Chapter Text
“Alchemy is simpler than you think, but don’t get stuck on simple ideas when you use it,” Ed explains on the biggest double-blackboard he could get Central University to give him. Even in his most mundane days, he returns to the Ouroboros, drawing that large circle with vivid red chalk from pure habit. It looks wrong in any other color—he can’t explain it. He tries not to dwell on it.
“Everyone talks about equivalent exchange, but it’s an oversimplification of a very complex process. A very knowing, intuitive process, that knows as much about you as you know about it.” At the end of his circle, he opens up the connecting lines, using an arrow pointing towards the end of the tail. “When you perform alchemy, you are actually involving yourself in the process a lot more than you think, and that’s where the simplification of ‘equivalent exchange’ leads people astray.”
He puts teeth on the inner side of his arrowhead, creating a child’s interpretation of an Ouroboros. “As long as you have the resources to perform alchemy, you have infinite possibilities in what you can do with it,” he pauses for dramatic effect. “But if you don’t, it’s very important you remember that being in ‘control’—” he uses air quotes, “—doesn’t absolve you of your complicity to the process.”
“We’re going to be heavily going over sacrifice. The law of equivalent exchange demands that you recognize that something cannot be created out of nothing—‘you must first give something of equal value.’ That’s nice and all, but that doesn’t really help people visualize the concept, does it?—Yeah, of course it doesn’t. That’s why I’m here!”
It will be impossible to work through their understanding of alchemy unless he properly deconstructs the entire subject. Right now, he’s kicking dirt to till the soil; he’s working with a whole lot of nothing here right now.
“One more thing before we start getting into the thick of it,” within the circle, Ed draws a hexagon with its six corners brushing against the circumference, and within that, he draws a triangle. A few of his students inhale sharply—it’s not a full human transmutation circle as he would never give them the full array to copy—but it’s enough to be recognizable. He’s basically drawing the outline of a monster under a child’s bed. “There are no forbidden subjects in my class. I may not tell you, say, how to perform human transmutation, but I will not shy away from the fact that it exists.”
His hand hovers to erase it, but feels like doing so after just telling his students there’s no forbidden subjects would make him a coward. He puts down the eraser as he talks: “The best alchemists are both scientists and philosophers. Just because a question—a fact of life—is disgusting, that doesn’t mean we get to look away from it,” he points at the center of the outline, as to not accidentally reveal a vertex to iterate his point. “Understanding why something is forbidden is as good, no, better, than understanding that it is. I will reiterate the core tenets of alchemy for you now.”
He writes down his own simple tenets of alchemy, or life as he drops the red chalk for a brand-spankin’ new white chalk:
DON’T MAKE GOLD
DON’T MAKE PEOPLE
DON’T THINK YOU HAVE THE ANSWER BECAUSE YOU KNOW THE FORMULA
“We’ll come back to that, probably.” He slides a fresh blackboard in front of the half-used one. He’ll go back to that. In white, he writes on the board as big as he can, as far up as he can make it: THE ALCHEMIC PROCESS.
“Let’s start with the basics. Every single one of you is already complicit in equivalent exchange even if you never perform alchemy in your life. You know why?”
No students answer. He’s not totally surprised—this early in the semester, they still think they need to raise their hands to talk to him, or they’re too curious about his past to not let him indulge in lectures, hoping for a bit of Fullmetal to shine through Professor Elric.
“I’m sure you all know a thing or two about Occam’s Razor, right? Simplest answer, fewest variables. We all affect each other forever. That’s the nature of being human. You affect others, and you get affected by them in equal measure. Small things, inconsequential things matter, because it’d be stupid if they didn’t. Because if nothing mattered, we wouldn’t be here.”
He checks to make sure his students understand and finds them looking at him blankly, some of them with their heads in their hands. He purses his lips together in a frown. “Thumbs up if you get me. Thumbs down if you don’t.” A couple of shaky thumbs oscillating—a handful of thumbs up from dutiful note-takers.
“Right. Humanity is cyclical, and people are a part of a cycle,” Ed explains as he makes another circle, this time in white. “Think of the cycle also like an ecosystem. You’re working with things in tandem and concurrently. Every choice you make in an ecosystem affects the total, even if you just kill one fish, spook one rabbit, so on.”
If he could send all of his students on an island to survive for a month, this would be much easier to teach.
“Alchemy is the same way. You’re affecting the ecosystem of experience as a total, a whole—if you spook the rabbit, that’s unnecessary energy it had to expend running away from you. That means it’s likelier to be caught by a predator. We affect these things even if, actually especially, when we don’t think about them.”
In the true north of the circle, he writes: PURSUIT. To the east, he writes: BARGAINING. The south: SACRIFICE. The west: EXCHANGE.
“So, you’re a part of the ecosystem. Wonderful,” he makes the word as sarcastic-soaked as he can make it, “let’s think about it in real terms. You don’t get clothes if you don’t pay for them. You can’t kill a fish if you don’t grab it. So is it that you ‘don’t’ get something out of nothing? Or that you can’t?”
After Ed finishes writing his diagram, he turns to his students, and he sits in the silence with them. Most people find this an uncomfortable truth of teaching—the silence when your students aren’t yet comfortable enough with you to freely speak and so badly want your approval that they’d rather be quiet than be wrong. He can’t play confidence for them, so he’s doing exactly what the Colonel did to him as a teenager, and he waits.
It’s not nearly so uncomfortable now. He used to be so uncomfortable with this kind of lingering silence, this open-air question, that he would crawl on furniture to avoid confronting it.
He swings his automail ankle over his human one when no one speaks for several minutes, and keeps waiting.
The longest record of a waiting period like this one is ten minutes. Luckily, Ed’s thoughts are the most interesting of all, and he does not mind thinking about more interesting things instead.
He has a half-finished transmutation circle he needs to ask Roy to try the next time he’s back in Central. He’s been trying to work with alkahestrian circles for some time now, and with Al in Xing most of the year, Ed has plenty of information to source from. The ability to use one kind of healing array in multiple spots would be revolutionary for Roy’s work in Ishval, especially with all of those construction accidents happening from the last time Roy wrote him.
He’s about to zone out, thinking about the array in his head, when a student clears her throat and asks: “Professor?”
His head perks up to address the student. “Yeah? You have an answer?”
“Yeah—yessir,” the student sits up a little straighter. “The answer is cannot. You cannot get something out of nothing. Nature will not allow you to do so.”
“Good answer,” he nods solemnly to consider it, and then points to his diagram and its four steps. “What’s this, then, in the context of your answer?”
“Uh…”
“Go ahead and guess if you have to. I’m gonna explain it either way, so you might as well try, even if you get it wrong.” Ed shrugs his shoulders to command a casual appearance.
“Right, okay,” the student leans forward. “I think—”
“Wait, sorry, hold up. What was your name?” Ed asks, cocking his head to the left like a dog. “I haven’t memorized everyone’s names yet.”
“Oh, my name is Eloise, Professor,” she says loudly enough so the whole auditorium will hear her. “It’s nice to meet you, formally and all.”
“It’s nice to meet you, too. Go on, Eloise.”
“Um, so sacrifice is only familiar to me in terms of human transmutation,” she pauses, probably waiting to be reprimanded. But then she forces herself to breathe in, and out, so when she continues her voice is steady: “In human transmutation, you typically give up something, and that’s the ‘sacrifice’—then you… you want something, so that’s pursuit, and then you try to offer something, and, if more resources are required, you give up something for it, and that’s bargaining and sacrifice, and then—results? You get what you wanted.”
Ed nods. “That’s a solid answer, Eloise, good job. And since you’re the first person who’s talking, I have to pick on you a little. You mentioned human transmutation. Let’s rip that bandaid off. That’s what a lot of people think of when they think about sacrifice, since, what is equal to a human person? Not a lot.”
“Nothing except other people,” Eloise interjects.
Pretty bold thing to say. “Exactly right,” Ed says, maintaining eye contact. “Human transmutation is one of the more obvious subjects in terms of an ecosystem discussion, or complicity within equivalent exchange. But it’s easy for this particular discussion, so it’s fine to use.”
He slaps the board to demand attention, and then draws a shitty amalgamation of features. “Let’s say we’re making a chimera. We want this chimera to be special, so special that it blows every other chimera out of the water. Let’s make it bipedal, give it wings, and have huge fangs for venom,” he draws a vaguely human-shaped chimera (more gargoyle than person), with wings and giant poking fangs that more similarly resemble tusks. “We want all of this because it’s sick as hell. But what happens if we don’t have enough resources?”
He writes down the resources they need. Simple, mostly magical-sounding, barely biochemical. FANGS (calcium phosphate, & hydroxyapatite); WINGS, (beta-keratin, calcium phosphate & collagen); A PERSON.
Ed repeats himself: “What happens to us, the person making the array, performing the transmutation? Are we involved? This is our ecosystem. This is equivalent exchange working at its most base, most animalistic form.”
“Yes,” Eloise whispers.
“Yes,” Ed repeats. “We are always—always—complicit. You will always be used.”
He writes it down: & YOU.
///
Almost two years ago, when Ed started teaching at Central University, he started spending every night at Roy’s. At first, it was a way to escape Ed’s terribly bare apartment and the fact that Alphonse was no longer even in Amestris, let alone Central—the fact was that there was no hope of being able to ask for a bit of company if it was a particularly rough teaching day. It started as a way for him to unwind next to a familiar face, someone who knew what he’d been through and had been through similar experiences.
Ed started savoring every second of companionship and waited for the inevitable moment Roy couldn’t make it happen one night, and Ed would shrink into himself and stop asking completely. It was the easier option, better than being rejected.
But Roy never did. He never kicked him out when he needed to get to work early, when they’d end up talking until almost dawn broke about alchemy, about the military, and the hopes they held for their country. They talked philosophy and ethics and language and politics. Roy was one of the few people Ed felt intellectually challenged by, and they ran rigorous sets against one another each night.
It grew into a tradition. Elrics tended to be good at those. Five days a week, sometimes six days, Ed came over to Roy’s townhouse that was only a few blocks from Central Command, and barely any farther from Central U, and they would talk over wine or whiskey. Ed would help him cook dinner and leave behind groceries to pick up for the next week. He also learnt that Roy went out for grocery trips on Tuesdays and only felt mildly ill. Sometimes, Ed would come over on Sundays just to stop that freakass tradition you have about Tuesdays.
Not once did Roy kick him out. He didn’t even question it. Maybe he knew that Ed couldn’t spend more than a few hours by himself without trying to crawl out of his skin about it. He even had the heart within him to look pleased when Ed came over. The way he smiled at Ed at the door set his skin alight.
As much as they still discussed the military, Roy’s upcoming promotions, and his projects, Roy was equally as insistent to learn about Ed’s teaching job. He was the one to offer the idea of a point reduction system for unsightly questions.
It was the Monday before one of Roy’s blasphemous Tuesday grocery nights, so in preparation of having fresh ingredients including vegetables and fresh meat from the butcher shop the next day, Ed was baking fresh roux for stew tomorrow. Roy was keeping him company instead of bringing work home. Somewhere down the line it started being mutually beneficial, though Ed couldn’t tell you exactly when that happened.
They’d been leaning on the counter waiting for the roux to bake as Roy considered Ed’s woes. “They ask me about Promised Day or being the Fullmetal so fucking much,” Ed complained, “and I get that they’re curious and I’m famous or whatever, but it bugs me out so bad still. I’m working on it, duh, but I can’t let this shit go if it’s brought up to me every day. It sucks.”
After a moment of concentrated thinking, Roy said: “If you don’t want questions about your past, why don’t you make it an actual problem for them? Make them take point deductions to their grade. It’ll get their attention because I know you don’t bluff,” Roy cocked his head at him then, to the right. “What do you think?”
It was just enough of a dastardly move that Ed would’ve been pissed at fifteen, but at nineteen, he was a little impressed by the idea. “That’s a solid one,” Ed said in the moment. “I guess I can’t do it this semester… but next one, for sure. I can prep it for next year’s syllabus.”
“Oh, that’s generous, Edward,” Roy said as he took a thoughtful drink. “A very generous professor, indeed. And where’d you learn that kind of kindness from?”
“Not you,” Ed said snidely, but Roy laughed all the same. Ed’s chest bloomed with warmth at the sound and tried not to dwell on the why that might’ve been.
Ed got all too used to their games, their debates—it was every night for some months and he got used to it. He could say whatever he felt was right to Roy, he could bounce his research off of him and get interesting answers back, and more interesting questions.
Roy got this look on his face when he particularly concentrated on an issue that Ed brought up, no matter whose job they were discussing at the time. When Ed suggested that it might be best for Amestris to let go of their State Alchemist program altogether to help prevent the further progression of militarized alchemy, Roy stopped talking for five minutes to think. Ed used to think that when Roy shut down that way that he probably thought Ed was being stupid. After many months of conversations like those, Ed realized Roy was thinking so hard about the implications he couldn’t pretend to do anything else.
Roy’s lips pursed and his brows furrowed; he circled the rim of his glass with his forefinger and stared off to the side of Ed’s frame without talking. Ed let him think without any further comment. Roy turned out to be one of the best ways to build stamina in tolerance for awkward silences that Ed used every day at work.
What he said then was, “maybe you’re right.”
It made Ed beam.
It wasn’t long after he had gotten used to this little life they shared when Roy’s responsibilities threatened to take him away to Ishval for the reconstruction efforts. Ed hated that idea because of who he was and how he was when he was without. It was a pretty humiliating experience to realize that he’d gotten too comfortable with the idea of spending almost every night at Roy’s, talking, debating, cooking together—it was a domestic life they cultivated, and one Ed took for granted all too soon.
He warned his students against that often. If something can be had, it must also have the potential to be sacrificed, he told them with a thickness in his throat. If you cannot live without it, that’s what will be taken from you first.
That is equivalent exchange at its core.
He swallowed his pride and did not reveal that particular misery to Roy. After all, who was he to deny Roy the justice he owed others?
To say that things shifted after Ed realized Roy would leave within the year would be an understatement. Ed never was able to keep his emotions to himself—he more than kept his emotions on his sleeve, he wore them in neon colors, screaming: I’M UPSET!
He stopped talking about teaching so much, worried he’d get too used to the idea again of things being the same and he’d forget that Roy would leave. Roy noticed, probably—he very rarely didn’t notice something about Ed, after all—but mercifully didn’t comment on his change in attitude. Their nightly topics changed to center Ishval. The culture, the language, and their work in alchemy.
Ed couldn’t pretend nothing was happening under the surface, but he did his best to enjoy the last few months they had together before everything changed. In hindsight, it seemed like Roy did his best to soak everything in and make use of it, but Ed was enduring a constant onslaught of tidal waves, always under threat of being washed asea.
Roy tried to visit Ed at work a few times, which always sent Ed’s nervous system haywire; he got so worried that’d be the last time they saw each other for whoever knows how long Ishval needed Roy for. He undoubtedly made classes much worse those days, but since Ed always pumped out so much research and papers, Central U never got on his ass for having a few off days teaching.
The last time Ed saw Roy was when he stopped by Ed’s office before he hit the train. Ed didn’t know he was leaving that day, but maybe it was better that way—Roy just ripped the bandaid off like that instead of making Ed dread and prepare badly for the day and probably have to take time off of work to recoup. He even left on a Friday.
Roy dangled a house key in front of Ed’s face. His voice was light, amicable. “For you,” he said sweetly. Ed took it in his right hand carefully, still getting used to the fact that he could feel things there now. Sometimes it still surprised him, the severity of a cold key in that palm. “You’ll keep the place warm, won’t you? And clean, hopefully. I don’t want it dusty when I visit from Ishval. My body can’t take the heat and the dust, I break out, you know.”
Ed was smiling before he knew it and clutched the key tightly. “You really don’t mind me coming over some more even when you’re gone? What if I blow it up?”
“I won’t have to worry about the dust, then,” Roy said neutrally while Ed sputtered into a laugh. “You’ll be fine, Fullmetal. I’ll visit whenever I can.”
“I know you will,” Ed said softly. “It’ll be weird without you in Central, but I’ll manage.” The sentiment came out too soft for Ed’s liking, and he grimaced after he finished saying the words. But when he looked up at Roy’s face, he had this look of resignation, maybe a bit of sadness, and the same sentimentality that Ed often found himself carrying in his own posture.
“General?” In times of discomfort, Ed found himself referring to Roy by his title. He’ll always be that little soldier boy, won’t he?
A je ne sais quoi in his mouth after that thought—maybe a tiny wish that nothing would ever change, even when things were bad.
“Nothing,” Roy said and then took a steadying breath. “You just looked so much like you used to for a second.”
“Great, I look fifteen again? Wonderful. I’ll have more colleagues asking me if I’m a lost freshman. That just makes my day.”
Roy sent him a wry smile. “Don’t fault your youth, Fullmetal. I rather enjoyed your company at fifteen. I’m sure everyone thinks you’re just a kid genius.”
Ed liked being nineteen. It felt so close to real adulthood, an experience that Ed had been craving since he was twelve. He wanted to believe the best in the adults around him back then, of course, but never willingly blinded himself with the belief that they were always right. Ed just wanted someone to be right sometimes so it wasn’t always on him to poke and prod and try to coax it out of the world around him.
Even though Roy never tried to make Ed believe that he was always right all of the time, there was a bit of relief in finding someone who wanted to try to do the right thing as much as he did. Ed often worried if that was some naivete he carried to faux-adulthood, but Roy still seemed to believe it—that even for men like them, justice was possible.
Even more importantly, that justice was worth fighting for.
“Yup,” Ed said lamely. “Kid genius, that’s me.” Roy huffed a small laugh, between that and an exhale, as he patted Ed’s desk goodbye and turned to leave.
Maybe Ed knew the truth at that moment, somehow, watching Roy leave. His stomach flipped.
“Hey! Wait a sec!” Ed barked. He saluted crisply when Roy turned to face him, but didn’t rise from his chair. Too much respect would freak them both out, he knew. “General Mustang,” Ed said, “I look forward to receiving your letters from Ishval. If I learn any helpful transmutations, you will be the first to know.”
Roy saluted him back. It was silly. It felt really, really good. “Former State Alchemist Edward Elric, you will be the first one I tell if I need any help during the reconstruction project. Your support is integral to my success. Stay safe and stay sharp.”
Ed watched him walk out of sight and tried not to feel sick.
///
Ed is allowing a lull to capture his lecture hall before he announces his students’ mandatory ten minute break, right as someone clears her throat loud enough to be heard across the auditorium. While he’s searching his mind for her name, he beckons her on with his right hand. Her voice is crisp and steady as it rings out across the floor: “I am about to take a point deduction.”
“Understood,” Ed sighs. “Go on, then.”
“How did you know that your alchemy would be a suitable sacrifice for your brother’s body?” The student asks. No—he knows he can remember beyond just student. As she finds the rest of her words, he reaches deep into the internal roots of his mind to find her. Shei, that’s it. Yeah. She’s a bioalchemy major. Ed writes her name down in his personal notebook with a tick for him to find later.
Shei’s voice continues: “You mention in your dissertation that all things have relative value until you talk about human transmutation, and then there’s a legitimate, objective worth. How did you quantify a human body? How did you know that there’d be a sacrifice out there enough for you to get your brother back?”
One of her friends jabs her hard on the arm with their elbow. Ed waves them off. “No, it’s not that I mind that you have questions, it’s that I don’t want it to take all of our time. It’s a great question, Shei, and I’m glad you asked a reasonably intelligent one instead of something stupid like, ‘does General Mustang smell like smoke?’ Let’s do this on the board.”
This is gonna take fifteen minutes he doesn’t want to have to waste, but as everyone leans forward, he might as well. Steeling himself, he grabs his red and white chalk, drawing two rectangles for the Gate on one side, an estimation of a human body on the other, and a simple matrix in the middle, all in white.
“When you’re talking in absolute values, you’re talking about Alchemy itself. We’ll call this Capital-A Alchemy, alright?” He puts Alchemy beneath the Gate drawing. “And everything else is lowercase-a alchemy,” he writes alchemy underneath the matrix, “so if you’re dealing with something that knows you, the All, the whole, the whatever you wanna call it—it knows what you do or do not find important. Say you’re ambidextrous, so for it to heal your blind eyes, you offer your left hand.”
He circles the eyes of the human in red with the word “GOAL,” and the left hand as well with “SACRIFICE?” He connects the person with a line from the center of their core, through the matrix, and touching the Gate with a piercing arrow.
“Capital-A Alchemy knows this isn’t a fair trade and it won’t be tricked. You’re perfectly capable of just using your other hand, so the sacrifice is basically worthless for you and it. But to gain your sight back, a huge advantage to suddenly get back—it wants more from you. It will take what it thinks is fair for what you’ll get. Remember when I said that ‘equivalent exchange’ was an oversimplification of an intuitive process? This is where that comes in. Capital-A Alchemy will take what it thinks it deserves for what it’s going to give you.”
He crosses out the hand by itself, but doesn’t yet put anything on the board. Instead, he draws an arrow from the Gate to the person, stopping right before, with a big question mark above the line. He turns back to his students.
“If you paid attention to my dissertation—which you should, because you mentioned it—you’ll remember that I used the explanation ‘impossible weight’ for the ‘relative value’ terminology. How much do you think you can lift, Shei? If you came down here to the floor and were told to pick up rocks until you physically could not—until you broke something. How much is your ‘I just broke my back trying to lift this shit’ weight?”
As she’s thinking, he writes down the problem as simply as he can. Ambidextrous, made blind, but what do you give? What is ‘equal’ to regaining your sight?
“Twenty-seven kilograms?” Shei offers. “I don’t think I physically could—unless I was under extreme duress.”
“Alright,” Ed says, moving across the board. He writes 27 and then Shei’s name a little separately from the rest of the equation. “You put twenty-seven kilograms as your breaking weight. So let’s say forty is your impossible weight. Just totally fucks you over if you try, right? Can’t do it.” Next to her name he writes his own name and then 90. “I can lift roughly ninety kilograms on a good day. Let’s say one-fifty is my impossible weight.” He writes 40 for her and 150 for him respectively.
He points to his board with his left hand, out of habit. “If one hundred-fifty kilograms is my impossible weight, does that mean that your forty kilograms is any less impossible for you? Someone else answer.”
A hesitant voice calls out. “No?” And then, when Ed cocks his head to wait for a reason why, they continue, saying: “Because it’s her weight, not yours. You can handle more, but she’s… well, she has her limits.”
“Exactly,” Ed says proudly. “Capital-A Alchemy knows that. When I offered my ability to perform alchemy in exchange for my little brother’s body, I already knew it would be accepted. Before I explain why, let’s go back to our blind guy. He can help me explain why exactly that was the answer.”
He turns back to his main problem, the blind man. He does not think about Roy. He won’t.
“So we have our guy over here. Thanks for waiting, fellow,” Ed taps the drawing of the person as if it’s a real guy. “Blind, ambidextrous, and willing to make a deal with Capital-A Alchemy to find something to exchange for his sight. Rookie mistake, but a couple of us make it in our lives. Can someone tell me some factors of why he may want his sight back? Assume he wasn’t born this way, he was made blind. Don’t raise your hand. Go ahead and call out.”
He gets a handful of answers. To fight is the core of a few of them. To see loved ones is another. He can’t traverse the world is one that a couple different people agree with. Smart—a man made blind would have to learn braille and how to use mobility aids like a cane all of a sudden. Ed’s fourth answer to get shouted out is merely because it was his to start.
He stops them there. “Right, so we have fighting, seeing loved ones, being lost in the world, and some sense of entitlement to his own senses. If we’re looking for an exact equivalent, what is the closest thing? To everything. Think about these four answers in specific.”
“Both arms,” Shei answers from the back, very quickly.
“Why?” Ed asks.
“He can’t hug his loved ones or hold them close, he can’t protect himself, and most of the world is built for people with arms. It’s a disability people assume you’ll have to figure out, or suffer alone about,” Shei says, steadying herself with a breath. “And you can’t grab anything you want anymore, so… entitlement fades, because you can’t grasp onto anything.”
Ed squeezes his right hand into a fist. “Very good. Capital-A Alchemy takes both arms.” He circles both of the man’s arms in red. On the line from the Gate to the man, he writes: EQUIVALENT EXCHANGE.
“When I talk about the concepts of ‘impossible weight,’ it’s meant to explain an unexplainable concept. It’s even more specific than the ‘sacrifice’ wording is. And the reason for that is that you don’t know who you can become until you are without something essential,” he looks at the diagram at an angle, but doesn’t face his students, lost in the picture he’s made. Even now, remembering the non-feeling from entering the Gate is a harrowing experience. The existence non-existence, the nothing-something. Pain and bright lights and then no feeling, not even in that order; the absurdity in the memory of floating in a sea of nothing follows him like a ghost, unable to be forgotten.
Ed’s leg port aches as he takes a steadying breath to work through the memories as they wash over him and pierce him clean through. He can feel his breath rattle, but, mercifully, doesn’t find himself trembling in the wake of them.
“Do you understand, now, why I made the choice I did for my little brother’s body? Why the deal was accepted, and why I knew it would be? Anyone but Shei answer, we’ve got too many good answers from her already,” he winks.
She gives him a disapproving glare. She probably still wants to talk. Aw, shucks.
It’s Eloise who pops up. To be honest, a bit of Ed’s heart swells with pride to see so many more female students each year in his class—the women he worked with in the military were few and far between. Not all of these students will join the military, but some of them will, and he’s glad to help strengthen their wills before they enlist.
“They’re both impossible weights, right? You mentioned that, saying that one-forty kilograms was your immovable weight—your, uh, ‘break your shit’ weight. But that kind of weight is haunting, right? You don’t like being weak, no one does. Having your limits shown to you is disconcerting. Losing your brother’s body… that’s an impossible weight, isn’t it? You can’t help but think about it. And alchemy—you still talk about alchemy, Professor. You’re the leading expert in Amestrian alchemy, after all. It haunts you, too. It must. No offense meant, sir—but… you traded one immovable rock for another. Didn’t you?”
She is clever. Ed smiles small and proud, which looks like a smug, mean little grin as he’s been told. “That’s exactly right, Eloise. I suffered one haunting weight for another. One I could live with.”
One he could pretend to live with, at least.
“All of alchemy is one experience after another. A lot of them will definitely be painful, some even disorienting or haunting. And so what? I’ll give you a Fullmetal freebie today and tell you this: no one can make you a victim until you decide you can’t move forward. Alchemy, even Capital-A Alchemy, can’t take your own will to live from you.”
“Professor?” Shei asks.
Ed wills himself to be calm. “I thought I said you were all done with comments,” he says jokingly, but beckons her on with his right hand. He can’t help but be hyperaware of his own body, metal or not, during discussions of the Promised Day.
He should try to call Roy tonight. After all, he’s one of the few who can understand what Ed went through during Promised Day. He can ask him about visiting for finals to perform the transmutations. Maybe he can call Alphonse for the same thing, if it’s not too late.
“Do you… regret it?”
Ow.
“No,” Ed says. “I would never, ever regret getting my little brother’s body back.”
“Do you miss it?”
“That’s another point deduction,” Ed says through grit teeth and he watches as Shei grimaces but nods in acceptance of her fate. “A friend once told me ‘everyone wants something they don’t have.’ That should be a pretty clear answer for you.”
He clears his throat. God, he’s spent. “Ten minutes break, and when we reconvene, we’ll talk about the first exam.”
///
It was before Ed knew, mostly because Ed kept himself from knowing at any cost, that Roy was returning home from Ishval for a little short break during the winter. It coincided partly with winter break for Ed too, which meant constant time together. Especially since Roy asked him to just stay here while I’m back, Fullmetal. No need to go home.
Ed wasn’t going to disappoint on that. He wasn’t one to skip on more debate nights if they were offered so readily to him.
Roy’s house was, admittedly, a mess, and it certainly wasn’t helped by the fact that Ed refused to watch any calendars in case Roy couldn’t make it back when he said he would try to be. Ed would always be Roy’s dog, he knew that, but it was another to admit he felt much like an abandoned dog in Central. He was better than that, damn it.
So, he cooked dinner for them and talked to Roy against the counter like they used to months before and did not mention how lonely he was. Not like he had much time to feel lonely with his students and his research anyway.
“Aren’t you turning twenty soon?” Roy asked lightly. The tips of Ed’s ears burned, feeling a little on the spot about it. It’s been years since he actively made it a thing, and even longer since he liked talking about his birthday. If he was honest, he didn’t like celebrations about him at all. He never felt as if he deserved them.
“Guess so,” Ed offered lamely, “probably in February, like every other year.”
“Doing anything fun?” Roy asked a little more insistently. Ed went between watching the vegetables sautée and Roy’s face, searching for clues on why he was asking. But Roy’s face was unusually impassive, even for their little nights, and Ed couldn’t get a hint. “Out with friends? Colleagues?”
“Not really,” Ed said back, a little curiously, so he said it slowly to really wring it out. Came out a little like not reaaaaally? “I don’t have much in the way of friends in terms of colleagues due to me being the whole,” he gestured vaguely, “y’know. And I don’t have time for friends. I don’t do well with friends.”
“That is so blatantly untrue it feels insulting that you’d even say it,” Roy said with an exasperated exhale-wheeze laugh. “But I understand that you’re stubborn and that you can’t see that you’re beloved. We should do something while I’m back. Has anything majorly changed in Central during my absence?”
Roy was saying it lightly, probably jokingly, and Ed knew that. He knew that although Roy was known for being that going-out, date-on-the-town kind of man, he knew Ed wasn’t. He might even mean something light with it, something meaninglessly small. He probably meant a night to the market together or a visit to Central Command. Not a date. It was fine.
“Fullmetal?” Roy asked a little cautiously. It must’ve shown on Ed’s face, his internal wrestling as clear as rain breaking through a sunny day.
Is something as simple as a date what he found himself yearning for by himself, filling Roy’s townhouse with knick-knacks and using every square inch of open floor, desk, or chair with his notes, papers, and assignments? When he fully decided he would no longer even pretend he didn’t stay here every night, when he admitted to himself that he was just going to use the guest room and not bother with cricks in his neck because he’d fear that sleeping in one of Roy’s beds would be weird?
It no longer felt distant. With Roy here, it felt unbearably close. Like a door waiting ajar, waiting for its insides to be seen and shown to the light.
But he was continuing to pay his job-subsidized housing, of course, because that’s what Elrics did, didn’t they? They always had contingencies for failure. Just in case.
“Can we stay in?” Ed asked a bit pitifully, he’ll admit it. “I just wanted to talk about stuff instead. Letters don’t do you justice, General; it’s nothing like being with you on the couch.”
He painfully forced himself to not look at how Roy responded to that question. Seeing any kind of disappointment or resignation on his face would crush Ed. He most pointedly did not want to start a perfectly good winter break with Roy that way.
He heard Roy sigh beside him in a faux-exasperated way that he sometimes reserved for the most poignant of Ed’s questions. The ones that Ed saved for as late in the night as possible, when Roy would be forced to turn to face him and ask: What the hell, Fullmetal? You’ve been cooking up that one until two in the morning just to mess with me?
But, in that moment, Roy snaked his arm around the lower curve of Ed’s back and let it rest there, even when it started killing Ed slowly. His mind completely left the vegetables cooking on the burner and only thought about Roy’s searing touch through his clothes. “Honestly, Edward, more nice evenings with you, getting to eat your food, and debating? That’s very domestic. I would not mind that at all. It’d be lovely, really.”
Domestic. Is that what he wanted with Roy?
Ed wanted to stay in and review interesting transmutations to avoid going out and he wanted Roy to not only let him, but stay with him and help him. He wanted to stay in. That was all.
It was bad enough that he basically lived in Roy’s house, making it his house, too. At least in the noise of their-sort-of-shared living space, Ed could pretend this was their normal and not think about the future or what it would bring. He didn’t want to go out. He wanted stew and books and Roy. That was all. He would turn twenty, but nothing would have to change at all. Nothing.
When had he grown to be such a coward?
Roy’s head ducked closer to Ed without him fully there, in his body, still so trapped in his head and his thoughts and his worrying that he almost didn’t notice. Ed flinched back at the last second, making Roy’s mouth brush against his chin and not his lips.
Ed was not panicking. And he most certainly was not panicking because things were changing, even if there was an ember inside of him that was waiting to catch into a full-blown fire within his ribcage. He did not panic because Roy did not kiss him. He could not have meant to kiss him, right? They weren’t like that. Ed was sure of it.
His heart hammered, but in spite of himself all he could do was laugh and ask: “General, you almost kissed me,” he tore at the inside of his cheek with his teeth while trying not to make it obvious. He averted his eyes again. “We getting sloppy tonight? I didn’t think you made moves like that.” He didn’t like how he sounded, but nothing offered as much as an escape as making it into a joke did.
Roy needed to go back to Ishval. Ed’s heart could not handle any more sacrifices like that. Long and painful and drawn out and ribbing against already scarred flesh, like a blade bouncing across skin. Was it what he wanted? It didn’t matter. The real question was could he have it?
Roy’s expression was unusually hardened when Ed looked up to face him. Was that it? He looked somewhere between confused and a bit pale, but eventually it smoothed itself back to impassiveness, a cool collection of emotions from his face. “Let’s just eat dinner soon, okay?” Roy asked.
Ed felt like he messed up somewhere, messed up in a much bigger way than he meant to, but he nodded hard and tried to breathe through the hard, arrhythmic beating in his chest. “Heard, man.”