cuddlefish (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cuddlefish) wrote2004-01-07 02:27 am
cuddlefish) wrote2004-01-07 02:27 am
ほのぼのＳＳ
White Place
There was a downpour two days ago. Water dropping down everywhere, in sheets, in buckets, soaking into people’s shoes and hair. And their gloves. Roy and Hughes had been in a bar having a drink after work, and by the time they got out, it had started. Roy lived close by, so he planned to walk home, but Hughes’ house was a little farther away and he was afraid that if he got a cold walking in the rain, his daughter would get it, too. Roy was waiting for him while he desperately tried to hail a taxi. Normally he wouldn’t have bothered, but a military officer had shot and killed a kid in a gang a few days ago, and they had seen bad reactions to that kind of thing before. Better safe then sorry---so Roy was standing in the rain while it seeped into his black overcoat and started to move onto the uniform he wore underneath. He was doing everything he could to keep his gloves, his best weapon, away from it, tucking his hands into his sleeves, then into his pockets, but it wasn’t going well. They were at least damp when Roy realized Hughes was shouting not just over rain, but over gunshots, and then it was too late. Roy probably would not have been shot if he had been able to char the shooter with a blaze of fire sparked from his gloves, first.
He remembered blood on his shoulder, in his shoulder, wet like the rain but warm, washed by the rain, diluted into the puddles in the ground. Hughes stopped the man with the gun and called the ambulance that carried Roy to the East City Hospital, flashing lights blurred by the water on the windows of whoever looked out to see what the sirens were screaming about. About half an hour later, the rain sighed, then slowed, and then stopped completely, leaving a soft, clear night. The storm clouds gave way to starlight and a full moon, and rain dripped off of trees and the roofs of quiet houses, but Roy didn’t see any of it.
After that, there was a patch---no more than two days---of sun, and then the weather clouded over again. It was the middle of spring, and the downpour had finally melted the last of the dirty, hardened snow on a few street corners, but nature had gone stubborn, and refused to move into warmer temperatures, even though it had nowhere else to go. East City did a good job of getting the bullets out of him, and then bandaging him up, enough so that he was sitting up in bed and looking out the window in two days, watching the overcast white sky. Soon enough after that he was sitting up in bed, walking around, appreciating the nurses’ skirts, and complaining about his drafty hospital gown.
Before they came, Roy had been looking at the cloudy sky. It was overcast, thinning yellow sunlight into soft white that was still blinding if he looked straight at its source. It shone into his room every morning through the big glass windows lining one side, lighting up the white sheets and the white floor, softly glinting off the metal on his bed. Some of it was caught by the tree outside his window, but it was too early in the year for it to be much more than black, wet branches. Looking to avoid any paperwork Liza brought him, bored with reading, he sometimes found himself staring at the pattern it cut on all the white. When his eyes got tired, he had the option of closing the curtains on his windows, but he had already annoyed the nurses there enough so that they tended not to take his requests to open them, close them, open them, close them, every time they went in to check on him. His other choices for staring into space were two dark old wooden chairs by his bedside from the last time he’d had visitors. That was another distraction for him, visitors, but he didn‘t get all that many. One set that stopped by was the Elric brothers. They came one day with a knock at the already-open door.
“Hello? Colonel?” Edward poked his head in the door.
Alphonse leaned in behind him, and bowed his head in a slightly more polite greeting. “Hello, Colonel Mustang...”
“Fullmetal, Alphonse,” Roy nodded to each of them. “Come in.”
“We heard you were in the hospital, so we thought we’d come see you…” Alphonse hesitated by the door, a huge metal giant hunched over and ready to give a polite bow at a moment‘s notice. Ed went right over to the colonel’s bed. His red coat still blazed in the sunlight, and Roy had to stop himself from squinting at him.
He seemed more preoccupied with getting closer to Roy than with making conversation, but then he remembered himself and asked a little late, “What’d they do to you, colonel?”
“Apparently I got caught in the crossfire in a gunfight between two gangs. One bullet in my left shoulder, another in my back. They‘re saying the second landed right next to my liver.”
Roy could tell Alphonse’s eyebrows were raised even though the suit of armor had nothing even resembling eyebrows. “Were you all right?”
“Hughes was with me at the time. He called the ambulance.“ Roy said. “The doctors are saying I should be out in a few days.” Alphonse nodded, and there was a short silence in which Roy realized Alphonse had been doing most of the talking. Edward had a look on his face that Roy hadn’t much seen since Ed had first become a National Alphonsechemist and dealt with a horrific misuse of alchemy and subsequent murder. It was quiet, faraway, very serious, and currently focused on Roy---not his face, but the bandage on his shoulder…or maybe a little to the side? There was thinking, remembering going on behind that face, probably about things that nobody wanted to have on their mind. Roy just barely had time to notice it when Ed seemed to pull out of his reverie. “We brought you a present,” he said, putting the box in Roy’s lap.
“Ah…do you mind if I open it now?“ Ed shook his head, and so Roy pulled the ribbon and the stiff beige wrapping paper off to find a box from a fairly popular bakery. “Melange?”
“Yeah. You’ve heard of it? I went there with Winley once…”
Roy nodded. “They make a kind of shortbread I like, actually. Thank you Fullmetal, Alphonse. I‘ve been missing this kind of thing here in the hospital,” he said, and started to open the box. “Do you mind if I have one?” Ed and Alphonse both shook their heads, and Roy got the cover off to find an assortment of Melange’s more popular cookies, including the chocolate-covered shortbread he was looking for. He felt, rather than saw, Ed’s typically intense interest focusing on the box and its contents, and saw him leaning forward a little in his seat for a look. “Would you like one, Fullmetal?”
“Huh?” Ed looked up suddenly, only just realizing Roy was watching him. “Uh, yeah, sure, if you don’t mind, I’ll just have one of these...” he reached out and nabbed a chocolate florentine. Roy was a little amused that Ed’s interest in cookies still managed to show through his surprise that the colonel was offering the army dog a treat. “Hey, you’re right, these are pretty good...” Ed trailed off and looked at Roy, who realized he was still holding his shortbread and watching Ed. Ed began to look puzzed, and then irritated. Roy could feel the colonel smirk on his own face without even knowing how it got there. He was going to get yelled at in a second, hospital patient or no, but it just didn’t seem very pressing while he was watching Edward. Just as Edward opened his mouth for a respectful, but annoyed ‘Wipe that smirk off your face,’ Alphonse spoke up.
“Ed, they had some coffee over at the nurses’ station...shall I go get some?”
“Aw, no, you don’t have to do that...”
“It’s all right. I’ll get some for the colonel, too.”
It was turning into a regular celebration. “Go ahead,” Roy said. “Hospital food will always be bland, but the coffee is alright.”
Alphonse nodded and got up. “Make sure you don’t get lost!” Ed called after his little brother, thinking he was on his way out, but then Al turned around, remembering something.
“Ah, how do you like your coffee?” He had clearly been asking the colonel, since he already knew his big brother liked his coffee black, but Ed answered anyway. At the same time as Roy.
“Black, please.” “Black.”
Ed, who had just stuffed the last of his florentine in his mouth, shot the colonel a look that clearly communicated that he had not realized Roy could still be a pain in the ass even with two bullet wounds. Roy also managed to look disdainful, because Ed had ruined the effect of his coy smile, but he had trouble keeping it as Ed took another cookie in retaliation. They both sat and munched for a moment, and then Ed was on the move again.
His attention had moved to a sizeable flower arrangement that stood in a vase next to Roy’s bed, and he stood up to examine it. “Was this one of your presents?” he asked, pointing at it, cookie still hanging out of his mouth.
“Hawkeye and Havoc brought it when they visited a day or two ago. She said they‘d pitched in with Hughes.”
“This card’s from him, too?” He had come across a little square card hanging from a spray of lavender.
“You’ve seen that picture of Alicia before?”
“The last nine times I‘ve seen him.”
“He said it was one of his top ten.”
Ed, taking that as permission to read the contents of the little card, opened it with his thumb. “Number three. Huh,” he rolled his eyes a little. “Explains why I’ve seen it so much. Did it cheer you up? Like it says?” He looked over his shoulder at Roy.
“Hughes’ love for his daughter is always heartwarming,” Roy said with a straight face. Ed snorted, and his eye fell on a pile of papers on the night stand next to Roy’s bed. “A personal gift from Hawkeye, so I don’t get behind on my work. I told her I’d get better faster if she gave me a hug, but she didn’t seem to agree.”
Ed nodded, examining the papers a little absently, and then asked, “Can I have a hug?” It felt like such a good idea to Roy that he realized he might have been wondering if Ed would never ask. He grabbed Ed’s arm, not hard, but enough to pull him over. He lost his balance a little and planted his face on Roy‘s pillow, but didn’t make any noise or protest.
After a moment, Ed separated himself just enough to sit down in his chair again. “Did that hurt you?“ He leaned forward and rested his arms on the bed.
“Not a lot.“ Roy scooched over to the side of the bed Ed was on, and Ed instinctually---shamelessly---made a pillow out of Roy’s middle.
Ed looked like he was going to drift off to sleep right there, but instead he reached up for the bandage on Roy‘s shoulder, first brushing with his fingers, then resting his hand on it, tracing it. He had that look again, looking up at Roy but not really looking at him, or maybe looking at the bandages, imagining the state of the body underneath. What are you thinking in your little head?
He keeps replaying the sound his mother made---gasping and wheezing---it was his fault, he had drowned her in gobs of her own flesh, had put her trachea next to her adrenal gland and her ilium, wrapped in a retinaculum. He had learned it was always next in his thoughts when he found his automail hurting him again. Sometimes just because there wasn’t enough to pad where the metal met his femur. Sometimes he had dreams it was a monster hanging onto his right shoulder with its teeth, and that it clawed at him with fingers that were supposed to be his, driving into his other, good shoulder like envious bullets. Roy was not going to need automail for a couple bullets. Ed didn’t want him to need automail.
Ed finally left Roy’s bandage alone, and let his arm fall lazily to the bed, eyes still far away. Roy rested his hand on Ed’s head. His thumb ran along the eyebrow it landed on, and Ed closed his eyes. It stayed there while Ed’s breathing deepened and steadied. The sun passed behind a cloud and came out, the wind sighed through the tree near Roy’s window, and the diluted light played across the bed.
When Alphonse came back, he gently put both cups of coffee on the windowsill so that they didn’t make any noise, and sat down in the chair next to the window. “He hasn’t been sleeping much since we called in and they told us you’d been shot,” he said quietly. “I...think he was having bad dreams.” He didn’t say he knew he was having bad dreams, because he’d been awake and watching Ed while he muttered and thrashed for maybe half an hour a time. It gave him bad dreams in turn, but he didn’t wake covered in sweat or with his heart pumping the way his brother did.
“I think he was really worried. I’m very sorry to come visit you in the hospital and have him---literally fall asleep on you.”
Roy looked down at Ed again, shook his head, and mouthed, "It's okay."
-------------
So I have a big book of anatomy that tells me the big names for what all the different bones and muscles and tendons are, but not how long you have to stay in the hospital when you get shot twice. I hope it doesn't show too much. (I wanted to have Ed's mom's lymph nodes lying around, too, but that part was getting really gratuitous and I don't know if those things are really big enough, anyways.)
The omake will be a little prequel where Roy gets sick of his hospital gown and goes for a jaunt down the hall stark naked. I think. And Liza eventually works out a deal where he gets to not wear it when he's in his room and in bed with a blanket on him. I think.
It's done in the sense that most edits I'll be making from now on probably will probably be cuts or revisions, not additions. Right now I need someone to tell me that what parts are corny, stupid, or weak, and that it's not boring as hell. You have to be confident on that last one. If you're not, I might write that omake there and then we'll all be...well, we'll all be jumping for joy.
Forgive my word processor's "'s and ...'s. It bites and doesn't know any better.
OH GOD I'M SO TIRED.
Lucky Ed...
*pictures Roy running stark naked down the hall*
I'm not sure if I should die of laughter or blood loss...
Re: Lucky Ed...
Good to hear it was a cute fic. See, I want to make it my little optional (read: NOBODY WANTS IT) offering when I join the FMA community, but I need to know it's worth reading so I'm not embarrassed for trying to make someone accept crappy fanfic. I think once I stick on the omake it'll be plenty excuse.
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*walks off*
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R...really?
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Maybe I'll just snip out that whole bit...