#edween2017

A/N I went to go get wine and chocolate and looked up some prompts and concocted this for @edweenweek! It’s only ~500 words but I like this idea. 

When he laid eyes on the Resembool house, Ed immediately thought of home. It was picturesque; tall two-story house of canary yellow siding with a country porch against a pastel backdrop sky of blue, orange, and pink. The green blades of grass beginning to shake off the winter and welcome the spring, just like he was. His journey from Baschool was all but easy, and he was here. He made it. He’d gathered information that Winry and Al had left the Northern sector unharmed and it made him all the more … excited, if it had to simmer it down to one word.

The inside was warm with the burning of firewood, but Granny Pinako didn’t answer when he called. The chimeras he travelled with easily made themselves at home and he was a moment too late to warn them about their feet on the couches. Sighing, Ed left them to their own devices, concocting an apology as he beelined to Winry’s workshop. But it was empty. He climbed the wooden stairs and he heard the creaks in his automail. She’d wave around her wrench menacingly, he was sure. But the warmth crept into his stomach in the same way when he talked to Hawkeye about Winry. He pushed the thought away in the same way he pushed the door leading to her room.

Ed exhaled. To his dismay, it was empty too. The window-door leading to her balcony was opening and the curtain billowed, swathing over the floor like a paintbrush and tinting the floor with the gradients of twilight.

That’s when the curtain of dusk fell.

It wasn’t the lack of light, but in his thoughts. An instinct. Ed tried to turn heel out of the room before he realized he couldn’t. He was frozen. His muscles weren’t obeying like they were rooted where he stood.

The door closed behind him. Slow enough to not cause any alarm to anyone who could hear it, but swiftly enough that it wasn’t caused by the breeze. The tendons at his neck were taut, he couldn’t tilt that either. He looked down and he thought he could see dark tendrils marking his skin. Cold sweat glistened his forehead and a strange fear paralyzed his thoughts, like a child’s fear of the dark.

“Edward Elric, we were wondering if you had survived.”

Her voice. But it was all wrong. It was like soft timbres of her voice were processed through a distorter. Like multiple tones of her voice spoke with her. Eerie. Unnatural. 

And she emerged from the shadow he didn’t see in the corner behind him. Her hair was down and picked up with the breeze. Her eyes were a dark and ominous violet, nothing like the blue waters he expected to lose himself in.

“Wi-Winry?” He said, choked.

for @edweenweek! it took me a while to come up with something properly horror-esque, i hope u enjoy

warnings: animal mutilation

The counter transmutation to return everyone’s souls was mostly fool proof.

Mostly.

In the weeks following that day where she woke up gasping on the ground, Winry had found herself experiencing the overwhelming feeling that something had shifted in her, and not in a good way.

It first began as small problems, little pangs and twitches that would make her put her tools down to rub at her head and hands. They came quick and sharp, and would disappear just as rapidly. Her vision would suddenly blur, and she’d walk into a room and forget why she went there in the first place.

Winry upped her water intake, and made sure to spend more time out in her small vegetable garden.

Sharp pangs eventually morphed into constant throbbing, and an inability to focus for long periods at a time. It became harder to sleep – oftentimes she would wander the paddocks surrounding her house in the hopes it would make her weary enough to pass out. The sheep would glance at her blearily, bleating as she passed them by, shying from the harsh light of the oil lamp she carried. The long grass would shift in the slight breeze and Winry would swear she heard chattering behind her. It didn’t matter how quickly she spun. No one was there.

The arrival of Edward and Alphonse was a blessed relief: all of the strange symptoms and events that seemed to be plaguing her suddenly disappeared, as if they had never occurred in the first place. Winry felt free, calm, and happy. The boys kept her busy: if she had ever complained about Edward’s appetite, this was nothing compared to Alphonse’s. As far as she was concerned, now she was trying to feed two bottomless pits instead of one.

She found herself growing less hungry as the days went on – almost every night would be a roast meal of some kind, normally lamb, but Winry couldn’t find it in herself to eat anything more than a few mouthfuls. She knew that they were starting to pick up on it – Edward especially – but as far as she was concerned, it was just a phase. It would pass.

She woke one morning covered in blood and had to bite down on her arm to muffle the scream that came out. Edward stirred next to her, and she flung herself out of bed and rushed into the bathroom, desperately trying to pull off the shirt she had nicked last night. The fabric clung to her skin and she tried her best not to sob as she peeled it off her skin. The blood left pink smears all over her stomach and she realised with horror that her arms were coated with it.

She heard Edward pad down the hallway, knocking softly on the locked door. “Is everything okay?” he asked, concern clearly evident despite the yawn that followed. “There was blood-”

“Y-yeah, it’s fine!” she called back, quickly dumping the sodden shirt into the bathtub and running cold water, rubbing at the fabric roughly. “My period turned up, that’s all.”

There was a pause, and Winry could well imagine the incredulous look on his face. “Win, that amount of blood-”

“And when have you been privy to how much blood I lose being too much?” she shot back, wincing a little at how harsh she sounded. “It’s not as bad as it looks, I swear. I just want to clean myself up Ed – give me a few minutes.”

She heard him sigh, and the sound of his hand moving over the wooden grain of the door. “I’ll go make some tea,” he called out as he made his way down the hallway.

It got worse after that incident – Winry would suddenly find herself missing entire hours of her day, unable to recall what she had done. She could feel Edward staring at her – and not in the way that encouraged Alphonse to make gagging noises and to yell at them to get a room. It was quiet, contemplative.

Edward Elric was a dangerous man when he allowed himself the time to think.

“What do you guys want for dinner tonight?” she asked, rising quickly from the sofa just as Edward began to sit down. He frowned at her, and reached for her hand but she quickly drew it into herself, rubbing at her wrist. More and more his touch was becoming like a firebrand, rather than the soft warmth she had imagined it would be. She felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck, and swallowed the feeling of unease.

“I want lamb,” Alphonse replied, shifting on the plush armchair and adjusting the blankets wrapped around him.

Winry nodded. “I can do that.”

There wasn’t any lamb in the icebox, and Winry swore under her breath. The feeling of foreboding was growing and her entire body felt on edge –

Whatever it was in her finally shifted: Winry heaved into the sink, watching in horror as her vomit splattered against the dull silver of the pewter, an ugly shade of puce.

Her head jerked towards the lower part of the property. Alphonse wants lamb.

Her legs took long strides towards the paddocks, her shadow thin and elongated against the last of the sun’s light spilling over the ranges. Everything was saturated in gold, and she ignored the shouting she could hear from the house. Alphonse wants lamb, the chattering voices intoned.

It was too quick, too easy to wrangle one of the sheep, to use her weight against the animal. The soft chattering behind her increased as she exposed the plump belly of the Romney, and she felt her arms positioning themselves without her realising she had. The sheep bleated.

The skin of the animal’s belly split cleanly under her nails and Winry dimly registered the choked cries before the sheep lay silent, limbs twitching. The blood spilled over her lap, coating her bare thighs in surprising heat. The metallic tang of iron lingered in the warm air and Winry thought she might choke on it.

The heart, she heard the chattering voices croon, and she felt her arms digging into the sheep, moving aside intestines and kidneys, fingers gripping onto something that felt wholly foreign and familiar.

“Win?” Edward’s voice called out, hesitant and soft. She turned towards him eyes pleading with him to see, to understand –

His face paled in the faint dusk settling over the land and he stumbled back a little, a hand covering his mouth in horror. “Winry what the fuck-”

Welcome to the first Edween week!!! It’s exactly what the name sounds like, 5 days dedicated to Halloween themed Edwin!! Any sort of content is welcome, whether it be art, fic, or whatever else gets you in the spooky mood. You can include as many characters or side ships as you like, but pertaining to the name, the main focus should be along the lines of Ed and Winry. There will be no themes, instead this will be an event where everything is Halloween related; it can be AU or whatever you please. 

For Edween, I though up a Soul Eater AU, admittly the two couples do act slimiar!