When Winry Rockbell was little, her world was like that of most little kids. Drawn in clear lines of black and white, right and wrong, good and bad. Sunshine and darkness.
Sunshine was most of what she had experienced growing up in the rolling hills of Resembool, chasing the neighbors' boys, Ed and Al, who had fast become her best friends. Gulping down her grandmother's stew. Being doted on by her parents, and watching her friends be doted on by their own mother.
(Winry had never met their father, who had disappeared when they were all very young. But in the way of young children, she hadn't questioned it. As far as she was concerned then, Ed and Al just didn't have a dad. That was the way of the world; she had Mommy and Daddy, Ed and Al had their Mommy. That was the map of Winry's universe, and changing things like that would be akin to moving continents.)
But then darkness started to seep in, a little earlier than it does in most lives. The black began to outline the white.
First, when her friends no longer had their Mommy. She'd fallen one day, triggered by nothing, and then been consigned to a bed... and it was like Trisha Elric had just faded away, faded the way seasons fade - green leaves turn to brown, snow melts into green grass. The disease took its course and everyone did what they could, but there was no stopping it, and Trisha could do nothing but surrender, much as they could all tell how much she wanted to live longer for her boys, and (everyone but the kids knew) to see her beloved Hohenheim again.
Then there was the lighter type of darkness, like a fog, that entered when the people Winry loved started to leave for other places. Her parents left for the war in the desert, because people would be wounded and needed them to fix their wounds. Winry didn't understand why people had to be wounded on purpose, when life was good enough at hurting people on its own, like Trisha. (She didn't know that there were plenty of adults, including her parents, who still asked that same question.)
Her two best friends found the mysterious housewife by the lake and were suddenly off to study alchemy with her. Winry had never had much interest in alchemy, but she knew it was special to Ed and Al - saw the pride in their eyes when they'd presented their mother with some trinket made out of dirt from the front porch. Their eyes hadn't shone like that much since Trisha had passed away. Winry wanted to see them shine again like that, and was happy if studying with that dark-haired woman would achieve that for them, but she didn't like them being gone so long.
Then, there came the two sharp blasts of darkness, brilliant and bright if those concepts weren't the antithesis of what darkness is.
Her parents, dead, gunned down by some then-faceless soldier, because they dared to heal both sides, because they dared to question the war, and the lines that it drew.
And then, not too long after, when Ed and Al had tried to resurrect their mother, and suddenly Ed was in Winry's house, crying out for automail, and Al was without a body, stuck in a gigantic suit of armor, his voice with a certain metallic resonance it hadn't had before and they all hoped it wouldn't have forever.
Two black bursts in the night, that had changed Winry Rockbell's life forever.
Clearly black. Clearly bad things.
They say one of the key lessons of growing up is learning to accept ambiguity, to let those lines of black and white blend into shades of gray.
No young person had been forced to learn that lesson, faster or crueller, like Winry Rockbell had. At least, none who weren't alchemists.
Like Ed and Al were alchemists.
Or the jittery young soldier who had killed Winry's parents, and shattered all his remaining idealism with the same bullets.
The phone was ringing. "I'll get it!" Winry called to her grandmother. She knew Pinako was busy sweeping the bedroom.
The bedroom that had once been where Ed and Al would stay when they visited. Its emptiness was just a cruel reminder that Winry would never see them again. She didn't know how her grandmother could stand sweeping it, but she was glad she did - because Winry definitely couldn't.
The younger Rockbell ran to and picked up the phone.
"Rockbell Automail Service," she said in the mock-perk that went with that phrase.
"Miss Rockbell, it's me," said a certain distinctive baritone.
"Colonel Mustang," she said. It had been a long time since he had called them.
"Yes, for once I don't have to correct you," he responded, a slight chuckle in his voice. "They restored me to my former rank, at least my rank before the mock Drachman campaign. I suppose it was as a thanks for my part in the Affair of the Gate. I'm still never going to lead this country, though."
"That's a shame," she said, solemnly. She wasn't sure what "Drachman campaign" he was referring to, but the Colonel often forgot what he had and hadn't told Winry. "I think you would be good at it. Being Führer, or whatever the title is now."
"Thank you, That means a lot coming from you," he said, and Winry knew it really did. She wondered if the Colonel knew she was being completely honest.
"Anyway," he continued, "I have a favor to ask of you, as much as I know that it's not and never will be my place."
"Sure," Winry said. "Fire away." The Colonel didn't have to keep groveling; Winry actually appreciated not being reminded. But she knew it was the only way that he could bear talking to her without drowning in his guilt, so she put up with it and didn't say anything.
"No, it's something I'd like to talk with you about in person," he said. "Let me know when I can come by your place, and I'll book my train tickets for Risembool."
Winry paused. This must be important, if Colonel Mustang was willing to travel all the way out here from Central in order to discuss it with her. Then, her brain lit up. "There's no need," the younger Rockbell said. "I'm supposed to be visiting a client in Central in a couple of weeks. I could come by to talk with you about it then, if that's not too late?"
"No, of course not," the Colonel said. "Whatever is best for you." It was always how he dealt with her. Winry sighed.
And thought of the question she really wanted to ask.
"So what is so important that it needs to be discussed in-person?"
There was a long pause, until Winry heard the Colonel take a deep breath, clearly readying himself to speak. "It's about Edward," he said.
Winry's eyes widened.
"I think...I think I've found a way for us to see him again," he stammed out, slowly.
And she dropped the phone.
Two weeks. Two long weeks passed, and Winry was supposed to be working on the client's automail, but her mind kept drawing back to what the Colonel had told her on the phone.
It was a military client, a woman who had lost an arm in some border skirmish with Aerugo when she was stationed in the South. Captain Amelia Forsyth. Winry wondered if the Colonel knew her, since they were both officers and living in Central.
And thinking of the Colonel brought her right back to that conversation, and Edward.
Winry wasn't sure when exactly she had begun to fall in love with the Fullmetal Alchemist. They had always been friends, and she had always figured that she would marry one of the Elric boys. But around the time that Winry began investigating Juliet Douglas with Sciezka, she started to realize that she thought of Ed much more often than Al, and particularly of physical things... of his golden eyes and his long, thick hair - too pretty for a boy - and his tanned skin. And how he always had a fire burning his eyes, of determination, to get his brother's body back and set things straight. And how he always marched into every situation full of boldness and confidence, and yet with the slightest twinges of fearful anticipation around his beautiful amber eyes, that you could only see if you looked closely - as Winry did, because she found she liked to look closely at Ed, and that she longed for him when he was gone. She missed Al, too, but there was a depth of her longing for the elder Elric that she didn't feel with anyone else.
That she wouldn't feel for someone else, at least, for some time. But when she did, she knew she'd realize it sooner because she'd notice the same signs. She had talked to her grandmother, to Sciezka, to everyone around her who might know and whom she could trust with her feelings, and she knew that it was the same for all people who were in love. Winry was in love.
And the Colonel was in love, too, with the same person. Now that Winry knew the signs, she could also read them in others. And she saw the longing in the way that Mustang spoke of Ed, the same depth of longing that Winry felt in her gut whenever the Fullmetal Alchemist came to her mind. With Ed's first absence, the longing had intensified and faded but then flared back into existence again when Winry thought of him, but with the brothers' permanent departure for the other world it had settled back into a sort of sad resignation.
But now she could feel the flaring up again as she packed her things for the voyage to Central, where Winry would be staying with Sciezka while she worked on attaching Captain Forsyth's arm and pondered over whatever the Colonel's proposal was.
The morning her train left, Winry bid Pinako farewell with a wave as she tugged her suitcase down the long path to the Risembool train station, checking her tickets and pulling her coat and scarf closer. It was autumn, and it just beginning to get nippy outside. Winry hadn't expected it would be this cold.
There were a lot of thing she'd experience on this trip, Winry felt, that she couldn't expect.
As she slid into her car, unpacking the breakfast she'd made in her lap, Winry could feel the same fearful anticipation she so often saw in Ed's eyes when he was off on another mission.
She had no idea what to expect in Central. She had no idea what to expect from the Colonel.
But it involved a chance to see Edward again, so she would weather it.
AN: I'm aware that I took some liberties with the timeline in the first part of this chapter, but I liked the way my writing flowed with that better, so it was on purpose. Also, the next chapter will probably go up a lot sooner. I wasn't really sure what to do with this one, but I have a pretty clear plan for the rest of this.