MEATSWORD Drabbles
Dec. 10th, 2022 04:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kraitI had a wonderful time hanging out with some FMA fans this weekend in the MEATSWORD ( Massively Entertaining and Transformative Slash Writers Online Retreat & Discussion) chat! Our wonderful host provided a bevy of 5-sentence fic prompts for Saturday's hangout, and although I didn't manage a ficlet for all of them, I still came out with a generous handful.
All are FMA, except for the "Night and day" prompt, which is NiF.
Roy was generally accustomed to the hazards of his particular brand of alchemy; flames were not, precisely, a surprise to him.
Of course, in the usual way, they weren't surprising because he was the one *causing* them. It turned out that arriving home from work to find them already billowing vigourously from the kitchen window was just as surprising to him as to anyone else; which was to say that his reaction was less than dignified - he flung himself out of the car and stood gawping in the drive like a village idiot, while Havoc, who had driven him home, shouted something about the fire station and drove off in a blur and squeal of tyres.
When he had collected his wits (a span of time he was never, under any circumstances, going to enumerate to anyone, because it was frankly embarrassing) and begun to advance toward the house, he abruptly found it necessary to reassess his original description, because the *actual* village idiot in this scene was tall, blond, and still holding a bowl and whisk as he exited the house with excuses on his (beautiful) lips.
Roy's pulse, pounding in his ears at this proof of life, overpowered his hearing for the most part, but gathered enough - due more to his knowledge of the person involved, and the smell of vanilla wafting from the bowl thant from the aggressive babble pouring from Edward - to infer that the love of his life had made a *slight* miscalculation in the process of making holiday cookies without an oven.
Alchemists tended to find numbers more intrinsically frightening than words. Particularly State Alchemists; and most particularly those on the front lines. Numbers were how they lived and died - quartermasters' figures, weapons trajectories, alchemical reaction ranges, chemical formulae, down to the millimetre or the minute or the mole that meant the difference in where death struck.
Words, outside of official orders, were a lesser evil, a more abstract terror, and Marcoh had little terror left to allot to them.
Until the whisper began to pass, quietly, nervously, sourcelessly, from man to man, and reached his ears: Someone found out how they make the Stones...
Something was rotten in the state of Amestris.
Really, really rotten.
"Mustang, something seriously stinks in here, and in case you haven't noticed everyone else has evacuated the building because there must be a *seriously* awful chemical leak somewhere; why are you still in the office, and also why aren't you puking all over your useless Führer paperwork?"
"I was waiting for my bodyguard to escort me out of the building, of course," Mustang singsonged at him - and then, just as Ed was about to grab his arm and hustle him along to safety, he went to the very secret safe that Ed had installed in the office wall behind the door, and drew out a lidless bottle, which reeked indescribably.
"Let the long weekend begin," Roy told him with a cheerful grin, and immolated the bottle's contents with a snap before offering Ed his arm.
The New Edward, as Roy found himself thinking of him, was a strange creature - half unbearably familiar, half unfathomably changed. Gone were the bright red coat and the leather trousers; the new brown coat and sober clothing made Ed look strangely adult (at least until he opened his mouth). He still muttered incomprehensibly when woken from slumber, but these days his mutterings came out not in alchemical code, but in languages that teased the ear with faint echoes of tongues Roy knew while remaining utterly opaque in content. The little brother that shadowed him was changed, too, though no less present in Ed's life.
Only the golden hair and golden eyes were completely, utterly, reliably familiar - they shone now exactly as they had in every memory Roy cherished, bright as flames and twice as warming through the ice-filled endless nights.
Al is safe. Edward thinks that thought confidently, like armour donned before battle; fiercely, like a man wielding a stick to fend off wolves; constantly, like a rat going round and round on its wheel. Al is safe at home, so even if Ed is here - wherever "here" is this week, France or Spain or Italy or Austria - everything is going to be all right, because the worst can't happen. Al is safe at home, wherever home is (another star? another galaxy? another universe?) and so there's nothing Ed can't manage - nothing he can't survive - in this strange world on the brink of war. The hardest parting he'll ever meet is already behind him.
There is nothing left of Lin Shu. The fiery warrior, the sun in Jingyan's sky, the bright and laughing soul who wrestled with him on the banks of the river outside the capital, has sunk beyond the mountains, spilled its redness over a snowy cliff and been eclipsed by uncaring stone.
The man before him now is pale as a winter moon - drowned in shades of grey and white, turning his face away now and then to cough delicately into a sleeve while he speaks of blackest intrigue: the subtle and chilling ways of a court that Jingyan has always disdained and distanced himself from. There's nothing in this Mei Changsu's words that stirs the slightest warmth in him; he's a frozen waterfall, edges sharp enough to cut and colourless even in the sunshine.
Jingyan prepares to unleash his own hot temper and watch the resulting damage with righteous enjoyment, until Mei Changsu's meaning becomes clear - the Chiyan army avenged, and Lin Shu's name restored - and Jingyan feels a strange sensation, like the first blush of light and warmth returning to the sky.
"That's what she said!"
Roy refrained, with extreme difficulty, from rolling his eyes, and grabbed instead for the bottle of whiskey Maes had precariously balanced on Roy's stack of books - as much to remove it from Maes's reach as to fortify himself against drunken repartee, because Maes under the influence had the humour of a typical twelve-year-old boy - and Roy, who had grown up in a brothel, had outgrown it even before that age.
"I know Serina just dumped you, but I really didn't want that level of detail about why," he groused, while Maes looked about for the booze and failed to find it, possibly because his glasses were hanging beneath his chin.
"Oh, Serina," Maes said, waving a hand through the air like a man dispelling smoke, "who cares about Serina, Roy, she can't compare to the beauty who walked into my 9AM Electrochemical Conversions class this morning; I told you all about her at lunch, remember?"
"Another beauty," Roy laughed, "well, no doubt this one - what's her name, Gracia? - won't last any longer than Serina did, but me and the whiskey will be here to console you over her, too."
Love, everybody said, raised you up - elevated your pulse, lifted your mood, lightened your step, made you aspire to new heights. And it had been like that between them, at first; a heady, weightless thing, a sensation of rising above your old self as though drawn by a cable. Alfons had been so sure, so certain that Edward felt the same: that when that strange, beautiful man who held himself at a remove from the world so easily attached himself to Alfons, fitting into his life as though he'd always been there, it was because they were both lifted by the same source.
"I'm sorry, but Alfons, you're - you're like a brother to me," " that exotic voice said, surprise and gentleness at war in it.
And Alfons remembered that elevators just as often dropped you down to the lowest depths.
Long ago - when they'd both been in college, young and drunk and more free than they'd known - he'd promised Maes he would be there to offer sympathy (and whiskey) when the new "love of his life" dumped him. At that point, Maes had had no fewer than thirteen loves of his life, and none of them had lasted longer than three months; Roy had been comfortably certain that this newest one would touch upon his friend just as lightly, and depart again as freely, and although he had been wrong he had been proud to stand as best man at their wedding.
Then had come the war; they'd enlisted together, fought apart but always in touch - a chain of letters linking them through a series of separate postings, and the rare and precious phone calls when they could manage, a tether through the darkness that reminded Roy of stories he'd read of explorers lost in blizzards, tied together to keep any man from getting lost.
Standing today at the edge of a grave, rain streaking his face, his heart felt strangled within his chest; how could Maes be gone?
He got very drunk that night on a bottle of cheap vodka, and woke tangled in his sheets as though he'd fought them all through the night, but on the following evening he plucked the whiskey from his cabinet and dropped it in a bag, so he wouldn't be tempted to drink it until after he'd arrived on Gracia's doorstep.
Ed squirmed restlessly against the sheets, bound hands tugging on the cord that kept them above his head, and began to regret the challenge he'd tossed at Roy this afternoon.
It wasn't as though he'd never called Roy an old man before, he argued to himself as Roy spread his legs again - for the *fifth* time tonight - and started to slip inside him once more! Why Roy had taken it so personally this particular time was a mystery, but he'd lifted one brow at an angle that told Ed he was *really* annoyed, and purred, "Edward, if there's one thing I'm confident I can outlast and outperform you in, it's sex," in a tone of voice that had Ed's cock rising instantly.
Waiting till evening had been difficult, his arousal returning every time he thought of the sharp glint in Roy's eyes and the way his mouth had moved around the words so sensually, so he'd bustled Roy into the bedroom while it was light outside - but he hadn't really believed Roy could make good on his boast... until, two mutually satisfying orgasms later, the man had sneakily drawn some kind of array on his own thigh that he wouldn't let Ed see, and since then he just - hadn't - stopped.
Above him, Roy hissed his way through a fifth orgasm and reached for Ed's cock on automatic, but there wasn't much for him to do about it, because it had given up two rounds ago, and at this point Ed didn't think it would rise again for a week - though he was going to see if Roy could make it through round six before admitting it.
with bonus chatter:
Krait: I figure if anybody has come up with illicit sex arrays, it's definitely Roy. 😄
Krait: Probably in college. Probably while drunk.
Krait: And the thing is, he's invented an entirely new form of alchemy! But to publish his research would probably require special permission from the Amestrian government censors, and also be really, really embarrassing.
All are FMA, except for the "Night and day" prompt, which is NiF.
Roy was generally accustomed to the hazards of his particular brand of alchemy; flames were not, precisely, a surprise to him.
Of course, in the usual way, they weren't surprising because he was the one *causing* them. It turned out that arriving home from work to find them already billowing vigourously from the kitchen window was just as surprising to him as to anyone else; which was to say that his reaction was less than dignified - he flung himself out of the car and stood gawping in the drive like a village idiot, while Havoc, who had driven him home, shouted something about the fire station and drove off in a blur and squeal of tyres.
When he had collected his wits (a span of time he was never, under any circumstances, going to enumerate to anyone, because it was frankly embarrassing) and begun to advance toward the house, he abruptly found it necessary to reassess his original description, because the *actual* village idiot in this scene was tall, blond, and still holding a bowl and whisk as he exited the house with excuses on his (beautiful) lips.
Roy's pulse, pounding in his ears at this proof of life, overpowered his hearing for the most part, but gathered enough - due more to his knowledge of the person involved, and the smell of vanilla wafting from the bowl thant from the aggressive babble pouring from Edward - to infer that the love of his life had made a *slight* miscalculation in the process of making holiday cookies without an oven.
Alchemists tended to find numbers more intrinsically frightening than words. Particularly State Alchemists; and most particularly those on the front lines. Numbers were how they lived and died - quartermasters' figures, weapons trajectories, alchemical reaction ranges, chemical formulae, down to the millimetre or the minute or the mole that meant the difference in where death struck.
Words, outside of official orders, were a lesser evil, a more abstract terror, and Marcoh had little terror left to allot to them.
Until the whisper began to pass, quietly, nervously, sourcelessly, from man to man, and reached his ears: Someone found out how they make the Stones...
Something was rotten in the state of Amestris.
Really, really rotten.
"Mustang, something seriously stinks in here, and in case you haven't noticed everyone else has evacuated the building because there must be a *seriously* awful chemical leak somewhere; why are you still in the office, and also why aren't you puking all over your useless Führer paperwork?"
"I was waiting for my bodyguard to escort me out of the building, of course," Mustang singsonged at him - and then, just as Ed was about to grab his arm and hustle him along to safety, he went to the very secret safe that Ed had installed in the office wall behind the door, and drew out a lidless bottle, which reeked indescribably.
"Let the long weekend begin," Roy told him with a cheerful grin, and immolated the bottle's contents with a snap before offering Ed his arm.
The New Edward, as Roy found himself thinking of him, was a strange creature - half unbearably familiar, half unfathomably changed. Gone were the bright red coat and the leather trousers; the new brown coat and sober clothing made Ed look strangely adult (at least until he opened his mouth). He still muttered incomprehensibly when woken from slumber, but these days his mutterings came out not in alchemical code, but in languages that teased the ear with faint echoes of tongues Roy knew while remaining utterly opaque in content. The little brother that shadowed him was changed, too, though no less present in Ed's life.
Only the golden hair and golden eyes were completely, utterly, reliably familiar - they shone now exactly as they had in every memory Roy cherished, bright as flames and twice as warming through the ice-filled endless nights.
Al is safe. Edward thinks that thought confidently, like armour donned before battle; fiercely, like a man wielding a stick to fend off wolves; constantly, like a rat going round and round on its wheel. Al is safe at home, so even if Ed is here - wherever "here" is this week, France or Spain or Italy or Austria - everything is going to be all right, because the worst can't happen. Al is safe at home, wherever home is (another star? another galaxy? another universe?) and so there's nothing Ed can't manage - nothing he can't survive - in this strange world on the brink of war. The hardest parting he'll ever meet is already behind him.
There is nothing left of Lin Shu. The fiery warrior, the sun in Jingyan's sky, the bright and laughing soul who wrestled with him on the banks of the river outside the capital, has sunk beyond the mountains, spilled its redness over a snowy cliff and been eclipsed by uncaring stone.
The man before him now is pale as a winter moon - drowned in shades of grey and white, turning his face away now and then to cough delicately into a sleeve while he speaks of blackest intrigue: the subtle and chilling ways of a court that Jingyan has always disdained and distanced himself from. There's nothing in this Mei Changsu's words that stirs the slightest warmth in him; he's a frozen waterfall, edges sharp enough to cut and colourless even in the sunshine.
Jingyan prepares to unleash his own hot temper and watch the resulting damage with righteous enjoyment, until Mei Changsu's meaning becomes clear - the Chiyan army avenged, and Lin Shu's name restored - and Jingyan feels a strange sensation, like the first blush of light and warmth returning to the sky.
"That's what she said!"
Roy refrained, with extreme difficulty, from rolling his eyes, and grabbed instead for the bottle of whiskey Maes had precariously balanced on Roy's stack of books - as much to remove it from Maes's reach as to fortify himself against drunken repartee, because Maes under the influence had the humour of a typical twelve-year-old boy - and Roy, who had grown up in a brothel, had outgrown it even before that age.
"I know Serina just dumped you, but I really didn't want that level of detail about why," he groused, while Maes looked about for the booze and failed to find it, possibly because his glasses were hanging beneath his chin.
"Oh, Serina," Maes said, waving a hand through the air like a man dispelling smoke, "who cares about Serina, Roy, she can't compare to the beauty who walked into my 9AM Electrochemical Conversions class this morning; I told you all about her at lunch, remember?"
"Another beauty," Roy laughed, "well, no doubt this one - what's her name, Gracia? - won't last any longer than Serina did, but me and the whiskey will be here to console you over her, too."
Love, everybody said, raised you up - elevated your pulse, lifted your mood, lightened your step, made you aspire to new heights. And it had been like that between them, at first; a heady, weightless thing, a sensation of rising above your old self as though drawn by a cable. Alfons had been so sure, so certain that Edward felt the same: that when that strange, beautiful man who held himself at a remove from the world so easily attached himself to Alfons, fitting into his life as though he'd always been there, it was because they were both lifted by the same source.
"I'm sorry, but Alfons, you're - you're like a brother to me," " that exotic voice said, surprise and gentleness at war in it.
And Alfons remembered that elevators just as often dropped you down to the lowest depths.
Long ago - when they'd both been in college, young and drunk and more free than they'd known - he'd promised Maes he would be there to offer sympathy (and whiskey) when the new "love of his life" dumped him. At that point, Maes had had no fewer than thirteen loves of his life, and none of them had lasted longer than three months; Roy had been comfortably certain that this newest one would touch upon his friend just as lightly, and depart again as freely, and although he had been wrong he had been proud to stand as best man at their wedding.
Then had come the war; they'd enlisted together, fought apart but always in touch - a chain of letters linking them through a series of separate postings, and the rare and precious phone calls when they could manage, a tether through the darkness that reminded Roy of stories he'd read of explorers lost in blizzards, tied together to keep any man from getting lost.
Standing today at the edge of a grave, rain streaking his face, his heart felt strangled within his chest; how could Maes be gone?
He got very drunk that night on a bottle of cheap vodka, and woke tangled in his sheets as though he'd fought them all through the night, but on the following evening he plucked the whiskey from his cabinet and dropped it in a bag, so he wouldn't be tempted to drink it until after he'd arrived on Gracia's doorstep.
Ed squirmed restlessly against the sheets, bound hands tugging on the cord that kept them above his head, and began to regret the challenge he'd tossed at Roy this afternoon.
It wasn't as though he'd never called Roy an old man before, he argued to himself as Roy spread his legs again - for the *fifth* time tonight - and started to slip inside him once more! Why Roy had taken it so personally this particular time was a mystery, but he'd lifted one brow at an angle that told Ed he was *really* annoyed, and purred, "Edward, if there's one thing I'm confident I can outlast and outperform you in, it's sex," in a tone of voice that had Ed's cock rising instantly.
Waiting till evening had been difficult, his arousal returning every time he thought of the sharp glint in Roy's eyes and the way his mouth had moved around the words so sensually, so he'd bustled Roy into the bedroom while it was light outside - but he hadn't really believed Roy could make good on his boast... until, two mutually satisfying orgasms later, the man had sneakily drawn some kind of array on his own thigh that he wouldn't let Ed see, and since then he just - hadn't - stopped.
Above him, Roy hissed his way through a fifth orgasm and reached for Ed's cock on automatic, but there wasn't much for him to do about it, because it had given up two rounds ago, and at this point Ed didn't think it would rise again for a week - though he was going to see if Roy could make it through round six before admitting it.
with bonus chatter:
Krait: I figure if anybody has come up with illicit sex arrays, it's definitely Roy. 😄
Krait: Probably in college. Probably while drunk.
Krait: And the thing is, he's invented an entirely new form of alchemy! But to publish his research would probably require special permission from the Amestrian government censors, and also be really, really embarrassing.
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Date: 2022-12-28 12:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-03 03:52 am (UTC)