I'll Love You More, Ch. 7
Title: I’ll Love You More
Chapter: #7, The Calm Before
Previous: 1, I, 2, 3, II, 4, 4.5, 5, 6, III
Genre: Drama/Romance
Rating: PG
Spoilers: for the entire series.
Summary: After six years, the brothers are finally reunited, but will Ed be able to adjust to a world that has long since moved on without him? This is an AU that ignores the movie. Pairings for now are an Ed/Win Al/Win triangle of sorts, with some implied Ed/Hei on the side
Chapter Summary: Ed is slowly recovering, and the air among the three friends develops and uneasy calm…
Chapter Seven: The Calm Before
The sound of her footsteps on the tiled floor marked the deliberate pacing that was a well-known habit of the General. She paused, turning smartly on her heel, looked her communications officer in the eye, and said, “No, I don’t like it. Something doesn’t sound right about it.”
He frowned. She was only echoing his own sentiments, and he hoped for some inkling of direction from her.
She turned back to the window, staring out at the walls surrounding the base. “It’s almost like someone is deliberately feeding us false information,” she mused, and he nodded. “Whoever they are, they’ve got operatives who are in this pretty deep, maybe in this base itself.”
He cleared his throat. “General Hawkeye, we’ve been through the personnel files of every soldier stationed here, nothing seems out of the ordinary.”
“Of course not,” she said briskly, turning her back to the window and leaning against the glass, her hands spread at her sides along the sill. “Of course it doesn’t seem that way, not at first glance.”
“Investigations is already-“
“Not investigations,” she interrupted him, looking at him intently. “You. Until we get to the bottom of this, involve as little people as you can. I trust you, but I can’t trust everyone, and the evidence is clear. They have someone, or some ones, inside the base.”
He pulled his hand up in a salute, spouting out “Yes ma’am!” and turning to leave.
“And Lieutenant!” she called after him, stopping him in his tracks, and he watched her point to the offending object on her desk. “What is this?”
He kept his features carefully blank as he answered, “That’s a bouquet of flowers, General, ma’am.”
“Who brought it in here?” she demanded, hands still clasped behind her back, eyes still a-flash with suspicion.
“Ah, the secretary, ma’am. They’re from your husband,” he added helpfully, because that’s what the secretary had told him, and that was the rumor that had been circulating the base: General Hawkeye was married to someone else in the military, someone who also held a high position, and the relationship was kept under wraps for professional reasons.
She arced an eyebrow. “They’re a security risk,” she said crisply, turning back to the window and waving her hand at them. “Remove them at once.”
“Al,” the blonde mechanic directed sharply, pressing down firmly on the older brother’s flesh shoulder. “Let go of his hand, he’ll smash your fingers.” Al released the hand reluctantly, and she snapped, “Hold his hip with your free hand, don’t let him jerk off the table.” She held the connection lever firmly in her own hand, making eye contact with Al across the table, and watched Ed squeeze his eyes shut in anticipation of the shock to his system. With a nod, they pulled their respective levers in unison, and Ed arched his back off the table and gritted his teeth. He gave a strangled cry that was cut short when the color drained from his face and his body relaxed suddenly on the table.
“Brother!” Al cried out, leaning closer to his face and turning his head to look questioningly at Winry.
“He’s fine, Al, he just passed out,” she assured him briskly. She had connected automail for dozens of patients, not only him, and she knew exactly what she was doing, although Ed was the only patient she ever replaced more than one limb for. Shoving her hands under his shoulders, she gave a grunt. “Come on, Al,” she instructed, “help me move him to the bed.”
Even between the two of them he was nearly too heavy, and they strained under the weight of heavy steel.
Winry hated this part. She hated causing him pain. She knew it was normal for a patient to lose consciousness after the trauma of nerve connection; she knew everything had gone smoothly but she still hated seeing him like this, pale and unconscious and hurting. She glanced over at Al, and knew he was thinking the same thing.
She watched his eyelids flicker, unsure if he was waking up already or not, but in another moment she was looking into gold eyes that were bright with pain. “It’s over,” she said reassuringly. “That was the worst of it.”
He nodded slightly, and squeezed his eyes shut, turning his head to face the wall as his brother put a cool cloth over his burning forehead.
Riza frowned, muttering to herself as she rolled up the map and exited the conference room. Something wasn’t adding up.
Amestris had been at an uneasy cease-fire with Drachma for over two years now with no hint of progress on a treaty, and now the Drachmen leaders suddenly were willing to make concessions. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the meeting had been a cover for some already pre-determined, unofficial agreement, and it worried at her unrelentingly. Everywhere she turned there was deception in this new government, and at times she didn’t know who to follow.
She was a good General, she knew that, that was why she had been promoted so many times, but, as she had been doing more and more frequently, she found herself wishing for the days of following the man she believed in and pushing him to the top.
Returning to her office, she sat down at her desk, twirling a pencil on its eraser and trying to make some sense out of the current situation. She could see the ring of water the vase from the flowers had left on the wood, and absently swiped her finger through it, thinking vaguely to herself that it looked like it could be a transmutation circle.
Just then her phone rang, and she shook herself, answering it promptly, “Hawkeye.”
“Did you get what I had delivered?” He didn’t identify himself but she recognized his voice immediately; only those she worked the closest with had her direct line at the base.
“General,” she said coldly, “Firstly, I don’t have time for anything so frivolous, and secondly, I’ve ruled that everything not entirely necessary to the function of this base to be a security risk. I had them thrown away.”
There was silence on the other end, and she frowned, drawing another line through the ring of water in the corner of her large desk. Finally she heard him clear his throat. “You threw away the papers?” he asked hesitantly, sounding uncertain.
At his words she sat up straight, her eyes snapping open. Had there been information concealed somehow in the bouquet? Was she wrong to assume they were merely another desperate attempt to win her back as more than just a co-worker? “Why did you send them that way?” she demanded, firing the questions at him one by one. “Why were you so secretive, why not just have them delivered military post?”
“What are you talking about?” he snapped back through the line. “I had Havoc personally deliver them to you, so there wouldn’t be any chance of the information leaking out, I know you’ve been having security problems in Dillon; it’s been all over Central command.” He was silent for a moment, thinking. “I take it they haven’t been received,” he said tightly. “Damnit!” he swore. “I haven’t heard from the Second Lieutenant in three days, and I assumed he must be living it up there in Dillon or something.”
“You didn’t send me flowers,” she said quietly, her cheeks burning. Someone had gotten those flowers past security, and they weren’t sent out of any misplaced affections of her ex-husband.
“Why in god’s name would I do that? You’ve always sent them back before,” he raged. She could hear something through the phone, probably him pounding his fist down on his desk. Control your temper, Colonel, she would have snapped in the old days, and he would have sat up at attention, as if it were her in charge of him and not the other way around. “I can’t get out of Central right now,” he said, his voice weary. “Things are too tied up with the terrorist attacks and the civilian unrest, or I would have come and spoken to you personally.” He groaned. “I knew I should have been worried when Havoc never checked in with me. I needed someone I trust to touch base with our contacts in Altenburg.” By “contacts” she knew he meant the Elrics, and wondered what was going on.
“Sir,” she inquired, “what was it Havoc was supposed to bring me?”
“I’m not telling you over the phone,” he said quietly. “You’re right to worry about the security in your base. Something isn’t right here either. Records I know I’ve read over are turning up missing, or worse, they’re filed but I can tell they’ve been altered. Classified government files from before the coup are unable to be located, and the president thinks the military has them-“
“What does this have to do with Altenburg?” she asked, her brows drawing together in worry. Roy hadn’t sounded this scattered, this panicked, since the days after the coup when they were both unsure of their fates.
“In my search through the military files,” he said carefully, “I found records of an Edward Heiderich, suspected to be the Fullmetal Alchemist, having been arrested and released in Central last fall.” She nodded; she had heard all about that incident. “But there are more current records of him having been in Central, even up to several weeks ago, and of course that’s impossible. Someone, for some reason, must be using his name, to what gain I don’t know.”
“Wasn’t there another alchemist, years ago, in Xenotime, who posed as Fullmetal?” she mused.
She could hear him sigh on the other end. “It’s not him, I’ve already located him. He’s in Xenotime with his younger brother, working on some kind of agricultural alchemy project for the government’s reconstructive efforts. He hasn’t been in Central in years.”
“But what reason would anyone have to use Edward’s title?”
“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I was hoping our friends could shed some light on this. I haven’t been able to keep in good contact with them recently. Do you have anyone you can send to Altenburg?”
She nodded. “I’ll go myself,” she said at once. “And I’ll have my people call you if Havoc turns up here, or if anything is heard about him at all.”
“Thank you,” he said, sounding relieved. “With the way things are going in this country, I don’t want to do anything that would put them in danger, but one of them might be able to tell us something. I just haven’t been able to get out of Central.”
“Sir, it’s all right. I’ll go. I’ll let you know if I learn anything.”
“Thank you,” he said again. “And Riza?” he added after another moment of silence. “Be careful.”
She pursed her lips. “I’m always careful, Sir.”
When he woke up his vision slowly came into focus on his best friend, sitting on the side of his bed, dropping her set of miniature screwdrivers from one hand into the other in a series of metallic clinks. Her hair was still tied under the scarf she wore when she worked, but several strands had worked themselves loose and hung in chunks around her face.
Careful not to move at all, he took a moment to assess his body. His nerves felt like something was sparking through them, which was, if not pleasant, at least familiar to him. He remembered vividly the efforts he spent fighting with his makeshift prosthetics wishing for even the pain of automail attachment, something he had always dreaded, if it meant he would be able to move freely.
He could feel the weight of the limbs pulling unnaturally on his body, and he remembered that as well. It was painful but familiar, and he felt his shoulder jerk involuntarily. That, too, was to be expected.
The movement startled her, and Winry looked down at him, putting the screwdrivers down on the sheets beside her.
“How long have I been out?” he asked, his voice cracking and his throat feeling scratchy.
“About two hours,” she said softly. “Do you want something to drink?”
He nodded, slightly, and remained still as he watched her stand up, leaving her pile of screwdrivers on the bed, and stride over to the sink in the workshop, reaching up to the shelf above for a glass for him. She returned, setting the glass on the bedside table and frowning. “You’re going to have to sit up a little, Ed,” she said apologetically, and he nodded.
“All right,” he agreed.
She pulled an extra pillow from the closet, and set a steadying arm around his shoulders as he lifted his head, shifting with the smallest of movements he could manage and grimacing at the sensations that went ringing through the wires, up into the ports and into his nervous system. Mid-way to sitting up he froze, eyes squeezed shut, breathing heavily. Through the rush of electricity he could feel her rough hand on his flesh arm. “That’s normal, Ed,” she said soothingly. “Just stay still a moment, let your body adjust.
He gave another slight nod. “I know,” he said hoarsely. After a few more deep breaths, he opened his eyes and sat up a little further, allowing her to slip the pillow behind him so he could lean back, letting the wall behind him support some of the weight of the metal arm that was bolted to his chest. She handed him the glass, and he drank it slowly, careful not to spill any on the sheets. “Where’s Al?” he asked, looking around.
“He went upstairs about a half hour ago, do you want me to get him?” she offered.
He nodded, staring down at the yet-immobile right hand at his side. The fingers twitched slightly, and he felt the twinge inside the port in his shoulder. A faint smile flickered on his lips. “How soon till I can get up, Win?” he asked her, looking up at her.
She shrugged. “You can get whenever you’re ready,” she said grudgingly. “If you feel up to it. You’re not going to be able to move, of course-“ She looked skeptically at the stairs leading up into the house. “I’ll have to get Al to help me get you up the stairs, you’re about five times as heavy as you were, Ed,” she added.
He shifted slightly on the cot, wincing at the way his every movement seemed to jar the ports of his arm and leg into a flurry of electrical activity. He heard the door at the top of the stairs open, and his brother’s voice called down, “Winry? Kaiya wants you, she keeps yelling ma-ma-ma-ma, can you come upstairs? I can’t figure out what she wants.”
Ed gestured to the stairway with his left hand. “Go ahead,” he told her.
She stood up, facing the stairway. “Al, your brother’s awake,” she called back, and Ed could hear the thunder of his brother’s footsteps on the wooden stairs. They passed in the doorway; Winry heading up and Al entering the workshop.
When Al looked he thought Ed seemed to be unconscious; he was completely still and his eyes were closed. His eyebrows were drawn together across his forehead, and when Al approached the cot he reached out, drawing his thumb lightly over the wrinkle between his eyes, wanting to make it disappear. One gold eye slit open. “Hey,” he said weakly.
“How do you feel?” Al asked, pulling a chair up to the cot and sitting down.
“Like I’m being over run by electricity,” came the response, and the other eye opened as well.
His brother looked small, Al thought. And young. And tired, but not necessarily in pain.
“See that?” Ed asked quietly, and Al blinked.
“See what?” he asked, following his brother’s eyes to the automail hand and saw the thumb and first finger twitch, coming closer together and almost touching.
A weak grin cracked across his pale face. “They’re moving, Al,” he said, his voice softly excited. “My fingers are moving.”
He would never get tired of it.
Ed watched his daughter pick up the red crayon and throw it on the ground with an expression of pure delight. He picked it up. The blue crayon was next. He picked it up and handed her the orange one, smiling. “Look,” he said, “on the paper, see?” He laughed as she banged the crayon down on the paper repeatedly, making a collection of orange marks on the white expanse.
When Kaiya discovered that the crayon would break if she banged it hard enough, she threw both halves of the orange on the floor and picked up the blue, intent on it meeting the same fate.
He heard her coming down the stairs before he saw her. Winry leaned her chin on the banister, and Ed tipped his head backwards, looking at her upside down. “What?” he asked her lazily.
“Al’s upstairs working on something,” she complained.
“I know,” he told her, “that’s why I’m down here playing with the baby.”
Winry rolled her eyes. “You’d take any excuse to play with her,” she teased.
“So would you,” he countered. “I thought Al was on leave,” he added. “What’s he got to work on?”
Winry narrowed her eyes. “Well, that’s your oh-so-good friend General Mustang for you. ‘Sure, Al, I’ll put you on leave for as long as you want, I’ll do anything for you Elrics. But while you’re on leave let me just call you back to Central every few weeks and send you home with extra work so you just think you’re on leave.’ What are you doing?” she asked then, reaching over the railing and messing her fingers through his bangs.
He immediately brought his hand up to flatten them back down. “Huh?”
She came down the last few steps and flopped down on the couch next to him. “What have you been doing all day?” she repeated. “Al’s holed up in his study and I’ve been filling orders for customers, what have you been doing?”
“I did all my exercises!” he said defensively, inching away from her. “I’m doing everything I’m supposed to be doing!”
She fixed her blue eyes on his. “Ed. I know that. That’s not what I was asking. What are you doing right now?”
“Huh?” he said again, rubbing his hand over the back of his head. “Just… I dunno, what do I always do? Kaiya and I are bumming around. We were coloring and stuff,” he said, gesturing to the crayons and paper spread out over the coffee table.
She leaned over, reaching for one of the thick sheets of paper with blue and orange marks in the corner of it. “Did you do this one?” she teased, her eyes glinting with a smile.
Ed raised his eyebrows. “No, mine’s the one with the airplane on it.”
“Airplane?” she asked curiously. Then she sat up on the couch, clasping her hands together. “You mean the machines that can fly up in the air?” she all but shrieked.
Ed chuckled. “Yeah, that,” he affirmed, looking at her with amusement.
She clutched the piece of construction paper to her chest, and he imagined he could almost see the little stars floating around in her eyes. Winry flung her arms out to her sides, still clutching the drawing and flopping back into the couch, and sighed. “Can you imagine!” she said wistfully, staring up at the ceiling. “Operating a machine that flies, what amazing technology! To feel the wind on your face, to be high above the word, up with the clouds, nothing but you and that beautiful machine… oh, Ed, how does it stay up there?”
He rubbed the back of his head, knowing he couldn’t get away with a simple explanation; this was Winry, after all. “Well, I told you I’d teach you how they work, remember?” When she nodded, he continued. “It’ll take a while to explain-“
“D’you think we can make one?” she said excitedly.
“You want to build an airplane?” he repeated, startled but not entirely surprised.
“Isn’t that what you were doing?” she demanded, and he stared at her. “In that other place, in Germany, weren’t you building a machine that was going to fly up into space?”
His mouth hung open. “How did you know that?” he asked her.
She folded her arms in front of herself. “Al told me. He said you and your… your friend, were building a rocket because you thought you could get back here that way. Right?”
Ed continued to stare.
“And then Al and your friend finished building it while you were here, and that’s how Al got back.” She looked at him. “Right?”
“I didn’t know Al told you that,” he said finally, and looked away.
She chased his eyes, moving over the couch back into his line of sight. “I don’t know why you didn’t tell me,” she added before she could stop herself, letting an indignant tone creep into her voice.
“You didn’t ask!” he protested.
“Ed!” she argued, sitting up on her knees now, so even sitting on the couch together she was taller. “Yes I did ask you, and you said I wouldn’t understand.”
He shook his head. “If I said you wouldn’t understand something, I was talking about alchemy. I’m sure you would understand about planes, in fact, if you had been born in that world instead of this one, I’m sure it would have been you, not me and Al, being the one to send a rocket all the way into space,” he told her, trying to placate her.
She sat back down. “You and Al and your friend,” she corrected quietly. “It was you and your friend who built your rocket, and when you were gone Al just helped him finish up.” She had said something wrong, she could tell by the way his expression became that of someone who wasn’t there. She figured, right then, that even if she waved her hand in front of him he wouldn’t see her. He was somewhere else entirely. “Ed,” she called softly. “Come back to earth.”
“I am,” he said, his voice vague but his eyes no more focused than they were. “I am back on earth.”
“What was your friend’s name?” she asked, surprising herself. She didn’t even know where that question had come from, there were plenty of things about Ed’s stay in Germany she was more curious about than the name of his lover.
He blinked, his gaze coming into focus once more, and he turned to face her, seeming to be debating whether or not to answer her. Finally what ever he was struggling with was resolved, and he said, “Alphonse.”
Winry raised her eyebrows. “Really? His name was Alphonse? Wow. That’s a coincidence, isn’t it?” She didn’t understand why he flushed the way he did, looking away and stammering some kind of explanation, reaching for the drawing again and looking at it as if it had some kind of answer he could not provide. Never in her wildest dreams had she ever imagined Ed with another man, but so it was, and who was she to think anything of it, she who had seduced (but there was no seduction involved!) his younger brother at the tender age of fourteen.
“It’s aerodynamics,” he said, nervous, his eyes darting from side to side. “It’s like a push-pull, to keep it up. There’s gravity,” he said, his voice becoming more even, more steady. “Gravity wants to pull the plane down, so it’s built with wings, see? And the wings give it lift. And the air, the air pushes against the plane, but it can fly through the air anyway because it has this huge engine that’s working against the air, and it pushes back harder than the air pushes…” he snatched a pencil off the table and began scribbling things next to his crude drawing. “It’s really all about physics,” he said, and she leaned in closer, suddenly fascinated with his descriptions of the foreign science, and, glad he was at ease again, she vowed never to bring up that ‘other Alphonse’ ever again.
Ed had found himself inordinately exhausted that night, and fell asleep early, sprawled atop the blankets with his clothes still on. He woke with a start several hours later; when he looked at the clock it was nearly one am. He could hear music coming from the other side of the wall, in Winry’s room, and rubbed his eyes, looking down at himself and realizing he had been sleeping in his clothes.
With a yawn, he stood up at rummaged through the drawers and pulled out some pajamas to put on, and then gave his automail a good stretch before venturing down the stairs to see what Al was up to this late.
His brother was not in the living room or in the kitchen, and Ed assumed he would not be another story down in Winry’s workshop if Winry was in her room. Puzzled, he made the difficult climb back up the stairs to check the study, but Al was not in there either. Pausing in the doorway of their bedroom, he thought he heard voices in Winry’s room, and felt his cheeks turning red when he realized exactly where his younger brother was and what he was doing.
Unsure of how to feel, he let himself flop down on the bed again, holding his automail hand above his face, studying it against the white of the ceiling. Slowly, he clicked each finger together with his thumb, something he hadn’t been able to do in ten years and something he had never been certain he would ever be able to do again, and let a smile flit across his face. Maybe, he thought, everything would turn out okay. Maybe he hadn’t destroyed his brother’s relationship the night he returned to his own world. Maybe he could live the rest of his life here, in the little three-story house in Altenburg, with his brother, his best friend, and his daughter. Maybe, slowly, just like Munich, this town would become home. He had a family all his own again, now, and maybe he would never leave them.
Edward Elric was tired of leaving things behind.
His father had left him when he was barely old enough to understand what was happening, and then his mother had left him too, when he was plenty old enough to know what had happened, and ever since then he felt his life had become a series of leaving things behind.
The brothers had left their home in Rizembool, burning it to the ground so they could not return even if they had wanted to, and with it they burned their childhoods, he realized now. So that had been left behind as well. When they had found -not really found, but obtained- the Philosopher’s Stone, they had left the military behind as well, including the people who genuinely cared about them.
In crossing the gate he had, albeit unintentionally, left behind once more everyone he cared about, and in crossing back to his own world he had done the same.
He did not want to do it again.
Eventually he drifted back into sleep, and dreamed strangely of his father, whom he hadn’t thought of in a long time, except to answer Al’s questions. When he woke the next morning the image of his father’s face, his eyes hidden behind the glare on his glasses, was burned into his mind.
“I can’t, Winry, I’m sorry, I know it’s beautiful outside but I have too much to do right now,” he heard his brother protesting on the top floor of the house. Kaiya, as far as he knew, was playing in Al’s study upstairs, and he looked listlessly at the book that rested in his lap. It was the one Roy had given him for his birthday, The Life and Times of the Fullmetal Alchemist, and he had to admit, it was entertaining in its inaccuracies, but after about the fifth reading it, like every other book he’d acquired since returning, seemed to loose its charm.
“This isn’t fair, Al,” Winry said darkly. “You’re supposed to be on leave, and yet somehow I still never get to spend time with you-“
“Well what do you want me to do about it?” Al exploded, and Ed flinched, looking up towards the stairway. “Shall I just not do my job, because my girlfriend wants to spend time with me?”
“You said you’d always make time for me!” she snapped. “But I see what’s really important to you!”
“Winry, that’s not-“
“Forget it.”
“No, wait, I-“
“I said, forget it. You have work to do.”
“Are you mad at me?” Al demanded
“No,” she said harshly. “I’m not mad at you.”
“Well then quit acting like it,” he hollered after her, his voice echoing off the upstairs hall.
Ed hurriedly looked away when he heard her storming down the stairs. He expected her heavy sigh and heavier flop on the couch, he didn’t expect her abrupt announcement, “Why does he always think I’m mad at him?” She looked at him and added, “Don’t give me that smirk, I’m not in the mood for you right now either. God, I don’t know how Al puts up with me.”
He leaned his cheek on his hand. “Cause he loves you,” he told her simply. Then he looked towards the window. “I’ll go for a walk with you, if you don’t mind walking slow,” he offered. “It looks like it’s the first nice day of the year.”
She stood up, looking at him critically. “Are you sure you’re up to it?” she asked skeptically.
He narrowed his eyes, sitting up straighter. “Yes,” he insisted, challenging her. “I said we’d go slow. I’ll be fine.”
She shrugged. “All right then,” she said, reaching into the closet for a light jacket. Then she pulled one out and handed it to him. “Here, wear Al’s, since he clearly isn’t going anywhere today.”
He took it from her, not saying anything, and she followed him out of the house and down the stairs, which he took carefully, grabbing at the banister for the last few but making it down without incident. She walked behind him for a few steps. “Put your heel down first, Ed,” she instructed from behind him, and he stopped short, turning around.
“I know how to walk,” he snapped, putting his hand on his hip.
“No, you don’t,” she argued, “or you’d be putting your heel down first. Your left leg needs to do exactly what your right leg does.”
Ed smacked his forehead. “Gah!” he said in frustration. “Can you be my friend for just one minute, instead of being my mechanic? I thought we were going for a walk, not having an afternoon of criticizing Ed.”
She folded her arms, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk. “Why do you have to argue with everything I say?” she demanded.
He raised an eyebrow at her, then tried to hide a smirk.
“What?”
He tried to wipe his expression unsuccessfully.
“What, Ed?” she repeated.
“No wonder Al always thinks you’re mad, if this is what you act like,” he said mischievously.
She just glared at him, and stayed a step behind him as they continued down the sidewalk. “That’s better,” she called after him after a few more steps.
He began to slow his pace more and more until they were finally walking side by side.
“You should have brought the cane,” she added after a few minutes of silence. “You’re still dragging your automail.”
She could see him stiffen, his lips forming a thin line, but he nodded. “Maybe,” he conceded.
“Lets stop in the soda shop there,” she suggested, gesturing to the little store counter on the other side of the street from them.
Ed looked relieved, and immediately agreed. They crossed the street, and he stepped quickly in front of her and held the door open with a flourish, smiling when he saw her shake her head at his attempts.
The shop was full of kids; giggling groups of girls and teenagers on first dates. Ed could imagine Winry and Al coming here, sharing a soda and looking into each other’s eyes.
“We should have brought Kaiya with us,” Winry mused, hopping up on one of the counter stools and resting her elbows on the counter and her chin on her hands. “You could have pushed her in the stroller.”
He shrugged, taking the stool next to hers. “Oh well. We can come again, you know.” He frowned, turning sharply when he heard a series of giggles from behind them. The group of girls were ducking behind their menus, and he was sure he saw one of them point. “What’s their deal?” he said crossly, looking down at his metal hand. “Don’t they know it’s rude to stare? Haven’t they ever seen someone with automail before?”
Winry smiled, shaking her head. “Ed, I don’t think it’s the automail they’re staring at,” she said with amusement.
His frown increased. “Well what the hell?”
She looked from the girls back to him, trying to figure out if he could really be so clueless, and finally told him, “Well, either they think you’re cute, or they know who you are. Or both.” When his cheeks flushed pink, she almost giggled herself.
“I don’t think they know who I am,” he mumbled, looking down at the counter. “I look completely different now.”
She shrugged. “You don’t look that different, Ed. Besides, I’m pretty sure everyone in this town knows who you are by now.”
Ed looked up when he realized someone was standing in front of them, and saw a man in a white coat standing behind the counter, smiling. “What can I get for you, sir?” he asked, his voice friendly. He was polishing a sundae glass as he spoke.
He turned to Winry. “What are you getting?” he asked her awkwardly.
“I’ll have a cherry soda, thank you,” she said with a smile, and the man nodded.
“Uh, I’ll have the same I guess,” Ed said quickly, feeling uncomfortable with the way he was being looked at. Wasn’t his return supposed to be this huge secret?
Soon there were two glasses of fizzing red drink in front of them. “So,” Ed said after a few minutes of silence and sipping. “Did you and Al come here a lot?”
She shrugged. “When he was around, we did.” She looked to the side, out the window at the people passing on the sidewalk, when she said, “This is where we came on our first date.”
Ed nodded. His guess had been correct, then. “There was a soda shop like this in Rizembool, in town,” he remembered, and Winry nodded.
If he had never talked Al into trying to transmute their mother, if they had both grown up in Rizembool living next door to the Rockbells, he and Al might have fought over who got to take Winry to the soda shop. He wondered who would have won.
“Ed, you cant be serious! You expect me to believe you?” Al asked him teasingly. “You’ve never been on a date?”
He just shrugged. “Well, really, what kind of girl would want to go on a date with me?”
Al’s expression was mocking. “I dunno, a bookworm maybe, someone who drowns herself in other people’s words, just like you do. Imagine how much you’d have to talk about!”
Ed rolled his eyes. “I have you for that, Al.”
Al laughed. “Well, that’s very sweet, but I worry about you, you know? You never try to meet anyone. Aren’t you even interested in girls?”
Ed fixed him with a serious gaze. “I have more important things to think about, you know that. I don’t have time for dates and girls.” He snorted. “Besides, what kind of girl,” he asked his friend slowly, “could possibly find me attractive?” His eyes took on that faraway look they got sometimes, the one that made Al’s mind burn with questions he never dared to ask. “Unless there’s someone out there who has a thing for mechanical parts.”
“Well, I think you’re pretty attractive,” Al said sweetly. “Mechanical parts and all.”
His friend just rolled his eyes again, returning to stirring his coffee. “There was a girl, once,” he said softly, in a brief moment of honesty. “She was my best friend, and my brother’s best friend.” He gave a light laugh. “Hell, she was practically the only girl I knew, or noticed, at least. And she was very beautiful.”
“What happened to her?” Al asked hesitantly. Ed’s voice was so soft, and his eyes were so sad, that he half expected Ed to tell him that this girl had died, or that something else tragic had come between them.
“I don’t know,” he said, very quietly. “She probably wonders the same thing about me.” He pushed his chair away from the table, standing abruptly and tossing a few bills on the table to pay for their coffee. “Let’s get out of here,” he said shortly, making it very clear that the reminiscence was over.
Winry was waving a hand in front of his face, and he blinked. “What?” he demanded.
She laughed. “What were you thinking about?” she asked curiously. “You looked completely gone.”
He shrugged. “Maybe I was,” he told her, unwilling at first to elaborate on his thoughts.
Were you thinking about your friend? she nearly found herself asking, but stopped herself right before she spoke. His reply startled her.
“Actually I was thinking that I’ve never been on a date,” he said hesitantly, and he seemed very young suddenly.
“Well this isn’t a date,” she said quickly, and he shrugged.
“I know.” He stirred his soda with the straw, and let his gaze wander around the shop once more. Most people had stopped staring by then; he guessed the commotion over his presence had died down. “Did you and Al really start dating when he was fourteen?” he asked her abruptly.
She blinked, even more startled this time. He didn’t sound like he was accusing her of anything, merely like he was curious, but her answer was still cautious. “Sort of,” she admitted. “Al… wanted me to move to Central with him, so that we wouldn’t be so far apart all the time,” she told him, “but I didn’t want to leave Rizembool. Of course, eventually I had to, because of the war, but-“ she paused, taking another sip of her soda. “We moved here because it’s a good place for my business; a lot of retired soldiers live here and in the nearby towns, so I get a lot of customers. And it’s close enough to Central that Al could come home more often.” She shrugged. “Once we got to see one another more than a few times a year, things just… happened.”
Ed looked like he was debating whether or not to say something, and she frowned. “What?” she demanded, on the verge of defensive.
“I didn’t say anything,” he protested, but her glare persisted.
“You were going to,” she pressed. “What was it?”
He looked directly at her. “I think,” he said slowly, “that fourteen is very young.”
She could have rolled her eyes, told him to mind his own business, snapped at him that he didn’t understand; there were a number of responses she had stored up for comments like his. Altenburg was a gossipy place, like any small town, and Alphonse had been famous already. She was used to criticism from strangers.
But Ed wasn’t a stranger. “Yeah,” she said softly. “It is.” She looked down at the tiled floor under her feet. “But Al always says he has two ages. When his body was fourteen, his mind was eighteen.”
“Do you believe that?” he asked intently.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. Age was a tricky thing. She herself was an adult now, but couldn’t say she always felt like one. Ed was four years older than her, but sometimes the difference seemed massive and sometimes it seemed like nothing. Sometimes she even felt like the older one. When she watched the brothers together she could sometimes believe that they were really only a year apart, but she couldn’t tell if that was because in her mind that was how she always thought of their ages or if that was how a stranger would see them too. “Do you?” she asked curiously.
Ed shrugged. “I don’t know either,” he told her.
She was expecting some kind of argument from him, and when none was forthcoming she demanded, “Why are you asking me this? Is this some kind of equivalent trade for the other day?”
He had finished his soda and was twisting his straw into an “o” shape. “Huh?”
“Are you asking me about Al because I was asking you about your friend?”
He dropped the mangled straw onto the counter and raised his eyes to her. “No,” he said simply. “I’m asking because I’m thinking about Kaiya.”
“Kaiya?” she repeated. He was never thinking about what she thought he was thinking about. “Edward Elric, you are the most difficult person to read I’ve ever known.”
He arched an eyebrow. “I’ve been told that before, I think,” he said nonchalantly. “And Al’s probably the easiest.”
She wasn’t exactly sure how to respond to that either, so she slurped up the last of her soda with a loud sucking sound, turning a few heads. “You’re worried about me and Al, and Kaiya?” she echoed, bringing him back to his first puzzling statement.
“I don’t want to ruin her family,” he said with difficulty. “That’s what my dad did. I’m not him. If you and Al are- that serious-“ he looked away. “I just want to be sure that she isn’t going to lose anyone. That she’ll always have her parents. That she’ll never have to be alone, without anyone to keep her from making the same mistakes Al and I did.”
“Ed!” she said, surprised. “She won’t be alone! She has all three of us-“
“She needs two parents,” he interrupted. “Not three. I don’t want her to grow up confused. I don’t want the other kids around her saying things, whispering things…”
His voice trailed off but Winry could fill in the missing words. She remembered how the other kids talked about the brothers after their dad left. She remembered the teasing and the whispers and the speculations. Both Ed and Al had brushed it off as if it was no matter, pushing away the comfort she had offered them when they were children, but clearly it had mattered, if it was something Ed was still worried about.
“She’s your daughter, Ed,” she told him, her voice low, serious. She felt her heart pounding in her chest. Part of her believed that, and she could tell part of him believed it as well. “She won’t grow up confused. Everything is going to be fine. We’ll all three love her as much as we can, and she’ll be fine.”
He wasn’t looking at her. “If I had never come back, we wouldn’t be in this situation,” he said quietly.
“If you hadn’t come back,” she said, equally quiet, “she wouldn’t even be here.”
“We don’t know that,” he insisted. “It could be you and Al and her, happily ever after, with nothing to come between you.”
Winry stood up, pushing her empty glass to the back of the counter. “Ed!” she exclaimed. “Enough of this! It wouldn’t have been happily ever after and you know it! Neither of us was happy without you here!”
He stared at her standing there in front of him with her hands on her hips, blowing a stray lock of hair out of her face, her eyes bright with frustration.
“Come on,” she said, taking him by the arm. “I’ve been cooped up inside all week trying to finish those orders. You said yourself this is the first nice day of the year, lets get out and enjoy it!”
He blinked once, then cracked a hesitant grin. “Okay,” he agreed, pushing his own glass to the back of the counter. “Let’s enjoy it.”
Second Lieutenant Havoc pretended to show a genuine interest in the plain, mousy woman who had elbowed her way into the spot next to him on the crowded train to Dillon. She had begun with mournful complaining about the heat in the compartment and the lack of seats. “They should really built bigger trains,” she groused, “after all, I paid for a ticket same as everyone else, why should I have to stand? You know what I mean?” she demanded, looking up at him, and he had nodded neutrally. “It’s really hot in here, too. Doesn’t that uniform make you over heat?” She was pulling her blouse away from her thin chest, attempting to fan herself. “Because let me tell you, I am beyond overheating. This train is just too stuffy for me. You know, I heard those trains they built out to the desert, the ones that are going to connect to Xing? I heard they’re air-conditioned.” She nodded. “That’s right. Let the foreigners have all the luxury-“
He could have interrupted to tell her that there were no foreigners on those trains; they ran only through Ishbal and the Ishbalites had no desire to ride a train out of their homeland for any reason.
“I’m going to stay with my sister in Bethan for a few days, haven’t seen her in ages -god it’s hot in here- Bethan’s near Altenburg, you know, the town they say the Fullmetal Alchemist has turned up in-“
This perked his ears up a bit. Ed’s return was supposed to be a secret, but the rumors had been flying for over a year now with no sight of settling down.
“But it’s not him, I’ll tell you that much. Met him, I did, the real one, years ago on a train. He saved us all from terrorists. Of course, that train had enough seats for all its passengers, and wasn’t so ungodly hot, like this one. Short little thing, scrawny with blonde hair in a braid, not much when you look at him but powerful to those rebels, I’ll tell you that much, and they were big men. Remember it clear as day.”
He couldn’t bite his tongue any longer. “Excuse me, but what makes you so sure the rumors aren’t true?”
Her face lit up at the opportunity for a real audience, not just the general public in the standing room of the train. “Well,” she began enthusiastically, “I met the fake one too, I did, out west. Said he was the Fullmetal Alchemist, I said no way. Had a watch and everything, was using it for free room and board at an inn in my town, my very own town.” She shook her head. “Never did a speck of alchemy, not him or that creepy companion of his either. Knew it wasn’t him, he didn’t have that giant suit of armor with him the way he did on the train. Powerful alchemy, that, to animate a suit of armor to follow you around and protect you, don’t you think?”
Just then there was a horrible screeching sound, and the train lurched. The passengers in the standing room were thrown to one end of the car, the chattering woman landing on top of him. Havoc gripped the center pole tightly as he felt the car swing around, and covered his head to protect his face from the inevitable shattering of glass when the car slammed into something to its side, hard, and continued to drag another hundred feet or so on its side until it finally halted.
“Al, find out why the baby is crying,” Winry directed as she jumped up from what she was doing to turn down the stove when the pot of spaghetti began to boil over.
Both brothers clamored over to the baby, Al picking her up and both of them cooing over her. “Give her to me, Al, she needs her diaper changed.”
“No she doesn’t, I just did that,” Al insisted. “Kaiya, don’t cry, okay? You just didn’t like being over here alone, right? We’re both here now, so everything is okay.”
Kaiya instantly switched from fussing to babbling, grabbing at Al’s face with her hand.
“Ed, you wanna get the plates down?” Winry called from the counter as she was pouring the spaghetti from the pot into the strainer, sending up a cloud of steam. With one hand she shook the water out of the strainer and with the other she grabbed Ed’s flesh wrist as he reached up to the cabinet, snapping, “Use your other hand!”
He jerked angrily out of her grip and reached up again with the same hand.
“Ed!” she insisted.
“I’m not too good at picking stuff up yet,” he said darkly.
“Well that’s because you do everything one handed! Start using it more, and you’ll get better at it!”
He drew his eyebrows down. “You said yourself that this one might not work as well as the other one-“
“I’ve run every possible test on you, it’s fine!” she pressed. “I know you’re used to doing everything with one hand but if you keep doing that-“
She was interrupted by the smashing of three plates on the kitchen floor, and the baby started crying again at the noise.
“Brother, what happened?” Al called from the other room.
“You did that on purpose,” Winry accused.
“I did not! Don’t yell at me, it was an accident, I said I wasn’t any good at picking things up yet!”
“It was not an accident, I saw it on your face, you just reached up and knocked them over, you weren’t even trying! You are so immature-“
“Hey, I’ll have you know, I’m older than you by-“
“I don’t care,” she retorted. “I don’t care how old you are, even Al’s more mature than you and he’s only eighteen-“
“I’m twenty one,” Al said, hefting the baby on his hip. “Would you two cut it out,” he added. “You both need to grow up, you’ve been fighting like this every day.” He sat Kaiya in her highchair at the table and watched scornfully as Ed flopped down in the chair next to her as he bent down to begin picking up the pieces of the shattered plates.
After a moment Ed heaved a pointed sigh and said, “I’ll get the broom.”
Al held the dustpan as Ed swept up the last of the pieces, looking over at Winry, who was standing at the sink with her arms folded.
“How come it’s spaghetti again tonight?” Ed demanded, emptying the dustpan into the trashcan. “How come you always make the same thing?”
Al laughed, trying to lighten the mood a little bit. “Winry only knows how to make three things, Ed, you know that.”
Winry smacked the back of his head as he sat down again. “Quit complaining, Ed, you wanna cook?”
Ed just shrugged, reaching over and switching the radio on before picking up his fork to dish some spaghetti into his bowl. He passed the serving dish to Al, who set it down and switched the radio back to off. “Hey!” Ed protested.
“Between the two of you,” Al told him, “Three of you,” he amended when Kaiya screeched and banged on the table, “I’d really like to eat dinner in peace and quiet. Besides, all that’s ever on the news any more is stuff about the terrorist bombings in Central.”
Ed reached for the dial and turned it back on. “It’s not just in Central anymore,” he said seriously. The previous bickering was forgotten. “Someone’s sabotaging the train tracks all over the country, I heard it this morning. A train derailed right outside of Bethan.”
Al looked thoughtful. “That must be why General Mustang wants me back so urgently,” he mused.
“Al!” Ed and Winry protested at the same time, and Al looked guilty.
“I have to go,” he said sheepishly. “It’s my job. Something’s going on; they need me.”
“When were you going to say something about it?” Winry demanded. “I thought you were on leave till the end of the month.”
“When I was certain I couldn’t get out of it,” Al said grimly. “And I’m pretty sure I can’t. Things are really serious in Central.”
“I wish I could go with you,” Ed said suddenly. “I miss being able to help out like that.”
Winry glared at him. “Don’t you dare,” she warned him.
“I won’t,” he assured her. “I’m not healed yet anyway, not completely.”
“But even when you are-“
“I know, I know,” he said, waving away her concern. “Al’s told me all about it. I’m a secret. No one can know I’m back.” He raised an eyebrow. “A really badly kept secret,” he added, “seeing how everyone in this town knows I’m here, and eventually someone’s gonna come looking for me-“
“We’ll deal with that when it happens,” Al said firmly. “You’re not coming to Central with me, Brother.”
Ed sighed. “Yeah, I know. I’m staying here. I’m retired from alchemy anyway.”
Chapter Eight
Note1: I figure with all three (four) of them stuck in the house together with all those issues, they prolly fight like that a lot.
Note2: I dedicate this chapter to origamistar, mvdp, baby_kitty_toes, and ketita, who voted me into the motivation I needed.
Chapter: #7, The Calm Before
Previous: 1, I, 2, 3, II, 4, 4.5, 5, 6, III
Genre: Drama/Romance
Rating: PG
Spoilers: for the entire series.
Summary: After six years, the brothers are finally reunited, but will Ed be able to adjust to a world that has long since moved on without him? This is an AU that ignores the movie. Pairings for now are an Ed/Win Al/Win triangle of sorts, with some implied Ed/Hei on the side
Chapter Summary: Ed is slowly recovering, and the air among the three friends develops and uneasy calm…
Chapter Seven: The Calm Before
The sound of her footsteps on the tiled floor marked the deliberate pacing that was a well-known habit of the General. She paused, turning smartly on her heel, looked her communications officer in the eye, and said, “No, I don’t like it. Something doesn’t sound right about it.”
He frowned. She was only echoing his own sentiments, and he hoped for some inkling of direction from her.
She turned back to the window, staring out at the walls surrounding the base. “It’s almost like someone is deliberately feeding us false information,” she mused, and he nodded. “Whoever they are, they’ve got operatives who are in this pretty deep, maybe in this base itself.”
He cleared his throat. “General Hawkeye, we’ve been through the personnel files of every soldier stationed here, nothing seems out of the ordinary.”
“Of course not,” she said briskly, turning her back to the window and leaning against the glass, her hands spread at her sides along the sill. “Of course it doesn’t seem that way, not at first glance.”
“Investigations is already-“
“Not investigations,” she interrupted him, looking at him intently. “You. Until we get to the bottom of this, involve as little people as you can. I trust you, but I can’t trust everyone, and the evidence is clear. They have someone, or some ones, inside the base.”
He pulled his hand up in a salute, spouting out “Yes ma’am!” and turning to leave.
“And Lieutenant!” she called after him, stopping him in his tracks, and he watched her point to the offending object on her desk. “What is this?”
He kept his features carefully blank as he answered, “That’s a bouquet of flowers, General, ma’am.”
“Who brought it in here?” she demanded, hands still clasped behind her back, eyes still a-flash with suspicion.
“Ah, the secretary, ma’am. They’re from your husband,” he added helpfully, because that’s what the secretary had told him, and that was the rumor that had been circulating the base: General Hawkeye was married to someone else in the military, someone who also held a high position, and the relationship was kept under wraps for professional reasons.
She arced an eyebrow. “They’re a security risk,” she said crisply, turning back to the window and waving her hand at them. “Remove them at once.”
“Al,” the blonde mechanic directed sharply, pressing down firmly on the older brother’s flesh shoulder. “Let go of his hand, he’ll smash your fingers.” Al released the hand reluctantly, and she snapped, “Hold his hip with your free hand, don’t let him jerk off the table.” She held the connection lever firmly in her own hand, making eye contact with Al across the table, and watched Ed squeeze his eyes shut in anticipation of the shock to his system. With a nod, they pulled their respective levers in unison, and Ed arched his back off the table and gritted his teeth. He gave a strangled cry that was cut short when the color drained from his face and his body relaxed suddenly on the table.
“Brother!” Al cried out, leaning closer to his face and turning his head to look questioningly at Winry.
“He’s fine, Al, he just passed out,” she assured him briskly. She had connected automail for dozens of patients, not only him, and she knew exactly what she was doing, although Ed was the only patient she ever replaced more than one limb for. Shoving her hands under his shoulders, she gave a grunt. “Come on, Al,” she instructed, “help me move him to the bed.”
Even between the two of them he was nearly too heavy, and they strained under the weight of heavy steel.
Winry hated this part. She hated causing him pain. She knew it was normal for a patient to lose consciousness after the trauma of nerve connection; she knew everything had gone smoothly but she still hated seeing him like this, pale and unconscious and hurting. She glanced over at Al, and knew he was thinking the same thing.
She watched his eyelids flicker, unsure if he was waking up already or not, but in another moment she was looking into gold eyes that were bright with pain. “It’s over,” she said reassuringly. “That was the worst of it.”
He nodded slightly, and squeezed his eyes shut, turning his head to face the wall as his brother put a cool cloth over his burning forehead.
Riza frowned, muttering to herself as she rolled up the map and exited the conference room. Something wasn’t adding up.
Amestris had been at an uneasy cease-fire with Drachma for over two years now with no hint of progress on a treaty, and now the Drachmen leaders suddenly were willing to make concessions. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the meeting had been a cover for some already pre-determined, unofficial agreement, and it worried at her unrelentingly. Everywhere she turned there was deception in this new government, and at times she didn’t know who to follow.
She was a good General, she knew that, that was why she had been promoted so many times, but, as she had been doing more and more frequently, she found herself wishing for the days of following the man she believed in and pushing him to the top.
Returning to her office, she sat down at her desk, twirling a pencil on its eraser and trying to make some sense out of the current situation. She could see the ring of water the vase from the flowers had left on the wood, and absently swiped her finger through it, thinking vaguely to herself that it looked like it could be a transmutation circle.
Just then her phone rang, and she shook herself, answering it promptly, “Hawkeye.”
“Did you get what I had delivered?” He didn’t identify himself but she recognized his voice immediately; only those she worked the closest with had her direct line at the base.
“General,” she said coldly, “Firstly, I don’t have time for anything so frivolous, and secondly, I’ve ruled that everything not entirely necessary to the function of this base to be a security risk. I had them thrown away.”
There was silence on the other end, and she frowned, drawing another line through the ring of water in the corner of her large desk. Finally she heard him clear his throat. “You threw away the papers?” he asked hesitantly, sounding uncertain.
At his words she sat up straight, her eyes snapping open. Had there been information concealed somehow in the bouquet? Was she wrong to assume they were merely another desperate attempt to win her back as more than just a co-worker? “Why did you send them that way?” she demanded, firing the questions at him one by one. “Why were you so secretive, why not just have them delivered military post?”
“What are you talking about?” he snapped back through the line. “I had Havoc personally deliver them to you, so there wouldn’t be any chance of the information leaking out, I know you’ve been having security problems in Dillon; it’s been all over Central command.” He was silent for a moment, thinking. “I take it they haven’t been received,” he said tightly. “Damnit!” he swore. “I haven’t heard from the Second Lieutenant in three days, and I assumed he must be living it up there in Dillon or something.”
“You didn’t send me flowers,” she said quietly, her cheeks burning. Someone had gotten those flowers past security, and they weren’t sent out of any misplaced affections of her ex-husband.
“Why in god’s name would I do that? You’ve always sent them back before,” he raged. She could hear something through the phone, probably him pounding his fist down on his desk. Control your temper, Colonel, she would have snapped in the old days, and he would have sat up at attention, as if it were her in charge of him and not the other way around. “I can’t get out of Central right now,” he said, his voice weary. “Things are too tied up with the terrorist attacks and the civilian unrest, or I would have come and spoken to you personally.” He groaned. “I knew I should have been worried when Havoc never checked in with me. I needed someone I trust to touch base with our contacts in Altenburg.” By “contacts” she knew he meant the Elrics, and wondered what was going on.
“Sir,” she inquired, “what was it Havoc was supposed to bring me?”
“I’m not telling you over the phone,” he said quietly. “You’re right to worry about the security in your base. Something isn’t right here either. Records I know I’ve read over are turning up missing, or worse, they’re filed but I can tell they’ve been altered. Classified government files from before the coup are unable to be located, and the president thinks the military has them-“
“What does this have to do with Altenburg?” she asked, her brows drawing together in worry. Roy hadn’t sounded this scattered, this panicked, since the days after the coup when they were both unsure of their fates.
“In my search through the military files,” he said carefully, “I found records of an Edward Heiderich, suspected to be the Fullmetal Alchemist, having been arrested and released in Central last fall.” She nodded; she had heard all about that incident. “But there are more current records of him having been in Central, even up to several weeks ago, and of course that’s impossible. Someone, for some reason, must be using his name, to what gain I don’t know.”
“Wasn’t there another alchemist, years ago, in Xenotime, who posed as Fullmetal?” she mused.
She could hear him sigh on the other end. “It’s not him, I’ve already located him. He’s in Xenotime with his younger brother, working on some kind of agricultural alchemy project for the government’s reconstructive efforts. He hasn’t been in Central in years.”
“But what reason would anyone have to use Edward’s title?”
“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I was hoping our friends could shed some light on this. I haven’t been able to keep in good contact with them recently. Do you have anyone you can send to Altenburg?”
She nodded. “I’ll go myself,” she said at once. “And I’ll have my people call you if Havoc turns up here, or if anything is heard about him at all.”
“Thank you,” he said, sounding relieved. “With the way things are going in this country, I don’t want to do anything that would put them in danger, but one of them might be able to tell us something. I just haven’t been able to get out of Central.”
“Sir, it’s all right. I’ll go. I’ll let you know if I learn anything.”
“Thank you,” he said again. “And Riza?” he added after another moment of silence. “Be careful.”
She pursed her lips. “I’m always careful, Sir.”
When he woke up his vision slowly came into focus on his best friend, sitting on the side of his bed, dropping her set of miniature screwdrivers from one hand into the other in a series of metallic clinks. Her hair was still tied under the scarf she wore when she worked, but several strands had worked themselves loose and hung in chunks around her face.
Careful not to move at all, he took a moment to assess his body. His nerves felt like something was sparking through them, which was, if not pleasant, at least familiar to him. He remembered vividly the efforts he spent fighting with his makeshift prosthetics wishing for even the pain of automail attachment, something he had always dreaded, if it meant he would be able to move freely.
He could feel the weight of the limbs pulling unnaturally on his body, and he remembered that as well. It was painful but familiar, and he felt his shoulder jerk involuntarily. That, too, was to be expected.
The movement startled her, and Winry looked down at him, putting the screwdrivers down on the sheets beside her.
“How long have I been out?” he asked, his voice cracking and his throat feeling scratchy.
“About two hours,” she said softly. “Do you want something to drink?”
He nodded, slightly, and remained still as he watched her stand up, leaving her pile of screwdrivers on the bed, and stride over to the sink in the workshop, reaching up to the shelf above for a glass for him. She returned, setting the glass on the bedside table and frowning. “You’re going to have to sit up a little, Ed,” she said apologetically, and he nodded.
“All right,” he agreed.
She pulled an extra pillow from the closet, and set a steadying arm around his shoulders as he lifted his head, shifting with the smallest of movements he could manage and grimacing at the sensations that went ringing through the wires, up into the ports and into his nervous system. Mid-way to sitting up he froze, eyes squeezed shut, breathing heavily. Through the rush of electricity he could feel her rough hand on his flesh arm. “That’s normal, Ed,” she said soothingly. “Just stay still a moment, let your body adjust.
He gave another slight nod. “I know,” he said hoarsely. After a few more deep breaths, he opened his eyes and sat up a little further, allowing her to slip the pillow behind him so he could lean back, letting the wall behind him support some of the weight of the metal arm that was bolted to his chest. She handed him the glass, and he drank it slowly, careful not to spill any on the sheets. “Where’s Al?” he asked, looking around.
“He went upstairs about a half hour ago, do you want me to get him?” she offered.
He nodded, staring down at the yet-immobile right hand at his side. The fingers twitched slightly, and he felt the twinge inside the port in his shoulder. A faint smile flickered on his lips. “How soon till I can get up, Win?” he asked her, looking up at her.
She shrugged. “You can get whenever you’re ready,” she said grudgingly. “If you feel up to it. You’re not going to be able to move, of course-“ She looked skeptically at the stairs leading up into the house. “I’ll have to get Al to help me get you up the stairs, you’re about five times as heavy as you were, Ed,” she added.
He shifted slightly on the cot, wincing at the way his every movement seemed to jar the ports of his arm and leg into a flurry of electrical activity. He heard the door at the top of the stairs open, and his brother’s voice called down, “Winry? Kaiya wants you, she keeps yelling ma-ma-ma-ma, can you come upstairs? I can’t figure out what she wants.”
Ed gestured to the stairway with his left hand. “Go ahead,” he told her.
She stood up, facing the stairway. “Al, your brother’s awake,” she called back, and Ed could hear the thunder of his brother’s footsteps on the wooden stairs. They passed in the doorway; Winry heading up and Al entering the workshop.
When Al looked he thought Ed seemed to be unconscious; he was completely still and his eyes were closed. His eyebrows were drawn together across his forehead, and when Al approached the cot he reached out, drawing his thumb lightly over the wrinkle between his eyes, wanting to make it disappear. One gold eye slit open. “Hey,” he said weakly.
“How do you feel?” Al asked, pulling a chair up to the cot and sitting down.
“Like I’m being over run by electricity,” came the response, and the other eye opened as well.
His brother looked small, Al thought. And young. And tired, but not necessarily in pain.
“See that?” Ed asked quietly, and Al blinked.
“See what?” he asked, following his brother’s eyes to the automail hand and saw the thumb and first finger twitch, coming closer together and almost touching.
A weak grin cracked across his pale face. “They’re moving, Al,” he said, his voice softly excited. “My fingers are moving.”
He would never get tired of it.
Ed watched his daughter pick up the red crayon and throw it on the ground with an expression of pure delight. He picked it up. The blue crayon was next. He picked it up and handed her the orange one, smiling. “Look,” he said, “on the paper, see?” He laughed as she banged the crayon down on the paper repeatedly, making a collection of orange marks on the white expanse.
When Kaiya discovered that the crayon would break if she banged it hard enough, she threw both halves of the orange on the floor and picked up the blue, intent on it meeting the same fate.
He heard her coming down the stairs before he saw her. Winry leaned her chin on the banister, and Ed tipped his head backwards, looking at her upside down. “What?” he asked her lazily.
“Al’s upstairs working on something,” she complained.
“I know,” he told her, “that’s why I’m down here playing with the baby.”
Winry rolled her eyes. “You’d take any excuse to play with her,” she teased.
“So would you,” he countered. “I thought Al was on leave,” he added. “What’s he got to work on?”
Winry narrowed her eyes. “Well, that’s your oh-so-good friend General Mustang for you. ‘Sure, Al, I’ll put you on leave for as long as you want, I’ll do anything for you Elrics. But while you’re on leave let me just call you back to Central every few weeks and send you home with extra work so you just think you’re on leave.’ What are you doing?” she asked then, reaching over the railing and messing her fingers through his bangs.
He immediately brought his hand up to flatten them back down. “Huh?”
She came down the last few steps and flopped down on the couch next to him. “What have you been doing all day?” she repeated. “Al’s holed up in his study and I’ve been filling orders for customers, what have you been doing?”
“I did all my exercises!” he said defensively, inching away from her. “I’m doing everything I’m supposed to be doing!”
She fixed her blue eyes on his. “Ed. I know that. That’s not what I was asking. What are you doing right now?”
“Huh?” he said again, rubbing his hand over the back of his head. “Just… I dunno, what do I always do? Kaiya and I are bumming around. We were coloring and stuff,” he said, gesturing to the crayons and paper spread out over the coffee table.
She leaned over, reaching for one of the thick sheets of paper with blue and orange marks in the corner of it. “Did you do this one?” she teased, her eyes glinting with a smile.
Ed raised his eyebrows. “No, mine’s the one with the airplane on it.”
“Airplane?” she asked curiously. Then she sat up on the couch, clasping her hands together. “You mean the machines that can fly up in the air?” she all but shrieked.
Ed chuckled. “Yeah, that,” he affirmed, looking at her with amusement.
She clutched the piece of construction paper to her chest, and he imagined he could almost see the little stars floating around in her eyes. Winry flung her arms out to her sides, still clutching the drawing and flopping back into the couch, and sighed. “Can you imagine!” she said wistfully, staring up at the ceiling. “Operating a machine that flies, what amazing technology! To feel the wind on your face, to be high above the word, up with the clouds, nothing but you and that beautiful machine… oh, Ed, how does it stay up there?”
He rubbed the back of his head, knowing he couldn’t get away with a simple explanation; this was Winry, after all. “Well, I told you I’d teach you how they work, remember?” When she nodded, he continued. “It’ll take a while to explain-“
“D’you think we can make one?” she said excitedly.
“You want to build an airplane?” he repeated, startled but not entirely surprised.
“Isn’t that what you were doing?” she demanded, and he stared at her. “In that other place, in Germany, weren’t you building a machine that was going to fly up into space?”
His mouth hung open. “How did you know that?” he asked her.
She folded her arms in front of herself. “Al told me. He said you and your… your friend, were building a rocket because you thought you could get back here that way. Right?”
Ed continued to stare.
“And then Al and your friend finished building it while you were here, and that’s how Al got back.” She looked at him. “Right?”
“I didn’t know Al told you that,” he said finally, and looked away.
She chased his eyes, moving over the couch back into his line of sight. “I don’t know why you didn’t tell me,” she added before she could stop herself, letting an indignant tone creep into her voice.
“You didn’t ask!” he protested.
“Ed!” she argued, sitting up on her knees now, so even sitting on the couch together she was taller. “Yes I did ask you, and you said I wouldn’t understand.”
He shook his head. “If I said you wouldn’t understand something, I was talking about alchemy. I’m sure you would understand about planes, in fact, if you had been born in that world instead of this one, I’m sure it would have been you, not me and Al, being the one to send a rocket all the way into space,” he told her, trying to placate her.
She sat back down. “You and Al and your friend,” she corrected quietly. “It was you and your friend who built your rocket, and when you were gone Al just helped him finish up.” She had said something wrong, she could tell by the way his expression became that of someone who wasn’t there. She figured, right then, that even if she waved her hand in front of him he wouldn’t see her. He was somewhere else entirely. “Ed,” she called softly. “Come back to earth.”
“I am,” he said, his voice vague but his eyes no more focused than they were. “I am back on earth.”
“What was your friend’s name?” she asked, surprising herself. She didn’t even know where that question had come from, there were plenty of things about Ed’s stay in Germany she was more curious about than the name of his lover.
He blinked, his gaze coming into focus once more, and he turned to face her, seeming to be debating whether or not to answer her. Finally what ever he was struggling with was resolved, and he said, “Alphonse.”
Winry raised her eyebrows. “Really? His name was Alphonse? Wow. That’s a coincidence, isn’t it?” She didn’t understand why he flushed the way he did, looking away and stammering some kind of explanation, reaching for the drawing again and looking at it as if it had some kind of answer he could not provide. Never in her wildest dreams had she ever imagined Ed with another man, but so it was, and who was she to think anything of it, she who had seduced (but there was no seduction involved!) his younger brother at the tender age of fourteen.
“It’s aerodynamics,” he said, nervous, his eyes darting from side to side. “It’s like a push-pull, to keep it up. There’s gravity,” he said, his voice becoming more even, more steady. “Gravity wants to pull the plane down, so it’s built with wings, see? And the wings give it lift. And the air, the air pushes against the plane, but it can fly through the air anyway because it has this huge engine that’s working against the air, and it pushes back harder than the air pushes…” he snatched a pencil off the table and began scribbling things next to his crude drawing. “It’s really all about physics,” he said, and she leaned in closer, suddenly fascinated with his descriptions of the foreign science, and, glad he was at ease again, she vowed never to bring up that ‘other Alphonse’ ever again.
Ed had found himself inordinately exhausted that night, and fell asleep early, sprawled atop the blankets with his clothes still on. He woke with a start several hours later; when he looked at the clock it was nearly one am. He could hear music coming from the other side of the wall, in Winry’s room, and rubbed his eyes, looking down at himself and realizing he had been sleeping in his clothes.
With a yawn, he stood up at rummaged through the drawers and pulled out some pajamas to put on, and then gave his automail a good stretch before venturing down the stairs to see what Al was up to this late.
His brother was not in the living room or in the kitchen, and Ed assumed he would not be another story down in Winry’s workshop if Winry was in her room. Puzzled, he made the difficult climb back up the stairs to check the study, but Al was not in there either. Pausing in the doorway of their bedroom, he thought he heard voices in Winry’s room, and felt his cheeks turning red when he realized exactly where his younger brother was and what he was doing.
Unsure of how to feel, he let himself flop down on the bed again, holding his automail hand above his face, studying it against the white of the ceiling. Slowly, he clicked each finger together with his thumb, something he hadn’t been able to do in ten years and something he had never been certain he would ever be able to do again, and let a smile flit across his face. Maybe, he thought, everything would turn out okay. Maybe he hadn’t destroyed his brother’s relationship the night he returned to his own world. Maybe he could live the rest of his life here, in the little three-story house in Altenburg, with his brother, his best friend, and his daughter. Maybe, slowly, just like Munich, this town would become home. He had a family all his own again, now, and maybe he would never leave them.
Edward Elric was tired of leaving things behind.
His father had left him when he was barely old enough to understand what was happening, and then his mother had left him too, when he was plenty old enough to know what had happened, and ever since then he felt his life had become a series of leaving things behind.
The brothers had left their home in Rizembool, burning it to the ground so they could not return even if they had wanted to, and with it they burned their childhoods, he realized now. So that had been left behind as well. When they had found -not really found, but obtained- the Philosopher’s Stone, they had left the military behind as well, including the people who genuinely cared about them.
In crossing the gate he had, albeit unintentionally, left behind once more everyone he cared about, and in crossing back to his own world he had done the same.
He did not want to do it again.
Eventually he drifted back into sleep, and dreamed strangely of his father, whom he hadn’t thought of in a long time, except to answer Al’s questions. When he woke the next morning the image of his father’s face, his eyes hidden behind the glare on his glasses, was burned into his mind.
“I can’t, Winry, I’m sorry, I know it’s beautiful outside but I have too much to do right now,” he heard his brother protesting on the top floor of the house. Kaiya, as far as he knew, was playing in Al’s study upstairs, and he looked listlessly at the book that rested in his lap. It was the one Roy had given him for his birthday, The Life and Times of the Fullmetal Alchemist, and he had to admit, it was entertaining in its inaccuracies, but after about the fifth reading it, like every other book he’d acquired since returning, seemed to loose its charm.
“This isn’t fair, Al,” Winry said darkly. “You’re supposed to be on leave, and yet somehow I still never get to spend time with you-“
“Well what do you want me to do about it?” Al exploded, and Ed flinched, looking up towards the stairway. “Shall I just not do my job, because my girlfriend wants to spend time with me?”
“You said you’d always make time for me!” she snapped. “But I see what’s really important to you!”
“Winry, that’s not-“
“Forget it.”
“No, wait, I-“
“I said, forget it. You have work to do.”
“Are you mad at me?” Al demanded
“No,” she said harshly. “I’m not mad at you.”
“Well then quit acting like it,” he hollered after her, his voice echoing off the upstairs hall.
Ed hurriedly looked away when he heard her storming down the stairs. He expected her heavy sigh and heavier flop on the couch, he didn’t expect her abrupt announcement, “Why does he always think I’m mad at him?” She looked at him and added, “Don’t give me that smirk, I’m not in the mood for you right now either. God, I don’t know how Al puts up with me.”
He leaned his cheek on his hand. “Cause he loves you,” he told her simply. Then he looked towards the window. “I’ll go for a walk with you, if you don’t mind walking slow,” he offered. “It looks like it’s the first nice day of the year.”
She stood up, looking at him critically. “Are you sure you’re up to it?” she asked skeptically.
He narrowed his eyes, sitting up straighter. “Yes,” he insisted, challenging her. “I said we’d go slow. I’ll be fine.”
She shrugged. “All right then,” she said, reaching into the closet for a light jacket. Then she pulled one out and handed it to him. “Here, wear Al’s, since he clearly isn’t going anywhere today.”
He took it from her, not saying anything, and she followed him out of the house and down the stairs, which he took carefully, grabbing at the banister for the last few but making it down without incident. She walked behind him for a few steps. “Put your heel down first, Ed,” she instructed from behind him, and he stopped short, turning around.
“I know how to walk,” he snapped, putting his hand on his hip.
“No, you don’t,” she argued, “or you’d be putting your heel down first. Your left leg needs to do exactly what your right leg does.”
Ed smacked his forehead. “Gah!” he said in frustration. “Can you be my friend for just one minute, instead of being my mechanic? I thought we were going for a walk, not having an afternoon of criticizing Ed.”
She folded her arms, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk. “Why do you have to argue with everything I say?” she demanded.
He raised an eyebrow at her, then tried to hide a smirk.
“What?”
He tried to wipe his expression unsuccessfully.
“What, Ed?” she repeated.
“No wonder Al always thinks you’re mad, if this is what you act like,” he said mischievously.
She just glared at him, and stayed a step behind him as they continued down the sidewalk. “That’s better,” she called after him after a few more steps.
He began to slow his pace more and more until they were finally walking side by side.
“You should have brought the cane,” she added after a few minutes of silence. “You’re still dragging your automail.”
She could see him stiffen, his lips forming a thin line, but he nodded. “Maybe,” he conceded.
“Lets stop in the soda shop there,” she suggested, gesturing to the little store counter on the other side of the street from them.
Ed looked relieved, and immediately agreed. They crossed the street, and he stepped quickly in front of her and held the door open with a flourish, smiling when he saw her shake her head at his attempts.
The shop was full of kids; giggling groups of girls and teenagers on first dates. Ed could imagine Winry and Al coming here, sharing a soda and looking into each other’s eyes.
“We should have brought Kaiya with us,” Winry mused, hopping up on one of the counter stools and resting her elbows on the counter and her chin on her hands. “You could have pushed her in the stroller.”
He shrugged, taking the stool next to hers. “Oh well. We can come again, you know.” He frowned, turning sharply when he heard a series of giggles from behind them. The group of girls were ducking behind their menus, and he was sure he saw one of them point. “What’s their deal?” he said crossly, looking down at his metal hand. “Don’t they know it’s rude to stare? Haven’t they ever seen someone with automail before?”
Winry smiled, shaking her head. “Ed, I don’t think it’s the automail they’re staring at,” she said with amusement.
His frown increased. “Well what the hell?”
She looked from the girls back to him, trying to figure out if he could really be so clueless, and finally told him, “Well, either they think you’re cute, or they know who you are. Or both.” When his cheeks flushed pink, she almost giggled herself.
“I don’t think they know who I am,” he mumbled, looking down at the counter. “I look completely different now.”
She shrugged. “You don’t look that different, Ed. Besides, I’m pretty sure everyone in this town knows who you are by now.”
Ed looked up when he realized someone was standing in front of them, and saw a man in a white coat standing behind the counter, smiling. “What can I get for you, sir?” he asked, his voice friendly. He was polishing a sundae glass as he spoke.
He turned to Winry. “What are you getting?” he asked her awkwardly.
“I’ll have a cherry soda, thank you,” she said with a smile, and the man nodded.
“Uh, I’ll have the same I guess,” Ed said quickly, feeling uncomfortable with the way he was being looked at. Wasn’t his return supposed to be this huge secret?
Soon there were two glasses of fizzing red drink in front of them. “So,” Ed said after a few minutes of silence and sipping. “Did you and Al come here a lot?”
She shrugged. “When he was around, we did.” She looked to the side, out the window at the people passing on the sidewalk, when she said, “This is where we came on our first date.”
Ed nodded. His guess had been correct, then. “There was a soda shop like this in Rizembool, in town,” he remembered, and Winry nodded.
If he had never talked Al into trying to transmute their mother, if they had both grown up in Rizembool living next door to the Rockbells, he and Al might have fought over who got to take Winry to the soda shop. He wondered who would have won.
“Ed, you cant be serious! You expect me to believe you?” Al asked him teasingly. “You’ve never been on a date?”
He just shrugged. “Well, really, what kind of girl would want to go on a date with me?”
Al’s expression was mocking. “I dunno, a bookworm maybe, someone who drowns herself in other people’s words, just like you do. Imagine how much you’d have to talk about!”
Ed rolled his eyes. “I have you for that, Al.”
Al laughed. “Well, that’s very sweet, but I worry about you, you know? You never try to meet anyone. Aren’t you even interested in girls?”
Ed fixed him with a serious gaze. “I have more important things to think about, you know that. I don’t have time for dates and girls.” He snorted. “Besides, what kind of girl,” he asked his friend slowly, “could possibly find me attractive?” His eyes took on that faraway look they got sometimes, the one that made Al’s mind burn with questions he never dared to ask. “Unless there’s someone out there who has a thing for mechanical parts.”
“Well, I think you’re pretty attractive,” Al said sweetly. “Mechanical parts and all.”
His friend just rolled his eyes again, returning to stirring his coffee. “There was a girl, once,” he said softly, in a brief moment of honesty. “She was my best friend, and my brother’s best friend.” He gave a light laugh. “Hell, she was practically the only girl I knew, or noticed, at least. And she was very beautiful.”
“What happened to her?” Al asked hesitantly. Ed’s voice was so soft, and his eyes were so sad, that he half expected Ed to tell him that this girl had died, or that something else tragic had come between them.
“I don’t know,” he said, very quietly. “She probably wonders the same thing about me.” He pushed his chair away from the table, standing abruptly and tossing a few bills on the table to pay for their coffee. “Let’s get out of here,” he said shortly, making it very clear that the reminiscence was over.
Winry was waving a hand in front of his face, and he blinked. “What?” he demanded.
She laughed. “What were you thinking about?” she asked curiously. “You looked completely gone.”
He shrugged. “Maybe I was,” he told her, unwilling at first to elaborate on his thoughts.
Were you thinking about your friend? she nearly found herself asking, but stopped herself right before she spoke. His reply startled her.
“Actually I was thinking that I’ve never been on a date,” he said hesitantly, and he seemed very young suddenly.
“Well this isn’t a date,” she said quickly, and he shrugged.
“I know.” He stirred his soda with the straw, and let his gaze wander around the shop once more. Most people had stopped staring by then; he guessed the commotion over his presence had died down. “Did you and Al really start dating when he was fourteen?” he asked her abruptly.
She blinked, even more startled this time. He didn’t sound like he was accusing her of anything, merely like he was curious, but her answer was still cautious. “Sort of,” she admitted. “Al… wanted me to move to Central with him, so that we wouldn’t be so far apart all the time,” she told him, “but I didn’t want to leave Rizembool. Of course, eventually I had to, because of the war, but-“ she paused, taking another sip of her soda. “We moved here because it’s a good place for my business; a lot of retired soldiers live here and in the nearby towns, so I get a lot of customers. And it’s close enough to Central that Al could come home more often.” She shrugged. “Once we got to see one another more than a few times a year, things just… happened.”
Ed looked like he was debating whether or not to say something, and she frowned. “What?” she demanded, on the verge of defensive.
“I didn’t say anything,” he protested, but her glare persisted.
“You were going to,” she pressed. “What was it?”
He looked directly at her. “I think,” he said slowly, “that fourteen is very young.”
She could have rolled her eyes, told him to mind his own business, snapped at him that he didn’t understand; there were a number of responses she had stored up for comments like his. Altenburg was a gossipy place, like any small town, and Alphonse had been famous already. She was used to criticism from strangers.
But Ed wasn’t a stranger. “Yeah,” she said softly. “It is.” She looked down at the tiled floor under her feet. “But Al always says he has two ages. When his body was fourteen, his mind was eighteen.”
“Do you believe that?” he asked intently.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. Age was a tricky thing. She herself was an adult now, but couldn’t say she always felt like one. Ed was four years older than her, but sometimes the difference seemed massive and sometimes it seemed like nothing. Sometimes she even felt like the older one. When she watched the brothers together she could sometimes believe that they were really only a year apart, but she couldn’t tell if that was because in her mind that was how she always thought of their ages or if that was how a stranger would see them too. “Do you?” she asked curiously.
Ed shrugged. “I don’t know either,” he told her.
She was expecting some kind of argument from him, and when none was forthcoming she demanded, “Why are you asking me this? Is this some kind of equivalent trade for the other day?”
He had finished his soda and was twisting his straw into an “o” shape. “Huh?”
“Are you asking me about Al because I was asking you about your friend?”
He dropped the mangled straw onto the counter and raised his eyes to her. “No,” he said simply. “I’m asking because I’m thinking about Kaiya.”
“Kaiya?” she repeated. He was never thinking about what she thought he was thinking about. “Edward Elric, you are the most difficult person to read I’ve ever known.”
He arched an eyebrow. “I’ve been told that before, I think,” he said nonchalantly. “And Al’s probably the easiest.”
She wasn’t exactly sure how to respond to that either, so she slurped up the last of her soda with a loud sucking sound, turning a few heads. “You’re worried about me and Al, and Kaiya?” she echoed, bringing him back to his first puzzling statement.
“I don’t want to ruin her family,” he said with difficulty. “That’s what my dad did. I’m not him. If you and Al are- that serious-“ he looked away. “I just want to be sure that she isn’t going to lose anyone. That she’ll always have her parents. That she’ll never have to be alone, without anyone to keep her from making the same mistakes Al and I did.”
“Ed!” she said, surprised. “She won’t be alone! She has all three of us-“
“She needs two parents,” he interrupted. “Not three. I don’t want her to grow up confused. I don’t want the other kids around her saying things, whispering things…”
His voice trailed off but Winry could fill in the missing words. She remembered how the other kids talked about the brothers after their dad left. She remembered the teasing and the whispers and the speculations. Both Ed and Al had brushed it off as if it was no matter, pushing away the comfort she had offered them when they were children, but clearly it had mattered, if it was something Ed was still worried about.
“She’s your daughter, Ed,” she told him, her voice low, serious. She felt her heart pounding in her chest. Part of her believed that, and she could tell part of him believed it as well. “She won’t grow up confused. Everything is going to be fine. We’ll all three love her as much as we can, and she’ll be fine.”
He wasn’t looking at her. “If I had never come back, we wouldn’t be in this situation,” he said quietly.
“If you hadn’t come back,” she said, equally quiet, “she wouldn’t even be here.”
“We don’t know that,” he insisted. “It could be you and Al and her, happily ever after, with nothing to come between you.”
Winry stood up, pushing her empty glass to the back of the counter. “Ed!” she exclaimed. “Enough of this! It wouldn’t have been happily ever after and you know it! Neither of us was happy without you here!”
He stared at her standing there in front of him with her hands on her hips, blowing a stray lock of hair out of her face, her eyes bright with frustration.
“Come on,” she said, taking him by the arm. “I’ve been cooped up inside all week trying to finish those orders. You said yourself this is the first nice day of the year, lets get out and enjoy it!”
He blinked once, then cracked a hesitant grin. “Okay,” he agreed, pushing his own glass to the back of the counter. “Let’s enjoy it.”
Second Lieutenant Havoc pretended to show a genuine interest in the plain, mousy woman who had elbowed her way into the spot next to him on the crowded train to Dillon. She had begun with mournful complaining about the heat in the compartment and the lack of seats. “They should really built bigger trains,” she groused, “after all, I paid for a ticket same as everyone else, why should I have to stand? You know what I mean?” she demanded, looking up at him, and he had nodded neutrally. “It’s really hot in here, too. Doesn’t that uniform make you over heat?” She was pulling her blouse away from her thin chest, attempting to fan herself. “Because let me tell you, I am beyond overheating. This train is just too stuffy for me. You know, I heard those trains they built out to the desert, the ones that are going to connect to Xing? I heard they’re air-conditioned.” She nodded. “That’s right. Let the foreigners have all the luxury-“
He could have interrupted to tell her that there were no foreigners on those trains; they ran only through Ishbal and the Ishbalites had no desire to ride a train out of their homeland for any reason.
“I’m going to stay with my sister in Bethan for a few days, haven’t seen her in ages -god it’s hot in here- Bethan’s near Altenburg, you know, the town they say the Fullmetal Alchemist has turned up in-“
This perked his ears up a bit. Ed’s return was supposed to be a secret, but the rumors had been flying for over a year now with no sight of settling down.
“But it’s not him, I’ll tell you that much. Met him, I did, the real one, years ago on a train. He saved us all from terrorists. Of course, that train had enough seats for all its passengers, and wasn’t so ungodly hot, like this one. Short little thing, scrawny with blonde hair in a braid, not much when you look at him but powerful to those rebels, I’ll tell you that much, and they were big men. Remember it clear as day.”
He couldn’t bite his tongue any longer. “Excuse me, but what makes you so sure the rumors aren’t true?”
Her face lit up at the opportunity for a real audience, not just the general public in the standing room of the train. “Well,” she began enthusiastically, “I met the fake one too, I did, out west. Said he was the Fullmetal Alchemist, I said no way. Had a watch and everything, was using it for free room and board at an inn in my town, my very own town.” She shook her head. “Never did a speck of alchemy, not him or that creepy companion of his either. Knew it wasn’t him, he didn’t have that giant suit of armor with him the way he did on the train. Powerful alchemy, that, to animate a suit of armor to follow you around and protect you, don’t you think?”
Just then there was a horrible screeching sound, and the train lurched. The passengers in the standing room were thrown to one end of the car, the chattering woman landing on top of him. Havoc gripped the center pole tightly as he felt the car swing around, and covered his head to protect his face from the inevitable shattering of glass when the car slammed into something to its side, hard, and continued to drag another hundred feet or so on its side until it finally halted.
“Al, find out why the baby is crying,” Winry directed as she jumped up from what she was doing to turn down the stove when the pot of spaghetti began to boil over.
Both brothers clamored over to the baby, Al picking her up and both of them cooing over her. “Give her to me, Al, she needs her diaper changed.”
“No she doesn’t, I just did that,” Al insisted. “Kaiya, don’t cry, okay? You just didn’t like being over here alone, right? We’re both here now, so everything is okay.”
Kaiya instantly switched from fussing to babbling, grabbing at Al’s face with her hand.
“Ed, you wanna get the plates down?” Winry called from the counter as she was pouring the spaghetti from the pot into the strainer, sending up a cloud of steam. With one hand she shook the water out of the strainer and with the other she grabbed Ed’s flesh wrist as he reached up to the cabinet, snapping, “Use your other hand!”
He jerked angrily out of her grip and reached up again with the same hand.
“Ed!” she insisted.
“I’m not too good at picking stuff up yet,” he said darkly.
“Well that’s because you do everything one handed! Start using it more, and you’ll get better at it!”
He drew his eyebrows down. “You said yourself that this one might not work as well as the other one-“
“I’ve run every possible test on you, it’s fine!” she pressed. “I know you’re used to doing everything with one hand but if you keep doing that-“
She was interrupted by the smashing of three plates on the kitchen floor, and the baby started crying again at the noise.
“Brother, what happened?” Al called from the other room.
“You did that on purpose,” Winry accused.
“I did not! Don’t yell at me, it was an accident, I said I wasn’t any good at picking things up yet!”
“It was not an accident, I saw it on your face, you just reached up and knocked them over, you weren’t even trying! You are so immature-“
“Hey, I’ll have you know, I’m older than you by-“
“I don’t care,” she retorted. “I don’t care how old you are, even Al’s more mature than you and he’s only eighteen-“
“I’m twenty one,” Al said, hefting the baby on his hip. “Would you two cut it out,” he added. “You both need to grow up, you’ve been fighting like this every day.” He sat Kaiya in her highchair at the table and watched scornfully as Ed flopped down in the chair next to her as he bent down to begin picking up the pieces of the shattered plates.
After a moment Ed heaved a pointed sigh and said, “I’ll get the broom.”
Al held the dustpan as Ed swept up the last of the pieces, looking over at Winry, who was standing at the sink with her arms folded.
“How come it’s spaghetti again tonight?” Ed demanded, emptying the dustpan into the trashcan. “How come you always make the same thing?”
Al laughed, trying to lighten the mood a little bit. “Winry only knows how to make three things, Ed, you know that.”
Winry smacked the back of his head as he sat down again. “Quit complaining, Ed, you wanna cook?”
Ed just shrugged, reaching over and switching the radio on before picking up his fork to dish some spaghetti into his bowl. He passed the serving dish to Al, who set it down and switched the radio back to off. “Hey!” Ed protested.
“Between the two of you,” Al told him, “Three of you,” he amended when Kaiya screeched and banged on the table, “I’d really like to eat dinner in peace and quiet. Besides, all that’s ever on the news any more is stuff about the terrorist bombings in Central.”
Ed reached for the dial and turned it back on. “It’s not just in Central anymore,” he said seriously. The previous bickering was forgotten. “Someone’s sabotaging the train tracks all over the country, I heard it this morning. A train derailed right outside of Bethan.”
Al looked thoughtful. “That must be why General Mustang wants me back so urgently,” he mused.
“Al!” Ed and Winry protested at the same time, and Al looked guilty.
“I have to go,” he said sheepishly. “It’s my job. Something’s going on; they need me.”
“When were you going to say something about it?” Winry demanded. “I thought you were on leave till the end of the month.”
“When I was certain I couldn’t get out of it,” Al said grimly. “And I’m pretty sure I can’t. Things are really serious in Central.”
“I wish I could go with you,” Ed said suddenly. “I miss being able to help out like that.”
Winry glared at him. “Don’t you dare,” she warned him.
“I won’t,” he assured her. “I’m not healed yet anyway, not completely.”
“But even when you are-“
“I know, I know,” he said, waving away her concern. “Al’s told me all about it. I’m a secret. No one can know I’m back.” He raised an eyebrow. “A really badly kept secret,” he added, “seeing how everyone in this town knows I’m here, and eventually someone’s gonna come looking for me-“
“We’ll deal with that when it happens,” Al said firmly. “You’re not coming to Central with me, Brother.”
Ed sighed. “Yeah, I know. I’m staying here. I’m retired from alchemy anyway.”
Chapter Eight
Note1: I figure with all three (four) of them stuck in the house together with all those issues, they prolly fight like that a lot.
Note2: I dedicate this chapter to origamistar, mvdp, baby_kitty_toes, and ketita, who voted me into the motivation I needed.