Heeeey readers. Finding a cover for this story was killer. I mean, I just realized how Ed is always making weird faces and he doesn't just smile nice at all. Bet he was a fun child to take xmas card pictures with. anywho, this is so going to be completed. i mean it. for real. working on the second chapter as we speak... or as i yabber on. gotta go write some more!

oh btw i'm making nice chapter names now (THEY'R OH SO WITTY AND PRETTY YA GOTTA SEE) and i'm ditching my ed-win story, those two are now my NOTP.

enjoy the popcorn and the smarm, yo.

Alfons Hiederich could never leave a puzzle as a child. Even as he neared adulthood, he was constantly solving them on whatever paper he had, or the paper napkins from the bar. As of late, he had grown out of the habit mostly, leaving behind the crude and ungainly child's puzzles of his youth. Upon joining the University, he was entertained briefly before any challenge that math, physics, or engineering could offer was stripped away, and the answers quickly fell into place. Soon his lectures no longer provided too much interest when he wasn't designing rockets. He had become bored once more with the wrestling with logic, now that nothing stumped him anymore. It was no longer a match of reason and wills, now he only needed to throw a few deductions and switches before each secret quickly revealed itself.

During his lectures he had taken to doodling, though he still took his notes dully, and absentmindedly he created more puzzles, but it was little more than mental masturbation. Then one warm afternoon, when the sun was setting early, Edward Elric joined his class.

From the moment he had first encountered him, Edward Elric had been a mystery to Alfons Hiederich. He was a textbook narcissist; he was a case to be cracked. He was an unsolved equation, he was the variables. He was the question and answer; he might have been the last digit of pi. He was an enigma. Just as Alfons thought he had found whatever made Edward tick, the question Ed presented changed, or added another step he had to go back and rethink. There was still so much he didn't know about him, so many missing factors: why did he walk with a limp on cold days, why did he favor his right hand to the extent of avoiding his left? When he was bored, why did he draw pentagrams inside other shapes, with geometric perfection, often noting the corners with little symbols he never explained? Why, whenever irate with an inanimate object, would he clap his hands together suddenly, and hold them in the position of someone that was praying? Alfons thought he had solved that last one, until he learned Ed was purely atheistic. However, despite all these mysteries, there was one that stumped Alfons the most.

Why couldn't he keep his eyes off him? At first he hadn't noticed from his seat in the lecture hall, a stack of books obscuring his view, and it hadn't helped that he had his head down on his desk. He'd gotten up to leave for the lavatory, almost tripping over his new classmate.

"Sorry, I didn't see you there-" he began, his mouth apologizing as his eyes gawked at the face before him. Golden hair tied back in a thick braid, and hypnotic eyes of the same color encased in shapely eyes. He stopped stammering out an apology, licking his lips as his eyes followed the edges of sharp cheekbones and sturdy jaw line, to a hair of luscious lips, bent into a frown.

"Who are you calling so short you couldn't see even with a magnifying glass-" Ed snarled in a deep, guttural growl that the texture of made Alfons' heart grow faint. Ed's glaring eyes seemed ready to shoot daggers as they dared Alfons to try to say "short".

"N-nobody," he stuttered, heart dropping into his stomach as he suddenly feared for his life. "I just wanted to, uh apologize for uh, tripping over y-" like a blond fox after prey Ed issued another warning growl. Something about the noise's primal nature stirred unknown emotions in Alfons' stomach. "Uh, y… your long legs," he managed, as politely as he could, trying to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. The specimen he encountered wasn't what he would call short, but calling him tall was stretching it. Alfons predicted that his height was superior to Ed's by at least a few inches.

He returned to his seat, not daring to approach the lion's den again. He yawned at his desk, unable to stop glancing at Ed or keep his mind on what the professor was saying. At one moment or another, it occurred to his that Ed was like a lion. A small lion cub that was not yet a hunter, albeit, that could easily unleash a hidden ferocity. But he was like a lion, with a long flowing mane of perfect hair and spellbinding eyes. He was a lion, in how he was perched in his chair, lazily, proudly, with an air of earned arrogance, as if the room were his kingdom, and any prey was his to take, and if he should've fancied a tall, quivering gazelle with short blond fur and sparkling blue eyes-

Alfons blinked. He was in an empty class room, not the grassy plains of some African safari, there was no heard of running gazelles, only the shuffle of students piling out the door, and his proud lion cub was leaving as well. The bell had rung and the class was dismissed. He hadn't heard the bell, only noticed that Ed had stood up and left, finding that he had been staring at him. He could feel the blood rush to his face as he realized the embarrassment. Quickly he gathered his books together and excused himself from the room as well.

He ran after Ed, the rush of adrenaline in the moment moving his feet and stirring other apparatus of his body's lower half, as well as his heart, but Ed had vanished. He panted in the empty corridor, looking around wildly for him. Often times girls he had never cared too much for had chased him, but now he was chasing. But alas, he sighed, he had lost his prey. Or his hunter. In all these metaphors, he was confused as to what he was supposed to be. He had never been very good in his Literary Arts classes.

Shoulders slumped; he dragged his once light feet to the evening lecture. Valiantly, he had searched in vain. He wandered the vaulted halls of the university a half hour longer, but Ed was nowhere to be found, as well as his reason as to searching for him. He went to his next class, puzzled, stumped for the first time in a while. He wasn't completely sure why he had been looking for the beautiful stranger. Was he even beautiful? Alfons shrugged to himself. What was he doing, thinking a guy had been even pleasant to look at? Sighing, he told himself it was stupid. Who had hair that long anyway? Girls did. He decided it was a logical and socially acceptable conclusion to reach, that he had merely gone too long without a girlfriend, and the long hair and evening sunlight, and intense boredom had confused him momentarily. With that answer in mind, for the rest of his warm autumn classes until the winter, he was left with two mysteries regarding Edward Elric: Why Ed vanished so suddenly after class, and secondly, how Alfons had been so preoccupied with the thought of Edward that he hadn't managed to take a single note for the rest of that lecture.