Work Text:
He starts with a stick and dirt. He can do circles, straight lines, precise angles in his sleep, even with how weak and wobbly the old arm can be, but organic shapes, proportions, faces—
It's good to be able to scrape his attempts away with a boot as many times as he wants, is what he's saying.
It can't last forever. Al figures him out eventually.
"This will be better for drawing in," he says, cheerfully ignoring how Ed's holding the sketchbook like a dead fish. "And this way you can look back and see your progress!"
"Great," Ed says.
He starts with the charcoal Al bought along with it, since he does have a point about starting with something closer to chalk. Everyone makes fun of him for how it comes out looking like a black blob eating the page. Ed lets himself be riled up, hissing and spitting about how they don't understand his vision, let's see you all do better, because it's more fun than admitting black blob eating the page isn't that far off from what he was going for.
"Hey, can you braid your hair real quick?" he asks Winry.
"Braid it yourself," Winry grumbles, which is fair, because she is working.
She startles a little, when Ed sits down behind her and actually does, but she doesn't tell him to fuck off, and pretty much immediately she forgets he's even there. He's not used to braiding someone else's hair, hasn't in—has it really been a year? Has it really only been a year?—and it doesn't come out looking good, but it's good enough to get the basics of the physical construction down.
He fills two and a half pages with braids, trying to get them right, while Winry does her own drafting. It's nice.
"Make sure you get my good side," Al preens.
"Wait, you have a bad side?" Ed makes a show of flipping to a clean page. "Let me get that one instead—"
He's mostly gotten over the feeling of vertigo from looking at Al and not having to tilt his head, but sometimes it still catches him off-guard. Sometimes an annoying part of him feels nostalgic for it, which is weird, obviously, but whatever.
He laughs at Al's puffed-up outrage and flips back to his latest shitty attempt at a portrait. He needs to be able to draw him from memory before he can start experimenting with trying to add any feelings.
"Ed," Granny says.
He didn't want her to see this one. Anyone, actually, but especially her. "What."
She doesn't say anything else, just stands there and looks at the page. It's empty, mostly, except for a greasy smear of charcoal where the oils from his hand smudged it more than he was counting on, and a few rushed lines curving up from it like dislocated ribs.
She squeezes his arm and lets him go.
He's gotten good at drawing Winry when she isn't paying attention. Hunched over someone's arm, hair pulled back and legs in a weird position she's going to regret later but don't you dare interrupt her when she's in the zone, Edward Elric. These days her profile comes out looking careful and measured, like the fine details of a circle's notation. He's not sure how he feels about that yet.
He can't remember her face well enough to translate it to pencil. but he's never learned as well on his own as he does with someone to check his work. So.
"Okay, tell me if this is stupid—"
"Oh," says Al, tearing up at a half-decent drawing of the back of Nina's head.
The first one somebody gets pissed at him for is a drawing of Al—the armor—with shadows pouring out of him. Ed's pretty pissed himself, given how well he tried to hide that one.
After, when Al's invalid ass has once again kicked him into the dirt as well as he could before he got winded, they do-don't talk about it.
"It felt…" Al makes a strained noise. "I saw it and it all came rushing back."
"Sorry," Ed says. The scar on his jaw's never looked like anything but a normal cut, but he gets headaches, every now and then. "I ever tell you he tried to do that to me too?"
Al still can't sit up, but he slaps a hand over Ed's face with clear intent to smother. "Winry's right, we're the worst. What do you mean he tried—"
He can use the newspaper clipping of Ling as a reference, but he can't just copy it. Greed held himself differently—and Ling held himself differently from The Emperor of Xing, anyhow—felt different, looked different. More openly alert, but more than that, he was…
Ed can't figure out what he was. But some of the portraits start to come closer.
He's missed transmuting dragons. Gargoyles. Spikes and flourishes, demons and monsters. He still can't get these ones to look the way they do in his head. He's mostly alright with it, human imperfection and all that, except for when teeth bleed into faces into eyes into grasping hands and voices—
He throws the sketchbook across the room and regrets it.
"You're not going to get any other colors?" Winry asks judgmentally.
"I like red," he defends. He likes black and white, really. They're… direct. But some things, he's starting to suspect, need to be in color.
She worries about him. He tries to appreciate it the way she deserves.
People he doesn't have photographs of. Things that show up in nightmares. Neighbors, Winry's patients, strangers once he's back to traveling. A meticulously-labeled floorplan of their childhood home done from fallible childhood memory, mailed to Al and then mailed back with corrections. Nina, as she was and as she was. Mom, the way he remembers her. Dad, with an expression besides that ridiculous sobbing.
Dragons and gargoyles and demons and monsters, because he draws to have fun, too.