Prompt 163, Coffee, "Goddamn Colonel"
Title: Goddamn Colonel
Author: Tiri
Series: Any
Word Count: 250 (exactly!)
Rating: PG/PG-13 for language
Characters: Roy Mustang, Alex Rivers (OC)
Summary: Roy runs his subordinates ragged -- some more than others.
Warnings: None.
A/N: Writing succinctly is hard; I don't know how you guys do it! Maybe once I write a few fics for this comm I'll get the hang of it. Hopefully they won't all be OC fics. Dang it muse, give me something better!
Rivers hated coffee. It was a disgusting, bitter substance, which really served just to make her morning routine needlessly difficult, just to mount her frustrations before she's even out the door. It does that well, too, a curse on her tiny, intolerant body -- her fingers shake as she pulls on her uniform, doing up clasps and buttons all-too-quickly, because the caffeine pushes her out the door right that moment, even if she's always early.
Sure, it makes her accomplish more work in a day, but that leads to more work the next day -- and that snowballs, always. It had been a mistake to even start drinking, but she'd had so much work at first, she'd thought it would help. It'd only served to make her superior 'marvel at her productivity,' and soon, she had even more work to do.
He always gives her that damn cocky smile about it, too. She's jittering, grimacing at every sip from her cup, and he has the gall to clap a hand over her shoulder as he passes her workstation. He leans down and murmurs some brief praise in her ear, and she has to grumble her thanks to Colonel Goddamn Mustang, who thinks he's such hot shit -- and damn it, if he didn't have a voice so perfectly smooth, she wouldn't take it. As is, she finds herself liking it, even as he drops another stack of files on her desk.
Sometimes, she thinks she drinks just to put up with him.