JJ doesn't know exactly what wakes her. After the day they've had, she should be absolutely dead to the world, beyond exhausted. Something woke her up though.

It's a high, tight sound of pain that finally kicks her brain from blurry to moving, grateful she took the bottom bunk. She pads over to Ed's bed, and the moon is bright enough through the window that she can see he's curled up.

"Ed?" she says, not a whisper but low, not wanting to wake Derek if she can avoid it. No reason for all three of them to lose sleep.

Curling into himself more, Ed whimpers, his left hand clutching at the appliance where his right arm is usually attached.

Phantom pains, she realizes. Ed had seemed almost dismissive of them before they went to bed, and she'd been too focused on other things to quite register how cavalier he'd been.

"Ed?" she calls a little louder, not daring to touch him when he's in so much pain. "Ed?"

"Sorry," he grits out.

She's not going to waste his energy arguing about the fact that he has nothing to apologize for. "Can I sit?"

"Should go back to bed," he tells her.

"We both know that's not going to happen," she says, running a hand through her hair. "I know you'd rather have Mustang here, but you don't have to do this alone."

He must have a new pain sensation because he tries to curl up even more, and JJ's heart hurts for him. She knows there's nothing you can do for phantom pains except ride them out.

Since he's in no position to protest, she sits next to him and begins to run her hand over his hair.

"Talk to me?" Ed asks after a minute, his voice still tight.

Distract me, she hears. Since he's so top of mind, she says, "Did I tell you about the stuffed animal that Henry got Mikey?" He makes a tiny shake of the head, so she dives in, telling him about the adorable little Mikey-sized thing called a Beanie Boo that looks like a tie-dye leopard cub. How Henry had picked it up at some school thing for him, and Mikey is obsessed with it because he loves anything that's brightly colored. The name on its tag is Dotty, and it is now required to go everywhere with Mikey.

When she's done regaling him with Dotty's Adventures, she moves on to talking about how different it is growing up with brothers is from raising boys. She stays away from work, from cases, trying to stay on things as lighthearted and innocuous as possible.

She isn't sure how much Ed's really hearing, but the tension slowly seeps from him. When she's about to launch into a new story—this one about some of the embarrassing things she did in college—Ed's hand nudges her thigh.

"I'm good now," he says. "Thanks."

JJ looks down at him for a long moment. "Are you really?"

He snorts. "In as much as I ever am," he says. "Really though—it helped."

"What does Mustang usually do?"

"Mostly what you did. Pets my hair and calls me pretty," he teases, and JJ's too relieved to be teased to be annoyed. "Well, pets my hair or rubs my back. Mostly he'll read to me, but at night, sometimes, he tells me stories like you did. Sometimes about his team from before I joined, sometimes about…" he trails off, then sighs heavily. "I'm gonna get everyone home, Jayge. I won't let you guys get stuck here." Like we were, he doesn't say, but he doesn't have to.

It's been one day. Only one day. They travel all the time and are away from home much longer than that all the time. It shouldn't be this hard, not yet. The fact that she can't just call Will and talk to him or Henry or listen to Mikey babble through the phone makes the distance seem much farther, far more insurmountable.

"I don't know how you did it," she admits.

"We had each other," Ed says, like it's simple, and it finally starts sinking in that for Ed, it is that simple. While she feels like the Ed she's learning about is a completely separate person from the Ed she's worked with, he's not. He's still the Ed she knows, she just has context now for the things she noticed that didn't fit but weren't wrong enough to challenge before. He's freer here, freer to be himself, but he's not fundamentally different.

"We knew, you know? We knew that you had terrible things in your past."

Ed scoffs. "You'd have been pretty shitty profilers if you hadn't figured that out." She chuckles softly in agreement. "It's different though, isn't it? Knowing there's bad stuff and knowing what the bad stuff was?"

"It's stupid, I know. I should be glad that the reason you didn't like to be touched is you were protecting your automail, not…" She doesn't want to say it, doesn't want to put those words out into the universe. In the hush of the deep night, it feels like putting that out there could cast some sort of spell. Ed says his alchemy isn't magic, and maybe he believes that, but in this place, JJ figures that being cautious can only be good.

"But you hear how young I was, and you think of Henry," he fills in.

"Yeah," she says, stroking his bangs back. "I do."

"You know it's not the same, right?"

"Ed…" she starts.

"No, really," he interrupts, not angry or agitated, just in a hear me out tone that makes her wait. "Henry has you and Will. He's always had you. Me and Al were mostly on our own from the time we were like, four and five. We were traveling on our own at eight and nine. Amestris is like… turn of the century compared to where your world is at. It's just not that strange for kids to be out on their own or to be handling adult-like responsibilities. And we were way too fucking smart for our own good." She opens her mouth but he holds up his hand. "I'm not going to argue the morality of it—I'm just telling you it's different. Your kids get to be kids. We didn't."

Silence falls between them as Ed lets her process. He's not telling JJ anything she doesn't already know rationally. She knows Ed's not Henry, she just can't stop equating them in her mind, imagining Henry being a little older, doing the kinds of things that Ed was doing. It's horrifying, and she's pretty sure that he's still not telling them things.

She is seeing Henry, but he's also forgetting something else. "You are part of this team, which makes you part of this family, whether you wanted to be or not," she says. "Don't expect me to magically be okay with learning about how much trauma you've been through. It's old for you, but it's new for us. No matter what we deal with day in, day out, it's different when it's people you know. It's different when it's family."

"I know," is all he says, and JJ thinks it's enough. He knows why it's hard for her. She knows why it's hard for him. She also knows there's more he's not telling them, and as much as it pains her to, she knows that it isn't her place to demand answers, that she's not owed them. For Ed, these are old pains, old hurts, wounds long healed regardless of the scars they've left. Picking at old scars can do nothing but make them worse.

The last thing she wants to do is be a source of further pain for Ed.

Soft, even breathing tells her that Ed has dropped back off to sleep. As she gets up to tuck him back in, she notices a pale ruby glow from his wrist. It's nowhere near as bright as it was before, but it's still there, showing the array is active.

She debates waking up Derek or going to find someone, but she remembers the pain on Ed's face when they forced him awake last time. She doesn't think it was all because of the automail reattaching. A faint smile pulls at Ed's lips, and JJ decides to let it go. Ed has barely slept and he wasn't worried about it. If he doesn't wake up on his own in the morning, they have options. She doesn't want to cause any more harm tonight.

Turning to go back to her bed, her feet seem stuck to the floor. Something in her is telling her that leaving it alone is wrong. She needs to at least tell someone. Decision made, she is reaching for the door when it opens and Mei steps in.

"Oh, you're awake," she says to JJ, surprised.

"Ed's array is active again," JJ replies. "I was just going to tell someone…"

"I just got Eden back to bed and thought I'd come check on him when I felt it activate."

"You can feel it?" JJ asks.

"It's… difficult to describe," Mei says haltingly. "But yes." She steps over to his bed on cat-light feet, taking his forearm in her hand, turning it until the array is face up. It's still dim but definitely lit.

"Do we need to wake him up?" JJ asks.

"I… don't think so," Mei says. "But I'll stay with him just in case."

"You're a new mom," JJ says. "I can stay up."

Mei smiles at her. "I appreciate it, but you're not an alchemist. If something changes and we need to wake him up, you won't be able to. Get some rest, Ms. Jareau. I insist."

JJ wants to argue, but Mei's right. "Only if you wake me up if you need to wake him," she says.

"I hardly think I could do otherwise," she assures.

Right. Small room. It would take a lot of noise to wake Ed. Still, she says, "Thank you."

Mei smiles and sits where JJ had sat earlier, keeping Ed's wrist in her hand. It's the last thing JJ sees before she slips off to sleep.

.o0o.o0o.o0o.

Roy curls around Ed's back and wraps his arm over Ed's waist, searching for the flesh hand, tangling their fingers together. Ed stirs just enough to squeeze back before settling back into sleep. Even with the automail, Ed is a radiator, and his warmth is exactly what Roy needs to sink into a deep, restful sleep.

.o0o.o0o.o0o.

"Hey, idiot," Winry says, smacking Ed in the head with a pillow.

He sits up, startled, ready to fight, and blinks at her dumbly for a long moment. "Winry?"

"No, I'm Jean. Of course , Winry," she says. "Get up!"

"Jean?"

"Havoc!"

Rubbing his eyes and yawning widely, he levers himself up using his arm. "Since when are you on a first-name basis with Havoc?"

She can feel her face heat up, but he's not getting away with it that easily. "None of your damn concern! I stayed up all night building your automail for you! The least you can do is get your lazy ass up so I can give it to you and make sure everything's good!"

He glances around the small room. "Where are JJ and Morgan?"

"Getting breakfast, which you can do after we reattach the new automail. It's been long enough since you've had an upgrade, I don't think you eating before reattachment is a good idea."

"Hey, I took good care of my automail!"

"You did," she concedes because she had been astonished the night before when she looked at it exactly how well he had taken care of it. "I didn't think you knew how."

"Yeah, well, that world doesn't have automail or automail mechanics. I had to figure it out myself, and if it broke, I was screwed. "

That must be true, but she still wouldn't have believed that Ed , of all people, could actually have done such a meticulous maintenance job on the automail. It wasn't unusual for automail to get replaced and upgraded every year or two—not that Ed's usually lasted more than a few months without some sort of accident—but it's more than just the shape the automail it's in, it's the obvious care given to it. "Even when you were in this world, you did a shitty job of keeping your automail maintenanced," Winry points out, picking up the leg from the table.

"Yeah, well, like I said, I had you. Roy's useless with anything mechanical, and their best prosthetics don't come close to automail. I was also hiding it. I needed it to be as normal-seeming as possible. I couldn't do that if I didn't maintain it."

"Are you seriously telling me that all of my yelling at you about how to properly take care of your automail didn't go in one ear and out the other?" she asks, trying to decide if she's going to reattach the leg or bludgeon him with it.

"I always hear what you're saying," Ed says flatly. "I just don't usually listen. "

Bludgeon. She's definitely going to bludgeon him.

Ed seems to realize it because he lifts his normal arm up and shields his face. "I'm sorry! All right! I've proven I can take care of your precious automail, okay? I'll make sure I keep taking care of it!"

"You had better," she says, making herself set the leg on the bed next to him, then kneeling down and pulling out her inspection tool. "Before I reattach, I want to check your ports." She taps it around on the inside, and then Ed makes sound of trapped pain in his throat.

"That fucking hurts!"

"Good, it should," she says, tapping it again another strangled and choked sound out of Ed.

"Fucking sadist."

"I'm an automail mechanic," she points out, leaving that nerve alone for the moment and moving onto the next one, knowing she's hit the right thing when Ed yelps. "If I couldn't handle my patients being in pain, I wouldn't be one." Another test of the ports, and yet another barely held back scream. When she lets off, Ed is gasping like he just had a workout.

"Fuck, Win…"

"I can tell you're not removing the automail often," she says, hitting another spot. She expects a noise from Ed but doesn't get it. She tries again but still gets nothing. "Have you been having responsiveness problems with the last two toes?"

"Yeah, for about a month."

It's a minor miracle it's only been that long. "Hold on a sec," she says, getting to her feet and grabbing her kit off the table. She kneels back in front of Ed, lifting his thigh up to get a better view of the inside of the port and can see the buildup. "How often are you cleaning the ports?"

"Not often, since I don't take it off unless I absolutely have to," he says pointedly.

She grabs a spray bottle of her patented automail port cleaning solution, and sprays it inside. "We need to give it a minute to break up the buildup," she says. "Fair warning: it's going to suck when I clean it out."

"I expect nothing less," he replies drolly. The quiet only lasts for a moment before he says, "You sent JJ and Morgan out so they didn't have to see this, didn't you?"

The solution is fizzing and beginning to bubble, which is what it should be doing. "They keep treating you like a kid," she says after a minute. "They just…"

"They don't get it," he says, voice clear and solemn in a way he usually only is for serious topics. "But it should get better. I talked to Jayge last night."

She looks away from the solution to meet Ed's eyes. They've always been so clear, so sure. They still are, even now, even after all he's been through and after all that has happened. Ed is still a rock in her life, and he's one she doesn't think she fully realized how much she missed until she had him back.

Clearing her throat, she pulls a clean cloth out and focuses back on the port. "They seem nice enough."

"They are," he says, then shudders as she begins to clean the port out. " Fuck, why is that always so weird?"

"It shouldn't be weird, it should hurt," she reminds, grabbing a little syringe out of her kit to suction out the tiny pieces of buildup that the cleaning cloth missed, then sprays it down a second time. Three cleanses to make absolutely sure everything is clean is best in her experience.

"It's not there yet," he replies in the tone he usually gets when something unnerves him. It's a relief, really, to hear that tone.

"Why didn't you let General Mustang help you clean the ports?"

"Aside from the fact that Roy knows even less about automail than I do?" he retorts.

"You could have taught him," she points out.

"Yeah, but if either of us fucked up something down there, it was going to be a problem. I just tried to keep it as clean as possible and tried not to remove them if I could avoid it."

"Well, it looks like there's… charcoal, almost? In here," she says, pushing the clean cloth back in while Ed shudders and makes that freaked out sound again, the big baby.

"I… might have been in a fire recently."

Winry stills and looks up at him. "You."

"Yeah."

"Were in a fire."

"Yeah."

She sits back and stares. "Holy crap, how did General Mustang react?"

He winces and looks away. "Not great."

"No shit!" she snaps. "We are talking about Roy Mustang here, right? The Flame Alchemist. The Butcher of Ishval!"

"Hero—"

"I can't imagine why he might not react well to his partner being in a fire!" She grabs the pillow off the bed and smacks him in the head with it. "How long ago was this?"

"Like a week and a half?"

That makes her pause. "But you said you've been having trouble with the toes for a month."

"'Cause I have—"

She grabs his thigh and shifts it again to get a better look, grabbing a small scalpel to scratch at the interior. She scrapes it out and then puts it on the clean cloth, taking a close look at it.

"What is it?"

"It looks like you've got a little blood in here," she says, examining the broken up bits closely.

"... That's not normal, is it?"

"No. Blood in the ports is not normal or good," she agrees. "But it's also not normal for kids who were your age to get automail put in at all, and if you'd been here, I think we would have changed out the ports at some point after you finished growing. I'd just feel better if the blood were from then rather than more recently, because that at least would make sense."

When Ed doesn't reply, she looks back up at him to see him scratching his nose the way he does when he's done something he's embarrassed by.

"What did you do?" she asks.

"Uh… before the fire I might have had to tromp a few miles through the desert."

"Through the desert?"

"Dragging an unsub—er, a bad guy."

"... A few miles, through the desert, dragging someone with you?"

"Yeah?"

"What other stupid thing did you do?" She crosses her arms and glares, because while that could certainly have been a contributing factor—Ed's automail really wasn't made for desert conditions—she knows when there's something else he's not telling her.

"I might have… caught a major support beam in my hand… In the fire…"

"You did what?"

"It's not like I had a choice!" he rushes to assure her, and Winry forces herself to lower the wrench she grabbed on reflex. "If I hadn't caught it, the girl I was saving would have died! It was just… a really big… hot beam…"

She drops the wrench back into the toolbox with a clang. "That actually explains some of the damage I found on your automail last night. I knew it had to be relatively new. You're lucky you found your way back when you did. Especially with this buildup, I don't know how long it would have been before it started giving you serious problems." She picks the clean cloth back up, sprays the dried blood and charcoal residue from it with her solution, and uses the scalpel to break it apart quickly. "Yeah, there's definitely sand in here," she confirms. "That could definitely have irritated internal structures and caused the bleeding, especially if you were putting loads on the automail that they weren't designed for," she says, relieved to have a rational explanation, or as rational as Ed got anyway.

She spends the better part of an hour meticulously cleaning out Ed's ports in his leg until they're as clean as she can get them. The ports are one part of his automail that Ed does not transmute because he just doesn't know their fine workings well enough to put them back if he does. Once they're clean, she attaches the new automail, and Ed's strangled gasp is both familiar and oddly nostalgic as he endures the pain.

"How does that feel?" she asks as he takes a moment to catch his breath before moving the foot around. Ed had skewed her understanding of how quickly people recovered from automail surgery for a long time, so she's not really surprised when he starts moving it almost immediately.

He sighs in honest relief. "So much better. It's really fucking light too," he adds, swinging the foot like a little kid.

"You think I don't have better alloys after eight years?" she asks, incredulous. "Budge up. I need to clean out the shoulder next."

"Yes, sir!" he salutes with the wrong hand, since it's the only one he has, and she pokes him in the ribs in retaliation before setting her kit on the bed next to him. As she cleans out the shoulder ports, she gives Ed the full rundown of the new alloy, as well as rambling about some of the combinations she's tried while he's been gone. He cares about the chemistry, so she knows he's listening between hisses, gasps, and yelps. The shoulder is a little worse off than the leg, which makes sense, as it's easier for water and particles to get into it.

She's getting ready to slot the arm back into place when Ed asks softly, "How's Granny?"

Shoving the arm in without warning him is more a reflex than intention, and Ed cries out, reaching to hold the arm as if he can soothe the pain of automail the way he might soothe sore muscles. She swallows, struggles to speak, but the words catch in her throat. It's only been about eight months, and her loss is still fresh, if not unexpected. But saying the words… saying the words is still unbearably hard.

Ed doesn't look at her, letting his hair shield his face as he keeps his head bowed. "Did she… did she get to meet Eden?" he asks, not needing the words to know.

"No," she finally manages to say. "But she knew about her." She takes a deep breath that still trembles. Ed must hear it because he turns to look at her. The pain in his eyes is raw, but he's not surprised. Granny was old when he and the General vanished; he must have realized sometime in the past day that the only reason Granny wouldn't be here was that she couldn't be. "She—Granny said the baby would be a girl," she adds, trying to smile.

The tears that fall from her eyes surprise her; Ed reaching his arms out to comfort her surprises her more. He's never been good at physical shows of comfort. Honestly, he's never been all that great at conventional comfort at all. It must be something he learned in the other world.

Something about being held like this, being held by the one other person other than Al who could understand, down to his soul, what it is to lose Granny, who will mourn her nearly as much as Winry, makes the sobs come fast and ugly.

"She always believed," she tells him between gasps for breath and terrible cries. "She always believed you were out there and you'd find a way home."

His flesh hand strokes her hair, oddly soothing, oddly out of place because Ed doesn't do gentle. Not like this.

"I'm so sorry it took us so long to get home," he says, and his voice is thick with his own sorrow, but she knows that tears won't come for him. "I'm sorry I wasn't here."

"You should be sorry!" she tells him, lashing out. "We needed you, and you weren't here." She knows it's not fair. She knows Ed would have been here if he could have, that he would never have chosen to be away from them at that time, but still, it hurts that he wasn't there.

"I'm here now," he tells her, and the grief in his voice makes her cry even harder. Somewhere in her mind, she knows it's been eight months, the pain shouldn't still be this fresh, this intense. She must have been mumbling without realizing it because Ed says, "There's no statute of limitations on grief, Win. We all grieve in our own times, in our own ways. And Granny is worth grieving. We grieve because we have suffered a loss. Even though she was old and lived a good life, we love her, and we will always miss her. We'll always miss her."

He bends his head into her hair, holding her as tightly as she's holding him. His voice had been strained, his grief palpable, and Winry doesn't know when he said we'll always miss her, if he was talking about Granny or his mother or both.

It doesn't matter. He'll always grieve them both, not the kind of grief that comes with tears and sobs that wrack his whole body—that's never been how Ed grieves. It's Winry who shakes as she cries, screams her sorrow out for anyone to hear. Ed just holds her, solid and real and stable, and exactly what she needs right now. Not crying, because that has never been how he mourns.

That's fine; she'll cry enough for them both.