Chapter 5
"Colonel Mustang…" Fuery asked. Roy looked up.
"Hmm?"
"May I work with you for a while?"
"Mmm."
Fuery backed out and fetched his paperwork. Then he stood and contemplated the couch. Roy had recently acquired a coffee table, for unknown reasons, but it was low enough that it was truly impossible to lean over and write properly. After some time, Fuery moved the table so it was perpendicular to the couch and draped himself over the arm and along the cushioned furniture.
If he were Ed, he reflected, he'd get all upset that his toes didn't go much past the middle cushion.
"Why are you here, Fuery?" Roy asked after a while.
"Just keeping you company, sir!" Fuery chirped.
"Hawkeye sent you to make sure I wasn't slacking?" Roy guessed.
"Nope!"
They scribbled for a while. Roy, looking over his desk, was surprised to see that Fuery's handwriting was adult. For some reason, the man impressed him as childish in every way. Maybe it was his sweetness. Maybe… he didn't know. It was just surprising that he didn't write in big, messy letters.
"Fuery?"
"Hmm?"
"How old are you?"
Fuery looked up. He had to consider the question for a moment. Roy assumed he had had a birthday recently. "Old enough to be in the military." He said instead. The subject was, somehow, in a sweet and nice but absolutely ineffable way, closed.
"Roy?"
"Yes?"
"What do you do for fun?"
Roy thought about this. "There is no such thing as fun, Fuery." Fuery did not have to look up to see this was a joke. Roy's voice quivered with laughter.
"Seriously, though."
Pen-scratching pause. "I bowl." Roy said finally.
"You bowl?"
"I bowl. I'm very good at bowling."
Fuery figured this was probably true. Roy seemed like the sort of person who would be good at anything he decided to be good at. "Anything else?" He asked after a moment of imagining Roy bowling, going home, eating, bowling, sleeping, bowling, working, bowling.
Roy stared at Fuery until the man met his eyes. "Yes. But I'm not just going to tell you." Roy was not going to confess his musical nature or his dance of choice to Fuery. Nor anyone, really, since he wasn't really very close to anyone at all.
"Okay."
There was a short silence. Fuery later guessed that Roy had been turning the conversation over in his head, because he broke it with,
"Why did you call me Roy?"
"But you are Roy. Everyone knows it. You're Roy like Ed is Ed not Edward - and certainly not Fullmetal Alchemist! - Al is Al not Alphonse, Hughes is Hughes, Havoc is Havoc, Falman is Falman, Breda is Breda, and Riza Hawkeye… Riza varies. I guess she's Riza when it's personal and Hawkeye when she's telling you what to do or fighting or something. You're Roy as ineffably as I am Fuery, not Kain."
It was dizzying logic.
"It's as possible to call you Mustang…" The word was strange, "as it would be to address Fuhrer Bradley as King."
That was an ineffable truth.
"So." Fuery commented after Roy had more or less finished ogling at the idea of calling the Fuhrer King. "Whatcha think of Ed?"
"Fuery!" Mustang paused. "I mean, Kain!"
Fuery stuck his tongue out amiably. He would get the truth out of Mustang eventually. It wasn't so much that he wanted to know - Hughes had told him already - as that Mustang needed to hear himself say it.
(0.0)
Envy was disgusted. They were getting along. It sucked.
Unless…
Wrath was disturbed. Envy was cackling, and still wouldn't let him into their room. He fetched Lust, who picked the lock with her fingers, and went to bed, though it was difficult to sleep with Envy cackling at random intervals. Honestly, did Palm Tree Head cackle in its androgynous sleep?
(0.0)
The next time Roy called Ed to his office it was… difficult. This made Roy angry. If that word Al objects to Master Sergeant Kain Fuery – Roy took pleasure in using the full name and title – hadn't been so word Al objects to persistent on the word Al objects to subject of Edward Elric, then none of this word Al objects to would have happened.
But he had, and now Roy was stuck in the office with both Elrics, their faces turned politely toward him. Fortunately, he had a coffee cup to be nicely distracted by. Unfortunately, the coffee was almost gone, and the Elrics knew it.
Ed cleared his throat. Roy took a quick sip of coffee. Al just sat. At least he wasn't staring so intently – every so often he'd look at Ed nervously, or just stare at something else.
"Uh, Colonel?" Ed asked. There was another furtive sip of coffee. "Colonel?" The elder Elric asked more loudly. Coffee, coffee, coffee. "Colonel! What are we doing here?"
word Al strenuously objects to. The coffee was gone. Where was Fuery when you needed him?
"You've been calling us here a lot, Colonel." Ed tried. Roy suddenly discovered the marvel that was playing with a pen. "To say very little, as far as I can tell." Could the pen be dissected? Yes! Yes! It could be!
"Colonel?"
The voice was too close. Roy looked up from his pen and found it snatched away. Ed was right there, right beyond the desk, holding the strangely half-dissected pen.
"Please try to concentrate." Roy found that looking at the pen was rather easy. "What are we doing here?"
To be honest, Roy didn't know. He'd just found a blank spot in his schedule and… sent for the Elrics. He had no idea why. And now they were here, and they wanted a purpose, and they were bored, and the entire situation was awkward. What was Roy supposed to tell them? That they were here because he was dodging paperwork? Even that wasn't true. Riza had just about gotten him to finish it over two overnights at the office.
"Well?"
"I'm thinking!" Roy snapped. This was not a good answer.
"You don't know why you sent for us." Ed was quite pleased. This was a good sign. He caught himself being pleased for himself and quickly put an end to it. He was pleased for Al – Roy was returning his affection, safe now he knew it was there. Never mind that the summons had been for Edward Elric.
Still, he was glad for Al. That was all. He wasn't allowed to like Roy. But because of Al, he sent Roy an encouraging smile.
"All right, then. Al, you wanna come over here? Let's see how much time we have." And Ed was rummaging through the papers, getting them all confused, but that was all right, and his good hand was rummaging, rummaging, finding nothing, getting jerky and exasperated.
"Drawer." Roy explained, opening it. He kept very little in his drawers – unlike others, who liked a neat desktop and would rather hide the mess, Roy liked everything to be in the open. If he really needed to find anything, it would be in a drawer. "An hour."
Ed frowned. "That's not much. Let's see." He took the little book from Roy and frowned at the pen. A clap later, it was in working order. He could have put it back together by hand – who knew how many hours Ed had spent taking pens apart and putting them back together? – but he wasn't in the mood right now. He wanted time. "Meeting with – huh? Dunno the name. Can't be important." Ed crossed the name off. Then he used alchemy on the pen again, because it wasn't red ink, and repeated the gesture.
"Meeting with… no. Lunch? Who needs it? Afterwards – paperwork? Another time." Roy began to envy Ed's planning. "Trip to the – what is this place?"
Roy snatched the book back. He hadn't realized that was today. "Top secret." He explained. "Only for high-ranking people. Really."
"Montgomery's Hair Emporium?" Ed asked with quite a bit of disbelief. Roy pulled off one of his multitudinous Gestures. Ed marked it in his memory to practice in the mirror later.
"Oh, well, I guess that means we can't cross it off." He wanted to pout. Instead, he looked over the space he'd cleared. "Four hours. We can do something with that. C'mon, Roy, bet you've never been to a cooking shop."
"Ed, not again!" Al protested quickly.
"Aw, c'mon, Al, we've four hours with Roy and I'm not going to blow it all in one place." Al did a mechanical version of eyebrow-raising. "Fine. Half an hour."
"Cooking shop?" Roy asked with some disbelief.
"I need a new cheese grater." Ed informed him. "Need. Crave. Must have a new cheese grater. Or better yet, one of those – ach, I've forgotten the name. You pull something, anything across them and it grates? Like a knife. Alchemy never works for these things."
"You cook?" Roy guessed.
"Naw, I have a lady friend who cooks." Ed put so much sarcasm into the statement it was barely recognizable as intelligible. "What else would I do in my spare time? And my shakes – "
"Avoid the shakes at all costs." Al advised Roy. "Come on, Ed, let's get this over with. Then we can go visit Fuery!"
"Fuery?"
"He says he has a whole network of pet shops." Al explained.
"And then we can go bowling." Roy defended, causing both Elrics to turn to him with some surprise.
"You bowl?" Ed asked.
"I'll teach you." Roy promised.