So this chapter is important, because I am introducing someone who will become a childhood friend of Ed's, so I hope you'll all like Charlie!
Chapter fifty-two
Roy was walking with Ed on his shoulders, enjoying the warm weather of City Park, the largest park in Central. It had been Al's idea as something to do while they were waiting for Sheska to write down the research notes. The weather forecast promised them pouring rain for the next week, so they were going to enjoy this trip. And Alphonse had told him that there was a large playground that had newly been built that Elicia had been telling him about for ten minutes straight, obviously mesmerised by it, so they figured that Ed might like to try it out too while Al and Hawkeye walked Rolf. It meant that Roy was wearing civilian clothes as the uniform could be intimidating to the other parents and their children. And Roy wished for Ed to make some friends his own age.
And so they reached the playground and Roy could see why it had got Elicia so excited. It was really somewhere between a playground and a funfair in Roy's opinion.
"What do you think, Brother?" Al asked, a smile in his voice.
"I wanna play!" Ed said excitedly and Roy lifted him off his shoulders and put him on the ground. Ed was running for the playground the second his feet hit the gravel and Roy said a hasty goodbye to Al and Hawkeye before following his son.
Ed was immediately climbing up the ladder of a slide and Roy sat down at the last a available bench in the vicinity, keeping an eye on Ed while also keeping some distance. Roy thought that it was good for Ed to do fun things without basically clinging onto Roy's leg. After all, Ed should ideally be starting school in a year and that meant that the boy should be encouraged to feel safe around other kids his age. And so Ed was climbing, sliding, spinning and then doing it all over again, obviously determined to try everything out.
"Excuse me, sir, but would you mind if I sat here?"
Roy looked up to his right to see a pretty redhead in her mid-twenties look at him hopefully, holding onto her daughter's right hand to keep her from running away. The little girl had red pigtails and lots of freckles like her mother. "Of course not," Roy said, smiling.
The woman sighed gratefully and then let go of the hyperactive little girl's hand and they watched her run over to the first thing she could climb. Roy chuckled a bit, reminded of Ed who was currently climbing up the slide for the fourth time in a row.
"Thank you, sir," the woman said, placing her bag on her lap and pulling out a water bottle and drinking from it. "I really hope you're not some creepy bloke who comes to watch small children play." She looked like she was joking, but she was just a bit too anxious for the answer for it to have entirely been a joke.
Roy chuckled. "No, mine's the one on the slide." Roy pointed and Ed saw it and waved, and so Roy waved back.
Her smile relaxed and became entirely genuine. "He's so cute! What's his name?"
"It's Edward. He's five. How old is yours?"
"She's five too. Her name is Charlotte, but she'll only answer to Charlie, she's stubborn like that."
Roy chuckled. "I know that one, Ed can be amazingly stubborn at times."
It was the woman's turn to chuckle. Then her eyes widened. "Oh! And please don't think I'm trying to chat you up or anything! I'm a happily married woman of twenty-five! I'm not one of the vultures swooping down on single dads in the park!"
Roy raised his eyebrows. "You really didn't strike me as the type, so that's good."
"And you? Do you have a special someone? I mean, you don't have a ring, not that you can't have kids without a ring of course! No-no! That's perfectly all right!" She laughed nervously. "God! I really hope I didn't offend you!" She blushed, clamping her hand in front of her mouth.
Roy was telepathically trying to remind her to breathe. "No, there's no one. I adopted the boys last month so I'm pretty new to the whole thing." Roy didn't mind just chatting, especially as the woman seemed like she desperately needed to socialise.
"So there's not just Ed?" she asked quickly, obviously grasping at straws to get the conversation rolling again in order to forget her little outburst.
"Yes, his brother Alphonse, he's fourteen."
She gasped. "You're Colonel Roy Mustang, aren't you?!"
Roy was surprised. "Yes?"
"My older brother, he's a Lieutenant Colonel, he told me about the ball! That was such a nice thing you did for those poor boys!"
Then she hugged him. She threw her arms around him and squeezed him with surprising strength, then she let go and looked at him with a grin. Roy was honestly a bit shocked.
Ed was wondering what to make out of the sand in the sandbox. He didn't want to make a sandcastle and he had filled the plastic bucket with water from the little stream by the playground so that he could make the sand harder and shape it like he wanted. Ed suddenly heard another kid coming into the sandbox and next second, Ed had someone stop right next to him, just looking at what he was doing. Ed looked up at her: she had red pigtails and freckles and her face was unreadable. "Do you want something?" Ed asked.
"They're noisy," the girl said. "Can we make a turtle?"
Ed was a bit confused, but Ed did think that a turtle would be cool. "Okay."
The girl looked a bit less confused and sat down and grabbed the other plastic shovel and they began making the shell first, Ed occasionally using water from the bucket to shape it correctly.
"You like turtles?" The girl asked, not looking at him, completely focused on their project.
"Yeah! Do you?"
"Mhm. We have two. Wally and Sebastian."
"That's so cool! We have a dog, his name is Rolf. But I have a really big inflatable turtle that I used on the beach! His name is Robert."
"That's cool, I'd like one too."
"I'm Edward Elric-Mustang, with a hyphen, who are you?"
"I'm Charlie Andrews." Ed liked that. It reminded him of the rubber ducky back home in East City. He began to wonder if Jimmy-Charlie was getting lonely after all this time.
They managed to make a thirty centimetre long turtle and it had a little smile. Ed was very proud of it and Charlie was smiling a bit.
Then suddenly a fat kid came running in and jumped on it, destroying their work. "HAH HAH! Now you have to start over again!" the kid said.
"That was mean!" Ed said, Charlie was looking shocked. Ed got to his feet and crossed his arms, realising that the other kid was bigger than him and at least seven. "You're gonna make Daddy mad!"
"Well, my Daddy is bigger than your Daddy!"
"My Daddy is stronger than your Daddy!" Ed said back.
"My Daddy can beat your Daddy anytime!"
"My Daddy can burn your Daddy with the snap of his fingers!"
"Cannot!"
"Yes, he can! He's the Flame Alchemist!"
"As if! You're just a liar and liars go to prison!"
"I'll show you! DADDY!"
The kid looked angry. "Liar!" Then he shoved Ed so that he landed flat on his bottom.
Then Ed heard sniffles from Charlie and saw that the bully had made her cry. She was still staring at their destroyed turtle, looking heartbroken and that made Ed really angry. You don't make girls cry, it was bad manners. Ed got to his feet and stood in front of Charlie to stop the boy from hurting her more and then grinned as the bully moved to shove him again, just as Daddy suddenly grabbed the boy's shoulder. "What's going on here?!"
"He ruined our turtle and made Charlie cry! And he called me a liar when I said that you're the Flame Alchemist!"
"And he shoved Ed…" Charlie said quietly, sniffing.
Daddy wasn't happy to hear that. He turned the bully around and looked at him sternly, pulling out his pocket watch and held it right in front of the boy's face. Ed walked over to Charlie and patted her twice on the back before he stroked it gently. "You see this?" Daddy said. "This is an official State Alchemist pocket watch. It shows that I report directly to the Führer. Do you still call him a liar?"
"N-no, sir!" The bully said, shaking his head.
"And furthermore, I just happen to have been appointed by said Führer to be this boy's bodyguard. So you tell me: are you going to shove him again?"
"N-no, sir!"
"And what do you say?"
"S-sorry, sir!"
Daddy turned him around to face Ed and Charlie. "And what do you say to them?"
"I'm sorry I ruined your t-turtle! And I'm sorry I shoved you!" He looked really scared.
"And you made her cry!" Ed said angrily.
"I'm sorry I hurt you!"
Charlie just looked up at him, not saying anything else.
Ed felt a bit triumphant and glared at the kid as Charlie sniffed again. "Now you promise not to be a bully anymore or I'll tell the Führer you attacked me!" Ed threatened.
The kid nodded and then Daddy let go of his shoulder and the boy ran away.
Daddy then put the watch back in his pocket and knelt down in front of Charlie, holding out his handkerchief. "Hi, Charlie, I'm Roy and I'm Ed's Daddy. Your Mum asked me to look after you while she went to find a toilet and she'll be here soon, okay?"
She only began crying more and so Daddy pulled her gently into a hug.
Ed, meanwhile, got an idea that would surely make everything better, so Ed grabbed a stick and began drawing up a transmutation circle in the sand. Ed then pressed his palms to it and grinned as he was about to fix things. When the alchemic crackling died down, Ed looked at what he had created and smiled widely. He had made a ten centimetre sandstone turtle that was even smiling. Ed picked it up and Charlie looked at it with wide eyes as Ed held it out to her. "Now you can have a Robert too!"
It was two minutes later that Charlie's Mum showed up and Charlie was gripping her Robert in her right hand and holding Ed's in her other one, walking up to her. "Mum? Can Ed come home to us tomorrow so that I can show him our turtles?"
