ii. but the seasons will still go round and round
(季節はそれでも巡り巡ってく)
Rating: K
Genre: Angst oh god the angst but with some hidden sap
Notes: First anime end spoilers, pre-CoS.
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She's not all that surprised when Al returns home, alone. She listens, numbly, detached, as the woman named Rose explains in hushed tones what had happened in the hidden city below Central: monsters and resurrection and sacrifice. Such darkness is so alien, so distant from the green windswept hills of Resembool that she can imagine it a story from a book, a scene from a movie watched years ago and forgotten about until now. Something from a fairy-tale, and not something that has happened to her.
She listens. She nods. And when the story's done, she walks slowly to the other room where Al-not-Al is and holds him.
Al-not-Al, ten years old in body and mind and oh, Ed.
He's just like she remembers, wide-eyed and innocent and perfect and it's almost enough to pretend that the last four years never happened, that it was all a bad dream and it's over now, Ed will be in the next room wide-eyed and innocent and perfect with two arms and legs –
But she's not the one transplanted in time; those days are over, gone, lost to her forever. The boy in front of her looks plucked from a photo album, stolen away from his childhood all too soon, and he asks for his brother for what must be the tenth time since returning to Resembool and that's what finally breaks her. She cries. She tells him, for what must be the tenth time since his return to Resembool, that his brother is gone and not coming back.
And for the tenth time he asks, "Where did he go?" and for the tenth time, she can't answer.
Because she doesn't know either.
She can't tell him. Rose couldn't, and she can't, so all she says is "Your brother loved you very much."
Ed loved him, and now he's gone. She doesn't want to say the word "dead," doesn't even want to think it – it sounds so final. And a part of her still expects that stupid boy-now-a-man to come limping up the road with a sheepish smile and a busted arm, and Hey, Winry, I uh, kind of...broke it. Any moment now. Any moment, she'll see the summer sunlight glinting gold on his hair in the distance, just above the curve of the next hill over, Ed returning to her like the sun rising in the morning.
Al scowls, his face all too childish. "He's not gone," he says; he can't say the word either. "He wouldn't leave me."
(But Ed left her.)
"He's missing, not gone," Al insists. "They never found his body, did they? I don't know what you're keeping from me, but he is not gone." He pulls away, leaves the room, and again, Winry is alone.
Later that week Mrs. Curtis and her husband visit for dinner. It's a tense, silent affair. And then Al-not-Al catches her gaze with a steel glare across the table and says he'll find his brother again, defiant and proud and so much like Ed. The shadow of his brother is in his resolute eyes and she knows, one way or another, she will lose him too.
Stupid brothers. Stupid brothers, think they could pull the moon from the sky if they worked at it hard enough.
When Al leaves her he leaves in a blaze of October red, his brother's coat draped over his skinny too-young shoulders. It billows in the wind like something alive. He walks the steps his brother walked and someday he will be grown enough to fill them.
She feels like she's gone back in time to four years ago, this time to one brother setting off alone, perhaps to never return. But maybe he'll get it right this time. Maybe Al will find him.
She tells no one, but she keeps a new arm and leg prepared for someone who might never use them. She lays the mechanical parts out in front of her and reassembles them, pieces her life back together after everything fell apart. She rebuilds Ed in bolts and screws and dreams.
And dreams of someday, two brothers returning home to her in a blaze of autumn gold.