Fullmetal Alchemist Fan Fiction ❯ Völuspá ❯ the Fifth: silence of the kith and kin of Heimdal ( Chapter 5 )

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]

Roy watched him approach the farmhouse, brilliant blond hair topping a body wrapped up in unfamiliar drab brown, moving like a beacon through the crowd of uniformed men and women. From the loft window, Edward was impossible to miss.

With the latest Intelligence briefing over, Roy should have been out checking the status of the supply shipment, which was now almost ten days late. Once the winter storms really began in earnest, Roy feared the army would starve to death, and it was probable the Drachmen knew that. If just one moderate snowfall could wreak such damage on the supply line, a real storm was going to be the death of them all.

The Drachmen didn't need to attack. They could just wait for the Amestrian army to freeze and starve to death on the flanks of the Briggs Mountains.

Instead of checking on the shipments, though, Roy stood in the window and watched Edward move determinedly toward the farmhouse, and then force his way past the guards and inside. Roy had already told them to let him in, if he came.

"That's really the boss, isn't it?" said Havok from the table.

"Yes," said Roy. Lust scratched his talons against the wall, but said nothing.

There was no further comment from Havok. Roy knew the man well enough to know everything Havok wanted to say, and Havok knew Roy well enough to know that Roy knew. Where has he been? You have a homunculus of him standing next to you, doesn't that mean he was dead? What does this mean for Lust? Roy had no answers for those things.

You can't let this affect your command.

Eventually, Roy brushed his fingers across the window, and moved away from it. Lust followed him down the loft stairs, and through the house.

It would have been impossible to stay away.

"You're going to see him, aren't you?" asked Lust. The Sin's voice was low, the tone slightly curious.

"I have to."

Edward was not in the kitchen, and the command staff cook had not seen him. That surprised Roy, as he would have thought that, freshly freed from captivity, his once-lover would have made straight for the nearest food.

His second guess was the bathroom, and he found the door closed. "Edward?" he called, knocking lightly on the door.

"What?" came the reply, slightly muffled.

"Can I come in?"

A pause, a splash of water, and then a somewhat lower response. "Nothing to stop you."

The door was unlocked, and Roy twisted the knob to open it. Lust shrank back beside the door, unwilling to enter, and for the second time in three-quarters of a decade, Roy went on alone.

Edward was sprawled out in the bathtub, head tilted back over the edge with his wet, unbound hair spilling all the way to the floor. His automail arm and leg were thrown over the edge to keep them out of the water, but the rest of him was as completely submerged as possible. "What do you want?" he asked, without opening his eyes. His nondescript brown clothes were strewn everywhere all over the floor, and his expression was blissful.

"Edward," said Roy, with so many things he wanted to say, wanted to ask, that he was having trouble on deciding where to start. Edward looked older ... shockingly older. Lust, perpetually frozen at the physical age of sixteen, had not prepared him at all to meet this weathered young man with lines at the corners of his eyes, waist-length hair, and roughly-cropped blond stubble peeking around the edges of his jaw.

"Yeah," said Edward, after a long pause and without opening his eyes. "That's still my name. You just enjoying the view, or was there something you wanted to say to me?"

"... how?"

"How what?" Edward turned his head then and looked at Roy. The gold of his eyes was the same: clear, piercing. "How did I get myself fucked by the Drachman army? Or how did I manage to get to Drachma in the first place? Those are both really good questions, and I have good answers for them, but they're going to last a lot longer than this bath. I have a better 'how' for you ... how did you make that thing behind you?"

"We thought you were dead," whispered Roy. "We all thought you were dead."

"I see." Edward sat up slightly and picked up the wash cloth and a bar of soap, and started to scrub his thighs. "Excuse me, but I was trying to bathe here. I haven't had a bath in what feels like about a year, so if you're going to stand in here and gape over me, you're going to have to watch me wash too."

Roy sat down on the stool in front of the dressing table. "What happened to you?" he asked. "Where were you? Why didn't you contact us?" His lover. His lover, alive enough to grouse. Older, matured, and still no taller than his shoulder.

"I would have if I could have. Look, I already told you that was a long story. I could write a fucking book about it, and you probably wouldn't believe half of it. The half that you will believe involves me getting stuck in Drachma for the last three years and not being able to contact you because of, you know, this motherloving war that you and the rocket scientists down in Central cooked up."

Roy blinked. The what? "I didn't cook anything up, Edward. I'm just ..."

"Yeah, yeah, just following orders, fuck, does that line ever get old. Whatever." Edward vigorously scrubbed his good leg and foot, and then ran the washcloth up over his chest. "I can see why they promoted you. What ever happened to Colonel I-will-never-follow-unjust-orders-again?"

This wasn't the way it was supposed to be going. Were he to be honest with himself, Roy would have to admit to having no idea what he had expected, but this certainly wasn't it. Where was all this hostility coming from? His reunion with his once-lover was supposed to be a happy one, bittersweet at worst, but Edward had been verbally violent with him from the moment the younger man had recognized him in the mountain meadow, and had only gotten worse from there.

"Is this about Lust?" asked Roy. Lust's existence couldn't account for all of it; Edward had seemed irritated to see him before ever spotting Lust. But the homunculus with Edward's face definitely hadn't helped matters.

"Why the fuck would this be about that thing?" Edward went for more soap before attacking his neck and good arm with the cloth. A scrim of grimy froth was forming on the surface of the water. "Unless you're going to try to say it's responsible for gathering a huge army together and invading Drachma. Actually ... I wouldn't put that past it." The washcloth disappeared under the murky water as Edward scrubbed submerged parts of himself.

"The situation here is a difficult one, Edward," Roy told him. Behind him, Lust made a little scratching noise on the door frame. "But you know, I don't want to argue politics with you. I don't want to argue with you at all."

"Great. So get the hell out and let me clean myself off."

All of Roy's desires, the ones he had spilled out to Lust so many times, all his regrets, everything he'd wanted to tell Edward ... How could he say such things to the face of this anger? "Were you treated well?" he asked eventually. "By the Drachmen I mean."

"Mmmm." Edward, apparently finished with the washcloth, dropped it with a wet thop on the floor and settled down into the water once more. The thin, soapy froth on the surface was disgusting - Edward really had been filthy - but Edward didn't seem to notice ... or if he did, he didn't care. "I guess. I was kidding about getting fucked by the army. They were pretty nice, I suppose, considering that they had decided that I was an Amestrian spy. By the way, I notice that Lieutenant ... uh, Colonel Hawkeye speaks really lousy Draekin. Take a real translator next time. She came close to calling them all goatfuckers on accident. I'm surprised they didn't get offended."

"All the intelligence people were busy on other things," said Roy.

Edward made a disgruntled sort of sound and just lay there in the warm, dirty water with his eyes closed. He looked slightly more like himself with the grime off, more like the boy that he had once been, that Roy had loved. He sat quietly and looked at his hands.

"I hate you sometimes," said Edward eventually.

Roy glanced up at him. Without opening his eyes, Edward made a vague gesture with his good hand and said, "I wish you'd fucking argue with me. I want to beat the shit out of you for what you did."

"What did I do?"

"What do you mean, what did you do? I was fourteen, you son of a bitch."

Blinking, Roy sat up and said, "What? Edward ..."

"Don't give me any of your damned excuses."

"Edward ... you wanted that."

"I was fourteen," said Edward again. The water sloshed, slopping out of the tub and onto the floor as the other man turned around to face him. Scowl at him. "I'm not even as old now as you were when you first fucked me, you sick bastard. Did you have no sense of decency?"

That was it. Roy didn't want to argue with Edward. He didn't want to fight with Edward. He'd loved Edward, he still loved Edward, but this was going too far. "You wanted that," he repeated. "You're not going to come back now, almost twelve years after the fact, and cry rape at me."

"I was fourteen," said Edward, yet again.

"Yes you were, and you wanted it. You came to my house and begged me to ..."

"I never begged you. Don't make shit up."

"Asked me then."

"I was a kid. You were the adult, you were supposed to be the responsible one and keep me from doing shit like that. You weren't supposed to take advantage of me."

Roy stared at him. He opened his mouth, and then stared a little more before saying, "I never took advantage of you!" There was no way he was going to point out that, except for that first time, he'd always been the one on his back, so that Edward could take what he wanted, at his own pace. He'd never say that, not where people could, conceivably, be listening. Bad enough that this conversation was taking place at all.

"You made me want you. You manipulated me, and you didn't say no when you should have."

In fact, this had gone way too far as it was. Roy stood up. "I'm not going to take responsibility for this, Fullmetal. You calm down a little, and then maybe we'll talk more later. I'm sorry for interrupting your bath."

"I'm not done yet, you bastard. You sit back down."

There was a soft scratching sound from the door - Lust's claws on the doorframe. Edward gave the doorway a glare, and then abruptly stood up, shedding water down his body. Roy glanced away by reflex.

"Hand me a towel," Edward demanded, and Roy, despite his wish for a tactical retreat, complied.

Water went everywhere as Edward stepped out of the tub and dripped across the rough concrete floor as he dried himself off. It was difficult not to watch him do it; Roy kept his eyes averted, and tried not to concentrate on the flash of curled blond hair as Edward wrapped the towel around his narrow hips. "Care to start explaining that?"

"There isn't much to explain. Lust is ... what you see. Everyone thought you were dead, Edward."

Edward began to gather his clothes together into a pile on the floor. "So that gives you the right to create a fucked-up duplicate of me? I'd ask you what the hell you were thinking, but it seems pretty obvious from the fact that you named it Lust. You're fucking the thing, aren't you? You're sick. You're fucking a thing that not only looks like me, it looks like a teenaged version of me."

Edward lowered his voice then, whispered something under his breath, and then clapped his hands together and laid them on the pile of clothing. Blue sparks of light arced up from his fingers, and down through the cloth, throwing out a fine dust of grime into a circle on the concrete. Lust made an indistinguishable noise from the doorway, and Edward shot the thing a murderous glare.

"This isn't going to get us anywhere," said Roy. "I'll let you finish getting cleaned up."

"No," said Edward, as he started to pull on his clothes. "I want to hear your justification for that thing."

Irritated now beyond measure, Roy snapped, "I don't have to justify Lust to you, Edward. Get this through your head. Everyone thought you were dead. Everyone. I'm not going to try to say that attempting to resurrect you would have been the right thing to do even if you had been dead, but Lust didn't ask to be born any more than you did, and now he's here."

Yanking up his pants, Edward said venomously, "So what did you give up when you made it? Your balls or your brain?"

Edward thinks I made Lust, Roy realized suddenly. "I wasn't the one trying to bring you back." And holy shit, of course Edward had no idea who had made Lust. If he had, he wouldn't have been wallowing in his rage.

It hadn't occurred to Roy that Edward wouldn't have known it immediately.

"It wasn't me," said Roy slowly.

He watched, with a fatalistic kind of horror, as the words sank into Edward. Because, aside from Roy, there was only one person who would have been both interested in bringing a presumed-dead Edward back to life, and capable of executing it.

Pale, pants halfway-buttoned, Edward whispered, "He didn't."

"He did. Edward, he thought ..."

"What happened to him?"