A/N: Another quick thing... Don't expect the timelines to make sense here... Like Ishbal and dates... Sorry!

Oh, and imagine that Wrath wasn't at the whole 'introducing thing' last chapter... Oopsies...

Wrath blinked and stared down at the two children. "Hello?" He offered.

The two merely continued to stare.

Wrath sighed. This was awkward. "I think they're broken." He complained to Father.

(Meanwhile, Envy smirked. He hadn't broken the children. He was so much better than Greed!)

"We're related to the Furher?" Both the children screamed.

"Surprise!" Father tried to sound guilty, he really did.

The two dirty looks he received told him exactly what the Elric brothers thought of him in that moment.

Wrath shrugged. "I can take them to my office, if you insist on me looking after them." He told Father.

Father mentally sighed. That was the best he was going to get.

(Envy suddenly had the feeling that he was better than Wrath, too)

"Being Furher is actually pretty boring." Wrath explained to the brothers as they stood in the elevator. "There's a lot of paperwork."

Surprisingly enough, neither of the brothers questioned the fact that there was an elevator leading from their home to the military HQ in Central.

"What do you do for entertainment?" Al asked curiously.

"I watch my subordinates... There's a lot of drama. And if there isn't any drama, I can always do surprise inspections." Wrath shrugged. "There's always something going on."

"Oh... So what kind of paperwork do you do?" This time, it was Ed that asked. And Wrath suddenly had the impression that the kids had to be really bored to be asking about paperwork of all things.

Hah, wait until he forces them to do some of his work.

Now that was going to be boring.

"You're both abnormally intelligent, right?" Wrath clarified as he dragged up two chairs at a spare desk in his office.

"Apparently so." Ed shrugged.

Well, they were abnormally smartass so that had to count for something.

"Well, this is meant to be a bonding exercise, to help you settle in and all that." He began, shuffling over to his desk and staring at the mountain of papers. Then he picked up the top half and dumped it in front of the boys.

"And they say that sharing is caring, so enjoy!"

"What?" The two spluttered.

"I'm the Fuhrer. I have a lot of work. You get the privilege of helping me." He explained with a cheerful grin. "I would be very annoyed if any of those very important documents were to be completed poorly."

The two boys each glared at him, then grabbed a pen and started working on the papers furiously.

By some miracle, it was an entire twenty minutes before the first paper airplane landed on Wrath's desk. He checked which form it was, before shrugging and throwing it right back where it came from.

Then two more followed. He frowned and checked them. They were different forms this time. They weren't actually important forms, so he merely shrugged and threw them back.

Then the next airplane sent to him had a transmutation circle on its side. He peered at it curiously, wondering what it did.

And he grew to hate the brothers as the circle lit up in a flash of brilliant blue light...

Only for a miniature explosion of air to sweep all of the papers off his desk.

He groaned and remembered that father told him that he couldn't kill the brats as he set out picking up all of the papers.

They had better be actually doing the stuff he gave them.

Wrath glanced down at the first sheet after the boys had been sent back to Father for their alchemy lesson. Everything seemed to be in order. He skim-read the rest of the pile, just to check that everything was completed properly.

Yep, everything looked fine.

He should let the boys do his paperwork more often.

Three young(ish) alchemists sat impatiently under the stares of different commanding officers as they anxiously awaited to hear whether or not they had successfully become State Alchemists.

"I'll read it out now..."

"By the power vested in me as Fuhrer, I King Bradley, hereby bestow upon Issac McDougal the title of... Frosty."

"By the power vested in me as Fuhrer, I King Bradley, hereby bestow upon Solf J Kimblee the title of... (King Explosion Murder) Blasty (*)."

"By the power vested in me as Fuhrer, I King Bradley, hereby bestow upon Roy Mustang the title of... Snappy."

"WHAT THE F**K?!"

"Hi Lust!" Al chirped as the brothers approached the only female homunculus.

"Hello boys." She greeted warmly. "Didn't you two spend yesterday with Wrath? How did it go?"

Lust had grown attached to the boys surprisingly quickly.

"It went okay." Ed shrugged. "He made us do paperwork, which was really boring."

Lust frowned. "Did he now?"

Al giggled. "We may have messed around with a few things, though."

Lust ruffled their hair. "Well done!"

The two beamed.

Lust smiled. "How would you two like to help me with the cooking?"

Yes, Lust was forced to do all of the cooking. Mostly because literally no one else could (Gluttony would eat everything, Pride couldn't reach everything, Sloth would sleep, Father wouldn't have a clue, and the less said about Envy, Wrath and Greed, the better.)

Meanwhile, Ed and Al almost felt like crying. They had sometimes helped their mother with the cooking before... before she passed away.

Still, attempting to make cookies with Lust was a lot of fun!

Even if they both sucked at cooking. The several flour fights may or may not have resulted in them needing to clean up the entire kitchen area, while the smell of baking cookies attracted Gluttony.

...

The three stared down at the badly burnt items of food that vaugely resembled cookies.

"We tried..." Al sighed.

"It was good, for your first attempt!" Lust encouraged. Envy's first attempt had started a massive fire that had actually burned down half of Central HQ... Of course that was many, many years ago.

The quarantine two years later had been Greed's attempt to be better than Envy.

"I don't think anyone will actually want to eat these." Al said sadly. Ed nodded in agreement glumly.

"Is the food done?" Gluttony asked eagerly, reaching towards the tray.

"You might not wanna eat..." Ed started warningly, and then watched in shock as Gluttony tipped the tray upside down and ate every single last one of the burnt cookies.

The tubby homunculus beamed. "They were really good!"

Two faces stared at him in shock. Lust merely tried to hide a smile.

"Can you cook more often?"

Father was watching as the two sketched out advanced transmutation circles on the floor with chalk, when the dreaded question was asked.

Normally, these sessions would pass in silence, with the occasional 'if I changed this, wouldn't it work better?' and 'careful with that symbol there, if you get it wrong, it'll blow up'.

But this one time, Edward couldn't keep his mouth shut.

"Hey, I noticed that everyone has these weird tattoos..." The child started, and Father started sweating.

He'd known that it would come to this eventually. They were geniuses. They'd notice that something was off eventually. They'd notice that their relatives weren't exactly human. He just hadn't expected to have to talk about it this quickly.

And boy would this be an awkward conversation. He was fairly sure the whole 'we're homunculi powered by souls... We're immortal and can't die and all that stuff... Oh yeah, we're also the bad guys here... We cool?' wouldn't go down well.

And the book specifically said not to traumatise the children. That was bad for them.

"Yes?" Father said catiously. How could he explain things delicately that wouldn't end up with screaming children.

Lie? No, they were geniuses, they'd see through it eventually.

Tell the truth? Well, he hoped that it wouldn't come to that. Now how to phrase it in a way that wouldn't sound too bad...

Blame everything on Hohenheim? Now there was a good idea. If he could just-

"So should we get the tattoo too?"

Nevermind.

"When you're older, okay?"

"Okay!"

Hohenheim was going to kill him

#

(*) Okay, so I made a rather obvious reference... (The whole 'King Explosion Murder was originally formatted to look like it was crossed out, but for some reason, it didn't accept that, so I changed it.) For anyone who is curious or hasn't seen the show, it was from Boku No Hero Academia... Because I can just see similarities everywhere now XD