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Jean had gone to pick up the boss. He hadn’t anticipated any problems; the boss, despite everything, was pretty easy to get along with, and at this time of day, traffic wouldn’t even be bad.
He hadn’t remembered the girlfriend until it was too late.
“What do you want with Ed?” she asked suspiciously. It wouldn’t have bothered him so much if she hadn’t been ominously tapping a wrench against her palm while she asked.
“Not sure,” Jean admitted. “The chief—uh, the fuhrer—wants him to fix something. I didn’t ask what.”
“I see. So you don’t ask questions. Interesting.” Tap. Tap. Tap. “Which one are you?”
Which one? “I’m…Jean Havoc. Nice to meet you. And you’re—”
“Winry Rockbell,” she said. He’d known that, of course. Winry Rockbell, the automail mechanic the boss was living (in sin, whispered his mother’s voice) with.
“Jean Havoc,” she repeated to herself. The tapping turned more thoughtful than menacing. “Oh, right. You’re the other contractor, aren’t you?”
Jean blinked. He’d never heard himself described as “the other contractor,” but it was accurate, as far as it went. “I guess I am,” he said.
“So why are you running errands for that Mustang guy?” she wanted to know.
Again, he’d heard the chief described many ways, often not complimentary, but “that Mustang guy” was a new one.
As for the question, the chief tended forget that Jean didn’t technically work for him anymore. Sometimes he asked for things he had no right to ask for. Most of the time Jean called him on it, but every once in a while he let it slide. Like now. Picking up the boss wasn’t a hardship.
All that was true. He didn’t think he wanted to say it to the girl with the wrench, though.
“I get paid by the hour,” he said instead. That was also true.
She smiled. Not a sweet smile, but like one of Ed’s smiles. Fierce, Jean thought, was probably the best word for it. “Glad to hear it,” she said.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Jean had originally hoped she might go and get the boss for him, but that was looking less likely every second. He might have to hoist the wheelchair out and do it himself, which would be a hassle. Maybe she’d help him with the wheelchair, at least.
“Havoc,” she said abruptly. “That’s right. You’re not using your legs, are you?”
He wasn’t sure whether to be pissed off about the way she’d put that or not. Not using them. Like he’d just woken up one day and decided he and his legs were quits. On the other hand, there wasn’t a bit of pity there, which was nice. Well, there wouldn’t be, would there? Automail mechanic.
He let it go. He was lousy at being mad, anyway.
“Yeah, the legs are pretty useless,” he said.
She tipped her head to the side and peered into the car. “So how’s your car set up?”
Right. As far as she was concerned, his legs were irrelevant. Clearly the point here was how he’d fixed up his car. She and Ed were making more sense all the time.
“Basic stuff,” he said. “I’m not a mechanic, myself. See?” He leaned back. She peered in the window, eyes bright with interest.
“Ah,” she said, leaning forward until her hair was all but suffocating him. “Broom handles attached to the pedals. You weren’t kidding when you said basic. How the hell do you steer?” She pulled back out of the car, much to Jean’s relief, and stared at him.
“It is tricky,” he admitted. “The clutch is a bitch. Uh, excuse me.” What was he excusing himself for? She lived with Ed; she probably didn’t even recognize speech without swearing in it.
She raised an eyebrow. “You’re excused. Keep explaining.”
“Explaining?”
“The clutch.”
“Oh. I have to keep one hand on the wheel, so I can usually hold onto the clutch or the gas with the other hand and brake with my elbow. It’s fine if I just want to brake, but it’s hell every time I change gears. Then I have to steer with one hand, swap between the gas and the clutch with an elbow, and shift with my other hand.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” she told him. “You must have freakish upper body strength.”
He was definitely offended now. Most cripples didn’t even try to drive, did they? He thought he’d done pretty damn well for himself, and here was this girl he didn’t even know, coming out of nowhere and mouthing off about his ingenuity and possibly his arms, of which he was rather proud.
He was never picking the boss up at home again.
“I can do better,” she said, like he’d challenged her.
“Of course you could,” he said, confused and annoyed. “You’re a mechanic.”
She frowned at him. “I mean I am going to do better. Get out of the car.”
“What?” he yelped. “I’ve gotta pick up the boss!”
“I thought you were paid by the hour,” she said, crossing her arms impatiently.
“I am paid by the hour, but there’s theft and then there’s highway robbery, and this—”
“Havoc? What are you doing here?” The boss’s voice had never sounded so good.
“I’m here to pick you up,” he said, relieved. “Chief wants you for something.”
“Wants me for what?” Ed demanded. Jean had a moment of acute déjà vu.
“I don’t know, Boss,” he said wearily. “Do you want the job or don’t you?”
Ed eyed him with those creepy gold eyes of his, then turned to Winry. He inspected her, too, from expression to wrench, and started to grin. “Win. Did you attack Havoc?”
“I didn’t attack anyone,” she snapped.
“Okay, okay,” he said, hands up don’t-shoot-me style. “It’s just he looks kinda panicky.”
“I was going to fix his car,” she said. “But he claims he’s too busy. All I can say is, if he gets himself killed in traffic with this stupid, jury-rigged disaster, it won’t be my fault.”
This last was directed at Jean, with gimlet eyes to match.
“So you’re gonna take me to see Mustang for reasons unknown and get me killed in traffic, Havoc?” the boss asked. Grinning. The thing about the boss was, he had no sympathy at all. Like a lizard.
“I’ve been driving this car for months,” Jean insisted, feeling attacked on all sides. “I haven’t had a problem yet!”
“Luck,” Winry said confidently.
“How’s it work, anyway?” the boss asked, peering in. Jean had a face full of blond hair again. This was turning into a long day.
“Yikes,” Ed concluded.
“I told you,” Winry said.
“Hey, if you get us to the office and back without getting us killed, you can have Winry fix it then,” the boss said. Like it was the obvious answer, like it was the most natural thing in the world.
“I couldn’t take up your time,” Jean started to say.
“You’ll be doing me a favor,” Winry said. “It hurts to even think about you driving in that. I’ll give you a good deal.”
“Winry’s idea of a good deal,” Ed muttered, checking the passenger side and finding a wheelchair there instead of a seat, moving to the backseat and gingerly shuffling weaponry off of it.
“Speaking of which, it’s time for your tune-up, Ed,” Winry said, leaning into the car again. Jean squished himself back against the seat. “Don’t think you can avoid me forever.”
“It’s sick that you charge me for those. I’m just saying,” the boss muttered. Jean was inclined to agree.
“You’re my best customer,” Winry said sweetly. She leaned back and tapped the wrench against the car door, then pointed it at Jean. “I’ll see you soon,” she said. It sounded distinctly like a threat.
Ed snickered.
* * *
As it turned out, it was a month before he made it back to Rockbell Automail. He’d hoped, foolishly, that Winry had forgotten all about him.
“So. Jean Havoc,” she said, appearing immediately after he drove up and looming over him. “Here to pick up Ed?”
Ed, who had no feeling for his fellow man, was sitting on the porch with Armstrong laughing, and showed no sign at all of wanting to come help.
“Ah. No,” Jean said, surreptitiously checking for wrenches. “You said something about fixing my car. So I thought…”
The way she went from scary to giddy in an instant, Jean thought, was more off-putting than the wrench.
“You want me to fix it?” she asked with manic glee. “That’s great! Perfect! Here!” She ran around to the passenger side, dragged out the wheelchair, pulled it around to his side of the car, and yanked open his door.
He hoisted himself into the chair as quickly as possible. Given the look on her face, he was afraid that if he didn’t hurry, she’d try to manhandle him into it herself.
“Alright!” she said, still with the glee. “Get out of here! I’ll take it around the side and call you when it’s done! I’ll need to rewire pretty much everything and disassemble the entire brake system for a start, so it might take a while. It’ll cost a fortune, too. You’re lucky I like you. Go talk to Ed and Alex.”
And she hopped in his car and, after only minimal fiddling with broom handles, pulled it around the side of the building and out of sight.
Jean sat at the side of the road staring after her, wondering what had just happened.
“Sorry, Havoc,” came the boss’s supremely unsympathetic voice. “You don’t know how much she’s been looking forward to this. She’s been doing research.”
Still slightly dazed, Jean turned to the porch, and noted that there was a ramp leading up to it. He was sure there hadn’t been a ramp there last month. Ed’s expression dared him to make something of it.
He quietly wheeled up the ramp.
Armstrong was bending large strips of metal into strange figures for reasons unknown. Jean was willing to bet it had something to do with automail, and that Winry had made him do it. The boss, meanwhile, was transmuting complicated knots of wires into even more complicated knots of wires. Purpose, once again, unknown.
They made a funny picture, the two of them: sitting on the porch in the afternoon sun, doing chores and chatting. People passing by and waving, because sometimes it seemed like everybody knew the boss. Maybe Ed had transmuted this part of Central into a tiny eastern town. It didn’t feel like the rest of the city at all.
“So what’s the megalomaniac up to, Havoc?” Ed asked, scowling at his knot of wires.
Jean wheeled closer, lit a cigarette, added himself to the picture. “He’s got some diplomatic stuff up north this month,” he said, trying to be a bit diplomatic himself.
Ed made no such effort. “He’s trying to keep your crazy sister from overthrowing the government again, Alex,” he said, grinning happily.
Armstrong harrumphed, and bent a half inch thick piece of metal with his bare hands. Ed was intimidated not at all.
“And then Lan Fan and Greelin are coming at the end of summer, right?” Other people, Jean thought, might have said ‘the Emperor of Xing and his bodyguard.’ “That’s gonna be a bitch,” Ed continued blithely. “Remember last time? We’re gonna have to lie and tell Mei Chang they’re not here; we’re gonna have to steal all her newspapers again. And I bet we’re gonna have to have that talk with Lin again about how he shouldn’t march across the desert and conquer Amestris.”
‘We.’ For someone who professed not to care about this country, and especially not about its Fuhrer, the boss took on an awful lot of personal responsibility.
“I wonder, Edward Elric,” Armstrong rumbled. “How did you talk him out of it the last time?”
“Huh? Oh. Just pointed out that it would suck for his people if he marched them across the desert like that.” He shrugged. “They’re neither of them bad guys, really. Greed and Lin. It’s just…wanting more than they can have is how they roll.”
“Ed!” Winry shouted from the other side of the house before anyone could respond to that. “Bring me some 3/8 copper wire!”
He tipped his chair back. “Insulated or not?” he shouted in her direction.
“Insulated! Who the hell uses bare wire in a car, Ed?”
“How the fuck would I know?”
“And I want wirecutters. And clamps!”
“You went over there without clamps?” he asked incredulously.
“Shut up, Ed!”
He rolled his eyes and stood up. “Havoc, you want a beer or something while I’m up?”
He was sitting on Edward Elric’s porch while Ed offered him beer and Ed’s girlfriend worked on his car. There was something surreal about it. “No, I’m fine, thanks. Any reason she’s having you get this stuff instead of getting it herself?” Winry had seemed a very do-it-yourself kind of person.
Ed shook his head. “She’s eviscerating your car. She’s probably so tangled in machine parts she can’t even move. I’ll be back.”
And off he went, unaware of the effect the words eviscerating your car might have on a person.
“I think I’ll go check on things,” he told Armstrong, trying not to sound panicked.
Armstrong smiled benevolently, then twisted some rebar into a tortured shape. “I wouldn’t worry too much, Jean Havoc,” he boomed.
Easy for him to say. No one had told him his car was being eviscerated.
And eviscerate was definitely the word for it, Jean discovered. How could one small girl do so much damage in such a short time without the aid of alchemy?
He wheeled cautiously closer. It looked like she’d reached into the hood, yanked the engine out by force, and then burrowed in where the engine should have been. It was horrible. Horrible.
“What are you doing?” he asked. Whimpered, really.
A blond head popped out of the wreckage. She blinked at him. “Fixing your car,” she said.
Jean begged to differ.
“More specifically, what are you doing?” he asked, moving next to the hood and peering into it in the spirit of masochism.
“Don’t ask specifically,” Ed warned from immediately behind him. Jean nearly jumped out of his chair. “Specifically will get you stuck here all day.”
“Some people appreciate the beauty of my work, Ed,” Winry said, reaching out an imperious hand for her wires and tools.
“Your funeral, Havoc,” Ed muttered, passing the equipment and scurrying off without a backward glance.
“Right,” Winry said with that unsettling, bright-eyed enthusiasm. “So. What do you want to know?”
* * *
The next week proved to be interesting in several different ways.
First and strangest, Jean acquired Edward Elric as his personal chauffeur for the duration, because the car (to no one’s surprise) ended up needing more than one day of work. Winry pointed out that she couldn’t drive Jean around and fix his car at the same time. Further, that Ed was almost always going to the same place as Jean anyway, and if they were both constantly going off to dance attendance on that Mustang guy, they might as well do it together.
It was a bizarre reversal, having Ed drive him around. The boss was a pretty good driver. That seemed odd.
Second, he got an education on the inner workings of a car like none he’d had before. Like none he’d dreamt of before. Winry told him everything there was to know about the theory of car workings, but refused to tell him what exactly she was doing to his car. She said she’d explain once she was finished. He tried not to wonder if that meant she wouldn’t know what she’d done until she’d done it.
He also hadn’t gotten an explanation as to why an automail mechanic knew so much about cars. Unless he counted the boss’s whispered machine freak as an explanation.
Third and most unsettling, he was starting to see what the boss saw in Winry Rockbell.
She was beautiful, for one thing; a tough, self-reliant kind of beauty. And she really was a genius; the boss hadn’t exaggerated a bit. Unlike Ed, though, she was pretty patient with people who weren’t her level of smart. Didn’t think less of you if it took you a while to understand. She was a good teacher, passionate about her subject. The way her eyes lit up when she was talking about something she loved…
And her body was amazing…
And Ed was going to kill him.
Jean’s love life so far had been an unmitigated disaster. He felt sure, though, that falling for the boss’s girlfriend was a disaster the like of which he’d never touched on before. It wasn’t that he was planning to do anything about it. But still. Ed was a goddamn genius, and Jean worried that he might just know.
By the end of the week, Jean was jumping at small noises and generally living in terror.
* * *
“Good news for you,” the boss said when they pulled up outside the automail shop on Friday. “Your car’s done. So I’m just gonna drop you off, okay?”
Jean blinked. “Where are you headed, Boss?”
“My place,” he said. Which didn’t make any sense.
“But…you live here. Don’t you?” Was Jean supposed to pretend he didn’t know that?
“I did until she kicked me out.” He shrugged.
“She kicked you out?”
Ed gave a sidelong look that suggested Jean was making a big deal out of nothing. “Yeah. She said the furniture costs were too high. Look, d’you want to go get your car or don’t you?”
“I do, but…when did this happen?”
“Like. Wednesday?”
“But yesterday you and your brother were still on her porch when Breda drove me home.”
“Yeah, we stayed pretty late. Why?”
Apparently they were not working from the same principles, here.
“You two broke up?” Jean felt the need to be clear on this.
“Yeah,” Ed agreed, willing to humor the madman.
“And yet you still…she…you can just sit on her porch and that’s fine?”
“She’s my best friend,” Ed said. “Why wouldn’t it be fine?”
Right.
* * *
“Luckily,” Winry said, “you had power steering and four-wheel hydraulic brakes to start with—sweet, by the way. Usually only the military rates that kind of stuff. Where’d you get this car?”
“Present from Rebecca,” Jean said. And now he could face Rebecca again, because his car—his beautiful, beautiful car, which he loved so much—looked like a car again. As opposed to the heap of scrap it had resembled for most of the last week.
“Rebecca?” Winry frowned.
“Hawkeye’s old friend, Rebecca. Did you meet her? She came up for the coup.”
Her expression cleared. “Oh, that Rebecca. Riza keeps promising to introduce us, but I think Ed’s been sabotaging it deliberately.”
Jean agreed with the boss on this one. Firmly, firmly agreed. But did not say so.
“So why was she buying you cars?” She raised a very suspicious eyebrow. Did she honestly think he had women buying him cars for immoral purposes? He should be so lucky.
“She took a lot of my stock, didn’t feel like paying for it in anything traceable. She had some conspiracy theory about how it was all being tracked by the old government. ‘When they gun me down, I don’t want it to be because I paid you for bombs on credit,’ that’s what she said.”
Winry stared.
“She’s insane,” Jean elaborated.
“About your car,” Winry said, dropping that entire subject. “I didn’t end up doing anything too complicated. Like I told you, I rewired the pedals. Originally, I was going to make it so instead of pushing the brake pedal, you’d pull the hand brake. Well, what used to be the hand brake. Then I thought, you’d have to be pushing the clutch at the same time, and you’d have no-hands steering, and you’d probably die.”
“Got it.”
“So I just put this handle on the right—it’s the clutch and the gearshift. It’s like a motorcycle…sort of. You squeeze to clutch, turn the handle to shift. And the brake is the same idea, but it’s actually on the wheel. Squeeze to brake.” Not complicated, she’d said. Sheesh. “You’re gonna have to squeeze like hell, though. I haven’t figured out…there’s got to be some way to make this less mechanically irritating. It shouldn’t have to be so much work—one-armed steering, tricky braking. This is only going to work because of your crazy arms. Thank Breda.”
He’d told her—possibly defensively—about the way Breda had bullied him into lifting weights while he was still, for God’s sake, in the hospital. She had largely used this information as a tool with which to mock him. In a strange way, it reminded him of home.
“Well?” she said.
He must have missed something. “Well what?”
“Well, are you gonna try it out, or just sit there?” She grinned at him. “Come on, I want to see if it works!”
“If it works?” Jean tried hard not to get swept away on that smile. “You swore up and down that you knew exactly what you were doing!”
“Well, you looked so upset,” she said unrepentantly, then tugged impatiently at his wheelchair. “Come on, don’t you want to try it out?”
He did, actually.
She’d built him a fold-out ramp on the passenger side. A real ramp, not the board he’d been using. Then she’d put strategic straps that made it easier for him to lift himself into the driver’s seat. Then, too, she’d put straps on the floor of the car for the wheelchair, so it wouldn’t roll around while he was driving.
She was a genius.
“Okay!” She said, allegedly sitting in the backseat, actually leaning most of the way into the front. “Let’s see what happens!”
Genius she might be, but he’d appreciate it if she could learn to say things in a non-horrifying way.
He started out with a fair bit of caution, because he was half-expecting something to explode. After a couple of blocks, though, he was having too much fun figuring out the controls out to worry about it.
She was right, the boss was right, they were all right. The broomsticks had been stupid. They had involved a lot of lunging and doubling over and veering wildly around the road while trying to change gears. This? This was almost like real driving. True, it was tricky to brake and steer with the same hand, he wasn’t used to the way the shifting worked, and it did take a fair amount of strength, but he didn’t have to go looking for anything; it was all right there.
In fact, maybe…maybe he could really drive.
He took them south of the city to a dry lakebed, had Winry put on a seatbelt, and tested out everything he’d ever learned about evasive maneuvers in driving. To his amazement, he could do a lot of exciting things. Not everything, though—at one point he skidded twenty feet sideways and had a moment when he seriously thought he would manage to roll the car on completely flat land.
They came to a halt. Dust settled. Jean waited in terror for the woman-rant from the back. He’d been surprised he hadn’t gotten it after the first 180, but back then, everything had been going right, so maybe that was why she hadn’t said anything. Now that things had gone wrong, he figured the rant was inevitable.
What he got instead was: “If I’d known this was a stunt car, I would've replaced the shock absorbers.” Then, after a pause, “Do you want sturdier tires? Do you do this all the time? You’re going to mess up my brakes.”
Jean realized he should know better than to try to predict what Winry’s reactions were going to be to anything.
“I don’t drive like this all the time,” he reassured her. “They taught me how to do this stuff when I was driving the chief around. Just in case we were in a car chase or something—not that we ever were. I just thought…I thought if I could still do this, they might let me drive him around again.”
Winry considered that. “You do get paid by the hour,” she remarked.
“I do get paid by the hour,” he agreed.
“Well.” She tipped her head to the side. “In that case, I think that trick would have worked just now if you’d let go of the wheel a little sooner. You’re trying so hard not to brake accidentally, I think you’re holding on to the non-brake part of the wheel too long.”
Jean digested that in disbelieving silence.
“Try it again,” she said.
* * *
When they finally pulled in at the automail shop, Winry gave a happy sigh and stretched her arms possessively across the backseat.
“I am a genius,” she informed Jean.
He could only agree.
“And you’re a madman,” she continued. She didn’t sound like she found it too upsetting. “So who taught you to drive like that? That was insane!”
Jean turned to grin at her. “When I came to work for the chief, Hawkeye took me aside and asked if I was a good driver. I said I was. She asked if I generally obeyed traffic laws. I said I did. She said, ‘Well, we’ll have to break you of that,’ and then she took me to a dry lakebed near East and just about scared me to death.”
“Riza taught you!? Oh God, that’s…well, it makes sense, really, but it’s….” She shook her head and started laughing.
She was beautiful when she laughed. She was beautiful. And brilliant, and she didn’t think he was a cripple, and because of her, he could drive again, and…
And this was how it always started. Well, with variations. He found someone amazing, he asked her out, and maybe she said yes and maybe she kicked him to the curb, but either way, either way, it always ended in disaster. One time, notably, it had ended with attempted murder, third degree burns, and paraplegia.
He didn’t have the guts to face it again. He wasn’t even going to ask. Anyway, she’d only just broken up with the boss. It wouldn’t be decent.
“Take me to dinner,” she said.
Jean blinked. “What?”
“Dinner.” She folded her arms. “It’s part of my fee. I was so busy trying to finish this today, I didn’t have time to get groceries, and then you took me out joyriding for so long there’s no time to cook even if I did have groceries. So. Dinner.”
“You want me to take you to dinner,” Jean said blankly. Like so many things having to do with Winry, this conversation fit nowhere into the world as he knew it.
“Yes. I want you to take me to dinner,” she repeated with surprising patience.
Jean stared. “Okay,” he said eventually.
She grinned. “Great! I want to go to that Cretan place on Main and Fifteenth! And don’t get your hopes up too much about your bill, because even with dinner, it’s going to be obscene. Do you know how much work I did? Hours! Days! I had to go harass the car guys on Cedar Street, and they always talk your ear off.”
Jean put the car back into gear, and decided to stop pretending that he had any control over this.
* * *
“So,” he said after they’d ordered, “Ed tells me you two broke up?”
He wanted someone to explain this to him in a way that made sense. He hoped he’d have better luck with Winry than he had with the boss.
“Nope,” she said. His heart sank. “I kicked him out,” she continued. “That’s different.”
Okay. Okay, maybe they were getting somewhere.
“Why did you kick him out?” he asked.
She shrugged. “We fight like kids. It was one thing when we were kids, but we’re too old to keep that up every day. And if we’re too old for it now, imagine what it would be like in ten or twenty years. Eventually, one of us would have had to kill the other one just for some peace.”
It sounded like it ought to make sense, Jean thought. And yet it didn’t make any sense at all.
“But he’s still going to be at your place all the time?” he asked, giving it one last try.
She looked surprised. “Why wouldn’t he be? He’s my best friend.”
Jean gave up.
“Anyway, tell me about your contracting job,” she said, bright-eyed with interest. “I know what Ed gets up to, but he’s an alchemist. What do they have you doing?”
“Basically, I’m Hawkeye’s security backup,” he explained, yielding control of the conversation. “Anything to do with security that doesn’t require legs, that’s what I do. Mostly I supply equipment, but I also train the new guys on the theory of it. Sometimes I work with Kain—helping him spy on people with his tiny machines.”
“That sounds creepy,” Winry wisely observed.
“It would be if it were anyone but Kain,” Jean agreed. “Lucky for Amestris, Kain gets embarrassed if he accidentally looks in somebody’s grocery cart, so if he’s not convinced you’re plotting against the state, he’s not listening.”
“Kain will die someday,” Winry pointed out.
“And the technology will linger on,” Jean acknowledged. “I know. My big hope is that Kain will outlive me. I don’t know what else to do about it.” He tapped a fork gently against his water glass, listened to it chime. “Anyway, most of those spying things were Hughes’s, originally. And he got the ideas for them from high command.”
“You’re saying we’re screwed.” He glanced up, and was surprised to see her smiling.
“I wouldn’t say screwed,” he said. “Unless the idea of the military spying on everyone really bothers you, in which case, yeah. The whole country is screwed.”
She tipped her head back and laughed. He didn’t know why, but he also didn’t care. It was good to see her laugh.
“And what about you?” he asked when the laughter died down. “What’s new in the world of automail?”
He was aware that he’d just opened himself up to a solid hour of the latest Rush Valley techniques. He didn’t mind. It was worth it to see her so enthusiastic.
This, Jean thought as Winry filled him in on the new alloys from Drachma, was the best date he’d been on in years. Shame that it wasn’t actually a date.
* * *
Jean had somehow gotten incorporated into the porch crowd without his knowledge or consent. It wasn’t that he minded—actually, he enjoyed it—but he’d feel better if he had any idea how it’d happened. He’d just woken up one day and realized that he’d spent nearly every evening of the entire last month sitting on Winry’s porch. What?
And it was Winry’s porch; Rockbell Automail was still the place everybody congregated. The boss hadn’t even tried to shift them to his new place.
“Ed doesn’t know how to have a home of his own,” Winry explained when Jean mentioned this to her. “He understands that other people have homes, but he doesn’t know how to have one himself. And, in his mind, everybody gathers at a home—so since he doesn’t have one, mine’ll do. This was never his home, you know; it was always mine. As far as he’s concerned, not much has changed.”
The thing about the Elrics was, the more you learned about them, the more depressing they got.
In any case, the porch crowd was an interesting bunch.
The old office was usually there—Hawkeye because she was mysteriously friendly with Winry. Breda because he couldn’t be kept away. Falman because Breda dragged him. Kain because Winry had demanded an introduction, and then bonded with him over electronics. The chief, occasionally, because Ed made it so. (The chief was kind of a production, because Ed seemed convinced that people were lurking in the shadows waiting to take him out. So he couldn’t just sit on the porch. He had to sit on the porch in disguise. These disguises almost always involved straw hats, and the porch crowd agreed that that was because Ed found straw hats hilarious.)
There were other military people—Alex Armstrong, Maria Ross, Danny Brosh, Rebecca Catalina (they couldn’t keep her away forever), a huge bear of a man who sometimes visited from North and whose name Jean was afraid to ask.
Then there were the other ones. Sometimes he wasn’t even sure where they came from, because the boss and Al and Winry were willing to put up anyone they knew who visited Central.
There was Mei Chang from Xing, who was doing a few years of alchemy research at the university. There was Paninya from Rush Valley, who was terrifying in combination with Winry. There was Rosé from Lior, sometimes. He didn’t know the story with Rosé, but she generally had a shell-shocked expression, and she seemed to know Ed, Al, and Winry equally well. There was a lady who sometimes came by with her kids, chatted with the boss, and then wandered off again. There were the chimera guys. There was a kid who apparently came from some mining town on the border. He knew the boss and Mei Chang.
“It’s all pretty tangled,” Winry said. “None of us have held still together for this long before. We’ve never had people come to us. When you see them all at once like this—it’s crazy, isn’t it?”
It was crazy. But interesting.
“How’s that guy doing?” Ed asked Mei Chang one night with a suspicious look.
“He’s fine, tiny man,” she answered, at least equally suspiciously. “Why do you ask? Do you think you can trick me into telling you where he is?”
“Still repenting, is he?” Winry asked. She sounded quite hostile. Unlike herself.
Mei Chang looked almost guilty for a second. “Yes. Repenting.”
“Don’t pick on Mei Chang,” Al said, taking the seat next to hers and passing her a cup of tea. “You know he saved her life. It’s not her fault.”
Mei Chang accepted the tea, shuffled a little behind Al, and glared. Al gave the boss and Winry a you great bullies look.
This was Mysterious Conversation #539 for Jean. Sometimes he could work backwards through rumors and get a general idea of what people were talking about, but more often, he didn’t have a clue.
Behind him, Paninya and Rebecca were talking about weapons, which was worrying. Falman and Rosé were discussing the history of religious belief systems in Amestris. There weren’t all that many people around tonight, but still, chaos.
I used to have such a peaceful life, Jean thought. Apart from the political uprisings. What happened to that?
As if in response to the thought, Winry wandered over to sit next to him. She grinned at him. He grinned back before he noticed that the boss was watching them. The boss was watching them more and more often, lately. Watching with an unreadable expression that made Jean really uncomfortable.
I haven’t done anything! he thought loudly in Ed’s direction.
Ed didn’t show any signs of possessing telepathy.
“So we should go to that new Xingian place tomorrow,” Winry was saying. Jean turned to her and tried not to worry about whatever the boss was making of it.
“Which Xingian place is this?”
“The one by the library,” Winry said. “The expensive one.”
She hadn’t lied when she’d said his bill was going to be obscene. She’d taken pity, of a sort, and said she’d cut the bill in half if he’d buy her dinner on Fridays for an undetermined number of weeks.
He’d agreed. He wouldn’t have agreed if he’d realized how many ridiculously expensive restaurants there were in Central. Winry seemed to have an inordinate love of places that specialized in foreign cuisine, which meant that a lot of their ingredients had to be imported, which meant that they felt justified in charging amounts of money comparable to house payments for every meal.
It wasn’t that Jean couldn’t afford it. Being the Fuhrer’s contractor was a pretty cushy job. Still, it was painful to see that much money disappear all at once.
“Do we have to?” he asked.
“I could always just up your bill,” she allowed.
“What time should I pick you up?” Defeat admitted.
“Six, thank you.”
If she’d been any other woman, he would have been sure he could call this dating. But she was Winry. Mostly he felt like calling it manipulation, or possibly robbery. It said something bad about his state of mind that he was enjoying the hell out of it anyway.
* * *
The density of the porch crowd tapered off as winter approached. “The novelty of having us in Central is wearing off,” Winry said. Jean suspected it was as much a function of the weather as anything. By late November, the big crowd was limited to Sunday nights, and only a few diehards stopped over during the week.
Which was how Jean found himself, on a Tuesday night, sitting alone with the boss and Winry while the two of them had a stare-off.
Stare-offs were a thing with them. It seemed to be their one concession to politeness. If there were people around, they sometimes swallowed the shouting arguments and just stared instead.
It was usually impossible to say what they were staring about. This was no exception. Everything had been normal: Ed complaining about the chief, Winry telling stories about her customers, both of them asking Jean about work. (He and Breda were working with the architects on a new capitol building, seeing as Rebecca Catalina and Olivia Armstrong, between them, had reduced the last one to rubble.)
Conversation had wound down to going-home time, and Jean had said he should head off. Winry had said, “Stay awhile.” Ed had made a dubious noise.
Stare-off.
After a few minutes, Jean got bored and went into the house to make coffee.
A few minutes after that, Winry walked in scowling. This did not necessarily mean she’d lost the stare-off. Jean hadn’t worked out exactly what counted as winning; usually they both ended up scowling and irritable.
“Coffee?”
She stopped scowling in favor of giving the coffee an interested look. Jean felt accomplished.
He gave her a moment alone with her coffee, then said, “You wanted to talk to me about something?”
She frowned at him.
He hadn’t done anything to piss her off, had he? Usually she made it clear when she was pissed off, which was lucky, because God knew she was never clear about a single other thing. Apparently the children of Resembool were raised to be baffling.
No, she didn’t seem to be angry so much as…hesitant. Which wasn’t like her. It was freaking Jean out a little.
Eventually she set her coffee cup down, walked over to him, climbed onto his lap, and started unbuttoning her shirt. He stared. She said, “That was fair warning,” then leaned down to kiss him.
Now that. That was pretty clear.
* * *
“Boss? Could I talk to you for a second?” Jean had been torturing himself over the necessity for this conversation since he’d woken up this morning with a mouthful of blond hair.
Ed raised his eyebrows. “Sure. What’s up?”
“Well.” Well. And how the hell was he supposed to say this? “About Winry.”
“Something happened to Winry?” Now he looked worried; Jean was terrible at this.
“No! No, it’s about me and Winry. We’re. That is, she. Or, I guess, we…”
“You’re telling me you’re dating Winry.” Ed rolled his eyes. “Okay. Be strong, Havoc. Good luck.”
“You knew?”
Ed gave him a strange look. “Havoc,” he said. “She’s been trying, in her really special Winry kind of way, to seduce you for months. In fact, I’m pretty sure I got dumped for you. She kicked me out last night so she could jump you. Of course I knew.”
Sometimes Jean forgot how long Winry and the boss had known each other. A lot of the time she was going to be a mystery to Jean, but completely transparent to Ed. It was only natural. Jean wasn’t going to let himself to get a complex over it. She’d dumped Ed, hadn’t she?
“I had no idea,” he said.
“I know,” the boss replied with a crooked smile. “It was embarrassing to watch. But Al’s gonna be happy. He wins the bet this way.”
“Bet?”
* * *
Over the next couple of months, Jean found his stuff drifting over to Winry’s place more and more. He stubbornly held onto his own apartment, mostly so that he could tell himself he wasn’t actually living (in sin) with her, but in practice, he was. He was treating his apartment more as an office than a place to live. And even his work stuff was starting to make its way to Winry’s.
This process hadn’t begun after they’d started dating; that was the problem. He’d felt at home in Winry’s house for ages before that, and now that they were together, he was only a breath away from moving in. And if he did that, he could never look his mother in the face again.
Winry could clearly see that something was bothering him, but she hadn’t figured out what. And he couldn’t bring himself to tell her, because he was aware that it was incredibly stupid. And besides, it would be admitting that he’d gotten to this age and never once lived with a woman. Which he wasn’t eager to admit.
One day Winry came up from the shop to find him already at her kitchen table, poring over work he’d brought with him. She kissed him in passing, told him there were leftovers from the obscenely expensive restaurant of the week in the icebox, and wandered off to shower.
Winry, he now knew, was quite a good cook. He was starting to wonder if all those restaurants were experimental—a could-I-make-that sort of thing. He wished she would just use cookbooks. That would be so much easier on his wallet.
He realized he was planning for cookbooks, and tried not to have a panic attack about how domestic it all was. How much it felt like this was home.
Winry eventually reappeared in the kitchen doorway, freshly showered and changed. “Not hungry?” she asked.
Jean shrugged. “I figured I’d wait for you.”
“You’re pretty old-fashioned sometimes, huh?” She wandered closer and peered at the blueprints for the new capitol building over his shoulder. She was warm and she smelled nice, and he had to peel his brain away from those things before he could answer the question.
“Old fashioned?” He tried to think about it despite distractions. “My mom was always pretty old-fashioned. I guess I was bound to pick up some of it.”
“Makes sense,” she agreed. “So when are we getting married?”
“Wait, what?”
* * *
“I didn’t want to go to your stupid wedding even when I thought I was gonna be the one marrying you!” Ed yelped. “And now you want me to be your maid of honor? Is this some kind of punishment?”
“Look,” Winry said shortly, hands on hips. “I would have picked Riza for it, but Roy”—she pointed accusingly at the chief, who remained carefully blank—“is going to be Jean’s best man, and the two of them are being weird together. I won’t have weird at my wedding, Ed.”
“Uh huh. Because having a guy for your maid of honor isn’t weird, you big freak.”
“It’s normal to have your best friend stand next to you at your wedding, you jackass. And you won’t be my maid of honor. Is there even a name for guys who aren’t married? My gigolo of honor?”
“Being a gigolo takes a lot more work than just standing around being unmarried,” Ed, who could be pedantic at the weirdest times, insisted. “And if you think that helped convince me at all, Win—”
“It’s not a question of convincing you. This is what's going to happen.”
“Oh yeah? What’re you gonna do when you wake up the morning of your wedding and I’m in Xing?”
“Good luck with that, Ed. I know more people in the Border Patrol than you do.”
“What? Why?”
“God bless automail.”
“Hey, Chief?” Jean asked, patting around for his lighter. “You ever wonder how the hell they raise them in Resembool?”
The chief didn’t answer. He did light Jean’s cigarette, though, which Jean took to be a vote of sympathy.
“Brother, I think we can call you the bride’s best man,” Al said, attempting to inject sanity into the conversation. “Or you could be the man of honor.”
“I’m not calling Ed ‘man of honor.’” Winry announced flatly.
“How is that any worse than ‘best man’?” Ed demanded.
Winry huffed.
Ed whirled on Jean. “And you! Why isn’t Breda your best man? I thought you two were close!”
“Breda refused to have anything to do with it,” Jean mumbled around his cigarette. “Says he’ll be distracted from laughing if he has to keep track of a ring.”
“And why isn’t Paninya your maid of honor?” Ed asked Winry, undeterred. “Isn’t she your best girl friend? Aren’t you supposed to have your best girl friend be your maid of honor?”
“You know Paninya has to take care of Dominic,” Winry snapped. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
Jean had heard a lot about this guy Dominic over the last couple of weeks. Apparently taking care of him meant preventing him from braining anyone who pissed him off, and that was likely to be almost everyone before the wedding was over.
“Why can’t Satera and Ridel take care of Dominic?” Ed wanted to know.
“They have three kids, Ed.” Winry’s patience with this conversation was clearly at an end. “Just shut up and accept it. You’re going to be my gigolo of honor.”
“It’ll work out, Boss,” Jean put in, feeling the need to prevent bloodshed. “This way you’ll be at the head of the line for cake.”
“Nice try, Havoc,” the boss said. But Winry was smiling at him, so, hey, some success.
He held out a hand, and Winry came and settled next to him. He was glad he had this soothing effect on her. He wasn’t sure how long it was going to last, though, so he figured he’d better make the most of it while it did.
“Where are we getting the cake, anyway?” he asked.
Her eyes lit up, as they usually did when discussion turned to expensive food or automail. “Sarah’s Pastry on Sixteenth,” she said instantly.
“Red velvet,” the boss said. “Their red velvet is to die for.”
“Yes. Red velvet,” Winry agreed. They smiled at each other.
It was good while it lasted. Sadly, cake was the last thing they agreed on all day.
* * *
After a few weeks of watching the alleged planners of the wedding run in circles and accomplish nothing, Al and Hawkeye quietly joined forces and organized virtually everything. Jean vowed to buy them a really nice present if they got married. Which was starting to look really likely, no matter what the boss thought.
Someone else’s wedding. Someone else’s wedding, which would be someone else’s problem. Jean was thrilled with the idea.
* * *
He’d been dreading the phone call to his mother ever since the word “married” had left Winry’s lips. He had to do it sooner or later, though. And this was later. This was definitely later, because everything had been set up and the wedding was in a month.
He’d figured his mother was not going to be happy.
“What do you mean, you’re getting married?”
And he was so right.
“I mean I’m getting married. Ah. Next month.” He was a grown man. He wasn’t going to cringe. Especially not over the phone; it wouldn’t even do him any good.
“Next month!?”
“Sorry.” So much for not cringing.
“Jean. You never even told me you were dating anyone.”
Well, he hadn’t realized they were dating until fairly late in the game. It wasn’t his fault.
“How long have you known this girl, anyway?”
“…About eight months.” And for one of those months, she’d been with someone else. God, it sounded bad when he thought about it like that.
“Eight months. You’re marrying someone you’ve known for eight months? What…Jean, I don’t know what to say. Who is this girl? Where’s she from? How did you meet her? What’s her name? How old is she? Has she ever been married before? Please tell me she doesn’t have any children.”
“She doesn’t have any children,” he promised.
“And?”
And. And and and, oh God. “Her name is Winry Rockbell. She’s twenty-three, grew up in Resembool. Never been married. She’s an automail mechanic—owns Rockbell Automail in Central. She’s a genius, Mom. You should see what she can do with—she just takes a heap of wires and metal and creates these amazing things that make people’s lives better.”
“Twenty-three,” his mother said. He could tell this conversation was going nowhere good. “And how did you meet her?”
Jean put his head down on the telephone table in despair. “She fixed my car,” he said.
“I see.” Ominous pause. “Why was an automail mechanic fixing your car, I wonder.”
I wonder. I wonder was a very, very bad sign.
“She fixed it so that I can really drive, Mom,” he said desperately.
“Jean.”
God, he’d felt exactly this way at ten years old when he’d accidentally set fire to the shed. “I...happened to stop by her place, and she saw the way my car was set up, and…you weren’t happy with the car either, remember. She’s a mechanic. She took it personally.”
“And what were you doing at her place if you didn’t know her?”
Backed into a corner. His mother’s instincts were terrifying; she always knew what he least wanted to talk about. “…I was picking up her boyfriend. He’s another contractor for, ah, the fuhrer.”
“Her boyfriend.”
“Right.”
“Her live-in boyfriend.”
“…Right.”
“This was eight months ago.”
“…Yeah.”
Silence. Jean let himself hope that he’d just lost the connection.
“I’ll be in Central tomorrow, Jean.”
Of course not.
“You don’t have to do that, Mom,” he tried.
“Oh, but I do.”
She hung up.
This was going to be such fun.
* * *
He hadn’t told anyone about his mother’s visit, not even Winry. It was a combination of cowardice and lack of opportunity. Tomorrow wasn’t exactly a lot of warning.
As a result, Winry burst into the apartment while he was writing training schedules for Breda and his mother was cleaning his kitchen. (His kitchen did not need cleaning; it was perfectly clean. His mother was invariably determined to make it cleaner, though. She bleached the hell out of his entire apartment every time she visited.)
Winry had been intensely busy over the last month. First there had been inept attempts at wedding preparations, until Al and Hawkeye had taken that away, and then there had been a rush of customers as she tried to fit everyone in so that she could take a couple of weeks off for their honeymoon. As a result of all this, she was running on high gear all the time. Probably, Jean thought sadly, it was really alarming to people who didn’t know her.
“Jean!” she said, dashing over to him and slamming to her knees in a way that looked painful. She always did it, though. She said she liked to keep them on eye-level, which tended to make Jean ridiculously happy.
“Look!” She held up a book, and Jean took it. She rested her chin on his knee and looked up at him with bright, maniacal eyes.
It was a book on automobile engineering. The page she was pointing to was filled with meaningless diagrams of the workings of cars.
“See!?” she asked. Hyperactive. So, so hyperactive. His mother disapproved of hyperactive people.
“See a car book?” he asked.
“No, no.” She came around and leaned over his shoulder, pointing wildly at various things. “See this? I think I can make your brakes easier to use if I wire this bit” she pointed out a jumble of lines somewhere under the wheel “like it’s automail. See? There’s no point in making you overuse your crazy arms if we don’t have to. Because we were going almost purely mechanical, but really, we can create so much electronic energy, and we can use that, we can wire it like the sensor plates on an automail arm, and if we do that maybe we can get rid of the shift handle and have everything on the wheel, and the only thing I’ll have to worry about then is getting wires crossed, so—”
And she was off. Jean had to love that she’d figured all of this out when she should have been working overtime on automail. It probably meant she’d pull an all-nighter tonight and be a zombie tomorrow, though.
Unfortunately, he doubted his mother appreciated the sacrifices being made on his behalf. He had to admit that, without the background, what Winry mostly sounded right now was insane.
“How does that sound?” she asked breathlessly.
Jean tried to forget his mother was in the kitchen, and smiled at Winry. “Is this all going on my bill?”
She waved dismissively. “You’re just paying for dinner for the rest of our lives. Isn’t that fair? No bill! I’m so nice.”
He closed his eyes and thought horrified thoughts about decades of expensive Xingian cuisine.
“Hey, I thought you were working today? Because I was just going to drop the book off, but you were here.”
“It’s Sunday, Winry,” he reminded her.
“Oh.” Her eyes widened. “Oh. That’s why it’s been so quiet. I’m supposed to be closed. If I’d known this wedding thing was going to make me so crazy, I’d never have let you talk me into it.”
“Wait a second, who talked who into it?”
“Well, you’re old-fashioned,” she said. “You didn’t say anything, but you’re the one who wanted to get married. Admit it. You have visions of being a cute family man.”
“Well.”
“You do. So I figured, I was keeping you anyway. Might as well get married, right? Only now I’m going insane. Oh! And I need to get back, because if it’s Sunday, then Mr. Fitch is coming in for his tune-up tomorrow before the flowers, and I have to recast all his fingers before then. Because he stuck them in his lawnmower. Can you believe there are people worse than Ed?”
“I wouldn’t have believed it.”
“I know.” She grinned, bounced up, kissed him, and dashed out the door with a shouted, “See you tomorrow!”
He smiled after her. Tomorrow they were supposed to help Hawkeye pick out flowers. Really, they were just going to sit quietly while Hawkeye told them which flowers to pick. Jean was looking forward to it.
“So that was the bride-to-be?” his mother asked.
Oh, fantastic. He really had forgotten she was there. He frantically ran the conversation through his memory and tried to think if they’d said anything incriminating.
“That’s right,” he said cautiously. “She’s been trying to fit a lot in lately so that we’ll have time for a honeymoon. She’s not normally so…usually she’s more calm.”
His mother studied him, arms folded, fingers tapping. Jean wished she would just decide what she wanted to yell at him about and get it over with.
“She came here to tell you she could improve your car?” she asked eventually.
Not what he’d been expecting.
“That’s right,” he agreed. “She says she’s worried about what I’m doing to my wrists with the car the way she has it set up now.”
“Hm,” his mother said. “Will her parents be in town for the wedding?”
“Her parents are dead.” He turned away to look for cigarettes. “In Ishbal. They were doctors; got killed by an Ishbalan they’d saved. Same Ishbalan saved her life when she was a teenager.” He found the cigarettes, tapped one out. “Don’t ask her about it.”
“I won’t,” his mother said quietly. Another considering pause. “Does she mind your smoking?”
Jean lit the cigarette and turned back to face her. “Nope. She grew up with her grandmother, and her grandmother smokes a pipe. She’ll be at the wedding. Sent me the most terrifying congratulatory letter I’ve ever seen.”
“Terrifying?” That tiny quirk of the lip she got when she was trying not to find something funny and failing.
“I am not going to show it to you,” Jean said firmly. She would enjoy it way too much.
“And what does the ex-boyfriend think of all this?” she wanted to know.
“He seems to think it’s funny. ‘Be strong, Havoc,’ he says. And then he laughs.” Jean scowled at the non-present boss. “We’ll see how hard he’s laughing when he realizes he has to walk arm in arm down the aisle with the chief.”
His mother blinked at him. “When he what?”
“Oh.” Oh, he hadn’t meant to go into this. “He’s Winry’s…best man? Man of honor? Whatever Al decides he ought to be called.”
“Al?”
“His brother, Al.” He felt like the more he tried to explain, the more confusing he was making it. “Al and Hawkeye—you remember Hawkeye—they put together pretty much the whole wedding for us.”
“Riza Hawkeye, I remember. She didn’t seem at all the wedding planning type.”
“She’s not.” Jean shrugged. “I think they just couldn’t stand the incompetence anymore.”
“Jean…” She’d uncrossed her arms, the better to rub at her temples. “You’re marrying a 23-year-old orphan whose ex-boyfriend is going to be her maid of honor. The wedding was organized by the ex-boyfriend’s brother and a sharpshooter. You haven’t invited any of your sisters to help, and you know how they’ll feel about that. You’re happy about all this?”
She couldn’t even see the whole picture, Jean thought. She didn’t know about the chief and Hawkeye, and she hadn’t met Ed yet. And then there was Dominic. And the bear guy from North, who Jean had been horrified to learn was invited. It was much weirder than she thought it was. He hadn’t dared add any sisters to it.
“I’m happy,” he said with a shrug. “Keeps life interesting. And now Breda owes me. He hasn’t had this much to laugh at in years.”
She tilted her head and gave the worried-mother look. “You do look happy,” she admitted. “Well.” She fretted for a second longer, then stepped forward and kissed him on the cheek. “When is the wedding? The twenty-second?”
“Right.” He hadn’t told her that. It worried him that she knew.
“I’ll be back on the twentieth, then.” She kissed him on the cheek again. “I love you, Jean.”
And off she went. Didn’t even finish the kitchen, which amazed him more than anything else.
Here he was, rapidly approaching forty, and she was having a fit of ‘little boy all grown up.’
Mothers.
* * *
Getting married, Winry thought. How weird.
She watched Al and Riza walk down the aisle, looking dignified. And good together. Ed didn’t know what he was talking about, as usual.
Ed went next, dragging Roy with him. He was ignoring the music completely, chatting with people as they passed. The chatting, Winry noticed, meant that he could get away with leaning back and plastering himself against Roy. Subtle, Ed was not. And that made the whole thing pretty damn funny, because Roy was really subtle. He assumed that Ed was doing all this to mess with him, when actually Ed couldn’t be bothered to do anything of the sort. Roy was outsmarting himself.
Just watching them together made the security nightmare of having the Fuhrer in her wedding worthwhile. It occurred to her that now that her love life was sorted out, she could gleefully sit back and mock everyone else’s. This was going to be excellent.
After Ed and Roy, it was her turn. She went up alone. It was the only fight she’d had with Riza over how the wedding should go. Her father was dead, and she wasn’t going to accept any substitutes.
It wasn’t like this was a wedding that hugely respected tradition, anyway.
She ignored the music, though she realized it was Ed-like. That stupid wedding walk took too long. She could see Jean right there with the Justice of the Peace; she didn’t plan on dithering now.
(It turned out that Jean’s brother-in-law was a Justice of the Peace, which was useful, because Ed had gone all “priests creep me out” when that question came up.)
Jean was watching her with his “the sun rises and sets on you” look. She’d have thought he’d know better by now. She’d even been extra-crazy on purpose for a while, just in case he hadn’t figured her out. Didn’t change the look. Maybe that meant he was crazy, too. If he was, though, it was a kind of crazy Winry could deal with.
She came up level, grinned at him, and dropped to her knees. (Rosé had spent days dragging her around, looking for a wedding dress that could handle this kind of abuse. Winry didn’t see the point. It only had to last for one day, right? So why bother? But Rosé would have none of this argument.)
“All right,” she said to Jean, ignoring everyone else. “Let’s do this.”
* * *
“Well, that was both irritating and pointless,” Ed said, hip against the table, slice of cake in hand.
“What was?” Al asked.
“The wedding. What the hell? What’s different now? Nothing. How many hours of my life can I not get back? A lot of hours.”
“It makes taxes easier,” Al pointed out reasonably.
“Yeah, for them,” Ed said.
“You’re supposed to let the bride and groom cut the cake, jerk,” Winry snapped.
“It’s what you get for being slow.”
“I tried to stop him,” Roy said. “But I wasn’t prepared to use violence. Not with all the papier mâché around, anyway.”
“Cut me a piece, Boss,” Jean said. Of course Jean would keep things in perspective.
“Me too,” Winry said. “In fact, Ed? You can just cut for everyone. Since you’re so eager.”
“I hate you,” he muttered.
“It’s my wedding day,” she said. “Pretend I’m your favorite.”
“Excuse me?” It was a little, cute-looking, mother-type lady. Who Winry’d never seen before, which was weird, because she definitely hadn’t invited anyone she didn’t know.
“Um…yes?” Cute lady seemed to be talking to her, as opposed to anyone else. Strange.
“It’s so good to finally meet you!”
“Ah.” Finally? “Thanks. What…?”
“Winry, this is…my mother,” Jean said. He was cringing. It was the weirdest thing Winry’d ever seen. Jean knew how to cringe? And…
“You invited your mother and you didn’t tell me!?” He’d made his brother-in-law conduct the wedding and then hadn’t even mentioned his mother? What? He never talked about her in the present tense, so Winry had just assumed she’d died at some point. She hadn’t wanted to ask if he didn’t want to talk about it, but jeez…
Ed laughed until he choked, which served him right.
The cute lady—Jean’s mother, for God’s sake—was starting to look a little amused and evil around the edges.
“Did you ever get around to mentioning my visit last month, dear?” she asked.
Jean rubbed at his temples and refused to look at anyone. Like a kid.
Actually, this was starting to be kind of hilarious.
“Maybe he forgot,” Winry said to Jean’s mother.
“He is so forgetful,” she agreed.
“And that would be such an easy thing to forget,” Winry continued. “I mean, you must visit practically every other day.”
“Or at least every other year.”
“So I don’t blame him at all for not mentioning it.”
“No, no. I’m sure there were lots of important things going on.”
“All right, all right!” Jean wailed. “I’m sorry! Chief, with all due respect, shut up.”
Roy bit his knuckle and tried to look more like the Fuhrer and less like a snickering adolescent. He and Ed completely deserved each other.
“Jean always calls you ‘Mom,’” Winry went on, choosing to ignore the men. “I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s Mary. And you’re Winry. Jean did manage to tell me that much.”
“Oh, I’m so proud.”
“Jesus, Havoc. You married your mom,” Breda said, wandering up out of nowhere and taking a picture.
“Winry is nothing like my mother,” Jean insisted through gritted teeth.
“Uh huh.” Breda smirked. “But I’m standing here looking, and…just like a mirror.” He took another picture, probably as evidence for later arguments. Winry crossed her arms.
“Stop picking on my husband,” she said. And damn, it sounded good.
“Ooh, you gonna hit me with a wrench?” Breda backed away, hands up.
“Don’t laugh, Breda,” Ed warned. “She’s gonna kill someone someday.”
“It’ll be Havoc. Why should I worry?” Breda said. Unwisely.
“Hold this for me, would you, Winry?” Jean passed his glass of wine.
“You’re not thinking you’re gonna chase me on the wheels are you?” Breda asked, backing further away. “Because that won’t really work.”
“The wheel,” Winry pointed out, “is more efficient than legs.”
And they were off. Breda had never been an athlete. He was doomed.
Winry watched them across the room, then got distracted by Dominic, who seemed to be using his grandchildren as a human shield between himself and Granny Pinako. Pointless, since Granny apparently hadn’t noticed him. She was on her way over to see Winry, or maybe just on her way to the cake.
Winry turned back to see Ed hand Mary some cake, just as someone (Jean?) hit a table in the background. The sound of crashing wineglasses briefly prevented conversation.
“The cake is amazing,” Mary said once the noise died down, ignoring it all like a pro.
This being married thing, Winry thought, was getting off to a surprisingly good start.