For the first five years of her life, Winry Rockbell lived in a modest apartment in East City. Her parents were both doctors, but her mother only worked part-time so she could look after Winry, and both her parents found time for her and loved her very much.
When she was five, her father sat her down and told her that he and her mother were going to have to go away, maybe for a very long while. That they still loved her very much, but that they were needed somewhere else. He told her that he and her mother were going to go to Ishval to help people, and she was going to go to Risembool to live with her grandmother. He told her all this very simply and very seriously and asked her if she understood. And Winry, five years old and very, very brave, whose parents had taught her kindness all her life, said, "Yes, Daddy," as solemnly as she knew how.
So, a couple months later, Winry hugged her parents goodbye on the train platform, and she cried a long time, and she was a little scared to be going away to live with her grandmother, who she only knew from a few weeks visiting in the summers and monthly phone calls, but she pretended not to be. (And her parents hugged their little girl, and they wiped their tears away before they could really begin falling, and they were very scared to be going off to a warzone, but of course they pretended not to be.)
That first year, Winry probably spent more time at the Elric's than her Grandmother's. Nothing against Granny, of course, Granny was wonderful, but the Elric boys made more interesting company for a little girl, and Mrs. Elric made the best cookies.
Looking back on it, Winry would remember that first year in Risembool as a sort of pinnacle of her childhood, a time full of lighthearted adventure, a time when nothing bad had ever happened, and it felt as though nothing ever could. That isn't true, of course. It is a hard thing for a child to lose everything she's known, to lose her parents. Those first few months, especially, were difficult, with everything so quiet and strange. But the Elrics, then and always, were like a force of nature, so much louder and larger than life, and they swept her up with them in all their adventures to see the world as they did, and for them, 1904 was the year before things began to go wrong.
The year that Winry was six years old, Mr. Hohenheim went away. He did not sit his sons down very seriously and explain where he was going and what he needed to do, he did not ask them if they understood, and he did not say a tearful goodbye on the train platform. He simply stood up one day and left.
Edward Elric was enraged, six years old and ready to fight the whole world, but mostly his father (whom he only called "That Jerk" because he didn't know the word "bastard" or "Fucker" yet) if he could get his hands on him. Alphonse was mostly sad and confused, and he trailed after Ed like a baby duckling, partly because Ed was his older brother, and Al clung to him in a world that no longer made sense, but also because even at five, Al considered it his job to look after Ed and make sure that he didn't get himself or anyone else hurt.
"Maybe," Winry said to Ed one sunny day, "Maybe he had a good reason to leave. Maybe he had somewhere he needed to be, maybe there's something important he needs to do."
"Bulshit!" Ed said. "Shit" was a word Ed had only learned recently, and he knew his mother didn't like him to say it, so he used it sparingly, exactly, like a hidden knife to be pulled out as a last resort.
"That's bulshit," Ed said, "That Jerk didn't have a good reason. There's no such thing. Parents aren't supposed to leave their kids, not ever!"
And Winry, Winry didn't know what to say to that.
Mrs. Elric died on a late spring morning almost a year after Mr. Hohenheim left. Winry went to her funeral, it was the first funeral she had ever been to.
Ed and Al stood on either side of her, like they couldn't bare to stand next to each other, like maybe if they looked at each other they'd hurt each other with their sadness. Alphonse had sobbed silently, shaking, with tears streaming down his cheeks so hard and fast that Winry was vaguely worried he'd get dehydrated, but not making a sound. Ed had sniffled violently, dashing his tears away with angry motions of one hand, while he held on to Winry's so hard with the other that it hurt. Winry had been the only one who cried like a normal person, noisily, with snot getting everywhere. She felt a little silly doing it, because Mrs. Elric wasn't her mother, but Ed and Al were both so quiet it scared her, and someone had to break that silence, and anyway, she couldn't stop.
Edward took to grief with anger, as if he could beat it into submission. But since there was no one to be angry at in this instance, he was merely sullen and bad-tempered and prone to blowing up at everyone at the drop of a hat. Al was a forlorn and equally stubborn shadow following him.
Both brothers refused to move in with Granny and Winry.
Winry was seven years old and not prone to patience, and she didn't understand people yet, quite as well as she thought she did.
"I wasn't this silly when I was five ," Winry said.
"What do you know?" Edward yelled, "It's not like your parents died."
Winry would get a letter from her parents twice in a year, if she was lucky. She had learned to write sending them letters, she wrote to them every single day at first, until her little hands ached and sloppy letters filled the page. She knew that they never received most of them. As time went on her letters dwindled, until now she only thought to write to them every few months. The last time Winry had written to her parents was soon after Mrs. Elric's funeral. She had been halfway through writing it when she realized that her parents didn't really know Mrs. Elric, and she broke down crying and never finished the letter.
Winry listened to the radio and wondered how much of what it said was true. She was seven years old and just beginning to understand what war was, beginning to see the edges of it. She helped Granny with the soldiers stumbling home, saw their scars and missing limbs, saw the things even Granny couldn't fix, and heard their stories sometimes, when they thought she wasn't listening.
"It's not like your parents died ," Ed said, and Winry screamed right back at him.
"They could have! They could have died months ago, and we wouldn't know."
Ed and Winry didn't speak to each other for a long while after that.
"It's our house , Winry," Al explained in the end, "We can't just leave it behind, because if we moved in with you it would still be our house, and it would still be right there, just sadder. We can't live next door to us, it wouldn't work."
The Elric house had belonged to Mrs. Elric's parents before they died. Ed and Al had lived there all their lives and so had their mother. Winry supposed that Granny could remember a time when the Elric house hadn't been built yet and there weren't Elrics living in it, but most people probably couldn't.
Winry's memories of the city were growing fuzzy around the edges, so far away it felt like another world. And even then it had only been the apartment, and her parents had only been renters. But Granny's house was still Granny's house, the place she'd come to visit every summer of her life. Even after two years it still felt like a long, extended visit, even if she had begun to have an unpleasant, twisty feeling in her stomach that her parents were never coming back, and she would stay here forever. Even if she had the even more unpleasant twistier feeling, that she couldn't picture a world where her parents did come back. She couldn't imagine living in a place where she didn't know everyone by name in a ten mile radius, couldn't walk down to the general store by herself and do the shopping, couldn't wander all across the hills and half-drown herself in the creek with the Elric brothers. She couldn't imagine ever leaving Risembool now, couldn't imagine leaving Granny or the Elrics. But still, it was Granny's house and not hers. It was different for Ed and Al.
"Okay," Winry said, and that was the end of it as far as she was concerned.
Granny, of course, had her own opinions, but in the face of steadfast Elrics, there's really nothing that anyone can do. Ed and Al ate and washed their clothes with Granny and Winry, and they even took their baths in Granny's big copper tub, but every night they went to bed in their own house.
For another two years things were alright, they were comfortable. Winry and the Elric brothers continued to be the young terrors of Risembool. They didn't spend so much time playing games of pretend, games began to feel a little too hollow, the real world to spread about them a little too real, for them to want to play at being legendary alchemists or heroes of myth. At least Winry supposed that was Ed's reasoning. She herself had never been that passionate about larger than life fantasies, only happy to follow in the brothers' wake and familiarize herself with the wide, sprawling country. They still wandered, free as the wind, ditching school to alternately be an annoyance underfoot, and help out in the surrounding farms. Ed and Al studied their father's books, advancing in alchemy in leaps and bounds, while Winry spent more and more time helping Granny with automail surgery. But the year that Winry was nine, in the spring shortly after Alphonse's birthday, the Elrics left.
It was an inevitable sort of thing, the Elrics were never the sort of people who stayed, and there had been a kind of frantic energy in them, ever since their mother died, that only built and built as time went on. They said they had learned all they could from their father's books, and were looking for a teacher, which was fair and true enough, even if Winry would have preferred if they were more patient.
"Those boys," Granny said, "Will either kill themselves or change the world. There's no stopping them either way."
As someone who had spent two years trying and failing to tell the Elrics what to do, Winry supposed she was an expert.
As for Winry, she felt a little lonely and strangely left out, but she didn't have much time to dwell on it.
Not long after, in that same year, the Rockbells received a telegram. Winry's parents were dead.
Winry stared blankly at the typed words. There wasn't much in the way of typewriters in Risembool. Print was for the newspapers and schoolbooks, impersonal, having nothing to do with her. Winry stared at the odd, blocky letters, and it didn't feel real, like a story from somewhere far away.
Well, she supposed it was that, technically.
Granny had tears in her eyes. That was the surrealest part of all. Granny and crying did not belong in the same universe.
Winry didn't cry. She thought she should. She had cried for Mrs. Elric, she should cry for her own mother. But she didn't.
It didn't feel any different, was the strange thing. She caught herself forgetting. Wondering if her parents would send a letter, wondering if she should write, and then remembering that they were dead. She hadn't written them in months.
When Mrs. Elric died it had been like the entire world had shifted, like she had left an eternal hole In Ed and Al, a gaping, black void that could never be filled. There had been a fire in Edward's eyes, a rage, all consuming, roaring, unstoppable. There had been an emptiness in Alphonse's, less noticeable, quiet, but vast, and to Winry, at least, who knew them so well, both before and after, far more frightening.
Winry looked at herself in the mirror, and she didn't see any difference at all.
Then she did cry. Curled up on her bed, wondering what was wrong with her, that she wasn't broken, and feeling ridiculous for it. She cried. For her parents, for Ed and Al, for something she couldn't reach, and didn't know.
The Elrics, she knew, were hardly a good template for healthy grieving, but they were the only example she knew of children who had lost their parents.
She had grieved her parents once, when she was five years old and lonely. She had been so very sad then, those first few months. She tried to remember it. Tried to feel what her younger self had felt for parents who were so very large and kind and real. But all the edges were blunted. She thought her mother's hair had been light brown, but she couldn't be sure. She wondered if it had actually been blond, and she had blended her with Mrs. Elric.
She had grieved once, when she was five years old, but she had not understood then. And she had been so sure they would be back soon. Maybe a few months, maybe a year, and for a five year old that was practically forever, but then again it was nothing like forever at all.
She had not quite grieved when her parents left, and now, four years later, it was too late, and she grieved the loss of her grieving.
The Elrics came back in March, just after Winry's tenth birthday. The Elrics came back as, Winry realized, she had never doubted they would. She and Granny welcomed them home with plenty of yelling, and all the hugs they would allow (some, in Al's case, and very few, accompanied by loud protestations in Ed's).
Ed had always had a knack for getting into fights, and Al had always had always had a knack for getting out of them, one way or another. But now it seemed that someone had gone and given them actual training, which was vaguely terrifying. They also seemed to have found their alchemy teacher, and were brimming with alchemical ambition.
Given all of that, and given that Winry herself was now something of a full time apprentice/assistant to Granny, and had to attend school at least three days out of five because Granny said so (and Winry wasn't the sort of girl who ran off and disregarded everything her legal guardian said just because she wasn't her "real parents") they didn't spend as much time together as they used to. But still, it was good to have them back, even if "back" sometimes just meant she could see the lights on next door at three o'clock in the morning. It was comforting to know they weren't off who knows where in the wide, wide world, like somehow she could watch over them.
What time they did spend together, they mostly spent in Mr. Hohenheim's study, talking. Ed and Al were only interested in Science, they considered themselves to be adults now, and had left more childish pursuits behind. At barely-ten-years-old, Winry thought this might be just a little premature, but then again, who was she to say no to Science?
So she and the Elric boys spent long happy hours debating the merits of different metals and alloys. Ed and Al knew all sorts of things about atomic structures and the interactions between elements that Winry was eager to learn. They seemed to have returned from their journey of self discovery with a keen interest in anatomy and human biology, and Winry happily answered all the questions she knew, and looked up what she didn't with them.
There were some things, of course, that Winry didn't know, and neither did Granny, automail was hardly a general field. Risembool didn't have a library, or much that could satisfy the Elrics' voracious appetite for knowledge. Mr. Hohenheim had quite a bit about biological alchemy, but of course the boys had read it all through multiple times by now.
My parents would have known, Winry thought. Odd, how she thought of them more now that they were dead than she ever had when they were alive.
Thinking of her parents, though, gave her an idea. "We could take the train to the City, just over the weekend," Winry said, "They have the library there, it's free and they let anyone read the books, at least the medical ones."
"Why didn't I think of that," Ed said.
Winry asked Granny's permission to go to the City, because she was polite (yes, really) and not an Elric. Granny gave it in the way that meant she knew perfectly well that her asking was just a formality. The way of a person who did not exactly think that her grandaughter taking an overnight train to a large city with only two other children for company was exactly a good idea, but who had more or less discovered the uselessness of "putting your foot down" when a couple of recently bereaved little boys had concluded that the concept of adult supervision was optional.
It was strange to be in the City again. She had forgotten what it smelled like, and yet it was simultaneously the most familiar scent in the world. She hadn't been here since she was five years old, and early childhood felt like another dimension, which she was now looking in on from the outside, too big to fit in it, and too small to reach its bigness.
Ed and Al took the lead as they headed out through the city in search of the library, and that was its own sort of strangeness. Edward always led the way at home, of course. He was, as he was always reminding her, the oldest. But Winry could remember when they were all very small, and she told them stories of the City, how she had told them there were buildings made of concrete that went up and up and up, and had metal inside for bones, and how Eward and Alphonse had stared at her with wide, wide eyes and didn't believe a word. Now they were Men of the World, and she was only a little girl from Risembool, who could hardly believe that the buildings went up so high without falling over, even if they were smaller than she remembered.
Or, well, really Ed and Al were still only a pair of small, country boys, even if Ed thought he was a man, and they were doing their fair share of wide-eyed staring. But Alphonse knew how to weaponize that, and got them good directions instead of muggings. As always, Alphonse was a little terrifying.
They reached the library and Ed and Al were in love. The rows upon rows of books were certainly impressive, but personally Winry preferred places with more grease and metal and an actual human patient, alive and messy. Books were important and necessary for understanding what you were doing, but she preferred the doing, she'd take metal and gears and good old fashioned elbow grease over the library any day. But then, that was alchemists for you, alchemy was all theory that sometimes somehow became reality. Or blew up in your face.
That being said, Winry still dove headfirst into this treasure trove of knowledge, and she was surprised to learn just how much she already knew about medicine. Ed and even Alphonse were geniuses in such a loud, flashy sort of way, they shone so very brightly, that Winry had never thought of herself as anything exceptional, she was the ordinary to balance out their ridiculousness. So it was a bit of a shock to realize that at the age of ten she knew more about, say, the human nervous system than most doctors.
Eventually though, Winry got bored of arguing with the Elrics about exactly how much selenium there was in the human body (answer: who the hell cares?) and wandered over to the mechanical engineering section instead.
Looking back, Winry could hardly believe she hadn't realized the boys were about to do something incredibly stupid, as though as long as they were right in front of her nothing bad could happen.
One night Winry was woken by a loud, metallic banging sound. When she ran down the stairs and opened the door, a huge suit of armor was carrying most of Edward Elric.
Winry had never once been sick at the sight of the parts of a human that were never meant to be seen beneath the skin and flesh, and she refused to be sick now. Instead, she scrambled to stop the bleeding and tried to remember what blood type Ed was. Granny was there moments after Winry was, and together they managed to mostly keep him from leaking and get him to surgery where they got some replacement blood into him. The suit of armor had Alphonse's voice, but that was a problem for later.
Ed wasn't dead. That's all that could be said for him, really, he wasn't dead.
In the end, Alphonse told them the story of it, how he and Ed had tried to bring their mother back, how Ed had traded his arm for Alphonse's soul and sealed him into the armor. It all sounded like some sort of nightmareish fairytale.
She and Granny manhandled Ed into a wheelchair in the morning, and manhandled him into the Granny had made up for him all those years ago when Mrs. Elric died. He looked terrifyingly small with half his limbs gone, he looked terrifyingly small, broken and quiet and defeated. Ed spent the days sitting in his wheelchair, silent and unmoving, like a dead thing. Alphonse sat next to him in a heap of metal, silent and perfectly still, like something that had never been alive. It was difficult to keep from staring at Ed. Winry was used to seeing people who were missing limbs, some of them chose to get automail and some of them didn't, but it was Ed's quiet that was so loud, so wrong, so impossible to ignore.
Winry didn't know what to do. She wanted to scream at Ed, she wanted to help somehow, she wanted to snap him out of it. But Winry had matured since she was seven. She knew that wasn't how trauma worked, she knew better than to yell at people who were hurt. So Winry tried to be quiet and she tried to be kind. It only added to the bizarreness of the situation, and if Ed were in any state to notice would have found it very creepy. (Alphonse did notice, and later he would tell her that he appreciated the effort, but please never be nice again.)
Then, a random soldier walked into their house, yelled at Ed, and snapped him out of it.
If anyone asked, Winry wouldn't have been able to explain why it needed to be her who made the automail, she just knew that it had to be. It had something to do with Ed, the way that he prickled at charity, the way he could never quite trust Granny, even if he loved her very much deep down, and it had something to do with Winry, the way he was her best friend, the way she felt responsible, and the way that this felt like a milestone with no turning back, one the Elrics had already crossed and she needed to be a part of.
Winry was ready. She knew her way around a wrench and a scalpel. She had been helping Granny for years, and she was very good at it. She knew she was ready, and she knew it had to be Ed.
Granny did not ask questions when Winry told her what she wanted. She only looked her up and down, as if weighing every inch of her.
"Alright," Granny said, "Do it properly then."
Winry did do it properly. She kept her construction of the arm and leg simple, even though her mind was buzzing with innovations she wanted to try out. She only made sure that it was easy to modify as Ed grew taller and she found ways of improving it.
And at the age of eleven, Winry performed her first surgery.
When Winry Rockbell was eleven years old she walked with her two best friends to the train platform. She hugged Al even though he couldn't feel it, because she knew he would appreciate it anyway. She didn't hug Ed, because she knew he wouldn't appreciate it, and because she thought if she hugged him she might never let go. She had promised herself she wouldn't cry, she had been sure she wouldn't, but she cried, a little, anyway.
"You understand why we have to go, right?" Ed asked, with that pinched look he had always gotten on his face when she cried for as long as she could remember.
"Of course," Winry said with a firm nod of her head. Because despite all the times over the past year she'd yelled at him and called him an idiot, all the times she tried to change his mind, of course she understood.
So the Elrics went away to join the military, and Winry stood on the train platform in Risembool and watched them go.