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Roy never came right out and told Chris Mustang he was gay, but you watch your kid grow up never dating just bragging, asking you quietly to set him up on stealth fake dates with the women he regards as sisters so his friends won’t get suspicious, molding himself steadily into a top tier and absolutely fulltime actor, and you kinda know what’s up. She never says anything cause that’s not how they work, their relationship operates on the assumption that the minute doctors tell her she cant smoke anymore he mercy kills her. They’ve got a contract. It’s semi-legally binding.
She only meets Maes Hughes the one time, few weeks after the war’s end, long enough after returning to Central that it was annoying Roy didn’t visit yet, not long enough that it was rude. She raised a gentleman, and she’s got a gun.
It was years ago, some meaningless weeknight in some forgettable winter month, one of the rare times it was empty enough to actually be relaxing. They’d been apart for years but Roy’s still got that awful haircut, and he still knows how to greet her: big stupid wink and a bag of cigars topped with a bow. He’s older now, more scarred, somehow even more performative than before, but he’s still her boy. Sure looks the same, eternal babyface.
Roy pulls Hughes away before they can swap too many Roy Mustang Epic Fail (Birth To Present Day) stories. Hughes gives him the finger and blows her a kiss, she gives Hughes both, and decides she loves him.
Roy gets a scotch cause he thinks he’s James Bond, Hughes gets something with grenadine and a maraschino and enough everclear to fell a horse cause he’s Chris’s new son. She keeps em coming but otherwise leaves them alone. She’s a bartender, not a babysitter.
The thing about Madame Christmas’ tavern is that its fucking classy. They don’t have mixed nuts, they don’t have patience - they do have real nice, wine-red drapes, real oak tables, and a live band on Fridays though. Roy and Hughes came in on a slow day, so they just get the radio, which is fine.
They do this thing on the stations she plays, maybe on all of them, she wouldn’t know, where they make a little announcement before the clock flips over to the next day, and they take just one request for the final song. Love songs usually, sometimes loud ones as a joke, end the night with a bang and a respectable hangover. That night it’s the former, and it’s so corny and overplayed even the hosts groan when the call comes in. They play it though, and folks get back to their drinks.
Chris is polishing a glass when she sees Hughes pull Roy out of his seat onto the dance floor. He grumbles but lets him wrap an arm around his waist, intertwines their fingers like Chris taught him to when he was nine. Proper gentleman. Good student. It’s quiet, so quiet.
It’s too late for anyone to give a shit about some scruffy looking soldiers slow dancing, so no one does. But Chris watches, forgets her glass, sees something new in the boy she raised, brighter and softer than she’d ever known him to possess. She's never seen him smile like that. She's never seen him happy like that.
They slot together like flea market spoons, her short and stocky Roy and his tall and wiry...something, uneven but well matched. Seven years and he’d only grown sideways, she thinks, and Hughes whispers something in his ear that makes him cackle into his chest, crush his jacket into his fist.
They kiss once, just once, when the song ends.
It’s so quiet.
They leave before she can give the you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here, somewhere around two. Roy kisses her on the cheek just to piss her off, Hughes gives her a genuine, genuine smile and a good honest tip.
Years later, Roy orders another drink: grenadine and everclear, cherry on top. And for the first time in twenty years, he lets his mom hold his hand.