Fullmetal Alchemist Fan Fiction ❯ Expect the Unexpected ❯ Larger Than Life ( Chapter 6 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

Disclaimer: Don't own Fullmetal Alchemist. Nor do I own the song "Larger Than Life" by Frou Frou. Now you can enjoy the story.

Chapter 6: Larger Than Life
Winry looked up from her papers when she heard Edward walk into the kitchen. At first he looked around with his usual arrogant manner until his gaze settled on Al. Then the arrogance from his face dissipated into surprise. She could clearly see the word, "Oops," written on his features. Then his eyes flashed to her and he looked slightly accusing. Immediately, she felt defensive. "Don't look at me like that, I didn't do anything!" she said crossly, resuming her bowl of cereal and stack of papers. She looked up under her eyelashes to watch the goings-on anyway.
Al was still sitting calmly at the table, looking at Edward. She vaguely saw him gesture to something beside him in a casual manner. "What's this?" she heard him ask.
Immediately, she flicked her eyes to Edward to see his reaction. He still looked a little taken aback at his brother's question. "A...bowl?" he suggested, glancing at said bowl nervously. Winry knew exactly what it was. Why didn't Al know his brother's 'pain relief method?'
"Filled with...?" he encouraged with a sickening helpfulness.
Edward changed his disposition from nervousness to rather vexed. "Isn't it obvious?" he growled, yanking open the fridge and taking out the orange juice.
She opened her mouth before she could stop herself. "Glass, Edward," she reminded. When she felt both brothers' gazes on her, she buried herself back into her papers discretely. Once she was sure they had forgotten about her again, she peered up once more. Then she was quite pleased to see Edward pouring the juice into a glass.
"Do you want any, Winry?" he asked her.
It took her a moment to recover. "Sure." She pointedly ignored the mug of coffee just to the side of her hand, hidden from his view. Momentarily, there was a tall, pink tinted glass of orange juice next to her. And also a little less-than-averaged height, twenty-one-year-old man sitting beside her.
"Why was there a bowl with cigarette ash on the porch, Edward?" Al wanted to know, finally cutting to the chase. That was the first time Winry had heard Alphonse use his brother's name, and it sounded like a rare occurance. Maybe he reserved it for when he was half-past mad, a quarter-to insane??
Edward seemed to not want to answer, as he suddenly started inspecting his glass of orange juice with keen interest. That frustrated Winry a little that he wouldn't answer his brother so she spoke up. "You haven't told your brother your...'pain relief method?' " she asked sweetly, looking at him with an innocent expression.
"Winry," he muttered. "You weren't even supposed to know about it." He glared at her. "Nosy people messing in my affairs." He took a sip of his juice.
"Well? What pain relief method?" Al pressed, looking vastly nonplussed.
Edward began mumbling under his breath. Winry caught a couple words like "...too early..." and "...arguing...' Then finally he seemed to want to just give up. Obviously, he'd meant that it was too early to be arguing. "Do you remember when that shrink diagnosed me with 'phantom pains?' " he asked, sounding a little frustrated.
Al nodded, still looking a little vexed.
"You remember all of the things I tried to relieve the pains?"
Al took a strained breath. "What's your point, Brother?" he hissed.
"Well, they usually happen when it's rainy and thunder out. A couple months ago, Havoc offered me a cigarette since I was tense - and in pain. I went into the bathroom and laid on the bench to smoke. I felt better. Something in the–"
"And you think that because it makes you feel better that it's okay to smoke?" Al demanded, looking mightily hurt.
Ed stood up and glared. "Yes, I do. It's better than not getting any sleep and trying to keep Winry safe here," he threw back, gesturing down towards her.
"Don't bring me into this," she said needlessly, holding up her hands in a gesture of surrender.
Al gritted his teeth and turned to run up the stairs. Edward chewed on his lip for a moment before sitting back down. He let out a frustrated sigh. Winry knew the feeling and could relate. She'd done the like on more than one occasion concerning him. And she would be lying if she said she wasn't a little irritated at him, as well, at the moment.
"You never told your brother you smoked? What type of family relationship is that?" she asked, trying to sound neutral.
She could feel his golden gaze burning the side of her face. She continued staring down at her notebook, not really seeing it. "I was...it was for his own good, Winry. I didn't need him worrying about the health risks of it when it was the one thing that made me feel better, aside from freezing us out of the house," he told her, sounding a lot more calm than what she guessed his expression set off. "And if he knew before now, he would have demanded that I stop." He paused. "Would I sound like an addict if I said that I couldn't?" he asked as if he actually cared what she thought.
Winry looked at him quizzically. "Yes. Why? Are you?" she returned easily, taking a sip of her orange juice.
He shook his head immediately. "No. I don't smoke because of stress; only when my phantom pains are setting in. If you discount last night, of course," he added hesitantly.
"Last night?" Winry thought. "Oh." She looked down at his feet and saw he wasn't wearing socks or those slippers he had declared manly and challenged anyone to argue with him about. "You know, you could have just said something."
"Would you have asked questions?" he countered defensively, reaching for his glass.
She thought a moment. "Maybe. Probably," she answered as truthfully as she could.
"You did anyway. But now you know. And it's still none of your business. Don't think that just because two of my secrets have been bared to the world means you get to know everything about them," he told her, setting his glass back down.
Winry chuckled to herself. "No worries," she told him, still laughing a little. She reached for her glass of orange juice, still looking at him with a bit of a smile. And since she wasn't paying attention to her hand, Winry felt her fingers jam into the glass, cause it to topple one way, swivel a little on the bottom edge and then finally spill, heading towards her and Ed.
He swore. She yelped in a little bit of surprise. They both stood up as the orange juice soaked the table cloth and her notebook. Then the gritted her teeth in frustration when she saw the ink on the page smearing. She reached for a dishcloth on the other side of the table and her hand brushed Edward's metal arm. They both paused for a moment before she continued reaching for the towel. She dabbed the towel over her notebook gingerly, sighing in aggravation. Once her notebook appeared that it would live, she started taking dishes off the table.
"Where's the butler when you need him?" Ed asked, attempting to jest.
Winry smiled a little and leaned over the counter to set her breakfast plate and orange juice glass in the sink. "He has Saturday mornings off," she said lightly, turning. She almost bumped into Edward. With only a few inches between them, Winry pursed her lips. This was interesting. She tried sidestepping to the right, but Edward had the same idea, opposite direction in mind. Then she tried to the left. Edward mirrored her move. Finally, Winry laughed. "Which way are you going to move?" she asked, still laughing.
"Depends," Ed murmured slowly. "Which way are you going?"
She paused a moment when she saw his hand twitch at his side. "Straight?" she offered quietly.
Then she felt a chill on her cheek. Ed wasn't wearing his glove, either. Why hadn't she noticed that? Well, she noticed it now because the metal was cold on her face as he trailed his fingertips along her cheek. She shivered unconsciously. It wasn't the late autumn chill in the air that made her do such, either. She wanted to move, to finish cleaning up the table before the juice settled in the wood. But she also wanted to stay where she was. She was afraid if she said something, then it would break the spell they were both under now. It was obvious Ed was entranced by something since he was looking at her so intently.
"You have a scar," he whispered.
Winry almost fell over from the shock. He said something first? And a comment about her face, no less. If the world didn't end now, she didn't know when it would. She waited for the impact, but maybe it had already come.
"How did you manage that?" She felt him trace the outline of the scar. It was usually covered in makeup when she was outside of her home. Or meeting people in her home. But since she had nothing important to do, the scar was left available to anyone who cared to look for it.
She worked her mouth a moment until words came. "Stray wire from a car. I was helping my dad with some electrical repairs," she mumbled.
Ed drew his hand back. Immediately and rather shockingly, Winry wished he hadn't. "You can do car maintenence?" he asked skeptically.
An indignant look came over her face and she pushed passed him finally. "Yes. My father's mother is a mechanic and he had to know at least a little about the trade or else she'd disown him. And since he knew some, I know quite a bit from him and my paternal grandmother." She reached for the other dishes only to find that they weren't there anymore. She looked at Edward strangely for a moment before bundling up the tablecloth and tossing it near a sliding wooden door.
"What does he do for a living?" Ed asked, leaning back on the bar as Winry reached for a towel.
She paused when she heard his question, though. A sobered expression crossed her features. "He was a doctor, along with my mother," she answered quietly.
"Was?"
Winry shook her head, dismissing it so she wouldn't have to tell him about her past yet. It was too early for them to share their past losses. And ironically, she realized he probably thought the same thing.
After drying off the table a little, Winry reached for her notebook and considered the damage. She knew better than to write with runny ink pens. It they got wet, they would bleed all over the page. She made a few dismayed sounds as she blotted a towel on her notebook again for a little while. When Edward sat back down at the table, she stopped and looked at him, mainly because she could feel him looking at her. "Yes?" she asked politely, the feelings she'd had earlier all gone now.
"What were you writing?" he asked her, trying to make heads or tails from the blotted ink.
"They were song lyrics, but now it's just ink..." she said, dismayed. "I'll have to start all over again."
Edward studied the page. "I can make out some of the words, but what are they? Some different language?" he wanted to know. "Or just blurred out?"
"It's Latin. I take it you never listen really closely when Al plays my music," Winry chided.
He looked at her, down at the paper, and then back up at Winry again. "Oh. No, not really. I'm usually working on a case file in the living room or something. That has my undivided attention to the point of Al answering the phone."
"He's pretty mad at you, you know," she reminded him, smirking slightly at the advantage she had. "What are you going to say to clear things up?"
Edward leaned back in his chair. She figured he would have put it on two legs if he'd been tall enough. Which brought to mind another advantage she had: she was taller than he was, even if it was by an inch. "I'm not going to," he answered after a moment. "We've always had fights, ever since we were little. And always, I would go find him a while after our fight, since he would run off someplace." He stood up again and headed into the kitchen, his metal foot tapping the ground as he did so. It made Winry curious about how he'd come across metal limbs in the first place. "So, we sit and think about what our fight was over and then I eventually go find him."
"Oh. Okay. Well, I'm going to go upstairs and rewrite my lyrics," she said, taking her notebook in hand and searching for another pen, one that wouldn't run if it got wet again. She didn't plan for it to, but just in case.
As she was about to leave the kitchen, Ed stopped her. Which surprised her when he reached out to touch her arm. "Do you...do you want some company?" he asked, sounding a little unsure, or at the very least less-than-confident. Winry had to tell herself, honestly, that was the first time she'd ever seen a male lacking confidence when asking her something.
And now, the very person she least expected to want to sit with her for a long period of time was asking if he could accompany her upstairs. He could have just come with her, without asking, and just sat up there looking miserable from a torture of his own making. Instead, he'd asked if he could. That was something out of the ordinary. And from the look in his eyes, the uneasy look that made her think he was afraid she would naysay him, he was actually sincere and not just trying to find a way to spend his morning. How could she tell him anything else but yes? "Uh, sure, if you want," she replied brightly. "I'm just going to be writing lyrics, nothing exciting."
He shrugged and followed her when she began walking again. "I've done most of the work I needed done already, so why not?"
Winry was faintly surprised, she mused, as they went up the spiral staircase. So maybe he was just filling in an empty morning. She figured he might have spent a goodly while with his brother, had they still been talking to each other at the moment. When they passed his door, she heard Al conspicuously shut the barrier the rest of the way. She heard Edward chuckle from behind her. She tossed a nonplussed look at him over his shoulder. "He's really, really mad, I think," she offered, not caring that her speech had degressed a little.
"I know. He'll get over it. I'm not going to stop; it makes me feel better, and lets me sleep," Ed replied. "It's his fault for looking."
"You left my bowl out there with your cigarette ashes out there," she pointed out as they reached the third floor.
She pictured him shrugging nonchalantly. "I didn't think you'd miss it much; you had four others like it," he told her.
Her laughter echoed off the long, narrow hallway as she went toward the door to her storage room. "What if that particular bowl was my favorite? It'd be ruined, now, for any type of use besides your adopted one." Winry stopped in front of the door with her hand on the knob. There was a sudden strange thought that went through her mind, but it disappeared too quickly for her to figure out what it was. Did it have something to do with her feeling of déjà vû, perhaps?
"What is it?" she heard Edward ask from behind her.
Immediately, she shook her head, dismissing it. "Nothing. Just had a thought, that's all." She pushed the door open and made her way to the alcove, refusing to look around suspiciously. Maybe she would cut back on her time upstairs. At least, alone. Who knew? If the day with Edward in her "thinking room" went okay, there could be a repeat in store. However, there was also every possibility that the day could go badly for numerous reasons. But she would wait until their morning was over until she started thinking on that.
Winry jotted a few lines she could remember, and that was no easy task to remember the Latin sentence structure. She had taken Latin all through high school, and two years of junior high, so she had been rather fluent in it, even when it came to cursing. But now, it was three years later and she was twenty-one. Needless to say, some of her language stores had depleted a little. The structure was a little difficult, more or less backwards from regular English. Then she had to conjugate the words to make them fit properly. Lord knew that if she didn't follow the ethics of the deceased language, she'd have die-hard linguists on her tail for writing ill with Latin. But Winry didn't mind all of the work to translate her lyrics. It usually gave her ample time to consider life and escape somewhere: her thinking chamber, the garden, or occasionally off of her property. Though she highly doubted, now that Edward was 'in charge,' she would be leaving her house very often without him.
After she had written down the first verse and part of the chorus, Winry looked up to jog her memory for the lines. She surveyed the room. There was usually a random word written on the boxes that would trigger a thought, words she'd put there for that exact reason. But during her slow perusal of the room, her eyes settled on her bodyguard. He looked a little...well, she didn't know how he looked, exactly. Edward looked a little impatient, curious, frustrated, and upset at the same time. The latter two she could explain to herself; his fight with his brother had probably left him feeling that way. But impatient and curious? What did he have to feel impatient about? She could take a couple wild guesses what he found so intriguing, but wouldn't be sure unless she asked him.
She continued studying him for a while. He was staring off into space, into a far corner of the room. She knew there was a huge spiderweb there with an equally large arachnid inhabitant. While Winry didn't fear much without good reason, spiders being at the bottom of the list, this particular spider scared her witless. On more than one occasion had it escaped down from its web to rest on the floor a few feet away from her alcove. The most unsettling thing about it was that the eight-spindly-legged beast seemed to always be in the same spot, watching Winry intently. It was a very silly notion for her to entertain, but she was fairly sure that it's numerous eyes would rest on her for long periods of her time spent in the attic. Granted, that never stopped her from coming upstairs because she usally didn't think about the spider. But whenever her eyes would roam the room, she would look at the web, see the dark colored spider, and shudder very visibly. And then, very shortly after, she would see the spider on the floor, four paces to her left and five paces towards the door. The room itself was ten long steps, not very long at all. And for that beast to be in almost the direct middle of the room unsettled Winry greatly sometimes.
Why she hadn't killed it yet was something a little beyond her. She'd tried many times and had complained to Primus more times than she'd tried killing it on her own, which was quite a few. Still, the beast remained there. Winry didn't remember a day that it hadn't been there in the past approximate year. Sometimes, she felt that the arachnid would come after her on her way out of the room until she shut the door. Once, she could have sworn she'd seen it in her hallway on the second floor in the middle of the night. But that would be a great distance for the spider to travel, just to torment her. And what was the reason behind it all? Was the spider some type of test of strength or moral? What significance did a spider that wouldn't leave her alone hold?
Maybe she could get Edward to send it to its Maker?
"Winry?"
Winry was positive she'd left her skin, she was so startled by Edward's voice. A shudder went through her. "Y-Yes?" she stuttered, trying to still her pounding heart by placing her hand lightly over it.
"What is it?" he asked her calmly.
She blinked. "What do you mean?"
"You were staring," he pointed out. "Am I that nice to look at?"
"I was thinking," she argued. But he did have a point; he was nice to look at. "You just so happened to be my focal point when I drifted into thought." There, that was a good reason. She really hadn't intended to have been staring at him. The last thing she remembered was glancing his way for a few prolonged moments before noticing he'd been looking at the spider. That was all.
"Sure." He looked at her a little skeptically, but was grinning insolently just the same. "What were you thinking about?" Ed asked her.
Winry shuddered again, unvoluntarily. "The spider you were staring at earlier," she replied with distaste.
"Oh. That's a heck of a spider," he answered with a shudder of his own. "I'm surprised you haven't sprayed it yet."
She scowled. "I've tried to kill it a few times myself. It's bitten me a couple times, but not long enough to get enough venom to do any damage. I've told Primus to get an exterminator out here, but the beast always disappears whenever it sees the truck pull up."
"I see," Edward murmured.
"And I really want that thing dead, because it always crawls out into the middle of the room and stares at me." She fixed her eyes on Edward for good measure. "And it will sit there for as long as I'm up here," she said. Then she immediately felt silly for going on about her spider paranoia.
"Does it stare at you like it's doing now?" Ed's question caught her off guard.
She looked down at the usual spot on the floor then looked back at her bodyguard. "Yes, as a matter of–" Then she broke off in a shriek when she jerked her head back over to it. She jumped out of the alcove and ran over to Edward.
Instead of the arachnid fleeing from her sudden movement, it took a few spiny-legged steps closer to them. Winry clutched Edward's shoulders with a rather tight grip as she hid behind him. She didn't care she was likely going to leave marks on his shoulders...well, his left shoulder at least. That stupid spider was out to get her! She didn't even have the peace of mind to contemplate the feeling of his metal shoulder underneath her right hand. She just cared that the spider was still looking at her intently.
She heard Edward swear under his breath. "Jeez, there's something wrong with this picture. Let go of my shoulders, Winry," he told her and took a step forward once she did so.
Winry watched him approach the spider. It shirked away from him a little, but it was no match for his stride. Or the metal foot coming down upon it. There was a very reassuring squish as Edward stepped on it rather roughly. But it still didn't ease her any. There was something very foul amuck.
Then the realization of what Edward had just done came to her. He'd just squished her stalking spider with his bare foot. Never mind it was metal and likely had no feeling. He didn't even take the time to, well, find something else to kill it before setting in upon it. That caused Winry to look upon him with a new type of reverence.
"My hero," she said weakly as he looked at her.
He nodded briefly. "My pleasure. Now do you have anything for me to get the spider guts off of my foot with?" he asked curtly, balancing on his right leg and holding his left leg at an angle, showing off the bottom of his foot to her.
She wrinkled her nose in disgust, but made an effort to move to the alcove without having to sit down first. Once she had the tissue box in hand, she made a great effort to keep as far away from the glob of mashed spider as she could. It took a great deal of willpower to remain upright while Edward wiped the remains of her tormentor off of his metal appendage.
"Well, now that that is--"
Winry didn't think. She reached out and grabbed Edward's shoulder, trying to keep him on his feet. She had seen him, from the corner of her eye, start to look imbalanced on his foot. Then she'd seen him teetering on his heel. And the next thing she had known, she'd found herself jumping to his rescue this time. But a good lot that did. She was also unstable on her feet, not having firmly planted herself in one spot. And, even though Edward was kind of small for someone his age, he had metal limbs and they weighed quite a bit! So his weight pulled both of them down.
Would this be a rather embarrassing moment for both of them?