Ed wakes up, disoriented for a minute as he remembers that he's in the old palace in Xerxes. His arms almost ache with the need to reach out to Roy again, to hold him again, be held by him again. It's only been a few days; he shouldn't miss him this much. He does though.

He doesn't know how he dealt with traveling so much when it wasn't necessarily easy to just call home to talk to Roy. Maybe it was just more of a given because the option to do so just wasn't there, so it was easier to accept that he was away. Or maybe it was because he wasn't used to spending so much time so close to Roy. Their relationship had been relatively new in Amestris, and he just… wasn't used to being still, being stuck in one place.

"Ed?" he hears Morgan ask groggily.

"Go back to sleep," Ed says, his own voice sleep-roughened. It feels odd because he feels like he was just awake, just talking to Roy.

Of course Morgan doesn't, instead getting up and clumsily feeling his way around in the dark. Ed wants to scold him, but they'll probably wake up JJ if he does.

"I saw your tattoo glowing earlier," Morgan says, easing onto the bed next to Ed.

Ed tugs up the sleeve of his shirt, revealing the tattoo on his wrist, almost invisible in the darkness. He holds the wrist in his right hand, but the tattoo is quiet and black again. He's never seen it glow with his own eyes, but he can imagine what that specific red of soul alchemy looks like. The specific red glow of a Philosopher's Stone.

He always knew playing with soul alchemy again touched on the same alchemy that fueled a Philosopher's Stone, but he hadn't counted on it acting like this, hadn't imagined being pulled into another world, hadn't imagined it allowing communication across worlds.

"Ed?" Morgan prods.

Shaking his head to clear it, Ed says, "You should go back to bed." He glances out the window; it's still dark, and at a glance, he doesn't see any signs of false dawn, much less real dawn, so it's still the depths of night.

"Did you see Mustang again?" Morgan asks. The question is oddly even and nonjudgmental, and Ed has to resist the urge to ask Morgan if he's feeling okay.

"Yeah," he admits softly. He tugs down his sleeve and hides the tattoo, though he doesn't know if he's hiding it from himself or from Morgan. "Yeah, I was."

"How's he doing?"

He is way too tired and disoriented from exhaustion to deal with a Morgan who is behaving in a decidedly unMorgan-like manner. "Can you please stop acting like you care? It's kind of fucking with me."

It's hard to tell in the dark, but he thinks Morgan looks offended.

"I care," he says.

Rolling his eyes, even if Morgan can't see it, Ed says, "You hate Roy. You don't care about him."

Morgan sighs. "I… am working on my reservations," he admits. "But you're part of this team, and I do care about you. Since whether he's doing well seems to directly impact you, yeah, I care. So how is he?"

Ed can't decide if he's relieved that Morgan is apparently coming around for real or if he's just irritated that it's taken so long. Regardless, it's the fucking asscrack dead of night, so he's not going to try to make sense of it. "You should really go back to bed," he says rather than answering the question.

"Are you going back to bed?" Morgan asks in the kind of tone that tells Ed that he already knows the answer.

"Not a kid, and you're not my mom or my fucking brother," Ed says. "I don't need you to tell me to go back to bed."

"But you can tell me to?" he replies, which is way too fucking coherent for this time of night.

Ed flops back against the pillow and huffs, which makes Morgan chuckle softly, and, okay, maybe he's being a little bit dramatic. He misses his partner; he thinks he's allowed to be a little sulky in the middle of the night when he's in bed alone and doesn't want to be.

"He's hanging in there," Ed says softly, figuring that the fastest way to make Morgan go away is to feed him crumbs. "I think the others have been rough on him, though he didn't exactly say it."

Morgan's quiet for a minute, processing that. "Yeah," he agrees. "I can see that."

Ed's reply to that is a soft but rude sound. He does care about his team, but damn, they can be fucking judgmental, and Ed really wishes he were there to kick some sense into everyone.

"Is there anything we can help with here?" Morgan asks when Ed doesn't say anything else.

Sighing in annoyance, Ed takes a moment to think it over, staring at the ceiling that he can't really see anyway. "Not… yet," he says. "I gotta talk to Al about some shit. Maybe Mei. But I don't think it's anything that can't wait till the morning."

"You think you have a way for us to go home?" Morgan asks, and it's the first time he's really asked, so he must be tired or have his guard unusually low.

Ed hesitated, then said, "I don't know." He didn't want to lie, but he honestly didn't know yet. "We figured out… some shit, but it's all alchemy and I don't know yet if I can use it to get people back where they belong."

It's Morgan's turn to hesitate, but he's thinking about something so loudly, Ed could almost swear he can hear it. "You're not going to come back with us if you can avoid it, are you?" he asks, the question whispered into the dark as if the dark can somehow hide it or soften the blow.

This question had to be coming, and Ed has been avoiding thinking about it, to be honest. "It depends," he says, not certain he even wants to say it, even under the cover of the night, even with the darkness feeling like it's eating the words and keeping them from carrying beyond the two of them.

"Depends on what?" Morgan asks, matching his tone.

"On if I can bring Roy back here," he admits. He's always known it, but it's the first time he's said it.

"If you can't, will you come back?" Morgan asks. Ed wants to throttle him to make him stop talking because he understands, okay? He gets it. The one thing they're almost certainly not going to have is the ability to travel freely between their worlds. Which means that once Ed figures this out—and he's going to fucking figure it out because only being able to see Roy in his dreams is not an acceptable long-term solution—he's going to have to make a decision: his world or theirs.

"I don't want to borrow trouble," Ed says, and Morgan snorts, which, yeah, okay, he deserves, and it makes him chuckle a little bit. It's not really that funny, but it's one of those things that he thinks if he doesn't laugh, he might start crying, and crying is not an acceptable option, so laughing it is. "Yuck it up, big man," Ed says, knocking Morgan's leg with the back of his automail hand.

Morgan says a quiet but emphatic, "Hey!" but he still chuckles like the asshole he is.

"I don't go looking for trouble," Ed says, trying not to sound like he's pouting, but he's pretty sure he's failing entirely.

"Of course you don't," Morgan replies, the humor still threaded through his voice.

"If you're going to be an asshole, you can just the fuck back to bed," Ed tells him, trying to make it sound like an insult, but he doesn't think he quite gets there.

Morgan lets out another soft chuckle before he settles down, then says, "You know whatever choice you make, we're going to support, right?"

"Oh my god, we're not doing feelings right now, are we?" Ed complains, covering his face with both hands.

He hears Morgan chuff again, and he pats Ed on the shoulder. "All right, all right," he says. "We won't do feelings. I just… I wanted you to know. I know things have been a little bumpy between us recently—"

"Only recently?" Ed can't help but quip.

Morgan continues on as if Ed hadn't spoken. "—but you're ours, you know? And we want what's best for you, you know that, right?"

Dragging his hands away from his face, Ed turns his head to look at Morgan's silhouette in the darkness. "I know," he says, his voice seeming to get swallowed up by the night.

"I don't know how long Spencer and I might have danced around each other if you hadn't stepped in," Morgan says, which is the first time that Ed thinks he's ever admitted that, at least to Ed himself.

"I do," Ed says, unable to resist the jibe. "You'd still fucking be pretending you were fucking insane over each other, sure that you'd both fuck it up." He has to chuckle imagining it. "For two really fucking smart people, you can both sure be idiots."

Snorting, Morgan pats Ed's shoulder again, seeming to relish the fact that Ed will let him actually touch him now. "Thank you, for that," he says. "Honestly."

It's Ed's turn to sigh. "I've been there, okay? Thinking that it couldn't be, that it'd fuck everything up." He pauses, thinking back to the Promised Day, the desperation of the days leading up to it, the certainty that if they failed, they'd all die. "It's always a risk," he admits. "But I think it's a risk you should always take. Better to take the chance than to regret."

"Yeah," Morgan agrees. "Don't forget that when the time comes."

Ed puts his flesh wrist over his eyes, and says, "Go the fuck to bed, Morgan. I can't take any more of you being sappy tonight."

"All right," Morgan concedes, but Ed can still hear the amusement in his voice. "Good night, Ed."

Ed grunts instead of replying properly, but Morgan gets up and carefully feels his way back to his bed and gets back in. The sounds of his shifting around, getting settled and comfortable are soft, familiar sounds of sleeping in the same room with another person, and it's oddly comforting not to be alone at the moment.

As he hears Morgan settle back down and his breathing even back out into true sleep, Ed considers trying to go back to sleep himself. It is still really late, and he doesn't really feel rested. He's not sure if sharing dreams with Roy actually affects the quality of his sleep. It's actually possible that he's effectively awake when he shares dreams with Roy, which is a sobering but important point.

He needs to be able to talk to Roy to understand what's going on in that world, to be able to coordinate with Roy on how to get everyone back where they belong. But if they aren't getting the benefit of sleep when they're communicating, then that's going to make everything more complicated than it already is. He already feels like he doesn't have enough hours in the day and that sleep is a necessary evil at the best of times. He's also not blind to the fact that he does, in fact, need sleep to function, and that, if he doesn't, at some point, he's just going to cease to function.

There's no way he can have that happen under the current circumstances, but at the same time, he doesn't really want to go back to sleep. Instinctively, he's sure that he won't see Roy again tonight, and he's not sure what his normal dreams might bring tonight. Probably nothing good. So he sets his mind to working on other problems.

A Kimblee is at large in a world that has alchemy again. That's a problem, but it's not really one he can do anything about; he's going to have to leave that one in Roy's hands. Which leaves the two things that are more in his wheelhouse: the conversion and calculation of alchemical power needed on Earth to fuel alchemy compared to Amestris, and if he should tell Gracia about the fact her husband has apparently been resurrected.

Resisting the urge to groan in frustration, he presses the heels of his hands to his eyes. With all these questions spinning through his mind, there's no real chance of going back to sleep tonight.