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When Fire Meets Fire	By : helliongoddess Category: Fullmetal Alchemist > Crossovers Views: 647 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: No ownership of either Fullmetal Alchemist or Saiyuki is implied or intended, no money made on this work.

Chapter List
- 1-When Fire Meets Fire
- 1
Author’s Notes:

Self-betaed, so all mistakes (and I’m sure there are many) are entirely my own, so I apologize in advance. Apologies also for any inconsistencies with the canon of either series. This was originally conceived as a short crack piece, but it clearly had a mind of its own, turning into something else altogether. Sometimes it seems like I’m just here to take dictation…

P.S. If I ever get another plotbunny for a crossover fic in my hands, will somebody please: first shoot the damned bunny, then shoot me. They are much, much harder than they look…

Setting: early in the Ishvalan Rebellion in FMA -- Early Saiyuki Reload...

Part One

Roy hunkered down deep in his foxhole, sipping slowly at the last cold dregs of the coffee Maes had made before he left that morning. He could have heated it up with a quick burst of alchemic fire from his glove, but he was totally alone in the area until Hughes returned, and had a one-track mind on staying as invisible as possible. He had no reinforcements to back him up, and no ammo for anything but his .45 sidearm: nothing but his pistol and his ignition glove to defend himself with if another detachment of Ishvalan rebels showed up. Granted, the enemy troops they had encountered up ‘til now had mostly been just ragtag poorly-armed groups of rebels, but things had been changing ever since the incident when some Amestrian soldier had shot an Ishvalan child. To the Ishvalans and many onlookers, it appeared to be a shooting in cold blood, but the Amestrian Army, of course, had reported it as a simple accident. Since that fateful day, the mood in the deeply-spiritual country had darkened, and the Ishvalan rebels had been out for blood, their ancient fury for vendetta fully-ignited. In some ways, Roy didn’t blame them.

So until Maes returned from Central in a few days with a transport full of men and ammo, all Roy could really do was lie low and try to draw as little attention to himself as possible. This meant no campfire to ward off the frigid cold that descended as soon as the desert sun went down, and no way to cook anything more complicated than a pot of coffee - he’d have to make do with the meager supply of MRE’s he had left in his pack. And because the desert surrounding him was so flat and visibility such a concern, Roy knew he really shouldn’t leave the foxhole for anything other than taking a dump - and he had to be damned careful when he did that. None of these wonderful prospects did anything to improve Roy’s already-grim mood.

He sighed heavily, pulling his long, thick greatcoat up over him as last sliver of the sun slid below the horizon and the temperature began to plummet. He lay back and looked up at the stars began to wink on in abundance across the vast vault of the desert sky, and was amazed once again by how much clearer the Ishvalan nights were than those in Central. Thinking of Central made the heaviness in his chest feel even more oppressive, prodding painfully at a carefully-hidden clutch of memories he was trying studiously to avoid. Roy Mustang generally was not one at all prone to looking back, and he told himself firmly that any brooding over the time he and Maes had spent together at the Acadamy, and later, during their first assignments in Central, was totally pointless, and only going to make him feel worse.

Roy had been the serious one in their class and Maes the class clown, and they had bonded quickly and naturally, becoming first best friends and then - discreetly, of course – “friends with benefits.” (Roy could never quite bring himself to call them lovers, although he remembered Maes using the term many times in their private conversations.). They had parted reluctantly when their assignments had separated them, sending them to opposite ends of Amestris.   It had been a bittersweet surprise many long months later when they had met up again unexpectedly in the middle of the bloody uprising in Ishval – with the Eastern Rebellion gathering momentum, there was little time for them to get re-acquainted, much less further their relationship. Nonetheless, Roy had been very glad to see Maes, and Maes him.

And now, Maes Hughes was gone from his life again. In one very important way, Maes was really gone for good, this time, and Roy was stuck here in this shitty foxhole, alone. He had to accept that this kind of solitude was going to be his status quo, from this point on. This was not exactly the life he had once envisioned for himself as a State Alchemist, Roy groused to himself as he fingered the brand-new Major’s stars on the shoulder-boards of his coat.

He had been forced to say goodbye to Maes Hughes that morning in more ways than one. Maes had broken the news to Roy last night that he had decided to propose to Gracia, and planned to do so as soon as he got back to Central. Neither of them needed to say it out loud, but the unspoken given that came with Maes’ announcement was, of course, the demise of the long-time physical relationship between the two men.

Maes had known Roy would understand that it had to end and why, with no explanations needed. It was one of the reasons he loved him so much, because Mustang was just that kind of honorable guy, despite the scandalous and gruff line of shit he liked to talk. Maes counted on the deep bond between himself and Roy, a bond that far transcended anything physical that had happened between them. He knew that bond would never change, no matter where their lives took them, or how much their paths merged or diverged. He would always have Roy’s back and Roy his, throughout this life and on into the next.

But what Maes Hughes did not know was just how much Roy had come to depend on that physical closeness between the two men. His intimacy with Maes had become an anchor for Roy, a point of stability and sanity for him in the midst of all the mindless violence and questionable politics he was constantly thrust into as a State Alchemist – especially since coming to Ishval. Being the Flame Alchemist had become a much tougher job than Roy had ever expected it to be: it was complicated and trying, simply dealing with the military bureaucracy every day. But it became downright soul-shattering, after the uprising in Ishval started, and Roy was sent in with unconditional orders to “exterminate” all Ishvalan rebels- men, women, and children alike. The goal had been to quell all unrest and bring the Ishvalans to heel, but ever since the shooting incident things had been steadily escalating. Roy could feel the spectre of a full-out civil war looming like an approaching hurricane: he knew it in his bones, and the implications of it sickened and discouraged him. But with Maes’ unfailing common sense and relentless good humor by his side all day, and his warm pliant body next to him at night, Roy had somehow been able to keep going, even through even the worst of it.

Of course, Mustang had no doubt their friendship would endure: he didn’t need Maes to tell him that. Roy assured his friend that he had no doubt he would love Gracia when he met her, and that everything would be fine, nothing would change. Roy could never let his friend know just how large a hole in his life Maes’ departure from his bed was actually going to leave. But Roy felt it growing already, on that first cold desert night, like the palpable phantom pain of a missing limb.

Roy couldn’t help but laugh at the irony, that Maes would not only be clueless as to how much Roy really needed him, but to end up being the one of them to manage to actually land and commit to a woman. God knows, the Army was no help – it seemed to constantly conspire to butcher any attempts at a personal life by its officers. Shit, this whole thing was all probably my own damn fault, Roy thought bitterly as he shivered in the foxhole. With all of his constant braggadocio about women, it probably never even occurred to Maes that the physical side of their relationship might truly be important to Roy, necessary even.

“Nicely done, asshole,” he chided himself out loud. He sighed again. “Well, nothing to be done now,” he grumbled wearily, pouring the dregs of the ice-cold coffee into the sand at the rim of the foxhole. He looked around, making one last survey of his surroundings to assure himself there were no signs of any enemy movement of any kind within his line-of-sight. Seeing nothing, Roy pulled his watch cap down over his eyes and slid down further into the foxhole. “Might as well get a few hours of sleep,” he groaned to himself, “gonna be a long fucking night.”

He was just starting to drift into that dark-grey area where muzzy wakefulness slides effortlessly down into deep sleep when he was suddenly shocked wide-awake by a loud fizzling sound, as the bright blue crackling light of alchemic static filled the foxhole.

“….aaanzoooooo, nooooo!!!!” It was a deep voice, starting out low and quiet, as if very far away, and getting progressively louder, and it seemed to be coming at him from out of nowhere, very quickly. Less than a second later, he heard a loud, aggravated, “SHIT!” barked out by the same voice, as something big landed with a heavy thud in the sand at the other end of the foxhole from Roy. As the crackling blue light faded, Roy could see it was definitely a human body, sitting mostly upright, quite clearly alive, and apparently intact and uninjured. It was definitely a male, long and lanky – almost all arms and legs, it seemed, with long red hair, wearing some sort of silly-looking dun-colored jodhpurs, clunky boots, and a thick blue vest over a white singlet.

The intruder seemed to pretty stunned, and was making no aggressive moves towards him, but Roy pulled his pistol, for intimidation purposes if nothing else, and held his gloved hand at the ready as well, leaving nothing to chance.

“Alright, who the fuck are you? How did you get here? Explain yourself!” he demanded angrily.

The red-headed intruder turned slowly, still shaking his head as if to clear it, and dusting himself off from his ungainly landing in the sand. He looked around the foxhole, obviously puzzled, and grinned lopsidedly at Roy.

“The name’s Sha Gojyo, buddy, and fuck if I know how I got here. Just where the hell am I?”

Roy pulled his small flashlight from his coat pocket and shone it directly at the man. The man squinted from the bright light in his eyes.

“You’re Ishvalan,” Roy hissed as he saw the crimson eyes and deep bronze skin of the intruder. His brain whirred, sifting all the possibilities. Just how the hell did he get here? And if this guy could get here, maybe there are more on their way...

“Since when do Ishvalans use Alchemy?” he growled.

“Ish-what?” Gojyo replied, puzzled. “Alchemy…” he thought a second, slowly realizing what the guy meant. “Alchemy?!” he laughed. “You think I got myself here somehow, on purpose? Like, with some kind of fuckin’ magic? That’s rich, pal. Listen, buddy, if I could’ve somehow ‘genied’ myself away from where I was for some kinda vacation, it sure as fuck wouldn’t’ve been to land on my ass here with you, like this.”

He shook his head, looking around and taking in more of his surroundings. He clearly was a long, long way from the Tougenkyou mountainside where he and the rest of the Sanzo Ikkou had been battling a large horde of rampaging youkai. He really hoped the other three were faring ok without him – it had not been going all that well when he had suddenly been yanked away, right in the thick of the battle. The last thing he remembered was hearing Sanzo rushing through his mantra, “om ma ni hatsu me un,” to activate the Maten Sutra, just as he had managed to wrap the chain of his shakujo around the scruffy neck of the demon that stood between them. Gojyo had been in a panic to pull the fucking youkai off of the priest, before those deadly claws sunk into the soft bouzu flesh they were just about to seize. He had guessed, from the absence of reports from the Smith & Wesson, that Sanzo was either out of ammo or had somehow become separated from his pistol, and Gojyo was afraid if he didn’t yank this demon back from the priest right away, the asshole would have made unholy mincemeat of Sanzo in less than a second. It wouldn’t have mattered to him all that much, but he knew Hakkai and the kid would have been pretty broken up if their fearless leader bit the dust, so he had acted on impulse and adrenalin, trying his best to save Sanzo’s sorry skinny butt.

Gojyo gritted his teeth and took a slow, deep breath. So… this was all goddamn Sanzo’s fault, then: he sent me here! It just fucking figures, doesn’t it… Fuck, but he’s gonna pay for this, when I get back, if I have to take it out of his tight cherry ass… Gojyo looked up at the young man in the uniform, aggravation distorting his normally-handsome features.

“Look, Sparky… I really need to get back to where I was…like, now? How’s about I tell you how I got here, and maybe then you can tell me how to get right back where I was, ok?” Gojyo offered reasonably, trying to fight off the creeping panic he felt. It sounded like a fair enough offer to him.

“Hey, I have the weapons - I make the deals. And don’t fucking call me that,” Roy spat, gritting his teeth at the hated nickname, one he had been saddled with off and on throughout his State Alchemist training, much to his chagrin. He told himself it had to be just a coincidence, and continued his interrogation determinedly. “So are you an Ishvalan, or not? You sure as hell look like one.”

Gojyo was starting to get pissed off, but the dude was right: he wasn’t the one with the gun, so he tried hard to suppress both his growing irritation and his natural smartass tendencies as much as he could. Dealing with cranky guys with guns and superior attitudes was something he was not unfamiliar with. Besides, for all he knew, this dude might be his only way to get back to Tougenkyou. He had no doubt that by know Hakkai and the monkey would be worried as hell. He was equally certain that the pissy-assed monk would be totally ballistic, blaming everything on him, when - as far as Gojyo was concerned - Sanzo was the one that had been careless and Scripture-happy and gotten him into this freaky predicament in the first place. He also knew beyond a doubt that Sanzo would flatly refuse any requests by the others to wait around for him to show back up. Merciful Goddess forbid, that they should have to delay the Journey so much as a single day on Gojyo’s account… the rat bastard.

“Holy fuck, but what I wouldn’t give for a smoke and a goddamn shot of whiskey right about now,” Gojyo muttered as he looked up at the endless expanse of the starry desert sky. He noticed with a pang of dismay how completely different the stars looked in this place he’d been so gracelessly dropped into - totally devoid of any familiar astronomical landmarks or constellations.

Unknown to Gojyo, his remark had helped his case with Roy, since it was well-known to the Amestrians that Ishvalans never touched either tobacco or alcohol, believing that both were defilements of the temple of the body, strictly-forbidden in their holy writings. Roy also couldn’t remember ever having encountered one who cursed like a longshoreman like this fellow did, either. Really, he seemed much more like one of the unrulier corporals in his unit than any Ishvalan Roy had ever encountered, and he decided he could probably relax and cut the man some slack, after just one more very necessary procedure. He waved his gun at the stranger and gestured, making his voice as commanding as possible.

“Stand up, bend over, and spread your legs,” he ordered.

Gojyo began to leer and dropped his voice to a low flirtatious growl. This guy was a bit of a looker, after all. Quite the knockout, actually.

“Usually, I like someone to at least buy me a drink first, but if you insist…” He stood up, advancing slowly towards the young officer with a salacious grin.

Roy felt his face heat up and a rush of blood to his groin as the red-headed stranger made the suggestive comments. He was distracted by the blatant come-on, but only for an instant, and he quickly waved the man off with his gun, making his face as cold and disinterested as he could.

“Back up, back up!” he commanded, waving him off again with the pistol. “I need to frisk you, you moron. If we have to share this small space, I need to be sure you aren’t packing, or wired. So just bend over and…” He trailed off, chagrined as he felt his face coloring again. “Look, just do what I said, goddamnit!”

It really aggravated Mustang that he was getting this rattled; worse yet, knowing that it showed in his voice. It just wasn’t like him to lose control like this. But for some reason, this guy was really unnerving Roy. It wasn’t just that he was so obviously attractive, but he just… he had this almost freakily seductive air about him. It was like the guy just exuded vaporized sex into the atmosphere or something, like plants exhaled oxygen. After less than five minutes breathing the same air, he somehow had Roy wanting – and wanting badly - to get into his pants. Roy Mustang liked to fancy himself the world-class stud, with both men and women, but a few minutes with this guy, and he felt outclassed, a rank amateur. He couldn’t figure out if he wanted to just deck his smarmy ass, or fuck it… or maybe both. Either way, it was all putting Roy off-kilter in a way he had never experienced.

Of course, as commanded, Gojyo eagerly turned around and stuck his ass up in the air, aiming it right at Roy’s face. He managed to resist the strong urge to mouth off about just exactly what he was packing and several things he could do with it when Roy brought that up. Despite his somewhat desperate straits at the moment, Gojyo still found himself checking out the young, good-looking brunet, wondering just what fleshly delights might lie inside that forbidding uniform of his, and thinking about just how much fun it could be to unwrap and explore them all.

Gojyo took some measure of comfort in being back on very familiar territory now as he leaned over in front of Roy: he was dangling the old standard bait in front of the mark, and seeing how long it would take to get the sucker to respond. It was almost soothing to his jangled nerves, seeing Roy begin to squirm – it reassured him that at least one very important part of his life was going on about its usual business, regardless of his having been whisked away by Sanzo-sama’s fucking Scripture to some god-forsaken corner of the universe. It looked like, as far as Sha Gojyo was concerned, an erogappa was always an erogappa, regardless of what crazy-ass world he was zapped into, and he silently thanked the Merciful Goddess for at least leaving him that.

“So how’s this,” he grinned lewdly, looking over his shoulder at Roy and waggling his hips wantonly, “this working for ya?”

Roy was grateful for the looseness of his uniform trousers, and how much they camouflaged the growing erection he was sporting thanks to his flirtatious intruder. He schooled his mind to the task at hand, and with the sternest expression as he could muster, stepped up behind Gojyo and began to pat him down. The man’s bronzed arms were bare, and as Roy slid his hands under the vest and up his back, over the thin cotton of the white athletic shirt, he could see tiny gooseflesh rising up on the tanned skin of the muscular arms, even in the pale moonlight. He felt Gojyo’s small nipples rise and grow taut under his hands as he moved them lightly over his chest, and he felt an answering surge from his own cock. Roy scowled as he tried valiantly to ignore his own traitorous body and continue his work. As he patted further down towards the intruder’s trim waist, Mustang was forced to move in closer and lean over Gojyo’s back in order to reach all the way around his front. As his hips brushed against his captive’s rear, Roy heard a soft, happy humming sound from the other as their bodies repeatedly made contact, and Gojyo leaned back towards him, nudging his arse against Roy repeatedly, like a cat insisting on being petted. Roy swallowed hard as his hands felt their way around Gojyo’s hip area, finding his mouth suddenly as dry as the Ishvalan desert wind.

“Down and a little to the right would do nicely,” Gojyo urged in his most suggestive purr as the one of the soldier’s hands lingered while patting the area over the rise of his hipbone.

“Shut it, asshole,” Mustang snapped, with as much vitriole as he could muster. He pulled his hands out and stood looking at them stupidly at them for a moment, stunned that they had seemingly developed a will of their own just a moment ago, and had been wantonly cruising around the man’s crotch, headed on a beeline straight for Gojyo’s cock.

Roy leaned back as far as he could, mortally afraid the stranger would detect the full erection that was now straining quite uncomfortably against the heavy layers of his uniform. As his wandering happy hands had been frisking the area around Gojyo’s crotch, it had been impossible to miss the fact that his visitor, in addition to being every bit as hard as he was at the moment, was also quite well-endowed by nature, thank you very much. Roy stood bolt upright and pulled his hands back sharply, almost as if he had been burned, and shoved them deep in his pockets, for lack of anyplace better to put them. Gojyo craned his neck towards him again and grinned knowingly, waggling his eyebrows for added effect.

Roy flushed a bright hot red, feeling like a three-year-old caught with his hand in Mama Christmas’ biscuit tin. Unable to escape the enticing spectacle of Gojyo’s ass still bent-over right in front of him, Mustang suddenly found himself in a rush to get the frisking over with as quickly as possible. He gritted his teeth and in a brisk, businesslike manner patted down the intruder’s muscular behind – eliciting another sound, this time a luxurious soft breathy humming, from Gojyo. Roy pretended to ignore the exaggeratedly-sensuous vocalization and continued on, moving swiftly down his captive’s legs, but even then, he couldn’t help but be impressed with how long and well-muscled the man’s limbs were, despite the ridiculous baggy pants.

Gojyo voluntarily toed off his clunky boots, and stood grinning impishly while Roy checked them for contraband. He felt sorry for the young officer. After some of the tricks they had had youkai pull on them, he knew all too well that you really couldn’t be too careful - but it did feel kind of strange to be on the other side of the fence, to be the intruder, the interloper, the one not to be trusted. After all his time with the Ikkou, Gojyo had finally started to be able to think of himself as “one of the good guys,” and not just some low-down barfly loser of a half-breed. He couldn’t help but chuckle softly to himself at the irony of this seemingly-thorough search of Mustang’s. After such a thorough frisking, he knew the poor Major would probably shit a ring around himself if he had any idea how easy it would be for his guest to instantly materialize his deadly twin-bladed shakujo right about now.

Roy threw his hands up in the air, immensely relieved to finally have the pat-down over and done with.   He did feel safer, in the sense that he knew he wasn’t going to get shot or knifed by the guy at any moment, but for some reason, he was even more unhinged now than he had been before the search, he felt even more vulnerable…

Suddenly he found himself in desperate need of the familiar, warm comfort of a good strong shot of whiskey. Of course, he told himself, it wasn’t every day that someone – alien? – suddenly, just literally, dropped right out of thin air into your foxhole, and in the middle of enemy territory, too. So who wouldn’t feel the need for a little shot of extra fortitude… or two or three? Roy also was more than ready to just sit down in the sand again so he could hide his rather indelicate problem, before Gojyo had a chance to notice the embarrassing way his body was responding to his antics. He slumped quickly back into his former spot in the foxhole, knees bent and greatcoat pulled over his lap, before giving Gojyo leave to change his position.

“Ok, fine, down. You… clean. Down… sit… done.” He sighed softly, frustrated at his sudden inability to put together a simple English sentence, and pointed at the sand in front of him. “Enough. Sit.”

He realized he sounded more than a tad unhinged, definitely not like his usual dry, cool self, and cursed himself for it. He tried to write it off as foxhole fatigue: nothing a good night’s sleep, after a little medicinal booze, couldn’t cure. His cheeks felt flaming hot, and he began scrounging around in his coat and backpack, ostensibly looking for a drink and a smoke, but mostly as an excuse to look anywhere but at that handsome face and those deep red eyes.

In his peripheral vision, Roy noticed the man making a flagrant adjustment of his genitalia through the fabric of his breeches, which apparently had become uncomfortably confining, for some reason. Gojyo caught Mustang’s eye as he was finishing his maneuver, and gave his package an extra little squeeze, winking saucily, as if to say “all this can be yours…” Or at least that’s what it looked like to the disgruntled Mustang.   Smug fucking bastard, he thought angrily. He swallowed hard against the walnut-sized dry lump that seemed lodged in his windpipe and conspiring to choke him.

Gojyo folded his long angular frame back into his spot opposite Roy and sat with his knees bent and wide apart, the faint shadow of the large ridge of his erection visible down the inside of one thigh of his jodhpurs. Once again, it was supremely comforting to Gojyo to find that at least this facet of his life was still functioning precisely as it was supposed to. Even after he’d been somehow sling-shotted by the Sutra, through some weird-ass gate off to only the gods knew where, in that supremely important way, no matter where he was, he was still definitely, without a doubt, the one and only Sha Fucking Gojyo. Damn straight.

“Well that was fun, yeah?” he grinned. “What do we do next?”

“Nothing,” Roy growled. “We do nothing.” He wondered to himself just how long he could hold to that resolve, left alone in the night with this red-headed version of sex-on-legs. He’d never told anyone, even Maes, but Roy had a deep and long-held fetish for redheads, especially red-headed men. And yetanother kink for men with long hair. Both were traits one so rarely encountered in Amestris or the outlying provinces, so it just rarely came up, so to speak. He groaned silently to himself and tried hard not to think about it.

Mustang pulled out the pack of cigarettes he found deep in his greatcoat and offered the stranger a smoke before pulling one out for himself. The man’s crimson eyes danced with gratitude, and he inhaled happily after tossing Roy back his lighter.

“Thanks, man,” Gojyo said sincerely, his body relaxing as the long-overdue hit of nicotine hit his system. He decided he might as well go ahead and try his best to answer some of the guy’s questions – at this point they seemed to be on pretty much equal footing, and he needed to figure some things out himself, as much or more than the soldier needed the information from him.

“So, look, man, fact is, I really don’t have a fuckin’ clue how the hell I got here. That’s the damn truth, dude.   Last thing I knew, I was balls-deep in a battle on some mountain, back in… well, back where I come from, and the next thing I know, I’m on my ass here in this hole in the sand with you.”

Roy knew there was more to it than that, that the man was withholding something.

“But what happened,” he persisted, “how did you get here?”

Gojyo studied him for a minute as he considered how best to answer. The guy seemed like a straight-shooter. He had absolutely no reason to believe the man was one of Kougaiji’s assasins or anything like that. For one thing, he was clearly not wearing anything that looked like a demonic power limiter, and all of Gojyo’s usually-reliable senses told him the guy was 100% human. Besides, he couldn’t see why anyone would have any reason at all to fucking kidnap him, of all people – Sanzo or Goku, maybe, or possibly even Hakkai, since the Three Aspects did have some investment in his welfare at this point, but certainly not him. And when it came to the Journey West and their mission, Gojyo had no illusions: he was just a damn half-breed, along for the ride. The gods knew, the shitty monk certainly never missed an opportunity to make that point abundantly clear. What had happened to him had to have just been an accident, because of some freaky-ass fluke with the Sutra. So, all things considered, Gojyo decided to risk sounding completely batshit crazy, and just come clean with his host about what little he did know.

“Ok… look, here’s the gods’ honest truth, man, all of it. I, well, I’ve been on this road trip lately with these three other guys, to … well, to try to stop this… sort of really bad shit from happening back where I live, yeah? So the leader is, well, he’s basically just an uptight asshole, but he’s also this super-important kind of priest-asshole, and he carries this really powerful… shit, I guess you could call it sort of a sacred scroll, kinda. So when things are going really bad in one of these fights we keep getting into on this trip, see, this priest-asshole, he can just chant all this hokey-pokey shit, and this scroll, well it sort of just swallows all the bad guys up – sort of like a cosmic garbage disposal for evil shit.”

“So he’s an alchemist,” Roy supplied quickly, undisturbed by what he’d heard so far.

As he processed Roy’s response, a grin pulled at the corner of Gojyo’s mouth.

“He would so totally hate to hear himself called that, but I suppose so, in a way, yeah.” He took a long drag on his smoke, and continued.

“So, anyway, we were in the middle of a big battle with these…creeps we keep running into on this trip of ours… and this priest-asshole used the…scroll. Well, apparently I musta been too close to it or something when he used it. I hollered at him, but it was too late, and I felt myself getting sort of sucked into it or something. It felt kind of like I was being pulled into big black whirlwind.   Next thing I know, I’m standing in front of this really creepy thing that looks like some sort of a fuckin’ ginormous weird-ass stone door…”

“You came through The Gate?” Roy hardly dared to say it. He had learned of The Gate of Truth during his Alchemy training more than once, but had always assumed it was just part of the ancient mythology, more of a symbol than something that actually existed.

Gojyo narrowed his eyes, wondering if the fact that the guy seemed to recognize it meant that he might actually have some idea about how the fuck to get him home. “Ok, yeah, I guess you could say it was a gate. It opened towards me, and there was this ginormous eye, and all these freaky black hands coming out of it – and the whole damn thing was just floating in the middle of… well, like, literally, just nowhere, like just floating in space, or something.”

He shuddered as he remembered the gigantic carved stone Gate, with its enormous terrifying singular eye, glaring intently at him as the doors slowly opened, and all the dark pulling, plucking hands hauling him towards The Gate, no matter how hard he tried to resist. It was definitely not an experience he cared to ever repeat, if he could help it. He still had too many strange things whirling around in his head that had seeped into his brain while he was standing in front of The Gate, but he hadn’t begun to understand them, and had no desire to try to share them - he knew then he’d get pegged as a lunatic for sure.

“So I only stood in front of this Gate thing for just a minute, less probably, when it starts tugging me in, with all those fucking creepy hands, and the next thing I know, I’m spit out here on my ass into this freakin’ sand pit with you. And that’s all I know, man - for real. I know it sounds crazy as shit, but that’s the truth.” He shook his head and exhaled a slow plume of smoke, looking Roy dead in the eye. “Now, care to tell me just where the hell I am?”

“You’re in Ishval, where, if I am not mistaken, a civil war is about to break out.”

“Ish-vall? What the blue fuck is an Ish-vall?”

“It’s a where, not a what. Ishval is a country that borders Amestris, to the south. Amestris is where I’m from. We’re trying to keep that war from happening, theoretically.”

“Hmm. So far, that doesn’t tell me much.”

“Amestris is between Creta and Xing.”

Gojyo blinked at him. “I think I’m in real trouble here,” he said slowly after a second or two of trying to digest what Roy was saying. He was clearly a very long way from home, if he was even on the same… planet? His stomach flip-flopped at the mind-boggling thought.

“Shit,” he said slowly as he slumped back against the wall of the foxhole opposite Roy. “Now I really wish I had that drink.”

His face fell as he pictured the familiar faces of his traveling companions, and realized the more he learned, the less likely it seemed that he would ever see them again. As difficult as it all had been so far, he had nonetheless gotten strangely attached to all of them, on their bizarre little field trip through hell. Goku had become the little brother he’d never had, and he’d had a feeling that Hakkai was probably going to be his best, lifelong friend since the moment he’d shoved his bloody guts back into his belly on that rainy night way back when. And then there was Sanzo…

Hell, he’d wanted to fuck the beautiful priest since the very first second he’d seen him, but that in and of itself didn’t mean a damned thing. Gojyo wanted to fuck lots of people as he meandered through his days, which, ironically, was the very crux of Sanzo’s reasoning for treating him like the dirt beneath the worms beneath his feet. But as the Journey wore on, Gojyo got to know the stiff-necked, pissy-assed monk, and he watched Sanzo just living his life, as their leader on the Journey west, and in his grudging roles as Sanzo Priest and Goku’s father figure. Gojyo had actually – although he would die before he would let him know it - developed a profound respect for the man beneath the arrogant and sarcastic exterior, and in turn, his desire for Sanzo had grown, and developed actual depth. It was far more now than just the perverse urge to deflower and dethrone the iconic priest-asshole that it had been in the beginning.

Of course, he covered it up this change by ramping up his verbal hectoring of Sanzo: his taunting sexual innuendo became far less oblique and more brazen. Gojyo figured there was a certain safety in hiding his desire in plain sight - if he was bold enough, no one, not even his best friend Hakkai, would suspect how enamored he was of the monk. He even used the teasing and taunts as a ruse to get physically nearer to the porcelain-skinned god of wrath every now and then, a way to get close enough to touch and smell him, even if it meant risking the swift and punishing retribution of the fan and gun. He always nurtured this dogged hope that if he could just look at Sanzo long enough and close enough, he just might to find that tiny flaw, that one weakness that could make the perfect marble surface of Sanzo’s sentiment crack. Maybe then he could manage to slip in, ghostlike, behind that perfect façade, even if just for a short instant, and somehow attain his goal. Gojyo was firmly-convinced that if just once he could get Sanzo to crack, he might find out that Sanzo wanted and needed him, too.

He thought he saw flashes of desire in those hooded violet eyes every now and then, behind the anger and the venom. Once in a while, he would even catching Sanzo looking at him when the monk thought he wasn’t looking, but Sanzo would look away so fast, Gojyo was never entirely sure he wasn’t just imagining the hunger lurking in Sanzo’s eyes, simply because he wanted so badly to see it there. But now, to think he might never see those drooping purple eyes, those delicate chiseled features, or that lean, dangerous body again… Gojyo felt a hollow, burning ache in his chest at the thought. He looked up at the unfamiliar night sky again, and tried to empty his mind in self-defense, to just think about absolutely nothing for a little while. It was too much all of a sudden, just too much, and it washed over him in a swelling, crashing wave of sadness, threatening to pull him under.

Roy Mustang looked at the color draining from the handsome face of the stranger and imagined what he must be thinking. What a kick in the head for the poor guy… to suddenly face losing his whole life as he knew it in one fell swoop. Maes’ image flickered in Roy’s head, and he remembered with a bittersweet pang the last time they had been together.

Gah… he thought, mentally smacking himself in the face. Enough! He could not afford to lose it now, not while he was stuck in an Ishvalan foxhole in the middle of the fucking desert, with no reinforcements or ammo. And besides, he was known for not being the sentimental type, right? He and this Sha Gojyo both were in severe need of a stiff drink, he decided firmly. He rifled around in his pack and pulled out the battered metal flask he had stashed in there – it was strictly contraband, but who cared? He was so far from Central right now, it was hardly a concern. He dug up the grubby coffee cup and swiped out the dregs with the tail of his coat, poured a generous shot, and set it in the sand beside him. He filled the silver shotglass that served as the cap for the flask to the rim and handed it off to his guest.

Gojyo smiled gratefully, and held the large thimbleful of whiskey up towards his host.

“Hey, thanks, man. To better days…” He stopped suddenly. “Hey, I don’t even know your name, dude.”

Roy smiled broadly, for the first time since Maes had told him about Gracia.

“Roy, Roy Mustang. Major.”

“Well, to better days, Roy Mustang, Major,” Gojyo grinned, and clicked his small cup lightly against Roy’s larger one before downing his shot all at once, in one happy gulp. He shivered as the strong whiskey burned a path down through his middle, and looked up at the brunet, waving slightly with his empty shot for emphasis. “Extra points for the cool name, by the way. Sure beats the hell outta ‘Sha-fucking-Gojyo.’”

“Oh, I took my share of shit about it when I was a kid, believe me,” Roy said with a wry smile. “I couldn’t walk down the street with someone, without hearing, ‘hey, so-and-so, you gonna “ride the mustang?”’ Or if I was with a group of kids, it was ‘hey, who’s gonna “break that mustang” tonight, Roy?’ You know, dumb shit like that. Kids can be so fucking stupid. And cruel.”

“Hey, tell me about it,” Gojyo empathized, nodding. His voice grew soft and tinged with bitterness as pent-up memories of a sad, tough, half-breed child struggling to survive were unloosed in his head. “To say I was unwelcome in my neighborhood would be a massive understatement – this red hair and these eyes made me fair game for everybody.” He looked at his empty cup ruefully. “Even my own mother…” he muttered softly.

“That’s rough,” Mustang sympathized. “Here, lemme refill that for you.”

“Thanks, man,” Gojyo said, holding out his glass with a grateful grin. He shrugged. ”Wasn’t all bad. Luckily, I had one helluva big brother. He looked out for me, as best he could. Things coulda’ been a whole lot worse without him.”

Mustang studied the red-headed stranger as he refilled the small silver cup. This Gojyo really was an incredibly good-looking man. Roy couldn’t help but wonder how the guy had gotten those wicked scars on his cheek - if it had something to do with childhood fights, or maybe even that mother, but he didn’t dare ask. The man was leaner and more muscular than Maes, taller, narrow-hipped and broad-shouldered. Based on the musculature Roy had couldn’t help but notice while patting him down, the guy either worked-out a helluva lot, or his daily life was incredibly demanding. But unlike some musclemen who just seemed like big bulky piles of tightly coiled springs, this guy’s long lanky arms and legs gave him a loose-limbed sensuality that Roy found very appealing. And after years of living around men with short military haircuts, the long hair was a definite turn-on, and the rich crimson color was evident even in the dim moonlight. Just thinking about running his fingers through that silky red hair got Roy’s dick twitching again in response.

He halted that train of thought abruptly, mortified and a little ashamed as he realized just how hot he really was for this most inappropriate person, and with Maes having just left that morning. He was an officer on patrol in a potential combat zone, and besides, he still didn’t even really know who this guy was. That story about how he got here really was pretty far-fetched, after all… a fuckup with some magic scroll, that had somehow sent him through The Gate of Truth, all the way from a whole other world, or another universe even? But then Roy had studied enough alchemy to know that more strange things were possible in this world than most people would ever imagine, and Riza Hawkeye’s father had told him some arcane, little-known tidbits about The Gate that went far beyond anything he’d ever read in his Alchemy texts in the Academy. Roy’s brain was in a muddle, and his body was being singularly uncooperative and unhelpful, as he tried to sort it all out.

Gojyo forced himself to sip the second shot Mustang gave him, as much as he would have liked to belt right down a quick second and then a third shot, followed immediately by whatever else remained in Roy’s flask. Much to his disappointment, he saw the flask was pitifully small, and held little prospect for a decent drunk for one person, much less for the both of them, even though the whiskey it held was impressive in its strength and quality.

He caught the young officer studying him, and flashed him his best licentious smile as he slid a little lower down in the foxhole, stretching one leg out towards Roy. His leg came to rest against Mustang’s wool-clad knee where he sat cross-legged across from the grinning kappa.

“Shit! S-s-sorry!” Roy stuttered awkwardly, flinching as their bodies touched. He hated like hell being unnerved like this, and he tried to cover his embarrassment by focusing all his attention on his cup, and taking a long slow pull on his whiskey.

“Don’t be. I’m not,” Gojyo purred, his small smile slowly blooming into one of his patented high-octane seductive grins.

Part Two

This guy was definitely hot, and Gojyo was catching the lovely wafting scent of arousal as Roy’s erections waxed and waned, as they became more and more familiar with each other there in the foxhole. Gojyo decided in that instant that, since he apparently wasn’t going home any time soon, and he couldn’t get decently drunk, there was no reason in either this world or the other one that he shouldn’t just go ahead and do what he did best and enjoyed most, since a golden opportunity was literally looking him square in the face. Besides, he reasoned to himself, this poor guy was out in the desert all alone, cold and lonely, serving his country- whatever country it was. Gojyo figured it was his patriotic duty: as a loyal citizen and representative of Chang’an, certainly the first one to come to visit wherever the hell he was, it was up to him to foster good diplomatic relations…

“It’s cold over here all alone,” he pouted, raising a coy eyebrow at Roy. “You got room for your poor lonely prisoner in that coat of yours?” Gojyo knew this man was like his Ikkou companions in that he was definitely no fool, and he would certainly have to be played with some degree of finesse. He nudged at Roy’s leg gently with the toe of his boot, more of a small caress, as much as one can manage a caress with boot leather through several layers of wool.

Roy sat up a little straighter and tried hard to get a grip on himself. His pulse was speeding like mad, and his cock was flipping around in his boxers like a koi at feeding time. He schooled his face into the sternest expression he could manage, and dropped his voice to a lower register to – he hoped – cover the shakiness from his rapid breathing.

“Look, asshole, knock it off. I don’t know what you think you’re doing…”

As Mustang was trying his best to dissuade him, Gojyo slid smoothly from his side of the foxhole to Roy’s, settling neatly into place beside him.

“… Wait! Look, now, nothing is going to…”

Ignoring him completely, Gojyo deftly lifted up the edge of the greatcoat and slid in underneath, his body heat radiating against Roy even through his uniform. A tiny groan escaped Roy as he felt the long lanky body settle against him, and he lost his focus for a moment. Shaking it off, he turned to face Gojyo and continued to try to set him straight.

“…Goddammit, I mean it. You’re my captive, and I am a Commissioned Officer in the Amestrian Army, not to mention, a State Alchemist. As such, it would be against regulations and completely inappropriate…”

Gojyo merely continued to grin knowingly at him. He knew if the guy was this rattled just from him sitting next to him, he had already sunk the hook. That being the case, he figured he might as well take his time and let the fish play out a little bit before he landed him.

“Look, Roy..” he said condescendingly, taking Mustang’s cup from his hand, and retrieving the flask from the ground next to him, “you have the upper hand here, not me.” He poured an inch or two of whiskey into the cup and handed it back to Roy. “You have the gun, not me,” he continued calmly as he poured his own shot, letting his voice drop into a slightly sad, plaintive tone. “I don’t even know where I am, or how the fuck I am gonna get home.”

He had said it to reinforce his position, but the unholy truth of it made his heart lurch for an instant. He took a deep breath and ramped his smile back up and continued.

“I just wanna stay warm, and have a little fun, man. You seem like a nice guy, you’re certainly the best-looking one I’ve seen in quite some time. It’s a beautiful night.” As he gestured up at the disorienting unfamiliar stars, his heart galloped with fear again and he quickly looked back at Roy, suddenly feeling the need to lose himself in those deep dark eyes a lot more than he had realized. “I mean, what else is there to do, yeah?” he asked softly. “Why not?”

He held his shotglass up to Roy’s, as if he was waiting for Roy to make a decision.

Roy studied the tantalizing crimson eyes, searching them intently for a short moment. Why not, indeed. He knew he was being played: it takes a player to know a player. But he also recognized the pain behind the play… he had his own fair share of that tonight. He wondered if Maes was in Gracia’s arms right now. Or if he was in some town on the way to her, standing in a jewelry shop, grinning like a madman as he picked out a ring to signify the promise of their life together.

Roy couldn’t bring himself to begrudge Maes all the things he was going to have with Gracia that he would probably never have, with anyone. He couldn’t bring himself to resent Gracia, far from it, and he didn’t question for one second Maes’ decision to abandon the intimate side of their relationship in favor of his marriage. Roy Mustang, more than anyone in Amestris, knew that Maes Hughes had a steadiness, a faithfulness, and a huge heart that made him perfectly-suited for marriage with someone like Gracia, and all that it involved. Roy also knew himself: he was just too restless, too ambitious, and too goddamned selfish for all that, and there was no point trying to pretend otherwise. But knowing and understanding all of that didn’t mean Roy couldn’t and wouldn’t long for what he would never have, or that he wouldn’t miss the very wonderful thing he had once had. And now… now there would be many, many more long, lonely nights to think about it all, with nothing more for company than his glove, his gun, and his flask. But tonight… well, hell, tonight didn’t have to be one of them.

He clinked his tin cup against Gojyo’s with a small tinking sound.
“Fuck it,” Roy grinned, “I’ve always found propriety to be highly overrated anyway.”

“Shit, yeah,” Gojyo cheered, wearing a wide expectant grin, like a happy child about to open a brand new toy.

Roy and Gojyo enjoyed the last of the whiskey in silence for a few long, tension-filled minutes, the anticipation rising and surrounding both of them like a warm cloud of steam at a hotspring.

“So, ever make it with a demon, Major Roy Mustang?” Gojyo tossed out casually, cutting his eyes at Mustang to see his reaction.

As Roy choked on the last sip of his whiskey, Gojyo set to work splitting the remainder of the contents of the flask between their cups.

“E-e-excuse me?” Roy sputtered. “Come again?” he asked cautiously, raising a wary eyebrow at his new companion.

“Oh, very likely, yeah,” Gojyo responded dryly, one corner of his mouth pulling up despite himself, as he tried to play it straight, “probably several times. One of the many fine advantages of having sex with a demon.”

He let that percolate with Mustang for a tic, knowing the guy was probably close to freaking out, but enjoying making him dig for it.

“Ok, you can’t just say something like that without explaining it, man,” Mustang pressed.

Gojyo debated with himself whether to give Roy the whole long weird story, with everything about the Minus Wave, and the Journey, and how he and the guys were out to basically save the world. The full accounting had the added advantage of making him look really, really heroic, he thought. But he opted instead for the shorter version, deciding that, all things considered, he would much rather spend the time fucking than talking.

“Ok, long story short, back home everyone’s either human, or demon – we call ‘em ‘youkai.’ Usually the two flavors get along fine, but pretty much keep each to their own, see? But once in a while, a human and a youkai will decide to go against the grain and get it on – and if they aren’t into safe sex, you can end up with a little baby half-breed, called a hanyou. This particular variety of fucking around is majorly frowned on where I come from, so there’s not too many of them, those hanyous.”

He lit a cigarette proffered by Roy and continued his tale, enjoying the intense dark gaze the other had fixed on him. “So, anyway, these demon types all have sharp teeth, and pointy ears, and mondo sharp claws, and they’re pretty fuckin’ strong - but, under normal circumstances, they’re really not all that different than you and me.” He hesitated as he continued, hating to say the words that evoked all the painful memories he usually preferred to keep tightly shut away. “Now, see, lucky me, I’m one of those half-breed, hanyou types, myself. Mommy-dearest was a demon, dear old Dad was human. But the whole hanyou thing is considered bad juju - hence much of the unhappy childhood,” he sighed.

“Must have been an interesting family,” Roy said, processing all that Gojyo had said. It was obvious that much was going unsaid, but Roy was fine with that for the moment. He didn’t feel all that much like trotting out all his skeletons, either.

“Yeah. Interesting…” Gojyo said with a hard edge to his voice. ”Let’s not go into just how interesting right now.”

Roy got it loud and clear that he had touched a nerve and he should sidestep talk of that part of Gojyo’s past.

“So these guys you’re on this trip with: demons or humans?”

Gojyo laughed softly.

“Funny you should ask... we’re kind of a freaky-ass group. You start with me, the halfbreed. Then you have my best buddy Hakkai: now he was born human and then turned into a demon – but that’s a real long story. Then there’s Goku: he’s kinda the kid brother of the group…” He shook his head, challenged by finding a simple way to summarize the Great Sage Equaling Heaven. “Goku, well, he’s sort of a demon, but at times, he’s sort of a god, but in a lot of ways he’s pretty human… oh shit, let’s just say he’s a damn monkey, and leave it at that. He’s a really standup guy, though. Just don’t turn your back on him around your lunch,” Gojyo grinned.

Roy felt like he was only getting more and more confused, but had the distinct feeling that further explanations would only leave him more baffled, so he let it go. Gojyo had covered two members of the group – but Roy remembered he had said there were three – he had left one out.

“And… you said… a priest, right?”

Gojyo shook his head again with a small bark of laughter.

“He’s just a fucking asshole,” he said, a little too quickly.

Roy raised an eyebrow, sensing another touchy spot, and decided to let that topic go, as well.

Needing suddenly to change the subject, Gojyo blurted out the first thing that came into his head. He realized as soon as the words left his mouth that it could easily have been the exact wrong thing to say, when it came to his plans for their evening.

“So, is there a Mrs. Mustang waiting back at home?”

It was Roy’s turn to laugh a little too quickly this time.

“Hardly,” he said, draining his cup and pitching it across the foxhole with a vengeance. “My lifestyle is… not exactly conducive to such things. Let’s just say the military has me by the short hairs.” He thought for a moment, and tried to keep the bitterness out of his voice as he continued. “I knew when I became a State Alchemist I was pretty much giving all that up. ‘Dog of the Military,’ and all that. I go where and when they tell me to go – that’s the job description.” He shrugged and stretched, straightening his cramped legs. “It’s just not in the cards for me, hearth and home, and all that.”

Gojyo nodded his understanding. “Gotcha. I’ve always had rambling feet myself. Just never had an actual career that paid me money to be on the move the way you do – smart move, that,” he congratulated Roy. “Although I guess you could say what I’ve been doing with the guys here lately is as close as I’ve ever come to a steady job. Not much money in it, though,” he laughed. “None, actually. Just glamorous conditions, kinda like this. We do get a tent now and then, though.   Sometimes even a room at an inn, if we’re really lucky, and the priest-slash-asshole is in the mood.”

“Plush,” Roy said enviously. “I’d sure take a tent right about now. It’s friggin’ cold out here. Goddamn desert,” he shivered.

“Ah, now, see,” Gojyo grinned, “there’s yet another advantage of keeping company with demons.” He slid one arm behind the other man’s back inside the capacious woolen coat and pulled him close, and slung one long leg over Roy’s legs. “Feel how warm?”

Roy was amazed: it was true. It was like Gojyo radiated warmth: he could feel it seeping into his body even through his heavy clothes. But more than that, there was something about the man - he just had this hugely seductive… aura, or scent, or something. Roy couldn’t put his finger on it, but the closer Gojyo got, the more Roy wanted him. It had a feeling of inevitability to it, like the very gravity that had pulled Gojyo down into the foxhole in the first place. Roy knew it was going to happen, and the only thing that would stop it was if another sudden alchemic reaction somehow took Sha Gojyo up out of the foxhole back to where he had come from – that or an incoming Ishvalan shell, but at this moment both seemed highly unlikely.

Roy’s arm went up between them and his hand curled around Gojyo’s neck, closing the distance between their faces in one smooth movement.

“Good,” Gojyo grinned as he felt Mustang’s fingers weaving into his hair and carding through it. “Yeah, like that,” he murmured as he nuzzled his nose against Roy’s and began teasing at Roy’s lower lip with his teeth, nipping and pulling at it gently.

“You got enough time, yeah? I mean, a bunch of other dudes with guns aren’t gonna come running up and jump in the foxhole with us any second, right?”

Roy laughed softly, nipping back sharply at Gojyo before answering.

“As far as I know, no one on my side is within a sixty kilometers of here, except the one that I sent off this morning for reinforcements. If anyone jumps in this foxhole with us tonight, it’s not gonna be one of my men, and we got bigger problems than just having our privacy invaded. But as dark and quiet as it is tonight, I think we’re safe.”

Gojyo lifted Roy up enough to divest him of the heavy greatcoat, and spread it out in the foxhole to serve as a groundcloth. He then set to work divesting Roy of the first layers of his uniform, reassuring him as he did, “Major Mustang, I promise you, if anything like that happens, I got your back.”

Roy laughed, “I appreciate the thought, and I’m sure you’re quite good in hand-to-hand, but if a large group of armed Ishvalan rebels showed up, it could be real trouble.”

Gojyo had managed to strip Roy to the waist, and was running his hands admiringly over his pale skin as Roy spoke. He laughed softly and stood, moving to the end of the foxhole and crouching slightly.

“I can see how you might think that, but there’s one thing you don’t know about me,” Gojyo said, with a touch of bravado in his voice as he removed his vest and cotton shirt. He stepped out of his pants and toed off his boots and stood up almost straight. “There’s one thing you missed when you frisked me, Roy.”

Expecting to be flashed with a view of his soon-to-be-partner’s engorged member, Roy was about to say something along the lines that, in point of fact, he had not missed it at all, but had actually appreciated both its size and hardness, when he was stopped dead in his tracks.

“What the fuck….?!”

Roy soon beheld something altogether different than he what he had expected. Gojyo crouched in the foxhole still in his boxers, extended his right arm, and suddenly his hand held a shining metal staff with a shining crescent blade at one end and an equally lethal-looking blade on the other end shaped like a slender shovel. It was impressive enough simply looking at it, the cold steel glinting in the moonlight, and Roy could tell from the easy way Gojyo worked the staff in his hand that the man would be totally deadly in combat with that weapon.

Just then a bat happened to fly by several feet over the foxhole. Unable to resist the urge to show off, with a snapping of his wrist so fast it was almost a blur, Gojyo snaked the weapon out and the crescent blade flashed out from the staff on its chain. He neatly sliced the bat in half and retracted the chain just as quickly as it had snaked out, snapping the blade back into the end of the staff with a soft “snick.”

Roy was still staring in open-mouthed disbelief when it suddenly dawned on him that the moonlight would be reflecting off of the weapon’s blade: it might as well be a signal mirror, revealing their location to any Ishvalans within twenty miles.

“Ok! That’s enough, I’m suitably impressed,” he said with a grin, “now put that freaking thing back wherever you got it from and get back down there before the whole world knows we’re here, or we’ll have more company than we want, for sure.”

“Thought you’d like it,” Gojyo grinned, beaming with manly pride. “Now let me show you the other one. This one really extends…” he chortled, looking proudly down at his hugely-tented boxers.

“God almighty,” Roy exclaimed as he reached up and pulled him down onto the coat. “Is everyone where you come from as big an idiot as you are, or are you in a class by yourself?”

“Depends on who you talk to,” Gojyo grinned as he stretched out on his side and watched as Roy took off the rest of his uniform. “Now I can give you references from thousands of women all over Chang’an that think I’m fucking brilliant… no, wait, I mean that I fuck brilliantly…” He waggled his eyebrows, taunting Roy as he crawled towards him.

“Yeah, I’ll just bet you could,” Roy grunted. “So what’s with these, anyway,” he asked, bouncing an index finger along one of the twin cowlicks that perpetually bobbed softly high in the air over Gojyo’s head.

“Beats the hell outta me,” Gojyo shrugged, “My brother said when I was born they came out first then the rest of me followed, and they just never went down. Everyone calls ‘em my antennae.”

“Do they work?” Roy asked as he lay down beside Gojyo on the coat, stripped down to nothing but his own white cotton military-issue boxers.

“Yeah,” he leered, “they help me find nice, sexy guys that like to fool around as much as I do.” He grinned as he rolled halfway on top of Mustang and tangled their legs up together. One crimson eyebrow went up and down suggestively as he looked down at Roy’s pebbled nipples. “Are you really that cold, or are you just happy to see me?”

“You don’t have to keep trying so hard, you know,” Mustang said wryly, “you’re in. And yes on both.”

“Good,”Gojyo said, covering the nipple he could reach with his mouth and tugging gently on it with his teeth, before smirking back at Roy, “on both.”

“Nnngghhh,” Roy groaned. He was becoming less and less able to sustain the witty banter as his cock started to take all the blood supply from his brain. He had been surprisingly monogamous since he and Maes had become lovers, partly because the Military had just kept him so fucking busy - consequently it had been a long time since he had been with anyone else. The newness of a stranger’s body, the different smells, ways of moving, tastes, all of it, was almost overwhelming to him. But god, did it feel good: so warm and affirming against the cold, lonely desert night and all its dark ghosts.

Gojyo dragged his tongue in circles around the taut nipple and traced a lazy path up Mustang’s neck towards his ear. Roy tilted his head slightly to give him better access, and Gojyo laved the tender flesh of his neck, and teased with his pointed tongue carefully and slowly around the soft crevices of his ear. He pulled back the thick dark hair and revealed the soft flesh of the neck just below the ear, and bit down, gently at first, then harder when his bite met with a groan of pleasure from Roy that let him know it was welcome, sucking and worrying the skin with his lips and teeth.

Roy began to buck his hips slowly, feeling the familiar ache grow in his groin, that feeling of an ascending, almost intolerably-pleasurable, pressure seeking its release. He turned his head and sought the other’s mouth, needing suddenly to take a kiss, several kisses, to taste what lay inside those teasing taunting lips, and their limbs tangled in such a way that hard bodies pushed against hard cocks. Both of them were suddenly groaning into each other’s mouths, straining and pushing against each other, hands roaming, feeling cold flesh under warm hands, warm flesh under cold hands. Roy felt a strange new heat gathering in his body, almost like he was siphoning off some of that warmth Gojyo radiated like static electricity, and it was coursing through his blood and super-heating all his limbs and skin, and ultimately, gathering in his cock. This was so very different than it was with Maes, a thing of full-on-abandon more than affection, something foreign and totally new, and so precisely what he needed to put the pain of losing Maes out of his head and move forward.

Gojyo slid down Roy’s body in one slow sleek arc like a stretching cat, and began to admire his cock, stroking it from root to tip and raking his long fingers through the silky black curls at the base. “Nice to know some things work just the same here as they do where I come from,” he purred as he ran the tip of his finger around the crown, “if not better.”

Roy’s muffled groans encouraged Gojyo to up the ante. He cupped the other man’s heavy balls gently with one hand and with his other hand steadied the shaft while he lapped his way around the end softly with the tip of his tongue and soft lips. As Gojyo’s mouth surrounded and began to move down his cock, Mustang’s hips moved up of their own accord, and his heels dug deep into the soft sand of the foxhole. Gojyo found the tender area behind the balls with his forefinger, and massaged it gently while he continued to suckle Roy’s dick. The effect was immediate.

“Nnggghhh…! Forgoddsakes, Gojyo, stop!! Now!!!” Roy frantically pushed at Gojyo’s shoulders, knowing if that fiery hot and extremely-skilled mouth didn’t immediately cease what it was doing to him, he was going to humiliate himself in very short order, which would make him a pretty poor representative of the Officers of the Amestrian Army when it came to matters of endurance.

Gojyo let his lips slowly slide up Roy’s cock and slip off the end with a slow “plop” that sounded very loud in the absolute deathly quiet of the desert night. He looked up at Roy with a salacious grin, his crimson eyes glittering like the brightest of the stars over their heads.

“So you said we have all night, yeah? No worries, man. Relax.” Before Roy could even respond, the kappa returned to his task like a man with a mission. Roys’s back arched as the intense climax slammed through him like a freight train and he bit back the hot howl of pleasure that threatened to breach the dark cool silence of the night and reveal to all of Ishval just where Major Roy Mustang was and exactly what he was doing.

*---*---*---*---*---*---*

Roy awoke slowly, finding it much harder than usual to drag himself up out of his deep miasma of dark disordered dreams and bone-weary sleep. He became conscious of a desperate need to stretch, feeling aches and stings in muscles and other places in his body that he hadn’t felt for years. As he started to unwind his stiff limbs, he realized he felt like his whole body was being weighted down by a huge tangled mass of limp leaden rope.

Roy slowly cracked one eye open as the strange (and eventually quite fulfilling) events of the night before began to come back to him in one immediate and headache-engendering rush.   Two dark crimson eyes were sparkling back at him impishly in the pale pinkish-grey light of the early dawn, and Mustang suddenly understood that the bulk of the weight he felt so pinned-down by was actually the limbs of a long lanky body lying carelessly over him, along with his heavy woolen army blanket and a pile of their hastily-discarded clothing, all piled on top of them both as a makeshift barrier against the deep chill of the desert night.

“Oh, god…” Roy groaned, scrubbing his face with his one free hand. “I can’t believe…”

“Mornin’, Sparky,” Gojyo grinned.

“Oh, bloody hell. Don’t make me have to fucking kill you first thing in the morning, dimwit,” Roy snarled. He was the first to admit he was not much of a morning person – it was something Maes had learned the hard way early on in their relationship.

“Nowthat sounds very much like someone else I know,” Gojyo chuckled. “I’d almost think I was back at home when you sweet-talk me like that.”

Roy sat up on one elbow and looked at his unusual guest. “Speaking of which… Not that this hasn’t been fun, but exactly how are we going to get you back home?”

Gojyo was appreciative that Roy hadn’t pulled right away from him, and apparently wasn’t put off by his natural inclination to post-coital snuggling, as so many guys, and even some of the women he had met, always seemed to be. It had been a very, very good night: the handsome dark-eyed young Major had given as good as he had received, in each form that he had been given, and Gojyo had thoroughly enjoyed himself. But he was also relieved – although really not all that surprised – to see that Roy was also definitely not the type to go all wibbly-wobbly in the head after just one night of sex. It was plain that Roy was aware and had no problem with the fact that Gojyo’s first priority had to be to get back to where he came from. While this different world, as well as his current host, seemed, all-in-all, just as tolerable and hospitable as the place and people he had left behind - if not more so, nonetheless Gojyo had obligations and a family of sorts back there, and he needed to return to it all as soon as possible. The prospect of the Journey proceeding for too long minus any one of the four of them seemed out-of-balance and improper, somehow, and far less likely to succeed – like a vehicle riding on only three wheels. It might go on for a ways, but it would be awkward and ungainly, and eventually would simply have to break down and come to a grinding halt.

“Man, I ain’t got a fuckin’ clue – I was counting you to have some ideas. This is all way outta my ballpark, this shit. Summoning that weapon you is the only kinda hocus-pocus I can do, and that sure as hell ain’t gonna get me back home.” A bizarre image of himself riding the shakuju like a witch on a broom flitted through Gojyo’s head, and he knew he must be both tired and stressed to even think of such a thing. Besides which, even if he could somehow do it, if the guys saw him that way, he would never in a million years live it down: he would almost rather stay where he was…

Roy ran his fingers through his disheveled mane wearily, scratching his scalp as if the increased blood flow might bring some ideas into his sleep-fogged brain. Caffeine…he thought, that might help – it sure as hell couldn’t hurt. He took one last lingering look at the naked redhead gracing his foxhole so languorously, and with a small sigh of regret pulled on his boxers and shrugged into his greatcoat.

“Maybe some coffee will help us figure something out,” he said as he poured water from his jug into the pot and scooped some coffee out of the small pouch in his pack. He set the pot over the small pot of gelled fuel on his campstove and slipped on his glove. One small snap of his fingers set the little stove blazing, and steam quickly began to rise from the bubbling pot.

“That’s a pretty neat trick,” Gojyo said admiringly.

“You ain’t seen nothing,” Roy said tersely as he took a quick scan of the horizon to make sure there was still no sign of any Ishvalan activity in the area. “This is one of its few constructive uses. What I do with it out on the battlefield isn’t nearly as much fun.”

“Krispy critters, huh?”

Roy nodded grimly as he retrieved his cup from the other end of the foxhole and swabbed out sticky mixture of sand and the last drops of whiskey.

“Back home there’s this youkai prince we tangle with now and then, summons these gonzo fire demons – sort of the same kind of juju, I guess. We’ve managed to avoid a direct hit from him so far, but sooner or later…”

“War is never pretty,” Roy said quietly, “that’s one thing you can count on.”

Suddenly Gojyo felt the need to return to Togenkyo and the Ikkou more urgently than ever. He began to pull his clothes back on, and decided to put his all cards on the table with Roy. “So, look, is there any way in hell for me to get back through that Gate thing and get the fuck home?”

Roy finished dressing in time to check the coffee, and poured the cup as full as he dared, offering it first to Gojyo.

“Sorry I don’t have another cup – we’ll have to share. Hope black is ok.”

Gojyo’s face brightened, and he grinned at Mustang. “Black’s cool. And after what we did together last night, sharing a coffee cup hardly seems anything to break a sweat about, man.”

“Point taken,” Roy laughed softly as Gojyo blew on the steaming tin cup and sipped gingerly. His dark brows knitted as he strained to remember every minute piece of information Bethold Hawkeye had told him about the Gate and how it worked. Something substantial in the form of a sacrifice was always necessary for the alchemic reaction that took you to the gate, that much he knew. It went without saying that he didn’t have a Philosopher’s Stone: despite all the stories Berthold had told him, Roy still wasn’t even entirely sure they actually existed. Failing that, the sacrifice of a human life the only way he knew of. He also clearly remembered Berthold talking about how ancient alchemists who attempted something like this, which was dangerously close to the forbidden transaction of human transmutation, were always somehow punished by The Gate, for violating that ultimate taboo.

With all that in mind, there was only one way Roy could think of to even try to send Gojyo back home through The Gate, and it was just too ridiculous to even consider. It didn’t even make sense, really. He shook his head ruefully.

“What?” Gojyo prodded, seeing the consternation on Roy’s face. He handed the coffee back to him and studied him intently.

“It’s not good. There’s really only one method that I can even think of, and it’s just…. Well, there’s no fuckin’ way.”

“And that would be….?”

“You don’t want to know,” Roy assured him, sipping slowly at the dark bitter coffee.

“Probably not, but tell me anyway, just for shits and giggles.”

Roy stared at him a moment, one dark eyebrow raised. “I’d have to kill you, or at least come pretty damned close to it,” he said quietly.

Gojyo’s mouth went suddenly dry and he swallowed hard, certain as he did that he had made one of those cartoon-like loud “gulp!” sounds. He tried hard to appear unruffled, but doubted he was pulling it off. “Is that all?” he croaked and swallowed again, “no problem.” He was trying hard to laugh it off, both for his sake and Roy’s, but was well-aware it he wasn’t totally pulling it off.

“There’s just no way,” Roy said adamantly. “That kind of alchemy has been forbidden for centuries – and with good reason. I’m just not sure I know enough about it to even pull it off. It would be risky enough, even if I was an expert, but for me to improvise when I’m not one-hundred-percent sure… it would just be insanity.”

“You don’t know the guys I travel with,” Gojyo assured him, hitting him with as much good-natured bravado as he could muster. “Where I’m from, insanity’s pretty much the status quo nowadays. And risk is… well, let’s just say it’s something I have become pretty comfortable with in the past year or so.”

Roy looked dubious, but Gojyo persisted. “Look, dude, I have to get home.” He heaved a deep sigh of frustration . “It’s hard to explain, but… I just have to. My life is there. A couple a years ago, I’ll admit it wasn’t much of a life. Now… well, it seems to count for something, or to at least be going somewhere… Shit, I’m not good with words like my buddy is, but I guess it just comes down to this: it’s totally worth risking my life to get back home, even if I end up kicking it in the process. And if it doesn’t work, it’s my bad, not yours – one hundred and ten percent. ” Gojyo laughed and tossed back his hair, a gesture not lost on Roy. “The real joke is, with my luck, I’ll probably risk my fine ass getting home, only to just have it shot to bits by the monk the minute I get back.”

“But… if that’s the case, wouldn’t you be better off just staying here? With that weapon of yours, we could use you in the Army of Amestris…”

Gojyo grinned as he accepted the cup from Roy, just refilled with more hot coffee.

“And live in these luxury accommodations, or better, right?” he teased. He shook his head slowly and looked Roy in the eye. “The tempting bit is spending more time with you, but we both know it probably wouldn’t work out that way. But, regardless, man… my place is back there. At least I have to try.”

Part Three

Roy looked up at the yellow-orange sun that was now creeping above the horizon, and suddenly remembered something extremely important, and was amazed that it hadn’t occurred to him sooner. Oddly enough, a total solar eclipse was due later that morning, if he remembered his Alchemical Almanac correctly. And as any Freshman Alchemy student knew, all solar eclipses amplified, or intensified, the power of any alchemic reaction, in much the same way as a Philosopher’s Stone does: the more total the eclipse, the more potent its effect. It was particularly effective in reactions such as trying to transmute someone to the Gate: he clearly recalled reading that in one of the ancient texts Berthold Hawkeye had given him to read. He was fairly sure he actually remembered the array necessary for the reaction - he simply wasn’t certain enough to risk having Gojyo lose his life over it. Since they didn’t really know everything they were dealing with in this particular case, Roy knew that, even with a far more experienced alchemist, such an experiment would be a long shot, at best. And at worst, it was irresponsible and unethical, not to mention possibly - hopelessly - fatal. It was definitely not something any self-respecting State Alchemist had any business fooling around with, and it would cost him his career if he was caught.

Gojyo could easily read and understand the conflict that was written all over Roy’s face. He knew he was asking something huge of the other man – and they had only just met the night before. But the stakes were immense for him as well – he really didn’t think he had a choice. He genuinely felt for the position he was putting the young Major in. He could already tell that, despite his gruff and sarcastic exterior, Roy was the kind of man that took his obligations and responsibilities extremely seriously, who thought more and did far more than most people ever did about the importance of doing the right thing, in pretty much all aspects of his life. In his old life, Gojyo would have quickly written-off someone like Major Roy Mustang as boring and hidebound, a real square, a military geek, even if he was a good-looking one. Now, thanks to his own three like Roy back home, Gojyo was learning to appreciate what it really meant to be a man of honor, and that they came in all shapes and forms.

“So what’s the worst-case scenario, if it doesn’t work?” he asked.

Roy’s face was grave. “Even if I somehow manage to get the reaction to work, you could get stuck in the Gate – and I have no idea what could happen then. There’s also the possibility you could end up going through the Gate and end up somewhere altogether different – not here, not back where you came from, either.” He looked Gojyo straight in the eye, searching his gaze. “Worst-case scenario, Gojyo, we completely cock it up, and you end up right here in this god-forsaken desert, totally fucking stone-cold dead.”

“Is that all?”Gojyo grinned with what he hoped was his most winning and persuasive smile, “Meh. I’ve always been a gambler.   Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? Let’s do ‘er.”

Roy opened his mouth to speak, three times, trying to find a way to say refuse him, but the bottom line was that he couldn’t see any real alternative. It was Gojyo’s life, after all. Roy respected his decision, and he had to admit that in the same position, he would probably do the exact same thing. And besides, it wasn’t like he hadn’t killed people every damned day since he had come to Ishval – at least this time, if he did, it would at least be for a cause he was sure of, and truly be his own decision, not just something he did to follow orders from some army desk jockey hundreds of kilos away, who didn’t know shit from shineola about the real world.

“Alright…” he sighed heavily. “I guess there’s no talking you out of it. You’re an idiot. You do know that, right?” It was really more of a statement than a question.

“So I’ve been told,”Gojyo smiled. He stood up in the foxhole and pulled his vest on and stepped into his boots. “So, what do we do first?”

“First, I try like hell to make sure I have the array right – that’s the circle you have to stand in when the reaction takes place. What gives this any chance at all of working at all is that there happens to be a solar eclipse this morning in about…” he checked his watch, “…thirty-five minutes, so we don’t have much time to waste.”

Roy stood and surveyed the foxhole. “No room to do the array in here. We’re going to have to take a chance doing it in the sand outside, and just hope like hell no one sees us.” He looked around the landscape nervously. “All the more reason to get this over with quickly.”

He wished he at least had his notes from his days studying with Riza’s father, or his Advanced Alchemy textbooks to refer to… some way to be more certain he had every detail of the complicated array just right.   Roy remembered the array in what he thought was pretty clear detail, but it was an extremely complex one, and he was tired and sleep-deprived, and not exactly in the best condition to be doing such an unusual and dangerous bit of alchemy.

He crawled out of the foxhole and kneeled down to begin cautiously and methodically drawing the array, making it a large one, about as big in diameter as Gojyo was tall. Several times he scrubbed out what he had done and re-did it, not satisfied that he had the minutiae of the array’s points and angles precisely right.

Gojyo hovered nearby, watching silently, sitting on the sand with his legs crossed. He pulled a battered pack of cigarettes from deep inside his vest and fumbled around in his pants pockets for a lighter. Snorting in frustration after several minutes of failing to find anything to light his much-needed smoke, he was about to give up and toss it away into the sand. Roy looked at him with a small grin tugging up the corners of his mouth, and held out his gloved hand, making a small “gimme” gesture. Gojyo held the cigarette out towards the Flame Alchemist, a smile illuminating his face as the most minute snap of Roy’s gloved fingers produced the perfect tiny flicker of flame needed to light his smoke.

“You’re a genius,” Gojyo sighed gratefully, exhaling his first deep drag of the much-needed smoke.

“You’d better goddamn well hope I am,” Roy sighed as he sat back on his heels one last time to check the array, “if you are going to trust yourself to this jerry-rigged improvisation.”

He checked his watch and squinted up at the sun: the eclipse was within a few minutes of starting. As he sat down in the sand next to Gojyo, Roy wondered how to best prepare him for what was about to happen to him. From what he could tell, pretty much all of alchemy was foreign to him, so how the hell could he explain to him how, if they were lucky, using the array, the eclipse, and his alchemy, they’d complete a reaction causing a transmutation that would send him back to The Gate, where – again, hopefully - Gojyo could somehow manage to get back home? The prospect of even trying to explain it brought home again to Roy the magnitude and complexity of what they were about to attempt, and he suppressed a cold shudder as he spoke.

“Ok, there’s two main problems,” he said gravely, “and they’re great fuckin’ big ones. One: if, by some stretch of unbelievable luck, this actually works, and you do get to The Gate again, I gotta tell you, I have absolutely no clue how you get home from there. If I do manage to get you back that far, you’re on your own - you’re just going to have to wing it. But you did get through it once, so it stands to reason, kind of, sort of, that you might be able to get through it again. But it’s a long shot, to say the least. This whole damn thing is.”

“I got it, I got it,” Gojyo said shortly, waving him off. He was getting more and more nervous about the whole thing, and the less he focused on the possible dangers, the better. Just the prospect of facing that creepy Gate thing again was bad enough. He just wanted to know what he absolutely had to know to get gone, and get it the hell over with - like pulling a tooth, or ripping off some sort of big cosmic band-aid. “You said two problems – what’s the other one?”

Roy sighed heavily. “I already told you, remember? The Gate always demands some sort of…well, toll, some sort of sacrifice, as in… well, usually…death.” Gojyo blanched. “As I remember it, the ancient alchemists used human souls – of slaves and captives - as a sort of disposable resource in their alchemy to access The Gate. What I’m hoping is that with the amplifying effect of the eclipse, we can achieve the same effect, without having to actually kill you.”

“That would sure as hell be my preference,” Gojyo said, trying to manage an offhand manner to cover the stone-cold fear he felt prickling at the hairs on the back of his neck.

“But… look, the fact is, we’re gonna have to come pretty damned close, to have any real chance of success. So…It’s your party, Gojyo. Name your poison.”

“You got any poison? Hey, can I drink myself to death? I’d always thought I would go out bangin’ some babe, but obviously that’s out. “

Roy laughed in spite of himself. He could already tell he was going to miss this gonzo redhead that had dropped right out of the night sky into his foxhole, even though he had only known him a few hours. “No, no babes, sorry to say, and we polished off the last of my booze last night. I’m afraid our only alternatives are considerably… less pleasant. There’s my glove, your blade, and my pistol.”

Gojyo’s eyes went wide for a split-second. “No thanks on the glove, if you don’t mind, man. It’s great for coffee and cigarettes, and I’m sure you’re a good man to have on hand in a battle, no pun intended, but I’ve gotten kind of attached to this old hide of mine – I think I’d like to keep it as intact as possible.”

“I figured as much,” Roy nodded with a small grin, “just throwing out all our alternatives.”

“There’s something about being taken out with my own fuckin’ blade that just bothers me, somehow,” Gojyo said slowly. “It’s almost like… it’s one of my best friends, or something. I just couldn’t ask it to do that, it would just feel too fuckin’ weird. Plus which, I was given the shakujo through some connections the Priest-asshole had, and I think it has some kind of strange Temple-priesty-juju – sort of like your alchemy, I guess,” he shrugged. “Hurting myself with it on purpose – even for a good reason – might not be cool.”

“Right then,” Roy said, fighting a brief reflexive impulse to correct Gojyo’s idea that alchemy had any spiritual aspects and inform him it that, in this day and age, was strictly a science. He forced a businesslike tone to cover his growing nervousness, “so, pistol it is, then. This raises another question - if you do manage to get back home and there’s still a big gaping bullethole in you, is there anyone back there that can save your ass?”

Gojyo laughed. “No worries there. If you can just get me back where I came from, I got that part covered, no problem.”

Roy was a little puzzled by Gojyo’s response, but didn’t have time to pursue it at the moment. “Next question: do you want to do the deed, or shall I do it for you?”

The sheer strangeness of the entire scenario was beginning to close in on him and threatening to overwhelm Gojyo, and for a moment he began to consider just giving up the whole thing and reconciling himself to staying in Roy’s world. It would certainly be far from the worst thing that had ever happened to him: to start a whole new life without the ghosts of his past, in a new place, where there were guys like this good-looking dude to hang around and knock boots with…   Gojyo had hit the reset button on his life plenty of times before he met Hakkai and Sanzo and the monkey and got caught up in that whole freaking quest business of Sanzo’s. He had never thought of himself as the “save-the-world” type anyway – he was more just about “right here, right now” – and this right here, right now was really not all that bad … not bad at all.

“Well?” Roy pressed. He could see the very first encroachment of the moon’s shadow passing over the sun.   “It’s about that time. We gotta decide now, whatever you wanna do. If you do want to go back, this is it.”

Gojyo cocked his head and studied Roy’s dark eyes and serious, handsome visage for a long moment.

“Ya know, it would be really easy to stay here, and part of me really wants to. But I need to at least try to go back. Those guys’ll royally fuck things up, without me there to cover their backs. Besides,” he grinned, “I’m the only one that will give the shitty monk a decent hard time, and someone’s gotta do it.”

Roy pulled the large .45 caliber pistol out of his holster and checked the magazine for ammunition. He clicked it back in place and held the weapon out between them.

“I understand, man, it’s your choice. That said: me, or you?”

Gojyo reached out and took the pistol, hefting its heavy dark weight in his hands. It was a much bigger and more menacing-looking weapon than Sanzo’s Smith & Wesson .38.

“You know, if the priest offered to do it, I’d be really pissed off, but coming from you, I’m really kinda honored, for some reason.” He shook his head firmly. “But I can’t ask you to do that, man. You’re doing more than enough, as it is. I’ll do it myself. So, gimme the lowdown - what exactly do I need to do?” He looked up and saw the eclipse was progressing quickly.

Roy’s heart pounded in his chest, and he tasted the metallic tang of adrenaline in his mouth. Not since he first used his glove in battle had he felt this much pure unadulterated fear at the prospect of using alchemy in any form. He took a deep breath and forged ahead, straining to keep his voice steely and calm.

“Ok. First you need to step – carefully - into the small circle in the middle of the array – that’s the big circle I drew. Don’t disturb the design in the sand any more than absolutely necessary.   I’ll activate the array the minute the eclipse goes total: you’ll see me do this…” He demonstrated how he would clap his hands together, and place them on the array to begin the reaction. “When I do, I’ll say, ‘FIRE,’ and that’s when you take your shot. And don’t hesitate, or we’ll be fucked. I think a chest shot should do it – but for god’s sake, aim to the right side, so you miss your heart. That should be life-threatening enough to do the trick, but still give you enough time to get back through The Gate and home to someone that can fix you. I hope.”

“From your lips to the Merciful Goddess’ ears,” Gojyo muttered.

“Excuse me?”

"Nothing, nevermind.” Gojyo stepped close to him, brushing his lips gently against Roy’s and curling his long fingers in a brief caress around the muscular curve of Roy’s ass. He sighed softly, then stepped back and grinned as he took Roy’s hand and shook it firmly. “Major Roy Mustang, it’s been a genuine pleasure. If you’re ever in my universe, come look me up,” he winked.

“Will do,” Roy grinned. He looked up and saw totality was nearly complete. “Go ahead and step in, Gojyo.”

“Aye aye, Captain,” Gojyo saluted, touching the pistol barrel to his forehead jauntily. He leaned over to step carefully into the center of the array with one span of his long legs.

“Don’t promote me just yet,” Roy averred. “If they ever find out about this, I’ll get busted back to Second Lieutenant for sure.”

“Gotcha,” Gojyo said with a grin as he twisted his wrist to angle the pistol towards the center of his chest. “See, Major Mustang, I’m not at all worried. I know that any guy that can fuck like you can handle a little thing like this, piece a’ cake.”

Roy looked up at him from where he kneeled at the edge of the array, and shook his head as the cocky redhead winked at him one last time. “Take it easy, Sha Gojyo. Good luck out there.”

“You too, man…”

There was an immeasurably long moment of silence as they both looked up at the tiny sliver of disappearing sun as the sky grew darker and darker. Roy clapped his hands together and down on the array.

“Ok, FIRE!”

BOOM!!

*---*---*---*---*---*

At first Gojyo felt the immense impact of the bullet entering his chest far more than any actual pain. It felt like someone had somehow condensed the entire weight of a freight train into that one .45 slug, and then slammed it into his chest at 500 kph. He became conscious next of a hot searing pain following the bullet’s short path into the core of his chest. A huge uproar of bright cobalt blue lightning whirled around him for a short moment as he tried unsuccessfully to take his next breath, after which he felt himself instantly and totally enclosed in the vortex of a silent black void. Then, nothing.

*---*---*---*---*---*

“Well, Kenren Taisho, you’ve certainly gotten yourself into a fix this time,” said a deep and sensuous female voice.

Gojyo slowly opened his eyes. He really couldn’t say if he had been out for only a second, or for thirty years. He felt like a large elephant was sitting on his chest, and a couple of whales might be lying on top of that elephant. When he tried to breathe, a bright, white-hot pain bloomed in his chest like a flash of summer lightning across a midnight sky. He raised his head as much as he could manage, and to his immense relief saw what he recognized as the same massive Gate he had seen before. So far so good. Now, if he could only just breathe…

“What, no greeting for an old and dear friend, Kenren darling?” the voice demanded, with a decided pout.

Gojyo groaned. He was torn between being irritated with whoever the voice belonged to, for bothering him when he had other things on his mind, confused because the voice sounded strangely familiar and the recognition was niggling at some dim recess of his memory, and more than a little pissed off and worried about the whole damn breathing thing. He tried to speak, but only a thin reedy whining sound came out.

“Oh, good grief,” the voice said imperiously. He heard the swoosh of silk and the tinkling of what he guessed was a lot of bracelets and jewelry as the possessor of the mysterious voice came closer. “You mortals are so fucking frail - I always forget. It’s just so pitiful. Hold on a minute, darling,” She said, her voice an odd mixture of amusement, impatience, and compassion.

He felt a warm hand draping long fingers gently over the area of his chest where the wound was, and suddenly it was almost like the sensations he’d felt when he shot himself had gone into reverse: the scorching heat of the pain began to swiftly heal and cool, and all the weight that had been compressing his chest was steadily being lifted right off of him. He coughed a couple of times and slowly sat up, rubbing his chest. As the fuzziness that had been muddling his vision began to clear, he was startled to find himself eyeball-to-eyeball with a pair of violet eyes the precise shade of Sanzo’s and very much like the monk’s. But… this couldn’t be Sanzo, this person was grinning at him very salaciously – something Gojyo had certainly never known the monk to do, ever, at anyone. He shook his head to clear it, and took a better look.

“Welcome back, Kenren dear” She purred. “Have a nice trip?”

Gojyo suddenly realized the astounding purple eyes and the familiar voice belonged to none other than the Merciful Goddess, Kanzeon Bosatsu, Herself. He was so startled he began to scuttle away from Her on his hands and his ass, backwards, like a frightened crab.

“Y-y-you again? W-what…what the hell….? Why…?”

“Calm down, darling, you’ll re-open that nasty little wound you gave yourself. When you went missing because of Konzen’s slap-happy use of the Scripture, everything came to a grinding halt, and I decided to take a little field trip, to investigate. But you ended up having a little fun for yourself, didn’t you Kenren, dear? Quite the little vacation, hmmm?”

Gojyo felt like his brain was about to explode. “But, how did you…. Who the hell is Konzen? And for that matter, who the fuck is Kenren, anyway?”

He shook his head, realizing he was probably being impolite, and possibly even ungrateful, to She Who Hears the Cries of the World, the eternal Goddess of Compassion, a bodhisattva who was way up there in the pantheon of such things… but dammit, the bitch was messing with his head!

Kanzeon saw the confusion and consternation on Gojyo’s face, and laughed softly. “I’m sorry, my dear boy. Don’t worry your pretty little head about anything. I’m simply here to help you get home, so you and your little friends can keep on with your Journey. I’m quite impressed that you found your way back to The Gate, darling, but I seriously doubted that you could make it all the way home, without a little help.”

As the Merciful Goddess spoke, The Gate began to open and the entities that inhabited it began to howl and moan. The huge eye blinked slowly at the Bosatsu and Gojyo, and the multitude of dark grasping hands began to reach out towards Gojyo threateningly. Gojyo’s eyes widened and he looked around for a means of escape, wondering if he could even summon his weapon in such a weird and ungodly place.

Kanzeon was about to continue, but the banshee noise of the Gate had become intolerably loud and intrusive.
“Knock it off back there!” She shouted irritably, glaring over Her shoulder at the offending entities. With a quick “swoosh”, the hands retreated completely back into The Gate and the voices fell instantly silent. Gojyo could have sworn he saw the giant eye blink apologetically to the Goddess.

“As I was trying to say,” She said, glancing menacingly one more time at The Gate before She continued, “your friend Roy did an admirable job of getting you back this far – I’m just here to help you get the rest of the way back to your little friends now, darling. That Mustang’s quite the looker, by the way, isn’t he?” She smirked, winking knowingly at Gojyo.

“Y-y-ou saw R-roy… and…?”

“Darling, I see absolutely everything,“ She assured him. “It is my job, after all.”

Before Gojyo could ask any more questions of the Merciful Goddess – and he had a steadily-growing list of them – She leaned down and kissed him full on the lips, and his vision began to grey out again.

“Taa taa for now, darling,” he heard the silky voice fade away as he blacked out.

*---*---*---*---*---*

“About time you woke up, asshole.”

Gojyo felt like he was swimming up from deep underwater. He ached in every bone of his body, and he was more tired than he had ever been in his life. He wanted more than anything to just go back to sleep and sleep for days, but he had the oddest feeling that someone was burning holes right into him with their eyes.

“Gojyo!” the voice barked insistently.

Gojyo sighed wearily. “Either I’m in hell, or that’s you, Sanzo.”

“Tch. If I needed a comedian, I’d have hired a stand-up comic,” the priest muttered irritably. He lit two cigarettes and handed one to Gojyo as the kappa slowly slid up to a half-sitting position in the bed.

“Aww, now see, you do love me after all, baldie-locks,” Gojyo teased, grinning as he took the cigarette from Sanzo.

Sanzo pulled back a hand as if to cuff the kappa’s head, then stopped himself and sat back sullenly in his chair.   “Idiot. If you’d stayed asleep like that one more day, I was just gonna drop-kick your ass into the nearest ditch and move on, whether Hakkai and the monkey liked it or not.”

Gojyo exhaled slowly, letting the nicotine do its work and revive him. “Screw you, Sanzo-sama. The way I remember it, it’s your fuckin’ fault I’m in this bed in the first place.”

Sanzo glowered. “Look, asshole, if you had just stayed the hell outta my way and let me do my fuckin’ job…”

Much to Sanzo’s surprise, his words were stopped abruptly by the sudden press of Gojyo’s lips against his, and the application of a slow, sensuous, and tonsil-tickling kiss. Before Sanzo could protest or resist, Gojyo had slid back down into the bed and closed his eyes again.

“It’s good to see you again, too, cherry-chan,” he grinned, yawning as he turned over and slipped back into a peaceful sleep.

*---*---*---*---*---*---*

Roy sat in the sand by the array for a long time after the blue alchemic blaze had subsided, long after the sun was nearly back to its full intense desert morning heat – much longer than he should have, as far as keeping his position concealed from the Ishvalans in the area. Finally, when his legs began to stiffen up from his kneeling position, he sighed heavily and rose slowly. Scuffing the desert surface with his boots, he destroyed what was left of the array and buried the blood splatters in the sand. He retrieved his pistol from where it had fallen when Gojyo had started to go down, just before he had vanished into the whirling firestorm of sizzling blue light.

Weary as an old man, Roy climbed back into the foxhole. He re-heated the last cup of the coffee and fished around in his pack for a breakfast MRE. The crackers were stale and the jelly and peanut butter tasted like petrochemicals, but Roy ate, not because he was hungry, but because it was something to do, and because he knew he was supposed to. He missed Gojyo. He missed Maes. He hated this war that wasn’t quite a war, and knew with a cold dread deep in his gut that the real war was only a matter of time, and would be much, much worse. Sometimes, he just flat-out hated his whole fucking life. This was one of those times.

But he stayed in his foxhole, he kept his watch, and later on that afternoon, when a detachment of Ishvalan rebels tried to conduct a raid on him in his foxhole, Roy Mustang did what he had to do. He had this deep-rooted belief that someday, somehow, it was all going to mean something, it was all going to be worth it. And until then, he just had to keep on keeping on.

*---*---*---*---*---*---*

The next morning, after another eighteen hours or so of sleep, a good breakfast, and a hot shower, Gojyo began to wonder if the whole thing hadn’t all been some kind of a weird fever dream. All he could get from Sanzo was that he had chanted the sutra, Gojyo had been there in front of him, and then, suddenly, he hadn’t. A half-hour later, when the battle was over and everyone realized he was actually missing, they had - of course - all gone looking for him. They finally found him under a sacred fig tree at the bottom of the mountain, about a half a klick from where the fight had been, stone-cold unconscious.

At first they had thought sure he was dead. Hakkai had found no injuries or apparent illness, but had been unable to get Gojyo to wake up, either. Gojyo had finally awakened the next morning, when Hakkai and Goku had gone to the market for some medicinal herbs and supplies, and left Sanzo to watch over him.

Gojyo really wanted to blow it all off: the way he remembered it all, the shit was just too fuckin’ crazy to possibly be real. It simply had to be a dream. But try as he might, he couldn’t shake the images of the dark-eyed intense young Major and the heat they had shared under that foreign night sky, and he still had a persistent ache deep in his chest, despite the fact that there was no scar where he remembered shooting himself with Roy’s pistol. No, it had to just be the result of the Scripture fucking with his brain, he decided: it had just knocked him the hell out, and gave him one long motherfucker of a crazy-ass dream.

Gojyo rose slowly from his chair, stretching carefully. He was still stiff from being in bed so long, and still felt a little shaky. He reached for his vest where someone – most likely Hakkai - had hung it neatly on a hook on the wall, and fumbled around in the inside pocket for his smokes. He felt something unfamiliar there in his vest pocket: a small object, hard, and heavy, deep inside, and he fished it out to take a look.

It was a filmy and fragrant piece of fine white gossamer silk, tied with a deep purple ribbon, enclosing something, almost like a small drawstring bag. Puzzled, Gojyo untied the ribbon and the silk fell open, revealing a slightly-flattened .45 caliber slug, and a small piece of parchment writ with an extravagant, if slightly sloppy, hand.

“Welcome home. K.B.”

~owari~
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When Fire Meets Fire