The bartender slings an ale at him expertly; the glass glides across the bartop like a figure skater and comes to rest in front of Ed's propped-up menu without spilling a single drop. He looks up, startled, upsetting the mirror he has balanced on the interior of the menu.
"I didn't order this."
"Compliments of the gentleman at the end of the bar," the man explains, leaning in conspiratorially. "He's a good-looking fellow but I'd be careful if I were you, seems to be spoken for," he says, with a point at his own left ring finger. Puzzled, Ed peers over to be met with the most unwelcome sight of the Fuhrer of Amestris, grinning like a Cheshire cat. He slides over several seats, taking his own conspicuous fan of a menu with him.
"Great minds think alike, huh Fullmetal?"
"Don't look now, but I think we're being watched," Mae whispers, and as she should have predicted, her date lets out an audible 'whuh?' and turns, stopping just short of being completely obvious when she raps him sharply on the shin with the toe of her boot. "I said not to look!"
"Sorry, jeez." Sam goes back to buttering the roll in his hand. For all that he's two years older he's a complete country boy, naive and transparent. Mae supposes that's what she finds endearing about him although at the moment she is finding it very difficult to be anything but annoyed with all of the men in the world.
"Where exactly did you say your father was tonight?"
"At some kind of conference," Sam says, finally looking up. "Something to do with Alchemy, and you know I never pay attention to that stuff."
"Well I do, and there's no such thing happening tonight," she says triumphantly, pleased at keeping abreast of all of Central City's Alchemical social gatherings. She might not be into anything big and flashy, but biomedical alchemy was just as fascinating as it was rewarding, as well as being a fairly competitive field. "And besides, they're sitting at the bar spying on us."
"They?" This gets his attention and he almost turns to look again before she reaches across the table to gently but firmly set her fingertips on his chin, keeping him from turning his head. Blue eyes meet amber and she realizes she can feel the faint scratch of stubble. Sam Elric is no longer the kid she used to boss around the playground, she realizes for something like the tenth time that day. It takes a while to unlearn what you've come to accept as fact, as she's finding, and maybe inviting him to dinner will prove to be as much of a prank on herself as on her father. She releases him just as she begins to blush, and buries her nose in the menu.
"Yes they, our dads are sitting at the bar together."
"Aw, they're getting along," he says, somewhere between sarcasm and sincerity. "Maybe we should send them a dessert."
"I think it'll be more fun to ignore them," she says. "after all, they're clearly very invested in our outing."
"Date," he corrects her.
"Funny, I don't remember specifying it was a date when I asked you."
"Funny," he contradicts, pointing a butter knife at her, "But you asked me, an eligible bachelor, out for a meal that coincides with the sun setting at a restaurant that employs a waitstaff. Ergo it is a date and ergo I assume you plan to pick up the check. We'll have two shrimp cocktails, thanks, and another bread basket if you get a minute." This is directed at their bemused waiter who nods and makes himself scarce. Mae begins to sincerely believe she underestimated this whole situation and briefly drops her head into her hands.
"Mustang what the hell are you doing stalking my kid?" Ed hisses, menu overlapped with the other man's in a strange battle of the vinyl.
"I think I could ask you the same question," Roy replies, seeming infuriatingly calm about the whole thing. "You see I just happened to be in the area and decided to stop by my favorite bar, Rinaldi's-"
"Rigoletto's," the bartender corrects him, setting a bread basket in front of them. "And I've never seen you here before."
"Well I blend into crowds you see, easily overlooked-"
There's a rustle and he finds himself face to face with the front page of the paper, which bears a very clear picture of him and Riza at the ribbon cutting of the new Ishvalan Culture Center. He can see roughly a third of Mae, who was standing next to them out of obligation but far enough away that she might avoid being in pictures like these and for a moment he felt slightly guilty. Only slightly, however.
"You're lucky the press hasn't swarmed the place," Ed tells him.
"Yeah because the Fullmetal Alchemist visiting Central for the first time in a decade isn't newsworthy at all," Roy drawls.
"I'm not an alchemist anymore!" Ed all but shouts, and even the bartender turns to him with a finger set across his lips in the universal sign for 'hush'. It's quiet for a moment before he speaks again. "So where does the Lieutenant think you are?" Roy raises an eyebrow at this.
"Lieutenant?"
"The ..." Ed racks his brain for Riza's current rank but can't seem to come up with anything. He's two pints deep and it's possible he's not as sharp as he normally is. "Major?" No. "Captain?" No dice. "You know who I mean!" He exclaims, frustrated and resolving to ask Winry when he gets home because surely she knows, she seems to know everything.
"Oh she thinks I'm with you," Roy says casually, prompting another near-explosion and another shush from the man behind the counter. "It makes sense, after all, that we would take some time to catch up. And look, it even turned out to be true."
"I guess," Ed says grudgingly. This side of thirty he finds Roy Mustang seems less of a ridiculous facsimile of an authority figure and more like a real flesh and blood human being. He can see wisps of gray at the older man's temples, and underneath the veneer of casual nonchalance is a guy who probably needs a night off very badly. Ed catches the bartender's eye. "Two more please," he says, and the man proves himself to be a quick-draw on the draft, complying before Roy has a chance to protest.
"Lighten up, Mustang," Ed tells him, clinking their glasses together. "You're only young once."
Mae does end up getting the bill and she isn't entirely sure how she feels about that. On the one hand, she did ask him and so it only seems fair, but on the other hand she still isn't entirely convinced she's on a date and not just some elaborate scheme for Sam Elric to eat four orders of shrimp cocktail without fiscal repercussions. As they leave the restaurant, however, he loops his arm through hers and steers them west, towards the park they used to run amok in as children. Well, one of many parks, to be fair.
"Care for a stroll?" he asks, "Or do you need to get back before our dads get blackout drunk and start setting fires?" Ed and Roy are, at this point, crouched in the bushed outside the restaurant, having dashed out the doors and directly into the foliage. She thinks she hears giggling but the very thought is too far beyond the pale to entertain for long.
"I think I have some time," she admits. They walk along in companionable silence for a few moments. "Why did you and your dad decide to visit the city?"
"Oh that," he says breezily. "I had an interview for an automail fellowship. I'll find out in the next couple of weeks whether or not I got accepted."
"Automail? In Central? Why not look for something further South?" Everyone knew Rush Valley was the place to be if you wanted to learn mechanics; Sam should know that most of all, considering who his mother was. He could probably get an apprenticeship with anyone in Rush Valley based off pedigree alone.
"Well for one thing I didn't want anyone to let me in based off of who my parents are," he admits, strangely quiet. "I probably don't have to explain that to you, though." Mae feels herself turn beet red. She pulled every string she could to get into the best Biomed Alchemy programs Central had to offer, and until now she's never really felt ashamed of her ambition. She feels almost like a fraud compared to the man next to her, golden and boisterous, walking the line between being talented and humble. But it wasn't exactly easy for a female alchemist to succeed, let alone one with a 'boring' specialty, boring of course meaning she never made anything explode.
She thinks back, however, and she remembers a time before she stopped caring about what people thought more than she cared about the results. She recalls, vividly, what it's like to be accused of resting on your parents' laurels. Her road to success has been a long and lonely one, and it's far from over. She hold his arm more tightly and to his credit he doesn't react.
"No," she replies, "You don't have to explain that at all."
"Move over, Fullmetal, I can't see!"
They're both less steady on their feet at this point; four rounds of the finest ale Amestris has to offer will do that to a person. Ed pushes a branch out of his face in time to see his oldest son walking off into the sunset arm-in-arm with Mustang's spawn. Well that wasn't fair, Mae was, in his experience, a nice girl who took after her mother in everything except for maybe hair color and aptitude for firearms. And really when you broke it down he had five other chances to have a child not marry a Mustang while this was Roy's only shot at an extended family. He finds himself patting the other man's shoulder.
"We wanted to have more than one kid," Roy says, the Fuhrer of the whole country, cross legged in the dirt outside a mid-range bar and grill. "But we couldn't get married until I got promoted and by then..."
Ed nodded; he was an ex-alchemist, capable of math, even after four pints of precariously strong brew.
"Hey you can borrow a few of mine anytime you want," he offers. "The twins are still preteens so you can experience all the joy of mood swings and sex talks all over again if you want."
"You have twins?" Roy exclaims, as he gets to his feet. "We'd better move before they get too far ahead; I'm starting to lose sight of them."
Ed doesn't want to point out that maybe Mustang needs glasses, so he hauls himself up and they advance to the next set of bushes.
The sun has dipped below the horizon by the time they get into the park, their fathers loudly crashing through the foliage behind them. A part of Mae wants to turn around and raise hell, but a bigger part is more interested in seeing where this date-not-date is going. From the sound of it Roy and Ed aren't paying much attention to them anyway, apart from using them as a kind of honing beacon. It's distracting many of the other couples who were taking advantage of the park, however, and she and Sam virtually have the place to themselves. They stop in front of the large fountain in the center, watching the last vestiges of daylight play across the bubbling water.
"Central's not so bad," Sam tells her out of nowhere.
"Not at all. I'm pretty fond of it," she says.
"Well you know, I'm from the country. Rolling green fields, skies bluer than anything. But this is nice too." He loosens his grip on her arm and she reflexively pulls away from the perceived rebuttal, but he's only sliding his hand down to meet hers, interlacing their fingers with an ease that feels both novel and familiar. It's quiet; quiet enough that she thinks their dads may have gotten sidetracked by a passing food cart and finally left them alone.
"Not the worst way to spend an evening," she admits. "Uninvited company excluded." He turns slightly, not loosening his grip on her hand.
"Much better than the last evening we spent together, when, if I recall correctly, you threw sand in my eyes."
"Well if I recall correctly, you were being an ass and needed to be put in your place." His sudden grin makes it seem like the sun has come back out.
"You really know how to show a guy a good time."
She rolls her eyes. "If by a good time you mean four 700 cenz plates of shrimp then yeah, I guess I'm the leading authority, because I doubt anyone else has ever been dumb enough to fall for that." He chuckles softly and bends to gently press his lips to hers.
"My only child!" Roy cries with all the anguish of a mediocre stage actor. Ed drags the keening Fuhrer out of the bushes by his stupid expensive-feeling scarf and back down the street from whence they came.
"You'll live. Like I said, if this kid was a bust you're welcome to try again with a couple of mine."
"You know what the worst part is?" Roy asks, after he finds his feet and trudges along, keeping step with Ed as he leads them back to the bar where this whole sordid reunion originated. "The worst part is Riza. She'll be thrilled." Ed wants to say he can't imagine but he pictures Winry's response and finds he absolutely can imagine.
"Let's talk about something else," Ed says as they slide back into place at the bar and the bartender, unasked, begins pouring two more beers. "Heard anything interesting from Xing recently?"
On the other side of Central, Mae and Sam stroll across the lawn in the moonlight. The lack of noises seem to indicate that their famous father have decided, at long last, to give it a rest. The stars are starting to come out, dimly against the orange glow of the city lights, and she listens as Sam starts to point out constellations, telling her how much more you can see of the sky in the country. Mae doesn't know that this is necessarily the result she set out to achieve, but she finds that maybe sometimes the best outcomes are the ones we stumble into.