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“Marry me,” he writes, in handwriting too sloppy for a state alchemist.
But he’s not a state alchemist anymore, or even an alchemist at all, really, so he lets it slide.
“Marry me,” he writes, in a surprisingly sober state. This is not to say he doesn’t have a shin-high stack of letters he’d written while drunk and been too cowardly to send; full of promises and wishes and misspelled syllables sloppily strung together that he’d cringed at upon waking with a splitting headache and a stinging loneliness. They all also start with those same two little words: Marry me. Then they devolve.
He’s starting to hate the West—mostly because it isn’t Resembool.
So Ed doesn’t let this one devolve. He simply writes, “Marry me. Yours, Ed” and lets that speak for itself.
This all started because he passed a jeweler’s shop somewhere in Creta that literally made him pause and then backtrack. It was nothing much—just a gold band with a diamond flanked by two sapphires—but it struck him with such an intense longing that he marched inside and bought it on the spot.
“Marry me,” he writes, and drops the ring in the envelope and licks the envelope and tries not to think about her mouth while he does it.
Three weeks later, he checks his mail box he’d rented for while he was abroad and sees a cream envelope marked by her spidery, elegant handwriting. Heart in his throat, he barely makes it out of the post office before ripping the envelope open.
The ring falls into his palm and his heart shatters. He tastes blood from its shards digging into his windpipe.
He scans the letter in a mad combination of disbelief and a sick sense of confirmation of what he knew to be true.
“I will answer when you ask me in person, and not before,” the letter reads, and his windpipe knits itself back together. Not a refusal, then. Not a re-thinking of all the vile things he’s done in his life and a decision to push him away, after all.
Because even if he still has doubts of her feelings, she signed it, “Yours.”
.-.
“Marry me,” he breathes into her ear, splayed upon the ground, the solid weight of her body pushing him into the grass. His suitcase fell off to the side somewhere after she’d seen him returning down the path to Granny’s house and ran to him, shrieking and jumping into his arms and wrapping her legs around his hips. He’d carried her for three seconds before the combination of the sloped hill and his off-kilter balance sent them both to the ground. It’s been a long three days by train but this is worth it.
He circles his arms around her torso, tighter, and squeezes her hard, if only to feel the solidity of her body. She cups the sides of his face in her hands, laughing and crying in the same breaths because she’s Winry and she’s incapable of holding her emotions in check.
“What?” she asks, kissing his cheeks and his nose and his forehead and his ears and his lips again—her lips, her lips! Ed could die for the softness of her lips.
“Marry me,” he says again.
“You know I will,” she says, and starts crying—and laughing—harder. “You really didn’t have anything else to say before that?”
“Like what?” he asks, smelling her hair—grease and lavender. There is no more heavenly combination.
“Hi, maybe? Hello?”
“Didn’t seem important,” he murmurs, and pulls her into a deep, deep kiss that he hopes communicates just how much he loves her.
“Give me that ring,” she says, a little breathless, as they pull away. Ed obliges, digging into his pocket for the little blue box he’s had next to his heart for six months now. He slips it onto her finger and it fits perfect—it sits just above her knuckle like it was made for her finger. It was made for her finger, he decides, as the light catches in the diamond and dances across his eyes.
“Welcome home,” Winry says, and even though he knows he’ll have to leave again in a month, Ed vows never to leave her behind again.
.-.
“Marry me,” Ed murmurs into her ear, his fingers buried deep inside her. She’s panting hard below him, her cheeks pink and lips already swollen from the fervor of his kisses. She snuck into his room hardly fifteen minutes after the tell-tale creaking of Alphonse—visiting from the East—and Granny going to bed. Ed remembers doing the same thing when they were younger and feels a comforting familiarity—and a thankfulness he doesn’t have to spend ten minutes warming up his automail anymore.
“Wh-what?” she gasps out.
Ed rubs his thumb over her and she shudders. “Marry me.”
“Mm-hmm,” she says, and cups her hands around his face to bring him down for a kiss. Many kisses, actually, and suddenly his body needs her, cries out for her, is desperate to be inside her. So he withdraws his fingers, hot and sticky, lets her roll her legs to the sides, and then he’s inside her, and with each rock back and forth he whispers desperately in her ear, “Marry me, Win,” over and over again, like some form of chanting prayer.
“Okay, Ed,” she says back to him, every time, like she knows how much he needs to know she means it, and her fingers are digging into his back and caught in his hair and her body is warm and soft and naked beneath his and God, he missed this—he missed her.
“Okay, Ed,” she repeats, and he’s aware of her voice getting higher, more breathless, more needy, and he responds in kind, until he’s not sure where he ends and she begins. He speeds up, feeling himself nearing release, and just as Winry gives a last great shudder underneath him and yelps into his neck, her teeth baring into the hot skin above his collarbones and her fingernails raking across the scar traveling around his shoulder, he hears banging coming from the room next door.
“She’s going to fucking marry you, Ed, for the love of GOD shut the fuck up!” Alphonse yells, muffled and sleep-deprived through the wall.
Winry, huffing and breathless, laughs and bucks her hips up into him, and says “Okay, Ed,” and that’s all he needs to let himself finish, groaning and gritting his teeth into the crook of her neck, her hands playing in the hair at the base of his neck.
He’s never been a praying man, but this is the closest thing he’s ever found to holiness.
The next morning, Ed drags Alphonse out of bed and throws him into the pond.
.-.
“Marry me,” he mumbles into the side of her neck, miserable and taut with anxiety. The bench at the train station is digging into the small of his back, hard and uncomfortable. Each tick of his pocket watch is one less second he has with her. He debates throwing it to the ground, smashing it into a million pieces. Maybe that’ll stop time. It won’t, of course—he of all people should know that time stops for nothing—but he indulges in the fantasy anyways.
“Okay,” she says, and turns her head to give him a beaming smile. Her fingers trace circles over his scarred knuckles. “Are you ever going to stop asking me that?”
“No,” he says.
“Good,” she says, and plants a kiss on his forehead. “Did you remember that new oil?”
“Yeah.”
“And you have that new maintenance kit?”
“Yeah.” Her hair is distracting.
“And you’re going to write to me all the time?”
“Every damn day,” he says, buried in the crook of her neck. If he stays here, maybe the train won’t ever arrive.
Winry pats his knee. “Keep me updated.”
He doesn’t want to keep her updated, he just wants her to know because she’s there. “Come with me. Buy a ticket right now.”
Winry laughs, loud and fond. “I have three new orders I have to finish by next month.”
“Fuck ‘em,” he says, and she laughs again. He’ll say anything to keep her laughing, keep the wind from tearing it from her mouth and away from his ears.
“Yeah,” she says. “Fuck ‘em.” And then she kisses him, long and deep, and he forgets about stopwatches and time ticking away and his suitcase at his feet.
Then a whistle, high and loud, pierces the air, and she pulls away from him. “There’s your train.”
Ed prides himself in the fact he’s not one for moping—keep moving forward, that’s his motto—but he’s dangerously close to doing just that as he heaves himself to his feet, pulled by her hands and the ring sparkling on her finger.
She pulls him in for one last embrace and he debates never letting go, but duties and knowledge and a promise to his brother make him release her and step onto the train. “It’s only a year,” he says, half to convince her—mostly to convince himself. He mutters a goodbye because anything beyond that feels like too much. She knows. She kisses him soundly and pushes him on board. It’s mostly empty, so he shuffles to a seat, slings his suitcase onto the seat next to him, and pulls open the window.
“Win,” he says, and she laughs to see him poking halfway out of the train.
“What?” she says.
“It’s not going to be a year,” he says. “Nine months, maybe.”
“I was hoping it wouldn’t,” she says, and presses a kiss to her fingers and brushes them across Ed’s as the train begins its trek.
As Ed settles into his seat, unhappy and already lonely, he decides it better be more like six.
.-.
“Marry me,” he murmurs in a bleary delirium, fever roaring under his skin and threatening to consume him from the inside out. Mustang would be jealous of this fire. Mustang’s work is cold, ice cold to the inferno suffocating him. Why is he so cold if he’s so hot? “Marry me,” he pleads to unseen specters. He screams at demons and sobs for someone named “Al” and begs someone named “Win” to marry him. The doctors can only exchange worried glances and wait.
Creta is unstable. Drachma is aggressive. The two do not make for very good neighbors.
Ed had just been trying to visit an archeological digsite. He didn’t know it sat over a coveted vantage point from both sides, tactically necessary for whoever was going to win the conflict between the two countries. He didn’t know that Drachma had planned an attack for the day he went there, alone and unsuspecting.
He didn’t know he’d get caught in the ensuing explosions.
They identify him by the government-issued ID in his pocket, unconscious and bloody in the midst of the wreckage. They identify Winry’s phone number by the blood-soaked business card in his pocket (always ready to hand to the next person he sees who needs automail). He’s taken to a government hospital—this will be a nightmare for Cretans if someone as important as he is dies on their soil—and someone rings for Winry.
She goes very still and says very little, then says “thank you”, hangs up, and slides down the wall to sit until the sun slants into darkness. Then she phones Mustang, packs a bag, and takes the next train to Creta she can get.
She gets there four days later, enters the hospital, and very quietly, very coldly, asks to see Ed.
A nurse leads her to him—she pretends not to notice the disappointment of the other nurses (even in the grips of death, Ed is very attractive). She has to stop and inhale a breath at the sight of him, pale and flushed with a bandaged torso and neck and arm and struggling too hard to breathe. She sits at his side and takes his uninjured hand—the one that didn’t used to be automail—and squeezes it. His eyes are closed, his eyelids a faint blue. She feels sick.
“You worked so hard for that hand,” she says, “it’d be a shame for you to lose it again.”
She sits with him and falls asleep holding his hand, huddled over his knees. The next day, he wakes up sweating and opens bleary eyes to rasp out, “Winry.”
“I’m here, Ed,” she says, holding back tears, and all he does is shift closer to nestle his head in the crook of her arm before returning to sleep with a broken fever.
The next three months of recovery are long and arduous, but he does it in Resembool—so Winry cherishes them anyways.
.-.
“Marry me,” he’d said, and for hot flash of a moment he wonders if he regrets it.
Not really. He could never really regret it. But sometimes, when she’s snapping at him and he’s yelling at her and their voices rise loud enough to roust the neighbor’s chickens wandering onto their property, he wonders if maybe this is the wrong decision and they are just too volatile to be together. Two wrongs don’t make a right, right? Two bombs don’t diffuse each other. And for fuck’s sake, they are explosive.
He’s not even sure how it starts, half the time—he sure can’t remember how it started this time. He’s not really sure what the process was to wind up with Winry slamming the door to her workshop shut and him stomping down the porch stairs to go chop wood. Since he can’t exactly hit her with an axe, he needs to get his aggression out on something.
Fuck, they are so much—when they love, they love, but when they fight, it’s a damn war. If his years weren’t shortened by using himself as a ramshackle Philosopher’s Stone to heal, they were going to be shortened by the screaming matches and dodged wrenches. Is it even worth it?
His axe swings down and splits the log, sending splinters flying. It’s hot. Sweat is already trickling down his neck.
They are so fucking stupid.
Swing. Crunch. Shatter.
He should find himself a nice girl. A quiet girl. Someone who won’t yell at him over every damn thing.
Swing. Crunch. Shatter.
Someone who wouldn’t challenge him; who he could talk to about alchemy without arguing. Who wouldn’t tell him he was wrong all the time.
Swing. Crunch. Shatter.
Someone who was easy.
Swing. Crunch. Shatter. Thunk.
Ed stops. Easy? Quiet?
“Shit,” he says, and realizes he’s a mopey idiot. Then he looks down and realizes a large splinter of wood is stuck an inch in his hand and he’s bleeding all over the axe. “Shit,” he sighs, and even though it stings, the sting in his chest from realizing the thoughts he’d been entertaining hurts worse.
So he goes inside, runs some quick water over it, and stuffs a washcloth on top to stop the bleeding, then goes to find his fiancée. The door is still closed.
“Go away,” she snaps as she hears the door open. Ed does not obey. Instead, he walks over to her, her back towards him as she sits at her workstation. Her screwdriver slips and she swears under her breath.
Ed walks to his fiancée and stoops, threading his arms around her shoulders and burying his face in her neck. A moment of silence passes. “Marry me,” he murmurs.
“No,” she snaps. The screwdriver slips again and she slings it off to the side, sending screws and bits of metal clattering. She huffs in frustration and buries her face in her hands, her blonde, sweaty bangs threading through her fingers.
Ed lets the silence sit for a bit again, then he squeezes her arms tighter. “Marry me,” he repeats again.
Winry sighs, and lets her head lean on his sweaty arms. “Okay, Ed.”
Then she kicks him out and forces him to let her bandage his hand before he gets blood all over her workstation, and somehow Ed falls in love with her a little bit more.
.-.
“Marry me,” he mumbles into her hair. The wee hours of the dawn poke up through the window, beginning to cast a hazy glow over Winry’s nose and collarbone as the soft purples of the early morning give way to day. Her skin is soft and warm below his, her hair splayed out onto the pillow and intermingling with his.
She sighs, soft and high, and answers without opening her eyes. “Mmm. ‘Kay. Tomorrow.”
Ed pulls her closer. The day before him seems interminably long.
.-.
There’s sweat dripping down his collar.
He’d say having their wedding outside was a mistake, due to the heat, but at least there’s a slight breeze and they can breath. Not that the breeze calms him down or fixes his current sweating problem; that issue is internal. Ed swallows hard and resists the urge to tug at the fabric; it’ll only make his tie loose and wrinkled, and Alphonse has already threatened him with bodily harm if he has to fix the damn thing for a fifth time. Al, of course, looks crisp and refined in his suit, his own tie pressed flat and his face clean of the sheen of perspiration; this is, perhaps, another thing that Truth has taken from Ed. Doomed to a life without alchemy and perpetually looking less put-together than his brother.
Well, maybe that’ll change on Al’s wedding day, and then it’ll be Ed’s turn to gloat at the fact he’s nervous and sweating and can’t eat anything without wanting to throw up. He subtly turns to look at his brother, standing slightly to his left near the altar, who gives him a cheeky wink and grin.
This is a mistake.
Ed’s hands tremble as they grip the paper holding his vows. He’d wracked his brains for hours and hours over the past week, trying to figure out what to say to sum up his feelings for Winry. It wasn’t even a matter of not having enough time to say everything in his heart; it was more a matter of not knowing how to even quantify his feelings at all. What do you say when you have literally the perfect woman? You literally have your perfect match? He’d tried, but the words still fall flat. He bets hers are perfect—like the rest of her.
Fuck, this is a mistake. Not because she’s not good enough for him—he’s not good enough for her. He looks out over the crowd, and the flowers, and Pinako grinning at him as she chews on her pipe—in a fucking wedding, Granny? Come on—and Roy Mustang, smiling that stupid Cheshire Cat grin, and all their friends, and he knows they know it too.
His stomach drops, and he starts to turn towards Al to tell him this is the most cataclysmic of mistakes and he’s leaving for Winry’s own good. As if he can read Ed’s mind—he probably can—Al sneaks his hand forward and grips Ed’s bicep with a fist of steel. Fucking Mei—she’s been working him too hard—Ed couldn’t escape if he tried.
But the slight pain of Al’s grip wakes him up a bit, and Ed manages to turn to the front again, letting out a steady stream of air filled with pent-up anxiety. He’s an idiot.
Winry can divorce him later if she wants to, right?
He doesn’t have time to go down THAT train of thought, because the music swells, and there’s Elicia, skipping down the aisle throwing petals. Then Paninya comes down, looking much more ladylike than usual. She sticks out her tongue as she passes.
Then the music changes again and holy damn SHIT it’s Winry, this is it, holy damn shit, the sum of ninety percent of his every waking thought over the past two years is walking towards him. He’d say she’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, but that spot is also reserved for her in her worksuit covered in grease; or her wearing his jacket; or her naked and sweaty and glowing; or her doing just about a million other things, so the most he can really register is just “Wow” and Al slowly letting go of his arm.
And she walks towards him, beaming, and she’s beautiful, and she lifts her veil, and she’s beautiful, and everything about her is so damn unearthly he almost can’t function. The officiant talks, and people laugh, and then he talks again and people cry, but he doesn’t even register anything because he’s too swallowed up in the fact that she’s marrying him.
Then the officiant says it’s time for Winry to do her vows. Paninya hands her a notecard; it’s written front and back, in Winry’s perfect, elegant scrawl, and Ed can already tell she’s got him beat in the vows department.
She lifts the notecard, looks at him, looks at the card again, and doesn’t say anything. Ed notices her hands are shaking and has to resist the urge to hold them again. She opens her mouth, looks back down at the cards, and then looks back at him—her eyes are so blue. He could go swimming in her eyes.
She falters, then squishes the notecard into a tiny ball. Ed’s stomach drops for all of two seconds, and she can tell, because she grabs her hands in his. She rubs her thumbs over his knuckles, feeling his every callus, every scar, and then simply says, clear, and simple, “Marry me.”
Ed wants to laugh. He wants to cry. Instead, he takes in a deep breath around the achingly wonderful lump in his chest, squeezes her hands so she can feel his heartbeat traveling to hers, and says, “Okay, Winry.”
.-.
-fin