The Family Way.txt

The Family Way (would have been untitled if not for ladyshadowphyre, so infinite gratitude to her =)
Rating: R, for pottymouth and unfortunately no actual sex.
Unbeta'd - I must stop throwing out unchecked things, I know I'm bad ^^;
Disclaimer: Sometimes I wish I actually owned the boys so much I could *weep*.

Spoilers: Post-movie scenario! Go watch that first! It's better than this anyway!

Summary: Post-movie, a companion piece to To The Letter - kids and fluff, fluff, fluff, fluff.

Notes: There has been much angst recently. I'm gonna have to write the last piece of the trilogy I tend to end up writing when crappy things happen to my friends, who don't deserve crap. In the meantime, though, reposted fluff and further apologies for bombarding my f'list with stuff they've already read ;)



Roy had had his reservations about the second child, for months beforehand and then for the entire train journey to Riesembool, as Ed jigged his ankle and tapped his knee and stared out of the window, picking at his gloves. Ed had never got on with his nephew; the boy's first interaction with his uncle had been to pull his hair so hard that Roy did have to admit that the child had incredible arm strength for a newborn ("He's a mechanic," Winry had said, mellowed with happiness and glowing with pride as she disentangled her son's hands from her brother-in-law's hair). Ed insisted it was premeditated.

"Infants tug things, Ed." Roy had said, but Ed just muttered, "You didn't see the look in his eyes."

Ed was worried about Winry, and about Al, and about the baby - but Roy was also worried that this child would take an instant and not-entirely-irrational dislike to its uncle as well, because he knew it hurt Ed more than he let on that his nephew quite clearly hated him. But, god, he could hardly be blamed for it - Ed held children one handed at a distance, eyeing them uneasily, and children did seem to be able to read these things . . .

They arrived to a one day old girl with fairy-blonde hair, who Al placed beaming into his brother's uneasy arms. Ed paused, stiff, but then the little girl opened her eyes -

And that was it, Roy knew, because the second she'd opened her eyes he'd seen Ed's heart drop into her lap. Trisha owned Ed from day one. She did not return Ed's sceptical golden gaze; she looked up with unfocused dark grey eyes, large and soft, and Ed settled her closer against his chest in the crook of one elbow with pure wonder on his face, and dangled automail fingers at her like a living mobile.

"We weren't sure what to call her until we saw her," Winry murmured from the sofa, little Sam sitting on her lap with legs kicking, suspiciously watching his uncle hold his new sister. "But then . . ."

Al fetched the photograph for Roy, who looked at it wordlessly and then held it out for Ed. Ed dragged his eyes up from the baby, focused on the picture. "Your mother," Roy said, watching the settled smile on Ed's face. Ed just nodded, looked down at the baby again and murmured, "Trisha," as if trying it out.

The photograph showed a pretty grey-eyed woman with a brown pony tail holding onto a tiny Al one-armed, a bouncy little Ed grinning at her side. "Didn't Uncle Ed look like you when he was little?" Winry said, holding the photograph for Sam, who scowled and said, "No.", his favourite word.

"I thought all that stuff got burned," Ed said, touching the tip of a metal finger very gently to Trisha's nose. She blinked, gurgled a question, and Ed beamed.

"I saved that one." Al said, taking the photograph back and glancing at it with a smile. "When I packed your suitcase, I . . . gave it to Granny Pinako to look after. I didn't know what to . . ."

"No." Ed murmured, lifting Trisha up, still grinning in such a mellow way for Ed. "You did the right thing. Sometimes I think . . . I mean, I know why we did it, but - it'd be nice to have more memories." He almost wriggled with glee for a second as Trisha cooed in his hands and half-lifted one little arm at him, and Roy couldn't stifle his own smile to see Ed like this.

"May I?" Roy said, as Al moved to put the photograph back on the shelf, and Al just smiled knowingly and handed it over again. Roy traced over it all carefully. There was nothing of his mother in Ed, not his face shape or his eyes, no feature at all but something about the expression Ed was wearing right now. Oh god, never tell him that; Ed was looking maternal.

"Oi," Ed said, nudging Roy with his elbow, eyes flicking up at him and glittering bright with joy. "She's your niece too, you wanna hold her or not?"

That night, cramped together in the guest bed, Ed whispered, "She's so tiny."

"So was Sam."

"Yeah, but she isn't freakishly strong or violent for a newborn." Ed muttered. "She's so soft - her bones are so tiny, she's - how do they grow into-" He lifted Roy's own arm up as an illustration, held it over his head and stared at it with wide eyes. "How . . . ?"

"Everyone starts out as a baby, Ed."

Ed stared wordlessly at Roy's arm for a moment, then lowered it and kissed his wrist, rolling into Roy's arms. Roy could feel Ed's smile against his shoulder. "She likes me," Ed whispered, and Roy closed his eye and grinned into Ed's hair because Ed never seemed to give a crap what anyone thought about him and suddenly the opinion of a person who couldn't even talk yet meant the world to him.

He murmured, "How could she not?" and Ed squirmed with delight against him, and Roy wished they were home already - he knew Ed too well to attempt quiet sex in a house containing two small children, one too-knowing little brother and one exhausted new mother.

"She actually likes me."

"You act like no-one else ever has."

"I dunno if they ever have."

"Alphonse likes you. I like you," Roy pointed out, a little affronted, and Ed rubbed his hip soothingly with a cool metal hand.

"You don't count," he said, and yawned. "You know you and Al, you're like, you don't count on the scale with normal people."

"I am elevated to the same level as Alphonse. You really must love me."

"Nearly the same level," Ed allowed, and Roy laughed out loud.

*

The fact that at least one child could be left in Ed's company without anything getting broken meant that they were asked to babysit more after Trisha was a little older. Every few months Trisha and Sam were sent to their uncles in Central, wouldn't they like a nice holiday? ("No," Sam scowled, and Trisha beamed) so their parents could have a week alone. "So there may be another one along soon," Roy murmured, and Ed looked aghast.

"Don't - even think about that!"

"What?" Roy realised where Ed's horror had come from and stared. "Ed, you must have seen from the evidence that your brother and Miss Rockbell-"

"Don't say it!"

"They're adults now, Edward-"

"Don't!"

Hands clapped over his ears and looking ready to hit Roy with a book to get him to shut up, because Ed's little brother, Ed's little brother was as pure as new snow and Ed wouldn't hear any different if Winry popped out a child a year, every year.

When they had the children, Ed squeezed his lab time aside - Roy knew he wouldn't see much of Ed the next week while he worked through the days he'd missed, but Roy found time off work harder to scrape up - and Roy came home each night to a heartbreakingly domestic scene; Ed with a finger firmly in front of his mouth because he'd just got them to sleep, or Trisha had a picture she'd drawn for him, or Sam had hit Ed over the head with a toy and Ed was shaking him upside-down by the ankle. Roy took the boy off Ed and pushed his lover spluttering into the kitchen, picked Trisha up in his other arm because she liked to play with the braiding on his uniform, sat down and had them tell him about their day with Uncle Ed, and discussed which parts of it they probably shouldn't tell their parents: ice cream for breakfast no, going to the park to feed the ducks yes, Trisha falling in the duckpond no, but she could show them the doll Ed had transmuted her to stop her crying.

Sam took things to pieces. "It's a phase," Winry had said in a voice airy with deception, handing him over at the station. This 'phase' of his had lasted from age one and showed no signs of abating now he was four years old and fully capable of using a little plastic screwdriver to do far more than he should have been able to with it. Things fell apart after Sam had been innocently 'playing' in the same room, and they had to get Fury to fix their radio every time the children left. Ed chose to believe that this was his mother's malignant genes showing through.

"Little brat, he has her blonde hair, doesn't he?"

Roy glanced to the top of Ed's head and murmured, "It's a little too brightly yellow, actually . . ."

All the same, if Winry had decided her son was going to be a mechanic, Ed and Al were in agreement that Trisha was a born alchemist. Other children drew people and flowers and dogs and splotches; Trisha crayoned wobbly arrays that wouldn't transmute anything, and Ed pinned up every one with manic pride. Roy returned home one night to Ed practically bouncing in the hallway, thrusting a bobbly ball of shiny brown at him. "Look!" he said. "Trisha transmuted it! Out of sand!"

"That's . . . lovely. What is it?"

"I don't know!" Ed said, delighted, turning it over in his hands. "It's going on the mantelpiece!"

*

Roy closed the bedroom door very, very quietly behind himself - Trisha was very sensitive to sharp noises when freshly asleep, Sam crashed out like a starfish and snored softly from the second you finally got him to close his eyes - and looked at Ed, sitting up in bed with book and pen and notes, frowning at the page, glasses low on his nose. Roy could see the ri...