Chapter 7

Fall From Grace

For long moments, Ed didn't move. He stared at the numbers tattooed on Winry's skin, scarcely able to believe what he was seeing. Beside him, he heard the hitch in Al's breath that told him his younger brother was similarly shocked.

Winry gently extricated her arm from his grasp and re-bound the cloth over her forearms, her eyes unreadable. Envy and Paninya suddenly seemed very interested in their drinks, but Scar was staring directly at Ed, and something in the Ishbalan's expression reminded Ed of their conversation last night.

"Vharla has been through more than you think...more than any of us can possibly imagine."

"Winry..." his voice came out as a dry croak, and he swallowed harshly before trying again. "Winry...what...is that...?"

"It's none of your business," Winry hissed.

Something inside Ed snapped. "The hell it isn't!" he snarled. "There's only one place you get a tattoo like that, Winry!" His voice softened, and he finished in an almost pleading tone, "You were in a prison camp, weren't you?"

Winry swallowed and closed her eyes briefly, as though shutting the world out. She supposed it had been foolish – to hope they might be able to reunite without ever discussing what had happened to her. They would have demanded an explanation eventually...

Something inside her shrank from that thought like a vampire from sunlight. But Winry gritted her teeth, took a deep, cleansing breath and faced the impending crisis head-on.

"Not here," she relented, already pushing her chair back from the table.

"Our room," Al said desperately, scrambling to follow her. "We can-"

"Fine," Winry said shortly, striding out the door with the air of one who just wanted to get it all over with.

Neither Envy, Paninya or Scar commented when their leader and her two childhood friends walked out.

oooooooo

The distance back to Ed and Al's room was covered swiftly in the heavy, constrained type of silence that accompanies a funeral. Winry's demeanor didn't encourage conversation – there was a coldness about her now, a jaggedness, like a shard of broken glass frosted with ice.

Even when Ed and Al let her into their room, neither of them dared to break her imposed silence. They closed the door and stood awkwardly in the middle of room, both privately wondering what they should do or say to put Winry at ease.

The blonde woman was leaning against the window, looking out at the darkening sky. Her spine was straight, her shoulders rigid, her lips pressed together and her eyes shadowed. Nothing about her body language was encouraging.

Then, as though a switch had been flipped, her whole posture suddenly relaxed. Her shoulders slumped, her head bowed, and she looked...defeated.

"What do you want to know?" she asked softly, turning to face them.

Her expression was resigned, like a condemned prisoner facing a long-awaited execution. Paradoxically, her despairing capitulation made Ed angry.

"What kind of question is that?" he growled, ignoring the way Al tried to subtly kick him in the shin. "We want to know what happened to you!"

There was an odd look in Winry's eyes, as though she were trying to decide how much they could take. "Everything?"

Al bit his lip, but answered for both he and Ed. "Everything."

"Well, you got my letters, right?" Winry began, her shifting weight the only indication of her discomfort.

"Yeah...but then they stopped about six months in," Ed said softly.

Winry nodded. "That's when I was caught. The spy I was working for was found out, and under the H-Faction's tortures, she gave up my name. They came for me in the middle of the night – actually killed Garfiel to get to me. They...found out...that I knew nothing about the spy's other contacts-"

"You were tortured?" Al yelped, his voice several octaves higher than usual.

Winry nodded. "Standard procedure for captured spies. Eventually, they figured out I was telling the truth when I told them I didn't know anything. So they sent me to a...a prison camp, I guess you could call it...called the Angel's Nest. And there, they-"

Winry paused, then suddenly removed her jacket. Ignoring Ed and Al's noises of surprise, she began to unbutton her shirt, parting it in the centre, revealing the white cloth of her bra, the curves of her breasts...

And the transmutation circle tattooed on the centre of her chest.

Ed choked. He'd seen that circle before...he stepped closer to Winry, staring at the tattoo, trying to pinpoint where it was from. It was the same black ink as the numbers imprinted on her forearm, the raven-coloured lines twisting in an intricate yet simplistic array, broken in two by a scar that started a few inches below the hollow of her throat and disappeared beyond the barrier of her shirt.

Then, as abrupt and as shocking as a train wreck, Ed realised where he'd seen that tattoo before. It was the same as the one imprinted on the chest of the man he had killed.

The Angel of Death.

But...that meant Winry was...

"I was an Angel of Death," she said softly, tracing her fingers over the tattoo and the scar that cleaved it. "The eighteenth Angel of Death, to be precise."

Ed couldn't move, couldn't speak. His whole being was focused on those words – words that implied so much horror...but made so much chilling sense.

The tattoo on her wrist; two digits, not six...so different from all the other prison camp tattoos he'd seen. Winry's inexplicable, unsettlingly expertise in fighting techniques and alchemy.

An Angel of Death. Winry Rockbell – cheerful, energetic, innocent Winry Rockbell had been an Angel of Death. Winry Rockbell, whose hands had eased pain, granted new movement and welcomed a newborn baby into the world...forced to kill in the name of the enemy.

"They kept us – me and the others they were training – in that place for...I don't really know, over a year," Winry continued, re-buttoning her shirt. "I won't pretend to understand what they did to us there. They taught us to kill, of course, in everything from alchemy to martial arts, but the way they did it...they implanted the techniques with a form of...brainwashing, I guess you could call it. That's the closest I can come to describing it."

"Were they all...prisoners?" Al asked tentatively.

Winry nodded. "No one was there by consent, except the soldiers who kept us there, and the scientists and alchemists who were working on us. I don't know how the H-Faction chose who would be sent there and who wouldn't be, or why they chose to work only with captives. All I know is what they did to us. And what they did to us was 'teach' us those techniques and abilities that the Angels of Death are famous for, and then to make sure we could use them..."

Winry trailed off and bit her lip. She took a deep breath, and started again. "The 'tests', as they called them, were brutal. That's the only way I can describe it. The ones who survived became Angels of Death, and were tattooed with that circle to keep us in servitude. The wrist tattoos were just a form of identification."

"But why aren't you still killing for them?" Al blurted in his distress, then realised how tactless his question had been. "I mean...uh..."

"I know what you mean," Winry reassured him. "I was in their control for a few months. I'm not really sure how long. But in that battle that wiped the other Angels out, I caught a piece of shrapnel in the chest. Sliced right through the circle, and I guess when the circle was broken, it broke their hold on me."

"How did you survive?" Ed asked quietly. "The battle, I mean."

"Quite simple, really. As soon as their hold on me was broken, there was nothing keeping me fighting anymore. So I turned tail and ran."

"Back to Rush Valley?"

"No, back to the Angel's Nest." At Ed and Al's disbelieving looks, she clarified, "I knew the H-Faction were training a new batch of Angels, and I wanted to get them out before they suffered what we'd suffered."

Ed found himself shaking his head. Alone on a battlefield, injured, terrified, only just freed from horrifying mind-control...Winry had still thought of others first.

"And I was in desperate need of medical attention," Winry added. "That was the only place within miles that would treat me."

She licked her lips nervously. "At the Angel's Nest, they were so pleased one of their Angels had survived the massacre they didn't even question how I'd gotten away or check to make sure I was still under their control. They just patched me up and left me in the infirmary. I broke out that same night, along with the other prisoners."

"But how did you get back to Rush Valley? All those people...didn't someone notice?" Al piped up.

Winry shook her head. "While none of them were as...advanced...as me, they had still been subjected to some basic training. Including stealth. The H-Faction never knew there was a small army passing through their territory until we were actually in Rush Valley."

Another pause stretched into silence while Winry gathered her thoughts. "Looking back, it was probably rather lucky that the people who were following me had such training. It's the only reason we were able to drive the H-Faction out of Rush Valley. But the fight..." her eyes grew distant, and crinkled slightly in the corners. "Paninya lost her hand. Dominic and his family lost their lives. And they weren't the only ones."

The short period of silence seemed almost contemplative, as though Winry were mourning those who had given their lives for her cause.

Then she gave herself a little shake, and went on, "The rest, as they say, is history. We freed Rush Valley and set up the Resistance under the same symbol that had once freed me."

For a moment, Ed was confused at her last words. Then he remembered the symbol of the Resistance, the bisected circle – like the transmutation circle tattooed on her chest, broken by the scar. The symbol of her freedom had become the symbol of hope for those oppressed by the H-Faction.

But Winry was still speaking, and he wasn't left any time to dwell on that thought. "But that's when the H-Faction began to attack in earnest – they couldn't just let me get away, considering what I knew."

Al's brow wrinkled slightly. "But...you were a prisoner! How much could you have known?"

"I was an Angel of Death!" Winry snapped. "I knew battle plans, positions of troops, methods of attack. I knew locations of prison camps, I knew their spies, their current intelligence, their scientific developments, their prototype weapons." With a breath to calm herself down, she finished quietly, "I didn't know everything, but I still knew far, far too much for them to let me get away."

"That's why Scar was worried about assassins," Ed realised.

Winry smiled faintly, and pulled up her shirt and tapped a long scar across her side, as though someone had tried to run her through. "It's not the first time I've been attacked. I make jokes about his over-protectiveness, but his paranoia has saved me more than once. Just don't tell him I said that."

Ed dimly noted the fact that he could see another line of scar tissue that cut across her lower abdomen, as though someone had tried to disembowel her. And he could see the ending of the scar that cut through the transmutation circle tattooed on her chest – it ended a few inches above her navel. Some part of him wondered how she could have survived such a blow, let alone escaped from a prison camp while so injured. But he reminded himself Winry now possessed more than a passing knowledge of alchemy, and had obtained medical treatment before she attempted the break-out...they had probably transmuted something to staunch the wound.

"The Resistance was only barely holding ground. I knew we needed more recruits, I just couldn't see how we were going to get them." Winry chuckled a little, but the sound was brittle. "Then I remembered how I'd started the army in the first place – with those I'd helped escape from the prison camp. So I took a small group of my elite fighters into H-Faction territory, and we attacked a prison camp. The people we freed joined us, and slowly, we grew from an annoying thorn in the H-Faction's side to a real threat."

"And that's when you started to spread outwards from Rush Valley," Ed assumed. "Forcing the H-Faction back."

She nodded. "Now you know."

Winry stared levelly at the brothers, her whole body so still it could have been carved from marble. Her face was like a blank canvas, devoid of expression and warmth, her eyes resting on them but appearing not to actually see them.

It was disturbing for Ed and Al, seeing Winry so frozen. Perhaps the most defining characteristic about Winry had been her energy, they way she was never quite still. Even when sitting down and involved in conversation, some part of her would still be moving – fingers tapping restlessly on a surface, a foot wiggling to the beat of music only she could hear. It was as though her skin wasn't enough to contain her ceaseless energy, forcing it to express itself in any way it could so she didn't fly to pieces.

But now...she was like a statue locked in frost, cold and completely still. And she said they now knew what had happened to her? Both Ed and Al knew they hadn't even begun to understand.

Ed was suddenly reminded of Scar's words, their meaning slowly taking shape in his mind, like looking into a pool of clouded water. You might not see anything at first, but if you looked long enough and your eyes focused on the right level...

"She's not as strong as she seems."

"She has been forced to shoulder those responsibilities before her wounds healed."

"She has buried them before they could truly be buried. She has been stone for far too long. But those wounds fester; like a plant's seed, spreading its roots throughout the rock, forcing the stone to crack. At first, the cracks are tiny, minuscule, barely noticeable...but they will widen. The seed must be rooted out before the stone crumbles entirely."

And for the first time since greeting her on that dusty street in Rush Valley, Ed truly saw Winry for what she was – a woman who been forced to shoulder responsibilities she wasn't truly ready for. She had been captured, tortured and terrorised, and had only just gained her freedom when she took on the mantle of the Resistance Commander. Then, she had been a girl who had only just turned eighteen, who had only just recovered from a grievous physical injury...and so she had been forced to let the injuries to her heart and soul go unhealed.

Winry was a true leader; thinking of those around her, putting others before herself, balancing compassion and cool-headedness, battles and dances, orders and jokes, followers and friends. But in doing so, she had neglected what she needed.

The people around her had needed a leader, not a traumatised child. So for their sakes, Winry had become that leader, burying her silent horrors and private terrors in a small, dark corner of her mind. Shuttered away, locked away, smothered and suppressed until she became the leader her people needed. The leader the world needed.

Time had dulled the wounds, time and the purpose she had found in her new role as Commander. But if time could dull, it could not erase entirely, and now that her time as Commander was coming to an end...the old wounds were asserting themselves. Her old pain came rushing up to the surface like a wellspring, and while the old hurts were not new or raw, they were only half-healed and still tender.

"We don't know what really happened Winry," Ed finally said, his voice soft and low as though he were approaching a frightened, abused animal.

"I told you everything."

"You didn't tell us what happened to you," Al murmured, his voice as quiet as his brother's.

"Yes I did. I told you-"

"You gave us a history book account of those years," Ed corrected, his tone still as soft as ever but with a firmer edge to it. "You didn't tell us what actually happened. You didn't tell us what they did to you, not really."

Winry's cool stance broke, becoming tense and feral, like a wild horse that felt the rope around its neck. She turned away from them and looked out the window again, as though the dark night outside offered some kind of shelter.

"It doesn't matter!" she hissed, her voice becoming slightly desperate. "Why do you want to know? I survived everything they did to me, isn't that the important thing?"

"I bet that's what you've told yourself," Ed continued doggedly. "'I've survived, so it shouldn't hurt me anymore', right? But some part of you knows that's not true."

Al hung back, watching as his brother stepped towards the woman at the window, one hand gently extending to touch her shoulder. Muscles jumped beneath her skin, and for a moment he thought Winry would leap away from Ed. But other than the controlled flinch, she didn't move.

"Winry?" Ed breathed.

Ed realised she was shaking. The movement was too small to be noticed, but he could feel the vibrations of quivering muscles where his hand rested on her shoulder. The pressure was building, had been building for a very long time. She had been stone for far too long. She was stone, hard and unyielding, constant and steady. But the right pressure, in the right place and at the right time...and even a stone will shatter.

Ed had a feeling Winry was about to shatter. She had been alone for a long time, forced to bear burdens that she never should have shouldered in the first place. He and Al's mere presence was causing the stone to crack, the knowledge that for the first time in five years, she wasn't alone. Someone was with her, someone who wasn't part of the Resistance, someone who she didn't see her as an invincible leader.

Someone she could trust.

"It's okay, Winry," Al breathed, coming to stand beside his brother. "Whatever happened...it's okay. You're with us now...we're here with you..."

Slowly, Ed moved so that he was standing in front of her. He tried to catch a glimpse of her eyes but her head was bowed, hiding her face behind a curtain of short blonde hair. Behind Winry, Al crept closer, finally slipping his arms around her waist and hugging her from behind.

Winry gasped and twitched, entertaining a half-hearted idea of shoving him away. 'Leave me alone!' a voice wailed in the cold, silent depths of her mind. 'Leave me alone! I don't need you – I don't need anyone! You don't have to know, no one has to know, you'd hate me if you knew...'

"It's alright, Winry," Al whispered, a warm, reassuring presence at her back. "We're here, we're here. We love you and we won't stop, no matter what-"

Winry broke. With a dry sob, her knees buckled and she crumpled to the floor. Ed pulled her into his arms and held her tightly to him, lowering them gently to the wooden boards. Al followed, his grip on the small woman never faltering for a moment. Winry shuddered against them, her face buried in Ed's chest, one arm around his neck and the other over Al's arms, anchoring them in place. For the first time since they had found her, Winry was not only accepting but maintaining human contact.

And then the words came. In a disjointed stream, heavy with emotion, the sudden outpouring all the more astounding for being so deeply buried, all the more explosive for being so long contained.

"They killed Garfiel," she choked out. "Killed him, right in front of me. They told him they wanted to see me and when he asked why they just shot him. Didn't even give him a chance, just shot him right there. God, there was so much blood...I thought they were going to shoot me, too. But they grabbed me and pressed something against my face...drugged, it had to be...and when I woke up..."

"You were in a prison," Ed whispered, stroking her hair.

"It was so dark," Winry breathed. "So dark and so cold. I was hungry all the time...they never gave me enough food, and any food they did give me was always filthy and tasted disgusting, but I never got anything else so I had to eat it. And every day, they'd pull me out of the cell and take me to...to that place...and then they'd string me up and burn me with cigarettes and whip me until I could feel blood running down my ankles..."

Ed was struggling valiantly to retain a sense of detachment. But hearing Winry's high, distressed voice babbling of her tortures was making him feel nauseous. He swallowed, telling himself firmly that it wouldn't help Winry if he threw upon the floor or burst into tears, and kept stroking her hair.

"They tied my arms to a winch and dropped me to dislocate my shoulders and shoved splinters under my fingernails and I tried so hard to be strong, but I knew that if I'd known anything I would have told them and that hurt – it hurt to know that. And at night they'd come to my cell and they'd...they'd..."

Winry's voice trailed off into a small whimper, like the sound emitted by a kitten that had been whipped. Ed was dimly aware that his muscles had tightened like coiled springs, and he was keeping his breathing slow and even with some difficulty. He had a horrible, sinking feeling about the next words that were about to come out of Winry's mouth...

But the words never came. She remained silent, shuddering gently, as though she couldn't bring herself to speak.

Some part of Ed didn't want to say it. As long as he didn't say it, it never happened, and he could live forever in the belief that Winry had never been...

But another, stronger part of him was well aware that ignoring something didn't make it go away. And he had to know.

"Winry...were you raped?"

Winry's breath hitched. Then, her face still hidden in his shirt, she nodded.

Ed's heart shattered like spun glass. He imagined he could almost see the pieces falling to the floor.

"More than...more than once?"

Nod.

"More than one man?"

Nod.

Ed's throat tightened, and he swallowed thickly, trying to force the lump of misery down. His eyes burned, and he blinked against the tears he could feel gathering in their corners.

'I'm not going to cry, I'm not going to cry, I'm not going to cry...'

A few drops of salty water slid over his cheeks. They gathered on the line of his jaw, surface tension fighting gravity, with gravity the eventual victor as several dark spots appeared on the shoulder of Winry's shirt, small circles of moist fabric.

Who was he kidding? He was on the brink of bawling like a baby, all because of the terrible, clawing despair and helpless misery that twisted his chest. That sensation had always bewildered him – weren't emotions meant to be nothing more than chemical signals sent through the brain? Then why did he feel as though his heart was physically tearing in two?

It was made worse by the crushing frustration building with him. The anger that seethed and boiled in his blood at the idea of Winry being harmed, being used, being violated like that, and the knowledge that such anger was useless. He couldn't help her, he couldn't do anything! For the first time, he thought he could understand the lost, heartbroken look that drifted into Mustang's eyes when he looked at Hawkeye.

"And then...then...I got pregnant." Winry seemed to choke on the words as they erupted from her mouth like poison.

"Winry..." Al breathed. "You...you had a baby?"

Winry shook her head vigorously, her hair whipping against Ed's chest. "No...they...they said they couldn't let it...couldn't let me...and then they cut..."

Her hand slid from Al's arm for a brief moment to press sharply against her flat belly, her fingers digging into her own flesh. It was only for a second – the next instant, she had renewed her grip on Al as though nothing had happened – but it was enough to tell both brothers what had happened. In a flash, Ed remembered the scar across her stomach. He'd thought an enemy had tried to disembowel her, he'd never thought for one instant that...

The H-Faction had never allowed Winry to carry the baby to full-term. Instead, they had cut the growing life from her body in a barbaric abortion that he would bet had been every bit agonising as horrific. Ed closed his eyes to try and quell the sickening images rising in his mind.

"But it went wrong...it scarred...it meant that I couldn't...couldn't ever get pregnant again..."

Ed's breath rushed out of his lungs with a ripping sound. He was almost dizzy with rage. It wasn't enough that they had tortured her, raped her, forcibly aborted her child...they had to ensure she had a permanent reminder in her inability to bear children, too?

Winry swallowed hard. "At least, that's what I thought. But when Dr. Marcoh came...he fixed me...did alchemy...made it so I could have children again, so that's..."

"That's why you call him Miracle-worker," Al realised.

Suddenly, it made sense. Winry's inexplicably hostile reaction to his question in the truck about that name...because she hadn't been ready to share her story with them. Not then.

Winry shivered slightly and went on, "Eventually...they realised I didn't know anything and then they sent me to Angel's Nest. They fed me and cleaned me and fixed me up and I couldn't figure out what they were going to do, until...until the first 'session'. They...they...I don't know what they did – I don't know!"

She hiccuped slightly. "But then...I guess no one really remembers brainwashing, right? And that's...that's why I'm so good at...at these things...alchemy, fighting, stealth...k-killing. It wasn't like learning...it was like they shoved it so deep into my brain it became...instinct. Instinct to know how to sneak into a house...instinct to fight – with hands or blades or guns...instinct to kill..."

Another shudder ran through her. "And then...and then the 'tests'...real-life situations, they said...made us fight each other...made us try to assassinate each other. They were...they were trying to see which of us...which of us was the best. Like...like we were livestock and they were trying to choose the ones to cull! So many people died...so many...but I survived...somehow, I survived...me and seventeen others...and then they put the tattoo on my chest and it felt...God, it felt awful, like someone was ripping me apart. And then I was following every order that came out of their mouths, even though I didn't want to, I couldn't stop myself...God, I killed so many people, just because they told me to. God...oh, God...oh God oh God oh God..."

She was starting to sound slightly hysterical, but Ed couldn't help noticing that his shirt wasn't wet. Winry wasn't crying. The only sounds emerging were dry, heaving sobs.

Ed just held her tighter, feeling the arm around his neck tense as Winry tried to pull him closer. He was strongly reminded of a story his mother had once told to him. A story about an angel who went down to Earth to help mankind, but ended up being mistaken for a bird by hunters. They shot at the beautiful figure in the sky, and when the injured angel fell she broke her wings. Unable to fly, the angel had been condemned to wander the Earth, enduring all its cruelties and evil, for the rest of her life.

The story had a happy ending, of course, something about her falling in love and living happily ever after, but that wasn't what Ed was thinking of at the moment. He was only thinking of the first part of the story. Like the angel, Winry had tried to help people. And like the angel, Winry had been shot down, her wings broken and ruined, never to fly again. She could never be innocent again, she would never taste pure, simplistic joy again. Not after what she had gone through, not after looking into the soul of the darkness.

Ed was speaking from experience.

But even the angel had been gifted a happily ever after. Even after the shadows, there could be happiness.

But first, you had to walk forward.

"It's okay, Winry, it's alright," Al whispered. "It's over now. It's over. You don't have to be strong anymore, not with us. You can cry if you want to."

Winry let out a quiet wail and finally, Ed felt the front of his shirt grow damp as Winry shed five years worth of pain and tears onto his chest.

oooooooo

AN: Once again, thank you so much LaughingAstarael, for beta-ing this story and tolerating my insecurities. This chapter would never have been posted without you.