Accidents Will Happen
By Rurouni Star

All right. It's Thanksgiving. I'm in a write-y kind of mood and not really wanting to be overly serious about it. Therefore, you get this. One bite-sized chapter a day. Forgive the complete WTF!ness of the story, because it does get way weird later. It's the caffeine.

Summary: Mustang is bored. Ed comes back. Mustang becomes less bored.

Prologue:
Another Day at the Office

Roy Mustang, Flame Alchemist, illustrious colonel, and all-around frightening sonuvabitch, was bored.

This was not an unusual occurrence. In point of fact, it happened just about every day, starting with the early morning wake, his cup of coffee, and a certain blonde-haired ice-eyed woman in his office with a stack of paperwork that reached to her eyes when she carried it.

Because, of course, being Flame Alchemist, illustrious colonel, and an all-around frightening sonuvabitch required him to scrawl his name three times a piece on five hundred sheets of wasted paper each day.

Mustang stared at the undiminished pile with a slight frown, tapping the fingers of his right hand on the highly polished wood of his cherry wood desk.

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Perhaps, he reflected, he ought to get another cup of coffee.

Just as he was rising from his seat and planning his route of escape through the office to the break room, however, a furious scream from just beyond his door made him sit back down, a smirk appearing instantly on his face.

The solution to his dilemma had, in fact, just arrived.

His door slammed open with an inhuman force just as he managed to cultivate the perfect expression of non-interest. A different blonde-haired subordinate pushed his way through the door, and Mustang remembered why it was he enjoyed his job so immensely and with such maliciousness.

"Did someone step on you again?" he asked mildly of the teen that had burst into his office, holding the smirk perfectly in place.

Edward Elric, bane of evildoers and kneecaps everywhere, leveled a twitching glare in his direction.

"Who are you calling so short that people step on him like an ant?" Ed hissed angrily, for once hitting the nail right on the head.

Mustang held up his hands in submission, still smiling. "I meant nothing of the sort, of course," he protested. "I just thought someone might have missed seeing you and tripped."

Ed gritted his teeth and, for once, seemed to make an effort to control himself. After a moment, he let out a long breath and closed his eyes, as though he'd just finished mentally counting to ten. Mustang, interested in his report despite himself, made no further height-related comments as the Fullmetal Alchemist sank into a chair in front of his desk.

It was very hard to hold himself back, however, as Ed seemed to have sunk so very far into the chair that he looked even shorter than usual.

"Reporting back, as promised," the other alchemist said unexpectedly, removing the temptation. "I'm ready to resume work."

"And your personal business?" Mustang asked with a raised eyebrow.

Ed frowned momentarily, and the colonel had the impression that he was grinding his teeth together. "Incomplete," he grit out.

The colonel's other eyebrow shot up, then, and he leaned back into his own chair. "I don't suppose you feel like informing me exactly why you requested two weeks leave out of the blue? We both know it wasn't to visit your brother – you said earlier that he was on his own vacation."

Vacation being a code word for "honeymoon". It was highly unlikely that Ed would be visiting him while he was with Winry Rockbell on the coast…

"You're right," Ed muttered. "I don't feel like telling you. I just had a score to settle, and I didn't quite manage it."

Mustang shrugged. "All right then."

Edward's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "All right then?" he asked. "You're not going to pry every little detail out of me that you can like the nosy little bastard you are?"

Mustang merely smiled. "Of course not. I have Hughes, after all."

Ed's resulting gape officially turned the day from 'boring' to 'highly amusing'.

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