Spencer steps into the hall, and both Mustang and Hughes straighten from where they'd been slumped, almost like misbehaving schoolboys, against one another.
"General Mustang, Agent Rossi could use your assistance," he says. They both stand, but Spencer steps into Hughes's path. "Mr. Hughes, if I could borrow you for a moment?" he asks.
The two men trade looks that Spencer can tell hold volumes, but say nothing, and Hughes gives Mustang a small nod after a moment.
"Dr. Reid." Mustang inclines his head as he passes, and Spencer half expects him to bump his shoulder, but he doesn't. It leaves him in the hall with Hughes.
"Do you mind if we step outside?" he suggests, wanting not to be easily overheard and to go outside and clear his head a bit.
Hughes raises an eyebrow, a hint of a grin playing at his lips, even though his eyes are serious. "After you," he says.
Spencer would prefer not to have the man at his back, but he has absolutely nothing to gain from hurting Spencer under the current circumstances, so he leads the way rather than arguing. When they step outside, the air is still heavy and wet, the scent of more rain to come thick in the air. Spencer makes himself take three deep, long breaths anyway, and feels a little clearer for it.
"So you wanted to talk to me alone?" Hughes asks after a moment.
A somewhat rueful smile crosses Spencer's lips too. He hadn't meant to play the silence game with Hughes, but he supposes that training and habit had made him do so. "I did," he says. Now that he's aware that being silent apparently works on Hughes, he leaves it at that, listening to the sounds of nature surrounding the police station, breathing in the damp air, wishing Derek were there.
The silence hangs for several minutes—longer than Spencer thought he'd hold out, in truth—before Hughes sighs and says, "Are you going to actually talk to me and ask me your questions, or are we just going to stand out here all evening?"
There are an infinite number of things Spencer could ask, and probably at least thousands that would be at least on topic, but when he opens his mouth, the question that comes out is, "Did you know that my partner is missing with Ed?"
Hughes watches him with shrewd, intelligent eyes, and Spencer feels like he can see the question being parsed and evaluated in real time behind them, even if only for a moment, before he grins widely, as if embarrassed. "I thought they were all your partners!" he says.
A deflection, then. Spencer could deflect back, and they could play this word game of implications for as long as Hughes desired, but that isn't what Spencer wants, and it's not a game he's interested in playing with Derek, JJ, and Ed missing. He leans against the railing, facing Hughes full-on, and says, "I just spent the last twenty minutes arguing with my boss and my team, defending General Mustang to them. I'd appreciate it if you didn't play dumb with me."
The jester's mask doesn't fall away completely, but it lessens, and Spencer will take that. Hughes says, "I'm surprised there aren't regulations against fraternization."
"There aren't," Spencer says. It's understood to be bad form, but there are no explicit regulations against it, and it's not like Hotch or Emily would be anything other than happy for them. "Are there anti-fraternization policies in your military?" he asks.
"Last I was aware, there were," Hughes returns, his smile widening again. "Not well-enforced or policed, but they technically existed." The grin becomes less goofy and more thoughtful as he adds, "But you already knew that because Roy mentioned that Ed transferred when they began dating."
Spencer did know, but not everyone would have remembered that passing comment when there were so many other shocks going around. "I forgot," he says.
Light seems to glint off Hughes's glasses, hiding his eyes for a moment. "Easy to forget such a detail," he says, warm and understanding, almost paternal.
Realizing their focus has been so much on Mustang that they've almost entirely overlooked Hughes makes Spencer hide a wince. Mustang is a frighteningly intelligent and competent man. Hughes isn't some ordinary friend, he's clearly one of Mustang's closest, dearest friends, and that relationship appears to be reciprocal. The reason Spencer wanted to talk to Hughes alone was to get Hughes's biased opinion of Mustang, to understand the man better from someone who obviously trusts and counts him as a friend.
He almost forgot that goes both ways. Hughes trusts and counts Mustang as a friend, yes, but Mustang also trusts Hughes and values him in obviously equal measure. Spencer wanted to ascertain Mustang's character, but what they know of Mustang can also give him information on Hughes.
"I spent the last twenty minutes defending your friend. I want to know if I did the right thing. If Mustang deserves to be defended, if we should look past his indiscretions with Ed. I want to hear about Mustang from someone whose view of the man, while biased, may not be as corrupted as Ed's may be," he says, deciding to lay his hand on the table rather than continue to draw this out.
Mustang is intelligent, shrewd, charming. They know just by his choice of partner in Ed that he values intelligence and charisma, if not tact. Given what they've seen of Hughes thus far, it's safe to assume that Mustang isn't a man who suffers fools lightly or willingly, and for all that Hughes enjoys playing the fool, he is most certainly not one. Better to appear to show his hand and hope that Hughes reciprocates in kind.
The jester's grin fades into something that's more knife-sharp and cutting but something that Spencer thinks is probably more real for it. That grin says Ah, you've done something interesting now, haven't you? It's the kind of grin that is both a promise and a threat, and Spencer is reminded that Mustang burned a woman—and probably more than that one woman—to death, but only after Hughes had put a knife in her head.
He still doesn't know if he believes it, but why admit to it if it weren't true? Why tell such an outrageous lie with such sincerity? Why reveal something that could only make them look worse in the BAU's eyes rather than better? Logic says there is nothing to gain from telling a fantastical lie, ergo, logic dictates that they must have been telling the truth.
Hughes gives a little chuff of amusement. "Roy… is a complicated man."
Spencer is not going to let him get away with that deflection and generality. "Most people are."
Green eyes disappear behind glinting glasses again, and Hughes asks, "Are they really?"
"You don't think so?" Spencer asks.
There's a moment, not quite a hesitation, but more a pause before Hughes replies, "Not in my experience, no. The complicated ones are relatively few and far between, and they're the ones that are the most… interesting."
"People like Mustang?" he asks, almost as if the answer means nothing to him.
Hughes doesn't fall for it though, instead watching Spencer with an almost predatory look in his eyes. "And Agent Rossi and Agent Prentiss, and even Miss… Penelope, was it? And you worked with Edward and seem fond of him, and no one in their right mind would ever consider Edward Elric anything but complex and extraordinary. It seems like your team populates itself with interesting people, and it seems that it's interesting people you devote your time to pursuing."
"You're synonymizing 'complicated' and 'interesting,'" Spencer points out.
"You don't?" Hughes asks.
"While there's often overlap in the criteria, complicated things aren't by definition interesting."
Hughes hums thoughtfully. "I think that depends on who you're talking to and the topic at hand. In my eyes, people are always interesting, and the more complex they are, the more interesting they are."
Spencer wants to cheer. "So that's why you're friends with Mustang? Because he's interesting?"
Instead of the backpedaling he expects, Hughes snorts. "I'm not friends with every interesting person, and I wouldn't be friends with Roy just because he's interesting any more than I'd study alchemy just because it's complex and challenging."
"If not that, then why are you friends with him?"
Hughes tilts his head before answering, considering Spencer as if he's given him new information to mull over. "You defended him, but you really don't believe he's a good man, do you?" he asks.
That's a loaded question, and if Spencer answers it wrong, he may shut down Hughes entirely. "I know that Ed loves him. I know that Ed defended him ardently. I know that Ed believes Mustang is in love with him. I'd like to think that Ed's judgment in this case is sound, but the truth is… he was a sixteen-year-old child soldier who got involved with his commanding officer who was nearly twice his age. I don't know that sixteen-year-old Ed's judgment can be trusted."
Sighing, this time as if Spencer has made a good point, Hughes leans his weight against the wall of the police station, and he looks thoughtful for a long moment before he answers.
"Have you ever met a man who has gone into war, bright-eyed and fervently believing in the cause, only to come out on the other side disillusioned and nearly broken?" he asks.
It's not at all the answer Spencer was expecting, and it makes him startle, but he's known of plenty of soldiers who have gone through exactly that paradigm shift. "It's sadly common, and it's also found to be a significant contributing factor to the high suicide rate among veterans," he says. "Mustang had such a shift?"
Hughes scoffs again, and this time the sound is humorless and bitter. "We all did. Hard as it might be to believe, Roy was an idealist." He looks past Spencer and out into the parking lot, but Spencer is sure he isn't seeing it. "The idiot probably still is in his heart of hearts." He closes his eyes and refocuses on Spencer. "Roy and I became friends in the midst of a terrible and unjust war."
Finally something that makes sense. Bonds made in war are known to be incredibly strong. "But he's still in the military, and it sounds as if you would still be if you hadn't…"
The grin curls Hughes's lips again, and Spencer is a little relieved to see the humor back, even if it is gallows humor. "If I hadn't died?" he asks.
Spencer gives him a small nod.
"We were," he says, looking away again. "Amestris is a military dictatorship. The only way to make change is from within the military."
Spencer wants to sigh at their apparently naive optimism. "I won't say that it's impossible to instigate significant change from within an organization, but it's exceptionally difficult and requires being either in a position of significant and protected power—if you're going to dictate the change—or it requires a significant supporting force that can't simply be fired."
"So it does," Hughes agrees far too readily.
Thinking back over the information that had seemed to be nonsense at the time, Spencer asks, "So your country is ruled by a… fuhrer?"
"You really do have a fantastic memory," Hughes compliments.
"Eidetic, actually. Answer the question."
Hughes doesn't sigh, but he looks like he would like to. "Yes, the fuhrer is the top position in the military, and he controls the country," he confirms.
"Exactly how does one become the fuhrer?"
That good-natured grin becomes sharp and cold again, and Spencer knows that he's hit on something important, but he isn't surprised when Hughes deflects again.
"Honestly, the fuhrer has been the same throughout my whole life. You'd have to ask Roy how it was accomplished when Bradley died. It sounds like maybe some sort of general agreement."
A new fuhrer was installed and it wasn't Mustang, but Spencer suddenly has no doubt that it's a position that Mustang aspires to. That fact does not further endear Spencer to the man, and it doesn't really make him feel any better about defending him, no matter how much he hated having to do it.
The grin fades and something that Spencer thinks is sincerity, or perhaps as close to it as Hughes is capable of being, settles on Hughes's features.
"Look, you asked if defending Roy was a mistake. It wasn't. I know that it's complicated, that Roy is complicated. He's not some shining paragon, but he is a good man. He's a man who believes in people and wants to do what's best for them."
It's Spencer's turn to scoff. "We have a saying about that."
"Oh?" Hughes asks, raising an eyebrow.
"Yeah." He waits a beat to make sure he has Hughes's full attention before adding. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
All humor falls away from Hughes's face. "And what are your intentions, Dr. Reid?" he asks.
"I intend to get my team back, and, in particular, my partner back. Since Mustang is my best chance of attaining that goal, I intend to use him to that end."
"Then I guess it doesn't really matter what I tell you about Roy. Whether he's a saint or a monster or both," Hughes points out.
Spencer finds it hard to disagree with that. "I'd prefer to work with the saint."
"I'd rather work with the monster," Hughes says. "Monsters are predictable, and generally, so are saints. It's the ones that are both that you need to watch out for."
"And which is Mustang?"
Hughes grins again, the jester's mask firmly in place. "Why, both of course. I told you—he's interesting."
Holding back a sigh, Spencer pushes off the railing of the porch. "Let's go back in," he says, feeling like he's no closer to getting Derek and JJ and Ed back than when he started this conversation. It doesn't really matter though, he learned what he needed to. Mustang is a man who is extremely driven and will stop at nothing to achieve his goals. He wants Ed back, so he will find a way to get the others back as well. If they can trust him for nothing else, they can trust that he will do whatever it takes to get Ed back.
No one ever said Spencer had to like a tool in order to be able to use it.