Title: Angel Heart

Genre: Romance/Angst

Pairing: Hughes x Roy

Summary: There was always the line between friends, which none of them dared to cross.

Warnings: Shounen-ai. Spoilers for ep. 25.

Disclaimer: I do not own FMA, nor the wonderful character song Angel Heart sung by Hughes's seiyuu, from which I got the title from, and also the ideas of this story.

Angel Heart (Part II)

Roy's POV

i. the strangeness of the heart

I'd never been in love before.

I couldn't understand why it was called 'falling' in love. I wasn't in love with any of the girls I dated.

It wasn't my fault that I was a magnet for the opposite sex. I couldn't help my dashing looks. I had inherited them from my father, being almost an exact replica of him. Sometimes I wondered if my father used to suffer from the same problems as I did now. As I grew older, and my rank in the military went higher, things got more out of hand. Fifty love letters, ten bunches of roses and other flowers, and twenty boxes of assorted chocolate in heart shapes, all in a day. It was absurd. They were over-obsessive fangirls, and the only solution to get rid of most of them was to go out with a few of them and break all of their hearts. I knew I was cruel, but I couldn't see another way out.

Some of them were quite attractive, I guess, with pretty blonde hair and beautiful blue eyes. But there was no feeling. No spark, as some would say.

I was jealous of Maes. He was deeply in love with his girlfriend, called Glacier or something... No wait, Gracia, that was it. According to him, that was, at least. For I couldn't tell what it was like to be in love. He'd only been in two or three relationships before, and he'd already found someone perfect for him. I couldn't even count how many girls I'd went out with. I wished I could be like him.

Maes once dragged me along to her house to meet her during lunch break. I'd only stayed for a few minutes, and suddenly I was no longer jealous of Maes. Instead, I was jealous of Gracia. The way she shared looks with Maes that only the two of them could interpret, the way they smiled at each other as if they had a secret between them, the way she sometimes rubbed her body against Maes like a cat would against its owner. My mind wasn't processing anything they were saying. My heart burnt with envy, and it was unbearable.

Eventually, I made up an excuse about Hawkeye and paperwork. It wasn't actually an excuse. As I ran at top speed back to headquarters after ignoring Maes's fervent calls for me to go back, I consulted my watch and realized with horror that it was nearly an hour after lunch break. Hawkeye would kill me for being so late.

When I arrived, I heard her stern voice warning me about punctuality. It sounded distant. I responded with a nod, went into my office and sat down numbly on my seat. I glanced at the sea of paperwork flooding my desk, and surprisingly wasn't worried about that. I was still thinking about the visit to Gracia's.

Why was I jealous of her?

I was very confused. I had a slight headache and incoherent thoughts were swimming through my mind. A sharp knock on the door jerked me out of my absent-minded state. Of course, it had to be Hawkeye.

"Sir, you have to start working," she said. "You're never going to finish those before tomorrow unless you stay late tonight. You don't have a date, do you?" She frowned at me with concern. "Are you okay, sir?"

"I'm fine," I assured her. "I'll get on with the work."

And so I did, but the headache didn't stop. As the night drew near, all of my subordinates left, leaving me alone in the office. I vaguely remembered the pile of paperwork finally seeming to lessen. I thought I dozed off at some point, but I didn't know whether I was really asleep or not. I remembered someone walking into the office. It was Maes. He came over and prodded me in the shoulder. I wanted to tell him to stop it, but I was too tired to open my mouth. Then he lifted me up from my chair, and I felt like protesting, but I didn't. He dropped me onto the couch. All this he did carefully, treating me like some fragile material. He went out of my sight for several moments, then came back with my blanket. How did he know where the blanket was kept? My brain was too foggy to contemplate on this. I felt the coolness of the blanket as it landed on top of me. I saw Maes's lime-gold eyes peering at me. He was smiling. His face suddenly zoomed up close, so close that I couldn't distinguish his features anymore, and I felt something warm on my forehead.

He disappeared soon after that.

I had no idea whether it was all a dream or it really happened in real life. I wanted it to be neither, but the event was lodged firmly in my memory bank. It must be have been one out of the two.

I tried to convince myself that it was only it was only a sign of friendship, dream or not.

But deep down inside I knew it wasn't.

Because I wanted to relive that moment again, and I wanted it to last forever.

ii. the loss of feeling

The door burst open and the familiar figure bounced into the office.

"I'm getting married to Gracia!" he announced in a voice made high-pitched by eagerness.

I almost had a heart attack. I blinked twice to force down the shock. The feeling choked me. "Congratulations," I said wryly. My throat was dry. My lips automatically formed an ironic replacement of a smile to match my tone. But since when did it feel so unnatural to smirk?

Maes seemed happy enough, with a huge sunny smile pasted on his face. He was looking the complete opposite of what I was feeling. My heart had been dropped into a pit and I couldn't seem to retrieve it.

"You've got to be best man."

I muttered a response that I need some time to think about it. And so I did. I needed more bloody time than I had. That night I went home with millions of thoughts whirring in my mind, and voices of my inner selves buzzing in my ears in a fierce argument with each other. I downed a bottle of Scotch in one go. Then I found another bottle and lay on the couch drinking it.

I didn't know what time it was when I got up from my position and picked up the receiver of the phone. I dialled Maes's home phone, a sequence of numbers which I was so familiar with that I had the curious habit of giving it to other people when asked for my own number. The ring sounded about ten times before Maes answered.

"Roy?"

"Yeah. I've thought about it."

"So you're gonna be best man?"

I felt uneasy. What had I planned to say? I'd forgotten. "Yeah," I said quickly.

There was silence at the other end of the line, then he said, "Great! You'll be here to witness one of the most precious moments in my life! So I'll see you tomorrow then. By the way, do you wanna go see my fiancee with me tomorrow?"

I remembered my last visit and squirmed, but I still agreed to go, not wanting to upset my best friend. We exchanged goodbyes and I slammed the receiver down. Some sort of anger was rushing out of me, and why I felt so furious was unfathomable. I should be glad that Maes was getting married at last to the woman he loved so much. Why wasn't I?

I glared at my reflection in the mirror. I looked so worn-out, so old, so sad. But why? There were too many questions that I couldn't find a reply to.

The next day, after work, I followed Maes to Gracia's. This time I took a better look at her appearance rather than how she behaved. She was a plain girl with short, light brown hair, much less pretty than most of the girls I went out with, but her sea-green eyes seemed to draw people to her. She had a very gentle smile which reflected her kindness.

Maes kept going on about what an excellent cook she was, but the apple pie I had was tasteless. Maes warned me that it was burning fresh from the oven, but it didn't feel hot at all. Maybe it was my problem. I felt horrible, and the apple pie made me want to throw up. I swallowed the urge though. I couldn't puke, not here, not now.

I whispered to Maes, "Can we leave now? I have a date soon." The date bit was made up, but Maes believed me. He told Gracia that he was busy and had to go. We both left the house and found ourselves immediately drenched by the pouring rain. Gracia kindly offered an umbrella to us, but to my utmost surprise he declined her offer.

"Are you crazy? It's almost hailing here and you refused an umbrella..."

"Who cares?" He grinned inanely. I stared at him as he danced about in the rain. Then, without warning, his hand grabbed mine. A spark of electricity surged through my arm and I almost let go reflexively. I looked at him, demanding an explanation.

"I can't see." It was true. Even I couldn't see through those wet lenses into his lime-gold eyes. So I let him hold onto me as we walked.

"He's perfect for you. But she's not my type," I said softly.

He just hmmed. We arrived at the apartment block I lived in. "Bye. Hope you get home safely," I said to him. "Wipe your glasses before you leave." He didn't listen to me and strolled away.

I watched him get smaller and smaller in the distance until he was an invisible dot in the horizon. There was only emptiness in me, and nothing else.

iii. the tears at the funeral

After Hawkeye had left, I stared down at the cold grey stone in front of me. All of this seemed unreal. Felt unreal. But it was real.

I had unanswered questions which could never be answered now that he was gone. Did he love me like I loved him? More than friends? Did he really love Gracia that much?

I also had thousands of what if's. What if we'd never met each other? What if I'd told him that I loved him? What if he'd never met Gracia? What if he'd never married Gracia? What if we hadn't been best friends?

The only question which I had obtained the answer to at last was why it was called 'falling' in love. Because when you become in love with a person, you would have fallen into a deep abyss. And as time passed by, you would be constantly falling, deeper and deeper into the abyss, and it became harder and harder for you to try and climb out of the dark chasm. In time, it would become impossible to find your way out, and yet you would still be falling.

That was my own definition, at least, that I had conjured with my experience.

"I think she's in love with me. The way she speaks to me, the way she acts around me, the way she smiles at me." I meant Hawkeye, my most faithful and only female subordinate. "But I'm no expert in subtle love, am I? If I am, I might have seen if you were in love with me or not. And, anyway, I'm not in love with her. I can't be in love with her." I stressed the word 'can't'. "I think I'm still falling. I can't get out."

I looked up at the clear blue sky. The weather hadn't been so perfect for weeks. It was mocking me.

"And no one is able to help me to."

I let the last tear slide down my cheek.

I wished it would rain like it had rained on the day of my second visit to Gracia's.

The End

A/N: I have finally completed this second part to Angel Heart. This is longer than the first part, and I hope that it will be slightly better too, but I don't know about that. Please read & review to let me know!