"Hiso—"

Hisoka seized her by the throat, digging his fingers into the vulnerable flesh of her neck, and smashed her against the wall. She choked under his grip as he squeezed, compressing her windpipe, and dragged her up the wall with pure brute force. Her feet dangled off the ground. Winry closed her hands around his forearm as she struggled to get a breath.

"Don't do this," she coughed hoarsely.

"Are you one of them?" Hisoka hissed. Winry's lips parted to answer but she only managed a wordless rasp. His hand drew tighter. She couldn't breathe. She could feel cells dying through her body as he cut off her oxygen completely. She was desperate for air, but she held out longer through willpower alone. If she struck back it would be the end. There would be no turning away from this path. There was still a chance for Hisoka to walk away with his life.

Her lips moved, mouthing the word "Stop" but no sound accompanied it.

He turned, throwing her like a doll across the room. Winry slammed into the stretcher and it toppled over on top of her as she landed. Her cry was guttural and weak, but she sucked in lungfuls of air gratefully. Her vision throbbed as she struggled to slide out from under it, and Hisoka prowled toward her. He snatched the stretcher and flung it out of his way.

"You got what you wanted," she said, coughing as she pushed away from him with her heels. "You wanted to fight Chrollo, you got it."

"The Troupe conspired for my loss," Hisoka whispered, his words dripping with menace as he grabbed her up by the front of her shirt, shaking her violently.

"You left the Troupe for this opportunity, they had no loyalty to you!"

He flung her at the ground and Winry landed in a crouch, hastily throwing up her left arm and focusing her aura into it as he kicked her hard. She tumbled backward in a roll away from him, putting distance between them as she tried to get to her feet. Hisoka was on her again already, raising his leg to stomp her.

"Hisoka, stop!"

She leapt away, narrowly missing the heel of his shoe.

"You refuse to fight back?" he snarled. His body turned to track her as she moved so that the stretcher was between them. He would rip her limb from limb until he was satisfied if he found the opening, and she knew it. "So you've given Chrollo your ability, too."

"No! I don't want to fight you, it doesn't have to come to this! You accepted the fight on his terms, you gave him the opportunity for every advantage, and he took it advantage of it."

He stalked toward her, unmoved by her words.

"Are you one of the Troupe now, mink?" Hisoka whispered.

Winry bit the inside of her cheek then squared her jaw, digging her heels into the ground. Her entire body was shaking with nerves. So it had come to this — her life or his. She'd once thought that if she couldn't kill Hisoka, then she didn't deserve the Troupe's attention. He was so clever though. Could she kill him? She'd have to try.

"I set you free," he continued, his big hands cranking into fists. "I did not judge or restrain you. I gave you your liberation, and you choose them."

"I wanted to choose you!" Her voice cracked, and his amber eyes narrowed, arched brows creasing together at his words. "For years, Hisoka, I chose you. I lived alongside you, I trained alongside you, I took you as the monster that you are. I chose that. And no matter what I did you refused to see me as anything but an outsider." She jabbed her hand toward the sealed doors, chest heaving with her breaths as the words she had suffocated for so long found their voice. "They have done for me what I did for you, and they will return it in kind. But you've made it clear that's a cost too high for you to pay."

Hisoka leaned forward, resting his palms on the stretcher and pushing it into her. She grabbed it from her side, pushing back. Her feet slowly slid backward as he moved them both anyway, inching closer to pinning her against the wall with it.

"You'll die for them?"

"The same way I once would've died for you," she breathed.

A demented smile spread across his lips and he shoved hard. Winry focused her aura in her feet, leaping out of the way as the stretcher crashed into the wall, her feet touching down for only a moment on its surface before jumping past him. Her fingertips grazed his cheek.

Hisoka turned, a hand raising to touch his face, and came back red with fresh blood. He smile broadened.

"So you didn't give the Boss your Hatsu."

"No," she admitted. "But he asked."

Hisoka advanced, and Winry came forward to meet him.

He leveled a punch for her head with his automail right arm and she sidestepped it, then stepped into his body. She hooked her right arm around his while he was still extended in the punch, and rocked back on her heels. The momentum of his throw carried him forward and Winry flipped him over her shoulder. He punched her in the kidney as he went over and she instinctively cringed from the pain, and they landed sideways on their backs. Winry disentangled herself from him, rolling away as quickly as she could while he pushed himself to his feet.

His low laughter echoed around her.

"I've imagined this," he said, watching as she slid her hand down her arm, severing the Bungee Gum he'd tried to attach to her, "countless times. Wondering how you would fare against me now."

Winry glanced down over her body and then the rest of the room quickly with Gyo, ensuring that he hadn't left anymore Bungee Gum traps for her to fall in yet.

Hisoka lunged for her.

Winry jumped away, landing on the stretcher and it rolled under her, crashing into the corner hard enough for her teeth to knock together. He came for her without hesitation, smiling wide, knowing he had her trapped with nowhere to run. She didn't take her eyes off him as her hands moved of their own accord, pure instinct to survive behind the wheel. She touched the wall behind her, her right palm sliding down it and she felt it open under her fingers while her left closed around the Philosopher's Stone in her pocket.

She tumbled through, shrieking in surprise and fear as she fell through the wall and kept falling. Winry crashed hard and wood broke under her back. She laid stunned for a moment before rolling over and crawling off the shattered pallet underneath her, stumbling away from it holding her side. She ducked behind a curtain as she heard Hisoka land in the same spot.

Winry forced her breathing to quiet, to be slow and steady as she crept through the labyrinth. It had worked. The smallest bead of hope had been all she'd had as she'd laid her hand against the wall, fueled by the knowledge that the Stone had worked for Chrollo and she had only a whispered prayer that it might work for her, too. In that moment she'd sought someplace where she might have an advantage — an upper hand. And the only place that had come to mind had been here.

Glam Gas Land.

She pulled the Stone out of her pocket, just a quick glimpse. Enough to see its color was fading. Its glow was no longer luminescent and bright; only a pinprick of red glowed at its core. Maybe she'd used too much of it with her hat trick. She probably had only one use left in it. The rest of this fight would have to be all her.

"You are such a onesome creature," Hisoka's voice called tauntingly from somewhere behind her. "You're making this exciting. Tell me, where did you learn this delicious technique?"

She didn't answer.

She had no plan, and she needed to formulate one quickly — desperately. She couldn't win a game of cat-and-mouse against Hisoka, even if she had the comfort of the lay of the land. Around her props hung like macabre decorations, half-eaten by the shadows. The hollow eyes of masks watched her duplicitously as she slipped by on quiet feet. She passed a bin of bō staffs and paused to draw one out, her heartbeat filling her ears so loudly she couldn't hear the sounds of the warehouse anymore. Winry closed her eyes, reaching out with En.

Behind her!

She turned fast on her heel, swinging the bō down at Hisoka. He had already drawn another from the bin and they met in the middle, staff to staff. Hisoka drew away first and Winry retreated a step back, rotating the bō in her left hand before switching it to the other, not taking her eyes off him. He stepped toward her, his bō swinging out, and Winry advanced on him again. She planted the end of hers on the ground, using it to balance herself as she threw up her other arm and focused her aura into it for the split second of impact as Hisoka's bō struck her, then refocused it back into her foot as she hammered him with a front kick. Blood spurted from his hip where she'd made contact.

Winry bolted away from him, scrambling up the makeshift stairs she'd built so many weeks ago from crates and boxes. Hisoka followed her without hesitation — he was a hunter and knew no fear of his prey. She had only a few steps lead on him, and she spun around on her heel and swung low with her bō. Hisoka dropped the end of his low, blocking her, but she stepped in close and slammed her elbow into his face. The boxes underfoot shook precariously.

Blood exploded from his nose, but Hisoka didn't back down for even a moment. He dropped the bō and wrapped his arms around her, locking her in against his chest. Winry slammed her head back, hoping she'd hit and damage his nose again, but she was simply too short. His grip around her tightened like a constrictor, and she struggled to inhale her next breath.

"Had you hoped for an advantage here, mink?" he taunted, and she felt his lips graze her ear.

She didn't answer, instead slamming the end of her bō between her feet. The box under them gave completely. Winry gasped as they shot down into it together and his arms let go of her with surprise. She dropped to her hands and knees, much smaller than he, and used her Hatsu to cut her way out before he had time to grab her again. She scrambled out to freedom and headed back up the steps to the high ground as he tore his way through. He looked up at her, lips pursed tight, then merely seized hold of one of the weight-bearing crates and ripped it free.

Winry let out a yip of surprise and pain as everything collapsed under her, and she fell headlong toward the floor. Hisoka caught her by the throat, holding her in the air. She lashed out, dragging her hands across his arms and she felt his flesh giving way under her touch. He hissed in pain, but didn't let go until she swiped across his face and felt her fingers cut through the jelly of his eye.

He dropped her at last and Winry dashed away. A playing card struck a box beside her and she flinched, ducking and dodging around a corner. She couldn't hear him behind her but she didn't dare look back as she bolted up a flight of firm wooden stairs to the top of a platform, shouldering her way through until she burst into circle of mirrors, each catching her reflection in the light that bloomed through the skylight above. There was no place to go, and she stepped back into the crevice, shrinking away.

"Mink."

She inhaled a trembling breath as Hisoka emerged into the space. Their gazes locked. Blood streaked his face, pouring from the gash across his eye and more on his other cheek. His lips were peeled back in a terrible smile, now that he finally had her cornered.

"We could have been tremendous, you and I," he whispered as he brandished a playing card between his fingers. She didn't answer, and he shrugged. "When I kill Chrollo, I will let him know you died on your feet."

She turned away from him, hunching over as his hand flicked the the playing card sliced through the air, and the glass of the mirror shattered. Winry came back with her gun free from its holster, the Philosopher's Stone in her other hand as she leveled the muzzle at Hisoka and pulled the trigger. The explosion of the gunshot thundered around them and Hisoka jerked back from the impact, blood blossoming in the air, but she was advancing on him, pulling the trigger as she went. Holes dotted his chest and after the fourth bullet he went down to his knees. Winry dropped the firearm and plunged her finger into one of the bullet holes in his chest, staring into his one amber eye as she focused her Hatsu into him, breathing ragged, body trembling, and severed the Bungee Gum surrounding his heart. The Stone in her hand dissolved into ash.

"Are we ready, Boss?" Nobunaga asked, glancing at Chrollo. Chrollo had his back to the rest of the Troupe, who stood waiting on the docks sullenly, to scan the area one last time. "She's probably dead."

"I'm aware, Nobunaga."

He knew that possibility well. They'd had to break through the wall of the exam room in their attempt to reach Winry, but once they'd done so they found the room empty. There was a hole in the wall that led to the exam room beside it, but it had been untouched. He didn't know where Hisoka and Winry might have gone. He didn't know if maybe, just maybe, Winry had chosen Hisoka's side at the end.

"All aboard for departure!" a voice boomed over the PA system.

It was Machi who took a step toward the ramp.

"Let's go," she said. "If she's alive, she'll be here when we get back."

If they ever came back.

He couldn't stall forever, though. Chrollo lowered his head, exhaled, then nodded.

"Very well. Let's go."

He put his hands in his pocket and waited for the rest of the Troupe to ascend the Black Whale's ramp ahead of him. The future laid across the sea — on the Dark Continent. And they would be among the first to explore it. To reap its riches.

"Boss, wait."

Chrollo glanced up, then looked back. Winry stood on the first step of the ramp. He smiled, and a knot in his chest lessened.

"It's time," he said simply, drawing her boarding pass from a pocket and holding it out to her.

Winry's eyes met his as she reached out, accepting it without a word, then reached into the pocket of her tobi pants and offered something to him in return, bowing as she held out her hand to him. A deck of cards. He touched her shoulder, drawing her back up without a word, then stepped aside. Winry stepped past, joining the rest of the Phantom Troupe ahead of him, and together they boarded the Black Whale, bound for the Dark Continent.