In older assemblers, there existed a preprocessor instruction ".even" or "even", which insert a NOP, if the current offset is odd, so that the offset of the next instruction/variable will be even. Does a similar instruction exist in FASM? Isn't it important anymore to place words at even offsets?
Alignment is still important, look at the "align" directive.
align 4;
e.g. will align the next instruction (or part of a data structure) at a 4byte boundary.