Work Text:
Blondes. Blondes with nice asses. Blondes with nice asses are going to be the end of Roy, and he knows it. He’s seventeen, so self-control is more or less an abstract concept, and he really doesn’t think it’s his fault that swinging blonde hair and a tight ass make his whole body pulse with chemicals until he’s high on hormones. They’re all like this, anyway; they’re all fucking crazy with it; Jean aims his eyes higher, and maybe most guys do, but Roy knows what he likes. Now that his stupidly awkward middle school days of misproportioned gawkiness have given way to something impressive—something so staggeringly fortunate that sometimes he does double-takes at his own reflection—he’s flushed with power and with the endless oxytocin-testosterone cocktails. Shit, he knows he’s lucky. He knows that he’d still be a nerd—albeit a nerd with a great throwing arm; no weekly paper blurbs about “sniper scope precision” would save him—if he hadn’t filled out and settled into that first ludicrous growth spurt.
He knows he’s lucky. And he knows that his luck could change. And he knows that there are going to be hundreds upon hundreds of smart, stuck-up, good-looking high school quarterbacks gunning for maybe one spot at Stanford.
He’s got that acceptance letter in his crosshairs, and he is not going to fuck this up.
“It’s barely September,” Heymans says.
“When did you start on the playbook?” Kain asks pointedly.
“Last May,” Heymans says, “but that’s different—football season starts a hell of a lot earlier than apps are due, and it’s way more fucking fun.”
“Sara Kieller really grew up over the summer,” Jean says wistfully. “Do you think she knows she’s hot yet? Sometimes if you get to ’em early, they don’t know that they could do better.”
“I think it’s an excellent idea,” Riza says to Roy. “And I’m glad that you’ve realized that your grades are more important than your pride.”
“They don’t even look at your senior year transcript,” Heymans says. He extends a hand in what appears to be a smooth sailing gesture. “I’m planning to skate by with straight Cs.”
“That’s the thing,” Roy says as they pause by the stairs down to the field, and Riza hikes her hockey bag more securely over her shoulder. “I don’t know if I can get a C in calculus, and it’s not a risk I’m willing to take.”
Riza smiles. “Like I said—very wise. Text me later and let me know how it goes.”
They’re all quiet as they watch her head down the stairs until Jean, in the throes of a typical Jean moment, decides to murmur, “She’s got really great tits.”
“If you value your balls,” Roy says, “don’t let her catch you looking.”
Jean’s bottom lip protrudes. “But—”
“If you value your social life,” Roy says, “don’t let me catch you looking.”
“You wouldn’t shun me,” Jean says in horror. “You wouldn’t. Would you?”
“Hey,” Heymans says. “Why aren’t you dating Riza, anyway?”
Roy directs their amebic cluster’s stroll up towards the library. “Because she’d eat me alive. And that would destroy my street cred.”
“We live in a suburb,” Kain says slowly. “I don’t think there is such a thing as street cred here.”
“All the more reason not to jeopardize it,” Roy says.
“Aren’t you jeopardizing it by going to tutoring?” Jean asks.
“Shut up,” Roy says.
Jean pouts a little more and hunches his shoulders as they approach the ramp up to the library doors. “I just don’t understand why I can’t ogle Riza. She’s my friend; she’d want me to be happy.”
“You know that saying?” Heymans says. “About how there are other fish in the sea?”
“Yeah, but every time I say that you and Kain say my line is limp and my bait is dea—”
“Riza’s a fucking shark,” Heymans says. “Did you hear about the game she had at Nationals last year?”
Slowly Jean shakes his head.
“Forty points,” Kain says. “She scored forty points in a game of field hockey.”
“And,” Heymans says, “she broke three knees and a wrist. On accident.”
“But,” Jean says, “but—she has such great—”
“Later, guys,” Roy says. “Somebody text Vato and tell him that you can’t graduate magna cum laude if you’re dead, and he should schedule study breaks for eating.”
“On it,” Kain says.
“Have fun being a nerd,” Heymans says.
Roy gives him the finger, adjusts his backpack so that he can square his shoulders, and strides into the Nerd Zone.
The Nerd Zone is actually pretty subdued—which Roy supposes kind of makes sense for a library and all. The huge clock on the far wall ticks really, really loudly while he stands just outside of the book-thief-detector archway and seriously considers making a run for it.
Damn it, Mustang, he thinks as sternly as he can. Lie back and think of Stanford, you dumbass. Even if they let you in, you can’t afford to go without that scholarship, and you will never forgive yourself if it’s a lack of effort that lets you down.
He swallows, cants his hips to 65% Cocky Bastard, and saunters over to the solitary table adorned by a paper sign that says AFTER-SCHOOL TUTORING.
It kind of makes sense, this late—between the two of them, football practice and the obligatory if-we-all-stare-fixedly-ahead-it’s-totally-heterosexual stint in the showers eat up most of the afternoon—but there’s only one kid sitting at the tutoring table. And he’s… kind of unlike anybody Roy’s ever seen.
Because only the goth guys wear their hair long—or occasionally the faux-surfers—and there is nothing remotely gothic about a Crayola-yellow ponytail. The kid’s wearing black jeans and a red hoodie, and there’s no mistaking that his eyes are yellow, too. Even where he’s sitting tangled up in the tilted-back chair, flicking through a brochure for Harvard’s school of medicine, Roy can tell he’s short, but he’s… powerful. He’s got animal eyes, and even at rest he’s tense, and with the sleeves of his sweatshirt pushed up Roy can see the tendons in his forearms.
Roy swings his backpack down onto the floor and slides into the chair next to him.
“You’re new,” he says, and it’s not a question, because he would have seen or heard about and would have remembered somebody who sticks out like this.
“Brilliant deduction, Holmes,” the kid says without looking up.
“Does that make you Watson or Lestrade?” Roy asks, and that gets the kid to raise his head.
Jesus, those eyes—Roy’s used to being looked at, but usually people either sneak glances or stare outright, and this… This is a glaring, gutting, critical onceover. This is a test where failure is expected. This is a searing assessment, and after three long seconds of scrutiny from those hot yellow eyes, Roy can feel them under his skin.
“Got transferred this year,” the kid mutters. “Me and my brother.”
Roy prays he doesn’t tutor in English.
“The whole thing was stupid,” the kid says, tossing the Harvard leaflet back onto a pile of similar mailings and stretching until his spine cracks. “We shouldn’t have to have legal guardians in the county if we can obviously take care of ourselves, and now our best friend is stuck at that stupid school by herself.”
Roy heard whispers about a pair of parentless brothers the first few days of school, but he didn’t pay much attention; usually the dramatic stories are more or less bullshit. “Wait, what grade are you in?”
The kid scratches the back of his head just underneath the red band in his hair and shrugs. “I think I’m supposed to be a sophomore, but fuck if I’m not graduating this year and getting out of this craphole.”
‘This craphole’ happens to be the best high school in the district, unless you listen to the basement-dwelling, SAT-worshiping posers down the highway, but Roy gets the feeling that if he interrupts he’ll be treated to a free dissection demonstration featuring his own organs.
“Al and I fucked our course levels up pretty good by homeschooling ourselves for a long time,” the kid is saying. “And I’m writing letters to a bunch of schools’ deans explaining why it’s in their best interests to take my side when I apply. I think I’m pretty close to a vaccine that’ll dramatically slow down cancer cells, so I figure it’s worth a shot.”
Roy… doesn’t… know… what…
“Why in the hell are you tutoring?” he asks.
The kid shrugs again. “Unofficially-emancipated minors aren’t exactly rolling in the dough, genius. And the family that adopted my cousin and then took us in… well, fuck you, why do you care?”
“Has your cousin always gone here?” Roy asks.
The kid glowers at him, and it’s amazing that the lightest-colored eyes Roy’s ever seen can be so dark. “Yeah. Alfons Heiderich, you know him?”
Roy’s caught glimpses. Rumor has it that he’s won awards for his professional-grade astrophotography. Then again, rumor also has it that he wears Confederate flag boxers in solidarity with the Aryan Brotherhood, and the rightmost stall in the bathroom in the math building has it that he LUVS COCK SUPERGAY!!, but Roy actually believes the first one, because he heard it from Kain. Alfons seems to suffer from the rare but highly-contagious affliction known as not giving enough of a fuck what the popular kids think of him, the only cure for which is utterly unfounded ridicule. Roy has seen it happen several times over the course of his high school career: an individual secure enough to practice nonconformity is perceived by the self-proclaimed campus royalty as a threat. Despite the fact that Heiderich is clearly much more interested in identifying never-before-seen astronomical phenomena than in undermining the dominant purveyors of peer pressure, he will have to endure “Alfie the Aryan Vegetarian” until a better target arises.
“I know of him,” Roy says.
“Huh,” the kid says, spectacularly unrevealingly.
Nothing else seems to be forthcoming.
“Do you tutor in calculus?” Roy asks slowly.
“Oh,” the kid says. “Yeah, sure. AB or BC or what?”
“The first year,” Roy says. “One week in, and I’m already confused, so—”
The kid snorts. “Well, at least we caught your case of the stupids early, right?”
This can’t be real. This kid can’t be real. This has to be a vivid hallucination. Somebody spiked Roy’s pre-practice Gatorade, and he’s imagining evil little sophomores with impossible eyes who think calculus is easy.
The kid offers his hand. “Ed.”
Much of Roy’s better judgment quails as he shakes. “Roy Mustang.”
He’s gotten used to smiling and nodding winsomely when people invariably ask, Like the car?—or, at lame parties at the team guys’ houses, he has to wink broadly at girls and say Like the smooth ride or the stallion.
But the kid’s—Ed’s—eyes don’t register any change. He’s got a hell of a grip, though.
“Cool,” he says. “Let’s get fuckin’ Newtonian.”
Roy prides himself on the acumen that lets him slither between social strata, but this is terrifying, because he has no idea what to make of Ed.
“I hope Winry’s okay,” Al says.
“She’s got Paninya,” Ed says. He’s so fucking distracted; what’s wrong with his head? He keeps looking down at his sandwich and realizing he’s forgotten to take the next bite. “If they work together, they can probably take over the whole school.”
“We should take over this school,” Al says.
Alfons spears a garbanzo bean in his salad so viciously that Ed wonders whose testicle that was meant to be. “Have fun with that.”
Al scoots a little closer to Alfons on the bench and flashes his sun-breaking-through-the-clouds smile. Juxtaposed like that, they look like magic, perfect wonder-twins, except for the color palettes and Al’s shorter hair.
“Lighten up,” Al says. “Just give me the name of the next person who bullies—”
“Hate that word,” Alfons mutters.
“Well, it’s what’s happening. All I need is a name, and they won’t be in a state of sufficient psychological awareness to bully anyone ever again.”
“Al,” Ed says, “if you get caught driving a bully to clinical insanity, you’re the one who’s gonna go to jail.”
“If,” Al says. “If I get caught.”
Ed is so totally not having that argument again. “Hey, Alfons,” he says. “You heard of some guy named Roy Mustang?”
Alfons gives Ed the slightly bitter sardonic look that’s replaced happy-go-lucky as his default expression. It’s really—sad. It’s really sad; he used to be different. “You mean the record-setting quarterback of the football team who may or may not be dating the even-more-record-setting captain of the girls’ field hockey team?”
“Oh,” Ed says. “Is he? He didn’t seem like enough of a prick to be a quarterback.”
Alfons stirs his salad dressing around a little as he chooses his words. “He’s not quite as much of a huge, dick-munching douchebag as most of the team. He was in my AP Physics class last year—”
Ed sometimes wants to hug Alfons for setting a precedent at this craphole school for underclassmen testing into higher-level classes. Ed would be even more bored out of his fucking mind if he had to sit through fucking trigonometry and fucking sophomore chemistry every single day.
“—and he was really respectful and kind of… unobtrusive, really. He actually has a brain, too.” Alfons clears his throat and stabs a few leaves of lettuce. “He and Noah were lab partners for a while, and she said he was much nicer than she expected. I think he sort of has to put on some of the asshole persona when he’s with the other big shots on the team, but mostly he hangs out with the same people he did in middle school. He actually got them all onto the team—except for Riza Hawkeye, of course, and I think that must be partly because he’s worried she’d be a better quarterback than he is. They’re all okay, I guess. If you ever need dirt on Jean Havoc, though, I once saw him bumming a cigarette off of a homeless guy.”
“Alfons,” Al says, “you could take over the school. You know everything about everyone.”
“That’s because I don’t have any friends,” Alfons says flatly. “So I have to listen to other people’s conversations instead of having any meaningful social interactions of my own.”
“Jesus,” Ed says, staring at him. “Why didn’t you ever tell us how shitty your school was?”
“I just have to get through it,” Alfons says, picking at his salad again. “Einstein hated school too. You do your time, you suffer, and then you move away and never come back.”
“That’s a bit dark,” Al says uncertainly.
“Sorry,” Alfons mumbles, more at his salad than at Al. “I’m tired. I’m just… tired.”
Al puts an arm around his shoulders. Some jock walking by very helpfully yells, “Gay!” despite the fact that they look like the brothers here.
Alfons covers his face with his hands. “Somebody dropped a couple letters. It was never meant to be ‘high school’; it’s hell school.”
Al gives Ed a look full of plans for bloody vengeance, and all Ed has to give back is a useless shrug.
Ed—the mysterious, miraculous, unsettlingly preoccupying Ed—is reading a Stephen Hawking book and chewing on his hair (his own hair; not Stephen Hawking’s) when Roy drags his tortured body into the library and drops it into a chair.
“I guess you come from football practice, huh?” Ed says, eyes still skimming across the page. “So you’re not getting all cleaned up just for me.”
“I had a dream last night that I was mobbed by integral signs,” Roy says, letting his head loll back against the chair. “An hour ago I got tackled by three of the guys on the team, and then everyone else dog-piled on top ‘for fun’. Do you think that means I’m psychic?”
“I think that means you’re in a stupid sport,” Ed says.
“If you hate on football,” Roy says solemnly, “the terrorists win.”
“Touchdown for terrorism!” Ed says, but if Roy’s not mistaken he’s fighting down a grin. “Terrorism is awarded a totally illogical number of points! Terrorism’s going to win a bowl, or maybe another piece of tableware!”
Roy needs to keep thinking about something—anything—other than integral signs in football jerseys, and he doesn’t think he’s up to talking Hawking. “What qualifies a not-stupid sport, then?”
“Not being stupid,” Ed says. He runs a fingertip up and down the edge of the book cover. “I… used to do gymnastics. Only this craphole doesn’t have a program because all the money goes to craphole football. And I can’t exactly pay the fees for a private gym, not that I have a car to get to one with anyway. And I’m not even sure I want to compete in college, but none of the good schools’re gonna want me if I haven’t logged any real practice in a year, and they might not let me be on the team anyway because I’m so much younger, and I can’t go to Stanford because my dad taught there, and… And stop looking at me, what’s your problem?”
Roy isn’t about to become a groundbreaking mathematician—if anything, a chemist; chemistry makes sense; the numbers in chemistry come from something concrete; the equations in chemistry balance—but he’s far from stupid. He has a talent for reading people, and he has a talent for manipulating their motivations so subtly that they walk away with only the faintest inkling that the idea wasn’t theirs from the start.
“The cheer team,” Roy says.
Ed stares at him like he’s a particularly unattractive alien.
“They’re nationally ranked,” Roy says, “they’re well-funded, and they do a lot of tumbling.”
“The only thing that’d help with is my fucking floor routine,” Ed says, scowling. “Which is fine, thank you.”
“The district is renovating our weight room,” Roy says. “In the meantime, a local gym’s been nice enough to give sports players extremely discounted memberships.”
“They prob’ly don’t have a set of parallel bars sitting around,” Ed says. The scowl deepens. “Do they?”
“Well,” Roy says lightly, scraping a bit of field dirt from under a fingernail, “it probably doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t last a week on the cheer squad.”
“Oh, fuck you,” Ed hisses, jabbing a finger at him. “You think I’m a coward? I don’t give a motherfucking shit what you people say about me. Listen up, Mustang—if you get an A on your calc test this Friday, then you tell me where and when the fucking cheer tryouts are, and I will blow their shit out of the water.”
“Done,” Roy says, and shaking hands with a sophomore for the second time in two days really shouldn’t make him feel like he’s sold his soul.
Ed fucking aces the stupid fucking cheer fucking tryouts.
Obviously.
He breaks it to the Alpha Males (Al and Alfons don’t find their new name anywhere near as funny as he does) and the Hugheses over—or, really, through, since his mouth is full—some of Gracia’s amazing peanut butter cookies.
“I think you should go for it,” Gracia says. “If you find that you don’t like it, you can always quit the team later on.”
“It would be a good way to channel your energy,” Al says. “And despite the alarming injury rate, I think it’ll actually be safer than the year you took up pyrotechnics.”
“We can bring Elysia to all of your meets!” Hughes says, beaming, ruffling Elysia’s hair until she giggles and bats at his hand. “She’ll be so adorable in the school colors—won’t you, sweetie? We can get her little tiny pom-pons, and she can cheer you on while you cheer for the team!”
“How meta,” Alfons mutters.
“I know you think it’s a bad idea,” Ed says, “but you think leaving the house is a bad idea.”
“Leaving the house is a bad idea,” Alfons says. “This… is suicide. They’re going to tear you apart.”
Ed has to grin at that. “Oh, yeah? Let ’em try.”
Ed continues to be an excellent tutor/torturer/slave-driver most afternoons, and Roy continues to hack his way through calculus like a man with a machete making for treasure at the heart of the jungle. It’s a little too disconcerting to extend that metaphor to casting himself as Indiana Jones and the AP test as the Temple of Doom, so he tries not to think about it.
All Ed will ever say about the cheerleading life is that it’s “interesting”, and then he tends to spit out the thoroughly-masticated drawstring of his hoodie and slam Roy’s textbook open on the table. Ed doesn’t seem to realize how lucky they are that the early-evening-shift librarian, by the way she looks at them, is waiting for Roy to turn eighteen before she tries to jump him—anyone else would have written them up or kicked them out by now.
In any case, it’s not until Roy steps out onto the field for the homecoming game that he understands that he’s made a terrible mistake.
He’d noticed, of course, that Ed is blond. Despite the rather startling vibrancy of Ed’s blondness, in fact, Roy has tried and failed to spot any traitorous dark roots. He can hardly imagine Ed giving a damn about something as frivolous as hair dye, but he couldn’t help taking a look.
The oversight—the tragic, crippling, world-ending oversight—was that his and Ed’s encounters took place exclusively in the library, always sitting down at the tutoring table, with Ed wearing that same too-big red sweatshirt rain or shine, regardless of the temperature outside.
Thus it is that when Roy sees him bounding onto the field, turning an effortless handspring, an effortless backflip, an effortless cartwheel—
When Roy sees that bright blond hair whipping back and forth like a gold pennant—
When Roy sees the perfect, perfect, perfect ass so beautifully showcased by the stretchy black and silver pants—
He realizes all at once that he is seriously, seriously fucked.