#also minor spoilers for exiled kinda...? idk when AM i gonna finish that series tbh

[makiswirl]

ok sorry if this is a silly question but I'm always curious about how post canon edling works? like what is their situation.

did the edwin proposal just never happen or are they exes? are the edwin kids a thing?

does ed live in xing at some point or does he just travel around and sporadically visit ling whenever he can? I think repeatedly traveling through the desert could be painful with automail so maybe only once a year or every couple years?

idk, let me know ur thoughts!! :)

OKAY SO I OBVIOUSLY CANNOT SPEAK FOR LIKE ANYONE ELSE WHO'S INTO THEM but i do have a specific canon for them (exiled) (and like... i don't like the writing of the fics anymore... but my main interpretation still centers around it and follows the same beats so surely that means something right)

ANYWAYS HERE'S THE GIST/RUNDOWN OF I HOW I KIND OF SORT OF MADE THEM WORK:

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(going to use parts of my personal doc for my ed blog (@alchemsol) that i use to keep track of stuff i've written that's canon for him just for convenience's sake)

so the general gist of the beginning of exiled is that after around four years of rehabilitation and one travelling in the west (what we see him doing at the end of canon, diverging without the edwin subplot since i prefer them being written in a more familial way like the start of canon did), ed travels to xing to visit everybody again along with his brother since he's working as an amestrian ambassador for xing now and living in the palace and learning alkahestry with mei, along with figuring out how to get jerso and zampano's bodies back ^_^

somewhere around this time ed and ling get together

during the span of about a month or two after the main plot ends, ed stays with ling in the palace and essentially accompanies him for a while as his s/o (unbeknownst to the main public). a while after he's called to border city milos to help solve a dispute with an alchemist

it is important to note that ling, despite this having been his entire goal and wanting to help his people and help reform xing, really fucking hates his job more than he thought he would since he's spent his whole life as a free spirit lol. more of ling's character arc involving naïveté it is!

so what ling does is he essentially knows that he can't really help xing much more than he already has in his position, and in a very strong sense of burnout and a horribly poor mental state that can really only hurt his people more than it would serve them, he and lan fan decide to desert, he fakes his death, and they both leave for and arrive in resembool while ed and al are still away in creta.

with mei having already been named his heir at this point in case anything were to happen to him and without any children due to the sudden elimination of the concubine system and lack of a love interest PRIOR to ed, she agrees to assume the throne and do what she had originally intended to do before ling had won the philosopher's stone and mostly continues out ling's work

"bluebirds" (the last exiled fic) essentially centers around ed and ling adjusting to resembool life (especially ling because of how goddamn high-stakes his life has been up to this point) after ed and al return from milos, and also introduces winry and pinako to the series. al leaves to return to xing after it concludes

the tl;dr by this point is that lan fan and ling are now in resembool, and while winfan ALSO begins forming in the background of the story, ling and ed adjust to the whole situation of ling, a whole-ass emperor, having faked his death and randomly having showed up AT THE ROCKBELLS' (and ed's in a more non-literal sense) DOORSTEP, which ed is Very ":/" about bc they didn't talk about this and it could be dangerous as fuck but when are they not known for being ballsy!!!

the other titles listed happen after "bluebirds" and exiled conclude, but are still in the same canon. coulomb arc is a personal project with a writing partner (my boyf) that veers off into this non-canon au ficlet, terrible day for rain and names to call you by are ficlets that i've posted and deleted in the past that introduce nella and leroy who ed and ling end up adopting (along with ollie who they had also adopted shortly after the events of under the apple tree), and the other ed/ling fankids i've mentioned (jingyi, delilah, chao) happen sometime after matryoshka and end up as their biological children

golden years is obviously the end of all that but it isn't really important since it's an unnecessary ficlet i just wanted to write ages ago lmao

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TL;DR: my interpretation is probably really far from what most people would consider in-character or most likely to happen after canon especially since it just ditches parts of the epilogue entirely as a result of it being a love letter to myself and what i like and not really much else because i just felt really silly goofy after consuming fullmetal alchemist content for the first time

however ^_^ ! it's basically just ed and ling living wild in their early 20s and then settling down and basically turning into domestic gay middle-aged men with 9 million kids because i think they deserve better than constant drama for once in their life lolz. i simply think it's good and soft for them to be normal especially given ling especially didn't get a taste of it at all when ed at least got a small sippy

ed ofc still travels from time-to-time because that's just the kind of guy that he is (usually bringing ling along with him to show him amestris), and he typically avoids doing it entirely unless he has a like. VERY important trip where he won't be gone for long after they have children mostly in fear of accidentally becoming like his father even though he's mostly forgiven him and absolutely doesn't hate him at all by now since he knows better than what he used to and why things ended up the way they did. it's just the matter of them getting used to living like actual normal and happy grown people, even with some bumps along the way, and they finally get to heal from everything that happened to them when they were younger together

tl;dr x2: i think they should heal and be shitty little country boys and make out maybe