Disclaimer: I don't own FMA. Or a car.

This is an idea that's been eating me for a while, so having finished Chapter 3 of HDWL and sent it to the marvellous wordswithout for beta-ing, I thought I'd start it.

A possible few chapters charting Roy's first few weeks with Madame Christmas. NB: I'm not clever enough to make the formatting work on FF for the newspaper bit below... imaginations at the ready please!

Thanks to ThousandSunnyLyon for her beta work on it (go and read her stuff: it's fabby), and to MegamiZe and Disastergirl for listening to me moan. :D

Your thoughts, as always, are welcomed with a smile/cowering behind arms.

Tally ho!

Husband and wife shot dead in plush West End home. Victims found with 'horrendous' wounds.

Oscar Mustang (35), an alleged political agitator, and his wife Jun Xia (27) were found shot dead in Central's affluent West End on Tuesday morning.

A police spokeswoman stated that the shooting bore the hallmarks of a paramilitary-style murder, and opposition publicist, Noel Canberra has this morning spoken out against the recent spate of attacks targeting purported activists.

A confirmed radical and friend of the family, who wished to remain anonymous, visited the murder scene and described it as a 'chilling' sight.

The couple are survived by their 4-year-old son, Roy Mustang, who is rumoured to have been found with the bodies when they were discovered by the hired help. Friends say he will be placed in the custody of Mustang's sister, 'Madame Christmas' - owner of the infamous bar of the same name.

A private funeral service will be held tomorrow at an undisclosed location.

"Roy Mustang!" Chris scolded as a plate clattered to the floor, closely followed by a glass of milk. "I'll let you starve, boy. Don't think I won't let you starve if you keep this up!"

Black patent shoes thudded against the table legs as the young boy kicked and squirmed in his seat. With another wild swipe of his arm, he sent a fork rocketing off the table to strike a lounging tabby cat on the backside. It darted from its comfy bed, issuing a sharp hiss at its attacker before prowling out of the room, tail in the air.

The child had been with Chris for over a fortnight now and still he refused to heed a single word she said. Up until he was placed in her care, she actually didn't mind the kid. They had shared a sort of naughty relationship where Roy didn't tell his father if she sneaked a drink during the day, and she didn't tell him if Roy had one too many macaroons. The two of them would sit together on the sofa listening to records and hiccuping happily until he was collected again at the end of his stay.

Now though, he was an unmitigated terror. Chris understood, of course she did, that Roy had been traumatised by the deaths of his parents horribly – hadn't they all? Oscar Mustang was an arrogant bastard at the best of times, but he was, when all was said and done, still her little brother. His wife also was a little too aloof for Chris' liking, but then, she was always polite, and was clearly desperately in love with her little boy.

Overnight almost, that boy had turned from a smiling, agreeable little gentleman into a miniature devil who swung between bouts of unbreakable silence and outright mayhem. He bit, spat, hit, wrecked and tore. He squealed, shouted, screamed and – surprisingly – swore. Often, he not only outright refused to eat his dinner, but also managed to discard it in the most imaginative ways. Chris once slipped on a pair of expensive, sheepskin lined boots only to find the toes stuffed full of mashed potatoes. The cats didn't escape lightly either. He may have been smaller than the average four-year-old, but Roy Mustang was quick. She was surprised any of her moggies still had tails.

And sleep? That was the worst of all. Chris might have considered whether the boy was half badger, his nocturnal activities were so energetic. She could not get him to stay in his own bed, no matter which tricks she tried. She sat with him until he nodded off: he climbed into her bed ten minutes later. She kept him up until 2am to tire him out: he woke at 3am screaming his head off. She once even resorted to locking him in his room to be rewarded by a wake-up call from the night watchman saying that the boy had pried open the window and was trying to escape out onto the roof.

The only time he did sleep was when he couldn't battle biology any longer and he was dragged under against his will. She knew that was no way for a child to live. Underneath all her anger and frustration, Roy Mustang, in his tiny waistcoat and black shiny shoes, was breaking her heart.

The smell of smoke roused her from her musings.

"Roy!" She cried, lurching to snatch his hand away from the candle that had toppled and ignited the lace table cloth. She pulled him roughly from the chair where he struggled in her grasp, his cheeks puffed out as he scraped the fingernails of his left hand along her forearm. "Bold! You're very bold – do you understand?" She asked. She shook him. "Do you understand, Roy?"

Like someone flipping a switch, all the fight went out of him. Two huge, doleful eyes crept up to meet hers. He looked for the world as though the boy who had been impossibly naughty a few seconds ago was a changeling and it was he – the innocent one – who was getting the blame. He glanced upwards to where one of the barmaids was beating the table frantically to extinguish the flames.

"Roy baby," Chris cooed eagerly, wiping his cheek as his black eyes danced with unshed tears. "You mustn't scare Aunty Chris like that. You frightened me, Roy-boy. Tell me you understand that."

His hands free, Roy twiddled his tiny fingers and sucked in a breath. He nodded and offered Chris his small, pale hand – a tragic gesture, really, because the boy only understood it as a way to say 'I'm sorry.' God knows he had seen it enough at his parents' funeral.

"I'm sorry for your loss, kid. It was a terrible blow."

"Your father was a great man. I'm sorry he ever came back to Central. Truly, I'm sorry."

"Sorry, Roy. I'm so very, very sorry."

"Sorry," he whispered, and in those two syllables he sounded ten times older than his scarce four years. "Sorry."

Chris bent low and took his hand, giving it a firm shake. He awarded her with a slim, cautious smile that made him look so much like his mother it was startling. With a ruffle of his hair – a messy affair, well in need of a chop – Chris stood to full height. With hands on her hips, she looked down on him and tried to recognise any signs of the child he once was. He avoided her gaze, choosing instead to stare at the cat, who against its better judgement, had wandered back into the dining room. He did a lot of that: 'not looking'. Sometimes those looks, distant and painfully bleak, scared Chris far more than she would ever admit.

Nobody knew for sure what had happened at Oscar's house that night: not the police, not his friends, not his son – nobody. The bodies were discovered by the cleaner the following morning. Oscar and Jun Xia lay butchered on the floor with little Roy curled up between them, sodden in their blood. Until one particularly astute detective showed up, no one even thought to check the boy for a pulse. They had simply assumed all three of them had been shot dead. The detective told Chris that Roy had been shocked into slumber by the violence and noise. Certainly, when he woke – grumpy and confused – he didn't utter a single syllable for three whole days. Even when just one hour after his awakening he was told the news, he didn't make a peep. He didn't even cry – he still hadn't. Experts told Chris that he might be mute, dumbstruck by the event. Then on third night the tantrums started.

As she tried to put him to bed, Roy bolted for the door, his skinny legs donned in clean white socks pounding his retreat. He made it about half way down the landing before a few of Chris' girls caught him and frog-marched him – kicking and screaming – back to his room. Chris was still missing a lump of hair he had pulled clean out of her head as he fought her efforts to make him settle down. He was very creative at being bratty. Clinging to her arm with monkey-like agility, he hoisted his legs to where they dangled a few inches above the bed. When she tried to lower him even further onto the sheets, his ankles swung up to wrap around her wrist until he was hanging like a sloth on her entire arm. She remembered noting, despite the chaos, how little he weighed.

A fake cough broke her from her thoughts. Roy was looking at her now with something between impatience and curiosity in his eyes. He cocked his head while he studied her right back, and she had to wonder if he felt as sorry for her as she did for him. There was certainly something going on in that head of his. Chris had noticed over the past few days that the boy had inherited his father's habit of clenching his jaw when he was deep in thought, which, when he wasn't tearing the house down, seemed to be most the time. Had their relationship been more well founded, she would have told him he had a lifetime of headaches to look forward to if he kept it up.

Whatever his notion, he discarded it a few moments later with a flamboyantly dissatisfied sigh. Then shoving his hands into his pockets, he gave her one more suspicious glance and strolled towards the stairs.

"Roy," called Chris. "Where are you going?"

He didn't look back but instead focussed on the grand feat of climbing old stairs with short legs. He removed one of his hands from his pocket to hold onto the low hanging bannister while he place one foot, then the other on each stair. It should have been funny, but it wasn't.

"Roy-"

"Art!" came the bothered response.

Art. The child was obsessed with art. In fact, it was the only thing Chris had seen him turn his hand to since he moved in with her. While her bordello girls tried to coax him to the piano or to learn draughts, he fobbed them off – sometimes with a snarl, sometimes with a smile – to sketch instead.

There must have been a hundred pictures in the box under his bed now. Some of the pictures were of dogs and houses, trees and cars – the usual rubbish that kids are obsessed with drawing. But most of them Chris didn't understand at all. Using a ruler and sometimes the bottom of a glass, Roy would spend hours drawing intricate, eye-melting shapes. To her eye, they looked like mostly nonsense, but when she showed them to Charles Knox, the young doctor who propped up her bar most every night, he nearly fell off his stool.

'He's definitely your brother's son, Chris,' he had said. 'There's no mistaking that.'

He tried to explain the meaning behind the lines; tossing out phrases like 'radial geometry' as if he were talking about a child's jigsaw puzzle.

'How does he know this, Chris?' he asked just a week ago, his eyes over bright with a particularly strong blend of Drachman whiskey. 'He's a genius. I'm telling you, woman: either that kid has a subscription to The National Geometry Index or he's a goddamn, straight-up child genius.' He had smiled then, casting Chris mischievous eyes over the lip of his glass. 'You could always sell him to the State.'

'Don't tempt me,' was her only reply.

Gathering herself, Chris sidled over to the young Chloe who was cradling a soaking, charred lace table cloth in her arms.

"What do you think, Chloe?" Chris asked, taking the cloth from her and tossing it to lie next to the bin.

The girl looked up, clearly still flummoxed by lunchtime's fiery proceedings.

Chris smiled and slapped her back. "You think I should kill him and put him in the stew?"

"What do I... what?" asked the girl in shock.

In answer to Chloe's confusion, Chris simply laughed and moved out to the front of house to greet her patrons. Chloe was left behind – arms still holding the absent table cloth. The new recruit had a lot to learn about Chris' sense of humour, and the older woman reckoned she may as well start teaching early. What better way than to threaten to throw the son of her dead brother into a rabbit stew? She couldn't say the idea wasn't appealing.

Chattering business types and early starters filled the large lounge to capacity, the typical lunchtime crowd. After an hour or so of helping to take the edge off the busy shift, Chris left her assistant manager to the rest. Emilia was a great supervisor; calm, popular with the customers and moreover, she understood exactly how much trouble three feet of rascal could be. Roy absolutely hated her, most likely because as an orphan herself, she was not willing to put up with his behaviour. One morning, on returning from the market, Chris found Roy passed out quite peacefully on one of the sofas, Emilia having fed him a dose of whiskey.

Thinking of him lying there, index finger to his lips, Chris had a rare moment of weakness. After everything, wasn't he just a lost little boy, wrestling with something he couldn't possibly understand? In her darker hours since she lost her brother, Chris had wanted to smash and bite and rail as well. In those moments, Roy's hair lightened to brown and his eyes to green, and in her mind she saw Oscar as he was as a boy: spirited and ready to shake the world into submission. Her little Ossy – she would miss him terribly.

She paused at Roy's bedroom door, fingering the brass knob as she reigned in her emotions. Little brat, she thought to herself, pulling in a deep, steeling breath. She counted to three. With a clack, the knob turned and Chris entered.

She breathed out a laugh; the image in front of her wasn't exactly what she had been expecting. Pencil still in hand, Roy sat on the floor, bent double at the waist so that his chest laid almost parallel with his thighs and his dark head rested between his bare knees. It was a ludicrous position to fall asleep in, further reminding Chris that she had four-year-old insomniac on her hands.

Creeping closer, she cringed when a floorboard creaked under her weight. She cursed the old property and took the next few steps with as much grace as she could muster.

Closer now, she could tell the boy had been forced into a heavy slumber. His chest rose and fell with steady breathing as his small fingers flittered in some dreamt exploit. She was never one for caution really, and so easing one hand under his legs and the other across his back, she lifted him up as carefully as she could, half petrified that he would wake and catch her in the middle of her non-crime. He didn't stir however.

There were benefits to him being so light, Chris realised, as she freed one hand to pull back the thick woollen covers of his bed. She laid him down, taking special care with his head as it sank into the pillow, and pulled the blankets up to his chin. In slumber, Roy wriggled and extracted his hands to curl his fingers around the edge of the blanket. He issued a soft moan and calmed into a deeper sleep again.

"Now why can't you do this when the owls are out, Roy-boy?" She whispered, repeatedly pushing his fringe back from his face, only for it to fall back again. "You're putting years on your Aunty Chris. First your dad, with his bloody meddling with one thing or another, and now you.

"I'm my own worst enemy, letting you sleep through the afternoon, you know that? You'll likely be up all night now terrorising my guests. Charlie Knox seems to like you, though God knows why. You do nothing but bother him from the moment he sets foot in the door. Man just wants a drink and there you are making a nuisance of yourself."

Her voice broke.

Looking at his pale, peaceful face once more, she rose and placed her hand to her breast. Her eyes, angry and bright, rose to the ceiling. "Oscar, you idiot man."

In the dark of dreams, the boy dreamt of a lone voice singing.

Thanks chaps! Thoughts? :D