Thy Poor, Earth Born Companion, Part I
Title: Thy Poor, Earth Born Companion, Part I
Author: Camudekyu
Rating: M
Characters: Roy & Winry
Length: 17 pages total
Warnings: Spoilers for end of the first series.
Summary: The cycle by which time consumes the past and reuses it for the future trundles on, a dance to a beat drummed out by pulses from a deep, inexorable otherwhere.
A/N: Sometimes, even when you are tremendously good at something as a child, you do not grow up to do it. Also, the epigram comes from the poem that gave such pithy verse as "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men."
Thy Poor, Earth Born Companion
"Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' weary winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell."
-Robert Burns, "To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough"
Such a thing as an attainable destiny was reserved for the Elrics, whose dream was so unattainable it seemed inevitable that the slippery Clockwork would backfire at the just the right moment to allow it. It was the calculated, clear, dialectical sort of dreams that fell by the wayside while life was building that bridge out to the Elrics' island, turning their destiny from an impossible wish to a peninsular hope. The dreams that were less dream and more plan-the ones that came with appendices of budgets and a resume and perhaps some flattering recommendations-were not the ones that were granted exemption from reality. And the reality here is, who actually gets what they want in the end? Honestly, who? And where did achieving their dream get the Elrics? They were gone. Had been gone for ten years in the spring. But Edward had always wanted them together. And together they were.
Take for instance, Winry Rockbell, who, while all the other girls in school had aspirations of being ballerinas or riding painted ponies or marrying old and infirm plutocrats, was busy pursuing a career in something she knew, something she was damn good at, something she was born to do. But that was when she was twelve. And now, at twenty-five, the dreams of a little girl were quiet, not unhappy nostalgias she kept in a box under her nightstand where she stowed away so many of the frayed ends of the threads that once tied her to the Elrics.
She once had never imagined that a day would pass when she did not cry at the thought of Edward and Alphonse. Now, however, she had not cried for them in years. At first, she did not allow herself to stop thinking of them. She kept her mantle crammed with framed photographs of moments that had come and gone, her memories of which were threadbare doppelgangers of the original moments, but releasing would be like forgetting. She could never allow herself to forget-
-until she was twenty-something when she discovered that the spectrum between a remembered memory and a forgotten one is wide. Her earrings disappeared one by one. And she still lit candles on her mantle for their birthdays, put flowers on their graves every spring. But the cycle by which time consumes the past and reuses it for the future trundles on, a dance to a beat drummed out by pulses from a deep, inexorable otherwhere.
In this dance, her alarm went off at seven o'clock, and she reached first to silence it and next for the soda crackers her doctor recommended she nibble before getting up. The nausea had almost subsided, but she still kept a sleeve by the bed and another in her purse. Next she got up and began picking through the mix of week's clothing on the floor. While pulling on Tuesday's shorts and a blouse from the weekend maybe, Winry caught herself in her mirror. She met her own eyes and frowned. She stood straight and turned profile. She smoothed the wrinkles in the front of her shirt down and looked for any rounding. But there was nothing.
The next step was breakfast. She stilled missed coffee, but the doctor said no coffee or alcohol, and she stuck to it. Then it was time to almost miss the trolley and to sling herself in the doorway, loop an arm around a pole, and tie her hair back. Her purse bumped against the side of the trolley as the wind whipped past. She minded the stops, watched the street signs slip by with that crowded sort of isolation that comes with being a woman on a trolley on her way to work.
Next, she arrived at Central Physiotherapy ten minutes early. She changed into her uniform, clipped her name tag to the pocket over her right breast, and checked her schedule for the day where it was written out in a spreadsheet, clipped to a board that hung by the coffee machine.
The rhythm was strong this morning. The clock ticked loudly in hall, and somedays, Winry truly appreciated routines. Not all days, but some days. There was a certain safety to it, to predictability, and in the life of a recently pregnant, unmarried young woman, predictability was a rare treat indeed.
The steps went on in four-four time: her first client was a woman recently relieved of a full-arm cast after breaking her collarbone; her next was a man who had taken a nasty spill from a horse; then it was mid-morning break when she walked the same half-mile path she always walked around the block toward the park and back again; then she sat with the receptionist's typewriter for an hour while she issued status updates to send to scrutinizing actuaries.
Then a boy whose body had atrophied while he slept away the measles; then a salad and sandwich for lunch; then a man relearning to walk or a woman relearning to write; someone who probably should have died ages ago or someone who did not deserve what happened to her; a man who would never ride a bicycle again; tenacity or despondency or weary resignation; and the sun clinging to the lip of the buildings across the street like dew on a web and the street lights flickering on before the darkness has even settled and the walk toward the last trolley home... almost.
Today there was a hitch, a stumble in the beat. As she gathered her purse and removed her uniform to take to the laundry and checked her schedule for the next day, a name caught her eye, one that had not been there that morning. A patient coming in during the last slot of the day to see the overseeing doctor.
The Clockwork snagged on that name.
She felt the shudder of a misfire. She stopped where she stood. A wash of things next: curiosity for details as his block on the schedule was cryptically blank except for his name; the watery memory of Edward's and Alphonse's faces; a desire and dread to rekindle all the things he represented. Schadenfreude, perhaps? Or was it sympathy? She didn't like thinking about it-she had not thought much of him in years. He had swum through her mind perhaps here and there when he was campaigning and when he was elected, when his pet projects or humbling missteps made it into the first few pages of the Central Times.
She did not like imagining him in her office, his marionette legs manipulated by another, his white-knuckled grasp on the parallel bars as he tried and tried to walk again, his pale, limp skin over pale, limp limbs. It was disgraceful, and she was humiliated for him, as though just seeing his name on the roster was a trespass. He had taken the last space of the day, after many of the nurses had left and most patients were home with their families: he did not want to be seen. And she decided she did not want to see him. She slipped out the backdoor and hurried around to the trolly stop. And all the while she thought about him, his impossible, relentless name, fervent and singularly driven.
Mustang.
x
x
x
He was back on Thursday. Winry saw his name on the schedule, in the same time slot. Her last client was about an hour before his appointment, so she had no reason to linger. No reason at all.
Monday morning, Winry saw his name again on the roster. Same time and same doctor. It made her mad. Like he was following her. Which was silly, she knew, but she felt it anyway. The more time she spent feeling it, the more she rather felt like she might be justified in telling him so.
She'd heard other PTA's talk about him, the dark-haired, one-eyed senator slipping through the door without his usual cadre of hangers-on-the pictures of Senator Mustang in the Times with a flock of bodyguards always made Winry laugh: Roy Mustang did not need protection.
Not many men came to the clinic in their work clothes, but Winry had heard that Senator Mustang always wore a three-piece suit, his vest buttons straight and a golden watch chain dangling from his pocket and his fedora pinched in his fingers-Winry couldn't picture it; his glaucous uniform was as much a part of him as he was a part of her. But the military ladder had been abruptly truncated, and the resultant power vacuum had sucked in just about any man with a morsel of ambition, at least a third-grade reading level, and a pulse.
Winry had not voted for him. She wanted to tell him that, too.
He was back again on Thursday. And then on Monday. Winry had taken to checking now, every Monday and Thursday morning for his name on the roster. She wondered what he looked like. Was he gray? He was an old man now, certainly. The life of an alchemist was a hard and fast one, and in the Elrics' case, a short one. But he'd gotten out of it now-what an impossibility that was, Winry thought; aren't men born alchemists?
She once had thought she was born a mechanic. Perhaps Senator Mustang kept his gloves in the top desk of his drawer, tucked beneath his nitroglycerin pills and silver flask. Perhaps on notably sluggish Sunday mornings, he lay in his bed and watched the ceiling fan and flipped through grainy, faded memories of heat at his back, his silhouette flickering and stretched across the pavement, doing its best to outrun him.
On Friday mornings, she leafed through the files left with the receptionist from the day before. She pulled out the one for Mustang, R. and flipped it open. She wasn't too terribly concerned with what got him here-the elderly snapped like twigs and grew back slow-but she pushed to the billing section and looked at his signature, the embossed loops of pen strokes, the only actual proof of him. As though she might have imagined her imaginings of his being there.
x
x
x
Winry was staring at the percolator in the break room and rubbing the flesh below her navel on a particularly rainy Thursday after her last patient of the day. A girl named Laura Flynn, who'd lost two fingers at the cannery, and Senator Mustang were the only two names occupying the last slot, and Winry had taken special precautions to avoid any place the Senator could have been around the clinic while seeing to her client. Miss Flynn's father had taken her home, Winry had finished her paperwork, and retreated to the break room to change and get her purse. Her deprived nerves sang at the thought of the dregs of that morning's coffee, and Winry debated. She actually debated with herself for a long, dizzy moment.
In the end, her baby won. Winry blew a sigh that made her bangs puff up, slung her purse over her shoulder, and headed for the lobby. The trolley stop was just up the street and around the corner, easily walking distance, but not within sight of the glass front of Central Physiotherapy. Winry knew the stop was uncovered and the shop owners there chased loiterers away from their awnings with brooms and rolling pins on days like this, and having so recently exercised what she thought to be a notable sacrifice-she really wanted that coffee-Winry was feeling rather like she was owed a break.
She slumped forward and rested her forehead against the glass, knowing full well that it would leave a smudge and not really giving a damn. The water bubbled up out of the gutters, coved the street in three-inch sheets, blurred the entire street to a smudgy, edgeless charcoal drawing. The trolley was probably delayed. The rain probably wasn't going to let up any time soon. And judging by the irony-quotient of her life just then, she probably had a hole in one of her wellies or something.
Winry allowed her self just an exquisite moment of self-pity before sighing hard, squaring her shoulders, and covering the open top of her purse with the sleeve of her coat.
Just then, she heard a door open. Men talking and footsteps down the hall. And she knew who it was immediately. His voice was an old record, one she had not heard in so, so long. He didn't sound so gravelly as most of the old men who ambled into the lobby. There was no waver or thinness to his tone. In fact, he sounded the same. A barrel-deep baritone, all dry humor and condescension you weren't smart enough to catch.
She should go. She should go. She should go, but she didn't. The pressure on her back to turn and watch him and the doctor enter the lobby was a gravity in itself.
She didn't go. Instead, she gave in and watched over her shoulder, her breath high in her throat and her heart in her ears. She reminded herself how much she didn't want to see his face ever again. Of all the things he'd done, all the people he'd taken from her, but it sounded like the words of a miffed child in her ears.
Then, in that moment, she understood all her flutter and fear: this was not an ancient anger, a revulsion kept on simmer for too long.
This was her wanting to see him. Desperately.
Seeing him would almost be like seeing Ed and Al, seeing herself smudged with engine grease and contentment she hadn't been able to appreciate at the time, seeing a dream before it was uprooted, rerouted, when it was still fresh and tender, a pre-blossom bud pushing its sepals.
Senator Roy Mustang was not a stooped old man. As soon as Winry saw him, she ran through the numbers in her head. Had the math always put him at around forty years and she just hadn't thought about it until then? His back was straight, his strides long and even. His hair was shorter, slicked back with pomade. He looked older, but not in a wizened sort of way. In a grown-up sort of way. Some of that boyish roundness was gone from his face. She saw it when the doctor greeted her by name, when her name registered to him and he looked over.
His gaze fell on her like the quiet weight of a storm.
No profound passage to an untarnished past opened when he smiled at her. She wasn't unpregnanted or re-Elric-ed or anything. In fact, she felt rather shy. Her cheeks heated up and she willed herself not to duck her head like a fourteen-year-old.
"Miss Rockbell," he said, and it was almost a question. He'd downgraded to a smaller eyepatch. Winry had not noticed it in any of his pictures in the papers, but she noticed it now. This new patch covered just passed his left cheekbone, and Winry could tell just by looking that whatever had taken his eye had crushed his zygoma. And a doctor had attempted to reconstruct it. But Winry had an eye for these things, the telltale signs of a repair when it should have been a replace.
"Gener-" she began and blushed deeper. "Senator," she amended.
The doctor, Winry's supervisor, blinked at them both. "Oh, I see you've been acquainted."
Senator Mustang did not look away from her when he said, "A very long time ago."
Winry knew she was being assessed as thoroughly as she was assessing him, and it seemed rather like something too rude for a man his age to be doing. This didn't stop her from doing it back. The doctor seemed somewhat uncomfortable with their exchange and said, "Yes, Miss Rockbell is one of my best PTA's on staff. She's always staying late." That wasn't true, but Winry appreciated it anyway.
Senator Mustang didn't ask what she was doing there and not in an automail shop, and she appreciated that, too. "Oh, don't listen to him," she said, managing to sound glib. She waved a hand dismissively at the doctor. "I'm just waiting for the trolley and debating going out into the rain." She glanced out the window. "I don't think I'm gonna be able to will it to clear up, though."
The doctor was initialing different check points on Senator Mustang's status report when he said, "You might call a cab, Winry. I wouldn't recommend being out in this weather in your condition."
Her supervisor might have all the skill of Hippocrates, but he had the social graces of a three-legged, incontinent goat. She watched a flicker of curiosity cross Senator Mustang's partially-hidden face, and she instinctively clutched her abdomen as though putting a hand over her womb would hide the bundled cells within. She regretted it immediately because now he could infer that her condition was rooted somewhere behind her navel. So either she was knocked up or she had a tape worm. Great.
"I've got a coat! I'll be fine!" Winry blurted. She could feel the heat in her face creeping down her neck.
"That's not necessary," the Senator said as the doctor passed him a form to sign. Winry heard his pen scratching the paper. "I've got a car coming. I'll be happy to drop you somewhere, Miss Rockbell."
The thought of being in a small, enclosed space with the Senator made Winry's stomach clench. When she opened her mouth to tell him as politely as she could that would rather stand in the February rain than be alone with him, "If it's not any trouble," came out instead. It must have been the baby, she thought, piping up through her mouth, and she glared down at her treacherous uterus.
A man she did not recognize drove Senator Mustang's spacious, gunpowder-grey sedan. He pulled the car to the curb, left the engine running, and hopped out, an umbrella over his head. Winry wasn't exactly sure what kind of dance the Senator and the chauffeur were starting or where she fit into it, but when the Senator took her elbow in one hand and rested the other against the small of her back, she let him steer her out from under the awning. The chauffeur darted in behind them, holding the umbrella over their heads instead of his.
She felt the Senator's breath against her neck as they approached the car. Over the sour, old smell of rain in the dirty city, she could smell tobacco and aftershave and the piney spice of whatever it was in his hair. The chauffeur opened the door to the car for them, and Senator Mustang guided her inside. She was not nearly so practiced at this as he was, and Winry flopped to the seat clumsily, splashing rainwater across the leather. She sat where she fell for a moment before she realized that her host could not get in until she moved. In a bluster of apologies, Winry scooted over, and Senator Mustang slid in beside her.
"We'll be making a detour today, Will," he said one the driver was back behind the wheel. He turned and looked at Winry expectantly.
Winry lived in the Hillside Apartments off Lexington Avenue, not too terribly close to where they were, and the car was pointed in the wrong direction. She assumed that the Senator lived somewhere in north Central, where the money tended to collect, and she was most definitely out of their way. "Just the trolley station, if you don't mind," she said as brightly as she could. She crossed her legs and leaned toward the door, kept herself as compact as she could.
The past was not unfolding blissfully before her. She did not feel the warm waves of nostalgia she thought she would feel. Somehow, she expected the world to look a different, maybe as bright and new as she remembered it looking ten years ago, but his presence was not revelational. He hadn't fixed anything. The bastard.
"How've you been, Miss Rockbell?" he asked.
"Good, thanks," she said, "Yourself?" She spoke like he was a stranger on the trolley instead of an invasive vine strangling life out of her family tree like a serpent.
"I've been well," he said.
Winry could sense the cords of nausea knotting in her stomach, and she began feeling less and less inclined to open her mouth.
"I've been seeing Dr. Cooper for a few weeks now, and I've never seen you around the clinic."
She was focusing too hard on trying to calm her stomach to put too much energy in censoring her words. "I've been avoiding you," she said succinctly. She noticed the pale band of skin around his left ring finger when he drummed it and his other fingers against his knee.
He nodded. "I see." He turned his appraising, single-eyed gaze on her and said flatly, "The years have been good to you, Miss Rockbell. You haven't changed at all."
It was not a compliment. Winry felt the acid in her throat, the clenched fist in her stomach tightening. She clapped a hand over her mouth, and inadvertently gave Mustang the most pleading look she could. She didn't want to vomit in front of him, and the only thing worse would be vomiting in his very expensive car.
Mustang tilted his chin to meet his driver's eyes in the mirror. "Pull over, Will."
The driver complied, and Winry opened the car door so fast, she cracked it against the curb. She managed to lean onto the sidewalk just in time. The end of her long ponytail slipped over her shoulder and into the pitiful stream that fountained out of her mouth as she retched up the few handfuls of pretzels she'd had in the break room.
Her nose and eyes stung. Her face and lips burned. She held the end of her hair when she sat back in her seat and closed the door, careful to keep it from dripping on the upholstery. When she had settled herself, Mustang tugged a handkerchief from his coat pocket and handed it to her. Winry accepted without looking at him. The car accelerated into traffic.
For a moment, it was very quiet except the rain on the windows and the purring engine.
"Morning sickness?"
Winry dabbed at her mouth. She had been doing pretty well, thus far, not feeling particularly ashamed about her pregnancy-she certainly had the energy and the means to raise a child by herself, and independence had always been a core value of hers-but something about his tone overcame her defenses effortlessly. Who was he to be judging her, she thought-not that he had sounded particularly judgmental, but Winry remembered the General well enough to know that he was quiet and subtle and always, always laughing at you.
With the kerchief pressed to her lips, she muttered, "It's not the morning," and once that was out, she knew it wasn't really a defense. If trying to make herself sound dignified to the Senator was her goal, she wasn't doing herself any favors with that. Nor was she with this: "And you're either cheating on your wife or divorced." When Mustang looked at her, she flicked her eyes to his left hand.
He laughed and held up the betraying digit to his eye. "Recently," he said, observing his atrophied ring finger.
"Cheating?"
"Divorced," he clarified. "Two weeks since the paperwork was finalized."
"Hmm," Winry said. "It's been nine weeks for me. Since, you know, I got pregnant."
"Only twenty-seven to go."
Was this what it was like to have a frienemy? Well, no, because there wasn't really any friendship in the equation. An acquaintemy? But when she thought of it, enemy was definitely too strong a word, too. Now that they had rather unapologetically forced each other to reveal their respective big, uncomfortable issues, maybe acquaintance wouldn't cut it, either.
Winry looked over at the Senator, who was watching his hands on his thighs. While keeping things in her life well-ordered made everything easier, she had known before she ever got into his car that the Senator was not a man easily categorized-particularly in relation to her.
From this angle, she could see only his good side. It looked different now, so very different, from her memories of him. She remembered looking down at him from the window in the Hughes's guest bedroom. She remembered the gamut of expressions that slipped across his face-all of them as understated at his humor, a trace above ground but with deep, deep roots. She had seen, first, the recognition of her as an acquaintance. Then the remembrance of her as a Rockebell. She had kept her face still and scowling, willing him to understand, I know who you are and I know what you did. And then she saw his eyes widen-he had two of them back then-just a degree as he understood.
At the time, Winry had been so furious at him, at the way his expression sank in resignation and he turned away. Winry could remember being so angry that he had clearly been hoping that she would never find out. He had been hoping to keep his participation in her parents' execution a dirty little secret from her. The coward. The sniveling, obedient coward.
But now she understood. Of course he would want to keep it secret. Of course he would. What man could endure such a thing?
The man had been punished enough, hadn't he?
She was older now than he had been when he grafted himself to her family tree-because if bringing someone into the world deserved a branch then taking someone out of it certainly counted, too-and she could say this about men with good hearts and too much power: all they can do is try their best.
He must have felt her eyes because he looked over at her. The car came to a stop outside the trolley station, and the Senator reached around the seat in front of him for the umbrella. He passed it to Winry and smiled.
He was trying his best. And because the world Winry knew very rarely let a person's best be enough, she decided that his was. She smiled and thanked him, took his umbrella and slipped out of the car.
x
x
x
So that was how it was. Senator Mustang had arrived, uninvited, into her life, and Winry wasn't so easily intimidated as to leave, and together, they were all the other had left of an easier time-perhaps that was too generous a description for the Senator: his life as a General had been no easier, but the hardships of the past were ground to dust by the Clockwork's gears while the hardships of the present were still undigested gravel, all sharp angles and unforgiving facets.
He came by the clinic two times a week, and while Winry didn't make a concerted effort to see more of him, she certainly gave up avoiding him. The first Monday following their reintroduction, the bells over the door announced the Senator to Winry, who was seated at the typewriter on a desk behind the receptionist's desk. She watched through the corner of her eye-as close as she could get to ignoring him while still watching him-as he removed his coat and hat and hung them on a stand by the door. When he turned back to the receptionist, he gave Winry and the girl behind the desk the noncommittal smile that men give to pretty women whom they know they will never sleep with-recognition and resignation but courteous nevertheless.
He was a gentleman, Winry thought. A good man.
"Senator," the receptionist said, and Winry could see that even the back of her neck was blushing. "You're in room two today."
He paused briefly at the desk to say, "Thank you," to the receptionist and then a polite, "Miss Rockbell," and a nod to Winry, and then he turned and headed down the hall.
Winry couldn't deny a touch of relief: after their last encounter when she had done just about everything in her power to offend him, she was not certain what, if anything, he would have to say to her. But a succinct, not-unfriendly greeting was just fine.
Winry felt eyes on her and looked over at the receptionist, whose mouth was slack and her brow was furrowed.
"What?" Winry asked.
"I didn't know you were so chummy with the Senator," she said and looked away, flipping her ponytail over her shoulder.
Winry recoiled from that a little. "He knows my name," he said. "That doesn't equal chumminess."
Without looking back, the receptionist went on, "He's single, you know. I read it in the paper. Been separated for months, but it's official now."
Normally this degree of unprofessionalism wouldn't bother Winry. She and the receptionist were the only women there remotely close to each other in age, and joking about patients was not uncommon. But not today. And not this patient. Winry whipped the unfinished form out of the typewriter and stood. "And I'm sure he really appreciates everyone's knowing," she snapped. "I swear. I hope those vultures with press passes find another body to pick over soon. Or, I don't know, focus on his political policy or something relevant."
"Oh, come off it," the receptionist said with a dismissive wave of her hand. "He's a senator. It comes with the territory."
She had a point. Certainly, when he'd been a general, he'd rather set the precedent of exhibitionism for his career, and now, with his sharp eloquence and that scarred breed of handsome, Winry imagined the man could be quite the press sweetheart. But she understood him better now, even after one very uncomfortable car ride. Time had taken the bad blood between them and weathered it down to a rust-color smudge, and now Winry could hear him speaking as a person. Just a man. So, when she responded, "He's still a human being," she meant it more than she could express. Having seen the measure of his mistakes firsthand and the depth of his repentance, she thought she had a rather good picture of what kind of human being he was.
She walked away feeling closer to him that she ever thought she could. It was like getting closer to the horizon, like putting her hand out and rapping her knuckles against the sun, hanging low in the sky like a bronze shield. It wasn't possible or explainable, but her desire to defend him came from her bones.
Despite that, when she walked by the open doorway to room two, saw the Senator sitting on a chair just inside, waiting patiently for his doctor, she was surprised by the look on his face. His brow was slightly furrowed, as though he was not certain how to justify what he had overheard.
But she knew how. She smiled at him as if to express what she'd come to understand: they could never truly be strangers.
After a moment, he smiled back. Winry felt those ten years of scar tissue stretching and releasing-it was the feeling of looking at him and knowing that though they had both played their own role in wounding the other in the past, their best judgment had brought them here now. To each other.
That Clockwork. What a sense of humor.
x
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x
The next Thursday, the Senator drove Winry to the trolley station again, even though it was not raining. It was, in fact, a bright, crisp day with a mild breeze. A good sort of day for a walk.
Winry's face as she slipped into the backseat of his car must have asked the question because he responded, "Go easy on your feet now, and you'll appreciate it later."
"A Senator and an amateur obstetrician?" she asked dryly, "It's a wonder you're single."
He laughed. Which was good because Winry said it before she was certain how he would respond. "Not according to my ex-wife."
x
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x
It was the first Thursday of March, and Winry had a doctor appointment after work. She was dropping down to once a month now that she was seeing the end of her first trimester and had never shown any signs of having a particularly precarious pregnancy in the first place. The nausea had faded-in fact, the last time she had vomited was in the Senator's car-she had had to replace all her bras, and her shoes were getting snugger by the day. She watched the veins in her feet become more distended. She could just feel the blood swelling in her body, and it was a sensation of fullness, of warmth, almost overwhelming, like laying across the hood of a dark-colored car in the sun. The oddest side effect of her pregnancy, of this incredible fullness, was the sudden sharpness of her senses. Like sharing her body with someone else was pushing her closer to the surface where she could feel again-a startling experience when partnered with the revelation that it had been a long, long time since she had felt anything.
Colors were brighter now. The sounds she heard were more than just sounds. Senator Mustang's voice was no longer a single note but a chord, an overlaying of four or five tones. She would watch him, listen to the oaken richness of his voice and not catch a single word. Smells, too. Only a few weeks ago, the Senator had smelled like a mix of things applied to him. Spicy and earthy smells that came from bottles, but as he walked her across the street to the trolley stop so she could catch the west train to her doctor, she closed her eyes and thought that this is what the ocean smelled like. Winry had never seen the ocean, of course, but she could imagine it. Sun and unsullied space. And blue. Preternatural expanses of light. That's what the Senator smelled like.
After the fourth time he had given her a ride, Senator Mustang had stopped offering. Instead, their timing continued placing them at the coat rack by the door at the same time. He continued holding her coat open for her. Then he held the front door open as she slipped out. Then his car door was opened in front of her, and it was the next logical step to sink to the upholstery and slide in. Then he would slide in after her, and they were closed into the car together, which became a pocket in time where it was possible-even natural-to become together the people they had once been. This was a bizarre sort of conflict for both of them as the people they had been before would not have voluntarily shared a small, enclosed space twice a week. But there was a simplicity in the Senator's company-the Winry he knew came from a time when she was still on the path to be who she wanted to be. And he still treated her like she was who she wanted to be. And it made her happy in a way that nothing had in years.
They talked about weather and literature, and Winry loaned him paperback novels that he always returned to her on the next drive, having read them in one sitting. They talked about the Senator's job when Senate was not in session: he taught Alchemy at the academy, everything thing from Alchemy for Liberal Arts Majors to uninvested freshmen to Organic Alchemy to men about to take their exams. They talked about what had brought him to physical therapy-an old, old back injury that hadn't healed right the first time and refused to now. At first, Winry had avoided the topic of politics, but he did not seem to shy away from it when it came up. In fact, the Senator seemed rather to enjoy explaining things to her-Winry was always a little frustrated by the way he smiled indulgently when she played devil's advocate to his arguments. He countered her points like a cat bats at a fleeing meal. But today, the topics of politics took the backseat to something rather closer to home.
"I can't help noticing," Senator Mustang said as he came to stand next to Winry at the trolley stop, his driver sitting in a parked car across the street, "There isn't ever anyone else driving you home."
Winry didn't understand. Should there be?
She watched him watching her for a moment. And then, "Presumably, you didn't get yourself pregnant."
"Oh," Winry said. "Yeah. No, I didn't." She laughed a little. "But, as far as I'm concerned, no one else did, either."
"I see."
Winry stretched her arms up over her head with a sigh. "Nope. Just woke up one day, knocked up. You know how it goes."
"I've got a couple theologian friends who would just love to meet you."
Winry wasn't allowed to drink alcohol, of course, and she missed it sometimes, but in the language of her newly honed senses, the Senator's brand of humor was an old, dark Carménère, the kind that left a rosy residue on the sides of the glass and made her tonsils tingle.
"That story is a lot more flattering than reality," Winry said with a shrug. "Daniel and I went on three dates, but it didn't take." She paused, then amended, "Well, some things took, but the relationship sure didn't. Anyway, he was long gone before I knew it."
The Senator was quiet for a moment, long enough that Winry looked over at him. He appeared to be thoroughly considering her words. "So three dates is the going rate these days?"
Winry felt her face heat up and she scowled. Which must have been the reaction he was fishing for because he smiled, his eyes laughing at her. "You're an animal, Senator."
"I believe by animal, you mean fledgling divorcee."
Winry furrowed her brow at him. "You seem real torn up about it," she said mordantly.
The Senator looked down at his left hand, at the pale band almost entirely faded in the late winter sunlight. "Thanks to Central County's Year-and-a-Day Law, it's nothing more than the dissolution of a contract at this point."
"What do you mean?"
If this enigmatic man were capable of sadness, Winry thought, this would have been his chance to show it. But he didn't seem as despondently sad or remorseful as a divorce might warrant-instead he seemed, at best, wistful. Like someone remembering a particularly mild winter. "The plaintiff and defendant must be formally separated for a year and a day before filing. That is a very long time to adjust."
A year and a day, Winry wondered. He must have been wearing his ring until recently-which, in her opinion, belied his nonchalance. "Which were you? Plaintiff or defendant?"
He looked over at her, and Winry was almost started by the sight: a man, as seemingly impenetrable as the Senator, speechless. Winry never thought she would see such a thing. Should she be embarrassed for asking such an insensitive question? Obviously, he was still grieving-even after a year and a day. But in this funny sort of armistice they had-was that a good synonym for friendship?-boundaries were too complicated to establish. So they simply had not.
"Defendant," he answered eventually.
She wanted to point out to him the difference here between when he wrung her for details on her pregnancy and when she wrung him for details on his divorce. He'd laughed at her, mocked her pain when she bore it up to him. But not her, she thought as the trolley pulled up. She put a hand on his left forearm and squeezed just slightly, and the nerves in her skin, so acutely tuned, sang like a field of cicadas in summertime.
"You know what they say, Senator," she said.
He stared at her.
"What doesn't kill you..." She meant to give his wrist another squeeze and then walk by him. But as she told her body to slip by, she found herself leaning instead, her feet planted, pushing up onto her toes. The skin at the corner of his mouth was dry and warm and rough against her lips, and by the time her mind caught up with her mouth, she had lingered too long. But he was not withdrawing first. Quite the contrary, he was turning his face toward her. Winry hurriedly dropped to her heels and stepped back.
"Have a good weekend, Senator," she said, keeping her voice light and casual. While she was certainly as shocked by her actions as the Senator was, Winry schooled her features to keep from showing it.
Anyone who saw them and did not recognize the Senator from his photos in the paper would not have seen two old, old acquaintances half-heartedly resisting a friendship. Anyone watching would not have seen a man with a complicated past and his only surviving victim. Onlookers wouldn't see a lonely man with handfuls of fragments or a girl with no idea how she got here or two people knowing that they could not be rescued by the other but still sort of hoping that they could be anyway.
No, a passerby would see something far simpler: a young woman trying to look casual because she was young enough to be embarrassed still by her own authenticity and a man knowing that something truly remarkable was happening.
Winry smiled and ducked her head. She turned toward the trolley.
"Winry."
She paused and turned, holding her hair back against the breeze and her mind flittering away like a mayfly. She had been wondering the last few weeks what the Senator would look like if he ever was at a loss for words. Now, seeing it for the second time, she found it about as disconcerting as he did.
He was quiet for a moment. Then, "It's been good. Seeing you again." His face was sincere.
Winry believed that he meant it.
Click here for Part II
Author: Camudekyu
Rating: M
Characters: Roy & Winry
Length: 17 pages total
Warnings: Spoilers for end of the first series.
Summary: The cycle by which time consumes the past and reuses it for the future trundles on, a dance to a beat drummed out by pulses from a deep, inexorable otherwhere.
A/N: Sometimes, even when you are tremendously good at something as a child, you do not grow up to do it. Also, the epigram comes from the poem that gave such pithy verse as "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men."
Thy Poor, Earth Born Companion
"Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' weary winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell."
-Robert Burns, "To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough"
Such a thing as an attainable destiny was reserved for the Elrics, whose dream was so unattainable it seemed inevitable that the slippery Clockwork would backfire at the just the right moment to allow it. It was the calculated, clear, dialectical sort of dreams that fell by the wayside while life was building that bridge out to the Elrics' island, turning their destiny from an impossible wish to a peninsular hope. The dreams that were less dream and more plan-the ones that came with appendices of budgets and a resume and perhaps some flattering recommendations-were not the ones that were granted exemption from reality. And the reality here is, who actually gets what they want in the end? Honestly, who? And where did achieving their dream get the Elrics? They were gone. Had been gone for ten years in the spring. But Edward had always wanted them together. And together they were.
Take for instance, Winry Rockbell, who, while all the other girls in school had aspirations of being ballerinas or riding painted ponies or marrying old and infirm plutocrats, was busy pursuing a career in something she knew, something she was damn good at, something she was born to do. But that was when she was twelve. And now, at twenty-five, the dreams of a little girl were quiet, not unhappy nostalgias she kept in a box under her nightstand where she stowed away so many of the frayed ends of the threads that once tied her to the Elrics.
She once had never imagined that a day would pass when she did not cry at the thought of Edward and Alphonse. Now, however, she had not cried for them in years. At first, she did not allow herself to stop thinking of them. She kept her mantle crammed with framed photographs of moments that had come and gone, her memories of which were threadbare doppelgangers of the original moments, but releasing would be like forgetting. She could never allow herself to forget-
-until she was twenty-something when she discovered that the spectrum between a remembered memory and a forgotten one is wide. Her earrings disappeared one by one. And she still lit candles on her mantle for their birthdays, put flowers on their graves every spring. But the cycle by which time consumes the past and reuses it for the future trundles on, a dance to a beat drummed out by pulses from a deep, inexorable otherwhere.
In this dance, her alarm went off at seven o'clock, and she reached first to silence it and next for the soda crackers her doctor recommended she nibble before getting up. The nausea had almost subsided, but she still kept a sleeve by the bed and another in her purse. Next she got up and began picking through the mix of week's clothing on the floor. While pulling on Tuesday's shorts and a blouse from the weekend maybe, Winry caught herself in her mirror. She met her own eyes and frowned. She stood straight and turned profile. She smoothed the wrinkles in the front of her shirt down and looked for any rounding. But there was nothing.
The next step was breakfast. She stilled missed coffee, but the doctor said no coffee or alcohol, and she stuck to it. Then it was time to almost miss the trolley and to sling herself in the doorway, loop an arm around a pole, and tie her hair back. Her purse bumped against the side of the trolley as the wind whipped past. She minded the stops, watched the street signs slip by with that crowded sort of isolation that comes with being a woman on a trolley on her way to work.
Next, she arrived at Central Physiotherapy ten minutes early. She changed into her uniform, clipped her name tag to the pocket over her right breast, and checked her schedule for the day where it was written out in a spreadsheet, clipped to a board that hung by the coffee machine.
The rhythm was strong this morning. The clock ticked loudly in hall, and somedays, Winry truly appreciated routines. Not all days, but some days. There was a certain safety to it, to predictability, and in the life of a recently pregnant, unmarried young woman, predictability was a rare treat indeed.
The steps went on in four-four time: her first client was a woman recently relieved of a full-arm cast after breaking her collarbone; her next was a man who had taken a nasty spill from a horse; then it was mid-morning break when she walked the same half-mile path she always walked around the block toward the park and back again; then she sat with the receptionist's typewriter for an hour while she issued status updates to send to scrutinizing actuaries.
Then a boy whose body had atrophied while he slept away the measles; then a salad and sandwich for lunch; then a man relearning to walk or a woman relearning to write; someone who probably should have died ages ago or someone who did not deserve what happened to her; a man who would never ride a bicycle again; tenacity or despondency or weary resignation; and the sun clinging to the lip of the buildings across the street like dew on a web and the street lights flickering on before the darkness has even settled and the walk toward the last trolley home... almost.
Today there was a hitch, a stumble in the beat. As she gathered her purse and removed her uniform to take to the laundry and checked her schedule for the next day, a name caught her eye, one that had not been there that morning. A patient coming in during the last slot of the day to see the overseeing doctor.
The Clockwork snagged on that name.
She felt the shudder of a misfire. She stopped where she stood. A wash of things next: curiosity for details as his block on the schedule was cryptically blank except for his name; the watery memory of Edward's and Alphonse's faces; a desire and dread to rekindle all the things he represented. Schadenfreude, perhaps? Or was it sympathy? She didn't like thinking about it-she had not thought much of him in years. He had swum through her mind perhaps here and there when he was campaigning and when he was elected, when his pet projects or humbling missteps made it into the first few pages of the Central Times.
She did not like imagining him in her office, his marionette legs manipulated by another, his white-knuckled grasp on the parallel bars as he tried and tried to walk again, his pale, limp skin over pale, limp limbs. It was disgraceful, and she was humiliated for him, as though just seeing his name on the roster was a trespass. He had taken the last space of the day, after many of the nurses had left and most patients were home with their families: he did not want to be seen. And she decided she did not want to see him. She slipped out the backdoor and hurried around to the trolly stop. And all the while she thought about him, his impossible, relentless name, fervent and singularly driven.
Mustang.
x
x
x
He was back on Thursday. Winry saw his name on the schedule, in the same time slot. Her last client was about an hour before his appointment, so she had no reason to linger. No reason at all.
Monday morning, Winry saw his name again on the roster. Same time and same doctor. It made her mad. Like he was following her. Which was silly, she knew, but she felt it anyway. The more time she spent feeling it, the more she rather felt like she might be justified in telling him so.
She'd heard other PTA's talk about him, the dark-haired, one-eyed senator slipping through the door without his usual cadre of hangers-on-the pictures of Senator Mustang in the Times with a flock of bodyguards always made Winry laugh: Roy Mustang did not need protection.
Not many men came to the clinic in their work clothes, but Winry had heard that Senator Mustang always wore a three-piece suit, his vest buttons straight and a golden watch chain dangling from his pocket and his fedora pinched in his fingers-Winry couldn't picture it; his glaucous uniform was as much a part of him as he was a part of her. But the military ladder had been abruptly truncated, and the resultant power vacuum had sucked in just about any man with a morsel of ambition, at least a third-grade reading level, and a pulse.
Winry had not voted for him. She wanted to tell him that, too.
He was back again on Thursday. And then on Monday. Winry had taken to checking now, every Monday and Thursday morning for his name on the roster. She wondered what he looked like. Was he gray? He was an old man now, certainly. The life of an alchemist was a hard and fast one, and in the Elrics' case, a short one. But he'd gotten out of it now-what an impossibility that was, Winry thought; aren't men born alchemists?
She once had thought she was born a mechanic. Perhaps Senator Mustang kept his gloves in the top desk of his drawer, tucked beneath his nitroglycerin pills and silver flask. Perhaps on notably sluggish Sunday mornings, he lay in his bed and watched the ceiling fan and flipped through grainy, faded memories of heat at his back, his silhouette flickering and stretched across the pavement, doing its best to outrun him.
On Friday mornings, she leafed through the files left with the receptionist from the day before. She pulled out the one for Mustang, R. and flipped it open. She wasn't too terribly concerned with what got him here-the elderly snapped like twigs and grew back slow-but she pushed to the billing section and looked at his signature, the embossed loops of pen strokes, the only actual proof of him. As though she might have imagined her imaginings of his being there.
x
x
x
Winry was staring at the percolator in the break room and rubbing the flesh below her navel on a particularly rainy Thursday after her last patient of the day. A girl named Laura Flynn, who'd lost two fingers at the cannery, and Senator Mustang were the only two names occupying the last slot, and Winry had taken special precautions to avoid any place the Senator could have been around the clinic while seeing to her client. Miss Flynn's father had taken her home, Winry had finished her paperwork, and retreated to the break room to change and get her purse. Her deprived nerves sang at the thought of the dregs of that morning's coffee, and Winry debated. She actually debated with herself for a long, dizzy moment.
In the end, her baby won. Winry blew a sigh that made her bangs puff up, slung her purse over her shoulder, and headed for the lobby. The trolley stop was just up the street and around the corner, easily walking distance, but not within sight of the glass front of Central Physiotherapy. Winry knew the stop was uncovered and the shop owners there chased loiterers away from their awnings with brooms and rolling pins on days like this, and having so recently exercised what she thought to be a notable sacrifice-she really wanted that coffee-Winry was feeling rather like she was owed a break.
She slumped forward and rested her forehead against the glass, knowing full well that it would leave a smudge and not really giving a damn. The water bubbled up out of the gutters, coved the street in three-inch sheets, blurred the entire street to a smudgy, edgeless charcoal drawing. The trolley was probably delayed. The rain probably wasn't going to let up any time soon. And judging by the irony-quotient of her life just then, she probably had a hole in one of her wellies or something.
Winry allowed her self just an exquisite moment of self-pity before sighing hard, squaring her shoulders, and covering the open top of her purse with the sleeve of her coat.
Just then, she heard a door open. Men talking and footsteps down the hall. And she knew who it was immediately. His voice was an old record, one she had not heard in so, so long. He didn't sound so gravelly as most of the old men who ambled into the lobby. There was no waver or thinness to his tone. In fact, he sounded the same. A barrel-deep baritone, all dry humor and condescension you weren't smart enough to catch.
She should go. She should go. She should go, but she didn't. The pressure on her back to turn and watch him and the doctor enter the lobby was a gravity in itself.
She didn't go. Instead, she gave in and watched over her shoulder, her breath high in her throat and her heart in her ears. She reminded herself how much she didn't want to see his face ever again. Of all the things he'd done, all the people he'd taken from her, but it sounded like the words of a miffed child in her ears.
Then, in that moment, she understood all her flutter and fear: this was not an ancient anger, a revulsion kept on simmer for too long.
This was her wanting to see him. Desperately.
Seeing him would almost be like seeing Ed and Al, seeing herself smudged with engine grease and contentment she hadn't been able to appreciate at the time, seeing a dream before it was uprooted, rerouted, when it was still fresh and tender, a pre-blossom bud pushing its sepals.
Senator Roy Mustang was not a stooped old man. As soon as Winry saw him, she ran through the numbers in her head. Had the math always put him at around forty years and she just hadn't thought about it until then? His back was straight, his strides long and even. His hair was shorter, slicked back with pomade. He looked older, but not in a wizened sort of way. In a grown-up sort of way. Some of that boyish roundness was gone from his face. She saw it when the doctor greeted her by name, when her name registered to him and he looked over.
His gaze fell on her like the quiet weight of a storm.
No profound passage to an untarnished past opened when he smiled at her. She wasn't unpregnanted or re-Elric-ed or anything. In fact, she felt rather shy. Her cheeks heated up and she willed herself not to duck her head like a fourteen-year-old.
"Miss Rockbell," he said, and it was almost a question. He'd downgraded to a smaller eyepatch. Winry had not noticed it in any of his pictures in the papers, but she noticed it now. This new patch covered just passed his left cheekbone, and Winry could tell just by looking that whatever had taken his eye had crushed his zygoma. And a doctor had attempted to reconstruct it. But Winry had an eye for these things, the telltale signs of a repair when it should have been a replace.
"Gener-" she began and blushed deeper. "Senator," she amended.
The doctor, Winry's supervisor, blinked at them both. "Oh, I see you've been acquainted."
Senator Mustang did not look away from her when he said, "A very long time ago."
Winry knew she was being assessed as thoroughly as she was assessing him, and it seemed rather like something too rude for a man his age to be doing. This didn't stop her from doing it back. The doctor seemed somewhat uncomfortable with their exchange and said, "Yes, Miss Rockbell is one of my best PTA's on staff. She's always staying late." That wasn't true, but Winry appreciated it anyway.
Senator Mustang didn't ask what she was doing there and not in an automail shop, and she appreciated that, too. "Oh, don't listen to him," she said, managing to sound glib. She waved a hand dismissively at the doctor. "I'm just waiting for the trolley and debating going out into the rain." She glanced out the window. "I don't think I'm gonna be able to will it to clear up, though."
The doctor was initialing different check points on Senator Mustang's status report when he said, "You might call a cab, Winry. I wouldn't recommend being out in this weather in your condition."
Her supervisor might have all the skill of Hippocrates, but he had the social graces of a three-legged, incontinent goat. She watched a flicker of curiosity cross Senator Mustang's partially-hidden face, and she instinctively clutched her abdomen as though putting a hand over her womb would hide the bundled cells within. She regretted it immediately because now he could infer that her condition was rooted somewhere behind her navel. So either she was knocked up or she had a tape worm. Great.
"I've got a coat! I'll be fine!" Winry blurted. She could feel the heat in her face creeping down her neck.
"That's not necessary," the Senator said as the doctor passed him a form to sign. Winry heard his pen scratching the paper. "I've got a car coming. I'll be happy to drop you somewhere, Miss Rockbell."
The thought of being in a small, enclosed space with the Senator made Winry's stomach clench. When she opened her mouth to tell him as politely as she could that would rather stand in the February rain than be alone with him, "If it's not any trouble," came out instead. It must have been the baby, she thought, piping up through her mouth, and she glared down at her treacherous uterus.
A man she did not recognize drove Senator Mustang's spacious, gunpowder-grey sedan. He pulled the car to the curb, left the engine running, and hopped out, an umbrella over his head. Winry wasn't exactly sure what kind of dance the Senator and the chauffeur were starting or where she fit into it, but when the Senator took her elbow in one hand and rested the other against the small of her back, she let him steer her out from under the awning. The chauffeur darted in behind them, holding the umbrella over their heads instead of his.
She felt the Senator's breath against her neck as they approached the car. Over the sour, old smell of rain in the dirty city, she could smell tobacco and aftershave and the piney spice of whatever it was in his hair. The chauffeur opened the door to the car for them, and Senator Mustang guided her inside. She was not nearly so practiced at this as he was, and Winry flopped to the seat clumsily, splashing rainwater across the leather. She sat where she fell for a moment before she realized that her host could not get in until she moved. In a bluster of apologies, Winry scooted over, and Senator Mustang slid in beside her.
"We'll be making a detour today, Will," he said one the driver was back behind the wheel. He turned and looked at Winry expectantly.
Winry lived in the Hillside Apartments off Lexington Avenue, not too terribly close to where they were, and the car was pointed in the wrong direction. She assumed that the Senator lived somewhere in north Central, where the money tended to collect, and she was most definitely out of their way. "Just the trolley station, if you don't mind," she said as brightly as she could. She crossed her legs and leaned toward the door, kept herself as compact as she could.
The past was not unfolding blissfully before her. She did not feel the warm waves of nostalgia she thought she would feel. Somehow, she expected the world to look a different, maybe as bright and new as she remembered it looking ten years ago, but his presence was not revelational. He hadn't fixed anything. The bastard.
"How've you been, Miss Rockbell?" he asked.
"Good, thanks," she said, "Yourself?" She spoke like he was a stranger on the trolley instead of an invasive vine strangling life out of her family tree like a serpent.
"I've been well," he said.
Winry could sense the cords of nausea knotting in her stomach, and she began feeling less and less inclined to open her mouth.
"I've been seeing Dr. Cooper for a few weeks now, and I've never seen you around the clinic."
She was focusing too hard on trying to calm her stomach to put too much energy in censoring her words. "I've been avoiding you," she said succinctly. She noticed the pale band of skin around his left ring finger when he drummed it and his other fingers against his knee.
He nodded. "I see." He turned his appraising, single-eyed gaze on her and said flatly, "The years have been good to you, Miss Rockbell. You haven't changed at all."
It was not a compliment. Winry felt the acid in her throat, the clenched fist in her stomach tightening. She clapped a hand over her mouth, and inadvertently gave Mustang the most pleading look she could. She didn't want to vomit in front of him, and the only thing worse would be vomiting in his very expensive car.
Mustang tilted his chin to meet his driver's eyes in the mirror. "Pull over, Will."
The driver complied, and Winry opened the car door so fast, she cracked it against the curb. She managed to lean onto the sidewalk just in time. The end of her long ponytail slipped over her shoulder and into the pitiful stream that fountained out of her mouth as she retched up the few handfuls of pretzels she'd had in the break room.
Her nose and eyes stung. Her face and lips burned. She held the end of her hair when she sat back in her seat and closed the door, careful to keep it from dripping on the upholstery. When she had settled herself, Mustang tugged a handkerchief from his coat pocket and handed it to her. Winry accepted without looking at him. The car accelerated into traffic.
For a moment, it was very quiet except the rain on the windows and the purring engine.
"Morning sickness?"
Winry dabbed at her mouth. She had been doing pretty well, thus far, not feeling particularly ashamed about her pregnancy-she certainly had the energy and the means to raise a child by herself, and independence had always been a core value of hers-but something about his tone overcame her defenses effortlessly. Who was he to be judging her, she thought-not that he had sounded particularly judgmental, but Winry remembered the General well enough to know that he was quiet and subtle and always, always laughing at you.
With the kerchief pressed to her lips, she muttered, "It's not the morning," and once that was out, she knew it wasn't really a defense. If trying to make herself sound dignified to the Senator was her goal, she wasn't doing herself any favors with that. Nor was she with this: "And you're either cheating on your wife or divorced." When Mustang looked at her, she flicked her eyes to his left hand.
He laughed and held up the betraying digit to his eye. "Recently," he said, observing his atrophied ring finger.
"Cheating?"
"Divorced," he clarified. "Two weeks since the paperwork was finalized."
"Hmm," Winry said. "It's been nine weeks for me. Since, you know, I got pregnant."
"Only twenty-seven to go."
Was this what it was like to have a frienemy? Well, no, because there wasn't really any friendship in the equation. An acquaintemy? But when she thought of it, enemy was definitely too strong a word, too. Now that they had rather unapologetically forced each other to reveal their respective big, uncomfortable issues, maybe acquaintance wouldn't cut it, either.
Winry looked over at the Senator, who was watching his hands on his thighs. While keeping things in her life well-ordered made everything easier, she had known before she ever got into his car that the Senator was not a man easily categorized-particularly in relation to her.
From this angle, she could see only his good side. It looked different now, so very different, from her memories of him. She remembered looking down at him from the window in the Hughes's guest bedroom. She remembered the gamut of expressions that slipped across his face-all of them as understated at his humor, a trace above ground but with deep, deep roots. She had seen, first, the recognition of her as an acquaintance. Then the remembrance of her as a Rockebell. She had kept her face still and scowling, willing him to understand, I know who you are and I know what you did. And then she saw his eyes widen-he had two of them back then-just a degree as he understood.
At the time, Winry had been so furious at him, at the way his expression sank in resignation and he turned away. Winry could remember being so angry that he had clearly been hoping that she would never find out. He had been hoping to keep his participation in her parents' execution a dirty little secret from her. The coward. The sniveling, obedient coward.
But now she understood. Of course he would want to keep it secret. Of course he would. What man could endure such a thing?
The man had been punished enough, hadn't he?
She was older now than he had been when he grafted himself to her family tree-because if bringing someone into the world deserved a branch then taking someone out of it certainly counted, too-and she could say this about men with good hearts and too much power: all they can do is try their best.
He must have felt her eyes because he looked over at her. The car came to a stop outside the trolley station, and the Senator reached around the seat in front of him for the umbrella. He passed it to Winry and smiled.
He was trying his best. And because the world Winry knew very rarely let a person's best be enough, she decided that his was. She smiled and thanked him, took his umbrella and slipped out of the car.
x
x
x
So that was how it was. Senator Mustang had arrived, uninvited, into her life, and Winry wasn't so easily intimidated as to leave, and together, they were all the other had left of an easier time-perhaps that was too generous a description for the Senator: his life as a General had been no easier, but the hardships of the past were ground to dust by the Clockwork's gears while the hardships of the present were still undigested gravel, all sharp angles and unforgiving facets.
He came by the clinic two times a week, and while Winry didn't make a concerted effort to see more of him, she certainly gave up avoiding him. The first Monday following their reintroduction, the bells over the door announced the Senator to Winry, who was seated at the typewriter on a desk behind the receptionist's desk. She watched through the corner of her eye-as close as she could get to ignoring him while still watching him-as he removed his coat and hat and hung them on a stand by the door. When he turned back to the receptionist, he gave Winry and the girl behind the desk the noncommittal smile that men give to pretty women whom they know they will never sleep with-recognition and resignation but courteous nevertheless.
He was a gentleman, Winry thought. A good man.
"Senator," the receptionist said, and Winry could see that even the back of her neck was blushing. "You're in room two today."
He paused briefly at the desk to say, "Thank you," to the receptionist and then a polite, "Miss Rockbell," and a nod to Winry, and then he turned and headed down the hall.
Winry couldn't deny a touch of relief: after their last encounter when she had done just about everything in her power to offend him, she was not certain what, if anything, he would have to say to her. But a succinct, not-unfriendly greeting was just fine.
Winry felt eyes on her and looked over at the receptionist, whose mouth was slack and her brow was furrowed.
"What?" Winry asked.
"I didn't know you were so chummy with the Senator," she said and looked away, flipping her ponytail over her shoulder.
Winry recoiled from that a little. "He knows my name," he said. "That doesn't equal chumminess."
Without looking back, the receptionist went on, "He's single, you know. I read it in the paper. Been separated for months, but it's official now."
Normally this degree of unprofessionalism wouldn't bother Winry. She and the receptionist were the only women there remotely close to each other in age, and joking about patients was not uncommon. But not today. And not this patient. Winry whipped the unfinished form out of the typewriter and stood. "And I'm sure he really appreciates everyone's knowing," she snapped. "I swear. I hope those vultures with press passes find another body to pick over soon. Or, I don't know, focus on his political policy or something relevant."
"Oh, come off it," the receptionist said with a dismissive wave of her hand. "He's a senator. It comes with the territory."
She had a point. Certainly, when he'd been a general, he'd rather set the precedent of exhibitionism for his career, and now, with his sharp eloquence and that scarred breed of handsome, Winry imagined the man could be quite the press sweetheart. But she understood him better now, even after one very uncomfortable car ride. Time had taken the bad blood between them and weathered it down to a rust-color smudge, and now Winry could hear him speaking as a person. Just a man. So, when she responded, "He's still a human being," she meant it more than she could express. Having seen the measure of his mistakes firsthand and the depth of his repentance, she thought she had a rather good picture of what kind of human being he was.
She walked away feeling closer to him that she ever thought she could. It was like getting closer to the horizon, like putting her hand out and rapping her knuckles against the sun, hanging low in the sky like a bronze shield. It wasn't possible or explainable, but her desire to defend him came from her bones.
Despite that, when she walked by the open doorway to room two, saw the Senator sitting on a chair just inside, waiting patiently for his doctor, she was surprised by the look on his face. His brow was slightly furrowed, as though he was not certain how to justify what he had overheard.
But she knew how. She smiled at him as if to express what she'd come to understand: they could never truly be strangers.
After a moment, he smiled back. Winry felt those ten years of scar tissue stretching and releasing-it was the feeling of looking at him and knowing that though they had both played their own role in wounding the other in the past, their best judgment had brought them here now. To each other.
That Clockwork. What a sense of humor.
x
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x
The next Thursday, the Senator drove Winry to the trolley station again, even though it was not raining. It was, in fact, a bright, crisp day with a mild breeze. A good sort of day for a walk.
Winry's face as she slipped into the backseat of his car must have asked the question because he responded, "Go easy on your feet now, and you'll appreciate it later."
"A Senator and an amateur obstetrician?" she asked dryly, "It's a wonder you're single."
He laughed. Which was good because Winry said it before she was certain how he would respond. "Not according to my ex-wife."
x
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x
It was the first Thursday of March, and Winry had a doctor appointment after work. She was dropping down to once a month now that she was seeing the end of her first trimester and had never shown any signs of having a particularly precarious pregnancy in the first place. The nausea had faded-in fact, the last time she had vomited was in the Senator's car-she had had to replace all her bras, and her shoes were getting snugger by the day. She watched the veins in her feet become more distended. She could just feel the blood swelling in her body, and it was a sensation of fullness, of warmth, almost overwhelming, like laying across the hood of a dark-colored car in the sun. The oddest side effect of her pregnancy, of this incredible fullness, was the sudden sharpness of her senses. Like sharing her body with someone else was pushing her closer to the surface where she could feel again-a startling experience when partnered with the revelation that it had been a long, long time since she had felt anything.
Colors were brighter now. The sounds she heard were more than just sounds. Senator Mustang's voice was no longer a single note but a chord, an overlaying of four or five tones. She would watch him, listen to the oaken richness of his voice and not catch a single word. Smells, too. Only a few weeks ago, the Senator had smelled like a mix of things applied to him. Spicy and earthy smells that came from bottles, but as he walked her across the street to the trolley stop so she could catch the west train to her doctor, she closed her eyes and thought that this is what the ocean smelled like. Winry had never seen the ocean, of course, but she could imagine it. Sun and unsullied space. And blue. Preternatural expanses of light. That's what the Senator smelled like.
After the fourth time he had given her a ride, Senator Mustang had stopped offering. Instead, their timing continued placing them at the coat rack by the door at the same time. He continued holding her coat open for her. Then he held the front door open as she slipped out. Then his car door was opened in front of her, and it was the next logical step to sink to the upholstery and slide in. Then he would slide in after her, and they were closed into the car together, which became a pocket in time where it was possible-even natural-to become together the people they had once been. This was a bizarre sort of conflict for both of them as the people they had been before would not have voluntarily shared a small, enclosed space twice a week. But there was a simplicity in the Senator's company-the Winry he knew came from a time when she was still on the path to be who she wanted to be. And he still treated her like she was who she wanted to be. And it made her happy in a way that nothing had in years.
They talked about weather and literature, and Winry loaned him paperback novels that he always returned to her on the next drive, having read them in one sitting. They talked about the Senator's job when Senate was not in session: he taught Alchemy at the academy, everything thing from Alchemy for Liberal Arts Majors to uninvested freshmen to Organic Alchemy to men about to take their exams. They talked about what had brought him to physical therapy-an old, old back injury that hadn't healed right the first time and refused to now. At first, Winry had avoided the topic of politics, but he did not seem to shy away from it when it came up. In fact, the Senator seemed rather to enjoy explaining things to her-Winry was always a little frustrated by the way he smiled indulgently when she played devil's advocate to his arguments. He countered her points like a cat bats at a fleeing meal. But today, the topics of politics took the backseat to something rather closer to home.
"I can't help noticing," Senator Mustang said as he came to stand next to Winry at the trolley stop, his driver sitting in a parked car across the street, "There isn't ever anyone else driving you home."
Winry didn't understand. Should there be?
She watched him watching her for a moment. And then, "Presumably, you didn't get yourself pregnant."
"Oh," Winry said. "Yeah. No, I didn't." She laughed a little. "But, as far as I'm concerned, no one else did, either."
"I see."
Winry stretched her arms up over her head with a sigh. "Nope. Just woke up one day, knocked up. You know how it goes."
"I've got a couple theologian friends who would just love to meet you."
Winry wasn't allowed to drink alcohol, of course, and she missed it sometimes, but in the language of her newly honed senses, the Senator's brand of humor was an old, dark Carménère, the kind that left a rosy residue on the sides of the glass and made her tonsils tingle.
"That story is a lot more flattering than reality," Winry said with a shrug. "Daniel and I went on three dates, but it didn't take." She paused, then amended, "Well, some things took, but the relationship sure didn't. Anyway, he was long gone before I knew it."
The Senator was quiet for a moment, long enough that Winry looked over at him. He appeared to be thoroughly considering her words. "So three dates is the going rate these days?"
Winry felt her face heat up and she scowled. Which must have been the reaction he was fishing for because he smiled, his eyes laughing at her. "You're an animal, Senator."
"I believe by animal, you mean fledgling divorcee."
Winry furrowed her brow at him. "You seem real torn up about it," she said mordantly.
The Senator looked down at his left hand, at the pale band almost entirely faded in the late winter sunlight. "Thanks to Central County's Year-and-a-Day Law, it's nothing more than the dissolution of a contract at this point."
"What do you mean?"
If this enigmatic man were capable of sadness, Winry thought, this would have been his chance to show it. But he didn't seem as despondently sad or remorseful as a divorce might warrant-instead he seemed, at best, wistful. Like someone remembering a particularly mild winter. "The plaintiff and defendant must be formally separated for a year and a day before filing. That is a very long time to adjust."
A year and a day, Winry wondered. He must have been wearing his ring until recently-which, in her opinion, belied his nonchalance. "Which were you? Plaintiff or defendant?"
He looked over at her, and Winry was almost started by the sight: a man, as seemingly impenetrable as the Senator, speechless. Winry never thought she would see such a thing. Should she be embarrassed for asking such an insensitive question? Obviously, he was still grieving-even after a year and a day. But in this funny sort of armistice they had-was that a good synonym for friendship?-boundaries were too complicated to establish. So they simply had not.
"Defendant," he answered eventually.
She wanted to point out to him the difference here between when he wrung her for details on her pregnancy and when she wrung him for details on his divorce. He'd laughed at her, mocked her pain when she bore it up to him. But not her, she thought as the trolley pulled up. She put a hand on his left forearm and squeezed just slightly, and the nerves in her skin, so acutely tuned, sang like a field of cicadas in summertime.
"You know what they say, Senator," she said.
He stared at her.
"What doesn't kill you..." She meant to give his wrist another squeeze and then walk by him. But as she told her body to slip by, she found herself leaning instead, her feet planted, pushing up onto her toes. The skin at the corner of his mouth was dry and warm and rough against her lips, and by the time her mind caught up with her mouth, she had lingered too long. But he was not withdrawing first. Quite the contrary, he was turning his face toward her. Winry hurriedly dropped to her heels and stepped back.
"Have a good weekend, Senator," she said, keeping her voice light and casual. While she was certainly as shocked by her actions as the Senator was, Winry schooled her features to keep from showing it.
Anyone who saw them and did not recognize the Senator from his photos in the paper would not have seen two old, old acquaintances half-heartedly resisting a friendship. Anyone watching would not have seen a man with a complicated past and his only surviving victim. Onlookers wouldn't see a lonely man with handfuls of fragments or a girl with no idea how she got here or two people knowing that they could not be rescued by the other but still sort of hoping that they could be anyway.
No, a passerby would see something far simpler: a young woman trying to look casual because she was young enough to be embarrassed still by her own authenticity and a man knowing that something truly remarkable was happening.
Winry smiled and ducked her head. She turned toward the trolley.
"Winry."
She paused and turned, holding her hair back against the breeze and her mind flittering away like a mayfly. She had been wondering the last few weeks what the Senator would look like if he ever was at a loss for words. Now, seeing it for the second time, she found it about as disconcerting as he did.
He was quiet for a moment. Then, "It's been good. Seeing you again." His face was sincere.
Winry believed that he meant it.
Click here for Part II