light_a_spark | 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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"It might be in the job description as well," he smirked, falling into step beside her.

"All these things I never knew," she replied, grinning at him. "It's amazing."

"I trust you to be my secret keeper," he replied. He might have just been tired.

"Cross my heart and hope to die if I tell," she replied, crossing her heart solemnly.

Any comment he might have made got lost as he couldn't hold back the yawn. He blinked as he finished. "Maybe I was more tired than I thought."

She just looked the slightest bit amused. "That's what happens when you don't sleep for five days."

"Four," he argued, only counting the nights.

"Oh? You went right to bed Tuesday night after talking to Molly and I?" Aly asked, raising an eyebrow at him.

"Of course not," he said right away as they made their way on the street, leaving the beach behind them.

"Five then," she said. "Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday."

"The day is still early," he pointed out. "I plan to sleep tonight." If nothing came up.

"I thought you were going to sleep now," she replied.

"I might do both," he admitted, glancing sideways at her. "Unless you object?"

She grinned at him. "Not a chance."

"Should I call you? Let you know when exactly I'm going to sleep so you can rest assured yourself?" he teased her.

"If you feel the need," Aly said, smirking back at him.

"I might," he said mysteriously, still smirking as he looked ahead.

"I am at your service," she replied. "Just like I was Monday night when a mysterious person called me from your house."

Roy had not yet met caller ID, but then he was pretty sure he hadn't called her on Monday. "What do you mean?" he asked suavely.

"Or which day was it that you called without leaving a message?" She grinned. "Needed to tell me you weren't sleeping?"

He frowned. "How do you know for certain it was me?" he asked, evading the last question.

"The telephone shows the numbers of people who've called," Aly said with a wink.

Roy frowned, feeling betrayed by the one technology he had been sort of at peace with. "I might have."

"If you had left a message, I would have called you back," she told him.

"I'm aware," he assured her with a sideways glance before pulling open the door to Mauvaise Chance and stepping back to let her go in first. "I called on Wednesday if I'm not mistaken."