"Oh... so this is where you were..."
"Winry..." Recognizing her voice, Edward Elric –sprawled quite comfortably on the grass– saw no need to open his eyes and simply nodded in response. He heard the rustle of fabric as she seated herself next to him.
"Where's Al?" She asked after a moment, noticing the absence of the younger brother.
"Probably looking for a home for that stray he found yesterday." He muttered, shaking his head in slight amusement. Winry laughed.
"True...that's rather like him. No matter what...Al is still Al."
"Aa..." The smile slipped off his face, and Winry heard the sound of metal joints flexing. She winced; tact was definitely not one of her best skills. Wanting desperately to alleviate the quiet tension but finding no way of doing so, Winry stared at her lap in dismay. It was out of the corner of her eye that she noticed something very interesting, Edward's hair, or to be more specific, the length of it.
"Your hair grew really long." It was an odd and completely random statement, she realized, but the words had slipped out of her mouth as soon as she had thought of them.
"...Yeah...Haven't had the chance to cut it...mom used to do it for me." With that, Ed turned on his side, away from her. Winry bit her bottom lip, feeling miserable at having made the situation worse. She was left staring at his long golden hair, swaying in the wind. An idea struck.
"Ed! Let me braid your hair!"
"Ahh??" Finally opening his golden eyes, he turned to give her an incredulous stare.
Winry motioned with her hands, "You know, a braid! Like, when you twist the hair together and stuff. I mean, it wouldn't get into your face when you train, and won't slap you like a ponytail would."
He made a face, "I know what a braid is. I just didn't know you could braid hair." A wrench found a home in his head.
"What's that supposed to mean?" She asked, insulted.
"SEE! Braiding is such a feminine thing! Real girls don't carry wrenches around with them wherever they go!" Ed cried, shaking the offending item in the air.
"Just sit up!" She huffed, forcing him into an upright position. She made sure to pull extra hard when twisting the three parts of hair together, pointedly ignoring Edward's shouts of pain. Plucking a blade of grass and tying the ends together with it, Winry finished with a triumphant, "Tah Dah!"
When Ed simply sat there, eying her suspiciously, she frowned, "Go and see it for yourself if you're so uncertain!"
Getting up and walking a short distance to the river below, Ed stared at his reflection for a good minute before turning back to her. "Just as I expected..." He pointed to the haphazard knot of hair that Winry called a 'braid' triumphantly.
"I mean, I knew it all along, a machine freak like you could never know how to do such a girly thing correctly." He continued, sighing dramatically.
"Ed..."
He blinked at the strange tone of her voice that was completely devoid of anger, "...O-Oi... I didn't mean it you know..."
Winry stared at the ground, fists clenched tightly around the wrench on her lap. "If...If I promise to get better at braiding hair...will you promise to come over everyday so I can braid yours?"
"Eh?" Though he was a very bright boy for his age, Edward Elric was completely baffled by his friend's strange request.
"Just...will you...?" She asked, blue eyes looking earnestly into golden ones.
"Uh...sure...okay..."
"Say it."
"All right, all right, I promise."
She smiled.
But Edward Elric would break that promise in less than a year's time. Perhaps that was why he would wake up, almost ritualistically, at six every morning, simply to braid his hair. It was his own skewed form of equivalent trade... for breaking a promise to his childhood friend.
"I'll braid your hair for you."
"It's okay, I'll do it later."
"I'll do it!" Persistence...pleading...
"...Aa..." Realization.
A/N: Because there is a severe lack of Ed/Winry fics in the FMA category on And yay! It fits into continuity! The fic takes place sometime after the automail surgery on Ed, but before he becomes a State Alchemist...so both are about 11 years old here. The last dialogue is taken straight from the sub of episode 45. The fic itself was inspired by that scene, among a few other things. (Like why Ed does have a braid instead of just a ponytail...the latter is so much easier to do. And Winry's line in chapter 24, when Mustang and Hawkeye came to see Ed, "Please don't take them away.")
Anyway, I sure as hell hope you liked my first foray into the FMA writing universe... Especially because the idea was haunting me all night, wanting to be written so I ended up sleeping at two in the morning... So reviews would be loved to bits and pieces...and may help me go to sleep earlier... xD