This is just an angsty conversation I imagined between Mustang and Hughes about Hawkeye just after she is assigned to Mustang as his aid and how he feels about it after a couple...a lot of drinks. I think it's pretty canon because the manga's a very sketchy with the details of Roy and Riza's relationship. P.S. reviews make me happy spread the joy...or hate if you wish.

The lyrics are by Van Morison I think, but I could be wrong. Willie Nelson, and Conway Twitty did the song too, among others.

Disclaimer: There not mine, but I wouldn't mind having a drink with them.

There Stands the Glass

by

Vesper Moonshine

I'm trying to finish off yet another gin and tonic, when I realize that I may be reaching my limit. Roy broods beside me on a bar stool, and has been this way all day - or at least since he suggested this little excursion after work. I sneak a rolling eye his way and see that he looks just a bit more lit them me, and that's saying quite a bit. Actually, he looks like a wrinkled load of laundry someone neglected on the floor, like utter hell is what.

I can't figure out what's bothering him and, knowing Roy, there's a big chance that I never will find its root, so by default I assume it has something to do with Ishbal. If that's the case I never should have went along with his 'club hopping' idea - which is inaccurate because we haven't hopped anywhere. We took a seat at the bar of The Indigo Club nestled in an ally off 32nd street and haven't moved in hours. I am thinking this just as he speaks up beside me, his voice has the smallest hint of a slur.

"I wrote her a letter that I haven't had the guts to send." he says, and his ambiguity finds me particularly intent.

"You wrote who a letter?" I ask carefully, trying not to slur as badly as he is.

He doesn't look up from his scotch and soda as he answers, woebegone. "Hawkeye. I spoke with her in my office today, I offered her the position of my aid and she excepted."

This confuses me, because this, in my opinion, is a good development. If Roy can turn Hawkeye's loyalty into something bad I am forced to wonder at his sanity, and not for the first time. "That's great! She'll be a strong ally, and I know you like having her around." I say, and even though he scowls at me, I know I'm right about his significant attachment to the Lieutenant.

"Maes, you don't understand. She's more. Don't be flippant! I am obligated to her."

His broken phrases sound very suggestive to me, especially being how they are the most Roy has ever divulged about his history with Hawkeye, aside from the dry fact that her father was his Alchemy sen-sei. But one word tickles my curiosity.

"Obligated?" I ask, and he doesn't answer me for a long while, swirling the pale golden brown alcohol around with the ice in his tumbler.

"We have more of a history then I have ever let you or anyone else know of." he admits, in a low, despondent way.

I take a sip from my own tumbler, trying to drown out my excitement at having my suspicions confirmed and the fervent curiosity coupled with the rise of this juicy bit. With the glass still below my lips I have to curse. "Damn, Roy! You know how to keep a secret better then anyone I have ever known."

"Oh you really don't know." he says, laughing bitterly, then his face falls again. His features are even lower this time, as he sways ever so slightly on his seat from the affects of the drink sitting complacently before him. "I have wronged her, Maes."

"Wronged her? What are you talking about, Roy?"

And as he looks into his past at his own memories, he takes a breath that seems to have a sobering affect on him, like the memories are so sharp they sting like a bucket of cold water over his head. This is so stringent it has even a sobering affect on me as I wait for my answer.

"I have ruined her life. Long before Ishbal, I was responsible for her ruin."

"What could you have done that was so bad?"

"It' complicated."

I smile. "The alcohol isn't going to run dry anytime soon." I take another sip.

A silence falls, and Roy seems to draw into himself, while he looks out on the glistening bottles lining the bar's mirrored back wall. A low minor note whines out from a muted trumpet playing in the band set up on a dais in the back of the club.

"I gave her hollow dreams in return for her secrets." he starts. He picks up his tumbler once more and holds it up in the dim, yellow overhead light and the glass refracts it and the blues, and reds, and greens of the neon bar signs.

"It's like this pretty little glass and the liquor in it. Your parents keep it from you because it's to volatile for children, they are right to do so, but discouragement attracts you to it all the more. You want to know what the adults are doing that makes them so funny, so idealistically happy when they're drink." He tilts his head to inspect the glass from another angle, and scoffs at what he sees, whatever it is he sees.

"You sneak your fathers whiskey bottle out on a Saturday night, and take your best girl to park on a dark cliff over looking the city just like the cliche teenybopper you are. You've been anticipating, you've had this planned, but it doesn't end up like you thought it would. The fog shortly clears and turns to a typhoon in your stomach, and you and your girl Friday get sick all over the leather upholstery of your father's car and never even kiss. The so called glory of war is like that, it is moonshine that leaves you sick and trembling..." He sets the glass back on the counter with a sloppy clank. "... and with your lover too far from you to hold."

He is completely engrossed in the glass for a moment then looks at me with a weary smile, the smile widens and turns into a small snicker, then a full out laugh. I'm a little worried, but what other outlet dose he have left but bitter laughter? At least he is laughing. After taking life as hard as Roy takes life, who, that be as stable as he is when he's sober and determined, would not have leave to fracture under the weight of a glass ( well several ) full of scotch.

He stops laughing and sighs loudly in my face, and his breath is acidic with the scent of booze. "You think I'm manic, I know. I guess I have always been dramatic..." He points a shaky finger at me. "...and if you tell anyone I admitted that you're burnt toast."

I laugh and take another sip absently and immediately remember after that I had vowed to cut myself off. I set the glass down and ask Roy, "You said you wrote to her, didn't you? What did you write?" We seem to be loosing the power to coherently organize our conversation.

Roy lifts his head up from it's precarious hovering over the edge of the bar that it started to slip into. "Wha-?"

"The letter. The letter." I wave my hand in front of his face. He straightens on his stool and almost falls from it and I have to reach out and steady him.

He clutches the bar and begins to speak again, animating his words in quick, zippy gestures.

"My mother always told me I had a tendency to brood. She would look at me in that Roy-your-being-ridiculous tone of voice and tell me the sun was shining, what had I to mope about? She was always saying perfunctory things like that, like life could be easy if you just didn't think about anything that brought a frown to your face. Optimists! It was charming, don't mistake me. That persistent optimism usually got me out of bed in the morning, and is maybe where my stubbornness comes from. Only, I have a gift of flipping things on their head and making them derogatory, and where she was a stubborn old goat, happily munching on soda cans, I was a cat perched on a high roof, adamant against not coming down no matter how many people sweetly called to me."

I laugh at the profound accuracy of his statement, and Roy leers at me.

"Are you gonna let my talk, or am I gonna have to see a shrink, because that's what this is starting to feel like." he says.

I have to laugh again, "It's 2:00 AM, and we're sitting at the bar in a blues club. Most people here could use a shrink."

He looks around at the scattered people, looking sad as they listen to what I believe to be the most depressing song the band could play.

He sighs "If you say so."

"I say so. Now, pussycat, get to the letter."

He sucks in a sharp breath as he remembers. "Oh, the letter. Well, Now that I think about it, it was all my mother's idea, not that I blame her, because I don't."

I hold up may hand. "Wait! Wait! It was you mothers idea to write Hawkeye?"

Roy whips his head back in a what-choo-talkin'-'bout attitude. "What?! No! No! Alchemy! It was her idea. Alchemy! She didn't know what she was doing. Fate's screwy that way, if your intentions are good it doesn't mean a damn thing to your actions. If anything, Ishbal taught me that. My mother noticed my aptitude for Alchemy very early on - no, that's not right, she fostered it. She bought the Alchemy books and shoved them in my face, she kindled the fire - no pun intended. I did come to love the scientific art of Alchemy on my own, though. Mostly I was fascinated by the intric...intricasiiisss...whatever I liked it." He takes another sip.

I'm wondering what all this has to do with my question, and the letter, but I let my chagrin drop away because I'm beginning to tire in the late hour.

"I thought it would be my means of success. My intentions were noble enough, protect and serve and all that, but I was stupid, and I wanted it so blindly that I took it from her with a kiss to her shoulders."

He stops for a fraction of a second and seems to be trying to swallow the memory down along with his next sip - which is really more of a gulp.

"I was older than her, I should have known better. I...I need to know if she thinks I used her. She's following me because she lived through Ishbal, the same as we did, but dose she hate me? I can live with a lot, have lived with a lot, but I don't know if I can live with her hating me. Hating me and using her service to me as some kind of penance."

The band picks up as the drummer taps the snare and the bass booms behind a jaggy lead. The gritty male baritone whines out a few lines that I actually pick up on in my hazy inebriation.

"There stands the glass. Fill it to the brim, while my troubles grow dim. It's my first one today..."

I look at Roy, he's laid his head upon the bar counter, his eyes are shut tightly, and I no longer have to ask what the letter said. I know.

"There stands the glass that will ease all my pain, that will settle my brain. It's my first one today..."

"Don't send the letter" I say. "It doesn't matter right now why she's loyal, just that she is. Time is a lot like moonshine too; it dims the memory just fine.

Roy opens his eyes and stares at me, almost through me, as he absorbs what I've said. Then he looks over to the band, his face scrunching in disgust. "Is he singing or whining?"

I smile, I imagine, fairly deviously. "I could ask the same of you."

And Roy narrows his eyes just as deviously and says three words that strike fear into my heart, at the same time as assuring me my best friend is going to be alright. That the soldier soldiers on; his uniform a costume, and his humor a song to lose himself in.

"BURNT TOAST, BUDDY..."

I just wish alcohol wasn't flammable..