When General Hakuro popped out of an office right in their path Lisa knew he’d been waiting for them, and tensed. There were a lot of unpleasant ways this meeting could go, and she could tell by the number of teeth in Hakuro’s smile that he had at least one of them in mind.

“Ah, Chuui. I was hoping you would come along today; do you have a moment?”

Now she could feel Roy tensing and took a smart step forward to stand in front of him. He no longer had the rank to shield his subordinates and his too-straight shoulders showed he was still off balance about that. She wasn’t sure if he was off balance enough to resort to more direct means, but better safe than scorched.

“Of course, Sir,” she said, in her best calm-and-capable, superior-soothing tone.

“Well, just in here for a moment, then.” Hakuro held open the office door, and directed his teeth at Roy. “We won’t be long, Mustang.”

He might as well have just added you civilian outsider out loud, Lisa reflected. Hakuro did not, however, say a word of protest when Roy caught the closing door with his foot and leaned against the doorframe. In fact he seemed to ignore Roy’s presence completely, and Lisa’s jaw tightened.

“I just wanted to ask whether you intend to resign your commission,” Hakuro told her, seating himself behind the desk.

If he meant it as a threat it misfired, and Lisa almost smiled at the wall over his head. “I do, yes Sir.”

“Ah.” Hakuro paused for a moment before the smile broke out again, twice as gleaming. “Of course, it’s only to be expected. Everyone knows of your devotion to Mustang; you couldn’t be expected to continue as an officer now that he’s gone.” His voice oozed condescension, and Lisa had to swallow a snort. She wasn’t home free yet, no sense in antagonizing him by laughing at his attempted insults.

“Yes, Sir.”

Hakuro whipped a slim sheaf of papers out of his jacket and slid them across the desk. “No sense in delaying, then!” he said, brightly. “Just sign here and we’ll have you processed out by the time you finish packing up.”

One did not contradict senior officers, Lisa reminded herself as she signed, no matter how absurd their statements. One left that to the officer’s senior sergeant. Perhaps someday, some benevolent NCO would tell Hakuro that Personnel never processed anything in less than forty-eight hours, and he would stop making a fool of himself by saying such things in public.

The prospect of not having to deal with all that idiocy anymore put a faint smile on her face as she exchanged, theoretically, final salutes with Hakuro. When she turned, though, it slipped a bit.

Roy’s eyes were black with rage and his fingers were curled in a way that made her glad his gloves were in his pocket not on his hands.

Of course. He had chosen a career as a soldier because most of a soldier’s life appealed to him. Why should it occur to him that Hakuro had taken nothing from her that she valued? She had never told him.

And she wasn’t going to tell him now. Which left her with a bit of a problem.

She stepped toward him quickly, cutting across whatever Hakuro was drawing breath to say. “Shall we be going then? I’ll find us two boxes.”

Roy’s mouth tightened, but he let her herd him out of the office and stalked down the hall, cane stabbing the tiles as though he had a grudge against the floor. Lisa paced beside him, turning over methods for damage control in her head.

“It could have been worse,” she said, quietly, once she was sure they were out of Hakuro’s earshot.

“Could it?” Roy’s voice was sharp.

“He could have refused to let me go,” Lisa pointed out.

Roy’s stride hitched for a moment and his eyes widened from their fixed glare as they darted toward her. Lisa stifled a sigh of relief that the momentum of his anger was broken, and proceeded to deliberately misinterpret his surprise.

“It would have been stupid. Only an idiot keeps unwilling officers around. But it’s wartime and he could legally have refused to allow me to resign my commission.” She watched out of the corner of her eye as her matter-of-fact tone refocused his thoughts away from his outrage and onto his puzzlement.

“You… don’t mind?” he asked at last, slowly.

Lisa hesitated. She’d put a certain amount of work into making sure he never asked her anything like this, so she’d never had to consider just how frankly to answer. His choice of career and her choice to support him and his plans were no longer at stake, of course, but still…

“I didn’t enter the army because I like the way it does things, Sir,” she said, at last. The truth. Just not the bluntest one.

“I see.”

A corner of Lisa’s mouth twitched. He didn’t sound like he saw. But he did sound thoughtful; it was a start.

TBC