Back again with more! Thanks so much for your wonderful reviews-I haven't replied to all of them yet but I will soon. This chapter's less fun and more, uh, meditating on the legacy of war crimes, and I wrote it in two days and had a stomach ache the whole time, so is it good? MAYBE NOT. But it's here! It's about the Rockbells, their grief, and the military state.
Song for this one is "Pillar of Truth" by the incomparable Lucy Dacus.
I, the anchor
I'm slowly sinking
Into darkness
Yet unknown
But the fading
Light around me
Is full of faces
Who carry my name
I am weak
Looking at you
A pillar of truth
Turning to dust
The second relevant piece of mail didn't arrive until Monday morning, where it was accompanied by another thick envelope full of military updates for Edward to sift through.
"Ugh, look at all this crap," he said, flipping the corners of the typewritten pages with his thumb. "This committee has a lot more required reading than I thought it would."
"Quit whining and open the other thing!" Winry chided, brandishing a triangle of toast at him from across the table.
"Okay, okay." He tore open the smaller envelope sealed with the military crest and pulled out a cream-coloured paper card.
"Well?" Pinako said, impatient.
Alphonse was trying to read the card over his brother's shoulder, but Ed turned the opposite way.
"Jeez, you guys," he said, then opened it up and read it aloud. "Dear Mr. Edward Elric, a.k.a. the Fullmetal Alchemist, your presence is formally requested at the official residence of the Führer-President of Amestris for a ceremony commemorating the military and civilian heroes of the Promised Day Conflict, to be followed by a light reception. Full dress uniform is to be worn. Please confirm your attendance by telephone."
"See, I told you!" Alphonse said, triumphant.
"Okay, yeah, you really put two and two together on this one," Ed conceded. "That doesn't mean I'm happy about it, though. Full dress uniform, ugh."
Pinako chuckled, taking a sip of her coffee. "You're gonna be quite a sight all dressed up like that. We'll have to make sure somebody gets a picture so we can show it to everybody."
"This is the worst," Ed groaned. "Anyway…" he reached into the bigger envelope his documents had come in, pulling out three identical wax-sealed envelopes and handing them out, "these are for you guys."
"Oh wow, we all get one?" Winry said, staring at the glossy wax seal.
"What a colossal waste of money," Pinako said, grinning as she tore hers open. "Dear Ms. Pinako Rockbell, your presence is formally requested…yada yada yada…Formal dress is recommended."
"This is so cool," Alphonse said. "Who would've thought that a bunch of random regular people from Resembool would be invited to the Führer's official residence, huh?"
"Well, I'm glad you're excited," Ed said, taking a bite of his breakfast sausage. "There's not a whole lot of mystique in it for me now that I've sat in insanely long meetings with Grumman already."
"You're not a big fan?" Winry asked casually.
"I mean, he's okay," Ed replied, pausing to chew. "And obviously I prefer him to the evil homunculus shadow government, so he clears that extremely low bar. But he's just so old and so weird."
"Weird how?"
"He goes on all these super-random tangents all the time that really drag things out—and he's always laughing at nothing and then saying 'you had to be there' when somebody asks what's so funny. He's a smart guy but he's also kind of nuts."
"Okay, now I'm really looking forward to this," Winry said, finally opening her own envelope and reading the invitation.
It was the same as the others, but she still liked seeing her own name written on the fancy cream-coloured paper.
Hours later, up in her bedroom, she took it out again to look at it as she sprawled out on her bed. Even getting to be a guest at something like this—it felt like a bookend, a way to finally draw a line under everything they'd all been through over the past several years. The inherent prestige and luxury of it all held some appeal, for sure, but now that she thought about it, she was really looking forward to being in a room full of people all acknowledging that it was over now, that they'd won.
Plus, well, she was absolutely dying to see a bunch of military top brass try to politely interact with her tough-as-nails grandmother. Granny Pinako had never been shy about her distaste for the military—not that she'd ever been shy about anything—and as such, she'd taken the news that the entire power structure had been a sham quite well. Whether she'd be able to hold her tongue about how much she really knew—let alone rub elbows with the new top brass without bodily injury or property damage—remained to be seen.
Winry's own feelings about it were a bit more complicated. She wanted to have faith that the military now wouldn't ever become anything like what it had been—but it nagged at her that the only parts of military command that weren't "real" were at the top. The Ishvalan massacre that took her parents' lives and decimated the East Area had been orchestrated by the Homunculi, but it was people like Roy and Riza and Major Armstrong and even Maes Hughes who had actually done it. That still didn't sit well with her—although she knew it didn't sit well with them either. They all had to sit with it; it was just another part of the uncomfortable bargain they all had to strike in order to move forward.
Winry knew how to swallow her anger—her real anger, which was separate from her temper—and she knew how to channel it into her work. Most of the time that was enough. But sometimes, when she was working through the night and everything was still and quiet, it would roar up like a flame in the centre of her chest and overtake her. In those moments she had no choice but to sit with the feeling—the aching, rocking, hollow sense of loss in her bones and the white-hot rage that twisted her stomach—and try to keep her breathing slow until it passed. She didn't want to wake anyone else, and she didn't want to fuel it if she could possibly avoid it. She did her best to suppress it, but the fact was that the anger was always there, a little pilot light in her chest ready to flare up at a moment's notice. She wasn't sure it would ever go out.
Maybe it was naïve of her to think this way—or maybe it was the only kind of thinking she could tolerate—but for the most part she did believe that Dr. Marcoh, Roy and Riza and so many of the other soldiers she'd met would keep working to redeem themselves and repair the harm they'd caused. They were all haunted by Ishval—especially Dr. Marcoh, who she'd seen come face to face with patients that his own work had orphaned, maimed, widowed, displaced and disfigured. He understood the burden he was carrying, and Winry knew he was working in Ishval even now.
Something had changed in her after meeting Dr. Marcoh, and after meeting the Ishvalan refugee families in the slums where they'd hidden out. She found herself lying awake thinking about the dozens of kids she'd chased and played with and read to every day for weeks, who never questioned who she was or why she was there so long as she spent time with them. She remembered their mothers, harried and kind, insisting on feeding her every time they saw her, and their fathers and uncles who always seemed to have a new joke at the ready for her. Many of them were sick, all of them were poor, and not one of them hadn't lost family to the war—but the children didn't seem to know it. The adults worked tirelessly to build the camp into a place that felt like home, and it was amazing how successful they were.
But she knew all the while that they were suppressing an anger much bigger than hers, dispossessed and hundreds of kilometres from their actual homes. Her parents had known that, and they'd seen it all firsthand, right up until the moment they died.
Winry had lived with her grief for a long time—in fact, as she'd realized recently with a pang, by next year she'd have lived without parents for longer than she'd lived with them. It was amazing how fresh it could still feel sometimes, raw like a knocked-out tooth, even though she'd had almost half her life to get used to it.
She thought about what her grandmother had told her days after the funeral: missing them won't ever go away, but it will start to feel different someday. She had gone on to explain that when you lose someone, they leave a hole behind in your life. The hole doesn't ever get any smaller, Granny had said, but it's your life that keeps getting bigger. You don't ever forget them—you learn how to carry them with you.
That was it—she had felt her parents' presence in a new way after learning about their lives and their work so directly, and it was changing her. The little pilot light in her chest flickered, but it didn't overtake her this time; it sent a wave of driving, distilled anger over her instead, and she took a long, slow breath.
Her parents had done everything they could. She didn't know what it would mean for her, exactly, but she knew she wanted to do everything she could, too.
Not that there's a whole lot you can do at a dinner party that's going to save anybody's life, Winry reminded herself. Unless maybe somebody needs the Heimlich maneuver done.
But now that she thought about it, having a ceremony to mark the end of the Promised Day—what did they call it? Incident? Insurgence? Fiasco?—was one thing, but for everyone who knew the whole truth about Amestris, it was also marking the beginning of a new kind of country. Things had to be different.
There ya have it.
The next chapter's gonna be a lot more fun, I promise! But I hope at least some of you enjoyed delving a bit more into how Winry feels about her parents and how that might play out down the road.
I can't remember how much of it makes it into the anime, but in the manga there's a really sweet panel showing Winry and a bunch of Ishvalan kids hanging out together in the slums, and I just...hooo, that gets me. There's lots more EdWin coming, but I also really want to write about Just Winry and her own little arc, so stay tuned for that.
Anyway, thanks for reading! Let me know what you think-more soon! :)
