Chapter Text
The airfield is comprised of a strip of concrete, a leaky barracks, mess hall, and an Intel cabin all jammed in an anonymous windy field outside Exeter. A few of the boys, Roy’s squadron, are being moved up north for an unspecified amount of time at 0600 tomorrow morning. ‘Where’ is classified, so it’s only through gossip that Roy even knows it’s - north, somewhere.
Roy wonders what that’s about; how it would be to fly night missions over the North Sea instead of the Channel, if that’s what’s planned for them.
He tries to bite wondering down. Havoc, a bomber captain, presses two pills into his palm before their the sortie that night, jumping into cockpits and hoping like hell they make it back in time for their marching orders. He bites down on those, too. His heart pounds, miles up, in the clouds. Roy can feel his lips, can feel the way the tips of his fingers rub inside his flight gloves. The moon is bright, bright, bright.
Thanks to the pills, probably, he’s still awake four hours after they land - no casualties. Hughes probably knows all this already, but is approving when Roy happens to stop by the Intel cabin to let him know. And also to check on the new puppy, the boy.
Roy found them, two puppies in a hedge, a boy and a girl with tightly curled yellow fur, soaked and miserable as he was. Now they live in the Intel cabin. One is Hughes’s. The other, well.
Roy looks around the cabin - there are a few rooms - but doesn’t see the professor, anywhere. Roy feels - off. Like he’s still up in the sky, like he hasn’t quite landed yet. Hughes tells him to get some sleep but doesn’t push him out of the Intel cabin, just sort of stuffs him in a corner by a blacked out window and a stack of what look like French newspapers and makes him a marmite sandwich. He doesn’t know why Hughes is awake, either, but by dawn Roy’s starting to feel like maybe he’s a human again. It feels like a surprise.
His squadron musters up for the trip north and he has to jog to make it. Jeeps take them to a rural train station, within sight of the cliffside, the sea. He flew over that ocean four hours ago, was afraid of it then, but Roy is suddenly struck by the desire to get nearer to it. Roy looks longingly out at the gray pre-dawn cliffs in the distance, all wrapped in barbed wire, mined. When he was a kid his foster mother would bring him down from London on business and he’d hike the cliffs with his sisters just along the coast between Lyme Regis and Beer. The wind was so strong off the Channel that you could lean into it, like you were gonna dare yourself to tumble over the edge.
Dawn is a generous word for the light that’s graying softly onto the scene, but the horizon is beginning to pink up, beginning to glow. If Roy were flying right now he’d be staring into the sun, across the wet curve of the Earth. The sea used to be some infinite thing, the wider world liquid on the horizon. Now it’s Alice’s looking-glass, ready for you to fall through. He tries not to think about the guys who’ve slammed into that water. Where they went. None of them try to think about that, god.
Among his squadron, Roy wonders who else looks down at Guernsey, either. No one talks about the Channel Islands, English soil so close to the Continent, so close to the battle lines. Maybe they've forgotten. Roy doesn’t know if anyone else has a friend down there; if anyone else feels like they’re fucking choking on the whole wide sky, so afraid of what might be.
He waits in dewy grass near the small platform, watches guys pile out of jeeps. To distract himself when he’s starting to panic, Roy sometimes tries to recite poetry in his head but he can’t focus on anything right now. A few cars pull up too; not for the flyboys out of the dorms, but the bigwigs in their Bentleys. Hughes hops out of one, and in another - Roy knows that cut of wool overcoat. Or rather, he knows those shoulders, glowing as the sun first tries to peek over France and the ocean. The professor.
Professor Elric has apparently stolen a mug from the officer’s mess that might still contain coffee, though perhaps not for long because he’s using it as a prop to wave in the faces of men much taller than him with many more shiny things on the front of their coats. The professor always dresses in civilian clothes. The part of Roy that can’t stop seeing connections and meanings and use behind everything thinks that’s smart - the brass would rather give up Roy’s entire squadron than the professor. Or, well. The brass really likes Roy’s squadron, and the RAF in general, but still. If the worst came to it, if Roy and the boys don’t do their jobs and the Americans don’t come and the invasion really happens, it would be Edward Elric who’d be spirited away into the mists of England, who would need to blend in, to get out. Roy’s alright with that. He’s probably not supposed to know any of it either, but he’s alright with that too, and Hughes hasn’t said a damn thing about how much Roy’s seen and extrapolated.
The coat Elric wears is blue-gray wool, a cheap looking peacoat. Roy likes it, studiously doesn’t examine the fact that he likes it because it nearly matches his own uniform, his flying blues; like Elric wears his colors.
A puppy runs into Roy’s legs, yapping furiously. The girl. She’s all curly golden fur, little wet nose, tiny muddy paws.
“You brought yours?” Roy hears Hughes demand. “Hang on a damn minute, who’s - lieutenant, on your next trip you are collecting my dog.”
The professor laughs. He throws his head back. His hair is blond and eccentrically long, and his ponytail is flying in that wind off the cliffs that Roy was remembering so well, cheeks red. The scarf around his throat looks very soft; it is a rich red. It looks like the sort of thing someone bought him as a present. His mother, maybe; he’s not that old. Not old enough to be a professor at all, early-twenties and looking more like the kid who pulls you a beer down at the pub than what he is - whatever he is.
Roy’s stooping down to pet the puppy, trying not to examine the little part of him that has finally settled to earth, now that he’s seen the professor. Like a pilot’s superstition, like the pebble Havoc kisses before he goes into the sky. The puppy is wriggling joyfully, gnawing at his meticulously shined uniform boots. Her hair is wiry and dewy-cold, her little belly startlingly warm when he bites off his gloves to stroke it. She rolls in the muddy grass to demand a belly rub; she forgives him his cold hands.
The flyboys passing by just smile at Roy and the puppy. Maybe because he just made Flight Lieutenant, maybe because he knows Hughes at Intel, technically an higher-up, they see him as a half-step apart from their number. So long as he doesn’t get more dinner than the rest of them, no one’s gonna say anything.
“Who’s that?” Havoc says, chewing a stick of Beamans, huddled up in his flight jacket in the dawn chill, the cut of his jaw looking like, well, what you’d expect of somebody who’s mum had Marlene Dietrich round for the holidays, before the war. He’s looking at the puppy.
“My best girl!” says the professor from behind Roy, making him startle. Havoc laughs and gives a little wave, moves off with his copilot. Roy picks up the puppy, holds her, wriggling, out to the professor. He feels caught out, even though no one saw him staring.
“Professor Elric,” he says, trying hard for neutral. Elric’s smile in response is a tricky thing. Roy’s heard through the grapevine that when one of their guys contacts their French spies in what used to be Alsace-Lorraine, what used to be Poland, the code phrase is something ridiculous and hopeful like ‘the Mona Lisa still smiles’. Pilots aren’t supposed to know that but it gets around; everybody knows each of them could be shot down over Alsace, over Austria. Could come in handy.
But right - Elric’s smile’s like that. If you look at it headlong it’s almost not there; blurred in the corner of your eye it’s like a bright flash.
But maybe that was the Benzedrine.
“You here to check out my puppy care, Flight Lieutenant?” Elric asks, taking his dog and holding her up so she can lick his face and start a tug-of-war with his scarf. Roy knows how he’s supposed to respond - yessir, nossir, that sort of thing. Or flyboy drawl - for sure, professor, then a wink. Nothing’s coming to his throat. He catches Hughes’s eye across the field. Hughes was already watching them. Roy feels caught out all over again.
“Elric!” yells Hughes. “Come on, they want us up in the front carriage.”
“Argh,” says the professor, “That’s not the fun carriage.”
“Neither is the back,” says Roy, unbidden. “I believe some of those are requisitioned cattle cars.”
Elric wrinkles his nose. “The best and brightest of the war effort, right here,” he mumbles. “At least the view is nice.” A gesture towards the sea, with the hand not holding the puppy. “I used to come down here to visit some cousins, you know, we played on those cliffs all the time. We were obsessed with finding fossils, it was great.”
Roy opens his mouth, says, “We hiked near here.”
“Oh,” says Elric, his nose wrinkling just a little. His hair whips at his face, gets caught in the corner of his mouth before he tugs it away. Across the milling crowd waiting for orders, Hughes is gesturing expansively. A nervous young recruit is dashing from the road towards the little train platform, another small puppy in his arms like a baby. Roy thinks the first carriage is going to be a little louder than the higher ups are used to. Teacups may be broken.
Elric is turning away, striding off, stopping at intervals to force pilots to admire his dog. Hughes gives Roy a friendly wave; behind the flash of spectacles, his face looks totally open now.
A hand comes down on his shoulder: his boys guiding him up into a train carriage. It does smell like cows, but yesterday Hughes tossed Roy an extra pack of cigarettes; once they’re all seated he passes them around, figures that was what was intended, and the boys perk up.
“Nice, Mustang,” someone says, and the wheels begin to turn. They lean back on the benches running around the edge of the car, passing around Roy’s last box of matches. Roy leans back, head against the window, and lets the train fly him through the mist sitting low on the fields of England.
An hour or two in, Roy’s still watching scenery flash by. It’s hard to tell where they are, exactly, except he assumes it’s the same rail line his family took when he was a kid, when Devon was still a playground, not an airfield. He wonders if another sortie has gone up by now. He wonders if they’ll keep their no-casualty, no planes lost run for a bit. If April is the cruelest month, and this is only March, what kind of spring is coming? But he can't get a handle on TS Eliot right now; some other poem long-ago memorized in a London schoolroom is tickling around his shoulders, shivering in the rattling glass.
There are not as many meadows as Roy remembers; more tilled brown earth, the spring planting kicking into anxious overdrive as the u-boat blockade settles in around the island. Rationing started on the 8th of January and still feels new, but then it must be a harder transition for civilians. He wonders if his foster mother has taken up with the black market or if that crosses her nebulous and tangled morals. He thinks it would. More scenes blur past. The signs have all been taken down from the railway stations as a precaution against an invasion, so they’re just blank brick faces, tired knots of people wrapped in black coats. The mist works itself up into a fog until it’s darker out than when they started, and the land becomes surreal. It’s hard to tell a pond from a bay leading to the sea. What he thinks is a little ornamental lake suddenly reveals a sailboat; a dog splashes out of what looked like a rough bay.
Roy’s just wondering how the puppies are doing in the front carriage when the door between carriages swings open. They all startle; the professor lurches in. The creamy puppy is yapping in his arms. Someone whispers something. One of the younger boys looks like he’s wondering if he should chuck his illicit cigarette out onto a sheep field. The professor might always wear civilian kit, but they’re all aware that he’s up the food chain, somewhere. A major, at least. At very least.
Roy takes a long drag on his own cigarette, performative for the rest of them. He gets the feeling that he doesn’t know what Elric cares about, but it’s probably not illicite smokes.
“There you are,” says Professor Elric, and crams himself down on the bench next to Roy, letting Roy take the fall for scooting over so hard he nearly knocks over Havoc. Roy watches the way Elric’s eyes rest on Havoc for a moment, take him in pretty obviously. Then Elric leans across and, putting the puppy down, grabs the cigarette out of Roy’s mouth and drags a breath down. His cold hair brushes Roy’s jaw; his shoulder presses, insistent, against Roy’s. The wool coat rasps against Roy’s leather flight jacket. Roy is frozen. He licks his lips and tastes tobacco paper; the cheap stuff the war has brought out. Even books are being bound with rationed paper.
“Elric?” he manages to choke out.
“We got thrown out,” the professor says, gesturing towards the puppy with the cigarette. Ashes fly off the end, dirty Roy’s slacks. A single ember burns a hole in them and he can’t seem to care, doesn’t even flinch at the quick flair of pain. Embers burn out quick, anyway. Fuck ‘em.
“Is it safe carrying her between the carriages?” Roy asks. Elric shoots him a glare. Roy doesn’t ask again.
“Anyway, I hear it’s more fun back here with the flyboys,” Elric says, looks around expansively, inviting a laugh, though all he gets are a few smirks. The boys are used to the professor when he sticks to his own sphere; here, they’re not sure what to make of him.
“Hello in there, Flight Lieutenant Mustang,” Elric’s saying, because Roy’s been staring, “You been asleep all this time or something?”
“No,” Roy manages, “No, I took something, I’ll be up for a bit. Your dog’s eating Fuery’s boot.”
“Babyyy, baby no!” coos Elric, in a totally unconvincing severe tone. A couple guys do laugh, and the professor flushes, pleased. His eyes slide back to Roy and Roy makes sure his smirk doesn’t drop, makes sure he doesn’t disappoint.
Elric sits down again, hip to hip with Roy. Roy’s not sure how he’s going to make it through this train ride. It could be eight, ten hours. Longer, though they’re troop transport and it’s the civilian train schedule that’ll get fucked up for them, not the other way around. He can smell what might be aftershave off Elric, but mostly damp puppy and wool. He looks out the window; it’s to his back the way the benches have been set up, around the edges of the compartment, kit bags piled in the middle. Mostly he sees the side of Elric’s neck, his ear red from cold, the way his hair curls behind it, a couple freckles if you squint.
Suddenly, a buffeting roar, and another train is passing them going the opposite way on the next set of tracks. It’s a regular passenger train, not troop transport. At first Roy thinks he’s noticing all the kids because he’s become so used to the RAF and not regular civilian families, but then he realizes that all the faces he sees plastered to the windows are kids. Cars and cars of them, whisked away.
Elric turns to look too; fortunately he turns his face away from Roy to do it.
“Must be getting near London,” Roy says under his breath, not thinking. He feels Elric stiffen, then carefully relax.
“Bristol, actually,” Elric says, so quietly Roy wonders if it was him who spoke. “They’re moving kids to the countryside from there, too. You didn’t hear it here, though.”
“Bristol,” says Roy slowly, thinking of - what was that Auden poem again, wasn’t it about Bristol, a street in Bristol? Maybe if he could remember it he could calm down a little.
“Bristol Street, Mustang, really,” says Elric when Roy mentions this. Roy is surprised. No one knows what the professor is a professor of, but Roy's steady bet is not on poetry. “It’s, y’know,” Elric’s voice takes on a sing-song quality, like he’s reading a kiddy book or talking to the puppy, “As I walked out one evening, walking down Bristol Street, the crowds upon the pavement, were fields of harvest wheat.”
“Oh,” says Roy, “I don’t remember that, with the wheat.” It sounded too much like war; he didn’t like it.
Elric shrugs. “There’s more,” he says only. Roy wonders if he knows the whole poem. How to get him to recite it, without the mocking tone. Roy really wishes he could remember the damn thing in full, so he could stop thinking about it.
He goes quiet, and falls asleep somewhere - past Bristol, probably - while the professor cranes his neck around Roy to chat to Havoc about some restaurants in Leeds they’ve both been to. Roy can’t follow it; he’s been to restaurants in Leeds but he hasn’t heard of these. That is fine. The benzedrine has worn off and he is going to sleep now.
He wakes up once, and finds a puppy curled in his lap, the space next to him empty. They can’t close the windows all the way so he’s also getting rained on, but just a little. It beads on his jacket. In the middle of the car, someone’s shoved the kit bags to one side and half the boys are down on the floor, the professor in the middle of them with what looks like a fold-out chess board and several discarded pieces of newspaper. He looks for Havoc next to him and finds Hughes instead.
“You get kicked out too?” Roy mumbles. Hughes laughs.
“Nope, mine’s the quiet one.” There’s a puppy in his lap too. Roy’s sisters would call the whole thing darling. Roy wishes Hughes was really his friend, that they could go down to the pub and bitch about work together. He wishes a lot of things.
“Makes sense,” says Roy, as a cheer goes up for something - who the hell cheers on a chess game? Did someone sneak in a couple bottles of wine? He sees Fuery; he’s the one across from the professor at the chessboard, face serious. Elric is laughing; Roy catches his breath, wants to laugh too, wants to be in on the joke. Roy is good at wanting.
“When you found the puppies, and brought them to us...I know I told you I had dogs growing up, but when did Elric say he wanted a dog?” Hughes says, close to his ear. They’re both watching Elric, in the center of everything. Roy is used to catching glimpses of Elric at the edges of things; Elric in the tiny cottage by the airfield with the other Intel guys and Hughes, dropping the baton from the typewriter on his foot, ink on his fingers. Storming into the officer’s mess at odd hours, and once, waiting silently in the dark night by the tarmac as Roy’s squadron, down five planes, staggered home. He always seems like a bright thing to Roy, but. It’s obvious now that he’s happier in a crowd.
“I dunno,” says Roy. “We talked about it once. Maybe in the mess.”
Hughes shoots him a look like, sure. Roy wants to say nothing’s happened, but even that would be too - too much. Loose lips, and all that. It really was the mess, probably. He can just remember Elric’s tone, talking about some dog, his gran’s dog, who knew? Roy was just listening hard as he could so he wouldn’t do anything else.
He can’t even remember if he told Elric about Riza, how Riza has always wanted a dog. Probably he didn’t. He keeps his mouth shut a lot, especially about Riza.
Fuery makes a move and slaps the floor. They don’t have a timer. Roy watches Elric make his move. He’s performative about it, his face mobile. Roy thinks he can tell - he’s not sure, but pretty sure - that Elric already knows what he’s going to do, and is just hamming for the crowd. From the look on Fuery’s face, maybe Fuery’s caught on too.
Fuery is very sharp. He’s here because he wants to be. He could be a university boy or his parents could pay someone and the war would’ve gone away a little bit. But he’s here and if he doesn’t blow up in the air, or shatter on the surface of the Channel, if the war really ends, he’ll do great things.
Elric is dragging the floor with him.
“Well,” says Hughes, “Don’t expect him to thank you, but he seems to have really perked up, having her around. I think he’s been missing his brother.”
“Have you named yours yet?” Roy asks, because he doesn’t know what to say to that. He doesn’t touch the brother thing; Hughes doesn’t volunteer information unless he’s trying to lead you somewhere, and Roy doesn’t have the energy just now.
Despite being in Intel, Hughes is a good guy, open for all that it’s his job not to be. In a similar situation Roy thinks he’d just eventually shut everything down. He doesn’t know how Hughes and Elric do it, whatever it is they do. Writing articles about fake air bases, he remembers, from that time Elric walked into a room ranting without realizing that Roy was there. Disseminating false information designed for enemy hands. Of course, maybe he’d been lying.
“Yeah,” says Hughes. “He’s called Lion.”
Roy smiles. “I like it.”
Hughes laughs. “Ed told me ‘patriotic with no poetry’.”
“But you’re Irish,” Roy says, straight-faced, and manages to make Hughes throw his head back and laugh.
From their left, the professor says, “Ten seconds on the timer,” apparently keeping count, and Fuery says, “Check,” and Elric’s laugh is loud enough to, to shake the columns down. To shake Roy down. The boys whoop, thinking their guy might have one up on the professor, here.
Hughes says, “Is there a pool going?” like he’s interested.
Roy says, “Shit, I dunno. I was asleep.”
“With Elric around?” Hughes asks, and it doesn’t sound pointed at all.
Roy shrugs, feels exposed again. He’s used to being raw. A tool, a pilot. So long as he takes down planes, so long as he keeps his bomber protected on a raid, so long as he doesn’t buy the old farm in the sky, well then, he can be whatever mess of a man he chooses. Or doesn’t choose, in some cases. His eyes stray to the professor, and away.
“Is there a pool going?” Roy asks loudly, like he’s being helpful, and Hughes is easygoing enough that he won’t give trouble. Someone laughs and Havoc says no, but he can pitch in anyway.
Outside the train, in the England along the tracks, twilight is falling without a fuss. Earliest spring; nights are still long and evenings come early. He watches sheep scatter, watches lights come in the cracks between blackout curtains, smells the new-turned earth, the wet snowmelt mud. They curve through a valley and slow down, crawling and then halting. It’s beginning to look like moorland; maybe they’re near the Lake District? Roy hasn’t flown over this bit of the country. Elric looks up, around. Looks at Roy and Hughes by the windows, at the chessboard, at the halting train like he’d like an explanation. Roy’s boys hardly care; shit happens, the CO can take care of it.
“Checkmate,” Elric finally says, makes a move, and stays just long enough to take in a few accolades before clambering out the damn door and onto the tracks.
“Professor Elric!” someone calls.
“Edward, jesus,” mutters Hughes. Hughes sticks his nosy head out the window, and Roy does to, just in time to watch the professor slope off towards the front of the train, where a flock of sheep are meandering across the tracks. He stops to talk through the window of the first carriage. Roy assumes someone is smart enough to try to order him back in, but someone else must be wiser than they are smart, and hands Elric, after much gesticulating on his part, an umbrella. Elric winds his way towards the front of the train, waving the umbrella like a madman, parting the sheep like an old testament prophet, if old testament prophets were crotchety and kind of short and made Roy’s teeth ache with want.
He returns triumphant, the umbrella apparently stolen for good, except after a few minutes he catches Hughes’s eye and says, “Briefing up front before we arrive, per the Commodore. Flight Lieutenant Mustang, you’re in charge of my girl,” he adds. Someone hoots but is shushed; the puppy is sleeping. She’s a little weight, warm in Roy’s lap. He wants to cry, suddenly. He wishes he could remember the rest of that damn Auden poem. Broken teacups reminded him - something about, about - ‘And the crack in the tea-cup opens….’ - but how did that bit end?
He falls asleep again. Only wakes a little when he feels the puppy squirm, yapping her happy yap. “Professor?” he says, but doesn’t get or doesn’t remember an answer. Before he slips under again he twists to look out the window into the black sea through which the train is swinging. Feels disoriented without any house lights to point out the horizon, and the overwhelming brightness of the stars.
He remembers that bit about the teacup, mumbles under his breath, “‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea-cup opens a lane to the land of the dead.” His breath fogs on the glass. He is very cold. It is very late.
Faintly, he makes out the outline of what looks like a hulking cathedral in the distance, silhouetted against the ambient light that just sticks in the sky. It’s so nice to see right up until he sees it with eyes like he’s a German bomber; how easy it is to spot. It slides right along though. It slides right along.
There’s a briefing. They are not, in fact, going to be flying sorties up here. Roy’s flight group has been designated to fly some new Spitfires and one bomber down from manufacture in Yorkshire, check them for issues, and land back at home base outside Exeter.
Something fractionally releases in his chest, then tightens again. He tries to shake it loose but it won’t respond to him, just to idiotic things. Things like worrying about where he’ll be stationed, whether he’ll remain near that cottage requisitioned by the Intel boys. The quiet one with the blacked out windows and the top-secret maps and the unfortunate caricatures of every politician from the last decade on the walls, even the ones of Chamberlain.
That’s not home, that’s not even his workplace. But it’s what his heart clenches around.
The flight group is pretty chuffed, all things together. This is because they all get a day of leave before they fly back.
They can sleep tonight, though. Roy feels like he hasn’t slept this much since 1938. He tries for some more, because before their day of leave they have an 0600 sector recce.
He has nightmares but that means he slept, so there.
The brass sent up Roy’s squadron but none of the Exeter ground guys, so when Roy hits tarmac at 0557, there’s a chain gang Roy doesn’t know prepping a plane Roy hasn’t flown before, but that’s okay, it’s not the first time he’s done it and it’s not into combat. Roy's good with planes.
The plane shakes to life beneath him. He takes a breath, takes extra care to call out his status - three greens, looking fine - because he’s sure someone somewhere is super nervous about making sure the boys get the good planes without any hiccups.
The radio operator on the other end of the line is probably nearing the end of her twelve-hour shift, but even she sounds a little loose this morning. She rattles off his call sign professional as anything, but also manages to make him laugh.
It’s not much of a flight, a hedge-hop really, but that’s what a sector recce is for, just getting used to the scenery and making sure you can find your way back to your new airfield. Roy memorizes the terrain on automatic. They’re not super close to the ocean; he can see a factory in the distance, a few villages and small towns, a bigger town on the horizon. He makes sure to land before the radio operator’s shift ends, so she doesn’t get stuck or something. The rest of the guys follow his lead. He’s not a Squadron Leader, but he probably will be if he doesn’t die in a month or two.
He strips off his gear on the runway, and pulls off his flying blues in the tents they’re using as dorms for a couple days, puts on his cleanest uniform. He goes to the mess because even if he doesn’t know all the cooks like he does in Exeter, the mess staff always know where to find anybody.
One of the dishwashers accepts Roy's last cigarette and tells him that there’s a large country house not far from the base proper. It’s not like the cramped cottage down south; it’s not just for Intel and there’s some higher-ups stationed there full time. It’s where Intel guys would stay.
He gets to the country house just fine; it’s a half-mile across a field of some sprouting crop or another; Roy is a city boy, he doesn't know what it is. Entry itself is a little harder. People aren’t anxious to direct you correctly when you’re looking for the Intel guys, but Roy has an honest face or whatever. Also, Lion sees him from around a corner and comes pelting up to say hello, and a sheepish secretary directs him the way he was guessing at anyway.
Lion races down the hall and nudges open a door, slips inside. Roy is still nearing it, trying not to knock his elbows into 17th century side tables, when he hears the professor saying, “After the trouble you could...you could say I caused at Bletchley….”
He breaks off when Roy walks in. Roy is not about to be found eavesdropping outside intel just because he was - he was, nervous, or something. Had to gird himself before seeing Elric. God. So he just walks in.
Elric barely spends a moment looking abashed, and Roy would hardly notice at all except Hughes actually goes pale. Roy tries really really hard to forget that sentence, which had honestly just sounded like some romping university story or the like. Hughes is usually not so obvious.
He doesn’t want to think what Elric did at university. He knows what he did - or was doing, till Hitler up and invaded Poland.
“How was your, uh, your sector recce, Flight Lieutenant Mustang?” asks the professor without missing a beat, mockingly showing off the lingo like RAF slang isn’t something he hears every day and ought to have memorized by now anyway. He looks warm in an ugly brown jumper and corduroy slacks. Objectively a terrible combination, but Roy just wants to slide his hands under the sweater, across the professor’s soft stomach. Do that sweetly while his other hand yanks a fistful of blond ponytail.
Hughes is still glaring at the back of Elric’s head; Elric appears to be taking delight in not looking at him.
“The sector recce was good,” says Roy, mouth dry. “Professor.”
“Good!” says Elric, like Roy’s ability to complete one of the most basic flights possible is personally satisfying to him. Elric shoulders his way through the cluttered room to square up to Roy. Any other guy with that body language would be looking for a fight. Honestly, Roy could perhaps use a fight right about now. Anything to keep him distracted from leering down at Elric, letting Elric catch is eye, only for Elric to get distracted by something else and act like he wasn’t trying to capture Roy’s gaze at all.
Hughes says, “Business or pleasure, Roy?” casual like either is fine. “Also, want some rhubarb and custard? We got officers' mess leftovers.”
“Please,” says Roy. Hughes is one of the better things to come out of Roy’s war experience so far. “And, er, I came about this morning’s leave.” He refuses to say ‘pleasure’ in front of the professor.
“Don’t feed him my rhubarb!” hisses Elric.
“You hate rhubarb,” says Hughes, unsympathetic. He holds it in a second more before he laughs a little at Elric’s put out face. “You really do. I’m giving it to Roy. He gave you a dog.”
Elric glances back at the far desk, where Roy guesses the puppy is chewing on something she shouldn’t. “Fine,” he says, and goes back behind Hughes’s desk to kneel on the floorboards and ignore them both in favor of his dog.
“Did you get a day of leave too?” Roy asks Hughes, who hands him a bowl. The custard is actually pretty alright.
“Me?” says the professor from the floor. His gaze swings back to Roy, sudden and sharp. Roy wants to say, yes, yes, you too. Already though, the professor has looked between them and said, “Oh,” and found something to do with both puppies tangled on the floorboards.
“Yeah!” says Hughes, lighting up a little. “Yeah, what were you thinking of doing?”
Sleeping, Roy wants to say. That would be the sane answer. But like hell he knows how to sleep like a human anymore. More than sleep Roy wants to be around people who do people things, still. Human things, like loving dogs and stealing extra portions of rhubarb custard.
“Some of the men were talking about Whitby -” he begins, but Hughes is already shaking his head.
“Your CO will nix that. Can’t have you too far, in case we need an all available pilots in the air for a scramble.”
Roy doesn’t question how Hughes knows this; it is part of how they are friendly.
“York’s close,” says Elric from the floor, where he’s irresponsibly letting a puppy chew on his jumper.
“You wanna come too, Elric?” Hughes asks. Elric frowns, like he has better offers, like he’s not sure.
“Can’t,” he says finally, and Roy’s stomach sinks. He feels shitty, too, because Hughes is great, a day out with him will be great. Hughes just shrugs.
“See you at 0900,” he says to Roy. Elric gives a regal little wave from the floor.
But when Roy makes his way to the group making the exodus to the city, he finds Elric there anyway, hanging back with Hughes and looking suspicious of all the pilots at their most boisterous.
“Changed your mind?” he asks Elric, smiling, helpless, even as his chest knots itself tighter.
“I’m on business,” Elric says, nose in the air.
“Are you supposed to say that?” asks Roy, feeling a little panicked, just as Hughes gets close enough to hear and roll his eyes.
“Probably not,” Hughes says. “Fine, Edward, after you finish up you’re getting a damn drink with us.”
Some jeeps are co-opted to drive everyone to the nearest station - Darlington - and from there it’s just one stop into York city proper. For all his talk, Elric certainly looks like he’s on leave. He’s more relaxed, joking loudly with Hughes, drawing Roy into the fray. They pile out of the station like that, and Elric takes the lead, either because he’s been here before or because he’s faking it well.
Roy hasn’t seen York before. The first thing he sees as they exit the station looks at first like a castle rampart, but he realizes is the old city walls.
“Don’t be too impressed,” says Elric, scooting past the taxi bank and across the street, assuming they’ll follow, “It was mostly rebuilt in Victorian times as a tourist attraction.”
Roy likes it anyway. “Can we walk on it?”
Elric sighs, put out. “Sure, but not that way. C’mon,” and leads them down the hill towards a swollen river, on the banks of which York crouches, medieval streets and tumbling rows of whitewash and wood frame houses, like a christmas card. Roy stops in the middle of the bridge to look out over the water, a heavy stone-built bridge with railings of stone and wrought iron in rose-designs. He watches the water rolling so swift with mud and snowmelt below his boots, mutters to himself, “O plunge your hands in the water, plunge them up to the wrist…?”
Elric says, several feet ahead, through what sounds like gritted teeth, “Stare, stare in the basin - and wonder what you’ve missed.”
“Huh?” says Roy.
“That’s the second half of that line, Mustang, c’mon. You can’t just say half of it. Auden would be sad.” He's making fun now, grinning, but he wasn't a second ago.
“I didn’t,” Roy begins, but Hughes’s saying, “Elric, you coming for the walkaround before the first pint?”
And Elric’s shoulders are tense and he’s saying, “No, I have something,” and suddenly he’s walking away at full anxious speed, blue-gray wool coat whipping around his thighs. They stand together and watch him hurry towards the avenue across the bridge that leads to the towering yellow spires of what has to be a cathedral. Hughes just shrugs, and directs Roy in the same direction, only they take the first right after the river and Roy can see the professor hurrying on up the road through the crowd around the cathedral.
What looks like the high street runs parallel to the river. Hughes and Roy amble along it, stopping to look at trinkets, for Hughes to buy two sausage pasties and press one into Roy’s hands. They smoke and watch girls feeding the pigeons in front of a little church; they duck into a record shop and browse, even if neither of them have access to a turntable right now. Heads turn at Hughes’s smile, at Roy’s flyboy uniform. The city is postcard beautiful, with narrow cobble-and-stone roads and daffodils coming up in all the cracks and churchyards, where headstones four hundred years old crowd up against a bookshop advertising tawdry romances.
They wander far enough along the river via the high street that they find another bridge. Below the bridge are some ancient, slippery steps down to the river level. A pub with the ubiquitous name, King’s Arms, has cafe tables outside - abandoned in the weak sunlight - and welcomes them in.
“Cheap cider,” says Hughes as they try not to break their necks on the stairs. “And we can drink it in the sun.”
Roy looks up; it’s noontime and there’s a little sun, mostly just - thin cloud. Weird weather to fly a sortie, fine for cider by a river, if fucking cold. There was also a part in that Auden poem about a river, he thinks. Long damn poem. He should’ve made Hughes stop at that bookshop. He should just buy a poetry collection and be done with it.
Roy goes into the warmth of the quiet pub, a few scattered people there for a late lunchtime pint, and buys the first round. The cider is cheap; Hughes was right. He obligingly brings it back out to Hughes and the cafe tables in the faint sun. They use the cider to keep themselves warm.
By the third or fourth round Roy goes past the bar to use the loos. They’re situated weirdly. It’s an old building, obviously, and the loos are round the back of the bar and through a short hall with a door to the alleyway in it. When he finally finds them, they’re the toilets where to flush you have to pull a chord from the ceiling, and the plumbing is probably as Victorian as the city walls. It’s when he’s leaving that the door to the alley swings open and bangs against the wall and he’s suddenly faced with Professor Elric shoving a clutch of papers down his trousers.
“Damn,” says the professor, and then, “Oh, it’s you, that’s fine then,” and pulls the papers out of his trousers and stuffs them carefully into a slit in the lining of his coat instead. Roy stares at him, a bit drunk already and feeling adrift. Maybe that’s just Elric, though.
“Come have a drink with us,” Roy says, just as Elric says, “Hey, you know, I listen to the radios every time you’re in the air and you’ve never actually told me your call sign, Mustang.”
That is a lot of information, all at once.
“I don’t have one,” Roy says, swaying. Towards Elric or away, he’s not sure. His flyaway blond hair is windswept, his boots are muddy. Roy would never have guessed Elric would know this city but he seemed to when they arrived. He’s always thought Elric was some product of Oxbridge; his accent is a kind of forced RP. But maybe he’s a Yorkshire lad, after all.
“What?” frowns Elric, sharp.
“Its...it’s not pilots that have a squadron code, it’s the individual a/c.”
“Just say ‘aircraft, you dumb flyboy,” then, “Oh.”
Elric is looking down at his muddy bootlaces, mouth mullish. Roy doesn’t know what Elric wants, but Roy knows he wants to give it.
“Come have a drink,” he repeats, too soft.
“Fine then,” says Elric, picking his chin up, and does a terrible job of letting Roy lead the way.
They find Hughes with a woman. When she introduces herself Roy recognizes her voice, says, “Were you on radio this morning?” and she says, “Oh yeah, you’re one of my boys!” and Hughes looks jealous, which is stupid. Hughes’s the one who’s been giving Roy knowing, warning looks over Elric’s head for weeks, months, however long this has been happening.
They could go to other pubs, and take the radio girl. This town is not like their little airfield in the middle of nowhere by the sea. There are options. They could drink other things than cider. They don’t go. They watch the sun set on the river and get to know the radio girl.
Roy goes to piss again and when he gets back through the warm press and out onto the cobbles by the river, it’s just the professor out there, waging a war of glares with a lone seagull that thinks he might have a sandwich hidden in that pint glass.
“It’s called the Ouse,” Elric says, gesturing with his glass at the quick eddies of water, cold and sucking silt-color, down off the moors. Elric pronounces this “Ooze” and Roy says, “Pull the other one, it’s got bells on,” and Elric scowls at him. He’s called Professor Elric but god, Roy thinks, how is he a professor? He’s all of twenty-five. Less? Jesus in heaven, it might be less. Roy’s older than that and he’s barely a pilot, much less a man with some civvy street occupation. Some title like ‘professor’ that means anything outside the war.
Elric gets up and wanders under the bridge, scrounging for stones in the gloom and throwing them in the river. He’s still scowling, every inch the angry bridge-troll, and when he turns and glares at Roy with one bright eye it’s like a punch in Roy’s gut. He swears he can hear himself gasp a little.
“Your poem,” the professor says, and Roy can’t track him, feels like when a battle’s going bad and everything feels like it’s on a delay, like his brain is lagging. “That poem you keep saying wrong. The river bit at the beginning goes, ‘As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement, Were fields of harvest wheat. And down by the brimming river, I heard a lover sing, Under an arch of the railway: ‘Love has no ending.’”
Roy snorts. “Nice,” he says. “Where’d Hughes go?”
“You don’t appreciate literature,” Elric says in lofty tones. “And he’s inside with Gracia.”
“Who’s Gracia?”
“You alright, Roy? The radio girl, she said her name’s Gracia Potter. Hours ago.” It’s delivered mockingly, with the professor’s damn sharp tongue. Roy doesn’t know why he keeps coming back for more of this. Why he didn’t just settle down with his easy, light friendship kindled with Hughes and let that get him through the grind-and-go of the war, of the RAF. He could’ve done that, easy. He doesn’t know why words tossed off disdainfully like this warm him, right down to his bones. He wants to grin; he wants to punch a wall. He wants to find Elric’s puppy and cuddle her close until everything goes away.
“Hey, anyone in there, Flight Lieutenant Mustang? Roy?” Elric slouches closer.
Roy is stuck on his name in that mouth. He wonders if the damn poem has anything useful to say about that. Elric comes to stand by him on the railing. Roy imagines dropping his pint glass in. He’s so tired, suddenly.
“I should go back,” he hears himself say.
“No way, we have time,” Elric says, surprising him. “I promised Scheska I’d save her from Lion by midnight if Maes didn’t come back for the night, but it’s barely, I dunno, half-six.”
“Have you named yours yet?” Roy asks, because he didn't understand most of that sentence.
“Of course,” Elric scoffs, but doesn’t volunteer anything more and Roy is terrified to push. Elric pushes off from the railing, takes the pint glass delicately from Roy’s numb fingers. Roy just watches him do it. Whatever you want, Roy thinks, too distinctly. Elric smiles at him, a quick sharp thing, then turns and hurls the pint glass on the water. He laughs at the splash and shocked, Roy laughs too.
“Let’s go wander around,” Elric says, still facing away from Roy, tone light. Roy has no idea why it sounds like - like.
“Alright,” he says, and follows Elric’s darkening silhouette up the slippery stairs and deeper into the medieval heart of the city. They’re already winding their way along several streets away when Roy remembers he never told Hughes where they were going; they’re untethered. Alone, thinks something hungry in him.
Elric halts suddenly, squinting across an open square lined with banks. Taxis file along patiently as what looks like a bustling outdoor market disgorges a steady stream of people as it shuts down for the evening. Some hair salons are still open, and through their glass fronts Roy can watch women chat. It’s not as mad as London, not as loud or bustling or alive, but it is also whole and unbombed and has a cheerful buzz to it. And it's old. York was the capital in the North, once.
He wonders how long it will take. He thinks of the beautiful train station, the way the light had streamed in and the wrought iron along the staircases had been painted white and red and green like a wedding cake, like a confection. On what day will the ladies look up from having their hair done and see a Messerschmitt against the sky? Or just the dull roar of a bomber, distant as god, and just as furious?
The professor taps his foot, ducks looks at Roy and away.
“Come on then,” he says finally with a toss of his head, “no need to lag.”
Roy does not get a chance to protest that Elric was the one who just stopped in the middle of walking. Elric takes off at a steady clip. Roy is totally turned around now. He knows London so, so well, but this is a place he’s never been, and it’s apparently retained its medieval tangle very well. They duck past what Roy assumes is a pub called The Roman Baths, until Elric gestures at it and says, “Built on the original baths, apparently, they serve overpriced fish,” and Roy can’t tell if he’s kidding or not.
There are lots of little tidbits like that as they walk. It’s one of the strangest guided tours Roy has ever attended. They pass some GIs off-duty, a dark coffee shop with a ceramic sheep outside it - Elric pats it on the head, fixes its bandana, and says “Heya, Barry, Al says hi,” - and wave at a man in a greatcoat and tophat that Elric says is doing a ghost walk.
“Are you saying he’s a ghost?” asks Roy, twisting around to watch the man turn a corner that Roy thought was barely a crack between houses.
“No, Mustang, keep up,” he says, and Roy glows again, stupidly. He wants to put his hands on Elric’s hips and squeeze, and know what he feels like under his wool coat. He wants to be a ghost on Elric’s shoulder and just ride around like that and not have to do anything else.
“Grape Lane,” Roy says, reading a street sign.
“Yeah, Roy-boy. Grape lane’s what they used to call that bit of town where you could pick up a certain kind of fun.” He says this suggestively, like a challenge, like he thinks Roy will spook. Roy of course knows what Grape Lane means - just because he doesn’t talk about his foster mother’s business much doesn’t mean he’s forgotten his entire odd childhood - but he feels himself flush a little anyway. He wants to push Elric back so they can see who will really blink first. Roy is pretty sure it wouldn’t be him. He’d like to see the surprise on Elric’s face.
Roy doesn’t say anything though. Elric leads them down to another street, in a door, up a creaking row of steps until they burst into one of the hundred pubs they must have passed, this one trying hard to be more of a bar, crowded and damp and hot inside. They’re playing swing music and someone is shooting pool. They don’t only serve cider here; Elric demands a martini and Roy orders a whiskey neat and says, “I’ve got his,” to the bartender.
Elric side-eyes him pretty hard. Something surges in Roy. He doesn’t want to go back to the base anymore.
The whiskey is middle of the road; he barely tastes it. He watches the way Elric’s mouth presses against glass as he sips his martini. He notices, on autopilot, a few pairs of eyes looking at Elric, and not - not like they might on base, where everyone’s vaguely aware of the professor - but like he’s some guy built small and stocky who came in with another guy who’s staring at his mouth.
An olive plops into his whiskey. He looks up to find Elric glaring at him, and once he’s caught Roy’s attention, glancing away, feigning interest in whatever’s on the radio. Roy couldn’t give a fuck about the radio right now.
Whiskey neat goes down pretty quick if you’re not paying attention. Roy’s left fiddling with his empty glass. He taps it hard on the table to get Elric’s attention; when he has it, he flings his glass back and catches the olive in his mouth, swigging it down like a shot. Elric’s eyes narrow. Roy puts his hand on the table, strung out with wanting, touch-starved but unwilling to go further. His gut sinks when Elric immediately slides his arm off the table, then stands. He hands his half-finished martini off to a surprised lady standing behind him. He marches all the way to the stairs before turning and staring at Roy.
Roy follows. God, of course Roy follows.
“Where are we going?” he says when they’re back on the street and he’s reasonably sure they’re not walking the same way they had come.
“You wanted to walk the stupid wall, right?” Elric says, sighing gustily. “I’m humouring you.”
Aren’t you always? Roy thinks, unbidden. He knows Elric maybe better than anyone on base but Hughes, but the trick is that once you learn a rule about Elric, the rule changes. Roy has - has had for a while - a sinking feeling that Elric isn’t just one of the Intel people. Hopefully he’s not a spy, either for this side or theirs. Somewhere hidden in his clothes right now there are still some kind of documents. Roy wonders if it’s uncomfortable. But Roy knows also that the Germans talk in code and so do the Brits, and somebody has to be making those codes, and somebody has to by prying into them. And that was not all. There are a lot of dark little things needed for a war effort. He knows this, deep down.
They’re skirting around the breathtaking cathedral - “It’s not a cathedral, it’s a Minster, it’s Church of England,” corrects Elric, sounding bored - and finally find the wall again. The stairs have a chained gate, which Elric scrambles over, legs too short to be graceful. Roy makes it over alright.
“Are we going to be arrested, Elric?” Roy asks, feeling oddly serene about it. Elric glances at Roy’s flying blues, his shiny buttons, his standard issue boots.
“Probably not you, at least,” he says finally. “Whatever, it’s just shut at night so drunks don’t fall off, but there are a bunch of bits where the open side is close enough to the ground that you could just climb up.”
They’re about twenty feet up; further on the far side, with its arrow slits looking out on the greater city - grocers and drugstores, houses and flats and post offices, all dark and hiding in the night. It felt wrong, suddenly, to be on leave, to not be ready on the airfield to tumble into the sky and defend all of this, with it’s silly sort-of old wall.
The wall was really only wide enough for one at a time, and there isn’t always railing on the inside, but Elric dogs his heels hard enough that they sort of manage to walk side by side. It starts to rain a little, just a fine mist. They are walking towards the minster again, on a level with the rooftops. It is like flying, a little, but without having a trigger under your thumb.
“If we went the other way, we’d see Clifford’s tower and the old run-down bit by the Foss River.”
“Did you want to go that way, Elric?” asks Roy.
“Nah, it’s depressing, I’m Jewish.”
“What?” asks Roy.
“Problem with that?” asks Elric, waspish. Roy can’t really see Professor Elric as very religious, but it doesn’t seem like the time to mention that. People are all sorts of things.
“No, I mean, what does that have to do with...?”
A pause. “Oh, Clifford’s Tower. It’s one of those places where they have a little plaque about how many Jews were killed there in, y’know, medieval times.”
“Oh,” says Roy.
“Oh!” mocks Elric. “Also, I’m a homosexual.”
Roy nearly trips off the wall, but regains and just says, that weird calm descending again, “Alright, Elric.” His lips are buzzing. He’s always liked being pushed, being tested.
Elric just sniffs. The minster comes into full view. It must be amazing in daylight, or even bathed in the warm glow of a city lit up.
“We’re going to miss curfew,” Elric says. “Because you wanted to walk this stupid wall.”
They’re going to miss curfew for a lot of reasons.
Roy glares. The wall is descending to snake through some sort of grove of trees adjacent to the minster. They’re flush with fresh new leaf buds of early spring. It is very, very dark as the old, old trees lean further over the wall, encasing them. Roy thinks about the wizard Merlin, locked into a tree for a thousand years. Maybe it’s triggered by that claustrophobia, but Roy feels everything, suddenly, everything springing out of its neatly labelled boxes: the desperation and the craven fear, the bluster and the cowardice, the scent of flying leathers gone damp, the scent of petrol and his own sick in a hedgerow out of eyeshot of the flight line.
“Come on,” says Elric, barely breaking through his head, “Come on, Flight Lieutenant Mustang, this section of the wall ends in a locked tower that has the stairs so we gotta jump down here.”
Roy looks down. Instead of the void, he sees the back garden of a pub.
They step down onto a picnic table on the pub’s back patio; the pub itself is built tucked up against the wall. They scoot through the sudden brightness inside, brushing leaves off trousers, Elric smiling blandly at the patrons as they shove through. They’ve shoved through so many crowds today that Roy’s starting to feel like they’re looking for something, someone. He hopes Hughes isn’t too worried.
Roy keeps imagining the minster lit up in searchlights, anti-aircraft guns firing up into the black. They don’t tell civilians this but ground-based anti-aircraft guns are mostly just to make you feel better. You might as well be trying to shoot the stars down as a German bomber. It’s only Roy’s boys who can do it, who can go up in the sky too and wrestle them down.
Yet another cobblestone street. Pub signs creak in the cold wind that’s beginning to pick up around the edges of things. He’s following Elric, following Elric.
“Here,” Elric says as they’re trotting down a perfectly good road, wood beams and white-washed buildings, trying not to look at the beggars, “Come on, the snickleway’s faster.”
The snickleway is a tiny alley, two men wide, and it looks like it’s open to the sky after it passes under the first house but until then it’s - “Watch your head,” sniggers Elric - low enough to brush Elric’s head as he passes through, and wang Roy a good one on the forehead.
“Damn,” he says.
“Don’t be a baby,” says Elric’s voice, getting further, then closer. “Where are you, anyway? I can’t see a thing. Augh, you’re definitely lost, aren’t you Roy?”
Elric bumps up against him; their coats brush, rough, and Roy catches his fucking breath. That’s Elric’s hand bumping against his shoulder, Elric’s hot breath along Roy’s jaw. Roy feels himself snap like a cheap rivet. He feels himself drift right up into the crack of sky far above them. He takes a step forward, then another. Hears Elric’s grunt of surprise, annoyance, and lets it slide past him.
“Maybe I am lost,” he says, and it’s a stupid fucking thing to say but it rumbles out of him two octaves deeper than normal and that sort of makes up for it.
“Oh, oh I see. You think you’re up for a Grape Lane proposition, huh punk?” says Elric. Calling Roy a punk - which he is, and has been since he was about fourteen - seems nonsensical when Elric had bluntly announced himself as a homosexual. The front of him brushes harder against Roy’s stomach, his breath leans away. Roy can imagine him taking on a feminine stance, a cant of hips, another challenge.
“Yeah, you punk,” Roy breathes through clenched teeth.
Elric moans once - loud, performative, the type of moan that he must think men want to hear. “You up for it, you square?” he says, breathy, fake, mocking. Fighting with Roy in the strangest way Roy has ever been fought with.
“Knock it off,” Roy growls. He steps forward again and it sounds like Elric’s head bounces off the wall; Elric doesn’t make a noise.
“Oh, too real for you now, sweetheart?” demands Elric, all sweet-sharp now, maybe actually angry, Roy doesn’t know.
Roy kind of wants to say his first job was as a receptionist at a brothel and this game is ridiculous, but he doesn’t know how to phrase it in a way that gets him what he wants.
Roy is hoping to be kissed but instead he sees the compromise he needs to make to get what he wants. It is with no hesitation that he falls to his knees on the damp paving stones, and breaths hot breath where Elric’s coat parts.
The professor makes a little punched out noise above him; Roy feels like he has finally scored a hit.
“Okay,” says the professor’s shaky voice. He unbuttons his wool coat; Roy can hear the crinkle of the paper inside of it, can feel the way it is heavy with something more than wool and paper as well. “Okay, okay.” One cool hand comes to cradle Roy’s face, his jaw. Roy leans into it, so relieved. Relieved to be kneeling here.
He noses at Elric’s trousers and Elric swears, smacks a hand on the wall. Then Elric is pulling him away by his hair, gently enough, and then unbuttoning his own trousers. Roy, floating now, kisses his hands as he works, begs without words. Their breaths are rattling things.
Elric shoves his trousers and underwear down until his cock pops free, grips the base of it. He goes to give himself a pump or two, but Roy wants to finish getting him hard himself. He puts his fingers to work, clever fingers on Elric’s shaft, a knuckle brushing his balls, testing him out. What he likes, his reactions, his unspoken rules and preferences. Elric’s hands are in Roy’s hair at his temples, gripping rudely and not giving a damn.
Roy rubs his cheek against Elric’s shaft, inhales, exhales. He should tease more, build him up more, but he wants it too much, wants - he kisses the tip. Once, twice, then open mouthed and accepts the burst of salt as his due. It thrums in him, the need to have a cock deep in his mouth, in his throat. Already he can feel the phantom sensation in his anticipation, a sweet mirror of flinching before a punch.
“Jesus fucking christ, you - you don’t have to-” Elric tries to say above him, which is the only thing that forces Roy to open his eyes, to look up and try to meet Elric’s in the gloom, let him see what even Roy doesn’t want to see, which is how much need rolls in his belly every day of the goddamn week, how much his skin burns for a hand on it.
He places his mouth loosely around the tip and stares up at Elric.
“Oh, oh fuck,” says Elric, “Fine, you win.” A pause. Roy stays there, feels compelled to just stay there with the tip of Elric’s dick jumping a little between his lips. “Do you want me to beg or something?” Elric finally asks, rough and shaky, and Roy thinks maybe he actually would, but that’s not what Roy meant to do.
He closes his eyes, pulls back so that Elric is just barely brushing his lips, concentrates on that feeling so that he can whisper, quiet as the stones, “Tell me I can.”
Elric’s cock jumps hard enough that precome is smeared across Roy’s lip. He licks it up, feels like he’s shaking and burning and perfectly still. Contained only by Elric, by being on his knees for Elric.
“Tell you - tell you?” A fist in his hair, fierce bright eyes above him, Elric’s teeth grit and his face a ferocious thing. Roy is drifting, burning down, aching for it. Roy just stares up at him, waits.
The professor takes a shuddering breath.
“Yeah,” he says, eyes fluttering closed, flush spreading on his neck, “Yeah you can do it, go on-”
Roy does - Roy just does. He can feel Elric’s hands in his hair, shaking just a little. He slides home, a smooth and practiced glide, his teeth tucked neatly behind his lips. He hears Elric’s head crack on the bricks again, his boots shuffle slightly on the paving stones, his fingers flex.
“Shit,” he hisses, “Shit, shit - ah!”, his back arching off the wall. Roy is nothing but a pulse, a heartbeat, the swing of his head as he fucks his mouth up and down on Elric’s cock. He speeds up a little; there’s no problem with speeding up a little, giving himself a little more, right? Everything in him wants that warm weight pressing down his tongue, the faintest shoves of Elric’s hips. Elric doesn’t really thrust up though. Someone taught Elric to be polite to people sucking his cock, and they can burn for all Roy cares. Roy thinks he wants it, wants to take it. He brings his hands off Elric’s cock to pinch his hips. Under Roy’s right hand, papers crackle, a reminder, a warning.
Roy doesn’t bloody care, not anymore. All this directionless loneliness, all the times his eyes followed the professor across the room and his brain said, what would it feel like if his hand just brushed yours? And his chest ached like nothing else. It is all exploding out of him now, and he can’t even begin picking up the pieces until the violence has run its course.
He grips Elric’s hips and hopes that he tears the damn papers. He grips Elric’s hips and uses them to pull his face down harder on Elric’s cock, letting him feel the softness of Roy’s throat swallowing around him. One of Elric’s hands slips from his head to his shoulder, snatching at the two little bars on his uniform that make him a Flight Lieutenant, that make him a man who is needed, who cannot be directionless, who cannot be allowed to be lonely and gutted and afraid.
Only he does not feel that, with his hands shaking and Elric’s hands shaking and the cold, cold light of the stars very far above them in the narrow crack of sky.
“Christ,” Elric is saying, “Christ, you really are - you really can.” He cuts himself off, hissing through his teeth when Roy pulls back to flick his tongue under the head, then swallows him down again and just shifts his tongue side to side under the shaft. Testing, trying. He brings a hand back up and follows his mouth with it, twists on the upswing. He glances up to see Elric’s head tipped back, mouth open and red and panting, and his eyes are not closed, just slanted down through his lashes and staring hard at Roy. Even in the dark, his cheeks are so flushed, show up dark against strands of hair fallen out of his tie.
Roy knows it is good, knew he can do this well, but still there is a tugging deep inside him, insistent, and he wants to hear it, wants - “Tell me it’s good,” he whispers to his own boots, his own cock straining obscenely in his trousers.
“Rea--” Elric begins, but stops the moment Roy lifts his face. He can see Elric get it with that whiplash mind. Elric doesn’t look like he’s confused, or humoring Roy. He just looks feral, undone, wanting. Like he knows what Roy wanted, what Roy is pushing for without pushing.
Elric reaches down, fists a hand in Roy’s hair, stares fiercely at him with wild, wild eyes and and says through his teeth, “It’s so good, shit. You’re so good.”
Roy moans, moves to go back to Elric’s cock, but Elric’s other hand is already there, pumping fast and hard and rough, slicked with Roy’s spit, red from Roy’s mouth. His hand in Roy’s hair remains, tight and prickling and sending shots of sparks down his neck, his spine. When Roy gets like this, sex isn’t just about his cock anymore and he loves it.
Roy lets his mouth drop open, lets his lips bump Elric’s knuckles - and every time they do, Elric whispers, “Shit, shitfuck, oh!” His hand leaps faster along his shaft, stuttering to the beat of their harsh breaths.
Then, “Shit, I’m gonna - you want it? Huh?” his hand working his cock over, his other hand holding Roy’s face right in front. It is probably, some muzzy part of Roy’s brain thinks, another stupid test that Elric expects him to back down from, but instead Roy’s entire body lights up; he groans, too loud, and meets Elric’s eyes again.
“Oh,” Elric says, cracked open, to whatever he sees there, then, “Oh, oh fuck, oh--” and he bends almost double as he comes, hand in Roy’s hair falling down to clutch his shoulder again, hard enough to pinch, hard enough to bruise. Roy leaves his lips parted, closes his eyes, feels serene and punched-through as the first spurt of come stripes across his lips, hits his tongue. His cheekbone.
“Fu-uck,” Elric says, as shakily as Roy has ever heard him. He gives Elric’s cock one last little lick and Elric jolts, and opens one eye to peer down at him.
He shuts it again and leans his head back with a groan. “Oh man,” he manages, breathing hard. “Oh man, I messed up your pretty face.”
Roy is - Roy is pretty out of it, but that makes him crack a smile. He swipes at his face with his sleeve and moves to stand, his own cock heavy and aching against his thigh, when both Elric’s hands snake down and fist in his lapels. Elric is far stronger than Roy would expect. He drags Roy up until Roy is standing, feet slightly apart so that he only has to curve his neck a little to pant inelegantly in Elric’s face, so hot for anything Elric is planning to give him.
Elric looks up at him, searches his face for a second, then grins a Cheshire cat grin. His fists are still in Roy’s coat; he jerks Roy forward and kisses him hard, his mouth opening under Roy’s, his challenge open now. He breaks away to hiss, “Yeah, that was good, you gave it to me so good.” Roy whines, clenches his hands in the back of Elric’s coat to keep from rubbing up against him, and he can refrain but he is burning, desperate.
Elric’s hands leave his lapels, skitter down to Roy’s fly. He repeats the trick of shoving Roy’s trousers down just far enough to draw his cock out. Even in the dark, even after having Elric’s cock in his mouth while he knelt on the paving stones, it feels vulnerable, exposed. He shudders, tries to concentrate, but his brain is everywhere and so are Elric’s hands. His grip is strong and his fingers too are surprisingly strong and dexterous, like a pianist’s hands.
“You know what,” Elric is saying, shrugging out of his coat so it only hangs off one arm, the illicit papers crinkling alarmingly again, “You really did give it to me good, you really fucking did, so maybe you deserve something nice, huh? You think you deserve something nice?”
Roy freezes for a second, not sure what the right answer is. He tries to hold himself still, figure out what to do, if Elric wants him to jerk himself off - but it doesn’t sound like that. He’s planted his hands on the wall the either side of Elric’s shoulders, his head bent forward as he gasps, dick straining under Elric’s firm grasp. His cock is leaking enough that Elric’s hand slides easily when normally he’d need - at very least - spit to ease the way.
“Yeah,” Elric says, as if he is thinking it over. “Yeah, you do.”
He turns in the cage of Roy’s arms and pulls his trousers down to mid-thigh in the concealing darkness. A few sparks feel like they go off behind Roy’s eyes at the sight of him, legs slightly spread and ass on display. But - “I can’t,” Roy gasps out as one of Elric’s arms snakes back, grabs the fabric of Roy’s coat and tugs him closer to the mindbending display in front of him, “I can’t - fuck you like that, not here, not without-”
Elric snorts and jerks him so that his chest is flush with Elric’s back, his hard cock pressed against the small of Edward’s back through his shirt, and instinctively he slips lower until he is brushing skin and his eyes are trying to roll back in his head over the suddenness of it, over holding back.
“What kind of punk are you?” Elric asks, in that sharp tone of his, only now he sounds just a little breathless. “We got options.” Then, quieter, darker, “Fuck my thighs, c’mon, I’ll get you what you need.”
A moan drags itself out of Roy’s chest against his will. He rocks his hips up against Elric’s ass, then somehow forces himself to stop and slide his legs a little further apart, to lick his hand and wet his cock - for all that he was leaking enough to need it - and slips between Elric’s thighs. The first few thrusts are all desperation and only teasing relief, and he lets loose a small whine before Elric, head to the side against the brick to watch him, smiles and slides his legs together, tightens his thighs into pressing heat and friction.
Roy feels himself break a little, feels some part of himself insisting on control and practicality chip away, feels himself finally give in. He fucks up between Elric’s thighs hard, snaps his hips and sends himself reeling, hears himself distantly, broken little noises. Elric swings his hips back to help, groans a little when he puts one hand down to feel where Roy is rutting against him and felt the slickness of sweat and precome - maybe he likes a mess, Roy thinks wildly.
Roy’s hands wrap around Elric’s torso, cling to his front, possibly tear a button from his coat. He feels the end beginning to build in his gut, crashes his mouth down on the side of Elric’s neck and Elric is urging him on, saying, “C’mon, c’mon, I want you to do it, I want you to come all over my thighs. Yeah, yeah -” Roy whines, buries his face in Elric’s neck, breathes him in desperately as everything comes apart at the edges, “Like that, that’s what I want,” Elric sighs, and Roy sinks onto him, muffling himself in the collar of Elric’s coat
He breathes for a moment. Then he makes himself straighten and tidy himself away, helps Elric shrug his coat back on.
Suddenly a hand is on his face and Elric says, “Aw, hell,” wiping at his forehead. “You’ve still got a little….” He goes rummaging in his coat, and comes up with a sheet of paper. In the darkness, Roy can see nothing on it, just what looked like digits evenly spaced across the entire page. Elric also glances at the paper, but shrugs, and begins to efficiently clean Roy’s face with it.
Roy is used to feeling a little sticky, a little unbalanced after surprise, tipsy liaisons, but somehow the professor’s demeanor is grounding him until he can get his legs back under him, and mostly he just feels pleasantly worn out. Like a dog that’s been taken on a run and can finally settle down.
The professor finishes desecrating his illicit paperwork in service of Roy’s face and steps back. Roy really, really hopes he isn’t a spy.
“Well,” Roy says, catching the way the professor’s eyes narrow at the rasp in his voice, “I think we can now agree that the missed curfew was a mutual failing.”
The professor barks out a laugh that echoes down the snickleway.
“Follow me home, flyboy,” he says, and Roy does.