A/N - I kind of get the feeling that I might have made Roy somewhat too young in this drabble... I mean, Alchemy sounds like pretty complex stuff - way too advanced for a six-year-old kid, but my (pretty weak) reasoning stands thus: You'd only catch Roy Mustang doing something this stupid while sober at this age.
Snapshots, Sketches and Scribbles
Kindling
The very first time Roy Mustang had summoned fire was when he was six, and still spoke with a lisp.
He'd read his father's books about Alchemy and found the science fascinating. After a successful attempt at transmuting a random array of papers (which turned out to be rose-scented for some odd reason that he never figured out) from a faggot, Roy decided to move onto demostrations of a more spectacular nature - the diagram of an oxygen-based combustion enthralled the dark-haired boy and he read the captions accompanying the illustrations with dedicated interest: It didn't seem so hard... And it looked like a lot of fun.
The alchemic circle was a clumsy, slightly shaky thing, scrawled in his mother's sewing chalk on the floor of his bedroom and copied from the thick volume. The simple fact that he was performing the transmutation in his room was his first mistake.
His second mistake was inviting his twitchy, highly jittery cousin to watch. The younger boy jiggled like a spider in an upset web as Roy pressed his hands onto the polished oak floor and told his cousin to strike the pair of flint stones over the circle.
His third mistake was drawing the circle ridiculously close to the long, blue curtains.
There was a spark.
There was a flare, lasting barely over three seconds.
There was a terrified gasp.
And two things happened at once.
Hardly possessing the mental stability for this sort of excitement, Roy's cousin sank into a dead faint as the curtains caught fire.
Fortunately, Roy was an intelligent lad, and despite his panic, managed to maintain enough rational thought to seek the closest source of water. Sacrificing his poor goldfish, he dumped the contents of Bubbles' bowl onto the burning blue and highly flammable fabric, successfully smothering the flames. (His father had explained later, to a teary, sniffling Roy that this was the Law of Equivalent Exchange: Bubbles had died for the sake of the curtains. It was a noble death... And they had been expensive curtains.)
After suffering an ear-ringing scolding and a sore bottom (It was amazing how hard his mother's soft hands felt when brought down with enough force on that particular area), Roy had mourned for Bubbles and vowed, at the tender age of six years and five months that he would never transmute gases again.
Which was why he completely forgot about this when he did it again two weeks later.