All Is Not Lost, Chpt II
Title: All Is Not Lost, Chpt II
Author: Camudekyu
Rating: M
Characters: Roy & Winry
Warnings: Spoilers for end of the first series.
Summary: Practice losing every day
A/N: Inspired by an NPR story about devastating brain injuries. Chapter One is here. Chapter Three is here.
II.
On the opposite end of Winry's apartment was what she called the parlor. Truly, she had a long bedroom with a faux Xingese privacy screen stretching from the wall to almost the middle of the room. Roy could see her bed around the screen, her dirty laundry draped around, and, of course, more mechanical clutter. The mess here, however, was rather more controlled-the stacks of things were pushed to the wall, at least, revealing the really nice, dark hardwood floor and a large, threadbare area rug. This room, he noticed, did not have any machinery in it, and Winry showed him to a large, lumpy couch with a sagging center and faded floral upholstery. A low coffee table sat between the couch and a purely decorative fireplace, and Winry plunked her dinner down on the opposite side of the table and sank to the floor. Roy took the hint and sat on the couch.
"Oh, right, the music," Winry said, popping back up. She hurried around the couch to where the gramophone sat on a small, wooden table. "Hope you like Romantic Era Aerugan. It's all I've got." She paused to think. "I might have an old propaganda record from before the Reformation, but I don't imagine you'd want to listen to that."
"Not voluntarily."
"Aerugan it is." As she set up the record, she began to sing tunelessly, "Oh, Mother Amestris, I'd give my life for thee."
Roy hadn't heard that one since, maybe, sophomore year at the academy. "It's overrated," he muttered.
"Huh?" Winry said, the needle hovering in her hand.
"Giving your life for Mother Amestris," he repeated, "It's overrated."
Winry was still for a long moment, staring at Roy, before she started the record and adjusted the volume. She came back to the table and stood opposite him, her hands on her hips. Her eyes were narrowed slightly, and Roy had the disconcerting sensation of being appraised. He'd offended her. He was certain of it. "I think almost giving your life for your country is overrated," she countered as she plopped down on the floor in front of the coffee table. "I don't imagine you worry too much about things like that once you've succeeded."
That stung a bit.
She would know, wouldn't she? She'd watched enough of her loved-ones do it. And Roy knew all about almost giving his life, about surviving his own martyrdom, and when she put it like that, he felt impossibly pathetic. When he met her eyes, he knew that she knew it, too. And they both knew that he deserved that.
But then she was smiling at him again and saying cheerfully, "Although, if you actually die for your country, you don't get to cash in that banging pension you guys get."
She went about eating her dinner with one hand and rubbing a stain on the table with her other, and Roy got the distinct feeling that he had just glimpsed an old bitterness in her, perhaps a healed-over hurt. Still a scar.
"You think much about retirement?" she asked, a prompt for such a harmless conversation that Roy started. He hesitated for a moment, blinking his one eye at her. But, no, there was no veiled passive aggression behind it. She was simply asking him a question.
He smiled. "I'm not nearly so old as that," he replied.
Winry pinked a little. "Oh, jeez, sorry. I didn't mean it like that," she stammered, putting up her hands. She had, of course, found him wandering around the street outside her house, so perhaps retirement was not so great an analytical leap, but he didn't say that.
"I'm only joking," he replied, even though she looked thoroughly mortified. "I haven't, actually. It's been suggested to me more than I'd like to admit, but I've not looked too hard at the logistics."
She furrowed her brow. "Folks are suggesting you retire?" she mused, "I guess I don't know much about it, but you seem pretty fit for duty to me."
Roy laughed out loud at that. "A man with a weapon and no depth perception can be quite the liability, Miss Rockbell."
She skipped pink and turned red this time, and Roy laughed again. She dropped her face into her hands. "God, I'm an asshole, aren't I?" she asked, her voice muffled.
"Clearly, I'm not so sensitive as you believe I am," he said. That wasn't true at all, and he could tell that she knew it. However, it felt rather satisfying to say it, to assert it to a woman who really did not owe him her sensitivity. On top of that, Roy was beginning to feel rather pleased with himself and how not sensitive he was being-coming up to Winry's apartment, drinking her booze, and sharing her conversation took a measure of bravery that he, quite honestly, had not known he possessed. It gave him a sense of invulnerability, like sitting in Winry's parlor was similar to sitting in a lion's den.
But she wasn't going to eat him, he thought when he looked over at her, swirling a soggy tea bag in her mug. And he never had been at risk of being eaten by her, had he? No, the only thing between the two of them that might consume him was his own fear, and he had, up until quite recently, been blaming her for that.
"The looming threat of involuntary retirement notwithstanding," Roy went on, "I'm confident I won't be seeing conflict again."
Winry took a pull off her mug. "Well, I bet that someone with your rank wouldn't be running around punching bad guys anyway, right? You're a strategist."
"The sun has definitely set on my bad-guy-punching days." Roy had no particular desire to linger on this specific subject as it seemed to lend itself to talking about Ishbal, and he really could not, even in his blackest masochistic fit, cognize of a situation more distasteful than talking about Ishbal with Winry Rockbell. "To be honest, between ironing wrinkles out of the Articles of Reformation-which were, I think everyone should know, written by academics and accountants-and this country's abrupt disinclination toward conflict, I think I'll be spending the balance of my career behind a desk."
"You don't sound too disappointed."
Roy smiled. "I'm not. Decisions are made by the men behind the desks not the men dying for them."
She stabbed a few noodles with her fork, popped them in her mouth, and then asked thickly, "You ever think about running for Senate?" she asked. "I can't tell you how many times I hear people griping about voting in representatives who don't know a thing about the military."
"Do you agree with them?"
"Well, I think it's on a case by case basis, but I do know that when you overspecialize, you breed in weakness, and all the men in Senate right now are lawyers. They all think like lawyers." She frowned. "Not to mention that they're all men. I don't really feel represented by any of them."
He smirked. "Perhaps you should be the one running for Senate."
She laughed drily. "It's not allowed. I checked. There are three qualifications to run for Senate," she held up her hand and counted off, "At least three decades of life, a penis, and a pulse."
Roy should have expected Winry to have a mechanic's mouth on her: she didn't seem too terribly shy about discussing penises with him, so he resolved not to be either. "One out of three isn't bad."
"Tell that to a pollster. I wouldn't be surprised if, of those three things, having a pulse is the only negotiable one."
Roy laughed out loud at that. "You don't seem to have an awful lot of faith in the new government."
"Bureaucrats! All of them!" She shook her head. "If you ask me, more laws aren't really the answer. Don't get me wrong. I think it's great not having a bloodthirsty monster making all the decisions for the country, but he wasn't quite so all about getting involved in every aspect of individuals' lives, you know? I heard the other day that there's a bill in Senate right now that will make every alchemist get a license to perform alchemy!"
Roy had heard about that. He, personally, didn't think it was such a bad idea. "It could save a lot of lives you know."
"It will also turn alchemy into a commodity."
"It already is."
"It might seem that way to you because you're certified, but most practicing alchemists out there aren't doing it for money. If this happens, government issuance of licenses will be a business with all the motivations of a business. Alchemists don't grow on trees, though, so demand won't be through the roof, and that means alchemy will only be available to people who can afford a fancy education and the license."
Winry was sharp as a tack, Roy thought. He'd had no idea. Smirking, he said, "You're quite the libertarian." She stared at him, confused. "Libertarian. Not libertine," he clarified.
"Oooh," she said, nodding. "I was about to say..."
Roy laughed. "Well, having seen the way you drink whiskey..."
She grinned and shrugged. "It's a mechanic thing."
"Go in for your interview at Elgrin and say exactly that. I guarantee you that they'll take you more seriously."
She was laughing with her head tossed back, an open-mouthed sound, her hands on her solar plexus, when the phone rang. She stopped laughing with a quiet Oh!, put her hands on the floor, and hopped up to her feet. "Maybe that's your cab."
Honestly, Roy had forgotten about the cab. In the moment, he had quite forgotten about the snow, about his unknown reasons for being so far from home, about his panic at being trapped under a Rockbell roof. Instead, he had been having dinner in the parlor of a friend. Friend? A pretty young woman who, for so many reasons, he could not pursue. They had been talking like companions, hadn't they? Eating macaroni and cheese and discussing politics. What an incredible display of mundanity. The gramophone rumbled on in the background, and Roy took the moment of solitude to shovel a few much-appreciated forkfuls of dinner into his mouth. He'd outdone himself, it seemed-this was one of his better roux. The onions caramelized just right. The garlic strong but balanced. He hadn't made dinner for a woman in a very long time, and the irony that his first meal for someone else was for Winry Rockbell was not lost on him. He'd been on dates that hadn't gone so well as this.
Her voice was muffled and distant in the kitchen, but he could hear her, mellowed and clipped. The phone made a series of clicking sounds when she hung it up, and she returned to the parlor shortly after, two shot glasses and the bottle of whiskey in her hand.
"That was the cab company," she said, and her voice was too apologetic for it to have been any kind of good news.
"You don't sound very positive about it."
"Yeah," she said somewhat reluctantly. "They called to say that they're not sending anyone out tonight. The roads probably won't get plowed until the morning, and it's too dangerous to have cabs out on the ice."
Roy looked down in his pasta. "Well, damn." What the hell was he supposed to do now?
"You know," she began as she stabbed at her dinner aimlessly, "You're welcome to crash here if you need. I don't have a spare bedroom or anything, but the couch is pretty comfortable. Also, I've retrofitted my water heater, so the thing's a tank. You'll be able to get a hot shower in the morning if you want one."
Roy turned over her offer for a moment. It was that or try to make his way home in the dark, over the ice. There was no guaranteeing, either, that he wouldn't forget what he was doing halfway through and end up stranded in a different end of the city, this time without the immense generosity of a mostly-stranger-partial-enemy like Winry to help him. What else could he do? It did help, though, that Winry had brought out the whiskey, letting him know that, should he decide to stay the night, he could get good and drunk without reservation.
"It doesn't look like I have much choice, do I?" he said.
She was cringing apologetically a little when she said, "I don't think so." Her face shifted, then, to a smile. "On the bright side, now I have someone to help me drink this whiskey."
Roy smiled. She'd read his mind. "I appreciate the offer." He watched her pour their two shots and push his glass toward him. "I really do apologize, Winry. I was not expecting to have to find a place to stay."
She shrugged and waved at him dismissively. "It's no big deal. Seriously, though? I'm glad for the company."
Roy raised his shot glass to his mouth. "Even me?"
She did the same, smiling against the lip. "Even you," she said and tipped it back into her mouth. He tossed back his shot and savored every burning inch down his throat.
x
x
x
It wasn't long before they had finished their dinners and Winry had brought out two bowls of ice cream with walnuts on top. Dinner had helped to mitigate some of the alcohol sloshing around in Roy's stomach, but he was at least two sheets to the wind when they reached the bottom of the bottle. Winry, to her credit, kept up with him shot for shot. Roy imagined that he had a foot of height and almost a hundred pounds on her, so if he were feeling the booze, she certainly was, too. Still, Winry did not slur or stagger. She became more talkative, less inhibited, but Roy didn't know if the alcohol was to blame for that or if it was this sudden, unexpected camaraderie burgeoning between them. Or perhaps the alcohol was the source of it all. Regardless, he was snowed into her apartment until the morning, so did it really matter what was to blame? Winry smiled so readily, told him the truth without hesitation, laughed at his dumb, contrived humor, and he began to wish he had more women like this in his life. Women friends. Yes, friends. The authenticity of her responses struck him. She was not trying to seduce him, and she was not trying to follow his orders-those were the two modes of women with whom he was most familiar. She was just a person. Someone who owed him nothing.
She made them fresh cups of tea, this time without whiskey. She poured them strong, a teaspoon of honey in each, and passed him his mug, telling him that she needed to sober up a bit if she wanted to stay asleep through the night. They sat, side by side on the couch, listening to Aeurgian symphonies, one after another. Winry had pulled her feet up onto the cushions, her knee almost brushing Roy's thigh, while he slouched back, his legs stretched more leisurely than he could remember being in the recent past. She began probing him for information about his brain damage-Roy remembered her fascination with all things nervous system, and he was just drunk enough not to care.
"The bullet is lodged in my frontal lobe. Just here," he poked his index and middle fingers against the peak of his eyepatch. "The doctor would have removed it, but-"
"It's got to be super close to the artery," Winry said, scrutinizing his face with a scientific interest.
"Precisely," he said. "The risks of removing it outweighed the benefits."
"Benefits, my foot," Winry said, sitting back. "You've got to regrow that brain of yours regardless of what's stuck in there." She paused. "Does it ever bother you?"
"Does what bother me?"
She twisted her mouth thoughtfully. "Having something stuck in there? A foreign object?"
Roy shrugged. "I was rather hoping it would give me super powers, but as of yet, I can neither fly nor see through walls."
Winry laughed. "That's not what I meant."
He knew. "I know," he said. "I'm a little surprised to hear an automail mechanic so concerned about foreign objects. You deal exclusively in foreign objects."
"But anything that I put on a client is on the outside. I only do limbs. I know mechanics who engineer false bones that go inside the body to replace ones that are too badly damaged, but I haven't ever tried that. Everything that I attach to someone is external. Compared to what you have going on, it seems almost... well..."
"Superficial?"
"Exactly. You've got something in you that is really in you. What is that like?"
"I can't ever feel it, if that's what you're asking," Roy answered. "I don't feel much heavier, either. I haven't set off a metal detector yet. To be honest, aside from a visceral understanding of what senility must be like, I don't feel much different. The headaches and dizziness have passed for the most part."
"It's just your memory?" she finished for him
"It's just my memory," he concluded.
She was smiling at him in a way that Roy knew resulted from her thinking of something quirky or profound, and he found himself excited to hear what she had to say. "Maybe this is your chance to live with less memory," she suggested.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, in all those Eastern religions, they talk about the importance of living in the moment. Living without judgment or attachments. This could be your chance to do that. I mean, what makes us the most emotional? Memories. What is everyone hung up on when they try to move on from something? Memories. Maybe, you're supposed to try to live without memories."
"Supposed to? According to whom?" he asked. "Remember, I'm an alchemist, Winry. I don't believe most of that religious BS."
"I'm not suggesting religious BS," she countered tartly. "Supposed to according to... to... the human condition. Do you know how much more I could get done if I didn't snag on a
memory every ten minutes?"
"There's still plenty of snagging," Roy responded. "I can remember as effectively as the next man most of the last thirty years. Particularly, the most challenging parts. It's hanging onto new memories I'm not so good at."
"It just takes practice. And, hey, you're practicing all the time!"
Roy smiled. She certainly was an upbeat girl.
"Should I expect to hear you wake up halfway through the night, wondering who's holding you hostage in their dinky little apartment?" she teased.
That could have stung, but surprisingly, Roy snorted. "It's possible. I haven't slept in a bed that wasn't mine in quite some time, so I couldn't tell you what to expect." It then, quite suddenly, occurred to him that that was a rather more revealing comment about his social life than he had intended it to be. He didn't often make a habit of telling pretty, young women about all the sex he wasn't having.
He rather expected Winry to blush and look away uncomfortably, to clear her throat and excuse herself, and when he glanced at her it was with some degree of dread.
As soon as he met her eyes, though, she began to snort. Then she tossed her head back and laughed. He heard her slap her knee, and she pressed her other hand to her chest as she gasped. And that, at his expense or not, was the best possible response he could have hoped for. With a rush of relief, he began chuckling-he could appreciate self-deprecating humor.
"You poor guy," Winry said through her laughter. "You just can't catch a break."
He should have known that she wouldn't be embarrassed-this was, after all, the same woman with whom he'd discussed the senatorial penis-requirement. Obviously, Winry was not so a squeamish woman as he had anticipated. He shrugged, "There's nothing like losing an eye to help you re-prioritize."
She quirked her head. "What do you mean?"
Roy wondered that himself for a moment. He had not really thought about it much, this sudden lagging in his usual social exploits. He would have, of course, blamed it on his slow, awkward recovery and the truly immense patience a woman would have to have in order to get involved with him now. He had not been willing to put forth the effort required to pursue a woman, quite frankly. But it seemed like rather more than that now. "I mean you begin putting the things that are important to you on a numbered list." He had done just that, on one of the many long, painful nights he had spent coming off the morphine-and remarkably, sex had not appeared on that list.
"What are your top three?" Winry asked, hugging her knees and her eyes lighting up with interest.
Roy smiled at her enthusiasm. "Recovering, dignity, and integrity."
She blinked owlishly. She sat back a little. "Whoa." She shook her head a little. "Whoa. That's kind of heavy."
He laughed out loud at that.
"Recovering, dignity, and integrity," she repeated. "What does integrity mean to you?"
Roy knew the answer to that already. "Doing the right thing even when no one is watching. It means knowing the difference between the choice that is right and the choice that is comfortable." He could tell that she knew exactly where she fit in his decision to put that in his top three. Her eyes showed that she was thinking what he was thinking-picturing her parents, their smiles he could remember and their bloodless bodies he hoped to God she never had to see. He'd made more victims from his poor choices than any otherwise well-meaning man alive. He was confident of that. But ignorance was not an excuse. Looking into Winry's pellucid blue eyes told him that ignorance was never an excuse. "What are yours?" he asked, feeling the liquor swimming in his thoughts and resolving not to fight it.
She pushed her gaze to the ceiling as she thought for a moment. "I'm living on my own for the first time, so self-sufficiency," she said, "I'm a mechanic, so, of course, precision, and..." she paused and her face sank a little, as though she were realizing something she had not thought of before. Her eyes searched the darkness for something Roy could not see. She flicked her gaze over to him and concluded, "forgiveness."
That could have been a stiletto slid between his ribs. Forgiveness. What had he done to deserve the energy she must have put into forgiving him... what had he done, honestly, to earn it? She was trying. He could see it in her eyes. She was trying with all her might to forgive him. She was succeeding, too, and Roy believed, truly, that there was nothing he could ever aspire to do to deserve it.
"All right," she continued, slapping her knees as she stood. "I think it's time to hit the hay. Lemme get you some sheets and a pillow."
"I appreciate it."
She turned back to him, grinning. "Don't thank me until I find some clean sheets."
He smiled at her because she was being humorous, but once she was gone, he put his elbows to his knees and his palms to his face and he berated himself over and over and over.
x
x
x
Winry returned with sheets, a blanket, and a pillow. She made a little nest for him on her couch, her linens smelling fresh and soft over the lazy, lived-in smell of her couch. Then she left to change into her pajamas behind the folding screen that separated Roy's room for the night from her bedroom. The streetlight that came in through the window, however, cast her silhouette sharply against the screen, doing little to maintain her modesty. As he slipped out of his suspenders and unbuttoned his shirt, he stole glances at her shape, the vague representation of her against the screen, the idea of her breasts and the distant notion of her hips.
"I'd offer you a set of pj's," she said from behind the screen as she pulled on her boxy, shapeless pajamas, "but I'd cry if they fit you."
Roy laughed. He tossed back the blanket she had draped over the couch and slid between the sheets. The couch was just a little too short to accommodate his height, so he rolled onto his side and tucked his knees up just a degree-he knew he would regret it in the morning when he had to straighten his legs, but he would cross that bridge when he reached it. The pillow was soft and thin, and he bunched up one side to support his neck. The couch was, indeed, quite comfortable. It was wide and soft and curved just enough to follow his back. He reached up and clicked off the lamp on the side table. He could see just a little of the window above Winry's bed over the top bar of the screen between them, and the snow was still piling up against the glass, turning the harsh streetlight to a canary color, muted and soft. He listened to her linens rustling and her mattress creaking and her floorboards squeaking as she lifted one foot and then the next off the ground. He listened to her punching her pillow and nestling down. He listened to her turning until she was settled. Then he listened to her slow, easy breathing-a quiet, feminine snore-as he lay awake and stared at the pictures of her parents she had poised over the mantel. In the dim light, he could hardly see their faces, but his memory served to fill in the rest until he finally drifted off to sleep.
x
x
x
In his nightmares, Roy saw women and children. He saw the bodies fleeing in the dark through the huge, heavy doors of the Ishballan temple, seeking refuge in the chapel, where the candles flickered and guttered. He saw his colleagues pushing the doors closed and using alchemy to fuse them shut. He saw his own right hand raised and snapping and the church bursting into flames from the inside. He saw the fire dancing against the glass windows before the heat caused them to shatter. He saw a woman with her baby trying to clamber through the window only to slice ribbons of skin off her arms and face and impale herself on a long spire of iron in the frame. He saw the child, open-mouthed and wailing, until the smoke silenced it.
"Roy."
He must have fallen asleep with war on his damaged mind, Winry's parents watching him from the mantel. His mind must have grown cruel in it's recovery, compelling him to see these things while sleeping on Winry's couch. He had not dreamt of the church in years, of the heat on his face and the frigid desert night at his back, of the smell of burning young bodies and ancient scrolls.
"Roy!"
The woman hanging limply in the window, her dead baby slung across her back, pushed herself up against the window frame. He watched her claw at the plaster on the outside of the wall, her mouth and burnt-out eyes gapping at him, black and eternal. She tore the skin off her fingertips, stripped them to the bone as she scrabbled at the wall until her flesh gave, the puncture in her belly splitting into a fissure. She tore her top half free, leaving her hips dangling limply inside.
"Roy!"
He saw her torso flop to the ground as the blood gurgled, black and fleshy, out of her mouth. She began reaching toward him, dragging her shoulders across the sand, and Roy stood frozen in terror, watching this dead half body and its dead baby hauling itself, hand over hand, toward him. He tried to take a step back, but the blood pooling around his feet had turned the sand into wet cement, sucking at his boots and tightening around his ankles. He lost his balance and fell backwards, and the half body descended on him, her empty, oozing mouth forming words he could not hear as she drew closer and closer. He could smell her burning breath across his face. Her hand, the skin and flesh shredded from her knobby finger bones, clamped onto his forearm. It was a claw, pinning him down, pulling him into the blood.
"Roy!"
Roy sat up with a yelp, wrenching with all his might away from Winry's hand on his forearm. He squeezed his eye shut and shook his head, but behind his eyelid the fire still raged, that burnt-out face still pressing ever closer to his. He had to get away from the church, had to get a breath of smokeless air before he suffocated. He rubbed his hand against his eye, felt his heart thundering in his chest and his lungs constricted.
"Goddammit," he heard a voice say. It was a man's voice. His? "Goddammit."
"It's okay," a woman said. "It's okay. You're okay."
"We locked the door. We burned the church and we locked the door."
The air tasted of smoke and then it did not and then it did again, and Roy could hear the timbers in the roof cracking. No one screamed anymore. They were all dead before the roof could give.
"Look at me," a woman commanded. It wasn't the burning woman-she was ashes now, leaving behind only her reek. "Goddammit, Roy, open your eyes and look at me."
He obeyed when Winry seized the front of his undershirt and shook him hard. Then, abruptly, he was in the dark-his mind, however, was in many places at once. He gasped in a ragged breath. The parlor was dark save an illuminated lamp next to the couch. Winry knelt between his knees, her eyes bigger and bluer than the sky.
He met her gaze for just a moment and then she flung herself at him, wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pulled him close. He felt her hands splayed over his back. Her shoulder pressed into his face, and it took Roy another moment to realize that she was hugging him.
In an instant, the vestiges of the nightmare dispersed.
"God, you scared the shit outta me," he heard her breath.
He felt his lungs relax and take in air slowly. His heart stopped thundering in his ears. There was something under his hands, thin fabric over something smooth and firm and warm. Her back. His hands were on her back. There was the curve of a rib. There were the ridges in her spine. Nothing burned. The air was cool and still, smelled lived-in and soft. The floor under his feet was smooth and hard. Her pulse raced against his chest like the smallest of things, a frantic songbird.
"You're okay," she said wetly, and Roy could feel her tears against his neck.
A distant, quiet corner of his mind told him to laugh at the absurdity of this, but he couldn't bring himself to comply. She felt like a ballast, something anchoring him here-warm, pliant proof to his five senses that he was not in that God-forsaken desert. He was somewhere else-anywhere else-with a woman who wept for him and pressed him to her chest and if he ever had to imagine a place furthest from Ishbal in every way, it would be right here.
"I'm okay," Roy said.
Winry squeezed him harder and sniffed.
He did laugh now. "Are you okay?"
"Yes!" she snapped, still crying. "You scared me."
Was there a point in being mortified that she had seen him, whining and kicking in his sleep? If there was, he couldn't bring his wrung out nerves to feel it. "That hasn't happened in a long time," he said. "I wouldn't have chosen for you to see it."
"I don't care," she cut across him.
She was leaned against him, half kneeling on the couch, half standing, in a position that was rather like straddling his thigh, and if Winry recognized their incredible closeness, she did not seemed bothered by it. Roy, to his credit, appreciated it, the impropriety and intimacy of it, so he resolved to push her away. In a moment. But then another moment had passed. And then another.
"It was like you weren't here," he heard her say. "It was like you weren't coming back."
She had no right feeling so much affection for him as that. And he certainly had no right reciprocating it, so he decided to let it be a temporary thing. It would serve a purpose now, and then it would drain out, like morphine in his blood. She pressed her breasts against him, pushed her knee into his inner thigh, let him feel the lithe curve of her back. He could abide that sort of thing in the dark and then, quite shamelessly, let the sun chase it away,
"I would think a person in your line of work wouldn't scare so easily," he said into her shoulder.
"I've seen plenty of soldiers suffering," she said, her voice dropping. She sniffed loudly then, and Roy could hear renewed tears in her voice, a sob quavering just below the surface. "But it's never been my fault before."
What? Roy put his hands on her waist and pushed her back. "What did you just say?" he demanded.
Standing over him, his knee between hers, she sniffed again and wiped her nose on her sleeve. Her eyes were swollen, the lamplight catching and lingering in her gathering tears. She drew in a shaking breath and exhaled, "I said it's never been my fault before."
A muscle behind his sternum wrenched, like someone had closed a fist in his chest. Another fist closed around his throat. He'd never heard anything so unconscionable.
"What in God's name makes you think you're at fault?" he managed.
"I can't even imagine," she began before pausing to swallow hard, "It must be hell to see my face."
She could easily say the same thing about him, he thought, his half-destroyed face, appearing in her life as uninvited as it was the first time, so many years ago. Why, in fact, she did not feel that way was a mystery to him.
Roy furrowed his brow at her. Instead, she brought him into her home and fed him. She roused him from his nightmares and she held him. She stood over him and wept for him for all the terrible things he'd done to her.
"Your face is a benediction, Winry," he said.
She barely restrained a sob and pressed her fingers to her mouth to hold it in. "Is that true?" she managed.
It hadn't been until that evening, but he could say now with confidence that it was. "It is."
"I always thought you must hate me."
He had hated her, hadn't he? When he'd seen her standing on her stoop, he'd hated her. He'd even hated her when she brought him in and let him use her phone. He had. Her face was hell to him. He had once imagined no torment greater than being in her home.
"What a remarkably small person I would have to be to hate you," he said.
She covered her mouth again and shook her head as though she did not believe him, she couldn't bear to hear him. "I," she began. "I can't," she attempted again. She paused and took a long, shaking breath. She closed her eyes, tilted her face upward, and wiped her eyes. "I'm sorry," she said, composing herself. "You just... that really scared me for a minute."
That struck Roy as singularly endearing, her petty, irrational fear. Like something a child might create. Even through his sleep-fogged thoughts, he smiled at her. "I apologize."
"You don't need to do that."
"Yes. I do."
She watched him for a long time after that, the thoughts drifting through her eyes like clouds across a window. He saw a hurt and an old, old fear, the kind of fear that remained a last vestige of childhood, the kind that, try as she might, a person cannot put away. Then, because Winry was independent and, perhaps, a little guarded, there was anger, quiet and white hot, breathing like a coal. Then, there was her confusion, which Roy could understand-he imagined that she had no greater villain in her life than he, and he was not acting the part. And finally, she gave him a sweet, sad smile, and this sadness Roy could not understand. It was a dual grief, half personal and half deeply empathetic, the kind of grief that was quintessentially feminine and, thus, outside of Roy's capacity to return. But he could identify it and he could do his best to receive it, however ill-equipped he might be.
She nodded then slowly and resignedly. "Okay," she conceded. She nodded again, this time more to herself, and turned to shuffle back toward her bed behind the folding screen. She paused, though, and looked back at Roy. Her lips parted for a moment, but she said nothing. Then she turned away and disappeared into the darkness.
When he was alone, he felt the distinct impulse to pick up the mug he had been drinking from earlier and heave it against the wall, to hear it shatter, to watch his tea trickle down the wall in thin, crooked rivulets. Perhaps that would banish the bittersweet combination of the sensation of an untouchable woman under his hands and the sound of a victim apologizing. Instead, he turned off the lamp next to the couch and crawled under the blanket again.
Author: Camudekyu
Rating: M
Characters: Roy & Winry
Warnings: Spoilers for end of the first series.
Summary: Practice losing every day
A/N: Inspired by an NPR story about devastating brain injuries. Chapter One is here. Chapter Three is here.
II.
On the opposite end of Winry's apartment was what she called the parlor. Truly, she had a long bedroom with a faux Xingese privacy screen stretching from the wall to almost the middle of the room. Roy could see her bed around the screen, her dirty laundry draped around, and, of course, more mechanical clutter. The mess here, however, was rather more controlled-the stacks of things were pushed to the wall, at least, revealing the really nice, dark hardwood floor and a large, threadbare area rug. This room, he noticed, did not have any machinery in it, and Winry showed him to a large, lumpy couch with a sagging center and faded floral upholstery. A low coffee table sat between the couch and a purely decorative fireplace, and Winry plunked her dinner down on the opposite side of the table and sank to the floor. Roy took the hint and sat on the couch.
"Oh, right, the music," Winry said, popping back up. She hurried around the couch to where the gramophone sat on a small, wooden table. "Hope you like Romantic Era Aerugan. It's all I've got." She paused to think. "I might have an old propaganda record from before the Reformation, but I don't imagine you'd want to listen to that."
"Not voluntarily."
"Aerugan it is." As she set up the record, she began to sing tunelessly, "Oh, Mother Amestris, I'd give my life for thee."
Roy hadn't heard that one since, maybe, sophomore year at the academy. "It's overrated," he muttered.
"Huh?" Winry said, the needle hovering in her hand.
"Giving your life for Mother Amestris," he repeated, "It's overrated."
Winry was still for a long moment, staring at Roy, before she started the record and adjusted the volume. She came back to the table and stood opposite him, her hands on her hips. Her eyes were narrowed slightly, and Roy had the disconcerting sensation of being appraised. He'd offended her. He was certain of it. "I think almost giving your life for your country is overrated," she countered as she plopped down on the floor in front of the coffee table. "I don't imagine you worry too much about things like that once you've succeeded."
That stung a bit.
She would know, wouldn't she? She'd watched enough of her loved-ones do it. And Roy knew all about almost giving his life, about surviving his own martyrdom, and when she put it like that, he felt impossibly pathetic. When he met her eyes, he knew that she knew it, too. And they both knew that he deserved that.
But then she was smiling at him again and saying cheerfully, "Although, if you actually die for your country, you don't get to cash in that banging pension you guys get."
She went about eating her dinner with one hand and rubbing a stain on the table with her other, and Roy got the distinct feeling that he had just glimpsed an old bitterness in her, perhaps a healed-over hurt. Still a scar.
"You think much about retirement?" she asked, a prompt for such a harmless conversation that Roy started. He hesitated for a moment, blinking his one eye at her. But, no, there was no veiled passive aggression behind it. She was simply asking him a question.
He smiled. "I'm not nearly so old as that," he replied.
Winry pinked a little. "Oh, jeez, sorry. I didn't mean it like that," she stammered, putting up her hands. She had, of course, found him wandering around the street outside her house, so perhaps retirement was not so great an analytical leap, but he didn't say that.
"I'm only joking," he replied, even though she looked thoroughly mortified. "I haven't, actually. It's been suggested to me more than I'd like to admit, but I've not looked too hard at the logistics."
She furrowed her brow. "Folks are suggesting you retire?" she mused, "I guess I don't know much about it, but you seem pretty fit for duty to me."
Roy laughed out loud at that. "A man with a weapon and no depth perception can be quite the liability, Miss Rockbell."
She skipped pink and turned red this time, and Roy laughed again. She dropped her face into her hands. "God, I'm an asshole, aren't I?" she asked, her voice muffled.
"Clearly, I'm not so sensitive as you believe I am," he said. That wasn't true at all, and he could tell that she knew it. However, it felt rather satisfying to say it, to assert it to a woman who really did not owe him her sensitivity. On top of that, Roy was beginning to feel rather pleased with himself and how not sensitive he was being-coming up to Winry's apartment, drinking her booze, and sharing her conversation took a measure of bravery that he, quite honestly, had not known he possessed. It gave him a sense of invulnerability, like sitting in Winry's parlor was similar to sitting in a lion's den.
But she wasn't going to eat him, he thought when he looked over at her, swirling a soggy tea bag in her mug. And he never had been at risk of being eaten by her, had he? No, the only thing between the two of them that might consume him was his own fear, and he had, up until quite recently, been blaming her for that.
"The looming threat of involuntary retirement notwithstanding," Roy went on, "I'm confident I won't be seeing conflict again."
Winry took a pull off her mug. "Well, I bet that someone with your rank wouldn't be running around punching bad guys anyway, right? You're a strategist."
"The sun has definitely set on my bad-guy-punching days." Roy had no particular desire to linger on this specific subject as it seemed to lend itself to talking about Ishbal, and he really could not, even in his blackest masochistic fit, cognize of a situation more distasteful than talking about Ishbal with Winry Rockbell. "To be honest, between ironing wrinkles out of the Articles of Reformation-which were, I think everyone should know, written by academics and accountants-and this country's abrupt disinclination toward conflict, I think I'll be spending the balance of my career behind a desk."
"You don't sound too disappointed."
Roy smiled. "I'm not. Decisions are made by the men behind the desks not the men dying for them."
She stabbed a few noodles with her fork, popped them in her mouth, and then asked thickly, "You ever think about running for Senate?" she asked. "I can't tell you how many times I hear people griping about voting in representatives who don't know a thing about the military."
"Do you agree with them?"
"Well, I think it's on a case by case basis, but I do know that when you overspecialize, you breed in weakness, and all the men in Senate right now are lawyers. They all think like lawyers." She frowned. "Not to mention that they're all men. I don't really feel represented by any of them."
He smirked. "Perhaps you should be the one running for Senate."
She laughed drily. "It's not allowed. I checked. There are three qualifications to run for Senate," she held up her hand and counted off, "At least three decades of life, a penis, and a pulse."
Roy should have expected Winry to have a mechanic's mouth on her: she didn't seem too terribly shy about discussing penises with him, so he resolved not to be either. "One out of three isn't bad."
"Tell that to a pollster. I wouldn't be surprised if, of those three things, having a pulse is the only negotiable one."
Roy laughed out loud at that. "You don't seem to have an awful lot of faith in the new government."
"Bureaucrats! All of them!" She shook her head. "If you ask me, more laws aren't really the answer. Don't get me wrong. I think it's great not having a bloodthirsty monster making all the decisions for the country, but he wasn't quite so all about getting involved in every aspect of individuals' lives, you know? I heard the other day that there's a bill in Senate right now that will make every alchemist get a license to perform alchemy!"
Roy had heard about that. He, personally, didn't think it was such a bad idea. "It could save a lot of lives you know."
"It will also turn alchemy into a commodity."
"It already is."
"It might seem that way to you because you're certified, but most practicing alchemists out there aren't doing it for money. If this happens, government issuance of licenses will be a business with all the motivations of a business. Alchemists don't grow on trees, though, so demand won't be through the roof, and that means alchemy will only be available to people who can afford a fancy education and the license."
Winry was sharp as a tack, Roy thought. He'd had no idea. Smirking, he said, "You're quite the libertarian." She stared at him, confused. "Libertarian. Not libertine," he clarified.
"Oooh," she said, nodding. "I was about to say..."
Roy laughed. "Well, having seen the way you drink whiskey..."
She grinned and shrugged. "It's a mechanic thing."
"Go in for your interview at Elgrin and say exactly that. I guarantee you that they'll take you more seriously."
She was laughing with her head tossed back, an open-mouthed sound, her hands on her solar plexus, when the phone rang. She stopped laughing with a quiet Oh!, put her hands on the floor, and hopped up to her feet. "Maybe that's your cab."
Honestly, Roy had forgotten about the cab. In the moment, he had quite forgotten about the snow, about his unknown reasons for being so far from home, about his panic at being trapped under a Rockbell roof. Instead, he had been having dinner in the parlor of a friend. Friend? A pretty young woman who, for so many reasons, he could not pursue. They had been talking like companions, hadn't they? Eating macaroni and cheese and discussing politics. What an incredible display of mundanity. The gramophone rumbled on in the background, and Roy took the moment of solitude to shovel a few much-appreciated forkfuls of dinner into his mouth. He'd outdone himself, it seemed-this was one of his better roux. The onions caramelized just right. The garlic strong but balanced. He hadn't made dinner for a woman in a very long time, and the irony that his first meal for someone else was for Winry Rockbell was not lost on him. He'd been on dates that hadn't gone so well as this.
Her voice was muffled and distant in the kitchen, but he could hear her, mellowed and clipped. The phone made a series of clicking sounds when she hung it up, and she returned to the parlor shortly after, two shot glasses and the bottle of whiskey in her hand.
"That was the cab company," she said, and her voice was too apologetic for it to have been any kind of good news.
"You don't sound very positive about it."
"Yeah," she said somewhat reluctantly. "They called to say that they're not sending anyone out tonight. The roads probably won't get plowed until the morning, and it's too dangerous to have cabs out on the ice."
Roy looked down in his pasta. "Well, damn." What the hell was he supposed to do now?
"You know," she began as she stabbed at her dinner aimlessly, "You're welcome to crash here if you need. I don't have a spare bedroom or anything, but the couch is pretty comfortable. Also, I've retrofitted my water heater, so the thing's a tank. You'll be able to get a hot shower in the morning if you want one."
Roy turned over her offer for a moment. It was that or try to make his way home in the dark, over the ice. There was no guaranteeing, either, that he wouldn't forget what he was doing halfway through and end up stranded in a different end of the city, this time without the immense generosity of a mostly-stranger-partial-enemy like Winry to help him. What else could he do? It did help, though, that Winry had brought out the whiskey, letting him know that, should he decide to stay the night, he could get good and drunk without reservation.
"It doesn't look like I have much choice, do I?" he said.
She was cringing apologetically a little when she said, "I don't think so." Her face shifted, then, to a smile. "On the bright side, now I have someone to help me drink this whiskey."
Roy smiled. She'd read his mind. "I appreciate the offer." He watched her pour their two shots and push his glass toward him. "I really do apologize, Winry. I was not expecting to have to find a place to stay."
She shrugged and waved at him dismissively. "It's no big deal. Seriously, though? I'm glad for the company."
Roy raised his shot glass to his mouth. "Even me?"
She did the same, smiling against the lip. "Even you," she said and tipped it back into her mouth. He tossed back his shot and savored every burning inch down his throat.
x
x
x
It wasn't long before they had finished their dinners and Winry had brought out two bowls of ice cream with walnuts on top. Dinner had helped to mitigate some of the alcohol sloshing around in Roy's stomach, but he was at least two sheets to the wind when they reached the bottom of the bottle. Winry, to her credit, kept up with him shot for shot. Roy imagined that he had a foot of height and almost a hundred pounds on her, so if he were feeling the booze, she certainly was, too. Still, Winry did not slur or stagger. She became more talkative, less inhibited, but Roy didn't know if the alcohol was to blame for that or if it was this sudden, unexpected camaraderie burgeoning between them. Or perhaps the alcohol was the source of it all. Regardless, he was snowed into her apartment until the morning, so did it really matter what was to blame? Winry smiled so readily, told him the truth without hesitation, laughed at his dumb, contrived humor, and he began to wish he had more women like this in his life. Women friends. Yes, friends. The authenticity of her responses struck him. She was not trying to seduce him, and she was not trying to follow his orders-those were the two modes of women with whom he was most familiar. She was just a person. Someone who owed him nothing.
She made them fresh cups of tea, this time without whiskey. She poured them strong, a teaspoon of honey in each, and passed him his mug, telling him that she needed to sober up a bit if she wanted to stay asleep through the night. They sat, side by side on the couch, listening to Aeurgian symphonies, one after another. Winry had pulled her feet up onto the cushions, her knee almost brushing Roy's thigh, while he slouched back, his legs stretched more leisurely than he could remember being in the recent past. She began probing him for information about his brain damage-Roy remembered her fascination with all things nervous system, and he was just drunk enough not to care.
"The bullet is lodged in my frontal lobe. Just here," he poked his index and middle fingers against the peak of his eyepatch. "The doctor would have removed it, but-"
"It's got to be super close to the artery," Winry said, scrutinizing his face with a scientific interest.
"Precisely," he said. "The risks of removing it outweighed the benefits."
"Benefits, my foot," Winry said, sitting back. "You've got to regrow that brain of yours regardless of what's stuck in there." She paused. "Does it ever bother you?"
"Does what bother me?"
She twisted her mouth thoughtfully. "Having something stuck in there? A foreign object?"
Roy shrugged. "I was rather hoping it would give me super powers, but as of yet, I can neither fly nor see through walls."
Winry laughed. "That's not what I meant."
He knew. "I know," he said. "I'm a little surprised to hear an automail mechanic so concerned about foreign objects. You deal exclusively in foreign objects."
"But anything that I put on a client is on the outside. I only do limbs. I know mechanics who engineer false bones that go inside the body to replace ones that are too badly damaged, but I haven't ever tried that. Everything that I attach to someone is external. Compared to what you have going on, it seems almost... well..."
"Superficial?"
"Exactly. You've got something in you that is really in you. What is that like?"
"I can't ever feel it, if that's what you're asking," Roy answered. "I don't feel much heavier, either. I haven't set off a metal detector yet. To be honest, aside from a visceral understanding of what senility must be like, I don't feel much different. The headaches and dizziness have passed for the most part."
"It's just your memory?" she finished for him
"It's just my memory," he concluded.
She was smiling at him in a way that Roy knew resulted from her thinking of something quirky or profound, and he found himself excited to hear what she had to say. "Maybe this is your chance to live with less memory," she suggested.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, in all those Eastern religions, they talk about the importance of living in the moment. Living without judgment or attachments. This could be your chance to do that. I mean, what makes us the most emotional? Memories. What is everyone hung up on when they try to move on from something? Memories. Maybe, you're supposed to try to live without memories."
"Supposed to? According to whom?" he asked. "Remember, I'm an alchemist, Winry. I don't believe most of that religious BS."
"I'm not suggesting religious BS," she countered tartly. "Supposed to according to... to... the human condition. Do you know how much more I could get done if I didn't snag on a
memory every ten minutes?"
"There's still plenty of snagging," Roy responded. "I can remember as effectively as the next man most of the last thirty years. Particularly, the most challenging parts. It's hanging onto new memories I'm not so good at."
"It just takes practice. And, hey, you're practicing all the time!"
Roy smiled. She certainly was an upbeat girl.
"Should I expect to hear you wake up halfway through the night, wondering who's holding you hostage in their dinky little apartment?" she teased.
That could have stung, but surprisingly, Roy snorted. "It's possible. I haven't slept in a bed that wasn't mine in quite some time, so I couldn't tell you what to expect." It then, quite suddenly, occurred to him that that was a rather more revealing comment about his social life than he had intended it to be. He didn't often make a habit of telling pretty, young women about all the sex he wasn't having.
He rather expected Winry to blush and look away uncomfortably, to clear her throat and excuse herself, and when he glanced at her it was with some degree of dread.
As soon as he met her eyes, though, she began to snort. Then she tossed her head back and laughed. He heard her slap her knee, and she pressed her other hand to her chest as she gasped. And that, at his expense or not, was the best possible response he could have hoped for. With a rush of relief, he began chuckling-he could appreciate self-deprecating humor.
"You poor guy," Winry said through her laughter. "You just can't catch a break."
He should have known that she wouldn't be embarrassed-this was, after all, the same woman with whom he'd discussed the senatorial penis-requirement. Obviously, Winry was not so a squeamish woman as he had anticipated. He shrugged, "There's nothing like losing an eye to help you re-prioritize."
She quirked her head. "What do you mean?"
Roy wondered that himself for a moment. He had not really thought about it much, this sudden lagging in his usual social exploits. He would have, of course, blamed it on his slow, awkward recovery and the truly immense patience a woman would have to have in order to get involved with him now. He had not been willing to put forth the effort required to pursue a woman, quite frankly. But it seemed like rather more than that now. "I mean you begin putting the things that are important to you on a numbered list." He had done just that, on one of the many long, painful nights he had spent coming off the morphine-and remarkably, sex had not appeared on that list.
"What are your top three?" Winry asked, hugging her knees and her eyes lighting up with interest.
Roy smiled at her enthusiasm. "Recovering, dignity, and integrity."
She blinked owlishly. She sat back a little. "Whoa." She shook her head a little. "Whoa. That's kind of heavy."
He laughed out loud at that.
"Recovering, dignity, and integrity," she repeated. "What does integrity mean to you?"
Roy knew the answer to that already. "Doing the right thing even when no one is watching. It means knowing the difference between the choice that is right and the choice that is comfortable." He could tell that she knew exactly where she fit in his decision to put that in his top three. Her eyes showed that she was thinking what he was thinking-picturing her parents, their smiles he could remember and their bloodless bodies he hoped to God she never had to see. He'd made more victims from his poor choices than any otherwise well-meaning man alive. He was confident of that. But ignorance was not an excuse. Looking into Winry's pellucid blue eyes told him that ignorance was never an excuse. "What are yours?" he asked, feeling the liquor swimming in his thoughts and resolving not to fight it.
She pushed her gaze to the ceiling as she thought for a moment. "I'm living on my own for the first time, so self-sufficiency," she said, "I'm a mechanic, so, of course, precision, and..." she paused and her face sank a little, as though she were realizing something she had not thought of before. Her eyes searched the darkness for something Roy could not see. She flicked her gaze over to him and concluded, "forgiveness."
That could have been a stiletto slid between his ribs. Forgiveness. What had he done to deserve the energy she must have put into forgiving him... what had he done, honestly, to earn it? She was trying. He could see it in her eyes. She was trying with all her might to forgive him. She was succeeding, too, and Roy believed, truly, that there was nothing he could ever aspire to do to deserve it.
"All right," she continued, slapping her knees as she stood. "I think it's time to hit the hay. Lemme get you some sheets and a pillow."
"I appreciate it."
She turned back to him, grinning. "Don't thank me until I find some clean sheets."
He smiled at her because she was being humorous, but once she was gone, he put his elbows to his knees and his palms to his face and he berated himself over and over and over.
x
x
x
Winry returned with sheets, a blanket, and a pillow. She made a little nest for him on her couch, her linens smelling fresh and soft over the lazy, lived-in smell of her couch. Then she left to change into her pajamas behind the folding screen that separated Roy's room for the night from her bedroom. The streetlight that came in through the window, however, cast her silhouette sharply against the screen, doing little to maintain her modesty. As he slipped out of his suspenders and unbuttoned his shirt, he stole glances at her shape, the vague representation of her against the screen, the idea of her breasts and the distant notion of her hips.
"I'd offer you a set of pj's," she said from behind the screen as she pulled on her boxy, shapeless pajamas, "but I'd cry if they fit you."
Roy laughed. He tossed back the blanket she had draped over the couch and slid between the sheets. The couch was just a little too short to accommodate his height, so he rolled onto his side and tucked his knees up just a degree-he knew he would regret it in the morning when he had to straighten his legs, but he would cross that bridge when he reached it. The pillow was soft and thin, and he bunched up one side to support his neck. The couch was, indeed, quite comfortable. It was wide and soft and curved just enough to follow his back. He reached up and clicked off the lamp on the side table. He could see just a little of the window above Winry's bed over the top bar of the screen between them, and the snow was still piling up against the glass, turning the harsh streetlight to a canary color, muted and soft. He listened to her linens rustling and her mattress creaking and her floorboards squeaking as she lifted one foot and then the next off the ground. He listened to her punching her pillow and nestling down. He listened to her turning until she was settled. Then he listened to her slow, easy breathing-a quiet, feminine snore-as he lay awake and stared at the pictures of her parents she had poised over the mantel. In the dim light, he could hardly see their faces, but his memory served to fill in the rest until he finally drifted off to sleep.
x
x
x
In his nightmares, Roy saw women and children. He saw the bodies fleeing in the dark through the huge, heavy doors of the Ishballan temple, seeking refuge in the chapel, where the candles flickered and guttered. He saw his colleagues pushing the doors closed and using alchemy to fuse them shut. He saw his own right hand raised and snapping and the church bursting into flames from the inside. He saw the fire dancing against the glass windows before the heat caused them to shatter. He saw a woman with her baby trying to clamber through the window only to slice ribbons of skin off her arms and face and impale herself on a long spire of iron in the frame. He saw the child, open-mouthed and wailing, until the smoke silenced it.
"Roy."
He must have fallen asleep with war on his damaged mind, Winry's parents watching him from the mantel. His mind must have grown cruel in it's recovery, compelling him to see these things while sleeping on Winry's couch. He had not dreamt of the church in years, of the heat on his face and the frigid desert night at his back, of the smell of burning young bodies and ancient scrolls.
"Roy!"
The woman hanging limply in the window, her dead baby slung across her back, pushed herself up against the window frame. He watched her claw at the plaster on the outside of the wall, her mouth and burnt-out eyes gapping at him, black and eternal. She tore the skin off her fingertips, stripped them to the bone as she scrabbled at the wall until her flesh gave, the puncture in her belly splitting into a fissure. She tore her top half free, leaving her hips dangling limply inside.
"Roy!"
He saw her torso flop to the ground as the blood gurgled, black and fleshy, out of her mouth. She began reaching toward him, dragging her shoulders across the sand, and Roy stood frozen in terror, watching this dead half body and its dead baby hauling itself, hand over hand, toward him. He tried to take a step back, but the blood pooling around his feet had turned the sand into wet cement, sucking at his boots and tightening around his ankles. He lost his balance and fell backwards, and the half body descended on him, her empty, oozing mouth forming words he could not hear as she drew closer and closer. He could smell her burning breath across his face. Her hand, the skin and flesh shredded from her knobby finger bones, clamped onto his forearm. It was a claw, pinning him down, pulling him into the blood.
"Roy!"
Roy sat up with a yelp, wrenching with all his might away from Winry's hand on his forearm. He squeezed his eye shut and shook his head, but behind his eyelid the fire still raged, that burnt-out face still pressing ever closer to his. He had to get away from the church, had to get a breath of smokeless air before he suffocated. He rubbed his hand against his eye, felt his heart thundering in his chest and his lungs constricted.
"Goddammit," he heard a voice say. It was a man's voice. His? "Goddammit."
"It's okay," a woman said. "It's okay. You're okay."
"We locked the door. We burned the church and we locked the door."
The air tasted of smoke and then it did not and then it did again, and Roy could hear the timbers in the roof cracking. No one screamed anymore. They were all dead before the roof could give.
"Look at me," a woman commanded. It wasn't the burning woman-she was ashes now, leaving behind only her reek. "Goddammit, Roy, open your eyes and look at me."
He obeyed when Winry seized the front of his undershirt and shook him hard. Then, abruptly, he was in the dark-his mind, however, was in many places at once. He gasped in a ragged breath. The parlor was dark save an illuminated lamp next to the couch. Winry knelt between his knees, her eyes bigger and bluer than the sky.
He met her gaze for just a moment and then she flung herself at him, wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pulled him close. He felt her hands splayed over his back. Her shoulder pressed into his face, and it took Roy another moment to realize that she was hugging him.
In an instant, the vestiges of the nightmare dispersed.
"God, you scared the shit outta me," he heard her breath.
He felt his lungs relax and take in air slowly. His heart stopped thundering in his ears. There was something under his hands, thin fabric over something smooth and firm and warm. Her back. His hands were on her back. There was the curve of a rib. There were the ridges in her spine. Nothing burned. The air was cool and still, smelled lived-in and soft. The floor under his feet was smooth and hard. Her pulse raced against his chest like the smallest of things, a frantic songbird.
"You're okay," she said wetly, and Roy could feel her tears against his neck.
A distant, quiet corner of his mind told him to laugh at the absurdity of this, but he couldn't bring himself to comply. She felt like a ballast, something anchoring him here-warm, pliant proof to his five senses that he was not in that God-forsaken desert. He was somewhere else-anywhere else-with a woman who wept for him and pressed him to her chest and if he ever had to imagine a place furthest from Ishbal in every way, it would be right here.
"I'm okay," Roy said.
Winry squeezed him harder and sniffed.
He did laugh now. "Are you okay?"
"Yes!" she snapped, still crying. "You scared me."
Was there a point in being mortified that she had seen him, whining and kicking in his sleep? If there was, he couldn't bring his wrung out nerves to feel it. "That hasn't happened in a long time," he said. "I wouldn't have chosen for you to see it."
"I don't care," she cut across him.
She was leaned against him, half kneeling on the couch, half standing, in a position that was rather like straddling his thigh, and if Winry recognized their incredible closeness, she did not seemed bothered by it. Roy, to his credit, appreciated it, the impropriety and intimacy of it, so he resolved to push her away. In a moment. But then another moment had passed. And then another.
"It was like you weren't here," he heard her say. "It was like you weren't coming back."
She had no right feeling so much affection for him as that. And he certainly had no right reciprocating it, so he decided to let it be a temporary thing. It would serve a purpose now, and then it would drain out, like morphine in his blood. She pressed her breasts against him, pushed her knee into his inner thigh, let him feel the lithe curve of her back. He could abide that sort of thing in the dark and then, quite shamelessly, let the sun chase it away,
"I would think a person in your line of work wouldn't scare so easily," he said into her shoulder.
"I've seen plenty of soldiers suffering," she said, her voice dropping. She sniffed loudly then, and Roy could hear renewed tears in her voice, a sob quavering just below the surface. "But it's never been my fault before."
What? Roy put his hands on her waist and pushed her back. "What did you just say?" he demanded.
Standing over him, his knee between hers, she sniffed again and wiped her nose on her sleeve. Her eyes were swollen, the lamplight catching and lingering in her gathering tears. She drew in a shaking breath and exhaled, "I said it's never been my fault before."
A muscle behind his sternum wrenched, like someone had closed a fist in his chest. Another fist closed around his throat. He'd never heard anything so unconscionable.
"What in God's name makes you think you're at fault?" he managed.
"I can't even imagine," she began before pausing to swallow hard, "It must be hell to see my face."
She could easily say the same thing about him, he thought, his half-destroyed face, appearing in her life as uninvited as it was the first time, so many years ago. Why, in fact, she did not feel that way was a mystery to him.
Roy furrowed his brow at her. Instead, she brought him into her home and fed him. She roused him from his nightmares and she held him. She stood over him and wept for him for all the terrible things he'd done to her.
"Your face is a benediction, Winry," he said.
She barely restrained a sob and pressed her fingers to her mouth to hold it in. "Is that true?" she managed.
It hadn't been until that evening, but he could say now with confidence that it was. "It is."
"I always thought you must hate me."
He had hated her, hadn't he? When he'd seen her standing on her stoop, he'd hated her. He'd even hated her when she brought him in and let him use her phone. He had. Her face was hell to him. He had once imagined no torment greater than being in her home.
"What a remarkably small person I would have to be to hate you," he said.
She covered her mouth again and shook her head as though she did not believe him, she couldn't bear to hear him. "I," she began. "I can't," she attempted again. She paused and took a long, shaking breath. She closed her eyes, tilted her face upward, and wiped her eyes. "I'm sorry," she said, composing herself. "You just... that really scared me for a minute."
That struck Roy as singularly endearing, her petty, irrational fear. Like something a child might create. Even through his sleep-fogged thoughts, he smiled at her. "I apologize."
"You don't need to do that."
"Yes. I do."
She watched him for a long time after that, the thoughts drifting through her eyes like clouds across a window. He saw a hurt and an old, old fear, the kind of fear that remained a last vestige of childhood, the kind that, try as she might, a person cannot put away. Then, because Winry was independent and, perhaps, a little guarded, there was anger, quiet and white hot, breathing like a coal. Then, there was her confusion, which Roy could understand-he imagined that she had no greater villain in her life than he, and he was not acting the part. And finally, she gave him a sweet, sad smile, and this sadness Roy could not understand. It was a dual grief, half personal and half deeply empathetic, the kind of grief that was quintessentially feminine and, thus, outside of Roy's capacity to return. But he could identify it and he could do his best to receive it, however ill-equipped he might be.
She nodded then slowly and resignedly. "Okay," she conceded. She nodded again, this time more to herself, and turned to shuffle back toward her bed behind the folding screen. She paused, though, and looked back at Roy. Her lips parted for a moment, but she said nothing. Then she turned away and disappeared into the darkness.
When he was alone, he felt the distinct impulse to pick up the mug he had been drinking from earlier and heave it against the wall, to hear it shatter, to watch his tea trickle down the wall in thin, crooked rivulets. Perhaps that would banish the bittersweet combination of the sensation of an untouchable woman under his hands and the sound of a victim apologizing. Instead, he turned off the lamp next to the couch and crawled under the blanket again.