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Xerxes.
For a country roughly the size of only the Central Area of Amestris, although far more densely populated, it was a land absolutely steeped in myth. It was the origin of all modern religions – stemming the cult of Kaze, the believers of Ishvalla, and the followers of the Dragon’s pulse. The people there were said to be descendants of Leto himself, with their golden hair and eyes. They were supposed to be able to control actual light, as if they had dominion over the very atoms of the universe. A lot of it was sheer speculation over a secretive nation, but some of it was woven out of threads of truth. How a tiny desert nation had become one of the world’s most influential super powers, commanding an army that out-strategized countries five times its size, for example, was still up for debate amongst the highest ranking politicians from every country in the world. Donbachii’s Prime Minister was of the opinion that ancient magicks were involved. With the ‘K’. Apparently the ‘K’ was important. Drachma’s Tzar thought that the King of that tiny nation was an immortal of some kind, and had shared his secrets with the Xerxian army. The Emperor of Xing heralded it as the birthplace of all forms of Alchemy and Alkahestry, and thought that expertise over these two disciplines was the reason the Xerxian army stood undefeated. Even the Fuhrer himself had his theories, although a lowly General such as Roy wasn’t privy to them.
He swept his hair back off of his face, feeling the uncomfortable heat of the desert sun bearing down on him as he and his party approached the palace in the capital city that made up the main hub of the entire country, and stopped to let their horses drink from the long low troughs of water that lined the city paths. Roy figured the country’s main success had to be that, unlike Amestris, it wasn’t worried about expanding its territories. It had a smattering of hamlets spread out across the desert that Roy’s group had passed on the way in, which were really just huts in the sand, centred around a focal water fountain, and then there was the main hub of a city, and that was it. That was what King Van Hohenheim of the Peoples of the Light was content with.
The city itself was a sprawling metropolis cut into the desert with low buildings that had rooftops covered in desert plantlife, beautiful viaducts and numerous water-ways that cycled the rare rainwaters through the city. Everything led up to a stepped palace that had great groves cut into the sides of it, which, when it rained, would become powerful waterfalls that trickled down into every corner of the city. A city that was made entirely out of a beautiful porous white stone. The kind of stone that held on to the sparse desert water supplies like a cactus did, keeping their houses cool year round. It wasn’t just clever architecture, though. Everything in Xerxes revolved around the collection and preservation of water. The desert peoples worshipped water as a god – had personified it as the head of their Pantheon, and prayed to it. Roy could understand that. Water gave life, and it took it too. But in such a harsh environment when rains were so few and far between, he thought to himself that their god was an unsympathetic one.
“Looks like we’re not the only ones His Right Honourable King Hohenheim sent for, then,” Breda mumbled to him, having dismounted his horse and led it to where Roy’s own steed was sampling some of the Desert People’s precious god.
He was right, Roy assessed, looking up ahead to where a group just like his, but made up of Xingese nationals, was standing ceremoniously at the bottom of the palace steps. Their long, light-blue Hanfu gowns looked incredibly hot in the desert sun. Maybe ten feet away from them was the dark skinned people of Donbachii, looking regal with their intricate braids, and the colourful shades of their ceremonial clothes shining brightly against the white of the building and cream of the sand. Just down the road was a Cretan party, wearing the tall white wigs of the Royal guard, and carrying lace parasols. And in a perfect three abreast marching rectangle was an envoy of Drachmans in their dark military uniforms: although Roy noted that they had forgone the furs. He frowned around at the gathered groups, feeling as if their own party, in their Amestrian Blues, was now just one of many delegates trying to show off the best of the best.
Except the Fuhrer had not sent his best, Roy thought rather self-depreciatingly: he had sent Roy, and Roy’s rag-tag team of like minded soldiers. Hohenheim, he hoped, wouldn’t see it that way. Roy was still a General in the Amestrian army, after all, and not only that, but the famed Flame Alchemist, Hero of Ishval. Not a title he liked, but one that had served him well enough in Amestris in securing his rank. Xerxes had stayed out of the Ishvallan conflict, outside of welcoming many Ishvallan refugees to its lands. Perhaps the King would see he and his associates as just as worthy of sharing his table as the other delegates from across the world.
Roy could only hope that Xerxes hadn’t decided it was time to shake things up a little on the world stage, and perhaps get revenge for the many Ishvallan refugees now sharing his waters. He could only hope that this wasn’t a declaration of war, and that he wasn’t about to walk into a massacre. He wouldn’t exactly put it past the Fuhrer to use Xerxes in an elaborate plot to take him off the playing field, after all. He’d made no secret of his sight on the top. He glanced around at his team. Hawkeye had her hair up, and a sunburn on the back of her neck, but her fingers were always hovering just over her holstered gun, ready to jump into action at a moment's notice. Havoc, too, was scanning the other delegates with mistrustful eyes, and seemed to be especially wary of the Drachmans. Breda, Fallman and Fuery attended to the group’s horses with their shoulders tense and their backs straight. But Major Alex Armstrong, on loan from the Fuhrer’s personal detail to join their crew, made a striking silhouette in the desert sun, and it was obvious that they had been spotted just as easily as they had spotted the other nation’s representatives.
Over all, Roy hated the uncertainty, and it would be fair to say he had not wanted to come to the desert country. But orders were orders, and so off to the Sandy Sanctuary he went.
In moments, the heavy palace doors opened, with not even a creak on their well oiled hinges, and from the vestibule inside flooded out a veritable host of golden haired palace attendants. Some of them were guards, denoted by the golden armour plates over their breasts, but others it was harder to tell. They flowed down the steps as gracefully as a river, and split like their watery ranks had hit invisible rocks, groups here and there meandering off to each set of delegates from their neighbouring countries. The group that came to them were all female, with waterfalls of beautiful auric hair in shades ranging from champagne to a deep amber honey, and they took the horses from them with coy little smiles and secrets behind their metallic eyes, leading them off to stables out of sight. Their silence did nothing to quiet Roy’s anxious mind, but when the two women left behind from tending to the horses waved for his group to follow them with long tanned fingers, he fell into step as easily as if he was following an order from his commanding officer.
He’d always been a sucker for a blonde, he told himself as he watched them walk ahead of them: the strong muscles in their legs obvious where their white tunics only reached their knees. Flowing white tunics like the togas of old adorned every citizen in the country, like an unofficial uniform. It made the already tanned Xerxians look even more bronzed, and that was only exaggerated more by the opulent embellishments that dripped from their every limb like honey. Golden bangles encrusted with rubies. Ornate golden earrings that dangled down their long necks. And necklaces of gold and lapis lazuli. For there was one thing the tiny nation of Xerxes had in abundance, and it wasn’t people, or lands, but wealth. A wealth that came from having the world monopoly of precious metals and rocks. For Xerxians, wearing gold was like wearing underwear. A simple fact of life, not a luxury.
They were certainly beautiful people, Roy could attest to that.
He and his group were lead into the beautiful atrium of the palace, a round room with a domed roof made of glass, with vines and desert plants trailing down the walls and decorating the stark white of the walls so naturally Roy could almost imagine he had walked into an oasis rather than a building. Underfoot he was stepping on the most intricate mosaic he had ever seen, and when he glanced down at the curved lines he noticed two things. One: he was walking on amethyst, rubies, and obsidian. And two: he was walking on an array.
“This is-!” he huffed in surprise at finding himself unwittingly in the middle of an intricate transmutation circle, carved right into the palace floor and made out of precious materials. But he was unable to finish his complaint, because somebody spoke over him, in a melodic sort of voice that Roy associated with tortured poets.
“The Life Matrix,” they called it.
The palace attendants that had been sent to collect him and his group immediately bent into fluid curtseys, and then fled the atrium entirely, without looking at the new arrival at all. A moment later, stepping out of the shadows of the colonnade that lined the atrium, and letting the light of the sun filtering through the glass domed roof catch on his resplendent visage, came a boy.
Roy found his next breath was difficult to exhale. He was brought to mind of the Aspen trees that lined Central’s streets in the spring time; the sunflower fields in the West Area, that Chris had taken him to once as a boy so that he could run his fingers over the silken petals; the sunsets he had watched with Maes on quiet nights, after intense training in the academy. Like just looking at this person had brought back every golden memory he’d ever held dear, and let them pale in comparison to seeing what true regality was. This boy was a lion, his loose braid of woven gold a mane, and his hard-lined body untameable and predatory. He paced the edges of the colonnade with his sharp, 24 carat eyes locked on his prey. On Roy. And the rest of the world seemed to fall away. The colonnade, the palace attendants and the delegates they were leading in, and Roy’s own team, all faded into the background, leaving only Roy, the mosaic, and this shining boy in front of him.
“It can not hurt you, Alchemist,” he promised, sliding further into the atrium to trace his steps along the mosaic. He was not a lithe boy – far too muscular for that descriptor – but his movements were as loose-limbed and spry as any ballet dancer.
Roy put him somewhere in the region of twenty to twenty-five years of age, but his eyes held the kind of intelligence that suggested he had spent an entire lifetime doing nothing but devouring knowledge. His tunic was longer than that of the palace attendants, and worn in a different style that covered his shoulders, but even so Roy spotted the silver sheen of a metal limb replacing his right arm. When he looked down he noted the boy was barefooted, and although his right leg was clinking with anklets set with diamonds, his left leg was also metal. Somehow that silvery shine seemed to set off the gold in him even more. Roy watched his progress carefully as he toed along the precious-stone mosaic like a cat on a garden fence, and couldn’t help but think to himself that he had never seen someone so beautiful. Or so dangerous.
“It is not a true array,” the man spoke as he tip-toed, danced and prowled the circle. He pointed to the mini circles decorating the edge of the larger array. “You see the symbols at the compass pedestals? They are representations of the soul, body, blood, and spirit, but they are not elements any Alchemist could activate. Now look at the half-way points – they are just Xerxian symbols for our gods: Leto, Kazantho, Terra and Aetherix. And of course the centre is dedicated to Aquae. This Matrix is in appeasement to our Lord Aquae, and only He could choose to bless you with it.” He stopped his trail of the edge and looked at Roy in the middle of the array with a look so confident in his own ability to captivate an audience that Roy found himself rooted to the spot. Then he watched as the boy danced inwards, his tunic flowing out behind him as he spun towards the centre. And when he came to a stop he was so close to Roy that Roy wanted to take a step backwards. But he resolutely held his ground as the lion smirked up at him, as if they were sharing some private joke, and not just physical space. “But Our Lord Aquae has not deemed anyone worthy of his blessings, for at least as long as I’ve been watching people pass through this Matrix, at any rate.”
Roy couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow down at the young man. He had always been told the Desert People held their religion in such high esteem that to waste even a drop of water was seen as a harshly punishable offence. But here this boy was, openly mocking Aquae, the personification of water itself. And Roy had no idea what to say to that. Belatedly, the acceptable greeting in Xerxes returned to his brain.
“May – may the rains of Aquae find you,” he stumbled, feeling foolish for his uncharacteristic stutter.
“And you, Alchemist,” the boy told him with a sharp grin that made Roy think of lions again. “Although I highly doubt Our Lord would send his waters to a man who makes his living from burning desert sands.”
“You know who I am,” Roy replied in a quiet voice, his heart clenching painfully in his chest at the thinly veiled reference to his role in Ishval.
At least continuing to keep the conversation on how this boy knew Roy was better than reliving the frankly embarrassing amount of times Aquae seemed to have ‘sent his waters’ directly to Roy, just to make him useless mid-battle. That line of thought didn’t help the sudden feeling of bashfulness that had sprung up at his being recognised. It wasn’t the first time he had been recognised, of course, but it was the first time outside of Amestris. And the first time by someone who was ethereally beautiful. He was regretful that that recognition came from his time as a human weapon, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, and he very much felt like a beggar in the presence of this shining man.
“I know everything,” the boy replied without a hint of irony or modesty in his tone.
Roy had a bright moment of cognitive dissonance in which he simultaneously wanted to bow down to the lion’s clear and obvious intelligence, and also find a way to put this young man in his place. But he was saved from the diplomatic fall out of doing that by another voice breaking through the hazy bubble that had enveloped just he and his lion. The new voice was a deep baritone that belonged to a man in ceremonial flowing white robes, who came striding out of the colonnade with a deep set frown on his bearded face and his own golden hair pulled back in a low ponytail. Immediately, Roy and his crew dropped into as low a bow as each of them could muster.
Because this man was the King.
“You must be the representatives of our Western neighbours,” King Hohenheim began, still frowning, not looking particularly impressed by the Fuhrer’s envoy. Roy didn’t even bother picking up his nose from the ground as he replied.
“May the rains of Aquae find you, your Majesty!”
“Indeed,” Hohenheim replied with a grumble, which was not the standard response, and spoke volumes about how little he regarded Roy and his crew. Roy raised his head only a little to see if he was still frowning, and found that he was. “I see you’ve met my son.”
Oh. Oh shit . Roy had already blown this diplomatic mission that he knew nothing about if the beautiful boy who had been circling him was Hohenheim’s son . Xerxes may have been a land steeped in myth, but the one constant known across the world was that its king held only one thing truly dear, and that was his sons. Apparently he’d married a great Amestrian beauty, and she’d bore him twins, both with faces that could start wars. But Hohenheim didn’t let anyone near them. Their mother had died young, and the boys had been in an accident when they were children. Hohenheim’s protectiveness of them was stuff of legend. Roy stood back up, straightening his back and sending the lion what he hoped was a discrete glance, noting his metal limbs once more. An accident when they were children, huh? If it had lost the boy two of his limbs, he supposed he could understand the father’s urge to protect.
“No need to get your tunic in a twist, old man,” the boy huffed, his shoulders slumping, and suddenly looking like the young man he was, and not the dangerous, stalking lion that Roy had previously thought of him as. As he moved out of the Matrix and towards where Hohenheim was radiating royal rumination, he looked very much like a scolded son. He stopped at his father’s side, looked over his shoulder and, when Hohenheim wasn’t looking, he sent Roy a wink. “By His rivers, Flame Alchemist,” he bid his farewell, before disappearing into the colonnade again, leaving Roy standing in the atrium, suddenly very aware that he was blushing.
It was Fuery who filled him in, when they were seen to their rooms, that getting involved with a son of the King would be a monumentally stupid move – as if Roy wasn’t already intimately aware of that fact.
Hawkeye, as the only woman in their party, was allotted a room to herself, and the rest of them divided themselves up into pairs for the remaining three guest suites afforded to them. Havoc and Breda were a unit that nobody would want to split up, and Fallman had volunteered to room with Alex, since he had at one point worked closely with the man’s sister, and they had more to talk about. Which had left them all parting from each other in a white-walled corridor, disappearing into separate rooms. Roy entered the small but charming suite that looked over a central courtyard, and had cool, terracotta coloured tiles underfoot, with Fuery by his side. The youngest and meekest member of their team, Roy had not expected the man to be so forward about what the entire group had witnessed in the atrium. But if he was going to encourage a culture of honesty amongst his ranks, he supposed sometimes that meant being called out on immediately falling head over heels for a hot blonde Xerxian Prince the moment he met them.
“The King is said to lose all rationality when it comes to his sons. I’ve heard rumours that the boys aren’t even allowed to be alone in a room with a potential suitor, in case it… sullies their innocence,” he explained in a carefully detached tone, as he put his backpack down on one of the two singles in the shaded room. He turned to Roy with his hands on his hips like he was a fretting housewife. “If anyone were to catch either of the boys with a… potential suitor,” he repeated, with a knowing look at Roy which gave Roy the distinct impression his subordinate had just called him a slut. “They’d probably end up being forced into marrying the Prince to preserve his grace’s dignity. Live here in the palace. A glorified pet at most, I expect. And there’d be the question of heirs, of course.”
He sent Roy another knowing look, this time letting his eyes wander down Roy’s body to make it clear that Roy very much did not have the equipment to produce the Prince of Xerxes an heir. None of that should have embarrassed Roy, but he still felt the urge to put his hands over his manhood, like Fuery was looking right through his Amestrian Blues and at his junk. As if he just assumed that Roy would be the one carrying a child, if they did get caught, and if that was even possible. Something weirdly pleasant tingled along his stomach at the idea of it. Of getting caught with the Prince. Of being forced into marrying him, and then the Prince trying his hardest to please the Xerxian gods by making every effort to knock him up. In Amestris that wasn’t something people talked about. It wasn’t like it was illegal to take your pleasures with another man, goodness knew Roy would be in jail if it was, but there was definitely a general consensus amongst the powerful men in the country that to take on the role of the ‘catcher’ wasn’t acceptable. That being submissive to another man made you, in turn, less of a man. It was misogyny at its finest, and not something Roy necessarily agreed with, but still a societal decree that Roy wrestled with in his own mind. It meant that thoughts like that, about getting knocked up by another man, were thoughts he pushed away the moment they ever entered his mind.
Having Fuery looking at him like that, like he knew exactly what Roy was thinking when it came to the Xerxian Prince, had him feeling tingly and unsettled all over his body.
Instead of rising to the upset of being called out for his reaction to the man, however, he decided to play it cool. He raised an eyebrow at his subordinate as if he had no idea what Fuery was talking about, and put his own things down on the other bed without a word in response to the man’s thinly veiled warnings. He went over to the arch of the window, and looked through it down to the desert plants growing in the sandstone coloured courtyard below. There were many palace attendants milling about in their knee-length tunics: some gardening, others simply walking through the courtyard on their way to their duties – but Roy’s eyes were immediately drawn to two men in longer tunics, sitting on a bench in the middle of the courtyard, talking to each other with their heads tilted into each other, like they were the only two boys in the world. Their faces were so alike they could be clones of each other. Or twins . One was the lion Roy had met earlier, his long hair still in that loose braid, the fluttery flaxen strands of his bangs framing his face like a mane. His brother, however, had cut his golden locks short, making them look a little lighter in the sun, and making him seem slightly less ethereal for the short-back-and-sides. He was slimmer, too, not as muscled, and had a slightly gaunter face. None of that really registered with Roy, though, who’s eyes strayed again and again to the brother who had danced around him in that array, stalking him like prey.
Nothing Hohenheim’s son had said during that encounter had told Roy he wasn’t the innocent little boy that the King wanted him to be. He was cheeky, perhaps, and clearly didn’t put as much stock into the almighty Lord Aquae that his father and countrymen did, but he hadn’t been flirtatious . At least, not in his words. He had simply been factual as he explained the array to Roy. Imparting knowledge as if imparting knowledge was what he had been born to do. It was his body language – the languidness of his dancing, and the challenge in his sharp, intelligent eyes, that had told Roy that the interaction was not simply a meeting of minds. That the Prince had been interested in him in a way that had sent arousal flushing through Roy. No one would have come away from that interaction believing the young man to be innocent , of all things. Predatory, single-minded, and the kind of person who always got what they want, was the take-away Roy had been left with, at any rate. And it was exactly the kind of take-away that left Roy wanting more. For a moment, looking down at that beautiful head of spun-gold hair, Roy thought to himself that being caught with that man, and becoming his glorified pet, would not be so bad.
Fuck, he’d even wear a collar and bark like a good little puppy, if it got him just one night knowing what it was to be loved by a lion.
They had time, he thought to himself. If it had been up to Roy then whatever this world-stage meeting was about, they would have gone right to business. But Xerxes stood on a lot more pomp and circumstance than General Mustang did. Before business could be discussed it fell to the King to feed and entertain his guests. It would insult his gods if he did not, and Xerxians were not known for taking their religion lightly – the Prince in the courtyard notwithstanding. That evening there would be a great banquet in the grand hall, and King Hohenheim would bring out his best singers, and jesters, and entertainers, in a hope of making his guests full of both good food and good feelings. All of it was in honour of Kazantho, goddess of the wind, if Roy’s research into the Xerxian pantheon was correct. Then the real meeting, and all the dirty political business, would happen the day after. It was the Xerxian way, and, for Roy, it was a perk of being the General the Fuhrer wanted out of sight, sequestered away in the Desert.
But what it truly meant was that, for the moment, he and his team, and all of the other delegates that had travelled to the Sandy Sanctuary, had an entire afternoon to kill, before they were expected anywhere for their ambassadorial duties.
“I’m going to unpack later,” he told his subordinate, unheeding of Fuery’s protests as he all but ran for the door.
He let it fall shut behind him and turned left. He’d paid attention on the way up, and he knew the corridors well enough to make an educated guess as to how to get out into the courtyard. Left again at the end and down the cool marble steps, and then there was a portico that led directly out into the desert flower-beds lining the courtyard. He took a moment to collect himself in the shade of the columns, before striding out into the sunny yard as if he had just been going for a stroll around the palace to get his bearings. A couple of uniformed gardeners were tending to a bed of cacti and spiky succulents ahead of him, and he stopped in a pretence of interest over the plants. Behind him, from the bench the Princes were sat upon, his lion laughed.
“I did not put the Flame Alchemist down for such an ardent botanist,” he teased.
Roy stood up straight from where he had been surveying the plants, and plastered a confident smirk on his face that he realised he didn’t really embody in that moment, as he turned to the Princes sitting on the bench.
“I think you might have me at a disadvantage, Prince Hohenheim,” he began, fully intending to go on to say that the boy clearly knew more about Roy than Roy did about him. It wasn’t even that Roy had come to this mission unprepared – Xerxes was simply so secretive that outside of knowing the Royal family had two Princes, little else was known about them. Certainly not something as identifiable as names. But at the mention of his surname the Prince’s shoulders dropped so suddenly, and scowl came about his features, that Roy thought he had done something very wrong.
“It’s Elric,” he huffed, for the first time dropping his royal cadence. He sounded younger, not using that tortured poet's voice. Cuter, too. “In Xerxes we take our mother’s name.”
“My apologies for my ignorance.”
The other Prince Elric gave his brother a highly amused look, but said nothing of the man’s behaviour. As he stood from his position on the bench it became obvious that the movement was difficult for him, and his brother held his elbow to steady him as he stood. A moment later he was straightened and mostly steady, and he looked at Roy with sparkling, harvest-gold eyes.
“May the rains of Aquae find you,” he greeted Roy, and, unlike his brother, it appeared this Prince genuinely believed in their watery god. “My name is Alphonse. This is my brother Edward. He is terrible at introducing himself, so please forgive him.”
“There is nothing to forgive,” Roy replied suavely, because that’s what you said when a Prince of a neighbouring nation requested your forgiveness. And also, Roy relented, because he probably would have forgiven Edward Elric absolutely anything.
Alphonse smiled at him with a blinding brightness, and, behind him, his brother stood from the bench too, putting his mismatched hands into the folds of his tunic, which Roy realised were pockets. Those flowing white robes were full of surprises, it seemed, and Roy wanted to find out what else they were hiding. He sent Roy a smirk over his brother’s shoulder, and Roy realised that this boy knew that it wasn’t desert flowers that had brought him down into the courtyard. Alphonse must have known too, because he sent his brother a very telling look, despite the blithe smile that stayed securely on his face.
“I look forward to seeing you tonight at the feast, General Mustang,” Alphonse told him, turning his knowing look away from Edward and clasping his hands together in front of himself in a very proper posture. “By His rivers,” he bid, nodding his head once before hobbling off away from them.
Roy watched the limp with a furrowed brow, and when he turned back to Edward the Prince had sat back down on the bench, looking after his brother with an affectionate smile on his handsome face. Edward patted the stone bench beside him, sending Roy a challenging look.
“Sit with me,” he ordered, and Roy followed it immediately. The both of them looked after Alphonse’s retreating back as he hobbled into the portico and out of sight. And then Edward put his hand down on Roy’s thigh, and Roy cleared his throat and tried not to jolt at the feeling of those strong fingers squeezing his leg. “I know you want to ask about him. About me.”
Roy sent him a sidelong look. He glanced up towards where his suite's window overlooked the courtyard, and wondered if Fuery could see him sitting there, being touched by the Prince of Xerxes, right out in the open. Sullied innocence, indeed.
“There are rumours,” he admitted. “That there was an accident. That that’s why your father is so protective.”
Edward snorted in derivative amusement next to him, and his hand retracted from Roy’s leg to run through his mane of beautiful hair, letting his fluttery bangs fall around and against his cheeks in soft tresses that Roy wanted to bury his fingers in.
“Protective my ass,” he grumbled, which sounded damn near scandalous coming from the mouth of a Prince. “More like controlling,” he added, but then his sharp eyes became wistful as he looked down at his own metal leg jutting out from under his flowing tunic. His next words were said in an impossibly low voice, and if Roy hadn’t been sitting right next to him, he might not have heard him. “Not that I really blame him.”
Roy had not signed up for feelings, when he’d come down into the courtyard to see if he could tempt the Prince into picking up where they’d left off in the atrium, but the low sadness of those words had both his curiosity peaked, and his empathy activated. He knew the tone as well as he knew his own face in the mirror, because he’d heard it so often in his own voice. Edward was blaming himself for something, and thought his father blamed him for that same thing – and Roy was switched on enough to figure out that that something was to do with Alphonse. He leant back on the bench, putting his hands down on the cool stone of it, and looked out at the white stone and the desert greenery.
“For twins, the two of you seem to have very different personalities,” he commented, because he wasn’t going to outright ask for the story from Edward, but if he kept the conversation on Alphonse long enough, Edward would eventually let slip why he had that tone of voice in regards to his brother.
Then the Prince sent him a sidelong look, a sharp grin on his face that suggested Roy had just said something misinformed.
“Ah, rumours and myth, the shields of Xerxes,” he lamented with amusement. “Alphonse isn’t my twin. He’s actually ten months younger than me. My little brother, although no one ever believes that. He’s my responsibility.”
“Let me guess,” Roy implored, knowing this self-deprecating behaviour from seeing it all the time, in himself. “The accident was your fault.”
Edward nodded, not looking at him, some difficult emotion swimming in his metallic eyes. Roy sent the last place he had seen Alphonse a look, as he thought over the younger brother’s limp. Other than that, he seemed fine. He certainly wasn’t missing two limbs, like Edward was. Edward followed his gaze with soft golden eyes.
“After our mother died, we… I lost my way. After we… After the accident, my brother was in a coma. For five years.” He kicked at a loose stone with his metal foot, and it went skidding across the courtyard and into a flowerbed. Roy watched its progress feeling a tightness in his chest at the revelation. “The King blames me too, for that lost time. I can tell. He doesn’t outright say it, but that protectiveness you speak of… it’s different for Al and I.”
“Different how?” Roy found himself asking, despite himself. Something about the eldest Prince ignited a natural curiosity in him that made him want to know the entire story. Like somehow if he knew it, he could make it better. What an arrogant assumption to make, he told himself.
Edward snorted again, looking down at his lap, his fingers splayed on the bench between them. Roy wanted to spread his fingers a bit further out, crawling them towards the boy’s bronzed skin, and hold his hand, like a boyfriend might. Like he was that potential suitor that Fuery had been talking about, and not like he’d just come down here in hopes of a quick fuck from a wild animal of a boy.
“Alphonse has a guard, twenty-four seven,” he admitted, and then laughed when Roy started looking around the courtyard for anyone wearing the breast plate of the palace security detail. “You won't be able to spot them – half the time I can’t even tell that they’re there. But they are. He’s watched. He’s protected. But he’s allowed to do what he likes. He leaves these gates to experience the desert communities, and he travels and explores. He even has a thing going on with one of the Xingese Princesses, much to our father’s delight. But my ‘protection’ is much stricter. I’m watched, but it's not out of love. He spies on me. I’m not allowed to leave the palace, or meet new people. I’m not even allowed in the library any more.”
This last sentence was said with much more bitterness than anything else he had complained of. Roy thought to himself that the library must be the perceived punishment Edward lamented the most. For a boy that seemed to exhume intelligence, not being able to read must have felt like the cruellest of fates. He had to wonder what in the world the man had done to bring down such harsh justice from his royal father.
“Because of the accident?” Roy asked. Edward sat forward on the bench, swinging his legs out a little in a display of youth.
“It’s not just about the accident. He doesn’t like that my preferences don’t line up with what he wants,” he admitted, and sent Roy a little smirk. “There’ll be no heirs if I don’t bed a woman, and I don’t want to bed a woman. It’s a point of contention. So he’ll just keep me here until he finds the right one, I guess. The one I’ll finally agree to make babies with.”
“So all those rumours, that your father wants you to stay innocent, that comes from you not being allowed to leave the palace, until he finds you the… right bride?”
Roy swallowed thickly. He highly doubted King Hohenheim would look at Roy and think he would make a good bride for his eldest son, but now the image was in his head, and a weird bubbling anxiousness had sprung to life in his stomach.
“Innocent,” Edward scoffed. “I’m twenty-two, in a country where the age of consent is fourteen. You can’t really think I’m still a virgin. I’m sure my father doesn’t think so either, despite his best efforts to stop me from finding someone. No one can be that naive.”
Roy frowned, a jolt of some emotion piercing his stomach that he refused to name.
“So what, you just wait for delegates to show up at the palace and choose one to get your rocks off with?” he asked, sounding judgemental even to his own ears. Edward spared him a bored look.
“Don’t tell me you’re the jealous type, General Flame.” Well, okay then, turns out he didn’t have to name it, because apparently the Prince of Xerxes would happily do that for him. Edward grinned at him. “I have a running thing going with a Xingese heir of my own,” he admitted. “He comes here often enough to scratch the itch, and it runs mostly under the radar of the King. But it’s not exclusive. He… doesn’t want to wait for me.”
“I see,” Roy responded, trying to portray someone who was relaxed about this new information, and probably failing miserably.
“No you don’t,” Edward told him, as if Roy simply wasn’t intelligent enough to get it. Roy got the impression that was how the Prince felt about the vast majority of people who came through his door, and wanted to prove him wrong. But then, simultaneously, he rather grumpily wondered what made Edward’s Xingese hook up so special, and as he was ruminating, Edward stood up from the bench with a little smirk back down at where Roy remained sat. Roy knew he should stand in the presence of a standing Prince, but he was feeling rebellious. Edward must have noted that, too, because his amusement only seemed to grow. “My room is on the south side of the building. Two stories up, door at the end of the corridor. I’ll see you there in an hour.”
And then he left, with a jaunty little wave over his shoulder, like he hadn’t just insinuated he was going to break every rule Roy had been told about when it came to the Xingese Princes. He called to mind Fuery’s warning once more, about becoming a glorified pet to this boy, should they get caught in their naughty dealings.
Well, pet he would become, he told himself. Woof fucking woof.
South side of the building, two stories up, and into a corridor that had three doors cut into it. One on each side, and one at the end. The personal suites of each of the three members of the Royal family? Or perhaps each of those doors lead to one of Edward’s personal rooms, because he couldn’t imagine a Prince being happy with just a singular room to himself. He stepped along the corridor with as light a tread as he could anyway, cautious that at any moment Alphonse, or King Hohenheim himself, might appear in the doorway of one of the other doors. How exactly he would explain his presence in Edward’s personal spaces if he did get caught, he had no idea. But no matter what, he thought, as he very gently knocked on the door at the end of the white walled corridor, he was pretty sure it was going to be worth it.
“Come on in, Flame,” came Edward’s royal voice from inside, and Roy took a moment to set his nerves, before turning the intricately carved golden doorknob and pushing into the room.
The sight that met him was all the proof Roy was ever going to need that this was not going to be his usual kind of hook up. He’d never fucked royalty before, and as such he had had no idea about the sheer opulence that would meet him on opening the door to a royal bed-chamber. Inside was another domed ceiling, made entirely of stained glass, showing off the visage of one of the Xerxian’s five gods. Roy wasn’t sure which one, although he could tell it was not Aquae, or Leto, who had been adopted by some zealous Amestrians. It wasn’t Aetherix either, because the more Roy looked the more he could tell this particular god was presenting as a woman, making Her the personification of either the earth, or the wind. She looked down on the room, casting hues of blues, greens and yellows across the pale tiles of the floor, making it feel like Roy had just stepped into a kaleidoscope. Directly under the stained glass was the biggest bed Roy had ever seen, made up with so many pillows Roy wasn’t sure how Edward actually slept on it. Some large and puffy, others small, firm looking and round, nestled amongst satin sheets in luxurious reds and blacks, draped over the sides until they brushed with perfect symmetry at the tiled floor on either side. If Roy had his way, that symmetry would turn into a mess of covers and thrown pillows by the time he was finished in that room. But time for that later. He kept his eyes roaming over the room, trying to distract himself from the opulence of the bed, and landed on an ornate arched mirror of bronzed gold attached to one of the phthalo green walls, and it was there that Roy spotted Edward, looking at himself in the mirror's tarnished reflection.
He’d changed out of his day tunic, and into some flowing white robes fit for a Prince, with long sleeves that covered even the very tips of his fingers, and a long skirt that draped down right past his sandalled toes. It was layered with a long red and gold stole that draped his shoulders and hung low about his thighs, as it tapered off into a shower of golden tassels. His hair had been left down, better to accommodate a delicate circlet of gold and rubies that rested imperiously about his waterfall of honeyed hair. He looked regal, and beautiful, and important. He did not look ready to get down and dirty with Roy.
“I feel like I should be calling you Your Royal Highness,” he commented.
“You should always be calling me that,” Edward told him with a deadpan expression, as he turned his back on the mirror and surveyed Roy coming into the room and closing the heavy door behind him.
He made not a single move to hide the fact that he was checking Roy out, letting his eyes roam over Roy’s own outfit. He’d changed out of the military blues, hoping not to be so easily recognised as an Amestrian as he made his way to the boy’s rooms, and had instead donned a plain white shirt and his best dark slacks. He had felt proud of the clean lines and timeless attractiveness of the outfit when he’d put it on, but now, in front of the splendidness of the royal dress, he felt nothing short of underdressed. Ideally, however, he’d like to be a lot less dressed. And he’d like for Edward to be a lot less dressed too. Looking at him now, dressed for the big old feast that his father was about to throw that evening, he had to wonder why Edward had invited him to his room at all. Had he completely misread the situation?
He realised, however, that he hadn’t, as the young man’s molten gold eyes darkened considerably, and a lustful smirk came to his face. It couldn’t be more obvious he was mentally undressing Roy with his eyes. Roy raised his eyebrows towards his hairline as he returned the favour. It was far too easy to imagine the hard lines of Edward’s muscles underneath the ceremonial robes, and the tantalising points where Ed’s flesh melted into metal. He looked somewhat androgynous in the flowing robes, with his long hair cascading down his shoulders and back in soft waves, but it couldn’t be clearer that Edward was physically strong. Strong enough to overpower Roy, most likely, and Roy felt another rush of arousal flood through him as he realised that fact. Right, blondes who could technically kick his ass. Roy had a type, sure him.
“The feast begins at eight,” he said, like it was a statement.
They both knew he was looking for confirmation, though, and perhaps trying to push them along a bit to the next stage of this clandestine meeting. Because since the feast began in less than an hour, they didn’t have a whole lot of time for other activities. Not if they wanted to make it to the dinner and represent their countries not looking like they’d just had a roll in the hay. Roy might not be missed, if they skipped it altogether, but Edward most certainly would – and his absence, when mixed with Roy’s, would be suspicious to say the least. Edward, however, did not seem at all concerned by the time restraints. He simply strode across the large tiled room, until he was standing in front of the immaculately made bed, and sat himself down on the edge of it, surveying Roy like he was a dish on the menu and not an actual person. The attention had Roy swallowing down yet more nerves he didn’t know he could feel. He suddenly felt very uninformed about Xerxian bedroom practices. In Xing, for example, the Emperor had countless wives and yet more bed-slaves. People whose entire purpose was to bring their masters pleasure. Was it the same in the Desert Country? Had Roy unwittingly signed himself up to become this boy’s toy for the evening? And if he had… Did that even bother him?
Edward’s smile was damn near unnerving.
“Undress,” he ordered, and Roy felt himself bristle.
“I don’t take your orders,” he mumbled, feeling petulant, because following orders was kind of exactly what he did. It was what defined his entire life. Edward knew that too, as his melodic laugh filled the stained glass room.
“Everybody takes my orders,” he confessed. “And you’re no exception. What do they call your kind back home, General Flame? Dogs of the military? Do I need to put a collar on you?”
Fuck. Roy hadn’t considered before that he might have a fucking pet-play kink, but apparently the idea of this shining boy putting his claim on him with a collar was bringing up turn ons he didn’t even know he had, because he felt himself getting hard in the pretty slacks he’d chosen to wear just to impress the Prince. He felt damn near woozy at the idea of it, and cleared his throat to cover the embarrassment he felt at getting hard at the idea. He sighed in a rather put upon way, trying to make it seem like he was doing this under duress, and not because Edward made him ready to follow orders, before toeing out of his shoes, and undoing the first few buttons of his crisp white shirt. Edward’s eyes didn’t leave him for a moment.
He let his shirt fall to the floor on top of his shoes, and tried not to make too much of a show about unbuttoning his slacks and undoing his zip. He wasn’t trying to give the man a strip-tease, even if Edward’s eyes, surveying him slowly revealing his body to the Prince, had him feeling like that was what was happening anyway. He pushed his slacks and boxers down in one go, flushing a little as he stood there, naked, in front of the lion lounging on the bed. He deliberately did not allow himself to give in to the urge to cover himself with his hands, and was intimately aware of his cock jutting up towards his stomach, hard and flushed. Edward hummed his appreciation, eyes roving over his body with clear interest.
“You certainly are pretty. I’m looking forward to having you under me.”
Roy felt himself swallow, and finally lost the battle with his own nerve, moving his hands to cover his manhood. Edward’s amusement only seemed to grow at that, and Roy felt like a butterfly pinned to a board, being looked over by a collector. Innocent Roy’s bare ass.
“I don’t catch , Your Highness,” he promised, in as confident a voice as he could muster, thinking of Amestrian hang-ups that Xerxes seemed to have no issue with. “Especially not to men fourteen years younger than me.”
Edward raised a challenging eyebrow, and then he leant himself back on to his elbows, his chin jutting up in a manly movement, his coiled and kinked hair making him look more like a lion on the hunt than ever before. It looked like he didn’t believe a word Roy said.
“Come here, puppy,” he ordered, and Roy’s brow furrowed as he fought a pathetic little whimper that wanted to crawl its way up his throat at the term.
He took a moment to assert himself a little more, telling himself to stop being so pathetic, and uncovering himself once more as he stepped forwards. Even so, he couldn’t help the blush that sprung up on his cheeks as his dick bobbed at the movement. It just looked so lewd, and it was obvious that Edward’s eyes were drawn to it, the downward turn of those golden irises making way for thick, bronze eyelashes fanning long shadows down his tanned cheeks. Roy stopped awkwardly in front of the bed, feeling horrifically exposed where Edward was still fully robed in his ceremonial gear. The younger man reached up, took Roy by his elbows, and gently, very gently, turned him around, until Roy found himself blushing at the heavy set door across the room, wondering if Edward was looking at the crease where his ass cheeks folded over into the tops of his thighs.
He may have told the Prince that he didn’t catch, but he couldn’t deny he was doing a grand total of nothing to actually stop the boy from having his way with him. He couldn’t deny that being on display for the Xerxian was equal parts mortifying and exhilarating.
“You don’t take my orders,” the Prince scoffed, making Roy’s ears heat up in embarrassment at how easily he had, in fact, taken the man’s orders. His old reservations, of what did and didn’t make a man, reared their ugly head again, and he tried to turn around – possibly to tell the Prince where he could shove his orders – but Edward put his metal hand on Roy’s shoulder and forced him back into looking away again, with a show of force that had Roy swallowing thickly. He trailed his mismatched hands down Roy’s shoulders and arms, and then put them on his naked hips, and pulled him back until Roy was forced into sitting backwards on the boy’s clothed lap. He could feel the lion’s erection pushing up between his cheeks, and Edward rocked his hips upwards to let him feel the size of it against his naked ass. Then Edward spoke his next words into his ear, eliciting a shudder from the older man as Roy felt the Prince’s flesh hand sneak down between their bodies to grab a handful of his left cheek. “You say you don’t ‘catch’, but tell me this: have you ever had a man back here, General Flame?”
Roy would be lying if he said no, but actually admitting it out loud was something he had never done before. Those nights in dark rooms, with men he didn’t speak to again come morning, were a shame he carried with him in Amestris. He wondered if Edward knew about the militaristic state’s hang ups regarding masculinity and how it related to sexuality. He wondered if this was Edward teasing him, or being genuinely curious. Because it was clear as day that Edward expected to have himself back there before the night was out, and Roy had no idea what to do with that information. He hadn’t expected any of this when he’d knocked on the door, and when he’d thought about what they would be doing that evening he had imagined himself inside of the beautiful Xerxian, not the other way around. But now that it was happening, it was obvious that the lion always got exactly what he wanted, and Roy’s ass was what the man wanted.
He nodded quickly, like even just doing that was confessing to a failing. Edward rewarded him for the honesty with a kiss to his shoulder, and then another few trailed up his neck.
“You like it, don’t you Flame? The feel of a cock stirring you up inside, fucking you good and proper. Getting you all loose and slutty for it. I know your type. So fucking needy for someone to just push you down and have their way with you. Absolve you of all decision making, because after all, they’re just taking what they want, right? You didn’t ask for it.”
Roy’s eyebrows furrowed as his eyes slipped closed. His stomach was jumping with a mortification that bubbled into arousal, and he didn’t know what to make of the tingling, scary-sexy feeling of it, and his reaction to those words. His toes curled slightly and lifted off the tiled floor, seating himself a little more down into the man’s lap, and Edward’s metal arm wrapped around his naked stomach to keep him where he was.
“I’m not like that,” he protested, but it sounded pathetically unsure, even to his own ears.
“Yes you are,” Edward told him, in that same immodest tone that suggested he was the keeper of all knowledge, and would not be taking notes. “But not tonight, puppy. Tonight, if you want something, you beg for it.”
Roy could no longer hold on to the whimper, and it erupted from him in a pathetic little noise as he bowed his head down towards where his own cock was dribbling pre-cum down itself. He couldn’t remember ever being so turned on. To think it was happening because of Prince Elric’s dirty words, and his confidence that he would be the one fucking Roy that evening, was not something he wanted to analyse too closely. He sucked in a harsh breath as Edward rocked his hips up once more, sliding his robed dick along the crease of Roy’s ass. Why did that feel so good?
Edward tilted them back until he was lying down on the luxurious bed, with Roy lying on top of him awkwardly, his knees drawing themselves up and his legs spread lewdly across Edward’s thighs, facing up to that glorious stained glass ceiling, and seeing Kazantho, or Terra, staring down at him with judgemental eyes. He wondered what sleeping every night under such a watchful, deified gaze must do to a person’s psyche. He wondered what getting fucked under that gaze was going to do to his own psyche. Edward’s metal hand kept him pinned, back to chest, and his flesh hand sneaked around his hips to take a firm hold of his leaking cock and start stroking him.
“Your Highness!” Roy heard himself call in a voice that didn’t even sound like him, as his thighs tensed and his mind went foggy with the feeling of another’s hand on his sensitive flesh.
Edward nibbled at the junction of his shoulder and neck, humming a contented sound as he gathered more of Roy’s sticky pre-cum and spread it about his cock, stroking him with long, nimble fingers, and then, on the down-stroke, taking a moment to massage at his balls, all the while holding Roy securely in place, as if he weighed as much as a feather, with his powerful metal arm.
“You’re so wet for me,” the Prince commented blithely, like Roy was a woman, who got wet for men to fuck them. The implication had Roy squirming slightly, a pleasured bubbling starting up in his stomach, making him feel like he was going to climax at any moment.
He tried to push that feeling away – that pleasured flush at the suggestion that he was like a woman: no less a woman who was a slave to their basic biological function of letting men fuck them. It had him straining against the hold, but Edward didn’t even break a sweat keeping him exactly where he wanted him. If Edward was a lion, Roy was a baby fucking gazelle, just waiting to be devoured. But devour him, Edward did not. It seemed he was the kind of cat that enjoyed playing with his food: because he spent the next few minutes just languidly stroking him, alternating between long, light strokes, and fondling his balls, and then lower still, where he pressed a firm finger against Roy’s taint, and moved on again before the heady feeling of that could pull a reaction from Roy. All the while undulating his hips up to press the hard line of his cock against Roy’s bare cheeks. It was good, but nowhere near enough. Roy reached down below his own hip to touch at Edward’s clothed thighs, and try and spur him on into more, but Edward kept his touch light, and only just teasing, until Roy was frustrated with how he was being held so securely, and Edward wasn’t giving him what he needed.
Then, the Prince turned his head into Roy’s ear, breathing a hot, sensitive breath over the shell of it.
“Tell me what you want, Flame,” he ordered. “Ask me nicely for it.”
Roy huffed up at the stained-glassed ceiling, feeling his brows furrowing once more at this brat’s stubbornness.
“What I want is for you to stop teasing,” he snarked.
“You can do better than that,” Edward shot back quickly, nipping at his ear like he was some feral street urchin, and not the heir to the Xerxian throne. “I said to ask nicely .”
Roy glared up at Kazantho/Terra. A very large part of him wanted to tell Edward where he could shove his ‘ask nicely’, but Edward was making not a single move to stop his teasing caresses, and they were beginning to feel a little overstimulating with just how light those touches were. Besides, he was really fucking horny, and nothing that had happened since he entered the room had made him any less horny. Desperate, Edward would probably call it. Or needy . Roy’s stomach churned with a strangely addictive mortification as he realised he was exactly the person Edward had described. The kind of person who just let someone hold him down and have his way with him. So he didn’t have to say it out loud. That that was what he actually wanted.
Because letting men fuck him in dark rooms was one thing. Saying it out loud, that he enjoyed that, in the light of this room, under the watchful gaze of Edward’s gods, was much more damning.
He had to take a long breath that he hoped was going to be calming, before he was able to rise to the challenge Edward was throwing down.
“Okay fine,” he hissed, feeling his face heating up in embarrassment once more, at finding himself in this situation. He’d walked in to the room completely unprepared for Prince Edward Elric of Xerxes, so graceful and golden, being a fucking sadist. “Can you let me up?” he asked, and then, glaring at the ceiling: “Please.”
Edward released his metal arm holding Roy down, and Roy wasted no time in sitting himself up and turning himself around, so that he was straddling the robed Prince on the bed. Edward couldn’t complain – he was still basically sitting in the brat’s lap – but this position afforded Roy much more freedom of his hands, and he put them to immediate good use. He grabbed that ridiculous stole, and looped it away from Edward’s shoulders, before pushing his fingers into the open folds of his long white robe, getting a good feel of the lion’s strong pectoral muscles under the material. Edward tilted his head up, and Roy immediately captured his lips in a searing kiss. This was much more like what he was used to – a reciprocal give and take. Except, he realised, whilst Edward had allowed him to tangle their tongues together, and take his fill of touching him, the Prince’s hands had gone lax; simply holding Roy in place at his hips lazily. Roy couldn’t help a frustrated growl, but didn’t let it get to him, as he trailed his own hands down the inside seam of the white robes, searching for the hard line of Edward’s cock he’d felt so addictively behind him before.
Before he could get a hold of it, however, Edward’s strong metal fingers circled his wrist, keeping him from the prize.
“You don’t want me to touch you?” Roy asked, raising a disbelieving eyebrow at the Prince.
“If you want to touch me, you need to ask.”
“Are you serious?” Roy ground out. He had half a mind to just leave this stupid endeavour off entirely and head back to his room. Except two things kept him in the bed. One: leaving Edward Elric with blue-balls might ignite an international incident, and two: Roy was still hard as fucking nails. He scrunched up his nose in annoyance, anyway. “You want me to ask ‘can I touch your penis, my lord’?”
“Your Highness,” Edward corrected. “And do you want to touch my penis?”
This might take the record for the amount of times two people had actually said the word ‘penis’ during sex. The word was making him feel a little stupid, and juvenile, because it kind of made him want to laugh.
“I want to have sex with you,” he admitted, feeling like he was completely out of his depth, and Edward was playing a game he didn’t know the rules of. “Usually that involves some touching of your -” he wasn’t going to say ‘penis’ again, “dick.”
Edward grinned his sharp, intelligent grin at him, like he could read Roy’s very thoughts, and knew how awkward he was feeling about the turn of events, and Edward’s weird bedroom rules.
“Do you want me to touch you?” he asked, and Roy fought the urge to roll his eyes.
“Yes,” he admitted.
“Where?” Edward asked, continuing to grin up at him. It took Roy a moment to figure out what he was asking, as the man’s hands trailed away from his hips, and grabbed a firm hold of his behind. Then, when his long fingers slipped between the cheeks, his brain stuttered to a halt and provided him with only two words: ‘wait, what?’. Roy blinked down at the younger man, feeling his entire body flushing at the feeling of a finger prodding at him between his ass-cheeks, and that Edward was asking him to confirm just where he wanted to be touched. Then Edward took just the barest amount of pity on him. “Here?” he asked, pressing the pad of his index finger against Roy’s rim.
Roy put his hands down on the boy’s shoulders and didn’t look at him, as his brain flooded him with images of Edward putting his fingers inside of him, and having his way with him. Of being this boy’s willing pet. Of getting fucked by him in a way that would leave Roy with no misunderstandings about exactly who he belonged to, and where he belonged in Edward’s bed. He gasped as Edward pushed a little further against his hole, and quickly nodded his head, despite himself.
“Try again, puppy.”
Roy screwed his eyes up, simultaneously hating that Edward was trying to embarrass him so much, and loving the rush of arousal that went through him every time he did.
“Please, Edward,” he whispered. “Just do it already!”
“Do what , Roy?”
Perhaps it was the command behind his question, or the fact that his finger was circling his hole and making Roy heady with need, or perhaps it was that for the first time Edward had used his true name, Roy might never know. But something snapped inside him, and all his inhibitions seemed to go out the arched window lining one of the walls of Edward’s kaleidoscope room.
“ Fuck me! Please,” he implored, and found his embarrassment washed away the moment Edward registered his words, and surged up to meet him, capturing his lips in another hot and heady kiss, this time giving his all to it.
“I knew you could do it,” he praised, before rolling them over and toppling Roy back onto his back on that ridiculously large bed, looming over him with all the power bestowed upon him as a member of the Xerxian Royal Family. Then, a promise: “Gonna make you feel so good.”
He reached behind himself to an Ottoman that was nestled next to the satiny sheets, and pulled out a veritable collection of oils and items that really only had one use. Roy found himself light-headed, as he imagined what Edward normally used those toys for. His usual Xingese hook-up? Or himself? Not that Edward had given Roy the impression he was open to anything other than being resolutely on top. He let out a puff of air at the bubbling anticipation that sprung up in him on seeing those items. They weren’t like anything you’d ever seen walking the seedy district in Amestris. Edward’s toys were all made of the highest quality materials, and shined with just as much splendour as everything else in the desert country. He selected one from the pack, along with a fancy looking bottle of oil, and let his predatory eyes settle on where Roy was lying on his back, panting gently.
“Turn on your front,” he ordered, and when Roy didn’t immediately move to obey, he hooked his metal hand under one of Roy’s knees and flipped him like it was nothing. The display of strength left Roy feeling breathless. “If you’re going to be mine, then you’ll learn to be a good dog, understood?”
“Yes, Your Highness,” Roy agreed, his mind fuzzy with arousal.
“Good boy,” Edward praised him, and he turned his head into one of the satiny pillows and moaned into it, as a flush of electricity shocked through him, going right to his dick. It should have felt ridiculous to have a brat fourteen years his junior calling him a ‘good boy’, but instead it just solidified his need to have Edward touching him, and fast.
What he didn’t expect was for a cool, slick finger to probe directly at his asshole, and then slip inside with no more warning. His hips instinctively rocked down into the mattress, but Edward’s hand just followed him down, and Roy made an unrecognisable pitched sound as that long finger dragged back out of him, before jabbing inside harshly.
“Here’s what good dogs do, Flame. They take what they’re given, and they say ‘thank you’ ,” he warned, pushing another finger past his rim and fucking him with them at a fast pace, as Roy whimpered and whined against the luxurious sheets and throw pillows, and took the hint.
“Th-thank you, Your Highness!” he yelped, as Edward managed to graze at his prostate and another jolt of hot pleasure rushed through him.
Edward pressed a dry kiss to his naked spine, and Roy could feel the billowing sleeves of his ceremonial robes flapping at his thighs as he continued fucking and stretching Roy’s hole with his fingers. Roy may have said he’d had men back there before, but it had been awhile, and this was quite the reintroduction. He couldn’t help the moans that seemed to slip from him with every thrust of Edward’s firm fingers, and his cock was still steadily leaking pre-cum, getting wet just like Edward had accused him of, making a damp patch on the satiny sheets. Then Edward withdrew his fingers, and dragged Roy up by his hips until his ass was in the air, leaving him feeling open and exposed. He tried to raise his shoulders to avoid the arch of his back, but Edward’s metal fingers circled the back of his neck, pushing him back down into the mattress, and holding him there. Like prey, Roy reminded himself. A dog subdued by their master. Shivers erupted over his entire body, his hands limp at the sides of his head, and his legs spread a little at Edward’s nudging, and behind him, Edward collected the toy he had selected earlier.
“I’m not in the habit of breaking my things,” he told him, keeping him right where he was with his face mashed into the sheets. “If anything gets to be too much for you, you can tell me. I’ll stop.”
Something about the idea that this twenty-two year old sheltered brat could do something that would constitute too much for Roy, fourteen years his senior and by all rights a metric-tonne more worldly, was almost insulting. He set his jaw as he told himself it would be damn-near shameful if he ever had to actually tell this kid to take it easy on him, even as his anxious mind whispered to him that if this sadistic Prince was actually warning him that something might be too much, he was likely about to get taken well past his limit.
“I can handle it,” he mumbled anyway, and heard the lion huff out a derisory laugh behind him, that just made his skin prickle with the injustice of it all.
“We’ll see, pup.”
Then Roy felt the first oil slick prod of something new at his entrance, cool like glass and rounded like the tip of a slim cock, but, Roy realised as Edward began to push, it was not a fake dick. It was a glass bead. Against the sensitive skin of his rim, it was difficult to take any measurements, but he could tell it wasn’t exactly small. Or, at least, not small considering where Edward was about to put it. Maybe the length between the tip of his thumb and its first knuckle. About 2cm in diameter. Nothing huge. But nothing to sniff at either, he thought to himself, as Edward used his thumb to push it past the muscle, until Roy was whimpering at the stretch of his rim around the girth of it, and then it was finally swallowed up inside of him.
Mindful of what he had been warned about earlier, Roy closed his eyes in mortification as he told himself to be a good dog and follow his master’s orders.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
Edward took in a sharp breath behind him, but did not tease him for the words. There was a short pause in the proceedings as both of them came to terms with what Roy’s whisper had meant, but then the Prince kept pushing, and Roy took measured breaths as the soft, golden coloured string connecting the first bead to the next was fed inside his hole, and then another, slightly larger glass ball was nestled up against his rim. Again, Edward used his thumb to feed the ball, slick with lube, slowly through the sensitive nerve endings just inside his entrance, keeping Roy subdued with his metal hand on the back of his neck, as he watched the progress of the toy. Again, Roy thanked him. The lion made a little sound of pleasure at it, but did not respond. Roy was too busy focusing on the new bead, which was now fully seated inside, pushed up against the one Edward had already put there.
After those two were fucked inside of him, Edward dropped the cord, letting the rest of the heavy glass beads dangle between Roy’s legs like a perverted tail, and hit the satiny sheets below with a thud. The tug of it pulled on the beads inside of him, stimulating the nerves at his entrance again through the movement, and Roy choked on his own spit at the feel of it. Edward used his now free hand to rub a comforting line up and down his spine, slick with oil, but somehow actually soothing.
“If I take my hand off your neck will you stay still?” he asked.
For the first time there wasn’t an undercurrent of an order there. There wasn’t any sadism slipping into his imperious tone. Just a simple question. Can I trust you to do as you're told? That, more than anything, made Roy want to be on his best behaviour. He swallowed once more, breathing through the intense stimulation of the beads inside of him, and tried his damnedest to relax a little.
“Yes, sir,” he replied.
His eyes slipped into a half mast, and his shoulders eased slightly, as some of the tension left his body. Edward rewarded him with yet more soothing rubs to his spine, and, after a moment, by slowly taking his strong automail hand off of his subdued neck. True to his word, Roy kept himself exactly where he was, keeping the lewd position with his cheek turned into the satiny sheets, and his ass in the air, with the heavy beads dangling down between his slightly spread legs, nestled up against his balls and then dropping down to the mattress below.
“Would you like another?” Edward asked, and Roy was too far gone to worry that replying to that, that saying yes , was an admission of some kind of shame he’d been carrying for years. He sighed way too daintily against the red satin, and slipped into the role the Prince of Xerxes had known he had wanted to play.
“ Please .”
Edward did not praise Roy for asking as nicely as he could, which Roy told himself he wasn’t disappointed about. Instead the Prince simply picked up the heavy beads once more, and began to push another one against Roy’s hole, feeding it inside. And as he did, he began to talk, the words coming out worshipping, but quiet, as if they were meant to be heard only by his own ears.
“Look at you. I’m not even having to apply much pressure, your slutty little hole just swallows them up. You’re doing so well, like you were made for this.”
Roy choked on a sob at the words, and although they sent a frizz of embarrassed arousal skimming over his body, and made him want to run away from the implications of his body being made to take Edward’s toys, and later, Edward himself, he resolutely kept himself exactly where he was. The shame mixed with his pleasure, twisting into something unrecognisable, but strangely good. He wanted to get out of the situation where it was beyond apparent he was enjoying being submissive to another man. And yet, in the next breath, he wanted to be this man’s good boy , and do as he was fucking told. He sobbed a little more as he stayed perfectly still, trying to relax down into the position again, and Edward pushed a fourth ball inside of him. A moment later he choked on his own spit as the Prince pulled on the cord and all of the beads slipped back out of him, the four of them falling out in rapid succession, as his rim once more stretched around them and then popped them out obscenely.
“Beautiful,” the lion praised, an unadulterated amount of lust in his tone.
Then, with no preamble, he picked up the cord once again and began feeding them back inside, as Roy’s forearms and thighs began to shake. It wasn’t long before Edward had pushed them all back inside of him. Four balls. Four whispered thank yous. And Roy felt himself tense for the pull out again, but instead he just felt a fifth nudging against his hole. Or, maybe it was the fifth. He’d already lost count, from how heady he was, struggling internally against the intense pleasure and what that meant for his masculinity. He knew that this ball felt larger again, and that he was feeling fuller than ever before, but fuck, he was so into Ed’s words and domination that he might have actually missed one of them getting pushed inside of him.
He moaned as the next one slipped past his oil soaked, sensitive rim, and nudged those already inside him deeper still, rubbing up past his prostate, and causing another small dribble of cum to leak out of his untouched cock. Was it the sixth, or the seventh? He was so fucking full he’d never be able to tell. The Prince let them sit there for a moment, and then he once again pulled on the cord, until three or four of them slipped back out of him. He moaned at the intense feeling, dribbling bodily fluid all over the bed, and Edward gave a rather dark chuckle behind him.
“Your hole is fluttering around the cord,” he commented, like Roy couldn’t intimately feel the involuntary spasms of his entrance reacting to the push and pull of glass beads being fucked in and out of him, and the strangely tickly feeling of the golden coloured cord that linked them hanging out of the furl of his asshole. “It’s like your submissive body is missing being stuffed full already. It’s amazing how honest a body can be, even if the person themselves is struggling to say what they want.”
He fed one of the pulled out beads back inside of him, and Roy was glad of the intense pleasure of that to focus on, rather than the Prince’s words. Because if he focused on the words his shame would overtake him, he knew. But with the balls being fed in, and then pulled out again, he could let the words, and the shame, wash away. It was impossible to tell how many he’d taken at that point. But still, he whimpered at the feel of the ball stretching him out and then nestling inside with the clench of his hole, and dutifully thanked the Prince for what he had been given. Another, and another, and another. But then, as Edward tried to nudge in one more, what felt like the largest one yet, that was stretching him so wide as it pushed past the sensitive skin at his opening, and nudged the beads already inside him ever more deeper into his guts, he felt himself locking up in pure tension. His toes curled, and his fingers clutched desperately at the sheets, as that next bead took him from ‘this is a lot’ to ‘this is too much’.
“Stop, please, Edward,” he sobbed, and then realised there was a pool of drool at the corner of his mouth, and felt even more pathetic.
Edward’s thumb was already sinking the bead inside of him by the time he managed to huff out his request, and it occurred to Roy that he couldn’t have stopped if he tried, as the glass ball slipped past the tense muscle at his rim and was swallowed inside. He choked on the feeling, his entire body tense as a bullet. God, he’d never been this full. He wasn’t even sure his ass had completely closed around that last bead. He felt open and gaping with it. He felt like he could feel the balls all the way up to his stomach. Immediately after, however, the Prince took his hands off the toy, and let the string hang again. This time it didn’t thud on the bed, and the weight of it pulled addictively and overwhelmingly against his entrance as it swung between his legs like a perverted tail.
“Alright, there you go,” Edward muttered, in a weirdly gentle tone, like he was soothing a toddler, and not a grown man. His hand went back to Roy’s spine to bring him some comfort, stroking up and down his back in firm, loving movements. “Well done. Thank you for telling me. You did so well.”
That praise was going to be the end of Roy, he thought to himself, toes curling once more, as he tried to relax the rest of his body around the delicious pull on his rim from the hanging toy, and the overwhelming fullness inside of him, and be the good dog that Edward wanted him to be. The man’s hand was rubbing firmly at his back, and he leant forwards over his prone nakedness, and pressed a strangely loving kiss to the back of his ear.
“So this is your limit, huh?” he asked, and Roy felt himself heating up as he replayed his own brazen declaration that whatever Edward could give him, he could handle it. Apparently, that had not been the case. But then Edward’s next words soothed his anxious mind in a way that Roy had not thought possible for such a blithe statement. “You took more than I thought you would be able to. I’m impressed.”
Impressed. Roy had impressed him. Perhaps not the way Roy would have wanted to impress this man, when he’d turned up on the palace doorstep that afternoon, but impressed nonetheless. A strange pride settled in his chest and made a home for itself, and Roy had no idea how to make it leave.
Then he realised that this foray into being fucked with anal beads had meant he had entirely lost track of the time as, to Roy’s abject horror, the gong that signalled guests down to the great hall, sounded a low chime throughout the palace. Whilst Roy was face down ass up in the Prince’s bed, with at least seven or eight glass beads buried in his asshole. Instinctively, he went to rise, but then Edward’s hand was quick as a shot back on his neck, subduing him once more.
“I didn’t say you could get up,” he hissed, slipping back into the sadistic tone he’d taken with Roy, before Roy had impressed him by having a slutty body.
“The feast,” Roy tried to explain his position, but Edward clicked his tongue like he was dealing with an unruly bitch, and put a small amount of pressure on the back of Roy’s neck, until he was forced into stopping his fighting and squirming.
“Dogs aren’t permitted at the table,” he told him in a cool tone. “So you’re going to stay here. Of course, I can’t be missed. Duties and other assigned bullshit. But I’ll be back for you, after the entertainment is over. A few hours, at most. I trust I won't have to tie you up.”
Roy swallowed thickly, the reality of the position he had got himself into by walking into Prince Elric’s room catching up with him. The boy wasn’t just a sadist. He was fucking insane.
“You can’t just leave me here,” he bargained, and Edward raised a regal eyebrow at him.
“Here’s the deal, Flame. You stay here, in this room, and you keep what I gave you inside you. When I come back, if you haven’t come all over yourself like a needy little bitch, you’ll get a reward.” Roy glared at him with all the ire he had left to muster. “And if you think to yourself ‘maybe I’ll just take the beads out, and put them back in after a few hours, he’ll never know I didn’t stay fucked full of them the whole time’ then know that I will know. After all, do you remember how many I gave you? And do you really think you could get that many back in yourself?”
Roy flushed darkly, because he’d been thinking exactly that, and he hated that Edward could read him so well. He also hated that the lion had seen through his work around and stunted the plan before it could take route. The sheer confidence in his voice, that Roy would not get the number right, if he removed the beads and tried to push them back in later, was enough to give pause to that plan. Besides, there had also been the caveat that Roy, apparently, was not allowed to come. If he did remove the beads, he wasn’t entirely sure the stimulation of that wouldn’t end up with him breaking that rule.
Edward put a hand on his hair, and messed it up a little.
“Be a good boy whilst your master is out,” he teased in a sing-song kind of voice. And then he was out the door, and gone.
By the time Edward’s heavy door opened again, some four hours later, Roy wasn’t even remotely aware of the time or how to count it. He had gone through the cycle of ‘screw this, I’m taking the beads out and going back to my room’, to ‘oh but I really want that reward, and I said I’d be good’, at least five times.
With each crisis of confidence that Edward would actually return to him, the thoughts of what the fuck he was doing, prostrating himself on the Prince’s bed, keeping those beads inside of his stretched ass, quickly sullied into what kind of man it made him, that he had been enjoying the attentions of another man putting things inside of him. His erection wilted, and waned, and then grew hard again over and over again, as slight adjustments to his position stimulated him in ways he had never had to endure for so long before. Edward had not actually said he wasn’t allowed to get up, look around the room, and otherwise entertain himself in the Prince’s absence – but any form of movement had the balls inside of him shifting and rubbing against themselves, and his sensitive prostate and nerve endings, until he was dribbling so much cum down his achingly hard cock that although he hadn’t actually orgasmed, Edward might think he had done. The urge to touch himself – to break the rule of no climaxing – was absolutely nerve-wracking. He was as hard as he had ever been, and seemed to have a never ending stream of semen ready to blow at any moment, even without jerking it. In his most shameful moments in those hours that he had been left alone, he’d found himself rocking his hips down into the boy’s sheets, until he’d come right to the brink, and then had to breathe very slowly and forcibly calmly as he gripped himself painfully tight at the base of his cock and managed to wrestle himself back from the edge.
Because if he was going to hang around in the Prince’s room for literal hours, as the sun finally set on the Sandy Sanctuary, and the moon filtering through the stained glass window turned the kaleidoscope into a fishbowl of silvery moonbeams and dark shadows, he was going to do so properly. He was going to keep those beads inside of him, and show Edward that he didn’t need to be restrained, because his internalised worries about what made a man had shifted thoroughly into ‘if you’re going to be this way , at least be fucking good at it’. And he was looking forward to whatever reward the Prince of Xerxes had in mind.
Now, as the door opened, at just past midnight, he had a brief panic that the person entering the room wouldn’t be Edward at all. Perhaps a maid cleared up his private spaces whilst he was out, and Edward had just left him there to be discovered in some kind of sick twisted game? But his anxiety faded as into the kaleidoscope room came the beautiful, lion-esque form of the eldest Xerxian Prince. And when Edward saw Roy, still lying on the bed on his front, letting himself rut down into the satiny covers with little pants and whines, and with his naked butt on display, with a few of the glass beads still hanging out of his hole like a perverted tail, his eyes darkened so considerably that the gold of his irises was almost entirely eaten up.
“You waited,” he breathed, like he couldn’t believe Roy had actually stayed. Roy couldn’t believe he had stayed either, so that made sense. Then Edward smirked at him. “This is a sight I’d like to come back to much more often,” he admitted, and a rush of something much more than arousal thrummed through Roy’s being.
He was put in mind once more of his youngest subordinate’s warnings; that should the two of them be caught together, to preserve Edward’s dignity, Roy would be forced into marrying him. That there would be the question of heirs . How Roy had made himself feel very strange imagining all the ways Edward might try his hardest to produce those heirs, despite Roy not having the equipment for it. Fuery had used the words ‘glorified pet’, and Roy had not known, at the time, just how literal the man’s prediction really was. Now, with Edward telling him how much he might like to see Roy in his bed more often, the idea of deliberately getting themselves caught, of submitting himself to a lifetime of curling up at Edward’s feet like a loyal hound, felt like a thrill it was dangerous to explore.
“I – I didn’t come!” he yelped, his head damn near delirious with how long it had been and how fucking desperate he was, even as he felt really stupid that that was the first thing he had greeted the Prince with.
Except he had had four hours of bringing himself back from the brink, and fuck him sideways if he wasn’t proud of the fact he’d managed to keep to the brat’s stupid fucking rules. Edward smirked at him with a predatory look.
“Well done,” he praised, and Roy felt himself go a little giddy at it. At this point Edward could blow on him and he’d end up coming his brains out. The praise was going to throw him over the edge of the cliff, and he’d damn well thank the man for it.
Edward stalked into the room, closing the door behind him with a quick snap, and shucked his ceremonial stole as he went, slipping it from his shoulders and letting it fall to the floor behind him with a carelessness that only came from having other people pick up after you. As Roy watched, over his own shoulder, the boy undid the ties of his white ceremonial robes and let them flay out, leaving him bare underneath, with an open robe lining the hard muscles of his stomach and thighs. Fuck, this horny brat hadn’t even been wearing underwear the entire time he was at the feast. It took him a moment to really register that, and it was only very belatedly that he looked down for another actual look at the brush of golden curls at the boy’s pelvis, to see what the man who had been subduing him was working with.
And well, yeah, that was reward enough in itself.
The Prince caught him looking with a smirk, and Roy didn’t even have it in him to be embarrassed any more about his own clear interest. He let his eyes roam up the tanned skin of Edward’s six pack, and over the dusky nipples on show, before finally bringing himself back to that beautiful face. Edward appraised him similarly, so there was no shame in it. He watched as the other man stood at the end of the bed, his eyes narrowed, as if he was plotting what his next move should be. As if it shouldn’t be to ravish Roy fucking entirely.
“Come here, Flame.”
Roy damn near scrambled to follow the order, wincing at the overstimulation to his dick and his ass as the movement made those balls inside of him brush up once more against his prostate, and had him whimpering. He crawled forwards on his knees towards the Prince on the bed, the remaining beads hanging from him swinging against the back of his thighs and his exceedingly drawn up ball-sack, and then he slipped from the bed entirely at Edward’s imperious look, to sink to his knees in front of the man’s cock. Edward put his metal hand on his cheek, and stroked the cool thumb over his top lip in a way that had him tingling all over.
“Are you ready to tell me what you want?” he asked, and Roy was – except what he wanted was everything .
“I want it all. I want you to make me yours. To feel you so fucking deep inside me I’ll never forget where I belong. Fuck, I wan’t you inside me so bad,” he confessed, the words sounding like a plea to a god. Edward’s affectionate look made them worth it.
“And I will be,” he promised. “But first, you deserve a reward, don’t you? Open that pretty mouth, Roy.”
Roy couldn’t help but moan as he did as he was told, letting his tongue flatten out against his bottom lip, and opening his mouth wide to accommodate the heft of Edward’s cock as the man gripped himself at the base and fed his length past Roy’s lips, pushing his head along his tongue so Roy could taste his hot flesh and his musky pre-cum. As he did so, he reached down behind Roy’s back, bending over himself so that Roy’s vision narrowed down to hard muscles and the ceremonial white robes that fell from his shoulders, and looped his automail fingers through the loop right at the end of the anal beads still hanging from Roy’s ass, and dragging on the floor. He hooked them up, the tug of them on Roy’s rim making him whine around the cock in his mouth.
Edward shoved himself slightly further down Roy’s throat, dragging himself back out against his tongue, before fucking back into his mouth with no real concern about Roy’s need to do basic functions. Like breathe. He felt saliva build way too quickly, coming thick with mucus at the abuse of his throat, and it dribbled out of him and down his chin as Edward fucked his face, but the Prince seemed to like that, because he collected some on his flesh fingers and pushed it right back into Roy’s mouth, tugging at the corners of his lips as he pushed his fingers in alongside his cock.
Roy figured at this point he was probably allowed to come. Edward’s words had specifically mentioned not orgasming until he returned, but now that he was back, surely he was allowed to get himself there? With that in mind, he reached down between his legs to take himself in hand, but at the sight of that movement, Edward’s automail foot kicked his wandering fingers away.
“Hands off,” he warned. “If the puppy wants to come, he’ll have to think of another way.”
Roy closed his eyes as he felt frustrated tears spring up behind them, and then put his hands on Ed’s hips and pushed him back a little, to give himself room to breathe, before popping off the cock entirely and glaring up at the Prince.
“How?” he asked, the word coming out raspy. Edward raised an unimpressed eyebrow at him, smirking in clear amusement at Roy’s predicament. He grabbed Roy’s face and led him back to his dick, and Roy opened his mouth to take him instinctively.
“I have a perfectly good leg,” he hinted, and then seemed to be amused by his own morbid humour as he added: “One of them anyway.”
Roy’s eyes went wide as he understood what Edward wanted him to do. Of course, just like a fucking dog. At this point he thought the Prince was taking the metaphor a bit far, but given everything else he’d accepted in the brat’s little pet-play scene, and given just how fucking desperate he was to come, he found himself seriously considering it. It would be a blow to his pride – but then lying there without even the excuse of being bound, being fed glass beads into his ass, and thanking the man for them had been a blow to his pride too. The kind of blow that hit like a freight train but brought him right to the brink of his desire.
He closed his eyes once again, letting himself relax into the position on his knees, and his throat relaxed around the blunt head of Edward’s cock ramming into it, as he subtly shifted himself forwards on his knees, and tried not to make it too obvious what he was going. He still blushed something crazy as Edward’s derisory laugh sounded from above him, with the first push of his own leaking and straining cock against the soft ceremonial robes up against Edward’s flesh leg. The Prince buried his hand in Roy’s hair, and between the shifting of Roy’s hips up against his leg, and the tug of beads that Edward controlled with his metal hand against his sensitive rim, he was moaning in pleasure in no time, feeling thoroughly filled up on so many different fronts. His brain kept trying to tell himself to shut the fuck up, and stop taking so much pleasure in what was happening. He was being messed with – being treated like a dog, being told to get off by humping the Prince’s leg. It was derogatory. Yet the stimulation still felt fucking amazing, and with each shift of his cock over the material of the man’s robes, and each tug of those beads pulling on his rim, he got closer and closer to orgasm, his moans getting louder and more debauched.
Then, just as he reached a crescendo, Edward leapt into action: shoving his cock as far as it would go down Roy’s throat until his airway was thoroughly cut off, and yanking on the cord holding the beads, dragging them in a quick movement from where they’d been nestled in Roy’s ass for the last four hours. He came just as all eight of them were drawn out of him, and with the combined sensations of the material against his cock, the dick lodged in his throat making him heady with lack of oxygen, and the balls dragging against his rim, it was the most intense orgasm of his life.
He put his hands on Edward’s hips, his entire body shaking as a scream built in his throat and had nowhere to go. He’d been leaking for hours, and had been convinced that when he finally came he’d have no spunk left to actually come with, but he was proven wrong as rope after rope gushed out of him, painting Edward’s fancy ceremonial robe and dripping down his leg. The Prince dropped the heavy beads to the floor, where they clattered and half-rolled away, and then put his metal fingers and thumb on Roy’s chin and gingerly extracted himself from the man’s mouth, where he’d been buried practically to the hilt, leaving Roy panting and shaking on the floor, suddenly feeling empty.
“Stand up,” he ordered, and Roy rose on quaking thighs to follow it, feeling massively overstimulated.
He almost collapsed again, but Edward was quick to steady him, a weird look in his eyes like he was looking at something precious, and not just Roy. He turned Roy around with steady hands, and guided him to put his own palms down on the satiny red covers, bending him at the pelvis to do so, and leaving his behind exposed, for Edward to look him over. His erection was wilting quickly on finally being able to come, but it gave another overstimulated twitch as after a moment of being looked over, Edward gripped his cheeks in his mismatched hands, spread them apart, and then buried his oil soaked cock inside of his bead loosened hole.
“Ffffffuck,” Roy swore in a hissed breath, feeling like he was going to pass out from just how long Edward had been playing with him, and the Prince responded only by dragging himself back out slowly and rocking into him with soft, measured movements.
His hands moved to Roy’s hips to keep him still as he took his pleasures in Roy’s twitching, fucked out asshole, and Roy tried really hard not to let his head and shoulders drop, as he sobbed at the overstimulated, overwhelming feeling of getting fucked after finally achieving his orgasm. His dick understood that sex was still happening, and was trying valiantly to get hard again. Arousal was still rushing through every nerve-ending in his body, but there was no way he could rise to the occasion: not so quickly after coming, and not after he’d been teased for an entire freaking night. He was forced to endure the fucking, as his own cock hung limply and uselessly between his thighs, swinging back and forth with each of Edward’s thrusts, that grew in intensity with every snap of his hips.
Then the Prince reached around his hips and took a firm hold of his spent dick.
“N-no, please,” Roy whined, ass clenching around the man’s cock inside him at the damn-near painful overstimulation of long fingers playing with him. Edward ignored his plea.
“You’re so fucking loose and wet, Roy,” he told him in that sadistic tone of his, as he worked Roy’s cock back up into a hardness he hadn’t thought he’d ever be able achieve. Tears were running freely down his cheeks now, and he didn’t even have the energy or head-space to be embarrassed about that. It was too much. Too soon. Too fucking hot, he was going to pass out. “Just think how soaked you’re going to be with my seed inside you. You want that, don’t you? Want me to breed you. Want to get fucked full of my cum, until you’re leaking with it. Sitting in that meeting later today still feeling it dripping down your thighs. You think you can look the King in the eyes, knowing that his son had you on your knees for him? Had you bent over and stretched out on my cock? Could you look him in the eyes with my cream inside you, reminding you exactly where you really belong?”
“Your Highness, please!” Roy begged, although at this point, what he was begging for he wasn’t sure.
To be let go? For Edward to stop teasing him with such lewd words? For the boy to come, and finish this once and for all? For Edward to keep going until Roy came a secondary time, overstimulated and with Edward’s cock inside of him? That didn’t seem possible, but it was definitely what the Prince was working towards, because his hand sped up on Roy’s cock, using firm strokes that had Roy gagging and sobbing as his arms decided they could no longer hold him up, and he collapsed forwards onto the bed. His dick was stinging with prickling pain-pleasure, and his ass was fluttering around Edward’s thick, heavy dick stirring him up inside, ramming up against his prostate and building a pressure from the inside that made Roy think that maybe he was going to piss himself.
But what really happened, as he tumbled over the edge with the scream he hadn’t been able to release earlier, was that he came dry, his dick twitching like it wanted to come, but had no more spunk to give. His entire body convulsed at the overwhelming feeling, lifting his toes off the floor, and his back and shoulders tensed as he shook and yelled into the pillows. His eyes screwed shut tight, and he shuddered and sobbed, as he seemed to come and then just keep on coming. Edward snapped his hips forwards a few more times, jabbing his dick as deep as he could get it into Roy’s spasming, fucked out asshole, and grinding it down as he held true to his dirty talk and filled him up with so much spunk that Roy felt like he could feel it in his stomach, and taste it in his throat. It coated every inch of his sensitive insides, and then there was still so much of it that it immediately began leaking out, around Edward’s cock still buried inside of him.
A moment later, with his hands on Roy’s hips to keep him steady, he pulled out, and another gush of his spunk rushed out of Roy and slid down his naked thighs. His shuddering legs gave out on him, and he collapsed to the floor, only narrowly avoiding hitting his knees on the unforgiving tiles by Edward’s strong arms catching him around the middle, and at the last minute pulling him back onto his lap. His eyes fell to half-mast, and kept rolling back in his head, even as he told himself to try and keep his wits about him. Edward pressed a chaste kiss to his cheek, circling his arms around him more securely, like they were just cuddling. Like cuddling was something he and the Prince of Xerxes just did.
“You did so well, Roy,” he praised one last time, tone gentle and caring, as Roy’s eyes slipped closed for a final time, and he immediately passed out.
He woke some hours later as the sun filtered through the window, and turned over in his bed, feeling bruised and battered and sated in a way he hadn’t felt for years. He snuggled further down into Edward’s ceremonial white robes, and found himself smiling before he’d even opened his eyes, but when he did confusion flooded him. Because whilst he was snuggling with the Prince’s robes, he wasn’t in the kaleidoscope room that belonged to the Xerxian. He was back in the suite he was sharing with Fuery, and simply wrapped up in those robes to hide his naked, worked over body. He shot up in bed, and then immediately blushed something nasty as a gush of Edward’s cum slipped from his asshole, making a cold, wet, squishy feeling spring up between his ass-cheeks and the mattress he was sitting on.
Across the room, Fuery was sitting on his own bed, in full uniform, his arms crossed and a very unimpressed look on his face. Roy dragged the ceremonial robes a bit further around his chest, just in case.
“Prince Edward delivered you back here at about two in the morning,” Fuery told him, lips thin with disappointment. He checked his watch – the modern kind that was strapped to his wrist. “It’s just gone seven in the morning. The meeting with the King is in twenty minutes. You were missed at the feast last night. I told everyone you’d come down with a fever.”
“Thank you,” Roy croaked, not sure what else to say, when it was very obvious that Fuery knew exactly what he’d been up to the night before. The tech-dork rolled his eyes, and then sent Roy a curious look.
“The Prince was at the feast, though… so…?” he probed.
Roy felt himself blushing again, remembering how Edward had attended the feast, but told him that dogs weren’t permitted at the table. How he had just stayed in the boy’s room like a loyal fucking puppy, waiting for its master to return home, and he hadn’t even had to be leashed. If he’d had a tail, he would have damn-well wagged it for that brat. And yet, despite how good he’d been, Edward hadn’t even kept him with him during the night – preferring instead to deliver him back to his borrowed suite. That said novels about how the man felt about him, and Roy shouldn’t have been annoyed by that – he’d gone into the boy’s room the night before knowing it was just a hook-up – but in the light of day he felt damn-near insulted that he’d given up so much control, and it had clearly meant nothing to the Prince.
“What the Prince does is none of my concern,” he said, clearing his throat. “I had a fever, so I don’t remember the evening well.”
Fuery sent him a rather judgemental little look, but then shrugged his shoulders and stood from the bed, stretching out his joints.
“You’d do well to hide that robe, then, because the maids will come in whilst we’re out, and I certainly don’t want them thinking I was the one the Prince lent it too.”
“R-right,” Roy stuttered, his mind racing as he tried to think of an appropriate hiding spot for the clothing. Did he need to return it to Edward, or could he put it in his pack to take home with him. Was it pathetic that he kind of wanted to take it home with him?
Fuery clicked his tongue, just to rub in how much he didn’t appreciate having to become Roy’s alibi, before heading for the door to give Roy a little privacy to get dressed, which Roy was thankful for, given the worked over state of his body. He stood gingerly from the bed, and let the robe fall from him, counting the small finger-mark bruises along his hips and the fact that even after an almost full night's rest he was still standing on shaking legs. He gathered the material of Edward’s robes, folded them neatly, and placed them in his pack. Even if he didn’t take them home, he could hide them there, for now. Then he pulled out the uniform he’d hung on the cupboard door the night before, before he had headed to Edward’s room, and changed into it with careful, controlled movements. He still felt over sensitive, and too big a movement sent another little gush of spunk leaking from him, turning his ears red. He wanted to grab a shower, and thoroughly clean himself out, but the meeting with the King was in only twenty minutes, and the palace was large enough that most of that would be taken up with the walk.
He recalled Edward’s words – that he would have to look King Hohenheim in the eyes knowing exactly where he truly belonged – and felt that same strange mix of arousal and shame flood through him. Last night had been like nothing he had ever experienced before, and he was upset with himself that he had somehow allowed himself to want more than what Edward was willing to give him. That he’d got caught up in the fantasy of experiencing that again and again, and perhaps replacing that Xingese heir as the Prince’s regular hook-up. Or even, he admitted to himself with a rush of shame, becoming that dangerous boy’s psuedo-wife.
He was feeling distinctly grumpy as he joined the rest of his team for the walk to the meeting hall, and he said very little as they joined the other countries' delegates in waiting for the King. Hawkeye spent most of that time filling him in on what she had learnt from the feasts activities the night before, and telling him how sorry she was that he’d been feeling poorly. Havoc winked at him as he added:
“You look like you’re more in your right mind now though, chief." And Roy figured most of his subordinates knew what he had really been up to the night before.
Then the King was there, and the meeting began, and Roy had to slip back into the role of General Mustang, the Flame Alchemist, even as he felt Edward’s spunk squishing between his thighs, and found he really couldn’t look the King in his eyes.
Hours later, and deals made, and Xerxes and Amestris both fairly happy, and Drachma not that happy at all, Roy gathered his things from his room and met with the rest of the team out in the courtyard. They needed to collect their horses and start the journey home, and Roy was lamenting a lot about his visit to the Sandy Sanctuary. Not least being that perhaps the talks had not gone quite as well as they could have done, considering Roy had left most of the political scheming to Breda, and sat there wishing he could sink into his chair as he continued to think about Edward and all the things they had got up to the night before. Then, of course, there was that he had spent days travelling the desert to get to Xerxes, on the promise of a feast and entertainment, only to miss the feast entirely. Not that he couldn’t call his dalliance with Edward entertainment, but passing out from exhaustion and being well fed seemed like two different ends of the spectrum. He lamented that he was about to leave Xerxes, and ride another three days on horse-back, with his ass absolutely wrecked from the hammering he’d received, and how it was definitely not going to be a pleasant journey.
But most of all he lamented that he was about to leave without being able to say goodbye to the man who had given him the best night of pleasure he had ever had. For someone who was rumoured to still be fucking virgin, Edward Elric was an absolute master of all bedroom proclivities, and Roy was loathe to leave without thanking him for opening his eyes to how good it felt to give in to the pleasure of letting someone else take control. He frowned and pouted to himself, annoyed that the only souvenir he would be taking from his time in Xerxes was the boy’s ceremonial robes, nestled in his pack, and the spunk that wetted his thighs.
He followed the team, subdued, as they walked out of the courtyard, along the portico, and along the corridor towards the Atrium, with its Life Matrix, where Roy had first laid eyes on the lion he was going to let devour him. He looked up at the domed ceiling of the Atrium, and then around at the pedestals of symbols representing the five Xerxian gods. The dome in the atrium was not as beautiful as the stained glass one in Edward’s kaleidoscope room, but everything seemed to put him in mind of the night he had shared with the Prince.
He tread through the Matrix now, keeping an eye on the shadows of the colonnade, berating his heart for beating over-fast, and for wishing that Edward might step out to greet him once more, before they parted the palace, and made their way home.
But Edward did not come, and when they went through the doors, and clambered down the steps which would take them back into the sprawling metropolis that made up the main city, and the majority of tiny little Xerxes, Edward would not be able to follow: bound as he was to the palace, under his father’s watchful gaze. Roy sent one more longing look at the colonnade, and followed his team out, sighing wistfully as they padded down the great marble steps. Fuery sent him a rather pitying look, and even that could not break Roy from his melancholy to try and gain back some of his pride.
They were seven footfalls past the palace steps when a commotion behind them had Roy and his team turning, looking back up the grand marble to see a lion ripping his way out of the King’s hold, and rushing down the staircase. Roy’s eyes widened in surprise as Edward practically fell and stumbled his way out of the palace and down the steps. When he reached the bottom, just as marble became sand, he hesitated. He was barefooted again, and Roy watched as he picked up his metal toes and paused mid-air, like he was about to test a hot bath, instead of step on to sand. And then he frowned, his shoulders tensing, as he resolutely put his foot back down on the marble step, not breaking the rules that saw him secluded in the confines of the palace grounds. Roy watched as he hung his head in shame.
A lot of the delegates were still hanging around, and Roy saw the Cretans watching Edward carefully. Roy’s own team were giving the Prince almost reproachful looks, but in that moment of hesitation Roy understood that Edward outside of the confines of his kaleidoscope room was a very different person to the boy who had thoroughly wrecked him the night before. He had duties, and responsibilities, and yet here he still was, right on the edge of his leash, eyes set in a hard stare, as he once more lifted his head and looked directly at Roy. And Roy was nothing if not the dog Edward had accused him of being, because his feet immediately took him back to his master. To the sand just before the palace steps. One footfall away from Edward.
“I can’t go with you,” Edward told him, face flushed delightfully, and shifting nervously from his flesh foot to his metal one and back again. “But I want you to know that I want to.”
Roy’s heart clenched, and relaxed again.
“I can’t stay here,” he admitted in a low voice. “But -” I want you to know that I want to.
Edward nodded, looking off to the side in obvious embarrassment, like he wasn’t the one who had had Roy on his knees yesterday, spewing absolute filth as he got Roy to hump his leg. Feelings were harder than sex, it seemed. Somehow, the sight of it, the thought of it, that Edward would struggle this much with being honest in the light of day, when it had been him telling Roy the night before to be honest about what he wanted, was so endearing that Roy wanted to kidnap him and take him back to Amestris, to keep him forever. International consequences be damned.
“Next time there’s one of these things,” the Prince mumbled, “You’ll come, right?”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Roy replied. He was pretty sure he’d spend the rest of his life looking for excuses and invitations back to the palace, to visit the boy stuck behind its walls.
Edward looked at him now, his bright, shining gold eyes swimming with emotions that Roy had never thought he’d see on his imperious face. He looked behind himself, at where King Hohenheim was standing regally in the entrance to the palace, his hard set frown looking down on the scene at the bottom of the steps with his nose jutting up. Literally looking down on them. Then Edward rolled his eyes, set his shoulders, and leant as far as he could outside of the realms of his confinement, whilst keeping his feet firmly planted on the palace grounds, so as not to technically break the rules. He steadied himself on Roy’s shoulders, leaning awkwardly, and pressed his lips with determination to Roy’s.
It didn’t last long enough for Roy to have a reaction to it, as Edward then used Roy’s shoulders to push himself back to inside the sphere of the palace, but Roy was pretty sure literally everybody had freaking seen it.
If they got caught he’d be forced to marry him. Glorified pet. Produce heirs. Fuck!
Roy stood there, blinking at the Prince, utterly dumbfounded, before his face erupted like a volcano into colour. Edward grinned at him, and then sent a challenging glare around at the spectators, and up at his own father, before settling it back on Roy. Roy looked around too in his panic, wondering if Edward had just trapped him in the palace forever too, but nobody was reacting outside of Roy’s own team, who were studiously looking anywhere else but at where he had just been claimed by a lion.
Myths and rumour, he replayed to himself, flushing at his own stupidly. The shields of Xerxes. Chances were there had never really been any truth to the rumour of having to marry the kid if they were caught anyway.
“Go do what you’ve got to do, Flame,” he told him. “And when you’ve achieved all the things you need to achieve, I’ll be here, in this palace.”
“Why?” Roy asked, and then felt that was a little awkward without context. “Why would you want me? Why would you want to wait for me?” he added, blushing.
Edward rolled his eyes.
“Because you waited for me,” he confessed in a small voice, and then set his jaw and became determined again. “So now, I’ll wait for you.”
And Roy set his resolve to become the Fuhrer even fucking quicker - because as soon as he did he was going to steal the lion right out of palace Xerxes.