I draw and stuff

and they do the deed, sign the papers, buy two separate properties in Central and Rush Valley because their work is consultant in nature and thus requires a LOT of travel as they’re still too unestablished and young to have clients travel to them. Especially winry’s clients, who often can’t travel due to being in hospitals, and ed’s clients, who often can’t travel due to being enormous pieces of infrastructure. So on the one hand it’s very easy for them to stay in love, because they barely live together and see each other on the kind of frequency basis and under circumstances that keep each encounter exciting and relieving, there’s simply no time for grinding interpersonal problems to develop. And then before they know six years have passed, Ed realizes he wants kids, Winry realizes she doesn’t, or at least not now, she’s having emotional infidelity due to having a business partner who understands your interests goals and needs so well they might as well be her own, they’re both traveling abroad more and more often as their reputations grow as fixers medical and alchemicoindustrial of problems nobody else can solve, Ed thinks he’s ready to settle down but can’t let go of the next big problem, Win knows for sure she’s not ready, she has sixteen medical conferences to present at this spring alone, her team’s got an artificial pulmonary system working, they’re partnering with clinical trials at two hospitals, this is gonna be huge -

And meanwhile the five year old is trying to drink the lawyer’s inkwell and the two year old who has never used a toilet indoors is squatting peeing in the corner of the office and there’s press outside bc the infamous fullmetal alchemist was spotted back in town and there’s a police cordon being drawn up and the lawyer* is in his private exec bathroom eating just, handfuls of tums

That's

That's Roy Mustang

Just the opposite.

Roy "I grew up with 10 sisters so I know how to disguise covert information reconnaissance as flirting" Mustang.

"I grew up with 10 sisters so I know how to weaponize my sexual charm to disarm others and win favor."

Roy led every higher-up to believe he was just a fuckboy and a manwhore in this for his own ego and that they shouldn't view him as any kind of violent revolutionary like "no sir I'm just a slut."

Which. is an absolutely batshit primary character backstory to mention once, late in the series, and then immediately move on from.

And actually Hiromu Arakawa did it so well that every single fan interpretation of Roy Mustang for the FMA03 anime treated him as an honest to god man-slut. Bought his whole act hook line and sinker.

oct. 3 pt 2.

also:

State alchemists can be fired for underperforming. We know this up front from the likes of Shou Tucker. And this makes a ton of sense from the homunculi's standpoint since the state alchemists are sacrifice candidates, and the homunculi would want to cull the weakest candidates and focus only on cultivating the strongest ones who stand the best chance of opening the portal.

........Then there's Edward. Who's already opened the portal.

There's no need to cultivate him. No gamble taken on whether he's good enough to open the portal. He passed the final test already. Graduated 4 semesters early.

And as such, has a free pass to do Absolute Fuck All.

And I'm imagining how funny this is from like an outside perspective.

Some newish state alchemist who'd only ever read up on the stories of Edward Elric, ready and excited to start their career of being paid handsomely with endless freedom to research and travel and do anything they want in the pursuit of science... surprised and confused to find themselves put on probation their first month for things like "ignoring orders." Which is, as best they had thought, a famous Edward Elric pastime.

Roy showing a slight bit of stress about his yearly state alchemist report, and Ed just snorting and rolling his eyes at Roy because every year HE just hastily does his on the train ride over (canon in the manga, a travesty it was left out of the anime) and it gets rubber stamped. Ed not realizing that other alchemists' reports get genuinely scrutinized and torn apart while Ed is free to turn in whatever absolute bullshit he thinks of 36 hours ahead of time. One year his report was about whether alchemy could be done via dance (conclusion: no it can't) and no one cared. Roy WANTS to tell Ed there's some kind of unknown favoritism around Ed making him literally bullet-proof but Roy has no way to phrase this that doesn't sound like he's just in denial and mad at how good Ed's train-reports are.

Guy from the Internal Amestrian Affairs sector who's responsible for auditing other internal military personel for any suspicious activity hitting about 1 million red flags for Edward Elric, issuing a STRONG and URGENT recommendation to suspend the alchemist pending further investigation into things like "literal bunk-buddies with two members of the Xingese royalty (enemy nation)" and "spent $10,000,000 of his stipend on a librarian to make her re-copy (what he seemed to interpret as?) military records in some extremely transparent effort to unearth state secrets (it was a recipe book but he was literally asking her about state secrets)" and "literally has never once obeyed an order, ever, not even once in his career, and is on public record having said 'I do not care about the goals and protections of the Amestrian Military. I am in fact only pursuing my own interests several of which are diametrically opposed to the safety and well-being of the governing body of Amestris'"

The issued recommendation is intercepted before it even reaches its intended desk. President Bradley himself has taken issue with it and denies it before a single set of eyes has seen it. The President's veto stamp is a terrifying hammer, used rarely, and it is now sitting on the auditor's desk.

Viltrumites on Earth + bonus

GET FNAF'ED IDIOT