When The Dust Settles
By Yellow Mask
Spoilers: Some spoilers for the manga.
Disclaimer: I do not own FMA.
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The house is deserted – as empty and desolate as the last breath of an old man. For the first time in Winry's memory, the house seems truly old. Where its halls once rang with laughter, there is now dusty silence. The warm glow of the windows has been replaced with a withered darkness, and when the wind blows, the wooden walls moan in pain.
The chill of the night creeps under the door like snake, whispering around Winry's ankles as she sits on the couch, sipping at a cup of tea. It's far too bitter, and she can taste the shreds of the leaves in the liquid. There was nothing to grind the leaves with, which is no surprise to her. There is almost nothing left in this house.
She came back here a week ago, for a reason she can't even remember now. To carry on the Rockbell business, perhaps? But she'd have a hard time fitting a customer with automail when all that's left in the workshop are scraps of metal; twisted, bent and broken.
Like her. Like Risembool. Like all of Amestris.
Winry spent two days cleaning it up, salvaging what she could. She swept the broken glass from the floor, took out the splinters of wood that were once furniture, boarded up the smashed windows. She scrubbed at the stains on the porch until the blood finally peeled away beneath the brush like flecks of old paint.
The beds are ruined beyond repair, but the couch still stands. It's the only furniture that somehow withstood the soldier's rampage, and it stands alone in the room like the survivor of a holocaust. A thin, ragged blanket rests on top, as tattered as a dog's favourite chew toy. That it's ugly doesn't matter – it's all that fights off the night's chill.
Winry drinks the bitter tea and gazes into space. She ignores the goosebumps marching across her legs – they are a mild discomfort, and hardly worth protesting or combating.
Tomorrow, she will help the survivors try to rebuild the dam before the rains come. It will take at least two days, with the numbers they have now. They could apply to Central for a State Alchemist to help them, but in the chaos that is Amestris's ruling city, it might take months before official eyes even land on the request.
Hardly any point. And there is no guarantee that the alchemist will be sent at all – the reformed military have to rebuild most of Amestris, after all. Risembool will hardly be considered a place in need of immediate attention.
Winry sips her tea, and stares into the distance through the only surviving window. The glass is webbed with cracks, but still hangs tenaciously in the frame.
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The hinges – rusty after being so long unused – shriek as the door opens.
Senses and reflexes honed by the last year of horror, Winry reacts within moments. She snatches her teacup, kettle, and whatever else that could give her presence away and runs up the stairs as silently as a cat. She doesn't turn off the light – that would be a signal as clear as a waving flag that someone is in here.
Confident that the darkness in the stairwell will hide her, Winry eases her head around the jamb and gazes into the living room.
She can hear footsteps, and there is something familiar about them. But she doesn't move. Trusting the familiar in these times is foolish. But then they call out, in a voice that echoes along the corridor like a lonely bell.
"Winry? Granny Pinako?"
Winry knows that voice. Ed! It is a testament to how much the last year has changed her that she does not immediately announce her location and go to him. She waits until she can see him.
Then the shadow on the floor shifts, and he steps into her view. As he's in the living room and she's upstairs, she can't judge if he's grown. His hair is longer, but it is still in his trademark braid. His clothes have changed – Winry recognises the uniform of the reformed military. A long, ropey scar decorates the side of his neck like some obscene form of jewellery. It ripples with the contraction of the muscles in his throat as he speaks again.
"Anyone here?"
Finally, she calls to him.
"Ed?"
She descends the stairs, her cup and kettle still held in her hands. She hasn't spilled a drop. He turns to her, and she's struck by how old he looks. Not in the sense of wrinkles, stooped back, or any of the physical degenerations. But he looks…weary. As though the war he survived consumed his spirit like a vampire drinks blood.
"Winry?"
The first thing that strikes Ed is how old she looks. Her eyes are empty, with shadows as dark as bruises beneath them. She looks tired, spent, drained. Like a river in the middle of a drought – the sparkling water has dried away, leaving only the dull stones.
She's thin, not painfully so, but in the sense of someone who lost far too much weight far too quickly, and is only just starting to gain some of it back. Her hair has dulled, the bright blonde appearing to have watered down like the colours of an old painting.
She looks...defeated. As though the war was a boulder that crushed her spirit beneath its weight.
Her smile is sad and bleak, no longer the sunny grin it once was. "Hey."
A single word of greeting, falling so flat Ed almost thinks he can hear it hitting the floor. But he mimics her.
"Hey."
The silence is not the easy companionship they once shared – it's tense and hard, with a razor's edge. Winry moves past him, back to the couch, setting the kettle back down on the floor. The state of house would have confused him, but he remembers the ravaged husks of homes in Central, and knows what happened here.
He moves to join her, and now that she watches him, his walk is slightly stilted, one leg longer than the other.
Ed notices her gaze land on his automail, and wants her to say something. Berate him, yell at him, anything. Anything to somehow break through the invisible barrier to the past they once shared.
But her lips are mute to the state of her creations. Some part of her wishes she could scold him once more, but she can't find it in herself to scold the hardened man before her. Not over something as trivial as automail.
Funny, a year ago, she would have been horrified at anyone who called automail 'trivial'. But now...now, after all she's been through, Winry's dreams have long since surrendered to reality.
"Do you want some tea?" The question is a cruel parody of acquaintance, but she doesn't know what else to say.
He's not thirsty, but he accepts anyway. The cup is cold tin, and he knows the drink will be tinged with the taste of metal, but he raises it to his lips. The liquid fills his mouth, and it tastes as bitter as a broken promise.
Winry notices his surprise at the taste. His face doesn't contort – after such a long time in the war, he learnt to hide his expressions – but she can see it in his eyes.
"There's nothing to grind the leaves with," she supplies. "I suppose the soldiers took it."
His eyes flicker at the mention of soldiers, and she can't help but wonder what happened to him. In the year they've been apart, both seem to have changed so much they can barely recognise each other. Winry knows that the woman in the mirror – hard-eyed and grim-faced – is yet to become familiar. She is a stranger to herself.
She wonders how much of him has become a stranger.
The silence grows, and the length of it disturbs Ed. Winry used to hate silence, she used to talk to fill it up. But now, she seems at ease with the death of noise.
"Winry?"
It is disquieting that Ed wants to break the silence. She has always known him to be comfortable with the absence of talking. But it seems that, as she has grown comfortable with it, he has grown uncomfortable with it.
"Yes?"
Just one word. No 'what is it, Ed?' or any other unnecessary queries. Ed wonders what taught Winry to be brief of speech.
"What...what happened to you?"
Her eyes are still on him, but he gets the impression they are looking through him.
"I might ask the same of you."
A breeze creeps in under the door, and Ed can't hold in a shiver, though he doesn't know if it's from the cold or her tone. Winry pulls a tattered blanket from the side of the couch and hands it to him.
"Aren't you cold?" There are goosebumps over every inch of her skin.
"Not enough to need a blanket."
Again, the answer is disturbing. This time not because of the tone – because of the implication that Winry has grown used to discomfort. That it has become a part of her life.
Again, silence settles over the house as the blanket settles on his shoulders.
Again, Ed is the one to break it, trying to bring back some of their old intimacy in the cloak of small talk. "Where's Granny Pinako?"
"Dead." Winry's voice as lifeless as the word.
Ed's surprise is the first real energy the house has seen in nearly a year. "What? How?"
"The military followed me here and killed her."
The eerie calm in her voice sends small darts of pain into his heart. Even as he mourns for the old woman who took him and his brother in, another part of him mourns for the woman in front of him, and the pain he can see in every line of her body.
Ed wants to understand what caused that pain. "Why would the military follow you?"
"Remember the Rush Valley Resistance?"
Ed remembers. The military split in half, plunging all of Amestris into a civil war. On one side, were those who followed the Fuhrer, and on the other...were those who followed Roy Mustang's ideal.
Ed and Al had been in the latter. But even with the Rebellion triumphant at last, Mustang could not take the mantle of the Fuhrer, not even to pass the power back to the common people. In the last weeks of the war, a bullet found its mark, leaving Riza Hawkeye to lead the country back to true democracy.
And leaving her the caretaker of Mustang's final legacy...the child growing within her womb.
But the Rush Valley Resistance had sprung into being almost immediately after the military divided. They had been a network of spies and suppliers for the Rebellion, until they military finally crushed them.
"I remember."
Winry's smile is not happy, but rather one of grim satisfaction. "I was the one who started it."
Ed's chest tightens with her words as the winch. He had never set foot in Rush Valley after the civil war started, afraid of leading the military to Winry. And now, it is one more regret to heap on his back like a lead weight – she was already a target, he could have gone to her anyway. Gone to her before he became what he is now.
"When the military stormed Rush Valley," Winry continues speaking, her voice tight with old pain, the remembrance of wounds that never quite healed. "I was already back here, trying to establish a small Resistance pocket here. I didn't think the military would know where I'd gone...I didn't think they would follow me. They killed Granny, right on the front steps. Some of the others died, but most were captured and tortured."
"How did you escape?"
"I didn't."
Ed stares, and for the first time, he notices the marks. The spider-webbing of faint scars. On her arms, her neck, her legs, visible only when the light of the bare bulb in the ceiling hits them just so.
"What happened?" The words are soft, as tentative as first kiss, as though Ed is giving her the option of not answering, of pretending she didn't hear the question.
But the past year has hardened Winry, and she faces it head-on.
"Come off it, Ed! I was a female prisoner in a camp full of male soldiers! What do you think happened?" She doesn't shout, but her voice cracks through the air with all the sting of a whip.
She sees Ed's eyes crinkle and gleam with sorrow, and again she wonders what the past year has done to him. Once, such an admittance would leave him angry, wrathful, raging against those who had hurt her. But this sad acceptance of her pain wasn't something she was prepared for.
Ed looks down at her scars, lets her words replay in his head, and for the first time he thinks that there might be some anger left in him. He thought the war took all his anger, leaving only the bleak ash of a fire that has long ago burned out. He thought he had seen every atrocity human beings could commit.
But Winry's words are like a swift breeze, stirring the embers of that fire and making them glow. For a moment, his stomach cringes and his fists clench at the thought of Winry – Winry, who had been nothing but selfless and caring in the sweet sixteen years of her life – being hurt like that.
But then the rage dies again. There is nothing he can do. He has never been so ashamed of his helplessness.
Silence descends like a shroud again, as though each is giving the story the respect it deserves. Remembering and acknowledging who and what was lost in its making.
Ed's fingers brush her arm, and Winry flinches automatically. No man has touched her since...since it happened. The reaction is brief and instinctual, and easily subdued. But Ed has already retreated, as though she had slapped his hand away.
Winry wants to reach across to him, to take his hand, to bridge this chasm between them. But she can't. Not without knowing what made that chasm.
"Where's Al?" It seems fitting that she should first learn what happened to him the way he learned about her – through a question about another.
"Still at Central," Ed's voice is weary, but there is a hint of pride. "Still helping people repair their homes and such. I restored him, you know? He's finally out of the armour."
Winry hadn't known that, and she finds a smile tugging at her deadened lips in spite of herself. Al has always been so caring, so tender and kind-hearted...she wonders if that has changed.
"He joined the Rebellion officially after that. But I was the one sent to the front line."
The idea is foreign to Winry, that Ed should go anywhere without Al. But this war changed so much, she finds herself simply nodding.
"What did you do?"
Ed snorts, but it lacks the mocking quality such a gesture would have once possessed. "What anyone did during a war – gave orders, killed people, watched people get killed..."
The only visible mark is on his neck, but his voice is filled with scars. Winry wonders what that did to him, being forced to murder people, to watch comrades fall before his very eyes, to think of people as objects rather than living beings.
"How did you cope?"
For a moment, Winry thinks the words came from her lips. But the stillness of her tongue and the questions in Ed's eyes tell her it was he who voiced his thoughts. The words drag on her ears, demanding an answer.
But she has none to give. "I don't really know how I 'coped', Ed. At first, my biggest worry was that I'd get pregnant, but when you're eating one meal a week chances of conception tend to drop off. And I never caught any sort of disease. When I escaped, I was...in a bad way, for a while. I'm better now, though."
She doesn't tell him about the guard she had to kill to escape, about how his face haunts her dreams. About how she wonders what he was, who he was, who will miss him? She makes no mention of the pain it caused her – to sacrifice every moral she ever had for the sake of freedom.
And she doesn't tell him about phantom sounds and sensations that wake her in the night, or the way she still scrubs her skin raw in the shower.
Some pain is hers alone, and no one else's. She turns the question on him, like a double-edged sword.
"How did you cope?"
"The way everyone always copes with war," Ed says, his voice soft, almost...contrite. "I punched walls, got drunk, fucked whores."
Winry's stomach cringes, but she doesn't flinch. She coped in her way, and he coped in his. Some part of her wonders at his honesty. Perhaps he is willing to talk with her now that he knows she is as tainted as he is.
Nothing he can say will corrupt her, for she is already corrupted.
"I never raped anyone, though," he tells her in a low voice. "I wouldn't...I couldn't have done anything like that."
He makes no mention of the girl he saved from such a fate, the girl with straw-blonde hair and bright blue eyes. The girl who looked like Winry. He doesn't tell her about how he wonders to this day if the only reason he saved her was because she looked like Winry. If she had been just a nameless face, would he have helped her? Did he only go to her aid because he was too selfish to watch a Winry-look-alike hurt? He's asked himself that question more times than he can count. And the truly frightening thing is, he still doesn't know the answer.
And he doesn't tell her of his dreams, nightmares of blood and screams and death. Death dealt by his own hands.
Some pain is his alone, and no one else's.
This time, the silence is more comfortable, even is it tastes of despair. So many secrets, so much pain, so much between them...
She stares at him, and he stares at her. They are different, they are scarred, they are changed by what they have endured.
But they have survived. Against all odds, they are here.
And now, when the dust settles, they have to face what they have become.
They loved each other once, but that love was young, naive, and began to die the day they first began to change. Each loved what the other was, and each is unfamiliar with what the other is now. The question is written in both their eyes as clearly as if inked out on paper.
'Can I love you again, and can you love me?'
The silence continues, and as he continues to stare at her, Ed finds the tightness in his chest easing. Hope trickles into his soul like the first drop of rain after a long drought. He had loved the old Winry, and he knows that this one is still Winry, at heart.
He doesn't love her now, but he could grow to love her again.
Slowly, Winry finds her gaze softening. Like a thread of gold amidst lead, a tiny burst of hope grows in her chest. She loved the old Ed, and at heart, this new one can't be that much different. He is still Ed – more scarred than before, perhaps – but still Ed.
She loved him once, and she can do so again.
They move together, leaning closer and gently taking each other's hands. There is a strange glitter in Ed's eyes, and the whole room seems to be growing lighter. Everything is edged in gold, as though ready for rebirth, and at first, Winry wonders why. But then she looks over her shoulder.
Through the cracked window, the sun is rising over the edge of the hills.
End?
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AN: I know I'm meant to be working on other things at the moment, but this story just jumped out at me. I re-read that part in the manga when Hohenheim warns Pinako that something terrible is going to happen, and I just had this vision of a horrible, bloody war. Swiftly followed by the vision of Ed and Winry sitting on a couch, drinking tea, both trying to reconcile the events which have changed them and driven them apart. I tried for a rather bleak, despondent feel to the story, with a hint of hope at the end.
And there won't be a sequel. The question mark is just there for dramatic effect – sorry guys, but this is a stand-alone piece.