"Mustang," Edward Elric gasped out, slamming open the door.

The man before him did not deign to look up from his paperwork. Colonel Roy Mustang's pen scratched against the form for a moment before he answered the sudden intrusion calmly.

"Yes, Fullmetal?" His voice was quiet and resigned, and had Ed been less frantic, he might not have found this reason to get angry. But now was not the time, and he was only infuriated by the apparent disinterest he was being met with.

"They've taken Winry." Ed's voice shook as he said it, and some part of him felt like the utterance made it real. But Mustang had looked up, and the blond alchemist took this sign of attention with both hands, rushing on with, "Garfiel noticed she was gone this morning and called Gra - Pinako. She just called me." He paused. "Mustang, I know this is Wrath's doing."

Black eyes regarded him silently for a moment, seeming to take in every detail of his tortured form. The beat of quiet stretched beyond comfort before the colonel chose to answer.

"To accuse the Fuhrer, you'll need something more than a gut feeling," he said a little coldly. Ed opened his mouth, gold eyes flashing, but the older man continued before he could be interrupted. "Beyond that, and more importantly - what do you need with me?"

Ed returned the veiled black gaze of his superior without flinching. He desperately wanted to shout, to storm out, even to hit that calm face, but his fear for Winry overcame these self-destructive options and enabled him to reply with a degree of control.

"I need your help, Mustang," he said from between gritted teeth, ignoring the resulting arched eyebrow of the man before him. "You're the only one that I can get at who knows about the humunculi. I can - trust you." His tone said otherwise, but Ed clenched his jaw, eyes daring the colonel to challenge the statement.

Mustang didn't. Instead, he dropped Ed's golden gaze and took up his pen again. Pulling the next sheet from the top of the pile of paperwork before him, he said flatly, "It doesn't have anything to do with me. Why should I risk my neck for your mechanic?"

With a bang, Ed slammed both of his hands onto Mustang's desk. The older man looked up with the same casual disinterest he had been affecting, but the fury and desperation in Ed's eyes served to alter Mustang's face to a certain extent - not that the golden-eyed alchemist could have noticed any change that subtle through the cloud of his anger. He was so enraged at his superior's cold response that it was taking all of his self-control not to hit the man.

"You fucking bastard," he hissed, and Mustang sat back, eyebrows raised. Ed opened his mouth, the screamed curses already rising in his throat like bile, but something in the way the man before him was watching his movements penetrated the swirling fog of fury. Snapping his mouth shut, the younger man took his hands from the desk and stepped back. Though his blood still hummed with anger, Ed forced his voice to be level as he spoke.

"What if the one gone was Lieutenant Hawkeye, Colonel?"

Ed couldn't help but feel a spark of satisfaction as Mustang's face went still and his eyes went wide. He turned away from his superior as the silence stretched out, his heavy steps all that belied the anger that remained inside him.

"Wait."

Ed couldn't help but give a small, humorless smile to the door before he turned back to face his superior, wiping his face determinedly blank. "Yeah?"

Mustang's black eyes held none of the emotion that had been so apparent only a moment ago. They betrayed as little as his face as he sighed and leaned forward, hands flat against the desk as he prepared to rise.

"Where do you propose we start?"

--

AN: As always, thank you to Yellow Mask for beta reading - especially for this chapter, over which I was sort of freaking out.

Roy is a jackass in this chapter. This was really hard to write (or, more specifically, to not edit out) - to me, Roy really is a deeply caring person, even if he doesn't show it all of the time. But this is following Ed's POV (which was also really hard to write), and he's not too charitable to Roy, and so I must let it lie. In two chapters I'll make it up x3.

Thank you everyone for your reviews (: