Roy Mustang is not unfamiliar with the sounds of metal and screaming, but the cacophony is not typically so irritating.

Something goes crashing to the floor outside his office, and he doesn't want to know what, but he's going to in a minute, whether he likes it or not. He can already hear Fullmetal shrieking amid whatever chaos is going on, and his brother trying to mediate? Fight? There's no gunfire, and no sounds of anyone in any serious pain or injury.

A moment later, the choice to turn an irresponsible blind eye is lost as his door swings wide open to reveal an entire full-grown goose waddling into his office. It is dragging an entire automail arm along the ground, and Fullmetal bursts through the doorway a second later, scuffed and disheveled, one sleeve of his hastily-donned coat conspicuously unfilled.

"Give me my arm back, you hellish overgrown duck!"

He lunges, and the goose dances out of the way like it's taunting him, dragging the metal arm across the room toward the desk. Roy does not entirely know what to do here except to try and take the arm while the goose is busy with evasion, which he attempts. The goose snaps at him and honks louder than Roy thought geese could honk, and somehow in his thirty or so years of life he has never actually realized that geese have several rows of sharp little teeth on their tongues.

He sighs. "Fullmetal, what is this doing in my office?"

"Don't ask me!" Fullmetal shouts, waving his other arm about like a deranged windmill. "It just showed up while Winry was doing a tune-up and it ran off with my arm!"

As if on cue, the mechanic girl rushes into his office, still carrying a wrench.

"Where is it?!" she demands, whipping her head around in search of the goose, which is currently attempting to drag the arm under Roy's desk. He kicks at it half-heartedly, and it honks again, rattling the fingers of the arm in its beak.

Winry descends on the desk with a wordless battlecry and swings, only giving Roy a split second to step out of her strike. She is on a warpath, driven by the unspeakable rage of a mechanic whose work has been disrespected in ways only waterfowl can imagine.

"You little-!!" She misses and swings again, and goose finally lets go of the arm to flee, circling around the desk and nearly tripping Roy in the process. It makes a mad dash out the door again, and Fullmetal exits in furious pursuit. Winry grits out a muffled scream, which Roy can appreciate, but gives up on chasing the bird to instead collect the discarded arm from the carpet. It doesn't look damaged to Roy, but Winry seems to have different opinions. She grumbles something about the fingers for a moment before she seems to remember where she is and whose office she has just barged into swinging a wrench.

"I am so, so sorry!" she apologizes, suddenly flustered. "The goose stole the arm, and it was--"

"Yeah, I saw," says Roy, who is half-listening and half trying to keep an eye on the new round of commotion outside. Fullmetal appears to be trying to wrestle the goose with one arm, and losing. "It's no issue. Just please don't do this again."

She still apologizes one more time before hurrying out of the office to catch up to her patient. The brawl moves outside, and the office resumes its quiet soon enough. Roy prays there will be no repeat performances, although when the Elrics are concerned, all bets are too often off. In the meantime, his piles of paperwork have been disturbed by the ruckus, and he'll have to sort them again to make sure nothing is missing or in the wrong stacks, which is also an excellent excuse for not doing any of it.

Half an hour later, he realizes he's missing a glove.

---

The meeting Wrath is currently caught up in is going quite well, for an activity which makes him want to tackle one of the many interchangeable official faces across from him and tear their eyes from their sockets with his bare hands. (To be fair, this is most activities. His urge to rip people's eyes from their sockets is less of an impulse and more a simmering baseline of fury, albeit one he is well-practiced at keeping in check.)

And then. The goose jumps onto the table.

He does not know where the goose came from, which is something of a novelty. Perhaps because it did not fall into the class of an actual attack, which his eye might warn him of; instead, there is simply a large obnoxious animal strutting up the meeting table like it owns the entire building, ruffling its feathers and waggling its tail. It walks up to him, stopping neatly just shy of arm's length, and honks.

Wrath clenches his jaw a little tighter than before, and stares at the goose. The goose stares back. Its eyes are the call of the abyss, and the glint of too-familiar mischief. And now, immediately, he knows exactly who this is, because there is only one person it could be. Like recognizes like.

The officials have mostly fallen into a baffled silence, a few gaping openly like fools, several more simply blinking or pinching themselves or stealing furtive glances back at the door, which was supposed to be shut, and is clearly not. One bolder individual stands and draws a sword, which makes him look either very brave or very stupid, regardless of which understanding of the bird's identity is given.

"Get out," Wrath tells the goose. He does not really expect this to work. The goose honks and makes a grab for one of the medals on his uniform, which he avoids with ease, but still stokes his animosity for his older sibling.

Envy sticks their neck out and flaps their wings a few times, sending briefing documents flying off the table in the following gust, then turns around and honks again at the next nearest official, who up until now has been mostly sitting in his seat, looking very confused. They rip a paper report from his hands and hop off the table, pit-pattering on webbed feet in an absurd wobbly run, and the room rapidly devolves into chaos.

The man with the sword, whose name Wrath does not remotely care enough about to remember right now, yells and attempts to stab them, only for Envy to grab the sword in their beak and yank it out of his hands. They bite him for good measure, dodge several supremely unhelpful others trying to corner and catch them, and depart, still carrying the sword, in a flurry of wingbeats, flailing goose feet, and scattered papers.

Wrath has been very well-behaved today. He is going to ask Pride to strangle them when they next meet.

---

This is a dangerous game Envy is playing. Father will not like it one bit, Pride thinks, if his sibling actually manages to sabotage something important with this. And as persistent as the current game appears to be, they very well might.

Wrath was in the middle of a meeting, this time. And now, Pride is in the midst of schoolwork.

He is trying very hard to pretend to be paying attention to the current lesson in painfully simple arithmetic. He is probably trying harder than anyone else in the room full of snotty wealthy children he has been set to imitate and mingle with, in fact. He does not deserve this.

The goose outside the window does not shut up.

Very subtly, Pride twists up a tendril of shadow near the goose, on the side of the school's outer wall. He gives it eyes and glares at Envy through them, grinding the gleaming teeth, trying to get across the general message of quit it or I'll slice your stupid goose neck in half.

The teacher gives him a questioning look when his vessel winces and squints for a moment in sympathy with his true form. The goose has pecked him in the eye, because his little sibling is a bastard who doesn't know when to stop, and doesn't have anything better to do than harass him, apparently.

Pride knows it would be a better plan, practically speaking, to ignore Envy and wait for them to leave. Or better yet, allow some humans to come and remove them out of misguided kindness to a lost farm animal let loose in the city streets. He has to find a compromise for now.

He waits until they're at the wrong angle for anyone indoors to see, and swipes blindly at Envy, slapping them upside their feathery head with a satisfying smack. They thrash around a bit, and bite him, but they can't do any real damage like this. A few nonlethal blows later and they're on the move, away from the school, having hopefully gotten the gist of things this time. When they don't come back within a minute or two, he presumes they have found someone more rewarding to plague with their current goosey nonsense.

It is not until after classes that he stretches his senses far enough to see the smoke, rising off a building at the far end of town.