Fanfic: Telephone (Fullmetal Alchemist)

[nebroadwe]

Title: Drabbles: Telephone
Fandom: FMA (manga version)
Character(s): Winry
Pairing: very early, one-sided(?) Winry/Ed
Rating: G
Word Count: 300
Warnings: Implicit spoilers for chapters 56 and 64.
A/N: Three drabbles about Winry that bunnied earlier today as I was thinking about my in-progress fic "Errands of the Eye" (aka "Winry and Paninya go to the movies"), which is by-golly going to get finished someday! Consider this a kind of preview. These drabbles are only my second sidling approach to romance; concrit welcomed with the ringing of bells and the freedom of the city. Crossposted from nebroadwe to Höllenbeck (i.e. hagaren_manga, fm_alchemist, fullservicefma, fma_het, fma_writers, fma_fiction, winrylovers and ed_winry).
Dedication: For tobu_ishi, master of the romantic drabble.

---

Dial Tone

Automail is a noisy business. Every competent engineer learns to sift sounds of order (or incipient disorder) from cacophony. Winry knows she's competent, but lately her ears trick her: she hears the telephone bell in the overtones of drills and saws, screaming as they bite into steel, in their motors' burring whine and even in the forge's hiss and clang. One morning she woke trying to answer her alarm clock, which was just embarrassing. Garfiel worries her about tinnitus when not teasing her about absence's effects.

Sometimes she wishes they hadn't called. Mostly, she wonders whether to call him back.

≈
Voice Message

Sensation is automail's Philosopher's Stone. Engineering makes the lame leap like a stag; why shouldn't it give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf? So Winry sketches the human ear: the tympana, the ossicles, the petrous labyrinth. Do sounds, she wonders, ever get lost in there, never reaching the vestibulocochlear nerve? Is that why she still hears his words (Are you all right?) as clear and puzzling as they were that day -- and as warming?

She snorts and crumples the sketch, ignoring her own blush. I hear what you said, Edward Elric. Why can't I hear what you meant?

≈
Disconnected

Winry stares at the disassembled knee on her workbench, but sees the wall by the telephone and the calendar with its picture of snow-streaked mountains brooding over an autumn forest. That's that. They're off again. Next time they call, it'll be because Ed's leg's too short or his elbow's seized up or ...

She won't think about "or". Ed's disregard for her masterworks is enough to make a dedicated engineer weep, but at least the repair bills pay her apprenticeship fees. And he'll always need his mechanic, her mind whispers.

The next time the telephone rings, she lets Garfiel answer it.

[Disclaimers: Fullmetal Alchemist (Hagane no Renkinjutsushi) was created by Arakawa Hiromu and is serialized monthly in Shonen Gangan (Square Enix). Copyright for this property is held by Arakawa Hiromu and Square Enix. All rights reserved.]

Comments

[tobu-ishi.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow. When I saw my name, I froze. When I read the drabbles, I melted. Very, very well done; with each theme distinct, and the romance crisp and poignant but not overdone, and the sort of tiny accurate observations of characterization and setting that make a theme pop with life. You make every word count.

What a gift, love, though you give me far too much credit. Thank you so much. ♥

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow. When I saw my name, I froze. When I read the drabbles, I melted.

Sign of a true writer: even editorial comments use neatly balanced metaphors. :-) I've mentioned it before, but I do enjoy making dedications. It's almost as much fun figuring out which piece suits whom as it is writing them in the first place.

You make every word count.

The praise of the praiseworthy ... nothing like a drabble to force one to think about one's words. The picture in "Disconnected" must have mutated through four or five different forms as I dumped cliche after cliche (it's hard not to use them when you're describing the scene on every other complimentary bank calendar). I'm still worried about "brooding", though it's hanging in there on the grounds that the landscape, in a pathetic-fallacy way, is supposed to be very gently reflecting the worries Winry isn't allowing to the top of her mind.

What a gift, love, though you give me far too much credit. Thank you so much.

You're most welcome, but I always give just the right amount of credit. Ask the people I beta-read for [wry] ...

Peace.1