cornerofmadness

Skirting Between Boundaries
Author –

cornerofmadness
Disclaimer – sadly, not mine, all rights belong to Arakawa
Rating – PG-13
Character – Roy-centric
Series – Manga
Timeline – some time after Ed joins the military but no real spoilers
Summary – Roy knows all about boundaries and how to get around some of them
Word Count - 499
Author’s Note – This was written for

fma_fic_contest's boundary prompt. I'm going with the longer version (it was too long for the contest) which I think is the better verson. Thanks to

evil_little_dog for the beta as per usual

* * *

There were boundaries that should never be crossed. Roy knew many of them intimately. The professional distance between he and Riza, for example, should never be breached. He suspected some knew they were in love even if he and she would deny it publicly to their last breath. It would be too dangerous, not to mention career ending, if it were an open fact.

You didn’t poach your friends’ girls and for all Havoc’s whining to the contrary, Roy had never done that. It was all ruse, additional cover for Chris Mustang’s girls, his sisters. Besides, if everyone thought he spent more time thinking with his dick than his brains, he’d be underestimated.

The next two went hand in hand for him, you didn’t break alchemic taboo and you didn’t betray secrets. You didn’t make gold, okay, admittedly he had done that one but to try to bring back the dead, Roy knew the penalty for that transgression. He had seen it first hand, had known it on sight when he stumbled into the brothers’ home. He kept their secret just as he kept the secret of the first person he had known to try it, his sister, his real sister.

She and he weren’t as close as they had been, their respective jobs and places in this world acting as a wedge between them. Roy had never thought there would be a day when he wasn’t tagging along behind his sister, learning alchemy from her then she married and he went to war. They had decided, he, their foster mother and his sister, that keeping their relationship hidden was for the best so now that he was outside her door, Roy had done everything short of alchemizing his hair blond to cover his tracks. His uniforms had been left in the East and he had gone out with his best friend to buy clothes. All anyone would see was the nauseating purple, yellow and green shirt and not his dark, almond-shaped eyes and black Xingese hair that he shared with her. Hopefully, no one would notice their resemblance.

The doorbell jangled overhead as he stepped into the butcher’s shop and grinned at the enormous mountain of gentle, supportive man his sister had married. Sig’s eyes narrowed slightly. Roy was never sure if the terse man liked him.

“What can I get for you?”

“What looks good today?” Roy asked.

“For a scrawny thing like you?” Izumi poked her head out of the back room. “The sparest of pork chops. Anything else and you might explode.”

Roy snorted at her, liking that she wasn’t too pale this time. He worried about her, knowing what her own straying across boundaries had cost her. “Since I need to travel, maybe cured salamis would be best.”

“We make the tastiest.” She nodded to Sig, handing him off some papers that he nestled between sheets of waxed paper before he got to slicing down Roy’s orders. Roy would pass the information Izumi had just provided on to their mother.

He pretended to eye up some immense steaks while she came around and whispered, “How are they?”

“One’s still sweet, one’s still a dick, they’re fine,” he replied, seeing the relief in her eyes. Alchemy and secrets, ones the brothers didn’t need to know, not yet; Izumi being in Resembol wasn’t an accident. They heard of Hohenheim’s sons, just like it wasn’t a paperwork snafu that sent him to their home later. They knew the rumors about the boys’ father and together determined they would look after them. He never interfered with their training and she didn’t interfere with his command of them. Neither sibling really liked the idea but it worked. He squeezed his sister’s hand, took his package and disappeared back the way he came, wishing things were different.