He just didn't understand it.

That's all it came down to in the end. It simply didn't make sense. All his life he'd spent watching his face in the mirror, perfecting a grand total of two facial expressions, blank and smirking. (Oh that smirk, that smirky bastard smirk. Women loved it, men hated it and it just got him everywhere and nowhere at once. Perfect for wooing anything that breathed, if he felt like it at the time.)

They were perfect in all sense of the word, and the only two he needed. With a subtle change here, a slight lift of the eye there, he could go from moody, to amused, to aroused, to utterly blank, to pathetic, to condescending, to I-don't-want-to-talk-about-it-right-now-Fullmetal all in the space of a quickened female heartbeat when they looked into black, sultry eyes and swooned helplessly.

That, he understood. That he held onto with his whole being and didn't let it go. It was all he needed, should have been all he wanted. He'd perfected the only mask (And what a true piece of art it was) he'd ever need and now he was shocked to discover that it had cracks.

They stood in front of him, in all the firey, free-range passion of a blond head and amber eyes with a cat's gleam. There was no control, no delicate and subtle enquiries made with one eyelid while the other danced in boredom, no looking up throughlong, gentle lashes or looking down over the tip of a slender nose. It was just as it was. Sloppy, stupid, uncontrolled, burning, straight from the soul... Beautiful when it came down to it, he allowed.

There was no mask, no lie, only a bored expression if truly bored, or heated and angry only if truly so. There was no holding back, no reigning in of the temper, it was truth in it's rawest, most unrefined form. Organic, if he could call it that.

Which was why he didn't understand how those stright-from-the-heart expressions could lie and deceive so easily.