"Are they gone yet?" Ed whispered, straining his ears to hear the sound of the door closing.
"Remind me," Winry whispered back, "why do we wait until Al and Luna are gone in the evenings? We didn't used to."
"They didn't used to leave, now did they? Always exploit conveniences, Win. Now shh, I can't hear."
Winry fell silent for about three seconds and leaned on the doorframe while Ed made a fool of himself, standing in the hall listening for the sound of the door to close.
"They must be gone," he said finally. "We're free as long as we don't wake Jo-jo."
"The child sleeps like a rock! Illegal stimulant drugs couldn't wake her."
He laughed a little. "I know, I know. Just... trying to cover all my bases. Remember that time Meta caught us in the closet?"
Winry laughed. "How could I forget?" She leaned off of the frame of the door and backed further into the room. "Oh, just get in here, idiot, before all your bother actually does wake the baby and then we're screwed."
"Somehow, I feel like you're timing me."
"Twenty-eight, twenty-seven, twenty-six... oh, what was that, Ed? Must've missed it, I was too busy counting down the seconds you have until I decide to get a 'headache' and stop you cold."
Ed rolled his eyes and stepped into the room, stealthily closing the door behind him. It was early evening and getting dark, so Winry went to the center of the room and pulled the chain on the light, but Ed came up behind her and pulled it back off. This was one of the several things Ed and Winry disagreed upon: whether to make out with the lights on or off. Winry preferred to be able to see what she was doing, while Ed's excuse was that he liked the sense of blindness and being able to move by touch.
Winry thought his real reason was that he was still self-conscious about his erections: at least if it was dark he had a little control over the situation, since it wasn't like she would notice by just looking down.
Not that she didn't notice.
Not that she didn't take advantage.
It was in doing just that—manipulating their positions so that she was straddling his lap—that Winry remembered the little piece of paper she had in her pocket and quickly withdrew it before it could get wrinkled. "Oh! I almost forgot!"
"What's that you've got?" Ed asked.
Winry waved it in front of his face.
"I can't see," he said.
"I bought train tickets. It leaves late tomorrow night and I plan to come back on Tuesday if everything goes my way, but just in case it takes longer than four days, I didn't get return tickets."
"Oh," said Ed. Then, a second later, "Plural?"
"Yes."
"Who's going with you?"
Winry stared.
"No, seriously. Who?"
She continued staring.
"Me?"
"Yes, Ed," said Winry with exasperation. "Of course, you."
"Why?"
Winry had fully intended to tell him straight-up about Charles just so she could have that burden off of her chest, but she chickened out again. "I thought you might want to come along. Seeing as you spend so much effort making sure we're alone, I thought maybe you'd like a chance for some real... uh, aloneness?"
Holy crap, she thought, what exactly am I offering? Suddenly telling the truth didn't seem so terrifying.
No fuckin' way, he thought, what exactly is she offering? Suddenly there was no way he could have said no.
"Uhh... nnn-... yehhh-... well..." Ed drew a mental blank. "Yeah, I guess... I mean, good idea." He wished he could come up with a clever one-liner so he didn't sound so... stupid right then, but nothing came to mind, so he laughed awkwardly. "Lior or bust, right?"
Robert Ingalls came home around five o'clock in the evening. When interrogated by his parents later about where he had been, he would claim to have been walking his girlfriend home and taking the long way there, but he had actually been smoking behind the diner with his friends until old lady Lucy herself had come out and shooed them away.
He didn't go straight inside. First, he made it a point to go around back and stow his cigarettes in the usual place. It was here that he noticed that one of the mares was missing, which was odd, because if she had been put out to graze, then why not the others as well?
Outside, he hung around purposelessly for a few minutes, then finally he ambled in the back door and pretended he had been home for some time.
His youngest brother was pacing a long path between the living room and the joined kitchen, while the second-youngest was sitting on the couch, tapping his foot. Both looked pale and anxious.
"What happened?" Rob asked, looking apprehensively at their faces. "Where's Mom and Dad?"
"Hannah..." Eric mumbled, putting his face in his hands. "She..."
"Mom's in the bedroom with Hannah; we're not 'lowed to go in," said Max mechanically. "Dad went'ta get the doctor."
Rob stared at them both, his mind blank for anything to say, then after a minute, he exhaled painfully and tried to keep calm for his little brothers' sakes. "Ta get the doctor? What happened?"
Max kicked a toy across the living room. It hit the lamp and made the light dance on the walls for a few seconds. "She's hurt."
"How bad?" Rob asked.
It was at this point that Eric could no longer contain it: the twelve-year-old, always a sensitive boy, burst into entirely unmanly tears, which he tried to hide for pride's sake.
Max went to the couch and not so much sat as threw himself upon it.
Judging by his brothers' reactions, and the muffled female sobbing noises from the upstairs (he could not tell who, exactly, was crying), Rob knew it had to be pretty dire. He joined his brothers on the couch, sitting rigidly. He was sixteen: almost a man, barely a man, kind of a child, mostly scared. "She's tough. She'll be okay," he promised, rubbing Eric's shoulder.
"What if she ain't?" he wailed. "What if it happens again?"
Horrified, Rob punched him. "You shut up! Hannah's fine, got it?"
"Oh, God!" Eric put his head in his hands. "You know it too! You know it too!"
"Shut up! Shut up!" Rob hit him again. "Shut up!"
"Y'know what I never understood? Haiku. What a pointless limitation on a piece of poetry. How can you possibly say anything meaningful in seventeen syllables, anyway? It's ridiculous!"
"Uh-huh," said Al.
It was late in the evening, and they were walking home hand-in-hand.
"Who invented that, anyway? The Xingese? Bunch of rice-munchin' idiots they are, anyway, especially the border-hoppin' desert-crossin' kind."
"I've never heard you drop so many G's before, Luna. You must feel quite strongly about this."
"I'm having an angry day," she responded.
"Is there such thing?"
"There most absolutely positively certainly is! Do you never wake up one morning and sense that somewhere out there, there are stupid people doing stupid things, and it just grates on your nerves until there's naught left to do but rant about stupid things 'til the cows come home?"
"Uh... nope, I don't think that's ever happened to me, Luna."
"Well, it happens to me sometimes, so maybe you're just an anomaly. And you know what else bugs me? Illegal Drachman immigration. Because honestly, doesn't their country spend all this flippin' time bothering our soldiers up at the border—and don't even get me STARTED on the border reinforcements, like that underfunded, understaffed, overregulated military hell hole that is Briggs Fort—and then these Drachman illegals have the balls to come over to our side of the border and beg to be given political refugee status because of their supposed 'tyranny'? I tell you, it was bad enough under Bradley, when we had all these Drachmans coming over and taking underpaid entry-level jobs up north, but NOW we've got Armstrong, who thinks she's some kind of good guy savior come to clean up Amestris once and for all, when in reality she—" Luna stopped talking, stopped walking, stopped thinking, stopped breathing. Slowly, as if in a dream, her hand slid from Al's and came to touch the side of her face. Had he just kissed her, or was she imagining it?
Al watched her carefully, trying to understand her reaction, while he internally panicked and hoped it wasn't too soon, hoped he hadn't screwed something up.
Luna's mouth was hanging open. She stared ahead. "What..." she managed to say, "was that?"
Al shrugged in his best façade of nonchalance. "I wanted to see what would happen if I tried it," he explained.
"Oh." She could not for the life of her think of anything to say.
"I'm sorry," Al apologized when she did not say anything else. "I made you uncomfortable?" But his tone said something more akin to "I can't believe I just did that; I'm an idiot; I feel like shit."
"No," said Luna, still in a daze. "Um... I think my brain shut down."
"Oh," said Al. He took her hand again. "Well, let's keep walking. It's getting late. We left at, what, nine o'clock?."
Melinda ran straight home, trying to contain her tears the whole way. If she had paid a little more attention, she would have noticed Al and Luna out as well that evening (at the moment that she ran by, they were having some kind of dull conversation some fifty yards away in a cornfield and didn't see her), which would have saved her some time given that her intent was to speak with one of her guardians. However, she did not notice them, so she ran all the way home, thudded and clattered her way upstairs, and ran to the door to what was technically Ed's bedroom but not really all his.
Ed was trying his damnedest to stay asleep despite Melinda's noise, while Winry was sitting up and it looked like she had been about to go investigate the sudden noisemaking. "What's wrong, Meta?" she asked, rubbing her eyes to see better.
"Get out," Ed groaned, muffled by the pillow in which his face was buried.
"There's a party for one of my friends on Saturday," said Melinda.
"So?" said Ed.
Winry punched him on the arm. "It's only Thursday, Me-mee, and neither of us is going to be here on Saturday anyway. What do you want us to do about it?"
"Forbid me to go."
Winry stared at her blankly. "What?"
"Just do it. Forbid me to go to the party."
"Why?"
"So I can tell my friends I'm forbidden to go to the party, duh."
"That doesn't make any sense," said Winry, shaking her head no.
"Just do it!" Melinda implored.
Ed gave a growl of annoyance and sat up. "Meta, you are forbidden to go to the party on Saturday." He looked at Winry. "See? Not that hard." He laid back down and flung the covers over his head.
"Thanks," said Melinda. She left without another word, leaving Winry to wonder and Ed to sleep.
Originally, the whole arc revolving around Max and the loss of his brother was only going to be included as it was relevant to Meta/Melinda's own issue. Max only had the other siblings just to prove that he had a big family. As I was writing, it occurred to me that this backstory was NOT NEARLY as powerful as it was in my head, and I finally diagnosed the problem in that the angst was too far in the past. So, to fix it (and also space out the action a little; have you noticed that all of this crap is happening in the same week?) I put in peril the life of the previously nonexistent Hannah Ingalls (whose name was almost Holly until I decided that was somewhat too old-sounding so I gave that name to Max's mom; there's a fun fact for ya) and then, since I didn't think the MAIN pairing in this fic was getting enough attention, I decided to also send Ed and Winry away for a few days. This is actually resulting in somewhat of a block for me, because--
SPOILER ALERT--
I can't decide how exactly the Charles Sorano arc is going to play out, though I'm hoping that between Winry getting sexually harassed in Lior and Chuck getting his lights knocked out (TWICE if I can manage it!) there will be time for some legit EdWin I-love-you's. There was one I love you implied in ENAT, when Ed was having that (can I say this on TV? haha) wet dream about Winry, he did say he loved her, and we found out afterwards that he had been talking in his sleep. But it was never explicitly STATED that Winry heard him say he loved her, and for good reason. However, it's now October (in ENATAgain time) and Winry has been wearing that damn ring since April. It's about freakin' time that SOMEBODY said I love you, y'know what I mean??
SPOILERS OVER.
Please review!!