Title: Love's Offices
Author: Tiamat's Child
Rating: PG
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist
Character/s: Ran Fan/Ling
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Summary: Ran Fan enjoys the structure of her life.
Notes: For the Winter prompt at 4purposes LJ: "early in the dark I rise"
Love's Offices
Ran Fan loved getting up in the cold. Every morning, in winter, crawling out from her place at the foot of her master's bed to dress rapidly in the dark of early morning, long before the sun even began to press its way through the shutters. There were no drafts in her master's room, the house was too well constructed for them, but the chill of the air was always enough to shock her awake, when she tugged her shirt over her head and shucked off her trousers.
Behind her, her master made a soft noise in his sleep, barely more than a harshly exhaled breath, and turned over. He could sleep like the dead when he chose to. Ran Fan had never learned that knack. Even as a child she'd been fitful, waking at the slightest noise, up before the sun. Always up before the sun, and she coaxed the fire back to life once she'd wriggled into her uniform.
A new day, always a new day. She touched her master on the shoulder, whispered to him, "Master, I'm going for water," gathered up the kettle as he murmured something like an acknowledgement, and slid from the room, nodding to her cousin outside.
She got the water for tea herself. Always herself, every morning. It did not do to leave these things to chance if there was a choice.
She drew water from the tap at the well, shivering in the wind that the courtyard walls let in. Hurry hurry but not so fast she splashed herself.
The warmth of the stoked fire was always a shock after that. Quite a different kind of shock from the chill, but one that woke her just as thoroughly.
She swung the kettle over the fire and brushed blown snow out of her hair. She left the fire, took down her master's tea set, checked it to make certain there had been no tampering, retrieved his box of tea, checked it for tampering too, and carried the whole to the hearth, where she knelt, and laid it down in front of her.
And then she waited, still and easy, controlling the rhythm of her breath.
Always, just before the kettle boiled, her master moved. He extracted himself from his bedclothes, managing to imply, every time, that it was only with great difficulty and by the exercise of tremendous force of will that he was moving at all, and crossed the room to her. "Good morning, Ran Fan," he said, every morning, as he settled to sit cross-legged on the still chilly floor beside her. "Thank you for getting the kettle going. Have you got time for tea with me?"
"Yes, Master," she said, every morning.
And, every morning, he smiled, and measured out the leaves.