Fullmetal Alchemist - Theme Seven (PG-13)
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Theme Set: Seven
Rating: PG-13
Author Notes: All of these are based off the manga canon, rather than the anime. Oblique spoilers abound, as do manga only characters and continuity.
Number.PromptSentence
001.Focus When Hawkeye works there is the gun and there is her target and there is the steadying line of her body, and everything else is at a step removed.
002.Civilization He walks through the markets and strides down side streets, and all around him everything is buzzing with summer and warmth and the everyday joys and tragedies of life, and he prays, as he tosses his brother an orange upon returning home, “Thank you, God, thank you, thank you, thank you,” and he lets the prayer pulse under his skin as his brother excitedly shows him his latest book.
003.Sink Fury decides he hates the plumbing system in East City the day he spends all morning trying to find the valve to shut off the water to one of the kitchen sinks so he can change the facet filter - but he doesn’t regret being posted there when Colonel Mustang smiles at him and says “Well done.”
004.Bullet There has always been a gun in Marcoh’s house - he hates himself for never thinking to use it until it is too late.
005.Count On long watches Ran Fan counts heartbeats, until she can time the hours of any night or day by the rhythm of her resting heart.
006.Mental Ed is vastly annoyed that Al has to take tests before going to the village school - he says it isn’t fair of the teachers to doubt Al, no matter how many times their mother explains that it’s only because they’re sending Al a year early.
007.Coast “I’ve never seen the sea,” Al says dreamily as they flip through pages in the private library Ed has begged their way into (later, Ed figures that the salt stains don’t really disfigure Adlebert’s rare sixth treatise, so there’s no need to mention them).
008.Fence Ed and Al paint the fence together, without being asked, because their father is not there to do it (“You shouldn’t let Mom hear you say those words,” Al says to Ed) and when their mother sees them, spattered in whitewash, she laughs and calls them her handy, wonderful boys.
009.Circle Al’s heard people say that when a king wanted an artist to prove his skill, the artist drew a perfect circle on a piece of paper, but Al draws perfect circles everyday, and he can’t see what’s so special about them.
010.Thin Knox’s heartbeat is thready and throbbing in his ears as he stands at the curb, surrounded by luggage, waiting for his wife and his child so he can stretch the bonds between them as thin and as far as they’ll go.
011.Room There is always room in Izumi’s home for Ed and Al, no matter when they come calling, no matter how many people are already there, for Ed and Al, there will always be room.
012.Blaze As a child, Knox was never afraid of fire - that would come later, far later, when he saw just what it did to the human body, and saw it again and again and again and again until he woke mumbling the statistics and autopsy reports - and he is not afraid of it now, though everything he saw is still clear and fresh in his mind, because he has better things to fear, these days.
013.Thought “Watch yourself!” Greed says when Envy says something scathing about the girl, and is once again mildly disturbed to realize that surge of protective anger was at least as much his as it was the boy’s.
014.Jealous Every time Winry starts to feel a sneaking jealousy for all the things her boys see and do and all the places they go, when she’s always lived in one place, she throws a wrench into the wall and hides her head on the table and remembers Ed’s surgery and Al’s huddled bulk until the feeling, shamed, sidles nervously away.
015.Sand Ross is learning how to keep the landscape she is passing through out of her lungs, but there is no way to keep this great desert’s old, old, old thoughts out of her mind, and she wakes from dreams not her own to a haze on the horizon and sand in her hair.
016.Doll Mei Chan desperately misses her favorite doll, her favorite old quilt, her mother’s hand across her forehead at night.
017.Curl For a very long time Sieg is afraid that he no longer knows the woman who sleeps in his bed and sharpens his knives and coughs up blood on bad days until, finally, she looks at him across the kitchen table and her eyes are clear of their shocked haze as her hand curls into his collar and she reels him in.
018.Farewell “Don’t die,” the youngest of Ran Fan’s brothers says to her, very small, and Ran Fan squeezes his hand and nods.
019.Story Sometimes, on long train rides, Al revives the old story game they played as children, and all their fellow passengers are unknowingly drafted into a wild adventure that never can seem to stay in one genre, though the boys’ roles are always the same - the mysterious scholars, just passing through.
020.Soft Gracia’s hands are always soft, always, she wears gloves to do dishes because her skin is so tender the strong soap hurts her, and Hughes imagines her soft, strong hand in his as he shivers in the desert night and wonders how long it’ll be before he has to kill this new commanding officer.
021.Pool Havoc curses the day he discovers that Breda is just as much of a shark at pool as he is at go, chess, and poker.
022.Serpent “Snake!” Al says, and gently scoops the small garter snake off of the city pavement, where she doesn’t belong, “Brother, can we - ”
023.Prey “Got you!” Dorchette says to Martel one morning as she fries onions, dropping his hands perilously close to both sides of her throat, and laughs when she twists in that impossible way of hers and hits him with the spoon.
024.Friend “She’s an old friend,” Roy says lightly, when asked about Hawkeye, and smiles despite (or, this being Roy, because of) the inadequacy of words.
025.Still Al is so good at being still now, so silent and unmoving so much of the time, that it makes Ed’s stomach hurt, just sometimes, just enough.
026.Exhausted Ed doesn’t cry until after the third day of surgery, and even then it’s not from fear or pain, it’s only that he is so very tired.
027.Bold “I’ll bring it back,” Ling told his mother, “I’ll find the way and I’ll walk it, and I’ll bring it back in my own body and mind.”
028.Hook Hughes lures his newest clerk and part time analyst into his family fold with promises of books, rather than the allure of pie - he knows when to specialize his bait.
029.Attraction It was, impossibly, the line of Izumi’s neck that Sieg noticed first, the way it curved, proud and strong and not at all submissive, when she bent to inspect a peach - and it is what he notices now, in the morning, looking up from the coffee pot, and he gladly reaches out to touch.
030.Will It is only through sheer determination that he manages to figure out how to move his strange new joints and bend, gathering his brother up and hurrying, racing, Pinako, Pinako, please, please, please fix him!
031.Bed Ran Fan knows the bed she has been tucked into is old, and she knows that no one but Knox has used it for years, and now here she is, shivering with trauma and fever, staring at the ridiculously convoluted energy patterns in the room and she thinks, at least he didn’t put the bed under a window.
032.Bell Greed threatens to bell Martel after the third time she gets close enough to him to make him jump when she answers his call - she just smiles and says she’d like a pretty collar, then.
033.Joy The sun is bright and warm as Ed and Al and Winry walk back to the Rockbells’ from fetching groceries in town, and Al fusses a bit about the possibility of the milk spoiling when they’re stalled by a flock of sheep changing pastures, and Winry can’t help it, she laughs and laughs and laughs until she’s shaking on Ed’s shoulder and he’s exchanging totally baffled glances with Al.
034.Decade Wrath thinks as he watches his son’s interests wander and grow, his wife’s face shift and line, that the years are catching up to him, too, and he laughs about it with them, protests lightly that everything is changing too fast, can’t we simply sit for a moment and give my cranky old knees a rest?
035.Test “I’m good at tests,” Al says mildly as Ed studies, “I could get in too,” but he doesn’t press further than that.
036.Gentle Hawkeye’s hands are always sure, always steady, and even though Al can’t feel her hand on his shoulder, the gesture still makes him feel safe and enveloped, like being ten years younger, like being as young as he is.
037.Hunger Ed has never read anything about the physical symptoms of malnutrition, or he’d recognize the signs in the way he can never get enough food, in the things that he eats first, inside parts he’d never wanted as a child, but now nothing tastes as good as liver and he can’t stop.
038.Mute Ran Fan has never known Ling to be as quiet as he is the long weeks they cross the desert, but, as he whispers to her at a rare oasis, they cannot afford to waste water, and he must have his voice when they reach their destination.
039.Quicken Trisha is roughly five months and two weeks pregnant for the second time when she feels her new child stir unmistakably inside her - “He’s late,” her lover says from the doorway, their child, their eldest, on his hip, and she smiles.
040.Absence Their lives order themselves around the fact that she is not there, not there, not coming home over the fields, laughing and whistling to herself, not there, not in the kitchen singing, not in front of the fire reading, not there, not there, and they fall around her empty space like stars around a black hole.
041.Maze The records stacks are a vast and complicated affair, something for the unwary and uninitiated to get lost in, so no one considers it surprising when Scieszka vanishes on her first day working in the back - the rescue party eventually finds her sitting in the middle of a stack of long since declassified folders (“I’m sorry,” she says, “They were just the only things I’m actually allowed to read”).
042.Close After Ishval Maes writes Roy every day at least, calls him every week at least, long chatty letters full of Gracia and Gracia’s family and office gossip that is less inconsequential than it might seem, and long, long calls that ramble on for hours and let Roy confer and talk and simply be.
043.Reign “You’ll reign over the city forever, now,” Envy’s father tells his new creation absently, and strokes his hand down a monstrous flank.
044.Crush “Glurk,” Winry says when Armstrong sweeps her up in the train station to loudly praise her truly admirable devotion and professional ethics.
045.Run Winry races Paninya home from the train station and laughs when she looses, laughs and laughs against the doorframe until she’s sliding to the floor and crying, and all her friends are around her, touching her, warming her, and she’s safe, and she cries harder.
046.Art There is an art to healing, Knox thinks, as he turns the water and decomposition swollen corpse that was, at one point, a female human, but no matter how much he does it, he simply cannot find an art in this.
047.Pressure Sometimes the memory of his brother - there not there only there in his body in his arm their instrument of revenge which he would never have wanted dreaming always dreaming of tomorrow his brother - presses against him, battering against him like water, like the ocean he’s never touched, like the air before a storm, and he welcomes it, because it is better than the thin, cold, mountain atmosphere of his absence.
048.Echo Sometimes Armstrong hears things that sound like echoes of things he remembers from Ishval and before, and it worries at him, dogs at him, makes it hard to breathe for a moment, before he shakes it off, promising himself he’ll do better this time, he’ll do better, it will not go that way again.
049.Heal “Easy now,” Winry says, brisk and sensible, the voice she learned from her grandmother, as she presses her patient back onto the operating table, waiting for the few drugs useful in this kind of work to kick in, “Easy now.”
050.Clear Al is covered in blood, covered in blood on the inside and it’s not his brother’s blood, and Martel bled out while he couldn’t help, and he remembers everything, everything, and it hurts all through, hurts and hurts and hurts because he was her and she was him and he remembers being the world, being the Truth.
Theme Set: Seven
Rating: PG-13
Author Notes: All of these are based off the manga canon, rather than the anime. Oblique spoilers abound, as do manga only characters and continuity.
Number.PromptSentence
001.Focus When Hawkeye works there is the gun and there is her target and there is the steadying line of her body, and everything else is at a step removed.
002.Civilization He walks through the markets and strides down side streets, and all around him everything is buzzing with summer and warmth and the everyday joys and tragedies of life, and he prays, as he tosses his brother an orange upon returning home, “Thank you, God, thank you, thank you, thank you,” and he lets the prayer pulse under his skin as his brother excitedly shows him his latest book.
003.Sink Fury decides he hates the plumbing system in East City the day he spends all morning trying to find the valve to shut off the water to one of the kitchen sinks so he can change the facet filter - but he doesn’t regret being posted there when Colonel Mustang smiles at him and says “Well done.”
004.Bullet There has always been a gun in Marcoh’s house - he hates himself for never thinking to use it until it is too late.
005.Count On long watches Ran Fan counts heartbeats, until she can time the hours of any night or day by the rhythm of her resting heart.
006.Mental Ed is vastly annoyed that Al has to take tests before going to the village school - he says it isn’t fair of the teachers to doubt Al, no matter how many times their mother explains that it’s only because they’re sending Al a year early.
007.Coast “I’ve never seen the sea,” Al says dreamily as they flip through pages in the private library Ed has begged their way into (later, Ed figures that the salt stains don’t really disfigure Adlebert’s rare sixth treatise, so there’s no need to mention them).
008.Fence Ed and Al paint the fence together, without being asked, because their father is not there to do it (“You shouldn’t let Mom hear you say those words,” Al says to Ed) and when their mother sees them, spattered in whitewash, she laughs and calls them her handy, wonderful boys.
009.Circle Al’s heard people say that when a king wanted an artist to prove his skill, the artist drew a perfect circle on a piece of paper, but Al draws perfect circles everyday, and he can’t see what’s so special about them.
010.Thin Knox’s heartbeat is thready and throbbing in his ears as he stands at the curb, surrounded by luggage, waiting for his wife and his child so he can stretch the bonds between them as thin and as far as they’ll go.
011.Room There is always room in Izumi’s home for Ed and Al, no matter when they come calling, no matter how many people are already there, for Ed and Al, there will always be room.
012.Blaze As a child, Knox was never afraid of fire - that would come later, far later, when he saw just what it did to the human body, and saw it again and again and again and again until he woke mumbling the statistics and autopsy reports - and he is not afraid of it now, though everything he saw is still clear and fresh in his mind, because he has better things to fear, these days.
013.Thought “Watch yourself!” Greed says when Envy says something scathing about the girl, and is once again mildly disturbed to realize that surge of protective anger was at least as much his as it was the boy’s.
014.Jealous Every time Winry starts to feel a sneaking jealousy for all the things her boys see and do and all the places they go, when she’s always lived in one place, she throws a wrench into the wall and hides her head on the table and remembers Ed’s surgery and Al’s huddled bulk until the feeling, shamed, sidles nervously away.
015.Sand Ross is learning how to keep the landscape she is passing through out of her lungs, but there is no way to keep this great desert’s old, old, old thoughts out of her mind, and she wakes from dreams not her own to a haze on the horizon and sand in her hair.
016.Doll Mei Chan desperately misses her favorite doll, her favorite old quilt, her mother’s hand across her forehead at night.
017.Curl For a very long time Sieg is afraid that he no longer knows the woman who sleeps in his bed and sharpens his knives and coughs up blood on bad days until, finally, she looks at him across the kitchen table and her eyes are clear of their shocked haze as her hand curls into his collar and she reels him in.
018.Farewell “Don’t die,” the youngest of Ran Fan’s brothers says to her, very small, and Ran Fan squeezes his hand and nods.
019.Story Sometimes, on long train rides, Al revives the old story game they played as children, and all their fellow passengers are unknowingly drafted into a wild adventure that never can seem to stay in one genre, though the boys’ roles are always the same - the mysterious scholars, just passing through.
020.Soft Gracia’s hands are always soft, always, she wears gloves to do dishes because her skin is so tender the strong soap hurts her, and Hughes imagines her soft, strong hand in his as he shivers in the desert night and wonders how long it’ll be before he has to kill this new commanding officer.
021.Pool Havoc curses the day he discovers that Breda is just as much of a shark at pool as he is at go, chess, and poker.
022.Serpent “Snake!” Al says, and gently scoops the small garter snake off of the city pavement, where she doesn’t belong, “Brother, can we - ”
023.Prey “Got you!” Dorchette says to Martel one morning as she fries onions, dropping his hands perilously close to both sides of her throat, and laughs when she twists in that impossible way of hers and hits him with the spoon.
024.Friend “She’s an old friend,” Roy says lightly, when asked about Hawkeye, and smiles despite (or, this being Roy, because of) the inadequacy of words.
025.Still Al is so good at being still now, so silent and unmoving so much of the time, that it makes Ed’s stomach hurt, just sometimes, just enough.
026.Exhausted Ed doesn’t cry until after the third day of surgery, and even then it’s not from fear or pain, it’s only that he is so very tired.
027.Bold “I’ll bring it back,” Ling told his mother, “I’ll find the way and I’ll walk it, and I’ll bring it back in my own body and mind.”
028.Hook Hughes lures his newest clerk and part time analyst into his family fold with promises of books, rather than the allure of pie - he knows when to specialize his bait.
029.Attraction It was, impossibly, the line of Izumi’s neck that Sieg noticed first, the way it curved, proud and strong and not at all submissive, when she bent to inspect a peach - and it is what he notices now, in the morning, looking up from the coffee pot, and he gladly reaches out to touch.
030.Will It is only through sheer determination that he manages to figure out how to move his strange new joints and bend, gathering his brother up and hurrying, racing, Pinako, Pinako, please, please, please fix him!
031.Bed Ran Fan knows the bed she has been tucked into is old, and she knows that no one but Knox has used it for years, and now here she is, shivering with trauma and fever, staring at the ridiculously convoluted energy patterns in the room and she thinks, at least he didn’t put the bed under a window.
032.Bell Greed threatens to bell Martel after the third time she gets close enough to him to make him jump when she answers his call - she just smiles and says she’d like a pretty collar, then.
033.Joy The sun is bright and warm as Ed and Al and Winry walk back to the Rockbells’ from fetching groceries in town, and Al fusses a bit about the possibility of the milk spoiling when they’re stalled by a flock of sheep changing pastures, and Winry can’t help it, she laughs and laughs and laughs until she’s shaking on Ed’s shoulder and he’s exchanging totally baffled glances with Al.
034.Decade Wrath thinks as he watches his son’s interests wander and grow, his wife’s face shift and line, that the years are catching up to him, too, and he laughs about it with them, protests lightly that everything is changing too fast, can’t we simply sit for a moment and give my cranky old knees a rest?
035.Test “I’m good at tests,” Al says mildly as Ed studies, “I could get in too,” but he doesn’t press further than that.
036.Gentle Hawkeye’s hands are always sure, always steady, and even though Al can’t feel her hand on his shoulder, the gesture still makes him feel safe and enveloped, like being ten years younger, like being as young as he is.
037.Hunger Ed has never read anything about the physical symptoms of malnutrition, or he’d recognize the signs in the way he can never get enough food, in the things that he eats first, inside parts he’d never wanted as a child, but now nothing tastes as good as liver and he can’t stop.
038.Mute Ran Fan has never known Ling to be as quiet as he is the long weeks they cross the desert, but, as he whispers to her at a rare oasis, they cannot afford to waste water, and he must have his voice when they reach their destination.
039.Quicken Trisha is roughly five months and two weeks pregnant for the second time when she feels her new child stir unmistakably inside her - “He’s late,” her lover says from the doorway, their child, their eldest, on his hip, and she smiles.
040.Absence Their lives order themselves around the fact that she is not there, not there, not coming home over the fields, laughing and whistling to herself, not there, not in the kitchen singing, not in front of the fire reading, not there, not there, and they fall around her empty space like stars around a black hole.
041.Maze The records stacks are a vast and complicated affair, something for the unwary and uninitiated to get lost in, so no one considers it surprising when Scieszka vanishes on her first day working in the back - the rescue party eventually finds her sitting in the middle of a stack of long since declassified folders (“I’m sorry,” she says, “They were just the only things I’m actually allowed to read”).
042.Close After Ishval Maes writes Roy every day at least, calls him every week at least, long chatty letters full of Gracia and Gracia’s family and office gossip that is less inconsequential than it might seem, and long, long calls that ramble on for hours and let Roy confer and talk and simply be.
043.Reign “You’ll reign over the city forever, now,” Envy’s father tells his new creation absently, and strokes his hand down a monstrous flank.
044.Crush “Glurk,” Winry says when Armstrong sweeps her up in the train station to loudly praise her truly admirable devotion and professional ethics.
045.Run Winry races Paninya home from the train station and laughs when she looses, laughs and laughs against the doorframe until she’s sliding to the floor and crying, and all her friends are around her, touching her, warming her, and she’s safe, and she cries harder.
046.Art There is an art to healing, Knox thinks, as he turns the water and decomposition swollen corpse that was, at one point, a female human, but no matter how much he does it, he simply cannot find an art in this.
047.Pressure Sometimes the memory of his brother - there not there only there in his body in his arm their instrument of revenge which he would never have wanted dreaming always dreaming of tomorrow his brother - presses against him, battering against him like water, like the ocean he’s never touched, like the air before a storm, and he welcomes it, because it is better than the thin, cold, mountain atmosphere of his absence.
048.Echo Sometimes Armstrong hears things that sound like echoes of things he remembers from Ishval and before, and it worries at him, dogs at him, makes it hard to breathe for a moment, before he shakes it off, promising himself he’ll do better this time, he’ll do better, it will not go that way again.
049.Heal “Easy now,” Winry says, brisk and sensible, the voice she learned from her grandmother, as she presses her patient back onto the operating table, waiting for the few drugs useful in this kind of work to kick in, “Easy now.”
050.Clear Al is covered in blood, covered in blood on the inside and it’s not his brother’s blood, and Martel bled out while he couldn’t help, and he remembers everything, everything, and it hurts all through, hurts and hurts and hurts because he was her and she was him and he remembers being the world, being the Truth.