"So, Fullmetal, I see your birthday is tomorrow."

Edward gave Roy a dirty scowl, shoving his hands in his pockets sullenly. "Don't remind me," he grumbled. "Al wants to take me back to Rizenbul to see Winry for it."

"Ah, but your work here-"

"-Keeps me here, so for once, find something for me to do, jackass."

Roy chuckled, setting down Edward's personnel file. "How old will you be? You still sound like you're fifteen."

"I'll be nineteen. I just don't feel like going back to Rizenbul. It's too dull there."

Roy cocked his head to the side. "Not even to see your girlfriend?"

Edward felt the heat rise in his cheeks. "She's not my girlfriend," he snapped. "She's Al's. Besides, she's too much like a sister to me."

"Edward." Edward didn't trust that too-patient tone from Mustang. "Have you ever even dated? Once? You're nineteen years old, you surely can't expect to stay married to your work forever. You've already accomplished what you set out to do, and yet here you are, still in the military, while your brother sits at home and waits for you."

Edward snorted. "No, I've never dated. I could, if I wanted, but why? Nobody would understand me and Al besides Winry, really. I figure I'll retire when those two decide to get married and move wherever they do. Play the ornery uncle and teach their kids bad words. Why?"

Mustang sighed theatrically. "I sometimes think you'll never grow up, Edward."

"I am grown up!" Edward protested, feeling that heat rising again, along with his ire. "And I can too get a date, I just don't want one!"

"And why do I not believe that?" Mustang asked with an infuriating smirk.

"I can to!" Edward shouted. "And I'll prove it! I'll have a date for this Friday, just you watch!"

Oh god, what did he just get himself into?

"Care to lay a wager on that, Fullmetal?"

Despite knowing that he knew nothing about dating, knew no girls he could potentially ask out, and had no idea how to ask a girl out in the first place, Edward narrowed his eyes and stuck out his hand. "You're on," he growled.

Sometimes, his stupidity really knew no bounds.

Edward's first problem, of course, was that he didn't know how to go about asking a girl out. It had to be simple, right? But should he have flowers, or would that be too forward? For that matter, who the hell was he going to ask out? The only two girls in Central that he knew were Sheska and the lieutenant. And Sheska was ... well, he liked her, he really did, but she was. Well.

Not his type. Leave it at that, yes.

And wasn't the lieutenant dating Mustang?

Well, even if she was, she was pragmatic, and didn't put up with Mustang's childish antics, so maybe she would help him. If nothing else, he could ask how one went about asking a girl out, and then he could potentially find a nice-looking girl off the street, eager for a chance to date a celebrity.

Sigh.

Everyone else in the office had cleared out already, since it was long past five, and that included Mustang. Fortunately, Lieutenant Hawkeye was still there, filing paperwork.

"Don't you ever go home?" he asked, standing in the doorway of the outer office.

She looked up quickly, blinking, then smiled. "Hello, Edward. I do. I simply decided to finish up a little more work before I went home."

Hayate dozed quietly next to her desk, but lifted his head as Edward walked closer, hooking a chair with his ankle as he neared and pulling it over to sit down. He reached down and scratched Hayate's ears. "Mind if I ask you a few questions, Lieutenant?"

She barely looked up from her work at the filing cabinet next to her desk. "Go ahead."

"How do you ask a girl out on a date?"

She froze, then looked at him, wide-eyed and blinking. "What?"

Edward took a deep breath. "Dating. How do you ask someone out? Maybe not a girl, but anyone. I've never done it before, and Colonel Jackass said I couldn't do it."

That brought an exasperated smile to her lips. "You two will never grow up, will you?" she said, then went back to filing. "It's quite simple, at least from what I've seen. You simply ask."

Wait, what? "What do you mean, 'from what you've seen'? Haven't you ever been out on a date?" She had to have been. She was what? In her thirties? Or not quite, anyway. She was just under ten years older than Edward, he remembered from her personnel file. So in her upper twenties, which wasn't so bad. But surely old enough to have dated before.

"I never had time for it," she confessed quietly. "Most boys when I was a teenager were too intimidated by my skill with the gun, then there was academy, then Ishbal, and then I got busy with my job here. I've been asked a few times, but I've been too busy."

He frowned. "I thought you were dating Mustang?"

She smiled, a little wistfully, he thought. "No. It was considered, after Isbhal, but whatever the battlefield had produced was just friendship. And it would be against the rules anyway, Edward. We'd both be risking our careers to do it."

A thought began to occur to him. "So I couldn't ask an officer out? Because I'm a State Alchemist and all?"

She looked over, blinking again, then shook her head. "No, Edward, you could date an officer. You're a civilian adviser, since you never took on the uniform. And you're lucky that way. You really ought to get out before war breaks out and you're forced into that thing. It sucks you dry. You may not be able to see it on all of us, but it's taken a toll on everyone here, even the colonel."

He was quiet, studying her for a minute. She really was attractive, past that uniform. He'd never noticed, too busy quarrelling with Mustang to really notice his subordinates. But she always made Al smile, and that was a point in her favor in his eyes.

And she wasn't Sheska, that was for sure.

"Can I ask you one more question, Lieutenant Hawkeye?"

"Go ahead," she said, starting on a new stack of reports.

"Will you go out with me this Friday?"

Once again, she froze, and stayed that way until the files began to slip from her arms. She scrambled to rescue them before they ended up on the floor, then stared at him. "Edward, I don't need your pity-" she started, clearly fumbling to pull up a stern Lieutenant Hawkeye mask.

He grinned disarmingly. "Come on, Lieutenant. Help a guy out. Besides, it's not pity. You make Al smile, that's good enough for me. Better than asking someone random off the street. And you deserve to not be too busy for it, even if it's only for one night." Please don't shoot me.

She stared at him, clearly uncertain what to make of that, before she turned away, her cheeks colored pink. "I- well, I'm not doing anything, so I suppose I can," she said quietly. Then she glanced at him, and Edward would've sworn it was shyly.

That was kinda cute, actually.

His grin widened. "I'll pick you up here at 5:00. We'll stop by your place so you can change, then we'll hit up a restaurant and then watch a silent, how's that? And if you don't have fun, you never have to do it again. But if you do, maybe we can do it again sometime."

"I- yes, that would be fine," she said. "And. Maybe. We'll see." She smiled.

He smiled back. "It's a date."

Of course, Mustang had flipped when he found out who Edward was dating that Friday. He'd tried to worm out of paying up the bet, claiming that Hawkeye was only doing it out of pity, but Hawkeye had quickly put that little notion out of his head and Mustang had reluctantly forked over the cash.

And the date was pretty fun, too.