Living Room Space: Machine Language
Title: Living Room Space
Chapter 1: Machine Language
Author: Terracotta Bones
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: EdWinry
Spoilers: end of the series, end of the movie
Disclaimer: It wouldn't be fanfiction otherwise.
Summary: She would let him sleep on her couch, if he came. She would breathe easier, if he were sleeping on her couch.
Author's Note: I started writing this almost a year ago... Amazing. Go here to hear the song that inspired the story (and watch the completely unrelated anime video, which I hereby disclaim).
Chapter 1: Machine Language
I can't imagine all the people that you know
and the places that you go
when the lights are turned down low
And I don't understand all the things you've seen
But I'm slipping in between
You and your big dreams
Winry retched into the toilet bowl, clutching the basin, knees on the tiled bathroom floor.
What a terrible way to end an evening, she mused. Look where I am now, Grandma! At the top of my game, interning with an automail surgeon at a Rush Valley hospital. Rush Valley! The Boomtown of the Broken Down!
She wiped her mouth with a paper towel, then convulsed with the next wave of vomit. Her head spun with the smell and the sound of flushing water.
She thought her white toilet might be turning orange.
Ah. Peachy keen.
Next time, she wouldn’t have quite so many drinks. She wouldn’t ignore her colleague’s hand on her, and she wouldn’t even try to have fun afterward. It was no formula for a good time - a little molestation, a bit more alcohol, some low lights and strangled bar music and people having way too much fun without her.
Her head pounded. Tomorrow, maybe she would jam her wrench four inches into Phil’s skull for rubbing up on her butt. Fuckin’ pervert.
Tonight, her bathroom was clean and cool and just small enough to close in on her.
She rinsed her mouth out, twice, three times, and slid to the floor, flat on her back. Life kicked her in the stomach. The tiles - all twenty-three of them, she’d counted - chilled her skin through her clothes.
She waited to feel better; she opened her eyes, closed them again, blinked back the blurriness in her vision. Ceiling, wall, shower, toilet, mirror, cabinet, sink.
She was not quite sure that everything would be fine in the morning. Besides the hangover.
And the idea of working a twelve-hour shift in an emergency room while she was shit stupid with coffee and painkillers didn’t have the shine she thought it would.
Winry dragged a hand across her eyes. When her breath started to catch, she stood up - if she broke down now it would be into a cesspool of throw-up - and anchored her hands on the sink to pull herself up, moving slow to make sure nothing would slip out from under her.
The mirror glared balefully at her, or she to it perhaps - her hair was scrambled in every direction, her skin was pale and sweaty; her makeup had smudged and evaporated, her clothes looked rumpled. She looked exactly like she’d just spent a night puking. Early morning, actually. A clock pointed out that it was 3:13 in the morning. Perfect. Sick, stupid, psycho, silly with coffee.
“Lucky me,” she muttered, and began pulling pins out of her hair. She switched on her shower full blast. Maybe the steam would help the goosebumps on her arms.
She glanced at the toilet and flushed it, still drunk enough to be only halfway disgusted.
It felt like her face would heat up and melt off if she jettisoned any more of her insides, or if that space in her chest wobbled off-balance any more.
The mirror was too big. She could see the upper half of her body in it, and all the wreckage that used to be beauty. Or plainness.
She undid all the buttons on her blouse - slowly - and slid out of her skirt. She pulled her boots from her stinging feet, and rolled off her pantyhose - wondered why she’d even thought to wear pantyhose for a night like this. It all fell in a heap on the floor, and she stared at it for a moment, wondering their similarities, her and this pile of nothing. Shaking her head, and regretting it, she detached the last twenty pins snagged into the brambles of her hair, and wiped her face with clammy hands.
Look at you.
The steam from the shower began to fog the mirror - but she could still see everything. She could stare, blearily, at her naked reflection.
She certainly wasn’t fat, or even plump, but she was thick with muscle - lumpy with muscle. She wished she was all clean lines - steel, pulley, wire, iron hand. Perhaps that was the problem, that she was thick with things - muscle, or hatred, or love. Maybe she overanalyzed.
Maybe everybody has an ugly, beautiful daughter.
She wondered if her parents ever imagined her like this. It probably hadn’t occurred to them.
She wished - she wished she could be perfect. Better. Iron hand. Steel, or steeled heart.
Her reflection disappeared in the white burn of her hot shower.
She pictured the vomit in her toilet in her mind, and nearly puked again.
When she stepped under the scalding water, it felt like her body was on fire; surely her hair was singed; surely her skin blistered under the heat. But she didn’t turn it down. Don’t be so easy on yourself. This was a way to scrub misery out. Hot hot water. She had to try.
Her vision blurred and darkened, for a moment, and she thought of ripping all her goddamn clothes to shreds. Then the curtains, and pillows, and apartment.
She wondered, out of the blue, if Ed and Al were going through something like this right now.
They’re probably at some inn in the middle of nowhere, she thought sourly. She pictured warm, bright rooms with friendly attendants; vast libraries; famous alchemists; fame. Are you the Fullmetal Alchemist? The hero of the people? You’re back?
Briefly, she had an inarticulate feeling of envy.
The state should have declared Ed dead instead of missing. Then he’d have made even more of a comeback.
And where was she? The top of her game at Rush Valley? She should’ve been out of here by now, famous.
She should’ve fixed the plumbing in this shower so it didn’t pulsate between a harsh spray and a weak one. Her face heated up again. The tiles were moldy, too.
She accidentally twisted the shower knob out of its base in the wall.
“Damnit!” She twisted it back in, then rubbed her face, leaned her head against the wall. “Edward!”
Why aren’t you here?
And now, even better, she was ugly and angry at the same time.
It's always you
In my big dreams
And you tell me that it's over
Wake up lying in a patch of four leaf clovers
And you’re restless, and I'm naked
You've gotta get out
You can’t stand to see me shaking
She walked into her darkened bedroom later, after aspirin and a nightgown and dried hair, and snapped the picture frame next to her bed face down. She knew its details without seeing it - it was her and Ed and Al in the Dublin marketplace a few weeks after Ed’s return. Sig took the picture.
She looked so young and worldly in it, she thought, with her long winter trench coat and her hair spilled all over her shoulders. Her smile stretched across her whole face. Al looked rosy and alive and happy. “Family photo!” That’s what he’d said.
Ed looked older than the both of them. His skin didn’t have much color, and his eyes were a little toneless. He was so tired, his left arm snagged on Winry’s right, and wilted.
The new Ed had aged more than the three years he’d spent as a missing person.
But of course the picture didn’t capture any of this. Looking at the glossy polychrome paper was just a way of remembering.
Tragically, Winry found that in the months since Ed had been back she couldn’t imagine him any longer, even when she tried. After he disappeared, she’d invented beautiful stories and terrible nightmares, her hopes and fears all wrapped up in mental adventures and speculations. Now that he was back, she was at a dead end.
She’d put him in her dreams, right next to her automail, so living without him wouldn’t be so bad. Now his life without her in it pulled a blank, and she couldn’t reason it out with any medical science or human philosophy.
You can’t pull justification out of nowhere, Granny used to say.
But justification for what? The fact that he wasn’t here with her in Rush Valley? That she hadn’t heard from him in months? She’d never asked him to come. She’d never thought to ask; she’d always assumed life would be just fine without him, now that she knew he was safe.
They’d lived so long apart, her and Ed, even when they could’ve been together, so it seemed natural to follow diverging paths. It wasn’t like she needed him just to survive; life was still life, even without him; she could whimper and dry her eyes and move on if it was required. When he came back, finally, after three years and the tide crested, it seemed alright, normal even, to leave. She’d been prepared for the worst, and it was over. The normal lives they’d all looked for could finally begin - and neither Ed nor Al asked her to keep traveling with them, so nothing stopped her.
That was a few months ago. Maybe she wanted him to chase her, or something, which was unreasonable because he never had and probably never would. He was too selfish; he was where he needed to be and nowhere else, which was why he only visited her, back when he visited her, when something was broken. He was too selfish for anything else. But that, she supposed, was what made him so strong, and what got Al back to normal - eventually.
She thought herself quite selfless - pathetic? - for letting him go.
Maybe she was just terrified that, this time, he was slipping away from her for good - he’d left for three years, but he hadn’t been able to come back; now he could see her any time he wanted, and didn’t.
The space in her chest burned, twisted like her churning stomach, when she thought of him. She hadn’t seen it coming, not at all. The hard line of his jaw; the pulled tissue and the scars on his shoulder; his loud, wide, lazy mouth. Ed: arms, legs, hair, chest, ass, head. Ed.
She wished she’d figured it out sooner. Now she was poisoned by - what? Futility? Fear? Resentment? But for whom?
How could I just leave?
There is definitely no purity in love.
A tiny, tinny part of her wondered if Ed would ever come back, or if he would travel until something broke, and leave as soon as it was fixed. He was selfish enough for that - but stupid enough, too? Would he see her, and figure it out? Should she let him, or should she be quiet? Were there other things to be concerned about?
That spool of heartstrings had a long thread, and she’d tied it to the photo next to her bed. She’d been one-upped before - by alchemy, then a stone; she could ponder déjà vu, and it wouldn’t be cynicism or bitterness, just reality.
But why should she cut out her heart now? Just to love? It couldn’t be that debilitating, just to love. But she wouldn’t know.
Perhaps she was just frightened that it would be the same, and he would never ever come to Rush Valley, the same way he’d never come to Resembol.
She was afraid that it wasn’t his fault, that she couldn’t even convince herself that it was in some way his fault, that she had brought this upon herself. It’s my fault. She should’ve made him come with her. She should’ve followed him. Why didn’t I just go with you?
She should’ve made sure he spent the night throwing up his stomach and all the alcohol and bar food inside it, because she couldn’t stand to be alone in it.
The blurriness in her eyes spilled all over her cheeks, like the milk he would pour onto the grass as a child. Back when she knew him step for step. When he wasn’t glare-bright in her heart. She pulled the covers over her head and wiped a hand across her face. How could she make such a wrong turn - how could she get everything she wanted, pay off every debt, and drown?
When, in the gaseous, volcanic beginnings of life, did love become its opposite? How could a stupid thing like a burning, not-at-all pure love like hers for him turn into a thorn?
It was her own life, and she didn’t fit in it.
A toast to dark bars and her third lesson in: people are made of vomit and yuck.
Or it was his life, and she didn’t fit in it, even where she used to do so well.
She was living without him, one more time. It shouldn’t have felt so different.
Could you let me go?
I didn’t think so
Reference: Rush Valley is referred to as "the Boomtwon of the Brokendown" in the FMA manga, for you anime fans.
Chapter 1: Machine Language
Author: Terracotta Bones
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: EdWinry
Spoilers: end of the series, end of the movie
Disclaimer: It wouldn't be fanfiction otherwise.
Summary: She would let him sleep on her couch, if he came. She would breathe easier, if he were sleeping on her couch.
Author's Note: I started writing this almost a year ago... Amazing. Go here to hear the song that inspired the story (and watch the completely unrelated anime video, which I hereby disclaim).
Chapter 1: Machine Language
I can't imagine all the people that you know
and the places that you go
when the lights are turned down low
And I don't understand all the things you've seen
But I'm slipping in between
You and your big dreams
Winry retched into the toilet bowl, clutching the basin, knees on the tiled bathroom floor.
What a terrible way to end an evening, she mused. Look where I am now, Grandma! At the top of my game, interning with an automail surgeon at a Rush Valley hospital. Rush Valley! The Boomtown of the Broken Down!
She wiped her mouth with a paper towel, then convulsed with the next wave of vomit. Her head spun with the smell and the sound of flushing water.
She thought her white toilet might be turning orange.
Ah. Peachy keen.
Next time, she wouldn’t have quite so many drinks. She wouldn’t ignore her colleague’s hand on her, and she wouldn’t even try to have fun afterward. It was no formula for a good time - a little molestation, a bit more alcohol, some low lights and strangled bar music and people having way too much fun without her.
Her head pounded. Tomorrow, maybe she would jam her wrench four inches into Phil’s skull for rubbing up on her butt. Fuckin’ pervert.
Tonight, her bathroom was clean and cool and just small enough to close in on her.
She rinsed her mouth out, twice, three times, and slid to the floor, flat on her back. Life kicked her in the stomach. The tiles - all twenty-three of them, she’d counted - chilled her skin through her clothes.
She waited to feel better; she opened her eyes, closed them again, blinked back the blurriness in her vision. Ceiling, wall, shower, toilet, mirror, cabinet, sink.
She was not quite sure that everything would be fine in the morning. Besides the hangover.
And the idea of working a twelve-hour shift in an emergency room while she was shit stupid with coffee and painkillers didn’t have the shine she thought it would.
Winry dragged a hand across her eyes. When her breath started to catch, she stood up - if she broke down now it would be into a cesspool of throw-up - and anchored her hands on the sink to pull herself up, moving slow to make sure nothing would slip out from under her.
The mirror glared balefully at her, or she to it perhaps - her hair was scrambled in every direction, her skin was pale and sweaty; her makeup had smudged and evaporated, her clothes looked rumpled. She looked exactly like she’d just spent a night puking. Early morning, actually. A clock pointed out that it was 3:13 in the morning. Perfect. Sick, stupid, psycho, silly with coffee.
“Lucky me,” she muttered, and began pulling pins out of her hair. She switched on her shower full blast. Maybe the steam would help the goosebumps on her arms.
She glanced at the toilet and flushed it, still drunk enough to be only halfway disgusted.
It felt like her face would heat up and melt off if she jettisoned any more of her insides, or if that space in her chest wobbled off-balance any more.
The mirror was too big. She could see the upper half of her body in it, and all the wreckage that used to be beauty. Or plainness.
She undid all the buttons on her blouse - slowly - and slid out of her skirt. She pulled her boots from her stinging feet, and rolled off her pantyhose - wondered why she’d even thought to wear pantyhose for a night like this. It all fell in a heap on the floor, and she stared at it for a moment, wondering their similarities, her and this pile of nothing. Shaking her head, and regretting it, she detached the last twenty pins snagged into the brambles of her hair, and wiped her face with clammy hands.
Look at you.
The steam from the shower began to fog the mirror - but she could still see everything. She could stare, blearily, at her naked reflection.
She certainly wasn’t fat, or even plump, but she was thick with muscle - lumpy with muscle. She wished she was all clean lines - steel, pulley, wire, iron hand. Perhaps that was the problem, that she was thick with things - muscle, or hatred, or love. Maybe she overanalyzed.
Maybe everybody has an ugly, beautiful daughter.
She wondered if her parents ever imagined her like this. It probably hadn’t occurred to them.
She wished - she wished she could be perfect. Better. Iron hand. Steel, or steeled heart.
Her reflection disappeared in the white burn of her hot shower.
She pictured the vomit in her toilet in her mind, and nearly puked again.
When she stepped under the scalding water, it felt like her body was on fire; surely her hair was singed; surely her skin blistered under the heat. But she didn’t turn it down. Don’t be so easy on yourself. This was a way to scrub misery out. Hot hot water. She had to try.
Her vision blurred and darkened, for a moment, and she thought of ripping all her goddamn clothes to shreds. Then the curtains, and pillows, and apartment.
She wondered, out of the blue, if Ed and Al were going through something like this right now.
They’re probably at some inn in the middle of nowhere, she thought sourly. She pictured warm, bright rooms with friendly attendants; vast libraries; famous alchemists; fame. Are you the Fullmetal Alchemist? The hero of the people? You’re back?
Briefly, she had an inarticulate feeling of envy.
The state should have declared Ed dead instead of missing. Then he’d have made even more of a comeback.
And where was she? The top of her game at Rush Valley? She should’ve been out of here by now, famous.
She should’ve fixed the plumbing in this shower so it didn’t pulsate between a harsh spray and a weak one. Her face heated up again. The tiles were moldy, too.
She accidentally twisted the shower knob out of its base in the wall.
“Damnit!” She twisted it back in, then rubbed her face, leaned her head against the wall. “Edward!”
Why aren’t you here?
And now, even better, she was ugly and angry at the same time.
It's always you
In my big dreams
And you tell me that it's over
Wake up lying in a patch of four leaf clovers
And you’re restless, and I'm naked
You've gotta get out
You can’t stand to see me shaking
She walked into her darkened bedroom later, after aspirin and a nightgown and dried hair, and snapped the picture frame next to her bed face down. She knew its details without seeing it - it was her and Ed and Al in the Dublin marketplace a few weeks after Ed’s return. Sig took the picture.
She looked so young and worldly in it, she thought, with her long winter trench coat and her hair spilled all over her shoulders. Her smile stretched across her whole face. Al looked rosy and alive and happy. “Family photo!” That’s what he’d said.
Ed looked older than the both of them. His skin didn’t have much color, and his eyes were a little toneless. He was so tired, his left arm snagged on Winry’s right, and wilted.
The new Ed had aged more than the three years he’d spent as a missing person.
But of course the picture didn’t capture any of this. Looking at the glossy polychrome paper was just a way of remembering.
Tragically, Winry found that in the months since Ed had been back she couldn’t imagine him any longer, even when she tried. After he disappeared, she’d invented beautiful stories and terrible nightmares, her hopes and fears all wrapped up in mental adventures and speculations. Now that he was back, she was at a dead end.
She’d put him in her dreams, right next to her automail, so living without him wouldn’t be so bad. Now his life without her in it pulled a blank, and she couldn’t reason it out with any medical science or human philosophy.
You can’t pull justification out of nowhere, Granny used to say.
But justification for what? The fact that he wasn’t here with her in Rush Valley? That she hadn’t heard from him in months? She’d never asked him to come. She’d never thought to ask; she’d always assumed life would be just fine without him, now that she knew he was safe.
They’d lived so long apart, her and Ed, even when they could’ve been together, so it seemed natural to follow diverging paths. It wasn’t like she needed him just to survive; life was still life, even without him; she could whimper and dry her eyes and move on if it was required. When he came back, finally, after three years and the tide crested, it seemed alright, normal even, to leave. She’d been prepared for the worst, and it was over. The normal lives they’d all looked for could finally begin - and neither Ed nor Al asked her to keep traveling with them, so nothing stopped her.
That was a few months ago. Maybe she wanted him to chase her, or something, which was unreasonable because he never had and probably never would. He was too selfish; he was where he needed to be and nowhere else, which was why he only visited her, back when he visited her, when something was broken. He was too selfish for anything else. But that, she supposed, was what made him so strong, and what got Al back to normal - eventually.
She thought herself quite selfless - pathetic? - for letting him go.
Maybe she was just terrified that, this time, he was slipping away from her for good - he’d left for three years, but he hadn’t been able to come back; now he could see her any time he wanted, and didn’t.
The space in her chest burned, twisted like her churning stomach, when she thought of him. She hadn’t seen it coming, not at all. The hard line of his jaw; the pulled tissue and the scars on his shoulder; his loud, wide, lazy mouth. Ed: arms, legs, hair, chest, ass, head. Ed.
She wished she’d figured it out sooner. Now she was poisoned by - what? Futility? Fear? Resentment? But for whom?
How could I just leave?
There is definitely no purity in love.
A tiny, tinny part of her wondered if Ed would ever come back, or if he would travel until something broke, and leave as soon as it was fixed. He was selfish enough for that - but stupid enough, too? Would he see her, and figure it out? Should she let him, or should she be quiet? Were there other things to be concerned about?
That spool of heartstrings had a long thread, and she’d tied it to the photo next to her bed. She’d been one-upped before - by alchemy, then a stone; she could ponder déjà vu, and it wouldn’t be cynicism or bitterness, just reality.
But why should she cut out her heart now? Just to love? It couldn’t be that debilitating, just to love. But she wouldn’t know.
Perhaps she was just frightened that it would be the same, and he would never ever come to Rush Valley, the same way he’d never come to Resembol.
She was afraid that it wasn’t his fault, that she couldn’t even convince herself that it was in some way his fault, that she had brought this upon herself. It’s my fault. She should’ve made him come with her. She should’ve followed him. Why didn’t I just go with you?
She should’ve made sure he spent the night throwing up his stomach and all the alcohol and bar food inside it, because she couldn’t stand to be alone in it.
The blurriness in her eyes spilled all over her cheeks, like the milk he would pour onto the grass as a child. Back when she knew him step for step. When he wasn’t glare-bright in her heart. She pulled the covers over her head and wiped a hand across her face. How could she make such a wrong turn - how could she get everything she wanted, pay off every debt, and drown?
When, in the gaseous, volcanic beginnings of life, did love become its opposite? How could a stupid thing like a burning, not-at-all pure love like hers for him turn into a thorn?
It was her own life, and she didn’t fit in it.
A toast to dark bars and her third lesson in: people are made of vomit and yuck.
Or it was his life, and she didn’t fit in it, even where she used to do so well.
She was living without him, one more time. It shouldn’t have felt so different.
Could you let me go?
I didn’t think so
Reference: Rush Valley is referred to as "the Boomtwon of the Brokendown" in the FMA manga, for you anime fans.