FMA fic written for my good friend Cynthianess, who requested aged-up!Ed/Roy with bonus lack of immaturity for her birthday. Love you, darling.

Notes: set post-series with spoilers for the entire anime plus a borrowed plotbit from the movie -- you don't have to have had seen the movie to get it (and honestly, I don't recommend watching it).

I.

Three years after his return from the world beyond the gate, Edward Elric is solemn and black-humoured and still short enough that Roy bites his tongue on calling him things like 'adorable lima bean' and 'my lovely little bacteria'; it's not funny these days, and his skin is no longer small. He bites his tongue on a lot of things: Edward's carefully doled-out alchemy, his theoretical genius that Roy still hasn't seen a word of, Alphonse, who is cheerful and reckless and still so very much Edward's younger brother for all that Edward Elric, the tempestuous temperamental son of Hohenheim, seems to have disappeared from the young man staring him down across the desk.

'You can't be serious,' he says, voice flattened by the remaining traces of an accent otherwise nonexistent in this world, by his frustrated objection. 'No way. Aren't I due a holiday?'

'Not until I see fit to allocate it.' Mustang puts on his best stern-commander face, and tries not to smile at his disbelief. The expression reminds him too much of the former Fuhrer, cold lines and colder angles, and he avoids the mirror hung indelible on the wall, rests his chin in his hands, gloves familiar and scratchy against his skin. 'I'm serious,' he says into the silence.

Edward sighs, irritated. 'Why? It's illogical.'

'Yes, it is,' and he just knows he's being infuriating. Watching for his scowl, his reflexive twitch, is one of life's small delights for Roy Mustang, the overgrown manchild in a Fuhrer's uniform. Edward's expression smooths all too soon, however, and Roy falls back. 'You will do as you are told, State Alchemist. Dismissed.'

He throws up his hands, but doesn't argue. These days he never argues beyond that initial point, never screams or shouts or goes off on long lines of improbable divergent excuses. He thinks it could have been Hohenheim's influence in that other world, the influence of a dead and dying man who was nevertheless a father, the influence of being an orphan in a world that no longer accommodates brilliant young alchemists to the point of military insanity. 'Fine. Just -- fine. Two weeks?' He doesn't wait for an answer. 'I'll have my report in next Friday.'

Roy shuffles paper and stops him at the door, careful to speak only while the door is still closed. The Fuhrer's offices are large and dark-panelled and soundproofed such that the tap of Hawkeye's heels as she passes by is a relief. 'Will you take Alphonse?'

Edward shrugs, one shouldered; his natural shoulder. He still has a habit of loosening his artificial arm, of acting without its function beyond a useless prop. 'No. I won't drag him into this. Sir.'

Roy sits in an empty office and stares at the door, lets his breath hiss between his teeth, and gets back to the work of running an army so full of surgically clean diplomats and alchemists and representatives that there is nothing for them to do but perform maintenance and create paperwork. Peace has broken out for the main, and it has taken will and five years lacking a certain alchemist with an infamous title not to say this is not what I thought it would be.

He doesn't quite know if Ed wanted to come back to routine missions across principalities trailing fame and influence, a quiet young man with political power second only to his, speech and presence and no action at all in his reason. Edward has become as precise and efficient as the rest of Central, restrained in peacetime to glorified public servants, and there is something to be said for that, a different kind of pride in guarding and guiding a cheerful populace.

But there is also nothing to be said for an Edward Elric who does not protest, who is by all appearances content never to transmute again.

II.

Hawkeye folds her arms across her chest. 'Sir.'

He knows that tone. 'What now?'

'Edward Elric's report, sir.' The thin sheaf of paper in her hands settles on the desk, and he knows that if he cares to read it, he will find the Fullmetal Alchemist's practiced handwriting and his careless report on yet another civil dispute resolved and otherwise stifled, histories written in the slope of his a, the ironwork loops of his z. 'As scheduled.'

Roy taps his pen against the edge of his desk, flicks a requisition form to the side. Denied. He's become used to paperwork, and he likes it more than he doesn't; it's occasionally infuriating, often dull, but it means things are working, that if he can stretch far enough, he'll be able to see treacheries, things amiss in the slip-slide-slap of paper coming and going in hands that are not his. 'Something wrong with it?'

She stares at him, even and uncompromising. He wonders if her mother wanted this for her, guarding him with recessed genes and chance giving her the Ishbalan colour of her eyes. 'You're worried about him.'

'I'm worried about everything,' not really an answer, and he doesn't intend it to be. He's stretched far and wide, but he's also stretched thin, meetings and departments and oversight, oversight, oversight. Internal transparency. Corruption. Doctored budgets and hidden laboratories and a Fullmetal Alchemist who does what he's told, no more and no less, goes above and beyond in answering only his duty to the people, not his duty of command, and he can't find it in himself to be irritated at the lack. Heartsickness requires time he does not have, a devotional thought without the qualifier for king and country. 'Fullmetal can take care of himself.'

'What about Alphonse?'

Roy Mustang, Fuhrer, lets his head sink down onto the desk, the wet ink of his signature unpleasant against his forehead. 'How is he?'

Hawkeye frowns minutely. 'He's -- Sir,' she says briskly, 'the Elric brothers are not your responsibility. However --'

'I know.' He gives her a wry look from under his hair and straightens, peeling pages of requisitions off his forehead. Apparently the toilet paper situation in the junior dormitories was rather dire. 'Where is Fullmetal?'

Hawkeye's face clears into proper blankness. 'His assigned quarters. Shall I summon him?'

He waves a hand. 'Tomorrow. Sixish?'

'Sir,' crisp understanding, and he sags thanks, takes a moment to contemplate the unwritten heroism of Riza Hawkeye, and goes back to work.

III.

He jerks awake, yawning. 'What?'

Edward Elric regards him with distant concern standing above his bed, the hand of his artificial arm gleaming cold in the drifting, muffled morning light. 'You sleep like a pig. Major Hawkeye said you wanted to talk to me.'

Roy stalls. Having a desk between himself and Edward's coiled regard is a very different thing from it standing above his bed, aged and far too heavy-shouldered for his liking. 'How's Alphonse?'

'He's Al. Doing Al things.' He huffs. 'Still trying to be me, when I was younger. We haven't talked much.' Edward scratches his ear. 'I keep telling him to cut his hair, but he won't listen to me.'

'What changed?' He doesn't quite know what he means, exactly; only that he's Fuhrer, but he's still Roy Mustang, while Edward Elric is still a State Alchemist, still Fullmetal, but these days none of those are men Roy knows well.

'Everything,' Edward answers, unhesitating. 'Wrath is still somewhere, and Al, I don't think he understands. And you, you're -- you're not a cad anymore,' he says simply. 'Back then you would've called me short soon as you saw me.'

'You're short,' he says. He still feels tired. 'What time is it?'

'Quarter past six. I'm making breakfast. Want some?' Again, he doesn't wait for Roy to say anything, turning to the door on little cat feet. He's learned to walk lightly, learned it as necessary habit, and he half-wishes to hear the stomp of his boots. 'You stink, by the way.'

Edward rummages loudly in his regulation kitchen and Roy stares at the ceiling, surprised and unsurprised all the same. He wonders if he cooks one-handed.

He doesn't get to find out. Breakfast is served by the time he's done wallowing, eggs and bacon and sausages and cream in his coffee and he takes a seat opposite Edward who eats with a fork and no knife, cutting and spearing and chewing in perfect distracted rhythm, concentrating on the newspaper sprawling over the table and hanging off the edge, and stares at him for a minute. Edward Elric is the Fullmetal Alchemist these days, and he is distracted and weapons-forged by using no weapon at all, and he is beautiful.

'You're a state alchemist,' Roy says, piling bacon onto his plate. 'Yet you don't perform alchemy.'

'Don't need to,' Edward says absently. 'It's inefficient. Complicates things.' He makes a face. 'Complicates everything.'

'Your duties --'

'They don't need to see it,' he interrupts, looking up for the first time, and his eyes are golden and sharp and foreign to him, weighted with six years of another culture, another world. 'They know who I am and they know what I can do, and demonstrating alchemy for the sake of polarising people is counterproductive.'

Roy is quiet. 'That's a politician's thinking.'

Edward's smile is sharp, flickering the way a candle does caught between index finger and thumb, and the turn of the page sounds like a crumpled wick. 'My father taught me a lot of things.'

IV.

Alphonse beams at him, wide and charming. It appears guileless, but Roy knows better. 'Alphonse Elric,' he drawls. One cad to another. 'How have you been?'

The youngest and for a time the last surviving Elric waves him in, closing the door behind him and bustling with the too-small movement of someone used to being a large, hollow weight, used to greater exchanges of mass and velocity, a touch on a trigger committing to an action unspeakable. 'I've been well, thank you, Mr. Mustang! Tea?'

'Yes, thank you.' Al serves tea with biscuits and little pots of sugar and cream and sits opposite him on the couches in his tiny living room.

He's bright and earnest in the open-curtained sunlight with something far too gleaming in his polished openness. The Elric brothers are creatures of habit. 'Can I help you? You said you wanted to ask me about something.'

'Have you spoken to your brother recently?'

Alphonse's worry looks put-upon. 'Is he okay?'

'Have you?'

'No.' His brightness dims. 'I haven't. I don't want to. He's still my brother, but he's different now. Everything's different now.'

Roy sips his tea. It's terrible, weak and fragile-tasting, softness too bitter. 'He loves you.'

'I love him too,' Alphonse says, simplistic. 'It doesn't make a difference. He left.'

'He died to save you,' Roy says, his second useless appeal, and thinks of Hughes.

'He left,' he repeats. 'I did my best, and it wasn't enough. I trained with Izumi, and I tried everything, and it -- he came back on his own somehow, and I thought he was dead, and he is. He's not Edward anymore. You've seen it too, haven't you?'

He chooses his words with care. 'Edward is willing. You should speak to him.'

Alphonse's tea is untouched. 'And say what, Mustang?' dropping formalities and shedding fleshy pride, and sometimes he catches himself looking for gauntlets and metal joins in the sides of his wrists, the impossibly squared jaw, the loincloth. Alphonse still wears clothes as though he would be far more comfortable without them, his trousers a little too tight, his shirt too loose, too many buttons undone. He has seen this boy naked in his humanity, in the form that defined him for so long, and he catches himself pondering the philosophy of emotion, reducing Alphonse to artificial artifact by habit.

This man still is an artifact of a sort as an Elric brother, a historical curiosity, but his artificiality is chosen, drawn around him like protection in ouroboros, the tattoo on his skin. That it is black, not red, gives him no comfort. There are worlds where Alphonse is not more unto Wrath than Edward; this is not one of them.

He is no longer mistaken for Fullmetal.

'You could say that you forgive him,' Mustang says wearily. He's too old for this. 'That you want to.'

Alphonse is very precise as he picks up his cup of tea, presses the rim to his lips without sipping, and sets it down again. 'You are making assumptions,' and his voice is cold and warning and very much like his brother.

V.

'Nice try,' Edward informs him a month later. 'Seriously, nice try, you piece of shit. What the hell did you say to him?' He goes through a series of exasperated gestures and ends up putting his hands on his hips, flabbergasted. 'He was an ice-cold bitch every time I tried to call him, and all he said was that you were --' He flushes, voice lowering to a dispirited mutter. 'I didn't teach him that kind of language. Mum wouldn't've approved.'

Roy tilts back in his chair, swinging on the two back legs and folding his hands across his stomach. Hawkeye's irritated reprimands when he does it are another of life's small delights. The dispirited expression on Edward's face is not, and Hawkeye is not here.

'He doesn't like you, I think,' Edward concludes. 'Not anymore. And neither of you are going to tell me anything.'

Roy is not inclined to recount his failures, even when called to accounting by the relatives of the tarnished and discharged. It is not his tale to tell, and if he is entirely honest with himself, he doesn't quite know what happened either. He wields what he does know instead. 'You abandoned him to save his life, Fullmetal.'

'I --' He stops, looking pained. 'That's not exactly -- are you telling me I brought him back wrong? That I, what, turned him into a homonoculus? That's ridiculous. I gave everything, Mustang. Everything. It was a last-ditch attempt and it worked and this is not because I got it wrong, or because I fucked up.'

'He finds it easy to detach his soul,' Mustang suggests. 'Pieces of it. He animates inanimate objects, commands them to act as his own at will.'

Edward shrugs, stiff and thin-lipped. 'Last time I brought that up, he threw me out. Something about being a horrible brother, or -- I don't know, making him that way. That it was my fault.' He rubs his eyes. 'I don't know. He's just, he's Al. He didn't have to come back wrong to hate me, Mustang,' humour gross and inappropriate. 'I always thought he kind of did when we were growing up, anyway.'

He finds he can spare a moment or two for heartbreak, and takes refuge in professionalism. 'Fullmetal, your partnership with your brother greatly improved your efficiency and ability.'

'That's when he was still my brother Al,' thoughtful head-tilt, unfazed by his crisp address. 'These days he's Alphonse. That's okay.'

Roy doesn't hide his disbelief.

'No, it is,' and he sounds more tired than Roy feels. 'It really is. It's not like he could follow me around forever even if things hadn't happened that way. He was -- he was going to marry Winry.'

Roy raises an interested eyebrow. 'Have you talked to her?'

'Some,' he admits, stamping his automail foot. 'She's not that happy with me. Made me a new arm and leg when I came back, but she'd got a boyfriend, they were pretty serious, and she yelled at me for a week for being so late, for going at all. He was nice. Local, you know? We grew up with him, but Winry says she told Al and he didn't know who he was.' He spreads his hands. 'At this point, I'm willing to accept that things happen.'

Roy quirks a smile despite himself. 'That's your philosophy?'

Edward nods, self-satisfied. 'Yeah. Things happen. Pithy, isn't it? There was a scientist in the other world,' he muses, and Roy sits straight in his chair, rocking its legs straight as gently as possible. 'Niels Bohr.' The name means nothing to him. '"The opposite of one profound truth may well be another profound truth." It's true that things happen, but it's also true that they don't. Me and Alphonse, that's one of the things that didn't happen.' He looks a little like himself, more settled in his body, a piecemeal unbalanced body, stance wide and confident. He's not quite speaking to Roy, more to the corner where Sloth once stood attendance. 'I'm okay with it.'

'How are you okay with it?' Mustang says. 'That's rather out of character for you. It's not the Edward Elric that I know. Knew,' he amends, because there was an Edward Elric and there is the Fullmetal Alchemist, and they are not always one and the same. Especially now.

Edward turns to face him. 'I'm not the Edward Elric that anyone in this world knows. And Winry is going to kill me for this eventually, but I'm not sure that's -- I got to meet my father. He died, but I met him. I knew him. And you still think I'm worthy of your direct command.'

Roy sighs. 'You're still the Fullmetal Alchemist, Edward. A dog of the military.'

He chuckles. 'Do you believe that, Mustang?'

Roy is forced to admit defeat, crowded by the shadows of the homunculus: King Bradley, Sloth, Lust, Wrath. Envy, whose story Edward will never tell him, although he makes out that he knows and understands it in part. He never expected to see resentment in the boy, but he finds it in the man clear as the glassy sheen of incomplete Philosopher's Stone.

He hasn't been able to rid Central of the shards holding shattered human lives; he hasn't been able to exterminate their presence; all he can do is bury them in the tradition and fashion of Marco, in codes and long-forgotten shelves and the simple unwillingness to know. He wonders on occasion if Alphonse has hold of such a thing, and then dismisses the thought as unworthy. For all his changes in the past decade, he is still Edward Elric's brother, and he is still the son of Hohenheim, and he is, if not moral, at least ethical in his scientific rigour and the arrogance his brother once held.

'Dismissed, Fullmetal.'

VI.

The next morning, he again wakes to Fullmetal's serious regard, the smell of breakfast already cooking, the touch of his automail hand, a distance, a familiarity. He knows well the scents of oiled machinery, the creaking lukewarmth heat of a working machine, and waking to it is a comfort, like going to sleep knowing that Hughes would stay on the couch, would lie with him in his bed, too, and sometimes he was merciful enough to slide under the sheets without needing to be asked.

Edward Elric was a boy who flared against the threat of dusty wind and is now a man who blazes, oil-wicked and uncompromising: technological progress, the development of self and design and outer appearance, the shield for safety, the deep well. There is no sputter to his voice, wreathed in the laconism of someone who doesn't care in the slightest that he's waking up the Fuhrer, inconsiderate and uninvited. 'Morning, shithead. Breakfast'll be ready in fifteen.'

Roy groans his way out of bed and slumps under the shower, rubbing half-heartedly at the back of his neck and piling himself into a rough approximation of posture at the table. 'Why are you here?'

'Hawkeye says someone has to make sure you eat breakfast.' Edward eyes him, critical and unkind. 'You look like shit.'

He does. He knows this. 'You haven't slept, have you?'

Edward sets a cup of much-needed coffee in front of him, briskly stirring cream into his own. 'You shouldn't have provoked Al.'

Roy doesn't know if he can listen to this; it's not his field, and he's not cut out for dealing with the Elric brothers' intimate complications. 'I thought I could help.' He forces himself to honesty. 'I was curious.'

'Now you know.' Edward seems unfazed, draining his coffee deep. 'I'm going now. Work to do, reports to write. You'll get to read them later.'

'Shall I read them later?' He doesn't mention that they're very proper, very dry, and so relieved of sarcasm that they make his teeth hurt.

'I could add some fart jokes,' he offers, stopping at the door. The lack of his red coat makes him look older, more subdued; this is not a brash man.

Roy waves him away, simultaneous dismissal and thanks. 'Your puns are terrible.'

'You bastard, Mustang,' Edward tells him as he leaves.

The joke occurs to him several minutes later, and he laughs, grip loose on his cup and balance precarious, laughs too loud and too long. It's been a while since he could.

VII.

Another joke: the fact that two months later, Edward is asleep in a chair in the anteroom of his office, breathing slowly through his nose and his hair slopping out of its braid over his shoulder. He always delivers his reports in person when he can, beholden to some sense of duty that seems to propel him into taking early trains and flagging down unimpressed soldiers to alert Central to his impending whirlwind presence.

Hawkeye nods at him from beside the door, benevolent and steely. Roy takes the message and slips to his side to pluck his mission write-up from his lap, disconcerted when it whispers out of his bare automail hand, fingers cold and lax against the tip of the thumb he hastily presses to paper to stop the pile from tumbling to the floor and waking up.

An hour later he grants permission for Hawkeye to move him to a emergency pallet in the breakroom alongside.

Edward stumbles into his office five hours after that, interrupting an important meeting with his equally important deputies, carrying a fistful of biscuits and a cup of tea, bleary-eyed and still mussed beyond any stretch of propriety. 'I told you to eat more, Mustang.' He eyes his deputies while Roy tries not to facepalm. 'Huh.'

They look back at him with expressions of profound apathy, but they radiate embarrassment on his behalf. 'We can resume this at a later date, sir.'

Roy waves them away. 'Give me an hour, generals.'

To his amazement they do nothing but nod and file out, near-identical in their dark-haired grimness.

Edward's smile is innocuous and shit-eating. 'She said you had a meeting, but I didn't believe it. You're always alone when I turn up. I was starting to worry.'

'You report only to me,' Roy counters, and this one of those days where it feels like an imposition. Delegation is the name of the game, but there are some things, some people. that should be handled alone. 'Should I have Breda and the rest here as well?'

'Would they ever let me leave?'

He doesn't bother to point out the obvious: that yes, they would. Hawkeye is one of the few who is willing to recognise this Edward as himself, and the others like him well enough, but they are not fond of him. Edward's genius is no longer endearing. 'Havoc might want dating tips.'

Edward grimaces, crumbs dusting the corners of his mouth. 'How about "listen to your partner, tell them off when their breath stinks, and don't lead them on when you get sick of them and start working longer hours at the laboratory to avoid them"?'

Roy's eyebrows are stretched so high they hurt. 'Personal experience?'

'Yeah.' He chuckles, self-deprecating. 'It was -- over there,' a flap of his hand over his shoulder to the door, palm up: yesterday, at the back, forget it. 'It didn't go so well.'

Roy is surprised to find he has absolutely no desire to know, no curiosity, no joking impulse. He has never tried; from the looks of it, Edward had tried, and wears the failure as he wears his failed experiments, once close and now far, and he can see them in his mind already, bossy with shy hands and a pretty mind given the sharpness of being yanked from indulgent daydreaming, unforgiving of lapses in expectation, in schedule and devotion. To say they made him this is disingenuous. To say they aided the creation of the man who stands before him licking crumbs from his palm and noisily draining his military-issue tea is closer to the truth.

Edward's voice draws him out of his thoughts. 'My report's satisfactory, right?'

Roy forgets to scramble for a polite variation on "exceedingly dull as ever, thank you". 'You forgot to include at least one fart joke. I'm disappointed in you, Fullmetal.'

He licks the rim of his teacup. 'I'm afraid I was distracted by the ravenous mob all out for my hair.'

Roy can't quite decide if he's serious. Stranger things have happened to the Elric brothers. 'What did they want with your hair?'

'They wanted to know about the fine and secret art of braiding, sir.' Edward's composure rivals that of King Bradley's secretary.

He can't quite muffle his snort. 'I'm sure you would never divulge state secrets,' folding his hands and leaning forward earnestly. 'How did you handle the situation?'

'I taught the elders to make pigtails instead,' bland and deadpan for the few moments before he begins to laugh, clutching his sides, head forced back by the expanse of his laughter. 'Your face!'

Roy finds himself unable to resist a chuckle or two. 'I don't want to know what you used to transmute ribbons.'

Edward's expression brightens with guile. 'I didn't, sir. One of the elders had a spare pair of --'

His mind presents him with horrible, horrible imagery. 'I don't want to know,' he repeats.

'It could be vital to the state of the nation,' Edward continues. 'Imagine if the Philosopher's Stone could be recreated through the use of --'

'I don't want to know,' Roy says, wincing away from his inappropriate glee. 'Keep it to yourself, Fullmetal.'

Edward salutes him like the cheeky little brat he used to be, grinning outright. 'As you wish, sir.'

Roy shakes his head, amused and a little nostalgic, watching his brightness fade into the everyday clarity he wears with the simple honesty he thinks Alphonse had when they were brothers who died for each other. He thinks, but he can't be certain; if only Alphonse had a human face at the time. Then he would have been able to tell. 'Your next assignment. Dismissed,' he says as gently as he can while drowning in pieces of detritus and piles of flotsam, and Edward Elric has never been either.

He startles out of his Alphonse-shaped thoughts and sets his cup on the edge of his desk, dusting crumbs off onto his jacket and taking the clipped pages he holds out to him. 'Oh, right. Yeah,' skimming the first page, 'this looks okay. See you Friday after next, Mustang.'

Both brothers address him so casually these days, his name become uninflected title, and it seems wrong to keep thinking of them when he has work to do, the stately business of budgets and moral accountancy and diplomacy and grudges poured into sons bartered to the military for a chance at death. He thinks of those six years without them instead.

VIII.

'Unforseen circumstances.' Edward explains his four-month absence with quick, wry words, arms folded. He's tall enough to tilt his chin down to meet his eyes, tall of spine and taller eyes, and Roy lets it go with a wave of his free hand, signing papers with the other.

Legislation without counsel irritates him. 'What circumstances would those be, Fullmetal?'

Four months of incomplete reports every fortnight and once a phone call to his home at six o'clock to remind him to eat breakfast was far too much like those years when he wasn't here at all, duplicated by his brother who was passable at a distance and eerily mistaken in the smaller things with no-one to tell him to stop, and he had worried, had remembered the fitful conversations he had with Hawkeye: I should search for Edward. Her response was rote by the second month: Where?

Where, indeed, and this time he'd known his precise location, confirmed every two weeks, and it hadn't helped at all.

'Internal conflict gone bad,' Edward dismisses. 'Same old same old to anybody who lived there, apparently, but it was the first I'd heard of it.' He makes an indignant face at his own lack of knowledge. 'I think it's settled now, but I'd like to go out there about a year from now to make sure.'

Roy is too relieved to see him whole and here again to be charmed. 'Are you sure you didn't create another Lior?'

Edward hardens like the transmutation of his hand into a blade, the sweep of his palm in working alchemy upon himself. 'That's low even for you, Mustang.'

He presses his fingertips to his eyes. 'I apologise,' stiff and formal and sorry. 'From my other reports, you did well.'

'I'm the Fullmetal Alchemist,' Edward says, and though he is not forgiven, he will let it pass, internal chemistry of memory undisturbed. The sound of him is bitter nonetheless. 'I learn from my mistakes when I know about them. Especially when they cause massacres. Those are the important ones, sir.'

Roy winces, stung. He knows what it is to be brought to unfair account. 'Leave it, Ed.'

He relaxes, arms unfolding and his hands coming to rest by his sides, open and identical through his white gloves. 'That's the first time you've called me that since I came back,' he observes. 'Guess that means I can ask you to have dinner with me. All connotations meant.'

'What?' He blinks. If anything, he expected the offer to come earlier, but apparently no Elric is subject to conventional timing. 'Fullmetal --'

'Edward,' he corrects. 'I know you'll turn me down, but it's there, just so you know. And don't think I forgot,' he warns. 'That was some seriously uncool shit-flinging, Mustang. You of all people, and with the Ishbal thing to boot --'

'I apologised!'

'You still said it.' He's implacable, grim-mouthed. 'You said it, and it was absolutely out of line, and we are not having dinner tonight.'

Roy smirks, uncomfortable with this kind of talk coming from Edward Elric and at ease with familiar territory. 'I wasn't going to accept.'

'I know,' he says, utterly unruffled. 'I'm making a point. Let me know if it worked. Goodnight.'

He stares at his back, tapping his pen, and calls him before he can open the door. 'Edward.'

'Yes?' Guarded and careful and clear.

He can't find anything to say. Should he apologise again? Should he try to explain how he'd thought to protect them both, how they had been children and he'd known what it felt like to be part of that, had imagined all too easily how it would feel to know he were the catalyst? Should he take him up on that invitation, though he has no time and no effort and no mind to spare for what will ultimately be a disappointing evening cut short?

In the end, he settles for something safely inane, and in the end, Edward beats him to it. 'Don't talk about my dead and I won't say anything about yours. Equivalent trade.'

'That's a myth,' he finds the voice to say.

Edward gives him a half-smile over his shoulder. 'But it's a nice story.'

IX.

'Let me tell you a story that isn't nice,' he announces, six months of dull and reassuringly boring twice-monthly reports later, palms flat on his desk, an intensity to his carriage Roy knows to be wary of. 'Let me tell you something. Back when guns jammed every six bullets, there was alchemy, and there was a Gate. There weren't many people who reached it.'

Roy shifts uneasily. 'Edward, this is not the time --'

He cuts him off with a sharp wave of his automail hand. 'Listen. Not many got there, but some did, and they reported creatures there, strange little children with sharp teeth and grasping sticky hands that, that unwound forever, and beautiful eyes.'

He shudders.

'And in this time of bullets that didn't go anywhere, there was another side of the gate. The gate had another door, another way out, or in.' He listens, horrified. Impossible. Absolutely impossible. 'And someone went through it. Went out. And there he was told that alchemy came at the cost of the lives on the other side of the gate.'

Blood drains from his face, aching and lightheaded. 'Edward --'

'There,' his voice only now shaking, 'there, he found it to be true.' He slaps his palm down onto the pile of his reports over the last year, reviewed for the annual performance evaluation he forces the entire military to undertake in an effort to share in his tedium. 'That's why I don't use alchemy anymore. Now, stop asking.'

Edward leaves, trailing his father's scent, and Roy sits in stunned silence and has absolutely no idea what to do.

'He could be wrong, sir,' Hawkeye says.

They both know that on occasion, the Fullmetal Alchemist makes mistakes. They both know that Edward Elric's mistakes are different again, and this speech, this monologue, is the result of neither.

Roy studies his gloves for a long minute, the air in his office still fraught with Edward's pain.

X.

The first time they touch, it's the press of Ed's hand to his jaw, his thumb crossing to his cheek, the apex of his hand against his chin. His automail hand, the hand that could crush his face, tear his jawbone away and dig in to rip out his throat as casually as Roy picks fishbones out of his teeth, his hand that does nothing but hold him still.

Edward's regard is challenging in its collectedness. 'Do you mind?'

'No,' and swallows against the feel of jointed metal, meets his eyes without moving his head. 'Do you?'

'I don't know,' Edward says, matter-of-fact truth, and his automail stirs as he drops to touch his collarbone, and he can feel it function against him, can feel parts and solidity and weight, and he shivers, anticipation roiling through his legs where it can't be seen.

Roy looks away. 'I still use alchemy.'

'I know that,' he says, withering censure and irritated forbearance. 'Not like you keep it a secret. But you should know what your mistakes are. It doesn't matter if you repeat them.'

'Is this a mistake?' He knows it most probably is.

'Yeah, maybe,' Edward admits, and pulls back, settling into the chair opposite him. Breakfast on a Sunday morning is much like breakfast on any other day he has the pleasure of his company: being woken up, grumbled at, insulted, and then eating food made from scratch -- invariably much better as a result -- with Edward Elric keeping him lazy company by poring over the newspaper and reading aloud the funny inch-squeeze articles.

Roy breathes into the damp gap of his palms stretched over his face, steepled over his nose, eyelashes brushing his fingers, and his voice is muffled. 'I'm not sure I have the time or inclination to take you up on this.'

Edward sounds amused and more like himself than he has in years. The more time they spend together, the more he sounds like his old self, as though Roy makes him remember snatches of dialogue and whispers of body language to put on his body until they wear true, and he doesn't know if he welcomes or resents it, if it's something he should like. He's become used to his standoffishness, his slippery unaffected sympathy. 'I figured. Whenever, or never, it's okay.'

'You're alright with my political concerns?' Roy supposes Edward had to learn patience somehow, sometime, somewhere, but the main didn't happen where he could see it, and that seems like the greatest loss of all at the moment.

'Since when have you been anything but politics?' He pushes a cup of coffee across the table, scraping loudly and visible through the gaps between his fingers. 'You look fucking awful. Drink up.'

'You look worse,' he counters, straightening and cradling his cup in his hands. 'Alphonse?'

Edward shrugs, his wry smile half-hearted. 'Who else? I promised him, you know. That we'd always be together, that whatever we did, it'd be together. We'd both get our bodies back. But I don't know what he blames me for more, that I broke the promise and he got a body because I gave up mine, or that I left.'

It's too early for Roy to step as carefully as he'd like to, given that Edward's account is no less conflicting and confusing than any other, if thankfully abbreviated. 'Is that what happened? Your friend Roze was not --' He hesitates over a word to describe her dull fear, her quirked smile as she told him Edward was gone, 'very forthcoming.'

'It was more complicated than that. But yeah, basically. I mean, he did it first, he used himself and got me my arm and leg back, but it wasn't -- I didn't do it to spite him. It wasn't trade. It was the right thing to do.'

He rubs his eyes, mind skipping over marginalia: the unrecognisable twisted weft of his shirtsleeves, the concentations of coffee and cream and the merits of syrup versus it simply being saturated, Edward's hair glossing grey at the temples in summer sunlight, alchemy and transubstantiation in the mediated mutation of intangible elements, soul and memory and sacrifice. 'Are such matters of concern to the Gate?'

'Yes and no,' Edward answers, maddening in his imprecision, and he rolls his eyes at Roy's irritated wave and explains himself. 'The Gate creatures don't care. They take the payment they're hungry for. But the Gate itself, maybe.'

Edward sketches rough diagrams in the air between them, towering double-doors framed by columns and the darkness within bound shut even as they slowly opened, describes ambient lighting and calmly indifferent sapience, countermatched by hands that writhed as they stretched forth, how Envy had gone in with angry fearlessness and paid for it, how he himself had been, and he doesn't explain further, speaks of other things. For his part Roy thinks further afield, of Riesenbool and his own father, of the man known as Scar and how his demeanour so reminded him of things he had long forgotten, of his mother and her well-honed acceptably-tamed fierceness. He thinks of the Elric brothers, how they had been, how one half waits opposite him, content in his broken-cupped openness.

'It cares about blood and it minds souls trying to cross, and sometimes those things mean something when they're applied right,' he says plainly. 'I was a murderer already, with my alchemy and the stupid stunts I pulled, and I paid the Gate with things that weren't mine, and when I did finally pay, it was, I got back the interest. It was enough to let Alphonse have his body back. All of the lives in,' Edward stumbles, 'the Philosopher's Stone, in the homonculi, were enough to let me see our father.'

He goes quite, quite still, steam curling warm in his nose. 'Alphonse was the Philosopher's Stone.'

'Yeah. It's a long story. Maybe I'll write a book someday when I'm middle-aged and crotchety and obsessed with philosophy and Alphonse forgives me,' that last as unlikely as the rest, and Roy eats his breakfast. Edward Elric is not a man who will live into the true adulthood of softening flesh and crows feet and inconvenient doctor's visits; he is young, improbably beautiful, and he will remain so until his all-too-expected early death.

He has half a mind to let himself be touched. He also has half a mind to deliver a stinging lecture filled to the brim with infamous Mustang wit on whatever happened to the Fullmetal Alchemist's audacity, but he knows now and it has become yet another joke punctured of its humour.

Edward sniffs dismissively and wipes his nose on the back of his flesh hand. 'But seriously, let me know when.'

Roy allows a smirk. 'Not if?'

His grin is bright and genuine, the hand he places atop his conspiratorial and comforting in its quick solidity even with the bubbles of snot smeared across his knuckles. 'I know you want me.'

XI.

This time he wakes to a State Alchemist flopped across his legs, head pillowed on the bed angled away from his shoulder and his shins uncomfortable against his knees. He's asleep, by the looks of things, and Roy scrubs a hand over his face and prods him away, concerned when he rolls with an easy acquiescence that belies how stubborn he is when conscious enough to put together an argument that might just be entirely bullshit. It usually is at least thirty percent bullshit. 'Edward?'

'Fuck off.'

'That's no way to speak to your superior.' Roy rolls his eyes and kicks him, pushing harder and harder each time until he yelps and clutches at the bedsheets to stop himself from rolling off the edge. 'Really, Fullmetal.'

'Shut up,' Edward mumbles, already asleep by the looks of things. 'Smug bastard.'

Life is just fine as long as he can get a rise out of Edward, Roy surmises, and feels better already, more awake in the rumpled sheets, the seam of his pillowcase now diagonal under Fullmetal's cheek, the grinding grey of once-crisp shirts gone flat and dull in humidity visible through his open cupboard doors, yesterday's suspenders slung over the back of a chair. More awake in his life of small things and large things writ as though they are small, lines on typewritten reports, Hawkeye's uncommon skill in guarding his door, the bright flush of Edward's hair in his bed, his gleaming foot.

This day he rouses himself and pieces together breakfast, toast burnt at one corner and butter melted too soon, coffee he doesn't burn, and sits at his table, two plates laid, and rests his eyelids during bites, breathing to the mechanical assurance of Edward's presence, soft clicks and burring movement as he sleeps. He has a little time.

Edward wakes as Roy considers making a fresh pot, haggard in rest. 'Urk.' He sniffs, tongue hanging out as he licks his teeth and gags at the taste. 'Cream?'

Roy dutifully pours some into the second, untouched mug. 'You should sleep in your own bed.'

'Bite me. You're the one who keeps making Hawkeye and everyone else worried enough to order six-am wake-up calls.' He nods at Roy's plate, pushes it against his forearm to make his point. 'Havoc says you're not eating enough to do your job.'

'Havoc owes me sixty dollars,' Roy says, dutifully buttering his third slice of toast. 'If he thinks I'll forget because of a decent meal, he's mistaken.'

Edward puts his chin on his palm and stares him down, methodically sipping his coffee and eyes so unblinking that Roy's start to water in sympathy. Finally, he says: 'Is this the part where I interpret that as an offer to take you out to dinner?'

He swallows abruptly and coughs for a minute, grasping the table in something he recognises as possibly being anxiety. It's intriguing, and he wasn't sure that he actually cared this much, but it seems becoming aware of the possibility helped it to matter. Helped a lot of things to matter, and he clears his throat. 'I think so, yes.'

'Alright,' a concise nod, and he straightens, palms flat on the table, and Roy finds himself charmed by how seriously Edward is taking this, has been taking all of it. Such reasoned discipline. 'Would you like to have dinner with me sometime so you can get fed and Havoc can stop acting squirrely?'

Roy nods. 'I would indeed, F--' He gets a warning look for the trouble, and revises. 'Ed.'

He prods the back of his hand. 'You can call me Edward if that's too informal.'

'Edward,' and by now he's not sure if he's agreeing or just mocking him a little, and he takes in the impressive indignant wrinkle in his nose and thinks over his schedule, the missions slated for his most infamous alchemist. The situation at large has been far better in the last four years, and better again these six months, and he is under no illusions about who is responsible for that particular blessing. 'Edward,' he says again, the matter settled. 'I have two hours free from six o'clock on Thursday.'

'Great,' Edward says, and by all appearances he means it, his smile the complicated satisfaction of adults. 'I've been meaning to check out the Central Library, anyway. Research!' He rubs his hands together in anticipation.

'Are you going to educate yourself on proper etiquette?'

He scowls. 'Are you saying I don't know my manners?'

Roy can't quite resist smiling at him, for him. 'Your comportment is severely lacking, Fullmetal.'

'You wish,' he bites back, and yes, he wishes. He wishes for Edward Elric to be someone who would, could, scream and shout at him; he wishes there were a single part of Edward's instinctive adjustment to public-private-public that he could find flaw with; he wishes Edward weren't a diplomat of an alchemist; he wishes the Elric brothers could have the delight of random, pointless, explosive transmutation again, no matter how wasteful he thought it to be at the time.

A finger flicks against his forehead and he blinks, controlled flinch in the jerking twitch of his eyes under the skin, and he refuses the urge to scratch it away. It irritates him. 'What was that?'

'You're brooding,' Edward explains, reseating himself. 'I'm beginning to think you need more than a few nights out of that stuffy office of yours.'

'A year of dinners,' he agrees. 'Dinners and women and enough cigarettes to drown my lungs. I delegate everything and you handle far more than I should in regulations, and I knew it'd be difficult.'

He nods. 'The daily shit sucks. Are you picking the place, or am I?'

'I'll choose,' he says immediately. 'I don't want to think about what you consider a good restaurant.'

'The Fuhrer needs to be seen with the Fullmetal Alchemist,' Edward says with matter-of-fact incisiveness, and sometimes Roy wonders what happened to make him this way, so aware of his visibility in a way his younger self never was, so able to decipher his code without spluttering at it or taking offense that he uses it at all.

Edward's familiarity with institutionalised and occasionally lethal politics makes sense if he were involved with some form of structured, competitive research in the other world without the benefits of alchemic talent, and as such, Roy doesn't bother to acknowledge the insight, examines him instead. 'You look like something the cat dragged in.'

He laughs to himself, low and quiet. 'Yeah, I was out. Got kind of sloshed, met a guy and hit it off and now I've had about two hours sleep.' His grin is brilliantly satisfied. 'So worth it.'

'I see.' It stings a little to hear it spoken of so easily, but there is no more loyalty that he can ask from Edward, and this is not Fullmetal's infidelity. In this he remains tactless as ever, which comes as no surprise, and a brief comfort in the knowledge that he will never be a man Edward speaks of so easily.

'I can stop when and if you have the right to ask me,' he says.

'No, I understand.' He pushes away his plate, doesn't want to stand up just yet, would like to keep their eyes level, their respective status vaguely equalised by his being one of the unlikeliest Fuhrers in history and Edward being Edward Elric and both of them off-duty in the complicated way of career military.

Edward rises, hands flat, and leans forward slowly, intense and serious and telegraphing like hell, and Roy sits and lets him, controls the tiredness and the reflexive thought of how does this contribute to becoming Fuhrer? He often has to remind himself that he is indeed where he wanted to be, where he dreamed of being, that he holds the power now.

And right now this is where he wants to be, holding the power to accept with the touch of Edward's mouth to his forehead, a seal of the unspoken promise to try and stop worrying Hawkeye, to move forward, to be more efficient in his leadership, to be what they are to each other with attendant interruptions. Then he brushes against his lips, a soft warming like change in the distance, a whirling seagull, an alchemist using no muffled-inherited alchemy at all in speaking of these things.

Part of adulthood is honesty, and he allows himself to be honest, allows himself to lean in, just a little, and draw back, a kinaesthetic metaphor for everything.

Edward's smile is warm and true and reminds him of Hughes. 'There, was that so hard?'

XII.

Alphonse concedes the issue, staring flatly at cobblestones and rubbing the side of his hand over a developing zit on his cheek, a chance meeting between open hallways and unguarded coffers.

'You don't trust me with your brother?' he says, mild as Hohenheim's coffee. If Edward didn't tell him outright that he'd encountered his father in the other world, that small habit would have.

His smile is glossy, filled with lurking sincerity and too many years alone to despair and guilt and resent. 'You always liked him better.'

'Alphonse,' reprimand, because as much as Edward is willing to love him, is willing to risk the attempt of loving with hindsight, Al has always been his first thought, and his accusation bears truth only in its direction. 'This is up to you.'

'I don't know what you think you're doing, Mustang,' he says, a final show of outwardly-cheerful put-on respect. 'Just don't fuck it up.'

Both Elrics remain fair men by habit and conscious inclination, and he can take grudging patience when it comes in place of bitterness, his thanks sincere in full.

XIII.

'I'm not that old,' Roy complains, and he's trying to maintain his dignity and refrain from scorching Edward's feet in revenge for playing silly buggers for the last half hour, but with Ed waving his latest report in his face and grinning mischievously like he knows Roy will never, ever discipline him is enough to make him wish for Hawkeye's ability to cold-clock people so they go down and stay there.

'You're old,' Edward pronounces like it's an obvious conclusion. 'You're going grey.'

'I'm too old for your antics,' he says wearily. 'That doesn't mean I'm old. It means you're acting like a toddler.'

'I'm not short!' Edward flares.

Roy pinches his eyebrows together. This is more interesting than reviewing the next morning's agenda, but the agenda has the added bonus of being inanimate and unlikely to tap his nose of its own accord. 'Then don't call me old.'

He kisses him and Roy trips him with his foot, not inclined to make this easy. 'Oi,' he protests.

'Behave. I need to verify this.' He doesn't say: There will be a secretary along in five minutes asking why I haven't signed anything in an hour and she'll tell Hawkeye and I have a reputation to maintain.

Edward picks himself up from the floor, playfulness subsiding as he sinks into a chair opposite him with a book stolen from the pile Roy now keeps on the corner of his desk, left behind on previous visits and never reclaimed. 'I'll wait.'

He waits as Roy had waited during those years, preoccupied elsewhere for brief periods but the act of remaining and waiting an omnipresent choice of constants and risks and declaratives from moment to moment, performing inaction: I waited. I do wait. I will wait.

'Come back with me for dinner,' he says an hour of rasping pages and quietly rearranged limbs and intense blurring focus later. They won't -- they won't anything. But it means something, this first of their both being in his standard-issue officer's flat at night, and though he means it straight the implications, the alternatives, hang like diffuse participles; maybe.

'You'll make me cook,' Edward says, distracted and still reading, making a note on the page with a pen no doubt stolen off his desk too.

Roy taps a pile of requisitions into alignment, side and top and side again, and he thanks his gloves for saving him from papercuts. 'Do you mind?'

'You're doing the dishes,' immediate and certain and a little fond of Roy and a difficult universe both, and he fails to quite care that his dish soap gives him hangnails.

'Will you stay after dinner?' He keeps signing things, crossing out paragraphs and striking out the odd absurdity working its way up the command chain, in hopes of being able to distract himself from an answer he finds he cares about.

Edward Elric is watching him when he risks looking up, book steady in finely-controlled hands, the son of Trisha Elric and Hohenheim of Light, brother to Alphonse and filled with six years elsewhere, Fullmetal Alchemist and ultimately Edward Elric, a man brimful of gates and circles and, in the end, doors which may or may not be opened, which may or may not respond to a particular chosen touch. 'Yes.'

'Good.' Roy Mustang is no longer a man to flinch from being loved.