#(by the way? i'm so glad that tumblr autotagged you bc i would DEIFINITELY mispell your url lol)

[smallblueandloud]

perhaps a royai neighbors/roommates au ?

okay so i feel like i’ve read enough fic about royai that this isn’t going to be entirely original but like. who cares? let’s do this. send me an au and i’ll give you 5+ headcanons for it (especially crossovers!)

roy is a scientist who works at a university doing research. he doesn’t teach, but he does help some graduate students with their various final projects.

(he’s currently working with the youngest person to ever go through the program, the kid’s a genius in physics and is studying biomedical engineering. his project involves building a set of prosthetic limbs for his brother, who lost them in an accident when they were young. his name’s edward, but everyone calls him the alchemist because he can do literally anything with whatever materials are available. anyways.)

roy himself is studying nuclear power and how it can be used in low income countries without a whole lot of anything. he doesn’t like to talk about how his former job involved one of those low income countries.

there’s a woman who moves in next door. he doesn’t see her for the first couple of weeks - edward is making a fuss about some homeopathic doctor who’s claiming he can make some girl’s leg grow back, when ed knows she needs a prosthesis to be able to keep living on her own - but at some point, he runs into her while she’s coming back from walking her dog.

she’s really pretty, by the way. super pretty. that has nothing to do with the fact that he agrees to help her figure out how the washing machine works, just as soon as she lets her dog into her apartment. nothing at all. shut up, maes.

her name is riza. her dog is named black hayate, and she just moved to the city.

when he asks her where she used to live, she looks away, and he takes his cue and shuts up. he sees the look in her eyes and knows better than to press.

it turns out that her father wrote some of the research that roy used at his... last job (that’s when he refuses to answer her questions) and that her best friend is dating one of roy’s colleagues.

she’s passionate about social justice, and she’s working for a nonprofit that’s helping some of (one of) the same countries that roy’s trying to help with his research.

the country in question, by the way, is ishval, and basically amestris screwed them over while they were still creating a centralized government, america style. they destroyed their economy for oil (using physicists to figure out the quickest and cheapest way to extract it) and used the army to... dispose of everyone who tried to argue.

riza figures it out when she sees him go stiff when ishval’s on the news and when he tells her what countries stand to benefit from his research and when she remembers that her father was an expert at oil extraction but never wanted to publish his book because he knew what people could do with such information.

she confronts him, and confesses that she was a sniper with the military around that time as well.

“all we can do is try to make up for what we’ve done” she says, and roy thinks he’s finally found someone who understands the impossible thing he’s trying to achieve (not the science, because science is only limited by the imagination, but redemption)

so they spend time together, and they heal. eventually they move in together, but their relationship is still very low key, and they spend more time at dinner discussing their plans for halting amestrian action in ishval and making sure the ishvalans have the resources to become independent than they do going on dates.

did i say low key? i meant low-as-edward’s-height key. as in, rebecca and maes each know that their best friend has a significant other that they’ve moved in with, but they’ve only met the s.o. like once. 

edward meets riza at the university sometimes (he’s helping roy with the ishval project, from a much more medical standpoint, and she’s become the organization’s liason with the university for obvious reasons) but he doesn’t realize they’re together for years.

he only really finds out because they kiss once in front of him as they’re passing each other in the hall and his thought process... dies. (it goes something like: “huh, mustang and hawkeye know each other! wow, they’re friends. oh, look, they’re- WHAT.” those five seconds on the university surveillance tapes are saved and replayed every year at his birthday)

ed invites them to his wedding to his childhood best friend and business partner, winry rockbell. they waltz in the middle of the dance floor as everyone parties around them and smile. they’re happy. and they’re slowly, slowly, redeeming themselves.

that’s the best they can ask for.