The Last Five Havoc/Winry Themes
Title: SWM seek CSFG w/ GP
Author: Camudekyu
Rating: R
Pairing: Havoc/Winry
Length: 10 pages, 'round about
Warnings: Fluff. Drinkin' and (finally) sexin'.
Summary: Jean Havoc, Winry Rockbell, and a roadtrip home. Hijinks abound.
A/N: The final five themes, #26-30. Thanks, y'all.
XXVI. Overflow
The house began as a dark grey speck on the lighter grey horizon. If Jean's truck had had a hood ornament, it would have remained in line with the speck the whole twenty minutes it took for the farmhouse to expand into a dot then into a block and finally into a building. Up close, Winry saw that the grey was faded whitewash, peeling off corners and edges. Blue shutters hung from the windows, and a long vein of a chimney bisected the front, and Winry could see another one on the opposite face of the house.
Jean pulled the truck down the drive where it circled around the back, and he parked in a wide, gravel lot between the house and the barn. There was another truck there, red with a flat bed, and next to that was a low, black sedan.
As Winry climbed out of the truck, she scanned the landscape. Beyond the house and the barn was flat, a blurred earth-toned streak that stretched across the sky, punctuated by the stray copse. Crooked lines of fences reached out as well, and far off to the north, Winry could see a dark shape near the fence, like a black smudge across the grass.
“What's that?” Winry asked, pointing toward the smudge.
“Cattle,” he replied shortly. Winry looked up at him.
He stuck a cigarette between his lips, lit it, and reached into the truck bed to collect their luggage. He slung the strap of his duffel bag over his shoulders and carried Winry's suitcase as he started toward the front of the house. He felt his wrist being snagged, however, and turned.
She looked puzzled. And concerned. “You okay?” she asked.
It wasn't until she asked that he realized he might not be. He shrugged. “It's been a while.”
Winry smiled at him and suggested that they designate a safe word. That way, when the family launched themselves into the seventh level of Conversational Hell―as families are wont to do―Jean could turn to Winry and say something like, “I'm jonesing for some cupcakes,” and Winry would know that he was looking for an out.
She stood on her toes and kissed him on the corner of his mouth. “Just keep telling yourself,” she said, “They love you a lot. And if Monrovia takes us down, we're taking everyone down with us.” She then reached out and took her suitcase from him.
The front porch of the house was little more than a high, concrete slab with steep steps leading up to it. The short awning over the door had a lantern mounted in it, and, that early in the afternoon, it was extinguished. As Jean knocked, Winry turned to look over her shoulder at the way they had come. A wintry fog was settling around in the field, thick and downy, obscuring the world outside this little glimpse into Jean's childhood.
“Hey!” a voice erupted when the door opened. “You finally made it!”
Winry jumped and spun around in time to see a man just shorter than Jean put one foot over the threshold and clap a big, heavy hand down on Jean's shoulder. And for all his apprehension, Jean was grinning and laughing when his brother took his duffel bag, tossed it down inside the door, and gave him a hug.
A much smaller body materialized by this other man's knees, and Jean paused only to pluck his cigarette from his mouth before scooping this little girl up into what must have seemed an impossibly high hug. Winry heard her plant a very loud kiss on his cheek.
“I made you this,” the girl said, and produced a sheet of paper covered in brightly colored crayon scribbles and hearts and flowers and the words Uncle Jeen on it.
“Thanks, Melia,” Jean said, appraising her artwork. “It's beautiful.” The little girl cinched her arms around Jean's neck, and Winry was suddenly making eye contact with her over Jean's shoulder. Melia's big, dark eyes narrowed a little at Winry. It would seem that Jean's niece was not interested in sharing.
Jean's brother crossed his arms. “She spelled that without my help,” he said, a sort of mock-pride in his voice.
“What can I say, Eric? Your kid's a genius.”
“Close the damn door,” a voice gruffed from within, and both Jean and his brother started a little. “I'm not paying to keep the cows warm.”
At that, Jean's brother stepped aside, and Jean, still laden with a frowning six-year-old, and Winry shuffled into the entrance. There was no foyer within. The house opened into a large room that looked to double as a parlor and dining room, with threadbare, overstuffed furniture gathered around a wide, lit fireplace on one end and a heavy, oak table and chairs on the other. At the table, sat another man, looking lined and sinewy.
“Jean, is that a girl?” Eric asked as he shut and latched the front door.
Winry spun around at that.
“Sure is,” Jean said a little tightly. He set Melia down, and she fisted her hands in his pant leg.
Eric, while making unwavering eye contact with Winry, leaned toward Jean. “You brought a girl home?”
Jean was smiling one of those smiles that was actually a glare when examined closer. “Sure did. And she can hear you.”
Eric began to laugh at his long-suffering younger brother, and Winry immediately liked the man. He and Melia shared the same big, dark eyes, and when he laughed, his eyes laughed with him. He stuck out a hand.
“Eric Havoc,” he said, beaming.
The resemblance was there, Winry thought. They had the same, long, straight nose. The same chin. But Jean was all lines and angles, and Eric was softer, had fewer edges. She took his hand. “Winry Rockbell,” she replied and shook his hand firmly.
Winry heard the scratch of chair legs across a hardwood floor.
“This is Melia,” Eric said, gesturing toward the body half hidden behind Jean, who dropped a hand on the little girl's head in an effort to coax her out. Melia responded by burying her face against Jean's thigh. Both men began to laugh, and Winry felt the inevitable mortification that comes with meeting someone's family increase just a degree. “Sorry,” Eric laughed. “She's shy.”
“It's okay,” Winry said, putting up her hands in their oversized gloves.
“A lot of strangers in my house today,” a voice, more gravel than breath, said from behind Winry. She jumped again and sidestepped, and the man from the table brushed past her without a glance.
Winry tried not to stare when Jean's father hugged him. Jean could have been a thirty-year-old snapshot of this man, the Patron Havoc. They were the same height, had the same build. Certainly more sun and weather had been applied to Jean's father, but it was unmistakable. It was his forearms that really gave him away, though. And Eric had them, too. Ropey muscles and light-colored, coarse hair; big, angular knuckles criss-crossed with scars; heavy wrists with jutting bones and corded tendons. Winry felt impossibly small and wispy, and she wondered when this house had last seen a woman.
Jean's father gestured to Winry and asked, “Who's this?” around a cigarette at the corner of his mouth.
Those blue eyes and lantern jaw. Winry thought, as far as aging well goes, Jean had nothing to worry about. And then she blushed at the notion. “I'm Winry Rockbell,” she said, and the man kept staring at her. She felt like she was facing the Havoc tribunal: Eric, Jean, and their father like a wall. “Um, Jean's dropping me off in Resembool. We just stopped for minute, but I'll be moving along.”
Winry didn't see the frown Jean gave her.
“Nonsense,” the elder Havoc rasped. He turned to Jean. “When did you last feed her? Pitiful thing. She's staying for dinner.”
And that was that.
~
While Curtis, Jean's father, prepared the two hens he and Eric had eviscerated that morning, Jean gave Winry a tour of the house. While he gave an engaging walkabout, he managed to inject into every room at least once, “This is weird.” Winry couldn't imagine. There was a great deal of difference between eighteen―when Jean had left home―and twenty-five―when he returned, and while Jean had reshaped his entire world in those years, this house on the farm had not changed at all.
“This is weird,” Jean announced when they came to his old bedroom. It seemed terribly small to Winry, whose bedroom in Resembool was the entire attic. Through the wall of south-facing windows, thick, sluggish light seeped in and spilled wearily across the floorboards. There was a full-sized bed in a heavy, wooden frame with a sparsely populated bookshelf in the headboard, and as Winry poked around through the photographs on the dresser, Jean sank onto his old bed and scanned the remaining books.
“Dad says he hasn't touched a thing, but I sure as hell didn't leave it looking like this,” Jean said as he pulled a book from the shelf with a finger. He opened it in his palm and leafed through.
Winry lifted the bedspread and peeked under the bed. “Am I going to stumble onto nudie mags if I look too hard?”
“Nope,” Jean said, absently scanning his book. “Took all those to Eastern with me when I left.”
Winry stood up and frowned at him.
“Hey, you brought it up,” he said, putting up his hands, book in tow. He closed the book, dropped it on the bed next to him, and reclined, his arms behind his head. “This is really weird,” he said to the ceiling.
Winry sat on the edge of the bed next Jean's hip. “Does it all feel the same as it used to?”
“No,” Jean said a little exasperatedly. “I wouldn't mind it all being the same.”
“What's so different, then?” Winry asked, scooting closer to the head of the bed.
He watched her for a moment, his face closed off and his mind tumbling away elsewhere. Then he smiled at her and put a hand on her knee. “For starters, there's a girl in my bed.”
Winry blushed and laughed. “Was that such a rarity?”
Jean rubbed his chin. “This bed has seen a grand total of one lady.”
“And who would that be?” Winry asked, crossing her arms.
He propped himself up on his elbows. “That would be you, Winry.”
This was a manner of attention Winry was not really used to. One of the drawbacks to being a child prodigy was that Winry had spent most of her adolescence in a workshop, being brilliant. And that was wonderful in its own way―Winry, of course, adored her work―but her years spent sequestered meant that when Jean sat up and kissed her, when he put his tongue in her mouth, and when he settled his hands on her hips and pulled her into his lap, Winry really had no idea what to do with herself. Her hands shook and felt heavy and hypersensitive, so she lay them on Jean's shoulders. He tugged her against him hard. Winry squeaked into his mouth and had to hold on to keep her balance.
Then his hand was fisting in her hair, pulling her down fiercely. Then his other hand was on the outside of her thigh, sliding up and up and ghosting over the hem of her skirt.
Winry made a strangled sort of noise in her throat. She had to give Jean quite a shove to make him stop, and when he pulled back, they both began to stammer out apologies. Then they were both laughing uncomfortably. Then they were both quiet.
“You first,” Winry breathed.
He looked like he was still composing himself. “I got a little,” his voice cracked, and he cleared his throat, “a little carried away.” He glanced at Winry's red mouth, her lips somewhat swollen from all the friction. “I've, uh, you know, had the hots for you pretty much since we left Central.”
Winry laughed. “You're so eloquent, sometimes,” she teased. That got Jean's attention away from her lips, and he frowned into her eyes. Winry felt, very suddenly, shy. “Oh,” she said. “Um, I was going to say,” she couldn't read his eyes and that made her even more nervous, “I'm just a little out of my depth here.”
A long whistle sounded from the door, and Winry and Jean looked up simultaneously to see Eric standing in the doorway, one hand on the frame and the other on his hip. Winry threw herself from Jean's lap, and in her effort to scramble away, she flopped inelegantly onto the floor beside the bed with a loud thud.
“Dinner's ready,” he said. “I'm glad I didn't send Melia up here to get you libertines.”
XXVII. If Only I Could Make You Mine
Winry had forgotten what it was like in the country, her country. Night fell thick and heavy, like a cover over a birdcage, and the expansive spaces of Risembool amplified the dark, made it deeper and emptier. The powdery-pale moonlight made luminescent the snow laying on the ground and hanging in the branches like sleeves. The road had been plowed recently, leaving only patches of thick, dark ice in the potholes, and Jean managed to maneuver the truck around most of those.
The roasted chicken and root vegetables sat heavy in them, and the long, easy silences that lapsed between them as they drove were inspired by that weight. Winry kept belching quietly into her fingers, and the little sounds seemed like the most impossibly dainty burps Jean had ever heard.
“You're coming inside to meet Grandma, you know,” Winry informed him as she scooted down in her chair and put her feet up on the dash. “I won't let you just drop me off and run.”
This was, Winry imagined they both were realizing, possibly the end of their trip together. Jean would leave her in Risembool and head back to Monrovia, and after New Years, Winry would borrow train fare from her grandmother and make her way back to Central. She might find him after the holidays, she thought, but Winry knew what extreme circumstances could do to people. And while the drive hadn't been all that extreme necessarily, she was aware of the effects of being stuck in a small box with another person for an extended period of time. What if, she wondered, this was only an effect of the trip, and what if, when she got back to Central, she would remember that she was actually a different person entirely?
Winry glanced over at Jean, at his terrible posture, unkempt hair, and three-day beard. She knew this feeling, this sinking collapse in her chest. This was the feeling of not being ready. But, she thought, if she wasn't ready for Jean to drive away, then she would have to be ready for him to stay...
The headlights through the window must have alerted Pinako because she came out onto the porch, her pipe stuck between her teeth, as Jean parked and retrieved Winry's luggage from the bed of the truck. Winry quickly plucked her suitcase from his hand. So quickly, in fact, that she did not see the look on Jean's face.
“Grandma!” Winry cried as she ran up the stairs. “God, is it good to see you!” She came to a stop in front of Pinako, and Jean came up unhurriedly behind her.
Pinako pulled her pipe from her mouth and blew out a smokey breath that condensed into a fog. “Took you long enough. I thought you would be here two days ago.”
Winry rubbed the back of her head. “Oh, you know how it is.” She waved dismissively, but Pinako was too old to be fooled with tricks like that. The fact that Winry still tried was almost a little endearing.
Pinako took a pull off her pipe. “You show up late and with a man?” She gestured with the bowl of her pipe toward the guest.
Winry felt her face go uncomfortably hot despite the snow that was now sifting lazily down around them. “This is Jean Havoc,” she said, leaving off his rank intentionally. She stepped aside and gestured for him to step forward. “He drove with me from Central.”
“How do you do, ma'am?” Jean asked and stooped to shake Pinako's small, leathery hand.
“I know everyone in this town,” Pinako said, chewing on her pipe thoughtfully. “I've never seen you around here.”
“Uh, no, ma'am,” Jean said, his eastern accent slipping out just a little at that. Winry had to hide a smile. “I'm from Monrovia.”
“I see,” Pinako replied. With that, she turned and headed for the front door. “Well come in before you both start growing snot-cicles.”
Winry and Jean exchanged a glance, not so surreptitiously checking the expression of the other for any sign of snot-cicle-induced revulsion. Pinako was, of course, just teasing them, the children coming in for the night.
After Jean and Pinako finished their hot toddies―Winry had a hot chocolate―Pinako stated that Jean was staying for the night. It was nearly ten, snow had been settling on the ground for the last forty-five minutes, and driving back to Monrovia was, she said, out of the question. “We've got plenty of guest rooms,” Pinako said. “Winry'll help you find one.”
Winry, who had been ruminating quietly into the the dregs of her hot chocolate, heard her name and sat up. “What? Oh, yeah, sure. I'll show you the bed―I mean the bedroom―I mean a guestroom!” she finished in a squeak. Winry dropped her face in embarrassment. Jean didn't look much better. Pinako merely smiled around the stem of her pipe.
“I'll see you two in the morning,” she said and left for her room upstairs.
Jean watched Winry spinning her mug slowly in careful quarter-turns on the table top. Color lingered high in her cheeks and the tips of her ears. He could see her fingers trembling as they worked around her drink. Her teeth peeked out as she worried her lower lip.
She looked like such a kid, he thought. It then occurred to him that he still didn't know how old she was. And he started to laugh. Winry looked up, glaring before he could even explain himself.
“I've never been much good at this part, myself,” he said, tipping his mug and wishing the last drops of his drink would collect into one more bracing swallow of whiskey and tea. He heard her let out an eep, and when he looked up at her, she had her head bowed so low that her cornsilk hair hid most of her face.
He had meant it to be somewhat comforting. Jean had always appreciated that handful of times when things seemed to fall into place with whichever girl it was and he could skip the mystery. There wasn't that uncertain, fumbling exchange in which both parties were trying desperately to read all the subtle cues of the other for some hint as to that night's sleeping arrangements.
In the week they had been driving together, Winry had never been this quiet. And Jean, who had been having some difficulty carrying on a conversation with Pinako because it was getting late and he was pretty sure Winry and he were thinking about the same thing, was starting to wish she would say something because, at this point, he had no idea what his chances were. He did know, however, that he'd been picturing the events leading up to this situation on and off for the week, and it never looked this awkward in his head.
“You want a cigarette?” Jean offered.
Winry clipped the end of his question with her blurted, “Yes.”
Winry showed Jean out onto the widow's porch because she wanted to sit on the wooden boards and dangle her legs through the posts of the railing like she used to do when she was a kid, and the addition of one of Jean's cheap cigarettes felt somehow appropriate. Like without that, it might be as though nothing had changed at all, like the life she had eked out in Central never happened.
Jean stood to her left, leaning his elbows against the railing, and together they watched the eerie quiet and the heavy stillness of a late-night snowfall.
When Winry finished her cigarette, she dropped the butt in her almost empty mug of hot chocolate. It hissed and died, and Winry stood. Without a prompt, Jean pulled a fresh cigarette from his breast pocket and handed it to her. She accepted, and when he flicked the striker on his metal lighter, Winry accepted that as well.
“You forget what it's like,” Jean mused around the filter of his own smoke.
“What?” Winry asked.
He took a drag and plucked his cigarette out of his mouth. “Real solitude. I can make myself feel alone in a crowd, but it's just not the same.”
“I forgot what quiet was like,” Winry supplied. “Central is never quiet.” She looked up. “And the stars. You can hardly see anything in Central.”
Jean glanced up as well. “Not much to look at now.”
“I remember them, though.” There was such affection in her voice. “From this very porch, in fact.”
He looked over at her then, her slender shoulders, her neck, long and arched like a gull's. She seemed different here. More still, perhaps. She had seemed rather like a sparrow trapped in the cab of his truck for much of the drive, but now she had an air of repose, of comfort and calm, and Jean felt a pang of jealousy.
“You belong to Resembool, don't you?” he asked, and it came out sounding a touch more bitter than he meant it to.
Winry turned to look at him. “I think so,” she admitted.
But Jean was there with her in Resembool, in her home, in this place like a snowglobe where nothing ever changes, and Winry began to feel the freedom of being the one variable in a world of constants. It seemed easier to move, somehow. She felt a blissful sort of detachment that only sweetens the binds that remain, and Winry found her nervousness expelled with the smoke from her lungs. When she brought Jean into her bedroom, when she asked him to stay there, she felt nothing but freedom. When he started kissing her and pushing her back to a wall, when they fumbled hurriedly with clothing, when he pressed into her and apologized against the crook of her neck, Winry fell in love with Resembool again. And there, with him, she understood then what had driven her so far from home, what the deal-breaking deficit had been, what she had been missing all along. It was not something about Resembool or Central. It was something about her.
But with Jean there, Winry thought she could belong just about anywhere.
XXVIII. Wada Calcium CD3
A fast, loud knock at the door at the bottom of the stairs jolted Winry and Jean awake. They looked at each other, then down at the rumpled bedclothes around them, then back at each other.
“Jean!” Pinako hollered through the cracked door at the bottom of the stairs. “Put on some clothes and come down here. Your brother's on the phone.”
Jean blinked. Eric had called? Jean started to laugh, and when he looked at Winry, he started laughing even harder: she was clutching the sheets around her chest, her cheeks burning, and her eyes turned away. When she heard him laughing, however, she narrowed her eyes at him and glared so hard that it was almost palpable.
“What's so damn funny?” Winry snarled, her face still florid as the sunrise in the window behind her.
Jean snagged her chin, kissed her quickly, and said, “God, you're cute.”
She started, her eyes wide for just a moment, and then her blush deepened and her glare returned. Winry opened her mouth to bark at him, but she quickly snapped it shut and looked away because Jean had unceremoniously thrown back the sheets and begun shuffling around the floor for his clothes.
Winry hazarded a glance over her shoulder in time to see Jean buckling his belt. He then stooped to pick up his undershirt from the floor, tugged it on, and pulled his dogtags out from under the V-neck. It was the first time she'd really watched him go through those motions, although it wasn't the first time she'd seen it. Jean must have felt her gaze because he turned to her and gave her a smile.
“You coming or what?” he asked.
Winry started again and sank a little farther under the sheets. “I'll be along,” she said, looking away. She heard Jean laughing all the way down the stairs at her.
~
“Morning,” he said as he picked up the receiver that lay on a table by the door to Winry's attic bedroom.
“'Put on some clothes and come down here'?” Eric repeated in mock incredulity.
“How did you get this number?” Jean asked through his teeth.
“There are only so many Rockbells in Resembool.”
“What the hell do you want?”
“Just calling to find out if we'd be seeing you for breakfast. I'm going to assume not.”
“I'm hanging up.”
“Now, what am I supposed to tell Melia when―”
Jean put the receiver down hard. “Bastard,” he muttered under his breath. It did not take long, however, for Jean to get distracted and follow his nose to the kitchen where Pinako was brewing strong coffee and frying sausages.
Already, Jean was certain that this was not going to play out like his previous run-ins with guardians of his lady friends. When he was younger, he'd snuck out his fair share of windows, stammered through some very awkward conversations with some very awkward mothers, even been chased away by a gun-wielding father once, but Pinako, serenely dividing up sausages onto three plates at the table, gave him the impression that she was downright disinterested.
That didn't stop him from being a little nervous. “Good morning, ma'am,” he said from the door. She looked up from topping off her coffee mug.
“Don't look so scared, Jean,” she said as he put the carafe back on the burner. “I'd say we're both a bit old for that, don't you think?”
Jean laughed uncomfortably. “I s'pose so.” He watched her reach into her apron pocket and produce a glass bottle. She unscrewed the lid and shook out six white pills and set two of them next to every plate. “What's that?” Jean asked as he came in and poured himself a coffee.
“Everyone in my house takes calcium supplements,” Pinako declared. “I should have taken them when I was your age, and I'm regretting it now.”
Jean leaned against the counter top and sipped his coffee―he had to hide a wince at the acrid flavor of mechanic's coffee. When the taste subsided, he started to laugh: so he and Winry were too old to pretend like sex didn't exist but not too old to be force-fed vitamins? He appreciated the backwards maternal logic, and, more importantly, he recognized it. There was a twinge in his chest he hadn't felt in ages.
XXIX. The Sound of Waves
The air was thin and dry and cold, and Winry watched halfhearted gusts fan Jean's hair over his eyes. He stood, perhaps, two steps below her on the front porch stairs, and she was just about eye-level with him. It was odd to see him from that angle. And so close. She could see all the shades of blonde in his scruffy beard and all the impossible blues in his eyes. And despite the layers she had on, she felt vulnerable to him.
She kind of liked it.
“I'll look you up when I get back to Central,” Jean offered, his hands deep in his pockets.
A wooly scarf covered Winry's mouth, so she simply nodded.
“We should get dinner or something,” he said. That sounded notably lame, even to Jean, who had always thought his interactions with women were lame at best. He hoped, though, that it was that sort of lame that beautiful women found charming, and he watched Winry's eyes for any hint of crinkling from a smile. She wasn't smiling, though. Her eyes were big and sad and maybe a little desperate, and Jean was afraid that it was his responsibility to fix this, and he wasn't entirely sure how to.
Because he'd spent a week crammed in a car with this girl, and what the hell did that count for anyway? He'd slept with women he'd known for less. How much was an attachment really worth when there was no one else to get attached to? He'd be damned, though, if he tried to tell himself that he didn't like her an awful lot.
There were acres of things he wanted to say to her:
Thanks for making me come home because I had no intention of going to Monrovia until I read your ad.
Thanks for navigating and going halvsies on gas and lodging.
Thanks for the sex, it was just great, and sorry about that whole virginity business.
But watching her against the backdrop of the buttery walls of her childhood home made him end on, Thanks for letting me share you with Resembool for the week. Looks like Resembool is gonna win this one, though, don't it?
“I should hit the road before it starts to snow again,” Jean said with a glance upward. The clouds above looked ready to split a seam.
She nodded again, and Jean really wished that she would bail him out and say something. Anything.
He waited. So did she. This wasn't how he thought it would end. “Well,” Jean said, stepping backwards onto the stair below, “See you sometime.” He then turned, took the last few stairs, and stepped onto the frozen, packed earth below the porch. His rusted truck was parked and crusted with ice in the lane a few yards away, and Jean resigned himself to its company and the special kind of solitude that comes with the bite of frigid leather seats.
He was fishing his keys out of his pocket when he heard a high, hurried, “Hey, Jean?” from behind him. He grinned but made sure his face was blank when he looked over his shoulder to see Winry on the porch, bouncing to stay warm and tugging the scarf down from her mouth.
“You're probably going to think I'm crazy, but, um,” she began. She clapped her mittened hands together as she worked with the words. She began to gesture as though she were speaking, but her mouth remained still and open and let out only a rather frustrated sigh.
And damn it all if that wasn't the cutest thing she'd done all morning.
Jean turned and came back to the porch. “You know, the worst you're gonna do is make me think you're crazier,” Jean teased, and he could tell how uncertain Winry was because that didn't get a rise out of her. He returned to the bottom of the steps, crossed his arms, and waited.
She began wringing her hands. “I know I've been talking all week about how much I want to come home and see my grandma and my house and all that, and I still do, and it's been wonderful for the, you know, twelve hours I've been here, but, um, I'm realizing now that I kind of just want to be where ever you are.” It spilled out in a muffled jumble, her lips too cold to move as fast as she wanted them to.
She looked rather like she had just asked him for money or his last cigarette. It took a moment for those rolling waves of confession to finish surging over him. Her eyes were searching and expectant and hell if Jean could say no to that. He held in a snort of laughter because he knew how much she had just bared herself.
“So,” Jean began and shrugged, “Am I taking you and Pinako to Monrovia for New Years, or is my family coming here?”
He very abruptly had to step back and brace himself as Winry threw her arms around his neck, soundly kissed him, and almost spilled them both onto the ground.
XXX. Kiss
Curtis, Eric, Melia, and a big, dead turkey in a sack showed up in the flat bed truck. Next came the Detwilers, their two sons, and their saint bernard, Dale, from a quarter mile up the road. Then Daniel Fenton who had a Rockbell leg and no family save his mother who was too old to cook a good New Years dinner. Then Mr. and the young Mrs. Curry and a herd of sharecroppers, mostly young, single men who looked both like rumor of Winry's homecoming had made it to their farm and like they hadn't had turkey since last New Years.
They toasted with pints of dark, dark beer when the radio announcer counted down to the New Year. Jean, who was quite a few pints in, made a big show of dipping Winry and kissing her until she was wholly done being kissed. Eric squeezed his daughter until she squealed out peals of laughter and planted an exaggerated kiss on his cheek. Mr. Curry was above that sort of display, and the Detwilers shared one of those quietly affectionate kisses that couples could share in front of their kids.
When the New Year was in and the night was thick as home brew, everyone went home except Jean who, for his many whispered promises to Winry of all the things he was going to do to her, collapsed face down in her bed, too tired and too drunk to remove his own shoes.
Winry, a touch tipsy herself, placed a big Mason jar of water on the night stand, tugged Jean's boots off, and pulled his feet into the bed. It was rather like trying to rearrange an area rug beneath a particularly heavy couch, but Winry eventually worked the blanket out from under him. She then drained as much water as she could hold, changed into her pajamas, and curled herself tight to Jean's side.
~
They loaded their luggage and a box of Winry's things that she had pulled out of storage into the bed of Jean's truck. Pinako gave them a sack full of turkey sandwiches, bottles of sarsaparilla, and a jar of aspirin for Jean's head before packing the two of them up into the truck as well. Surreptitiously, Pinako stuffed a handful of cash into Winry's coat pocket and made her promise to take care of herself over the long drive back. Winry did not have to ask to know that taking care of herself meant no more picking fights with biker gangs and no more involuntarily smoking up, no more sleeping outside and no more wandering off into backwoods towns overrun by kiddie crime syndicates. If Pinako couldn't convince her granddaughter to ride the train, the best she could do was warn her to look after Jean―you know how delicate men are, Winry―and to keep the truck gassed up.
Goodbyes exchanged and tire chains fitted, they got into the truck and headed west. The road was treacherous, but Winry could hear the sound of the chains crushing ice to crumbs beneath them.
After a last, full-armed wave out the window, Winry swung herself back into the cabin of the truck. She was pink and flustered from the wind and said, “We should do this again next year,” as she beat snow out of her hair.
Jean glanced over at her, a quiet, satisfied sort of grin on his face. “Okay,” he said.
They drove on to Monrovia. It took almost an hour because of the condition of the road out of Resembool, but as they reached the city limits, the snow on the ground thinned. Once at the old farm house, they stopped only briefly. Eric and Jean nursed a couple glasses of Alka-Seltzer while Curtis poured Winry some coffee in a tin cup.
When they exchanged their quick but sincere goodbyes―Winry smiled as Curtis gave Jean a broad, heavy hug and muttered something in his ear that made Jean start and then laugh―Eric shook Winry's hand and said in a voice low enough that Jean could not hear, “Keep an eye on him, all right?”
Winry felt like she should explain to Eric that she wasn't Jean's girlfriend or anything. In fact, before that week, they were barely acquaintances. She felt like she was lying to him when she said, “I will.” But intention had to count for something, right? She certainly liked the idea of keeping an eye on Jean. Still, Winry felt like she was being deceitful. She felt like she was an interloper in a situation where a real girlfriend should be. She looked at Jean, who was having a quiet conversation with his father. Jean's adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed and nodded in silence. His father spoke lowly, a stern look on his leathery face.
This was, she thought, the first time Jean had been home in so many years. Really, she had no business being here, pretending to be someone who might have a right to see this. Perhaps it was her desire to be that person that made her reach for Jean's hand as they turned their backs to Curtis's front door and walked to the truck. His fingers closed around hers, and he held her hand until he opened the car door for her and helped her in.
They stopped at the last gas station in Monrovia, and they pooled cash together to fill up the tank. While they waited for the attendant to fill up the tank and check the oil, the silence settled in the cab of the truck thick as the cold, wet air. Winry drummed her fingers on the armrest on her door, gathering up her courage. She glanced at Jean. He was looking at his hands in his lap, clearly submerged in his own thoughts.
“Hey, Jean?” Winry said, seizing his attention.
He hardily had time to look up before Winry sat herself squarely in his lap, her knees against his hips and the curve of the steering wheel pressing into her lower back. She felt him set his hands on her hips. He slipped his thumbs into her belt loops.
“Hello,” he said, a little surprised.
“Are you okay?” Winry asked, searching his eyes for a hint to the answer before he could give it. Winry would not put it past him to evade if it were too heavy.
He smiled a sad sort of smile at her. “Yeah, I'm fine.” Winry gave him her I'm-not-buying-it look. He laughed. “You remember when I said I wouldn't mind everything being the same as it was when I left?”
Winry did. That was shortly before Eric walked in on them having their first, terribly clumsy bedroom tussle.
“Yeah, that was bullshit,” Jean said. “I don't know...” He glanced out the window. “Let's just say I'm relieved that nothing is the same.”
Winry rested her hands on his biceps and squeezed.
“I left for a reason, you know,” he went on, watching his hands fiddling with the hem of Winry's sweatshirt in her lap. “And it was a good reason. I really thought I'd hopped the last life boat out. I wasn't sure what we were going to find when we got there.” He looked out the window again. “He was really lost without her,” he muttered.
Winry wrapped her arms around Jean's shoulders and pulled him forward against her. It was the first time, she thought, that she'd really hugged him. And it felt wonderful. Now that the giddy panic of their first few physical exchanges had subsided, Winry was left with this sort of quiet weight, the comforting solidity of him. She felt impossibly small compared to Jean, but she hoped that, for what it was worth, he found some solidity in her.
She wanted to know more. She wanted to know all the details of all the days. She wanted to know all his losses and triumphs, all the griefs and the hurts, all the steps that brought him from Monrovia to Eastern and Eastern to Central and Central to right there with her.
But there was time for that later.
Jean sat back with a sigh. “Do you think I'm an asshole? For bailing, I mean?”
“I think,” Winry said, straightening his collar with small, gentle motions, “that you are a goober, Jean.” He frowned at her. “I think you're a goober in search of truth.”
“Well,” he began, feigning affront in his voice, “I think you're a truth-er in search of goob.”
Winry smiled at him and kissed the corner of his mouth. “I think that search is over.”
The gas station attendant tapped on the glass, seizing their attention. Winry flushed and flipped off Jean's lap as he rolled down the window and passed the attendant a handful of bills. He then rolled up the window and turned the key in the ignition.
The engine turned over, and Jean asked, “Shall we?”
Winry smiled. Jean put the truck in first and pointed them west.
In retrospect, this story could definitely be called How Winry Got Her Goob Back. XD
Author: Camudekyu
Rating: R
Pairing: Havoc/Winry
Length: 10 pages, 'round about
Warnings: Fluff. Drinkin' and (finally) sexin'.
Summary: Jean Havoc, Winry Rockbell, and a roadtrip home. Hijinks abound.
A/N: The final five themes, #26-30. Thanks, y'all.
XXVI. Overflow
The house began as a dark grey speck on the lighter grey horizon. If Jean's truck had had a hood ornament, it would have remained in line with the speck the whole twenty minutes it took for the farmhouse to expand into a dot then into a block and finally into a building. Up close, Winry saw that the grey was faded whitewash, peeling off corners and edges. Blue shutters hung from the windows, and a long vein of a chimney bisected the front, and Winry could see another one on the opposite face of the house.
Jean pulled the truck down the drive where it circled around the back, and he parked in a wide, gravel lot between the house and the barn. There was another truck there, red with a flat bed, and next to that was a low, black sedan.
As Winry climbed out of the truck, she scanned the landscape. Beyond the house and the barn was flat, a blurred earth-toned streak that stretched across the sky, punctuated by the stray copse. Crooked lines of fences reached out as well, and far off to the north, Winry could see a dark shape near the fence, like a black smudge across the grass.
“What's that?” Winry asked, pointing toward the smudge.
“Cattle,” he replied shortly. Winry looked up at him.
He stuck a cigarette between his lips, lit it, and reached into the truck bed to collect their luggage. He slung the strap of his duffel bag over his shoulders and carried Winry's suitcase as he started toward the front of the house. He felt his wrist being snagged, however, and turned.
She looked puzzled. And concerned. “You okay?” she asked.
It wasn't until she asked that he realized he might not be. He shrugged. “It's been a while.”
Winry smiled at him and suggested that they designate a safe word. That way, when the family launched themselves into the seventh level of Conversational Hell―as families are wont to do―Jean could turn to Winry and say something like, “I'm jonesing for some cupcakes,” and Winry would know that he was looking for an out.
She stood on her toes and kissed him on the corner of his mouth. “Just keep telling yourself,” she said, “They love you a lot. And if Monrovia takes us down, we're taking everyone down with us.” She then reached out and took her suitcase from him.
The front porch of the house was little more than a high, concrete slab with steep steps leading up to it. The short awning over the door had a lantern mounted in it, and, that early in the afternoon, it was extinguished. As Jean knocked, Winry turned to look over her shoulder at the way they had come. A wintry fog was settling around in the field, thick and downy, obscuring the world outside this little glimpse into Jean's childhood.
“Hey!” a voice erupted when the door opened. “You finally made it!”
Winry jumped and spun around in time to see a man just shorter than Jean put one foot over the threshold and clap a big, heavy hand down on Jean's shoulder. And for all his apprehension, Jean was grinning and laughing when his brother took his duffel bag, tossed it down inside the door, and gave him a hug.
A much smaller body materialized by this other man's knees, and Jean paused only to pluck his cigarette from his mouth before scooping this little girl up into what must have seemed an impossibly high hug. Winry heard her plant a very loud kiss on his cheek.
“I made you this,” the girl said, and produced a sheet of paper covered in brightly colored crayon scribbles and hearts and flowers and the words Uncle Jeen on it.
“Thanks, Melia,” Jean said, appraising her artwork. “It's beautiful.” The little girl cinched her arms around Jean's neck, and Winry was suddenly making eye contact with her over Jean's shoulder. Melia's big, dark eyes narrowed a little at Winry. It would seem that Jean's niece was not interested in sharing.
Jean's brother crossed his arms. “She spelled that without my help,” he said, a sort of mock-pride in his voice.
“What can I say, Eric? Your kid's a genius.”
“Close the damn door,” a voice gruffed from within, and both Jean and his brother started a little. “I'm not paying to keep the cows warm.”
At that, Jean's brother stepped aside, and Jean, still laden with a frowning six-year-old, and Winry shuffled into the entrance. There was no foyer within. The house opened into a large room that looked to double as a parlor and dining room, with threadbare, overstuffed furniture gathered around a wide, lit fireplace on one end and a heavy, oak table and chairs on the other. At the table, sat another man, looking lined and sinewy.
“Jean, is that a girl?” Eric asked as he shut and latched the front door.
Winry spun around at that.
“Sure is,” Jean said a little tightly. He set Melia down, and she fisted her hands in his pant leg.
Eric, while making unwavering eye contact with Winry, leaned toward Jean. “You brought a girl home?”
Jean was smiling one of those smiles that was actually a glare when examined closer. “Sure did. And she can hear you.”
Eric began to laugh at his long-suffering younger brother, and Winry immediately liked the man. He and Melia shared the same big, dark eyes, and when he laughed, his eyes laughed with him. He stuck out a hand.
“Eric Havoc,” he said, beaming.
The resemblance was there, Winry thought. They had the same, long, straight nose. The same chin. But Jean was all lines and angles, and Eric was softer, had fewer edges. She took his hand. “Winry Rockbell,” she replied and shook his hand firmly.
Winry heard the scratch of chair legs across a hardwood floor.
“This is Melia,” Eric said, gesturing toward the body half hidden behind Jean, who dropped a hand on the little girl's head in an effort to coax her out. Melia responded by burying her face against Jean's thigh. Both men began to laugh, and Winry felt the inevitable mortification that comes with meeting someone's family increase just a degree. “Sorry,” Eric laughed. “She's shy.”
“It's okay,” Winry said, putting up her hands in their oversized gloves.
“A lot of strangers in my house today,” a voice, more gravel than breath, said from behind Winry. She jumped again and sidestepped, and the man from the table brushed past her without a glance.
Winry tried not to stare when Jean's father hugged him. Jean could have been a thirty-year-old snapshot of this man, the Patron Havoc. They were the same height, had the same build. Certainly more sun and weather had been applied to Jean's father, but it was unmistakable. It was his forearms that really gave him away, though. And Eric had them, too. Ropey muscles and light-colored, coarse hair; big, angular knuckles criss-crossed with scars; heavy wrists with jutting bones and corded tendons. Winry felt impossibly small and wispy, and she wondered when this house had last seen a woman.
Jean's father gestured to Winry and asked, “Who's this?” around a cigarette at the corner of his mouth.
Those blue eyes and lantern jaw. Winry thought, as far as aging well goes, Jean had nothing to worry about. And then she blushed at the notion. “I'm Winry Rockbell,” she said, and the man kept staring at her. She felt like she was facing the Havoc tribunal: Eric, Jean, and their father like a wall. “Um, Jean's dropping me off in Resembool. We just stopped for minute, but I'll be moving along.”
Winry didn't see the frown Jean gave her.
“Nonsense,” the elder Havoc rasped. He turned to Jean. “When did you last feed her? Pitiful thing. She's staying for dinner.”
And that was that.
~
While Curtis, Jean's father, prepared the two hens he and Eric had eviscerated that morning, Jean gave Winry a tour of the house. While he gave an engaging walkabout, he managed to inject into every room at least once, “This is weird.” Winry couldn't imagine. There was a great deal of difference between eighteen―when Jean had left home―and twenty-five―when he returned, and while Jean had reshaped his entire world in those years, this house on the farm had not changed at all.
“This is weird,” Jean announced when they came to his old bedroom. It seemed terribly small to Winry, whose bedroom in Resembool was the entire attic. Through the wall of south-facing windows, thick, sluggish light seeped in and spilled wearily across the floorboards. There was a full-sized bed in a heavy, wooden frame with a sparsely populated bookshelf in the headboard, and as Winry poked around through the photographs on the dresser, Jean sank onto his old bed and scanned the remaining books.
“Dad says he hasn't touched a thing, but I sure as hell didn't leave it looking like this,” Jean said as he pulled a book from the shelf with a finger. He opened it in his palm and leafed through.
Winry lifted the bedspread and peeked under the bed. “Am I going to stumble onto nudie mags if I look too hard?”
“Nope,” Jean said, absently scanning his book. “Took all those to Eastern with me when I left.”
Winry stood up and frowned at him.
“Hey, you brought it up,” he said, putting up his hands, book in tow. He closed the book, dropped it on the bed next to him, and reclined, his arms behind his head. “This is really weird,” he said to the ceiling.
Winry sat on the edge of the bed next Jean's hip. “Does it all feel the same as it used to?”
“No,” Jean said a little exasperatedly. “I wouldn't mind it all being the same.”
“What's so different, then?” Winry asked, scooting closer to the head of the bed.
He watched her for a moment, his face closed off and his mind tumbling away elsewhere. Then he smiled at her and put a hand on her knee. “For starters, there's a girl in my bed.”
Winry blushed and laughed. “Was that such a rarity?”
Jean rubbed his chin. “This bed has seen a grand total of one lady.”
“And who would that be?” Winry asked, crossing her arms.
He propped himself up on his elbows. “That would be you, Winry.”
This was a manner of attention Winry was not really used to. One of the drawbacks to being a child prodigy was that Winry had spent most of her adolescence in a workshop, being brilliant. And that was wonderful in its own way―Winry, of course, adored her work―but her years spent sequestered meant that when Jean sat up and kissed her, when he put his tongue in her mouth, and when he settled his hands on her hips and pulled her into his lap, Winry really had no idea what to do with herself. Her hands shook and felt heavy and hypersensitive, so she lay them on Jean's shoulders. He tugged her against him hard. Winry squeaked into his mouth and had to hold on to keep her balance.
Then his hand was fisting in her hair, pulling her down fiercely. Then his other hand was on the outside of her thigh, sliding up and up and ghosting over the hem of her skirt.
Winry made a strangled sort of noise in her throat. She had to give Jean quite a shove to make him stop, and when he pulled back, they both began to stammer out apologies. Then they were both laughing uncomfortably. Then they were both quiet.
“You first,” Winry breathed.
He looked like he was still composing himself. “I got a little,” his voice cracked, and he cleared his throat, “a little carried away.” He glanced at Winry's red mouth, her lips somewhat swollen from all the friction. “I've, uh, you know, had the hots for you pretty much since we left Central.”
Winry laughed. “You're so eloquent, sometimes,” she teased. That got Jean's attention away from her lips, and he frowned into her eyes. Winry felt, very suddenly, shy. “Oh,” she said. “Um, I was going to say,” she couldn't read his eyes and that made her even more nervous, “I'm just a little out of my depth here.”
A long whistle sounded from the door, and Winry and Jean looked up simultaneously to see Eric standing in the doorway, one hand on the frame and the other on his hip. Winry threw herself from Jean's lap, and in her effort to scramble away, she flopped inelegantly onto the floor beside the bed with a loud thud.
“Dinner's ready,” he said. “I'm glad I didn't send Melia up here to get you libertines.”
XXVII. If Only I Could Make You Mine
Winry had forgotten what it was like in the country, her country. Night fell thick and heavy, like a cover over a birdcage, and the expansive spaces of Risembool amplified the dark, made it deeper and emptier. The powdery-pale moonlight made luminescent the snow laying on the ground and hanging in the branches like sleeves. The road had been plowed recently, leaving only patches of thick, dark ice in the potholes, and Jean managed to maneuver the truck around most of those.
The roasted chicken and root vegetables sat heavy in them, and the long, easy silences that lapsed between them as they drove were inspired by that weight. Winry kept belching quietly into her fingers, and the little sounds seemed like the most impossibly dainty burps Jean had ever heard.
“You're coming inside to meet Grandma, you know,” Winry informed him as she scooted down in her chair and put her feet up on the dash. “I won't let you just drop me off and run.”
This was, Winry imagined they both were realizing, possibly the end of their trip together. Jean would leave her in Risembool and head back to Monrovia, and after New Years, Winry would borrow train fare from her grandmother and make her way back to Central. She might find him after the holidays, she thought, but Winry knew what extreme circumstances could do to people. And while the drive hadn't been all that extreme necessarily, she was aware of the effects of being stuck in a small box with another person for an extended period of time. What if, she wondered, this was only an effect of the trip, and what if, when she got back to Central, she would remember that she was actually a different person entirely?
Winry glanced over at Jean, at his terrible posture, unkempt hair, and three-day beard. She knew this feeling, this sinking collapse in her chest. This was the feeling of not being ready. But, she thought, if she wasn't ready for Jean to drive away, then she would have to be ready for him to stay...
The headlights through the window must have alerted Pinako because she came out onto the porch, her pipe stuck between her teeth, as Jean parked and retrieved Winry's luggage from the bed of the truck. Winry quickly plucked her suitcase from his hand. So quickly, in fact, that she did not see the look on Jean's face.
“Grandma!” Winry cried as she ran up the stairs. “God, is it good to see you!” She came to a stop in front of Pinako, and Jean came up unhurriedly behind her.
Pinako pulled her pipe from her mouth and blew out a smokey breath that condensed into a fog. “Took you long enough. I thought you would be here two days ago.”
Winry rubbed the back of her head. “Oh, you know how it is.” She waved dismissively, but Pinako was too old to be fooled with tricks like that. The fact that Winry still tried was almost a little endearing.
Pinako took a pull off her pipe. “You show up late and with a man?” She gestured with the bowl of her pipe toward the guest.
Winry felt her face go uncomfortably hot despite the snow that was now sifting lazily down around them. “This is Jean Havoc,” she said, leaving off his rank intentionally. She stepped aside and gestured for him to step forward. “He drove with me from Central.”
“How do you do, ma'am?” Jean asked and stooped to shake Pinako's small, leathery hand.
“I know everyone in this town,” Pinako said, chewing on her pipe thoughtfully. “I've never seen you around here.”
“Uh, no, ma'am,” Jean said, his eastern accent slipping out just a little at that. Winry had to hide a smile. “I'm from Monrovia.”
“I see,” Pinako replied. With that, she turned and headed for the front door. “Well come in before you both start growing snot-cicles.”
Winry and Jean exchanged a glance, not so surreptitiously checking the expression of the other for any sign of snot-cicle-induced revulsion. Pinako was, of course, just teasing them, the children coming in for the night.
After Jean and Pinako finished their hot toddies―Winry had a hot chocolate―Pinako stated that Jean was staying for the night. It was nearly ten, snow had been settling on the ground for the last forty-five minutes, and driving back to Monrovia was, she said, out of the question. “We've got plenty of guest rooms,” Pinako said. “Winry'll help you find one.”
Winry, who had been ruminating quietly into the the dregs of her hot chocolate, heard her name and sat up. “What? Oh, yeah, sure. I'll show you the bed―I mean the bedroom―I mean a guestroom!” she finished in a squeak. Winry dropped her face in embarrassment. Jean didn't look much better. Pinako merely smiled around the stem of her pipe.
“I'll see you two in the morning,” she said and left for her room upstairs.
Jean watched Winry spinning her mug slowly in careful quarter-turns on the table top. Color lingered high in her cheeks and the tips of her ears. He could see her fingers trembling as they worked around her drink. Her teeth peeked out as she worried her lower lip.
She looked like such a kid, he thought. It then occurred to him that he still didn't know how old she was. And he started to laugh. Winry looked up, glaring before he could even explain himself.
“I've never been much good at this part, myself,” he said, tipping his mug and wishing the last drops of his drink would collect into one more bracing swallow of whiskey and tea. He heard her let out an eep, and when he looked up at her, she had her head bowed so low that her cornsilk hair hid most of her face.
He had meant it to be somewhat comforting. Jean had always appreciated that handful of times when things seemed to fall into place with whichever girl it was and he could skip the mystery. There wasn't that uncertain, fumbling exchange in which both parties were trying desperately to read all the subtle cues of the other for some hint as to that night's sleeping arrangements.
In the week they had been driving together, Winry had never been this quiet. And Jean, who had been having some difficulty carrying on a conversation with Pinako because it was getting late and he was pretty sure Winry and he were thinking about the same thing, was starting to wish she would say something because, at this point, he had no idea what his chances were. He did know, however, that he'd been picturing the events leading up to this situation on and off for the week, and it never looked this awkward in his head.
“You want a cigarette?” Jean offered.
Winry clipped the end of his question with her blurted, “Yes.”
Winry showed Jean out onto the widow's porch because she wanted to sit on the wooden boards and dangle her legs through the posts of the railing like she used to do when she was a kid, and the addition of one of Jean's cheap cigarettes felt somehow appropriate. Like without that, it might be as though nothing had changed at all, like the life she had eked out in Central never happened.
Jean stood to her left, leaning his elbows against the railing, and together they watched the eerie quiet and the heavy stillness of a late-night snowfall.
When Winry finished her cigarette, she dropped the butt in her almost empty mug of hot chocolate. It hissed and died, and Winry stood. Without a prompt, Jean pulled a fresh cigarette from his breast pocket and handed it to her. She accepted, and when he flicked the striker on his metal lighter, Winry accepted that as well.
“You forget what it's like,” Jean mused around the filter of his own smoke.
“What?” Winry asked.
He took a drag and plucked his cigarette out of his mouth. “Real solitude. I can make myself feel alone in a crowd, but it's just not the same.”
“I forgot what quiet was like,” Winry supplied. “Central is never quiet.” She looked up. “And the stars. You can hardly see anything in Central.”
Jean glanced up as well. “Not much to look at now.”
“I remember them, though.” There was such affection in her voice. “From this very porch, in fact.”
He looked over at her then, her slender shoulders, her neck, long and arched like a gull's. She seemed different here. More still, perhaps. She had seemed rather like a sparrow trapped in the cab of his truck for much of the drive, but now she had an air of repose, of comfort and calm, and Jean felt a pang of jealousy.
“You belong to Resembool, don't you?” he asked, and it came out sounding a touch more bitter than he meant it to.
Winry turned to look at him. “I think so,” she admitted.
But Jean was there with her in Resembool, in her home, in this place like a snowglobe where nothing ever changes, and Winry began to feel the freedom of being the one variable in a world of constants. It seemed easier to move, somehow. She felt a blissful sort of detachment that only sweetens the binds that remain, and Winry found her nervousness expelled with the smoke from her lungs. When she brought Jean into her bedroom, when she asked him to stay there, she felt nothing but freedom. When he started kissing her and pushing her back to a wall, when they fumbled hurriedly with clothing, when he pressed into her and apologized against the crook of her neck, Winry fell in love with Resembool again. And there, with him, she understood then what had driven her so far from home, what the deal-breaking deficit had been, what she had been missing all along. It was not something about Resembool or Central. It was something about her.
But with Jean there, Winry thought she could belong just about anywhere.
XXVIII. Wada Calcium CD3
A fast, loud knock at the door at the bottom of the stairs jolted Winry and Jean awake. They looked at each other, then down at the rumpled bedclothes around them, then back at each other.
“Jean!” Pinako hollered through the cracked door at the bottom of the stairs. “Put on some clothes and come down here. Your brother's on the phone.”
Jean blinked. Eric had called? Jean started to laugh, and when he looked at Winry, he started laughing even harder: she was clutching the sheets around her chest, her cheeks burning, and her eyes turned away. When she heard him laughing, however, she narrowed her eyes at him and glared so hard that it was almost palpable.
“What's so damn funny?” Winry snarled, her face still florid as the sunrise in the window behind her.
Jean snagged her chin, kissed her quickly, and said, “God, you're cute.”
She started, her eyes wide for just a moment, and then her blush deepened and her glare returned. Winry opened her mouth to bark at him, but she quickly snapped it shut and looked away because Jean had unceremoniously thrown back the sheets and begun shuffling around the floor for his clothes.
Winry hazarded a glance over her shoulder in time to see Jean buckling his belt. He then stooped to pick up his undershirt from the floor, tugged it on, and pulled his dogtags out from under the V-neck. It was the first time she'd really watched him go through those motions, although it wasn't the first time she'd seen it. Jean must have felt her gaze because he turned to her and gave her a smile.
“You coming or what?” he asked.
Winry started again and sank a little farther under the sheets. “I'll be along,” she said, looking away. She heard Jean laughing all the way down the stairs at her.
~
“Morning,” he said as he picked up the receiver that lay on a table by the door to Winry's attic bedroom.
“'Put on some clothes and come down here'?” Eric repeated in mock incredulity.
“How did you get this number?” Jean asked through his teeth.
“There are only so many Rockbells in Resembool.”
“What the hell do you want?”
“Just calling to find out if we'd be seeing you for breakfast. I'm going to assume not.”
“I'm hanging up.”
“Now, what am I supposed to tell Melia when―”
Jean put the receiver down hard. “Bastard,” he muttered under his breath. It did not take long, however, for Jean to get distracted and follow his nose to the kitchen where Pinako was brewing strong coffee and frying sausages.
Already, Jean was certain that this was not going to play out like his previous run-ins with guardians of his lady friends. When he was younger, he'd snuck out his fair share of windows, stammered through some very awkward conversations with some very awkward mothers, even been chased away by a gun-wielding father once, but Pinako, serenely dividing up sausages onto three plates at the table, gave him the impression that she was downright disinterested.
That didn't stop him from being a little nervous. “Good morning, ma'am,” he said from the door. She looked up from topping off her coffee mug.
“Don't look so scared, Jean,” she said as he put the carafe back on the burner. “I'd say we're both a bit old for that, don't you think?”
Jean laughed uncomfortably. “I s'pose so.” He watched her reach into her apron pocket and produce a glass bottle. She unscrewed the lid and shook out six white pills and set two of them next to every plate. “What's that?” Jean asked as he came in and poured himself a coffee.
“Everyone in my house takes calcium supplements,” Pinako declared. “I should have taken them when I was your age, and I'm regretting it now.”
Jean leaned against the counter top and sipped his coffee―he had to hide a wince at the acrid flavor of mechanic's coffee. When the taste subsided, he started to laugh: so he and Winry were too old to pretend like sex didn't exist but not too old to be force-fed vitamins? He appreciated the backwards maternal logic, and, more importantly, he recognized it. There was a twinge in his chest he hadn't felt in ages.
XXIX. The Sound of Waves
The air was thin and dry and cold, and Winry watched halfhearted gusts fan Jean's hair over his eyes. He stood, perhaps, two steps below her on the front porch stairs, and she was just about eye-level with him. It was odd to see him from that angle. And so close. She could see all the shades of blonde in his scruffy beard and all the impossible blues in his eyes. And despite the layers she had on, she felt vulnerable to him.
She kind of liked it.
“I'll look you up when I get back to Central,” Jean offered, his hands deep in his pockets.
A wooly scarf covered Winry's mouth, so she simply nodded.
“We should get dinner or something,” he said. That sounded notably lame, even to Jean, who had always thought his interactions with women were lame at best. He hoped, though, that it was that sort of lame that beautiful women found charming, and he watched Winry's eyes for any hint of crinkling from a smile. She wasn't smiling, though. Her eyes were big and sad and maybe a little desperate, and Jean was afraid that it was his responsibility to fix this, and he wasn't entirely sure how to.
Because he'd spent a week crammed in a car with this girl, and what the hell did that count for anyway? He'd slept with women he'd known for less. How much was an attachment really worth when there was no one else to get attached to? He'd be damned, though, if he tried to tell himself that he didn't like her an awful lot.
There were acres of things he wanted to say to her:
Thanks for making me come home because I had no intention of going to Monrovia until I read your ad.
Thanks for navigating and going halvsies on gas and lodging.
Thanks for the sex, it was just great, and sorry about that whole virginity business.
But watching her against the backdrop of the buttery walls of her childhood home made him end on, Thanks for letting me share you with Resembool for the week. Looks like Resembool is gonna win this one, though, don't it?
“I should hit the road before it starts to snow again,” Jean said with a glance upward. The clouds above looked ready to split a seam.
She nodded again, and Jean really wished that she would bail him out and say something. Anything.
He waited. So did she. This wasn't how he thought it would end. “Well,” Jean said, stepping backwards onto the stair below, “See you sometime.” He then turned, took the last few stairs, and stepped onto the frozen, packed earth below the porch. His rusted truck was parked and crusted with ice in the lane a few yards away, and Jean resigned himself to its company and the special kind of solitude that comes with the bite of frigid leather seats.
He was fishing his keys out of his pocket when he heard a high, hurried, “Hey, Jean?” from behind him. He grinned but made sure his face was blank when he looked over his shoulder to see Winry on the porch, bouncing to stay warm and tugging the scarf down from her mouth.
“You're probably going to think I'm crazy, but, um,” she began. She clapped her mittened hands together as she worked with the words. She began to gesture as though she were speaking, but her mouth remained still and open and let out only a rather frustrated sigh.
And damn it all if that wasn't the cutest thing she'd done all morning.
Jean turned and came back to the porch. “You know, the worst you're gonna do is make me think you're crazier,” Jean teased, and he could tell how uncertain Winry was because that didn't get a rise out of her. He returned to the bottom of the steps, crossed his arms, and waited.
She began wringing her hands. “I know I've been talking all week about how much I want to come home and see my grandma and my house and all that, and I still do, and it's been wonderful for the, you know, twelve hours I've been here, but, um, I'm realizing now that I kind of just want to be where ever you are.” It spilled out in a muffled jumble, her lips too cold to move as fast as she wanted them to.
She looked rather like she had just asked him for money or his last cigarette. It took a moment for those rolling waves of confession to finish surging over him. Her eyes were searching and expectant and hell if Jean could say no to that. He held in a snort of laughter because he knew how much she had just bared herself.
“So,” Jean began and shrugged, “Am I taking you and Pinako to Monrovia for New Years, or is my family coming here?”
He very abruptly had to step back and brace himself as Winry threw her arms around his neck, soundly kissed him, and almost spilled them both onto the ground.
XXX. Kiss
Curtis, Eric, Melia, and a big, dead turkey in a sack showed up in the flat bed truck. Next came the Detwilers, their two sons, and their saint bernard, Dale, from a quarter mile up the road. Then Daniel Fenton who had a Rockbell leg and no family save his mother who was too old to cook a good New Years dinner. Then Mr. and the young Mrs. Curry and a herd of sharecroppers, mostly young, single men who looked both like rumor of Winry's homecoming had made it to their farm and like they hadn't had turkey since last New Years.
They toasted with pints of dark, dark beer when the radio announcer counted down to the New Year. Jean, who was quite a few pints in, made a big show of dipping Winry and kissing her until she was wholly done being kissed. Eric squeezed his daughter until she squealed out peals of laughter and planted an exaggerated kiss on his cheek. Mr. Curry was above that sort of display, and the Detwilers shared one of those quietly affectionate kisses that couples could share in front of their kids.
When the New Year was in and the night was thick as home brew, everyone went home except Jean who, for his many whispered promises to Winry of all the things he was going to do to her, collapsed face down in her bed, too tired and too drunk to remove his own shoes.
Winry, a touch tipsy herself, placed a big Mason jar of water on the night stand, tugged Jean's boots off, and pulled his feet into the bed. It was rather like trying to rearrange an area rug beneath a particularly heavy couch, but Winry eventually worked the blanket out from under him. She then drained as much water as she could hold, changed into her pajamas, and curled herself tight to Jean's side.
~
They loaded their luggage and a box of Winry's things that she had pulled out of storage into the bed of Jean's truck. Pinako gave them a sack full of turkey sandwiches, bottles of sarsaparilla, and a jar of aspirin for Jean's head before packing the two of them up into the truck as well. Surreptitiously, Pinako stuffed a handful of cash into Winry's coat pocket and made her promise to take care of herself over the long drive back. Winry did not have to ask to know that taking care of herself meant no more picking fights with biker gangs and no more involuntarily smoking up, no more sleeping outside and no more wandering off into backwoods towns overrun by kiddie crime syndicates. If Pinako couldn't convince her granddaughter to ride the train, the best she could do was warn her to look after Jean―you know how delicate men are, Winry―and to keep the truck gassed up.
Goodbyes exchanged and tire chains fitted, they got into the truck and headed west. The road was treacherous, but Winry could hear the sound of the chains crushing ice to crumbs beneath them.
After a last, full-armed wave out the window, Winry swung herself back into the cabin of the truck. She was pink and flustered from the wind and said, “We should do this again next year,” as she beat snow out of her hair.
Jean glanced over at her, a quiet, satisfied sort of grin on his face. “Okay,” he said.
They drove on to Monrovia. It took almost an hour because of the condition of the road out of Resembool, but as they reached the city limits, the snow on the ground thinned. Once at the old farm house, they stopped only briefly. Eric and Jean nursed a couple glasses of Alka-Seltzer while Curtis poured Winry some coffee in a tin cup.
When they exchanged their quick but sincere goodbyes―Winry smiled as Curtis gave Jean a broad, heavy hug and muttered something in his ear that made Jean start and then laugh―Eric shook Winry's hand and said in a voice low enough that Jean could not hear, “Keep an eye on him, all right?”
Winry felt like she should explain to Eric that she wasn't Jean's girlfriend or anything. In fact, before that week, they were barely acquaintances. She felt like she was lying to him when she said, “I will.” But intention had to count for something, right? She certainly liked the idea of keeping an eye on Jean. Still, Winry felt like she was being deceitful. She felt like she was an interloper in a situation where a real girlfriend should be. She looked at Jean, who was having a quiet conversation with his father. Jean's adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed and nodded in silence. His father spoke lowly, a stern look on his leathery face.
This was, she thought, the first time Jean had been home in so many years. Really, she had no business being here, pretending to be someone who might have a right to see this. Perhaps it was her desire to be that person that made her reach for Jean's hand as they turned their backs to Curtis's front door and walked to the truck. His fingers closed around hers, and he held her hand until he opened the car door for her and helped her in.
They stopped at the last gas station in Monrovia, and they pooled cash together to fill up the tank. While they waited for the attendant to fill up the tank and check the oil, the silence settled in the cab of the truck thick as the cold, wet air. Winry drummed her fingers on the armrest on her door, gathering up her courage. She glanced at Jean. He was looking at his hands in his lap, clearly submerged in his own thoughts.
“Hey, Jean?” Winry said, seizing his attention.
He hardily had time to look up before Winry sat herself squarely in his lap, her knees against his hips and the curve of the steering wheel pressing into her lower back. She felt him set his hands on her hips. He slipped his thumbs into her belt loops.
“Hello,” he said, a little surprised.
“Are you okay?” Winry asked, searching his eyes for a hint to the answer before he could give it. Winry would not put it past him to evade if it were too heavy.
He smiled a sad sort of smile at her. “Yeah, I'm fine.” Winry gave him her I'm-not-buying-it look. He laughed. “You remember when I said I wouldn't mind everything being the same as it was when I left?”
Winry did. That was shortly before Eric walked in on them having their first, terribly clumsy bedroom tussle.
“Yeah, that was bullshit,” Jean said. “I don't know...” He glanced out the window. “Let's just say I'm relieved that nothing is the same.”
Winry rested her hands on his biceps and squeezed.
“I left for a reason, you know,” he went on, watching his hands fiddling with the hem of Winry's sweatshirt in her lap. “And it was a good reason. I really thought I'd hopped the last life boat out. I wasn't sure what we were going to find when we got there.” He looked out the window again. “He was really lost without her,” he muttered.
Winry wrapped her arms around Jean's shoulders and pulled him forward against her. It was the first time, she thought, that she'd really hugged him. And it felt wonderful. Now that the giddy panic of their first few physical exchanges had subsided, Winry was left with this sort of quiet weight, the comforting solidity of him. She felt impossibly small compared to Jean, but she hoped that, for what it was worth, he found some solidity in her.
She wanted to know more. She wanted to know all the details of all the days. She wanted to know all his losses and triumphs, all the griefs and the hurts, all the steps that brought him from Monrovia to Eastern and Eastern to Central and Central to right there with her.
But there was time for that later.
Jean sat back with a sigh. “Do you think I'm an asshole? For bailing, I mean?”
“I think,” Winry said, straightening his collar with small, gentle motions, “that you are a goober, Jean.” He frowned at her. “I think you're a goober in search of truth.”
“Well,” he began, feigning affront in his voice, “I think you're a truth-er in search of goob.”
Winry smiled at him and kissed the corner of his mouth. “I think that search is over.”
The gas station attendant tapped on the glass, seizing their attention. Winry flushed and flipped off Jean's lap as he rolled down the window and passed the attendant a handful of bills. He then rolled up the window and turned the key in the ignition.
The engine turned over, and Jean asked, “Shall we?”
Winry smiled. Jean put the truck in first and pointed them west.
In retrospect, this story could definitely be called How Winry Got Her Goob Back. XD