More Havoc/Winry Themes
Title: SWM seek CSFG w/ GP
Author: Camudekyu
Rating: R
Pairing: Havoc/Winry
Length: 8 pages, 'round about
Warnings: Fluff. More drinkin'. Jean shows off his pistol--that's not a euphemism. He actually pulls a gun on someone.
Summary: Jean Havoc, Winry Rockbell, and a roadtrip home. Hijinks abound.
A/N: Got inspired by the 30_kisses themes. This is theme 21-25. Not entirely sure how I feel about #21. Thoughts would be nice. And #24 features contra dancing, which, if you've never done it, is like square dancing on amphetamines and is an Appalachian staple.
XXI. Violence; Pillage/Plunder; Extortion
They opted, instead of walking back out to the truck, toting a full and unruly gas can, to have the truck towed to Pomona. It cost more, certainly, but neither Jean nor Winry was really in the mood to retrace the three miles with civilization at his or her back.
The heart of Pomona―a large, packed-earth square where all the roads converged like the spokes of a wheel―was closed to traffic that evening, making finagling the truck into the parking lot at the front of the hotel somewhat of an obstacle course. People milled about the square in packs, pairs, and singles, and all seemed happy to make eye contact with the strangers in the strange truck and then to keep walking down the middle of the street.
After crawling their way to the hotel, they parked and got a room. Winry was intrigued by the activity outside, and by the time she had dragged Jean out of the hotel room and into the street, the lamps were being lit and a tall bonfire was taking off in a shallow pit in the very center of the square.
A band collected by the fire and then the dancing started.
Winry seemed enchanted.
“What do you suppose their celebrating?” Winry asked, her stride swaying in time with the music.
“From the looks of things, this is the Annual Drinking and Inbreeding Festival,” Jean muttered, casting glances around him at the clusters of people loitering around them.
“Says the man from Monrovia.”
Jean stopped and pointed at her. “Hey, I might be country, but I'm not a redneck.”
Winry looked around. “What's the difference?”
“My folks weren't siblings?” Jean said, and Winry elbowed him hard in the ribs.
“What is your problem?” she hissed. “What do you have against this place?”
Jean couldn't quite put his finger on it, so he said instead, “I don't know. We're getting a lot of weird looks, and it's freaking me out.”
They found a bar with an outdoor patio―Winry insisted on listening to the music in the square―and settled at a small wooden table for a few beers. All the bar had was an extra pale pilsner, which Jean took as a sign of Pomona's failings, but he let Winry buy his drink anyway.
The bonfire was climbing high into the air by the time they finished the first round. The music, a four-man string band that sang everything in three-part harmony, drew the dancers closer to the fire and pushed the loiters farther and farther out, until Winry was catching herself looking longingly at the couples waltzing around the blaze.
After the server brought them their next round of watery beers, Winry rested her chin in her hand wistfully and asked, “Doesn't that look like fun?”
“Yeah, if you want to get hepatitis.”
She glared at him. “I don't know what you've got in mind, buddy, but I just want to waltz.” Winry shoved herself back from the table. “What is wrong with you, Jean? Why are you being such a baby?”
“A baby?” Jean asked, sitting forward and putting a hand to his chest. “I've got a gut feeling that I don't like this place, and you think that makes me a baby?”
“Well why don't you and your gut feeling go keep each other company in the hotel room while I go waltz?” Winry crossed her arms over her chest and jutted out her chin just a bit.
Jean muttered something under his breath.
“What?” Winry demanded, leaning over the table. “What was that?”
“I said, like hell I'm leaving you alone out here, all right?”
Then Winry started laughing at him, and Jean bristled.
“Oh, please,” she said, waving a hand at him. “I'm going to go find someone who will waltz with me, and you can sit here and watch if it makes you feel better.”
Jean stood up. “You do whatever the hell you want, Winry. I'm not hanging around to see what happens!”
Winry bolted up as well. “Fine!”
“Fine!”
“Bye,” Winry said as she threw down some bills on the table, turned around, and marched toward the fire, where a thin ring of watchers stood waiting for whatever inspiration they needed to join in the dancing. Jean watched her go and stand, her defiant stance cast as a silhouette against the towering bonfire. He let out a brusque sigh and stormed back for the hotel.
Only when he was back in the room, thumbing through Pomona's attempt at a newspaper, did Jean realize what about this place struck him as so odd. He noticed, first, that all the stories in the paper had heartwarming, family-friendly endings. He flipped back through, and, sure enough, he did not find one story about crime. Not an assault. Not a theft. Not even vandalism. While Pomona didn't strike him as a criminal hotspot, any town with a population greater than one would have something to mention. Jean looked again. There wasn't even an obituary page.
He thought back to the party in the center of town. For all the people hanging around the celebration, Winry was one of only a handful of women there. There were a few matrons around and some paired off women, but otherwise, the crowd was all men. A party like that would attract girls, right? Gaggles of them. But there had been no gaggles. And Jean could think of only so many reasons for parents to keep their daughters home en masse.
Jean didn't waste any time second-guessing as he dug through his luggage for his shoulder holsters.
~
He strode with his hands sunk deep in his pockets to keep his coat from blowing around. There were fewer people dancing now than there had been half an hour ago, and Jean didn't bother trying to look like a partygoer as he elbowed past others. He thought if he could just find her, see her waltzing innocuously, probably with her head tossed back and a big, dumb grin on her face, then he'd know he was overreacting, and he'd go have a beer and a smoke and go back to the room.
But she wasn't one of the people dancing. He watched them go around and around the fire. In the bold, orange light, he looked at the face of each woman that passed, and she was definitely not there.
Thinking she might have gone back to the bar, Jean went there next.
Perhaps, he thought when he didn't find her at the bar, if he stood in one place where he could see most of the square, he'd be able to catch her if she were moving around. She was a pretty girl in a crowd of men, right? She had to stick out.
But it was dark and cold, and everyone, men and few women alike, were bundled down into asexual, amorphous blurs. So Jean looked for that long, blonde tail of Winry's, swaying like a pendulum in time with her gait.
When he finally spotted her, she was being hurried away down a sidewalk away from the party. A man had an arm cinched around her ribs, and he maneuvered her gracelessly. She looked like she needed a pilot, too. Her long, bare legs, as pale as fondant in the lamplight, seemed to get knotted together. Her feet looked heavy and unwieldy. She didn't lift them properly, didn't set them where they needed to go.
“Winry!” Jean called as he jogged to catch up.
She looked over her shoulder and blew him a kiss, laughing. But then bodies passed between them, blocking his view, and Jean had to shoulder his way around the corner.
When he caught sight of her again, Winry and her guide blinked into an orange puddle of lamplight. She was falling on this man, her smile slipping. If possible, she looked even drunker than she had before. Jean frowned. He had only left her out alone for, perhaps, half an hour. How many drinks had she pounded with this guy?
Winry passed below a lamp, once more, and Jean got a better look at her guide. He was just a kid, a lanky teenager with dark hair and eyes. He had a look of determination and thinly veiled panic in his eyes as he negotiated Winry past other people in the street.
“Fucking hell,” Jean muttered as this kid guided her off the main road, around another corner, and onto a narrow side street.
Jean put aside the pleasantries and began shoving people out of his way. With the lamplight at his back, he charged into the alley. Winry and the boy were only a few yards in, close enough for Jean to dart forward and seize her by the shoulder. He meant to drag her out into the light, but her feet got tangled in themselves. She dropped to the ground and remained seated there. Jean pointed a finger at the boy. “It's just not your night, pal,” Jean told the boy as he leaned down and wrapped a hand around Winry's bicep.
She shakily rose to her feet with help, leaning heavily against the wall to his left.
“Jean,” she whined.
“Let's get the hell out of here,” he said, ready to turn his back to the boy. What happened to the kid wasn't of consequence now; Jean intended to drag Winry back to the hotel, prop her up in the bathroom, and pour water into her until she vomited up whatever this boy had given her.
He could see the boy in front of him twitching and trembling as he stepped back away from the light. “I,” the boy began, his voice cracking, “I won't let you do that.”
“Look,” Jean began but stopped when he heard the sound of approaching feet from within the alley. He squinted his eyes into the darkness. Four, perhaps, fives shapes came to stand behind the boy. And while Jean thought he could probably take down a single high school drop out, a small crowd of them was something different.
“Jean,” Winry moaned, her head slumped against the bricks.
“I'm armed,” he warned, keeping his hands steadily at his sides. He hated this part, this guns and civilians part, and it had been so long since he'd had to point a gun at anyone, let alone a pack of kids.
He heard a low ripple of laughter from the shadowy crowd, still almost indistinguishable just outside the edge of the lamplight. Then came a chorus of tinny clicks and swishes―Switchblades? Jean thought. He really was facing off with a gang of high school drop outs.
Winry began to gag, and Jean turned in time to see her shoulders lurch against the wall as pale yellow vomit fountained out of her mouth and splashed across her shoes and the pavement. The end of her ponytail, draped over her shoulder, hung in the way as she retched. She coughed and gasped, one hand fisted against her knee and the other pressed to the wall. “Jean,” she moaned again, a low, mournful sound.
His hackles began to rise. He'd had enough of this for one night. He reached within his coat and flicked open the thumb break on one of his two holsters. Even over the party in the background, Jean could hear the snap. He felt the cold metal grip of his Walther PP under his fingers as he produced his pistol and held it down, muzzle pointed somewhere around the boys' feet. “I said, I'm armed.”
Feet shuffled and paused and shuffled again. Jean had met deaf, legless, twelve-year-old veterans less amateurish than this.
He moved slowly toward Winry and clamped his free hand around her upper arm. She was hardily aware of him. Jean hesitated, watched the shadows of shapes as well as he could, but none of them seemed to be moving. He had, it seemed, succeeded in making himself enough of a challenge to dissuade this pack of seventeen-year-olds, and Jean couldn't deny the creeping relief that none of these kids wanted Winry badly enough to hazard facing a pistol.
He backed them out of the alley and into the street. Winry stumbled and swayed, her head rolling loosely on her neck. Once out in the lamplight, Jean held his right hand and pistol just inside his coat to avoid drawing attention from the people coming and going from the bonfire, which raged on in the distance.
“Jean.”
“Tell me about it,” he muttered distractedly as he leaned Winry against a lamp post. With his hands free, he put his pistol back in the holster and snapped closed the thumb break. He looked up in time to catch Winry's shoulders before she could slump to the side of the lamp post.
“I puked,” she told him, her eyelids drooping.
“Sure did.”
“I puked in my hair, didn't I?”
Jean looked over her shoulder at her dripping ponytail. “Yep.”
She shook her head lethargically. “I want to go home.” She started to tremble.
Jean wished he could drape his coat around her, but for fear of flashing his handguns in the crowd, he knew he could not. Instead, he settled an arm around her shoulders and steered her back toward the hotel.
XXII. Cradle
Before the thin, powdery light of morning, before the water running in the bathroom, before the sweet-smelling detergent in the sheets, Winry sensed pain. Like a hand pressed to her face, pressing her back, holding her down. Her head pounded, and her stomach felt small and empty.
She managed to crack an eye.
Above her, the white, plaster ceiling twisted and leaned for a moment before slowing and stopping. Light shafted down through the windows over the bed, motes blinking in and out. Though it took effort, Winry lolled her head to one side and then another. She saw a row of windows and a couch to the right of her bed, a dented pillow and rumpled blanket abandoned there. And to the left, was an open door.
Winry blinked hard, her eyelids gummy and recalcitrant. When she could focus, she saw a pair of legs standing just within the bathroom doorway. Long, brown slacks.
Nothing was fitting together. When she looked into the night before, she saw a big, dark void.
The water shut off in the bathroom. Winry heard a tap tap tap of something hitting the edge of a sink. Then Jean came out of the bathroom, a towel around his shoulders, and the wooden box containing his shaving kit in his hands.
He noticed her as he came around the bed.
“The belle of the ball awakens,” he said dryly as he sat heavily on the couch. He leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, and Winry saw his dog tags swing on a chain before the scooped neck of his undershirt.
“Jean,” she said.
He was getting rather tired of hearing his name said in that tone. That plaintive moan.
“I can't remember last night.”
He watched her for a long moment. He lifted his right hand and rubbed his mouth pensively.
“What ha―”
“You hungry?” Jean asked, sitting up straight and clapping his hands down on his knees. “I'd kill for a cup of coffee right now.” That was such an odd thing to say when he was still feeling like an ass for pulling a gun on a passel of kids the night before. “I bet you're thirsty.”
Winry smacked her lips softly. They were dry and cracked and sore. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. “I am.”
“I'll get you some water,” he said and stood.
Jean went to the bathroom and filled one of the glass tumblers by the sink. When he returned to the main room, Winry was doing her best to sit herself up, and he could see the look on her face when she recognized that she was wearing her clothes from the night before. Jean came and hooked an arm around her ribs and eased her up and back against the headboard. Winry took the offered water in a trembling hand and took tentative sips, and Jean managed to snag the tumbler from her fingers before she could drop it.
He would tell her, he thought. But not yet.
XXIII. Candy
“Jean?”
“Hmm?”
“Why did you just turn?”
“You didn't see the sign?”
“No.”
“Oh,” he said. “We're taking a short detour.”
Winry hurriedly pulled a map out of the compartment in her door. She unfolded it, expanding it until it took up half the cab. She found the road they were taking―they'd gotten onto Route 60, which was a straight shot to Monrovia and, just east of that, Resembool―and she looked for where Jean had turned. The map, like the view out the windows, showed nothing but empty farm land.
“Jean?”
“Hmm?”
“Where the hell are you taking us?”
With his chin just slightly turned up, he glanced at her. “Pumpkinville.”
“What?”
“Oh, sorry,” he said, as dignified as he could, “I bet they pronounce it Pun'kinville.”
Winry slammed the map down on her lap, wrinkling it and upsetting the intricate system of folds. “What the hell is Pumpkinville?”
“Uh, only the pun'kin capital of the nation?” he informed her as though, really, she should know this already.
Winry slapped a hand over her eyes. “We're never actually going to get to Resembool, are we?”
Jean was quiet for a moment. “You know what you sound like?”
“What?”
“The Road Trip Downer.”
Winry turned and punched him in the ribs. Hard.
When they arrived in Pun'kinville, Jean paid their admission to get into the weekend-long Pun'kin Festival. With the winter squash harvest completed, the brochure explained, and the weeks of curing in a heated root cellar passed, it was time to enjoy all the winter-time treats pun'kins had to offer. There also was, Winry saw, a small segment of the fair dedicated to that age old debate: which is the superior cold-weather vegetable for pie-making, pun'kin or sweet potato?
“It's just a gimmick,” Jean explained to Winry as they passed the unpopular sweet potato rallying booth. “I bet pun'kin wins every time.”
Winry sighed. “No, really? It is the pumpkin festival.”
He had only been joking. Jean furrowed his brow and looked to his right, where Winry was ambling, bumping his shoulder as they went. “Who rattled your cage?”
The loose, slumping shoulders of her gray sweatshirt went up for a long moment and then dropped. She looked up at Jean, the light behind her eyes somewhat dimmed, her mouth just cracked. It was the face, Jean knew, that she made when he was disappointing her.
“I just want to get to Resembool,” she said.
Jean felt like an asshole for making her say something he should already know. “I know,” he said.
They stopped by a booth selling confections, little baked dollops of pureed pun'kin, encrusted with brown sugar and drizzled with syrup, and Winry bought a box of a dozen. They were still warm and drippy, and Winry held the open box between her and Jean as they wandered the fair grounds.
The festival was not particularly crowded on that gray Saturday morning, and the longer they strolled, the more grateful Jean became for it. With the candy box in one hand, Winry would rest her other hand on Jean's arm periodically. Once he was aware of her doing it, Jean began to look for a pattern―perhaps she took his arm when they passed groups of teenaged boys or solitary men―but there was not one he could see. Jean could only assume that Winry sought out his arm in time with her thoughts, and he wouldn't attempt to interpret those.
“Oh, a petting zoo,” Jean said, eliciting a small, forced laugh from Winry, and in the distraction of turning them around toward the corral, Jean looped his arm through Winry's. She went rigid for a moment. Then she relaxed. Then she adjusted her steps to they walked on the same foot. Then she drew very close to his side.
Winry leaned her elbows against the split-railed fence and fed the rest of her candies to an eager, brown goat, who gave her fingers sloppy, grain-specked kisses.
“I can take you straight to Resembool tomorrow, if you'd like,” Jean offered, turning and leaning back against the railing.
Winry folded up the paperboard box until it was a rigid square, and she worried one corner with her thumb. “You'd drop me off and double back to Monrovia?”
Jean shrugged. “Sure, if you want me to.”
Winry thought of her house, her room in the attic, her grandmother. The smell of the laundry drying on the line and strong coffee in the mornings. Pinako's pungent tobacco―sweet and deep and nothing like the cigarette Jean was smoking.
She pulled her hands into the sleeves of her sweatshirt―it was almost hers by this point―and said, “Okay.”
She watched Jean quirk a brow slightly, watched his mouth tighten slightly, just slightly, and part of her felt bad, but another part knew he'd understand.
Looking back over the sheep and goats, butting heads and bumping flanks to stay warm, Winry straightened her back and rested her palms―the palms of Jean's gloves through the sleeves of Jean's sweatshirt―against the railing. Jean drew closer in her peripheral vision, and she went rigid when she felt a body step up behind her. But then there were hands settling next to hers on the rail, a cigarette pinched in the knuckles of one of these new hands, big and angular and more heavily-lined than hers, and then that body was leaning into hers, and then there was the pressure against her scalp of Jean resting his chin on top of her head.
And, oh. That was nice.
XXIV. Goodnight
“Well,” Winry said, trying so hard to sound resolved, “I guess I'll see you tomorrow morning.” She stood in the entrance to her hotel room, one hand on the jamb and the other on the door.
Jean held the key to his hotel room in his hand. He gave her a smile he hoped let her know that he understood. “All right.” Then he turned and went to his room across the hall.
The caller stepped them through the Pun'kinville Reel, and Winry was still uncertain of all the steps when she saw Jean grinning like a kid and tapping out the beat against his thigh as the band started up. They stood in two separate, facing lines, the men in one and the women in the other.
“Ready?” he asked as his line executed quick bows.
The rest of the women in Winry's line were curtsying, and she did her best to follow. “No,” Winry admitted.
Oil lanterns hung high in the rafters and in sconces on the support beams of the long barn. At one end, the double doors were closed and a band sat in wooden chairs on a low platform. The caller stood next to them on a bale of hay, a bullhorn in her hand.
But Jean was quite patient with Winry, repeated the caller's directions low in her ear. “All right, now gyspy. Ouch. No, it's okay. Close enough. Okay, promenade. Perfect, but you've got to let me lead, Winry.”
There were so many young people there. Winry watched ten-year-olds execute complicated moves and exchanges that made her mouth slacken and her head tilt. Still, she and Jean kept it simple, and Winry felt some relief when the band shifted into a quick, even waltz.
“I can do this one,” Winry said brightly as they made their way around the barn with the other couples. “And, hey, I'm going to remember it tomorrow morning, too!” Jean faltered when she said that, took a moment to recover, and laughed when she laughed.
The waltz marched on a few minutes longer before it began to peter out. The band then began a slow song, the sort of song that couples chat through as they dance, the kind that sends sweating, young dancers to their seats. Winry was ready to find her own bale of hay to park it at, but Jean held her hand, spun her once, and pulled her unwittingly into another, final dance.
Winry was still a little winded from the waltz, and that made it much easier for her to relinquish the lead to Jean.
He laughed at her. “I see I've got to wear you out before you start dancing like a girl.”
“Shut up,” Winry said, leaning her cheek on his shoulder. “You're gonna ruin it.”
Men's sweat, Winry thought, had a very distinct smell to it. She did not particularly like the smell when it was dried, but new sweat, freshly worked up, that was rather nice. An earthy sharpness. Jean smelled like petrichor and smoke and aftershave in that dusty, hay-scented barn, and Winry leaned in and breathed deep. He was quiet and comfortable, and for as jagged at they could be when they spoke, in their dark, lilting truce, they nested like a round riverstone in a palm.
It was so quiet now. No rumbling engine. No speeding landscape.
Jean spun her out again, and because Winry was still pliant enough to be led, she did not resist when he only half turned her and pulled her toward him, her back to his front. He crossed her arms over her solar plexus and held her hands so that she hugged herself to him. Winry felt him conforming to her, bowing just slightly in order to pull her back into this quiet cove of his, and she eddied there, felt herself pooling in his arms.
One of his hands stole up her side, slipped unobtrusively under the waist of her sweatshirt. His fingertips slid over the narrow glimpse of skin below the hem of her blouse, and he lingered there, brushed his knuckles against that skin as though coaxing something out of her.
She felt his breath on her ear followed by his mouth resting against her temple. It wasn't a kiss, really. Perhaps the heart of the gesture was the same, but this was a subtle insistence, a patient question, and Winry answered by leaning deeper into him.
Then the strings ceased singing. The spell subsided. Winry awoke to Jean's intentions with a start.
XXV. Fence
Winry watched the morning light progressively painting her ceiling in lighter and lighter shades. Red to orange to yellow to white, and finally at white, she was so sick of lying there, practicing what she was going to say that she counted to three, threw the blankets back, and got out of the bed.
The wall clock said almost nine. If he wasn't up yet, she would wake him herself.
Winry felt her resolve pooling in her stomach, her heart beating hard against her sternum as she padded barefoot across the hall. And then she realized that, as much as it was diffused with terror, she was excited. She was giddy almost, and she took a deep breath to make her blood slow as it coursed through her veins.
Then she knocked. She heard a muffled reply from within, and she hoped it was a welcome because she was opening the door and walking in before it occurred to her that Jean might have said something else.
He stepped out of the bathroom in his pajamas, patting his face dry with a towel.
“You look like a woman on a mission,” he said a little warily.
In lieu of a reply, Winry marched right up to him, stood on her toes, and planted a kiss squarely on his mouth. His mouth was warm and wet and entirely unprepared. She withdrew before Jean could ease the rigidity from his back and shoulders.
“So I was thinking,” Winry began hurriedly, “We've got two options here. We can keep dancing around and pretending and interacting like two spooked neighbors talking over a fence, or I could just be a grown-up about it and admit that I've had more fun with you than I've had in a really long time and that I'm really grateful for everything you've done for me and that I like you.” She paused to breathe. “A lot.”
She stared at him with such sincerity, her pellucid eyes so big and scared and hopeful, that Jean couldn't help it: he dropped his head forward and slumped his shoulders and laughed. When he met her eyes, her face was fierce. Her fists on her hips were trembling.
“So, you're just going to laugh at me. Is that it?”
“I'm not,” he started but paused to order his thoughts. “I'm not laughing at you.” But he was having an awfully hard time stopping.
“That's really hard to believe when you can't―”
He hooked his index finger under her chin and kissed her back. He felt Winry become completely still, limp even, and then she began to squirm excitedly. When he pulled away, the terror was gone. Her eyes, like looking off the end of a dock, were still impossibly large and searching his face, and the light behind them was resplendent.
“You wanna come with me to Monrovia?”
She hardily let him finish. “Yes!”
Author: Camudekyu
Rating: R
Pairing: Havoc/Winry
Length: 8 pages, 'round about
Warnings: Fluff. More drinkin'. Jean shows off his pistol--that's not a euphemism. He actually pulls a gun on someone.
Summary: Jean Havoc, Winry Rockbell, and a roadtrip home. Hijinks abound.
A/N: Got inspired by the 30_kisses themes. This is theme 21-25. Not entirely sure how I feel about #21. Thoughts would be nice. And #24 features contra dancing, which, if you've never done it, is like square dancing on amphetamines and is an Appalachian staple.
XXI. Violence; Pillage/Plunder; Extortion
They opted, instead of walking back out to the truck, toting a full and unruly gas can, to have the truck towed to Pomona. It cost more, certainly, but neither Jean nor Winry was really in the mood to retrace the three miles with civilization at his or her back.
The heart of Pomona―a large, packed-earth square where all the roads converged like the spokes of a wheel―was closed to traffic that evening, making finagling the truck into the parking lot at the front of the hotel somewhat of an obstacle course. People milled about the square in packs, pairs, and singles, and all seemed happy to make eye contact with the strangers in the strange truck and then to keep walking down the middle of the street.
After crawling their way to the hotel, they parked and got a room. Winry was intrigued by the activity outside, and by the time she had dragged Jean out of the hotel room and into the street, the lamps were being lit and a tall bonfire was taking off in a shallow pit in the very center of the square.
A band collected by the fire and then the dancing started.
Winry seemed enchanted.
“What do you suppose their celebrating?” Winry asked, her stride swaying in time with the music.
“From the looks of things, this is the Annual Drinking and Inbreeding Festival,” Jean muttered, casting glances around him at the clusters of people loitering around them.
“Says the man from Monrovia.”
Jean stopped and pointed at her. “Hey, I might be country, but I'm not a redneck.”
Winry looked around. “What's the difference?”
“My folks weren't siblings?” Jean said, and Winry elbowed him hard in the ribs.
“What is your problem?” she hissed. “What do you have against this place?”
Jean couldn't quite put his finger on it, so he said instead, “I don't know. We're getting a lot of weird looks, and it's freaking me out.”
They found a bar with an outdoor patio―Winry insisted on listening to the music in the square―and settled at a small wooden table for a few beers. All the bar had was an extra pale pilsner, which Jean took as a sign of Pomona's failings, but he let Winry buy his drink anyway.
The bonfire was climbing high into the air by the time they finished the first round. The music, a four-man string band that sang everything in three-part harmony, drew the dancers closer to the fire and pushed the loiters farther and farther out, until Winry was catching herself looking longingly at the couples waltzing around the blaze.
After the server brought them their next round of watery beers, Winry rested her chin in her hand wistfully and asked, “Doesn't that look like fun?”
“Yeah, if you want to get hepatitis.”
She glared at him. “I don't know what you've got in mind, buddy, but I just want to waltz.” Winry shoved herself back from the table. “What is wrong with you, Jean? Why are you being such a baby?”
“A baby?” Jean asked, sitting forward and putting a hand to his chest. “I've got a gut feeling that I don't like this place, and you think that makes me a baby?”
“Well why don't you and your gut feeling go keep each other company in the hotel room while I go waltz?” Winry crossed her arms over her chest and jutted out her chin just a bit.
Jean muttered something under his breath.
“What?” Winry demanded, leaning over the table. “What was that?”
“I said, like hell I'm leaving you alone out here, all right?”
Then Winry started laughing at him, and Jean bristled.
“Oh, please,” she said, waving a hand at him. “I'm going to go find someone who will waltz with me, and you can sit here and watch if it makes you feel better.”
Jean stood up. “You do whatever the hell you want, Winry. I'm not hanging around to see what happens!”
Winry bolted up as well. “Fine!”
“Fine!”
“Bye,” Winry said as she threw down some bills on the table, turned around, and marched toward the fire, where a thin ring of watchers stood waiting for whatever inspiration they needed to join in the dancing. Jean watched her go and stand, her defiant stance cast as a silhouette against the towering bonfire. He let out a brusque sigh and stormed back for the hotel.
Only when he was back in the room, thumbing through Pomona's attempt at a newspaper, did Jean realize what about this place struck him as so odd. He noticed, first, that all the stories in the paper had heartwarming, family-friendly endings. He flipped back through, and, sure enough, he did not find one story about crime. Not an assault. Not a theft. Not even vandalism. While Pomona didn't strike him as a criminal hotspot, any town with a population greater than one would have something to mention. Jean looked again. There wasn't even an obituary page.
He thought back to the party in the center of town. For all the people hanging around the celebration, Winry was one of only a handful of women there. There were a few matrons around and some paired off women, but otherwise, the crowd was all men. A party like that would attract girls, right? Gaggles of them. But there had been no gaggles. And Jean could think of only so many reasons for parents to keep their daughters home en masse.
Jean didn't waste any time second-guessing as he dug through his luggage for his shoulder holsters.
~
He strode with his hands sunk deep in his pockets to keep his coat from blowing around. There were fewer people dancing now than there had been half an hour ago, and Jean didn't bother trying to look like a partygoer as he elbowed past others. He thought if he could just find her, see her waltzing innocuously, probably with her head tossed back and a big, dumb grin on her face, then he'd know he was overreacting, and he'd go have a beer and a smoke and go back to the room.
But she wasn't one of the people dancing. He watched them go around and around the fire. In the bold, orange light, he looked at the face of each woman that passed, and she was definitely not there.
Thinking she might have gone back to the bar, Jean went there next.
Perhaps, he thought when he didn't find her at the bar, if he stood in one place where he could see most of the square, he'd be able to catch her if she were moving around. She was a pretty girl in a crowd of men, right? She had to stick out.
But it was dark and cold, and everyone, men and few women alike, were bundled down into asexual, amorphous blurs. So Jean looked for that long, blonde tail of Winry's, swaying like a pendulum in time with her gait.
When he finally spotted her, she was being hurried away down a sidewalk away from the party. A man had an arm cinched around her ribs, and he maneuvered her gracelessly. She looked like she needed a pilot, too. Her long, bare legs, as pale as fondant in the lamplight, seemed to get knotted together. Her feet looked heavy and unwieldy. She didn't lift them properly, didn't set them where they needed to go.
“Winry!” Jean called as he jogged to catch up.
She looked over her shoulder and blew him a kiss, laughing. But then bodies passed between them, blocking his view, and Jean had to shoulder his way around the corner.
When he caught sight of her again, Winry and her guide blinked into an orange puddle of lamplight. She was falling on this man, her smile slipping. If possible, she looked even drunker than she had before. Jean frowned. He had only left her out alone for, perhaps, half an hour. How many drinks had she pounded with this guy?
Winry passed below a lamp, once more, and Jean got a better look at her guide. He was just a kid, a lanky teenager with dark hair and eyes. He had a look of determination and thinly veiled panic in his eyes as he negotiated Winry past other people in the street.
“Fucking hell,” Jean muttered as this kid guided her off the main road, around another corner, and onto a narrow side street.
Jean put aside the pleasantries and began shoving people out of his way. With the lamplight at his back, he charged into the alley. Winry and the boy were only a few yards in, close enough for Jean to dart forward and seize her by the shoulder. He meant to drag her out into the light, but her feet got tangled in themselves. She dropped to the ground and remained seated there. Jean pointed a finger at the boy. “It's just not your night, pal,” Jean told the boy as he leaned down and wrapped a hand around Winry's bicep.
She shakily rose to her feet with help, leaning heavily against the wall to his left.
“Jean,” she whined.
“Let's get the hell out of here,” he said, ready to turn his back to the boy. What happened to the kid wasn't of consequence now; Jean intended to drag Winry back to the hotel, prop her up in the bathroom, and pour water into her until she vomited up whatever this boy had given her.
He could see the boy in front of him twitching and trembling as he stepped back away from the light. “I,” the boy began, his voice cracking, “I won't let you do that.”
“Look,” Jean began but stopped when he heard the sound of approaching feet from within the alley. He squinted his eyes into the darkness. Four, perhaps, fives shapes came to stand behind the boy. And while Jean thought he could probably take down a single high school drop out, a small crowd of them was something different.
“Jean,” Winry moaned, her head slumped against the bricks.
“I'm armed,” he warned, keeping his hands steadily at his sides. He hated this part, this guns and civilians part, and it had been so long since he'd had to point a gun at anyone, let alone a pack of kids.
He heard a low ripple of laughter from the shadowy crowd, still almost indistinguishable just outside the edge of the lamplight. Then came a chorus of tinny clicks and swishes―Switchblades? Jean thought. He really was facing off with a gang of high school drop outs.
Winry began to gag, and Jean turned in time to see her shoulders lurch against the wall as pale yellow vomit fountained out of her mouth and splashed across her shoes and the pavement. The end of her ponytail, draped over her shoulder, hung in the way as she retched. She coughed and gasped, one hand fisted against her knee and the other pressed to the wall. “Jean,” she moaned again, a low, mournful sound.
His hackles began to rise. He'd had enough of this for one night. He reached within his coat and flicked open the thumb break on one of his two holsters. Even over the party in the background, Jean could hear the snap. He felt the cold metal grip of his Walther PP under his fingers as he produced his pistol and held it down, muzzle pointed somewhere around the boys' feet. “I said, I'm armed.”
Feet shuffled and paused and shuffled again. Jean had met deaf, legless, twelve-year-old veterans less amateurish than this.
He moved slowly toward Winry and clamped his free hand around her upper arm. She was hardily aware of him. Jean hesitated, watched the shadows of shapes as well as he could, but none of them seemed to be moving. He had, it seemed, succeeded in making himself enough of a challenge to dissuade this pack of seventeen-year-olds, and Jean couldn't deny the creeping relief that none of these kids wanted Winry badly enough to hazard facing a pistol.
He backed them out of the alley and into the street. Winry stumbled and swayed, her head rolling loosely on her neck. Once out in the lamplight, Jean held his right hand and pistol just inside his coat to avoid drawing attention from the people coming and going from the bonfire, which raged on in the distance.
“Jean.”
“Tell me about it,” he muttered distractedly as he leaned Winry against a lamp post. With his hands free, he put his pistol back in the holster and snapped closed the thumb break. He looked up in time to catch Winry's shoulders before she could slump to the side of the lamp post.
“I puked,” she told him, her eyelids drooping.
“Sure did.”
“I puked in my hair, didn't I?”
Jean looked over her shoulder at her dripping ponytail. “Yep.”
She shook her head lethargically. “I want to go home.” She started to tremble.
Jean wished he could drape his coat around her, but for fear of flashing his handguns in the crowd, he knew he could not. Instead, he settled an arm around her shoulders and steered her back toward the hotel.
XXII. Cradle
Before the thin, powdery light of morning, before the water running in the bathroom, before the sweet-smelling detergent in the sheets, Winry sensed pain. Like a hand pressed to her face, pressing her back, holding her down. Her head pounded, and her stomach felt small and empty.
She managed to crack an eye.
Above her, the white, plaster ceiling twisted and leaned for a moment before slowing and stopping. Light shafted down through the windows over the bed, motes blinking in and out. Though it took effort, Winry lolled her head to one side and then another. She saw a row of windows and a couch to the right of her bed, a dented pillow and rumpled blanket abandoned there. And to the left, was an open door.
Winry blinked hard, her eyelids gummy and recalcitrant. When she could focus, she saw a pair of legs standing just within the bathroom doorway. Long, brown slacks.
Nothing was fitting together. When she looked into the night before, she saw a big, dark void.
The water shut off in the bathroom. Winry heard a tap tap tap of something hitting the edge of a sink. Then Jean came out of the bathroom, a towel around his shoulders, and the wooden box containing his shaving kit in his hands.
He noticed her as he came around the bed.
“The belle of the ball awakens,” he said dryly as he sat heavily on the couch. He leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, and Winry saw his dog tags swing on a chain before the scooped neck of his undershirt.
“Jean,” she said.
He was getting rather tired of hearing his name said in that tone. That plaintive moan.
“I can't remember last night.”
He watched her for a long moment. He lifted his right hand and rubbed his mouth pensively.
“What ha―”
“You hungry?” Jean asked, sitting up straight and clapping his hands down on his knees. “I'd kill for a cup of coffee right now.” That was such an odd thing to say when he was still feeling like an ass for pulling a gun on a passel of kids the night before. “I bet you're thirsty.”
Winry smacked her lips softly. They were dry and cracked and sore. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. “I am.”
“I'll get you some water,” he said and stood.
Jean went to the bathroom and filled one of the glass tumblers by the sink. When he returned to the main room, Winry was doing her best to sit herself up, and he could see the look on her face when she recognized that she was wearing her clothes from the night before. Jean came and hooked an arm around her ribs and eased her up and back against the headboard. Winry took the offered water in a trembling hand and took tentative sips, and Jean managed to snag the tumbler from her fingers before she could drop it.
He would tell her, he thought. But not yet.
XXIII. Candy
“Jean?”
“Hmm?”
“Why did you just turn?”
“You didn't see the sign?”
“No.”
“Oh,” he said. “We're taking a short detour.”
Winry hurriedly pulled a map out of the compartment in her door. She unfolded it, expanding it until it took up half the cab. She found the road they were taking―they'd gotten onto Route 60, which was a straight shot to Monrovia and, just east of that, Resembool―and she looked for where Jean had turned. The map, like the view out the windows, showed nothing but empty farm land.
“Jean?”
“Hmm?”
“Where the hell are you taking us?”
With his chin just slightly turned up, he glanced at her. “Pumpkinville.”
“What?”
“Oh, sorry,” he said, as dignified as he could, “I bet they pronounce it Pun'kinville.”
Winry slammed the map down on her lap, wrinkling it and upsetting the intricate system of folds. “What the hell is Pumpkinville?”
“Uh, only the pun'kin capital of the nation?” he informed her as though, really, she should know this already.
Winry slapped a hand over her eyes. “We're never actually going to get to Resembool, are we?”
Jean was quiet for a moment. “You know what you sound like?”
“What?”
“The Road Trip Downer.”
Winry turned and punched him in the ribs. Hard.
When they arrived in Pun'kinville, Jean paid their admission to get into the weekend-long Pun'kin Festival. With the winter squash harvest completed, the brochure explained, and the weeks of curing in a heated root cellar passed, it was time to enjoy all the winter-time treats pun'kins had to offer. There also was, Winry saw, a small segment of the fair dedicated to that age old debate: which is the superior cold-weather vegetable for pie-making, pun'kin or sweet potato?
“It's just a gimmick,” Jean explained to Winry as they passed the unpopular sweet potato rallying booth. “I bet pun'kin wins every time.”
Winry sighed. “No, really? It is the pumpkin festival.”
He had only been joking. Jean furrowed his brow and looked to his right, where Winry was ambling, bumping his shoulder as they went. “Who rattled your cage?”
The loose, slumping shoulders of her gray sweatshirt went up for a long moment and then dropped. She looked up at Jean, the light behind her eyes somewhat dimmed, her mouth just cracked. It was the face, Jean knew, that she made when he was disappointing her.
“I just want to get to Resembool,” she said.
Jean felt like an asshole for making her say something he should already know. “I know,” he said.
They stopped by a booth selling confections, little baked dollops of pureed pun'kin, encrusted with brown sugar and drizzled with syrup, and Winry bought a box of a dozen. They were still warm and drippy, and Winry held the open box between her and Jean as they wandered the fair grounds.
The festival was not particularly crowded on that gray Saturday morning, and the longer they strolled, the more grateful Jean became for it. With the candy box in one hand, Winry would rest her other hand on Jean's arm periodically. Once he was aware of her doing it, Jean began to look for a pattern―perhaps she took his arm when they passed groups of teenaged boys or solitary men―but there was not one he could see. Jean could only assume that Winry sought out his arm in time with her thoughts, and he wouldn't attempt to interpret those.
“Oh, a petting zoo,” Jean said, eliciting a small, forced laugh from Winry, and in the distraction of turning them around toward the corral, Jean looped his arm through Winry's. She went rigid for a moment. Then she relaxed. Then she adjusted her steps to they walked on the same foot. Then she drew very close to his side.
Winry leaned her elbows against the split-railed fence and fed the rest of her candies to an eager, brown goat, who gave her fingers sloppy, grain-specked kisses.
“I can take you straight to Resembool tomorrow, if you'd like,” Jean offered, turning and leaning back against the railing.
Winry folded up the paperboard box until it was a rigid square, and she worried one corner with her thumb. “You'd drop me off and double back to Monrovia?”
Jean shrugged. “Sure, if you want me to.”
Winry thought of her house, her room in the attic, her grandmother. The smell of the laundry drying on the line and strong coffee in the mornings. Pinako's pungent tobacco―sweet and deep and nothing like the cigarette Jean was smoking.
She pulled her hands into the sleeves of her sweatshirt―it was almost hers by this point―and said, “Okay.”
She watched Jean quirk a brow slightly, watched his mouth tighten slightly, just slightly, and part of her felt bad, but another part knew he'd understand.
Looking back over the sheep and goats, butting heads and bumping flanks to stay warm, Winry straightened her back and rested her palms―the palms of Jean's gloves through the sleeves of Jean's sweatshirt―against the railing. Jean drew closer in her peripheral vision, and she went rigid when she felt a body step up behind her. But then there were hands settling next to hers on the rail, a cigarette pinched in the knuckles of one of these new hands, big and angular and more heavily-lined than hers, and then that body was leaning into hers, and then there was the pressure against her scalp of Jean resting his chin on top of her head.
And, oh. That was nice.
XXIV. Goodnight
“Well,” Winry said, trying so hard to sound resolved, “I guess I'll see you tomorrow morning.” She stood in the entrance to her hotel room, one hand on the jamb and the other on the door.
Jean held the key to his hotel room in his hand. He gave her a smile he hoped let her know that he understood. “All right.” Then he turned and went to his room across the hall.
The caller stepped them through the Pun'kinville Reel, and Winry was still uncertain of all the steps when she saw Jean grinning like a kid and tapping out the beat against his thigh as the band started up. They stood in two separate, facing lines, the men in one and the women in the other.
“Ready?” he asked as his line executed quick bows.
The rest of the women in Winry's line were curtsying, and she did her best to follow. “No,” Winry admitted.
Oil lanterns hung high in the rafters and in sconces on the support beams of the long barn. At one end, the double doors were closed and a band sat in wooden chairs on a low platform. The caller stood next to them on a bale of hay, a bullhorn in her hand.
But Jean was quite patient with Winry, repeated the caller's directions low in her ear. “All right, now gyspy. Ouch. No, it's okay. Close enough. Okay, promenade. Perfect, but you've got to let me lead, Winry.”
There were so many young people there. Winry watched ten-year-olds execute complicated moves and exchanges that made her mouth slacken and her head tilt. Still, she and Jean kept it simple, and Winry felt some relief when the band shifted into a quick, even waltz.
“I can do this one,” Winry said brightly as they made their way around the barn with the other couples. “And, hey, I'm going to remember it tomorrow morning, too!” Jean faltered when she said that, took a moment to recover, and laughed when she laughed.
The waltz marched on a few minutes longer before it began to peter out. The band then began a slow song, the sort of song that couples chat through as they dance, the kind that sends sweating, young dancers to their seats. Winry was ready to find her own bale of hay to park it at, but Jean held her hand, spun her once, and pulled her unwittingly into another, final dance.
Winry was still a little winded from the waltz, and that made it much easier for her to relinquish the lead to Jean.
He laughed at her. “I see I've got to wear you out before you start dancing like a girl.”
“Shut up,” Winry said, leaning her cheek on his shoulder. “You're gonna ruin it.”
Men's sweat, Winry thought, had a very distinct smell to it. She did not particularly like the smell when it was dried, but new sweat, freshly worked up, that was rather nice. An earthy sharpness. Jean smelled like petrichor and smoke and aftershave in that dusty, hay-scented barn, and Winry leaned in and breathed deep. He was quiet and comfortable, and for as jagged at they could be when they spoke, in their dark, lilting truce, they nested like a round riverstone in a palm.
It was so quiet now. No rumbling engine. No speeding landscape.
Jean spun her out again, and because Winry was still pliant enough to be led, she did not resist when he only half turned her and pulled her toward him, her back to his front. He crossed her arms over her solar plexus and held her hands so that she hugged herself to him. Winry felt him conforming to her, bowing just slightly in order to pull her back into this quiet cove of his, and she eddied there, felt herself pooling in his arms.
One of his hands stole up her side, slipped unobtrusively under the waist of her sweatshirt. His fingertips slid over the narrow glimpse of skin below the hem of her blouse, and he lingered there, brushed his knuckles against that skin as though coaxing something out of her.
She felt his breath on her ear followed by his mouth resting against her temple. It wasn't a kiss, really. Perhaps the heart of the gesture was the same, but this was a subtle insistence, a patient question, and Winry answered by leaning deeper into him.
Then the strings ceased singing. The spell subsided. Winry awoke to Jean's intentions with a start.
XXV. Fence
Winry watched the morning light progressively painting her ceiling in lighter and lighter shades. Red to orange to yellow to white, and finally at white, she was so sick of lying there, practicing what she was going to say that she counted to three, threw the blankets back, and got out of the bed.
The wall clock said almost nine. If he wasn't up yet, she would wake him herself.
Winry felt her resolve pooling in her stomach, her heart beating hard against her sternum as she padded barefoot across the hall. And then she realized that, as much as it was diffused with terror, she was excited. She was giddy almost, and she took a deep breath to make her blood slow as it coursed through her veins.
Then she knocked. She heard a muffled reply from within, and she hoped it was a welcome because she was opening the door and walking in before it occurred to her that Jean might have said something else.
He stepped out of the bathroom in his pajamas, patting his face dry with a towel.
“You look like a woman on a mission,” he said a little warily.
In lieu of a reply, Winry marched right up to him, stood on her toes, and planted a kiss squarely on his mouth. His mouth was warm and wet and entirely unprepared. She withdrew before Jean could ease the rigidity from his back and shoulders.
“So I was thinking,” Winry began hurriedly, “We've got two options here. We can keep dancing around and pretending and interacting like two spooked neighbors talking over a fence, or I could just be a grown-up about it and admit that I've had more fun with you than I've had in a really long time and that I'm really grateful for everything you've done for me and that I like you.” She paused to breathe. “A lot.”
She stared at him with such sincerity, her pellucid eyes so big and scared and hopeful, that Jean couldn't help it: he dropped his head forward and slumped his shoulders and laughed. When he met her eyes, her face was fierce. Her fists on her hips were trembling.
“So, you're just going to laugh at me. Is that it?”
“I'm not,” he started but paused to order his thoughts. “I'm not laughing at you.” But he was having an awfully hard time stopping.
“That's really hard to believe when you can't―”
He hooked his index finger under her chin and kissed her back. He felt Winry become completely still, limp even, and then she began to squirm excitedly. When he pulled away, the terror was gone. Her eyes, like looking off the end of a dock, were still impossibly large and searching his face, and the light behind them was resplendent.
“You wanna come with me to Monrovia?”
She hardily let him finish. “Yes!”