Title: If This Reaches You
Author: S J Smith
Rating: K+
Summary: Edward wonders just how long Winry might be willing to wait.
Disclaimer: If I owned absolutely any of this, I'd be less worried about job security.
When you set your house on fire, you made a promise to yourself – never look back. The problem with that is you still have ties to your past; metal casings and gears, rubber and insulation. Not to mention memories, all wrapped up in a package that, somehow, you wish you could just put on a shelf or deep in a closet and forget. But the soft clank of armor is yet another reminder – if you only look forward, you might forget the important stuff, too.
You try to write her letters. More times than you can count, you start a heading on a page, "Dear Winry." And somehow, the letter winds up in the trash or gets torn or forgotten in your haste to get to somewhere else, someplace where someone might know something about the Philosopher's Stone. So, guilt. Guilt for not sending that first letter becomes guilt for losing the next becomes guilt because it's been two months, six months, a year, longer without a single letter getting mailed. You tell yourself that you'll do better telling her in person and soon, you'll get leave from the military and be able to go back to Rizembool. But military leave finds you chasing more leads on the stone and by the time you've followed up with those, your leave is up and you still haven't gotten to Rizembool.
She probably hates you, you think.
Maybe it's easier not to think about her at all.
Sometimes, you wake from nightmares, hearing the cries of that thing you brought from the other side. Sometimes, Al hears you, wakes you, tells you that you were thrashing, muttering, screaming. He always asks, you always tell him, "Bad dreams, I'm okay, go back to sleep." It hurts too much to remind him of what you both lost, his loss so much greater than yours, that night.
Sometimes, you wake from dreams, your mother's voice echoing in your head. Those dreams you share, telling your brother, "I dreamed of Mom last night."
Sometimes, you dream of her, leaning over the railing of the porch upstairs, her hair caught by the wind. In the dream, she's waiting for you. You don't share those dreams, either.
Secretly, you wonder if you dream true.
You write in your journal, a travelogue of what cities you visit, what you learn, what duties you accomplish. It's encoded, a code you made up, a code even your brother doesn't understand. Tabs mark certain pages, doodles decorate borders, words, your words, spill from page to page, sometimes frantic, sometimes lazy, always running on and on, like you and your brother in your search for the stone.
There's a secret inside the cover, where, one day, in a fit of boredom you pried up the flypage. A little pocket of space, big enough for a folded piece of paper, a half of a page torn roughly from the back of the journal. You'd left the jagged page as a clue, wondering if someone finding your journal would be clever enough to figure it out.
On the ripped paper, you wrote Winry's address but before tucking it into the pocket, you turned the page over, writing on the back, "The journey back should be easy. If this reaches you, wait for me."
Those words are burned in your memories, like the sight of flames engulfing your home. They had been in another journal, leather-bound, one you read once and couldn't understand. (Now, you know. An alchemic journal, encoded, just like yours is.) An older journal, your mother told you, that once upon a time had belonged to your father.
A journal he'd left behind before he walked out of your lives.
Those words were on the last page, headed with your mother's name, ended with your father's.
...If this reaches you...
A part of you doesn't want her to be waiting. It seems selfish and surely you've grown that much, that she could maybe have found someone else, someone other than you, someone who's home, who can love her with his whole heart, not just a dog sent out on command to flush the prey of the military.
You don't want her to be like your mother, loving someone who's never around to share her life.
You don't want to feel guilty about leaving her because, even if you do go back, you know you won't stay. You have Al to take care of first, foremost, and you know her well enough – or knew her well enough, once upon a time – to know that she'd understand your reasoning.
You wish you could convince yourself of that completely, that you still don't feel guilty about those unwritten letters, the secret in your journal, her appearing in your dreams.
Because you know now no matter what you thought so long ago, the journey back will be far harder than you ever imagined.