Chapter Text
This was done purely to knock two birds out with one well placed giant boulder.
The first bird was a rumor about the fact that the Colonel didn’t blush (Supposedly, if there was any physical evidence, Hughes wasn’t telling, and it was safer to just not broach the subject with Hawkeye). The Team was hoping that the snow would force the paler man to blush, or at the very least, force his skin to look slighter more dark than “blank sheet of copy paper.”
As for the second bird…
Under normal circumstances (read: when Hawkeye wasn’t sick) , they would never dare carry this out, even just to sate their curiosity. However, this wasn’t under normal circumstances, and besides, payback unto their superior officer was long overdue.
(They had a list going in the office, currently Falman had the most grief with the raven haired man, beating out even Havoc with his impressive trail of stolen girlfriends. Apparently the Colonel also liked to grab random books from Falman’s collection to add to his own, which forced everyone to ponder if Mustang was secretly a kleptomaniac, but then when they realized it was mostly scientific texts with a few spiritual ones peppered in, it was chalked up to: Alchemists are fucking crazy, and we shouldn’t question their behavior, which, coincidentally, most of Mustang’s quirks eventually ended up being categorized as.)
Ignoring for a moment, the fact that Mustang was an alchemist, and so any revenge he would and could extract would probably lay them in the hospital for weeks, the man was also a cheerful sadist (ever since the Spring Incident of 1911, they hypothesized that the trait had started showing after Mustang met Hughes and began their reign of terror at the Academy), and under normal conditions had them regularly doing near suicidal missions just to “keep them on their toes”, nevermind what fuckery he would think up when actually pissed off.
And putting their CO in the snow for kicks and cenz was rapidly passing into “not normal circumstances” territory; Hell, they had passed it several years ago and had just never bothered to look back.
Now, normally , for fear of their lives (and of reprisal from angry coworkers that would have to deal with a bitchy Mustang and an annoyed Hawkeye), the Team generally left the Colonel and his spontaneous naps alone.
But then some bright eyed, bushy tailed FNG decided to fuck up the delicate balance by uttering just a few simple words:
“Rumor has it that Mustang can sleep anywhere.”
And that was that. Anyone who knew the men that comprised Mustang’s team knew that they all had a bad case of the betting bug. If a bet was running in East HQ it was a sure thing that at least one of them was in on it, if not outright running it.
So that simple rumor was what led 4 full grown adult men to be carrying yet another fully grown (though some would claim that this was debatable) man between them out into the snow.
“Fuck, how is he so goddamn heavy?! ” Havoc groused, shifting Mustang’s body so that the man lay flat on his back. “He looks like he weighs all of like 100 pounds normally! Plus he’s so fucking short. ”
“Shut the fuck up Havoc, you’re gonna wake him up.” Breda elbowed him. “We’re almost to the door, you are not fucking this for me.”
“It’s strange though, even the Colonel doesn’t sleep this heavily normally.” Falman muttered as he avoided a boot to the head.
“Oh, Hawkeye’s been slipping him sleeping pills in his coffee.” Fuery said nonchalantly.
“Wait, what?! ” Havoc sputtered, nearly dropping Mustang in the process. “She’s been fuckin’ drugging him?! And getting away with it!?” Everyone leveled a deadpan look at the tall blond, who blushed as he realized what he had implied. If Riza Hawkeye wanted to drug her CO, there was damn well nothing on God’s green earth that was going to stop her, especially if said CO didn’t even know he was being drugged.
“That just begs the question as to why and how she knows how much medication would send the Colonel under.” Breda said, as he carefully maneuvered down the last staircase. “Besides, she wants him to do work, not skive off, you’d think she’d slip him stimulants, not try and knock him out.”
“In her defense, she only started doing it recently, about the time she came in sick.” The men paused in their movements to share a sympathetic thought with Hawkeye, who was currently holed up in her apartment reading a murder mystery novel and sipping on honey sweetened chamomile tea.
“To be fair, out of all of us, he does mother hen over her the most.”
“Do you remember the last time I ended up in the ER? Fuck, he told me to “stop acting like a baby Havoc, it’s a broken leg, walk it off!” I had to fight him over it! But Hawkeye?! No, she got a scrape and he shoved his coat onto her and looked like he was about to reinvent medical alchemy just for her! Fuck, maybe the man’s just inhuman, it would explain so goddamn much. ”
Fuery winced, the team’s field to desk ratio had always been off, but with his recent addition, most of the officers in Mustang’s inner circle were information and comms specialists, leaving Havoc, Hawkeye, and Mustang to pick up the slack whenever they were called out for fieldwork, resulting in days where those three members of the team came back looking like they had been run over by trucks while the rest of them looked perfectly healthy.
Finally, they made it outside, and apparently Mother Nature was just having an off fucking day or something because it was freezing outside, rivalling Briggs freezing.
Now, faced with a blizzard the likes of which only hit East City every other century or so, most sane people would shrug their shoulders, call it a day, and harass their CO another day.
Team Mustang, was not made up of sane people.
So they dumped their CO into the snow, locked the doors, and waited for the telltale sounds of Roy Mustang waking up, and when they heard nothing, heaved a sigh of relief, and quickly got the hell out of dodge.
Sure, whatever poor intern was on door duty was in for a helluva scare, but quite frankly, none of the men really wanted to deal with the unholy (read: bratty) terror that was Roy Mustang when soaked to the bone.
It was nearly 6 hours later when Mustang deigned to walk back into his own goddamn office, and by that time, the men were just about ready to pack it up as a failure.
“So, does anyone want to tell me why, when I was woken up, an intern helpfully informed me that I was found face down in a snowdrift?”
“Colonel, we’re not paid to babysit you. That’s Hawkeye’s job.” Breda deadpanned. “When we got here you were nowhere to be found.”
Now, this was complete and total horseshit, and they knew it. People downstairs knew it, if you stopped a random recruit they’d probably know it.
Fuck, people in Central probably knew it was horseshit, because there was no way in hell that Mustang had arrived earlier than anyone else, especially if Hawkeye was out sick.
Under normal circumstances, this would have set off Mustang’s BS detector and it would’ve been going off like crazy, but considering that the man had just:
- Woken up in a snow drift
- Apparently taken a side trip to go get coffee
- Was soaked to the bone
- And looked to be about 5 seconds away from total collapse
It would be a miracle if he was even vaguely skeptical about Breda’s response.
In any case, the State Alchemist stared blearily at his team, and staggered into his office, slamming the door behind him.
“Bullet dodged.” Fuery said, abandoning his pile of scrap metal wires. “So Falman, how’d he look? Was he blushing?” The tall man thought for a second.
“He wasn’t blushing, however, his skin had darkened a few shades.”
“Shit man, are the Xingese from whereeverthefuck he’s from just resistant to cold, or fuckin’ what?” Falman shrugged in response to Havoc’s question.
“I would love to answer, but as you so eloquently put it, we have no idea where he, or his parents are from.” Breda rolled his eyes.
“Whatever, so the man darkened up a few tones, whoopdeedoo, what important is that he walked in here looking like death warmed over, and he had had to be woken up by some poor intern- who we’re sending a present, fuck they must be traumatized-which means that not even being dumped into snow for over 5 goddamn hours was able to wake him up.”
“Those sleeping pills must be something else.” Fuery said. “I mean, he still looked tired. Are we certain she didn’t dump like, tranquilizer into his coffee?”
“Well he likes it like heroine Fuery, 100%.” Kain wrinkled his nose.
“So, black?” The other three men shared a look and burst into laughter.
“Oh, you poor kid. The Colonel doesn’t just take it black, oh no, he’s a special kind of insane where he alchemizes the caffeine out, dumps that into another cuppa black, and adds alcohol before downing it.” Fuery looked at them discerningly before shrugging.
“It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing he’s done. Anyways, if he’s going to knock himself out, I say we pack up.” The team nodded as one, and quietly cleared out the office, flicking the lights off as they did so.
The next day, one situation was quietly crossed off the betting pool list, the team walked into the office each a few hundred cenz richer, and a few interns walked away to cry their sorrows out to their Team Mustang-hardened friends.