Multi-part production, [FMA]: "Symphonic Suite #2" (Roy/Winry)
I'm still...going...with this. @.@;; Believe it or not. Anyway, I'm seriously hoping that you guys, as readers, are enjoying this fic, because I was so very nervous about it's initial production. ^^;; Basically: IF YOU LIKE, YOU COMMENT, BECAUSE MAN, I'M REALLY STUCK ON THIS THING.
...It's also shorter than I thought. *POPS A FEW MORE PILLS OF FUCKITOL*
Also, I nearly cross-posted this to fma_yaoi because I fail and write too much buttsecks. :(
Arc: Symphonic Suite
Movement: Venus, The Bringer of Peace
Conductor: devils_devotion.
Measure: PG-13, with the occassional stumble into R and the ultimate NC-17. This arc features smut, but not omnipresently.
Tempo: Romance, Angst. Introspection (more of which than is healthy). Flashbacks, and did I mention angst?
Tone: Roy/Winry. Like..............OMGWTF. @.@ Other pairings implied, but they're not really important, so I won't bother to list them.
Rhythm: A symphony in seven movements. She had never expected to end up fleeing from a murderer on her first trip to the symphony.
Audience: Still cephiedvariable, as this was an intial drabble-request-turned-birthday-fic. Heh, who says Demi can't economize? In other news, Jenn, HURRY UP WITH DDS. :( I need more people to squee with about it. ...*eyes wonky grammar sadly*
Form: First of all, there are END-OF-SERIES SPOILERS scattered throughout this sonofabitch like the plague. AU from the movie, because I haven't seen the movie yet. LOLLER. Warnings for...angst. Yes. Angst. Much of.
Accompaniment: In the second movement of this fic, I give you the second movement of Holst's "Planets" suite: Venus, The Bringer of Peace. So download, and love!
( The previous movement: Mars, The Bringer of War )
She remembered dressing for the symphony; had remembered her earrings and her clutch and yes, even her lipstick, but the one thing she hadn't bothered to bring had been her wrench. It was an entirely understandable mistake, even in hindsight. She hadn't expected to find herself fleeing from a murderer during her first trip to the symphony, after all.
"Miss Rockbell, wait!" she heard that bastard imploring after her, hearing his grunts as he wrestled through the sea of symphony goers, hearing the clack of her own high heels against the polished floor as she ran. There were stairs, somewhere around the back...stairs that perhaps went up into another wing of the building, and she took them two at a time, flying with a fear reserved only for the dying, hair falling out of its carefully-constructed updo and bosom nearly falling out of her dress. It didn't matter. Mustang had difficulty with stairs, she knew, from a letter that Scieska had written her detailing the man's injuries in full - let him feel it! let him know what it's like to feel pain! - and she used the knowledge mercilessly, ascending from first the bottom floor, then the upper floor.
'Don't listen to them, Winry,' Granny warned her, staring out the window ominously and smoking her pipe. 'Don't you pay any attention to those Elric boys. They don't understand what they're getting into, when they throw around a term like "human transmutation" lightly.'
The gravity of her grandmother's tone didn't register with her, however, and Winry snuffed a little through her tears. 'Bringing back the dead...? Grannie, if it can be done, why hasn't anyone done it before?' Against her will, her interest with the topic had perked up, and it was only fueled by the smiling faces of her mother and father, as they had packed their bags for Ishbal and kissed her goodbye. 'If it was something that could let me see Mama and Papa again - '
'You're speaking foolishness, child!' Pinako had snapped at her, and though Winry understood later that the lines around her grandmother's mouth and eyes had meant that she was grieving too, and battling the temptation just as much, she didn't know it at the time, and so she had stood violently from the table and bolted for the door, sobs ringing loudly in a house that was all the more hollow with the knowledge that her parents were dead, and that they would not be coming back.
It had rained the day earlier, and so the ground was still soft and the air still smelled of sweet earth when Winry had started down the pasture, running and running and sobbing, running so fast that the tears had nearly dried on her face, hair disheveled and flying, but her memories were getting mingled, because she remembered a gentle hand on her shoulder that was warm, too warm, and too kind, and though she was supposed to be too young at the time, she could have sworn that her makeup was starting to run through her tears.
The speed was too fast, and her abandon too raw, and before she even knew what was happening, her foot had turned on a stone and she was -
- tumbling to the floor, gasping in pain as something wrenched hideously in her ankle and blinding agony shot up her leg in a whetted spike. The upper floors seemed to be layered with a thick carpet, and so she wasn't terribly hurt in other places as she fell, but -
"Damn!" She looked up in time to see her pursuer, honestly forgotten in lieu of her memories, trip over her good leg, which was still stretched out over the stairwell, and come crashing down atop her.
She fell into a tangle of wet leaves and muddy earth, spilling underneath of her parents' favorite willow tree, out of breath yet still calling their names, over and over and over...
In the aftermath of the tension, there was an empty, if not awkward silence, punctuated only with the harsh breaths of the living, caught up entirely in their memories of the dead. Winry closed her eyes and gritted her teeth, flexing her ankle around and making small noises through her clenched jaw, but it didn't seem broken. She tried to move the other leg, but it was still pinned under that murderous bastard Mustang, who was at the moment panting and seeming heavily out-of-breath, and the blonde smirked cruelly. Getting out of shape in your old age, Colonel? she thought smugly, bitterness evident in the way she shoved harshly at his shoulder. "Get off of me!"
She had fallen, undoubtedly, because of her heels, but since she hadn't really bothered to pay attention to where she had been running to, Winry took surveillance of the setting now. They were in an upper suite of the symphony hall that seemed reserved for VIPs, or other bigwigs of the sort. The floors were covered in a rich, velvetly carpet, there were gilded couches and chaises everywhere, and to the right were a huge set of double doors that looked like they proclaimed some sort of entrance into an even bigger hall. The hallway they had fallen in continued straight down, past the double doors, and seemed to corner off to the right at the end, possibly leading to more stairs. The lounge seemed to be deserted, which she was grateful for, as she didn't want anyone to be witness to the...compromising...position she happened to be in, nor the the murder she was about to commit of the man who had caused the compromising position in the first place.
Said man who was sprawled ungracefully on top of her, face in her shoulder and hips weighting down her legs, though thank God he hadn't landed anywhere near her bust ankle. Hearing his heartbeat was bad enough.
And just like that, Winry froze. She could hear his heartbeat. His accursed heartbeat, rapidly and out-of-sync with her own, from somewhere just underneath her ribs, pounding like the wardrums of the Mars movement, a living testament to the man's terror, and her own rose to match it, and greet it with a pounding of its own. She was struck dumb, momentarily, at how such a cold-blooded killer could feel so fantastically warm, and at how such a heartless military bastard could have such an infinitely echoing heartbeat, but when she breathed deeply of his hair, she could still smell the charcoal underneath of all of that cologne, and it was enough.
"Get off!" she snapped, shrilly, feeling a blush starting up on her nose, prickly enough to itch, feeling her ankle throb in tune with her heart, feeling as though she wanted nothing more than to disappear on the spot, and it was only when Mustang finally pushed himself up and sat back on his heels that she was finally able to breathe. They hovered there, for another impossibly long stretch of time, and the blonde took a savage glee in the fact that he looked uncomfortable, too, and yes, even colored a bit at the situation, a hand awkwardly rubbing the back of his head and the other hand twitching a bit on the carpet, fingers rubbing slightly. For a moment, those fingers captivated her, and she recalled words - "killed by some military bastard...I think he was called the 'Flame Alchemist', or something..." - and she envisioned the faces of her beloved parents being swallowed up by that flame.
"Are you all right?" Mustang was asking her again, and Winry snarled soundlessly at the inquisition.
"Fine," she grated out through her teeth, and squared her palms against the floor, preparing for the painful ascent to her feet. It was slow going, and it resulted in her flashing far more leg than she would have liked, though she was forced to admit a grudging appreciation when the man politely turned his head away, looking at anything and everything else in the room save her. It was a strange side to what she had always seen as a hopelessly two-dimensional man, and as she hauled herself strenuously up onto one leg, Winry found herself eyeing him strangely, noting the way his nostrils flared uncomfortably, and the way he subtlely rolled his lower lip with his teeth, a nervous habit that was oddly...well, not endearing, but mortalizing, and she couldn't stand to be in the same room with him anymore.
'He's not a man,' Scieska had said definitively, one night over coffee and cake, 'he's something like...a machine, I guess, though machines are easier to predict, that's for sure.' She grumbled something unflattering under her breath - a rare outburst for the otherwise mild-mannered librarian - and shifted the throw pillow on the sofa behind her back. 'I hope he's happy with his promotions, because in the end, he's going to be left with nothing. And he'll have deserved it.'
"Move," Winry breathed, overcome with claustrophobia, and took a step. A single step, and that was as far as she got.
Pain wrenched up her right leg, and her ankle suddenly couldn't support her weight; she was falling, falling -
Caught.
A surprised grunt, a downward shift, and those hands were on her again, and for a moment, her world went devastatingly black.
"Miss Rockbell! Are you all right?"
Caught, half-kneeling on the floor with her face in that bastard's shoulder, she found it miserably ironic that he would keep asking her that question. "You're about ten years too late to be asking that," she mumbled scathingly, and rejoiced in the way the man stiffened; jerked his hands in an agonized contraction, and inhaled sharply through his teeth. She tested her ankle, and felt it give yet again under her weight, and finally slumped, deadweight and exhausted. It was over. She'd never be able to walk past that bastard if the two of them kept bumping heads, and so she thought not of her grandmother staring out the window and solemnly smoking her pipe, nor of the other implications of flame, and instead gave in.
"I can't walk," she said simply, and looked up defiantly into his eyes.
It was a magical transformation. The tension left Mustang's frame and he smiled, though it looked painful. "I see," he said, simply, and winced at what he saw on her face. Then he got an arm under her shoulders, and helped her limp across the room to one of the chairs in the lounge. She'd been hoping that he would leave her alone, and go get help, perhaps, but he knelt in front of her instead, and lifted her heel.
"This is, ah - Miss Rockbell, if you could kindly sit still - " and she hated him for it, felt her mouth twist into a sneer, but she kept her mouth shut - "Well, though I'm surprised that there isn't more damage as an aftereffect of sprinting most admirably on these heels, I'd have to say that, at the worst, you appear to have suffered a severe sprained ankle. You'll need to stay off of it for a while, and perhaps ice it - "
"Don't you think I know?" Winry whispered, high and broken, and she'd honestly meant to shout, meant to howl her grievances to the sky, but all that came out was that damned whisper. "My parents were doctors, after all, or did those military bastards not even tell you that?"
Whisper or not, she honestly didn't think that she could have gotten a more profound reaction even if she'd slapped him - Mustang recoiled, visibly, though he still kept hold of her ankle, and he bared his teeth in an even, straight line, despair dancing like a devil in his remaining eye. For a moment, he stared at her and seemed not to see her, throat working and hands shaking like he was about to snap; "I - " he started painfully, but she scowled, suddenly embarrassed at her obvious attack, and shook her head.
"Forget it," she muttered, and kicked idly with her good leg. "We've already been down that road, remember? You may have..." - and she forced herself to say it - "...killed...my parents...but you saved my best friends. We - Scieska and I, and everyone else - we...didn't understand, okay? I won't bring it up anymore."
The news didn't seem to relieve the dark-haired alchemist in the slightest, who instead loosed his tie and began to wrap it carefully around the blonde's ankle, good eye dark and impossible to read from her angle, intent on his task. It was a strange feeling for Winry, to feel the hands of her parents' murderer so attentive and careful on her feet, and she flinched, reflexively.
"Ah - I'm sorry, I don't mean to hurt you..." the man said in response to her obvious recoil, and though Winry could have seriously argued that point until her face turned blue and one or the other of them expired - the other children whispering behind their hands about the girl whose parents were traitors - she shook her head, and fingered a coil of her disheveled hair, and looked pointedly at the ceiling.
"It doesn't hurt," she managed to croak out, and she was almost grateful for the fact that the bastard didn't seem to believe her. He knew, which was a curious thing, and the blonde couldn't decide if she liked it better that way or not.
After another minute or so, Mustang finished wrapping her ankle with his tie and stood, stuffing his hands in his pockets almost immediately and smiling that painful smile again, shaggy hair covering the side of his face with the ruined eye, leaving the other that much more open and raw for it. "Can you stand, Miss Rockbell?" he asked quietly, and withdrew a hand from his pockets to hold it out for her, and she noticed that it was trembling slightly. The gloves caught her eye right away; for all the man was dressed in formal evening attire and not his uniform, he would still be that bastard so long as he wore those gloves, and involuntarily, Winry pressed her back into the chair, shrinking away.
"Take those off, first," she ordered breathlessly, and though she didn't specify, Mustang understood - seemed to understand a lot of things, which was disconcerting - and stripped his hands of the rough fabric, depositing them into his jacket pocket, where they hung unrecognizable yet still within easy reach. Curiously, when he offered his hand to her again, it was steady.
And Winry relaxed, and allowed herself to be hauled to her feet. There was hardly any pain as she set her ankle down gingerly on the ground, and she blinked, impressed. "You know what you're doing."
The grin was sheepish, but the bark of his laugh was bitter. "You pick up skills like that rather quickly in the military, I'm afraid. If you don't have two legs to walk upon, then you have the tendency to get left behind," and Winry thought then of Ed, determined even as he clenched his jaw against the pain, and she felt her throat constrict painfully.
"I let myself be fixed up on this blind date so I could forget about Ed, for a change," she told herself firmly, then gasped and crammed her fist into her mouth as she realized that she wasn't talking only to herself, and felt her face burn hot enough to broil a steak. "Ummm, mmm-mmmfff mfff mfff," she mumbled around her fingers, chancing a petulant glance upwards through her bangs, but there was no smugness or superiority on Mustang's face, only a mild curiosity and that damned smile, almost infuriating with it's painfulness.
"Blind dates have never worked well, in my experience," he admitted, and let go of her hand to shrug, and Winry was dismayed at how cold the room was, without the warmth of that hand. Her blush more than made up for it, but even her embarrassment was tame in the face of the other emotions that roiled in her heart.
'So...that's your superior officer,' Winry mused around the screwdriver in her mouth, bags packed and ready to go in the corner of the hotel room, careful not to get any oil on her traveling skirt.
'Lazy, good-for-nothing skirt chaser,' Ed punctuated clearly, as though the insults were synonymous with the man's name. His heart wasn't in it, though, and he looked drained, looked tired and worn-out and thoroughly traumatized, eyes staring but not seeing anything other than his own sins.
'He does seem...stand-offish,' Winry admitted, quietly, and tried not to think about the torrent of emotions on the man's face as she told him her name and age, and gave her official statement on the Barry the Chopper case. Cold and pointedly indifferent...apologetic. Yes, definitely apologetic. 'I hope that he'll be good to you and Al.'
'Who knows?' Ed drawled, drumming the fingers of his flesh hand on the chair and trying not to fidget as the shorter blonde gave her final inspection of the automail before she left for the Central train station. 'I think that that bastard's impossible to read, anyway.'
But Winry heard Edward's words in her head, and saw something entirely different on Mustang's face, and thought that perhaps that neither of them were right.
Impossibly hard to read, perhaps, but not...impossible. No...not at all.
She grinned back, hesitantly. "Forgive me for saying so, but you don't seem to be the 'blind date' type, Colonel."
"Neither do you," he parried, congenially, and his smile seemed noticeably more relaxed. "I thought that you were here simply out of a love for the symphony...?"
Winry colored again, and scowled, feeling undeservingly antagonized. "Who the hell honestly likes the symphony?" she grumbled, and crossed her arms. "It was his idea, for whatever ungodly reason. I hate dressing up like this."
"Which is a shame, as it suits you," Mustang replied, seemingly sincere, then tilted his head back suddenly towards the ceiling. The blonde stared at him, an awkward moment where she was fiddling with indecision, so many what ifs flying through her head, and in the end she decided to simply ignore them all.
"Well, anyway, this entire thing was Scieska's idea, and the guy was apparently her mother's friend's son, who's got a degree in engineering," Winry went on, mildly aware that she was babbling. "I figured that we'd get along great, especially because he was supposed to be a real hot - " She choked, then coughed for a second, chewing on her nails for a moment and feeling like a moron. "Yeah, well, you get the picture."
She was a little irritated when the man laughed, but it was good-natured, and she couldn't bring herself to get angry about it. "Ah, and did you? Get along great, that is."
"Does it look like it?" the blonde seethed, tossing her hands into the air, gesturing at the two of them, at her ankle, at the situation, then stopped and sighed abruptly, shoulders sagging. "Agh, to hell with pretenses," she decided aloud, and looked her companion straight in the eye. "He didn't show, all right? I got stood up." It was embarrassing to admit it, a low blow to her already demoralized pride, but in the end, she wouldn't look away from this similarly demoralized man, and in that instant, she couldn't be certain whether or not she liked the look on his face or not.
"An unfortunate turn of events," Mustang agreed solemnly, but without hesitation, "however, it is definitely the young man's loss." And again he cast his eyes upward, and seemed uncomfortable having said so.
His discomfort was making her uncomfortable, and Winry felt her nose prickle again with the beginnings of a blush. "Eh, y-you're nice for saying so, but don't worry about it, really. I...I thought it would be good for me, you know? Scieska told me that I couldn't sit around like a moping maiden forever waiting for - "
She cut off not because she was embarrassed to say it, but rather, because it was too painful to say.
It didn't matter. The bastard understood. And for that, for his slightly sympathetic nod and the offer of his arm, bent outward at the elbow, Winry was starting to think that maybe 'that bastard' wasn't really a suitable title for him, after all.
"We should be heading back," he suggested, though the supplication seemed tinged with regret, and the young mechanic was starting to comprehend it too, was also resentful that the moment would have to end, and she forced the image of her smiling parents in her memory to reemerge, to make her nod stiff and her brush past that outstretched arm imperial and offhand. An olive branch was one thing, but it was quite another to even feel a remote acceptance of her parent's murderer, and she felt her eyes blur with tears again. What the hell was she doing, talking to the man like that?
"It's fine, I can make it back to my own seat," she managed to get out, and she commended herself, because it even sounded normal. She took the first step slowly, and let out of a sigh of relief when her ankle held.
"I insist; it wouldn't be very gentlemanly of me to allow you to go on your own," Mustang persisted, and though his propriety might have been charming to other women, Winry just wished that he would go away, as she'd seen far too much of the man('s human side) tonight, anyway. She gritted her teeth into silence, however, and allowed herself to be guided down the stairs, listening with only half an ear to the man's explanation of his last promotion, and the balance of the military and Parliament within the government, nodding occassionally when it seemed appropriate to do so.
She excused herself to go to the ladies washroom and scrub her face, which she was dismayed to discover resembled something in a horror show - her makeup had ran most dreadfully from her sweat and her tears - and she didn't bother to reapply anything save the lipstick, if only because her mouth was dry.
Her grandmother had always told her that she was the living portrait of her mother, but all that Winry saw when she looked in the mirror was the face of a total stranger, and she put her head in her arms, leaning her face into the basin of the sink, and tried her damndest not to cry all over again.
'We regretfully inform you of the death of Sarah and Stephen Rockbell, killed in service to the Amestris military on this day, the...'
Author's Notes Upon Completion: Hmmmm. Something's really bothering me about this. I think that because it's my first time writing Winry, that I'm really sucking at it. Fuck. This is supposed to be an awesome fic, too. GOD DAMN IT ALL TO HELL. *swears wildly, karate-kicks a nearby wall* So I guess I apologize for the blatant OOCness of this chapter, and I SWEAR ON JENN'S (SOON-TO-BE) GRAVE THAT I'LL GET BETTER AT THIS. *nod* Argh. Just. This fic. Makes me want to stop living. -___-;; I blame it on the fact that I've gotta poop. Oh, and on the fact that I haven't been into the FMA fandom these days, so I've sort of forgotten how to write for it, ehehehe... ^^;; *sheepish*
...It's also shorter than I thought. *POPS A FEW MORE PILLS OF FUCKITOL*
Also, I nearly cross-posted this to fma_yaoi because I fail and write too much buttsecks. :(
Arc: Symphonic Suite
Movement: Venus, The Bringer of Peace
Conductor: devils_devotion.
Measure: PG-13, with the occassional stumble into R and the ultimate NC-17. This arc features smut, but not omnipresently.
Tempo: Romance, Angst. Introspection (more of which than is healthy). Flashbacks, and did I mention angst?
Tone: Roy/Winry. Like..............OMGWTF. @.@ Other pairings implied, but they're not really important, so I won't bother to list them.
Rhythm: A symphony in seven movements. She had never expected to end up fleeing from a murderer on her first trip to the symphony.
Audience: Still cephiedvariable, as this was an intial drabble-request-turned-birthday-fic. Heh, who says Demi can't economize? In other news, Jenn, HURRY UP WITH DDS. :( I need more people to squee with about it. ...*eyes wonky grammar sadly*
Form: First of all, there are END-OF-SERIES SPOILERS scattered throughout this sonofabitch like the plague. AU from the movie, because I haven't seen the movie yet. LOLLER. Warnings for...angst. Yes. Angst. Much of.
Accompaniment: In the second movement of this fic, I give you the second movement of Holst's "Planets" suite: Venus, The Bringer of Peace. So download, and love!
( The previous movement: Mars, The Bringer of War )
She remembered dressing for the symphony; had remembered her earrings and her clutch and yes, even her lipstick, but the one thing she hadn't bothered to bring had been her wrench. It was an entirely understandable mistake, even in hindsight. She hadn't expected to find herself fleeing from a murderer during her first trip to the symphony, after all.
"Miss Rockbell, wait!" she heard that bastard imploring after her, hearing his grunts as he wrestled through the sea of symphony goers, hearing the clack of her own high heels against the polished floor as she ran. There were stairs, somewhere around the back...stairs that perhaps went up into another wing of the building, and she took them two at a time, flying with a fear reserved only for the dying, hair falling out of its carefully-constructed updo and bosom nearly falling out of her dress. It didn't matter. Mustang had difficulty with stairs, she knew, from a letter that Scieska had written her detailing the man's injuries in full - let him feel it! let him know what it's like to feel pain! - and she used the knowledge mercilessly, ascending from first the bottom floor, then the upper floor.
'Don't listen to them, Winry,' Granny warned her, staring out the window ominously and smoking her pipe. 'Don't you pay any attention to those Elric boys. They don't understand what they're getting into, when they throw around a term like "human transmutation" lightly.'
The gravity of her grandmother's tone didn't register with her, however, and Winry snuffed a little through her tears. 'Bringing back the dead...? Grannie, if it can be done, why hasn't anyone done it before?' Against her will, her interest with the topic had perked up, and it was only fueled by the smiling faces of her mother and father, as they had packed their bags for Ishbal and kissed her goodbye. 'If it was something that could let me see Mama and Papa again - '
'You're speaking foolishness, child!' Pinako had snapped at her, and though Winry understood later that the lines around her grandmother's mouth and eyes had meant that she was grieving too, and battling the temptation just as much, she didn't know it at the time, and so she had stood violently from the table and bolted for the door, sobs ringing loudly in a house that was all the more hollow with the knowledge that her parents were dead, and that they would not be coming back.
It had rained the day earlier, and so the ground was still soft and the air still smelled of sweet earth when Winry had started down the pasture, running and running and sobbing, running so fast that the tears had nearly dried on her face, hair disheveled and flying, but her memories were getting mingled, because she remembered a gentle hand on her shoulder that was warm, too warm, and too kind, and though she was supposed to be too young at the time, she could have sworn that her makeup was starting to run through her tears.
The speed was too fast, and her abandon too raw, and before she even knew what was happening, her foot had turned on a stone and she was -
- tumbling to the floor, gasping in pain as something wrenched hideously in her ankle and blinding agony shot up her leg in a whetted spike. The upper floors seemed to be layered with a thick carpet, and so she wasn't terribly hurt in other places as she fell, but -
"Damn!" She looked up in time to see her pursuer, honestly forgotten in lieu of her memories, trip over her good leg, which was still stretched out over the stairwell, and come crashing down atop her.
She fell into a tangle of wet leaves and muddy earth, spilling underneath of her parents' favorite willow tree, out of breath yet still calling their names, over and over and over...
In the aftermath of the tension, there was an empty, if not awkward silence, punctuated only with the harsh breaths of the living, caught up entirely in their memories of the dead. Winry closed her eyes and gritted her teeth, flexing her ankle around and making small noises through her clenched jaw, but it didn't seem broken. She tried to move the other leg, but it was still pinned under that murderous bastard Mustang, who was at the moment panting and seeming heavily out-of-breath, and the blonde smirked cruelly. Getting out of shape in your old age, Colonel? she thought smugly, bitterness evident in the way she shoved harshly at his shoulder. "Get off of me!"
She had fallen, undoubtedly, because of her heels, but since she hadn't really bothered to pay attention to where she had been running to, Winry took surveillance of the setting now. They were in an upper suite of the symphony hall that seemed reserved for VIPs, or other bigwigs of the sort. The floors were covered in a rich, velvetly carpet, there were gilded couches and chaises everywhere, and to the right were a huge set of double doors that looked like they proclaimed some sort of entrance into an even bigger hall. The hallway they had fallen in continued straight down, past the double doors, and seemed to corner off to the right at the end, possibly leading to more stairs. The lounge seemed to be deserted, which she was grateful for, as she didn't want anyone to be witness to the...compromising...position she happened to be in, nor the the murder she was about to commit of the man who had caused the compromising position in the first place.
Said man who was sprawled ungracefully on top of her, face in her shoulder and hips weighting down her legs, though thank God he hadn't landed anywhere near her bust ankle. Hearing his heartbeat was bad enough.
And just like that, Winry froze. She could hear his heartbeat. His accursed heartbeat, rapidly and out-of-sync with her own, from somewhere just underneath her ribs, pounding like the wardrums of the Mars movement, a living testament to the man's terror, and her own rose to match it, and greet it with a pounding of its own. She was struck dumb, momentarily, at how such a cold-blooded killer could feel so fantastically warm, and at how such a heartless military bastard could have such an infinitely echoing heartbeat, but when she breathed deeply of his hair, she could still smell the charcoal underneath of all of that cologne, and it was enough.
"Get off!" she snapped, shrilly, feeling a blush starting up on her nose, prickly enough to itch, feeling her ankle throb in tune with her heart, feeling as though she wanted nothing more than to disappear on the spot, and it was only when Mustang finally pushed himself up and sat back on his heels that she was finally able to breathe. They hovered there, for another impossibly long stretch of time, and the blonde took a savage glee in the fact that he looked uncomfortable, too, and yes, even colored a bit at the situation, a hand awkwardly rubbing the back of his head and the other hand twitching a bit on the carpet, fingers rubbing slightly. For a moment, those fingers captivated her, and she recalled words - "killed by some military bastard...I think he was called the 'Flame Alchemist', or something..." - and she envisioned the faces of her beloved parents being swallowed up by that flame.
"Are you all right?" Mustang was asking her again, and Winry snarled soundlessly at the inquisition.
"Fine," she grated out through her teeth, and squared her palms against the floor, preparing for the painful ascent to her feet. It was slow going, and it resulted in her flashing far more leg than she would have liked, though she was forced to admit a grudging appreciation when the man politely turned his head away, looking at anything and everything else in the room save her. It was a strange side to what she had always seen as a hopelessly two-dimensional man, and as she hauled herself strenuously up onto one leg, Winry found herself eyeing him strangely, noting the way his nostrils flared uncomfortably, and the way he subtlely rolled his lower lip with his teeth, a nervous habit that was oddly...well, not endearing, but mortalizing, and she couldn't stand to be in the same room with him anymore.
'He's not a man,' Scieska had said definitively, one night over coffee and cake, 'he's something like...a machine, I guess, though machines are easier to predict, that's for sure.' She grumbled something unflattering under her breath - a rare outburst for the otherwise mild-mannered librarian - and shifted the throw pillow on the sofa behind her back. 'I hope he's happy with his promotions, because in the end, he's going to be left with nothing. And he'll have deserved it.'
"Move," Winry breathed, overcome with claustrophobia, and took a step. A single step, and that was as far as she got.
Pain wrenched up her right leg, and her ankle suddenly couldn't support her weight; she was falling, falling -
Caught.
A surprised grunt, a downward shift, and those hands were on her again, and for a moment, her world went devastatingly black.
"Miss Rockbell! Are you all right?"
Caught, half-kneeling on the floor with her face in that bastard's shoulder, she found it miserably ironic that he would keep asking her that question. "You're about ten years too late to be asking that," she mumbled scathingly, and rejoiced in the way the man stiffened; jerked his hands in an agonized contraction, and inhaled sharply through his teeth. She tested her ankle, and felt it give yet again under her weight, and finally slumped, deadweight and exhausted. It was over. She'd never be able to walk past that bastard if the two of them kept bumping heads, and so she thought not of her grandmother staring out the window and solemnly smoking her pipe, nor of the other implications of flame, and instead gave in.
"I can't walk," she said simply, and looked up defiantly into his eyes.
It was a magical transformation. The tension left Mustang's frame and he smiled, though it looked painful. "I see," he said, simply, and winced at what he saw on her face. Then he got an arm under her shoulders, and helped her limp across the room to one of the chairs in the lounge. She'd been hoping that he would leave her alone, and go get help, perhaps, but he knelt in front of her instead, and lifted her heel.
"This is, ah - Miss Rockbell, if you could kindly sit still - " and she hated him for it, felt her mouth twist into a sneer, but she kept her mouth shut - "Well, though I'm surprised that there isn't more damage as an aftereffect of sprinting most admirably on these heels, I'd have to say that, at the worst, you appear to have suffered a severe sprained ankle. You'll need to stay off of it for a while, and perhaps ice it - "
"Don't you think I know?" Winry whispered, high and broken, and she'd honestly meant to shout, meant to howl her grievances to the sky, but all that came out was that damned whisper. "My parents were doctors, after all, or did those military bastards not even tell you that?"
Whisper or not, she honestly didn't think that she could have gotten a more profound reaction even if she'd slapped him - Mustang recoiled, visibly, though he still kept hold of her ankle, and he bared his teeth in an even, straight line, despair dancing like a devil in his remaining eye. For a moment, he stared at her and seemed not to see her, throat working and hands shaking like he was about to snap; "I - " he started painfully, but she scowled, suddenly embarrassed at her obvious attack, and shook her head.
"Forget it," she muttered, and kicked idly with her good leg. "We've already been down that road, remember? You may have..." - and she forced herself to say it - "...killed...my parents...but you saved my best friends. We - Scieska and I, and everyone else - we...didn't understand, okay? I won't bring it up anymore."
The news didn't seem to relieve the dark-haired alchemist in the slightest, who instead loosed his tie and began to wrap it carefully around the blonde's ankle, good eye dark and impossible to read from her angle, intent on his task. It was a strange feeling for Winry, to feel the hands of her parents' murderer so attentive and careful on her feet, and she flinched, reflexively.
"Ah - I'm sorry, I don't mean to hurt you..." the man said in response to her obvious recoil, and though Winry could have seriously argued that point until her face turned blue and one or the other of them expired - the other children whispering behind their hands about the girl whose parents were traitors - she shook her head, and fingered a coil of her disheveled hair, and looked pointedly at the ceiling.
"It doesn't hurt," she managed to croak out, and she was almost grateful for the fact that the bastard didn't seem to believe her. He knew, which was a curious thing, and the blonde couldn't decide if she liked it better that way or not.
After another minute or so, Mustang finished wrapping her ankle with his tie and stood, stuffing his hands in his pockets almost immediately and smiling that painful smile again, shaggy hair covering the side of his face with the ruined eye, leaving the other that much more open and raw for it. "Can you stand, Miss Rockbell?" he asked quietly, and withdrew a hand from his pockets to hold it out for her, and she noticed that it was trembling slightly. The gloves caught her eye right away; for all the man was dressed in formal evening attire and not his uniform, he would still be that bastard so long as he wore those gloves, and involuntarily, Winry pressed her back into the chair, shrinking away.
"Take those off, first," she ordered breathlessly, and though she didn't specify, Mustang understood - seemed to understand a lot of things, which was disconcerting - and stripped his hands of the rough fabric, depositing them into his jacket pocket, where they hung unrecognizable yet still within easy reach. Curiously, when he offered his hand to her again, it was steady.
And Winry relaxed, and allowed herself to be hauled to her feet. There was hardly any pain as she set her ankle down gingerly on the ground, and she blinked, impressed. "You know what you're doing."
The grin was sheepish, but the bark of his laugh was bitter. "You pick up skills like that rather quickly in the military, I'm afraid. If you don't have two legs to walk upon, then you have the tendency to get left behind," and Winry thought then of Ed, determined even as he clenched his jaw against the pain, and she felt her throat constrict painfully.
"I let myself be fixed up on this blind date so I could forget about Ed, for a change," she told herself firmly, then gasped and crammed her fist into her mouth as she realized that she wasn't talking only to herself, and felt her face burn hot enough to broil a steak. "Ummm, mmm-mmmfff mfff mfff," she mumbled around her fingers, chancing a petulant glance upwards through her bangs, but there was no smugness or superiority on Mustang's face, only a mild curiosity and that damned smile, almost infuriating with it's painfulness.
"Blind dates have never worked well, in my experience," he admitted, and let go of her hand to shrug, and Winry was dismayed at how cold the room was, without the warmth of that hand. Her blush more than made up for it, but even her embarrassment was tame in the face of the other emotions that roiled in her heart.
'So...that's your superior officer,' Winry mused around the screwdriver in her mouth, bags packed and ready to go in the corner of the hotel room, careful not to get any oil on her traveling skirt.
'Lazy, good-for-nothing skirt chaser,' Ed punctuated clearly, as though the insults were synonymous with the man's name. His heart wasn't in it, though, and he looked drained, looked tired and worn-out and thoroughly traumatized, eyes staring but not seeing anything other than his own sins.
'He does seem...stand-offish,' Winry admitted, quietly, and tried not to think about the torrent of emotions on the man's face as she told him her name and age, and gave her official statement on the Barry the Chopper case. Cold and pointedly indifferent...apologetic. Yes, definitely apologetic. 'I hope that he'll be good to you and Al.'
'Who knows?' Ed drawled, drumming the fingers of his flesh hand on the chair and trying not to fidget as the shorter blonde gave her final inspection of the automail before she left for the Central train station. 'I think that that bastard's impossible to read, anyway.'
But Winry heard Edward's words in her head, and saw something entirely different on Mustang's face, and thought that perhaps that neither of them were right.
Impossibly hard to read, perhaps, but not...impossible. No...not at all.
She grinned back, hesitantly. "Forgive me for saying so, but you don't seem to be the 'blind date' type, Colonel."
"Neither do you," he parried, congenially, and his smile seemed noticeably more relaxed. "I thought that you were here simply out of a love for the symphony...?"
Winry colored again, and scowled, feeling undeservingly antagonized. "Who the hell honestly likes the symphony?" she grumbled, and crossed her arms. "It was his idea, for whatever ungodly reason. I hate dressing up like this."
"Which is a shame, as it suits you," Mustang replied, seemingly sincere, then tilted his head back suddenly towards the ceiling. The blonde stared at him, an awkward moment where she was fiddling with indecision, so many what ifs flying through her head, and in the end she decided to simply ignore them all.
"Well, anyway, this entire thing was Scieska's idea, and the guy was apparently her mother's friend's son, who's got a degree in engineering," Winry went on, mildly aware that she was babbling. "I figured that we'd get along great, especially because he was supposed to be a real hot - " She choked, then coughed for a second, chewing on her nails for a moment and feeling like a moron. "Yeah, well, you get the picture."
She was a little irritated when the man laughed, but it was good-natured, and she couldn't bring herself to get angry about it. "Ah, and did you? Get along great, that is."
"Does it look like it?" the blonde seethed, tossing her hands into the air, gesturing at the two of them, at her ankle, at the situation, then stopped and sighed abruptly, shoulders sagging. "Agh, to hell with pretenses," she decided aloud, and looked her companion straight in the eye. "He didn't show, all right? I got stood up." It was embarrassing to admit it, a low blow to her already demoralized pride, but in the end, she wouldn't look away from this similarly demoralized man, and in that instant, she couldn't be certain whether or not she liked the look on his face or not.
"An unfortunate turn of events," Mustang agreed solemnly, but without hesitation, "however, it is definitely the young man's loss." And again he cast his eyes upward, and seemed uncomfortable having said so.
His discomfort was making her uncomfortable, and Winry felt her nose prickle again with the beginnings of a blush. "Eh, y-you're nice for saying so, but don't worry about it, really. I...I thought it would be good for me, you know? Scieska told me that I couldn't sit around like a moping maiden forever waiting for - "
She cut off not because she was embarrassed to say it, but rather, because it was too painful to say.
It didn't matter. The bastard understood. And for that, for his slightly sympathetic nod and the offer of his arm, bent outward at the elbow, Winry was starting to think that maybe 'that bastard' wasn't really a suitable title for him, after all.
"We should be heading back," he suggested, though the supplication seemed tinged with regret, and the young mechanic was starting to comprehend it too, was also resentful that the moment would have to end, and she forced the image of her smiling parents in her memory to reemerge, to make her nod stiff and her brush past that outstretched arm imperial and offhand. An olive branch was one thing, but it was quite another to even feel a remote acceptance of her parent's murderer, and she felt her eyes blur with tears again. What the hell was she doing, talking to the man like that?
"It's fine, I can make it back to my own seat," she managed to get out, and she commended herself, because it even sounded normal. She took the first step slowly, and let out of a sigh of relief when her ankle held.
"I insist; it wouldn't be very gentlemanly of me to allow you to go on your own," Mustang persisted, and though his propriety might have been charming to other women, Winry just wished that he would go away, as she'd seen far too much of the man('s human side) tonight, anyway. She gritted her teeth into silence, however, and allowed herself to be guided down the stairs, listening with only half an ear to the man's explanation of his last promotion, and the balance of the military and Parliament within the government, nodding occassionally when it seemed appropriate to do so.
She excused herself to go to the ladies washroom and scrub her face, which she was dismayed to discover resembled something in a horror show - her makeup had ran most dreadfully from her sweat and her tears - and she didn't bother to reapply anything save the lipstick, if only because her mouth was dry.
Her grandmother had always told her that she was the living portrait of her mother, but all that Winry saw when she looked in the mirror was the face of a total stranger, and she put her head in her arms, leaning her face into the basin of the sink, and tried her damndest not to cry all over again.
'We regretfully inform you of the death of Sarah and Stephen Rockbell, killed in service to the Amestris military on this day, the...'
Author's Notes Upon Completion: Hmmmm. Something's really bothering me about this. I think that because it's my first time writing Winry, that I'm really sucking at it. Fuck. This is supposed to be an awesome fic, too. GOD DAMN IT ALL TO HELL. *swears wildly, karate-kicks a nearby wall* So I guess I apologize for the blatant OOCness of this chapter, and I SWEAR ON JENN'S (SOON-TO-BE) GRAVE THAT I'LL GET BETTER AT THIS. *nod* Argh. Just. This fic. Makes me want to stop living. -___-;; I blame it on the fact that I've gotta poop. Oh, and on the fact that I haven't been into the FMA fandom these days, so I've sort of forgotten how to write for it, ehehehe... ^^;; *sheepish*