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He pounded his fist to the door until it rattled in its hinges; to little avail.
Ed stood back and waited. And waited. And waited.
His jaw worked as he muttered filth under his breath, glaring up and down the vacated corridor as if the solution to his problem would materialise if he just willed it hard enough.
The flat behind the door remained dead silent, and the door itself unyielding and unmoving.
Ed didn’t have time for this shit.
His flesh fingers dug into the worn leather of the book in his grasp, and he delivered a sharp, frustrated kick to the door that echoed down the hall before it faded into silence.
Nothing.
Fucking nothing.
He had fucking shit to do today, and he knew Colonel Wetwipe was in there because his stupid car was out front, so the bitch was purposely ignoring him! As if he had all fucking day!
“Open the fuck up, Mustang!” He kicked again, less vicious.
Ed was swiftly losing interest; he glared down at the book–he had snatched the thing from Mustang’s office the other day, entirely on accident, because Mustang had thrown them out and Ed had swept all the shit in front of him into his bag–and had half a mind to just put it down on the floor. Let the Colonel trip over it when he left for Headquarters tomorrow.
The thought was almost enough to tickle a smile out of him.
He heaved a heavy sigh instead, tapping the book to the door as he mulled his next move over.
That was when something stirred on the other side.
His head snapped up, and he listened, brows pulling into a frown.
Ed couldn’t exactly... place what he was hearing. It wasn’t something he associated with Mustang.
Mustang moved with purpose. This was unsteady. Uneven. The timing of the steps was all wrong, the weight distributed a different way each time.
Stumbling. Tripping.
Something was wrong. Was he hurt? Was that why it took him so long to respond?
Ed shifted silently on the spot, one foot slipping in front of the other. His mouth tightened into a grim line, and he readied himself to drop the book and transmute a weapon.
Finally, the door cracked open-
And Ed faltered.
“What the hell is wrong with you? I’ve been knocking for like twenty minutes!” he demanded, even though it had probably been closer to 45 seconds.
His shoulders, tensed for a different sort of confrontation, did not relax.
Mustang leaned heavily in the doorway, whole and healthy, and as if seeing him out of uniform wasn’t disturbing enough already, his hair was a mess, his eyes glassy, and he swayed on the spot despite the doorframe’s support.
“Yeah, sure. Sorry. Thought you’d go away eventually. Should’ve known better,” Mustang replied, his usual crisp and clipped words flowing into each other like a distorted melody. “What’d’you want?”
Ed frowned.
This was wrong.
“I kinda accidentally stole one of your books the other day when you kicked us out of your office.” He thrust the hardcover against Mustang’s chest and was even more perturbed when it took the man three whole seconds to react and accept it. “What’s wrong with you? You sick or something?”
He made a noncommittal noise and pointed his gaze downwards in the general direction of the book in his hand, though for some reason Ed doubted he was really seeing it.
“Something. Thanks. Bye.”
Mustang turned away, and Ed followed before the thought had even properly manifested in his head.
This was wrong.
Mustang stopped at the soft, muffled thunk of Ed’s gloved automail hand colliding with the door. The man frowned at him over his shoulder, the hand not clutching the book shooting out to his side to catch himself against the wall when he stumbled over nothing.
“No. Out,” he ordered, but that flat tone of voice really did not inspire Ed to listen.
The Colonel was acting weird. If he was sick... he probably shouldn’t be alone. Not that Ed volunteered to play the bastard’s nursemaid; no, but he could call someone. He had to have friends, right? Family?
...or he could always resort to calling Lieutenant Hawkeye.
“Nope. I’m coming in,” he said and closed the door behind himself, marching past the somewhat familiar entryway and into the unknown rest of the apartment.
Mustang let out an annoyed breath and staggered off, one hand raking through his mussed hair. He dropped the book to the nearest flat surface–which happened to be a hip high stack of other books sprouting up from the floor like a stalagmite–and himself on the nearest comfortable flat surface, which happened to be the couch dominating the middle of the room.
“Damn, bitch, you live like this?” Ed said, eyes flitting around the space.
The curtains were drawn, every window covered. There were a bunch of boxes piled into one corner of the room, and a tastefully messy desk shoved into the other.
The small kitchen that connected seamlessly to the living area was clean and tidy–unused.
Barely any furniture apart from the couch and armchair. A small cabinet nestled against the far wall. The coffee table drowned under books and loose papers, some of which didn’t look like they belonged in a private residence, judging from the military’s crest stamped on them.
Then, there was the half empty, uncorked bottle sitting inconspicuously on the one empty corner of the table.
Ed deflated, a knot in his gut.
“Are you drinking the day away, Mustang?” He made his slow way over to the armchair, taking in the ambience of the room.
It was dark, and messy, and lonely.
It was sad.
Mustang hummed, crossing his legs at the ankles over the opposite armrest of the couch, one arm thrown across his eyes as the other fumbled blindly for the bottle that waited within perfect reach of him.
Ed looked away, but the sloshing of amber liquid against glass was deafening and inescapable in the silent room.
“You’re going to be fun at the office tomorrow,” he said, because he didn’t know what else to say.
Or, well. How to say it.
“I’m off tomorrow.”
Ah.
“And you have nothing better to do?”
The judgement carried clear in his voice, but he was pretty sure Mustang wouldn’t pick up on it in his state.
Ed wasn’t unfamiliar with alcohol. He had no real interest in it, because frankly, he had better things to do, but he had observed its effects as a kid during parties and festivals back home.
It was supposed to be fun. Unrestrained laughter echoing up to their room in the middle of the night, after Granny had sent them off to bed. Clinking glasses, stupid jokes, arms linked in an effort to steady one another only to tumble over together.
Mustang’s arm slipped from his face, revealing dull black eyes fixed unseeingly to the ceiling. He laid the bottle down against his chest, without the cork but empty enough that it didn’t spill over his ratty undershirt.
“I was s’pposed to-” he broke off, blinking, and Ed frowned. “...doesn’t matter.”
They fell silent. Mustang lay there with his shoulders propped up on the armrest, head tipped back, eyes far away, hands folded over the whiskey bottle.
This room was fucking stifling.
Ed’s chest squeezed around his lungs, ribcage constricting his heart.
He really wished he knew more about alcohol. How high was the percentage of actual ethanol in an average whiskey? How much of it was detrimental to consume for a man of Mustang’s age and size?
His silent, fragmented calculations were interrupted by a shuddering breath drawn.
“I should have died in that building,” Mustang said, soft and flat, and Ed’s blood froze in his veins.
“What the fuck are you on about?” he said way too quietly, his voice cracking.
Mustang’s face was like a mask, expressionless and unmoving, and Ed didn’t like it. It was nothing like the asshole’s pokerface, infuriating but familiar, nothing like his cocky grins, his softer, more private expressions when he rested a hand on Ed’s shoulder and said something stupid and playful that made Ed snort even if he didn’t feel like it.
This was nothing.
“I don’t know why I fought,” he went on in that same creepy-ass tone, eyes somewhere else entirely. “I should’ve let them kill me. How many people-” He fell silent and raised the bottle to his lips with shaking hands, swallowed a few times.
Mustang blinked slowly, and Ed’s innards knotted.
“Why did I fight?” the words were little more than a slurred whisper, but they ripped through the dark, silent room like a gunshot. “Why did I kill them? They were right. I should have died. They should have killed me. Let me burn. Burn to ash like everyone else.”
“Colonel,” Ed croaked, bile burning the back of his throat.
This wasn’t right. This shouldn’t-
Why would he say that?
Mustang went on as if Ed hadn’t spoken. “I’m too selfish to die. Too much of a coward to put a bullet in my head like I should. I should have let them kill me. Why do I always fight? Why do I keep fighting?”
Ed sprang to his feet, balled fists trembling at his sides. His throat was clogged with a dozen words, all trying to tear free at once and none breaking through.
He stomped around the coffee table and snatched the bottle from Mustang’s unresisting hands.
“You’ve had enough!” He turned on his heel and strode to the kitchenette, where he slammed the fucking bottle down on the counter and scrubbed a quick hand over his watering eyes.
Ethanol acted as a dehydrator. They should start with rehydration.
Ed ripped open and slammed shut cabinet doors until he found the glasses, cursing under his breath when he had to hike his knee up on the counter in order to reach them.
He filled the hard-earned glass with tap water and stalked back over, setting it down firmly in place of the bottle.
“There. Water.”
Mustang didn’t react, no matter how intensely Ed stared and willed him to.
“Maes was the only person who was happy when I came back out of that building,” he said after another few moments, so quiet Ed probably wasn’t even meant to hear.
It punched the breath from his lungs, and his knees grew weak.
“Maes?” he repeated, thin and weak. When had Lieutenant-Colo- Brigadier-General Hughes become Maes?
An image of that framed photo flashed before his mind’s eye, the one in the Hughes’s living room, the one of the Colonel and Mister Hughes, young and together and smiling.
Yeah. Yeah, maybe that checked out.
“Maes was the one who wrestled the gun from me, over and over, no matter how many times- a-and he took away my lighter-” Mustang made a strangled, hurt noise that echoed painfully around Ed’s hollowed ribcage, and the man’s death mask cracked, finally, his brow scrunching with grief. “Which was so fucking stupid. As if I need a fucking lighter to make a flame. But he still tried. He always tried. God, he was such an idiot, such a stupid wonderful idiot, stupid enough to give a shit about someone like me, and now he’s fucking dead.”
Ed swallowed hard against his tight throat and dug his teeth into his lip. His eyes burned, and his throat burned, and his heart burned.
He let himself collapse onto the couch at Mustang’s hip. His mind stumbled over every single word that left the man’s mouth, unable to process anything. Unwilling to.
“He was your friend. I’m sorry,” Ed said quietly, as if realising it for the first time, staring at the floorboards between his heavy boots. He had been so caught up in Mustang’s betrayal at the time, his own grief, and the part he played in Mister Hughes’s passing, that it never occurred to him-
Mustang was probably in pain, too. In a lot of pain.
Silence settled. It weighed a million tons.
“It wasn’t your fault, you know,” Mustang said, and Ed snapped his head up to find him looking at him directly for the first time since the door.
“How d’you-”
“Gracia told me. She doesn’t blame you. Maes didn’t either.”
His lips parted, but no sound broke free. The words hurt. In a good way.
“Miss Gracia? When did you talk to her?”
Mustang twitched his shoulder, directing his unfocused gaze straight up at the ceiling again.
“I visit her. Not as much as I should... but as much as I can.”
“Oh,” he said softly, not sure what to do with that.
Ed didn’t really consider Mustang... a person, as such. He was more of a spectre to him. A presence bound to a desk at Headquarters, spotted only occasionally out under the open skies. Haunting Ed’s ass for reasons unbeknownst to him.
The thought of Mustang going to visit Miss Gracia and Elysia was beyond foreign.
But the spectre was becoming fleshier every second Ed spent in this sad, lonely flat with him.
“So, why are you sad?” he spoke up again and only realised after the words had left his mouth how fucking childish they sounded. He pulled a face, and Mustang snorted.
“Don’t bother, kid,” he said, the faintest hint of a smile tugging on his gloomy features, and flickered his empty eyes back up to the ceiling. Slipping away, and away, and away. “Y’should go back to your brother.”
“Nah.” He crossed his arms, kicked his feet up onto the cluttered table with a violent thud, and dumped himself backwards against the couch cushions and a little bit on top of Mustang, just to bother him.
And, maybe, to try and make him smile. Not that Ed was going to admit it.
He waved away the Colonel’s oof and halfhearted, glassy glare and settled in, made himself comfortable.
“I’m staying. Someone's gotta make sure you drink your water.”
“Fullmetal. Fucking remove yourself from my property,” he ordered, though he sounded nothing like a military commander and was very much talking to the ceiling, so Ed found it even easier than usual to disregard him.
“This ain’t your property. You're renting. So, I’m gonna stay right here, and you’re gonna drink that fucking water. Alcohol is a dehydrator. You're dehydrated. Hydrate, bitch, c’mon.”
Mustang heaved a tired sigh and didn’t argue. Just laid there, hands folded atop his stomach, mind floating away.
Ed watched, and his put upon nonchalance slipped, left him off balance and helpless.
He didn’t know what to do, but there had to be something.
“Hey, um. D’you want me to call the Lieutenant?”
The Colonel’s chest swelled and deflated with a long breath taken and expelled, but his eyes didn’t even flicker in his direction.
“No. No, don’t bother her. I need to be alone.”
Ed hummed. “One of those days, huh? I get it. We can be alone together.”
Mustang snorted, though nothing in his expression so much as twitched.
And that was that.
Ed bent and picked up the uppermost book from the stack at the foot of the couch, settled back in, and flipped it open.
“You’re a good kid, Ed,” Mustang said after one, two, three minutes, and Ed’s eyes froze on the middle of the page, but he didn’t look up. The Colonel’s voice was... frail in a way Ed couldn’t have imagined, and he wouldn’t pair that sound with a face. “You should stay away from me.”
He stared at the page and let out a slow, controlled breath.
“Don’t tell me what to do, Mustang.”
He went back to reading. Mustang shut his stupid whore-mouth and, finally, reached for the goddamn water. His hands shook so bad he almost spilled it.
And Ed, well. He pretended he didn’t notice the gentle, barely audible hitch of Mustang’s breath, or the way he kept rubbing his knuckles across his dull, glistening eyes.