Disclaimer: Do not own Fullmetal.
A/N: This is crackfic born of an ABC meme posted on my lj, here .. (Feel free to add more prompts, too, as I still haven't got a full alphabet). Yeah, it is insane, I know.
Flamenco
Sometimes she really didn't know why everyone – herself included – was so willing to follow him.
It was a desperate time, that was true and, as they say, desperate times do sometimes call for desperate measures. But the desperation Riza Hawkeye was witnessing from her seat at the bar did not quite seem in proportion to the situation.
Hughes was in East City on one of his rare visits out to the country's borders and, in one of his strange, manic moods Roy Mustang had insisted, for the sake of moral, that they all go out to celebrate. The Eastern command center had seen its share of troubles lately and Riza knew that Roy was also worried that the Elric brothers had not reported in to him in some time, so she could not blame him for wanting to be frivolous to take his mind off it, even if it was only for a little while.
Her mind had gone blank earlier on all of the reasons she usually had for declining to accompany the Colonel and the rest of his staff out for drinks and she could not produce one that was sufficient to convince Mustang to allow her to absent herself. They came flooding back to her now as that same Colonel, now smelling strongly of scotch, heaved himself up onto the bar. No one else seemed to note the ridiculousness of this action. Havoc was halfway across the room trying to sweet talk a shapely brunette who, despite her obvious state of intoxication, did not seem the least inclined to give him the time of day. Fuery's head was already down on the bar, three empty glasses sitting beside him as he tunelessly wailed some sort of hiccupy drinking song with Breda, who was waving his arms around so enthusiastically with the melody that the beer in his heavy mug splashed out onto the floor. Falman sat trying not to look as drunk as he was, wobbling on his stool as Maes showed him a seemingly endless stack of photos of his little Elycia. Maes himself was brimming both with liquor and affection as he described each picture in slurred words and provided poor Vato with innumerable little extra bonus stories about how his little girl was going to be a painter or a dancer or a marine biologist.
"C'mon, Riza," said Roy, crawling on his hands and knees across the bar to place himself in front of her. She drew her glass closer to herself so as to avoid its being spilled by Roy's fumbling hands. Unlike the others, she had no intention of leaving this bar smelling of alcohol. "C'mup here and dance with me."
"I don't think so, sir," she replied curtly. She wouldn't have danced on the bar if she were drunk, much less cold-sober as she was now. "I don't really think you should, either."
"You're so serious," he slurred, patting her on the head. She considered slapping his hand away, but she was a little concerned that it might upset his balance and send him toppling off the bar and onto his skull, so she refrained. Not that he wouldn't have deserved it. "You won't come up here?" He put on his best puppy dog face, his dark eyes wide and round and his mouth turned down in a little pout, but she ignored it with practiced ease. She had faced it on a daily basis – practically every time the Colonel wanted to get out of his paperwork to get home early – and she had never given in to it yet. Even Hayate had learned that that trick didn't work with her.
"No."
He sighed and looked deflated for a second before he laughed it off. "You're such a stick in the mud," he said, and wrapped his knuckles on her forehead. This time she did swat him but he only continued to laugh and withdrew his hand.
"All right, all right," he said, giving up on her. He pulled himself up to his feet so he was now standing on the bar, and turned to where Maes was still flipping through photographs with Vato. "Maes! Get over here!"
"D'you wanna see the pictures, too, Roy?" asked the proud father. Maes expertly shuffled the arsenal of photographs in his hand like a deck of cards and fanned them out for Roy to inspect. Roy drunkenly leaned down to squint at the pictures, bending in half at the midsection so that Riza was sure he would lose his balance and land on Hughes. He seemed to ponder the photos of the little girl for a moment, precariously positioned with his shined black dress shoes on the edge of the bar, before looking back up at Hughes with an expression that would have held the utmost seriousness had the Colonel not already imbibed one scotch too many.
"Put those back in your pocket, Hughes," he said, his alcohol-soaked tongue ruining the authoritative tone in his voice with its sluggishness. "A bar is no place for little daughters."
Hughes looked as if he wanted to argue the point, but was unsure what to retort.
"Men!" Roy yelled, gaining the attention not only of his subordinates and friends but of all the denizens of the dimly lit pub. Though he did not seem to mind the fact that all eyes were on him. Riza sighed and feared the worst.
When he started to sing a lively drinking song, she bowed her head and covered her face with one hand, hoping that all the eyes now watching him did not lump her in with him and his other subordinates, who had picked up the tune he had started and were all now wailing out the lyrics with a gusto she sorely wished she could see in the office when she laid their paperwork in front of them. But her real horror kicked in when she heard the tapping of his very fine shoes on the scuffed bar and looked up to see him dancing to the melody in such a way that not only completely ignored the rhythm but the style of the song as well. His hands flourished about him, fingers splaying wide like ruffling fabric at his hips. His heels clicked loudly against the wooden bar-top as his feet moved with more speed and sureness than they had any right to, considering how drunk the Colonel was.
It was only a matter of moments before Maes and Breda were climbing bar stools to join him on the counter, and Riza suddenly wondered when everyone she knew had gone insane. Havoc landed face first on the bar beside her, his face bearing a red hand-shaped mark that was already blurring in the stream of tears pouring down his face even as he continued to sing along with the others. Falman, finally embracing his state of inebriation, stumbled over to Fuery and picked up the smaller man, whose glasses sat askew on his face and enhanced the confused and wide eyed expression he currently wore. Falman deposited the Sergeant onto the bar, dropping him almost carefully to lie on his stomach, before climbing up as well and joining in the drunken chorus line which looked as if it would blend in at a mental institution better than a pub.
"This is so beautiful!" came the voice of Major Armstrong, and Riza whipped her head around to see him moving rapidly from the door of the pub toward the bar where she sat. "Allow me to join you!"
She knew the Major could not yet be intoxicated, having just walked into the bar, though at this point it was hardly surprising to her when he leapt up onto the counter to join the Colonel and the rest in their dance. It was even less surprising that he had somehow shed both his coat and his shirt before beginning his dance, his bare pectorals practically sparkling in the dim lighting of the bar.
The bartender, whose yelling at the assembled men on his countertop had thus far been ignored, finally turned his attention to Riza.
"Are you with them?" he demanded. "Get them down from there!"
"I don't know them," she said flatly. She laid a few sens on the counter to cover the cost of her drink, careful to avoid the flailing feet of the men on the counter, gathered up her coat and walked out of the bar. Her exit was barely heeded by any of the men, for which she was quite thankful since she did not at that moment particularly want to be associated with them. She did hear one of them bawl her rank out after her but she did not stop or turn to see who it was as the bell above the door rang with her departure.
The next day, First Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye smiled uncharacteristically brightly at each of her five bleary-eyed co-workers, producing frightened and worried expressions from each as they were put on their guard in addition to having to nurse their hangovers by inhaling copious amounts of coffee and cradling their aching heads. She made no effort to muffle the thumping of the unusually tall stacks of paperwork she dropped before each of them, eliciting a pained hissing and a wince from all five.
Mustang glared at her, taking in her unusual cheerfulness and wondering how she had managed to escape the affliction that he and the rest of his men were currently suffering under.
"Why are you so happy?" he grumbled as she noisily dropped a mountain of paperwork onto his desk. "And where did you go last night?"
She smiled wickedly. "About the time you lot assembled to do a group table dance on that poor bartender's counter, I decided that it was about time I got home. Sir," she said, adding the last word as an amused afterthought. "Though, sir, I will say that you were right about last night's outing improving morale."
He looked at her wide eyed for a moment before the memories came flooding back and he bowed his head to hide the grimace that formed on his face as he remembered singing too loudly, dancing with almost his entire unit, and subsequently being thrown out of the bar to raucous applause and an order from the bartender to never set foot in there again.
Damn, he thought. And I really liked that bar, too.