Yeah folks, sorry it's been so long. Many apologies, plus that tide-you-over thing last chapter. I make no excuses. And I'll have you know my grades were worth it. Much Roy/Hawkeye today. I haven't been writing much serious Royai lately, and boy does it show. Ah well, still plenty of funnies. Enjoy. Please also review…it feeds my ego something wonderful.

"Candid Casualty"

There was a wall where it shouldn't have been. The visible chamber (aka the company's office) had transformed into something that was about two-thirds of its former size. This, of course, meant that things were cramped.

"Damn," Breda said. "I didn't think we'd damaged the supporting wall that badly."

"Those shots didn't even go all the way through the plaster," Falman added, raising an eyebrow. "What happened to the file cabinets?"

"They're in my office," Roy said, pushing nonchalantly past and toward the new wall. It had a door in it.

A door. Now it was making sense.

"They gave you an office?" If there were frequency levels to indignity, Breda's voice was communicating in gamma rays. "An office?"

"I am curious," Fury said.

"I'm furious."

Mustang waved a hand and disappeared inside.

"While you were having fun in prison he managed to convince the construction workers that his company distracted him from his duties," Hawkeye said. Her bemusement was somewhere between green and ultraviolet.

"Well, it does a disservice if it keeps you out too," Falman pointed out.

"Notice how there is six of us, but only four desks visible."

"So where are you going to work, in his lap?"

The First Lieutenant shot Breda a poisonous look.

"Being on a military budget, I'm sure the wall's very thin," Falman said thoughtfully. "Not very ideal for privacy."

"Just whose side are you on here, Warrant Officer?"

Falman shrugged. "It appears that I'm not on the window side of this arrangement…just the same as you, Lieutenant."

"Whose desk is whose?" Fury asked, as the two principal conversationalists stopped talking because they were preparing to get a little more physical.

Hawkeye shrugged. "I'm not the maid. I didn't keep track of where they moved everything. I figured you'd be smart enough to figure it out for yourselves. Though I could always be wrong—"

"I think we'd best get to work," Fury said before Breda or Falman could think of a snide comeback. He grabbed an inert Havoc and gently dragged him out of the hallway.

"Do we have to?" Havoc whined.

"He's speaking in full sentences now?"

Havoc paused, as if thinking very hard. "Want hungry?" he tried.

"False alarm." Falman said.

Hawkeye rolled her eyes for what had to be the thousandth time that day and followed the Colonel into his office.

"Say, Breda, whatever happened to that video camera?" Falman asked, looking up briefly from his latest daily activities manifest. "Did you ever get anything useful out of it?"

"You know, I never checked," Breda answered thoughtfully. "Hey Fury, do you remember where exactly we stashed it?"

"What are you talking about?" Fury said, not missing a beat. He didn't want to be involved in anything that could potentially get them into trouble yet again. True, he had helped jury-rig an innocent-looking container for the thing, but Breda also had failed to specify his intentions. The Colonel and his second-in-command could get into a lot of trouble if they were caught fraternizing. Somehow, miraculously, the rumors perpetuated by Falman had never been substantiated by an outside party, and were generally considered an exaggeration of Mustang's current reputation as a horndog. Fury thought it was sweet that the two of them were finding some kind of happiness…if constantly being teased by your co-workers didn't aggravate it too much, anyway.

"I bet we could really get some good stuff now that they're not constantly running the risk of being walked in on," Falman said. "I bet we could get some stuff that's sellable."

"That's so immoral!" Fury protested, over the clamoring of his brain to keep quiet. "Don't you have any human decency—?"

"I'd sacrifice just about anything to see the Lieutenant—"

"See me what?" At that precise moment, the inner office door opened and Hawkeye emerged, carrying a stack of manila folders. Her face revealed nothing about how much of the conversation she'd overheard.

Breda evidently decided to go for broke. "Let your hair down once and a while. You're so uptight, Hawkeye. Why don't you relax and let us police ourselves?"

"Because if I did I'd end up with nobody to boss around," she replied, and went off straight-backed (and –faced) to run whatever errand she'd had in mind.

"What exactly did that mean?" Falman asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Obviously some joke we're not smart or involved enough to understand," Breda snapped, suddenly moody.

"Caught you off-guard, did she?" Havoc asked.

Everyone stopped to look at him. Again.

"What? Never more bananas have looked gentle."

"You're pathetic, Jean."

"If you ripen up," Havoc said, drifting back into his normal (or what had recently become so) state.

"He's right, however accidentally," Fury said. "That was close. You really shouldn't antagonize her like that—it just puts you under stress, and I don't like watching."

"What a thrill though," Falman argued. "Always gets my adrenaline going, when I have to restrain the roaring laugher."

"In any case, tack up one more spectacular, witty recovery on my part," Breda said, going just a little red in the face.

"It didn't really sound like she believed you."

"How would you know?"

"We've worked with her for how long?"

"In any case, it's the processing in the recesses of my great brain that counts here!"

"Does that rank down there with the fruit-packing plant, or did it recently qualify for a coal-burning permit?"

"It's unskilled labor," Fury muttered darkly.

"What did you just say?"

"He said that he doubts your capacity for intelligent thought and planning," Havoc said sharply.

"Uh…" Breda tried, trying to digest Havoc's sudden cognizance of the conversation.

"Wrestle the weasel sometime. You'll see."

"It must be a conditioned response," Fury said weakly, poking at the once-again-inactive Second Lieutenant.

"A what?"

"You know, like how a dog comes running if you ring a dinner bell."

"I wouldn't know…usually if a dog's running at me I'm running away."

Falman immediately began (silently) planning a prank that involved stitching many tiny bells into Breda's uniform. After some further pointless bickering all around, Fury was passed a set of drawings of a humanlike blob fleeing, terrified, from little doglike blobs. All around the amateurish art was a sophisticated scheme, written in code (dog terms inserted where vowels would be), for how to get Breda temporarily out of his uniform. Fury, eyes wide, immediately stuffed the papers into his Drawer of Forbidden Things, fully intent on never looking at them again.

There were several loud thumps from the other side of the Inappropriate Wall. "This thing's very thin, you know," Mustang's muffled voice informed them. "Didn't I ever teach you kids how to use your inside voices?"

They sighed, collectively, and worked a little more on their manifests.

Our company worked harmoniously and efficiently on the currently assigned project, Fury wrote, and marveled at his own boldness.

A while later, Breda said, "No, really, that camera was expensive. I want it back. Where did we put it, Fury?"

"I'll get it later," Fury responded. And immediately cursed himself for being so nice.

The wall clock, restored from its back-and-forth state, showed 9:12 pm.

"The house is so nice and quiet when all the kids have gone out," Mustang sighed. He yawned, rolled back his chair, and propped his boots up on top a finished patrol report (due two days ago). "It seems so much easier to do anything at all when they're not making a racket."

"It doesn't seem that your wall idea has been terribly successful," Hawkeye said, signing off her own report from tomorrow's patrol. "I don't know why you were so insistent if you didn't believe it had at least a small chance of raising your productivity."

"Who said it hasn't?"
Hawkeye glanced up and moved a white knight on the chessboard that sat exactly on the seam where their desks met. "Checkmate. I know I've improved my game. That's what, the fourth in a row?"

"Fifth," the Colonel sighed. "I suppose all this office rearranging has affected my mental state. We'll have to start a tally tomorrow. Loser buys dinner that night?"

Hawkeye chuckled. "Are you sure about that?"

"Well, I do get paid more than you."

"So you're admitting you're probably not off your game after all?"

"Wasn't that game that I was referring to."

Hawkeye deposited her completed assignments into her "out" tray and raised an eyebrow. There was that point where it got difficult to ignore. "I can't even have a real office for one day before you start coming on to me, can I?"

The Colonel shrugged. "See, I figure if I start now I'll get somewhere by, you know, next year."

"Am I really so cold?"

"I don't imagine so, when it's this warm."

She raised her eyebrow again. "You have terrible taste in jokes, you know that?"

"Critic."

"Clown."

They stared at each other for a moment.

Mustang grinned. "Ok, so we've had our first disagreement. Do we get to make up now?"

Hawkeye sighed. "Why do you provoke me?"

"Because I know it's easier than most people think."

Hawkeye snapped her arm out across her desk and pushed Mustang's boot back. Straight-legged and reclined as he was, he lost his balance and, in a cloud of half-finished papers, crashed to the floor.

"So is that." She said.

"Okay okay okay, uncle! But, you know, this floor is a lot more comfortable than I thought it would be."

"You have such subtle way with invitations, Roy Mustang."

"You, madam, are just too smart for me."

"And yet way too easily persuaded."

Breda arrived at work the next morning strangely eager for what he claimed was nothing at all. In fact, he arrived early and with a lock-pick. The abandoned black sock on the floor seemed promising.

First Lieutenant Hawkeye arrived several hours late, complaining of the long hours she had clocked last night, and how payroll wasn't counting them towards what she had missed this morning. Promptly at 5 o'clock, she and Mustang both left. The Colonel was complaining about how he wasn't going to have any spending money for the next month.

"I'm confused," Falman said. "Those two shouldn't be allowed to talk to each other without us knowing what it means."

"Maybe we'll have some answers here," Breda said, pulling out Fury's video camera triumphantly. "I set everything up last night…got a fresh tape and everything. Now that they're gone, we can watch."

Knowing that there was nothing he could do to further incarcerate himself, Fury joined Falman and Havoc (who was moving on his own today) at Breda's desk.

After some rewinding, a tiny, slightly fisheye-angled Mustang and Hawkeye appeared on the playback screen. They were working on papers. After a moment, the Colonel glanced up and said something. Hawkeye's shoulders sagged slightly. She apparently said something back, because the Colonel laughed. The actions cycled a few more times, and then Hawkeye began to stuff papers into an envelope. Then she did something strange: she pulled off her boot and removed a sock.

"Uh oh," Breda said.

Hawkeye put her boot back on, stood up, filed her envelope in a nearby cabinet, and then reached up toward her audience. The screen went dark.

"Well, that was bloody useless," Breda groaned, and shut off the camera.

"Serves you right," Havoc said.

"What?"

"Fire trucks go woo-woo!" Havoc replied, and held his open palm out behind his back. Fury low-fived him, and tried not to grin and give himself away.

It was hard. Oh, it was hard.