For Her. For Him.

A/N: Thank you to all of my reviewers. I'm over 100 reviews now, and 3,500 hits! Glad everyone is enjoying this. Hopefully we can get to a little lime soon, now that the two have gotten it through their thick skulls they like one another, but I make no promises of a lemon for a few chapters.

Chapter 21

Friendly Confrontation

Back at the office, Kain Fuery’s words were falling on deaf ears. “Why should we be so upset if the colonel is happy? When was the last time that you saw him have a popcorn fight with anyone? Or smile like he did last night?”

Kain felt wrong, standing, discussing the colonel’s love life in the office that Falman shared with the other warrant officers--empty at the moment, as many who worked on the floor had the day off.

“He did with the lieutenant.” Havoc was fighting with a pack of matches, struggling to light just one to put to the cigarette hanging from his mouth.

“Well, not the popcorn fight,” Breda said. “She’d have killed him first.”

“And how are you even sure the kid is his?” Falman asked. Fuery was so grateful there was at least one person blessed with a little common sense, as he seemed to be at least considering options to Havoc’s adulterer theory.

“The colonel and the girl asked that everything be sent to his house. I managed to find that out, but the clerk was pretty tightlipped about anything,” Havoc said, finally getting the match to light. “And we all know the colonel doesn’t ‘do’ the family thing.”

“The woman at the store didn’t want to talk to you because you looked ready to kill, Havoc.” Breda leaned back on Falman’s desk.

“Get off of that. I don’t want you breaking it,” the warrant officer ordered, receiving a hand gesture from the heavier-set man.

“Until we can talk to the colonel,” Fuery said, “we won’t know anything.”

As though on cue, the topic of their discussion walked by the open door.

“Colonel!” Havoc yelled, running like a madman out the door.

“Shit!” came an uncommon cry from the dark-haired man in the hallway. The other three ran to the door, trying to squeeze their way through, wedging themselves quite successfully in the process. From his perspective, Fuery could see the colonel moved with remarkable speed to keep ahead of the charging blond.

“Get back here. I only want to talk to you,” Havoc said, unbelievably.

“If you only want to talk,” Mustang said, "then why are you chasing your commanding officer?”

“Because he’s running like a fugitive.”

The colonel reached his office and stuck his key in the door, only to have Havoc reach him, swiping to grab a hold of the older man’s collar, but by some stroke of luck, the brunette ducked and dodged.

“I’ve never seen the colonel move like that,” Breda said.

It was true, he managed to evade Havoc remarkably well, despite being about four years the blond’s senior, and unaccustomed to hand to hand.

“Listen, Havoc, I don’t have time to be interrogated.”

“You’re going to see her? The kid you were out with last night?”

Mustang managed to get back to his door, turn the keys and slip inside. Before Havoc could even react, the shorter man had shut the door in his face. From the hallway, the four men--the other three had finally extricated themselves from the doorway--struggled with Mustang’s office door. They could hear the phone ringing inside his office.

“Hello?” There was a pause. “I told you I had to come here... Yes I already got it... Exactly the color we agreed on... I’ll pass there after I get my paperwork and get away from four nosy subordinates, three of whom should be taking the day off...” That last part was obviously for the men outside to let them know he was aware they were eavesdropping. “We’re out of pickles? What kind?... Okay, I’ll get some on my way home... I know, not the ones with the peppers, the sweet kind... I know I bought the wrong ones last time... Listen, I won’t be long.”

Havoc gestured to the rest as though to signal, “would anyone talk this way if the kid wasn’t his?”

“We’ll never get him,” Kain said. “The colonel has a way of getting out of here that no one knows. Not even Lieutenant Hawkeye knew how he did it.”

“Falman is it your lunch break yet?” Havoc said.

“In ten minutes.”

“You’re taking it ten minutes early.” Havoc said, puffing on his neglected cigarette. “I can think of one person who might know something, and I know where we should be able to find him.”

********

Ed sat at Roy’s desk, trying to focus on the papers and research he’d received from Al and Major Armstrong. It had come at about the same time as the dozens of boxes of baby furniture the two expecting parents had bought the night before. At the very least, the research gave Ed an excuse not to be trying to haul those boxes to the nursery in his current condition, which Roy emphatically and threateningly instructed him not to attempt.

He laid his hand against his cheek as he rested his elbow on the desk, remembering that Roy had woke him up with breakfast in bed, pressing a gentle kiss to the forehead. Ed had beamed up at the older man while accepting the pancakes covered in a thick, sugary blueberry syrup. Begrudgingly, he even drank the milk on the tray, knowing that it held vitamins necessary for the babies.

If that didn’t prove his determination, nothing did.

Sitting there, thumbing through the research his little brother so dutifully did, Ed hadn’t the heart to admit that only half of the stacks of papers and notebooks were worth anything, and less than half of that were things that Ed himself didn’t already know.

As he opened another file, he heard the door open.

“Roy?” he called out, struggling to stand from the desk chair, but failing miserably.

“No, Boss, it’s me.”

Ed’s eyes widened as he struggled to pile every piece of paper in front of him and pull himself to the desk without ramming his swollen chest or stomach into it. “Lieutenant? What are you doing here?” He had successfully made himself a floating head over a sea of paperwork, and was quite satisfied with the result, even if he was angry he’d had to do it in the first place. Seeing the four men from the office, he could have almost cried in frustration. “Don’t come over here!” he said, a little more frantic than he’d intended. Quickly covering, he added, “You’ll mess up all my research from Al and Armstrong.”
The four men situated themselves around the library, Falman and Havoc taking the two wing chairs and Breda puling up the ottoman. Fuery, alone, remained standing.

“Boss,” Havoc said, a curious look on his face, “since when do you call the colonel, Roy?”

“Since he held my hair while I puked up my guts.” It wasn’t exactly at that moment, but close enough.

“Were things really bad?” Fuery asked, his puppy dog eyes showing his sense of guilt, though why he felt guilty, Ed didn’t know. Of the bunch, Fuery was the only one who regularly called to check up on him.

“Yes.” Ed couldn’t do the guilt trip, much as he wanted to, hoping that making them feel uncomfortable would make them leave. “I was pretty particular about who I let around me. The only reason I dealt with the colonel at all was because he didn’t give me a choice.”

“Major,” Havoc said, “we’re here to ask you questions about the colonel’s date last night. Since you’ve been staying here, we figure you know something about her.”

Ed cleared his throat and scanned over a page of Armstrong’s hand-written notes in front of him. “A little. What do you want to know?”

“He wants to know if she is pregnant with the colonel’s baby,” Falman said, “and he won’t be satisfied to let any of us alone until he knows.”

“Why does it matter?”

“Havoc’s sure the colonel’s gotten this girl pregnant because that’s the only way he’d have been out with her,” Breda explained. “He isn’t exactly comfortable with families. But if the kid is his, then he got the girl pregnant while he was dating Lieutenant Hawkeye.”

“Not to mention the fact that the colonel seems to be dating jailbait,” Havoc muttered, trying to light a cigarette.

“Don’t you dare light that thing in here,” Ed said so sternly, the older men all stared at him. Though he once again had to cover a sudden outburst, his face showed no change in attitude as his voice had. “I’m not listening to Mustang complain.”

Havoc stopped and put his cigarette and matches in his back pocket. “Sorry, Boss.” He folded his arms around his chest. “Look, is the colonel going to get in trouble with this girl?”

Ed sighed as he heard the click of a door latch in the hallway. “You want to know about Roy’s date?”

“Yes. How old is she?” Havoc asked.

“Under eighteen.”

“I knew it,” Havoc said. “We know she’s pregnant, but are we going to have a colonel flashing baby pictures around the office?”

Ed’s lips drew up in a smile, thinking of Roy showing his precious Nicholas and Aideen to the entire military, just as Hughes had always done with Elysia. Some of the deeper hurt gone, Ed even smiled at the memory of Hughes. “Double the pictures, I’m afraid. They’re twins, a boy and a girl.”

Ed glanced up at the man who’d appeared in the doorway.

“So Mustang went and knocked someone up,” Breda said with his usual tact.

“Yes” the man at the back of the room said, “Riza told me two weeks before she died that she was pregnant. Apparently she had known a bit longer than that, but had been afraid to let me know. I tried so hard to keep her out of battle, but she would have none of it and would have gone in on her own, as a part of the military or not.”

“Is that why you’re dating someone who’s going to have a baby?” Fuery asked, innocently.

“Roy, can you help me get out of this chair?” Ed said. “I’m stuck.”

With a kind and playful smile, Roy walked over to Ed. “And what would you have done if I’d have had work today?”

“Called you home to get me out,” Ed answered. Roy rolled his eyes as he walked by the confused men toward Ed. Wrapping his arm around the teen’s back and grabbing his hands with his own, he pulled the blond up out of the chair. Because of Ed’s height, nothing was revealed to the others when he stood, but when Ed stepped out from behind the desk and the papers atop it, there were audible gasps, and Breda rolled off the ottoman and onto the floor, unconscious.

“What the hell?” Falman said.

“One of the arrays I drew on the lieutenant wasn’t to save her,” Ed explained, “it was to save the babies. She’d told me she was pregnant. So, for almost three months, I’ve been carrying them.” Ed rubbed both hands over his belly and noticed Havoc looking up from where the hands were moving. “And in order to keep them, I’ve been taking female hormones.”

“That’s incredible,” Fuery said.

“That was what we thought.”

Of the bunch, the only one brave enough to step forward was the bespectacled man. “May I?” he asked, holding out a hand. Ed moved his own away from the rounded bump. Fuery placed his right hand along one side of Ed’s distended stomach and his left at the other.

“It doesn’t freak you out?” Havoc asked from his chair, still appearing dumbstruck, but getting his point out just the same that touching a pregnant stomach was not something he commonly did.

“Sure, but only because it’s the Major having them.” He stopped for a moment. “I think I feel one of them moving. It’s really faint, like it’s shifting.”

“That’s Nicholas. He moves constantly. Every once in a while, his sister will shift, but her movements tend to be more kicks and punches.”

“You’ve named them already?” Falman asked as Breda grunted on the ground.

“Wasn’t anyone going to check and see if I was okay?”

“You’re talking,” Falman said. “Sounds like your okay.”

“Yes. We named them,” Ed said, shifting Fuery’s hands. “That one right there,” he moved the hand to the lower right side of his stomach, “is Nicholas Maes. This one,” he shifted the other hand more to the front left of his belly, “is Aideen Riza.”

Fuery grinned. “I think I felt her elbow.”

“That’s nothing. Wait until she gets in a fight with her brother,” Roy said, putting his hands on Ed’s shoulders and squeezing the non-mechanical one--possibly the mechanical one as well, though Ed couldn’t exactly feel it, only the pressure of his hand resting there.

“So you were the girl,” Havoc said, still in shock. “But you let the colonel kiss you.” He seemed to be trying to get a grasp onto the smaller mysteries before he moved on to the bigger ones.

“We knew you were there all along. We had to make it look realistic.” Ed wasn’t quite sure if he should say anything about what had happened the night before with the colonel. He wasn’t even certain what he could call what they now were to one another. Baby before first kiss, let alone before sex of any kind was more than a tiny complicator in their relationship.

********

After Roy and Ed explained and re-explained the entire situation to the four officers, Falman had returned back to the office, and the other three remained, determined to make up for barging in and for not taking an interest in Ed’s health sooner. Together with Roy, they moved boxes out of the room designated as the would-be nursery and completely stripped the bedroom of even the last scraps of curtains on the windows. The four men cleaned and scrubbed each wall before working on wallpapering and painting the room for the babies, with a hunter green paint at the bottom on the bottom five feet, with pale yellow wallpaper at the top with thin green stripes at the top. It wasn’t overly masculine, but not so girlie that the two fathers would feel uncomfortable in the room, rocking the babies to sleep.

As they worked, the four men got to actually talk like friends, not co-workers, not colonel and subordinates, and Roy had to admit he liked it. He wished that Ed would have been there, but they had banished him from the room, afraid he might inhale paint fumes or something in the dust that could harm the twins.

“How did you learn to move like you did in the hallway at the office?”

Roy looked to Havoc. “You know how much the Elrics like to spar? Well, try having them both in your house, with one who shouldn’t be going up against a giant suit of armor and another who still wants someone to fight with. So, I’m the best option for both of them. I’m getting rather good, though they could both kick my ass if they wanted to. Even Ed, in the state he’s in, could still manage it.”

“Speaking of Al, how’s he doing with Armstrong?” Fuery asked, wiping his sweat-covered forehead with the back of his hand.

“The boy has the patience of a saint. It’s remarkable how that kid manages to tolerate even the most obnoxious of Armstrong’s traits.”

“Like this one?” Breda asked, flexing his non-muscles and attempting an Armstrong-like sparkle.

“And how are you and the major getting along?” Fuery asked, once again climbing a ladder to hang one of the last pieces of the wallpaper.

Roy turned and faced the corner, feeling heat rise to his face as he began painting said corner. “We’re getting along fine. He has his outbursts and threatens to kill me a little more often than when he isn’t pregnant, but other than that, I’m actually enjoying his company.”

“Never thought I’d see the day you two got along,” Breda said.

“So does he have any idea your birthday is coming up next week?” Havoc said, taking long, even brush strokes as he smirked.

“No, and I’d rather he didn’t.”

“That’s right!” Breda said, “As of next Thursday, you’re officially an old man.”

“Unless he’s going to be one of those lame-asses who says, ‘I’m twenty-nine and holding,” Havoc said.

Roy extended a paint-splotched finger to his subordinates, saying, “That isn’t meant for you Fuery, just the two idiots on the ground.”

“You’re going to be thirty?” a shocked voice said from the hallway.

“Ed, we told you not to come up here,” Roy said, moving out from the room.

“You’re practically old enough to be my father.” Ed looked amused, and he only seemed to grow more so when he realized that Roy was not. Roy saw the teen was holding out a pitcher of lemonade in his automail hand and held several glasses under his left arm.

“What are you doing up here?”

“Five minutes up here isn’t going to kill me, Roy,” Ed said as he set the pitcher down on a table in the hall and began arranging the glasses around it. He began to pour the lemonade, and stopped for a moment. “This might be a little sweet. I don’t like anything that’s very tart, so if it’s too bad, I won’t be hurt if you don’t drink it.” He walked in the room, looking around at the progress the men had already made. “It looks really good,” he said as he handed a glass to Havoc and up to Fuery. “Very good. If you ever quit the military, you could get jobs as paperhangers.” With a slight waddle that Roy knew would only get more distinct as the babies grew, Ed left the room and returned with glasses for the colonel and Breda. “You on the other hand,” he said to Roy, “shouldn’t quit your day job.” Ed was looking over at the corner where Roy had been painting only to keep from facing the others with brilliantly red cheeks.

“Why don’t you get yourself a little drink?” Roy asked with a smile, waiting for the explosion.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m short, you’re old, big deal.” Ed then lifted himself on his toes and pulled Roy down in for a quick, but more than passionate kiss. “And I think I’m going downstairs.” As quickly as he could, Ed disappeared out the door, gone before Roy regained coherent thought and the others their ability to speak.

He had bested Roy. He left the colonel with his subordinates to explain what exactly that kiss was about.

He was going to kill that little blond when he got downstairs. That or make him follow through with what that little kiss promised.