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Leo sneezes, and his nose bursts into flames.
The blond woman places a gun at his temple.
“What the hell?!” He squawks, the fire on his nose blazing in sync with his surprise, before he snuffs it out entirely. Fire out his nose was a little bizarre, but not worth a bullet in his brain. “Why’re you putting a gun to my head! The hell did I do?!”
“Where did you learn that?” At his baffled look, the woman exhales through her nose, eyes sharp. “Flame alchemy,” she clarifies. “Where did you learn it?”
“I don’t— alchemy?” He wracks his brain for the word, it sounds familiar, but in the panic of having a gun pressed to his head, the term slips his mind. “I don’t know what that is.”
She narrows her eyes and clicks the safety off. He wonders how a woman that shows so little emotion could be so terrifying.
“I swear!” He nearly screams, hands grasping at his cuffs as he squirms to get off the chair. “You’re insane!”
She sighs, her eyes going back to that dead, aloof look they had before, and removes the gun from his head. She doesn’t reholster it though, and she doesn’t even turn off the safety. Leo swears the second he can he’s going to dismantle the thing and steal its parts. Just to be petty.
“Do you have a transmutation circle?”
“No? Obviously?” He says, though he has no clue in Hades what a transmutation circle even is . He leans his head back over the chair. “You think I’d hide that in my nose? Go and check!”
She looks unimpressed, and her hand flexes against the gun before she finally puts it away. “Explain how you did that, please.”
He thinks the please is a little out of place when she just threatened to shoot him in the head, and he snorts at her. He goes back to tracing the cuffs with his fingers, searching the lock. “Well I can’t give away all my party tricks,” he jokes, giving her an impish smile that he hopes is charming.
Apparently not, her fingers twitch back to her holster.
“ All right , all right—no need for the gun! Gods, you’re in love with that thing aren’t you?” He huffs, feeling for a paper clip in his back pocket.
“Look it’s— it’s uh—” He stops. Searches for the word. “Pyrokinesis.” Sure. Go with that .
Her expression doesn’t change. “Pyrokinesis,” she echoes, disbelieving.
“Yeah, pyrokinesis. Y’know, like, controlling fire and stuff.”
“That doesn’t exist.”
“Sure it does.” He twists his wrist and shoves the clip into the lock of the cuff. “You just saw it didn’t you?”
“I don’t know what I saw.” She exhales, a profoundly frustrated sound. “It’s not possible. It had to be alchemy.”
“Well it’s not, you see. Because I don’t know what alchemy is,” he responds, shooting her a smug grin. “Mind explaining?”
The woman levels him with a quiet glare, debating whether she should dignify his question with a response, surely. However, it seems she deems his curiosity genuine by the way she rests her hands behind her back.
“Alchemy is a science. Specifically, the technique of understanding the structure of matter, decomposing it, and reconstructing it again,” she begins, reciting the definition as if she was reading off a textbook. “It relies on the principle of Equivalent Exchange. You can only create mass if something of equal value is lost.”
Leo nods along, twiddling the edge of the thin wiring through the lock until he hears a satisfying click. “So how is what I did impossible? I could’ve just turned oxygen or whatever else into fire. Boom. Equivalent Exchange.”
She looks like she’s about to sigh again, but instead gestures towards him over the thin metal table. “You can’t practice Alchemy by accident . It’s obvious you don’t know the composition even needed for the array.”
Leo shrugs, leg bouncing, and the cuffs around his wrist loosen. “Chemistry was never really my strong suit. I’m more of an engineer, actually.”
Her lips twitch upwards, and Leo’s chest wells in pride that he was able to get this woman to show any positive emotion. “Surely an engineer would know you need a spark to create a flame.”
No, because I’ve never exactly needed a lighter before, he thinks, but he doubts that that would go over well with this specific gun woman. “I never said I was a particularly good engineer.” A lie. I was the one who rebuilt Festus, of all things , his mind preens.
She raises an eyebrow. “Somehow, I doubt that,” she says, taking out a notepad and pencil and scribbling something onto it. “I’ll get someone with more expertise in the area of Flame Alchemy, even if you insist it’s pyrokinesis— which is nigh impossible—we still need someone with a better understanding of the transmutation to investigate.”
Leo blinks, “you’re leaving me alone?”
The woman stops writing. “No. There’s a watchman stationed outside, I’ll ask him to fetch the Colonel for me.”
“Well, wait, before we get to that I have one more question,” Leo interjects swiftly, the cuffs weigh heavily on his arms.
She raises an eyebrow. “Yes?”
“What’s your name?”
The question takes her by surprise, and she pauses before answering. “Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye.”
Leo gives her a grin that stretches his cheeks. “Well, Lieutenant, my name is Leo Valdez.”
His cuffs clatter to the floor, just as he shoots off his chair and kicks the metal table towards the Lieutenant. It collides with her stomach and she stumbles backward with a stifled grunt.
Leo sprints to the door and shoves it open with his foot. He turns back to Hawkeye as she rises from the floor and winks.
“And it was very nice to meet you!”