Chapter Text
Winry Rockbell double checked her bags while waiting for the train to arrive. Her automail kit was stuffed with everything she could carry, which was quite a lot. The rest of her things, like clothes and her toothbrush, were tightly packed into a backpack.
Winry shifted from one foot to the other. She had never left Amestris before.
The train pulled up right on time.
As the first person on board, Winry got to have a window seat. The soft morning light highlighted a puff of dust when she sat down on the soft bench. Her automail case took up the rest of the bench space, so nobody sat next to her. That was alright; she wasn’t in the mood to talk to anyone right now.
Last night Mustang had called to inform Winry that Ed had gone missing.
Well, Mustang didn’t say Ed was missing, just that he had missed a couple check-ins, but Winry knew her fiancé. He was a bit of a trouble magnet. There was no doubt in her mind that something had happened. She wasn’t terribly worried. Ed could take care of himself. But something was telling her that he might need help this time.
Mustang wanted to know if Winry had any information, like if Ed had contacted her.
Winry had something a little better than that.
After Promised Day, when Ed and Al had finally come back home, Winry had installed a tracking device in Ed’s automail leg. She told herself it was only for emergencies. Those long months between Briggs and Promised Day where Ed had been missing had been terrible. Winry wasn’t going to let that happen again.
The tracker said that Ed was still in England. The last letter Winry had received had been from London, but the tracker said that Ed was a bit north of that.
She called Mustang back to share this and wound up with a ticket to England and a wish of good luck. Mustang’s team was busy with something and weren’t available to go looking for Edward until the end of the week.
So here she was, on a train to a country she knew almost nothing about.
Countryside melted into cityscapes as Winry moved west. She had to change trains a couple times to get from Amestris to England, but the trip only took a little over a day. Her legs were cramped by the end of the trip. She stumbled out of the train in late afternoon into a gray train station in London, the last place he said he was.
“Now, Ed, where are you?” Winry said to herself. She pulled out the tracking device and frowned.
The little red dot that represented Ed was blurry, and the tracker couldn’t seem to come to a conclusion on his exact location.
The mechanic sighed. “That’s what I get for trusting someone else’s technology…”
The train station was more crowded than any other Winry had visited before. Most people wore dull colored clothes, though there were a few wearing highly saturated dresses with matching pointy hats. She wondered what type of country could produce two wildly varying fashion senses.
A child passing by eating a pretzel reminded Winry’s stomach that she hadn’t eaten in a while, so she left the station to start her quest. First food, then Ed.
Outside the train station, Winry looked around for a local food place.
There was one hole-in-the-wall type shop that the dull-clothed people avoided, but the pointy-hat people flocked to. Ed, with his loud red coat, would have fit in with those people. So the Leaky Cauldron, as it was called, was probably a good place to go for finding both food and Ed.
The Leaky Cauldron was dark but cosy. Most of the customers were adults, but there were a few groups of kids and teens there as well. The man at the bar, Tom, was easy to talk to during her meal. Apparently the Leaky Cauldron was also an inn.
Winry was happy to settle in for the night. Traveling by train was exhausting. She locked her automail case and her traveling bag in her room and went back downstairs to people-watch and drink some cider.
Customers entered the establishment through both the front and back doors, which Winry thought was odd. When she had passed by the back door earlier, she had looked outside and seen nothing but a tiny enclosed courtyard, yet there was a steady stream of people moving through that door.
One of the customers was a bit shocking to look at.
He had a scarred face and an automail eye. It was large and electric blue. Winry had never seen such a thing before! She was highly impressed at whoever had designed such a beautiful piece of machinery. What was more shocking was that the man walked with a limp, and a close look at his legs revealed he had a wooden peg instead of automail.
Who did automail on an eye but left a limb without it? She considered that it was possible the man couldn’t afford both, but decided that she still wanted to know who made his eye.
Winry leapt off the barstool and walked up to the man.
“Excuse me, sir?”
“What?” the man growled. The man’s gruff demeanor was no deterrent to Winry!
“Who’s your mechanic?”
“My what?”
Winry pointed to her own eye. “I want to know who was able to make your eye. It’s a really impressive bit of automail!”
The blue eye whizzed around in its socket.
“That’s none of your business, lass!”
The man moved to walk away, but Winry wasn’t going to let him go that easily.
“It’s exactly my business!” she snapped. “I’m an automail mechanic myself, and there are a lot of people I could help if I knew how to make automail eyes.”
“What is this ‘automail’?” the man asked, looking curious despite himself.
He doesn’t know what automail is? Maybe it’s called something else in this country.
“Automail is a prosthetic that is connected to the nerves of your body,” she explained. “It’s powered by your body’s natural electricity, and automail limbs can move naturally. Automail is one of the most wonderful things! Beauty and function together in one!”
The man’s brow furrowed as she spoke, and his blue eye looked her up and down. He opened his mouth to reply, but someone bumped into him. He fell into a fighting stance and pulled out a stick from his sleeve. The new person just crossed his arms, like this startle response was more annoying than threatening.
“My apologies, Alastor,” said the new person. He didn’t sound sincere. The two men stared at each other for a moment, Alastor glaring and the new guy sneering. “Put that away,” he said, gesturing to Alastor’s stick.
“If you could just give me the contact info for whoever made your eye,” Winry said, continuing the conversation with Alastor, “I could help you get automail for your leg. Equivalent exchange, you know?”
Winry offered the man a hopeful smile.
“What’s this about your leg, Alastor? Finally deciding to switch to the paranoid model?”
Her smile left and Alastor frowned at the new guy.
“Crawl back into the hole you slithered out of, Severus.” Alastor looked back at Winry. “I’m not interested, lass. And I don’t give out information to strangers.”
Alastor limped out the front door of the Leaky Cauldron, leaving behind a dejected Winry and a smug Severus.
“You horrible man!” Winry whipped around and pointed an accusing finger at Severus. “What kind of person does that? I had almost convinced him to tell me about his mechanic.”
Severus narrowed his eyes and carefully looked at Winry’s face. She was a little discomfited by the scrutiny.
“You didn’t go to Hogwarts…” the man said.
Winry didn’t know what that was, so of course she hadn’t gone there, wherever “there” was.
She shook her head.
Severus made a noncommittal humming noise then brushed off his dark clothes, which absorbed light like coal, and sat down at the bar next to Winry’s spot. A simple gesture to Tom and a drink was slid towards him.
“You know that guy, right?” Winry asked, still standing. She looked out the window but couldn’t see Alastor anymore.
“Yes.”
“Do you know who made his eye for him? I’ve never seen anything like it, and yet his leg was just a stick…”
“Alastor Moody. He’s as paranoid as they come. He’ll never share his supplier’s name, not even with people he knows. I’m surprised you managed to talk to him for as long as you did, miss…”
“Winry Rockbell, of Rockbell Automail.” Winry sat back down.
“Severus Snape, professor of Hogwarts.”
Winry took a quick sip of her drink to hide her face. This guy was a professor?
“And about Alastor’s leg: of course it’s just a stick, he can’t grow it back.”
Winry nearly choked on her drink. She hadn’t pegged this guy as someone with a sense of humor.
“Well, I wouldn’t expect him to grow it back,” she rolled her eyes. “Automail is the next best thing. I was just surprised that someone managed to make one work for his eye.”
“So this automail-” Severus waved a hand around slowly, “-it works just like a normal limb?”
“For the most part! The limbs are heavy so it takes a lot of physical therapy to get used to them, and since there is no feeling some people have trouble with dexterity. My fiancé used to be right handed but had to switch to his left when he got automail.”
Severus nodded and took a sip of his drink.
“And you make… automail?”
“I’m one of the best!”
“…Interesting,” Severus said. His left arm twitched violently. He grimaced and gulped down the rest of his drink.
“I must be going now, but it was nice to meet you, Miss Rockbell.”
“You too,” Winry waved. It wasn’t really nice to meet him, but he had given her some information that she wanted.
She yawned. It was getting late, and she had to be well rested to spend the next day looking for Ed. First sleep, then Ed.
The next morning Winry got up bright and early. She wore her comfiest shoes (to do lots of walking) and her brightest shirt (to blend in with the people in this part of town).
Downstairs, Tom had breakfast ready for her as part of the room.
“Any plans for today?” he asked.
Winry stirred some brown sauce into her eggs. The food here was kinda bland compared to Amestris.
“I’m looking for someone,” she admitted. “My fiancé. His name’s Edward Elric. My age, long blond hair, red coat, gold eyes. Have you seen him, by any chance?”
Tom scratched his head. “Can’t say that I have.”
“Well, my plan for today is to find him.”
“If you’re gonna be staying for a while, I recommend stopping by Gringott’s Bank to switch out your currency.”
Winry gulped. She hadn’t thought about money last night and had given the man cenz for her room and board.
“Oh, right! Sorry about that, I’ve never left my country before.”
“It’s fine, miss,” Tom waved away her concern. “We get lots of traveling folk through here. It’s the entrance to the wizarding world of Britain, after all.”
“Wizards?” she chuckled.
Tom froze. His eyes flickered around the nearly empty room before returning to her.
“Are you a muggle?” His voice was hushed.
“What’s a muggle?”
“Someone who can’t do magic.”
Winry blinked. There was definitely something odd about this country’s terminology for things. Calling alchemy magic, what a laugh. Ed hadn’t mentioned that in his letters.
“It’s weird that you call people who can’t do ‘magic’ muggles. People don’t do that in my country…” she shrugged and took a sip of her drink. “I guess I’m a muggle, then, but Ed’s a ‘wizard’.” She didn’t physically do the motion for the quotes, but she did them in her head.
The tension left Tom’s shoulders and he sent a sad smile to her.
“I hope you find your Ed soon, then. Dangerous times are brewing…”
That was ominous. Winry shuddered. She quickly finished breakfast and stood up to leave.
“Gringott’s is out back, I can open the entrance for you,” Tom announced.
Winry brushed a hand through her hair. A hidden entrance would explain the movement of the customers she’d witnessed last night.
Tom led the way to the back courtyard and pulled a stick out of his sleeve. With a few well placed taps of the stick, the brick wall opened up into an archway.
Alchemy without a circle or any reaction light. Interesting. Maybe it was like alkahestry from Xing. Magic from England. Winry nodded her thanks to Tom and stepped through the brick archway.
The street ahead of her was so much more colorful and loud than the one she had seen getting off the train yesterday. She turned around to ask Tom where the bank was, but the wall had closed behind her.
“Why do I always find the alchemy freaks,” she muttered. She shook her head and squared her shoulders. Bank first, then she can ask around for Ed.