If that's what you think, sure."

Roy chuckled softly again, and then picked up on the topic of discourse they'd left off on in the office, although the atmosphere between them was more relaxed than it was in Central Command. Roy was quicker to smile or laugh, and his expression was less guarded and more open.

He kept a steady eye on Ed the entire time, never breaking eye contact, and Ed wondered how was it possible to generate such an intense gaze with only one eye. Somehow, losing almost half of his visage hadn't detracted from Roy's appearance at all. If anything it only added to his mystique. At least, Ed didn't look at him any differently. But according to Roy, the response he elicited from most other people now, especially women, had changed dramatically. Women preferred their men whole and well, and rich and prestigious too if possible, he'd said once. The strangest thing was how little his own decline in this department seemed to bother him.

He met Roy's mismatched gaze unwaveringly. It was just the two of them now, but there was no increase of tension, and Ed felt at ease in Roy's company, listening to his deep, sonorous voice rise and fall. Roy was still going over the high points of his last visit to the Hughes' apartment. "I can easily see why Maes loved her so much, aside from their blood bond, obviously," he related, smiling fondly. "She's adorable. When I told her that no one could ever replace her father, she asked if I could be her uncle instead."

"So she's calling you 'Uncle Roy' now?" Ed chortled. "That's rich."

"I know you don't see me as the fatherly type," Roy said dryly, "but you should know better than to underestimate me."

"Nah, that's not what I meant." His mischievous laughter died, but the wide grin remained on his face. "You've always been protective of me, now that I think about it. Not always in a good way, but that was just your fatherly side peeking out through all the smug pretension, wasn't it?"

Alfred made a small intrusion on their camaraderie to thunk a green bottle and two small glasses on the table in between them. As Roy poured some out for himself and Ed, a tall woman with long, flowing chestnut hair stepped up to the corner stage, where a man with dreadlocks was setting up a small string instrument. In moments he began to strum the strings, and the woman's low, sultry voice murmured across the room in a plaintive song about broken hearts. The chatter in the bar quieted down to a hush as everyone moved to listen.

"She's beautiful, isn't she?" the bartender sighed. "She's the newest addition to our nightly lineup."

"Exquisite," Roy agreed solemnly, and turned to his subordinate. "Edward?"

"Uh, yeah, sure." Ed's eyes flickered at the singer briefly before he returned to sipping his drink.

"Speaking of women, why haven't I ever heard you talk about any?" He took a gulp of his vodka, and both him and the bartender turned to look at Ed, waiting for his answer. "Picking up girls should be an easy task for an attractive young man like you. When I was your age, I had a new girlfriend every week."

Ed blinked. Ignoring the stroking of his own vanity that Roy was doing, a certain part of the sentence before that didn't sit well with him. He could feel heat rushing to his face, and turned away to hide it from Roy. His boss had said it so insouciantly, as if he was just stating a commonly-accepted fact. He didn't know what to make of it.

He tried to keep his voice equally as blithe. "I'm not interested in that sort of thing right now." He took another sip of his drink. Both Roy and Alfred were studying him with the corners of their mouths turned up, as if disbelieving.

"I see," Roy drawled, dragging out the words.

Truth be told, it wasn't a matter of interest or disinterest. He just didn't have a girl in his life with whom he was close enough to consider having more with. However, if the opportunity ever came along, he would give himself the option to chance it. Now that he wasn't on a life-consuming quest of one kind or another anymore, he could afford distractions like that.

Still, he didn't see himself ever meeting girls at bars and taking them home with him. That was more Roy's game.

"What about you? Anyone like that in your life right now?"

Roy shook his head. "There hasn't been for a long time."

"I thought old habits died hard."

"They die more easily when you're too busy wallowing in your own guilt for anything else," Roy said derisively. "Speaking of philandering habits," he added, swiftly changing the subject, "Jean has officially agreed to end his forever. Believe it or not, he proposed yesterday, and Thalia said yes."

Ed's eyes widened in surprise. "His plan worked?"

"Not exactly," Roy said with a wicked grin, and leaned closer to tell him the story.

With their heads inclined together, Ed listened intently. Unexpectedly, wisps of something smoky and pleasantly saccharine wafted towards him. He breathed it in, and pinned the source down to Roy.

His boss was wearing cologne. He'd never noticed it before; he didn't think Roy wore it while sitting alone in his office, but then, he rarely ever got close enough to tell. It was a subtle scent, redolent of glowing embers in a midnight fire, which was certainly fitting, and a touch of some wildflower he couldn't place a name to. Whatever reason Roy had for wearing it tonight, Ed found nothing to dislike about it.

Soon they'd reached the bottom of their bottle, and Roy had swiveled around to call to Alfred, about to raise his hand and order another one, but Ed stopped him.

"Don't," Ed cautioned, lightly pushing Roy's hand down with his own. His speech was already beginning to slur slightly, and Ed knew from experience that another serving would send him over the edge. He was adept at hiding it, but there had been quite a few times when he'd been in the grips of terrible hangover during one of Ed's visits.

Roy faced him again and heaved a sigh, but didn't put his hand up again. "I'm not as strong as you," he admitted, with a bit of reluctance. "Since Ishval, I've been looking through the bottoms of these glasses too often to be healthy. You, on the other hand, deal with your pain by setting a goal and focusing on it, not by drowning it with alcohol."

Ed frowned at him, troubled by this confession and unsure of how to reply. What _could_ he say to that? Should he accept it as a compliment?

Not a good idea. He fixed his gaze firmly on Roy, instead. "Look at me," he said with gravity, echoing Roy's own words to him. "You're better than that."

Roy smiled wryly at him. "I'm flattered that you think so well of me."

"What about your dream of becoming Führer? How does that not count as a goal?"

"I gave up on that a long time ago." He shook his head. "Things must be becoming truly abysmal, if you're going to act as the voice of reason for me now."

He went on to own up to some of the various other slipups and failings he'd suffered because of his experiences in the eastern rebellion, letting it all out, and Ed went on to wonder at which point their relationship had changed from one of a commander and his recalcitrant protégé to a bond between two men who shared similar burdens. He had the feeling that all the layers of masks were falling away now, and the man that Ed was seeing now was closer to the truth than he had ever seen as a child.

It had been pitch black outside for more than an hour by the time the two of them decided to call it a night. Roy reached around in his pockets to search for his wallet, and when Ed opened his mouth to protest, he put his hand up. "I'll foot the bill," he said resolutely. "You know that I get paid better than you."

Rock-solid logic. He was probably making much less than he did before as Colonel, as he was on probation, but that was likely still more than Ed made.

Ed backed down, but not before muttering, "You don't have to rub it in."

His superior grinned. "Thank you for joining me tonight, Ed. Can I expect to see you here again sometime?"

"Yes, sir," Ed said in his most serious, formal tone, smirking.

Roy gave him a look of capitulation. "I hate to renege on my word, especially so soon after I've given it," he sighed, twirling his almost-empty glass between his fingertips, "but I'll allow you to call me Roy, when we're alone and outside the office. Since I'm taking liberties with your name."

"Roy," Ed said thoughtfully, testing the name against his tongue with a smile. "Something about that feels right."

Roy was still grinning, but his voice when he spoke was stern. "Try not to get overly cozy with me. We have to retain some semblance of the professional boundaries we're supposed to have." The last part came out sounding slightly strangled, as if he was choking on his drink.

"Yes, sir." Ed tipped his glass to him, but he knew that it was probably already a lost cause.

Roy paid the bartender and bid him goodnight, and then the doorbell was jingling and a rush of cold air was seeping through Ed's clothes as he left the bar with Roy. His eyes adjusted to the darkness after a moment, and he could make out the street signs well enough to follow them home. His boss apparently hadn't exhausted his stream of dialogue for the night, because he continued to talk as he walked Ed back to his flat.

"Do you know who you're reminding me of?" Roy mused. "The Brigadier General. He used to accompany me on these nights."

"That's a lot of pressure," Ed said uncomfortably. He knew perfectly well that he could never fill in a hollow left by someone who had known Roy for years, who had stuck with him through thick and thin.

"Forgive me. I didn't mean to pressure you. Besides, no one could ever replace him." Turning to look Ed in the eye, he added, "Or you."

As they stood together under a streetlight on a sidewalk at the edge of road, about to part ways for the night, Ed could tell that Roy was struggling internally with something. He could see it in the furrowing of his eyebrows, and the tiny lines that cropped up around his uncovered eye.

Roy had walked with him all the way to the entryway of the ground floor of his apartment, which was farther than most people would have gone, but still seemed loath to leave him. There appeared to be something else that he wanted to say, something important. Ed waited for him to spit it out. Al was waiting at home for his help on an array, and he didn't want to keep his brother waiting.

"Ah, to hell with boundaries," Roy said, and, reaching out suddenly, he twined a hand in Ed's hair and pulled his subordinate to his shoulder in an unexpected embrace. Roy's other arm became a warm band around his waist as he was pulled in closer.

Once he got over his initial shock and remembered to breathe, he relaxed and closed his eyes, feeling the supple cotton of Roy's jacket against his forehead and breathing in the scent of Roy's cologne. It was different, somehow, from the hug that Winry had given him last, and certainly not as hard-edged as Al's reunifying embrace, not unpleasant at all. Roy was taller and broader than him, and encompassed him in a way that felt safe and secure.

It may have been just the rasp of a breeze, but he thought he heard Roy whisper "I'm glad you're alive," into the crown of his head.

After a moment that felt much longer than it actually was, Roy released him, hands lingering briefly on his shoulders. Then he left with nothing more than a "Goodnight", leaving Ed utterly bewildered, with an odd feeling in his chest.

.

~o{}o~

.

A/N:

As you could probably guess, the purpose of this chapter is to show what Ed does with his time on a daily basis. It's part of the 'establishing what everyone's lives are like after the end' thing that I've been doing. ;9 Well, that's all for this week. Once again, thank all of you who reviewed (or favourited, or followed). I was feeling quite discouraged after the last chapter, and almost felt like giving up on this story, but your encouragements helped get me writing again. See you again in a few weeks! :D

~Vina


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