This was a commission for @vanyali07! *___* They were kindly cool with me sharing it with the rest of Tinternetz so that you guys get to enjoy it too! ♥
Not-so-secret secret, writing Hughes is obscenely fun, and every time I do it, I’m baffled that I don’t just shoehorn him into every single fic. X’D
Roy Mustang is a man of such innumerable talents that most of them don’t even receive any attention—which is a good thing these days, since lately one of his best-honed skills is surreptitiously ogling Edward Elric.
There are, of course, two primary problems with this incomparable aptitude: the first is that Riza sees it and knows exactly what he’s doing regardless of how covert he is at any given time; the second is that Ed doesn’t notice a damn thing, which means that absolutely nothing but a smidgeon of eye-strain has come of it thus far.
That’s all right. Ed has found his feet now, after a bit of rest and a bit of traveling and a bit of auditing university courses and complaining vociferously to anyone who will listen about the content; he’s returned to Roy’s command of his own free will, and that in itself is a blessing past description. He’s here, present and accounted for and much more inclined to respect hierarchical authority at least seventy percent of the time, and that’s more than Roy would have asked or could have hoped for. It would be obscene to fish for more—hubris has hamstrung better men. Roy is not in the business of cordially inviting his own destruction; it has a tendency to slam the door open and stroll on in without his assistance as it is.
* sits on his back porch with his legs propped up on the table, reading a book, drinking grapefruit Radler out of a pint glass they gave out in Dublith at the full solar eclipse celebration last year. He’s listening to the whole Stevie Winwood catalog and he’s humming the organ riff from “Gimme Some Lovin’.”
* rides his bike in the bike lane, on the trails, and in the park with his helmet on and no shirt, talks to kids at the splash pad about his automail, takes literally an hour to say goodbye to a dog who’s decided his lap his its new favorite place to nap
* puts his hair up into a messy man bun when he’s sweaty from pulling dead dandelions out of the yard, and fills up the whole compost bin before he decides he can be done
* wants to write his alchemical theories in a Moleskine but he can never find it, so he ends up writing them down on some printer paper that he’s cut or neatly torn into quarters. He half-rolls the notes and puts them in an orange juice can, back from when people used to drink frozen orange juice. He says he’s going to transcribe them into his Moleskine when he finds it but then he never gets to it
* smells like cedar and pheromones and the patio of the pub he met Roy at, where he abandoned a good two-thirds of his fries — his fries! — when they started talking about the band on Roy’s t-shirt. Ed had seen them a few times at a country fair a decade ago. The first time was hazy with pot smoke and the second time he remembers very clearly and wonders aloud if Roy was there too
* invites him over even though he really hasn’t cleaned up and he’s tracked in the detritus of the yardwork from earlier, but he knows that if he waits until he feels like he can impress Roy, he’ll never make a move. They sit in the shade and they talk and Roy picks up the book Ed was reading and Ed gets another beer and sits down next to him, a little nervous, but it’s too hot to really shiver even inside, so he just kind of doesn’t
* melts into Roy when they kiss for the first time, just a slow long sigh of gold and sunset and it’s almost dark and it’s still 92 degrees, the crickets are out, the rhododendrons are folded up and the evening stars are coming out, shining between the box elder trees.
tora42's nonsensne 