Pygmalion

Indoor autumn light cascaded with a desert glow, overwhelming the air with musk and liquor mildew. He’s bouncing on his heels between the legal age and childhood, taking only acid sips from the glass in front of him. He doesn’t know why he’s here, wouldn’t even be here if not for the man across the table.

“Has anyone ever told you how beautiful you are?”

Mazes of capillaries burst beneath his skin at the sound of that voice, pale blood flowering on his cheeks in accordance with those words. “I’m not…”

“You are, Edward.” The other brushed his objections away like a wrong canvas stroke, his tone somber despite the bittersweet smell of his breaths.

A thumb touched butterflies below his chin, casting his stare upwards into the dimness of a newborn sun. He had never been able to not follow this man’s earnest commands.

“Look at me.”

*

Something damp and painful and yearning tickled his nostrils, and he swallows whatever it was before opening his mouth to draw air from that instead. Long, sandpaper fingertips flicker over his pliant lips, as if in carnival wonder, and he chokes as his listening heart yelps and rises to his throat.

It had been so long, since that first time, that first real meeting between them—when he’d stopped being an obnoxious protégé who’d seen too much of the world, when Mustang drew in from being a brash soldier with far too much ambition. It’s a smoky remembrance, that swaddle-cloud night with an alcohol-flavored Colonel, both their heads swimming and their organs floating aimlessly inside them, and sometimes he’d forget which of them confessed first. Only sometimes, before Mustang himself would bring up his own dated sense of romance.

Once, Mustang had told him, softly like a whispered bruise—as Ed pressed kisses to his fluttering pulse—that they were made for each other. He had snorted in the man’s ear for that, joked that the women he’d been fooling around with all these years had rubbed some of their cliché cheesiness off on him. But the Colonel had kept his tongue knotted and his features staid, and when faced with those calm oblivion eyes Ed had never found it in himself to look away.

*

“I loved you, even before…” He’d said, the canyons in the road making up for the glitches in his tone.

Ed snickered, as he was prone to, when Mustang tried to be emotional, opting not to glance at him in place of the looming dry landscape.

“Yeah, sure. I was eleven five years back and you were more than twice of that, you pervert.” He paused, to let the jibe sink in through the throes of that thick arrogant head. “Still are, actually…”

The Colonel ignored his attempt at nonchalance, as he was prone to, gracing his persona with a muted note.

“You loved me, too.”

Ed nearly released cluttered laughter into the caustic breeze. “Aren’t you just a little full of yourself?”

“It was a long time ago…”

“Wonder how you still remember it, old man.”

“What makes you think I meant this life, Edward?”

*

He’d drawled like he often did every time the past was mentioned—with the moonlight flowing ivory-still and the stars dancing strobes on his face—that they’d been together, in every other life but their present. Always, always destined to know each other like grapevines and their sour wines, like worms with their coiled wings and cocoons. Somehow, in some way, one of them had made a mistake, which was why they’d been born into this one with more than age differences and military fraternization rules between them. It shouldn’t have been this way.

Ed had always feared it was him who did it, secretly; after all, he screwed up everything else; why couldn’t he have failed at the best thing that had ever happened to him? Maybe he’d been the adulterous woman who'd broken Mustang’s heart, the man who'd left her and their children in a slowly collapsing house, who’d ripped a younger Mustang of innocence on unmerciful grate-ice sheets, who’d murdered him with the quicksilver of a knife or the dime danger of a gun…

Mustang, as if making a pocketbook of his thoughts, only inhaled and held him closer, like he was doing now, drifting with a succumbing exhale. A lukewarm palm drifts over the miles and imperfection of his form, a worn traveler seeking rest; a sculptor’s grip, forming him so he can never leave again. Fingers tangle in the waxen shears of his hair, ensnaring him for all he was worth. And with the metal taste of god-like irony, it was this man who had shaped him into a matchless mold since he was young, who’d used him and lead him and protected him; and he knew, he knew that they’d had lifetimes before this one. And oh, it had been so long, so unbearable without this—he’d given up on any chance of coming home then, defeated by an existence to be spent in that other world that would’ve never been like home…

Then, on the most mundane of daybreaks, the most polluted of sunsets, and suddenly, a blinding white, a flash of dear beloved alchemy, and five seconds later he was somewhere else. He’d coughed and racked his lungs in a flurry of dust, and opened his eyes to a long-missed face.

*

“Colonel!” He’d gasped, misusing the title as he slipped into a once-forgotten habit.

Mustang stared at him through a dark fringe in half a cup of disbelief—why was he wearing an eye patch?—and Ed’s arms moved of their own accord to wrap around him.

“Mustang, god, Roy, Roy…you, I… this is—how’d you get me back?”

He’d seen the surroundings behind him in fleeting observance—the musk and gloom of a despair-stuffed basement, the patterns of a circle searing its sins on the floor. Roy had attempted human transmutation—and succeeded. Bargained flesh for flesh, and Ed was here… but what had he lost?

Ed twisted from the fumbling, desperate warmth and ran his eyes over the planes of the man’s body. Nothing missing, except for the eye, but that had clearly been gone for quite a while—perhaps it was an internal trade…?

“Roy, what did the Gate take from you?” Take, not ask for. Equivalent Exchange, after all. Mustang only gazed at him through a plethora of sadness, and shook his head as tears swiped clear lines on his ashen cheek.

Roy’s lips began to move, a soundless melodrama, and his silence answered for him.

*

Roy had written down explanations for him, ink hurriedly scraping on swells of blank paper, in the gaping weeks that came after—how Archer’s wayward bullet cost him the eye, but not his life; how he’d relentlessly climbed his way to Fuhrer after Ed’s disappearance, his own brand of self-mutilating justice; and how exactly the Gatekeeper had stated what would be stripped from him, if Ed was to be returned. The Gatekeeper held the Truth—of course it was an eternal number of steps ahead of him. It knew about their interconnected souls, knew how much the two of them needed each other, which was probably the only reason it allowed the exchange. Its cruelty also knew no earthly bounds; it knew how much this would make them suffer.

For how can one love without saying so?

At the very least, Ed was glad to have proven it wrong—nothing could have stopped this, nothing ever could, not a world’s laws or literally being worlds apart. This man, who’d shared this bed with him, laid by his side like a ghost, below him like a captive, above him like a demon or a god, around him as if succumbing to a fortress—he was all that, and more, and Ed’s teeth nipped at the edges of a twitching, scurrying frown, struggling against the guilt of robbing Roy of more than he could ever give.

As the memories paraded on the trace of his lids, early dreams dissipating into the white noise of his mind, a thigh slips between his uneven legs, and a hand reaches out clumsily to settle on the crook of his hip. It trails heat up his arm—dull fires through slightly itchy cotton—to ghost upon his lips again. Roy’s own quirks into a smile, and Ed blinks back the tear aches that sprung. And the man with the stolen voice, tells him over and over—as carving fingertips caressed his lips and grazing hands mapped his face—the honest, quiet words that said it all, started it all.

‘You’re beautiful, you’re beautiful, Edward, you’re beautiful…’