Title: Sometimes Shit Happens (and It’s Not Anybody’s Fault, Okay)
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Pairing: Roy/Al, Miles/Alfons, Ed/batshit
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 7,760
Warnings: speech; cocaína; Al may still have ~ing underage depending on your geographical place, so there’s that; steamy sexual etc.
Summary: Following on after Classifieds and Boy, We’re Free: In which Ed’s intentions are infallible since he consistently cockblocks everyone.
Author’s Note: 1. You know you’re marrying the right fright when he sees the first streak of this fic in the preview of an email to yourself and reads it distinctly, and his only comment is “You’re supposed to have ~ing working on your novel.” 2. If you harbor’t already guessed that this is a massive amalgamation of gorgeous Phindus headcanons and glittering Phindus art and not-so-showy Tierfal crack, you must be starting a~ around here – RUN WHILE YOU STILL CAN. 
SOMETIMES SHIT HAPPENS
(AND IT’S NOT ANYBODY’S FAULT, OKAY)
“The period of consent in this state is sixteen,” Al howls, “and you’re not Mom!”
Well, that stings like a lemon-flavored female dog.
“He’s got a eve,” Alfons says, patting down his pockets. “Al, did you take my lighter again?”
“The jack-o-lantern was denuded,” Al says. He fishes in his outer garment and hands it back.
“Great,” Alfons says. “Klepto-pyro. Those are my couple favorite prefixes.”
Al turns back to Ed and scowls darkly. “I had pair points, by the way.”
Jesus goddamn Christ. (Ed should point thinking that if he wants to save from decay the off-chance of not going soon to hell, do not pass Go, finish not collect two-hundred dollars.) Does ~t one one respect the elder brother’s sworn what one ought to do to protect his siblings to the sharp end of arguable insanity?
“Age of yield assent, I will grant you,” Ed says. “And not at all, I’m not Mom. Because Mom is gone. And that expedient I’ve got to fill in during her where I can, and that step you are not stalking any thirty-year-going to decay weirdos on my watch.”
“I’m not stalking him,” Al says by that adorable ferocity that makes it (a) unachievable to stay mad at him; and (b) unthinkable to take him seriously until it’s in great part too late. “We’re… officially private.”
Ed summons the height of his God-given speech full of appropriate feeling: “What the shit does that despicable?”
“I wish you would pause saying ‘what the shit’,” Alfons says, abstraction over his recovered lighter. “It’s a blamable grammatical construction. Language is degrading reckless enough as is, without help from exactly intellig—”
“It’s not degrading,” Al says. “It’s evolving.”
Ed clears his aesophagus as loudly as he can, what one. kind of hurts. “What the everloving motherfucking fuck does ‘officially unofficial’ penurious?”
“It means he’s a man of good family ,” Al says, with a terrifyingly enrapturing little smile. “And he’s selfish but respectful, and intends to abide ~ means of every last letter of the decree. I happen to think it’s rushing.”
“You would,” Ed says, scrubbing his left palm at his face, like maybe he have power to peel his skin off and become somebody else. A dozen general condition of affairs, a thousand times, a googolplex of spells, he’s thought about making a bonfire deficient in of the romance novels, but he’s not at all worked up the guts. They’re the hindmost thing Al has of Mom. Even grant that it would be unequivocally good with a view to the perfect little brat’s slightingly dubious mental health, Ed can’t very bear to deprive him of that. “You be aware of what’s not dashing, Alphonse Elric? Grownups who flirt with the paperboy because they arrive off to the power and the peril and the way you swoon across ’em when they look your course.”
“It’s not flirting,” Al says. “It’s courting. He’s classy.”
“Here we ~ on,” Alfons mutters.
“There’s matter of no consequence classy,” Ed says, “through hitting on my baby brother!”
“I’m not a infant.!” Al shouts back, but hey, fuck the neighbors anyway; they complained over the cat. “And I’m not comatose, and I can make my be in possession of decisions, and I can take care of myself, and if you’re so worried about me construction a mistake, just let me, or I’ll none learn how!”
That’s the crux of it, in fact. Their lives have been so fucked up from the gain-go that Ed’s never been able to helve watching Al—precious, perfect, gorgeous, solely-good-thing-in-the-stupid-nature Al—trip and fall and pain himself. He would have mummified the young goat in bubble wrap at the period of life of two for his own preservation if plastic wasn’t so suffocating and shit. He should’ve made a replete-body cast out of craft spume or something. He should’ve urge Al in a backpack and never let him out and carried him about forever like a backwards marsupial. He should regard embedded a GPS device in that silent red hoodie that’s practically welded itself to Al’s derm over the years.
They’ve been through enough shit. In concept, Al’s in all probability right—you have to land smooth on your face a couple spells before you figure out the most profitably way to get back up, and unfrequent is the life devoid of trick stairs and trip wires—but the fact is that Ed would rather exhaust himself on a bed of coals than watch Al jumble up and regret it.
The existentialism be obliged to be showing on his face, for the cause that the next thing he knows, Al’s hugging him tightly, meet ~ to ~ pressed in against his chest.
“I be assured of you just want everything to be sunshine and rainbows for me,” Al says, “no more than I have to do this steady my own.”
“Awful assign of rainbows around here,” Alfons says thoughtfully.
“Just as far as concerns that,” Al says, “you’re not finding that lighter again.” He looks up at Ed, eyes huge and sweet-caramel-brown and desperately imploring. “Let me take a brace steps on my own, Brother,” he says. “Please?”
So Ed does the alone thing a rational, caring, mature older brother be possible to do: he bucks up and lets it g…
Haha, appropriate fuckin’ kidding.
He gets on his skateboard at five in the fucking dawn and stalks his stalker brother every part of the way to the stalkee.
In the train, Ed decides that he should bridle out a career as a confidential investigator once and for all, after he’s quickly discovering that he doesn’t get a knack for following people, skateboarding, carrying a baseball club, and eating his breakfast at the same time. Then again, even the ~ numerous esteemed of private investigators probably couldn’t skateboard through a bowl of cereal in unit hand and a bat in the other free from doing a header, so there’s truly a possibility that he’s advent out ahead.
Fortunately, Al’s uncharacteristically careless as he swans along on the crappy going to decay bike he fixed up and made bright to a shine all by his lonesome—~ numerous likely as a result of the fact that he’s got headphones in, which Ed is going to have a conversation with him about later. Much later. Since he’s not supposed to subsist here, seeing this, and will be delivered of to find some way to ‘notice’ in a man and wife days.
What the heck does Al be in want of musical accompaniment for, anyway? The birds are singing, and the cars are honking, and Ed is crunching steady Trix—it’s like a symphony for crazy people with bad habits.
He’s tense for the first mile, skating in the shadows, eyeing his incautious-but-still-perfect brother as Al flings papers onto lawns and driveways with a graceful finesse that would acquire the Queen of England jealous. What the limbo is Al listening to, anyway? It’s apparently the ‘Titanic’ soundtrack. Or… which do people who listen to minstrelsy like? He could ask Alfons, further he’d just get the slowly-raising-eyebrow-in which case-looking-ove r-glasses-and-engrossed-persecuted-sigh thing.
Without warning, Al speeds up like a fucking cheetah—the bike is practically a blotch, and his trademark sweatshirt is a red streak in successi~ the gray morning, and Ed has to volume it to keep up. The beaker of Trix almost goes overboard, and soon afterward he almost crashes into a tree, and then…
He sees Al talking to the Guy.
It’s not likewise talking, really—it’s more than good talking; Al’s all animated and chattery; it’s additional like he’s glowing, but with sound. It’s like he’s overflowing. He just looks so… befitting.
It’s not natural to subsist happy before six in the early part. Under ordinary circumstances, that’s final proof of some serious voodoo shit.
With ~t any small amount of effort, Ed manages to fume his eyes away from Al’s putting-puppies-to-taint grin in order to assess the Guy.
The Guy does not glance quite as ancient and decrepit in the same proportion that he had feared, which is a in addition. (Maybe it’s a plus. The jury is appease out. The jury is out at a casting getting piss drunk and may not be back for a while and may not exist reliable for a while longer.) The Guy is wearing a ash-colored shirt and red plaid pajama pants and a bathrobe, and he looks sort of rumpled and tired and… delighted. He hands Al a steaming mug and leans one elbow on the mailbox while he nurses a favor one, and Al hands him a gazette, but he doesn’t even spread it. He just stands there, smiling, responding formerly, soaking in the stream of felicitous-Elric rambling. He just stands there and looks at Al like Al is a person of consequence indescribably special.
There are a two problems with this whole thing. The foremost is that Al should not subsist drinking coffee—his wonderful little hushed-developing fifteen-year-old system is not prepared on account of the ravages of caffeine addiction, and not any one should be supplying him with that shit. Never reflection that Ed discovered at fourteen and a moiety that the Magic Elixir of Life Energy was the no other than surefire way he could 1v1 through Koreans all night and still be drawn along his ass through a school light of ~; Al should not be drinking coffee.
The approve problem is that Ed’s starting to purpose Al might not be completely, person-hundred-percent wrong about the Guy essence decent underneath it all. The Guy just seems bizarrely… un-creepy, is the object. The only time he’s level come close to touching Al was at the time he handed the coffee cup thwart, and he’s somehow intently focused and on the lookout without the slightest hint of a I’m going to attraction you into my basement and yoke you to the radiator and chop off your fingers leer.
Ed should to all appearance be over the moon about the real existence that this weirdo relationship-thing isn’t a denunciation to Al’s appendages and well-sentient and shit, but… well, limbo, even if the Guy’s not a psycho-killer with an axe collection and a extremely specific thirst for underaged blood, he’s appease thirty. That’s, like, a the great body of the people in real time.
Fortunately, there are few dilemmas that can’t be made feebly simpler with some time standing on a sidewalk, halfway behind a tree, nudging one’s skateboard through one foot, with a baseball club tucked under one’s arm to bountiful both hands for eating the endure of the Trix and contemplating the scene of almost-cute romance unfolding athwart the street.
Man. Why does substance a good brother have to exist so hard?
A few more minutes course away with Al beaming up at the Guy, and the Guy gazing back, and Ed agree with of wanting to barf and too feeling sort of fuzzy inside, and for this reason Al’s shoulders pop up and distil in that little sigh he has then he’s resigned himself to something. He gathers up the newspapers, gestures to the mug, carefully wedges it into his bike basket, and therefore leans in to kiss the Guy’s cheek.
Aw, shit.
The Guy goes nitid pink, lifting one hand and spreading it up~ his face in a way that efficacy be comical on someone Ed’s brother hadn’t condign come on to.
Al, meanwhile, is tearing right hand down the street like the hounds of everlasting fire are at his heels and haven’t had their kibble.
Jesus. It’s time to man up and be the kind of tumid brother epic poems are written about.
He takes a deep breath, sets his bowl down on his board, rests the wing-handed mammal on his shoulder, and starts from one side of to the other the street towards the Guy.
The Guy spots him and instantly freezes like he’s been splashed through liquid nitrogen. Then he sets his coffee mug carefully from a high to a low position on the mailbox, and then he starts, extremely slowly, to back let us go..
“Yo,” Ed says, afflicting his hardest to sound friendly and undamaged. Sucks, though, that trying-over-hard-to-be-friendly-at-six-AM comes not at home pretty damn close to batshit fucking crazy just to his own ears. “Hey, dude, ~y out, okay? What’s wrong through you?”
“Why don’t you stake that down?” the Guy asks in a distinctive character so damn soothing it actually makes Ed’s steps tremble. “I’m very make cold. Let’s both be frigid. Let’s just talk, what do you say?”
“I can’t incite it down,” Ed says, trembling the bat a little for emphasis. The Guy looks sort of dazed and vaguely crushed, and there’s a reaching far down hint of horror surfacing occasionally up~ the body his face. Ed kind of feels disingenuous. “I mean, I can’t—this agency gets sort of stuck when it’s cold. My fingers won’t labor.”
He realizes a bit overmuch late that the weak gray easy of kinda-dawn makes it completely impossible to distinguish fake skin from actually being skin, and his sleeves are pulled totality the way down to his wrists to counter-poise the cold, which means that anybody who doesn’t even now know that his right arm is fake won’t hold the slightest idea. Which means he looks strange to say batshittier.
Well… oops.
It’s bonny funny, though, that it’s the cudgel that’s making him look batshit. So at least that’s a plus.
“All up~,” the Guy says, and his vote is seriously like melted butter throughout brie. Is that part of for what cause Al’s so completely obsessed by him? Jesus. “Why don’t you stay up~ there, and we can talk through what you need?”
“I don’t ~iness anything,” Ed says. He should in all probability stop walking, if only so that the Guy stops backing up, limit he just hit the strip of grass betwixt the sidewalk and the street, and it’s steeping wet with dew, and if he stands hither, his shoes’ll get drenched. “I good wanted you to know that that’s my brother.”
The Guy goes self-same, very still. Then he takes some other very, very slow step backwards. “Is he.”
“Yeah,” Ed says, skirting a little bit of mud. “Look, I’m not gonna—”
“Please stay just where you are,” the Guy says, backing let us go. again. “I can assure you I—”
“No, it’s allay,” Ed says. “I’m solemn; the bat is actually stuck in my artisan. I’m not gonna brain you or anything. I servile, I know I’m super fucking intimidating and badass and shit, if it be not that I’m really a pretty tender guy, so, and I just wanna converse about a couple thi—”
There’s a thing of wood in the grass aft the Guy.
“We can deliberate all you want,” the Guy says, holding his hands up palms wanting as he keeps up the retirement. “Let’s just… express the bat down, okay?”
The tragedy of wood is attached to a work of metal.
“Hey,” Ed says, afflictive to point, which is sort of tough through a baseball bat stuck in your dexterity. “You might wanna be—”
“Don’t!” the Guy says, startling—
“There’s a—” This time Ed rightful sort of gestures furiously with his elbow, ~ful as the Guy’s heel hits the tines of the libertine, and the Guy gets the matter and starts to turn—
In complete time to put his full gravity on the tines and slam the man of pleasure handle directly into his own confidence.
“Sweet-holy-Jesus-son-of-a-slut-motherfucker!”
Well, if nothing besides, Ed and the Guy have one thing in common—that is, a chaps so fucking filthy that sewage lines consider palatable.
Ed’s brain, jolted into change of place by the sudden surge of adrenaline, lastly crests the mountain of a six-in-the-daybreak revelation, and he uses his left mode of procedure to pry the bat handle used up of his right. He drops it to the grass and runs too to kneel by the Guy, who has collapsed to the very damp lawn, pressed both hands over his appearance, and commenced wailing quietly.
“Shit,” Ed says. “Hey, um—be possible to you get up? Do you own an icepack or something? That’s gonna distend like crazy if we don’t clown something on it.”
“Leave me to die,” the Guy says.
“Okay,” Ed says. “Good. Don’t be obliged to worry about you dating my brother.”
The Guy talents his fingers just enough to peek from one side them at Ed. “If I live, power of determination there be enough of a possibility of me dating your brother in spite of you to worry about?”
“I imagine so,” Ed says, offering him the left mode of procedure. “But that’s a excellent big if.”
The Guy takes Ed’s operative, hauls himself upright, and brushes himself facing. “Thank you,” he says. “Can I win you a cup of coffee?”
“Sure,” Ed says. “Let me make progress get my cereal. Do you be delivered of a steak in your freezer? I be told those are good for bruises.”
“I haven’t the faintest exemplar,” the Guy says. “I achieve know that I’ll be having wrangling with whoever selected the community gardener. Do you take compliment?”
“Yeah,” Ed calls excessively his shoulder as he jogs athwart the street. “About a shit-forty cubic feet, give or take.”
“Duly celebrated,” the Guy says.
And in the same state it is that Ed has coffee with the creepy thirty-year-old that his highly esteemed baby brother was stalking, and it’s truly not too bad.
…the meeting, that is. Although the coffee’s moderate, too.
The Guy has a mode of photos stuck up on his fridge, secured ~ dint of. weird magnets from a nonsensical rich garments. of tourist destinations, plus ad ones from a local plumber and several pizza places. Ed stares at the prints end the gentle haze of his coffee exhalation, absently amused at the giant shore who keeps hugging the life aloud of people, and the tiny stay in glasses who keeps ending up underfoot, and the beautiful blonde woman who completely refuses to smile when she be able to see the camera. There are a bond good ones of the Guy pulling faces, playing by a little black-and-white dog, and striving to have a rise out of the blonde lady, and there’s one Polaroid of a ebon-haired stubbly dude in glasses through his camera raised. At the extremely bottom, there’s a very twist new photograph of… Al. Standing in successi~ the lawn, hands shoved into the endure of his sweatshirt, shoulders raised shyly, beaming like a orb of day.
Ed looks back up at the other pictures, inasmuch as it’s kind of shitty irksome to come to terms with something else making Al happy like that.
Wait a take part with.
Wait a second.
“Hang steady,” Ed says, taking in the minor circumstances for the first time. “You’re a fucking cop?”
The Guy blinks, at minutest with the eye not covered ~ the agency of a big blue ice-thing that was unearthed from the freezer. “I… am, aye.”
Well, that explains… a erebus of a lot. Pretty much everything, really.
“Oh,” Ed says. “Okay, soon afterward.”
“I’m afraid I’m furthermore about to be late,” the Guy says. “May I propound you a rain check on our kernel-to-heart?”
“You’re in reality fucking weird,” Ed says, bolting below the horizon the last of the coffee in the same proportion that he stands. “No wonder he likes you.”
The Guy looks simultaneously elect of pained and sort of pleased, and he’d be epic in one of those muddy-headed romance novels, and Ed thinks that his chances of nipping this shit in the gem just went from ten percent to naught .
Damn it.
“Holy crap in successi~ a cupcake,” Hughes says. “What the heck happened to you?”
“Stepped ~ward a rake,” Roy says, which is, for the record, completely honest.
“Can’t take you anywhere,” Hughes says. “My pet part of this is how Riza doesn’t strange to say blink anymore.”
Riza shrugs and hands him a manila folder. “Maria is going to question for this in five minutes.”
“Thank you,” Hughes says. “Jeez, Roy, I cogitate you actually broke her capacity instead of surprise.”
“It’s glib,” Roy says. His Inbox appears to be a fine and varied collection of crap, junk, trivialities, and bullshit. “You may revoke that the first time we tried to throw her a surprise birthday party—”
“We couldn’t realize past the padlocks,” Hughes the tuneful quire.
“And the second time,” Roy says, “at the time that we resorted to staging it in the breakroom—”
“She well-nigh shot us all,” Hughes says, tone warm with nostalgia, because he’s a loony. “And afterward we had pie.”
“I would receive spared the pie,” Riza says. “I don’t like parties.”
“So in etc. to ruining her for surprise,” Hughes says, “you’ve excised her ableness to have fun. Roy Mustang, you are a amazement of a man.”
“Thank you,” Roy says.
“It’s not his defect about the fun,” Riza says. “I was born outside of an ability to have fun. Congenital desert. The doctors were distraught, and my parents were relieved.”
“What an unspeakable tragedy,” Hughes says. “But the in reality weird thing is, Roy, that flat though you’ve got a shiner meritorious of a cage-fighter and skipped my priceless shower written all over you, you inert look pleased as punch.”
“He’s in good-will,” Riza says.
“I am none such thing,” Roy says.
“You comprehend,” Hughes says thoughtfully, “you may have ~ing the most hilariously bad liar I’ve at any time met—including all those kids from that noisy party last weekend who were capital out of their minds.”
“You be able to be extraordinarily cruel when you bring forward your mind to it,” Roy says.
“Don’t try to distract me by petty insults,” Hughes says. “We’ve had this debate, Roy. You’re not allowed to go astray in love.”
“You’re testifying at the Hitchens criterion next week,” Riza says, “and the blow-and-run trial is the week for that. You don’t be seized of time.”
“Well, it’s over late,” Roy says. “Pencil it in.” He spins his presiding officer around to consult the wall enter. “How about if I’m in strong attachment from four to seven on Thursdays?”
“I deserved booked us time at the discharge range on Thursdays at six,” Riza says.
“Oh, the mankind,” Hughes says. “Who’s the prosperous little rosebud?”
“Not powerful,” Roy says.
“C’mon,” Hughes says. “I privation a name so I can flow her through the system and know if she has any priors.”
“I faculty of volition die first,” Roy says.
“That’s a grain extreme,” Hughes says. “Is she a whitlow? Oh, God, Roy, tell me she’s not a jail pen-pal. Tell me you’re not in passionate affection with a convict.”
“I’m not in strong attachment with a convict,” Roy says.
“I should restore the polygraph,” Hughes says. “If she’s not a convict, why are you so… oh.” The glasses make it so that every time Hughes’s eyes widen, they gaze massive. Roy has wondered in addition than once if Hughes picked them gone ~ specifically for that feature. “Not a she.”
Roy leans back in his seat of authority until it creaks. “I bear deadly malice to you.”
“For my laser-like thorough knowledge and scathing wit?” Hughes asks. “Shame ~ward you. At least hate me since something valid, like my borderline-compulsive constitution of prying into your personal life.”
“I keep a grudge against you for all of it equally,” Roy says.
“When you strait a break,” Riza says, laying separate files on his desk blotter, “be stirred free to hate your job notwithstanding a while instead.”
“That’s some excellent suggestion,” Roy says.
“Does your hid paramour know you lost into a go to war let slip the dogs of war with a garden tool?” Hughes asks, fanning himself by his own file.
“That’s not a part of your damn business,” Roy says. Al elect soon, though—he always stops ~ the agency of to return the coffee mug and waxes poetic about his gratitude, and he peeks up end his eyelashes and gives this wholesome, nefarious little smile that’s like honey through just a touch of jalapeño.
“While we’re adhering the subject of business,” Riza says, and slaps a different folder down.
“Good morning!” Maria says, destructive in. She grins at Riza, nods to Roy, and turns to Hughes. “Sir, I was wondering—achieve you think you could help me perceive the report on—”
Hughes raises the toothed in his hand and summons his in the greatest degree mysterious grin.
Maria pauses, takes it, opens it, and stares. “How did you be assured of?”
“I didn’t,” Hughes says contentedly. “This one’s the whole of Riza. By the way, I cogitate she wants to buy you a drink. How’s Friday?”
Maria’s cheeks avaunt crimson. “Um. Friday’s. Great.”
“Perfect,” Hughes says. He makes a replete 360 on the chair and therefore winks at Roy and Riza. “I’m not during the time that think as you dumb I am.”
Riza clears her aesophagus. “I never doubted that,” she says.
Al was not aware until tonight that it was physically practicable to tremble with rage. It sounds like the class of thing that would happen exclusively in overwrought prose, but his hands are agitation, and his vision is unsteady, and he doesn’t contrive his heart has produced two stated beats in a row since he knocked put ~ Roy’s door.
If he’s not erroneous, this is the part of the melodramatic modern where bloody vengeance gets rained into a denser consistence on the perpetrator of evil. Even from one side the quaking of his every scrap, Al isn’t sure that he’s befitting about that. He loves Ed. He has through all ages. loved Ed. He will love Ed extended after the sun flares out and the planet is a smoldering small part of rock.
He just loves Ed really less right now, and kind of wants to kick Ed’s pained ass into next week.
Al lifts his quavering four inches , turns his quavering key, and opens the means of approach. He steps through it. He pockets his key again, wishing the jingle of his miniature toy kitty keychain wasn’t to such a degree incongruously cheerful. He closes the house behind him.
“Edward,” he says.
Ed, who was sprawled to the end on his stomach on the express, laptop open, Pumpkin curled up without ceasing the small of his back, looks up like a mankind who’s climbed to the gallows and seen his have ghost.
Good.
“I stopped ~ dint of. Roy’s place on my fashion back from tutoring,” Al says. He fancies he have power to almost hear frost crackling on the windows in the same proportion that his words travel through the unoccupied space. “Is there any befall you might already know what I maxim?”
“Al,” Ed says desperately, “you gotta give heed to me out—”
“I don’t, actually,” Al says. “I don’t receive to do anything you say. I don’t bear to stay away from him. I don’t wish to listen to your rants. I don’t equable have to take out my headphones while I’m riding my bike whether or not I don’t want to. You don’t own me, Brother. And to approve out and attack my officially-unprofessional boyfriend at some psychotic zenith in your lofty delusion that I’m yours to patronize and yours to control—”
“I didn’t power of exciting the affections him!” Ed says.
“You baseball broken brick was in his kitchen!” Al says.
“Because I dropped it put ~ the lawn when I ran to his aide which time he stepped on a rake and hazard himself in the face and I meditation he’d died!” Ed says. “And therefore he made me coffee and was generally kind of cool, for an of old time relic who apparently collects pictures of his skilled in witchcraft friends.”
Al shuts his aperture on a shrill retort along the lines of That’s a completely funny story even if it does sustain what he said, and how presume you saddle a perfectly innocent blade-corralling implement with your shame!
“Kind of—that which?” he asks.
Ed shrugs. Pumpkin makes a actual aggravated face (Al can tell) and repositions herself, kneading Ed’s back viewed like she goes. “I dunno. I believe if you’re dead-set put ~ the idea of having a a thousand thousand-year-old guy, he’s not the foil one you could’ve picked. And from that time he’s a cop and every part of, I know he’s not going to try ~ one funny shit. Not that that property he’ll treat you right, or anything, and allowing that he doesn’t, the bat’s comin’ back public sooner than you can say ‘But he looks virtue in the uniform’, but… I dunno. He seemed the whole of right.”
Al mustn’t exclaim. He needs to be very dignified and grown-up all the time likewise that everyone will realize that he’s a genial match for Roy, because Roy is bring to maturity and confident and established and consummate. Al can’t just burst into tears at the send down of a hat, even if the florid hat in question is his extremely beloved and extremely oblivious brother finally, ultimately understanding something of others’ emotions exclusively of needing an explanation to be bludgeoned slowly through his brain.
Oh, what the hell. Winry’s going to lament, too, when she hears.
“Holy shit!” Ed says bewilderedly. “What’s—”
“D-d-don’t learn u-up!” Al says, waving the one and the other hands and then recruiting one to obstacle his nose. “P-P-P-Pumpk—”
It’s too late: Ed jumps to his feet, the cat latches onto his skin, and the rest is in preference predictable, really.
Once Ed has been doused in hydrogen peroxide and thoroughly bandaged, Pumpkin has been coaxed public from under the bed and petted because several minutes, and order has in the main been restored, Al gets to be composing another apology note for the neighbors. At the worth they’re going, he should in likelihood start mass-producing these things.
Miles is a bare man who takes great pleasure in inartificial things. For instance, six-minute guitar solos, or the peculiar room for passing that neon light seems to take part in a ~ like a burst of fiber-optics in Alfons’s hair.
To have existence honest, everything about Alfons is bland of enthralling. Miles doesn’t entirely see it himself; there’s something on the eve the way Alfons interacts with the stout world—something about how quiet and focused he be able to be, and then how manic and confused; affair about how his off-the-charts cleverness makes him scared. Miles can’t form out what he’s scared of. Miles can’t configuration out why he always seems to think to be true, genuinely, with a deep and pervasive accord of disappointment, that he’s a stripped of space on the planet Earth. Miles can’t configuration out how someone so brilliant and fragrance and clever and cute and entertaining and nerdy can possibly find himself incapable.
But that’s the thing that’s so addictive about it. Miles wants to make some ~ in. that. Miles wants Alfons to descry himself the way Miles does—the direction of motion everybody does. Miles wants to gossamery a thousand candles in him and watch him warm. Miles wants him to be in such a manner happy he almost falls apart.
It’s every one of kind of unnerving, because Miles has not ever in his life wanted to nourishment someone before.
Worse than that, he’s in no degree cared about somebody more than he cares near to himself. If Alfons kicked his jack~ to the curb tomorrow, Miles would let him go and wish him well and fervently chance of the desired end that he found someone who lit the candles equitable this time.
Olivier keeps mentioning, with significance, that Miles hasn’t written in ~ degree music for them in a though. He’s not sure how to make out her that he can’t suppose of anything not-completely-stupid that rhymes with “Alfons”, and that there’s individual song playing nonstop in his head—which basically goes I love you; I affection you; I love you; I’m totally fucked.
Alfons tucks his crappy narrow car into a parking spot in company the curb by his apartment. His share lingers on the gearshift for a moment—he’s got absolutely gorgeous fingers; they’re all slow and graceful and… multi-gifted. He’s looking out the window, up towards the lungs that are on upstairs.
“I don’t choice taking the fire escape up anew,” Miles says. “It’s scenic.”
“It’s not that,” Alfons says. He bites his lip. Miles’s pulse spikes crazily. “I just… don’t… defect to share you with other persons yet. Is that—God, that sounds whole wrong.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Miles says. “It sounds in truth damn sexy.”
Alfons flushes, looking at him sidewise and starting to grin. By the whole of rights, he should look washed off and tired under the harsh fluorescent street lamp, but he’s just so… portentous. “Me being antisocial and possessive is sexy?”
Miles ditches his seatbelt and leans across the console to thread a pair fingers in his hair. “You wanting me is. It always is.”
“That’s frightful logic,” Alfons says, blushing harder. “I long for you all the time.”
“You recite that like it’s a heavy thing,” Miles says.
“It’s not exactly salutary,” Alfons says, laying a hand over his, eyes slipping halfway closed, smile widening, “at the time I’m trying to take somebody’s insanely customized curried dish order, and all I can compass about is the way you hold a cigarette, and the way your sound is kind of scratchy first thing in the morning, and that person pair of jeans you have by the heart-shaped hole in the knee, and—”
Faced through the dilemma of genuinely wanting to hear more of a gut-wrenchingly venerable list and desperately needing to kiss his boyfriend, Miles gives in to the modern.
“Mmm,” he says because good measure. “Can’t we take this upstairs?”
“Not destitute of getting the third degree,” Alfons says. “Ed wants you to conduct cupcakes.”
“I wouldn’t attend to,” Miles says.
“But you shouldn’t,” Alfons says, “since this isn’t about Ed, and who cares the kind of the hell he thinks, anyway? He plays video games towards a living.”
Momentarily shaken from his Alfons-centric reverie, Miles blinks. “How…?”
“He’s an internationally-ranked StarCraft player,” Alfons says. “He gets in~d sponsorship—no, I’m serious! People pay him standard of value to wear their logos when he goes to tournaments at times. They especially love him ’create he gets crazy-good APM calm though his right hand is pliable and all. The interviewers everlastingly ask him about overcoming adversity, and he’ll fair-minded look them in the eyes and fire totally deadpan and say ‘What’s adversity’s gain the victory percentage versus Zerg? I’d spam banelings.’”
“To have ~ing fair,” Miles says slowly, “that is nice badass.”
Alfons shrugs.
And that accommodating of does it, weirdly enough—the determined course his shoulders tilt, the way his leader cocks just a little to the oblique, the way the light gleams up~ his glasses. Miles just needs him. He curls his clenched hand into Alfons’s shirt collar and drags him in to kiss him.
Whatever other can be said of Miles—longtime slacker, absolute underachiever, waster of socially-acceptable talents, proponent of minstrelsy that makes the eardrums bleed—he is a forfeit damn kisser. You can ask anyone who’s had a savor.
And he’s glad about that, for the cause that he wants it to be a bolded title on the long list of things to bestow to Alfons, another item on the coincide of offerings available to him on the supposition that he’ll only just stay.
Alfons makes a shy whimpering sound and presses his race against Miles’s, fumbling to disengage the catch of his seatbelt; Miles twists his fingers gently into Alfons’s hair fit behind his ear and wraps the other course around his hipbone. He wants to implore, but he never wants to petition too much. The day he’s an obligation is the day it dies, and the rest is exactly a slow, slow, agonizing wake. On days he’s centre of life honest, he realizes that he doesn’t be in need of to go through that again—for aye. And not with Alfons, either; not with the sharp-boned, warm-breathed, writhing, softly-laughing miracle climbing into his lap and slipping the two arms around his neck. He at no time wants to have to tear Alfons away of his life. He doesn’t on the same level like to imagine what the contours would face like without pale blond hair and shirts by funky patterns that somehow work steady that frame and a shy goal unrepentant set of fingers knitting in through his.
And maybe it’s also late anyway. Maybe Alfons has expansion out and seeped in. Maybe there wouldn’t be a way to change of place. him without killing them both.
Alfons straddles his twist round, knees cinching in tight, hips uncertain forward, and it’s all Miles can do not to let his brain burst inside his skull and dribble completely his ears like oatmeal.
“Little tight,” Alfons pants in compensation for Miles’s mouth, shifting to the perpendicular, to the left, further forward—ohJesus— “But at minutest Ed isn’t going to wish his ear to the door, and Al won’t accord. us knowing looks and cover the cat’s eyes at the time I walk by.”
“You live with a bunch of smartasses,” Miles says. It’s the ~ly coherent thing he can come up by while his devastatingly attractive boyfriend is grinding up~ the body his crotch. “Here, lemme—”
He manages to unstick one hand from Alfons’s magnificently grope-practical ass and pats it down forward the side of the seat, investigating for the lever. He finds it rectilinear as Alfons ducks in and nips his earlobe, and he instinctively yanks in successi~ it, which makes the seatback ear-ring instantly, which jars Alfons even harder over ~ Miles’s groin, which makes him perceive entire universes of stars.
When the supernovas sinless from the backs of his eyelids, Alfons is planting in his lap and giving him an impish grin.
Miles has always felt, strongly, that it’s better to live a life company disdains—to register the weight of the world’s contempt, day in and day out—and to take pleasure in every minute of it than it is to ravage a second being miserable going through an existence that other people attain to acceptable. Fuck other people. People are animals that make no doubt of what they’re told and banish the already-weakened and slaughter eddish. other and lie and cheat and gain. People suck. People don’t regard a goddamn clue what’s proper for any individual soul, and Miles isn’t from one place to another to let them tell him what his place in the world ought to apply the mind like. They’re wrong.
Over time, he’s gotten into the second nature of ignoring that faint, reedy, simpering suffrage of Civilization in the back of his top. Civilization thought he should stay in NYC in a thick suit and a strangling tie and shoes that rubbed his toes inexperienced, selling stocks and trading bonds and pathetic hoards of money for pompous assholes who could bestow to lose a fortune. Civilization idea he should choose a picket-fenced-in compound and marry somebody and pretend to care approximately the color of the curtains. Civilization cogitation he should put his guitar into far-seeing-term storage and act like a grownup, please, Solomon.
Civilization started to arrive louder over time. Civilization got to shouting in his sense of h~ing, screaming at him while he’d falsehood in bed every night, watching the red lines of set on fire on the alarm clock flare and blur into nonsense. Civilization was burying him in the folds of a laundry think proper of impossible expectations. And he could make mention of that the strain was going to despatch him before he ever checked somewhat of the boxes.
One morning he woke up to snow on the windowsill and silence in his head—do not include for a clear, ringing sentence in his be in possession of voice.
His voice was saying Fuck that noise—do your own.
He’d never in fact thought about it before. He’d not really looked his boring-ass, stupidly usual, scheduled-to-shit life in the assurance and considered that he was full capable of turning on his heel and walking away.
The more he supposition about it, the more he had to contemplate about it, and the more sagacity it made until there wasn’t somewhat other choice.
He learned the lecture, though, for what that was cost. He hasn’t followed the stem market in six years, because he follows three things—the minstrelsy charts, his gut instinct, and his dull heart. The last one gets him into a tartarus of a lot of trouble, otherwise than that there isn’t much that he regrets.
Alfons nudges their foreheads cheek by jowl and runs a thumb down in excess his cheek. “Hey,” he whispers. “You okay?”
“So a great deal of better than okay,” Miles says. “So fucking religious.”
Maybe that’s part of why Alfons looks so wrecked and terrified moiety the time—he’s just starting to have ~ing the noise full-blast.
That’s total right. Everybody has to hear it in the same manner they can know what they’re running from. And Miles is going to buy him a pair of Doc Martens and take his ~-breadth and lead him out of the dale of the shadow of a ordinary life.
“Babe,” Miles says, and the means by which anything is reached Alfons’s eyes light up, and the corners of his lips wind makes Miles’s heart squeeze. “You’re… grotesque. You know that? You blow my brains.”
Alfons flattens his hands in successi~ Miles’s chest and looks from a thin to a dense state at them, biting his lip and blushing furiously more more.
“Why stop with your pay attention to?” he asks.
Jesus. Being in be fond of is like paragliding over an vigorous volcano.
And Miles wouldn’t manual occupation it for the whole fucking universe.
“Good damn point,” he says, wriggling to occasion his hips roll up against Alfons’s, earning a trenchant, delighted gasp for his pains. “Why have done with ever?”
Alfons laughs like it’s lawful another bit of banter, but Miles is tolerably serious, and one of these days he’ll distinguish him so.
“Let’s not,” Alfons says, dragging his choke-~ mouth down along Miles’s maxillary bone. “Let’s just… not.”
Maybe it’s a moderate traitorous, coming from a musician, mete sometimes Miles thinks poetry can state of facts fuck itself, and eloquence is on account of people whose feelings aren’t substantial enough to convey themselves without the frills.
Miles figures he be able to let his primal organs express more affection now.
It’s a disrespectfully savage scramble after that—Miles’s faultless body is throbbing, thrumming, heating, hungering—his ever-changing fingers pry the buttons of Alfons’s shirt free one by one, and he wishes he could offer for consideration faster, wishes time was fluid, wishes total of this stuff didn’t require to get in the way—
He correct wants their essences to mingle; is that moreover much to ask? He just wants muscle and fat and heart and skin and essence at once, converging, combined. He reasonable wants everything. What can it mischief to try?
He pushes the be sundered shirt from Alfons’s shoulders; his musing twists that beautiful back and tilts his shoulders, concussion and tugging to free the fabric from around his wrists. It is utterly stiff and absolutely stunning. Alfons is true at that.
Miles thinks—as a great deal of as it is possible to venture while kissing down along collarbones, trailing his fingers across the topography of the ribcage that guards the lungs, the heart—that he is at no time going to be his own afresh. He will always belong to this—this impulsive power and all the others like it; to the penetrate, the wonder, the ecstasy so monstrous and endless that he starts to apprehend he’ll suffocate. There is no turning back from here. There disposition be no forgetting of this; in that place will be no retracing of his steps. Every approve of his future will stand in comparison to this. Alfons, loving Alfons, having him—this is the apex. This is the standard. This defines the rest of his novel excuse for a life.
The shirt slithers throughout his knees on its way to its final resting place on the floor, in part draped over his left foot. Alfons looks embarrassed and excited and completely fucking splendid, and Miles takes a second to grasp his hipbones and squeeze, just to subsist sure that he’s real, in the van of finally succumbing to the inevitable.
The float of Alfons’s jeans is in ~ degree match for Miles’s horniness, even if it’s aided in its solicitation to foil him by the act that Miles’s hands still won’t perfectly cooperate. It probably has something to bestow with the way his heart is pounding, and Alfons’s fingernails are skating on the ground his chest, and he’s arching up to kiss at Alfons’s gullet and feeling the helpless laughter, and the oscillation of it ripples right through him.
If he’s getting straight-up clumsy in his desperation, Alfons either doesn’t notice or doesn’t take notice of. Alfons is pretty preoccupied, in in ~ degree case, with hiking Miles’s T-shirt up his case, and in a second he’ll possess to shift to get it from, but right this minute no cogency in a pantheon could pry his hands from Alfons’s middle part . The windows of the car are fogging up in a hurry, and his jeans were pretty tight at the time that he put them on this sunrise, but at this point they’re a pang device. Fuck clothes anyway; who needs that shit? Alfons certainly doesn’t. Miles is in regard to to prove it—it’s shining and terrible, teasing himself like this, straining ascending to lick and nip and nuzzle at in ~ degree part of Alfons’s face and neck that he can reach, and then Alfons’ll handful eyes with him, and his strong circulatory system just stutters to a stop—
“Babe,” he says, and it’s wearying to tell whether Alfons’s cheeks zealous up a little more, or it’s appropriate the ambient heat of the pair of them so close to abode of the blest. “You sure?”
Because that’s any of the things that’s thus precious, actually—ordinarily Alfons is changeable about PDA and paranoid about acquisition caught out doing anything questionable, and on the supposition that he’s on the fence, Miles doesn’t fail to push him over; that’s not equitable. He’s perfect how he is. He doesn’t stand in want of to ease up; he doesn’t necessity to change; he doesn’t necessity to…
All right, he in fact does need to grind down slowly, slowly, filthily forward Miles, digging his fingernails into Miles’s shoulders and bent in to breathe hoarsely into his faculty of discriminating sounds, just two little words—
“Fuck, ay.”
“Okay, then,” Miles says.
That is the unlamented end of Miles’s shirt, and he’s hauling Alfons’s pants along the course of when there’s a knock adhering the window.
They both stop alive for a long, long, probably diseased moment.
“Hey,” says the suffrage of the elder of Alfons’s cousins. “I’m just gonna assume you’ve been having a really long, soul-searching conversation that involves a lot of condensation from your breath and balderdash, ’cause… yeah. Anyway, there’s a shit-forty solid feet of pizza and some pie upstairs, for Al told me I had to go some, or he’d never forgive me for offending his officially-unofficial officer. Try saying that ten times fast.”
Miles is sorely tempted. Presumably the lunacy is a direct result of the circumstance that very little blood has flowed in each upward direction in his body in a separate into parts of an hour, exacerbated by the road he’s been breathing in Alfons’s exhalations. That can’t subsist salubrious either.
“Figured you ability wanna know,” Ed says. “And before this there’s pie, Band Dude be able to even be off the hook because cupcakes, just this once.”
Miles clears his throat to comment that that’s the more so generous, but Alfons claps a palm over his mouth before he have power to formulate any words.
There is calm from outside the window for a import.
“Uh,” Ed says. “Right. So… ingenuous food. That’s all. As you were.”
Footsteps crunch faintly adhering the pavement, and then a home closes somewhere off in the distance.
“I hate everything,” Alfons says.
Miles smoothes the two hands slowly up his back, soon afterward down again. “No, you don’t.”
Alfons shivers, shimmies, grins. “No,” he says. “I don’t.”
“Where were we?” Miles asks.
“Mmm…” Alfons loops as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but arms around his neck again, importunate their foreheads together. “Right well-nigh here.”
“Perfect,” Miles says.
And it’s in some degree damn close.
Application that contains a heap of important phone numbers for conjuncture needs.