The trees are changing colors, and it really is fantastically beautiful. The mountains are dappled with pine, spots of green among red and golds and oranges. Smells sharp, clean. Smoke rises somewhere in the distance. In this moment, he can almost be someone else, bloodhounds and horses and the scent of gunpowder. They hide the hospital in this forest, deep behind the front lines where the war gropes fruitlessly with unseeing fingers.

He pulls the thin cotton sheets around his shoulders and shivers in the early morning chill. It’s awkward with only one arm, the other encased in white plaster. He rings a bell and a nurse brings him another blanket. Hospitals are all the same in the mornings, dead and cold. Respite, maybe. Turn over and go back to sleep.

He wakes up again when the nurse comes back with breakfast, some unidentifiable white glop in bowl. Protein mixture, she says. Take better care of yourself, sir. It looks like vomit and tastes like cardboard. He eats it anyway and notices the bed next to his for the first time, golden strands on military issue sheets. The boy is on his belly.

“Do you have any idea,” Ed says, “How awkward it is to eat like this?” The words are thick on his tongue, bruised and swollen. “The nurse had to fuckin’ spoon feed me that shit.”

Roy mumbles something; he can’t even hear himself. The bandages on Ed’s back are a gauzy maroon-brown, stained with dried blood. There are a couple of uncovered scratches on Ed’s arm.

“What was that?” Ed asks.

Roy pauses, clears his throat. “Thank you for saving my life.”

“Oh,” says Ed. “Yeah, whatever.”

Sometime in the middle of the morning he gets up and rolls their beds together. Ed looks at him skeptically. “You’ve got a head injury.”

Roy touches the bandage above his good eye. “Nothing serious. I’m just here for observation.” The nurse had left him a paperback romance novel and a deck of playing cards, creased and rubbed soft around the edges. He'd dropped the novel on the floor. “Want to play cards?”

“I only know how to play Go Fish.”

“That’s fine,” Roy says.

“I used to play it with Al and Winry when we were little.” Roy takes this information, tastes it delicately with his mind, and rolls it away into a corner. He wonders how he is going to shuffle the deck with a broken arm. Automail probably wouldn’t have a very good grip, either. He settles for dropping the cards from one hand to the other, and deals them into piles on the creased sheets. Ed studies his hand intently.

“I’m sorry,” Roy offers. “I should have waited for the other platoon.”

“Moron,” Ed says. “Go fish.”

They play a few rounds and Ed wins, seven to five. Roy makes conversation about the breakfast food and looks sideways to where Ed is blowing the hair out of his face. A few strands get caught in his eyelashes.

“I’m going to sleep,” Ed says irritably. “They were picking shrapnel out of my back for half the night.”

Lunch is some kind of meatloaf garnished with a few limp slices of tomato, a slice of bread to the side. There are also glasses of water and little pill plates on the tray. Roy recognizes the orange multivitamin and the light blue painkillers, but not the oblong white ones. He swallows everything anyway. The nurse had come back earlier, noted the playing cards with an indulgent smile. Ed eats lying down, his head pillowed on his arm.

“Does it hurt a lot?” Roy asks.

“What?”

“Your back.” He motions with a bread crust.

“Oh. Not really. I mean, it hurt like a bitch when they were picking stuff out, but now it’s mostly just sore. It looks a lot worse than it really is.”

“Ah,” says Roy. Ed gnaws ferociously on a chunk of meatloaf. When he blushes, Roy notices, it always starts from the tips of his ears and spreads across his face to the bridge of his nose.

“You ever seen two girls kissing?” Ed asks. The words run together like pebbles underwater.

Roy thinks back to his school days, before he entered the military academy. Cut grass and sunshine. A wooden swing over a pond. “Yes.”

“Fuck,” Ed says, “Who am I kidding? Of course you have, you big fuckin’ pervert.” Angry red.

Half an hour later, Ed removes his face from his pillow.

“Ross and Hawkeye,” he explains.

“What?”

“It was that night after that big ambush. I had to take a piss, and I guess they were both on sentry duty or something, because I just kind of ran into them. I don’t think they saw me.”

Roy nods, and reminds himself to have a word with Hawkeye about what kind of behavior is considered appropriate when one is responsible for the safety of thirty-two other soldiers. There is a war on, after all.

They’re both getting restless, but Roy hides it much better than he expects Ed will ever be able to. Even when he hadn’t been a child anymore, he’d worry the edges of his jacket and shuffle his feet when giving his reports, eyes flitting from Roy’s face to the window to the desk to the couch. A study in suppressed kinetic energy, braid swinging back and forth. The twitching of his foot makes the wire frame of the bed creak. Roy’s bed rattles in sympathy.

“Edward,” Roy says, and Ed jerks.

“Fuck! What?”

“Ed,” Roy says, and reaches across the mattress with his good hand to grasp Ed’s. Ed’s grip is clammy and painfully tight.

“Fuck,” Ed says again. “Fuck you, you bastard.” He draws a shaky breath. “Fucking hell, don’t you ever do that – ”

“Okay,” Roy says, “okay.” Ed has doubled over on himself and is making low hitching noises. A fresh layer of red blooms across the bandages on his back. Roy leans over and unfolds him, smearing away the tear tracks on his cheeks. Ed’s lips taste sour, sleep and hospitals and blood and meatloaf. Shudder once and sigh. Some of the cards on the sheets between them fall to the floor.

“Okay,” Roy whispers into Ed’s hair, “I promise.”

Ed falls asleep again with his head pillowed on Roy’s thigh, fingers clenched stiffly in the fabric of Roy’s hospital pants. There are purple and green bruises across his cheekbones, pale skin and red lips. He’s a fractured stained glass window with translucent eyelids, and Roy runs his fingers down the softness of his exposed neck once and goes back to the romance novel he picked up off the floor. The scent of pine blows in through the curtains.