Dystychiphobia

Started this fic when I was a junior, I am now going to be a sophomore in college (whoa bitch whoa). I edited it a bit because at first the writing seemed super melodramatic and was, for some odd reason, in a screenplay-ish sort of format. The story may still fairly reek of melodrama, but alas. Fic is for a close friend who we will just call the silver wind alchemist. Title of the fic means fear of accidents, seeing as, well, shit happens and people get afraid. This is just a prelude, I suppose I may continue if I feel like it. Chapter titles are based around ironic little things Roy says. Roflirony.

Warnings: future lemon (if this goes anywhere), angst, gore, and general psychopathic behaviour

(Oh my)

Don't own. But you knew that already.

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You cant go around trying to bring every living creature that dies on you back to life, Edward. It's not possible and it's not healthy.

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There are no lights on, and it's fittingly quiet save the thunder that takes its time to unfurl and rumble, and the flash follows the lazy roll of noise shows us the man with the eye patch, the one who kept his back straight and his face empty at the funeral. He has been thinking about a child's allowance and an alchemic array, about how black the sulphur and the phosphorous would look against his white-gloved hand. How would it feel to press his hands into the array, how would the glow of it surging with energy look between his splayed fingers…

When you think of the word defeated, you can see him exactly as he is now: leaning against a wall of his living room, adjacent to a window, with an the half-closed black umbrella pointed downwards, dripping all over … well, over Ed's favourite rug. And his eyes linger on it because there is something terrifying about it, taking in the fact that the red, black and gold baroque piece is the humdrum reminder that life one moment contained Ed, and then…

But he can wonder, like the way he wonders briefly what exactly he was expecting when he got home. What would have happened to his mind, really, if he were to return home after they put Ed's coffin in the ground to find his general's quarters as bare as when he had first moved in, smelling of hardwood polish and fresh paint.

Ed had hated the smell of paint, and this is where Roy remembers: he remembers the days Ed complained like a bitch when he had to lift a brush and help him put on a new coat on the walls, carped that he had too many rooms for just the three of them living there. Ed had always managed to clumsily get paint all over himself, splattered all in his long, hoary blonde hair. Crusted dapples of color hardened and oddly highlighted the hair, escaping from the pony worn on the crown of his head and spilling to frame his scowling face…

Roy is a broken man, his hair jet black and wet, clinging to his forehead, some of it curling into little upside down question marks. He wonders if it really would have been better if he had come back and found it almost like Ed had never been here,

(should he transmute everything away? Burn it in a quick fire-snap?)

wonders if it would have been better in for his head.

And Al. Roy does not want to imagine what this is doing to him, because it means that he somehow needs to imagine his own pain worse than it already is, and that does not seem possible. Al has been left behind again- not encased in armour or fuddled and amnesiac, but honestly, just left behind. They are the only words Roy can use to describe him, when he thinks back to Al's crumpling face when the military's funerary tribute sounded from the soldier's trumpets, or the way her turned his face into Winry's shoulder and just cried when the bottom of the coffin hit the bottom of the grave.

Roy did not cry. Not at the funeral, and not when he put Al and Winry and Pinako on the train to Risembool to recover.

Pinako's face was gnarled and tear-stained, and her eyes were too sharp.

"You're welcome to come along as well, Roy. We have a spare room."

Winry gave him a look that made him uncomfortable, a look that said I understand your loss and I want to fix it. And Al, in a body of flesh, was as broken apart as if he had been metal again, and his face was too human that moment, behind the pane of glass, begging Roy to accompany them.

Roy didn't know what his face must have looked like to them, but the train whistle sounded and his mind focused on a mundane image of Ed: sprawled on an easy chair by their fire place, shooting him a look of disinterest over an alchemy book. Roy shook his head no: a polite decline. A thanks left his mouth that put his most banal politico-office courtesies to shame, and then Pinako's eyes sharpened to the points of jack-knives, and they cut him open the way only eyes with years behind them could. She didn't stop looking at him until the train rounded the bend, and after that, he stood motionless on the platform like someone had tansmuted him still.

The weather had been nicer the last time around, when he had to go through this business of lowering the coffin of a loved one into the ground. God. Hughes. Hughes.

Hughes had punched him the last time he had been thinking about this.

(It's called a taboo forbidden alchemy it's kinda fun)

What other comfort was there, though.

(You know years ago I had a theory on human transmutation after all we've seen I was actually trying to remember it now we alchemists are such hopeless predictable things)

Roy tries to remember where Ed last put the chalk. Ed and Al had never needed it.

He finds them in a yew cabinet, and listens to the fall of his feet like a funerary march. He is at the trim of the red and gold and black carpet and throws back the corner to reveal the paneling beneath.

He peels off his gloves and does not consider his hands before he begins to draw. When he brings Ed back to life, he wants to touch his lover with his bare hands.