(Why did it take me exactly 25 plot ideas until I found one I was happy with? And why was this one so hard to write that it took me 16 drafts until I finally finished it?)
Anyways, we love some Roy guilty consciousness moments, and some parts were inspired by this drawing, and you guys owe me a lot of reblogs /lh
The lock fought back. Not like a person, obviously, but still, it refused to open for a long time.
Roy had expected some resistance, given how Ed had always been meticulous about mechanisms, but not something like this. The key turned halfway and stopped with a dry, ugly click, like something inside had been bent too hard. Roy swore under his breath and tried again, slower this time, coaxing instead of forcing. Still, nothing happened.
"Of course," he muttered. "Of course you'd rebuild the damn thing."
He braced his shoulder against the door and tried the handle again, harder. The metal groaned. He leaned his whole body against the door, and with his ear almost fully squished against it, he heard paper rustling.
That stopped him.
Roy went still, hand frozen on the handle. He listened for some other noise, but that didn't come for a long while.
Eventually, a very low, hoarse voice, barely more than a breath, seemed to be threading itself through the silence. It almost didn't sound like coherent words, though they had to be. Fragments of words, numbers, names and all types of half-phrases that tripped over each other and disappeared before they could finish forming.
"I can't hold it- why won't they- congeal- twelve, nine, nine, three- I wasn't-"
Roy's entire body stiffened. He took a step back, lifted his boot, and swung it back before bringing it back and kicking the door just below the lock. Wood cracked to form a hole, and the mechanism finally gave in with a sharp snap, making the door swing inward and hit the wall in a brutal manner.
The smell was the first thing to hit his senses.
Ink and old paper, then something metallic, then the raw smell of accumulated saliva, and finally some kind of alchemical residue he wouldn't be able to identify without seeing it. The room was dim, curtains drawn tight, only a thin blade of afternoon light cutting across the floor.
It illuminated what could only be called a faithful recreation of battlefield chaos.
Edward sat cross-legged on the bed, coat discarded somewhere on the floor, sleeves torn up to the elbows. His automail hand moved in fast, jerking motions as he wrote, scratched, scribbled, or whatever else he was doing, with how the pen kept flying across the pages without pause.
Notebooks were everywhere and in every form: stacked, splayed open, some without cover and others torn to shreds, littering the bed, the floor, the desk, even the walls. Some were filled with dense alchemical notation, showing arrays warped into unfamiliar geometries, circles layered until they collapsed in on themselves. Others were… more dangerous.
Rambling paragraphs, repeated words and sentences, and the same question written again and again in slightly different handwriting that had no doubt deteriorated over the past couple of days.
Why doesn't it stop?
Symbols crowded the margins: teeth, mouths, an eye ringed by broken lines, various crude ouroboros, drawn, crossed out or simply redrawn even darker. The word HUNGRY appeared more than once, half-hidden under frantic crosshatching that slowly evolved into chicken scratch, as if Ed had tried to bury it and failed.
He didn't look up when Roy finally turned his attention fully towards him.
Roy stepped inside and closed the door softly behind him, despite the hole, though there was no one to overhear this. His boots crunched on loose paper and broken glass that could have had multiple origins. Ed flinched, just slightly, but kept writing.
"Where is Al- Wrong angle- Thirty-two, thirty-nine when-"
"Edward."
No response, Ed hadn't even moved his head to look at him. Roy wanted to believe Ed just hadn't heard him, instead of actively ignoring him.
Roy moved closer. The blonde's eyes were glassy, unfocused, tracking something only he could see. His lips moved constantly, the words tumbling out in a relentless undertone, as if something terrible would happen if he dared to stop talking.
"Edward," Roy said again, louder. "Look at me."
Ed's pen snapped.
The sound felt disgusting in the oppressively silent room. Ink splattered across the page, black droplets creating a giant ink stain on both pages, that might have looked like a flower if it wasn't so messy. Ed stared at the remains of his broken pen for a second, then reached for another without hesitation, letting the debris of the unfortunate pen fall on the bed, ready to pick up a new one with his ink covered hand.
Roy caught his wrist.
Ed froze.
For just a few seconds, Roy thought the younger man might fight back, lash out, alchemy blazing, teeth bared like a rabid animal. Instead, Ed went eerily still, like a statue, his eyes drifting to Roy's hand on his arm, before becoming unfocused again.
"I can't just stop," Ed murmured. "If I stop I'll forget something. If I forget everything will spill over and then-"
"Edward, listen to me." Roy crouched in front of him, placing himself in Ed's line of sight as much as possible given the height difference. "You're in your quarters, there's nothing going on right now. No one's attacking you."
Ed blinked once. Twice.
"… door was locked," he said faintly, as though he'd forgotten some words in that sentence.
"I unlocked it."
"Why would you?" Ed shook his head, a small, sharp motion. "I fixed it, I didn't want it to open."
That landed wrong in Roy's subconscious.
He glanced back at the lock, before quickly returning his attention to the other man. Slowly and carefully, as if handling a small child, he loosened his grip on Ed's wrist but didn't let go entirely.
"Ed," he said, lowering his voice. "When was the last time you slept?"
Ed didn't answer. His eyes slid back to his notebooks, attention seeming to change every half second, already itching to move again. Roy tried to follow his gaze but wasn't able to keep up.
This had no name except compulsion.
He'd seen something like this once before, in Ishval, with soldiers who kept writing letters to people who were already dead, hands moving long after their minds had snapped under the weight of it. This was the same frantic need to empty something out that could never actually leave, as if trying to expel something from both body and mind.
Roy straightened his posture, a single decision settling heavy and cold in his chest.
"This is too much for your body. I'm going to get Winry."
That finally got a full reaction.
Ed’s head moved too fast and seemingly stopped mid-air, his jaw clenched and mouth stretching to create an ugly frown.
"No!" he yelled, though not nearly as loud as what he was capable of. "They should- she can't see this.”
Roy softened his tone. “Edward, you're worrying everyone."
Ed swallowed. His voice dropped to almost nothing.
"If anyone sees how much there is," he whispered. "Everyone will know it's not normal."
Roy closed his eyes for a moment. That was it, then. Not exactly exhaustion nor stress. It was a fear of being seen. In such a state, at least.
"I'll be right back," Roy said quietly. "I'm not leaving you like this. Death itself can come beat me before I ever stop trying to help you. Am I making sense to you, Edward?"
He waited for some kind of answer, but Ed didn't meet his eyes. Didn't argue or even move, as if frozen by winter.
By the time Roy was reaching for the door, Ed had already picked up another pen.
Ink began to flow again, faster and hotter than before, words giving way to symbols, and symbols into shapes that looked disturbingly like mouths.
Roy stepped out and immediately began running, not wanting his search for someone to take more than ten minutes.
Inside, Elric kept writing.
And for the first time since he'd met the young man, Colonel Mustang had the unshakable thought that whatever was eating him, if it was even eating, it wasn't going to stop on its own.
