Author's Note: Fairly simple theme. (I think my chapters are getting short, unfortunately. Maybe my subconscious wants me to write drabbles like I'm supposed to, lol.) Came up with this pretty quick. And I hadn't intended it, but one paragraph in particular started sounding an awful lot like my old fic "Swelling Heart." Interesting.
Timeline: None
Theme 55: Infectious crying
Tears could be very dangerous. They made you vulnerable, exposed your weaknesses to the world. Once you started crying, you couldn't pretend anymore. You couldn't tell people that you were fine, that you weren't affected. You couldn't fool even yourself that you were strong, whole, healthy, or even normal. Tears instantly turned you into a wet-eyed, red-faced golem that people wanted to turn away from in disgust and discomfort. But you could hardly blame them. Who would want to see all the ugly, broken parts that should be kept inside? Watching someone cry was like watching someone vomit.
And the worst part of it was that when you watched someone vomit, you started to gag yourself. It was the same way with crying.
Edward Elric prided himself on being able to restrain his tears around people. When Winry, and occasionally his mother, would cry, he contained himself very well. The trick, he discovered, was to look somewhere else and tell himself he had to be strong, because he was a man and that was what men had to do: Be strong when the people they cared about were not.
And Edward was strong, with a heart of metal and eyes of hardened gold. When people looked at him, the thought of tears never entered their minds.
But there was one person who could make Edward cry every time.
It was amazing. Edward could keep his composure when Winry was bawling over her parents' deaths, but when tears began trailing softly down Alphonse's cheeks at the thought of their mother dying.... When Edward saw his little brother crying, his heart would swell and burst its metal bonds, sending a gush of blood up to his throat, where it would throb and send tears to his eyes. And with these infectious tears, Edward would forget all he had ever thought about crying. When he looked at his weeping brother, he wouldn't see an ugly, broken golem he wanted to run away from. He would see a soul, so precious and so dear. He wanted to heal that hurting soul, to take away the pain and wash it clean of guilt. He wanted to compress every particle of that soul's pain into tears, and he wanted to catch those tears and drink them down, take the pain onto himself and lighten that soul's burden. He would give that soul everything he had, every part of himself, pour out every last drop of blood in his body, if only it would help.
And what was even more amazing was that, even when Alphonse was in a suit of armor and couldn't cry, Edward was still affected by his tears.
