The Morning After
Fullmetal Alchemist fan fiction

Rating: PG-13 (T) for randomly excessive profanity
Genre: post-series, character study, humor/angst
Pairing: Roy/Ed
Word Count: 1100 or so
Notes: For anotherfmafan's "Competition" Roy/Ed contest.
Warnings: Ed has the unfortunate task of being both the viewpoint character and completely wasted, which apparently general lack of coherence and the tendency to wax poetic. O.o

So that's all there is, after all. Only crests, and their aftermath: a chaos-inducing crash or a slow running-down, like old clockwork. And maybe you find the flow again, and crest again.

And maybe you just crash and that's the end of it.

That morning is one of the crashes.

Ed wakes up to the mountain sun, which blares down with molten light. He is either being cooked alive, or feeling the aftereffects of some fucktard's Very Brilliant Plan to sleep out in the open last night. He feels worse than he would've if he'd just slept by his own damn rock, and he makes his complaints quite clear.

Mustang is folding up the bedroll, tucking corners and sharpening creases like some senile old wetnurse. "I know you would've preferred the castle, Your Excellency, but seeing as this entire arrangement was subject to your choice of venue, I can hardly see the justification for your complaints."

Fucking fancy way of saying he's the one who ran up here in the first place—of saying he needed to be caught like some truant kid! Why does he need to say everything with twenty-something syllable words? And fuck, What is wrong with that sun? is what he really wants to know. It's supposed to be…higher, or something.

Or something.

"Now you're just being ridiculous, Fullmetal." And Bastard himself is standing over him; he can tell, even though there's no shadow, because he can smell the hear and cinders on him (and if he weren't trying so hard to move—and if he weren't failing so fully at it—he'd tell the bastard that he's never going to get that smell out of his clothes; that it's stuck in there for good and—

What the hell is he even going on about?)

"No one gets thatwasted on half the military limitation. No one. Take it as a kindness that I refrain from saying anything more."

And he can hear the bastard laughing, even though no sound ever crosses the threshold of his lips.

Lips. …Hm. He remembers those. Better'n he thought they'd be.

But he doesn't let on. He figures Mustang knows already, anyway, and he doesn't need any more ego trips. Not when Ed can't even get off the fucking ground and Mustang certainly isn't making any move to help. "Fuck you, Mustang. Fuck the whole damn bunch of you!"

Underneath all the damn pine needles, somewhere under there, there's got to be some bedrock he can use for leverage. It's a mountain, right?

A mountain of pine needles, apparently. Pine needles and pretentious (still laughing!) bastards.

The funny thing is, he doesn't even remember the liquor. He assumes there must have been come kind of competition, and that he must've won; because if he'd lost, he'd have felt a hell of a lot less like dying right about now. And he never would've lost, not to Mustang, because that was the one thing he swore to himself he'd never do.

Fuck.

"Ms. Rockbell called me. She said Alphonse knew you'd gone, and that you hadn't returned." There must have been something in his expression that betrayed him, because Mustang added, "You know he can't come. Don't think that just because you resort to drastic measures, you're going to get drastic consequences, Fullmetal. You know better than that."

Don't even talk about 'drastic consequences,' you cagey fucking bastard, he wants to say, but he figures it's not worth the effort, and the retort is hardly one of his greater masterpieces.

But honestly. He is one fucking mile from Al, but it was Mustang who'd come, come for three days by train, outside of any actual obligations, to fetch him. There was something screwy about that. Not like it was Al's fault, nonono, but something was screwy all the same. (If anything, it's his fault.)

When things got too fucked over, Al'd always find the river. And sure, Ed could find him sitting by a river (Ed can hear the rush of mountain water as it surges into the Riesenburg valley. It's very far off, but it's there and it reminds him of this); Ed could find him sitting by that little river, but all that time he'd never been able to find that same steady flow that Al always seemed to pluck out of nothingness.

He knows where Al is; now he's looking for the river.

Or well, he was. Then Mustang came and fucked that over, laying into him like leaving Riesenburg was some kind of federal crime. (But then, maybe it was. Ed imagines that, yes, a more-or-less-complete human transmutation would probably be perfectly justifiable grounds for lockdown. Next thing you know, he might be trying to bring dangerous criminals like Nina Tucker and Lieutenant Colonel Hughes and Rose's silly boyfriend back to li— Waitaminnit. How in hell is he even remembering things like that? Honestly, he barely remembers Rose.)

"Fuck!" The sky bounds backward and the trees bound forward as he's propelled forward, like a rag doll on a springboard. Mustang could've warned him.

But Mustang never warns anyone; that's not his duty. If it were, he would've told Ed that if he goes flying off the edge, it really is the edge—that if he was going to chase after bringing Al's body back, and let everything else fall away until there was nothing left but that one thing—

Somehow he's standing, and maybe even walking. Though he can't be sure; maybe the movement he's feeling is only vertigo from the initial ascent, that last surge of agency before the world settles into its dust and its endings. Because, hell, it's done what it set out to do; the river's run dry and there's no further it can flow. How can it be possible that every game he wins fucks things over worse, yet every game he loses just makes him want to win that much more?

Mustang finds that river before he does.

And maybe that is the one game Ed truly loses, because finding that river is the only thing Mustang's ever really done for him.

In fact, dumbass Mustang thrusts him into the flow, never mind that it's damn near freezing and Ed's finally beginning to accept that he really must be as wasted as the bastard claims he is. When he comes up hissing and spitting like a half-drowned cat, Mustang is already halfway down the mountain path, strolling along like nothing's happened.

The current is gone, but Ed's still caught in the motions. And either his legs are going to collapse from the sheer strain of it, or he's going to ride it out, make its power his own.

Mustang is a blurry, wavering fleck far downstream, but Ed swears that every so often the fleck will stop and turn around, maybe even backtrack a little. But what the hell does he know?

He simply follows the river back home.

fin