Driving Stickshift

by FlamingEyebrows

The summer Ling Yao shows up, dusty and grinning, on the Rockbell-Elrics' doorstep, four years after the Promised Day, is the summer that Mrs Hughes, hands on her hips, declares that her extended family and its extended family are going on a vacation to the beach. Effective immediately. Fortunately, the drive is about to warm up in more ways than one.

A/N:

Written for a prompt: "Write the Big Four FMA ships doing it. In a car. Good luck making them different." Enjoy your twenty thousand words of smut, kiddo.

[This is my first smut fic and actually my first FMA fic overall. Also, given the fact that 99.9% of the smut I read is f/f, keep that in mind whilst reading the het smut.

Written in short bursts, so the tone varies wildly. Unbeta'd and unedited.]

Note: Everyone is four years older, which means that Edward Elric and Winry Rockbell are both eighteen, Alphonse Elric is seventeen, and May Chang is sixteen. Although the age of consent in my country of origin is sixteen, you might consider this underage, so read at your own risk.

"So, Miss Teacher, this is what I spent my winter break on instead of homework and studying for my exams! Aren't I just fucking goddamn incredible?"

---

The summer Ling Yao shows up, dusty and grinning, on the Rockbell-Elrics' doorstep, having apparently skipped out on his duties as the Emperor of Xing and put up a younger Yao sister as a temporary stand-in ("It's not as though they'll notice the difference," he explains, a full half of Edward's dinner already fallen into his cavernous stomach, "since I've never seen any of them lift their head off the floor in my presence. Maybe they like the smell?") is the summer that Mrs Hughes, hands on her hips, declares that her extended family and its extended family are going on a vacation to the beach. Effective immediately.

Granny Pinako declines with a mumble about making sure the hoodlum kids down the street don't burn down the automail shop while everyone's off canoodling in the sand ("Canoodling? Who the fuck said anything about canoodling?! Engaged doesn't mean married, you perverted old hag!"). By the following morning the motley crew has assembled: The Elric brothers; the proud owner of Rockbell Repairs and Reconstruction; the Emperor of Xing; his loyal vassal; the appointed Heir to the Throne until the aforementioned Emperor can father himself some suitable Xingese asses to put on said throne; the wife of the former Führer; the adopted son of the wife of the former Führer; the current favourite to become Führer; the current favourite to become the wife of the Führer, although she would prefer to call it a strictly professional relationship; and the two Hugheses, the latter of which jabbers excitedly at her dear Uncle Roy, much to Edward's delight, if the devilish look on his face is any indication.

"So, Uncie Woy, why the hell are you coming?" The former Fullmetal Alchemist crosses his arms and cocks an eyebrow; his smirk could rival a homunculus's. "Run out of excuses to not do paperwork?"

"At least he has paperwork to do." Hawkeye smiles innocently at Edward, whose brow furrows. Opening and closing his mouth a few times, he seems to weigh whether snapping at the captain would earn him anything other than an even worse insult back. Fortunately he favours jamming his hands into his crinkly leather pants over poking a sleeping dragon with a long, pointed stick.

Mustang glances up from Elicia's cries for attention. "Ah, yes, Fullmetal, speaking of your current unemployment, I've been meaning to ask whether you'd be interested in doing consultation work for the military."

Edward's eyebrow arches so rapidly it achieves orbital velocity. "You're shitting me. So the future leader of this damn country decides to finally grace me with his holy fucking presence, and he can't even remember what I goddamn told him a year ago?" He rolls his eyes, then rolls then again for good measure. "I told you. I'm done with the military."

"Never thought you a passive man, Fullmetal."

"And stop calling me that, Colonel Bastard."

"That's General Bastard, now."

"General Jerkass. Even better. Has a nice ring to it."

While the two continue the infamous Fullmetal versus Flame arguments, Winry, May, and Alphonse survey the inside of the Hugheses' rented vehicle, the largest Mrs Hughes could find in the city. "Well, if there are six seats, and twelve people," May begins.

With a snicker in her voice, Winry points out that there are only ten and a half, since the shorter kids must count as a half apiece. Alphonse counts on his fingers: "Elicia, Selim—" May touches his shoulder, gently, softly. "—and . . . ?"

"My idiot fiancé."

"Oh. Ten and three-quarters, then, at least."

In the end, two people per seat appears the fairest option, and another squabble commences. Edward immediately offers to share a seat with his brother, rescinding his proposal the moment Alphonse mildly notes that, as the taller one, he presumes Edward would be on his lap. The fight over the shotgun seat between Winry and Ling almost turns bloody until Lan Fan physically lifts Winry into a rear seat and is about to strap her in when someone notices Hawkeye is busily shooing Mustang into the passenger seat herself. At length Mrs Hughes apparates in the middle of death threats to come up with her own solution: "Chell and I will be in the front with the kids." Selim looks almost frightened at the use of his mother's given name. Winry murmurs something to her fiancé under her breath, earning her a rib in the side and a grin from the Xingese princess on her left. "Everyone else: Girls on boys' laps. I'm sure you eight can pair up somehow." Complaints of sexism. Mrs Hughes lifts a hand. "Unless anyone here is gay and I'm not aware, or unless anyone is uncomfortable with this, we're doing it my way. In memory of a car ride I once took."

That shuts the arguing eight up almost instantly.

Mustang and Edward shove themselves into the middle two seats, leaving the back four for the royalty, Lan Fan, and Alphonse. Carefully Hawkeye manoeuvres onto Mustang's lap with an air of dignity that fails to hide the smirk at the general's barely suppressed blush; Winry slips onto Edward's with the familiarity of a fiancée, rolling her hips in a way that reminds anyone who has spoken to her recently of her frustration with Edward's evident "abstinence until marriage"; May plops on Alphonse's thighs with a small, shared smile between two close friends comfortable with one another's bodies as with their own; and Lan Fan perches on Ling's knees as though he were a fragile china doll a second away from fracturing under the weight of her supposed sins. Funny, that, considering whom it is she's sitting on. Gripping the steering wheel tightly, Mrs Hughes beams at them from the rear-view mirror. "Everyone ready? Any last minute bathroom trips?" A few minutes and nine separate flushes later, she continues: "And if anyone's legs fall asleep, well, ladies, you know what to do." A chorus of groans, giggles, and hastily muttered if-you-dares accompany her fated words. The vehicle sets off.

Mrs Hughes, the occupants realise rapidly, must have an automail foot, because she stomps on the pedal and refuses to let go.

About forty minutes into the trip, Edward stares out the window and fixes his gaze on the line of mountains passing on the horizon. The purple mountain majesties supposedly rising off majestically in the distance serve merely to remind him of his initial trip to Rush Valley, Paninya and Ling and all, and the corner of his mouth twitches downwards, then upwards. The car has settled into a lulled quiet punctuated by occasional whispered conversation, the constant stream of friendly chitchat from the front seat running as an undercurrent below the peaceable silence. Winry hasn't said much at all. At all. And her typical motor mouth—okay, that's bullshit; if she has a motor mouth, then his must be on some form of illegal automail enhancements, yet she would still usually be the one to engage them in conversation, if only because his preferred forum of discussion rests in touches and hidden glances and smiles beneath the cover of his unruly bangs—is drawn tight. Her jaw sets in a firm line. The fingers of her right hand taps a melody of thought on her chin. At least her face, visible to him in his profile, reveals a slight upturning of her lips.

A moment passes. Resting the side of her head against the window, she increases the frequency of her chin taps. "If you're mad at me, we can stop the car," he mutters under his breath. "If you'd r-rather sit with someone else."

Winry hmms as though she heard him and shrugs against him: He can feel the movement of her shoulder blades against his chest, rising to brush against his lower jaw, and he presses his forehead to her back. "It's getting warm. You mind?"

Edward blinks. "'Course not."

She pulls the white jacket off, rustling against him while she does so, and abruptly he recognises that her navy blue miniskirt has been hitched up around her hips by her movements, the protective fabric she's come to wear underneath for rapid automail fixes gone in favour of cool skin. No, actually, warm skin at the moment, from where he can sense her on him. Thank his own ratty wardrobe that he has not a single pair of loose pants. Because the th-thought of her, in nothing but her panties, atop him—

He clears his throat. Gripping the rim of the seat, he edges himself away from her until the curve of his spine conforms uncomfortably on the straightness of the seat back. She finishes her cautious movements and rolls the jacket up, placing it on the tiny middle seat between the two usable ones, to reveal a light sky vest top. The stitches at the nape of her neck make him squint and cross his eyes from their proximity: The dark black forms a tiny flamel cross.

He grins so hard his cheeks ache.

"Thought you'd like it."

Scratch that. He's pretty sure his cheeks are on fire. Along with the rest of him. Wincing—okay, perhaps thanking his lack of loose pants constituted an early assumption—he tries to scoot further away from her, but she teeters on his thighs and pushes herself against the seat in front of her. Mrs Bradley turns her head, looks back the two of them playing a game of not-quite-hard-to-get. "Is something wrong? Oh, Winry darling, what a cute top!"

"Thank you, Mrs Bradley." She practically squiggles with excitement atop him; the mischievous glint in her eye must be a mischievous fucking star by now. "The new apprentice, Marco, he's been learning to sew, a little, since Mrs LeCoulte's pregnant again. She's been teaching him, you know." Mrs Bradley giggles, and Edward frowns at the apparent camaraderie between women. Some mysterious connection that appears to defy the laws of physics and thermodynamics. Or would that be the camaraderie between people in general? "So he offered to make me something if I showed 'im how to work with the thermal silver-plating mix I've been working on, for use in colder weather."

Potentially because the blood that should be feeding his intellect currently resides elsewhere in his body, he valiantly attempts to inspect the front of her shirt without initiating a Ground Zero event. Straining his back and neck, he manages to catch a glimpse of a pattern composed of the seven alchemical symbols corresponding to the human body scurrying along the hem of the top before something hot and heavy collides with something almost painfully hard.

His yelp is muffled solely by his instinctive shoving-his-face-in-her-side manoeuvre, for which the military should promote him to lieutenant colonel immediately, despite his no longer being in said military. Jerking away, he snags a breath of respite prior to Winry shoving herself back into the heat of his lap. "Could you stop moving?" she's grumbling while she adjusts herself. Her hips brush against him with each swinging twitch, and he bites his lower lip, turning his gaze back to the trees outside. "I really don't need to fall over in the general's lap. I checked my to-do list today, and I'm pretty sure I didn't see that on there."

From the seat over, Mustang snorts. "What's wrong, Fullmetal? Can't handle a pretty girl on your knee? There's medication for that, you know." Ling and May burst out laughing behind them. Edward sneaks a look to the backseat: At least Alphonse has the decency to smile apologetically, but even the stoic Lan Fan is crinkling her eyes in her amusement. Had he still possessed alchemy, Edward would consider clapping his hands together and letting the earth swallow him. Wait, no, not him: He'd let it swallow General Jerkass and carry himself and Winry off to get shotgun-married in less than three seconds. In fact, Captain Hawkeye would thank him for taking away her need to do double paperwork for the rest of her career. Sounds like a plan.

A real plan.

"What, you gonna recommend a brand?" He would fold his arms, but that would involve folding them over Winry's stomach, and the possibility of accidentally touching a breast is not high on his list of intelligent things to do. "Since you're obviously familiar with 'em."

Hawkeye chuckles. Mustang's poison-eyed glare is all Edward needs from the world. "He has a point, sir," the captain remarks innocently. Mustang shoots her a glance as withering. "You are useless when wet."

May whispers something in the back, and suddenly the entire backseat rolls with laughter. Someone kicks his seat, either the princess or his own brother. Edward growls, or at least thinks he does, until he realises it's coming from his fiancée.

"Ed, what the hell—" Mrs Hughes clicks her tongue. Elicia asks what that hell word means, with all the grace of a child able to exactly pinpoint the curse word, and Mrs Hughes clicks her tongue more loudly. "—sorry, Mrs Hughes, won't happen again—did you put in your pocket?! I'm usually the one with the wrenches. Are you that desperate you shoved an entire book of alchemy up your—oh." To her credit her epiphany manifests as a soft exhalation. She settles her weight directly on top of him and ceases to move. For a moment.

"S-sorry," he mumbles. He feels the rise and fall of her breaths against his chest, her back flexing with each measured pulse, both of them still. His pants are tight indeed, warped around his need, and his fingers hesitate over the zipper. But reaching it, and unzipping, would not simply alert the entire vehicle by the noise, but also involve touching the soft curve of Winry's bottom. He swallows. She sniggers quietly.

And then, so softly he can barely perceive it, she rolls her hips.

He claps a hand over his mouth and rivets his attention to the trees. Yes, trees. Tall, and long, and vaguely phallic, and wood, and. Shit.

Shit.

The car swerves dramatically. She leans into it and grinds against him, the leather squeaking when the fabric of her panties compresses against it; he couldn't stop the shudder that runs over him if he tried. "That drunk idiot almost got us killed!" Mrs Bradley gasps, embracing the children desperately, evidently terrified the two might spontaneously soar off into space. With an uncommon grimace Mrs Hughes rightens the car. Selim inquires as to what she's doing with her hand. Mrs Bradley sighs and tells him to wait until he's older; giggling, Elicia whispers the secret of the universe in his ear. "Roy, dear, remind me," Mrs Hughes says with a long-suffering heave of breath, "to slit Jean's throat when I get the chance, if you would."

Mustang chortles. "Will do." Without even sparing him an iota of his attention, Edward burns under the hypothesised heaviness of the Flame Alchemist's knowing leer. No, impossible. Not even with the noisy material of his pants.

He might take up that new apprentice on the latter's offer to sew him some clothes that don't bring a cacophonous percussion symphony with them everywhere he goes.

In the meantime the vehicle lurches again, this time towards the left: Mrs Hughes appears entirely incapable of quitting her foot from the gas pedal even on the sharpest of curves. Lan Fan yelps in the back; when May conversationally questions her troubles, the poor vassal makes some general noises universally translated as mortification. Truly following in the Pantheress of Resembool's footsteps, Winry shifts her entire weight atop him in a fluid motion, then visibly curves her spine to ease the pressure off prior to grinding against him again. He grits his teeth. The pleasure mixes with the sheer agony of his impossibly inflexible attire—why the fuck did he elect to put on hot leather on a hot day? And damn that ponytailed bastard in the back guffawing at him; damn him and his loose Xingese trousers—and he bites down on his right hand to swallow down the moan roiling behind his bobbing adam's apple.

"Win." His voice is rough, low; he clears his throat. "Oi, Winry." She turns her head enough to offer him a raised eyebrow. He struggles to keep his words as inaudible as possible: Hearing Breda and co. holler to one another about Chief Fullmetal getting a lap-dance in Mrs Hughes's car would kill him where eight homunculi, a serial killer, a terrorist, and his own brother's cat obsession could not. "It's, ah, starting to hurt."

"What's wrong?" Her smirk sends another jolt of urgent need through him; he throbs. "Are your legs falling asleep?"

Wincing, he slips a hand, the right hand closest to the window, under her hip to hold her in place. "Winry, you know what I—"

There's a sudden wet suckling sound. With a horrified squeal, Winry kicks Mrs Bradley's seat; her cheeks flush at the same time as his fingers twitch over the handle of the car door, seriously considering popping it open and throwing himself out to try his hand at surviving the wilderness. He can picture the panties pushed to the side by her incessant moving about, the harsh cut of his pants slipping against the damp inner flesh of her—

As the shudder ripples through him, slamming his back against the seat and his temple against the window (at least his white-hot cry can be attributed to his head trauma), he grabs her arms and squeezes them tightly enough to make her attempt to wrench herself from his grip. Panting, he waits until his blurred vision clears and his ears start to function properly again: The other occupants of the car stare blankly, gossiping amongst themselves.

"Are you all right, Winry dear?" Mrs Bradley starts, but Mrs Hughes shakes her head.

"Let the girl be, Chell. She's probably just cookin' up some automail schematics in her head, hm?"

His bangs slightly moist with sweat, Edward lifts his head up to catch Mrs Hughes's expression in the rear-view mirror but finds Mustang watching him with a bemused twinkle in his dark eyes.

"So that's what it is, Fullmetal?"

Hawkeye folds her arms across her chest; she seems entirely unimpressed. "I don't know what you're talking about," Edward hisses in response. Atop him, Winry struggles to put her panties back in their proper place (his mouth waters at the various colours and patterns that miniskirt of hers might hide), and he pulls the material tautly enough to allow her to subtly scoot the fabric over herself, her minute movements going mostly unnoticed.

Mustang laughs and tips his head back to rest it on the seat while he continues to quirk a brow in Edward's direction. "Is that a challenge, Fullmetal?" Hawkeye raises a hand in the girl's direction; the two exchange unreadable glances.

Edward notes Hawkeye smiling. The shine in Winry's violently blue irises reveals her contained mirth.

The hairs on the back of his neck stand at erect attention. He ignores his own innuendo.

The vassal of the Divine Son of Heaven, His Majesty Yao Ling of the Yao Dynasty, Holy Dragon of Xing, has come a long way from seeking comfort from the company of shadows and obscuring her emotion behind masks of black and white. Despite the imperial court wagging their chins about "the Emperor's alleyway whore," about the "bitch" who declines the traditional self-references of "this one" or worse, Lan Fan has found her voice, and her personal pronouns (she suspects—a word which here means "knows"—that her dissatisfaction at the court constitutes a major reason for him suddenly announcing their vacation to Amestris; sneaking off with her through the damn desert, may it rain every day for a thousand years; and leaving that cunning younger Yao on the throne, although the apparent switch would fool no one but for the fact that the Emperor remains the Emperor, holy and divine, no matter what his advisors believe). Yet for how far she's come, sitting in the Emperor's lap on a drive of several hours borders on obscene. And with Winry transparently gyrating on her betrothed—surely the girl can't think herself invisible—Lan Fan creeps through her pockets to finger the contours of the mask.

She promised Ling to wear it solely for battle. But perhaps this counts.

The Emperor himself is resting his forehead against the slope of her back. Although the occasion called for the two of them to don civilian apparel that would not betray their Xingese origins quite as blatantly, given the ever-heightened possibility of a half-sibling or three throwing xir stake into the game of thrones, she didn't elect to strip herself nearly bare as the others did and continue to do while the temperature steadily inches upwards.

About fifty minutes or so into the drive, she dips into the chi surrounding her. Ling and May, the latter an alkahetrist, the former nonetheless intimate with the Dragon's Pulse, have asked previously for an illustration of her ability: Unlike the chi-reading taught in the northern part of Xing, where the majority of the Fifty Clans take root, the technique she learned as a child, carried from the southern steppes to serve the Yao Clan, a mighty honour, has a markedly different texture. She has since mastered both. The chi of the North concerns itself with abnormalities in the flow, where the Dragon's Pulse breaks into eddies around a central focal point of power, where an imbalance swirling with potential energy awaits an alkahetrist's touch to send it smooth, unrippled, forward. Yet the chi of the South . . .

She sees the world in intricate swoops of glowing ribbons and threads, some thicker than her forearm in her mind's eyes, some thin and fragile and wearing quickly, interspersed with singular points of origin that almost shimmer to her their secrets. Whereas Ling explained the philosopher's stones as being akin to darkened areas belied by the Dragon's Pulse's white shine, she views them—or viewed them, now, regarding their scarcity in the world once more—as a single individual carrying with xem far more ribbons than any mortal human could, most of the threads tied off to indicate departures, tiny missing pieces of the whole. Meeting van Hohenheim for the first time disturbed her, for all of his ribbons save five, and later a few more, were broken and tied into knots of remembrance, rustling with him as he moved, his footsteps slow, distorted, as though the weight of the millions and millions he had somehow lost pressed heavily on his shoulders. Later she learned of the immeasurable vault of souls hidden within his heart of hearts. And still later she understood the ribbons as the families and friends of every one of those souls as well as the death accumulated on half a millennium of life.

Now she dips into the chi and nearly smiles at the brightly engorged ribbon between the two currently twitching on the seat diagonal from the. Obnoxious as their behaviour may look and sound, the pulses of glittering lust and love passing back and forth across their thread make for something lovely in its fragility. And the pulses passing between the two in the seat next to her, though not as strongly: They're considering it, or discussing it. Or the pulses passing between the two directly in front of herself and Ling, the Amestrisian soldiers off-duty. Or those, even, between the two mothers and their children whenever they interact for the briefest span of second.

Her grandfather, may he rest in peace with the other legendary martyrs, cautioned her once that intercourse appears beautiful to those unaware of its true implications. But she has come, may she and her children and her children's children respect her grandfather and his memory, to comprehend that perhaps what he meant to say was love.

Frighteningly, Ling's ribbon to her has beaten more and more strongly over the years. Of course she felt his infatuation as a fifteen-year-old, but even the Son of Heaven passes through the age of hormones and spontaneously proposing marriage to every gorgeous girl he meets (and a few boys, though more often than not those who offered him free meals without complaint tended to blush and twiddle their long hair and shift their arms to their knees to focus his attention on their breasts as if globs of fat could somehow direct him away from the precious repast before him). But by now plays across Xing portray scarcely concealed versions of the Emperor nibbling on peaches for running jokes in the background whilst the imperial court spreads rumours that his motivation for stoutly refusing his fifty wives lies not in him regarding the reordering of Xing a more imperative matter but in the supposed male lovers he evidently takes on with alarming frequency according to chirping boiled goose eggs that constitute most of said court.

The Emperor of Xing, far from possessing alleyway heirs or boyish night-time visitors, is an idiot, blessed be His name, the Divine Son of Heaven, His Majesty Yao Ling of the Yao Dynasty, Holy Dragon of Xing.

But still an idiot.

"Lan Fan." He grins into her back; she senses the thickening of the thread between them, the different pressures on her through her shirt exposing the curve of his lips, and she swallows without movement.

"Yes, my lord?" She softens her words, lowers her voice.

The fabric of her pants shifts, moving up, and comes to a point along her knee. Sensation on her lower leg. A fingertip. Two, brushing against the downy hairs running along the back (though the current fashion in the imperial court bids its women to go hairless but for that at their heads, as his constant guard she has little time for necessities much less for such frivolity). "Lan Fan, how good are you at keeping ssh?"

He traces a curve upwards on her left leg, the one facing the window, his arm undoubtedly disappearing into her garments. Scanning the rest of the vehicle, Lan Fan observes the others' attentions shimmering in silver threads between the couples: As long as none specifically stares at the Emperor or at her, specifically below the waist, the scandal could theoretically progress unnoticed.

Heat in her cheeks. "My lord." She inhales carefully; her shirt nonetheless rises with her shallow breath, but her face cools.

"Ssh."

His grin widens. He draws his hand further up to rest at the inset at the back of her knee, like the Forbidden City at the borderline of the North and South. Forbidden. She arches her spine until she can no longer feel the weight of his head on her.

He giggles. Surreptitiously, yes, but the soundless shake of his shoulders that shudders her thighs in the same stead could mean nothing but. "Am I affecting you that much, Lan Fan?" Her name rolls off of his tongue as though he is savouring a sweet, and the second shudder that trembles even her fingers comes although the Emperor has devoted his ministrations again to her legs.

She finds her knees squeezing themselves together and notices abruptly the sweat beading on the back of her neck. His fingernail sweeps the crevice, hesitating tantalisingly at the slight dip at the right, and then he grips her knee in a motion that startles her less from the surprise and more from the obscenity. "My lord," she bites out the instant the faint half-keen vanishes into the air.

"Lan Fan?" On their right side, the Princess of the Chang Clan tilts her head like a bird regarding a particularly scrumptious worm. "Is something the matter?"

Her gratitude for the Princess's Xingese dissipates when she recalls her consort's ability to speak the mother language, and from there the knowledge shall surely spread from brother to brother to the entire rest of the world, given the older Elric's notorious tongue as loose as a four-year-old child's. And an Amestrisian child's at that. "This one is fine."

Ling's hand stills on her flesh. "Lan Fan, I thought we made—"

"This one," Lan Fan snaps, "apologises for interrupting His Majesty."

May butts in once more: "You really don't have to say this one-that one with me, you know." She steals a glance at her consort, whose hands lie innocently folded in her lap in a manner that suggests an invisible lily between them. "And, Lan Fan? I know you don't say that this one thing with Ling, either." The Princess winks. Not at him, but at Lan Fan.

The vassal examines her nails and discovers a deplorable speck of dirt beneath the crescent of her right middle finger.

"I've heard you. Don't try to pretend with me." Warmth on her wrist. Unbidden, her gaze falls onto the Princess's face: Her eyes crinkled at the corners, her smile a swoop of curved lips, Xiao Mei riding her shoulder and for once not growling, somehow. "The two of you are cute together, anyway, and you deserve each other. Don't you dare tell me—"

Lan Fan stiffens entirely, completely, at once, her toes pointed downwards, her sloping spine flattened to a stringent line, her jaws already aching from the force with which she bites down on her words, her palms burning from the scythe-shaped marks her tension leaves in the flesh. At the same time Ling hooks the fingers of his unoccupied hand into her elbow, holding her, like she were plummeting to her death. "May." His timbre swings dangerously low. The Princess's brow smooths and begins to wrinkle in the opposite direction, her perplexion and worry scrawled across her features. Then her mouth rings into a small O of understanding. "Thank you."

"I'm sorry." The Princess bows her head. With her blunt teeth Xiao Mei tugs on the lobe of her ear, and May strokes the panda's belly. "Lan Fan, you . . . you can—"

Alphonse collapses the delicate structure of his hands to hug her fiercely enough to knock the breath from her lungs: Lan Fan focuses on the gasp her failed turn of phrase manifests when it expires to avoid feeling the tightness of the Emperor's muscles and the nearly imperceptible shiver in the index and thumb still curled around her elbow.

At length the vassal sighs internally. "Are you all right, Princess? This one is not sure what has happened."

May sighs externally. Lan Fan quells the smile threatening to contour her impassivity. "I offended you. And maybe hinted that I know a li'l bit more than I should about—" Her pupils dilate, darkening her irises, and from the direction of her gaze the vassal can imagine the fearsome fury currently clouding the Emperor's features. When the Divine Dragon of Xing wears His anger, the very stormfronts break on His beaches to escape His wrath.

But he was never Wrath. And he's no longer—no longer battling Greed.

"Ling!" With her hands now resting on her hips, the Princess sighs again. Her consort starts to unwind her extensive hair, frizzy from the growing humidity, and replace them in her signature multitude of braids. "Lan Fan, my brother is very upset with me because I can read your qi just as you can read mine. Idiot emperor, don't look at me like that: You two are cute together, and I want Lan Fan to be happy. Do you know who fended off bandits with me on the way back to Xing while you were fainted from quote-unquote hunger? One of the most incredible people I've ever met is who." Her half-anger, although never as awe-inspiring at the Emperor's, holds enough vitriol to paradoxically calm Ling (his hand returns to mapping the corded muscles and the rounder, softer spaces between; she inhales shallowly again in a vain attempt to summon ice to press to her cheeks). "Then again, perhaps I was wrong. Lan Fan, I think you could do better." The panda roars pathetically to punctuate the princess's point.

Her eyes narrow, her vision blurred red, her world reduced to a line of sound: You could do better. "I could never!"

A beat, and she covers her face with her hands whilst Ling trails fire along her inner thigh and May laughs. "Heheh, I knew it. You have to think consciously about that now, don't you? It's not the imperial court's doing. You were trying to . . . ah, never mind." May whispers something to her consort, of which Lan Fan catches, "to hide her embarrassment," and the fire of Ling's touch arcs ever closer to an unbearable inferno.

Her legs shake. She forces their immobility and likewise sets her face in immutable stone. Immutable. Unchanging. Tracking his every movement, his thumb sweeping arc after breath-shuddering arc along her muscled inner thigh, she lowers her eyelids and tilts herself back until his head is resting on the line between her shoulder blades again. Warmth.

"Ah." He hesitates near the apex of her thigh. A twinge indicates he's caught one of the hairs at the crease between leg and hip, longer and more wiry than the fine down of her thighs. "Ah, there you are."

Instinctively, instantly, her larger hand closes over his, his bones fine and delicate, his fingers long and slender in comparison to her own broad and thick and calloused to roughness, in yet another reminder of his careful breeding of the court and her own of the steppes in the valley of the wind. The evidence of his obscenity bulges her clothing from hip to ankle in wrinkles around the imprint of his arm.

"My lo-ord."

"Mm, Lan Fan, I think I asked you if you knew what sshmeant." He pulls lightly on the hair, and the twinge, far from being painful, reminds her of the scant location between his divine hand and her unholy, unworthy, undeserving w-wetness. Oh, ancestors hear her plea and help her.

By now she has told herself in the mirror of (her) washbasin every morning that she deserves him, that she can be greedy for him, that he wants her more than she ever could, and somehow safety lies in that imbalance of avarice; he echoes the sentiment when he steals a kiss through the mask in the ephemeral moments between one official leaving and the next entering, when he begs her to descend from the rafters and sleep beside him in his imperial quarters, when he spends the night lying beside her nearly shivering in the giddiness of her qi a swirling nexus next to him, not needing to touch her to murmur scraps of ancient love poems and blush himself to bed, and although she never answers the couplets under the pretense of not having had the epics (crammed into the already miniscule space of her skull by tutors in white beards sweeping the floor and painted masques of white lead that would weaken their frail figures until the bags of bones crumpled into dust like the former Emperor, blessed remain His name), the dual breakfasts awaiting him in bed the following morning, and the open mouth awaiting his half-shy half-excited offer to feed her ("A good king must feed his people, just as the people must feed their king. Lan Fan, did you know that the red in your cheeks brings out the nighttime in your eyes? Of course not, because the night sky must cry such sable so much more beautiful than she!"), betray her affections. But she could describe the touch of skin-to-skin merely as sinful, a word transcending time and space to rest uneasily in the lower annals of her heart. The automail port at her left shoulder pings out the smallest ache of pain, and she reaches up with her other hand to massage the sore muscles carrying the burden of such a weight. Of course she has grown accustomed to the alteration to her centre of mass, to the increased strength yet lack of receptive feedback in her hand, to the phantom limb that claws its way through her dreams and wrenches her awake in the darkest midnights to clamp desperate fingers onto steel to pry some feeling out of an arm so far gone the dying embers of pins and needles have dwindled into the abyss. And yet. And yet.

"Lan Fan?"

His hand has not twitched. The nail of his thumb vibrates (the nail of his thumb vibrates). The bile rises thick and acidic in her throat.

"Lan Fan, I know I asked for ssh, but if you . . . if you don't want . . ."

The secondary hesitation. For the vassals of the royal siblings, and particularly the vassals of the Emperor, must respond to any request. And if the royal sibling, and particularly the Emperor, should demand a vassal quit xir clothing and step into the light of the imperial chambers and tremble against the silken blankets and cry out or remain entirely silent when the royal sibling rams xemself into xir vassal over and over again, then the vassal shall do so.

And the last thing he wants—and he wants, as though his soul were woven from threads of greed and knit from strands of avarice—is to take her, and to have her claim her happiness, and to see her crystalline smile and to hear her crystalline laughter, because he wants, and she does as he will.

He wants her happiness and her smile and her laughter. Her happiness, smile, laughter. Not his for him. But hers, for her, so that maybe he could catch the starlight in her hair, run his fingers through the coarseness and come away with liquid droplets of gold clinging to the tips.

He imagines her happiness tastes like winter peaches.

His hand within her hand collapses into a fist. Her wiry pubic hair remains wrapped around his index finger, and he cautiously wipes the side of the finger against her thigh, dislodges it. Her nails dig faint pain into his knuckles. He smiles.

"If you don't want," he says again, this time in Amestrisian, because Greed would. Xing does not know the seven sins, or the seven heavenly virtues, for Xing knows the balance of the spirit. But he could never be the lost yang to her yin; yang, after all, is supposed to be the Tiger, and the black teardrop on her mask marks what she has lost and found and lost all over again, but isn't he the Dragon of Xing? The Immortal Son of Heaven? And someone immortal, truly immortal, is at once immutable. He could not change to become her Tiger if he tried.

(The impossible has never stopped him before.)

Lan Fan says nothing. But the hand containing his hand quivers, relaxes, uncurls.

Uncurls. Uncurls.

"May I?"

Xingese, again. Ling arches an eyebrow. Her chin wobbles for a fragile instant before her jaw firms. "May you what, Lan Fan?"

"May I want, my lord?"

He squeaks out a noise at the same time as a sudden wet squelch surprises him enough that he grabs a handful of inner thigh, his fingers dipping into the space between them to slip directly over her undergarments, adjacent to the heat radiating from her. Winry shrieks. Commotion: Giggling to the right, amused challenges to the front, panicked questions from the driver and friend.

"You may want," he answers in audible, audible Amestrisian, "whatever you want, Lan Fan. My wish is your command tonight." She seizes up an instant, throws her head left and right—he chuckles into her back, and she pushes her shoulder blades against either side of his face—and allows the tension to bleed from her. Back to Xingese, then. "Weren't we travelling incognito? Then, equals. And you're older, Lan Fan. You set the rules."

Somehow, miraculously, she shifts a centrimetre away from his knees and towards him. "Age before beauty?"

He laughs. Out loud. "So tell me what you want, what you really, really want."

She tugs on his hand. "Then, this one—" He scowls, and she makes that scratchy sort of laugh low in her throat, dry as dandelion fluff, that tickles his stomach and crinkles the corners of his eyes and could play a song on his tongue. "—should know that I want you."

"Sir, is this really necessary?"

Hawkeye wipes her mouth with her hand in an excuse to cover her knowing smile. She feels Mustang inadvertently pressing himself against her bottom, his hardness tenting his shorts in what she imagines would be adorably embarrassing had she been able to stare at it and then slowly look up at his face, arching a single eyebrow while he blushed and dithered and tried to excuse himself, the floodgates of alibis open and humiliating. Well. He shouldn't have worn shorts. Particularly not those silly flamingo-printed vividly turquoise things. Snorting with laughter on their last vacation, Hughes had purchased the pair and demanded Mustang don them at once. For her, in turn, he had found a headband complete with reindeer antlers and a massive poorly knit red sweater depicting a long blob shape that Hughes insisted was actually a horse drawing a sleigh. "It's not winter," she'd complained, "much less the holidays."

"Not with that attitude, no!" Hughes had grinned cheerily—she could see him mentally high-fiving himself—just as Mustang must be smiling now, echoing their friend's turn of phrase from half a decade prior.

She exhales in something of a sigh. He flicks the back of her knee, and she kicks his shin with her heel. "Damn you."

"Please, sir, there's no need for such redundancy." No response. She reaches out and curls his bangs around her finger. "You seem offended, sir." Mustang jerks his head back, draws away from her. Laughing under her breath and tipping her head to one side, Hawkeye meets Winry's gaze over the teensy middle seat. A glint of lust darkens the girl's blue eyes: Her widened pupils swallow her irises. "Winry, what do you think?"

Winry mirrors the tilted head and closes her left eye when the sunlight streams across her face from the opposite car window. "I s'pose we shouldn't let the boys have all the fun."

"Oi, Win," her golden boy butts in. His eyes shimmer, too, but not necessarily from excitement. "What are you planning?"

"The challenge, Ed. Or are you giving up already? Whatever happened to an alchemist's arrogance, huh?"

He winces. Visibly. Hawkeye chokes out a laugh, and he fixes his expression of sheer anger onto her, not unlike a tiny kitten attempting to intimidate a pack of wolverines.

Which is silly, really, because by this point Edward stands taller than Mustang and therefore herself, but he doesn't act like it. For all of his spitfire fury, for all of his scream-yell-ranting, the Fullmetal Alchemist behaves perpetually shortly, a descriptor Hawkeye would never have imagined had she not met Edward Elric. "So, Winry, shall we?"

The girl smiles shyly, lowers her lids to a far less shy half-mast. "Okay, but . . ."

The captain taps Winry's shoulder. Squeezes gently. "If the boys have anything to say to you, they can say it to my gun holster."

She can feel Mustang's scowl against her back, and she lets go of Winry to rub her temple. "I would never—"

"—and neither would I," Edward interjects hotly. "I mean, t-technically it'd b-b-be a favour, in a way, even though I haven't, uh—h-hey! Stop laughing at me, Win: I'm trying to make you feel better!"

Doubled over from giggling, Winry wipes tears of mirth from the corners of her eyes and swings her head up swiftly, nearly smacking Edward's forehead. "You idiot!" She crosses her arms and shakes her head; this time her hair sweeps into his face multiple times, and he grabs a fistful of blonde.

"Kinky. Oof! Captain, my shins are going to be bruised for a week if you keep kickin' them."

She hms. "I have no idea what you mean, sir."

Clutching Edward's wrist tightly, Winry glares at him, but given the glint in the blue iris Hawkeye can see from her position, the captain hypothesises the girl must not be serious. "Edward Elric, if you honestly think that I'm concerned about what some dumb blond boy and his even dumber former superior think, then I'm breaking off this engagement."

As though she were threatening him at gunpoint, Edward drops her hair instantaneously but leaves his hands up defensively, palms outwards, a bead of sweat glistening on his brow. "No, no, no. Then what were you worried about?"

Winry sighs and glances towards the front seat. "Mrs Hughes?"

"Mm?"

"When's the next rest stop?"

Gracia Hughes looks back for half a second, punctuated by Mrs Bradley yelping loudly and her adopted son giggling about some deer that is clearly "gonna be some roadkill!" The vehicle swerves and jolts, and Hawkeye takes the opportunity to steady herself with one hand on the side of the car and the other slipping over Mustang's, her fingertips brushing over his dry knuckles and sliding into the creases between his fingers. Simultaneously she uses the leverage from the curve to dig her hip into him; his erection rides over the back of her pants as she pushes against his hand to move herself closer to his chest, and then she feels him pressing on something at her front. The movement passes by so briefly she can't tell exactly what spot, what heavenly spot he hit, but she bucks forward, curling inwards on herself, and catches herself just before she manages to ram her head into the seat in front of her.

All that pleasure, and she could barely sense his erection through her pants.

Pants. She notes to herself to present Winry with an award of strategy and tactical genius for thinking to wear an easily discarded skirt.

"Oh, ah, do you need to use the restroom?"

Although the former pants against her, his own hips twitching from her motion, Mustang and Edward whisper silently behind her. She hears alchemy. "So, first one to get the alkali metal with the water wins?" her lap is saying.

Edward hrms. "The explosion? Secondary, though, I presume."

The general winks. "I'm the Flame Alchemist, aren't I?"

"Dunno," he answers cheerfully. "Sometimes I wonder if they didn't name you the Lame Alchemist."

Winry waves her hands speedily. "No, no, the opposite! I like the drive, so I was wondering—"

"Oh, no, then, don't worry." Gracia Hughes adjusts her grip on the steering wheel. The automobile accelerates, and Hawkeye grinds herself into Mustang again; the shirt over her shoulder blades tightens, and she feels his teeth and exhaled breath through the fabric. "Not for a while longer, at least. Thirty, forty minutes? Then we can get a bite to eat."

Elicia smacks her fist against the dashboard of the car. "No fair! What if I'm hungry right now?" Her four-year-old companion concurs as loudly as humanly—or inhumanly, Hawkeye supposes, considering the circumstances—possible, and Mrs Bradley hurriedly retrieves a wrapped package of her finest emergency war rations: chocolate chip cookies.

"Secondary reaction, then."

Edward extends an arm. "Shake on it?"

The quivering from Mustang's shoulder vibrates her own, and she responds by nudging him with her elbow. "Shall we?"

Winry's smirk practically shines. "First one there gets the other's dessert when we eat?"

The innocence of her request, as with everything else about the determined automail mechanic taking a break after running a start-up for two long years of Edward Elric's frantic telephone calls to Central trying to get love advice from the general, brings a laugh to Hawkeye's throat. "And we don't need to shake on it."

"Though shaking on it—" Winry wriggles, and Edward's pupils widen until the otherwise gold of his eyes appears to darken. "—might be a good start."

"W-winry," the boy gasps, his knuckles white, and mumbles something Hawkeye doesn't catch. Winry giggles. "You're going to work against your own fiancé?!"

She taps her chin mockingly. "I intend," she replies with another blush-inducing movement of the hips, "to win that dessert."

Turning her attention back to the task at hand, Hawkeye realises that something else is also at hand. Namely, Mustang has sneaked such a hand into her shirt and is currently caressing the horizontal line at her belly button where one roll of muscles ends and the other begins, a sensitive crease sparking a shiver at the very base of her spine. "Why, hello there. So tell me about yourself," he breathes into her ear, stirring the faint hairs on her eardrum with the warm of his mouth. He nips at her earlobe, catches the tender stretch of skin between his teeth, and then marks a line of flame up the shell of her ear with his motile tongue. "Would you call yourself the captain of this lovely ship, as wet—" Pulling up the waistband of her pants with his index finger, he dips his thumb lower over her panties, hinting towards the crevice emanating heat. "—as she is?"

Hawkeye claps her left hand over her lower face and lets go of Mustang's right. He draws his thumb in a circle, then starts squiggling shapes into the skin just above the most responsive regions of her body, and she gulps needed air. "Are those letters?"

"Maybe."

She tenses the muscles in her abdomen and clenches her thighs together to constrict his easel. Focuses. An O, a V, a shape she can't make out, another V, an O, a U. Frowning, Hawkeye takes the opportunity of the next turn to slide a hand beneath her, now resting on his hip. "I can't tell what you're writing, sir."

His flushed cheeks heat the back of her neck. "Ah. Well. Perhaps I should try in the tapping code."

"Mm. Perhaps, sir. Though you've never been very clever with codes, even ignoring for a moment your paltry attempts at chess." She skims the surface of his trousers and rubs the heel of her palm on the apex of the tent. "Well, sir, it appears that the circus has come to town." Her hand closes around the bulge, and his chest inflates abruptly on her back. A gentle squeeze. She outlines the ridge of his erection with the base of her thumb, circles him—even as she touches him, she can feel the mirror movements on her own rear—and moves down the shaft. "A shame, sir, about your boxers."

The noise he makes sounds half-growl, half-moan, and from the front Elicia, with the wisdom of a true seven-year-old, inquires as to what would possibly be wrong with her Uncie Roy. Said uncle jerks himself away from Hawkeye like General Armstrong caught him sleeping during his shift and swiftly complains about banging his knees on the seat. Mutters of bemused dissent. Elicia giggling. At last, quiet.

Curling her fingers inwards slightly to remind Mustang of her continued existence, Hawkeye glances over at their competition. Winry has trapped her mouth in her right fingers, the same arm held tightly to her chest, but the captain notes the way her shirt undulates, the raised cleft of her bra. She appears to be sitting on her left hand, but judging from Edward's expression caught on the precipice between torture and ecstasy, Hawkeye can merely smirk.

Mustang manouevres beneath her and presses himself into her palm. She offers him another rub of the heel of her palm, along with another squeeze. Leaning her head back and craning her neck to whisper in his ear, she murmurs, "Could you possibly unzip your pants, sir? Or drop your boxers?"

"Have you considered not calling me 'sir' while you've got me by the cock?" he mutters. She elbows him. "Hand. In pants." From the corner of her vision she observes his face suddenly redden, imaginary wisps of steam coiling from his ears. "And h-how did you know I was wearing boxers?"

She allows her grip to loosen—Mustang lets out his breath—and traces upwards along the seams of his trousers to hunt down his zipper. Then she reaches the hem of his printed shorts and has to restrain herself from slapping her face in her stupidity. Gingerly Hawkeye maps out the edge of the fabric. Blinded, her lids lowered until she can no longer see the seat before her, she gradually charts the twin creases between his muscled stomach and his hips, one on either side, leading downwards to the prize. His breaths deepen and quicken, and he starts to swallow every inhalation as though it represented his last.

When she dips below the curve of his belly, he muffles his groan by biting her shirt again. The sensation of taut material riding on her back arches her back and squishes her thighs together, nearly crushing his hand.

Complications: Her fingers catch on a veritable jungle of pubic hair (a glossy black, and surprisingly straight in comparison to hers, curiously different from the wiry Amestrisian hair she'd become accustomed to growing up, and she wonders if the variance would be greater had he been more than half Xingese), and she feels him tense his fist in faint pain while she attempts to tug herself free. A moment. He relaxes and brushes against her, running the first knuckle of his index and middle fingers just between her lips, the tantalizing sensation frustratingly alarming enough that she tilts her hips to sink his hand into her heat. At the same second she forces her fingers lower. His resultant spasm strokes her between folds of tender flesh, sweeps over her clit, drops for an instance into her inner walls. She clenches around the unexpected intrusion and resolves to break the bones of her shoulder to reach lower still to grab his erection.

Hawkeye can't tell if he's the one gasping or if the gasp is hers. "Holy shit," he says stupidly, and in the front seat Selim predictably elects to make a spectacle of the fact that Mrs Bradley adamantly refuses to elaborate on its meaning.

"Sir." The captain circumscribes the base of his shaft. She leans forward to place as much weight as possible on her legs so as to stand slightly over him. Balling a fist around his erection, she returns herself to his lap with her hand now between his erection and her bottom. When she encircles his length, then, she traces a circle on her sensitive rear as well. "There's no need whatsoever to speak that way in a civil setting." To underline her point she adjusts her grip and strokes the underside of his shaft with the bony side of her thumb, and he throbs in her palm.

"Extremely civil."

"Of course. The most civil. No one could beat you in a civility-off, sir, you are simply the most civil person there is." Hawkeye begins to stroke, slowly at first, and angles her head to listen to his breathing, timing each run over him to start exactly at his inhalation and return at the exhalation. As his breaths grow quicker so too do her pulsations of clenching-unclenching around his erection (and around the two fingers that have wetly glided into her inner walls). With one hand he continues to map the responsive regions of her lower belly and the seams along her hips and thighs at the same moment that the other pushes into her. She raises her eyelids to inspect the interior of the automobile: Gracia Hughes and Mrs Bradley chatter away about some incident at the former's employment evidently involving some sort of Cretan acrobats being called into the wrong location and performing in front of the switchboard operators instead of at some upper-class party on the other side of Central whilst the kids play I-Spy with a singular tree by the side of the road. Edward has grabbed Winry's left hip, his white-knuckled fingers straining the fabric of her skirt, and is hiding his face in her hair. Huh. So Amestrisian and Xingese have two separate shades of that hair, the blond's a more radiant sunlit gold, the blonde's a more saturated straw yellow. Winry still holds her arms tightly at her sides, but she no longer sits on the one hand, which is currently either in her shirt or her skirt and for the life of her Hawkeye doesn't have the patience to try to solve the conundrum. Satisfied at their surreptitiousness, the captain resumes her ministrations of Mustang. "Mm, sir, I'll have you know that your name can contain plenty of added alliterative appeal if I set my mind to it."

He draws his fingers upwards to massage her clit, crooking his index to rub the centre of the valley between her folds from her opening to the peak hidden within the mass of sensitive tissue, ending each stroke by quivering his fingertip on the apex of pleasure for several seconds prior to letting her plateau while he begins anew, kneading life into her nerves and setting them aflame with that bastard ability of his. Starlight gathers at the edges of her vision, yet when she opens her eyes and fixates her gaze on Winry's expression of determination, she shakes the building pleasure from her system and refocuses. "What are you calling me in your head now, Captain? Randy Roy? I suppose I should refer to you as Horny Hawkeye from now on."

"I suppose you shouldn't say such things so loudly, sir." She clamps her hand down, and she feels his yell of pain well up in his throat and die at her words. "Now, sir, could you slow down a bit?"

He chuckles. "What, too sensitive already?"

"No, you've yet to win your bet."

"And you, yours."

When her hand remains at the lower end of his erection, Hawkeye rocks her hips against him and opens and closes her thighs in rapid beats, rubbing herself on his hand and likewise rubbing him against her. The second inertia returns her to her previous position, she compresses and loosens her grasp up his shaft, pausing at the base of the swollen head. "Not for long, sir. I signed up to serve you as best I could, and this simply doesn't represent my best. Not yet."

If Alphonse were to lay his life down on a single bet, he would either say that the laws of alchemy are true, or that Edward would slit both Alphonse's throat and his own if he discovered his innocent cat-loving apple-pie-nibbling little brother had been sleeping with May Chang since nearly the beginning of their relationship, after May had spent a year assisting Ling with the clan reforms and he had travelled through Xing and beyond. Initially their relationship, as far as he's capable of recalling, marked itself in racy letters exchanged over borders that in themselves spawned as a medley joke of "you know Brother would throw himself off a cliff if I were to have sex before him" and "since I was a girl, I was taught to lie back and think of Xing, but wouldn't it be so much more interesting if I sat up and did a little something?" But meeting akin brought together a reaction akin to splashing water into acid in a rigid container: Sudden, quick, and exothermically explosive, desire bubbling under the surface and exuding outwards over nights and mornings and afternoons. After all, suddenly catapulting his body from eleven to fifteen had changed him in manners he had never thought possible: Their mother had assured them that, in true Elric-Hohenheim tradition, they would be late bloomers, and she had been proven right not only in Edward's height but in the brothers' other physical characteristics as well. And May, following years of celibacy and repression forced upon her, first by the stringent requirements of the imperial court and of her native land in general, and later by the stress of undertaking a grueling journey a full three years younger than Ling and without physical and emotional support besides, had awoken all at once to her status as a woman and as the girlfriend of a very willing young man. Inevitably, then, their reunion had gotten them banned from the family hotel in which they had chosen to stay until morning (in hindsight and through the lens of three years of experience, he should have foreseen the consequences of breaking furniture in an amateur attempt to tie one another up).

He has never seen stars brighter than those on that night spent sitting on the curb and bursting out laughing between intervals of passionate I-love-yous and what Winry later affectionately termed "eye-fucking".

And at the present moment, Edward and Winry are relatively clearly fuck-fucking in the seat in front, considering their wildly blinding chi paths and the semi-regular pulsations of the car-seat. General Mustang and Captain Hawkeye have also taken advantage of the opportunity of no one watching or caring, and Lan Fan squirms to their left. "Which means," Alphonse remarks in serene Xingese, "that we're in the clear, May."

"Heheh." Xiao Mei jumps from her shoulder to snuggle in her lap, and he scritches the panda bear behind the ear to May's giggled delight. "You sure?"

"Mm! I've wanted to try this for a while."

May flashes him a grin that curls his toes in anticipation. "I can see the Elric fire in your eyes. Determination's a good look on you." She pokes his cheek with her forefinger. "Determination mixed with a little worry, that is."

He catches her finger between his lips and sucks on it gently, sliding his tongue into the crevices between and over the knuckles, probing wetness in that manner that drives her to nearly dance on his lap, grab his wrist needingly (he winces). Her eyes widen and her lids lower, and he pushes against her slightly in response. "Your bedroom eyes," Alphonse murmurs around her hand, "could kill a man, and then some."

"Are you a woman then? Or two men? Or an elephant, long trunk and all?"

"Whatever I am, I'm yours."

May flicks the roof of his mouth. He softly bites down, as Xiao Mei does to those she trusts, and lets go. "Don't think I haven't noticed how much water you've been chugging."

"Mm, well, Mrs Hughes said we have another forty minutes or more, and as I said, I've wanted to try this."

"Phew, okay." She seems to regard him from behind dark lashes, and her heavy gaze hardens him. The light blush on her cheeks merely brings him to kiss her face and lips repeatedly, little gentle pecks, and tuck a strand of flyaway hair behind her ear. "How are you feeling, then?"

He places his hand flat against his thigh. "Well, mostly, like I need to piss." May laughs; Alphonse chalks her happiness as another victory for the day and reaches behind him towards the trunk. Fortunately, most of the participants have become accustomed to travelling light, so the packing party had managed to fit the few suitcases and so forth brought along. His rests partially open. Groping inside, he shakes each water bottles and listens for the tell-tale sloshing of water. "Got one."

"Wait." She touches his wrist as though he were made of gossamer, and he kisses her forehead. "So what happens if you can't make it until the spot?"

He clenches the bottle firmly. "First off, I'll make it. But just in case, I'm an alchemist, and I'll at least be able to transmute the water. I can handle some dry residue on my jeans, May: I'll wash up there and transmute myself dry. It'll be fine."

She fingers the loop of the braid affixed to the back of her head. "I mean, don't you think it'll be noisy?"

"More noise than the wheezing going on in the front seat?"

And out of nowhere Ling Yao drops into the conversation. "It's pretty clear what everyone in the car is doing, honestly." Lan Fan buries her face in her hands. "You should be fine."

May raises an eyebrow. "Do you know what we're doing?"

Ling makes a popping noise with his mouth, and Lan Fan shudders. "Nah, but it looks fun." His irises glint. Alphonse unscrews the water bottle and tips his head back to down about a third. "Wanna tell me about it?"

His vassal glares at him. "My lord, I don't mean to take your attention away from your vital conversation, but my lord."

He frees a hand from her shirt to sheepishly rub the back of his neck, his bangs drooping from what Alphonse hypothesising would be sweat. "Ah, sorry there. May, could you tell me about it later?"

Licking her thumb, May paints a heart of saliva in Alphonse's palm. "Mmhm. So, Al, start talking. I love your voice."

He chuckles. "As you've said before."

She elbows him hard in the gut, and he scarcely rebounds from the abrupt pressure on his bladder. Oh. Oh. "I passed the need-to-pee point something like—" He counts back on his fingers. "—an hour before the drive? Now I'm at the second need-to-pee stage, or getting there."

"Mmhm?"

His face flushes, and he changes his position underneath her. He's forcing his thighs together, she observes over the all-too-familiar erection cradled in the warmth between their bodies (last night, cradled in her palms and the walls of her mouth and the walls of her person, enveloping him, taking what is hers, her pleasure and her joy and her Alphonse). "Mmhm?" she says, elbowing him again, this time trying to angle her arm to hit where his bladder should theoretically be.

"Ah." He bites his lower lip. Something about the heady mix of his teeth on his glistening lip, his concern-widened eyes, his furrowed brow—something about that brings her to slip her hands towards her body, letting her sleeves fall to the sides. She cups her stomach in her palms and then slowly moves upwards towards her bindings. "Well, at first it was a faint annoyance, this . . . pressure of sorts in my abdomen. But by now, I feel inflated. It hurts, a little. Not hurt, really, more akin to straining." He laughs nervously and moves his hips from side to side, intentionally or not rubbing himself against her, and she grinds down into him. He smiles, then grimaces. "All right, more than straining, more like a consistent ache, as though my muscles're clenching hard around it. I suppose they are; I'm not entirely sure of the anatomy of that particular area. I would term the feeling tender. Swollen comes to mind, too."

Tugging on the hem of her bindings, May maps the sensitive curve beneath her breasts and marvels at the partial-chill that spreads outwards from her nipples, which harden to the point of somewhat hurting. Goosebumps rippling outwards in circles. The waves become more intense when she runs her fingers lightly over the swell (and when a half-formed memory of Alphonse enclosing her in a flooded inferno of pleasure in sticky saliva, nimble tongues and tingling skin and wet sounds of suckling, floats to the surface of her mind). "Is it possible for you to stop pretending to be so scientific about everything?" she murmurs. On her rear and the lower curves of her thighs she feels his hands twitch and slide closer to his crotch. One curls around his thigh, while the other rests on his lower abdomen, massaging his inflated belly.

He leans himself as if stretching his spine and curves back into himself, pressing his torso against hers. "Sorry, May. I'm used to being not only an alchemist but, nnrgh, also a medical school student. A doctor. In training, I mean, and apparently I haven't studied my urology enough. Although we haven't gotten to that, mf, yet." His slightly quickened breaths raise the hairs on the back of her neck. She palms her breasts, which fortunately fit comfortably, fully, in the basins of her hands, and clasps them. Squeezes them, hard, until her nipples poke sharp into the creases of her palms and pain sparks from the centre of each breast. She quivers atop him while he faintly stumbles over his words in a manner she has rarely heard before, every jerk and bounce of the vehicle eliciting these little gasps from his mouth that she wants to hold between her fingers forever and tuck into her pockets to hear them again on the coldest nights of winter and warm her over herself. When her clit begins to ache from the lack of attention, she embraces the familiar vacant space within her begging to sink itself onto something hot and hard. Giving her left breast a final agonising squish for emphasis, she flicks her nipple, digs the nail of her thumb into the delicate tissue around it, and detaches her left hand from her chest to dip it beneath her lower bindings. She skims over smooth flesh and pauses at the apex of her lips for a second prior to crooking her index finger into the valley between. "Are you wet?"

"Not yet." May wanders lower towards her opening and starts to stroke upwards towards her clit to ease out the wetness and slick the rest of her folds. "Keep talking."

"O-okay." She watches him down the rest of the bottle. Beads of water collect at the corners of his mouth and trickle down his neck, glistening on his bobbing adam's apple. She licks her dry lips and kisses the hollow of his throat hungrily. He cocks his head to one side to catch her mouth; their noses dab together at first, but she angles her neck and captures his lower lip with her teeth. His breath hisses between the gaps where their jaws don't quite match together: The coolness fills her mouth, and she nips lightly at his swollen lip prior to letting go with an unintentionally loud pop. His ears flare scarlet. He rubs his thighs against one another, tensing his spine to bob his lower belly up and down. "There's pain, and pressure, and it actually feels kind of good. Like that tightening feeling you get when you're about to come. Or when I'm about to come, I suppose; I'm not sure if you feel that tightening."

She nestles onto her fingers and jostles against him. Huffing, Alphonse shifts his hand over his erection—the point of hardness against her replaced with the bumpy terrain of his knuckles and wristbone—and kneads his groin in such a deliberate motion that she checks his chi and wonders at the desperation therein. "I know what you mean. Still think you're going to make it?"

"When an Elric says something, he means it," her boy answers pleasantly, but the crack in his timbre betrays his mild concern, "to the best of his ability, unless the circumstances of reality prevent him from doing so."

"Heheh." When she brushes against the material of her bindings, they feel soaked, and her sensitive regions would tend to agree with the observation. Submerging two curled fingers into her and pulsating her right breast, her thumb crushing her nipple with an acute light flash of pain on every squeeze, she rolls herself back and forth on him. Xiao Mei clutches into the fabric of the summer dress with her tiny claws for dear life. At least the years of casually sneaking into utility closets at the Medical Institute and University of Central City and ripping off one another's robes in imperial alcoves have prepared her for this moment of not allowing a single moan to cross her lips if she can help it. Still, she whines quietly, and Alphonse bucks against her. "More. More."

He inspires sharply and smacks his forehead in the spot between her shoulder blades. By now he has begun quaking continuously, shuffling his limbs and body, pressing and lightening and tensing and uncoiling incessantly, both hands creeping downwards to hold his crotch. "It's nearly distressing by now," he manages at length. "Ahh, I f-feel like I'm about to, nngh, explode. Like I've got come but I—" He groans low and butts against her. "—I know I can't, ah, f-fuck."

"Silver fulminate?" she offers.

Alphonse shakes his head ("Brother said he was 'sorry' about destroying the tapestry, May, and I'm sorry for transmuting the substance for him in the first place."), and his bangs tickle her neck. She giggles. The vibration of her chest wobbles her lower torso around her fingers; shivering in delight as gooseflesh coats her legs, signalling her proximity to the summit, she spreads herself wide on two fingers to neatly fit a third within, her ring finger barely noticeable amidst the lubricated opening until she contracts her walls around herself and barely stops herself from screaming. His thighs tremble. May leans over to kiss his cheek tenderly, touching the tip of her tongue to the warm skin and slowly tracing the Xingese characters for I love you as another tremor wracks his form and he releases his hands to hug her fiercely around the waist, crushing her to him and inadvertently sinking her fingers further within her. Her nail scratches something rough and swollen within. She lurches against the vice grip of his arms. White-hot lightning flashes behind her eyes and down her spine to spark pleasure-pain down her limbs, curl her fingers and toes, snap her neck back so sharply it might well have broken, but the golden pulse thrumming her body, her muscles and tendons and stretches of self an erhu's strings vibrating from the touch of a master, leaves no room in her for caring. The car falls away off the end of the world along with the other passengers and her clothing, abandoning her with nothing but herself and Alphonse's weight on the slope of her back and the fountain of bliss cradled between her thighs and belly.

When the golden light dissipates and her vision clears to Edward griping about her kicking his seat and Winry griping more loudly about the former alchemist's attention span, Alphonse is painting smooth circles into her hips. "That good, hm?"

Xiao Mei cries out from the floor and hauls herself back up to May's lap, tiny claws grasping at her robe. "Al."

"Mm?"

"Alphonse."

"May."

"I love you."

He wets his fingertip and writes roses on her jawline. "When we get there, we'll go down to the store, and then I'll teach you how to bake cupcakes."

"You're too saccharine for words, Al."

"But not too saccharine for you."

She fumbles along his cheeks for a few seconds prior to discovering the bow of his lips and kissing him, hard, her tongue under his and their noses bumping together at their sides, and out of nowhere she is laughing into his mouth. "I'll take all of your sugar and transmute it into hot breath and wetness." He pulls his head back, asks her to repeat it. She does, this time with a smirk.

He grins crookedly. "Carbon dioxide and water vapour. I love you, May Chang."

Turning towards the front again (dying in an automobile accident is likely not very high on her to-do list), May scratches Xiao Mei behind one ear and then the other. She settles her right hand on Alphonse's, once more massaging his bladder, and gingerly explores the worn crevices of his palm. With her forefinger she trails the bumpy ridge of the spider's-web scar extending from the midpoint to his wristbone from when Lan Fan caught him with the tip of a kunai during a routine sparring session. "You're trying to keep your mind off of your need to piss, aren't you."

Alphonse smiles sheepishly into her neck, and she beams at recognising the tone of his curve of facial muscle. "You know me too well."

As she walks her fingers up his arm, across his chest, and downwards towards his stomach, she follows the swell towards the engorged area and gently depresses. He groans softly. "Well." May gives the spot another pulse. "I doubt you'll have your mind off of it for long."

Edward tries to cup her right breast in his hand without it spilling over his fingers whilst Winry tucks her arm flat against her chest, scarcely concealing his lewdness. "Now is the time you decide to violate your little law?" she hisses. Her hair tickles his nose. "So what I wanted didn't matter, but some harebrained bet does?"

"Win. Calm down." He embraces her around the waist with his left arm and cranes his neck to rest his chin on the crown of head. "Would it count," he commences carefully, "considering the fact that we're in a car, and we're not exactly facing each other, and it's more like a lap dance only without clothes . . ."

"You know what they call a lap dance without clothes, Ed?" She slaps her face with the palm of her hand. "Sex."

"Hey!" He lets her go and starts to tug on the end of his ponytail, swept over his shoulder, as though searching for something to do with his fingers.

Impatiently Winry taps her foot against the floor. "Ed, are you just trying to make excuses, because—"

Edward squishes her in his clutch, feels her sharp nipple standing out from the general softness of her breast, and presses his face into the back of her neck. "I'm trying to make myself feel better about this," he shout-whispers in a harsh bark that barely details the maelstrom of fear swirling in his stomach and forcing acidic bile to climb up his throat, "b-because I'll do it for you, Winry, but I don't like fucking my morals up, and I'm sorry."

She closes her mouth so rapidly he can hear the chink of her jaws snapping together. Her hand touches his through her top. "Ed, we don't have to."

His words sound muffled against her skin. "I have a bet to win. And a Win to please."

"Huh?"

If he had a bowl of cookie dough, he would smear it on his cheeks and they'd all end up with fucking damn baked cookies just popping off of his face from how hotly he's blushing. Fuck biology. Fuck his stupid body. Fuck him. No, wait, scratch that last bit.

"I want you to be happy!"

Winry glances at him with her arched eyebrow and her uncertain smile that threatens to melt his cheeks. "And you think you need to shove yourself inside me for that?"

He claps a hand over her mouth. "Tsssh! Do you want them to hear?"

"Hear what?" Elicia butts in, staring at them from the front seat, pigtails swaying with the bumping of the automobile.

At least he feels her face become nearly as hot as his own. "N-nothing!" she mumbles around his hand. "We were just talking about how much we love each other. Weren't we, Ed?"

Her elbow discovers the scar between two of his ribs, and he sees literal flashpoints of agony. "Y-yeah. Of course."

Elicia blinks. For a seven-year-old girl, her cats' eye-green gaze seems far too intelligent for his liking. "But Winny, don't you always say that Eddie's so emotionally constipated he proposed to you using alchemy?"

"He's so emotionally constipated that he'd die if he told me he loved me," she mutters in response. Frowning, Elicia makes a quiet oh noise and withdraws into the front seat in time for Edward to seriously consider detaching his automail leg and stabbing himself repeatedly in the chest.

"Winny?" he echoes with a faint smile.

His fiancée's eyes narrow. "Shut it, Eddie."

"Touché." He kisses the back of her neck, sucks on that spot that bids her quiver. "You know how much I love sneaking up behind you while you're working on automail? Holding you and kissing you like this?"

Her expression softens. "As if I don't hear your foot clanging from kilometres away."

"As if you don't love the sound of your automail clanging from kilometres away."

The corners of her mouth curl upwards in a ghost of a smile, a crescent moon of white between her bruised lips. "Ed, if you're really okay with this, then okay. I just don't want to force you to do anything that would, you know, fuck up your morals, like you said."

"Fuck, I love it when you say that."

Winry raises an eyebrow, and he reaches up to stroke the outer shell of her ear, outlining the delicate skin around her multitudes of earrings. "I didn't know you liked dirty language. Or are you just trying to say I love without the you bit at the end?" She lowers her eyelids to half-mast and chews on her lower lip. Edward stiffens. All of him at once. The ache in his pants starts up anew. "Because that bit is a little important, you know."

Maybe stabbing himself repeatedly in the chest would be too easy. Maybe he needs to slowly chop up his entire damn body and have someone throw his remains to Black Hayate.

Sounds like a real plan.

Edward flicks her earlobe. "A chemical reaction takes place whether one writes down the formula or not."

She rolls her eyes so dramatically he could almost hear her skull crack from the force. But she's still smiling, which logically ought to mean something. Research into previous scientific investigations reveals no potential hypotheses. "As cute as your alchemy is, Ed, you can't spout off some cryptic proverb mumbo-jumbo and expect me to accept it. Just like that." Winry snaps her fingers. "Did you see the fire coming off? No? That's because—"

"Winry." He rests his chin on her head, pulling her close and tight into his embrace, enveloping her in himself. Her eyes widen; her fingers crease her skirt. "I'm okay with this. More than okay. I . . . I want you, Win, but I'm not going to do it do it until we're married, so I'm making this okay for myself. Okay?"

"You dork." Her grins broadens. "I guess you're used to finding loopholes in everything, huh? From Col—General Mustang's orders to the laws of the universe." He leans forward to lick a long, wet road up her ear, and she shivers; he runs his thumb over her nipple, and she shakes. "Oxygen potassium. Right?"

Despite himself he can't stop the laughter that bubbles in his belly and billows from his throat. "And you say I'm a dork?" Bending her arm awkwardly, she pinches his shoulder where his former automail port still keeps the flesh sensitive. "Let's see if we can do this without alerting the rest of the world."

"Say that a little louder: I don't think Xing heard you."

He grinds his teeth. His seat bounces him forward and he smacks his head against the back of hers. "I think May just kicked my fucking seat."

"Heh. Fucking seat is put." She snickers. "I think your brother is pulling ahead of you, then." Absentmindedly she worms her hands steadily over his thighs; the leather squeaks as she flounders her way over his erection, presumably searching for the zipper, and he braces himself against the tightening in his groin that could only spell disaster.

Edward snorts. "I don't think Al'd know what a boner looked like if his hit 'im in the face."

"He's that well-endowed?"

His hand hovers over her breast for a hesitant heartbeat prior to slumping down her side. Taking a moment to cup her bottom in his palm and give her a swift squeeze that grants him a swifter squeeze of his shaft (his vision blurs), he touches her wrist. "If I am waiting until marriage, I doubt he'll be doing anything for a while, especially not with May in Xing while you've been staying by my side all these years."

"Uh-huh." He arrests her forefinger between his thumb and index and guides her to the beginning of the zipper. Winry pops the button; his exhalation whistles between his teeth. The metallic fangs catch and tinge as she drags the zipper down and then keeps dragging, sagging his pants at the hips and tugging them a centimetre lower on his torso. Heat and moisture from her panty-covered vulva replaces the expected cool air. He shuts his eyes tightly. "Ah. Boxers?"

"Rip them open."

"Ed."

Swearing under his breath, Edward tenses when she hooks her fingers into the hem of his boxers and jerks her arm down; after a second of agonising strain, his erection fucking pops out and he moans into her shirt. Her wet panties squelch against his swollen head (his face could melt metal if he tried; perhaps he should offer his services next time Winry crafts automail). Despite the constraining seatbelt and their awkward position, he swerves his torso somewhat to circumscribe the appropriate outline of her lips with his length (he feels his heartbeat at the base of his shift and at the end of his heart).

"Ed," she says again, but he hears the undercurrent of desperation, senses her weight increase as she grinds down on him and rubs stars into his eyes. They breath. Together. Chests rising and falling and rising and falling and grinding. His heart beats thrum-thrum-thrum in his chest. "By the way." Winry nudges his unoccupied wrist up to her ear again. "Turns out my boobs aren't that sensitive. Go figure."

He clips a nail underneath her highest piercing, one of the flat-looking ones. She stifles a gasp, her throat convulsing. "But your ears are."

"What an observation. You're truly a marvel there, my wise alchemist." The quick, chaste kiss on the nose immediately washes away any irritation. "I'm kidding, I'm kidding. You don't have to sit there puffed up and offended like that."

"I'm not." He lets her go, intent on removing her panties, but the automobile jumps on the next curve and their sole point of contact at her ears forces out a kyaah! of agony. Sheltering the wounded side of her face with a hand that has slapped his away, his fiancée stammers out answers to Mrs Bradley and Mrs Hughes's honest distress at her apparent issue ("I just wasn't expecting a swerve that, uh, swervey!"). In the meantime Edward returns to looping his arm around her waist. When he breathes into her inner ear, the warmth comes reflected back onto his face. "Well, I guess I am puffed up, but not—" He taps his temple. "—with this head."

Winry snickers immaturely. "Ed! God, I know why you're not in the military anymore. You're still thirteen years old at best."

"Mmhm. And you just giggled like a twelve year old." He mimics her tone. "At best." Giving her ear a final series of silken caresses and gossamer tugs (if he stops touching her, she'll stop moving so needingly atop him and she'll stop those tiny gasps that quake through her chest and legs and form in general until she sloshes down into a quivering mass of Winry in his lap: Thank alchemy for the human-ness of his hand; thank alchemy that the former automail port in his shoulder is merely that), he waits for her to rock forward—his shin smarts, and he hears her other heel bang automail—and shoots his hand into th-e crevice of air keeping them apart. His palm slides over his shaft. Already pre-come has wet the head, and he gingerly thumbs the slit. His teeth seal around her shirt: The muffled moan that shakes him pushes him against her soaked panties. Soaked panties.

His mind spins.

Soaked panties.

The vehicle lurches left. Speedily Edward hooks the opposite hem of her panties and drags them aside. Heat proliferates. A droplet of liquid fire dampens his head, and he swallows down a scream. Propping herself up with her hands on his thighs, Winry hovers over him, gazes at him with those bright blue eyes he wouldn't mind wading and drowning in, and deliberately, steadily moves herself down until the folds of her wetness slip against his head. She's biting her lower lip, her tongue bulging her cheek.

He kisses her neck. Before she can breath in he kisses her again, sucks at the point, swirls his tongue around the tender flesh of the love bite he's imprinted into her skin (a tiny revenge for the hickeys he finds each morning down his arms, chest, torso, sometimes in the hollow of his throat or along his jaw where not even a high-collared shirt could hide the reddened marks).

"Oi, Win?"

Her nails leave crescent moons of pain in his right thigh despite his leather pants. Slickly she rolls her hips back, leading him lower and lower into her, until he senses a depression. Her entrance. Shutting his eyes again he continues to suck on the back of her neck, continues to suckle her and probe her with his tongue, continues to paint words into her skin.

All at once her hands fall away from—and then—heat—wetness—tightness—

Clenching around him—

Constricting him—

Blinding him—

("Oi, Win?")

Winry sinks him into her until she feels his sack heavy against her. In this position his every motion jostles against her clit as well, providing stimulation to her already pulsating vulva (her heart has come to rest between her thighs). As her inner walls adjust to the welcome length throbbing. When he doesn't move, much less breath, she guides his hands to her hips. "Ed?"

"Nnrghfhl."

"Thrust. Could you do that for me?"

He shudders. No response.

"Did I kill you?"

Silence.

She tightens her muscles as if she were trying to hold in her piss, then slowly relaxes them, only to tighten them again all at once. His forelock trembles against her neck.

"Ed. Edward Elric."

Her fiancé shakes his head.

Glancing out the window, Winry watches the scenery flash by. Trees, grass, an occasional fenced meadow of cows or a far-off farm surrounded by growing green. Blue sky. Clouds. A signpost, indicating the next large village is twenty minutes away. Massive throbbing erection shoved up her inner walls. Owner of said massive throbbing erection apparently having second thoughts. Or something.

She strokes a heart onto the back of his right hand. "Ed? Are you okay? At least say something. Please?"

He lifts his head (she misses the sensation of forelock to skin) and kisses her neck again. "Sorry. I'm here."

"Are you sure you want to do this?"

She feels his chin wrinkle (she knows he's scowling). "I should be the one asking you, right? The guy's supposed to ask the girl?"

"As if you've ever done what you're 'supposed' to do."

His fingernails press into her hips; she prods his hand warningly. "I guess that stuff's sexist bullshit anyway."

"Mm."

Quiet. Mildly surprising, considering the fact that he is currently in her. And yet not, considering the fact that he is Edward Elric. Slowly Winry releases her grip on his shaft, as much as she and her vulva would prefer to cling to him and ride him like a studhorse, but she resists. Links her fingers in her lap. For his sake.

Mrs Bradley and Mrs Hughes are speaking idly. Something about work. Acrobats, a Cretan trained monkey set loose during an office party, havoc wreaked upon the poor switchboard operators, a destroyed cake smeared along the prized boss's rug, clean-up spanning literal hours. Winry drums her fingers on her shivering knees.

At length—she sniggers silently, shoulders shaking—he nods against her back. "Okay, I think I can do this. J-just tell me if I hurt you, all right?"

After her time in Rush Valley with Paninya and so forth, and during his months of travel around the world (they promised one another a free and open relationship, because an eighteen-year-old man wandering through fields of beautiful foreigners likely wouldn't sit around pretending to be celibate, but upon his return she realised at once that she'd taken a far greater advantage of the situation without thinking), Winry would sincerely assure him that he couldn't hurt her if he tried, yet she merely nods and squeezes his wrist gratefully. "I promise."

"Then, I guess I just . . . h-how do I . . . ?"

"Thrust." She tilts her hips, places her hands back on his thighs. "Thrust your hips up." Before he can fluster, Wirny adds: "Oh. And you can go back to touching my boob. That felt nicer than nothing."

His fingers tremble when he finds her breast again beneath her bra, and she returns to holding her right arm close to her person. "Like this?"

"You're so sweet when you're embarrassed."

Abruptly Edward grips her breast tightly enough that she narrows her eyes. "And what's that supposed to mean, automail freak?"

"I mean," she says cheerily, lifting herself up a few centimetres (the seatbelt can go to hell) and crashing herself down upon him, causing him to buck wildly, "that I don't often see you so uncertain and eager to please." His other hand cups her hip. Holding her with a touch so gentle she could believe herself to be spun of silk in his calloused fingertips, Edward pushes into her softly, experimentally, and then lunges into her forcefully, the stroke hard enough for both of them to quake less in pleasure than in a painful sensation.

In a second he sits still again. His fingers quake. "Shit. Sorry. I fucked up. I fucked up." The words call her from her daze. "I fucked up."

She leans towards him and angles her head to kiss his cheek. "You didn't." Her inner thighs sting; the soreness will chase her to the next rest stop, and riding the rest of the road bumping on someone's not-so-luxurious lap doesn't sound pleasant on her smarting groin. "You didn't. Take it at—at your own pace, okay?"

Her fiancé smiles faintly, and then he breaks out into a broad, dashing, patented Elric grin, in his typical Edward fashion. "Yeah. Lemme just, uh, just try that again." This time he braces more solidly on his hip. "Ready?" Winry replies with a roll of her muscles, compressing him all over at once. When he thrusts upwards she gasps and alters the angle of her hips. The second pulse: He hits that spot parallel to her clit that throws golden light across her vision.

"Right there." Her expiration whistles over her teeth. "Right there. Oh god. Oh my god."

A third. Fourth. Somehow his breath cycle hasn't breached a thousand in-outs a minute. In-outs. Breaths. Thrusts. They come together with the slight awkwardness of two people whose bodies have yet to fit comfortably in one another, but even though his strokes haven't settled into the steady rhythm of experience, she attempts to predict his thrusts so that she can raise herself up and sink down at the second of the upwards pulse, tightening at same time, drawing out his every yelp and whine and half-choked moan-sigh. Her top feels as though he's about to rip it clean off. Well. It can go to hell along with the restraining seatbelt. Whatever bastards invented the demon thing's getting a wrench to the cranium. Repeatedly.

Amid trying to capture the groans in the base of her throat before they alert everyone in the entire world from Drachma to Xing that she and Edward are making passionate love in the backseat of Gracia Hughes's rented van with two kids in the front row, she checks her watch and times. He lasts a minute-forty-six. She covers his shriek by loudly apologising for kicking him. He's warm.

Winry'll have to engineer him a plaque of congratulations the next time they return to Rockbell Repairs and Reconstruction.

Sweat trickles down his face and onto the back of her neck, and she senses the warm liquid dampen her collarbone. "Hey, Winry?"

Already he's softening within her. "You're adorable." We'll work on the performance issues, she wants to add, but ruining the moment would force her hand and she would open the car door to roll onto the asphalt below. "You might wanna clean up a little. Boxers and all." Catching Hawkeye's eye, she winks, and the captain arches her eyebrows. Tilting her body towards the centre between their seats, Winry whispers, "I'm getting the dessert."

Hawkeye winks back. "Fair and square. Of course, he is a virgin."

"Not anymore."

The women chuckle until the captain's pupils dilate out of nowhere and she bites her lower lip. Her laughter melting into giggling, Winry leaves the older woman to her boy and returns to hers.

Edward is writing something in the creases of her palm. No. Drawing.

A heart?

His breath tickles the shell of her ear. "I love you. A lot. More than I've ever loved anyone. Like that. Or will. Um. Winry, I love you, and I don't know what I'd do without you." His jaws click shut.

Oh.

Oh.

Edward nudges her thigh up. Numbly she raises herself, and the leather of his pants creaks noisily (their sex must have been cacophonous, as though a tornado had swept through an adult superstore stocking more leather than she could dream to exist in the entire world) while he tucks himself into his underwear and pants.

Oh.

Suddenly his fingers clutch at her wrists painfully. "W-w-win!" he blitzles gently. "I didn't—fuck—holy shit—c-con—protection—"

She smirks. Presses her lips to his cheek.

"It's okay." Winry winks. His bright pink face could melt the heavens. "I put one on this morning." He opens and closes his mouth, fish-like. "And I love you too. Alchemy dork."

"Picture this: We're in the imperial throne room, and the advisers have left perhaps a second or two ago for a recess, and the plan is to return to discussing, hm, tax standardisation in the more difficult-to-reach districts of the country. After said brief recess. Which means we have maybe four, five minutes to ourselves, and suddenly I've grabbed your shoulder. 'Lan Fan,' I say, and you appear from your position in the hidden beams in the ceiling, 'what do you think of the taxes?'"

The Emperor murmurs into her left ear, low, scarcely audible even to her, as if spilling his divine words into the open air would somehow foul him (and they are his words, and it would foul them, and she would foul them—only not anymore, because she is allowed to want him, and she does). And yet despite the improbability that any other living creature could even catch that he speaks, she senses the seat below them and the metal around them easing under the weight of what she would call infatuation left over from their childhood and he would call love over and over again until she believed him with his immortal (frail) heart cradled in her palm.

". . . and you would brace your hands on that giant imperial table of mine, scattering official scrolls like autumn leaves, and I kneel behind you." He chuckles, and she hears the choir in his laugh. "The Emperor kneels for his vassal like a servant kneels for his Emperor. Your pants are so soft, Lan Fan, when I take them off."

Since she could walk, her grandfather, may his spirit find joy and parsimony in the world beyond, had taught her to fight, to protect, to conceal herself if absolutely necessary (never hide, nor flee, for hiding and fleeing mean she has given up, and she would sooner slice her other arm off, rip her automail clean from its port, and spend another six months vomiting blood in lieu of aching for three years, because of him, and because she could barely stand six months without her weight on her feet, her kunai in her hands, and her purpose thudding below the surface of her heart). She would take a position behind a corner or high up on a ledge. A breath. And then Lan Fan would not move, not from heat, nor from cold, nor from sound nor silence, and she would remain in that manner for hours at a time. The moment she so much as twitched, her grandfather, may he rest in peace, would instantaneously attack her with a pair of kali sticks. For the first year of training she would try to sleep between grueling sessions without disturbing the purple-blue patterns of bruising that her slip-ups painted across her form, a game of connect the dots from hell ("Does that miserable one understand, worm? That useless one will never amount to anything, wretched girl-dog, if that one doesn't learn to stop that noise! Are her feet made of imperial bricks? Are her lungs coated in crinkling paper? Is she made of bells and whistles, or is she merely a worthless rotten dog's liver?" her grandfather, may his memory never fade from this world, would bellow at her, but then he would tell her stories of female warriors and empresses; fight with her parents to allow her to continue training; and love her as his granddaughter and as a fledgling vassal of the future Emperor). But for all of her experience, her muscles ceased listening to her several minutes ago.

Lan Fan is squirming in the lap of the Dragon of Xing.

Lan Fan is squirming in the divine lap of the Dragon of Xing, born of heaven and sent to His people as a sacred gift from the gods.

(Even if they both know that his divinity is a crock of shit—he's had the nearest equivalent, his violet-violent-burning avarice keeping him up at night with its demands for women, wine, wealth, and still somehow he released it all and returned to her—He is unmistakeably the Emperor of the Largest Nation on Earth, and she will not allow herself to forget that.)

His hand strokes her inner thigh, following the corded muscle. ". . . and when you've finished writhing over the royal paperwork, I offer you a final kiss, to your swollen entrance, for safekeeping. Heheh, okay, I would probably squeeze your ass too, friendly-like." To her dismay her bottom tenses, and Ling smiles into her neck. "I stand up, fetch a handkerchief somewhere from a drawer, and wipes your fluids from my face. Though not before running a finger up your slit and popping it in my mouth. Do you know how delicious you are, Lan Fan?"

Coolness dribbles down her back and her brow. Her automail complains from the firm clenching of her fist. And still she wriggles from the mental images surfacing and refusing to let go. The vividness: Flashes of cream parchment under her shaking fingers. The golden phoenix stamp of the Yao peeking out between the middle and ring fingers of her automail hand. The heady incense dissipating through the uncomfortably hot atmosphere. Her scent perfuming his face. Her taste on his lips when they kiss. The brilliant saffron and scarlet of his robes slightly sullied from the floor. The equally brilliant saffron and scarlet of his handkerchief thoroughly sullied from her. The court-fashionable, powdery makeup caking in and around her vulva as he replaces her trousers. Dipping into the surrounding chi hurriedly to make up for lost viligance. Hesitant to inquire if he would agree to bathe with her later to scrub out the gluey remains of their sex. Hearing him ask first. Scrambling jelly-legged to the rafters an instant prior to the advisers returning.

And she wonders why she can't stop herself from moving.

"Lan Fan?" He nears the apex of her thighs. She squishes his hand between her legs, but he wiggles his fingers against her hot flesh, and she bites her tongue until her mouth floods with copper. "I know you get off on the danger of getting caught. Half-breaking the law." She yelps before she can sense the sound in her throat. He touches her collarbone gently with his other hand, the delicate caress somehow more mind-numbingly tantalising. Cheek, jaw, neck, shoulder. Travelled by his feathery fingertips. "It's okay, I promise. I love you, you know that? You and no one else." He smirks into her sweaty, heated skin, and she marvels that the universe has not imploded. "I may be a greedy bastard, but very specifically I want you. What do you want?"

Lan Fan bows her head. "You. Ling."

He grins widely and grabs any part of her he can: her thigh with his left hand, her shoulder with his right, her earlobe with his teeth. A strange sort of embrace, but he's seen stranger. "Ling. Yes."

Her exhalation comes out with a twinge of half-embarrassment, half-amusement. "I'm impure today."

"Ah." Ling returns to massaging her inner thigh. Her hair thickens, lengthens, and curls as he trails upwards.

She grips his fingers painfully through the fabric of her trousers. "I'm impure today."

"A true emperor helps his people through peace and war." He shrugs and chokes back a laugh at her blush. Loud blush. Her entire face and body darkening red. "And a true swordsman doesn't mind blood on his sword. Or on his fingers." While she covers her face with her hands, he steals the opportunity to press a thumb to her wrappings. Thicker than usual. Mm, that answers that question. "Besides, I've seen more of your blood than I ever wanted to in a lifetime, so a little more can't hurt."

Her words come burbled through her fingers. "But that's—not proper—"

In a perfect world Lan Fan's expressions would range from joyful to peaceful to wonderfully, lovingly flushed-red shyness; in a perfect world she would have naught to contort her features to wrath or terror or grief. At least within the concealed world of the automobile ride, he can capture an immobile memory of her happiness.

"I'll make you a bet," Ling offers. With her hands still over her mouth and cheeks, she nods steadily. "If my fellow royal cousin is also doing unmanageably kinky, you'll let me."

"Ling!"

He sighs contentedly. "My name sounds like the heaven themselves have descended to your lips, Lan Fan. Keep saying it." Leaning forward, he fingers the hem of her loose shirt before throwing his hand up all at once to brush against her side, outlining each rib with a gossamer touch, and then hunt over her hard abdomen to hunt down the soft spots not entirely composed of muscle and sinew. These he jiggles whimsically. "How I want to run my tongue over every one of the chinks in your armour, Lan Fan, and mark them with my teeth, like so." He bites her shoulder through her shirt. She practically jumps against him, and he embraces her as she lands. "I want to know, to own each single last centimetre of your body, and I want you to know, to own each single centimetre of mine. Oh, you know what part of you I do know?"

His hand flutters over her stomach and chest, skittering over her bindings, alighting on the hidden swell of her breast. Lan Fan finds her tongue after a handful of heartbeats. "Which part of me?" A pause. Then: "Ling?"

"Please." If she says his name one more time, with that much desperation boiling under the surface clinging together as unmistakably fragile as spun sugar, he'll surely ruin his boxers, and a shame, given he just stole them from the Amestrisian general store that very morning. "Your lovely breasts are always the most sensitive part of you, and when you're 'impure', as you say—" He could live without the word. "—they're the worst. Which is why you bind them. So they don't move at all, and you can concentrate, hm?"

He listens to her tongue flail behind locked jaws. At length she opens her mouth, and he bites her shoulder again, harder this time. She keens. Ling beams. "H-how did you know?"

Her stutter could replace the sun. "I know you," he says simply. "Thank you for not binding them so tightly today, by the by. I love you for it." While she claps a hand over her lips to keep her yell within, Ling worms both hands under her bindings and rests his forefingers on the far corners of her breasts. "I know, I know, I'm good with my mouth, aren't I? With my tongue. I bet you taste delectable right now, if I were to slip my tongue in your yoni. Sweet fire." The tender undersides feel dry. Pulling out one hand and then the other, Ling coats his fingers in his saliva with a series of noisy, moist shlops (she trembles on his lap; he loves too much to say). "When we get to the beach I'm going to lock myself with you in a closet and rake my nails in your back—" Someday she'll have the courage to return this particularly riveting favour. "—and then I'm going to lick the wounds and suck until you're absolutely covered in my spit. In my fluid, Lan Fan. I'll make a miniature sea of your spine and leave a love hickey at the base." Wet now, her skin parts easily. First with his soft fingertips, and then with the sharp ends of his nails, he follows her curves. They're small for all her twenty years (the night a romance novel informed him smaller breasts tend to be more sensitive some six years ago, he left a thank-you offering at a shrine for the first time in months). Perfect for him to cover them completely with his hands, for him to drive her wild with too much stimulation at once. "You know, Lan Fan, you make me want to lose my voice." Dampening his thumbs again, even though her breasts have become slick with sweat, he draws endless circles on her areolae and senses the bumps and wrinkle deepen and grow under his fingertips. Creating a terrain for him to explore in its entirety. "I'm going to tie you to the ceiling with some silk scarves that'll tickle your wrists, and I'm doing to see just how long I can keep you on the plateau with all of your holes strained to brim." Carefully Ling gauges her reactions: Based on the pattern of her quivering spasms interspersed with brief periods of respite and vaguely normalish breathing, her left prefers a faster stroke and more nail, whilst her right is more sensitive when he pinches her curve and retains a pinky on her underside for a touch of extra stimulation. "And then someone'll come looking for us in our room. And you'll be shaking there with baited breath and I'll be doing everything in my divine power to make you scream." He nibbles on her ear. She begins to gasp, tiny flighty spurts of air like a swallow's wingbeats. "No, no, better: I'll do it in the main room, and anyone wandering around would need to look up, and they'd see you, and me, and me with you. And then it'll be a game of cat and mouse, hm? You wanting to climax already for thrilling-fear of being caught. And me, completely serious about keeping you right at that peak for as long as possible." On the final word Ling abruptly depresses her nipples.

She kicks the seat in front of them. Hard.

He laughs out loud. "Now, let me see about that bet, shall we?" Lan Fan starts to shake her head anxiously, but he leans right.

May Chang is fiddling with her braid when he tips an ear to their conversation. Her eyebrows droop at the sides, curving into the rough shape of an upside-down V. "I mean, don't you think it'll be noisy?"

Alphonse Elric clicks his tongue. For some reason he balances a plastic water bottle in the palm of his hand. "Noisier than the wheezing going on in the front seat?"

"I told you so," he whispers to Lan Fan, whose nipple has begun to harden under the careful ministrations of his thumb, and then pops up more loudly: "It's pretty clear what everyone in the car is doing, honestly." He proffers his worried half-sibling an encouraging smile. "You should be fine."

To her credit, the Princess rapidly rids her expression of concern and affects one of eyebrow-arching curiosity. "Do you know what we're doing?"

"Nah. But it looks fun." Ling scans the Elric's apparent discomfort and the light rosy twinge to May Chang's cheeks. While he watches, Alphonse Elric gulps down a significant chunk of water, and the Princess smirks knowingly. "Wanna tell me about it?"

Before she can reply, Lan Fan arches her back to press her breast more firmly into his palm. Ah, his hand has stilled in his distractions. "My lord, I don't mean to take your attention away from your vital conversation," the love of his life snaps, and only the seatbelt stops him from dropping down to one knee, Amestrisian-style, "but my lord."

Beaming, Ling quits her breast entirely to rub the back of her neck. "Ah, sorry there." Her glare could paralyse a battlecrew of killer whales. At least his position as Emperor is keeping her from bodily hurting him, although her automail elbow twitches dangerously against his ribs. "May, could you tell me about it later?"

"Mmhm," May Chang responds absentmindedly, already moving on to her boy, and Ling does the same: He flicks her nipples; she chomps down on her not-metal arm. Shifting his right leg beneath her, he massages her vulva with his knee between her thighs, pressing against her in tandem with his languid pulses on her breasts. Occasional breaks consist of rolling her nipples while he nudges her thighs further apart.

"You're pressing your knees together," he murmurs, smirking on her neck, "which means you're close. Very close." Immediately Lan Fan sets the offending appendages apart, and prior to her realisation at what she's done, he fits his knee through to apply pressure directly to her most sensitive areas. The tendons in her neck flex. "Careful you don't leave teeth marks on your arm, Lan Fan. Since I intend to leave some myself. Though at the moment it seems like I'll be painting your breasts into an ocean sunset."

She manages to choke out a few scant syllables: "Ocean sunset?"

"Sure!" He pinches her left nipple. The fabric squinches from the force of her bite. "Blue and purple. I hope you're not mad at me, Lan Fan, because I love you so much I can't really say how much except that all the greed in the universe couldn't hold a candle to a flaming sun." He flicks her nipple again. "I couldn't hold my arms wide, either. I've have to touch finger and thumb and claim that was the outside." His chuckle sounds self-conscious (it is). "Not that that made any sense."

Lan Fan moans into her arm. Something like "I couldn't hate you if I tried," which here means "I love you but I'm too 'this one'-y to say it," which here means she loves him, which here means his life is complete. "You stopped. Again."

"Only for a second." His right wrist is beginning to ache from the terrible angle of consistently swerving against her underside. His right leg prickles sleeping pins-and-needles from taking on the brunt of her weight, automail arm and all. Yet every gasp and movement and squirm makes his discomfort more than worth it. Much more than worth it.

"So you're on the ceiling where I've tied you by those scarves." Ling licks the side of her neck out of nowhere at the same time as the next pinch. The chi of the other couples throbs in the back of her mind, goading her on and on to fiery oblivion. "And I've got all of these massive black di—"

Abruptly she seizes up, one long wave of muscle tightening from her jaw to neck to shoulders to arms to stomach to snapped-together legs. Beat. With a silent cry Lan Fan throws her head back and cracks him in the forehead. Yellow Yao birds twinkle in the corners of his vision as he forces himself to come to so he can hold her as she shatters over the summit in his embrace (he burns the image into his retinas to keep him warm on winter nights). Her fists open and clench reflexively. In her shoes, her toes must be curling.

Ling thinks this is maybe the first time she's ever purred, but he hears the thrumming hum in her chest. And in his. Oh. Heartbeats.

"You got dirt on your nose." He wipes the button with his thumb.

She hangs limply in his arms.

"Ling?"

"Never stop calling me that."

She closes her eyes. He feels her chest expand, And then she smiles faintly, so faintly he would have missed it but for knowing her inside-out.

"I . . . I love you. Thank you."

"Ah."

His right hand slides over her breast to rest in the centre dip. Her heart purrs on his palm.

"Lan Fan? Don't leave."

"Ling. Ling, I'm here. I promised you: I'll never leave again."

"Okay." His heartbeat sings in his ears. "Then there's nothing to fear ever again."

Of all the accomplishments to write on her future resumé, Captain Hawkeye would probably not place "has jacked future Führer off without alarming the other near-dozen of individuals in a crowded, secluded moving vehicle" at the top of her list. And yet here she sits with her thumb atop the general's pulsing erection, smearing pre-come over the head in quiet circular motions that track across his glans. Every lush stroke over his slit sends him reeling in shaking muscle. In relation his fingers flutter over her clit, and she grits her teeth, locks her jaw.

Still, both of them linger dangerously close to the edge. Or perhaps she is already falling and has simply not admitted it yet. After years of bar-hopping (being a wealthy, intelligent, charismatic, not-douchebaggy, extremely attractive influential man with enough Xingese to warrant an exotic flair amongst the usual Amestrisian blond certainly helped), Mustang knows his way around a woman. But as does she, around a man. Well, around people in general.

Not to mention, of course, the last handful of years at the Hawkeye manor, the two of them quivering on the cusps of eighteen and sixteen and stumbling under the weight of his imminent departure for the military and her father's worsening condition.

They know one another.

The question comes down to circumstance, to mental condition, and to motivation. And at the moment, she has a bet, and dessert, to win, in addition to the glory of causing Mustang to lose his. Mustang has nothing but his pride to lose. And he will lose it all.

When her thumb glides easily over his slickness, she moves onwards to his shaft, slicking the hot flesh with hints of cool. At least his laziness or decision not to shave means she isn't rubbing against the friction of bare skin, although coarse hair catching in the creases of her palm hardly fares better. "Oh my," Hawkeye purrs (she's giving it her all, and she's giving it her all), "you're so wet. How ever do you plan to lead the nation, then, General Mustang?"

"Eh?" Finding the hidden sweet spot at last, he twists her clit, and she grinds down on him, the tip of his erection prodding the slope of her bottom.

"You're useless when wet. So useless you might even be—" She curls her fingers around the base of his length with the pad of her thumb furthest away from her. Brushing upwards, Hawkeye ensures she presses on the delicate understreak of his erection, drawing out a moan fortunately covered by Elicia noisily inquiring about Edward. "—impotent."

Mustang glowers. "I thought your side of the bet was something about me coming first, wasn't it, Captain?" As she leans forward to adjust her, better timing her strokes with his honestly irregular breaths, he adds hastily: "And how do you plan on making me come if you keep deflating my pride like that?"

"Is that a euphemism, sir?"

With his length fittingly lubricated, she redoubles her efforts, pacing herself from the base to stretch her thumb over his glans and slit with each brush. She gauges his distance from the metaphorical cliff by the timing of his own motions within her folds. At first he switches between massaging her clit and curling two fingers into her entrance, occasionally outlining her lips from the sensitive region just above the initial opening to the perineum. Yet while her strokes increase in speed and force (her arm shakes; she braces herself on his knee and curses herself for not having a third arm she could theoretically use to fondle his face fondly or perhaps tweak a nipple, for his are far more sensitive than a man's have any right to be, although in her experience she's found that men do generally tend to react more to such tweaking than women), he starts to focus solely on her clit. Perhaps anxiety that he's to lose his bet drives him. Whatever his motivation, her tissues threaten to become overly sensitive to the point of pain, not from climax but from the duration of the stimulation. Weighing her options, the captain elects to release the hand on his knee to nudge his fingers down. In the process she crashes upon him, his erection riding upwards on her back, and the apparent agony of nearly having his length broken bids him pinch her clit between his nails. Pain sends a cascade of red bursting over her vision (unbidden, her fingers clasp around him constrictingly; a shiver courses through his legs) before she can prop herself back up on his knee. When the captain reaches back towards him, he's softened enough for her to take note, and she frowns.

The mood is fucked, and not even in the good way.

Then Winry's golden hair invades her field of vision. The girl smirks. Glancing at Edward and the blank, dazed expression on his usual emotional features, Hawkeye mentally waves good-bye to the clementine cake she'd planned on ordering. "I'm getting the dessert," Winry says, winking mischievously.

The captain inclines her head. Mustang growls into her skin, but her clit throbs out a pulse of agony. "Fair and square." She winks in turn. "Of course, he is a virgin."

Winry puts a hand to her mouth and giggles. "Not anymore."

At that—at the sheer unimaginable stupidity of having their first time in a shitty car on a trip to the beach for the purposes of winning a bet when she had already proved she could simply, and possibly more effectively, give him a lap dance instead—Hawkeye bursts out laughing. Her stomach pings painfully; the corners of her mouth ache down to her jaws. The victor starts a snicker that devolves into full-blown snorting laughter after several seconds. In her pants, Mustang circumscribes her clit with a pleasantly mild touch prior to allowing his forefinger to slip downwards to her opening. Two fingers, then, his index at near side and middle at the far, that hold her apart even whilst her walls tighten around him.

Winry falls away from the world. "Sir." The captain's voice shakes at the edges. "I—"

He leans towards her so that she can see his raised eyebrow. "As your superior officer, it is my duty to ensure your safety and whatnot, even when we're off-duty." The general slides upwards through her now thoroughly soaked folds, misses the peak of the clit on the first try, but distracts her by replacing two fingers suddenly inside her. Shuddering, Hawkeye loosens her tense muscles. He invades deeper to his knuckles. Then he crooks them and brushes against something far too sensitive to exist. "Besides, what kind of a future Führer would I be if I could never finish what I've started?"

"Hopefully you see me with a slightly higher level of priority than your paperwork then, sir, considering the fact that that you would rather take a nap than finish that work."

His laughter more akin to snide giggling, Mustang restarts his careful strokes, as does she. Somewhere along the line she notices his hot breaths warming her at the same time as her chest deflates (somewhere along the line she notices their ministrations parallel one another in speed and force). A hint more, a hint more—

The climax breaks over in its white-hot fury. Convulsions crush his hand between her thighs and his length between her fingers. As her spine rattles, her head snaps back and her lips part with a wet pop. Abruptly his fingers are digging into the sides of her mouth, but at least she hasn't kicked out at the driver's seat. Even so Gracia Hughes swerves the vehicle to the left. "That's the second time today!" her friend warbles. "How do so many drunk idiots end up on the roads?"

Grimly Gracia Hughes looks up at the rear-view mirror. "I would be upset, but his car just rolled off the road. And I think—did it hit a tree? Oh my god, it did!" The automobile brakes smoothly to a crawl. Still tremulous from the aftershocks of orgasm painting shine into her body, Hawkeye pants against her general, spent, while he withdraws his hands and wipes them ("As always, a delicious finish, Captain.") on a spare napkin he tucks neatly into a pocket. "Should I stop and help?"

Selim bounces up and down; the seat in question shakes, and Elicia jabs at him. "Let's help 'im! I don't like seeing people get hurt."

"Except when you stole my last cookie!" she returns with all the terrifying wrath a seven-year-old could muster. "That hurt me, you dummy!"

The (presumably former) homunculus squiggles his arms. "You're biggerer'n me! It's diff'rent!"

The argument devolves into push-shoving moderated by the ferocious wife of the former Führer, a woman capable of withstanding a relationship with the physical manifestation of wrath itself. "Sir," Hawkeye murmurs, turning her head towards him and his stupidly smug smirk, "would you like me to finish my work?"

"I wouldn't want to ruin these, actually." Mustang tugs her hand out from his shorts.

She frowns as the climax fades from her still-trembling extremities. "But isn't it the duty of a subordinate officer to—"

He presses a finger to her lips. She smiles on his skin. "Perhaps you could return the favour when we return to the hotel room, mm?"

"Oh." Hawkeye squeezes his hand, and he taps her wrist three times, deliberately (he's blushing). She returns two (he's flushed). "Excellent thinking, sir. I wholeheartedly approve of the plan."

"Good."

Drumming her hands on the steering wheel, Gracia Hughes revs the car back up. "We're taking the next exit," she announces. A collection of groans. "There's a man who needs our help, and I never turn my back on people who need me." A snippy comment in the back. "Ling Yao, you will speak to me privately later."

Mustang grins into her back (she misses the tautness of her shirt). "I'm taking you later, Captain."

"Of course, General." Her smile deepens; her eyelids lower to half-mast. "Of course."

"Oi, Fullmetal?"

Edward Elric moans quietly.

"Looks like I won."

Alphonse Elric is going to die. Well, pragmatically, that would be the case with everyone he's ever encountered, but realistically, he is going to die before the next rest stop after all. The pain in his poor overworked bladder, swelled up like an inflated hot water bottle, has progressed from a dull ache to an acute, urgent bolt of agony that sloshes out torment with each slight jostling of the vehicle, and he clenches his muscles so tightly that they burn and sting, strained as well. Even given his medical knowledge, Alphonse feels as though his bladder pushes aside his other organs in the same stead. At least May seems to be enjoying herself, breaking over him, her eyes partially rolling, her braid trembling and coming undone from the clip at the crown of her head.

Gritting his teeth as the pain throbs through his lower abdomen, Alphonse nudges her elbow. "That's number four, isn't it?"

"Five," she says, panting. Her hands reappear in her lap, and she cradles Xiao Mei like a frail lily, the panda bear's ear flicking back and forth as she snoozes. The sheer adorableness temporarily alleviates the agony of needing to piss beyond measure (his first order of business upon entrance to Xing will involve drawing a detailed map of every single bathroom location in a fifty kilometre radius). "You have no idea how good it's going to be tonight for you."

He smiles wryly. "I'm glad I decided to give this a try, thennnrgh." As the vehicle switches lanes, Alphonse senses a bead of wetness on the inside of his boxers, and he grabs May's arm, constricts her wrist. "May, I don't think I'll be able to last much longer."

"Whatever happened to that fiery Elric determination?" May outlines a heart on his cheek with her still-sticky hand, and he tilts his head until her fingers slip over his lower lip and into his mouth, her familiar scent washing over him. He salivates. She tastes salty-sweet. Had he not been fighting an increasingly urgent desire to soil his pants, his arousal would have gone the way of an explosive chemical reaction (although the pressure-pain is unusually arousing itself, and he whispers to May for her to remind him to try this again some time he isn't in danger of urinating over Mrs Hughes's rented van; her dry laugh fades into a voice deepened with concern). "Al? You okay?"

"I'm barely holding on," he answers, and that in of itself sounds like an understatement. With the force his bladder exerts on the rest of him and the equivalent force the rest of him exerting on his throbbing bladder, another twenty minutes sounds distant, unmanageable. "Although your quintet of climaxes was worth it. Those little gasps of yours, May, hm?"

Blush colours her cheeks, the same pink of the Chang Clan heraldry. "Al, you are absolutely the worst human being I've ever met in my life."

"Which is why you're marrying me."

"Maybe if you propose." She squishes his cheeks with her left hand and brings Xiao Mei up to his cheek. The panda nuzzles him with her soft, wet muzzle; she squeaks out her need for a petting. Had he not occupied his hands with holding his crotch (arching his back, he rocks side to side, somehow managing to cross his shivering legs under May's weight), his fingers would be scritching her head and trailing down the little ridge of fur that starts at her shoulder and peaks at her tiny puff of a tail. "Al, don't forget that you can transmute the liquid away."

He grimaces. His rocking intensifies. "I know, I know, but I, mmrgh, don't want to stain the seat, either. And I'm somewhat concerned with the scent in the air as well: It's not as though I deal with transmutations like this on a daily basis."

"You will, if you intend to become a doctor."

Alphonse laughs for an instant before the motion of his shoulders shaking sends another dribble of liquid to wet his boxers, and he swallows, coiling his muscles, rallying his strength for the final—he checks his watch—nineteen minutes. "It's not like I'm a certified doctor yet! And urology doesn't interest me as much as other aspects. Besides, it'll be audible." May cocks her head and blinks innocently. "One of these days you'll end up arrested for being too cute. Or some homunculus will show up at your doorstep demanding the secrets not to immortality, but to being adorable."

She giggles. Unfortunately the movements of her form threaten to physically burst his bladder, and his choked half-whine stills her. "Sorry."

"It's okay, I think, for now."

May caresses the inside of his palm, gently stroking through his creases and between his fingers, touching the callouses and scars so softly he can forget his agony for a moment or two. "Thank you for all of this. If it helps, I think you're awfully brave. And strong." She smiles at him, widely, brilliantly. "Even fighting against insane psychopaths is easier than holding in pee, huh?"

Chuckling sans motion, he clicks his tongue. "I think I'd rather deal with the, hhrn, piss, to be honest." With his head rubbing on the damp patch in his underwear, the urgency has amplified to a physical point of pain. But May is cheering him on.

He can do this.

Abruptly they're knocked to the right. His elbow hits the side of the car; her elbow hits his abdomen; and a sound like a cat clawing out of a jean sack accompanies his low groan of sweet relief, a pleasure more than comparable to the lengthiest orgasm. Heat floods his groin and trickles down his pant legs, pooling in the seat and moistening his heels. "God," he whispers quietly. Or at least he thinks he whispers quietly.

When his senses start to function again, the lack of pressure feels akin to vacant emptiness within him (is this what May feels when he pulls out?), his girlfriend is squeezing his hand ("If it makes you feel any better, six is a new record for us."), and Mrs Bradley is shrieking in the front seat. ". . . do so many drunk idiots end up on the roads?"

Mrs Hughes slows the car and rightens it. "I would be upset, but his car just rolled off the road. And I think—did it hit a tree?" Her voice ratches up an octave. "Oh my god, it did! Should I stop and help?"

"There's an exit up ahead, isn't there? What if we got help from there?"

"I suppose." Mrs Hughes drums her fingers on the steering wheel. Then the automobile begins to hum and vibrate underneath him. "Okay. Then we're taking the next exit." Complaints from the middle seat. Mrs Hughes claps loudly. "There's a man who needs our help, and I never turn my back on people who need me."

A snort to his left. Alphonse arches an eyebrow in Ling Yao's direction. "What if I need to get to the beach already?"

"Ling Yao." The Emperor gulps and bows his head, his bangs hidden behind Lan Fan's bun. "You will speak to me privately later."

"My lord," Lan Fan interjects when Mrs Hughes commences driving the car once more, "surely you would do the same for one of your people."

"Naturally." He shrugs, but Alphonse can read the genuine sorry over his features. "But seeing as Amestris isn't exactly my country, I don't care if giant dumplings fall from the sky and crush everyone in it. Except Winry, who needs to bake me more applie pies." The last two words ring in Amestrisian.

May scoots away from Alphonse. Xiao Mei leaves his cheek cold. "Applie pies?" the Princess echoes in her lightly accented Amestrisian. The urine has begun to cool and congeal, and his boxers feel thoroughly wet and sticky in the worst manner possible.

"Yep! Not apples, although they're sweet enough, but the teensy wrinkled kind. Applies."

Lan Fan laughs. Edward actually leans left to stare into the back seat as if witnessing a miracle (sweat plasters his long bangs are plastered to his forehead and face, and judging from his chi, Alphonse's hypothesised has proven more than slightly correct). He presses his thighs together. The second his brother looks away, he'll transmute his little dilemma, patching it for the time being. "Those are crabapples, Ling." Her eyes widen. "I—I mean—my lord."

"Ling."

She smiles. "Ling."

Pupils enormous over the glowing gold of his irises, Edward catches Alphonse's gaze and points to the Emperor's vassal, mouthing: "Ling?!"

He mouths back: "Four years."

His brother stares at him for what seems like years. Then he slinks back to his seat, and Alphonse's hands fly together possibly more quickly than ever before.

A hiss of vapour. Sparks of blue. A slightly uncomfortable crust remains, but he'll be able to easily re-wet and then vaporise that in the safety of the washroom.

"What did you transmute?" Lan Fan inquires. Ling looks on, eyebrows drawn together inquisitively.

May snickers into her hand. "Don't worry about it. We'll discuss it later, I swear on Al's blush." As if that helps matters. "I love your blush, silly."

"I know." Grinning both at her words and at the heat in his cheeks, he brushes the (piss) dust off of his ankles and legs into his palm. The automobile curves slightly and rolls to a slow stop. He can see a gas station sign reflected in the window. "I love yours, too."

"Aha!" Ling's seatbelt zips off of him with a speed of a thousand Major Armstrongs given the opportunity to showcase their muscular arms. "Lan Fan, time to hit the beeeeach—after this rest break, of course, eheh. What say we get those, what're they called, pop thingimajigs?"

Mrs Hughes opens the car door to a wash of a hot air. Selim and Elicia dart out, followed shortly by the other passengers. Hawkeye holds the general's hand under her sleeves, and Mustang is smiling as if Olivier Mira Armstrong descended from the heavens and handed him the führership on a plate spun of her hair. Winry props up a wobbly-legged Edward, his chi dim from exhaustion. Clambering over the backseat, Ling offers Lan Fan (and Xiao Mei) a piggy-back ride, and Lan Fan frowns, flails her hands to refuse, and ends up with her knees tucked around his sides and her arms around his neck while he struts off to the traveller's mart with her, proud as a peacock with a rainbow-coloured tail. May assists Alphonse in scootching over the seats towards the exit. While Mrs Hughes and Mrs Bradley rush off to request assistance and Mustang chases the kids away from the open highway, Alphonse opens the door to the mart. A bell tinkles. A breath of chill dissipates the inferno outside.

His shirt draped over his shoulder, Ling sucks on an orange creamsicle; twirling a lime compliment in her right hand, Lan Fan feeds the panda cracker crumbs with her left. Winry is purchasing a package of ribbed condoms with absolutely zero shame (Alphonse wishes her luck on that one). May points him in the direction of the water closet and wanders off to help the search party.

The man who hit the tree is apparently the store manager's son (alkahestry has already healed the gash on his leg to a mere fading scar). Retrieved and tended to, he stammer-slurs out an apology for the inconvenience, and the store manager shakes her head and repays the beach-goers with free gasoline, food, and directions to the washroom.

His brother leans over a sink. Although he's wearing pants, he scrubs his boxers in the basin, the water running over the printed fabric. "Don't ask," he snaps at Alphonse, who grins fondly and touches Edward's shoulder prior to vanishing into a stall and discarding his trousers. Rewetting them, he presses his palms together soundlessly and vaporises the urine. "Al? The hell did you just transmute?"

He flushes and opens the stall. "I didn't see any toilet paper in there, Brother, but the stall over had some." Not a lie. He'll tell Edward the full story once he's confirmed that his brother won't suffer a heart attack over it.

"Oh." He pauses, scratching his chin, then gestures to his boxers. "Mind drying these?" Clap. Sparks. Unzipping and dropping his pants, Edward dons his clothing and buttons. "Thanks." Alphonse's grin doesn't so much as budge. His brother arches an eyebrow at the window. "What?"

He embraces Edward from behind, his arms wrapping around his waist, his hands falling just short of the older Elric's hips. "Congratulations."

His brother freezes, his automail leg banging against the sink. "On what exactly?"

"Don't die on me, Brother. You know what I mean."

A silence. Comfortable. Edward spins around slowly on his heel and returns the embrace.

"Yeah." They touch foreheads. "Thanks, Al."

"Mm."

A knock on the washroom door. Lan Fan, her voice muffled through the wood. "Unless you've drowned in there and I need to perform a rescue operation, you'd better get back to the car. Elicia's mother will leave without you, you know."

Pulling away from one another but not from the embrace, the two look at each other, yellow-gold, greenish-gold. Then they burst out laughing.

"Come on." Edward holds the door open, as he always has, and Alphonse waits for him, as he always has. "Let's hit the damn beach."