FMA: From Here On
Title: From Here On
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 5,150
Summary: The Elric Brothers have attempted human transmutation, and Winry must deal with the consequences. Manga based AU, what if? scenario.
A/N: Because I love Halloween, I decided to take Winry and drive her crazy (it’s a sign of love, honest - last year I did it to Toph from Avatar). This grew from one little thought - what if the Gate took Ed and Al’s bodies but not their souls - and spun completely out of control. No, seriously, this is easily the longest one shot I’ve ever written, and it’s all angsty gen!fic too! I have no idea what I was thinking...
The night everything goes terribly, horribly wrong is actually bright and clear and beautiful. Winry reflects later that it seemed all wrong - that the night her two best friends died should have been dark and rainy and disgusting - and thinks it’s even worse that while Ed and Al were going through who-knows-what she was sitting happily in her warm little house with Granny, trying to wheedle extra dessert from the woman and, when that failed, an extra hour to work on automail before being forced into bed.
Sometimes Winry likes to sneak out of bed and gaze out of the window in the bathroom, the one that faces the Elric house, looking for the inevitable light in the upstairs study where she knows Ed and Al spend most of their time, waiting for it to either blink off or for sleepiness to overcome her. That night, however, her eyes are closed almost as soon as her head hits the pillow - Granny’s been trusting her with bigger projects recently, and she’s been spending a lot of time researching automail makeup - and so Winry misses the flashing lights in the Elric household that would have signaled that something had gone badly for the brothers.
Winry is the one who finds the scene the brothers left behind, storming to the house in a huff after a full day’s silence. It’s not unusual for Ed and Al to isolate themselves from her and Granny - in fact, it’s become the trend of late, and Winry is slowly forcing herself to accept it - but at the very least, they always, always, come for dinner, no matter how often Granny makes spaghetti. Winry can deal with them going on long journeys to learn alchemy and them making fun of her obsession with automail when they’re equally obsessed with alchemy and them ignoring school and refusing to sleep at the Rockbell’s in favor of their house, but she absolutely will not allow them to miss dinner.
She’s really too angry when she slams open the door, practically trembling with self-righteousness, to notice that something in the house is off - she’s only been in it a few times since Miss Trisha died, and it hadn’t felt the same then anyway, so the even more tense and strange atmosphere doesn’t register with her.
In fact, as she climbs the stairs bellowing Edward’s and Alphonse’s names, she thinks that it really makes sense, stupid boys, for them to be trying to hide from her when they know she must be angry.
When the door to the study creaks open what Winry first notices is that the blinds to the window are open instead of drawn, the evening sun glinting dully off of the suits of armor stuffed into one corner of the room. Then she notices that her feet are getting wet, like she’s stepped into a puddle that’s seeping over the soles of her sandals and between her toes.
That’s when she sees the blood; the blood and the circle and the horrifying twisted thing that’s lying in the middle of the room, a thing that looks like a person, but it can’t be a person, can’t can’t can’t, because its skin is grey and sagging and Winry’s eye can tell that the joints are wrong, twisted in the opposite direction they should be, and nothing human has teeth like that and the eyes -
- the eyes are still open -
are looking at her.
Winry never remembers what happened immediately afterwards, but at the funeral she doesn’t speak, because her throat is raw and aching (from screaming for her mother and her father and Granny) and Granny purchases a special hat with a long black veil for her, to cover up the scratch marks on her face (from her own nails.)
The night of the funeral the man named Mustang visits the Rockbells. Winry and Granny are sitting silently in the living room, Granny puffing endlessly on her pipe and looking impassively out the window while Winry dismantles a junk arm with vicious accuracy, pulling wires from the thing, rethreading them, and pulling them out again. Den, curled up in front of the door to block the draft, suddenly perks and goes wild, nearly howling at the door as he jumps up and bows in a defensive position.
Granny’s eyes suddenly focus on something out the window, and she hops from her chair and points out the room. “Workshop. Now.” Winry, too unnerved by the anxiety under the usual barking tone of her voice, drops the arm and bolts, slamming the door just as Granny pulls open the front door to greet their guest.
Tempers flare quickly, and voices are raised almost immediately. All Winry can glimpse through the keyhole is the flash of blue pacing the room - the man from the military who’s come to see Ed and Al about alchemy.
“What happened back there?” he demands, and Winry cringes as she hears Granny clean out her pipe, the old beat-up thing banging against the table like a judge with a gavel.
“What business is it of yours?” the old woman shoots back, but doesn’t give Mustang a chance to answer before barreling on, “Who do you think you are, invading our home tonight of all nights? How dare you?”
“The cart driver told us that you were the boys’ guardian, that it was your granddaughter who found them at the house!”
That’s wrong, Winry thinks, because there were no bodies to find though it appears that everyone in town has agreed that it’s best to pretend as though there were.
“I demand to speak to her! I need to know what she found - what she saw up there!” He’s practically snarling, and with a whimper Winry decides she’s heard enough. The military took her parents from her, and she isn’t going to let them take Granny from her as well. Fumbling with the latch of the workshop window, she drops the six feet to the ground, tearing a hole in the knee of her coveralls, and runs as fast as her little legs can carry her barefoot to the Mills’ house.
Mrs. Mills is short and round and squishy and nothing like her own mother or Miss Trisha were but Mr. Mills is large and burly and has a big gun and when Winry gasps out what’s happening in her house he doesn’t hesitate to grab it and head down towards there, muttering curses that Winry knows she and Ed and Al would have giggled over for hours if she could have told them.
When Granny and Mr. Mills return to the house to retrieve Winry - who has failed to be charmed by Mrs. Mills gingerbread and hot chocolate as she paces furiously - Mr. Mills appears supremely satisfied and Granny’s voice is steady as she reassures Winry that the man in blue will not be coming back.
Exactly one month after the death of the Elric brothers, Winry wakes up, rolling over in bed and sitting up, blinking owlishly out the window and thinking I could bring them back.
There’s no question as to who “them” is, even though she’s lost many people in her short life and has wished at various times to bring any one of them back. It could be seen as a normal part of the grieving process, if it weren’t for the fact that Winry’s thought had come from nowhere, with no prompting, and arrived in her mind with absolute, utter confidence - confidence she thinks doesn’t even belong to her.
That’s when things start to change.
She starts to worry about Granny. Granny’s been watching her like a hawk since Ed and Al died; ever mindful of things like what time Winry goes to bed and how much Winry eats at dinner and how much time Winry spends working on automail through the day. Winry tries not to be bothered by it even though Granny always encouraged Winry to be as independent as possible, because who else does Granny have to take care of?
Still, she can’t help but be a little nonplussed when Granny starts insisting she needs to spend more time outside.
“But Granny!” Winry protests uselessly as Granny strong arms her out the door.
“Not buts.” The old woman’s tone is curt and tense. The lines around her eyes are deeper than before and her ubiquitous pipe droops when she’s not talking. “You’ve been spending too much time cooped up in the workshop.” Winry wants to point out that they have orders to fill, and that when Granny is in surgery it’s up to her to perform regular maintenance, but Granny brooks no argument. “Go feel the sun on your face and run around a little bit,” she orders, shutting the door firmly behind Winry.
Winry walks automatically, and it’s not until she’s standing in front of the porch that Winry realizes she’s back at the Elric house. She can hardly blame herself - it’s where she always went when Granny shoved her out of the house, but she hasn’t been back since that awful evening when she stumbled into their study.
It’s funny, Winry thinks, because while the house still feels strange - strange and tense, like it’s waiting in anticipation - it also feels like it’s still lived-in. Like the lights are only off because the owners stepped down to the market, like there’s food in the cabinets waiting to be eaten, like Winry would be a welcome guest in a home instead of an intruder on abandoned property. It still feels like someone’s home.
She stands on the porch, the doorknob in her hand, and thinks of the orange gleam of the sun against those suits of armors in the study, the last concrete thing she remembers before blood and screaming and running, and feels a sudden, intense impulse to see them again and actually study them closely. She has no idea where this impulse comes from, but like the thought she had that morning, it feels foreign, like it’s someone else’s desire.
The urge is so strong she actually turns the knob to get into the house - and briefly wonders why Granny hasn’t locked it up - but is prevented from going any further when Den chooses that moment to come bounding up to the porch, barking madly for attention. Winry immediately wheels away and runs after the dog, feeling both relieved and disappointed that she did not go further. She doesn’t question which is her true feeling.
Winry starts to daydream. She is a bright, imaginative child, and those sorts are always prone to mind-wandering and daydreaming, but Winry is also the determined sort who can always put aside her silly thoughts when it’s important or when something peaks her interest.
This is why she’s absolutely confounded by the fact that she can’t seem to make herself focus on automail anymore.
It’s the truth - more and more often, she finds herself sitting at the workbench, her tools lined up neatly and the piece in front of her, ready to be worked on, but lately it’s been taking her longer to complete even simple tasks, like aligning and setting the ratios between the joints. She responds by taking longer breaks and working longer into the evening, usually until Granny storms into the workroom and finally insists she get into the shower or relax before bed.
One afternoon, not long after lunch, Winry sits in a daze when she is supposed to be taking notes on alloy compositions, for a customer who has arthritis and weak joints. No matter how determined she is to make the finest, lightest automail possible for the old man, the words in the book are swimming across the page and the pencil in her hand is idle. Soon the shadow of the fan looping around the ceiling catches her eye, and a half hour later when she finally pulls herself from the haze, she sighs and looks back down at her book.
What catches her eye, however, is in her notebook. She hasn’t taken any notes, and she frowns as she peers closer to see what is written:
It is a perfect circle - which would be strange enough on it’s own, as Winry’s never been able to draw a perfect circle; angles and diagrams and maps are fine but her circles have always been wobbly; something Ed and Al used to make fun of her for - but what makes it even worse are the strange triangles that are crisscrossing it. She’s never seen this particular circle, but she knows that circles means alchemy and alchemy means Ed and Al.
For a moment she just sits there, blinking at it, then, after looking over her shoulder to make sure Granny isn’t near the room, rips the paper from her notebook and shreds it into the tiniest pieces she can manage.
The seasons change and the lady who took Ed and Al away from her the first time comes to see them, appearing on the front stoop with her hulking husband blocking the sunlight through the doorway. Den gives her a cursory sniff and a cautious bark, but eventually decides that Izumi and Sig Curtis are safe enough, unlike the Lieutenant Mustang who so rudely invaded their home.
Despite Den’s seal of approval Granny is harder to convince, and, like the night the military man visited, sends Winry to the workshop where she huddles against the door and holds her ear so tightly against the wood that her whole head aches.
“How long?” she asks Granny sadly. Winry can hear a chair groaning and knows that Granny has just shown Sig a seat.
“Almost four months,” Granny answers, equally sad. “Sometimes I wake up thinking that they’ve just returned to Dublith, to you two, before I remember.”
A chair squeals against the floor and Winry chances cracking the door open, to peer at Izumi Curtis as she paces the floor, biting her index finger apprehensively. “Did you go in the house?”
There is a long pause from Granny before she answers. “It was horrific,” she finally says. “It couldn’t have been their mother - it wasn’t even human. I buried it behind the house.
“Stupid boys,” Izumi grumbles, but her voice is rough and she’s swallowing hard. “I told them, I warned them against it.”
“They’d made up their minds long before you tried to teach them anything,” Granny says with some finality, and whatever Izumi is going to reply iss lost with three sharp raps on the door. However Winry cranes her head she can’t see the front foyer, but she can hear Mr. Mill’s voice booming through the house.
“Catherine insisted that I return this pie plate to you, Ms Pinako,” he says politely. Then, “I do hope I haven’t interrupted anything.” There is a threatening undertone to his voice: We saw strangers come into the house. If there’s trouble, we’ll put a stop to it.
Granny, to her credit, is gracious and thankful before sending Mr. Mills away and turning her attention back to Izumi. “It’s a small town,” she says by way of explanation. “We all look out for one another.”
Izumi is studying a picture hanging on the wall, of a tiny Ed and Winry sitting together on a cushy armchair, Ed frowning as he struggles to hold a squirming toddler Al in his lap. “Stupid little boys,” she repeats, more to herself than anyone. “They wouldn’t have had a chance against the Gate.”
That night, Winry has her first dream. At first it’s so vivid she thinks it’s not a dream but real life - just her and Ed and Al running around like they used to, laughing and shrieking. She and Ed are calling each other names, and Al’s trying desperately to mediate through his laughter, and then suddenly the sky grows dark and Ed and Al turn solemn.
“We have to go home,” Al says as Ed shuffles his feet and jams his hands into his pockets. Winry frowns and turns towards the Elric house -
Only to find that the front of the house has changed; what’s there now, instead of the little porch and front door that she knows so well, is a tall, square door, with a tree branching out and words in a language Winry doesn’t understand inscribed upon it.
It’s the scariest thing she’s ever seen in her life.
Ed and Al don’t comment upon it, and start running towards their house. Winry wants to call after them, to try and warn them away, but she’s stuck, frozen to the spot, watching in numb horror as her best friends run towards what is clearly their doom.
“Maybe tomorrow you can come to play?” Al tosses the suggestion over his shoulder, and then Winry wakes up, shivering and trembling and tangled up in her sheets.
She rolls out of bed and lands on all fours before scrambling to her feet and bolting into the bathroom and what she sees is the Elric house, standing innocuously against the star-filled night.
The dreams continue, and get more intense in their realism. It’s always her and Ed and Al, and they’re always outside in front of the Elric house, playing until Ed and Al have to go home.
If she were old enough to appreciate irony, she would laugh at the fact that Ed and Al now invite her to come with them every time they leave, wanting her to follow them into the house.
“We’ve learned so much, Winry,” they always say, “We want to show you,” and even though Winry shakes her head stubbornly and closes her eyes and plugs her ears and threatens to tell Granny neither brother ever stops asking. “We want your help,” they say, while Al tugs and tries to pry an arm away from her ear while Ed starts to trace a circle in the dirt.
“Don’t!” she shrieks, because she wants nothing to do with their alchemy, she can’t do alchemy, and alchemy has something to do with that terrifying door that looms over them night in and night out.
She doesn’t know much, but she knows that she never ever wants to see what's behind that door.
The brothers are so disappointed by her rejection, and then they have to go and as usual Winry wakes up in a cold sweat, teeth chattering and wondering what Granny would say if she tried to crawl into bed with her like she was a five year-old again.
One night when she wakes up it’s nearly dawn, and as she sits up she blinks in the soft half-light that’s barely illuminating her room. There’s something sticking out from under her bed, just barely, and Winry wonders what it is because she’d been looking under the bed skirt for her misplaced wrench and hadn’t seen anything.
Reaching down with a shaking hand, she pulls a book from under her bed - it’s an old book, the pages yellow and heavy and leaving the tips of her fingers silky with dust - and it’s open to a page showing a circle and a diamond enclosed within another circle.
Winry whimpers, lacking the breath to do anything else, and tries to remember the last time Ed and Al could have been in her room and been absentminded enough to leave behind a book.
The book ends up buried in the bottom of a pile of leaves that Granny plans to burn; Winry can’t remember the last time Ed and Al had been in her room, but she could remember that the diamond and the square within had something to do with transmuting carbon, and she has no idea how she knows that.
The next night, the door starts to creak.
Ed and Al run towards the creaking door, not like they’re rushing home to a gentle, smiling mother, but home to a stern, disciplining father; like they know they’re in trouble. Their pleas for Winry to follow, to help them, become more earnest, more intense, but the sight of the darkness behind the door makes her freeze, and it makes a voice ring in her head:
You could bring them back, little girl, if you wanted to pay the price.
A combination of the dreams and the voice and a sudden glut of automail orders makes Winry wary of sleep; she spends more and more time holed up in the workshop, working furiously and occasionally, when her eyes are crossing and her neck just cannot hold her head up any longer, she catches a cat nap on the bench or slumped over her latest creation.
It is not the ideal sleep cycle for a prepubescent young lady, and Winry soon finds that dark circles start to show under her eyes and that she has to pull her belts a little tighter to keep the waist of her shorts from sagging around her hips.
Still, it’s better than closing her eyes and seeing that door and hearing that voice; that voice offering to show her how to bring the brothers back, if she can pay up.
It’s not that Winry is unwilling to sacrifice to bring Ed and Al back; it’s that she knows that alchemy is nothing but false promises - smoke and mirrors and pretty lights and tricks, but in the end just briefly entertaining empty lies.
There is nothing wrong with her granddaughter.
That’s a lie, of course, and Pinako Rockbell knows it’s a lie. Lies, generally, go against the nature of the straight-talking automail engineer, but this time there are extenuating circumstances.
Winry just hasn’t been the same since the Elric boys died, and that’s to be naturally expected, but Pinako is starting to give up the belief that what the girl is going through is just the normal phases of grief - a process they both know a little too well.
She can’t bear the thought of losing someone else, of watching yet another person she loves - and not just any person, the last person in her family - waste away, and she knows she should really get a doctor out here to look at the girl.
Still, that meant admitting that there was something wrong with Winry in the first place, and damnit, Pinako is determined to prove that she can take care of her. Winry is hers, Winry is all she has left, and if she can’t take of Winry, then what kind of grandmother - not just grandmother, but mother, mentor, partner - is she?
These are the thoughts running through her head as she washes dinner dishes at one o’clock in the morning - it’s the china’s third round through the sink, but Pinako finds the action soothing and it can’t hurt - when she hears a sound at the doorway to the workroom.
Standing in the doorway is Winry, her eyes half-lidded and glassy and her hair hanging limply over one shoulder. She’s mumbling to herself, and Pinako snorts and orders, “Speak clearly, girl!”
Winry continues to murmur softly, and when Pinako actually approaches her she realizes Winry is sleepwalking, and finally hears what she’s whispering in her sleep:
“35 liters of water, 20 kilograms of carbon, 800 grams of phosphorus, 250 grams of sodium…”
She can’t walk in a straight line anymore - no matter where she walks in the house it seems like she’s always staggering into the walls or hitting the doorways. Too much daylight bothers her, as her head always aches and it seems like she’s always fighting to keep her eyesight clear -
- and the part of her mind that’s still rational can recall the text from her parent’s medical books word for word -
- but it’s something she can live with, even if her hands shake so badly she can’t even hold a screw driver straight anymore -
- because that’s all she has left of her parents; her mother’s pearls and their medical texts -
- anything is better than seeing that gate, and realizing that the words upon it are starting to make sense even if she doesn’t know what the language is called, and hearing the voice, and understanding the things that are whispered to her -
- Beyond impaired motor skills, people who get too little sleep may have higher levels of stress, anxiety and depression, and may take unnecessary risks -
- so when the door starts appearing right in front of her in the workroom, when she can hear Ed and Al calling her name and hear that thing, that person whispering to her, and when she looks down into the palm of her hand and sees the piece of chalk that’s laying there -
- Vivid hallucinations, heightened senses and a feeling of incredible creativity may occur after 48 hours (or more) of being in a state of sleeplessness -
- Winry throws it as far away from her as she can manage and refuses to give in.
When she wakes up again she’s in her bed and she has no memory of the last three days.
Her hands hurt, and drawing them from under the covers she finds that they’re bandaged, but the little bits she can see, ringing her wrists, are red and raw and aching. Winry’s been hurt before - once Ed slammed her right hand in the heavy storm door of the basement, and the doctor had taped all the fingers together - but that’s nothing comparing to the pure absolute burning in her hands.
She has to go to the bathroom and rolling out of bed - awkwardly, without putting any weight on her hands - she manages to tottle down the hallway, unsure on her legs and able to focus only on the thought of the toilet.
These thoughts are banished by a loud voice from downstairs, and carefully, one foot at a time, Winry makes her way down the steps.
It’s a male voice from their living room, and for a moment of intense, trembling fear Winry thinks the man from the military has returned, but no, she knows this voice; it’s Mr. Mills from up the hill, the one who’s been keeping his eye on the visitors to the Rockbell home, looking for troublemakers who aren’t interested in automail, but the Elric brothers.
“We’d never tell you how to raise a child, Ms. Pinako,” he’s booming, “But if she’s going to be a threat to the whole town then you need to do something! The whole place is spooked!”
“I’m taking care of her!” Her grandmother is snarling, but there’s an undertone of panic to her voice, like a dog that’s been backed into a corner. Terrified, Winry stumbles into the room, to see Mr. and Mrs. Mills, along with the Fosters, their next closest neighbors, sitting in a loose circle around her grandmother.
When they see Winry all conversation ceases.
“Winry-“ her grandmother says, low and soothing and utterly out of character.
She ignores Granny, her jaw dropping and her eyes so wide they’re nearly watering as she stares past the men and women and her grandmother, past the living room and into the threshold of the kitchen, where she can see out the window above the sink to the hill behind their house.
The Elric house is nothing but a pile of black ash.
She’s never given an official explanation of what happened that night, but she doesn’t particularly need one: the way all of Risembool treats her coupled with the scars on her hands tell the whole story. Soon Winry balks at going down into town, hesitates when she sees the neighbors, because they all look at her with a mixture of fear and pity: There’s the Rockbell girl, who never got over the Elric boys. Hope Ms. Pinako’s got a firm hand on her by now.
The doctor comes to see her, to change her bandages and make sure she’s sleeping again - which she is. The doctor has prescribed something that neither Winry nor Granny talk about; Granny crushes it into Winry’s tea each night without fail and Winry pretends that she doesn’t notice the added bitter taste.
She no longer remembers her dreams - though she knows she’s still having them and she knows they’re not happy, because what fuzzy bits she does remember involve Ed and Al being desperate and despondent, calling and reaching for her and Winry being unable (unwilling?) to reach back. She also knows that the Gate is locked tight again, and that’s a relief even if the thing still looms large in her mind once in a while.
Still, most of her days feel like she’s swimming in syrup - floating through; working on automail, lunch with Granny, more automail, dinner with Granny, bath, tea, sleep, rinse, repeat.
At some point, the doctor decides that even if Winry is no longer a threat to herself or others, she’s still not getting better, and whispers to Granny that perhaps a change in scenery is in order.
All of this takes place in the background - it’s not automail, or food, or sleep, and Winry can’t concern herself with it - so she doesn’t find out she’s moving on to Rush Valley until three days before the date printed on her little scrap of a train ticket.
“I have old friends there,” Granny says grimly, chewing thoughtfully on the end of her pipe. “They’ll take care of you. They’ll teach you some new things.” They’ll watch you carefully, Pinako does not say, even if it’s implied. They’ll teach you to live again, Pinako doesn’t add, even though she’s thinking it with no small amount of relief. Rush Valley iss where Pinako herself had lived through her raucous early years. She wants Winry to leave with the same reputation she herself had earned.
The doctor wants Winry to get a change in scenery, so if the rolling green hills of Risembool won’t help, maybe the dirt brown cliffs of Rush Valley is the place.
Winry doesn’t protest - there’s automail, and food, and sleep in Rush Valley, and there’s not a giant black hole where Ed and Al used to be - so Winry packs up without complaint and prepares to leave.
The night before she leaves is bright and clear and beautiful - the stars have never gleamed brighter over the pastures of Risembool - and Winry actually feels the first stirrings of excitement as she gets ready for bed, anticipating the organized chaos that morning will bring.
She can’t sleep, however, and finally she pulls herself from the bed and quietly slips down the hall into the bathroom, where she braces her chin in her hands and looks at the now empty space where she used to watch so carefully for her friends.
She could have brought the Elric brothers back.
She’s going to let go of them instead.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 5,150
Summary: The Elric Brothers have attempted human transmutation, and Winry must deal with the consequences. Manga based AU, what if? scenario.
A/N: Because I love Halloween, I decided to take Winry and drive her crazy (it’s a sign of love, honest - last year I did it to Toph from Avatar). This grew from one little thought - what if the Gate took Ed and Al’s bodies but not their souls - and spun completely out of control. No, seriously, this is easily the longest one shot I’ve ever written, and it’s all angsty gen!fic too! I have no idea what I was thinking...
The night everything goes terribly, horribly wrong is actually bright and clear and beautiful. Winry reflects later that it seemed all wrong - that the night her two best friends died should have been dark and rainy and disgusting - and thinks it’s even worse that while Ed and Al were going through who-knows-what she was sitting happily in her warm little house with Granny, trying to wheedle extra dessert from the woman and, when that failed, an extra hour to work on automail before being forced into bed.
Sometimes Winry likes to sneak out of bed and gaze out of the window in the bathroom, the one that faces the Elric house, looking for the inevitable light in the upstairs study where she knows Ed and Al spend most of their time, waiting for it to either blink off or for sleepiness to overcome her. That night, however, her eyes are closed almost as soon as her head hits the pillow - Granny’s been trusting her with bigger projects recently, and she’s been spending a lot of time researching automail makeup - and so Winry misses the flashing lights in the Elric household that would have signaled that something had gone badly for the brothers.
Winry is the one who finds the scene the brothers left behind, storming to the house in a huff after a full day’s silence. It’s not unusual for Ed and Al to isolate themselves from her and Granny - in fact, it’s become the trend of late, and Winry is slowly forcing herself to accept it - but at the very least, they always, always, come for dinner, no matter how often Granny makes spaghetti. Winry can deal with them going on long journeys to learn alchemy and them making fun of her obsession with automail when they’re equally obsessed with alchemy and them ignoring school and refusing to sleep at the Rockbell’s in favor of their house, but she absolutely will not allow them to miss dinner.
She’s really too angry when she slams open the door, practically trembling with self-righteousness, to notice that something in the house is off - she’s only been in it a few times since Miss Trisha died, and it hadn’t felt the same then anyway, so the even more tense and strange atmosphere doesn’t register with her.
In fact, as she climbs the stairs bellowing Edward’s and Alphonse’s names, she thinks that it really makes sense, stupid boys, for them to be trying to hide from her when they know she must be angry.
When the door to the study creaks open what Winry first notices is that the blinds to the window are open instead of drawn, the evening sun glinting dully off of the suits of armor stuffed into one corner of the room. Then she notices that her feet are getting wet, like she’s stepped into a puddle that’s seeping over the soles of her sandals and between her toes.
That’s when she sees the blood; the blood and the circle and the horrifying twisted thing that’s lying in the middle of the room, a thing that looks like a person, but it can’t be a person, can’t can’t can’t, because its skin is grey and sagging and Winry’s eye can tell that the joints are wrong, twisted in the opposite direction they should be, and nothing human has teeth like that and the eyes -
- the eyes are still open -
are looking at her.
Winry never remembers what happened immediately afterwards, but at the funeral she doesn’t speak, because her throat is raw and aching (from screaming for her mother and her father and Granny) and Granny purchases a special hat with a long black veil for her, to cover up the scratch marks on her face (from her own nails.)
The night of the funeral the man named Mustang visits the Rockbells. Winry and Granny are sitting silently in the living room, Granny puffing endlessly on her pipe and looking impassively out the window while Winry dismantles a junk arm with vicious accuracy, pulling wires from the thing, rethreading them, and pulling them out again. Den, curled up in front of the door to block the draft, suddenly perks and goes wild, nearly howling at the door as he jumps up and bows in a defensive position.
Granny’s eyes suddenly focus on something out the window, and she hops from her chair and points out the room. “Workshop. Now.” Winry, too unnerved by the anxiety under the usual barking tone of her voice, drops the arm and bolts, slamming the door just as Granny pulls open the front door to greet their guest.
Tempers flare quickly, and voices are raised almost immediately. All Winry can glimpse through the keyhole is the flash of blue pacing the room - the man from the military who’s come to see Ed and Al about alchemy.
“What happened back there?” he demands, and Winry cringes as she hears Granny clean out her pipe, the old beat-up thing banging against the table like a judge with a gavel.
“What business is it of yours?” the old woman shoots back, but doesn’t give Mustang a chance to answer before barreling on, “Who do you think you are, invading our home tonight of all nights? How dare you?”
“The cart driver told us that you were the boys’ guardian, that it was your granddaughter who found them at the house!”
That’s wrong, Winry thinks, because there were no bodies to find though it appears that everyone in town has agreed that it’s best to pretend as though there were.
“I demand to speak to her! I need to know what she found - what she saw up there!” He’s practically snarling, and with a whimper Winry decides she’s heard enough. The military took her parents from her, and she isn’t going to let them take Granny from her as well. Fumbling with the latch of the workshop window, she drops the six feet to the ground, tearing a hole in the knee of her coveralls, and runs as fast as her little legs can carry her barefoot to the Mills’ house.
Mrs. Mills is short and round and squishy and nothing like her own mother or Miss Trisha were but Mr. Mills is large and burly and has a big gun and when Winry gasps out what’s happening in her house he doesn’t hesitate to grab it and head down towards there, muttering curses that Winry knows she and Ed and Al would have giggled over for hours if she could have told them.
When Granny and Mr. Mills return to the house to retrieve Winry - who has failed to be charmed by Mrs. Mills gingerbread and hot chocolate as she paces furiously - Mr. Mills appears supremely satisfied and Granny’s voice is steady as she reassures Winry that the man in blue will not be coming back.
Exactly one month after the death of the Elric brothers, Winry wakes up, rolling over in bed and sitting up, blinking owlishly out the window and thinking I could bring them back.
There’s no question as to who “them” is, even though she’s lost many people in her short life and has wished at various times to bring any one of them back. It could be seen as a normal part of the grieving process, if it weren’t for the fact that Winry’s thought had come from nowhere, with no prompting, and arrived in her mind with absolute, utter confidence - confidence she thinks doesn’t even belong to her.
That’s when things start to change.
She starts to worry about Granny. Granny’s been watching her like a hawk since Ed and Al died; ever mindful of things like what time Winry goes to bed and how much Winry eats at dinner and how much time Winry spends working on automail through the day. Winry tries not to be bothered by it even though Granny always encouraged Winry to be as independent as possible, because who else does Granny have to take care of?
Still, she can’t help but be a little nonplussed when Granny starts insisting she needs to spend more time outside.
“But Granny!” Winry protests uselessly as Granny strong arms her out the door.
“Not buts.” The old woman’s tone is curt and tense. The lines around her eyes are deeper than before and her ubiquitous pipe droops when she’s not talking. “You’ve been spending too much time cooped up in the workshop.” Winry wants to point out that they have orders to fill, and that when Granny is in surgery it’s up to her to perform regular maintenance, but Granny brooks no argument. “Go feel the sun on your face and run around a little bit,” she orders, shutting the door firmly behind Winry.
Winry walks automatically, and it’s not until she’s standing in front of the porch that Winry realizes she’s back at the Elric house. She can hardly blame herself - it’s where she always went when Granny shoved her out of the house, but she hasn’t been back since that awful evening when she stumbled into their study.
It’s funny, Winry thinks, because while the house still feels strange - strange and tense, like it’s waiting in anticipation - it also feels like it’s still lived-in. Like the lights are only off because the owners stepped down to the market, like there’s food in the cabinets waiting to be eaten, like Winry would be a welcome guest in a home instead of an intruder on abandoned property. It still feels like someone’s home.
She stands on the porch, the doorknob in her hand, and thinks of the orange gleam of the sun against those suits of armors in the study, the last concrete thing she remembers before blood and screaming and running, and feels a sudden, intense impulse to see them again and actually study them closely. She has no idea where this impulse comes from, but like the thought she had that morning, it feels foreign, like it’s someone else’s desire.
The urge is so strong she actually turns the knob to get into the house - and briefly wonders why Granny hasn’t locked it up - but is prevented from going any further when Den chooses that moment to come bounding up to the porch, barking madly for attention. Winry immediately wheels away and runs after the dog, feeling both relieved and disappointed that she did not go further. She doesn’t question which is her true feeling.
Winry starts to daydream. She is a bright, imaginative child, and those sorts are always prone to mind-wandering and daydreaming, but Winry is also the determined sort who can always put aside her silly thoughts when it’s important or when something peaks her interest.
This is why she’s absolutely confounded by the fact that she can’t seem to make herself focus on automail anymore.
It’s the truth - more and more often, she finds herself sitting at the workbench, her tools lined up neatly and the piece in front of her, ready to be worked on, but lately it’s been taking her longer to complete even simple tasks, like aligning and setting the ratios between the joints. She responds by taking longer breaks and working longer into the evening, usually until Granny storms into the workroom and finally insists she get into the shower or relax before bed.
One afternoon, not long after lunch, Winry sits in a daze when she is supposed to be taking notes on alloy compositions, for a customer who has arthritis and weak joints. No matter how determined she is to make the finest, lightest automail possible for the old man, the words in the book are swimming across the page and the pencil in her hand is idle. Soon the shadow of the fan looping around the ceiling catches her eye, and a half hour later when she finally pulls herself from the haze, she sighs and looks back down at her book.
What catches her eye, however, is in her notebook. She hasn’t taken any notes, and she frowns as she peers closer to see what is written:
It is a perfect circle - which would be strange enough on it’s own, as Winry’s never been able to draw a perfect circle; angles and diagrams and maps are fine but her circles have always been wobbly; something Ed and Al used to make fun of her for - but what makes it even worse are the strange triangles that are crisscrossing it. She’s never seen this particular circle, but she knows that circles means alchemy and alchemy means Ed and Al.
For a moment she just sits there, blinking at it, then, after looking over her shoulder to make sure Granny isn’t near the room, rips the paper from her notebook and shreds it into the tiniest pieces she can manage.
The seasons change and the lady who took Ed and Al away from her the first time comes to see them, appearing on the front stoop with her hulking husband blocking the sunlight through the doorway. Den gives her a cursory sniff and a cautious bark, but eventually decides that Izumi and Sig Curtis are safe enough, unlike the Lieutenant Mustang who so rudely invaded their home.
Despite Den’s seal of approval Granny is harder to convince, and, like the night the military man visited, sends Winry to the workshop where she huddles against the door and holds her ear so tightly against the wood that her whole head aches.
“How long?” she asks Granny sadly. Winry can hear a chair groaning and knows that Granny has just shown Sig a seat.
“Almost four months,” Granny answers, equally sad. “Sometimes I wake up thinking that they’ve just returned to Dublith, to you two, before I remember.”
A chair squeals against the floor and Winry chances cracking the door open, to peer at Izumi Curtis as she paces the floor, biting her index finger apprehensively. “Did you go in the house?”
There is a long pause from Granny before she answers. “It was horrific,” she finally says. “It couldn’t have been their mother - it wasn’t even human. I buried it behind the house.
“Stupid boys,” Izumi grumbles, but her voice is rough and she’s swallowing hard. “I told them, I warned them against it.”
“They’d made up their minds long before you tried to teach them anything,” Granny says with some finality, and whatever Izumi is going to reply iss lost with three sharp raps on the door. However Winry cranes her head she can’t see the front foyer, but she can hear Mr. Mill’s voice booming through the house.
“Catherine insisted that I return this pie plate to you, Ms Pinako,” he says politely. Then, “I do hope I haven’t interrupted anything.” There is a threatening undertone to his voice: We saw strangers come into the house. If there’s trouble, we’ll put a stop to it.
Granny, to her credit, is gracious and thankful before sending Mr. Mills away and turning her attention back to Izumi. “It’s a small town,” she says by way of explanation. “We all look out for one another.”
Izumi is studying a picture hanging on the wall, of a tiny Ed and Winry sitting together on a cushy armchair, Ed frowning as he struggles to hold a squirming toddler Al in his lap. “Stupid little boys,” she repeats, more to herself than anyone. “They wouldn’t have had a chance against the Gate.”
That night, Winry has her first dream. At first it’s so vivid she thinks it’s not a dream but real life - just her and Ed and Al running around like they used to, laughing and shrieking. She and Ed are calling each other names, and Al’s trying desperately to mediate through his laughter, and then suddenly the sky grows dark and Ed and Al turn solemn.
“We have to go home,” Al says as Ed shuffles his feet and jams his hands into his pockets. Winry frowns and turns towards the Elric house -
Only to find that the front of the house has changed; what’s there now, instead of the little porch and front door that she knows so well, is a tall, square door, with a tree branching out and words in a language Winry doesn’t understand inscribed upon it.
It’s the scariest thing she’s ever seen in her life.
Ed and Al don’t comment upon it, and start running towards their house. Winry wants to call after them, to try and warn them away, but she’s stuck, frozen to the spot, watching in numb horror as her best friends run towards what is clearly their doom.
“Maybe tomorrow you can come to play?” Al tosses the suggestion over his shoulder, and then Winry wakes up, shivering and trembling and tangled up in her sheets.
She rolls out of bed and lands on all fours before scrambling to her feet and bolting into the bathroom and what she sees is the Elric house, standing innocuously against the star-filled night.
The dreams continue, and get more intense in their realism. It’s always her and Ed and Al, and they’re always outside in front of the Elric house, playing until Ed and Al have to go home.
If she were old enough to appreciate irony, she would laugh at the fact that Ed and Al now invite her to come with them every time they leave, wanting her to follow them into the house.
“We’ve learned so much, Winry,” they always say, “We want to show you,” and even though Winry shakes her head stubbornly and closes her eyes and plugs her ears and threatens to tell Granny neither brother ever stops asking. “We want your help,” they say, while Al tugs and tries to pry an arm away from her ear while Ed starts to trace a circle in the dirt.
“Don’t!” she shrieks, because she wants nothing to do with their alchemy, she can’t do alchemy, and alchemy has something to do with that terrifying door that looms over them night in and night out.
She doesn’t know much, but she knows that she never ever wants to see what's behind that door.
The brothers are so disappointed by her rejection, and then they have to go and as usual Winry wakes up in a cold sweat, teeth chattering and wondering what Granny would say if she tried to crawl into bed with her like she was a five year-old again.
One night when she wakes up it’s nearly dawn, and as she sits up she blinks in the soft half-light that’s barely illuminating her room. There’s something sticking out from under her bed, just barely, and Winry wonders what it is because she’d been looking under the bed skirt for her misplaced wrench and hadn’t seen anything.
Reaching down with a shaking hand, she pulls a book from under her bed - it’s an old book, the pages yellow and heavy and leaving the tips of her fingers silky with dust - and it’s open to a page showing a circle and a diamond enclosed within another circle.
Winry whimpers, lacking the breath to do anything else, and tries to remember the last time Ed and Al could have been in her room and been absentminded enough to leave behind a book.
The book ends up buried in the bottom of a pile of leaves that Granny plans to burn; Winry can’t remember the last time Ed and Al had been in her room, but she could remember that the diamond and the square within had something to do with transmuting carbon, and she has no idea how she knows that.
The next night, the door starts to creak.
Ed and Al run towards the creaking door, not like they’re rushing home to a gentle, smiling mother, but home to a stern, disciplining father; like they know they’re in trouble. Their pleas for Winry to follow, to help them, become more earnest, more intense, but the sight of the darkness behind the door makes her freeze, and it makes a voice ring in her head:
You could bring them back, little girl, if you wanted to pay the price.
A combination of the dreams and the voice and a sudden glut of automail orders makes Winry wary of sleep; she spends more and more time holed up in the workshop, working furiously and occasionally, when her eyes are crossing and her neck just cannot hold her head up any longer, she catches a cat nap on the bench or slumped over her latest creation.
It is not the ideal sleep cycle for a prepubescent young lady, and Winry soon finds that dark circles start to show under her eyes and that she has to pull her belts a little tighter to keep the waist of her shorts from sagging around her hips.
Still, it’s better than closing her eyes and seeing that door and hearing that voice; that voice offering to show her how to bring the brothers back, if she can pay up.
It’s not that Winry is unwilling to sacrifice to bring Ed and Al back; it’s that she knows that alchemy is nothing but false promises - smoke and mirrors and pretty lights and tricks, but in the end just briefly entertaining empty lies.
There is nothing wrong with her granddaughter.
That’s a lie, of course, and Pinako Rockbell knows it’s a lie. Lies, generally, go against the nature of the straight-talking automail engineer, but this time there are extenuating circumstances.
Winry just hasn’t been the same since the Elric boys died, and that’s to be naturally expected, but Pinako is starting to give up the belief that what the girl is going through is just the normal phases of grief - a process they both know a little too well.
She can’t bear the thought of losing someone else, of watching yet another person she loves - and not just any person, the last person in her family - waste away, and she knows she should really get a doctor out here to look at the girl.
Still, that meant admitting that there was something wrong with Winry in the first place, and damnit, Pinako is determined to prove that she can take care of her. Winry is hers, Winry is all she has left, and if she can’t take of Winry, then what kind of grandmother - not just grandmother, but mother, mentor, partner - is she?
These are the thoughts running through her head as she washes dinner dishes at one o’clock in the morning - it’s the china’s third round through the sink, but Pinako finds the action soothing and it can’t hurt - when she hears a sound at the doorway to the workroom.
Standing in the doorway is Winry, her eyes half-lidded and glassy and her hair hanging limply over one shoulder. She’s mumbling to herself, and Pinako snorts and orders, “Speak clearly, girl!”
Winry continues to murmur softly, and when Pinako actually approaches her she realizes Winry is sleepwalking, and finally hears what she’s whispering in her sleep:
“35 liters of water, 20 kilograms of carbon, 800 grams of phosphorus, 250 grams of sodium…”
She can’t walk in a straight line anymore - no matter where she walks in the house it seems like she’s always staggering into the walls or hitting the doorways. Too much daylight bothers her, as her head always aches and it seems like she’s always fighting to keep her eyesight clear -
- and the part of her mind that’s still rational can recall the text from her parent’s medical books word for word -
- but it’s something she can live with, even if her hands shake so badly she can’t even hold a screw driver straight anymore -
- because that’s all she has left of her parents; her mother’s pearls and their medical texts -
- anything is better than seeing that gate, and realizing that the words upon it are starting to make sense even if she doesn’t know what the language is called, and hearing the voice, and understanding the things that are whispered to her -
- Beyond impaired motor skills, people who get too little sleep may have higher levels of stress, anxiety and depression, and may take unnecessary risks -
- so when the door starts appearing right in front of her in the workroom, when she can hear Ed and Al calling her name and hear that thing, that person whispering to her, and when she looks down into the palm of her hand and sees the piece of chalk that’s laying there -
- Vivid hallucinations, heightened senses and a feeling of incredible creativity may occur after 48 hours (or more) of being in a state of sleeplessness -
- Winry throws it as far away from her as she can manage and refuses to give in.
When she wakes up again she’s in her bed and she has no memory of the last three days.
Her hands hurt, and drawing them from under the covers she finds that they’re bandaged, but the little bits she can see, ringing her wrists, are red and raw and aching. Winry’s been hurt before - once Ed slammed her right hand in the heavy storm door of the basement, and the doctor had taped all the fingers together - but that’s nothing comparing to the pure absolute burning in her hands.
She has to go to the bathroom and rolling out of bed - awkwardly, without putting any weight on her hands - she manages to tottle down the hallway, unsure on her legs and able to focus only on the thought of the toilet.
These thoughts are banished by a loud voice from downstairs, and carefully, one foot at a time, Winry makes her way down the steps.
It’s a male voice from their living room, and for a moment of intense, trembling fear Winry thinks the man from the military has returned, but no, she knows this voice; it’s Mr. Mills from up the hill, the one who’s been keeping his eye on the visitors to the Rockbell home, looking for troublemakers who aren’t interested in automail, but the Elric brothers.
“We’d never tell you how to raise a child, Ms. Pinako,” he’s booming, “But if she’s going to be a threat to the whole town then you need to do something! The whole place is spooked!”
“I’m taking care of her!” Her grandmother is snarling, but there’s an undertone of panic to her voice, like a dog that’s been backed into a corner. Terrified, Winry stumbles into the room, to see Mr. and Mrs. Mills, along with the Fosters, their next closest neighbors, sitting in a loose circle around her grandmother.
When they see Winry all conversation ceases.
“Winry-“ her grandmother says, low and soothing and utterly out of character.
She ignores Granny, her jaw dropping and her eyes so wide they’re nearly watering as she stares past the men and women and her grandmother, past the living room and into the threshold of the kitchen, where she can see out the window above the sink to the hill behind their house.
The Elric house is nothing but a pile of black ash.
She’s never given an official explanation of what happened that night, but she doesn’t particularly need one: the way all of Risembool treats her coupled with the scars on her hands tell the whole story. Soon Winry balks at going down into town, hesitates when she sees the neighbors, because they all look at her with a mixture of fear and pity: There’s the Rockbell girl, who never got over the Elric boys. Hope Ms. Pinako’s got a firm hand on her by now.
The doctor comes to see her, to change her bandages and make sure she’s sleeping again - which she is. The doctor has prescribed something that neither Winry nor Granny talk about; Granny crushes it into Winry’s tea each night without fail and Winry pretends that she doesn’t notice the added bitter taste.
She no longer remembers her dreams - though she knows she’s still having them and she knows they’re not happy, because what fuzzy bits she does remember involve Ed and Al being desperate and despondent, calling and reaching for her and Winry being unable (unwilling?) to reach back. She also knows that the Gate is locked tight again, and that’s a relief even if the thing still looms large in her mind once in a while.
Still, most of her days feel like she’s swimming in syrup - floating through; working on automail, lunch with Granny, more automail, dinner with Granny, bath, tea, sleep, rinse, repeat.
At some point, the doctor decides that even if Winry is no longer a threat to herself or others, she’s still not getting better, and whispers to Granny that perhaps a change in scenery is in order.
All of this takes place in the background - it’s not automail, or food, or sleep, and Winry can’t concern herself with it - so she doesn’t find out she’s moving on to Rush Valley until three days before the date printed on her little scrap of a train ticket.
“I have old friends there,” Granny says grimly, chewing thoughtfully on the end of her pipe. “They’ll take care of you. They’ll teach you some new things.” They’ll watch you carefully, Pinako does not say, even if it’s implied. They’ll teach you to live again, Pinako doesn’t add, even though she’s thinking it with no small amount of relief. Rush Valley iss where Pinako herself had lived through her raucous early years. She wants Winry to leave with the same reputation she herself had earned.
The doctor wants Winry to get a change in scenery, so if the rolling green hills of Risembool won’t help, maybe the dirt brown cliffs of Rush Valley is the place.
Winry doesn’t protest - there’s automail, and food, and sleep in Rush Valley, and there’s not a giant black hole where Ed and Al used to be - so Winry packs up without complaint and prepares to leave.
The night before she leaves is bright and clear and beautiful - the stars have never gleamed brighter over the pastures of Risembool - and Winry actually feels the first stirrings of excitement as she gets ready for bed, anticipating the organized chaos that morning will bring.
She can’t sleep, however, and finally she pulls herself from the bed and quietly slips down the hall into the bathroom, where she braces her chin in her hands and looks at the now empty space where she used to watch so carefully for her friends.
She could have brought the Elric brothers back.
She’s going to let go of them instead.