Crush

It had been his first true crush.

The man was older than he, a career officer with lofty dreams and a handsome face. The only consolation for the hapless teen was that he was hardly the first to develop feelings for the dashing soldier.

The officer was well known in the Headquarters dating circuit, and could often be seen in public with some pretty thing hanging off of his arm. Usually someone young, but that was to be expected-- the officer was not that old himself.

The teen had tried to deny it at first. After all, before he had met the other man, he was perfectly fine with females.

Normal.

He still found them attractive, but not as much as this one person who now haunted his every thought. Who he ran into almost every day now. Who he even started having damn dreams about.

The whole problem was that it just so happened that the-- the annoying jerk-- was pretty much his ideal. Intelligent, good-looking, witty, skilled, and driven. And from the office banter, it also sounded like they had quite similar backgrounds.

However, his own plans for the future did not take into account a gay lover. So he tried ignoring him... with little success. The officer was just too flashy, it seemed.

He then tried to push the man away... but that didn't work either. Instead, it only seemed to amuse his unwary crush and cause him to pay even more attention.

Then, one grey afternoon, he finally hit the end of his rope. The two were alone in the older man's office, and it had seemed the right time to just go on out and say it. He would confess, then what would happen would happen...

He just wanted it done with.

So, nervously fingering the hem of his jacket and barely able to meet those eyes, he said it. He never forgot the way they had widened ever so slightly but still did not appear to be surprised.

Typical.

In turn, the teen was not shocked in the least bit by the officer's response. The man had only shook his head sadly, then spoke of his future.

It was a gentle let down. The other man really did seem to be genuinely regretful. In later years, the younger soldier even imagined that there was a glimmer of interest in those deep eyes at that moment.

He never got a chance to find out if his suspicion was true. The world kept on spinning, and he soon found his life quite changed.

Horrible things happened, and by the end of it he was no longer a teen. He was no longer the type to harbor one-sided crushes on uninterested people, either.

He simply moved on.

Now the tables were turned, and he was now the one sitting behind a desk and blinking in shock as a subordinate confessed to a crush. It was almost word-for-word what he had said himself oh so many years before.

Gold eyes glared, and his heart skipped a beat. Idly, he found himself amused by the irony. The younger alchemist even looked a bit like the young officer he himself had fancied years ago.

"...Well?"

Coming to a decision, Roy Mustang opened his mouth to speak...

And the world spun around yet again.