Ed is already starting to recognize the dream world. There's something so innately comforting and comfortable about it, something that puts him at ease in a way he almost never, ever is in the real world, that this time, he knows where he is when he opens his eyes.
Beside him, Roy is asleep. This is the second time Ed has woken up before Roy, and he can't help but relish the moments to watch him sleep, see him be so much at peace. Their years in Virginia have done a lot to ease the darkness from Roy's eyes, heal a lot of pains, but there's always something lurking there. A tiny part of him is a little sorry to draw him back to Amestris, to drop him back in the viper's pit. He won't delude himself into thinking that once they're both home that Roy won't be diving headfirst back into the work of becoming fuhrer again.
He really shouldn't let Roy sleep—their time together in these dreams have been far too short—but he's loathe to wake Roy when he's so at ease. Their time together here is rare and precious, but so too is time where Roy doesn't carry half the worries of the world on his shoulders.
Before he has to make the decision himself, Roy stirs, meeting his eyes sleepily. Something about that seems off. Ed wakes to the dream as if he's slept long and deep. Exhaustion and weariness don't seem to carry over for him, but Roy seems lethargic and groggy.
"Hey," he greets softly.
Roy smiles back at him, echoing, "Hey," in an equally soft voice. He yawns and rubs his eyes.
"Did something happen?" Ed asks. "Are you okay? Is Hughes okay? The team?"
Blinking sleepily, Roy meets his eyes. "I… think we're all okay?" He doesn't sound anywhere near sure enough for Ed to be satisfied.
"What happened?" Ed asks, sitting up. He's not surprised when Roy lumbers himself upward to mirror him.
Rubbing his eyes again, as if he can't quite get the sleep out of them, Roy says, "We found Kimblee."
It takes conscious effort not to cradle his side from where he was impaled. He sees Roy's eyes go to the wound anyway.
"What happened?" Ed asks, trying to draw his attention away from the wound, away from what it means. Neither of them like to remember that injury. Ed, because of, well, he'd been impaled ; Roy because of what it cost Ed to heal it. The fight they had when Roy demanded he never, ever use his own soul that way again is the closest they'd ever been to breaking up for real, before the fight about the fire.
Ed wonders why he hadn't noticed that before, that their two most severe fights were about Roy demanding promises from Ed that Ed simply couldn't give. Roy demanding those promises from a place of concern and care and very real fear for Ed, and even so, promises that Ed could not make. If he were in a situation where he had to use his own soul or die again, he'd use his soul. It's not even a question. If the choices are "dead" or "alive but for less time," Ed is going to choose "alive" every time, regardless of the caveat that comes with it. Alive to be with Roy and Al and Elicia and Winry.
If the choice between saving a little girl means running into a fire and putting himself at risk, well, he's probably going to do that too. Because if he didn't, even though he'd still be alive, alive to be with Roy and Al and Elicia and Winry, he's not sure if he could live with himself if he could have saved a child and done nothing.
And in his heart of hearts, he knows that Roy knows both of those things. Worse, Roy doesn't actually want Ed to lie to him. He doesn't want Ed to say "I won't do it," if he doesn't mean it. So as difficult as it is, the choices are to let Ed be himself and make the hard decisions that Roy disagrees with, or to let him go.
Ed may not believe in a god, but he's grateful every day that Roy is just selfish enough to want to keep Ed despite it.
Roy sighs, pulling Ed out of his thoughts. "More accurately, I think, would be to say that Kimblee found us. We went back to the barn to look for a red stone."
A child runs through Ed at the words, making him shiver. "A red stone… you're not—"
"There was one there."
It's Ed's turn to rub his face, though he's not doing it out of any kind of tiredness, more like disbelief. "The transmutation ate twelve people, spit out Hughes, and still had enough leftover juice to make a red stone?" Ed asks, appalled. He had hypothesized that the transmutation had to have been exponentially stronger in the other world than in Amestris, but strong enough to resurrect and create a stone with the leftover energy?
"Apparently," Roy says, propping up a pillow behind him and leaning against the wall. Ed looks at him more closely, noticing that now that he's awake, he seems a little thin, a little pale.
"What did you do?" he asks, not really wanting to know what the answer to that question is, but needing to hear it.
Roy rubs his hand over his eyes again, particularly rubbing the left as if it's irritated. "I killed him," he says simply.
Such a simple thing to say. Such a loaded, terrible thing to mean. And Ed has no doubt of exactly what Roy means when he says I killed him in that particular flat tone.
Ed doesn't think he's capable of hating alchemy. If all the pain it and Truth have cost him haven't been enough to make him hate it, he doesn't think anything can, but Roy's flame alchemy might come close. Not just because of what a terrible and terrifying weapon it is, but because of what using it does to Roy.
"I'm sorry," Ed says, though the words feel hollow and inadequate. I'm sorry I wasn't there. I'm sorry you had to make that call. Because he had to, Ed knows. Roy would not have willingly used his flame alchemy in front of Ed's already antagonistic team if there had been any other viable options at hand.
Strangely enough, Roy's shoulders loosen and he looks at Ed with open affection. "You have nothing to apologize for," he says.
Getting into a debate in the dream world about what Ed does and doesn't have to be sorry for would be a terrible waste of time, so he doesn't start it, even if he kind of wants to. It's almost a ritual for them these days, a litany of things they have to be sorry for, reassuring one another that of the things they have to be sorry for, this is not one of them.
Swallowing to fight down the bile taste in the back of his throat, Ed says, "So Kimblee's dead. What happened to the stone?"
Roy rubs his eye again, and it's such an odd, repetitive thing that it starts sending up red flags in Ed's mind. "Reid had it, last I knew."
"Reid?" Ed asks, reaching out to grab Roy's hand when he tries to rub at his eye, yet again. "What's going on with your eye?" he demands.
"I don't know," Roy replies, trying to pull free of Ed's hand for a moment before giving up and trying to rub with his free hand. Ed pulls that down too, looking at Roy's eye. From what he can see, it looks just fine, but this isn't the real world, it's a dream one. One in which he's pretty certain that your appearance is shaped by how you perceive yourself. In which case, even if something has happened to Roy's eye, he's almost certainly not internalizing the injury enough for it to be part of him.
Frowning, Ed asks, "Do you remember anything happening? If you were fighting Kimblee, I'm guessing there was shrapnel flying around."
He can see Roy flinch, feel him tug at his hands. "I think… I think I may have gotten something in my eye," he admits.
Ed's chest aches with the knowledge. Roy may not consciously have internalized the injury, but it must be bad to be bleeding over to this place in this way. Cautiously, he lets go of one of Roy's wrists and reaches up to stroke his face.
"You're here in the dream," Ed tells him. "You are as you envision here. Just like I changed my flesh arm for the automail, it's all down to your mind. Your eye isn't hurt here," he says, brushing the edge of his automail thumb under Roy's eye. "Just focus on it."
Roy's chest rises and falls as he takes in a deep breath and closes his eyes. When he opens them again, he seems a little more at ease. He takes Ed's hand and moves it to kiss the wrist, even though he knows that Ed can't feel it on the metal. It hurts because he wants to focus on what happened to Roy, wants to look for a solution. He knows, however, that there's nothing he can do here. Worse, he knows that even if they somehow manage to make this work, even if he's right about his theory, it's not just going to be a day or two. He doesn't know if he can get Roy back soon enough to heal whatever damage has been done to his eye.
"The stone—" he starts to say, then cuts himself off. Even with a real Philosopher's Stone, healing isn't a simple thing. You need to have a better than average understanding of human composition and the internal workings of a human body. Ed would never have been able to heal himself with his own soul if he didn't have such a good grasp of anatomy from all his research on building a human body. And that was with a true stone, not a red stone. Ed doesn't trust red stones in the hands of anyone other than an expert under the best of times, and no matter how good Roy is, anatomy isn't his strong suit.
"I think Dr. Reid has already used the stone too much," Roy says.
Of anything that Ed expected to come out of Roy's mouth, that's not one of them. "Reid?" he asks. He almost feels bad about how incredulous he sounds since if Reid were actually there, he'd probably be insulted, but then again, Reid?
"He was able to use the stone to… impressive effect for someone with not an ounce of training."
Ed has to pinch the bridge of his nose as he thinks through it. He's never really used the stones himself, so he's not entirely familiar with how they work, but he knows that Cornello wasn't an alchemist and was able to use one. He wasn't able to control the rebound, though. His lack of true understanding of equivalent exchange meant he easily overloaded the red stone he'd been using.
"He didn't overload it?" he asks. Now that he's past his knee-jerk reaction of why the fuck was Reid using a stone, of all of his team, Reid actually makes the most sense to be able to use a stone untrained. Ed's not exactly pleased to hear that someone who has no training was using a red stone, but if he was using it, if Roy let him use it, it was because there weren't any other good options. He can be pissed off about it later.
"Not that I saw," Roy says. "But I… didn't manage to stay conscious much past killing Kimblee, I don't think."
Ed stills at that. "You're not just asleep," he says. "You're unconscious…" He swallows, wondering if Roy's unconsciousness is part of why his injury is bleeding over to this space. They simply don't know enough about the dream world, and they don't really have the luxury of time to figure it out. "Roy, how badly were you hurt?"
"I…" Roy trails, looking pained. "I think my eye was injured, and I must have… hit my head." He shakes his head as if trying to jar his memory loose. "I should be fine, I think."
Biting back his own concern, Ed wraps his arms around Roy, pulling him close, wishing he was holding him for real and not just in this dreamscape. He can't help Roy from here. Even if he dared try healing alchemy, he doesn't dare risk it here, not when he doesn't actually know what the injury is. Chances are good he'd fuck things up worse than they already are.
"What the fuck does the universe have against your eyes?" he asks into Roy's shoulder.
Roy chuffs softly, wrapping his arms around Ed, pulling him close, squeezing back as tightly. "At least this time it's just one?" he says in an almost teasing voice that makes Ed's chest tight. "As long as I have one to see you with, that's all I need."
"Sap," Ed says, making it an insult. Roy kisses his neck.
"You love me in spite of my flaws," he replies.
It makes Ed laugh, which is probably just as well because he's barrelling headfirst for laugh-or-cry territory, and they probably don't have time for him to have an emotional breakdown.
"You're lucky you're pretty," Ed says, sniffing back tears.
"Worst case scenario, I should be very dashing in an eyepatch," Roy says.
Ed laughs again, and if it sounds more like a sob, Roy doesn't call him on it.