So here it is, the FMA ficlet that was about Ed proposing to perform alkahestry as a party trick, but in usual Ed fashion, it gets sort of sidelined by other things, namely, Roy:
There was a side of his jaw that always ached when Ed looked at him, but not really at him—rather, through him, like a homing missile would consider the wall in front of it—and Roy could imagine that lesser men than him had succumbed to its pressure, so it was not really a matter of shame that he had to cough into his hand and look away before he did something inadvisable.
Like, grin like a loon at the armed missile sitting in front of him.
“S’anyway, the point is that there’s always two sides to these things, one strand of energy positioned inwards and the other facing outwards, if you know what I mean. Mei explained it much better and Al, the traitor, nodded along even when he didn’t get it, so whatever it is, it needs two opposing forces to react at the same time, or else you’ll just get a big fat nothing—not even a fizzle…” Edward was gesticulating with the half-eaten burger still in his hand, which was in danger of dripping grease all over the car seat, if it hadn’t already. Maybe Roy was just sitting in a puddle of burger grease and he didn’t know it. There were worse ways to spend a Sunday, he guessed.
“Like, okay, the easiest way would be to demonstrate it, and you can even do it at parties—hell, I’d do it at the next one I’m invited to. So, all you do is—Mustang, turn around,” Ed instructed, gesturing with the remnants of the burger. Roy could make out the onion rings sticking out between the buns like bleached bones, which had the telltale shine of grease that had just dripped onto the leather, but he decided to redirect his attention and replay what Ed had said first.
“You want to perform alkahestry at parties?” Roy blurted out.
Ed’s nose scrunched up like Roy had expected it to. Usually, it would accompany an aborted attempt to lob something at someone, but in this case, it was just a scrunch that evened out as Ed stuffed the last bits of the burger into his mouth and swallowed it pretty much without chewing.
“It’s not a magic trick that can be performed, Mustang,” Ed replied, with as much performative distaste as he could pack into his voice, and reaching for the bottle in Roy’s hands at the same time. “I’d just be asking people if I could feel their Dragon’s pulse, and then demonstrating how it flows through the earth and into their bodies.”
“Right,” Roy murmured non-judgmentally, but Ed bristled, anyway.
“You think it’s bollocks, don’t you?” Ed charged, jabbing him in the ribs with the bottle, and Roy moved incrementally backward to put some distance between him and Ed’s belligerent bottle, but for a short guy, Ed had incredible reach. “You do, it’s written all over your stupid bastard face,” Ed continued, punctuating the sentence with more jabs, and Roy decided to do what he did best. Defuse the target before it became a threat.
“On the contrary, I think it’s an incredibly complex process with a long and rich tradition in the East which shouldn’t be performed lightly as a party trick,” Roy added, steepling his fingers for better effect. That worked better when he had a desk to rest his elbows on, but whatever. Desperate times called for desperate measures.
“God, you sound just like Al now,” Ed complained, throwing his head back and making the tail of his braid thwap against the window and then slither down slowly with a hiss. “If he knew what I was going to do, he’d just give me a look like I’d dipped his cat’s tail in ink and tried to squiggle out a few calligraphy strokes on court issued paper—not that I’ve ever done anything like that,” Ed scrambled to add, scratching the tip of his nose and then looking out of the window, where his bangs fell into his eyes, hiding them momentarily. “It’s all purely hypothetical. The bastard had squirmed too much before I could get a grip—anyway, all hypothetical. Besides, you can just imagine the line that develops in the middle of Al’s brows, like this—” Ed looked back at Roy, directing the burning gold of his eyes towards him, which Roy could sense more than see, and frowned comically, until there was an X-shaped mark in the middle of Ed’s forehead. “So, he’d do this and not say anything else, but he’d definitely not be happy that I would be doing this to random strangers. There’s some kind of an energy backlash thing that Mei had warned us about specifically for situations like these.”
“But you’re going to do it anyway,” Roy responded, eyeing the blur of grease glistening on Ed’s lips as it curved up into a grin.
“If you’re the kind that prefers a warning, then you better make the best of it,” Ed remarked, taking the glove off his left hand. He wiggled his fingers in front of his face before extending it towards Roy, and Roy, like a true coward, folded like wet paper and turned his back to Ed like it wouldn’t set off twenty million alarms in his head if he’d tried to do this for anyone else except Riza.
He braced for the impact of Ed’s fingers, but instead, the car lurched, and Roy careened forward and was saved from face-planting into the seat when a vice-like grip tightened on his collar and yanked him back with all the gentleness of a military tank.
Roy was about to make a disgruntled noise when Ed’s finger jabbed at the base of his skull, and suddenly his entire face was alight—he could feel a sharp electrical charge hissing its way through everything—skin, fat, muscle, bone, and even moving the lymph around. But the shocking thing was that between one moment and the next, it had spread across his jaw and through his nose and had reached the back of his eyes. Roy blinked, feeling wetness gather at the corners, but before he could focus on the sensation, there was another zing that travelled all the way through his ear like it would pop out his eardrums and it was the single most painful thing that Roy had ever felt, barring Lust stabbing him through the stomach, which, Roy would admit, wasn’t a fair point of comparison under most circumstances.
“Ow,” Roy murmured, massaging his jaw because it felt like his teeth would fall out even if his ears survived the ordeal. “Did you just try to flash-fry my nerves with alchemy?”
Ed turned him around with a frown, and Roy winced at the sudden movement.
“That’s what it felt like? Guess I need to work on my technique,” Ed replied, flexing his flesh fingers bemusedly as if they were the culprit here.
“It was definitely alchemy and not alkahestry,” Roy intoned, still sore about the whole thing. His teeth still ached. “I could feel the alchemical discharge in the air.”
“Okay, maybe I pushed in a bit of alchemy there, just to speed things up a bit,” Ed conceded, pulling his glove back on and shaking out his wrist. “It’s essentially the same principle where you turn ambient energy into something that can flow through the body. Everything felt so sluggish inside you that I decided a tiny bit of alchemical charge would do the trick.”
“So it’s my fault now?”
“When is it not, bastard?” Ed offered, but without much heat, leaning back into the seat.
Roy rubbed at his eyes some more, because they were still prickling at the corners. When he tried to focus in front of him, Roy startled—imperceptibly, because he could hide his body’s responses almost on instinct now—but Ed still caught it like a bloodhound scenting blood.
“Feel any different?”
Roy tried to err on the side of casual. “Not by much,” he admitted, pulling out his handkerchief from his jacket and dabbing his eyes with it before folding it up into a neat square and pocketing it again. Ed watched the whole routine in the manner of observing a particularly lackluster experiment. Then Roy curled his fingers in and tried to focus on the array on his gloves and suddenly it appeared like a brand across his eyes, searing the deep red lines into his eyeballs in a way that had not happened in a long, long time.
Beside him, Ed was on the verge of hammering a hole into the leather seat, if his impatient tapping was anything to go by.
“Well?”
“How?” Roy mustered, blinking again, to make sure it wasn’t an illusion that his mind was drawing from, rather than what he could actually see. No one knew about this. Not even Riza, but she had probably guessed why Roy had taken up new reading glasses to do her infernal paperwork. But the thing was, the glasses, to borrow Ed’s empathic vocabulary, did shit. Roy guessed it was possibly an after-effect of healing his eyes with the Stone, although it could just be Truth’s twisted joke that despite getting his vision back, Roy Mustang could never see the finer details again.
“You have frown lines now,” Ed supplied, as if that was the answer to the mystery.
“Pardon me?” escaped Roy even before he could school his response, but he wasn’t trying to school it in the first place.
“You squint a lot more, hence the lines, dumbass,” Ed remarked, pointing at his own eyes and Roy is once again, taken by the burnished gold of them which seemed much clearer now—like a pool of sparkling gold. “You stumbled on a leaf, a fucking leaf on the platform. It wasn’t like you didn’t see it—it was more like you could see some of it and decided to be a prick and sidestep it, except you overcompensated, because you didn’t know it was a leaf, and therefore, you missed the part where you could just walk all over it,” Ed continued, his gaze sharpening in a way that was proportional to the sense of relief that Roy felt. So Ed had noticed. Roy didn’t know why it was a good thing. “You’re not as good at hiding as you think.”
“Appreciate the feedback,” Roy murmured, ignoring the drumming under his veins as he realized that not only did Ed notice, he decided to do something about it, in true Ed fashion. Without asking him first. But that was the only thing that was expected. Ed did not mix business with consent.
“So, still skeptical about me doing this at parties?”
Roy plastered on his most harmless smile because no matter what he said, it would be tantamount to drawing blood. “I don’t think most people would take too kindly to being jabbed in the neck with an alchemical charge, and definitely not from an alchemist. Also, you forget that the military are paranoid for a reason.”
“It’s not always the neck, bastard!” Ed growled, and then leaned forward. “It could be your lower back, your inner elbow, or even your groin, which has a bunch of nerves—although Mei doesn’t call them that.”
Roy felt his smile slipping and turning into something of a grin, but it didn’t seem that Ed noticed that.
“The point is, the all is one and one is all doesn’t just apply to alchemy, it applies to the human body, too,” Ed remarked with a touch of grump as if he didn’t want to admit that in particular. “So I never know what I might end up jabbing.”
“Charming, just what I wanted to hear,” Roy replied. “I’ll make sure everyone gets the no alchemy at parties’ memo.”
“Technically,” Ed began, and Roy knew that he had left himself wide open with that one, “it isn’t alchemy.”
“An esoteric healing art from Xing practiced by a novice who mixes it up with alchemy wouldn’t inspire much confidence, either,” Roy added, and Ed scratched his chin like he was thinking of making it worse.
“I’m counting on them being drunk,” Ed replied.
Roy supposed that was always an option.
“I suppose there isn’t anything I could do to change your mind,” Roy said, knowing that giving in now would be better than Ed persevering to change Roy’s, instead.
“You could always let me try it on you,” Ed remarked.
Roy rubbed the back of his head reflexively, and decided that this was what being a true leader actually entailed. Riza would be proud.
“At parties,” Ed added.
Okay, Roy would need to scratch that out. Riza would not be proud.
“You can do it on Jean, instead.”
And that was the end of the matter, Roy supposed, until he saw Jean’s face at the next one of these gatherings, fixing a look of abject betrayal as Ed possibly jabbed him in the stomach to get the full effect of what he was trying to achieve. Except, it amounted to Jean being able to lift himself up from his wheelchair for two whole minutes, and amid the loud cheering and the haze of alcohol, Roy decided that sometimes, it was better to see through things than not see them at all.
For @strangesparrow26
