I just finished a marathon of FMA eps (all 51 in two days) and I just had to write this. I hope that I can keep them reasonably in character.
Disclaimer; I do not own any of the characters or placenames mentioned herein, not am I taking any financial gain from this work of fiction.
He never screams, even when it hurts the most.
Grown men cry and curse and scream when the nerve-endings are attached, but he simply grits his teeth and takes it.
Some times, she thinks it would be better if he did scream; this silence is unnatural, and it unnerves her. She thinks it would be better if he let the pain out, instead of keeping it inside where it festers and turns into a sore.
He never screams, and he never looks at her.
The mis-matched hands are what gets his attention, the cold metal and the screws and the sharp line between living skin and dead machinery. Too long he stares at the body that his foolishness and desperation brought him, and even though he does not look at her she can see the hatred in his eyes; the hatred of what he has done, the hatred of himself.
He never looks at her, and he never speaks.
It is she who has to speak in his stead, and endless stream of meaningless things, jumping from the weather to butterflies, to the latest auto-mail she has made, to what they will be having for dinner. She fills up his silence with the sunlight and the smell of apples in her words the best she can, because she remembers the night when the windows burned. She remembers the rain on a broken and bleeding little boy.
He never speaks, and he never smiles.
She jokes as the screwdriver tightens up his limbs, trying to drive away the gloom in his eyes and the stark hate in the lines around his mouth – he's too young to have a lined face; you're immortal when you're fifteen, and your friends are never going to die, but he has seen too much and she has watched him for too long to believe in immortality.
She no longer jokes to make him laugh; now, it is to make herself think of something else than the blank eyes and the slump posture. The jokes are weak – the kind that parents tell their children even when they know they aren't funny – but they keep her from throwing the wrench across the room and they keep her from grabbing his shoulder and shaking him until he comes alive again.
But she never does.
He never smiles, and he never moves.
He just sits there like a broken doll, patiently waiting for her to finish her work and let him walk away. The apathetic stillness is why she tries to drag out the repairs for as long as possible; she doesn't want to let him go back outside and watch Alphonse because she knows that when he does he will blame himself tenfold, and she doesn't know when he will be coming back.
It is selfish of her to keep him like this, but she thinks she has the right.
After all, she is his mechanic and half of him is her construction.