Flames turn the sky a low, ruddy color; smoke obscures the stars. Winry sits on her bed by the window, arms wrapped around her knees, trying not to look. (She had gotten up as soon as she'd smelled the smoke, seen the distant fire, but Granny had sent her back to bed in a tone that said she would brook no disobedience right now.) The fire frightens her, but she has never liked fear, so she turns it to anger. Damn them, she thinks, and then immediately takes it back: she has seen the look in Ed's eyes that says he already believes himself damned. So her fingers pleat the coverlet, and she thinks, instead, If you don't come back soon I'm going to brain you with a wrench.
The language between them has always been very physical, puppy tussling and bony-limbed hugs and smacks to the back of the head. She doesn't know how she'll communicate with the Elrics when they have gone more than an armslength away, now, for good.
The fire has burned so completely that she thinks Ed must have done something to it with his alchemy. A normal housefire wouldn't have been hot enough to consume as much as this one did . . .
But there are some things that remain. A cast-iron pan. Cracked tiles from the kitchen. A warped curl of metal that was probably once a ring. She leaves everything but the ring, which she takes home with her, and softens over the fire, hammers flat, shapes with pliers to make an earcuff.
Whenever she puts it on, she thinks of Auntie Trisha and her boys. She feels bad, sometimes, that she stole the ring, but she needs something besides the carefully labeled and ordered boxes of spare automail parts to remind her. Ed would call her sentimental.
Long nights, long days. She is happiest with the rhythm of the all-nighter, working on a piece of automail for thirty-six hours straight and then sleeping a day away. Her body passes thorough exhaustion into a period of dreamlike productivity, and the tired burn behind her eyes serves to keep her focused, spur her on. Just do this and do it right, and you can sleep —
"You don't need to work so hard," Granny says, with the tartness of tone that Winry knows is her mask for concern. She puffs on her pipe, always a sure sign of hidden agitation; most of the time she doesn't even have it lit. "Mister Taybury doesn't need his refit that soon."
"I know," Winry said, "but I learn a lot by doing it this way. The harder I work the faster I'll get good at it."
"You're young yet, dear," Granny says. Smoke puffs from her pipe in a series of white bursts, like the exhalations of a train. "You have plenty of time to become an expert automail mechanic. I daresay you could get a normal amount of sleep and still be the talk of Rush Valley by the time you're twenty."
"Like you were?" Winry asks, cheekily, and Granny rolls her eyes. (It will not be for a few more years that she finds out that Granny really was.)
It is impossible to explain because she doesn't know, herself, exactly why she feels so urgent. It's all bound up together: it is part the desire to be a daughter that her parents would have been proud of, part a need to make, to do, rather than to wait and wonder; part a need to keep up with the Elrics, even from so far away—and perhaps most of all the joy of automail engineering, a pleasure in the work that is so pure and uncomplicated that it works on her like a drug.
She is silent too long; Granny sighs, exhales her fragrant smoke that is more vanilla than tobacco. "If you work yourself sick you'll fall behind on your studies, and I know that would make you insufferable," she says, which translates to: I love you, you're the only family left with me, please, please take care of yourself.
Edward and Alphonse return and leave and return again. When they are there she throws herself into her work. (Ed's automail is her masterwork, and she improves it whenever she can, whenever he gives her the chance, so that it can be a living masterwork, absorbing every new trick and flourish and algorithm that she has perfected in his absence.) And when they spar on the green after her repairs are complete, she sees flashes of eye-searing bright sunlight reflected off Ed's automail, Al's armor, and it mingles with the flaring of Ed's coat and the gold of his hair and makes her think of fire on the horizon.
She has never told them that one of her earcuffs is made from their mother's ring, fished from the ashes of their destroyed house. She wants to, but she isn't sure what she would do if they were offended, if they wanted her to give it back. Its presence in her ear is a reminder and a comfort, and if that makes her sentimental, so be it.
"What?" Ed asks, eyes narrowed, when he catches her looking at him. He always assumes insult, which is fair, because she pretty much always gives it. She realizes that she's fingering her earcuff.
A comeback would come quickly to her lips, but instead she says, "Nothing," and drops her hand from her ear. "I'll tell you later."
With the pocketwatch open in her hand, she can feel the tears rising to fill her throat. (She has never believed that tears are something to be ashamed of.) She wipes them with the back of her hand, and closes it, hears the decisive click, feels a similar decisive click inside herself. "I'm gonna go ask Dominic to make me his apprentice one more time," she says, to Paninya's startled stare, and squares her shoulders.
Like Ed and Al, she feels older than her years, and she is ready to leave something behind, and to make her own life. The fire is more metaphorical, but it is hers, and it is true.