Chapter Text
“Chief, you gotta get up,” Havoc pleaded, one hand on the table and another resting gently on Roy’s back.
Roy groaned, and mashed his cheek further into the sticky wood. Everything was wrong—the smell of old beer instead of perfume, the sound of his staff closing up instead of a tinkling laugh and the click of expensive high heels, Havoc’s large, rough palm attempting something like a comforting pat instead of a hand resting on his own.
He felt hungover. He wanted to feel drunk.
Instead, he focused on becoming one with the table. Tables didn’t have feelings. Tables just sat there, calm as anything. No one dumped a table for being emotionally unavailable, no one flipped their pretty, perfect hair and told a table, “Better you hear it from me than from someone you’re serious about.”
He was about to explain this to Havoc’s awkwardly firm pats when a solid leather boot, inside of which was a solid metal foot, collided with his shin.
“Ow,” he said, wrenching his face up to glare blearily in the direction of the kick.
“Get the fuck off my bar, asshole,” Ed said, singularly unimpressed.
“Technically,” Roy said with all the dignity he could muster, while Havoc snatched back his hand as if he’d touched a hot stove and made a beeline for somewhere not in the range of Hurricane Elric, “it is my bar.”
“Only on Thursdays,” Ed said, and gave Roy a narrow-eyed glare.
Roy knew that there would be another kick coming somewhere more painful than his shin if he went back down, so he gave a heavy, put-upon sigh and dragged himself upright, sitting properly on the barstool instead of sliding slowly, bitterly off of it. It was important that Ed knew how gracious he was being, following his orders in a time of crisis. He was positively magnanimous.
Ed watched for a moment more, to make sure that Roy wasn’t going back on his unspoken promise, and then rounded the bar with a humph. He threw his cleaning rag over his shoulder, and faced Roy with folded arms.
“Alright,” he said grudgingly. “What’ll it be.”
Roy grimaced. “She said I was emotionally unavailable, but that’s a bit—"
“Too on-the-nose,” Ed agreed. “No one’s gonna buy an Emotionally Unavailable.” He fiddled with a margarita glass, looking thoughtful. “I’ve got some peaches in, if you want to work in a stone-fruit reference.”
“What about being made of stone,” Roy said despondently.
Ed winced. “Did she say that?”
“She heavily implied it.”
“Made of Stone. I can work with that.”
Roy leaned on his hands, and watched while Ed methodically measured, poured, and mixed. Even through his misery, he could appreciate a good show, and Ed was nothing if not theatrical, though he’d never admit it. He insisted that flipping the bottles aerated them, despite all evidence to the contrary. Between the flips and flourishes his smooth, economical gestures were mesmerizing. Watching his hands could almost make Roy forget what he’d walked away from—or what he’d watched walk away from him—earlier that evening.
The Made of Stone was delicious—sweet and bright with peach syrup and a squeeze of lemon, over soda water and crushed ice, with muddled rosemary and a slice of fresh peach as garnish. Ed slid one of the glasses over to Roy, and they tapped them twice on the bar and once together in silent tradition before drinking.
It was a perfect summer drink, and Roy hummed his approval as he took another sip.
Ed was frowning at his glass consideringly. “I think the rosemary is too much.”
“Maybe if it was infused in the syrup, instead of muddled?”
Ed turned his frown up to Roy. “You know, sometimes I think you might not be as stupid as you are,” he said, and swung away, shouting for Havoc to help him with the kegs they had on tap for the night.
Roy stayed seated. Usually he would help with closing, or at least glance over the books to see how they’d done that night, but it wasn’t an ordinary night. He swirled his glass, and watched as the ice melted.
He’d really expected Olivier to stay. He’d gone into the relationship with high hopes, and they’d been together for nearly six months. She’d met his staff, spent time at the bar. Maes was friends with her brother. She knew what it was to be a veteran. All of the pieces seemed to be falling into place, until two hours ago when they all abruptly fell apart, and then burst into flames for good measure.
It wasn’t one of the breakups that he’d seen coming from a mile away. He’d had plenty of those, but Olivier hadn’t given him any signs over the past couple weeks. She was just as calm and cool as she’d been when they first met, just as calm and cool as she’d been when she told him, matter-of-factly, as if it was something he should have known from the beginning, that she didn’t see any sort of future with him.
Perhaps that was the problem.
He’d thought that they made a pretty good team, he’d thought that she wanted someone calm and cool to match her, and so he’d been suave and charming and kept his complaints and his histrionics and, he was now beginning to see, all of his real emotions for his friends and employees. He wasn’t sure they’d ever had a genuine conversation, looking back on it. He’d thought that that was what she wanted. Evidently, it wasn’t.
After Havoc and Ed finished stacking chairs and wiping tables, Ed returned to the bar. He exchanged Roy’s glass of melted ice and rosemary for a plastic cup that had been chilling in the bar fridge, a Strange Obsession to close out the night. Roy took the hint, and took the cup to go. It was a good choice, fresh and fruity to match the Made of Stone with an edge from the peppercorn that gave it a satisfying burn, and made him almost forget how much he wanted to crack open a bottle of bottom shelf vodka and drown his sorrows for a day or five.
He locked up under the watchful eyes of Ed and Havoc, and waved off their offers to see him home. Or, rather, he waved off Havoc’s spluttered attempt at an offer, and dismissed the silent inquiry that lived in the tilt of Ed’s head and the turn of his shoulders, with a smile small enough that it might not even be fake.
He walked home alone.