run, i'm a natural disaster
44- Insane
"You're fifteen? And you're getting married?" Ed says incredulously. They're staying with a traveller community going East. Heinkel and Darius were not as adventurous as she had hoped and had refused to cross the desert with her and the map she had bought off of an old guy with a really stylish beard. The group lived out of caravans and sold handmade merchandise. Apparently their cranberry sauce was legendary. Ed wasn't too sure how that worked out, as they couldn't hand grow cranberries in the middle of the desert, or when they would not be permanently camping where the berries grew. After looking at the faces when she brought up the irregularity, she decided that maybe she was better off not knowing.
"Well, yeah." The traveller girl says. She's a year younger and a head smaller than Ed, which fills her with joy. Or it had until Heinkel and Darius had pointed out and then mocked her for feeling proud. She'd 'borrowed' their more comfortable walking clothes in retaliation, meaning they had to walk in their un-heat protected, heavier clothes. She wasn't horrible though (though maybe a small mountain village near Drachma may protest this, but whatever. They'd had it coming), and was prepared to give them back the next morning. "What's your point?"
"Aren't you a little young?" Ed says. She can't imagine marrying ever. Her parents weren't married and she turned out mostly not too fucked up. The only married couple she'd seen close up were Teacher and her husband, and while they were kind of sweet, she didn't want to emulate her teacher in that respect.
The traveller girl looks a bit shocked. "The marrying age for travellers like us is fifteen to eighteen. Anywhere past that and you're considered an old maid." She leans forward, suddenly interested. "If you didn't assume you were too young to be married, would you have your eye on anyone?"
Ed quickly rummages her way through her memories of Winry's instruction on small talk and 'indentifying with other women, especially to identify possible weaknesses'. In a way it seemed like Mustang's desperate lessons on politics. It was a relationship question, which was tricky.
"I have a thing. With a guy." She blushes slightly and wishes she didn't have to speak, but gossip is a way of repaying hospitality. "He's not… I'm not… Well, suffice to say neither of us are the marrying type."
"Or indeed the relationship type." Heinkel adds.
"Or the simple type," Darius ends, with an eye-roll. "His name's Greed, and he's kind of an arsehole."
A.N: The insanity here is getting married at fifteen. Or alternivately, watching 'My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding'