Archive of Our Own

It’s such a gorgeous day that they don’t even make it halfway down the front steps of HQ before they both give in to the urge to sprawl on the white marble and sunbathe in the last of the light.

Heymans props his elbows up on the step above him and kicks his right leg up over his left knee, swinging his foot.

“Ten thousand cens,” he says.  “Final offer.  Last chance.”

“No way,” Jean says.  At least he turns his face away before he blows the cigarette smoke skyward.  “You know who bets that kind of money against the likes of you?”

“Stupid people,” Heymans says.

Jean points the glowing end of the cigarette at him.  “Exactly.  Even if I had the cash to burn—c’mon.  If anybody could get—” He pauses and glances around them, but Hawkeye proceeding down the stairs with her arms full of files is the only soul in earshot.  “—Mustang and Fullmetal to finally stop dancing around it, it’d be you.  So like hell am I gonna bet against you on some shenanigan like that.”

Heymans can’t remember the last time he heard someone use that word in the singular.  Jean is so fucking cute sometimes that Heymans just wants to hold a picture frame up in front of his face and imprint the image on the back side of his own skull.

The even, measured boot steps just above them pause.

“How much is the bet?” Hawkeye asks.

Heymans blinks up at her, but her face is completely unrevealing.  If anything, she looks sort of bored.  Maybe she disapproves of them using their hard-earned—mostly hard-earned—salaries to make monetary wagers on whether Mustang’s going to persist in denial and misery or finally cave to the obnoxiously obvious sexual tension.

Wait, who the hell is Heymans kidding?  Hawkeye approves of anything that involves taking the piss out of Mustang.  That’s her unwritten job description these days.

“Ten thousand,” Heymans says, slowly.  “The bet is if I can get Roy and Ed to shack up inside of a week, and the seven days start from the handshake.  But nobody—”

Hawkeye shifts all the folders into her left arm and thrusts her right hand out at him so violently that he startles back on instinct.  “Done.”

Heymans feels a prickle of a terrible premonition, but he just made this bed, and now he has to lie down and go night-night whether he likes it or not.  Life is a fucking travesty and no mistake.

“Cool,” he says, reaching up to clasp her hand in his.  “I take personal checks.”

“Noted,” Hawkeye says calmly, and she squeezes his hand in a way that is terrifyingly non-threatening before she releases it and resumes her descent of the stairs like none of this ever happened at all.

Heymans gazes after her.  The premonition thing is getting worse.

“She knows something you don’t,” Jean says.

“I know,” Heymans says, sounding slightly faint even to his own ears.  “I’m hosed.  Is Mustang actually straight or something?”

Jean takes a long drag off the cigarette.  “No.”

Heymans watches the smoke twirl upward and turns a few things over.  Mustang has, in the past, exhibited a tendency to flirt with very nearly everything that breathed—but that could have been part of the smokescreen.  The brass would, rationally enough, underestimate an indiscriminate philanderer even more than a discerning one.  It could have been a calculated move to add plausible depth to his image.

On the other hand, most of them either know better by now, or know enough to realize that Grumman isn’t the type to keep a court jester in his inner circle, so the simple fact that Mustang has the Führer’s ear proves that there’s more to him than meets the eye.  There are a whole host of buffoons with stripey shoulders, sure—but most of them have developed a nose for power by this point.  If they hadn’t, they’d probably be dead.

So it’s not much of an advantage for Mustang to play flighty and flirty and fancy-free in public anymore.

And he doesn’t, mostly.

Except when he’s teasing Ed.

On the other-other hand—which is a spatula shoved into a glove but can still hold up a counterpoint in a pinch—Roy has always taken unholy glee in the pursuit of teasing Ed.  Going to the theater is expensive, whereas riling up a twenty-year-old with a chip on his shoulder and a half-suppressed old-habit crush is free, and offers better explosions.  It could be as simple as that.  Mustang never seems to push Ed quite past playful ribbing to the point of real humiliation, which is something of a delicate balance with a temper as short—pun always intended—as Ed’s.  Maybe it’s really just all in fun.

“You sure?” Heymans asks.

Jean looks over at him, very seriously, and takes another drag.  “I’m sure.”

Heymans eyes him until he shrugs, sighs, and tips his head back.

“Look,” Jean says.  “I met Hughes and Mustang before Hughes was married.  You get me?”

Heymans turns that over.

Then he gets up, stretches his back, yanks his jacket off, and drapes it over his arm.  “Okay, then.”

Jean frowns up at him.  “Where are you going?”

“Home,” Heymans says.  “I’ve only got seven days to pull this off, and she’s got something on me or on Mustang that I don’t even know about.  I need a battle plan, pronto.”

Jean pulls a face.  “You promised me dinner.”

“Duh,” Heymans says, gesturing in a streetward direction with the jacket.  “Are you coming, or what?”

Jean grins, and Heymans holds a hand out to him, and then they’re up and off.

If Heymans didn’t have such a creeping feeling that he was going to be kissing ten thousand cens goodbye six days and twenty-three and a half hours from now, tonight would be pretty close to perfect.

Ed bangs into the office at ten minutes to ten the next morning, brimming with the same joyous disdain for authority as always, and clomps directly into Mustang’s office.  He barely even makes an attempt to close the door behind him.

“Do you mind?” Mustang says.

“Not really,” Ed says, cheerfully.  “Took care of your rodent swarm problem.  It was exactly as fun as it sounds.  No need to thank me.  You can make it up to me later with ice cream.  A gallon.  Maybe two.”

“Grace my barren desk with one of your eloquent reports,” Mustang says, “and I’ll gamble on the likelihood of you puking on my beloved couch.”

It’s even odds at this point whether Mustang is talking about the office couch—which Ed spends so much time sprawled on that there’s an imprint of his boot heels on the arm—or Mustang’s home furniture.  For a military contractor purportedly “beholden to none of the fucking bureaucracy”, Ed spends an awful lot of nights hanging around waiting for Mustang to finish up so that they can leave together.

“Not much to report,” Ed says.  “There were alchemically-facilitated rodent swarms.  Now there aren’t.  I’m pretty sure everybody’s unanimously in favor of that.”

Heymans can picture the fingers-jammed-against-temple slump Mustang must be doing right now.  It’s one of his favorites.  “If it’s all the same to you, Ed, I would really rather not reexplain the concept of record-keeping this week.  I’ve got a meeting in forty-five minutes.”

“How about if I write it like a newspaper serial?” Ed asks.  “I can give you a little bit of it every couple days, and each section could end in a cliffhanger where you can’t wait to find out what the rodent swarms are going to do next.”

“It has to be in the standard format,” Roy says.

Heymans can hear the overstated huff from here.  “I’m pretty sure that wasn’t in my contract.”

“Check the fine print,” Roy says.  “Subsection 2b, if memory serves.”

“You,” Ed says imperiously, “are no fun.  At all.  None.”

“Carve it on my headstone,” Roy says.  “In the meantime, I’m sure we have a typewriter we can spare.”

Ed manages to sigh so long and loud that he makes it last all the way across Roy’s office and out the door.

Heymans nudges Jean’s elbow with his and jumps to his feet.  “Hey, Ed, hold up—I need you to settle a bet for me.”

Ed has clearly modeled his withering look on Hawkeye’s, and has clearly been practicing.  Maybe that’s what she knows that they don’t—she’s been teaching him office-ruler secrets, and she thinks that now there’s no way he’d settle for a career procrastinating layabout like Mustang.

She must have somehow missed the way these two idiots sometimes look at each other like they’re starving to death and just spotted the world's single most beautiful cake.

“It’ll be quick,” Heymans says smoothly, “and then you can get right to work on your darling report, I promise.  Lieutenant Havoc thinks you can still do a free-standing handstand, but I said there’s no way.”

“Oh, come on,” Ed says, but the flicker of a challenge in his smirk gives him away.  That one he learned from Roy.  “Hang on, I need a little space—”

As predicted, he immediately opens Mustang’s office door again and moseys right back inside.

Heymans ignores the stares and goes over to lean against the doorway with his arms folded expectantly.

“Never bet against me,” Ed says, and then he turns himself upside-down, palms planted on the floor, so fast that Heymans blinks and misses the part where he flips the switch to deactivate the local gravity.

As predicted once again, Ed isn’t content with disproving the discredit: toes pointed towards the ceiling, back curved ever so slightly to balance his weight, he walks four even steps across Roy’s office carpet on his hands.  His loose button-down shirt slips all the way down to his armpits, putting the still-damned-impressive condition of his chest and abs unabashedly on display. 

Heymans glances over towards the desk.  Mustang has his hands folded in front of his mouth and his eyebrows placed firmly in the low, unamused, I am a serious General now position, but his eyes don’t stray from Ed’s body for a second.

“All right, all right, all right,” Heymans says, backing out of the doorway.  “Point taken, show-off.  You ever thought about relaxing for five minutes at a stretch?”

Ed slings himself upright just as effortlessly and shoves his hair back out of his face.  His cheeks are flushed, his eyes are bright, and he hasn’t noticed Mustang’s undivided attention.  “Don’t think I know how.”

“You should try it sometime,” Heymans says, dropping back into his chair.  He fishes some cash out of his pocket and pushes it across the tabletop to Jean.  Nobody else needs to know that it’s exactly what he owes for all the coffees Jean spotted him for last week.  Jean rolls his eyes and starts shoving the crumpled bills into his wallet for next week.  “It lowers your blood pressure.”

“My blood’s supposed to have pressure,” Ed says.  “That’s how the circulatory system works.”

Heymans tries to give Jean a Can you believe this punk look and gets nothing but a grin in return.

“Y’know,” Jean says, “I reckon not setting up a wager on every other thing also lowers your blood pressure.”

Heymans leans his chin on his hand.  “Wanna bet?”

Jean hits his arm, and Ed snickers and then tosses the long blond ponytail over his shoulder.  Roy’s door is still open, which means he must have seen that.  It’s almost more satisfying to win a round when no one even knows you’re playing.

Logic lives in the disentanglement of cause and effect, but sometimes things simply don’t happen in sequence—sometimes they overlap.

A while ago, they started spending most of their time at Heymans’s apartment, because Jean’s neighbors are obnoxious and loud.  That just makes sense.

But then Heymans asked Jean not to smoke inside, and Jean’s been holding to it like he’d cling to a spar in a shipwreck, because he cares.  Which makes Heymans love him even more.  Which makes Heymans pay even more attention to him, and the extra attention is the reason that he notices the way that Jean is chewing on his toothpick more avidly than usual, which means that Jean wants to smoke but also wants to stay inside and continue helping Heymans with this inordinately stupid little plan.  Which once again makes Heymans love him more.

And which makes Heymans gather up his notebook, finish the fizzy water shit that he’s been trying to make himself reach for in the general interests of greater longevity or whatever, beckon to Jean, and go out onto the tiny balcony that he’s crammed an even tinier bench onto.  Which he did because he wanted Jean to come over more.  Shit, what a mess.

The tiny bench has a solitary advantage, which is that it can barely fit the two of them together.  It only makes sense for Jean to sling his arm around Heymans’s shoulders as soon as he’s lit up.

“So what’s next?” Jean says.

Tomorrow’s bullet point is labeled Use implication instead of instruction for people who run on pure spite, with a few vague suggestions scribbled underneath.

“Mustang’s definitely attracted to him,” Heymans says.  “And Ed is obviously not immune to Mustang Disease, or he wouldn’t’ve come back in the first place.  But I think I need to get them to say it.  Just drop a seed out of a hole in my pocket, so that they think they planted it in the first place—that kind of a thing.”

“Sounds like what Roy would do,” Jean says.

“It is,” Heymans says.  “Which is why he won’t expect it.”

Jean’s got the best smile in the whole damn country.  It even looks good from way-too-close.

“Tricky,” he says, tilting his head back as he takes another drag and then blows the smoke straight up towards the overhang.

“That’s what I’m worried about,” Heymans says.  He forces himself to look out at the view—not that it’s spectacular, given that it’s a paved courtyard sort of a deal with a couple scraggly bushes, but otherwise he’ll just stare at Jean all night long and not get anything done.  “Just… be honest, okay?  Do you actually think it’s a good idea?  What if the reason they’re not together already is because they shouldn’t be?  Maybe they’re better off as friends with weird sexual tension.”

He sneaks a glance.  Jean is smiling at him sideways.

“Were we?” Jean says.

“I don’t think we’re a very good control group,” Heymans says.

“You sound like Ed,” Jean says, which is half compliment and half tragedy.  “Take it easy, man.  It’s not like you’re shoving them into a room and locking the door until they fuck or something.”  Other than the logistics, that sounds a whole hell of a lot easier, actually.  “You saw something they didn’t—and you’re really good at seeing stuff like that—and now you’re trying to get them to see it.  If it’s really not right for them, at the end of the week, they’ll just keep on being… friends with weird sexual tension.  Or whatever.”

“And I’ll lose ten thousand cens,” Heymans says.

Jean is trying not to smirk around the cigarette, which unfortunately also looks good as hell on him.  “It’s funny, I know someone who’s always talking about how you can’t put a price on knowledge and experience.”

Heymans eyes him.  “What an idiot.”

Jean laughs and leans in to kiss Heymans’s ticklish ear before he can squirm away.  “He’s pretty hot, though.”

“Shut up,” Heymans mutters, tapping his notebook on his knee.  “You don’t think it’s messed up to risk pushing them into a relationship before they’re ready for the purpose of monetary gain?”

Jean is grimacing around the cigarette now, but at least Heymans’s ear is safe.  “You’ve sure got a gift for making things sound worse than they are.”

The way Heymans figures, he has enough other gifts these days to even that one out.

People are towers built from habits, bound by what they consider to be their codes.  Sometimes knowing someone is as easy as tallying their tendencies.

At the very least, it makes it much easier to ambush people if you know when they usually come in to work.

Ed points a half-eaten donut at Heymans, which is much less threatening than he seems to think.  “I don’t want to settle any more of your stupid bets.”

“I’ll cut you in,” Heymans says, deliberately slowing down so that it will take them longer to reach the top of the steps up to Command.

“No,” Ed says. “And how are you even gonna do that when you always lose?”

“I win all the time,” Heymans says, which is… plausible, anyway.  “C’mon, it’ll be quick.  I bet Jean that you hang out at Mustang’s to read his books.  Jean thinks it’s to eat all his food.”

Ed rolls his eyes and finishes the donut in a single bite, which has to be bad for his esophagus, if nothing else.  It also muddles his enunciation something awful, but Heymans is pretty sure he just said “That one’s a tie.”

“Damn,” Heymans says, trying to sound like he means it.  “Fine.  Well—humor me, then.  I’m dying to know what his place is like.”

Ed swallows in one giant gulp like a snake.  Mustang sure can pick ’em.  “It’s a house?  I dunno.  It’s nice.  S’got books and food.  Furniture’s comfortable.  He doesn’t usually bother me when I’m reading.  Why the hell do you care?”

They’re nearing the top of the stairs, so Heymans can’t afford to equivocate.  “Does he bother you the rest of the time?” 

Ed looks at Heymans like he’s spontaneously started speaking in Cretan.  “It’s Roy.  He was bothering people before he emerged from the womb.”

At risk of being accused of sounding like Ed again, Heymans might have to use that one.  “How many books does he have, anyway?  You must’ve gotten through most of them by now.”

Ed shrugs, brushes at some fallen flakes of donut glaze on his shirt in a way that rubs them in deeper, and pulls the door open.  He holds it open and gestures for Heymans to go through.  Those damn Eastern boy manners always crop up when you let your guard down.

“He buys new ones,” Ed says.  “Especially when I mention one I want to read.  It’s pretty cool, I guess.”

Heymans manages to say “Thanks” about the door thing instead of punching the air.

Mustang brings files and reports with him to the cafeteria these days.  Whether it’s a matter of desperately trying to keep up or a way to distract himself from the mediocrity of the food doesn’t make much difference—the fact that he’s willing to let other people see him actively working, and moreover that he’s chosen that ahead of schmoozing for the duration of his lunch break, strongly supports Heymans’s other observations about the shift in his image.  Playboy Mustang has dwindled down to nearly nothing.  This Mustang wants people to know that he’s a threat.

“Hey, Chief,” Heymans says when Roy has just closed one folder and started to move towards another.  He hasn’t touched most of his food, so it could be a really fucked-up diet plan.  Roy glances up, possibly even vaguely grateful for the diversion, so Heymans gives him a winning grin.  “Personal question for you.”

Honestly, Roy’s lucky that everyone else turned their nose up at the cafeteria today and went across the street for lunch.

He doesn’t look like he feels lucky, but the reports must be a damn nightmare, because he says, albeit very slowly, “Shoot.”

That’s fairly appropriate, since so far today has felt like shooting fish in a barrel.  Nicer, though.  The poor damn fish didn’t do anything, and they’d probably be stressed enough about the barrel situation even before they started getting fired on.

Heymans attempts to look very wide-eyed and hero-worshippy as he says, “I’m trying to up my game, sir.  What would you say is your type?”

Roy opens his mouth.  Heymans can see the gears turning behind his eyes—and the way they swivel just fast enough to make him choke down the words Why the hell do you need to ‘up your game’ when you landed Jean Havoc, one of the most notorious skirt-chasers in the ranks? and shut his mouth again.

Roy clears his throat.

Then he says, “I’ve never put much stock in that idea.”

Heymans has to admit that it’s much less fun to watch the master of bullshit in action when the person that he’s bullshitting is you.

“Come on,” Heymans says, as wheedlingly as possible, leaning back in his chair as far as he dares.  He’s seen these fall apart underneath people before.  Command sure loves its troops.  “I’m not asking for some kind of a commitment here.  Just… y’know.  Everybody has a trait or two that makes them take a second look at somebody.  Doesn’t even have to be a deal-breaker, just that thing that always catches your eye.”

Roy’s eye—both eyes, actually—are currently caught on Heymans, with about as much sardonic unamusement as is it possible to convey.

“Take me, for instance,” Heymans says, as casually as possible, hiking his right leg up over his left knee for good measure.  “I’m just a little extra weak when they’re blond.  With good shoulders.  Little bit old-fashioned.  Too smart for their own good in a way a lot of people don’t appreciate.”

The flicker in Roy’s eyes now might as well be a theater marquee lighting up at sunset, and Heymans has to resist a one-sided bout of pugilism with the air above him for the second time today.

“And tall,” Heymans says.

The flicker disappears, the better for Roy to roll his eyes exaggeratedly, but Heymans is too observant to miss the faint hint of a smile as he gathers up his next folder and taps the bottom edge on the tabletop.

“You need to get out more,” Mustang says.

“Man,” Heymans says.  “I sure wish you’d say that to the guy who has to sign my leave requests.  Oh, wait.”

“It’s funny,” Mustang says, which it’s not, “but I don’t remember you actually submitting any leave requests.  That might be the part where you’re going wrong.”

Heymans gestures to the files crowding out their trays.  “Would you be able to find them if I did?”

Mustang looks deeply pained.  “That’s… fair.”

Heymans sits back and basks a little bit before he decides to rub it in.  “So how about those blonds, huh?”

“Shut up,” Mustang mutters, pretending very hard to be concentrating on the paperwork.

Two hooks, two lines, two sinkers.  Now all Heymans has to do is smash them together.

He considers his agenda and contemplates the subtle art of figurative-fish-mashing later that night.  He gets some of his best thinking done when he should be sleeping, and the rest when he should be working.

“Have you ever tried painting?” Jean asks.

Heymans glances up.  He’s pretty sure that he could practice daily for a dozen years and still find his skill agonizingly inadequate to capture the way Jean is sprawled out on the couch, lying on his front with his arms wrapped around a throw pillow.  He’s traded the daytime tight T-shirt for a nighttime tight tank top—white.  There’s a smudged trace of sweat shining on his forehead, left over from the physical therapy exercises he recently finished off.  He looks drowsy and comfortable and content.

Heymans taps the end of his pen on the edge of the notebook.  “Is that your way of telling me I should get another hobby?”

“Are you kidding?” Jean says.  “I’m not dumb enough to tell you to do anything.  I’m just… asking.  In a normal way.  With no ulterior motives whatsoever.”

Heymans feels every bit as damn drowsy and comfortable and content as Jean looks.  And that’s why this matters more than it should.

The running and chasing and guessing part is shit.  It’s a pain in the ass.  It’s stressful.  You strike out easy and go down hard, and it never seems worth it.

But if it clicks—

If you get something like this—

Ed and Roy have both been through an awful lot of shit, is all.  And it would be nice—really nice—to be able to give them this part.  Even if Heymans has to bang some fishing poles together to accomplish it.

“I’ll take up art if you take up nude modeling,” he says.

Jean grins at him.  Shit.  He is weak for blonds.  “I’ll take up nude modeling if you take it up with me.”

Heymans tosses the notebook down and crosses over to the couch, where Jean just rolled over onto his back and tipped his head up, ready and waiting for Heymans to kiss him right through the grin.  “Maybe we should skip the art.”

Heymans is lying in bed staring at the ceiling and thinking about ways to bait fish who are not actually fish, thereby minding his own business, when Jean’s fingertips stroke slowly down along his jaw and outward towards his chin.  “Maybe I should take up painting.”

Heymans tilts his head away, but he can’t move out of reach without jeopardizing the precious pre-sleep phase.  “Knock it off.”

“I mean it,” Jean says.  His fingers curl around Heymans’s shoulder instead.  “You know I mean it.”

“You’re just trying to get me to let my guard down,” Heymans says, looking up into the dark, “so that you can tickle my defenseless ears.”

Jean squeezes gently.  He knows.  He always knows.  “It’s not my fault they’re so damn cute.”

“That doesn’t make it fair,” Heymans says.

Jean pats his arm, and then his ear.  “Love.  War.  Weird bets on your coworkers.  You get used to it.”

Heymans hopes he never gets used to this—not really.  He hopes it always feels as mind-glowingly special as it does right now.

Someday, instead of rolling out of bed, staggering across the room, and fumbling for the switch to silence the infernal ringing, Heymans is going to hurl the alarm clock out the window onto the concrete three floors below and shoot it when it hits the ground.  This is an eventuality that he’s accepted.  He’ll probably only be about thirty percent awake when it happens, so it’s not like he’ll be able to stop it.

In the meantime, though, he groans into the blessed silence, rubs his face with both hands, and feels around for the fleece jacket hung from the corner of the top dresser drawer.  He tries to shove his feet into his house slippers at the same time as he threads his arms through the sleeves, which is a nightmare of a motor skills pop quiz this fucking early.

“Good mornin’, gorgeous,” Jean says, stretching extravagantly, back arched and shoulders cracking, until his toes extend out past the edge of the blanket.  Then he drops to the bed again.

Heymans tears his eyes away before he succumbs to the desire to climb right back into the warm bed and give up on the entire day.  “Oxymoron.  ‘Good morning’.”

“C’mon,” Jean says.  Heymans puts a hand against the wall so that he won’t trip and break his face before he ever makes it to the life-giving coffee.  “It’s another bright, beautiful morning to meddle with your coworkers’ love lives.”

“I’ll meddle with your love life,” Heymans mutters, and Jean laughs so delightedly that it almost makes the hour seem less awful.  He turns the kitchen light on, grinds his teeth against the urge to hiss like an unhappy cat, and takes down the tin of the extra strong shit.  “I thought you said it was a good idea.”

“I did,” Jean says.  “Because it is.  That doesn’t mean I can’t give you shit about it.”  Unfortunately, he has a point.  “Hey, could you give me a hand, babe?”

Fucking blonds.

Heymans would like to give Jean both hands, in a series of ways that would make them extremely late for work.  For the moment, though, he sets the tin down on the countertop and drags his weary bones back into the bedroom.

Jean made it to the edge of the bed, but he’s massaging the small of his back hard with both hands and trying to grin through a grimace.  One of these days Heymans is going to convince him that he doesn’t have to do that.

“Sorry,” Jean says.

Heymans holds both hands out to him.  “For what?”

Jean scoots forward, puts his elbows in Heymans’s palms, clasps his fingers around Heymans’s shoulders, and takes a deep breath.  “Y’know.”

“Well, I’m not,” Heymans says.  “I wouldn’t trade back a single fucking minute.”

Jean smiles.  Maybe it still sounds like a reassuring exaggeration to him.

Maybe one of these days, Heymans will tell him everything—tell him how Hawkeye sounded like a different person on the phone.  Tell him Heymans broke the receiver in his hand.  Tell him how dead he looked in that hospital bed.  Tell him that the real reason he’s always out of cigarettes when he comes back from a mission or a stakeout or any solitary assignment is because Heymans sits out there on the shitty balcony and chain-smokes through an entire pack.

“You ready?” Jean asks.

Heymans braces his feet and his shoulders.  “Do your worst.”

Jean leans heavily on him while he slowly moves his feet down onto the floor, and even more slowly starts to shift his weight on them.  He stops twice, suddenly, and twists his back a little before he tries again.

“You can take a leave day,” Heymans says, very quietly.  “Nobody’d mind.”

“It’s fine,” Jean says, belied somewhat by the tremble at the tail end of every breath, but his eyes are hard enough that Heymans knows not to argue.  “Just a little stiff in the morning sometimes.”

A man cannot change what he is, or who he is, or what’s funny even if it shouldn’t be.  “I’ll show you ‘stiff in the morning’.”

At least that wrings a grin out of Jean, spiting all the rest of it.  “Any time you like.”

He’s worked his way almost upright, and he leans his head against Heymans’s in the home stretch, scrunching his eyes closed for a second.  Heymans grips his arms a little tighter.

“Cane day?” Heymans asks.

“Cane day,” Jean says.  It’s worse than he’s letting on: he’s swallowing the ends of his breaths.  “Maybe that’s good, though.  I can shake it at you if you try to rope me into any more fake bets in front of everybody.”

“Sorry,” Heymans says.

Jean cracks his eyes open for a faint grin.  “You are not.”

“I’m working on it,” Heymans says.  “Every day, I’m growing as a person.  You sure you don’t want to call out?”

“Yeah,” Jean says.  “Gonna kick this day’s ass if it kills me.  As long as it doesn’t try to run away, ’cause then I’m screwed.”

“I’ll help,” Heymans says.

“I know you will,” Jean says, and kisses his forehead in that light, casual way that always feels like it was almost imaginary.  How the hell are you meant to date someone who’s too good to be true?

Jean draws a deep breath and then starts to shift his weight back, easing it off of Heymans’s shoulders.  Heymans waits until he’s sure the balance is there and stable before leaning down and picking up the cane propped against the nightstand.

“Your noble steed,” he says.

“Rain check on that joke,” Jean says, sounding a little bit less strained this time as he takes it.  “Gotta find a way to make it not sound like it’s about Mustang.”

“Please,” Heymans says.

He returns to the kitchen to get the coffee going while Jean digs around for clean clothes.  Heymans told him he should take his showers first because he’s faster—which is true, helpfully, but not the reason.  The hot water runs out fast, and he wants Jean to be able to have it for his back.

“Shit,” Heymans says, mostly to himself.  There’s a calendar tacked to the wall above the coffee pot, for all the good that nonsense does when you haven’t had your coffee yet.  “It’s Thursday, right?” 

“Sure hope so,” Jean calls back.  “Pretty sure yesterday was Wednesday, and I can’t even organize my socks.  I don’t think I’m ready to reorganize the week.”

“Smartass,” Heymans says.

At least Jean is starting to sound a little better.  “I think it’s a job requirement when you report to Mustang.  That and the whole treason thing.”

“Don’t have the treason on the calendar either,” Heyamns says.  “Maybe we should reorganize this thing after all.”

Jean braces one hand on the doorway into the kitchen, keeping one on his cane.  He’s holding a new shirt and a pair of uniform trousers to his chest with the other.  He smiles.

“Maybe,” he says.

Jean stops at the bottom of the looming white marble wall of stairs that greets them at the entrance to Command.

Heymans eyes him, trying not to make any sudden movements.  “I can bridal-carry you if you want.”

Jean has already set his jaw—not that it needs the damn help to look delicious—and fixed his eyes on the doors at the top.  “Nah.  Just—would you mind going to grab me another coffee?  I need a lot of sugar in it today.  And a ton of that chocolate syrup shit.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Heymans says.

Heymans keeps an eye out as the day wears on, but Jean seems to have a handle on it, or at least wants everybody to think he does.  At least the military’s good for one thing—it trains you to follow someone else’s lead, and occasionally that is the best choice.

He waits until four o’clock—too late for the average innocent teammate to think about it too much, call anyone, or change any plans—before he stretches both arms over his head and says, “Who wants burgers at Paula’s? I’m buying.”

Hawkeye gives him a look that clearly says Bold move for a man about to lose ten thousand cens, but she doesn’t lift her hand.  Which is, of course, all according to the plan: it’s late enough into the week that she’s getting sick of all of them, but the prospect of Friday freedom hasn’t made her charitable yet.

Fuery pulls a face, which is also in keeping with the diabolical plot.  “Sorry, I’ve got plans.”  He glances at Falman, who committed to accompanying him to some sort of radio expo weeks ago.  “You can go if you want.”

“Next time,” Falman says.

“Aww,” Heymans says, drawing it out, “come on.”  He turns a mournful gaze on the unsuspecting victims.  “What about you guys?”

Roy is very subtly—he seems to think—watching Ed.

Ed leans forward and props his chin up on his hand.  “Are you sure you can afford to feed me on your measly military salary?”

“I laugh in the face of danger,” Heymans says.  “Pretty sure that’s a prerequisite to work here, actually.”  He slides his gaze over to Roy and raises an eyebrow.  “You coming, sir?”

He feels he’s showing remarkable restraint by not adding Or are you going to let me buy burgers for your man without you?

“I have an early meeting tomorrow,” Mustang says slowly, “so I can’t stay out too late, but…”

“Perfect,” Heymans says.

When half past five rolls around, and a combination of wheedling and whining from all remaining parties has finally pried Mustang away from his desk, Hawkeye ends up accompanying them after all.

It’s a little bit of a surprise, but Heymans reassesses and determines that it’s not a setback, at least.  She’s probably just coming to make sure that he doesn’t offer each of his targets four thousand nine-hundred ninety-nine cens apiece to pretend to be dating for a week.  Nobody respects the rules of engagement more than Riza Hawkeye, and the bet was that Heymans could get Roy and Ed to go out, not that he could do it in the face of intense interference.  She must be attending in the capacity of a referee, not a saboteur.

Well.  Hopefully.  Betting is what got him into this.  There’s probably a life lesson here, which he has every intention of ignoring for as long as possible.

Somebody needs to do something about all these fucking steps.  Heymans casts a baleful look over at Mustang as he tries not to hover too close to Jean’s elbow, but the world’s premiere proponent of unpopular policies is preoccupied with gazing at Ed, who is gesturing like he’s conducting an orchestra from fifty yards away.

“I could drive you home first if you want,” Heymans says to Jean, keeping his voice low.  “I mean it.  No sweat.  There’s plenty of time.  These two are just gonna argue about alchemy for the first hour and a half anyway.”

“I think they call that ‘foreplay’,” Jean says, sparing another grin for him before focusing on the descent again.  Heymans obediently pantomimes retching, which makes the grin widen.  “I’m good, though.  A lot better than I expected from this morning.  And if there’s plenty of time, I’d rather spend it with you, so… tough shit.”

“Wow,” Heymans says.  “Terrible.  Cruel punishment.  Truly, I am the universe’s punching bag.  If you’re sure.”

They’re almost to the bottom.  Ed is still waving his hands so recklessly that he nearly knocks the hat off of some pompous officer type who notices Mustang just in time to reconsider the impulse to try to tear Ed a new one.

Lucky guy.  Laying into Ed would’ve ended way worse for him than anything Mustang would ever do.

“Besides,” Jean says, “it’s fun watching you in action, even if sometimes the game pieces are our friends.”

“You consider Mustang your friend?” Heymans says.  “Gross.”

Jean whacks him in the side of the foot with the cane tip, which he supposes he deserves.

It’s gotten unsettling how many reasons there are to love Jean Havoc.  Heymans doesn’t have to say anything—he isn’t even thinking it particularly loud.  Effortlessly, gracefully, naturally, while navigating a crowded pub with a cane in hand, Jean helps him shepherd Roy and Ed to a booth table at the head of their group, so that the rules of civilized society guide them both to slide in first and sit on the inside together.  Heymans boxes them in on one side, and Jean immediately sits down opposite him to block the other.  Hawkeye settles next to Jean, looking so amused that Heymans’s skin crawls.  The worst part is that it’s a criminal understatement to say that she knows something, because the problem is more that she knows everything.

As soon as everyone’s had a chance to drool over the paper menus a bit, Heymans raps his knuckles on the tabletop.  When the place is slammed like this, someone has to go make the orders at the bar.  “So what’ll it be?  Don’t forget I’m buying.”

“As if,” Ed says, reaching directly across Roy to shove the menu back at him.  “If you try to bail and escape out the back door, I’m gonna find you.  I want the big one.  With peppers.”

“I’d tattle to Al that you were trying to kill me over a hamburger,” Heymans says.  “He’d save me.  Sir?”

Mustang is looking at him with a hint of pity, like he has made a very poor choice for mostly rational reasons.

The guy ain’t seen nothing yet.

With the list of meals and drinks collected and organized in his head, Heymans winds his way up to the bar, where he doesn’t have to wait too long before an Ishvalan kid wearing about twelve earrings darts over and whips out a notepad.  “What can I do you for?”

“Thanks,” Heymans says.  “First thing—is there any way you can hold off on the entrees for a little bit?  Give everybody a little extra time with their drinks first?  We all kinda need to unwind.”

“Sure!” the kid says, scribbling a note.  “Not a lot of people asking us to slow down, I gotta warn you.”

“Don’t worry,” Heymans says.  “I know my crew.  And they really need to loosen up.”

“Got it!” the kid says, and Heymans makes a mental note to leave a tip that’ll make him do a double-take.

By the time he gets back to the table, Ed is already up in arms about something, even without the aid of alcohol, and Mustang is already watching with that special combination of fondness and resignation that he reserves for Ed.  Despite Heymans’s vacated seat, they haven’t moved an inch away from each other—if anything, they’re closer together than they were when he left.  Ed’s more vehement gestures brush the point of his elbow against Roy’s arm.

Ah, love.  Makes you stupid and no mistake.

“Did you inform them,” Roy is saying, “that you know substantially more than the average alchemist about producing fire?”

“Of course I did,” Ed says.  “Though I used real person words, so maybe any bullshitters like you didn’t understand me so well.”

Roy looks amused instead of offended.  This is past the point of life preservers: Central City’s ladykiller of the year for half a decade running is underwater.  “We bullshitters can be a bit dense.”  Hawkeye snorts and then weakly pretends to cough into her sleeve.  Mustang just smiles prettily at that, too.  “Let me guess—they insisted that dragons are real, and are physically and physiologically plausible, and do haunt and torment the hills of eastern Aerugo.”

Ed makes a face at him.  “Do you want to tell my story?  You can, if you want.  Go ahead.  I can’t wait to hear it.”

“Be careful what you wish for,” Mustang says.  He honest-to-fuck bats his eyelashes for a second, and then he squares his shoulders and sits up straighter and folds his hands on the table, smiling winsomely at everyone but Ed.  “Once upon a time, there was a military contractor named… Egbert Eldritch—no relation to anyone you might recognize, of course, for legal reasons, and for other reasons that I haven’t yet made up—who had once made the grand and reckless decision to go exploring in the wilds of Aerugo, which I understand have more sheep than people, rather like certain places where certain young men like Egbert might, in fact, have grown up—”

“You’re already eight kinds of wrong,” Ed says.  He holds up both hands and starts ticking off fingers.  “Factually wrong, morally wrong, geographically wrong, historically wrong—”

They haven’t even started drinking yet, unless you count the way that Mustang is drinking Ed in.

“Seven I could live with,” Mustang says, “but eight sounds unsustainable.  Maybe you should tell it.”

“You,” Ed says, slowly and deliberately, eyes fixed on Roy’s face, “are the worst.”

“I wish I could drink to that,” Hawkeye says, and when Heymans chances a glance at her, she’s eyeing him.  She knows.

Well, she can’t do anything about it.  He’s still playing within the rules, so what she knows can’t hurt him.  Maybe he should bet against the one person on the planet who plays fair more often, if his better judgment doesn’t implement a gambling embargo in the immediate future.

“Right?” Ed says, holding both hands out towards Hawkeye, the right one gleaming in the light, like she just made the world’s best point.  He gives Mustang about the forty-fifth reprimanding look of the day, even though he must be aware by now that Mustang has long since developed a bulletproof immunity.  “You stole one of the best parts of the story and then ruined the rest.  I don’t even want to tell it anymore.”

Heymans looks over to check on Jean.  After a bad pain day, it’s no surprise that he’s been a little subdued, but the upshot is that he looks more wearily contented than miserable.  He seems to be trying to merge with the cushion on the back of the booth seat, though, which is a bad idea for a number of reasons—firstly, fuck knows who’s spilled what kinds of horrible shit on those over the years; secondly, it’ll make his back even worse if he keeps slouching like that, but Heymans isn’t about to tell a grown man who knows his limits how to sit—

“Yes, you do,” Roy says.  He puts his elbows on the table and rests his chin on the heels of both hands, fingers curled up around his cheeks.  He looks so unbelievably cutesy-stupid that Heymans can’t even wheeze out a laugh past the incredulity.

He’s also so unashamedly close to Ed that Heymans starts to wonder if Hawkeye’s just having him on, and he might win this bet early.

“And I would have gotten away with it, too,” Ed says in a ringingly deep vocal affectation with a measured Central accent, glaring right back into Mustang’s face, “if it wasn’t for your infernal meddling, General Mustang.”

Mustang lowers his hands for a little slow-clap.  “I’m never sure if I should be very proud of or very distressed by the fact that your brass impression gets better every year.”

Much as this is increasingly becoming dinner and a show, Heymans has definitely gone soft, because he’s still more worried about Jean than anything else.  He wants to nudge Jean’s foot under the table in a reassuring sort of way, but if he misses and kicks Hawkeye in the ankle, he’s going to have no choice except to walk straight out the back door of this joint and expeditiously hurl himself into the river.

While he’s pondering that dilemma, he glances over in the direction of the bar, and the Ishvalan kid with the decorated ears waves to catch his attention and then points down at a tray of glasses.

“Guess that’s us,” Heymans says, not that he imagines either Ed or Mustang will notice, and gets up again to go fetch it.

Heymans did not prepare for the potentiality of the plan working too well.

Ed is actively leaning on Mustang’s shoulder after barely a beer and a half.  Despite the pertinent detail that Heymans has known this kid since he was a loose-cannon liability of a whippersnapper with all the poise of a puppy newly-woken from a nap, this feels… embarrassing.  It feels like seeing him naked.

In a weird way, Ed is naked when he lets his guard down.  Maybe all of them are.  Maybe that’s why it matters so damn much that they’re here, at this table, ganging up on Roy to give him shit for drinking wine in an alehouse.

“Hell with it,” Heymans says.  “I’ll make a bid for Führer.  And the first thing I’m gonna outlaw is wine in pubs.”

“I’ll bring a flask,” Roy says, perfectly calmly.  The way his eyelids have dipped a little—closer to the calculating face than the sleepy one, but representing a bit of both—is the only sign that the alcohol on an empty stomach is getting to him.  “Or one of those…” He gestures unhelpfully like he’s trying to slash or swoop across his own chest and then getting hung up below his own ribs.  “…you know.”

So maybe the eyes aren’t the only sign.

“Wine skins?” Hawkeye says.

“Yes!” Roy says, pointing at her, which should be displacing Ed’s fake-accidental slump against him but doesn’t even come close.

“How can you skin wine?” Jean asks.  “If you skin the grapes first, could you call that skinned wine?  That could be a thing.  You could charge extra.  Or, wait—are the things in the skins?  The things that make it bitter?”

“It’s not bitter,” Roy says, sounding tremendously offended on behalf of viniculture everywhere.  “It’s…”

“Shitty,” Ed supplies.  “Acrid.  Really shitty.  Ass-like.  Tastes like ass.”

Roy mutters something that is almost certainly Uncultured swine and pointedly takes a swig of his bottom-shelf barroom red, like none of them are going to notice the way he grimaces at the aftertaste.

“Tannins,” Hawkeye says.  “Like in coffee.”

“Like in my soul,” Ed says.

Mustang laughs so uproariously that he almost sprays wine, although it’s probably the laughing and not the spraying that makes Ed whack him in the arm.

“Shut up!” Ed says, trying to fight the wineglass away from him.  Heymans snatches Ed’s pint glass clear of the fray instants before the metal elbow collides with it and lands them all in a spot of spilt beer and shattered glass.  “This shit makes you stupid.  More stupid.  I didn’t even know that was possible.  You’re not allowed to drink it anymore.”

“Tagline of my campaign,” Heymans says, setting Ed’s glass safely on the other side of the table.

Hawkeye sips delicately at her beer.  “You’ve got my support.”

That halts Roy in his tracks, at least, though Ed flails at him for another second before registering what she just said.  Roy’s jaw drops, and it’s Ed’s turn to laugh until it looks like he’s going to strain something.  The sheer slapstickiness of it stirs the wriggle of amusement in Heymans’s chest into a full-fledged laugh, too—and then Jean’s laughing, with his eyes shut and his dimples out in force, and Heymans would do it, for real, for him.  Heymans would run for Führer or conquer a nation or grind his own bones down to dust.  Whatever it took.  Whatever he wanted.  Whatever he asked.

The lucky thing is that mostly what Jean seems to want is someone who actually listens to him and respects him, and the occasional back massage.  Which is shit Heymans always, always would have given him for free.

Jean raises an eyebrow when he notices Heymans’s attention on him, and then tips his head in the direction of the bar.  Heymans glances over, and the Ishvalan kid is waving at him again, then gesturing to an even bigger tray of plates this time.

“Guess that’s us again,” Heymans says.

“Who’s ‘us’?” Roy says.  “You’re all dead to me.”

“Sounds good,” Heymans says as he gets up.  “I’m cutting you off, sir.”

“You can’t,” Roy calls after him.  “I outrank you.”

“Not for long,” Heymans calls back.

When Heymans gets back to the table, everyone is quiet for almost three solid minutes while they stuff their faces with burgers.

Then Jean says, very innocently, “Y’know, Chief, collectively we outrank you.”

Roy is clearly saying something along the lines of “There’s no such thing!”, but since everyone else is laughing loud enough to earn some glares from other patrons, they can all claim later that they didn’t hear it.

Heymans is, despite some arguable recent evidence to the contrary, a good damn friend.  He stands by that.  He’s also standing by the taxi line making sure that Ed shoves Mustang into a cab without bonking his precious little head too hard against the top of the door.

Ed slams the door after Mustang, waves through the window at Hawkeye, and makes a point of dusting his hands off before making his wobbly way back over.

The fact that Ed lives on the same side of town as Heymans and Jean do adds more fuel that the fire doesn’t really need at this point.  There’s just no damn reason for Mustang to be driving him all over the place every other night unless they’re both desperately trying to get more time alone together.

“You know,” Jean says, placidly, “I think collectively we’re… very drunk.”

“On a Thursday,” Heymans says.

Ed just says, “Fuck.”

Heymans tries to elbow him and narrowly misses, which supports the drunk thing, but there are definitely some extenuating circumstances given Ed’s legendary reflexes.  “What are you complaining about?  You’ll bounce back.  It’s us old people that are gonna be in trouble tomorrow.”

Ed sticks his tongue out, which doesn’t really help him look his age.  “You miss the part where I spent, like, the entirety of my teenage years beating the shit out of myself in pretty much every possible way?  Catches the fuck up with you.  Trust me.”

Heymans experiences more success with the attempt to clap him on the shoulder.  Unfortunately for Ed, it’s still a touch too early for most taxi drivers to be waiting for prey.  “So how about that Mustang, huh?”

“How about him?” Ed says, cool as a cucumber on ice, like he wasn’t just hanging off the guy’s arm and every word for an entire deliberately-extended dinner.  “He’d probably beat you in the polls, but if Lieutenant Hawkeye ran, she’d slaughter him.  Or Al.  Al would gut him in broad daylight and dump his body in a ditch.”  He pauses.  “Figuratively speaking.  Don’t… repeat that.  But it’s true.”

Jean pats Ed’s other shoulder, then glances down in surprise at the reminder that it’s metal.  “Lots of shit you can’t repeat is true.”

Ed makes another face.  “I can’t tell now if we’re talkin’ about tongue-twisters or state secrets.”

“Does it matter?” Heymans says.  “You’re avoiding the question.”

This time, Ed goes so far as to bare his teeth, which would be more intimidating if he wasn’t so liable to sway on his feet without the shoulder-patting for support.  “The question was ‘How about Mustang’.  Told you about how.  What else do you want?”  His eyes narrow.  “Why the fuck are you so interested in him all of a sudden, anyway?  You keep askin’ me shit about him.”

“Curiosity’s just human, isn’t it?” Heymans says.  He extends his free hand and presses it to Ed’s chest.  “You’ve got science and alchemy and shit.”  He lays it over his own heart.  “I’ve got creepy, nosy questions about my boss.”

He overplayed that one: Jean’s mouth is screwed up tight in the way that means he’s going to bust up laughing in another second.

“You need a hobby,” Ed says, still glowering at him, but with so much less of an edge that Heymans dares to hope he’s in the clear.  “You ever thought about, like, sculpture or something?  Hear that shit’s relaxing.”

“Ed,” Jean says, patting harder, “what the hell do you know about relaxing?”

“Oh,” Ed says.  He gazes out at the street, more than a little bit desolately.  “Good point.”

They both start patting in unison.

Friday sucks.

Heymans had grand plans for clever things he was going to charm out of Mustang and Ed both, like an absolute word wizard on a do-or-die timeline, but now all he wants to do is die.  Preferably quickly.  Before his brain peels itself fully free of the walls of his skull and withers into a little hard rubber ball like they used to bounce off of the wall behind the school when class was over.  Before his entire gastrointestinal tract turns itself inside out.  Before the cottony mold growing on the roof of his mouth in fast-motion spreads throughout the rest of him.

Hawkeye keeps smiling at him sweetly and dropping things on purpose—which he probably deserves, but that doesn’t make it hurt less.

The highlight of the whole intolerable morning is when Jean pushes a cup across the table towards him and says, “Drink some water, babe”—then freezes, and then chokes out, “I mean… Second Lieutenant.”

Everyone studiously pretends not to have heard any of that, and Heymans loves them all almost as much as he hates the universe.

This whole rigmarole has gradually progressed from being a probably-bad idea to an indubitably-stupid one.  The best part of the entire week is lying in bed dozing on Saturday morning for a while because you don’t have a damn thing on your agenda more important than enjoying the warmth and the cushiness.  Heymans has even deprived himself of that.

“We’re behind,” he says, partly to Jean and partly to the ceiling.

Jean is still mostly successfully dozing.  At least someone’s priorities are in order.  He might be one good dream away from drooling on Heymans’s shoulder, but that’s a sacrifice Heymans thinks he’s willing to make.  “Do me a favor.”

“Sure,” Heymans says.

“Pretend I’m awake enough to make the ‘fine ass’ joke,” Jean mumbles.  “Besides.  We can’t be.  Behind, I mean.  ’Cause it’s your plan.”

“Yeah,” Heymans says, lifting the arm Jean’s not leaning on and rubbing at his eyes, “but I was too hungover to want to do any of the shit I should’ve done yesterday, and all of the building blocks are important.”

“So move ’em,” Jean says without even opening his eyes.  “You’re in charge, right?  Move ’em to today.  Then they’re not late.”

Heymans stares at the ceiling for a few more seconds.  “That’s… cheating.”

“It’s not,” Jean says.  “’Cause it’s your thing, so it’s your rules, so you can say it’s not cheating, and then it’s not.”

Heymans wonders if it’s possible to stare at the ceiling for long enough that the ceiling stares back.  Given the whole Selim Bradley business, he probably shouldn’t think about that too much.  “I guess if I want to make a run at Führer, I should get used to creating my own loopholes.”

Jean yawns.  “And you gotta make ’em big enough to march a zombie army through.”

Heymans pets Jean’s hair a little, which has no effect on the puffiness but hopefully feels nice anyway.  “I’ll work on it.”

Jean slings his arm the rest of the way across Heymans’s chest and nuzzles in closer against his shoulder.  His voice comes out in a lower register this time.  “We could just stay in bed all day, y’know.”

Heymans strokes uselessly at Jean’s bangs.  “Aren’t you the one who just told me to loophole my way into cramming two days of the plan into one?”

“Shit,” Jean mumbles, but then he shifts in closer again—and squeezes tighter with his arm, hooks his ankle around Heymans’s, and looks up with his eyes all smudged and sleepy but very, very warm.  “We could stay in bed for an hour.”

Well.

Heymans rolls him over onto his back and kisses up along his jaw to reach the grin.

“We may be able to spare an hour,” he says.

Jean grabs a fistful of the back of Heymans’s T-shirt and grins a little wider still.  “Thought we might.”

Central is a city so big and so brutal that its suburbs have suburbs, and its slums have slums.  Heymans is going to have to play his cards precisely right and get very, very lucky indeed if he wants to cross paths on purpose with one man in particular in this miserable metropolis.  It’s going to take all the ingenuity and all the good fortune that he’s got.  He’s expecting to dump his entire Saturday into…

Seeing a familiar flick of dark hair in the open-air market on King’s Street before they’ve even stepped into the line to order high-octane coffee.

“General!” Heymans calls, and Mustang looks up sharply, eyes wide like a cat caught with one paw in the fish tank.  He smoothes his surprise over in the next instant, as always, but it’s hardly Heymans’s fault that he feels compelled to rub the fur backwards, is it?

“Fancy meeting you here,” Mustang says, so dryly that Heymans can’t even gauge the level of sarcasm.

Heymans can, however, gauge the level of Mustang’s bag—which is, at present, overflowing.

“Wow,” he says.  “Stocking up?”

He considers coming right out and saying Just how many nights a week is Ed at your place, licking the walls of the icebox?, but he doesn’t want to put Mustang on the defensive right out of the gate.

Mustang looks down at the bag, somewhat accusingly, as if its contents have changed while he wasn’t watching, and then up at Heymans’s admittedly probably pretty obnoxious grin.

“It costs less than going out,” he says.  “On the days that you’re not paying, anyway.”

“I’ll bet,” Heymans says.  “That grape juice you were drinking practically broke the bank.”

Jean nudges his elbow against Heymans’s arm.  “Maybe he’s got the right idea.  If one of us could cook, we’d be unstoppable.”

“He’s even smarter than that,” Heymans says.  You have to give credit where it’s due if you want credibility.  “None of that is stuff you have to cook.”

The cigarette hanging out of the corner of Jean’s mouth bobs as he leans down and looks closer at the packaged cold cuts and the little loaf of bread and the wax-paper-wrapped cheese and the apples and so on.  “Hey, you’re right.  Are you going on a picnic, sir?”

Roy looks like he’s going in front of a firing squad.  “…no.  But…” He makes the devastating tactical mistake of glancing at Jean, whose innocently expectant smile has felled stronger men.  Mustang sighs.  “Ed has talked me into going to the library with him on Saturdays so that he can use my State Alchemist clearance to get access to more of the books.  I try to leave something in the car for when he inevitably gets hungry enough that he can’t concentrate anymore.”

Heymans gives Jean a significant look, more because it’ll drive Roy up the fucking wall than because it’s remotely necessary.  “That’s so nice of you, Chief.  Looking out for him like that.  Getting all his favorite stuff for him.”

Jean itches behind his ear.  “Do you read stuff, too, or do you just, like, sit there and watch him?”

Heymans has to bite down so hard on his lip to prevent himself from laughing that he almost draws blood.  He could kiss Jean all the goddamn time, but right now—

Mustang looks less inclined to be physically affectionate.  “I usually try to catch up on—”

“You could bring him some flowers,” Heymans says.  “Tough guys secretly love that.”

“We do?” Jean says.

“You don’t count,” Heymans says, trying to reduce the amount of goop that seeps through into his voice.  “You’re a teddy bear.”

Jean gapes at him.  “I was the best marksman in my entire graduating class!”

“I know,” Heymans says.  “You’re a deadshot teddy bear.  That’s even cuter.”

Jean goes extremely pink extremely fast, throws his hands in the air, and stalks away.

Roy watches him for a few seconds before returning his attention to Heymans and raising an eyebrow.  “Forgive me if I don’t leap at the opportunity to follow your advice.”

“Damn, sir,” Heymans says, feelingly. 

They both watch Jean angrily pick up and set down a few little baskets of strawberries.

Then Mustang’s eyes shift to him and stay there.  “What’s the game?”

“Game?” Heymans says, managing to make it sound more surprised than he expected.  “There’s no game.  I’m just… we’re all just really happy to see you and Fullmetal getting along so well after all these years of… not.”  He plants his hands on his hips and tries to make it look like the idea occurred to him out of the blue.  “Hey, speaking of which—are you two free tomorrow night?  The four of us could all go get dinner.  Someplace nice, maybe?  Where they wouldn’t give you shit about drinking grape juice.”

Mustang eyes him.  “I’ll ask Ed.”

“Great,” Heymans says, as brightly as possible.  “Hey, nice seeing you.  Give me a call and let me know, all right?”

“All right,” Mustang says, slowly.  “Until Monday, then, if not tomorrow.”

Heymans waits for him to saunter out of earshot before joining Jean next to the unfortunate strawberries that got caught in the crossfire.

“He knows something’s up,” Heymans says.

“Of course he knows something’s up,” Jean says.  He rearranges a few more of the little baskets.  He’s got such nice fingers that Heymans can’t help being a little bit mesmerized.  “His entire job is knowing when something’s up.  Are they going to come on the double-date?”

Heymans picks up the little basket that Jean has touched the most, meets the stall owner’s eye, gestures to it, and fishes for the change in his pocket.  “Good odds.  I think the morbid curiosity will get the better of them, if nothing else.”

Jean gives him a look that is clearly fonder and more impressed than he wants it to be.  “Spiffy.”

“I try,” Heymans says.  “You wanna go eat all of these in the park really fast and then regret it?”

The grin gets the better of Jean, which seems fair, since he’s been getting the better of Heymans for years now.

“Yes,” Jean says.

“Not fair,” Jean says, casually, as Sunday afternoon starts to wane, and Heymans goes to put on the pinchy shoes in the name of benevolent deception.

“What isn’t?” he asks.

“How damn good you look in a waistcoat,” Jean says, handing his coat over, “when we’re already late.”

Heymans focuses as intently as possible on his shoelaces so that maybe Jean won’t notice that his face is starting to match his hair.  “Come on.”

“You come on,” Jean says, shrugging his coat on and adjusting it on those damn shoulders.  Jean Havoc has no room to talk about how good anybody else looks.  Not ever.  “They’ll give the reservation away if we don’t show.”

“No,” Heymans says, “they’ll give it to Mustang and Ed.”

Jean blinks at him for a second.

Then Jean says, “You should run for Führer.  At the very least, it’d scare him enough to make him do better.”

“Still thinking about it,” Heymans says.

Ed looks vastly uncomfortable and completely adorable in a nice red shirt and a black tie.  Heymans isn’t going to tell him that, because Heymans wants to live, but that doesn’t make it less true.  He keeps slipping his finger into the knot of the tie and tugging at it and then glancing swiftly over at Roy and then trying to pretend that he didn’t.

Mustang makes the kind of cordial, gracious smalltalk that he always does in public—right up until they settle down at their table, and the maître’d has explained some boring-sounding specials, handed them too many menus to keep track of, and walked away.

Then Mustang’s face goes stone-cold, and he folds his hands on the table and leans forward.

“I’d very much like to enjoy this meal,” he says.  “So can we get to the point?”

Heymans feels like a kid in a goddamn candy store.  It’s taking everything he’s got not to giggle.  Mustang looks like he’s going to blow a gasket; Jean looks like a million cens; Ed just looks confused; the table is covered in little leather-bound menus no one has even touched; none of the other patrons have the slightest idea that this table might be on fire in a matter of minutes.  This is paradise.

“There is no point,” Heymans says, as sweetly as possible.  “Just thought it would be nice to get out and catch up.  How are you?  How are things?  You two look good together.  Anybody ever tell you that?”

Ed now looks like he’s been struck around the head with a two-by-four.  “We—what?”

“You know very well that no one has,” Mustang says, trying the commander voice this time, as if that has any power in a place like this.  “Second Lieutenant—”

“Did you pre-game?” Ed asks, staring openly now in a combination of amazement and disgust.  “Are you already drunk?  You weren’t this weird on Thursday.”

“I’m always this weird,” Heymans says, feeling utterly at peace with the world—feeling the warm wings of victory enfolding him in a gently transcendent embrace.  “It’s just so great the way you two have been meeting in the middle lately.  It’s great the way that you talk about each other, with so much respect—but also with so much excitement, y’know?  And it’s great how you look out for each other in so many little ways, and in the bigger ones, too.”  It’s his turn to fold his hands on the table like some caricature of a villain.  “Seems to me that the only thing greater than what you’ve already got would be making it official and letting it get even better.  So here’s my proposition.”

Mustang makes a point of looking bored, the fucker.  Ed still looks like his tie is trying to strangle him, and he’s starting to hope it might succeed.

Whatever.  Rapt audience or otherwise, this is it.

“I dare you,” Heymans says, “to go out on a date.”

Speechless.  Stunned.  Stupefied.  The feathers of victory’s plumage graze Heymans’s cheeks, and the sun filters through them to caress his skin, and he’s going to find a way to invite Jean in here to make it even nicer, and—

“What the hell do you mean?” Ed says, face crumpling up.  He glances over at Mustang again, who offers an extremely subtle little shrug.  Ed turns another scowl on Heymans.  “Isn’t that what this is?”

“It should be!” Heymans says, pushing his chair back.  “In fact, why don’t we just leave you two to it, and—”

“Hold on,” Jean says, grabbing Heymans’s shoulder just before he makes it to his feet.  “Sir—”

Mustang is smiling now.

Mustang is smiling thinly.

Might as well hit a balloon with a machete as far as Heymans’s victory goes.

“Second Lieutenant Breda,” Mustang says, very silkily, “as much as I sincerely appreciate your… efforts… to have our best interests at heart—Ed and I are already dating.”

This silence is a whole fucking shit-lot worse than the last one.

This silence has no feathers at all.

“You—no, you’re not,” Heymans croaks out.  “Since when?”

This time, Roy glances over at Ed, and it’s his turn to shrug—although he also rolls his eyes, slouches lower in his chair, and turns an interesting shade of pink.

“Two and a half weeks,” Mustang says.

Heymans feels like his head is very, very empty.  Which is fair, he supposes, since the world is.  The world is an endless garden of thistles and disappointment.

“Can you prove that?” he asks.

They both stare at him like he’s the one drinking fermented grape blood in a pub this time.

“Okay,” Heymans says.  “Well, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go to the bank and withdraw my life savings and then maybe throw myself off of—”

“How are you gentlemen doing tonight?” the waiter asks.

It’s pretty impressive, all things considered, that the guy doesn’t turn on his heel and run back into the kitchen, given the character of the looks he probably just got.

“Do you need a little more time to decide?” he asks instead.

“A few more minutes would be wonderful,” Mustang says, all bullshit suave geniality as usual, “if you wouldn’t mind.”

Heymans can probably wrap up the existential crisis by then.  He’s pretty good at this by now.

They all look at each other for a few seconds once the waiter ghosts away.

“Important question for you,” Mustang says.

This isn’t enough to ask for his resignation over, obviously, but Heymans’s system summons a little spike of adrenaline just in case.  “Sure, Chief.”

Mustang opens one of the smaller menus, holds it out to him, and smiles sweetly.  “Would you like some grape juice?”

“Aw, jeez,” Ed says.  “Are you trying to start a cult, or something?”

Mustang arches an eyebrow at him, still looking pleased as grape-flavored punch.  “Would you join?”

Heymans takes the damn menu.  “Do they have anything stronger than that?”

Mustang smirks, the bastard.  “I would bet that they do.”

Heymans’s expression must be really fucking good, because Ed starts snickering, and Jean pats him on the shoulder.

“You deserved that one,” Jean says.

“I know,” Heymans says.

To say that Monday morning is not the pinnacle of unbridled joy would be an insult to pinnacles.  On top of the evident miseries, Heymans has to drag himself out of the warm, cozy bed at an even ungodlier hour than usual so that he can stop by the bank on the way in to work.  The only good thing that can be said for this entire rotation of the planet is that he’s not hungover like he was on Friday, because Jean made him drink about a gallon and a half of water with last night’s fancy brandy.  Arguably, the brandy creates another positive: at least he didn’t wake up this morning as part of Mustang’s wine cult.

Heymans is a man of his word, even on Monday mornings.  He thinks that that stands to his credit.

He waits until everyone has come in and settled down and finished most of their coffee, and then he clears his throat.  Hawkeye looks up.

He takes the envelope of cash out of his jacket pocket and pushes it across the table to her.  “You earned this, Lieutenant.”

Hawkeye pushes it right back, smiling with one eyebrow raised.

“I didn’t do it for the money,” she says.  She lets him stare at her, open-mouthed like a beached fish, for no fewer than four seconds before she says, “I did it for the entertainment.  You definitely held up your end of the bargain.”

“Always glad to be of service to a patriotic Amestrian citizen,” Heymans says, slowly drawing the envelope back towards himself, in case she’s about to change her mind and verbally eviscerate him instead.  “In light of which, I’ll make it the first major donation to my Führership campaign, in your name.  How’s that?”

Hawkeye sits back in her chair and folds her arms.  He can tell she’s trying not to laugh, which is an achievement in its own right.  At least he has that.  “Acceptable.”

“Great,” he says.  “I’m working on my slogan.  I’m thinking—” He holds both hands up, spread apart to indicate words in block letters arcing in between them.  “‘Whatever It Takes—That’s Braidycakes.’  I’m targeting the unhinged and/or morbidly curious demographic.  My mascot is going to be a teddy bear with a sniper rifle.”

Jean holds his hand in front of his mouth and clears his throat loudly, which does nothing to disguise the way his eyes dance.

“You know, it’s funny,” Kain says, resting his chin on his fist.  “Sometimes people tell me that they get bored at work.”

“Boredom is going to be the first thing I eliminate as Führer,” Heymans says.  “Campaign platform promise.”

Mustang steps out of his office, ignores the look Hawkeye gives him, drops into an empty chair, and stretches until his spine cracks.  “I’d vote for you.”

“You should lean into the bear thing,” Ed says, obviously looking intently at Heymans so that he won’t get caught looking at Roy.  “Like ‘Get a slice of Braidycakes if you think the government’s unbearable.’”

“You’re hired,” Heymans says.

Falman taps his pen on a neglected report.  “Considering how unprecedented an open election would be, and the dwindling trust in the mechanisms of the military, you might well pull a lot of votes from people thinking that the polar opposite of Bradley has some appeal.”

“Polar bears,” Heymans says.  “Noted.  You’re hired, too.”

Jean has given up on the hand and is just grinning at him now.  “Just, uh, maybe stay away from anything to do with ‘The best bet’, okay?”

“It’s implied,” Heymans says.  “Cake is always the best bet.  They’ve all gambled on government enough.  We can do something with that.”

“‘Just desserts’,” Jean says.

“You’re also hired,” Heymans says.  “Permanently.”

Jean grins even brighter.  “Good.”