This chapter is rated: R and a half.
Warnings: pov screw-arounds. I have also committed the Elric-Uzumaki crime. Again. OTL
with pairings of: Roy/Ed. Ed/Winry.
some notes: creepy shit that makes me wanna swallow potassium cyanide but ALAS I AM DONE. 8D Dedicated to Peridot Tears.
Summary: A heart is nothing but four chambers and a rhythm.
REset{PLAY}
part four: in faith
by ezylrybbit
{RE set}
Winry intrudes on him another day, when the skies are still a smidgen short of threshold opacity and the curtains of the dorm are closed but not completely closed and he's not really aware that she's watching him. She has always been watching him, and sometimes she wonders what he would do if he ever found out about it. Yell at her, probably. Stop being such a stalker, Winry. Don't you have better things to do? Grind out a few immature epithets, ones that have classically-conditioned her to want to slam her fist into something metal and gut-shaped. Sadistic Mustang might convince him to file a restraining order on her or something—oh yes, she can just imagine it.
Though in all honesty, she thinks, what is so fucking complicated about it, anyway? Just her eyes following his. Just Winry's eyes following Ed's, in a world of eyes following eyes, eyes following shadows and objects and people just barely out of reach and pushed out of Attainable, playing hopscotch along the tangent lines of the sphere of influence. The rapports had retained all the elements of fair trade. Winry has spent more than half a decade pouring her heart into the automail—the least Ed could do is let her stare a little. Story of girl loves boy, boy falls victim to pedophilia, girl cries herself to sleep at night. (Just what part of this fantastical travesty makes any fucking sense?) No freak appearances, no umbrellas in the rain, no turning-point revelations. No kisses, no bleeding-on-the-inside, no stimuli encourages no reaction. Impulse dies before they could draw the curtains. She can't help it, she loves him. Might make her feel stupidly useless and stupidly helpless every hour of the day—but what of it? Ed has never liked her beyond friendship, and she's long since resigned herself to it. She won't stop, even if nothing happens. She just gets more and more used to this feeling, a little pang here, a softer ache there.
As such, the consequences of stalking Edward Elric include being witness to a number of things that she would have been better off not-hearing, but do anyway.
She never knew she could be such a masochist.
(Why do you do this to me, Ed whispers to the empty room, to the sheets on the bed and the light fixtures and the windows and the wooden chair propped against the door. He has one hand balled into a fist under his pillow and the other one below the blankets, fumbling, feeling, stroking. Release comes too quickly and too sourly. Now he's whispering a name, he's biting his lips, he's crushing his damp hair under a lumpy pillow, he's heaving with dry sobs because he's not a boy and he doesn't cry, he's undeserving, he's reckless, he's unstrung, he's been lost all this time—he's Edward Elric, trying to salvage the pieces of a breaking heart.
Is he still searching?
From the corner of her eyes, Winry realizes that her cheeks are wet.)
{PLAY}
There is one time when Edward Elric comes back to fetch his little brother, and it really feels like it's the one time to end it all. Perhaps the portal to the other world is just a deus ex machina who took pity on the tragedy in three acts. Roy doesn't need the pity.
"So this is the second goodbye, huh," Ed smiles, shakes his head lightly, "Don't get me wrong. I meant it the first time, too."
Roy's mouth is dry, but he nods. "No understanding lost."
"Pfft. There wasn't anything to understand, really. Just—thanks."
All of a sudden, he wants to question the validity of this second goodbye.
The boy (is he still a boy?) throws him a lazy look. "Thanks for…being there, you know? Letting Edward Elric's younger self find some sort of passion in life and all that. For a moment, I'd really thought I'd fallen in love and everything—"
(The conversation is cut short when an army of mindless killing machines descends on the tower, hammering iron fists into tin roofs. We'll meet again, believe it! And then Fullmetal, Edward Elric, the boy whom he would have given his life up for is gone, gone like the fresh bit of poetic elegance swimming in grayscale waters, clambering up the ascending tube of the metal aeroplane, plucks open the door to the other world. Alphonse Elric's red cape billows in the high-altitude slipstream, not too far behind.)
It's all rush after that, repairing and rebuilding and reassessing. Re-appreciation, re-association, reapplication. Re-agglomeration, re-assimilation, re-apprehension. State Alchemists position transmutation circles around the city to encourage the walls to grow back from the earth, and there are endless stacks of papers to file, permits to confirm, identities to establish. Even Riza's too busy to keep an eye on him, so Roy finds himself living in the moment, drinking too much beer and not enough hard liquor, going out with girls every other night and fucking them into the wall. It's reckless, but he's self-efficient and self-sustainable, always been, maybe even more so now. He works, too, sits behind his desk and stamps seals over forms, marks X's in the boxes, files pension forms whose significance equates to that of Falman's salary. When everyone's looking the other way, he shoots beer and aspirin and puts on a really good show of looking sober.
On a rest day, Havoc makes a rare proposal (for good or for worse).
"Hey, Roy, wanna join me and the boys for an evening of sinful debauchery?"
"Is it business related?"
Havoc pouts, and Roy decides that he never wants to see that look on his subordinate's face, ever again. "We need your help to pick-up the ladies!"
"Why don't you just go to a gay bar?"
"But I'm not interested in men."
"Does it matter?"
"…God, you're impossible."
"I'm very sorry you think so."
(He could cry. He could really shed a few tears, hold his head in his hands and put on the pretense of being hangover at 2pm in the afternoon, he could really bawl out an ode to la tempête, croon a few syncopated lamentations, mourn for his loss, mourn for the military's loss, mourn for the loss of a disillusioned dog of the army, mourn for long blonde hair and frosty blue eyes, mourn for the frown that could render swoons in matriarchal dominators around the world. Yeah—he could really cry.
But –and he's facing the facts, here– he's probably going to go for that evening of sinful debauchery, instead.)
Ed plucked at the metal screws embedded into the tendons on his arm. The wires plugged into his nervous system were getting a bit wobbly, and he would probably have to ask Winry to rework some of the metal plating after another inch off his right leg. Might have to go forty-six more reimbursement forms for the sake of pleasing a female mechanic. "Fullmetal? Out of all the cool nicknames they could've given me, he decides on the stupid automail?"
Roy shrugged, tapped the metal shoulder with a stiff smile. "Hey, it's the reason you're famous."
(He felt it, then. Felt his love for Edward Elric like he had never felt it before.)
The gunshot rings, once, twice. Two bodies fall. One twitches, gurgles crimson that scatters rose petals on the floor. Tears, too many tears and too many injustices unspoken and too many precious nights spent in happiness. Oblivious to fate, walking on a tightrope in a box canyon vibrating at a frequency that tunes in to all oblivion and fate. The other body's already lifeless.
"Please…Please…!" Two more words, ones he doesn't catch, and now Dr. Rockbell and Rockbell have left the world behind.
What should I be feeling? He asks himself, and isn't surprised when there is no response. Abject horror is now predominant, the last traces of any sort of adhesive shame and dignity and honor scraped off with the tip of two metal bullets. What should I be feeling?
He tries to look for it, searches under the heavy fabric of the jacket. The pistol's already been hurled away near the medicine cabinet, and his hands are trembling as he claws open the black buttons on his army uniform. Where is it? Even though he knows it's still beating, still pumping blooding through his circulatory system, pushing through veins and arteries and capillaries –biologically, functioning and performing as it was intrinsically designed to do– he can't feel it, not in the way that the philosophers from the Greek papers described it.
Where is it?
His heart—it's not there anymore.
What's happening to me, he thinks, where's my heart. Where is my heart?
When the Elric brothers are finally out of sight, he sees it all over again; remembers it like it's been there all along. And it's all coming to him now, in flashes of objective correlatives and grayscale oceans. He remembers wooden toys dumped into grandmother's lap, letters of admittance into the world of alchemy and dirty fighting, Havoc's girlfriends and Hughes' martinis, the night by the countryside and the bloody arm and leg, his (almost desperate) childhood desire to become a lawyer, Doctor Rockbell and Rockbell. He remembers his apartment room in the universe, Riza Hawkeye's flushed cheeks, Hawkeye's legs, Hawkeye's skirt by the foot of the bed, Hawkeye's don't-give-me-your-crap voice, the cake with the taste of tears, Winry Rockbell's trembling lower lip, Winry's bitter warning, Ed's first goodbye, Ed's second goodbye, the smile on Ed's face that had eternalized world enough but time. (Maybe it's the only smile he's ever believed in, even after his imagination had left him at the age of five and half. Maybe he still believes in it, even now. Maybe he doesn't care.)
Take me with you, he thinks, as the doors to the other world close on him. Take me with you, Fullmetal.
Please.
And the moment he thinks that, he knows he won't ever say it out loud. He'll whisper it to himself a few more times, maybe, and dream a little more. But he can feel it now, once again—Roy feels his heart beating. Thump, thump. Thump, thump.
It stops for a second, just one second. Thump, thump, thump.
The ticker tape skips to reset-play, and it ends, again and again.
~tick, tick, tick. THE END.
Thanks for reading. As ever, nope! My writing is still this kind of crap and I'm very sorry you ever laid eyes on it. Reviews would be lovely anyway. Because FUCK I'M FINISHED. It's been about three years since I last finished a multi-chap. The love I have for youuu, Dottie-dear~ n_n