FMA -- 51% Problem Child: Chapter 1
Title: 51% Problem Child (Chapter 1)
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Characters/Pairings: Roy/Ed, Al/Alfons (HELLS YEAH), Hawkeye/Ross; featuring various characters from Brotherhood as well as '03 because all canons should fear me
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 23,850
Warnings: language, teenagers scare the livin' shit out of me, canonsmash, crack and madness, dramaaaaaa
Summary: The homecoming dance follows right on the heels of the first football game, which will make it easy for Roy to remember the date of his own destruction.
Author's Note: Fittingly enough, the first part of this fic had a number of truly wonderful cheerleaders who gave me some incomparably great ideas and brainstorming assistance. You guys know who you are, and hopefully you know how much I appreciate it. :3 ♥♥♥ I would like to make a formal apology for the fact that this cliffhanger is actually worse than the last one - and I'd promise that the next part won't take almost two years to produce, but I always end up a liar when I do that. XD I'm also veryveryvery sorry for the fact that only the first few pieces are coming out today - the later parts need a bit more editing, and I won't have time for that until next weekend. :c The chapter titles are from Florence, 'cause I needed some musical accompaniment to slog through the end of this ridiculous thing. X'D
51% PROBLEM CHILD
CHAPTER 1: Louder Than Sirens
Alfons is leaning forward, his elbows on his knees and his chin cradled in his hands, gazing out at the football field and looking kind of disconcerted. He glances over at Al. “Are you okay with the fact that the entire school is staring at your brother’s butt?”
“No,” Al says truthfully. “But my choices are to put up with it or to gouge out the eyes of every person here, and that would take a really long time.”
Alfons chews on his bottom lip slowly. He’s wearing a pair of navy blue knit gloves-he was saying earlier that he cut the fingers off of them himself to make it easier to operate his telescope.
“I’d help you,” he says.
“Thanks,” Al says.
The bleachers are really cold. He scoots a little closer.
“Is Mr. Hughes actually going to sit with us?” he asks.
“I’m not sure,” Alfons says, hunching his shoulders. He looks like a bird fluffing up his feathers-it’s really adorable, and Al will never, ever tell him so. “Maybe after the game starts, and Ed sits down, he’ll realize there’s nothing to take pictures of until halftime.”
“Don’t cheerleaders have to celebrate touchdowns?” Al asks. They never went to football games at their old school; Winry dated one of the linebackers the summer before they started, and he was evil, so they boycotted the team in every way they could.
“Oh,” Alfons says. “I guess so.” He glances over at Mrs. Hughes, who is quite contentedly focused on preventing Elysia from spilling apple juice all down her little pink parka. “It’s funny,” Alfons says, nodding down at the man who has flung himself halfway over the railing of the bottom row, the better to document the way a dozen female cheerleaders pale almost to invisibility around Ed’s pinwheeling grace. They can see the camera flash from here. “Normally he’s only like this with Elysia or on holidays.”
Alfons pauses another moment, and then he turns to Al, and it’s only a half-smile, but it’s the warmest and most genuine one that Al has seen on his face since they arrived.
“I guess you guys are definitely part of the family,” Alfons says.
Al’s heart swells until he thinks he’s going to choke.
It’s fine. It’s going to be fine. Everybody has-preferences, and everybody has a couple moments where they go off the deep end and totally lose their shit, but most people climb back out of the pool afterward and dry off and get on with their lives.
Oh, God, Roy’s drowning. He’s fucked. He’s so fucked. He’s so fucked there has to be a stronger word than fucked for what he is, like megafucked or hellafucked or überfuckalized. He is überfuckalized beyond recognition; he can’t stop looking, and somebody’s bound to notice and call him out and obliterate everything he’s spent the past four years building from scratch. He founded an empire, raised a temple, conquered a waste, and now he can feel it crumbling.
Not now. Not when he’s so close to the finish line. Not when he can practically smell the cake at his own fucking graduation party.
Get a goddamn grip, Mustang, he thinks. He’s heard his speaking voice recorded, and the voice in his head is different. Sometimes he thinks it’s his father’s. You’re eight months from a man, you’re the most decorated QB this school has ever had, and you’re going to be a Stanford student. Get the fuck out there and act like it.
He can do this.
He has to.
He tears his eyes away from Ed and forces them to focus on the coterie of black-and-silver-clad boys slouching on the bench. His heart is thudding in his ears, and the lights are always too bright, but whether or not they show it, these guys want it, too. They want to win. For a lot of them-for Jean, at least, and for all of the dumb jocks who tag along at Roy’s heels because he’s the top dog here-this is all they’ve got. Football is all they’ve got; winning is all they’ve got; and they need him, or they’re nothing.
Roy breathes in, breathes out, and flexes his fingers. This is his favorite game in the world. That’s got to count for something.
The refs wave the cheerleaders off the field, and as most of them prance away with pigtails trailing, the refs stare unabashedly at the part of Roy’s vision that he’s blacking out with a mental Sharpie-harsh, heavy scribbles that can’t quite hide one last standing backflip that earns a ripple of approbation from the crowd.
But as the whole cluster of cheerleaders goes to sit on the track that runs between the field and the bleachers, preserving their pert little asses from the damp grass, the band starts up, and the refs start posturing, and the guys start stretching, and everything is tilting back towards normalcy. It’s the first official iteration of the year, but this is a process Roy practices nightly in his head.
This is a routine. This is a regimen. This is a ritual. It is a familiar pattern that begins when the band’s brassy overtures and the roar of the crowd fade to a humming at the back of Roy’s head-a sequence that ends with him raising both arms skyward and letting the endorphins rampage through his veins. It’s just the middle that’s up in the air, buzzing with the lights, flitting and swooping with the moths, and all he has to do is reach out and take it.
There’s a huge collective rustle as everyone gets to their feet so that the band can barge through “The Star-Spangled Banner” while everyone holds their right hands over their left lungs and tries not to look too impatient about the rote patriotism standing between them and their football game. Roy angles his body towards the flag and his eyes towards the other team. These are the guys from the district’s other high school, down the road. These are the guys who have the same geographic region, the same demographics, maybe better test scores, maybe better grades. The tall guy at the front is the quarterback; Roy read up and stalked him on Facebook, glared at his profile picture until the red and white jersey blurred and looked like blood-splattered snow. This kid is quite possibly the single biggest threat in the country to Roy’s bid for that Stanford spot.
It’s nothing personal, but Roy is going to destroy him.
There’s a slight breeze-just enough to ruffle the tips of the grass stalks; just enough to tickle the hair at the back of his neck until he fits his helmet on. The insulation that will be protecting his brain from blunt force trauma for the next two hours doesn’t shut out the noise, but everything does dull a little more. The rest of the world is fading out to make way for this: the lights, the dirt, the grass, the muscles in Roy’s body, the itch in his fingertips for pebbled leather-just a touch. His fingers only want to kiss it and let it go.
He always has Heymans call the coin toss; the guy has eyes like a falcon even for a challenge that involves so little skill. Roy doesn’t believe in luck, but his personal track record for coin-tosses is so shitty it’s a statistical miracle, and he prefers to start the game on his terms.
Heymans doesn’t disappoint.
They take up their lines. The Hillview QB shouts something, and the red-and-white bodies shuffle like playing cards in Wonderland as they switch their cornerbacks so that the taller one can cover Jean. Roy gets a glimpse of the QB’s eyes; they’re dark brown and darting every which way; he’s grimacing around his mouthguard already. Roy doesn’t smile just yet, but it’s nice that these guys have done their homework, and they’re scared.
It’s right about time to give them a reason.
The ref whistles; the clock shudders into motion; they’ve been planning to start this game with this play since Heymans designed it early in the pre-season.
Sometimes, especially in the first couple games of the season, Roy will have a moment where it’s all just too surreal-where the situation is too bizarre, and his being in it is briefly inconceivable, and holy shit football is a stupid game. He’s crouched down staring between Kain Fuery’s legs, waiting for a ball that’s not even round to get pitched at his head so that he can hurl it to somebody else. What in the hell are they all doing? Why do people take this seriously?
“Hut,” he says.
He can hear his own voice from a few minutes ago reverberating in his head. Blue 69-yes, that was very mature, Heymans, ha, ha, ha-and the snap on four. Everybody crystal? Ready? Break!
“Hut,” he says.
Kain’s fingers twitch in open air.
One of these nights, one of these days, the huddle won’t break; he will. It’s a weird thought, and it drops in his stomach like a stone. He’s been flying high since freshman year-how long does he honestly think he can keep this up?
“Hut,” he says.
He drags his fingers through the grass by his right foot and breathes in the damp. This field is a living thing; and he is a living thing; and there’s some complicated physics reason why the shape of the planet is actually slightly oblong, even if it’s not quite like a football. There’s nothing he hates more than astroturf on a football field; he has to be a part of this, or the whole thing dissolves into nonsense. He rubs the grains of dirt into his fingertips and focuses on the way the grass cradles that stupid brown ball.
Let’s do this.
“Hut,” he says.
Kain’s hands should have their own mythical origin story; the ball smacks into Roy’s palms so sharply his skin tingles; Jean feints right and then jackknifes his narrow body between two Hillview goons and takes off. There’s a play clock in Roy’s head, bigger and brighter orange than the one on the scoreboard-one-one-thousand-two-one-thousand-
The Hillview lunk shoves past Kain, who yelps as he goes down; their smallest player still makes Kain look like a seventh-grader; no time to worry about whether they knocked one of his contacts out again; the field is a fast-expanding chessboard of black-silver and red-white, and there is an unfriendly bulk barreling towards Roy-
The trick is that you can’t think beyond the pass. You just have to get the ball out of your hands, get it moving, get it out and away; letting go of it won’t save you, but you can’t think about that yet. The trick is to shift your arm back and give over to how natural it feels to transport an object by throwing it. The trick is that you play keep-away every day of your life, and this is just a less existential version of the game that dictates everything.
The trick is to spin the ball off the tips of your fingers as you send it soaring, so that it moves like a bullet and flies directly at the silver 22 on Jean’s chest.
He tucks it in against his body like a baby, barely interrupts his stride-
And a freight train slams into Roy’s ribcage and drags him to the ground.
Most likely he’s never going to stop wondering, in that first moment of breathless agony, whether he’s damaged his spine this time. Funny how something so much like a hug can actually kill you, padded uniform and all, if you twist your body just the wrong way.
It makes him feel fragile. It makes him feel lucky. It makes him feel alive.
It makes him feel really fucking sore. A stranger actually stopped him in the supermarket sophomore year and stared at his bruises and asked if he was being abused.
The linebacker who just tried to crush him into kibble hops back up, and Roy wheezes in a breath and starts to feel slightly less like Flat Stanley. The linebacker holds out a hand; Roy thinks that the face behind the helmet mask looks familiar, which means the guy is almost certainly a senior.
I’m taking you down, Roy thinks. I’m taking you all down, and I’m taking your scholarships.
He clasps the offered hand around the wrist and shifts his weight to make it easier for the guy to haul him upright.
“Hey, thanks,” he says.
So cheerleading is super fucking weird. It’s like a really stupid roller coaster-you have to be all crazy-excited about the start of the game, and then you have to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down and stay there clinging to your pom-pons and pretending to give a crap about the dumb jocks running back and forth between two giant tuning forks, fighting over a piece of leather. What fucking part of this is cheery?
And then you’re supposed to get progressively more agitated when the plays keep pushing the line of scrimmage (people keep saying “scrimmage” like it doesn’t sound like an STD) down the field. And you’re supposed to bounce up and down and yell totally insipid things like “Go, go, go!” as if it wouldn’t be distracting if the guy could even hear you. And then, as it turns out, when Jean Havoc, Moocher of Hobos’ Cigarettes, gets the piece of leather all the way down to the endzone, you have to go nuts, although at least at that point somebody encourages Ed to do a couple ostentatious backflips while the crowd in the bleachers roars.
All in all it’s probably a lot like being a little organ-grinder monkey, although admittedly Ed doesn’t have a whole ton of personal experience being a monkey, so he’s drawing on conjecture here.
It’s sort of fun, though, too, after a while-because you do get caught up. He knows about crowd energy from the part of gymnastics meets before he used to retreat completely into the safety of his head, and from that school play they did in elementary school where Al got really nervous and threw up onstage, but this is some incredible shit. The air is practically sizzling; and every time there’s a pause for the refs to argue or for the players to catch their breath, the band’ll bludgeon their way through the melody of either an 80s song or something that’s still on the radio; and it’s like the whole world and all of its emotions have been crammed into this little bleacher-bowl crucible, and everyone’s going to lose it.
After Havoc does a touchdown dance so hilariously embarrassing it explains why he’s “serially single” (Alfons should really start a blog or some shit), the little tiny guy whose jersey says FUERY (the extra E makes Ed realize it’s his name instead of a mean-spirited joke) has to go through an elaborate half-play thing and kick the ball through the tuning fork, which for some reason counts for one point even though it’s way more than one-sixth as difficult as running down the field with a ball in your hands.
Mustang goes around squeezing shoulders, not that anybody can probably feel it under all of the padding, and then heads to the sideline and drops onto the bench so some broader-chested defender guy can take his spot on the field. Watching Mustang is even more interesting than analyzing the mob psychology-the balance of strategy and improvisation in this dumb game pretty much rests on the shoulders of the quarterback, and Mustang gets intense. In the library, even when the calculus is turning his limited little brain into scrambled eggs, he’s really chill and kind of charming-which is obnoxious; Ed hates charisma; you can’t trust power you can’t explain. This, though, is like watching a friendly cat hunting sparrows.
Mustang tugs his helmet off, dangles it from one hand, and runs the other through his sweaty hair, which sticks up all over the place. He laughs halfheartedly at something the guy next to him says, and then he’s got his laser-gaze fixated on the field again; every now and then he looks up towards the clock.
Very, very belatedly, Ed realizes he’s staring.
Well, so the fuck what? Everyone else is looking at the game, but it’s already pretty obvious that their team has more technical skill in basically every aspect of the sport, so unless something goes horribly wrong, they’re going to win, and what happens in the middle isn’t really that important. It makes more sense to look at the guy who holds all of the shit together on the field, to try to figure out what makes him tick. That’s what explains everything.
…and so maybe there’s a tiny little sliver of a chance that Roy Mustang’s kind of not totally bad to look at, either. He’s got a really nice neck, for one thing-graceful. When he’s leaning forward like this, or bending over his calc book, his hair sort of parts around it, and it just… it curves nicely. It’s just-it’s a really good neck. It’s the kind of neck that artists would probably aspire to drawing, and poets would write lots of badly-rhymed sappy shit about. It’s not wrong to want to look at a neck that’s really good to look at.
…and so maybe Mustang’s eyes are kind of nice, too, and his nose, and he has an interesting chin, and holy shit he has nice hands.
Ed really hopes that if the other team scores, they’re allowed to shout obscenities. Nobody’s taught him a “F-U-C-K, who’s the team that sucks today?” cheer yet, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t have one. Jesus, anything to distract his stupid animal brain from Mustang.
Just then one of the girls near him goes, “Oh-!”, and Ed looks at the field just in time to see the one whose jersey says BREDA ram his shoulder into the other-team guy running with the ball, and the ball pops up out of his arms like a buttered eel (Mom used to say that; it still doesn’t make any damn sense)-
And Breda scoops it right out of the air, and the disembodied voice from the speakers thunders “Fumble goes to the Timberwolves!”, and then everybody in the bleachers just goes batshit, and all the other cheerleaders are whooping and flailing around even as Breda gets tackled to the grass.
Ed would’ve thought Breda wouldn’t be celebrating, at least, given that he just got his face mashed into the field, but when the guy clambers back up to his feet, he’s grinning like he just won the lottery.
Clearly everybody who enjoys this game has lost their fuckin’ minds.
“Halftime already?” Hughes sings. “My goodness, this game is so riveting, I can’t believe how fast it’s going! Isn’t that right, sweetie? Isn’t this fun?”
‘Fun’ is one word for it, though Alfons thinks ‘ass-numbing’ might be more apt.
“Yeah, Daddy!” If nothing else, Elysia seems to have inherited her father’s boundless enthusiasm. Alfons kind of wishes he had that hereditary predisposition. “Canna have a hot choklit?”
Ordinarily, Alfons doesn’t like children. Ordinarily, Alfons doesn’t like to be mothered, which of course is just one letter short of smothered; ordinarily, Alfons doesn’t like to be petted and looked after and cared for, because it makes him feel confined.
But the Hugheses are extraordinary to say the least. They’re his family; they chose him, and they took him in and wrapped him up in their warm little nuclear nest even though he doesn’t belong. He loves them for a lot of things, but he loves them the most for that-for wanting him.
“Of course you can, cupcake!” Hughes is saying. “Sweeties for my sweetie!”
And then it’s time for a round of the very familiar stubble-snuggle game, which elicits a series of squeals from Elysia. Alfons is still surprised every time to find that what bubbles in his throat at moments like this is laughter instead of bile.
“Let me take her,” Gracia says, running a hand up and down Hughes’s arm. “You try to get a picture of the boys all together before Edward has to perform.”
“Beautiful and brilliant,” Hughes sighs, swooping in to kiss her. “I lead a charmed life. You heard the perfect woman, Alpha Males-come on!”
Alfons is going to kill Ed for sharing that nickname with Hughes.
Al picks his way down the bleachers, stepping in empty spaces and vacated seats, and just by the delicateness of it, Alfons can tell he’d be every bit as stunningly acrobatic as Ed is.
Alfons shouldn’t be watching Al. He should be watching where he’s going. He should be watching his back, because no one else is going to do it for him.
“Oh,” Frank Archer, captain of the lacrosse team and full-time dickwad, says as he elbows Alfons’s shin almost hard enough to send him toppling, “didn’t see you there.”
“It’s fine,” Alfons says, trying to step past him and finding a pale hand in the path of his retreat.
“How’s your Mexican girlfriend?” Archer asks.
Alfons could say a lot of things. He could say Noah is Romani, you ignorant shit. He could say She’s not my girlfriend; we just had total and complete ostracism in common. He could say She’s at community college taking classes to transfer, because she has a future, unlike you.
What he says is, “Have you met Mr. Hughes? He’s a police detective for the county.”
There’s a list a mile long of things Alfons appreciates about Hughes, and one of those things is the fierce intellect underneath the exuberance.
“Sorry,” Hughes says, holding out a hand and holding up a grin that doesn’t touch his eyes. “What was your name, again?”
Archer mumbles something as he shakes and becomes significantly less obstructive to Alfons’s descent. Alfons would count it as a victory if he didn’t know he was going to pay for it in blood and humiliation come Monday.
But Monday’s still a ways off, isn’t it? He just wants to have fun tonight. Is that really so much to ask?
Al’s already leaning over the railing and waving his arms by the time Alfons and Hughes make it to the bottom of the bleachers; people jostle past them to get to the stairs, strangely delighted to go pay too much for food and lame commemorative junk.
“Brother!” Al is shouting. “Hey, Ed!”
Ed, of course, responds like a dog at his master’s whistle-if a dog could dart over, shimmy up one of the poles that raises the bleachers six feet off of the ground, and sling himself up onto the ledge to come level with them inside of thirty seconds. “Hey!”
Al flings both arms around him and hugs him happily despite the metal railing in the way. “You look amazing out there, Brother!”
Ed blushes faintly. “Shut up, I do not.” He tugs on the fringe of Al’s scarf. “You warm enough?”
“Yes,” Al says. “C’mere, Alfons-”
Just like that, Ed has his free arm draped over Alfons’s shoulders, and Hughes is blinding them all with the flash.
“Is there a halftime show?” Al asks. “I really need to pee, but I don’t want to miss anything.”
“They’re doing some stupid homecoming court thing,” Ed says. “With cars. The dominant girl in the squad is in it ’cause she got nominated, so the rest of us are just supposed to stay out of the way.”
Alfons leans over the rail and cranes his neck. Sure enough, they’re opening one of the gates onto the track, and they’re carefully driving in three old-school convertibles. The one in front is a cherry-red Mustang, and Alfons can guess where this is going.
“Oh,” he says. “I heard about this last year. They parade the homecoming court nominees around a little and then literally put them on a pedestal.”
Ed blinks at him and then blinks out at the honest-to-goodness red carpet they’re unfurling on the football field. To their heretofore-nonexistent credit, most of the players look extremely unimpressed.
“So essentially,” Al says, “it’s the the Westminster dog show, but with popular kids.”
Alfons could kiss him.
This is stupid. Roy had forgotten about this-two years ago, he’d just started QBing for the frosh-soph team, and he went home and passed out before the varsity game started; last year, the entire game was a maelstrom of panic and terrified desperation, and he thinks he spent halftime in the locker room, alternately hydrating and hyperventilating. Which is what he’d really prefer to be doing now. That and maybe taking a piss. Gatorade really runs through you.
Instead, though, he’s standing in the backseat of a slow-moving Mustang (oh, ha, never heard that one before) striving to amuse himself by doing a little Queen-of-England wave.
“This year,” Olivia Armstrong says, “it is my mission to halve the football budget.”
“I really doubt they even let you see the numbers,” Roy says. Olivia’s thick, pale eyelashes lower, and the corner of her mouth twitches downward. “The way I understand it, Student Body President is more or less a symbolic position, unless you count picking the prom theme as actual power.”
A vein pulses in Olivia’s temple. Ten points to Roy.
“Actual power,” Olivia says, “is the ability to dictate the fate of another human being. Do you really want to play this game with me, Mustang?”
Roy used to dream that the shooting sparks between him and Olivia would resolve into an attraction that could turn them into the school’s golden couple. Over time he realized that what he had interpreted as electric sexual tension was actually her genuine hatred of every fiber of his being-which is too bad, given that she fits squarely into the blonde-with-a-great-ass category.
Oh, well. She’s not angling for his Stanford spot because she wants to go ‘a real Ivy’, to which end he wishes her all the best and hopes that she freezes her great ass off in the snow.
“Not particularly,” he says. “I can only assume that you hate me because you think I’m a threat to your social influence.”
By the look she gives him, her mission for the year has changed from cutting the football budget to cutting off his head. Or maybe something lower.
Jesus, perish that thought.
“Don’t fuck with me, Mustang,” Olivia says. “I will make an exhibition of the skeletons in your closet.”
Idly, Roy thinks, There’s nothing in my closet.
Then he thinks, Except for me, apparently.
And then he thinks, Well, shit.
When Ed scampers off to turn a few cartwheels on the field before the game starts again, Mr. Hughes bounds back up the bleachers to get a few pictures of Elysia sipping hot chocolate, and Al sees Alfons start in surprise as they turn more slowly.
A very, very pretty girl with brown eyes is watching them interestedly.
“Are you Al Elric?” she asks.
His instinct is to shake his head slowly and back away slower, but instead he smiles and offers his hand. “Sure am!”
She puts down her pen-she has a page of notes and diagrams on a clipboard, and if he’s not mistaken they’re criticisms of the Timberwolves’ performance in the first half of this football game-and shakes warmly. “Riza Hawkeye. This is Maria.”
Maria has short dark hair and is also extremely pretty, especially with that beaming smile. Is there something in the water around here?
“Welcome to the school,” Riza is saying. “Are you settling in all right?”
“Great,” Al lies.
“Everyone treating you okay so far?” Maria asks, and Al sees Alfons twitch.
“So far,” Al says, which is… slightly less of a lie.
Alfons reaches for Al’s sleeve and then stops with his hand hovering halfway between them. “We should probably get back to our seats…”
“See you around,” Riza says.
Alfons leads the way back up, and Al doesn’t comment on the fact that they take a very different route than they did descending.
“Interesting,” Alfons says, shoving his gloved hands into his jacket pockets as they sit.
“What?” Al asks.
“Roy and Riza aren’t dating,” Alfons says. “Maria Ross is Riza’s second-in-command on the field hockey team. Did you see how close they were sitting?”
“But girls do that a lot,” Al says. “And they can get away with linking their arms and stuff.”
Oh, dear. Now it sounds like he wants to be allowed to link arms with other guys. The fact that he does is not the point.
Alfons doesn’t seem to notice. “That’s the thing, though-that’s usually a showy, look what BFFs we are gesture, but they were close in a way that was just… comfortable. And not for warmth, by the way they were dressed; just… for them.”
Alfons has such lovely eyes.
Al looks down at his own knees and smoothes out a wrinkle in the denim. “You really could tear this school apart,” he says. “You have everyone figured out.”
“Except myself, obviously,” Alfons says, and then the announcer shouts something at a hideously unnecessary volume that makes the speakers crackle with static, and the game starts up again.
Roy darts into the locker room to fetch his phone and darts back out again to hit the speed-dial in the crisp air; his blood is pure champagne, and the bubbles are rushing to his head. He only has to wait two rings before the line picks up, and he can hear the hubbub in the background. “Mom!”
“Did you bulldoze the bastards and crush their sad little dreams?” his mother asks calmly.
Roy holds the door to the locker room for Kain, who flashes him a grin. “Uh… yes? Sorry I didn’t text you at the half; there was-”
“Oh, I know. Riza sent me a picture.”
“Aw, crap.”
“My little baby’s all grown up. I left lasagna in the fridge for you-nuke it for two minutes and then chop it up a little and then do another two.”
He can’t eat before games; the nerves make him nauseous. “Thanks, Mom.”
“Go ahead and turn off the porch light when you get home. And get some sleep-you’ve got the stupid dance tomorrow night.”
Jon Pritchard high-fives him; the door swings shut. “Can’t make any promises.”
“Brat,” his mother says. “Oh, and-Roy?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m proud of you, kiddo.”
That’s even better than lasagna.
[Back to 65% Cocky Bastard] [On to Chapter 2: Louder Than Bells]
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Characters/Pairings: Roy/Ed, Al/Alfons (HELLS YEAH), Hawkeye/Ross; featuring various characters from Brotherhood as well as '03 because all canons should fear me
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 23,850
Warnings: language, teenagers scare the livin' shit out of me, canonsmash, crack and madness, dramaaaaaa
Summary: The homecoming dance follows right on the heels of the first football game, which will make it easy for Roy to remember the date of his own destruction.
Author's Note: Fittingly enough, the first part of this fic had a number of truly wonderful cheerleaders who gave me some incomparably great ideas and brainstorming assistance. You guys know who you are, and hopefully you know how much I appreciate it. :3 ♥♥♥ I would like to make a formal apology for the fact that this cliffhanger is actually worse than the last one - and I'd promise that the next part won't take almost two years to produce, but I always end up a liar when I do that. XD I'm also veryveryvery sorry for the fact that only the first few pieces are coming out today - the later parts need a bit more editing, and I won't have time for that until next weekend. :c The chapter titles are from Florence, 'cause I needed some musical accompaniment to slog through the end of this ridiculous thing. X'D
51% PROBLEM CHILD
CHAPTER 1: Louder Than Sirens
Alfons is leaning forward, his elbows on his knees and his chin cradled in his hands, gazing out at the football field and looking kind of disconcerted. He glances over at Al. “Are you okay with the fact that the entire school is staring at your brother’s butt?”
“No,” Al says truthfully. “But my choices are to put up with it or to gouge out the eyes of every person here, and that would take a really long time.”
Alfons chews on his bottom lip slowly. He’s wearing a pair of navy blue knit gloves-he was saying earlier that he cut the fingers off of them himself to make it easier to operate his telescope.
“I’d help you,” he says.
“Thanks,” Al says.
The bleachers are really cold. He scoots a little closer.
“Is Mr. Hughes actually going to sit with us?” he asks.
“I’m not sure,” Alfons says, hunching his shoulders. He looks like a bird fluffing up his feathers-it’s really adorable, and Al will never, ever tell him so. “Maybe after the game starts, and Ed sits down, he’ll realize there’s nothing to take pictures of until halftime.”
“Don’t cheerleaders have to celebrate touchdowns?” Al asks. They never went to football games at their old school; Winry dated one of the linebackers the summer before they started, and he was evil, so they boycotted the team in every way they could.
“Oh,” Alfons says. “I guess so.” He glances over at Mrs. Hughes, who is quite contentedly focused on preventing Elysia from spilling apple juice all down her little pink parka. “It’s funny,” Alfons says, nodding down at the man who has flung himself halfway over the railing of the bottom row, the better to document the way a dozen female cheerleaders pale almost to invisibility around Ed’s pinwheeling grace. They can see the camera flash from here. “Normally he’s only like this with Elysia or on holidays.”
Alfons pauses another moment, and then he turns to Al, and it’s only a half-smile, but it’s the warmest and most genuine one that Al has seen on his face since they arrived.
“I guess you guys are definitely part of the family,” Alfons says.
Al’s heart swells until he thinks he’s going to choke.
It’s fine. It’s going to be fine. Everybody has-preferences, and everybody has a couple moments where they go off the deep end and totally lose their shit, but most people climb back out of the pool afterward and dry off and get on with their lives.
Oh, God, Roy’s drowning. He’s fucked. He’s so fucked. He’s so fucked there has to be a stronger word than fucked for what he is, like megafucked or hellafucked or überfuckalized. He is überfuckalized beyond recognition; he can’t stop looking, and somebody’s bound to notice and call him out and obliterate everything he’s spent the past four years building from scratch. He founded an empire, raised a temple, conquered a waste, and now he can feel it crumbling.
Not now. Not when he’s so close to the finish line. Not when he can practically smell the cake at his own fucking graduation party.
Get a goddamn grip, Mustang, he thinks. He’s heard his speaking voice recorded, and the voice in his head is different. Sometimes he thinks it’s his father’s. You’re eight months from a man, you’re the most decorated QB this school has ever had, and you’re going to be a Stanford student. Get the fuck out there and act like it.
He can do this.
He has to.
He tears his eyes away from Ed and forces them to focus on the coterie of black-and-silver-clad boys slouching on the bench. His heart is thudding in his ears, and the lights are always too bright, but whether or not they show it, these guys want it, too. They want to win. For a lot of them-for Jean, at least, and for all of the dumb jocks who tag along at Roy’s heels because he’s the top dog here-this is all they’ve got. Football is all they’ve got; winning is all they’ve got; and they need him, or they’re nothing.
Roy breathes in, breathes out, and flexes his fingers. This is his favorite game in the world. That’s got to count for something.
The refs wave the cheerleaders off the field, and as most of them prance away with pigtails trailing, the refs stare unabashedly at the part of Roy’s vision that he’s blacking out with a mental Sharpie-harsh, heavy scribbles that can’t quite hide one last standing backflip that earns a ripple of approbation from the crowd.
But as the whole cluster of cheerleaders goes to sit on the track that runs between the field and the bleachers, preserving their pert little asses from the damp grass, the band starts up, and the refs start posturing, and the guys start stretching, and everything is tilting back towards normalcy. It’s the first official iteration of the year, but this is a process Roy practices nightly in his head.
This is a routine. This is a regimen. This is a ritual. It is a familiar pattern that begins when the band’s brassy overtures and the roar of the crowd fade to a humming at the back of Roy’s head-a sequence that ends with him raising both arms skyward and letting the endorphins rampage through his veins. It’s just the middle that’s up in the air, buzzing with the lights, flitting and swooping with the moths, and all he has to do is reach out and take it.
There’s a huge collective rustle as everyone gets to their feet so that the band can barge through “The Star-Spangled Banner” while everyone holds their right hands over their left lungs and tries not to look too impatient about the rote patriotism standing between them and their football game. Roy angles his body towards the flag and his eyes towards the other team. These are the guys from the district’s other high school, down the road. These are the guys who have the same geographic region, the same demographics, maybe better test scores, maybe better grades. The tall guy at the front is the quarterback; Roy read up and stalked him on Facebook, glared at his profile picture until the red and white jersey blurred and looked like blood-splattered snow. This kid is quite possibly the single biggest threat in the country to Roy’s bid for that Stanford spot.
It’s nothing personal, but Roy is going to destroy him.
There’s a slight breeze-just enough to ruffle the tips of the grass stalks; just enough to tickle the hair at the back of his neck until he fits his helmet on. The insulation that will be protecting his brain from blunt force trauma for the next two hours doesn’t shut out the noise, but everything does dull a little more. The rest of the world is fading out to make way for this: the lights, the dirt, the grass, the muscles in Roy’s body, the itch in his fingertips for pebbled leather-just a touch. His fingers only want to kiss it and let it go.
He always has Heymans call the coin toss; the guy has eyes like a falcon even for a challenge that involves so little skill. Roy doesn’t believe in luck, but his personal track record for coin-tosses is so shitty it’s a statistical miracle, and he prefers to start the game on his terms.
Heymans doesn’t disappoint.
They take up their lines. The Hillview QB shouts something, and the red-and-white bodies shuffle like playing cards in Wonderland as they switch their cornerbacks so that the taller one can cover Jean. Roy gets a glimpse of the QB’s eyes; they’re dark brown and darting every which way; he’s grimacing around his mouthguard already. Roy doesn’t smile just yet, but it’s nice that these guys have done their homework, and they’re scared.
It’s right about time to give them a reason.
The ref whistles; the clock shudders into motion; they’ve been planning to start this game with this play since Heymans designed it early in the pre-season.
Sometimes, especially in the first couple games of the season, Roy will have a moment where it’s all just too surreal-where the situation is too bizarre, and his being in it is briefly inconceivable, and holy shit football is a stupid game. He’s crouched down staring between Kain Fuery’s legs, waiting for a ball that’s not even round to get pitched at his head so that he can hurl it to somebody else. What in the hell are they all doing? Why do people take this seriously?
“Hut,” he says.
He can hear his own voice from a few minutes ago reverberating in his head. Blue 69-yes, that was very mature, Heymans, ha, ha, ha-and the snap on four. Everybody crystal? Ready? Break!
“Hut,” he says.
Kain’s fingers twitch in open air.
One of these nights, one of these days, the huddle won’t break; he will. It’s a weird thought, and it drops in his stomach like a stone. He’s been flying high since freshman year-how long does he honestly think he can keep this up?
“Hut,” he says.
He drags his fingers through the grass by his right foot and breathes in the damp. This field is a living thing; and he is a living thing; and there’s some complicated physics reason why the shape of the planet is actually slightly oblong, even if it’s not quite like a football. There’s nothing he hates more than astroturf on a football field; he has to be a part of this, or the whole thing dissolves into nonsense. He rubs the grains of dirt into his fingertips and focuses on the way the grass cradles that stupid brown ball.
Let’s do this.
“Hut,” he says.
Kain’s hands should have their own mythical origin story; the ball smacks into Roy’s palms so sharply his skin tingles; Jean feints right and then jackknifes his narrow body between two Hillview goons and takes off. There’s a play clock in Roy’s head, bigger and brighter orange than the one on the scoreboard-one-one-thousand-two-one-thousand-
The Hillview lunk shoves past Kain, who yelps as he goes down; their smallest player still makes Kain look like a seventh-grader; no time to worry about whether they knocked one of his contacts out again; the field is a fast-expanding chessboard of black-silver and red-white, and there is an unfriendly bulk barreling towards Roy-
The trick is that you can’t think beyond the pass. You just have to get the ball out of your hands, get it moving, get it out and away; letting go of it won’t save you, but you can’t think about that yet. The trick is to shift your arm back and give over to how natural it feels to transport an object by throwing it. The trick is that you play keep-away every day of your life, and this is just a less existential version of the game that dictates everything.
The trick is to spin the ball off the tips of your fingers as you send it soaring, so that it moves like a bullet and flies directly at the silver 22 on Jean’s chest.
He tucks it in against his body like a baby, barely interrupts his stride-
And a freight train slams into Roy’s ribcage and drags him to the ground.
Most likely he’s never going to stop wondering, in that first moment of breathless agony, whether he’s damaged his spine this time. Funny how something so much like a hug can actually kill you, padded uniform and all, if you twist your body just the wrong way.
It makes him feel fragile. It makes him feel lucky. It makes him feel alive.
It makes him feel really fucking sore. A stranger actually stopped him in the supermarket sophomore year and stared at his bruises and asked if he was being abused.
The linebacker who just tried to crush him into kibble hops back up, and Roy wheezes in a breath and starts to feel slightly less like Flat Stanley. The linebacker holds out a hand; Roy thinks that the face behind the helmet mask looks familiar, which means the guy is almost certainly a senior.
I’m taking you down, Roy thinks. I’m taking you all down, and I’m taking your scholarships.
He clasps the offered hand around the wrist and shifts his weight to make it easier for the guy to haul him upright.
“Hey, thanks,” he says.
So cheerleading is super fucking weird. It’s like a really stupid roller coaster-you have to be all crazy-excited about the start of the game, and then you have to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down and stay there clinging to your pom-pons and pretending to give a crap about the dumb jocks running back and forth between two giant tuning forks, fighting over a piece of leather. What fucking part of this is cheery?
And then you’re supposed to get progressively more agitated when the plays keep pushing the line of scrimmage (people keep saying “scrimmage” like it doesn’t sound like an STD) down the field. And you’re supposed to bounce up and down and yell totally insipid things like “Go, go, go!” as if it wouldn’t be distracting if the guy could even hear you. And then, as it turns out, when Jean Havoc, Moocher of Hobos’ Cigarettes, gets the piece of leather all the way down to the endzone, you have to go nuts, although at least at that point somebody encourages Ed to do a couple ostentatious backflips while the crowd in the bleachers roars.
All in all it’s probably a lot like being a little organ-grinder monkey, although admittedly Ed doesn’t have a whole ton of personal experience being a monkey, so he’s drawing on conjecture here.
It’s sort of fun, though, too, after a while-because you do get caught up. He knows about crowd energy from the part of gymnastics meets before he used to retreat completely into the safety of his head, and from that school play they did in elementary school where Al got really nervous and threw up onstage, but this is some incredible shit. The air is practically sizzling; and every time there’s a pause for the refs to argue or for the players to catch their breath, the band’ll bludgeon their way through the melody of either an 80s song or something that’s still on the radio; and it’s like the whole world and all of its emotions have been crammed into this little bleacher-bowl crucible, and everyone’s going to lose it.
After Havoc does a touchdown dance so hilariously embarrassing it explains why he’s “serially single” (Alfons should really start a blog or some shit), the little tiny guy whose jersey says FUERY (the extra E makes Ed realize it’s his name instead of a mean-spirited joke) has to go through an elaborate half-play thing and kick the ball through the tuning fork, which for some reason counts for one point even though it’s way more than one-sixth as difficult as running down the field with a ball in your hands.
Mustang goes around squeezing shoulders, not that anybody can probably feel it under all of the padding, and then heads to the sideline and drops onto the bench so some broader-chested defender guy can take his spot on the field. Watching Mustang is even more interesting than analyzing the mob psychology-the balance of strategy and improvisation in this dumb game pretty much rests on the shoulders of the quarterback, and Mustang gets intense. In the library, even when the calculus is turning his limited little brain into scrambled eggs, he’s really chill and kind of charming-which is obnoxious; Ed hates charisma; you can’t trust power you can’t explain. This, though, is like watching a friendly cat hunting sparrows.
Mustang tugs his helmet off, dangles it from one hand, and runs the other through his sweaty hair, which sticks up all over the place. He laughs halfheartedly at something the guy next to him says, and then he’s got his laser-gaze fixated on the field again; every now and then he looks up towards the clock.
Very, very belatedly, Ed realizes he’s staring.
Well, so the fuck what? Everyone else is looking at the game, but it’s already pretty obvious that their team has more technical skill in basically every aspect of the sport, so unless something goes horribly wrong, they’re going to win, and what happens in the middle isn’t really that important. It makes more sense to look at the guy who holds all of the shit together on the field, to try to figure out what makes him tick. That’s what explains everything.
…and so maybe there’s a tiny little sliver of a chance that Roy Mustang’s kind of not totally bad to look at, either. He’s got a really nice neck, for one thing-graceful. When he’s leaning forward like this, or bending over his calc book, his hair sort of parts around it, and it just… it curves nicely. It’s just-it’s a really good neck. It’s the kind of neck that artists would probably aspire to drawing, and poets would write lots of badly-rhymed sappy shit about. It’s not wrong to want to look at a neck that’s really good to look at.
…and so maybe Mustang’s eyes are kind of nice, too, and his nose, and he has an interesting chin, and holy shit he has nice hands.
Ed really hopes that if the other team scores, they’re allowed to shout obscenities. Nobody’s taught him a “F-U-C-K, who’s the team that sucks today?” cheer yet, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t have one. Jesus, anything to distract his stupid animal brain from Mustang.
Just then one of the girls near him goes, “Oh-!”, and Ed looks at the field just in time to see the one whose jersey says BREDA ram his shoulder into the other-team guy running with the ball, and the ball pops up out of his arms like a buttered eel (Mom used to say that; it still doesn’t make any damn sense)-
And Breda scoops it right out of the air, and the disembodied voice from the speakers thunders “Fumble goes to the Timberwolves!”, and then everybody in the bleachers just goes batshit, and all the other cheerleaders are whooping and flailing around even as Breda gets tackled to the grass.
Ed would’ve thought Breda wouldn’t be celebrating, at least, given that he just got his face mashed into the field, but when the guy clambers back up to his feet, he’s grinning like he just won the lottery.
Clearly everybody who enjoys this game has lost their fuckin’ minds.
“Halftime already?” Hughes sings. “My goodness, this game is so riveting, I can’t believe how fast it’s going! Isn’t that right, sweetie? Isn’t this fun?”
‘Fun’ is one word for it, though Alfons thinks ‘ass-numbing’ might be more apt.
“Yeah, Daddy!” If nothing else, Elysia seems to have inherited her father’s boundless enthusiasm. Alfons kind of wishes he had that hereditary predisposition. “Canna have a hot choklit?”
Ordinarily, Alfons doesn’t like children. Ordinarily, Alfons doesn’t like to be mothered, which of course is just one letter short of smothered; ordinarily, Alfons doesn’t like to be petted and looked after and cared for, because it makes him feel confined.
But the Hugheses are extraordinary to say the least. They’re his family; they chose him, and they took him in and wrapped him up in their warm little nuclear nest even though he doesn’t belong. He loves them for a lot of things, but he loves them the most for that-for wanting him.
“Of course you can, cupcake!” Hughes is saying. “Sweeties for my sweetie!”
And then it’s time for a round of the very familiar stubble-snuggle game, which elicits a series of squeals from Elysia. Alfons is still surprised every time to find that what bubbles in his throat at moments like this is laughter instead of bile.
“Let me take her,” Gracia says, running a hand up and down Hughes’s arm. “You try to get a picture of the boys all together before Edward has to perform.”
“Beautiful and brilliant,” Hughes sighs, swooping in to kiss her. “I lead a charmed life. You heard the perfect woman, Alpha Males-come on!”
Alfons is going to kill Ed for sharing that nickname with Hughes.
Al picks his way down the bleachers, stepping in empty spaces and vacated seats, and just by the delicateness of it, Alfons can tell he’d be every bit as stunningly acrobatic as Ed is.
Alfons shouldn’t be watching Al. He should be watching where he’s going. He should be watching his back, because no one else is going to do it for him.
“Oh,” Frank Archer, captain of the lacrosse team and full-time dickwad, says as he elbows Alfons’s shin almost hard enough to send him toppling, “didn’t see you there.”
“It’s fine,” Alfons says, trying to step past him and finding a pale hand in the path of his retreat.
“How’s your Mexican girlfriend?” Archer asks.
Alfons could say a lot of things. He could say Noah is Romani, you ignorant shit. He could say She’s not my girlfriend; we just had total and complete ostracism in common. He could say She’s at community college taking classes to transfer, because she has a future, unlike you.
What he says is, “Have you met Mr. Hughes? He’s a police detective for the county.”
There’s a list a mile long of things Alfons appreciates about Hughes, and one of those things is the fierce intellect underneath the exuberance.
“Sorry,” Hughes says, holding out a hand and holding up a grin that doesn’t touch his eyes. “What was your name, again?”
Archer mumbles something as he shakes and becomes significantly less obstructive to Alfons’s descent. Alfons would count it as a victory if he didn’t know he was going to pay for it in blood and humiliation come Monday.
But Monday’s still a ways off, isn’t it? He just wants to have fun tonight. Is that really so much to ask?
Al’s already leaning over the railing and waving his arms by the time Alfons and Hughes make it to the bottom of the bleachers; people jostle past them to get to the stairs, strangely delighted to go pay too much for food and lame commemorative junk.
“Brother!” Al is shouting. “Hey, Ed!”
Ed, of course, responds like a dog at his master’s whistle-if a dog could dart over, shimmy up one of the poles that raises the bleachers six feet off of the ground, and sling himself up onto the ledge to come level with them inside of thirty seconds. “Hey!”
Al flings both arms around him and hugs him happily despite the metal railing in the way. “You look amazing out there, Brother!”
Ed blushes faintly. “Shut up, I do not.” He tugs on the fringe of Al’s scarf. “You warm enough?”
“Yes,” Al says. “C’mere, Alfons-”
Just like that, Ed has his free arm draped over Alfons’s shoulders, and Hughes is blinding them all with the flash.
“Is there a halftime show?” Al asks. “I really need to pee, but I don’t want to miss anything.”
“They’re doing some stupid homecoming court thing,” Ed says. “With cars. The dominant girl in the squad is in it ’cause she got nominated, so the rest of us are just supposed to stay out of the way.”
Alfons leans over the rail and cranes his neck. Sure enough, they’re opening one of the gates onto the track, and they’re carefully driving in three old-school convertibles. The one in front is a cherry-red Mustang, and Alfons can guess where this is going.
“Oh,” he says. “I heard about this last year. They parade the homecoming court nominees around a little and then literally put them on a pedestal.”
Ed blinks at him and then blinks out at the honest-to-goodness red carpet they’re unfurling on the football field. To their heretofore-nonexistent credit, most of the players look extremely unimpressed.
“So essentially,” Al says, “it’s the the Westminster dog show, but with popular kids.”
Alfons could kiss him.
This is stupid. Roy had forgotten about this-two years ago, he’d just started QBing for the frosh-soph team, and he went home and passed out before the varsity game started; last year, the entire game was a maelstrom of panic and terrified desperation, and he thinks he spent halftime in the locker room, alternately hydrating and hyperventilating. Which is what he’d really prefer to be doing now. That and maybe taking a piss. Gatorade really runs through you.
Instead, though, he’s standing in the backseat of a slow-moving Mustang (oh, ha, never heard that one before) striving to amuse himself by doing a little Queen-of-England wave.
“This year,” Olivia Armstrong says, “it is my mission to halve the football budget.”
“I really doubt they even let you see the numbers,” Roy says. Olivia’s thick, pale eyelashes lower, and the corner of her mouth twitches downward. “The way I understand it, Student Body President is more or less a symbolic position, unless you count picking the prom theme as actual power.”
A vein pulses in Olivia’s temple. Ten points to Roy.
“Actual power,” Olivia says, “is the ability to dictate the fate of another human being. Do you really want to play this game with me, Mustang?”
Roy used to dream that the shooting sparks between him and Olivia would resolve into an attraction that could turn them into the school’s golden couple. Over time he realized that what he had interpreted as electric sexual tension was actually her genuine hatred of every fiber of his being-which is too bad, given that she fits squarely into the blonde-with-a-great-ass category.
Oh, well. She’s not angling for his Stanford spot because she wants to go ‘a real Ivy’, to which end he wishes her all the best and hopes that she freezes her great ass off in the snow.
“Not particularly,” he says. “I can only assume that you hate me because you think I’m a threat to your social influence.”
By the look she gives him, her mission for the year has changed from cutting the football budget to cutting off his head. Or maybe something lower.
Jesus, perish that thought.
“Don’t fuck with me, Mustang,” Olivia says. “I will make an exhibition of the skeletons in your closet.”
Idly, Roy thinks, There’s nothing in my closet.
Then he thinks, Except for me, apparently.
And then he thinks, Well, shit.
When Ed scampers off to turn a few cartwheels on the field before the game starts again, Mr. Hughes bounds back up the bleachers to get a few pictures of Elysia sipping hot chocolate, and Al sees Alfons start in surprise as they turn more slowly.
A very, very pretty girl with brown eyes is watching them interestedly.
“Are you Al Elric?” she asks.
His instinct is to shake his head slowly and back away slower, but instead he smiles and offers his hand. “Sure am!”
She puts down her pen-she has a page of notes and diagrams on a clipboard, and if he’s not mistaken they’re criticisms of the Timberwolves’ performance in the first half of this football game-and shakes warmly. “Riza Hawkeye. This is Maria.”
Maria has short dark hair and is also extremely pretty, especially with that beaming smile. Is there something in the water around here?
“Welcome to the school,” Riza is saying. “Are you settling in all right?”
“Great,” Al lies.
“Everyone treating you okay so far?” Maria asks, and Al sees Alfons twitch.
“So far,” Al says, which is… slightly less of a lie.
Alfons reaches for Al’s sleeve and then stops with his hand hovering halfway between them. “We should probably get back to our seats…”
“See you around,” Riza says.
Alfons leads the way back up, and Al doesn’t comment on the fact that they take a very different route than they did descending.
“Interesting,” Alfons says, shoving his gloved hands into his jacket pockets as they sit.
“What?” Al asks.
“Roy and Riza aren’t dating,” Alfons says. “Maria Ross is Riza’s second-in-command on the field hockey team. Did you see how close they were sitting?”
“But girls do that a lot,” Al says. “And they can get away with linking their arms and stuff.”
Oh, dear. Now it sounds like he wants to be allowed to link arms with other guys. The fact that he does is not the point.
Alfons doesn’t seem to notice. “That’s the thing, though-that’s usually a showy, look what BFFs we are gesture, but they were close in a way that was just… comfortable. And not for warmth, by the way they were dressed; just… for them.”
Alfons has such lovely eyes.
Al looks down at his own knees and smoothes out a wrinkle in the denim. “You really could tear this school apart,” he says. “You have everyone figured out.”
“Except myself, obviously,” Alfons says, and then the announcer shouts something at a hideously unnecessary volume that makes the speakers crackle with static, and the game starts up again.
Roy darts into the locker room to fetch his phone and darts back out again to hit the speed-dial in the crisp air; his blood is pure champagne, and the bubbles are rushing to his head. He only has to wait two rings before the line picks up, and he can hear the hubbub in the background. “Mom!”
“Did you bulldoze the bastards and crush their sad little dreams?” his mother asks calmly.
Roy holds the door to the locker room for Kain, who flashes him a grin. “Uh… yes? Sorry I didn’t text you at the half; there was-”
“Oh, I know. Riza sent me a picture.”
“Aw, crap.”
“My little baby’s all grown up. I left lasagna in the fridge for you-nuke it for two minutes and then chop it up a little and then do another two.”
He can’t eat before games; the nerves make him nauseous. “Thanks, Mom.”
“Go ahead and turn off the porch light when you get home. And get some sleep-you’ve got the stupid dance tomorrow night.”
Jon Pritchard high-fives him; the door swings shut. “Can’t make any promises.”
“Brat,” his mother says. “Oh, and-Roy?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m proud of you, kiddo.”
That’s even better than lasagna.
[Back to 65% Cocky Bastard] [On to Chapter 2: Louder Than Bells]