Sorry for the lateness! This chapter was actually done ON TIME, but I wasn't anywhere near a computer (or even a pretty phone with Internet capacity!) over the weekend, so unfortunately I couldn't post it on Saturday. I know it's now Monday and I ought to post the NEXT chapter of ENATAgain today as well, but I won't do it today. Primarily because it's not typed yet (since I was nowhere near a computer). In case anyone gives a rat's ass, I was out of state, in Shenandoah, Virginia. Now, not to knock VA (it's my motherland), but if you're not an outdoorsy person by nature, you won't have much fun in Shenandoah. Sure, I could TELL that there was fun happening all around me, but I wasn't having it. Also, the one fun thing I did do... got white clay dust all over my shoes, and that hasn't come off yet. I don't quite understand why the clay dust is white, since Virginia's soil is almost uniformly made of RED clay, but... Nyeh.

Right off the bat, let me mention that the train Ed and Winry are in is not set up like American trains, by which I mean metros, because we don't HAVE trains in America anymore (haha.) In my head, it's a train of the Hogwarts Express variety: sort of private, sort of not; I don't know the word for those little booths, so I'm calling them booths. Sue me if I'm wrong.

Winry shifted on the poorly cushioned bench and scowled. "I hate riding on trains," she complained. "All this bumping and vibrating hurts like crazy."

"Sorry?" said Ed, for lack of anything useful to say. "You get used to it after a while. I just ignore it."

Winry groaned. "I'll never get used to it!" She looked out the window, but it was just cows and bales of hay out there and had been for miles. "I wish I had a distraction, at least..." she sighed, wishing that she hadn't already finished reading and rereading this month's ProsthetiTech Innovations Co. catalog.

"Now that's just asking for trouble," Ed commented, his eyes sliding over to her for a second before he again fixed his vision on the opposite wall of the booth.

Winry made a questioning noise, looking at him.

When he realized she hadn't gotten the joke, Ed gave her a look.

"I don't know what that face you're making means," she told him, breaking the momentary silence.

Ed couldn't tell if she was joking or not, so he continued to stare.

Winry realized she wasn't being transparent enough. She moved so that she was sitting on her knees on the bench, facing Ed's left side. Only her hands in her lap kept her short skirt from riding up. "Maybe I am asking for trouble," she said in an unmistakably seductive tone.

The glow of the lightbulb flicking on over Ed's head was almost visible as he realized that she had been joking from the start. He rolled his eyes at her. "Clearly, you'll have to ask for trouble with a little more directness from now on, Win."

She grinned and crawled across the bench until she was on top of him, then straddled his lap, a position she put herself in so often Ed was beginning to suspect she was doing it on purpose. He also suspected she wanted him to know she was doing it on purpose, which made him almost a little paranoid in that the-whole-world-is-secretly-ganging-up-behind-my-back way.

"Can we make some trouble, then?" she asked, still smiling wickedly.

Ed decided he didn't mind the whole world secretly ganging up behind his back, as long as the ganging-up involved this.

"Traditionally, isn't it the guy who's always asking to fool around, and the girl who's supposed to receive?" Ed wondered aloud. "If so, I think I have some serious identity issues."

Winry actually thought about this. "Who told you that? Sounds like a load of crap."

Winry groaned loudly after she had unlocked the shop, let herself and Ed in, and dropped her bag on the floor just inside the door. Slowly, she stretched her back, then her arms, her elbows, and finally her wrists and fingers. "God, travel really takes it out of me! I can't believe we spent ALL DAY on that stupid train!"

Ed flicked the lightswitch for the fluorescents in the shop and looked around. It looked an awful lot like the basement automail workshop in Resembool, and he supposed that Winry had rearranged it like that on purpose. "As far as modes of transportation go, I much preferred riding the train from Resembool to Lior than I enjoyed lugging these bags all the way across town to get here. Walking is painfully slow."

"Flick those lights off, Ed, they're giving me a headache already," said Winry. "See that door on the far left? It opens into the staircase. Upstairs is where the living space is." She picked up her bag again and headed for it with Ed not far behind. "Shoot," she said as they were trooping up the steps. "I'll have to buy some food, too, won't I? Can't live off of canned beans and rice for nearly a week."

"I'll do that first thing tomorrow, Win," Ed offered. "You've got work to do, right? Just write a list."

"Write you a shopping list? You, shopping?" Winry giggled. "That sounds so... domestic."

Ed wanted to shove her. "Fine, then you can just do it yourself while I laze around... domestically. Ha!"

Winry halted at the top of the stairs. "'Domestic'! That reminds me..."

Ed nearly bumped into her, but caught himself. "What?"

Winry turned around and faced him, giving him a very stern look which was compromised by the fact that they were standing in an unlit stairwell in the middle of the night. "For the next week, if anyone asks, your name is Edward Rockbell, okay? (Unless it's a person who already knows your name. But then they wouldn't be asking for it.)"

"Why the hell is it that?" he demanded. "Is this another one of those things where you told somebody we were married? Because I was not pleased about that, you know!"

Winry sighed. "I'm sorry, but this is another one of those things."

"Winry! Give me a break!"

"I said I'm sorry! Look, because my last name is known around here, people are going to think it weird if my 'husband,'" she made finger quotes around the word, "has a different last name than me. So you have to be Rockbell for now. It's only a few days, I promise."

"Why did you tell that lie AGAIN?" Ed was still fuming.

"Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies," said Winry, holding up her hands apologetically. "You'll probably find out soon enough anyway."

Whenever Charles found out she was back...

Winry spent most of the first day back organizing her unfinished Lior business. She had been running it by mail for the past three months, but there are some things that couldn't really be done by mail, or at least not done well.

She had worked with a helpful automotive engineer in the city to be the medium between her customers and herself, because of course a customer couldn't exactly perform automail attachments and detachments on their own. For repairs and problem diagnostics, the only way she could do her job was to have every single malfunctioning piece removed from the customer's body and shipped to where she was. It was a big hassle, and so for the smaller fixes, many of her customers had told her they would wait until she got back to take a look. After all, most of these people had gotten by fine before she was here, and they were still getting by okay when she suddenly left.

Winry had made the mistake of telling some people the date she would be back in town, so on the first full day back, the shop was mobbed by dozens of customers.

Fortunately, most of them had minor issues with their automail—after all, those with major automail malfunctions would have sent their automail down to her for repairs—but the sheer volume of people who had found out one way or another that she was back was daunting.

Winry was up to the challenge.

Ed woke up early, around eight o'clock, and stared around at the room he was in, surprised to find that it wasn't his room in Resembool... and then he remembered where he was, and everything made sense again.

He glanced at the clock on the stand on Winry's side of the bed (she was already gone, of course) and realized that it was quite early for him to be up, compared to his usual waking time (eleven o'clock). It wasn't long before he figured out that the disturbance in his sleep was the voices coming from downstairs. The shop...

Ed rolled out of bed and dressed himself, then picked up Winry's clothes where they had been discarded on the floor and made a pile of his and her stuff by the wall to worry about later.

The upper level of Winry's shop had two bedrooms, one on the north and one on the south sides of the building (the shop front faced east). The bathroom was on the west wall and it opened to both bedrooms and the common area. This area had on the east wall a long row of counters with overhanging cupboards which were broken by the presence of the icebox, the range, and the sink. A few feet away there was the dining table and a trio of chairs, while the rest of the space in the common room was dominated by a very nice navy couch set gathered around a coffee table. The only other furniture in the space was a bookcase, which was almost empty except for a row of paperbacks that were all the same shape and color scheme; Ed suspected this was a series of automail manuals of some sort.

The shopping list he'd asked her to write yesterday was sitting on the coffee table, along with 1,000 cenz in notes of 200. Ed picked up the list but left the money; he felt like a thief, buying food that was for himself (well, half of it was) with her money.

It wasn't until Ed got downstairs that he realized just how full the shop really was. People were crowding every chair in the front part (the shop front area) while those who did not have a place to sit were milling about aimlessly. Since none of the customers had been allowed past the counter, Winry was easy to spot in the back of the shop (the workshop area) and she had an older woman's right metal leg open. Hovering near her was a dark-haired (and... t-... t-... tall...) man who Ed initially assumed to be assisting merely because of his location, but after a moment Ed realized the man wasn't actually DOING anything. He then remembered that Winry didn't have an assistant, so he stared at him for a few moments, perplexed, before he gave up trying to figure it out and just headed out, having to squeeze between the crowd of Winry's waiting customers to do so.

"Hey, Win, who was that kid who just came out of that door back there?"asked Charles.

"What door?" asked Winry, a little impatient of Charles' constant distractions. "What kid?" She looked up from Mrs. O'Donaghy's right leg to see what Charles was talking about.

"He snuck out of that door there, looked at you for a minute, then left the shop. Isn't that the door that leads to the staircase...?" He gasped as he figured it out. "Winry! He just robbed you! Oh my God, and in broad daylight! Don't worry, honey, I'll chase him down and kick his a—"

"Charles!" Winry shouted, twisting to grab hold of the back of his shirt before he could leave.

"Chuck," Charles said automatically. He stopped and looked at her. "It's cute of you to be concerned, but don't worry, baby, I won't get hurt! Let go of my shirt."

"He's not robbing me," said Winry. "That was Ed. He came with me from Resembool. He has my money with him, but only because I told him to go food shopping today. So calm down and stop distracting me from Mrs. O'Donaghy's leg. Thank you for being so patient with us, Mrs. O'Donaghy."

"It's no trouble," said Mrs. O'Donaghy. "Call me Marsha."

"Sorry, babe," said Charles to Winry, running his fingers through his hair as if this somehow eliminated his temporary lapse in cool. "You never told me you brought a friend from your hometown up here."

"He's not just my 'friend,'" Winry informed him. She fell silent for a second, distracted by a wire that had become frayed and refused to come out. By the time she had achieved the wire's removal, she'd forgotten her prior train of thought completely.

Charles took her distraction to mean that she was done with her sentence. "Why would you bring someone you don't like with you?"

"Is this cream, or yellow?" Winry wondered to herself, only half listening to Charles. She stood up and went to a shelf, where rows of small, neat bins kept many wires of different colors and lengths organized. Mrs. O'... uh, Marsha needed seventeen inches of yellow wire... "I'll have to cut a twenty-inch down to size," Winry said aloud as she plucked one of these wires from its place and came back to the worktable where Mrs. O'... Marsha was sitting.

"Win," said Charles, a little impatient. "Why ya ignorin' me, babe?"

"I'm sorry, what was your question?" Winry asked, looking at him blankly. Her short-term memory was frayed by the stress.

"Why did you bring someone you don't like with you?"

"Who don't I like?" Winry asked in response. She set the wire down on the table next to Mrs. O'... Marsha and went to go find her wire cutter.

Charles followed her. "That Ed kid. You just said you don't like him."

"Did I?" she asked airily. "That doesn't sound like something I would say."

Charles rolled his eyes. "You just said it. Two seconds ago. Win, are you feeling okay?"

"I'm fine, I'm fine, get your hand off my shoulder, I'm just having a very busy day and you're confusing me while I'm trying to work."

"Sorry, babe."

Winry bit back a very colorful response and brought her wire cutters back to the main worktable, then picked up the yellow wire again. "It'll be a few more minutes only, Mrs. O'Marsha," she said as she used her thumb to guesstimate how much to chop off of the wire.

"And anyway," Charles was saying somewhere in her peripheral, "it's not like I really care what you think about that Ed kid, right? After all, I know your 'type' pretty well: tall, dark, and handsome; in a word, me."

Winry wondered if his ego might inflate too much and explode, rendering him a useless vegetable. She hoped that this was possible and that it might happen soon. "Charles, we—"

"Chuck."

"—'re not together, you know."

Charles nodded but didn't look like he believed her in the slightest. "Riiight, your mystery husband."

"You mean Ed?"

Charles did a comical double take. "WHAT?"

"Are. You. Talking. About. Ed. Question mark?"

"You're with HIM?!"

"Yes." Winry was totally calm.

"The little short blond kid with the ponytail?" he asked incredulously.

"Yes."

"What do you SEE in him?"

Winry faltered for a satisfying answer. "I just love him, okay?" she said finally, exasperatedly. "That's all there is to it."

When Ed came back later that day, his arms laden with grocery bags, the shop was still busy, with about five people waiting patiently for their turns to be seen by Winry. A sixth person came in alongside Ed; a woman about old enough to be his mother held the door open for him since his hands were full, and as she did this he saw both her wedding ring and the finger on which she wore it glint in the sunlight.

Ed didn't call attention to himself as he passed through the shop to get to the stairs, but he noticed that the guy he'd noticed earlier was noticing him right back, and he did not look pleased.

Because he was that kind of stubborn, Ed stuck his tongue out at the guy before he went upstairs.

My favorite part of this chapter is the first part, when Ed asks why he receives and Winry initiates. What Ed doesn't realize, which we know full well, is that Ed will always be the bitch. Hahaha.

Also, Ed sticking his tongue out in the last line, it's just so Ed.