Ed had long since given up trying to keep Winry from working on automail while pregnant. He couldn't account for every one of his kids' brain cells, but being exposed to engine fumes while in utero hadn't seemed to deprive them of anything important. (And by virtue of being his and Winry's, they should have plenty of brain cells to spare. Obviously.) So here Winry was, seven months along with their fifth child, doing adjustments on his leg.

They liked to think this one was technically on purpose. They'd been talking about coming off their eight-year baby hiatus around the time she'd gotten pregnant again. As far as intent to reproduce went, this was a lot closer than some previous attempts.

As Winry tightened a screw, she remarked, "You've gotten better at holding still for this. You always used to be so fidgety." She rubbed her belly. "Wish I could say the same for Junior here."

Ed smiled. "Kid giving you a hard time?"

"Yeah. I hope she uses up all her energy before bed so she won't keep me up tonight."

"I wouldn't count on it," said Ed. It was mid afternoon and their other kids would be home from school soon. "There's still plenty of time for her to take a nap and be raising hell again before we turn the lights out."

"Thanks, Ed," she said sarcastically. "That makes me feel so much better."

"Just saying."

"And I'm 'just saying' that if you don't want to -" She cut herself off with a loud gasp.

"What is it?" Ed sat up. He took one look at the dark stain spreading between her thighs and said, "Oh shit." He was already on his feet and halfway to the door. "I'll call the doctor," he said, trying to keep the panic out of his voice.

"The doctor?" asked Winry. "What for?"

"What for?!" Was Winry in shock or something? "The baby's coming!"

He watched her catch up with his train of thought. To his surprise, she flushed. "That wasn't my water breaking," she said. "The baby, she uh, she . . . landed a good one on my bladder."

Ed fell back against the door. The baby wasn't early. Just hyperactive. Ed's hand came to his face and he started laughing.

"It's not like I could help it, Ed!" Winry was clearly humiliated.

"Not laughing," Ed panted, "at you. Just so relieved."

"Childbirth is still that scary?" Winry smirked at him.

"When it's two months early, yeah," he said.

"Guess you have a point," she said. "Ugh, this is so gross."

"Eh, you've had worse. Like that one time -"

"Don't you say it!"

"- when we were four . . ."

"Oh my God, Ed!"

"Well, you gotta admit that was a lot worse than this."

"Bad enough that you're still bringing it up thirty years later! Jerk."

Ed laughed as he ran down the hall. When he came back to the workshop with a mop and full bucket, Winry met him there. She'd changed out of her wet work clothes and was buttoning a large shirt over her belly.

"I can clean that up," she told him. "It's my mess."

"It's not yours, it's the baby's," Ed said with a chuckle. "And we thought our other kids were troublemakers. This one's making messes before she's even born."

Speak of the devil. They heard the front door open and their oldest announce "We're ho-ome!" over the patter of feet down the hall.

"I'll take care of this," Ed told Winry. "You make sure Andar and Izumi don't get into those fruit tarts and spoil their dinner."

"All right," she said. "Thanks, Ed." She leaned over for a quick kiss. It was chaste, but you wouldn't guess that by the shriek coming from the doorway.

"Ah, my eyes!" cried their thirteen-year-old. Ellen, who preferred to go by L and signed all her schoolwork in monogram, had inherited Ed's taste for the dramatic.

Ed was about to tell her off – she'd seen her parents kiss before – but he realized he was still in his usual automail adjustment attire. With him in his boxers and Winry's shirt still not completely buttoned, he could see why L would jump to the worst conclusion. "It's not what it looks like," he said instead. "We were just –"

"I don't wanna know!" L said with her hand over her eyes. "Just come out when you're decent, okay? Izumi made a new circle and she's itching to try it out."

Winry snatched the mop away from Ed. "Get your pants on," she told him.

Ed didn't argue. Their eight-year-old daughter had a penchant for alchemic explosions and a reluctance to follow the rule of having her father look over every transmutation she planned to make. It kept the whole family on their toes, to say the least.

Ed was still tugging his shirt into place as he walked into the kitchen. "Show me the circle," he said.

L handed it to him, careful to keep it out of her little sister's reach. She must have taken it from Izumi on their walk home from school.

After looking it over, Ed said, "This is a circle you showed me last week, Izumi. Where's the real one?"

She bolted. L, who'd been ready for that, grabbed her arm and pulled her into a headlock. Ed wanted to tell her to go easy on her sister, but Izumi was sly and a biter. Together they worked Izumi's schoolbag off her back, trying to avoid being kicked in the face. Once the schoolbag was free, Ed dug through it until he found a circle he hadn't seen from her before. He didn't get much time to look at it, though, because Izumi had worked one of her legs free and kicked it out of his hands. With an elbow to L's gut, Izumi sprang free from her hold, grabbed the circle, and ran back out the door.

Ed ran after her, and L followed, rubbing her side. This wasn't the first time they'd have to chase after her, and it probably wouldn't be the last.

After finishing the mess in her workshop, Winry started cooking pork chops for dinner. Ed had picked them up earlier that week, teasing her about how she'd spent half this pregnancy sick over the smell of meat and now she couldn't get enough of it.

Her sons had already cluttered the dinner table with books and papers. Henry, her oldest, seemed to be working on schoolwork, but she knew Andar's fifth grade teacher wasn't assigning books as thick as the one he was reading. "You better have this cleared off by the time dinner's ready," she reminded them.

"Ozakayza, mozam," Andar answered.

So Andar was using a simple code today. Winry's apprentice, Zelma Nuri, had taught it to him before leaving to celebrate the Ishvalan high holidays with her family. A z sound, or za as it was called in Ishvalan, was added after every vowel. Annoying as this one could get, this code was at least less complicated than some others Andar had spent weeks using.

Henry seemed to have lost focus on his schoolwork and was staring at the calendar on the wall, probably counting down the days until Zelma came back. All the kids loved Zelma, who had become part of the family in the few months she'd been Winry's apprentice, but Henry seemed to have a bit of a crush on her. He'd never been quite so interested in making automail before Winry had hired Zelma, though he had known the basics of engineering. All the kids did, as well as the basics of alchemy. Ed and Winry weren't interested in pushing them into either field, though. Izumi had wanted to learn more about alchemy, so Ed had taught her. L had asked to learn martial arts, so Ed taught that, too. She also trained with his teacher whenever they visited. Andar had been interested in codes since he'd learned to read, and beyond the occasional question or two, all he required was reading material. He'd cracked many of Ed's alchemy codes almost completely on his own, and had picked up Xingese from the language manuals Al had left behind. Now he and Henry were working on Ishvalan. It was typical of Henry to learn along with his siblings, even when he didn't have a crush to impress. He was a jack of all trades. But Winry knew that once he did settle on a particular interest, he would be fantastic at it.

Izumi ran inside then, slamming the back door behind her. She was breathing heavily.

"Did you show Dad your transmutation circle?" Winry asked her.

Izumi shook her head.

Concerned, Winry set her spatula on the counter. With a hand to her hip, she asked, "Where's the circle, Izumi?"

"L took it," Izumi said, and ran upstairs.

"We'll be having dinner soon," Winry called after her.

Winry had finished cooking the last pork chop when Ed and L finally came inside the house. "Izumi!" Ed called.

"She went up to her room," Winry told him. "Is this about the circle she drew?"

"Yes," said Ed, "and I need to talk to her about something. Izumi!" He called for her again. "Get down here!"

Gold eyes poked out from behind the wall where it met the stair railing.

"You're not in trouble," Ed told her. "Much. But we need to talk about this reaction you wanted to set off."

She descended the stairs in a slump. "You're not going to let me activate it, are you?" she asked as she plopped onto the sofa.

"Of course not," said Ed. "No responsible alchemist would. And you knew that, didn't you?"

"I woulda kept it contained."

"You couldn't have. No one could. Do you realize what this reaction does?"

"Izat blozaws stuzaff uzap," Andar said with an eye roll. "Azall hezar azarrayzas doza."

"Not all of them!" Izumi retorted.

"Hey, hey," said Ed. "That's not the point. The point is that this is the most efficient breakdown into constituent elements I've ever seen."

Izumi's face lit up. "Really?"

Ed smiled back. "Yeah, it's brilliant, just like everything else you come up with." Winry could see him resisting the urge to gush over how ingenious his little girl was. But he forced himself to stick to the subject of discipline. "The problem is, it's too efficient. You'd be making a self-sustaining field that breaks down everything it touches. Where would it stop?"

"Probably within a few hundred meters," Izumi answered.

"You call that contained?" asked Henry.

"I woulda taken it out to Heidelberg's Peak, away from everyone."

Winry was appalled. "You were going to blow up Heidelberg's Peak?"

"She's not going to be blowing up anything," Ed said. "Izumi, if you had activated this, it would've gone a lot farther than that. It's self-sustaining. The energy from the molecular division would have fed the reaction until the field was too far away from any other bonded atoms. Do you understand what I'm telling you? The field would have grown until it reached empty space."

After a beat, everyone started talking at once.

"Are you kidding?"

"You would've blown up the whole planet?"

"We all woulda died - just like that!"

"A weapon of mass destruction. Made by my eight-year-old sister. Good god."

When everyone had quieted down some, Ed said to Izumi, "So now you know. Don't try to hide new circles anymore. It's not safe."

"That's an understatement," said L.

Ed said to L, "And if you hadn't caught her, everyone would've died. Way to save the world, kiddo." He mussed her hair.

"Ack!" She ducked out of his hold, fixing her ponytail. "Dad! My hair!"

"It needed fixing anyway," he said.

"Well, what kind of world savior goes around with messed up hair?" she said, grinning. "Shit, I'm gonna have to make a new life goal now."

"Language," Winry reminded her.

"I dunno what kind of goal tops saving the world, though," said Henry.

"I can think of a couple," said Ed with a glance at Winry.

"Awwww, Dad, that's so sweet," L said slightly ironically. "We were your new goal."

Ed scoffed. "Last I checked, there were five of you. And a half. I only said I had a couple."

"Yeah, Dad, we already know most of us were accidents," said L, to her and Henry's amusement.

"That's not true," said Winry as she stirred a helping of instant potatoes. "You were the only complete accident, L."

"You don't need to tell them that!" Ed said loudly.

"So what were the rest of us?" asked Andar. "Half accidents?"

"You and Izumi were completely planned," Winry answered him. "Henry was a planned accident."

"What d'you mean, I was a planned accident?"

"Dad, I read those doctor manuals," said Izumi, whose ears were being covered. "I know how you make babies."

Winry rolled her eyes at Ed. Her explanation was hardly going to be a graphic one. "It means that we wanted a baby, we just hadn't decided exactly when yet. So fate decided for us - just like with this one." She patted her belly.

"Okay, I didn't want to know about the new baby," said L. "Way too recent."

"Yeah, Winry, geez," said Ed.

"Oh grow up, Ed." Winry turned off the stove and covered the mashed potatoes. "Andar, Henry, will you clear the table so we can eat?"

"So what are we going to do with Izumi's circle?" Henry asked as he gathered up his books and papers. "It could destroy the whole world. We better make sure it doesn't fall into the wrong hands."

"You gonna turn it in to the Fuhrer, Dad?" asked Andar.

"No way," said Ed. "I might trust the bastard all right, but our government's had way too many weapons of mass destruction."

"Then we'll have to burn it," said L. "So no one will ever learn the secret."

"No!" cried Izumi. "I worked really hard on it."

Winry looked at Ed, who'd taken a stack of plates from the cupboard. Both of them wanted to keep their family and the world safe, but their daughter had made the array with innocent intentions. They didn't want to hurt her more than they needed to. "Let's talk about it over dinner," Ed said. He started setting table places. "L, would you get the salt and pepper?"

She scoffed at him, but did as she was told. Winry sighed, feeling the baby squirm inside her again. To her, the family excitement that had just taken place was no different from any other. It was all loud, familiar voices, and the conversation to come would be just like all the others as well.

It sure wouldn't be the first time they'd discussed world domination at the dinner table.