AN: written for the prompt: Fullmetal Alchemist, Edward/Winry, Making a new home their own.
When they moved in, the entirety of their possessions fit in five boxes—three of which consisted of Winry's automail supplies. Winry set up her workshop while Ed unpacked dishes into the cupboard, put the box of their clothes in the bedroom and that was it. There was a long list in Ed's head of what they might need, but he figured they'd get it as the need arose. They didn't need stuff. Still, it felt a bit too empty. He'd had rooms at inns that were more homey than this.
"Curtains, do you think?" Winry said when he mentioned it.
He shrugged.
She bought them a day later, and they were a cheerful light yellow that made Ed double take every time he entered a room. They made Winry happy though, so he let the color slide.
It started with little things. Ed would pull a bowl from the cupboard and find a screw sitting in the bottom, or curls of stray wires cluttered on the kitchen table. One memorable time, a half-finished automail foot somehow found its way into the bathroom sink scaring Ed half to death when he stumbled to use the toilet in the middle of the night and found toes peeking over the edge of the basin.
Then they found the armchair on the side of the road and that became a fixture in the living/dining room.
The first time Al visited, he brought a book as a gift. After that, Ed started picking up a used book here and there when he found an interesting title with a decent price. Winry complained about tripping over book piles in their bedroom. Ed complained about finding springs in the leftovers yesterday. No one wins and they bickered happily over the little things because they could.
The table got a scorch mark down its center. Ed broke the bedroom window. The wall gained a hole when an argument gets out of hand (Ed's fault, he patched it over the next day grumbling the whole while) and the bathtub had several chips and cracks that neither one of them is going to admit how they got there. Another chair joined the arm chair and a carpet, a gift from one of Winry's clients, got a place between them. Ed built a bookcase to stop Winry complaining about the growing piles. He refused to acknowledge that Winry probably could have built it better. It only tilted a little bit to the right and it was enough to fit all the books he had accumulated.
It is a year, three months, and six days since they moved in to the place that Ed stops in the kitchen, halfway through reaching for plates to set the table. He looks around the room and Winry looks back, eyebrow raised.
"What?"
"When did we get so much stuff?" Ed asks.
Winry shrugs. She puts knives and forks at two place settings with cheerful yellow cloth napkins. "What you have expands to fill the space you can use," she says.
Ed puts the plates on the table and looks at the room with new eyes. There's a vase in the windowsill with daisies he picked for Winry walking back from work. A blueprint is still on one end of the table and one of his books is on the counter and he can't quite remember when this room became more comfortable than even Granny's house.