"You were in love with him," Winry says. On the street, with the rain in her hair turning it dark, she looks up at him and says—that, as if it were something simple, as if it were something he could say a plain 'yes' or 'no' to.
He says nothing, but looks at her with his one good eye—and still says nothing.
"It's okay," she says, and her mouth twists. "I was, too."
Winry Rockbell always orbited Mustang's social circle, but the tether that kept her spinning around them was Edward—so he is surprised when Ed leaves and still she chooses to stay in Central. She rents an apartment with Sheska as her roommate, which makes some sense, since Sheska is her closest friend (who remains on this world). There is some lascivious muttering about that, but Roy is pretty well convinced it's innocent. If nothing else, he doubts that Sheska would interrupt her continuous, passionate love affair with books for one with a human being.
Winry at nineteen is no more a child than Ed at nineteen was—and not, truly, that much younger than Sheska or even Ross or Brosh—but still it unnerves him to see her in passing, who he had once seen only as an adjunct to Ed. She is bright, bright and young as the countryside and springtime, and she does not belong in Central.
With the rain coming down, plastering her hair down in a sheet of dark gold to her throat and shoulders, plastering Roy's own bangs down so that they dripped into his eyepatch, Winry looks down at her hands and says, "You don't have to say anything, I know it probably doesn't help to say anything—but I wanted you to know I understand."
"What makes you think you understand me?" he says, and there's more aggression, more copper-edged anger in his voice than he really means. She looks up suddenly. Though in some ways she actually looks surprisingly like Ed (the same fair skin, fair hair, the same Risembool complexion and small sturdy frame) her eyes are nothing like his—his eyes were unworldly and hers are very real, like knives made of blue. "I saw the way you looked at him," she says. "You don't have to say anything but don't lie to me. I'm not stupid."
In the pub Havoc starts to tell a story about something that happened in the locker rooms and then realizes that Winry is there and stutters off. It's funny: he never stops telling those stories for Hawkeye, and anymore he presses on ahead in front of Ross, too, but Winry is something else. Twenty-one and sly and brilliant, and her automail shop is one of the best-regarded in Central, but there's still something about her that . . . maybe it's that she was always so close in Ed's orbit, that they can't but see her through the lens of Ed when they knew him, when he was sixteen.
"Don't stop on my account," she says. "I saw my first naked man when I was eleven."
Havoc's jaw drops.
"Naked, screaming, and near about pissing himself," she says. "Automail surgery will remove a lot of your illusions in a hurry, let me tell you."
"Now now," Breda says, grinning and wagging a finger at her. "It's not nice to say something about someone who's not around to refute it."
Winry looks briefly nonplussed, and then, very suddenly, laughs. "I don't mean Ed," she says. "Ed never screamed."
There is unsettled shuffling.
"Not once," she says reflectively, and looks at her hands, which are small and pale and yet strong and marked with calluses.
"He's gone, though," Winry says. "Isn't he?" The rainwater draws long wet lines down her face. They look nothing like tears.
"He's not coming back," Roy says, and in a way it is like drawing a deep breath, it is a release. Though he has believed it for over a year now he has not yet said it aloud.
"I know," Winry says, and smiles, a small, wry, twisted smile, like a curl of castoff metal at her workshop. And then without a trace of coyness she reaches up and puts her hands on either side of Roy's face, and pulls him (unresisting) down into a kiss that tastes of rain and not of tears.
Her body molds close to his, warm despite the cold rainwater that passes between them. He lets his hands settle on her waist and tastes her wet lips, and thinks of the countryside and springtime.