light_a_spark | The beach - Saturday Morning

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The beach - Saturday Morning

Roy hadn't slept since he'd talked to Molly - he wasn't counting the unplanned nap he'd taken on Thursday before getting hug-attacked - and now that apparently he had the freedom to, he was too awake.

He found a quiet spot along the beach and sat down in the sand. Even the morning sun already felt warm on his dark blue uniform and he dug the heels of his boots into the sand. He remembered this kind of heat, but it wouldn't turn as blistering as it had in the Ishbalan desert. The beach was very different from any desert and the scent of the ocean was one he rather liked. It was nothing like Amestris and right now, it was good to be reminded of that.

If radio was right, then the students had dealt with the threat themselves. Roy grimaced. Somehow he kept failing to keep people safe and children, too young to have to deal with these kind of horrors, kept having to pay the price for it. It didn't help that as far as he knew, he might not have been able to stop this guy either. Not with just a gun and not even flame alchemy would have worked.

If alchemy worked here. Ed's theory about the flow of energy had made him wonder, but it felt strange that Alphonse wouldn't have told him. He slowly started drawing a simple array into the sand. It was meant to simply reshape the sand beneath into whatever sort of sculpture he could think of. Roy stared down at it. It was one of the simplest principles of alchemy: take the material and give it a new form. Deconstruct and rebuild, yet somehow he had managed to take these two base principles and make his whole life about the deconstruction.

His stomach roiled at the thought and he remembered too many faces, too much pain. His hand was shaky as he rested it in the sand, inches away from the transmutation circle before he erased it from the sand with one angry sweep.

((So I got wordy. Post is open, but he is in a mood.))

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He raised an eyebrow. "Is that a challenge?"

She smirked. "Wouldn't be much of one for me."

"Cocky," he tilted his head back, his hair falling away from his face. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to agreed."

"That's almost too bad," she commented, watching him.

"I know you love arguing," he assured her, "but I'd hate to fail to keep you interested in a match."

"An arguing match?" Aly asked innocently.

He shook his head. "That I can do without any sleep at all."

"I don't doubt it," she replied. She grinned. "You strike me as the type."

She glanced down at the 'chessboard' and rubbed out another piece. "Is it that the students ended up dealing with the attacker on their own?"

He'd thought he'd sufficiently distracted her, but he should have known better. His shoulders slumped and he turned his attention back towards the sea. "I took his job to keep them safe," he said.

He wasn't just talking about the sheriff job.

She nodded. "Sometimes we have to keep them safe by letting them know they have a place to go when they can't handle it," she said.

"Sometimes they're too stubborn to recognise they have such a place," Roy shot back.

"True," she agreed, in no way thinking of herself at that age. "But the majority of them aren't. And especially here, some of the so-called children have skills we don't."

"All the more reason," he said determined. "They will be facing enough already. Isn't it our responsibility to enable them and keep them safe for as long as we can?"

She looked over at him sympathetically. "Would you have appreciated that at their age?"

"If it lets them hold on to their ideals a little longer then it doesn't matter," he told her. "They might enter a fight on their own free will, but it is our responsibility to not let the fight destroy them."

Aly watched him for a few more moments.

"I don't disagree with that in the least," she said softly. "But I don't think any of the students who acted last night were choosing a fight out of anything but their own free will."

"But they don't have much faith in the adults on the island, do they?" he glanced at her, raising an eyebrow.

She shook her head ruefully. "It doesn't help that many of the students comes from places where adults are not to be trusted if they're not downright evil. But that's not to say that all the adults on this island are trustworthy or even have their best interests at heart." She paused. "So I suppose it takes more time to start to win their trust. And even then, it's a careful process."

"It's easier when you outrank them," Roy mumbled more to himself.

"Your students seem to trust you," he said louder.

Aly caught the gist of his mumbling and chuckled. "Don't I know it." She shrugged. "I hope they do. It probably helped that I knew some of them before I came here."

"Molly came to you," he pointed out. "As I understand it, she would never have come to me without your influence."

"You're probably right," she agreed. "I was happy to be able to convince her to." She shot him a bit of a teasing glance. "If in part to show that I don't just pull pranks."

He chuckled. "It is duly noted that you can be responsible when the situation requires it, miss Alianne," he teased her.

Aly saluted him teasingly. "Pass that on to your investigative friend, Dale, hmm?"

"Cooper has taken a job at the station," Roy said. "You met him then?"

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