Chapter Text
Winry comes home, automail case empty and heart weighing a ton of bricks, the ghosts of the living tailing her footsteps.
Pinako waits for her on the front porch as Winry ascends the hill, and for a moment she almost wants to apologise.
I’m sorry, Granny. I failed.
Because Winry is coming back alone, without Ed, without Al, in tow.
Pinako takes a drag off her pipe, an eyebrow raised in a silent question. Somehow, the prospect of explaining the events to her grandmother makes Winry’s heart ache with fatigue. Where does she even begin?
He’s gone–
I wasn’t good enough–
He didn’t want to stay with us–
“Ed went back where he came from. Al went with him,” is all she can muster.
Pinako nods. “Well, as long as those two boys are happy, that’s all that matters.”
Is it, though? Winry wants to snap. Is it really all that matters? Their happiness? What about her happiness, what about her and Granny, and her, he had a home, she was supposed to be his home and–
She doesn’t know whether she wants to scream, cry or hammer her face into the wall.
“I’m going to take a nap,” she says to the empty air.
“Go ahead. I’ll wake you for dinner.”
Winry walks upstairs, oblivious to Den’s concerned whimper. She doesn’t come down for dinner.
Sleep eludes her.
Her pillow underneath her chin, ignoring the pressure building behind her eyes, Winry keeps replaying the day’s events like a broken tape on a loop.
He was right there–
After three years of waiting, hoping, pining for him to come back–
To come back to her–
for things to be like before,
he’s gone.
He’s gone.
He’s really gone.
The sob tears its way out like an airship soaring through the sky. Away from her throat, into her pillow.
Winry muffles her sounds and cries until there’s nothing left. Until her throat is dry, her eyes sting and her heart is crumpled and tossed away.
She succumbs to a dreamless sleep and wakes two hours later, a whimper lodged in her throat and a knot twisting in her belly.
He’s not here–
She can barely finish the thought before a new wave of tears crashes over her.
She ignores Pinako’s calls for tea and Den’s snout on her arm for comfort.
She doesn’t answer the calls coming from all sides of the country. Letters from her friends remain unopened.
She doesn’t want to hear it.
If she hears one more “I’m sorry” she’ll burn the whole place down.
She’s tired of condolences. She’s tired of being reminded of her grief. She’s so damn fucking tired of grieving.
Grief, like an anchor of loss around her ankles.
Grief, dragging her down.
Grief, a constant echo into the void left by the one she misses so hard her heart is gasping for breath.
She’s lived a life of losses.
Winry is no stranger to death, be it through her parents, Izumi, and the stories of automail surgery gone wrong she’s heard from Dominic.
Mourning the living is a blueprint she can’t decipher. Crawling out of a grave she can’t visit, the questions haunt her, grabbing at her ankles.
They come in the morning when she wakes, in an unguarded moment when she’s not focusing on automail; in the night when she tries in vain to reach for Morpheus. It’s a tightening in her chest, a voice in her mind laced with poison.
Why weren’t you good enough?
Why couldn’t you make him stay?
He never wanted you, anyway.
Winry tosses and turns, trying to block out the fear settling over her chest. Still, she wonders if their childhood trio is a dream long gone, one she clung to long after it had fizzled through her fingers.
She’d waited.
She’d been patient.
She’d kept hoping for a universe, a world where they could work things out, where they weren’t struck by star-crossed tragedy. Where Ed wouldn’t crack the door to his heart open just a few inches, enough to let her see the broken boy underneath, longing for touch, longing for love and acceptance. Things she was more than happy to give; things he kept refusing for himself. Refusals that would always leave her hanging, battered and bloody and feeling like there was something wrong with her, with the automail she made for him, that would warrant such treatment.
Maybe I deserve it, she thinks. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. Maybe I didn’t understand him well.
She wonders if there’s someone in this other world he wandered off to, someone else. Someone who can hold his heart without breaking it, someone who doesn’t have to beg to be let in. Someone he laughs and shares his hopes and dreams with. Someone who’s never stayed awake, aching to understand why he cut her off for years and kept spitting on the door of the home she offered.
Some days, when she’s not screaming at the sky, she almost wants to apologise.
I’m sorry I couldn’t be what you needed me to be.
I’m sorry I wasn’t the best version of myself when you were around.
I’m sorry you never saw a reason in me to come back.
It was never goodbye for good. It was goodbye for worse.
Her grief is a ball and chain, a dark cloud over her mind wearing her down like sandpaper.
And Winry is at a crossroads, torn between letting go of the weight bearing down on her and keeping it close to her chest for fear of losing—
Losing what, exactly?
The answer comes to her on a stormy night, when the thunder rages in loud outbursts and the rain patters on the windows, begging to be let inside.
She’s been holding on to a dream.
A dream of their trio reunited, where things were like before.
Before tragedy struck and forced them all down diverging paths.
Her inner sense of justice had protested against the change, refusing to accept their new reality. Surely Ed and Al would stop being obsessed with alchemy, surely her parents would come back from Ishbal, surely all this waiting for Ed and for him to come to his senses and make time for her, damnit, was a temporary glitch in the matrix, and things would be okay eventually.
For the first time, she admits eventually is never and waiting is staying stuck.
She has a choice.
Through the blur of her tears and the ache in her heart, she realises something else.
She wants to move forward. Even if it means carrying the questions with her, never to be answered. Even if her life has taken a direction she didn’t expect. Even if her secret dreams of a white fence family and blonde heads running around will never come to life.
At least not with him.
But she’ll make her dreams come true, even if he won’t be there to celebrate by her side.
Step by step, she’ll move on.
She wipes her eyes and steadies her heart as the rainy night gives way to a new sunrise, and goes to meet the dawn.
Rose comes to visit and brings her son along with her. Winry watches her friend bask in her river with her child, the sun on her face and dried watermelon juice on the corners of her lips. Her and Rose lie on the balcony during Ismael’s nap and allow themselves to talk about menial things like piercings and clothes and what the latest Central fashion trends are.
Winry offers to pierce Rose’s ears. When Rose suggests getting matching piercings, Winry can’t think of anything better.
Later, both girls giggle as they disinfect their reddened skin.
Armstrong drops by with two years’ worth of wood and asks if there’s anything he can do to help.
Winry is about to shake her head no when he says something that stops her in her tracks.
“I know it doesn’t bring them back, but I could draw their portrait, if you’d like. I’m an artist in my spare time, it’s a skill passed down–”
“The Armstrong family for generations,” Winry finishes with a playful smile. “I would love to take you up on that, Major Armstrong.”
He gets to work, and Winry and Pinako help him finetune the details. The curve of Ed’s lips as he smirks, Al’s open-toothed grin and hopeful eyes, Ed’s golden eyes, shining with fierce determination.
Somehow, having him in the form of a painting lessens the pang that usually knocks her out at the mention of his name.
Winry keeps her voice steady and her eyes dry. “Thank you, Major. It’s beautiful.”
Time passes. Each day, the pain lessens, and goes from a pulsing, reddened and angry wound to a scab, then a scar.
The questions she’d turn over from every angle like a stone become wonderings, thoughts passing like paper planes in her mind. She can distract herself most times.
Winry laughs in the summer heat, hugs her grandmother, goes to visit Gracia and Elicia and learns the apple pie recipe (to make for when Rose and Paninya come to visit next week).
Elicia, standing tall at 3 feet of endless curiosity, asks her if she has a boyfriend. Gracia, eyes wide in alarm and acute understanding of misplaced questions, hurries to hush her reckless daughter.
“It’s okay.” Winry smiles with a hand held up as a peace offering. “I don’t have one, Elicia.”
“But you’re pretty,” Elicia responds from her fairytale-fueled logical standpoint. “Boys should be asking you to be their girlfriend.”
Winry lets out a breathy chuckle. There’s no equivalent exchange for beauty and a heart set on a prince with metal wings. “I’m fine without one,” she says as she ruffles Elicia's soft waves.
“Besides, there are much better things to have than a boyfriend.”
She lays the flowers at Izumi’s grave and stands beside Sig. A little makeshift grave has been dug next to Izumi, in memory of Wrath. Winry casts a look at Sig, an unspoken question on her lips.
He catches her inquisitive eyes, and turns to her. “What is it, Winry?”
She tenses up, stumbling and bumbling on an apology. He slaps her shoulder hard enough she thinks he might send her down to Izumi, and laughs. “Oh come on, Winry, don’t be shy! “What’s troubling you?”
She stares at the ground, a wave of grief washing over her. “I just– does losing people ever get easier?”
He seems to understand the implicit plea in her question. “It doesn’t. Each person you lose is a loss. Nothing can make up for them, or take them back.” His eyes harden, his fists clenched in anger she recognises within herself. She’s screamed her fury at the sky more times than she’d care to admit.
“But we can’t let that stop us from living and moving on,” he adds. “The cycle of life will come for us soon enough. The best we can do for the ones who’ve left is to keep living, remember them and pass on their memory to the people who will listen. That’s the best way to honour them. Reviving the dead never reaps anything good.”
Now that is something she agrees with.
Sig lets out a hearty laugh. “Besides, Izumi would barge out of the Gate and kill me herself if I ever entertained those thoughts! I’d rather die a peaceful death and reunite with her than die at her hands.”
Winry can’t help but laugh at that, too. She leans against Sig and he puts a fatherly shoulder around her.
“You’re allowed to miss them, you know,” he says. “But don’t let it keep you from meeting new people to love. Finding joy is the greatest remedy we have against our impending death.”
Day by day, piece by piece, one step after the other.
Winry opens her hand, finger by finger, and lets him slip through.
Pinako has barely closed the door after telling them to hush that they burst into a fresh fit of giggles.
Her belly hurts and her jaw aches from laughing, but Winry wouldn’t exchange it for the world. It’s been a while- years, if she’s honest– she’s had the luxury and indulgence of pure, unadulterated joy and innocent girlhood. Who knew a girls’ sleepover with her three best friends would be a better cure than any medicine science has come up with?
For so long, she’d isolated herself. There was no need to make new friends when her childhood duo would come back and they’d be together again. It took her losing them to find community in the friends she’s made in their absence.
Equivalent exchange, she thinks fleetingly, before Paninya throws a pillow at her and a pillow fight for the ages erupts.
“Sometimes, people can’t love us the way we need them to. It doesn’t make them bad, or mean they don’t love us. It’s no one’s fault. It’s just a bad set of circumstances.”
Winry tosses and turns in Gracia’s guest room, replaying the words Riza said when they had dinner earlier.
From a logical standpoint, she understands the sentence. She may have fallen asleep more times than she can count during school, but she does have a grasp on basic grammar. It’s in her heart the words get jumbled. They feel foreign and taste weird on her tongue.
The childish part of her screams no, it can’t be true.
How can people love us and leave?
Shouldn’t love triumph? Shouldn’t it be enough?
She thinks back to Ed. Carefree, sensitive, gentle Ed before tragedy whacked him over the head again and again. Ed, who would hug her and spin her around. Ed, who always fell asleep next to her at naptime.
She sees him side by side with the Ed she knew after. Ed, reeking of shame and self-loathing after the transmutation. Ed, determined and desperate to get things to what they were before. Ed, closing in on himself and shutting everyone, including her– especially her –out for reasons only known to himself.
For the first time, she sees him from a distance. And all at once, the words make sense.
Finally, she forgives. Both him and her.
And finally, she lets go for good.
Life in Rush Valley is nothing and everything like she expected.
In the span of a few months, Winry learns more about automail than in 7 years of her own tinkering, and passes the first part of her certificate with flying colours. Even Dominic, who communicates in silence, gives her a pat on the back and an approving grumf.
Paninya teaches her how to drink and how to fend off the worst of the hangover before her working hours start. She shows her how to roll a joint and Winry discovers the pleasure of sitting on the roof with her friend, watching the sunset.
The lines between friendship and desire blur one night and Winry learns more about herself and her body than in 19 years of being in this world.
Being with Paninya is easy in many ways. In other ways, it’s like navigating a sea without a compass, but Winry isn’t afraid of getting lost. More than anything, it’s like automail. You just need to learn which parts fit together.
She tells Pinako with a hint of apprehension in her voice.
“You really have a thing for people with automail, huh? Maybe I taught you too well.”
Winry ignores the desert heat creeping up her cheeks. “Is that all you’re going to say, Granny?”
She can hear Pinako’s smile at the end of the line. “Oh, how stupid of me. Congratulations, Winry. Bring her over for dinner next time you visit.”
Like bubbles in a soda left out in the sun for too long, her and Pan fizzle out.
It’s a dull kind of ache, nothing like the hole in the chest Ed left in his wake, but a throbbing, ever-present pain tugging at her wrist all day long. They’re just too different, better suited for friendship than a lifelong affair.
It takes two months of awkward step-arounds and avoidant stares before Paninya clinks two beers and points to the roof with her star-stealing smile.
Winry accepts, and the two pick up their friendship like an old photo album.
There are still times when the sense of loss strikes like lightning from a blue sky, and the rain streams down her cheeks.
Winry knows she has no choice but to surrender to the wave.
During the times she feels lost at sea, she clings to her friendships, her lovers, her community of people who care about her like a lifeline until the storm passes.
Her people are her rainbow, the mirror in which she recognises the fierce, independent and strong woman she’s become.
She’s on a house call in a small town with a weird name and decides to check out the bars and the boys.
She settles her sights on a tall, blonde, smooth-talking alchemist, who talks about his little brother with affectionate devotion and their father’s alchemy with mixed sadness and pride. It’s enough. She’s sold. When he suggests going back to his, she accepts and discovers that sex with men can be life-changing.
“I’m sorry,” she says in the morning while he makes her breakfast, “I think I forgot your name.”
He laughs, not offended in the slightest. “You sure seemed to remember it last night, considering how many times you said it.”
Winry blushes, too embarrassed to pull out her wrench and knock him out cold.
He hands her the plate and runs a casual hand through his movie-star coiffed hair. “The name’s Russell Tringham. Although I’m famous for borrowing a famous alchemist’s name until I got arrested. So if you prefer, you can call me Edward Elric.”
Winry almost chokes on her eggs.
Once the danger of death by eggs and loaded names passes, she takes a look at him. Well, that explains a lot. But would it be so bad…?
“I’d like to see you again,” he says.
Winry smirks. “Me, too.”
Russell becomes her friend, her confidante, and her best pillow-talker.
They don’t define whatever is going on. He’s busy with his alchemy, she’s taken up by rush orders and automail patients. They make time to meet for drinks when they’re in neighbouring cities and catch up in alleys, by rivers and under the sheets.
It suits her just fine. She doesn’t need more. Some corners of her heart are still healing, even though she barely thinks of him anymore.
Still, she’s not ready to bear her soul to anyone like this.
Jake’s blue eyes are the first thing she notices when she meets him at an automail convention in Central. He’s doing a lecture on alternative medical advancements for automail surgery, namely on the legend of a red stone that cured a plague years ago, and how it could be used to hasten recovery. She smirks. He’s just given her the golden ticket to a conversation.
“That doctor with the red stone you mentioned, that was Dr. Marcoh, wasn’t it?” she asks him as he packs up his reading materials.
His eyes (so, so blue) wash over her, and she makes sure to stand a little taller, push out her chest and smile a little bigger.
“How do you know?”
“An old friend of mine told me about him. He devoted his life to curing civilians after the horrors he saw in the military.”
He also knew the man who killed my parents. She keeps that information to herself.
He whistles to her, visibly impressed. “Damn, you sure know your stuff! What else do you know?”
Butterflies flutter in her belly. Now's her chance. “If you buy me a drink, I can tell you more,” she winks.
“Deal.”
It takes two drinks before the tension casts sparks between them and Winry wordlessly takes his hand and leads him back to her hotel room.
Jake is different.
She’s not sure in what way, at first. Maybe it’s in his unwavering certainty when he asks when he can see her again. Maybe it’s the fact he calls her to make sure she’s back in Rush Valley, and every night after that.
It’s unfamiliar, being actively wanted. He amends his schedule to see her, picks her up even when it’s inconvenient for him, keeps telling her how wonderful, brilliant and intelligent she is and how lucky he is to be with her.
So what if he’s 8 years older than her? She loves being with a man who knows what he wants.
When Den passes and Winry calls him, incoherent and blubbering, he shows up in Risembool the next day with two bouquets of flowers and a dog plushie just for her.
She opens up to him about the secrets she’s tucked underneath her heart for so many years. She lets him see her at her saddest, ugliest, most sleep-deprived. He kisses her forehead and takes her to bed to see literal and metaphorical stars.
When he asks her to marry him, she says yes without a moment of hesitation.
This is it, she thinks as she goes to stand beside him.
Her dress is white, she’s been scrubbed raw from grime and grease, her hair is shiny and her steps don’t falter.
For all her losses, she never imagined life could be so beautiful. She never thought she’d see the day all her broken pieces would fall into such a wonderful mosaic.
Jake lifts up her veil and puts the ring on her finger. And when the town hall clerk pronounces them husband and wife, and Jake pounces on her to give her a deep kiss, Winry thinks to herself equivalent exchange might be real after all.
There was something to gain from losing Ed.
"the love was there. it didn't change anything. it didn't save anyone. there were just too many forces against it.
but it still matters that the love was there."