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Ed hated hospitals. All of them smelled like alcohol and bad waiting room coffee. But he didn’t exactly have a choice this time. Granny had hung on long enough to birth his first two children, but she didn’t live long enough to even know there would be a third. And since Ed knew next to nothing about birthing babies, he’d driven at a breakneck speed to Resembool General Hospital- a tiny building that probably held no more than fifty patients at any given time.
The nurses helped Winry inside, more infuriated that Ed had nearly stripped the gears in the old car getting them there than the fact that she was in so much pain she couldn’t walk. While they whisked her away to deliver, Ed was ushered inside where he filled out a stack of paperwork that would have made Mustang cringe. How many damn times did they need to know his name and address anyways? Couldn’t they just look at the first form and figure it out for themselves!? He had more important things to do, like pace the waiting room and keep checking the clock every three minutes.
They’d arrived just before noon, and it was quarter after seven when he heard his stomach growl. As badly as he wanted to get something to eat, he didn’t want to miss his third child’s arrival. Then again maybe a snack was definitely in order. James had taken a whopping twenty eight hours in coming, but Sara only took a little over ten. Maybe this baby would come even quicker? Ed didn’t know, but he knew he was going to have to eat something if he wanted to keep this pacing thing up.
Ed ate a brown bag dinner of a tuna salad sandwich (that was actually quite tasty, truth be told), a bag of crispy potato chips and a big fat peach. When he returned, someone had freshened up the coffee, but despite being fresh, it was still awful, tasteless sludge, no matter how much cream and sugar he put in it.
By ten-thirty, he knew there were two hundred and fifty-eight sea foam green tiles in the floor, and thirty-four of those had been cut in half because the room dimensions didn’t work with the flooring that had been chosen. There were four big windows, one of which he had cracked for some fresh air that didn’t smell like a burning coffee pot. Each window pane had a different level of clarity. The clearest ones were the ones closer to the ceiling and the ones spotted and dotted with fingerprints, nose prints and other various smudges were right at the level of a child’s face if they were kneeling in the chair, facing out the window. He’d counted the cracks in the toes of his leather boots (seventeen on the left, twelve on the right), he wondered what his children were doing with the neighbor’s wife… what they’d had for dinner… hoped they weren’t giving the young woman a hard time.
“Next time, I’m gonna bring a knapsack,” he grumbled to himself. “Full of snacks and a crossword puzzle or something…” Just then, a nurse strode quickly by him and he nearly tackled her as he asked for news of Winry.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Elric,” she apologized. “I’m not attending to your wife, but I heard everything is going normally.”
Ed sighed. “Alright. Sorry, thank you.”
She patted his arm. “I’ll try to find out something for you, dear.”
Ed thanked her again and went back to staring at the ceiling. He tried to picture what the baby’s name would look like when he wrote it for the first time, wondered whether that name would be Anna or Conrad. As his thoughts wandered, he decided that maybe closing his eyes wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Besides, he knew the room forwards and backwards now, eyes open or shut. Turns out, it was his best decision since the tuna salad.
He awoke to the sound of a woman’s voice and the feel of a gentle shake. “Mr. Elric? Mr. Elric, time to wake up!”
All at once he sprang forward, a string of mumbled questions flying out of his mouth like a typhoon.
“Shh, it’s alright!” she said soothingly as she beamed at him. “I just wanted to let you know your son was born fifteen minutes ago, and that mother is doing great and can’t wait to see you.”
“A son?” he replied, a big grin spreading across his face. “Another boy!”
“Twenty and one quarter inches long, lots of dark blond hair and brown eyes that I imagine will brighten up to gold when he’s a little older. And he’s quite a hefty little booger- he weighed in at over nine and a half pounds!” She laughed when his jaw dropped. “That’s how come he took so long to make his debut, Daddy!”
She went on to tell him that Winry would be wheeled into her own room shortly, once they finished cleaning her up, and that he could come see her in about half an hour.
“This calls for a celebration!” Ed crowed as he got to his feet and stretched. “I’ll call the pub and get ‘em to bring up a keg!”
The nurse laughed as her cheek pinked. “Heavens, I don’t drink anything stronger than coffee!”
Ed’s nose wrinkled. “If you can drink that sludge, you can probably out-drink me in whiskey.”
Now she really laughed. “The staff doesn’t drink that garbage!”
“I knew it,” Ed teased, shaking his finger at her. “That’s how you stay in business then- make the visitors drink the dregs while you get the finer stuff.”
“How about I get you a cup the top shelf coffee at the nurses’ station. My treat for soldiering through fifteen hours of labor in a wooden chair.” She winked at him, “We have real cream, too!”