Hello again! Thank you so much for the wonderful reviews, they make me so happy! There will be more Central stuff later, I promise. This time we've got a little story about the Rockbell house, and just how much can fit into one small room. The title comes from the song "Come On Up to the House" by Tom Waits, which has deeply Pinako vibes, in my humble opinion. Hope you like it!

All your cryin' don't do no good
Come on up to the house
Come down off the cross, we can use the wood
You've gotta come on up to the house

Well, you're high on top of your mountain of woe
Come on up to the house
And you know you should surrender, but you can't let go
You've got to come on up to the house

It had been a week since the Elric brothers had come home. A still-fragile Alphonse had been given priority for the guest bedroom where Ed had usually slept when he'd visited in the past, and, not wanting to take up one of the patient beds, Ed slept on the living room couch without complaint.

Okay, with some complaint. But not a lot. He didn't say anything about the couch itself, but Pinako picked up on how he was already awake every morning around sunrise when she came downstairs, how stiff he was at breakfast, how he winced and stretched just a little too often.

She also noticed his suitcase, tucked under the coffee table next to where he slept. Edward had never been known for neatness; on the contrary, Pinako remembered with a sad smile how, when the boys were little, Trisha had fought a daily losing battle with Ed's personal tornado of books, toys, papers and snack crumbs. Even Izumi had complained about it on the phone when the boys were training with her—and it had been a constant annoyance for Alphonse, she knew, during the years they were on the road together.

But now, Edward took the blankets off the couch and folded them into a neat stack every morning, and stuffed his clean clothes, books and papers back into his suitcase every night. The only permanent indicators that he was living in the house at all were his toothbrush by the sink and his bar of military-issued soap on the edge of the bathtub.

Well, Pinako thought, that and all the food he ate.

Although that, at least, she was glad to see. But as for the rest, she wasn't sure how to get it across to those boys that they were really home for good.

After finishing her eggs and toast, Pinako stepped out of the crowded kitchen for a moment. The kids were still eating and bickering, and she let them be, taking her coffee with her and heading upstairs. When she got to the landing she stopped at the door to the guest room—Alphonse's room—and looked inside. Her eyes moved over the neatly-made single bed, the small nightstand with its stack of folded laundry on top, the bare floorboards and the large bookshelf on the far wall that was piled with medical texts and other reference books.

A very, very long time ago, this room had been her husband's study. When the house and the shop were both new, Pinako had a slight tendency to dominate whichever space she was in while she worked, spreading her sketches and blueprints across every surface and focusing so intensely she snapped when disturbed. Her husband had eked out a separate space early on so that he could do his own work during those occasional moments when she got carried away. It was a good system, especially given that he could never for the life of him stop thinking out loud while he worked.

It stopped being her husband's private oasis right around the time Yuriy was old enough to start paying attention to his parents' work. Pinako remembered with a pang how her son had looked as a bright little boy, sitting on a stool stacked with phonebooks so he was tall enough to see the blueprints spread out over his father's desk. Of course they had all worked together in the shop, and Pinako spent plenty of hours down in the basement with her son, just the two of them, snacking on dill pickles and preserved peaches from the shelves while she taught him how to weld and craft parts. But the study had been Yuriy and his father's space—and when his father died, a teenage Yuriy took it over for himself.

Once he grew up and married Sarah, things were different. The two of them worked as a pair almost all the time, which baffled Pinako. Even when they were fighting or bickering they would still sit side by side at the workbench, silently passing tools back and forth, until they both cooled off. When they weren't in the shop or up in their own bedroom, the two of them often worked together at the kitchen table. Yuriy's father's study sat empty for months on end.

Then, all of a sudden, it was a nursery. An ecstatic Yuriy had actually broached the subject himself; he came to Pinako a few days after the pregnancy announcement and asked her what she thought about using "Dad's study" for the baby, and she had smiled slowly and told him she thought it was a great idea. Then he asked her for help—and there they were again together, for the first time in years, welding in the basement.

It had taken a few hours a day for a week—even though it was a simple design, Yuriy stretched out the work with endless tweaks and adjustments, his perfectionist streak on full display as he checked and re-checked every inch. But it would have been worth any amount of work to see the look on his face as her son led his four-months-pregnant wife to the door and opened it with a flourish, displaying the smooth-edged metal crib he had built from scratch, complete with a mobile hanging above it.

And so the room was Baby Winry's nursery, and eventually her bedroom. Winry had been too young to remember, but there were photos of her when she was very small in what was very obviously the same room. As she grew, the crib was disassembled and relegated to some corner of the basement, replaced with the same twin bed that was in the room now.

Winry had moved into the master bedroom upstairs just before Yuriy and Sarah had gone to the front in Ishval. Giving her the room was one of many things the girl's parents had done to try and cheer her up. Pinako had thought it was a ridiculous idea at the time—it was crazy, she'd said, to spoil her by bribing her out of her misery. She would adjust to her parents' absence, and she would adjust again when they came back.

But, true to their word, Yuriy and Sarah had moved Winry's things up into their own bedroom—all her books and toys and clothes—and let her take over the grown-up-sized bed. Multiple times a day she would walk out onto the little deck leading out from the bedroom and keep watch over the road leading up to the house—she waited for her parents to come back every day like a tiny, chubby sentry.

When, of course, they didn't come back, Pinako was grateful she'd been spared the trouble of closing up their former bedroom like an untouchable shrine, or of painfully converting the space into something else. Most of their personal things were already in boxes, and that gave her time to deal with them slowly enough to cope.

That was how the study became a spare and almost-empty guestroom. After the accident, Ed moved from the tile-walled surgical suite to a patient bed while he recovered from his amputations, and then back to the surgical suite again for his automail grafts, and back to the patient bed to recover from those. It wasn't until the first time he came back for repairs that Ed slept in the guestroom, and he was one of the few who did.

Alphonse, of course, hadn't needed a place to sleep at all in almost five years. But now, looking at his meagre assortment of personal effects, Pinako could tell he thought of the room as a guestroom—and of himself, by extension, as a guest. That wouldn't do.

She finished her coffee, and then set off to find her granddaughter; they had some work to do in the basement.

Three days of a few hours' work at a time (and a few jars of peaches between them) was all it took, and while Ed and Al were playing with Den in the yard Winry and Pinako moved the parts upstairs and got everything set up. When it was ready, Winry went out onto the front steps.

"Guys, come inside," she called. "We've got something to show you."

The Elric brothers came into the house and up the stairs after Winry, standing outside the guestroom door in confused anticipation.

"Ta-da!" She opened the door, revealing the room in its latest incarnation. The bookshelf on the far end had a space cleared to make room for new books; Yuriy's father's old writing desk had been sanded, stained and brought back up from the basement, as well as a proper chest of drawers. And in the middle of the room, where the plain twin bed had sat for years, was a set of brand-new metal bunkbeds.

Edward's suitcase sat closed on the desk, and the top bunk was made up with the blankets he'd been using on the couch.

Pinako didn't say much—she was hoping the gesture would speak for her. And judging by the look on the boys' faces, it had.

"Wh—where did you get this?" Ed stammered, eyeing the bedframe.

"What do you mean, where?" Winry said, laughing. "We built it, dummy."

The brothers glanced at each other, at the bunkbeds, and then back at Pinako and Winry.

"You built this for us?" Al said, almost shyly.

"Of course we did," Pinako said.

There was a beat of silence as Edward and Alphonse both looked at the floor.

"Thanks, Granny," they said.

"Don't mention it," she replied, and turned and strode back downstairs.

And there we have it. I took a few liberties in making up some of the Rockbell family dynamics, so let me know what you think! I can't remember Pinako's husband's name ever coming up in canon, but if I am mistaken please enlighten me. Thanks for reading-back soon with more! :)