Lisa rolled her favorite pen between her fingers, smoothing her thumb up and down the cool, green enamel. It had been a present, years ago, from her mother, and she had never found another that weighed as well in her hand.

Today it seemed a little heavier than usual.

She rested her chin on her fist and stared down at the blank paper in front of her.

Roy would be in motion again, soon. He probably didn’t know it, yet, but she was sure of it. She had watched him recovering from his physical injuries, and the progress of the wound that his discharge had dealt him wasn’t all that different. He was still drifting; but he was drifting closer and closer back to the current of pure idealism that had carried his cold and ruthless manipulations along at such an incredible speed.

And when that current took him again, it would take her, too.

Lisa tapped a nail against the pen, each click firm and clear. She’d decided, about a year into her tenure as Roy’s second, that her life would be far easier if the reasons she loved him were different from the reasons she followed him. Everything would be simpler if she could separate the two. But the brilliant, wild, arrogant precision that had caught her intellect, and the rage and compassion that had captured her loyalty, were the same things that fascinated her heart. And that was that.

Act like what you want to be to him.

It would be easier to follow Gracia’s very good advice if there were fewer things she wanted to be to him.

Act like what you want to be…

Lisa’s head came up, and she took a grip on her pen and pulled the paper toward her. What she wanted to be was the kind of person Roy Mustang would be proud to stand beside. Whether he ever noticed it or not was beside the point.

She would be that kind of person because it was what she wanted.

And if her own past could serve that goal, then she would use it.

She lifted the pen her mother had given her and wrote down an address she hadn’t visited since she was eighteen.

TBC