b Title: /b Trace Elements
b Pairing: /b Roy/Ed
b Rating: /b PG-13
b Theme: /b #1
Roy wasn't sure exactly when he had noticed that Edward used his tongue very little during sex, but the boy was most certainly all teeth. While Roy found that he enjoyed little more that pulling the younger man's supple flesh between his lips and suckling at it, Edward preferred bites, nips, and leaving marks that were hard to explain in the morning.
Edward wasn't sure exactly when he had noticed that Roy was averse to having the light off when they made love, but the man most certainly preferred the dark. Edward speculated, though never out loud, that it had something to do with the eyepatch and the void it hid behind its stiff black curve. He didn't like the dark; he liked to see Roy's face as he reached his climax. He liked to see the muscles in Roy's shoulders shift and tense when he tipped his hips a certain way.
They hadn't been together long; six months or seven months or maybe it was six months and twenty-four days, not that Edward kept count. But they were learning these small things about each other, things that no one else knew, things that made them lovers.
Their relationship was a bit of a running joke amongst their few friends "in the know." They would laugh at how two people with such dominant, stubborn personalities could not only coexist, but be doing it in a way that made them both very content. But Roy and Edward knew better than to base their compatibility off the people they were when they were dealing with mundane things like work.
Edward knew that, when it came down to it, no one could stimulate his mind quite like Roy could. They had spent many nights sitting with their legs drawn up beneath them, facing each other on the couch and arguing with hand gestures and diagrams about the finer points of array development and theory. In turn, Roy knew that there was no one he would welcome more into his home. He enjoyed how they worked together when they weren't competing like they did at their jobs. Roy knew that something as simple as cooking dinner became as thrilling as alchemy itself when he shared the experience with Edward. He enjoyed the passionate, intellectual debates over the exact definition of "a dash" and what constituted a "simmer."
As much as they enjoyed flexing their academic muscles for each other, they enjoyed learning from each other more. Through each other, they were relearning friendship and love and vulnerability.
Roy would never ask Edward to stop biting at his flesh so hard and Edward would never ask Roy to please keep the lights on, just this once. They would never ask those things of each other because it was those small things, those trace elements, that made them who they were and made them fit together so amazingly, inexplicably well.