HEHEH. I HAVE RETURNED. IMAGINE THE GRIN OF SMUGNESS.

Winner of last reference: lotrprincess! It was Doctor Who. Heh.

This time it is;

"Shut up."

"I didn't say anyth—"

"You were thinking. It's annoying."

Shiny gold star, up for grabs!

And now, starring angst, THIS CHAPTER! HA!

…and my younger brother collected another cat from the corner. The weather in that part of the country is calm, it doesn't rain much. That's good, I don't like the rain. Next week, we head off for—

Edward's eyes forced themselves closed as he yawned, stretching his arms and looking around. His books and papers were strewn all over the floor, sofa, and coffee table. It was beginning to darken.

Roy's shadowy figure still occupied the other sofa, his broad back was to Edward, rising and falling slightly. His shoulder twitched occasionally.

Edward grabbed at his papers, sweeping them into some form of organisation. After he'd sorted them, he placed them all back inside the case and closed it, letting out a long sigh and folding his arms.

"Mmh!"

Edward looked at Roy. Is he waking up?

Roy twitched again, this time significantly more noticeably.

"Mustang?"

No response. False alarm. Edward settled back down only to perk back up a second later as Roy rolled onto his back, his left arm falling off the couch and hitting the floor.

His face was slightly creased in places, as if he were frowning. Edward flinched as Roy suddenly sank his fingers into the pillow, twisting his head to the side and moaning.

"Mustang? Hey, Roy?" Edward called softly. He bit his lip.

"…no…no…" Roy twisted again, his shoulders pulling taught. His expression was still something like painful turmoil, and for the first time, Edward noticed sweat on his face in the dim light.

He looked almost…frightened.

"Roy?" Edward's voice seemed small and quiet in the suddenly intimidating room. He pulled his knees in close and called out again. "Roy…?"

Roy grit his teeth and tossed his head once, sharply, before his eyes shot open and he gasped out, "Gloves!"

Edward looked across at him warily, his golden-amber eyes gleaming dully as the light flashed over them. "Gloves?" he repeated.

Roy sat up and looked at him confusedly, his eyes appearing even darker than normal. "Who…Edward?"

"Yes, Edward," the boy replied sarcastically, almost defensively. "That's me. You are Roy. This is a coffee table, and that is a sofa. That's a carpet, and that's a wall…" He began to point at the objects he was naming. "…painting, suitcase, vase…"

"Okay, okay, I get it…" Roy raised a hand to his face and rubbed his eyes, then wiped his forehead on the inside of his elbow. "Where are my gloves?"

"I dunno," responded Edward. "In your pocket or something?"

Roy swung his legs off the bed and patted them down, sighing as he reached the middle of his thigh. "Yeah. There."

Edward watched, not quite sure how to react, as Roy closed his eyes again and rubbed at his forehead. He sat back against the chair, and as Edward looked closer, he realised the man's hands were trembling.

"Are you okay?" Edward asked cautiously, moving his feet back onto the floor.

"Yeah." That was the only response Roy gave.

"Okay, then." Edward looked towards the window. The sun was beginning to set, the fancy buildings of Ranri outlined with fiery red as the sky began to darken from red streaked pink to dusky violet.

"Are you okay?" murmured the boy again. "Because you don't look okay."

After a few seconds of consideration, Roy replied with, "It was nothing. I'll be fine."

"'Nothing' my ass," Edward retorted with a flick of his dark ponytail. "That was a nightmare and we both know it."

"I said I'd be fine," Roy repeated firmly. He didn't meet Edward's eyes. "So just drop it. I'm going to bed. You should rest too."

The boy watched Roy stand up and make his way down to the bedroom without another word. He disappeared into the darkness of one room, leaving Edward alone in the other.

He sat there for a moment before grabbing his case and following. He stepped into the room as well, catching sight of Roy's white shirt in the darkness. The man was lying on his back with his hands behind his head and staring at the ceiling. His eyes slid to Edward for a second, then back up to the roof.

The young alchemist reached behind his back and tugged the tie out of his hair, shaking his head roughly to straighten out the lengthy black bangs. He put the tie on top of his case before pulling off his gloves, placing them with the tie and struggling with the braces for a bit.

Roy raised one hand and beckoned the boy over. "'Mere."

Edward crossed his arms huffily and stomped over. Roy sat up - even then he still reached at least Edward's waist. He reached up and swiftly undid the clasps before flopping back down on the oversized pillow. "There."

Edward grumpily tied the braces up in a ball and threw them at his case before unbuttoning his shirt and tossing it there as well.

Now adorned solely in the black trousers Alphonse had willed him to buy in a bid to look at least half-normal, Edward himself dropped heavily onto the fluffy thing. His auto-mail arm hit the carpet with a metallic thunk, whereas his flesh arm made a soft thud.

"Hey, Mustang?"

"What?"

Edward cleared his throat. "Back in the Eastern Desert when you…uh…m… You said your fire almost killed you. What do you mean?"

Roy sighed. After a few moments, he said, "Why do you want to know? It's not really…an enjoyable topic."

"Curious. It just didn't make much sense to me. But it's not that important. If you don't wanna tell me, don't."

"I see." Roy fell silent, and Edward supposed he wasn't going to tell him anything. He'd almost closed his eyes when the man spoke up again.

"It means just that. I almost burned to death."

Edward glanced at him. The man's eyes were tired, living in a time period that Edward couldn't access. He appeared older now, the boy decided. He was younger than all the other Colonels and Generals around, but now Edward could see that a military man's real age wasn't how long he'd lived, but rather how much he'd experienced.

How much of the world he'd seen.

How much of his loyalty he'd devoted to his cause.

And how many people he'd killed.

In that aspect, Roy was much older than any General Edward had met.

"I was ordered into an inhabited district to exterminate any Ishbalans I saw. But, by that stage, just about everyone knew who I was - the Flame Alchemist. I was directed into a huge maze of a market building, and the Ishbalans I'd been sent to kill laid a trap for me. They knew they couldn't face me and live, but they could at least try to bring me down with them. They sacrificed the last of their kerosene to get at me, dousing everything so that when I snapped, the whole place went up in flames. Tenacious lot, they were…"

Roy trailed off and was silent briefly before continuing. "I was running for ages, choking on the smoke and my fingers and feet were getting burnt. I thought I was going to die there, and so I compiled a list of all the stuff I'd wanted to do and wouldn't be able to. You can imagine my shock when I stumbled out of there a second before the roof caved in and killed everyone inside."

Edward listened in mute intrigue, his head cocked at little on the side as he did.

"It took Hughes a full day and a couple of slaps to convince me I wasn't dead myself. After that, I came to realise something," Roy said solemnly. "I might have the ability to start fires and send them at whatever or whoever I want, but once they're out, I can't fully control them. Fire's a dangerous thing. Spend too much time around it and you'll eventually get burnt."

As if to prove his point, Roy rolled back his sleeve and held his arm out in Edward's direction. In the dim lighting, Edward could only just make out patches on the man's hands where the skin was a slightly different tone, or places along his arm where the fine hair no-longer grew.

"If you look carefully enough, you can see all my close encounters. My fingertips are permanently a different colour now. And all those burns there were from that one event. It was then I realised that fire just doesn't care."

Roy drew his hand back in towards himself. "It'll burn anything and everything 'til there's nothing left but ashes. I thought I'd already knew that, but… Heh," Roy smiled humorlessly, raising that same arm into the air as if to examine it. "I was a fool back then. And I probably still am. Fire's dangerous. You can't control it. Even if you've spent as long studying it as I have, it's still unpredictable. Just when you think you've got it contained - crack! - out comes a spark and it's burning away on the outside again."

Roy's smile faded and he lowered his hand. "I always asked myself if a power as reckless and uncaring as fire could be used to do something constructive. After much thought, I decided no, it couldn't. My alchemy blows things up, for goodness' sake."

"Yeah, but…" Edward began quietly. He couldn't think of anything to say. Roy had just…talked to him…with words that sounded…almost human. Not like the normal words that came from that jerk afflicted with some type of god-complex.

"You look like a stunned fish, Ed. Is it so surprising that I have emotions?" Roy mumbled. As an afterthought, he added, "Probably."

"I've just… I've never heard you talk about your flame alchemy like it's a bad thing before," Edward explained. "You usually talk it up."

Roy chuckled a little. "Yeah, I s'pose. But think about it. It really is demonic sometimes."

"But you can use it for good," Edward pointed out. "You just have to send them in the right direction, don't you? Burn the bad guys."

"Frankly, I don't know whether to be reassured by that or not," said Roy softly. "It's such an innocent, naïve notion."

"But it's logical, isn't it?" Edward argued. "If you're on the good side, and you only do good stuff then…"

Roy looked at Edward, his smile defied by tired eyes. "It's surprising you haven't figured it out already, Ed. In real life, there is no such thing as right or wrong. And when you do what I do, morals go right out the window. Isn't that right? After all, I am a 'morally corrupt bastard with a god complex', as you so eloquently put it."

Roy rolled over so his back was to Edward. "A piece of advice, Edward. Don't try to live by concepts like justice and mercy. Because your enemies sure won't."

Edward frowned. He could tell he wasn't going to get anything more from the man.

"I know that…" he said slowly, holding his auto-mail hand out in front of his face and moving it about so it made clanking noises. "I know the world doesn't really respect equivalent exchange. The entire prospect is warped to sound better. I had a whole load of stuff happen to me and I still can't figure out what good came out of it. The world is cruel like that. If we do one bad thing, it pays us back - with interest. It's not like 'do something good and get something good in return'. It's not 'endure something painful and something nice will happen'. It's 'put one foot out of line and get punished for it'. If you do something good, you don't get anything in return. If you do something bad, you get something worse. That's the real equivalent exchange."

Edward rolled to face the other way.

"Life isn't fair; I've said it, you've said it, everyone's said it. For everything us alchemists live by, equivalent exchange sure is a flawed concept. It works against us all the time. Like Alphonse. He was just following me, but he ended up worse than I did. I should have been the one affected the most; it was my idea. Perhaps he wanted it more, perhaps he somehow deserved more punishment than I did. And Winry, her parents died at war. Where's the equivalent exchange there? And all those Ishbalans who died there too, where's their equivalent exchange?"

Edward sighed angrily, irritated by his own loose tongue. This, in his opinion, was one of his greatest failings. When he was mad, he spilled out all his thoughts like a tipped can of paint.

"And Nina Tucker, where's her equivalent exchange? She didn't do anything to earn what happened to her! If anything, it was her father who should have been on the receiving end of that! No, he just died quick and painless, where she had to spend her last moments in pain and in a mutilated body until she was killed! And she didn't even do anything; she was just a little girl!" he growled.

"And where's Alphonse's equivalent exchange? He lives every day in a hollow can, living possibly one of the hardest lives I could think of, just for one little mistake that was all my idea, my fault in the first place! That doesn't even make sense! I made one little error, I did one thing wrong, and he was the one that paid for it. Where is this so-called 'equivalent exchange'? Where's his, and hers, and theirs?! Everyone's?! Where's… Where's my equivalent exchange…?"

Edward's voice shook with rage now - he was no longer talking to Roy, he was just venting his frustrations to the night. He continued, gradually falling more towards hollow sadness and grief now than his previous anger.

"I can tell you now. I know. It's no-where, that's where. Equivalent exchange is just a pitiful excuse we hide behind, trying to justify our actions by it and pretending like we understand the world. Deceiving ourselves by saying that we'll eventually get paid back for what we've done. Fooling ourselves into thinking things are going to be better one day. Making us think that maybe…we could actually do something to fix these things… That maybe…there's hope for people like me and Al…"

Edward let out a huff of breath and folded his arms against his chest. He closed his eyes, sick to death of looking at the world that was hell bent on smashing him to the ground over and over again.

A soft warmth on his shoulder caught Edward's attention. That same slightly burned hand was now resting on his arm, the owner looking as expressionless as ever.

"Just don't," he said softly. "Don't say that. I told you not to trust enemies to live by justice and morality, so you should try to expect that. I've spent a long time trying to find the right places and situations… Where to keep to things like morals and compassion…and where to forget them. Where to go ahead and shoot to kill."

Roy shrugged. "But in all that time, I've discovered that you can't ever predict the correct time and place to show mercy. It's all in the spur of the moment. I could be given the order to kill a man, and go straight ahead and do it. But what if I knew that man? What if he was my friend? What would I do then? We humans are easily influenced. So I tried to wrap my own feelings up as best I could and hide them away. I must seem so cold and heartless to someone as young and inexperienced as you…"

Roy gave his head a quick shake. "But I think you can understand that concept quite well. You can hide away those things like righteousness and integrity, but don't ever let go of something as pure and beautiful as hope. In this world, no matter how dark it is for you, there's always one little pinprick of light there. Hope. Don't ignore it. Don't try to get rid of it. Don't forget it."

"That's what I'm saying," Edward muttered. "We're all fools deluded by that useless thing we call hope. We cling to it like it can give us salvation or freedom. Even power. Money. Fame."

"Absolution?" Roy put in softly. "Forgiveness? Peace of mind? I know. Both of us hope for the same things, Edward. You should understand where I'm coming from when I say you can't afford to give it up. There are people relying on you."

Edward stared stubbornly forward. He didn't speak, just glared silently at the window. "No offense, Roy, but I can't trust you. In fact, you're one of the most unreliable people I know. Besides, your situation and mine are totally different. You can't know…what this feels like."

"It feels like you've got chains attached to your bones and heart, dragging you down to the ground. It hurts physically, like there is really steel piercing your flesh. It feels like you couldn't move, even if you wanted to. You're tired, fed up, frustrated. Guilty. Confused, even," said Roy gently. "You feel like you could lie there forever. Maybe even like you could just die."

Edward shifted slightly, his eyes moving up to Roy. He didn't say anything.

"I can't tell you I know exactly how you feel. I can just tell you how I felt and think you might be feeling right now," Roy said, his eyes lit with a strange, impossible mix of compassion and apathy. "I can't say that everything will be alright in the end. I don't know that. It'd be stupid to say so. I can't even tell you I fully understand. I'd be lying, and that won't help either of us. But I can say for sure that neither yours nor your brother's situations will be improved any by losing hope. So don't."

Edward's eyes moved back to the wall.

"If you give up, you'll be disappointing everyone. Especially me."

Edward tensed.

"I have high expectations for you, Edward Elric. I'm proud of how much you've progressed this far, and I believe that if you try, if you put all your effort to it and pursue it doggedly, you can achieve your goal. So don't let me down."

With that, Roy went back to his own bed and settled down in complete silence. Edward listened to his breathing, and could tell he was asleep.

The boy sat bolt upright, tossing a glance Roy's direction and then down at his hands. His eyes were stretched open in baffled surprise. In his own cold, professional manner, had Roy just told Edward he was…proud of him?

Wide-eyed, Edward pulled the top of the bed over himself and curled into it, strangely enlightened, a little bit…happy? Happy that Roy thought he could do it? Happy that Roy had faith in him? Happy that Roy was proud of him? Huh?!

No. That thought…was just…ridiculous… Edward's consciousness faded.

On the other side of the room, Roy smiled. For someone who's slept in dorms as a young man, he knew exactly how to fake being asleep.

Such a naïve concept, he thought wearily. And yet…so true.

Shorter than I thought. Hopefully it's got enough good writing skills and stuff in it to make up for that. Like they say, 'Quality over quantity'?

Review responses;

lotrprincess; Remember a couple of chapters back where you said about Roy having lots of little scars from mistakes? Yeah, well, I thought that too, and I finally managed to stick it in somewhere. Yeah, it was Doctor Who, although it was Eleven and Amy Pond. And those various foodstuffs were pulled from their respective manga/anime. Inuya, however, was just a name I pulled out of no-where because his character reminded me of a puppy. Heh.

SapphireClaw; Multi-coloured G-strings indeed… Heh.

THANK YOU TO ALL OTHER REVIEWERS! LOVE YA'S! Also everyone who's followed and favourited! Together, we will rise through the ranks of and make EVERYONE wear miniskirts!

Bonus Thingy (because I can): Boring Rant

"…Where is this so-called 'equivalent exchange'? Where's his, and hers, and theirs?! Everyone's?! Where's… Where's my equivalent exchange…?" Edward broke off, panting.

"Zzz…" On the other side of the room, Roy snored and rolled over. "Zzz…"