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RUBBER GLOVE
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"Grandma, do we have any rubber gloves?"
Pinako Rockbell knew better than to ask why her granddaughter was looking for rubber gloves at this time. They had each worn out a pair last week in their routine house-cleaning before Ed and Al's arrival. Pinako didn't think she wanted to know why Winry needed another pair so soon. A massive oil spill in her workshop was Pinako's best guess, and she shook her head as she thought of how her usually careful assistant seemed to become slightly more clumsy and forgetful each time the boys came to visit. It was almost as if Ed and Al's presence made Winry want to be a child again, to go back to the time when they had been neighbors and visited each other every day.
However, given the way certain things had been developing between Winry and Ed during each visit, Pinako knew that this wasn't the case. Winry wasn't trying to revert to childhood; she wanted to grow into a woman. And her mind was moving too fast for her body to keep up.
"You forgot the other glove!" Pinako called to her after pointing out the extra, unused pair in one of the kitchen cabinets. Winry was already out of the kitchen and halfway upstairs by the time she answered back, grinning, "We only need one!"
Now Pinako was sure she didn't want to know what was going on.
---
Ed lay on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. When he heard footsteps coming down the hall, he sat bold upright and looked expectantly at the door, which was opened a few seconds later by a grinning and triumphant Winry. Ed caught the rubber glove she tossed to him as she shut the door behind her, locked it and then checked it twice.
"There you go," she giggled. Winry only ever giggled when she was in her most nervous or excited state. It was all very well that she would be nervous, Ed thought – but at least she wasn't the one who had to transmute the glove.
Ed gulped and stared at the glove in his hands, face burning. He wished at this moment that Winry was the alchemist instead of him. If the Colonel or anyone else at Central were to find out that he'd used alchemy for this, he would never hear the end of it. It would become the biggest joke in the military. People would laugh and nudge him every time he came within ten feet of anything made out of rubber.
It might even be in the papers. He could be forced by his superiors into doing ads for schoolchildren who saw him as a role model. He imagined posters of himself on the sides of buildings all over Central: "The Fullmetal Alchemist Uses Protection… And So Should You!"
"NO!" Ed snapped back to the present and dropped the glove as if it were a venomous snake or a fifty-page stack of Colonel Mustang's paperwork. He couldn't let any of that happen, not even if the posters made him look six feet tall.
"Ed? What's wrong? Isn't the glove okay? It doesn't have bugs in it or anything, does it?" Winry asked, picking it up to inspect it inside and out.
Seeing Winry acting like her normal self again made Ed quickly forget about posters and other dumb figments of his runaway imagination. He wanted her, wanted her more and more each second, and right now this rubber glove was the only way for him to get what he wanted. The rubber glove, and his alchemy.
"It's fine," he assured her as he took the glove back from her and set it on the floor, more carefully and deliberately this time. "Stand back."
Winry stepped away and watched with eager fascination as Ed performed the familiar hand-clapping, floor-touching moves and the area around the glove was surrounded with a beam of light. It crackled for a split second, and when it faded, the glove was no longer a glove.
Winry stared. Ed stared. Very delicately, as if it were made of rice paper, Ed picked up the newly transmuted item. He opened his mouth to ask Winry what they should do, only to see her looking bewilderedly from him to the thing in his hand and back again.
"Winry…?" Ed was confused. He hadn't done anything wrong with the transmutation that he could see. "Didn't it come out the way it was supposed to?"
"Uh, almost. Except…." A single eyebrow and one side of Winry's mouth twitched upward in unison.
"Except what?" Ed growled, starting to get annoyed. Whatever the mistake was, Winry seemed rather amused by it. If only she'd hurry up and tell him so he could fix it and get on with things!
"It's…" Winry's eyes slid from the item in question to the area below Ed's belt, and settled there… "way too big."
Too big.
Ed had almost -- almost -- gotten used to people insulting his height, but this was an entirely new low, one that not even the rudest military dogs had ever sunk to in insulting him. And it was coming from Winry, of all people! Enraged, Ed jumped to his feet.
"ARE YOU SAYING MY CO – mmrph!!" Winry clamped her hand firmly over his mouth before he could finish, wearing a look that showed she was definitely not amused anymore. She didn't know which word the last syllable would have turned into, but either way, it wasn't one that would be safe to scream out just now. Winry wanted things to move along just as much as Ed did, and having Al and Grandma hear him would have been an immediate setback to their progress.
"I'm no expert on size," Winry rolled her eyes, "but even I can tell that thing would fit better as a tube sock. Stop showing off and try it again." She placed a brief but still less-than-innocent kiss on the lips she had just removed her hand from. A good incentive.
Just as Ed was about to obey, there was a loud, hollow knock at the bedroom door, making the two jump.
"Winry! Brother!"
"Al?!" Winry squeaked as she paced back and forth, wringing her hands.
"Unlock it," Ed breathed anxiously, and Winry complied as soon as she saw the glove had been transmuted back to its original form. "Do you need something?" she asked Al as she pulled back the door.
"Auntie needs her glove back as soon as possible. It's an emergency."
"Emergency?" Ed sounded suspicious. "What's going on?"
"She found something growing under the sink that needs cleaning right away."
Ed and Winry stared, blinked, and then slowly turned to look at each other in disbelief. "What's under the sink?" asked Winry.
"I don't know," said Al, his echoed voice ringing with anxiety. "It's so bad she won't even let me see it, but she says it's poisonous and can't be touched with bare hands!" Then, without asking, he snatched the glove from Ed's hand and dashed down the hallway to the stairs.
---
"Fuck," Ed hissed once the door had closed again. He slid to the floor and pounded it with his metal fist.
Winry snorted at the irony of his curse. "We can't now. Not until we find something else made of rubber that Grandma and Al won't miss before long."
Ed groaned, sounding as frustrated as Winry felt. "Isn't there some easier way?"
"Well, it won't be quite the same," Winry flushed in the same way she had when she'd first suggested the glove idea, "but there is this… special attachment I've been working on for your arm. I was going to save it until after we'd tried things the conventional way, but since we can't—"
"That's what that vibrating thing I saw you working on the other day is for?" Ed buried his face in his hand. "Well, that'd take care of you, I guess. But what about me?"
"You'll see," Winry said slyly as she went to retrieve her new invention from her closet.
Oh, yes. Ed would see. After all, Winry couldn't have become a mechanic if she wasn't good with her hands. Between that and her new automail contraption, she was sure she and Ed would both end up more than satisfied.
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END
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Wait, don't leave yet! I have a special guest omake (i.e. alternate scene) from my friend and beta Elffromspace!
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"Blast," Ed hissed once the door had closed again. He slid to the floor and pounded it with his metal fist.
Winry snorted at the irony of his curse. "We can't now. How are we supposed to have a water balloon fight without rubber for balloons?"