[Fic] "Circle of the Sun" (Ed/Al/Winry, PG)
Title: Circle of the Sun
Author: cryogenia
Genre: So fluffy you could sleep on it
Rating: PG
Pairing: Ed/Al/Winry
A/N: This was written for the FMA April Fool's challenge - prompt was "Ed, Al, and Winry - cute kids with dangerous machines". Am posting it now cause omfg, I'm on deadline and I don't know if I'll get it posted otherwise XD; Seriously. I've been primarily on an internet blackout lately.
"BOYS!"
Alphonse Elric wasn't anywhere near the workshop, but he could still hear Winry's voice as if she were standing right next door, and that alone inspired an automatic wince. It did not take a rocket scientist (to borrow one of the many strange expressions his brother had brought back from that unusual other world) to realize that somebody was in trouble. There was a certain magic combination of decibel and octave that Winry went through when she was "displeased", then "annoyed", then "seriously displeased", then "upset."
This, unfortunately, was well into "going supernova".
Al raised his head up from the lab notebook he was scribbling in to look over at his brother across the way. Edward had also visibly paled, and somehow Al didn't think that was owing to lime dust from their experiment. Both their eyes flicked briefly over to the laboratory window, and they knew instinctively what the other was thinking. Al had never quite gotten Ed to explain what exactly it was that a rocket scientist did, but he knew it had to do with ballistics and trajectories, and damned if it didn't take a rocket scientist to realize flying out the window right now might be preferable to going downstairs.
Unfortunately, Alphonse Elric was an alchemist, so calculating how fast and far they would fall from the window was not within his realm of expertise, but more importantly, he had also been with Winry long enough to realize that escaping now would only make things worse later. He grabbed his brother by the lab coat and hauled him down toward Winry's automail workshop; Ed made a mournful sound as the window disappeared as an option.
They knocked with trepidation, Al smoothing the front of his lab coat nervously and Ed hastily applying his most earnest honestly-I-could-care-less look. Winry had them both whipped and they both knew it; the difference was in whom could handle letting on to the world that they knew.
There was a rather lengthy delay and then finally the door clicked open. Winry's brilliant cornflower eyes glared out at them accusingly.
"What do you want?" she asked, sounding surprised.
Al blinked. "You called for us...?"
Winry blinked right back, and then started as if remembering something. "Oh!" she said, mouth rounded. "No, no, I was yelling at..."
She scowled, as if remembering something. Threw the door open wider.
"Alphonse Elric, do you have any idea what your sons just did to my toolkit?!"
Al visibly paled. Rule of thumb at their house - it must be bad, whenever the kids became Ed or Al's sons.
Winry grabbed him by the ear and tugged him inward without further ado, eager apparently to have someone else to visit her frustration on. Behind him, Ed made the mistake of snickering at Al's predicament, and she snagged him with her other hand before he could escape.
"Hey--leggo---ow, what did I do!?"
"I could name a few things," Winry said pointedly, jerking her head down at the two toddlers smiling innocently up at them. Tristan Maes and Joseph Louis, both tow-headed children with big, inquisitive eyes; neither of whom were meant to be in the midst of Winry's power tools.
"Hey...you guys aren't supposed to be in here," Al frowned and reached for the nearest one, and little Tristan laughed and offered up some strange sort of object instead. It looked like a piece of steel kleinized into a mobius strip.
Ed and Al exchanged looks.
"Uh-oh," Ed breathed.
"'Uh-oh' is right!" Winry snarled, rounding on them hard. She pointed at the floor on the other side of the work bench, which Al, to his horror, now recognized was covered with strange, glassy metallic puddles that might have once been tools. "I thought they were down for a nap," (Al swallowed hard at that one; technically he'd been the one to put them in their cribs last), "but when I came back from the bathroom, my best ratchet was all over the floor like this! They're not old enough for arrays, I hadn't expected..."
Al and Ed crouched down to survey the damage, all the myriad puddles.
"We'll fix it," Al promised her hastily, even though, to be truthful, he had absolutely no clue what the flower shaped twist of metal he was fingering had previously been. "Won't we, brother?"
Ed's thoughts were lost down a different track though, unfortunately.
"Well I'll be damned," he breathed (earning him an elbow to the ribs from Al, who was still fighting a valiant, if losing, war with Winry and Ed against cursing in front of the children). "You two deconstructed these all by yourselves?" His face lit up and he turned toward the children, both of whom were smiling at their Edward-daddy with abject adoration.
"That's my boys!" Edward crowed, and Winry smacked him solidly over the head.
"Ow, fuck! No hitting in front of the kids!" he complained.
"No swearing, either," Winry said, but her eyes grew anxious; she didn't like arguing in front of them any more than the rest of them. "Maybe we should put them back to bed before they get into any more trouble?"
"Good idea," Al chimed in hastily, and he reached down to scoop up little Tristan, his secret favorite of the two (though he would die if he ever had to admit he had a favorite), to get the ball rolling.
"Da-da?" his son asked anxiously, and Al smiled down at the kid, stroked his silky, baby-soft hair. He smelt like warm child and baby oil, and even though he was certainly getting heavier these days, Al had no problem with carrying the toddler back into his room. Tristan was the one he most likely had fathered, and while he hated it how unfair it felt that it had turned out that way, he really was the one Al most related to.
Well, he hated it in theory. When Tristan was right in front of him, all the kid had to do was look up with those big gray eyes of his, and Al was a goner.
Not that Joseph wasn't adorable too, he reminded himself. Joseph had much the same effect on him, only Joseph was currently fussing against Ed's best attempts to put him down in his crib, and using his alarmingly precocious verbal skills to argue that he had already had one nap already, surely that fulfilled his quota for the day.
"No, I don't know where 'quota' came from either," Al said in response to Winry's puzzled look. It really was scary to think sometimes just how much children absorbed from the world around them, like eager little sponges pulling in stray words and conversations (exactly why, he noted sourly, why the shop talk needed to tone down around the little ones. They could take after their other parents in all other ways, for all he cared, just please let one member of his household grow up with some decent manners!)
"I caught Tristan saying 'spanner' the other day," Winry said smugly as she tucked said child in. "Isn't that right, sweetheart? You showed Great-gramma Pinako how good you are at fixing that silly broken radio didn't you? Clever boy..."
Tristan smiled sleepily up and let his mother continue to pet on him as she murmured soothing stories about transistors. Al went over to help his brother with combative Joseph, who was as usual growing increasingly less combative as his limited energy reserves started to wear down. After the third or fourth over-the-crib-bars escape attempt failed, the boy finally consented to be tucked into his cream-colored blankets and drift off to sleep.
When the coast was clear and both boys were snoozing, the three frazzled parents tiptoed carefully out of the room and into the hall, with only a brief pause for Winry to oil the squeaky door so it would swing shut quietly.
"Glad that's over," she sighed, vanishing the oil into one of her many tool belt pockets again. "Maybe we really should consider having Rose help with them when Granny's out of town..."
"Or Sheska," Ed offered.
"You only like her because she brings you books," Winry accused, though her tone was mischievous, not jealous. Ed didn't seem to notice though, and Al was amused as his brother proceeded to worm his way into her arms offering platitudes.
"In all seriousness," Winry said a moment later. "I'm surprised they figured it out so fast. You two were quick too, but you still had book learning, but those two..."
Ed and Al nodded.
"Yeah," Al said, considering. He thought back to the previous week, when he had dropped a glass down in front of little Tristan and shattered it, how he'd thought nothing of putting his hands together and transmuting it back into its proper shape. And his son had throughout watched him intently, and if there was anything Joseph had to say about the world, it was that there was nothing his little brother could do that he couldn't do better, and Al had the sudden, startling picture of the two of them finding one of Winry's tools, a solid chunk of the same molecular compound all the way through, feeling it out, and considering that they might know what do with it...
He shivered a little. His brother, still wound up around Winry, shivered too.
"They must have learned by watching us," Ed said, reaching the same conclusion Al had. A shadow passed over his face. "And we learned from Dad's books."
It was a lot to think about. For a moment, no one spoke. Sometimes, Al thought, gazing absently at the little oak nursery door, behind which lay their greatest creations of all, fatherhood was a thing of pride, and sometimes, the responsibility was like a curse.
Then Winry extracted an arm Ed was monopolizing and collared Al with it, pulled him in close to be part of their collective once more; three hearts, one family, and they held each other close.
"It'll be all right," she said gruffly. "And hey, they're just tools. I'm sure I can manage."
Ed raised a skeptical eyebrow. Al couldn't help doing so as well.
"'Just tools'?" Ed sniggered at the way Winry's eyebrow twitched. "Try saying that again three times fast."
It really was unfortunate for Edward, Al tsked a moment later. He pleaded his case well, but out in the hallway, 'no violence in front of children' really ceased to apply.
***
Later (much later) after they had cleaned up scraped elbows and dealt with the resulting temper tantrums (really, Al though, it was no wonder they still jumped when Winry yelled for the 'boys'; Ed was as bad as two toddlers and then some), Al and Ed returned to their neglected alchemical studies only to have a sudden and sadly halfway expected, shock. One thing they had learned from Gramma Pinako, when she'd first heard that Winry was expecting and naturally, had been enjoying scaring the living daylights out of all of them, was that when all three of them had been little, none of them had ever wanted to sleep a wink. The boys had inherited that, and what was worse, no crib could hold them.
So, as Al had feared, there were Tristan and Joseph smack dab in the ruins of what had once been their laboratory...tinkering eagerly with some kind of device that might have once been the nursery room clock, but now looked alarmingly like it might be capable of ambulation instead.
"Da-da!" Tristan squealed happily as he continued stacking empty beakers on the floor in front of him. Ed made a strangled noise as Tristan clapped his tiny hands and the glass melted, flowed anew onto the boys' strange creation. Al sucked in a breath too.
"They're going to take over the world someday," his brother said faintly, and Al nodded, looking down in horror as his son continued to alchemize odds and ends and hand them to his brother. Tristan beamed up at them, and both Al and Ed smiled and waved nervously.
Joseph, for his part, just knelt there and tinkered with the device, his bright blue eyes burning with a calm, cool intensity that Al recognized, and trembled at.
This world was theirs, and it belonged to them already.
***
Author: cryogenia
Genre: So fluffy you could sleep on it
Rating: PG
Pairing: Ed/Al/Winry
A/N: This was written for the FMA April Fool's challenge - prompt was "Ed, Al, and Winry - cute kids with dangerous machines". Am posting it now cause omfg, I'm on deadline and I don't know if I'll get it posted otherwise XD; Seriously. I've been primarily on an internet blackout lately.
"BOYS!"
Alphonse Elric wasn't anywhere near the workshop, but he could still hear Winry's voice as if she were standing right next door, and that alone inspired an automatic wince. It did not take a rocket scientist (to borrow one of the many strange expressions his brother had brought back from that unusual other world) to realize that somebody was in trouble. There was a certain magic combination of decibel and octave that Winry went through when she was "displeased", then "annoyed", then "seriously displeased", then "upset."
This, unfortunately, was well into "going supernova".
Al raised his head up from the lab notebook he was scribbling in to look over at his brother across the way. Edward had also visibly paled, and somehow Al didn't think that was owing to lime dust from their experiment. Both their eyes flicked briefly over to the laboratory window, and they knew instinctively what the other was thinking. Al had never quite gotten Ed to explain what exactly it was that a rocket scientist did, but he knew it had to do with ballistics and trajectories, and damned if it didn't take a rocket scientist to realize flying out the window right now might be preferable to going downstairs.
Unfortunately, Alphonse Elric was an alchemist, so calculating how fast and far they would fall from the window was not within his realm of expertise, but more importantly, he had also been with Winry long enough to realize that escaping now would only make things worse later. He grabbed his brother by the lab coat and hauled him down toward Winry's automail workshop; Ed made a mournful sound as the window disappeared as an option.
They knocked with trepidation, Al smoothing the front of his lab coat nervously and Ed hastily applying his most earnest honestly-I-could-care-less look. Winry had them both whipped and they both knew it; the difference was in whom could handle letting on to the world that they knew.
There was a rather lengthy delay and then finally the door clicked open. Winry's brilliant cornflower eyes glared out at them accusingly.
"What do you want?" she asked, sounding surprised.
Al blinked. "You called for us...?"
Winry blinked right back, and then started as if remembering something. "Oh!" she said, mouth rounded. "No, no, I was yelling at..."
She scowled, as if remembering something. Threw the door open wider.
"Alphonse Elric, do you have any idea what your sons just did to my toolkit?!"
Al visibly paled. Rule of thumb at their house - it must be bad, whenever the kids became Ed or Al's sons.
Winry grabbed him by the ear and tugged him inward without further ado, eager apparently to have someone else to visit her frustration on. Behind him, Ed made the mistake of snickering at Al's predicament, and she snagged him with her other hand before he could escape.
"Hey--leggo---ow, what did I do!?"
"I could name a few things," Winry said pointedly, jerking her head down at the two toddlers smiling innocently up at them. Tristan Maes and Joseph Louis, both tow-headed children with big, inquisitive eyes; neither of whom were meant to be in the midst of Winry's power tools.
"Hey...you guys aren't supposed to be in here," Al frowned and reached for the nearest one, and little Tristan laughed and offered up some strange sort of object instead. It looked like a piece of steel kleinized into a mobius strip.
Ed and Al exchanged looks.
"Uh-oh," Ed breathed.
"'Uh-oh' is right!" Winry snarled, rounding on them hard. She pointed at the floor on the other side of the work bench, which Al, to his horror, now recognized was covered with strange, glassy metallic puddles that might have once been tools. "I thought they were down for a nap," (Al swallowed hard at that one; technically he'd been the one to put them in their cribs last), "but when I came back from the bathroom, my best ratchet was all over the floor like this! They're not old enough for arrays, I hadn't expected..."
Al and Ed crouched down to survey the damage, all the myriad puddles.
"We'll fix it," Al promised her hastily, even though, to be truthful, he had absolutely no clue what the flower shaped twist of metal he was fingering had previously been. "Won't we, brother?"
Ed's thoughts were lost down a different track though, unfortunately.
"Well I'll be damned," he breathed (earning him an elbow to the ribs from Al, who was still fighting a valiant, if losing, war with Winry and Ed against cursing in front of the children). "You two deconstructed these all by yourselves?" His face lit up and he turned toward the children, both of whom were smiling at their Edward-daddy with abject adoration.
"That's my boys!" Edward crowed, and Winry smacked him solidly over the head.
"Ow, fuck! No hitting in front of the kids!" he complained.
"No swearing, either," Winry said, but her eyes grew anxious; she didn't like arguing in front of them any more than the rest of them. "Maybe we should put them back to bed before they get into any more trouble?"
"Good idea," Al chimed in hastily, and he reached down to scoop up little Tristan, his secret favorite of the two (though he would die if he ever had to admit he had a favorite), to get the ball rolling.
"Da-da?" his son asked anxiously, and Al smiled down at the kid, stroked his silky, baby-soft hair. He smelt like warm child and baby oil, and even though he was certainly getting heavier these days, Al had no problem with carrying the toddler back into his room. Tristan was the one he most likely had fathered, and while he hated it how unfair it felt that it had turned out that way, he really was the one Al most related to.
Well, he hated it in theory. When Tristan was right in front of him, all the kid had to do was look up with those big gray eyes of his, and Al was a goner.
Not that Joseph wasn't adorable too, he reminded himself. Joseph had much the same effect on him, only Joseph was currently fussing against Ed's best attempts to put him down in his crib, and using his alarmingly precocious verbal skills to argue that he had already had one nap already, surely that fulfilled his quota for the day.
"No, I don't know where 'quota' came from either," Al said in response to Winry's puzzled look. It really was scary to think sometimes just how much children absorbed from the world around them, like eager little sponges pulling in stray words and conversations (exactly why, he noted sourly, why the shop talk needed to tone down around the little ones. They could take after their other parents in all other ways, for all he cared, just please let one member of his household grow up with some decent manners!)
"I caught Tristan saying 'spanner' the other day," Winry said smugly as she tucked said child in. "Isn't that right, sweetheart? You showed Great-gramma Pinako how good you are at fixing that silly broken radio didn't you? Clever boy..."
Tristan smiled sleepily up and let his mother continue to pet on him as she murmured soothing stories about transistors. Al went over to help his brother with combative Joseph, who was as usual growing increasingly less combative as his limited energy reserves started to wear down. After the third or fourth over-the-crib-bars escape attempt failed, the boy finally consented to be tucked into his cream-colored blankets and drift off to sleep.
When the coast was clear and both boys were snoozing, the three frazzled parents tiptoed carefully out of the room and into the hall, with only a brief pause for Winry to oil the squeaky door so it would swing shut quietly.
"Glad that's over," she sighed, vanishing the oil into one of her many tool belt pockets again. "Maybe we really should consider having Rose help with them when Granny's out of town..."
"Or Sheska," Ed offered.
"You only like her because she brings you books," Winry accused, though her tone was mischievous, not jealous. Ed didn't seem to notice though, and Al was amused as his brother proceeded to worm his way into her arms offering platitudes.
"In all seriousness," Winry said a moment later. "I'm surprised they figured it out so fast. You two were quick too, but you still had book learning, but those two..."
Ed and Al nodded.
"Yeah," Al said, considering. He thought back to the previous week, when he had dropped a glass down in front of little Tristan and shattered it, how he'd thought nothing of putting his hands together and transmuting it back into its proper shape. And his son had throughout watched him intently, and if there was anything Joseph had to say about the world, it was that there was nothing his little brother could do that he couldn't do better, and Al had the sudden, startling picture of the two of them finding one of Winry's tools, a solid chunk of the same molecular compound all the way through, feeling it out, and considering that they might know what do with it...
He shivered a little. His brother, still wound up around Winry, shivered too.
"They must have learned by watching us," Ed said, reaching the same conclusion Al had. A shadow passed over his face. "And we learned from Dad's books."
It was a lot to think about. For a moment, no one spoke. Sometimes, Al thought, gazing absently at the little oak nursery door, behind which lay their greatest creations of all, fatherhood was a thing of pride, and sometimes, the responsibility was like a curse.
Then Winry extracted an arm Ed was monopolizing and collared Al with it, pulled him in close to be part of their collective once more; three hearts, one family, and they held each other close.
"It'll be all right," she said gruffly. "And hey, they're just tools. I'm sure I can manage."
Ed raised a skeptical eyebrow. Al couldn't help doing so as well.
"'Just tools'?" Ed sniggered at the way Winry's eyebrow twitched. "Try saying that again three times fast."
It really was unfortunate for Edward, Al tsked a moment later. He pleaded his case well, but out in the hallway, 'no violence in front of children' really ceased to apply.
***
Later (much later) after they had cleaned up scraped elbows and dealt with the resulting temper tantrums (really, Al though, it was no wonder they still jumped when Winry yelled for the 'boys'; Ed was as bad as two toddlers and then some), Al and Ed returned to their neglected alchemical studies only to have a sudden and sadly halfway expected, shock. One thing they had learned from Gramma Pinako, when she'd first heard that Winry was expecting and naturally, had been enjoying scaring the living daylights out of all of them, was that when all three of them had been little, none of them had ever wanted to sleep a wink. The boys had inherited that, and what was worse, no crib could hold them.
So, as Al had feared, there were Tristan and Joseph smack dab in the ruins of what had once been their laboratory...tinkering eagerly with some kind of device that might have once been the nursery room clock, but now looked alarmingly like it might be capable of ambulation instead.
"Da-da!" Tristan squealed happily as he continued stacking empty beakers on the floor in front of him. Ed made a strangled noise as Tristan clapped his tiny hands and the glass melted, flowed anew onto the boys' strange creation. Al sucked in a breath too.
"They're going to take over the world someday," his brother said faintly, and Al nodded, looking down in horror as his son continued to alchemize odds and ends and hand them to his brother. Tristan beamed up at them, and both Al and Ed smiled and waved nervously.
Joseph, for his part, just knelt there and tinkered with the device, his bright blue eyes burning with a calm, cool intensity that Al recognized, and trembled at.
This world was theirs, and it belonged to them already.
***