Fanfiction: An Inconvenient Season (Fullmetal Alchemist)

[nebroadwe]

Title: An Inconvenient Season, Part 2
Fandom: FMA (manga version)
Character(s): Ed, Winry and a special guest
Pairing(s): Ed/Winry
Word Count: ~2700 (for this part; ~5700 total thus far)
Rating: PG-13 (eventually, for language and what I hope will be an exciting action sequence)
Warnings: None, as long as you've kept up with Viz's English translation. Takes place in an imagined future seven years after the end of the series.
A/N: Part two of a novella I first conceived as an entry in the 2008 Ed/Winry Fire and Ice Challenge, but was unable to complete in time. (Part 1 may be found here.) When we last left our heroes, Winry had just encountered an unpleasant intruder in the West City automail clinic where she works, but don't expect an immediate resolution to her plight. I believe in cliffhangers with the passion of a thousand skull-crushing hailstorms. Concrit welcomed with an Kevlar-reinforced umbrella. Crossposted from nebroadwe to Höllenbeck (i.e. hagaren_manga, fm_alchemist, fma_het, ed_winry, fma_writers and fma_fiction).
Dedication(s): For my father, who advised me that villains never fight fair.

---

      Edward Elric stomped the slush from his boots on the delicatessen's welcome mat as the bell jingled to announce him. The counterman looked up from his newspaper and smiled. "Evening, Ed," he said, folding the paper and laying it aside. "The usual?"

      "Nah, just half-a-dozen dill pickles with the juice," Ed replied, breathing in the rich scent of mixed meats with no small regret. "I've got dinner waiting at home."

      "Coming right up." The counterman wiped his hands on his apron and opened one of the small pickle barrels. "How about this weather, huh? You think maybe we've been annexed by Drachma and they forgot to tell us?"

      If we had been, I wouldn't be in here buying pickles, Ed thought, but answered lightly, "As long as they don't outlaw spring."

      "Hear, hear." The counterman filled a small, waxed-cardboard container with shiny, knobbly, yellow-green cucumbers, ladling a generous helping of vinegar over them. "That's one-fifty."

      Ed groped in his pockets for coins and handed them across the deli case. "Thanks."

      "Pleasure. Stay warm, eh?"

      Ed waved the man his farewell and pushed back out into the raw, misty evening. It said something about the current state of Amestris that you couldn't even talk about the weather without the Drachmans popping up -- never mind that the latest cease-fire agreement with them appeared to be holding. Ed had refused to vote for President Grumman on principle (c'mon, Senator Mustang, get it in gear!), but at least the twisty old general had repudiated his predecessor's militarism when he took up the mantle of power. He got what he wanted: the whole country's his problem now. Not mine. Amestris's uneasy relations with her neighbors north, south and west were merely the crabbed lees of a cup Ed had drained and left on the table seven years ago, in the last days of another life.

      Rain began to needle down. Lacking an umbrella, Ed turned his collar up and pulled his cap low over his ears. "Stay warm?" Ha. How about "dry"? The apartment hadn't been free of the reek of wet wool since before New Year's -- it seemed to have settled into the walls, and even throwing the windows open to air the place out for an arctic hour didn't shift the must. Ed took the pickles in his left hand and fisted his right in his coat pocket, rubbing his thumb back and forth across his tingling fingers. At times like these, flesh revealed its limits almost as painfully as automail did, and there wasn't much to pick between bad circulation and heat transfer as far as Ed was concerned. Winry, too, nagged him as unmercifully about cold hands and wet feet as she once had about maintaining her mechanical masterpieces. On the other hand, you had to prefer problems that could be solved with dry towels and hot tea, or a cuddle under the quilt ...

      ( ... except that one thing leads to another ... )

      Ed quickly pulled his thoughts back from the edge of that sinkhole. Winry's pregnancy was Not A Problem: they'd agreed to that at the outset and he'd done his damnedest to act accordingly. We have six months, she'd said. If we start preparing now, we'll be ready then. So they'd economized, laying by as much as they could of her salary and his pension against future need. That meant no more Saturday nights at the cinema-theater, no more dining out because they were too busy or too tired to cook. They brown-bagged their lunches like day-laborers and bought cheap cuts of meat to stew with cabbage and potatoes in water instead of milk. Hey, poverty has its advantages. But it wasn't enough and they both knew it, even if Winry was unwilling to admit it. If she loses her job, Ed reflected grimly, I'll have to leave school.

      He'd raised the matter with her twice, but each time she'd brushed him off: Granny kept my dad in a sling on her back while she worked; there's no reason I can't do the same. But Pinako Rockbell had been mistress of her own shop at the time, not the wage-slave of a pair of star-struck mediocrities who valued her name above her talents. ("One of the Rockbells of Riesenbuhl! Do you mind if we mention that in our advertising?" Gah.) Ed remembered his own first meeting with his wife's employers all too well -- he should've guessed that trouble lay ahead when he caught the eager glance they'd exchanged at the sight of him. The portly one had wrung his hand while the other gushed, "So pleased to meet you, Mr. Elric -- or should I say, 'The Fullmetal Alchemist'?"

      "No," he'd replied, more bluntly than usual, just to watch the annoying gits deflate.

      Winry had scolded him afterward -- I work for these people, Ed! If you want to come pick me up at the clinic, you have to be polite to my bosses! -- but with more exasperation than heat. She understood what he meant when he denied his former title. If he had to, he explained that he'd renounced it on retiring from the military, but he preferred to say nothing at all. That was easier to do here in the west, where he and Al had traveled little, making few acquaintances to recognize the boy he had been in the man he now was. Even the legends helped: people looked for automail and saw an arm and leg of flesh; they expected an alchemist and met an apprentice surgeon. The name? Just one of those strange coincidences -- and they looked again, and doubted, and when they apologized, he could respond with platitudinous half-truths: I get that all the time; I was born back east and Elrics are thick on the ground there; sure, everybody's heard of the Fullmetal Alchemist ...

      ... but I'm not him anymore.

      He'd slugged Al once, in the worst of the early bad days, for accusing him of trying to run away from himself. If I'd wanted to do that, I'd've changed my name and joined the Creatan merchant navy. But he'd already known that was no answer and it was his brother who'd finally fled: to Xing, hoping that distance and the eastern kingdom's healing alchemy might cut the tangle of loss and guilt that bound them after their final encounter with the Truth.

      Ed fidgeted with the pickles, tucking them into the crook of his elbow, then swapping them from hand to chilled hand. Of all the things he'd done on the Promised Day, that last transmutation was clearest in his memory, burned into his imagination like the afterimage of a carbon arc. He'd stood the hazard at the Doors over Al's objections and listened incredulously to a mocking voice tell him that he could have everything he wanted -- his brother's body, his own limbs, their great sin redeemed -- at what seemed in comparison a bargain price: the knowledge and the power and the glory of alchemy. What's the catch? he'd demanded.

      Once burned, twice shy? The half-unseen figure had grinned at him. No catch -- just equivalent exchange.

      It was always difficult, in that featureless, echoless, obtundent no-place, to remember exigence, but the sight of Al's gaunt face and the memory of his soul's fraying bond to the physical world had been goad enough. If he dies, Ed began, I'll --

      The other held up a hand -- his own hand -- to cut him off. It's not his death I want. Nor yours, alchemist. The arm lowered and straightened, wrist turning to offer the palm. So?

      So he'd taken the gamble and only rued it after, remembering too late that the house never pays out more than it collects. Not your death, indeed -- but what about his life?

      Who was Edward Elric, if not the Fullmetal Alchemist?

      Not his brother's keeper, though he'd helped nurse Al back to health with suffocating care. Not a soldier, and surely not a politician -- he'd spurned every reward urged upon him by representatives of his allegedly grateful nation (he'd've refused a pension, too, except that Lieutenant Hawkeye had threatened him with more paperwork than the gesture was worth). He'd made a good run at dog in the manger, belittling his brother's continued interest in alchemy until he'd driven Al away, all the while floundering in bitterness and confusion in which Winry's love and her parents' medical books had been his lifelines. Now all he regretted were the months wasted in funk and the pain he'd caused his family and his friends. It's all right, Ed; I understand, Al had written from his new alchemic apprenticeship in Xing, and later, more trenchantly, Quit apologizing, brother -- having your life turned inside out is a perfectly legitimate excuse for getting your head stuck up your ass. Winry, reading that passage over Ed's shoulder, had giggled until he'd stopped her mouth by the pleasantest means available.

      So he'd taken Al's advice and stopped apologizing, and taken Winry's hints and gotten married, and taken his own counsel and entered the Western College of Chirurgery, with the result that he felt himself a new man these days. A better man. Perhaps even a family man ... until Winry's announcement made him realize he'd always imagined testing his nascent maturity on a dog or cat first, and working up to actual children. I'm not ready for this -- I'm not old enough to be someone's father! Hell, going by his own father's example, he was too young by a century or three -- not that he intended to take the old man for a model. You'll never catch me running out on my kids.

      An omnibus pulled up to the corner ahead of him. Holding a newspaper over her head, a single passenger jumped out the door and scuttled across the street, while the few people waiting at the curb shoved forward, barely recognizing the right of another woman, shopping bag in one hand and heavily-muffled child clinging to the other, to board first. Ed frowned as she yanked her burdens up the steep, slippery treads. He'd heard people say that however unready you thought you were, everything changed when you held the baby for the first time. Winry had reminded him how excited he'd been after she'd delivered Mrs. Lecourt's son: All you could say was how awesome it was to see a new life brought into the world, remember? And Ed did remember it -- along with how useless he'd felt during the birth and how enormously relieved he'd been afterward that everyone had come through okay. Besides, nobody was handing me the kid to keep. Given the botch he'd made of raising himself and Al after their mother's death, nobody in their right mind would have trusted him with that responsibility.

      Ed trudged on, wrinkling his nose at the fart of diesel exhaust from the omnibus as it lumbered away. At least he wouldn't be alone this time. He'd never leave Winry -- and if she hasn't given me the boot by now, Ed thought wryly, I'm not sure what I'd have to do to get rid of her. They were in this parenthood thing together ... except that they weren't. Not exactly. Not when every discussion had to end with him agreeing that they had nothing to worry about. A shift in the wind blew sleet into Ed's face and he ducked, shaking his head and tucking the pickles back under his arm. Maybe it was easier for Winry, with their child developing cell by cell inside her, to accept what was happening. Maybe his view of childbirth was getting skewed by his medical training, as she'd once charged: after all, nobody called a surgeon to attend a laboring woman unless something had gone direly wrong.

      Or maybe everything he'd seen and done in his search for the Philosopher's Stone had unfitted him for fatherhood, just like his old man.

      Ed wiped the back of his hand across his mouth as he turned up Arch Street, momentarily shielded from the storm. It was easy to say I'll never walk away from my children -- but what if it came to a choice between that and messing up their lives? When he lost his temper and picked a stupid fight with Winry, she gave as good as she got, but that was no way to treat a kid. Damned if I'm going to raise my son -- or daughter -- to tiptoe around me like I'm picric acid, he promised himself defiantly.

      If you can help it, came the answer in a sly whisper.

      Ed quickened his pace up the street toward the clinic. The sidewalk was empty but for him; this part of the city had few residences and its shops and offices closed early even in fine weather. He'd gotten into the habit of calling for Winry on his way back from the hospital if she were working late -- not because she needed the escort (or mostly not), but because the stroll home gave them a chance to exult or grumble over the day's events together in relative privacy. Maybe tonight we can talk about the future. He grimaced as the sleet turned briefly back into rain. Or not. No point in bookending the day with quarrels, not when he had a peace offering ready to underline his apology for the morning's blow-up. Winry claimed she wasn't having any odd cravings, but she also never turned down a sour pickle these days. And she'd been right about the icicles -- he'd been thinking less about how dangerous they could be if they fell and more about how occluded the view from the bedroom window had become. Hopefully she'd find it a lot harder to say I told you so with her mouth full.

      Meanwhile, nothing prevented Ed himself from mulling plans against the chances his wife refused to consider. The midwife guessed that Winry was almost four months along now; if they were lucky, the baby would be born at the beginning of summer, between terms. Ed had studied straight through last year's break in order to test out of sophomore physics and chemistry and into the first of his two "mixed years," when classes were supplemented with clinical assignments. His success had earned him the dubious privileges of carrying the scut bucket for every consultant to whom he'd been assigned and of being peppered on rounds with questions about everything but chemistry or physics. Ed scowled, kicking a loose chunk of ice into the wall of a shuttered shop, then shrugged. He'd gotten his own back a time or two, picking apart an ill-conceived inquiry, but he'd also recognized the gaps in his knowledge of surgical science and crammed furiously to fill them. If he had to, he could get a job tutoring struggling first- and second-years during the vacation, and if that didn't bring in enough cash, he'd deliver newspapers or mop floors.

      And if worst comes to worst, I'll tell her we have to go back east for a bit, he thought -- another resolution less troublesome to make than to keep. She'll understand. She has to. There's the money -- and we can't have the old lady camping out in the apartment and all of us tripping over each other and the kid crying and ... He pulled the plug on that mental photoplay, reminiscent of too many hardship melodramas. We just can't.

      Even thinking the words left a bitter taste in his mouth.

      Hopping a frozen puddle in the center of Bard Avenue, he caught sight of the A-1 Automail Clinic's facade, half a tall, narrow, yellow brick building with a flat roof and a street-level front door. He supposed that was what had recommended it to Winry's employers -- otherwise it was an unprepossessing example of West City's boom-town architecture, built fast, cheap, and just sturdy enough. A warm orange glow burned behind the closed curtains of the first-floor windows, and Ed slowed to check his watch. Twenty past seven -- normally the clinic closed at six. Maybe they've got an emergency? But then why weren't the frosted panes of the upstairs surgery lit?

      The left-hand window dimmed, then brightened again, as if something had passed between it and the lamp. Ed stopped altogether, staring uneasily at the clinic, and pulled his hands from his pockets. A darker shadow flitted across both casements, hesitating at the edge of the further one, then ballooned to block the lower sash before it disappeared, sending an agitated ripple through the folds of drapery.

      Oh, hell no!

      Ed dashed across the street, the worn soles of his boots skidding as he leaped the berm of grit-encrusted frozen slush edging the opposite sidewalk, but he threw himself forward and rammed his shoulder into the door. It burst open, offering no resistance, and he windmilled frantically to keep from faceplanting into the floorboards. "Winry!" he shouted.

To be continued ...

---

[Acknowledgments: Fullmetal Alchemist (Hagane no Renkinjutsushi) was created by Arakawa Hiromu and is serialized monthly in Shonen Gangan (Square Enix); two anime of the same title were produced by Studio Bones. Copyright for these properties is held, inter alia, by Arakawa Hiromu, Square Enix, and Studio Bones.]

Comments

[alchemyotaku75.livejournal.com]

I bow to you, oh Master of the Cliffhanger!

*weeps* I patiently look forward to the next installment...

[malka2009.livejournal.com]

... *whimpers*

[ishte.livejournal.com]

Oh no!!! The same cliffhanger from two different points of view!? *tearing out hair* This is terrible! I love it! Write more ... right now!

Also, didn't realise until this section that Ed was all flesh and no alchemy. What a price to pay. I think learning he has no alchemy is okay here. It resolves a question ... mainly "why doesn't he just use alchemy?" but it might be better to make it clear that both hands are flesh earlier on.

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

I'm working on it. It's full of movement, which always slows me down -- I find it much easier to write dialogue than action.

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

*pats* There, there ...

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Oh no!!! The same cliffhanger from two different points of view!? *tearing out hair* This is terrible! I love it!

Hee. Although, as planned (and as it will go to archive on FF.net, if I ever get it finished), this section and the next one are continuous, so lucky future readers will only have to put up with one cliffhanger. Ed charging through the door just made a useful break point in the process of revision: this section was all about getting his state of mind properly anatomized; the next one is all about pace and timing. They're such different technical problems that I found it easier to deal with them completely separately.

Also, didn't realise until this section that Ed was all flesh and no alchemy. What a price to pay. I think learning he has no alchemy is okay here.

Good. The difficulty with getting that revelation in is that for the characters, it's old news. Not only did it happen seven years ago, but all the adjustments Ed, Al and Winry had to make to deal with it are also long past (mostly) and the current problem is the oncoming baby. Winry, in section one, gets to do the spadework about that, because it's all that's biting her. Ed gets to revisit ancient history here because it turns out not to be as ancient as he'd like, and his consciousness of the looming shadow of the past darkening the present is a significant element of his difficulties pulling in harness with Winry. Hello, significant icicles! (I hope nobody dumps the story because an Ed without alchemy is inherently uninteresting. If I can ever get the courage to do it, I have a plot outline from my early days writing in this fandom about Ed, Winry and the first automail heart transplant that was the source of the Ed-trades-in-his-alchemy-and-becomes-a-surgeon idea. The research issues are massively intimidating and it's narrated by an OC who'll have to be handled with extreme care, but I am quite fond of it.)

It resolves a question ... mainly "why doesn't he just use alchemy?" but it might be better to make it clear that both hands are flesh earlier on.

Earlier on in this section, or in the piece as a whole? I tried to get it into the Ed-centric narrative as quickly as possible -- it's the first revelation after the introductory dialogue with the deli guy, in paragraph, um, [counts] 9. It wouldn't be completely unnatural for Winry to mention it in the previous section, but I'd be a bit worried that it might draw the focus from her character before it was time. I wanted to give her a full share of the stage in this story -- it's one of the things that's making the revisions to part 4 such a hassle. [grumbles off]

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

This chapter (segment?) seems much less caught up in the headspace of explanations that were in the previous bit from Winry's POV. Also, it's nice to see some sort of action, even if it's just Ed switching the pickles from one hand to the other and wandering around the street. I wasn't surprised with Ed losing his alchemy to get his limbs and Alphonse back - I considered that previously, and wondered what Ed would do. Becoming a surgeon seems...well, that sort of career would certainly dovetail with Winry's work, which makes me curious to know if that's why he chose it.

Ed's mental guilt trips are still at play; the thoughts of driving Al all the way to Xing - ouch. And that he wasn't sure what it would take to drive Winry away - more ouch.

On a completely different topic, you should check out my submission in judging for . Not a plea for a vote, just thought you'd be...interested.

[moonlit-waters.livejournal.com]

Your cliffhanger has me so very much hooked.

More! ASAP

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

This chapter (segment?) seems much less caught up in the headspace of explanations that were in the previous bit from Winry's POV. Also, it's nice to see some sort of action, even if it's just Ed switching the pickles from one hand to the other and wandering around.

Slowly, slowly, I manage to get all the exposition out of the way ... I promise there will be more character movement in the next bit and a lot less introspection. Hopefully the world-building has its charms? I didn't know West City was where Amestris had its film industry until I started writing "Winry and Paninya go to the movies," but it kind of stuck once I invented it. And the Amestrian medical-industrial pecking order was fun to discover. (Well, for me. Then again, I read Leviticus for pleasure as a child.)

I wasn't surprised with Ed losing his alchemy to get his limbs and Alphonse back - I considered that previously, and wondered what Ed would do. Becoming a surgeon seems...well, that sort of career would certainly dovetail with Winry's work, which makes me curious to know if that's why he chose it.

I think that's part of it. (I really have to write that automail heart story at some point; Ed gets so peeved off when he can't get Winry privileges at the hospital because she's "just an engineer".) And surgeons are the hot dogs of medicine: they come in, they fix things (often spectacularly), and they leave, which struck me as a career ethos suited to Ed's character. His previous knowledge of chemistry and physics would help him, but he'd have to delve into biology, which would be a new world to conquer (and therefore not always have him harking back to his lost skill). Thus me. (I suspect that Arakawa herself is likely to go for the Cincinnatus trope, and that the final chapter of the manga will show a slightly older Ed and Winry, living comfortably in Resembool, possibly with a kid or two. You heard it here first. :-)

Ed's mental guilt trips are still at play ...

Ha. Ed takes so many guilt trips he's probably qualified for a frequent-flyer card.

On a completely different topic, you should check out my submission ... Not a plea for a vote, just thought you'd be...interested.

I was! (Must leave comment on your LJ. And you got one of my votes even before you left this comment, so ...)

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Revisions to part 3 are fermenting as I type. Part 4 is going to be the real annoyance; it has to bear the weight of revisions to all the previous sections as well as working out its own kinks ...