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Ed inhales—the world burns, dust and fire, explosions sear the horizon, civilians scream, wounded bray as the desert sand threatens to swallow them up, soldiers die beneath a burning sun, the ground sizzles at their feet, they are not welcome here, outsiders and murderers, the earth screams from the blood that wrongfully soaks it—and exhales.
Ishval is fucking hell.
He shouldn’t be here. No one should. This is a pointless war fought over a desertic scrap of land with no real value beyond making an example out of the defiant people who live here and resist Amestrian subjugation. This is war fought for pure Amestrian pride and nothing more, nothing less.
Pride is not enough to justify mass murder.
As always, the medic’s tents are alive. Wounded pour in on stretchers. Doctors bark orders. Nurses flit around, sterilizing equipment. Staff returning from elsewhere hastily scrub in. Surgeries are performed in the back. Illnesses are quarantined. Bedsheets are scrubbed clean. Bandages are changed. Drunkards who had a little too much vodka smuggled in from the outside sleep it off, their breath thick with alcohol.
Considering yesterday’s offensive, he’s almost surprised to see it so slow. That’s good, he supposes, grudging though he is to admit it.
Ed watches the chaos through a slit in the curtain that superimposes itself between himself and the main area. Instead of confined to a bed, he leans back against a chair, one false leg crossed over the other, pantlegs rolled up to display the gleaming metal of his automail. An empty stool sits off to the right, white as a skeleton picked clean and bleached beneath the desert sun. Tools gleam, arranged artfully, recently sterilized and polished, within the confines of a cheap plastic tray atop a worn-down worktable. An examination light bends over it, peering down with a bulb not unlike a curious eye. While the burlap tent offers reprieve from the sun, heat still smothers as it pours in from the flapping entrance.
He is uninjured, and waiting.
If he closes his eyes, lets the din grow fuzzy and distorted, he can almost imagine that he’s out on the battlefield right now. Sun blistering on his brow and sweat tracing salty rivulets down his throat. Shouts from the soldiers in his company, orders thrown out by commanding officers like a bone to a pack of mad dogs. Guns firing in the distance, bombs doing their work. The ting of bullets glancing off stone when they miss, anguished screams when they don’t. Sand in his mouth, ash in his throat, corpses baking in the brutal heat.
It’s the same here, on the edge of their camp in the Sero District—just south of Deliha, but the offensive line is gaining ground quick, moved forward a whole twelve yards just yesterday with Ed’s help—in this place filled with people that are either healing or being healed. Desperation is so thick in the air you can all but taste it. Blood, pain, anguish, death. No matter where you go, Ishval gives it, free of charge.
In his mind’s eye, the pocket watch glitters in Bradley’s palm, the threat hanging over his head like a guillotine waiting to shear clean through his throat. In his mind’s eye, he reaches out and accepts, the chain tangling around his fingers.
He shouldn’t be here.
The sharp snap of the curtain has him looking up. Winry’s scrubs are dark with other people’s blood, her gloves dirty and worn, her hair bound into a fraying bun at the back of her head, bags dark beneath her eyes from too little sleep. Without a word, she snaps the curtain closed behind her, because the illusion of privacy when there is none is more precious than victory.
Back when this first began—when they tread upon this forbidden and blood-caked ground, ignorant of the horror that would seep into them like an infection—she would greet him with a weary smile. They still had hope then, because Executive Order 3066 had just been enacted, there was still a chance it could be recanted, because the notion that Amestris would waste so much manpower and resources on stamping out a small corner of its territory was utterly ridiculous. Disbelief led to expectation, which led to hope and maybe even wistful thinking, and there were soldiers saying to one another what they were going to do once they returned home, saw their loved ones after so, so long. New recruits were relieved, convinced they could emerge with hands unstained and unsullied.
Four months later, she doesn’t smile anymore. There was only hope in their ignorance, and the desert sun stripped that away as it does everything.
As she approaches, he uncrosses his legs and kicks his boots off. They land off to the side, on their sides, in soft sand that lets out a minor puff of dust as protest. Automail gleams in the low light, testament to a childhood sin—and thank god his twelve-year-old self had some scrap of sense in him, and wouldn’t let Al touch the circle. He doesn’t think he’d be able to forgive himself if some part of his baby brother had been shredded up by the rebound. No, instead, Al is whole and well, back home in Risembool, the same age as Ed was when he tried to bring their mother back and as blessedly far away from this hellhole as he can be.
She moves to the left. Strips off her gloves and shoves them into her pocket. Blisters mar her fingers from nonstop work. Anger and pity swirl through him dully on her behalf. “I’m going to start with the right, okay?”
A nod of acknowledgement. Words aren’t needed anymore.
Even when he braces himself for it, jaw clenched in anticipation, the shock of detachment through his nerves still aches. Light flashes behind his eyes as he smothers a noise in his throat. It’s everything he deserves and more.
There’s a dull thunk to his left as she sets the limb down on the tray. He peers at her back through half-lidded eyes as the pain simmers away, as she opens up the steel casing to get at the nest of wires underneath. The dingy scrubs give her a solemn, grim presence, more like a mortician than a physician.
“You’re in here a lot now,” she remarks, grabbing the examination light and flicking it on. The bulb burns bright white as the desert sun, unforgiving against the gleaming length of his prosthetic.
He’s not sure what he’s supposed to say to that. It’s not untrue—between maintenance on his automail and personally escorting injured soldiers in his company and even sometimes drinking a little too much from the flasks of contraband booze passed around the weekly bonfire, the medic’s tent has become an unlikely home to him. If such a place can be considered “home”, out here, where each sunrise smolders with the uncertainty over whether it will be your last.
Some phantom of humor curls in her voice as she goes on, “Figures it would take a literal war to make you take your maintenance appointments more seriously.”
“I guess,” he mumbles, and doesn’t say that he had nothing to hide from, in the past. Not like this, anyway. Back then, Amestris spread out before him and his brother, bright with promise, glittering with adventure. The allure was too much be drawn away from for something as measly as maintenance—Al ended up making a catalogue of all the terrible sounds Ed’s knees would make when they went too long without a mechanic’s touch, ranked from minor inconvenience to imminent catastrophe.
But then—Bradley, the damn watch, Executive Order 3066.
He shouldn’t be here.
Her hands still, and she pauses long enough to cast him a dull-eyed glance over her shoulder. “How are you?”
Ah, yes. The therapy sessions. If not for the frontlines and all that awaits him on it, he would have avoided the medic’s tent, and her, on principle. “We’re in a fucking warzone, Win. How do you think I am?”
Eyeroll. She turns back to his leg, grabbing a sharp-looking doohickey so she can go poking around inside. “You know what I meant.”
Of course he knows what she meant. A sigh leaves him as he shifts in place. There’s a vulnerability in having just one leg attached, and he hates it. Not that he deserves to be comfortable... “Didn’t go out on the field today. So. That’s something.”
A brief pause. She’s half-bent over the exposed innards of the crus, her elbow raised high for leverage on the tool. He watches as she lowers it slowly. “...I heard a rumor that you got into it with Colonel Fessler again.”
Ohhh boy. Here we go.
“Fessler,” Ed spits, “is a raving madman.”
“Uh oh. What’d he do now?”
“That fucker’s idea of progress is a thousand of us dead to take out one Ishvalan.” He snares his leg with both hands—fingers curling tight around the kneecap to the point where he swears he hears the metal groaning and his knuckles pop as they whiten—to keep from breaking everything in the vicinity. “‘Every sacrifice is worth it for one less savage in the world’, he says! Said that to my fucking face! Fucking—I swear, by all that is holy and unholy, the only fucking thing keeping me from fucking shooting him is that his fat, fucking head doesn’t even have a fucking brain!”
At some point while he began to foam at the mouth, the shuffling resumed. He pants for breath. A look back shows that Winry has resumed her work, unfazed—it’s nothing she hasn’t heard before.
Methodically, she wipes a cloth over the inner mechanism. The bane of automail out here is sand in the hydraulics, and the cure is regular cleaning. “So... did you get into it with him or not?”
“...maybe a little.” Well, technically, Ed transmuted a knife and threatened to eviscerate him right then and there. Might’ve even gone through with it, too, if the fucker hadn’t wizened up after the last time and had guards there to step between them.
In another life, maybe he wouldn’t have gone so far. Wouldn’t ever fantasize so vividly about splitting open the fucker’s fat belly and watching his innards spill red-brown all across the sand. But now he knows what it means to kill, how to do it, and what’s one more bloodstain on his hands? Especially a bloodstain from a man who would contentedly scale a mountain of Amestrian bodies, plant a flag into the belly of the poor bastard at the top, and proudly declare it a victory over the Ishvalan “enemy”.
“What’d he say this time?” There’s a soft grinding noise. She must be checking the suspension, now, or something like that. Ed’s understanding of his own prosthetics is as distant as the prospect of going home tomorrow—theoretical and hopeful, but ultimately non-existent.
Silence stifles them. Heat, thick in the air. Reluctantly, he releases his knee. His hands ache from holding it so tight. The desert burns inside his throat as he swallows.
“...he wanted me to set off an earthquake.”
Again, she stills. And this time, she stays still for a good long moment. Long enough for sweat to bead on Ed’s brow as the desert pays him back for the slaughter of its people, even while he basks in the blessing of temporary shade.
Slowly, carefully, trying her best to hide the tremor in her hands, she sets the cloth aside. When she rises to her full height, there is a tension in her shoulders like something coiled too tight. “Earthquake.”
“Yeah. Like the one in Mektev?” That’s when he became the military’s golden boy. It was a fluke, a mistake—a rescue mission to save the poor boys stranded across the Halik River, captured and wounded and half-dead from torture. They were right at the shoreline, Ed with both hands pressed together to transmute a bridge, when they found themselves surrounded on all sides by enemy guns.
Did you know that sometimes, tectonic faults will be nestled underneath rivers? Ed hadn’t known that. But oh, he knows it now.
Ishval shook for days.
Casualties—those counted around the vicinity, anyway, he never did find out how the rest of the desert was affected, he’s not sure he wants to—totaled 8,431 Ishvalans and, miraculously, only 563 Amestrians. Wounded were tended to. Dead were buried. Ishvalan survivors were shot. A new camp was set up in the detritus of what was once the Mektev District. Fullmetal’s killcount skyrocketed to join Crimson’s. He earned pats on the back from all his superiors, awe and fear from all his subordinates, and a wide berth from everyone but those who knew him before he brought an entire city down overnight.
In Ishvalan mythos, the Halik descends into the world of demons, and earthquakes are them trying to claw their way out of Hell.
They call him the Demon of Ishval, now.
“That’d be dangerous,” Winry begins, carefully, once she finds her voice again, “for both sides.”
“Yeah. He was oh so concerned about potential loss on our side.” Ed glares down at the dully reflective surface of his kneecap, pressure building in his throat. If only he managed to actually get that knife in...
“Think he’ll change his mind?”
A bitter chuckle gets lost somewhere in his throat, emerging splintered and too-sharp. “Not unless someone puts a bullet in him.”
The air grows feathered with her sigh. There’s a click that signals the metal plate being locked back into place. Guess everything’s in working order, then. Not surprising—he must have the best maintained automail of his entire company, if not the whole army, with how often he’s in here.
“You ready for reattachment?”
Not really. The rawness in his nerves from the initial detachment has only just faded. Normal procedure, from what Ed understands, is to wait a couple hours for the nerves to settle again. But this is Ishval, this is a warzone, and there is no time to be wasted on waiting for people to get comfortable.
He nods.
It’s only awkward for her to carry the leg back over to him because of its size, not its weight. Some special alloy went into the chassis to make it as heat resistant as possible, and lighter as a result. Northern tech, he thinks, that was adapted for the desert. Another example of how cutting-edge resources have been squandered on this hellhole.
“Ready?”
Ed squeezes his eyes shut. “Yeah.”
Reattachment is always infinitely worse than detachment. It’s almost like body knows that it’s more natural lose limbs than to gain them back, so it punishes him for the defilement of his nervous system, screams at him as a reminder of how he inadvertently gambled away his legs when he chose resurrecting the dead over moving forward with his life. He didn’t know, he was twelve and scared and almost-alone, but that doesn’t matter now, does it?
Pain tears up his thigh before rampaging across his entire system. A wild beast would have been kinder to him—mindless but not without mercy, and never cruel for the sake of being cruel. There would be no divine punishment in a wild beast tearing him open, spilling his life out all over the sand, gorging itself on this sin-stained vessel he dares to call his body. This agony, though, is sentient in its malice. It burns in a way only the flames of hell ever could, as though they’ve arrived just to give him a taste of what’s to come once he dies and joins the ranks of the damned. Oh, this is pain that lances callously up and down his spine in an infernal burning-white feedback intent on ripping him apart while he’s still alive.
Stars become supernovae behind his eyes. The world narrows into that searing burn. He can barely breathe, even after it ends.
With a muted thump, his skull meets the back of the chair. His vision swims. Winry’s hands are firm and calloused as the pressure pins his thigh in place, a deterrent against the primal urge to thrash. Her face hovers somewhere between reality and dream. Somehow, even with her face gaunt and smudged, there’s something about her that draws him in before he even realizes he’s approaching the brink at all.
Those eyes... how could he have lived his whole life and not realized just how vivid they were, how breathtakingly blue?
“We can save the left for tomorrow,” she offers. Even now, calloused by war, she somehow finds it in her to be gentle.
Only then does he realize he’s been gripping the sides of the chair so tight his knuckles have gone white. Reluctantly, he lets go. His hands ache. “S’okay. Go ahead.”
“Ed.”
“Might as well, right?”
Sigh, heavy as the world on Atlas’s shoulders. His head is still a little fuzzy as she drifts to his other side, a phantom of who she once was. He thinks he catches her grumbling to herself about idiocy and stubbornness and the two not being as mutually exclusive as you might think. If he had the strength, he might have laughed.
“On three?”
Nod. Deep breath. Eyes closed.
“One, two, th—”
No amount of preparation can prepare him for the stinging jolt that eats away at him from the inside out. It feels like being stabbed, like a gunshot ricocheting around his belly. The world is hazy dark-light, too hot, too tight. He thinks his teeth might break with how hard he clenches them.
It’s not enough. Barely even scratches the surface of all the misery he’s caused.
By the time clarity reluctantly returns to him, Winry has returned to her worktable. The muted thunk of the metal limb being deposited greets him, a vague stranger he can just barely recognize over the dull thud of his heart in his ears. Breathing sends soreness flaring through his ribs. He feels like a walking wound.
Maybe he is. Maybe that’s what he’s always been—this open gash, weeping all over everyone. Now he’s started to fester and rot from the inside out.
Silence, or a mockery of it, descends. True silence cannot be attained here, with the bedlam behind the curtain, the frantic desperation of soldiers not to die and physicians not to let them. Heat finds a way to plague them even now, drawing sweat from their foreheads in sticky-salty kisses. The uniform Ed wears is dingy with sweat. Whoever decided wool was a good material clearly needs to be taken out back and shot three times in the temple.
“How’ve things been with you?” His voice comes out rough.
At that, her shoulder blades form sharp peaks rising up from between the valley of her spine. Tension clenches her arms. He could have sworn she didn’t used to be so thin. “Same old, same old. Another day, another Ishvalan to take apart on the testing cites.”
His ribs clench around his lungs. She came here under false pretenses, convinced that the need for doctors could be met with her steady hands, the deep well of her compassionate heart. Technically she’s a year shy of the enlistment age—but like him, they made an exception for her obvious brilliance. Instead of a pocket watch, she was entrusted a set of silver surgeon’s tools. The sentiment was the same, though.
Alchemist, be thou for the people.
Physician, be thou for the people.
Not out here. Never out here.
Aching pain flares up his spine as he forces himself to sit up. “What happened?”
Tools clatter as she hastily grabs for one. Metal groans beneath her hands. “We got another round of experimental medicine. I told you about that, right? How some pharmaceutical companies are getting the military’s permission to use the prisoners as free guinea pigs?”
“I vaguely recall something about that.” That, and soldiers were being rewarded with a small stipend for every decently healthy Ishvalan they turned over. Sergeant Conway had made a show of how much he’d pocketed—Ed fantasized for weeks afterwards about leaving hand-shaped bruises on the bastard’s throat.
“Today, there was this pregnant woman—not that you’d know it, with how thin she was.” A rustle of wires. Winry’s elbow bobs up and down, up and down, as she works. “She was strapped down to the table, cursing and screaming and crying as we injected drugs into her. One of my colleagues kept calling her ‘the subject’ and ‘it’. I almost grabbed the nearest tool and gouged his eyes out.”
It’s said with such dispassion that it would have almost been disturbing. But everyone here has been cracked open beneath the sun, and they all fracture in their own ways. For Ed—well, his temper was always a firebrand against his soul, but the desert warped it into a violent thing rattles against his skeleton and blackens his bones. For Winry, she found a new friend in distance, apathy and her coming to close terms as she wrestled to salvage her own sanity from the atrocities that confront them every day.
“Fred?” Ed guesses. This isn’t the first time he’s heard this complaint.
“Piece of scum.” Now it’s her turn to spit, bitter and angry.
“I’m sorry.” And he is. He genuinely is. Winry volunteered under the assumption that she would be keeping good men from dying, but he catches her outside of the medic’s tent most days, attending the gruesome travesties conducted in a commandeered holy building.
Probably not so holy anymore. Bradley’s idea, if Ed had to guess. What better way to defile a sacred place than to turn it into a place of torture for its believers?
Movement catches his eye. Her shoulders shake, wobble with a kind of tremulous pressure like she’s trying to keep from bursting bloodily across the curtain right then and there. In the past, he would have leaped to her side, but he feels so dull and distant as he watches her arms curl around herself, her hands gripping her forearms to the point where he imagines her nails are threatening to break the skin. To an outsider, it looks like she’s trying desperately to keep her skeleton from flying out of her skin so it can flee from this terrible place.
Her sob makes his heart seize.
“God, Ed.” Unshed tears thicken around the tremulous horror in her words. “What are we even doing out here?”
Somewhere, lost in the desert with the rest of their souls, is perhaps a good reason, a good excuse. But Ed doesn’t think he could find it even if he tried. He’s not sure he wants to, anymore.
She shouldn’t be here. Doesn’t deserve to be. Not like him—this is penance for a hubristic little boy who thought nature was his plaything and sought to bend it in his hands. Hands that carry the dual purposes of synthesis and slaughter in each palm, for alchemy is as much deconstruction as it is creation, try as many might to deny the truth of it. Destruction has always been the nature of himself and others like him, buried somewhere in the recesses of their souls. Many just had the luxury to avoid confronting it until they set foot in this hellhole, invaded this cursed ground of death and despair and making murderers of innocent men.
Him? Oh, he was always made for this, in some form or another. After all, it’s the only thing he seems capable of doing right. So maybe he was born for it.
But she wasn’t. Winry is a doctor, a physician. Death and the spread of it were never meant to be her vocation. Her hands were designed to mend, to restore, to heal, to fix. Not to break, never to break. Which is exactly what she’s being asked do now, running counter to her very nature.
She shouldn’t be here.
A migraine starts to build behind Ed’s temples. He folds his arms over his chest, a gunshot ringing in his ears from the first bullet he ever put in another person. The body made a sickening thump against the sand. “Because some bastard shot a little girl.”
“That’s not what...”
He knows what she really meant. Amestris could have surrendered at any time—they were the ones whose soldier screwed up, and the honorable thing to do would have been to admit defeat. But oh, this country has no honor, has no shame. This is war fought for pure Amestrian pride and nothing more, nothing less.
Pride is not enough to justify mass murder.
Sniffling, dry and light, because the tears haven’t fallen and she won’t let them. Winry-before-the-war wept openly, wept proudly, the master of her own tears. Winry-during-the-war needs to keep herself hydrated. Winry-during-the-war doesn’t have the time or luxury or energy to expend on everyday sorrows.
There’s a leaden helplessness in watching as she wipes her eyes furiously, then bends down to resume her work.
“Let’s change the subject,” Ed suggests. Maybe this keeps them human, ruminating on their commitment of atrocities and acknowledging the horror of it, but they’ll go insane like this. How funny that they’ve been asked to choose between sanity and humanity.
“Alright.” She’s gone for the cloth again. It’s a dingy thing, white at one point but tarnished to the point of ugliness. “Have you written to Al, recently?”
No. Not that. Anything but that.
“Oh yeah,” Ed snarls in return, bitterness black and cold and burning as it wells up inside his throat. And he’s told her why he doesn’t write, spilled every awful thing at her feet, so why does she keep asking this of him— “‘Hey, little bro, things are great out here in the fucking warzone. Ling stole more of my rations and says I can bill him after the war’s over. Lanfan got her hands on a knife sharpener somehow and now everybody’s terrified. How’re Granny and Hohenheim doing? Oh, by the way, let me tell you all about the Ishvalans I killed today in a shower of gore and viscera!’”
Scoff, more amusement than anything. Or at least, some faded phantom of amusement. “Maybe leave out that last part.”
Maybe it’s the pain shimmering at his nerve endings, or maybe it’s the subject, but Ed is struck with exhaustion, then. There’s a weight in his bones like the lives of every poor soul he’s taken have burrowed inside him, sleeping inside his marrow, waiting until the pressure is enough to break. His uniform is dark with blood and sweat, clings to him as though it’s forgotten that they were supposed to be separate beings, his skin and this infernal badge of military ownership. When he closes his eyes, the din beyond the curtain catches him again, a battlefield beyond the battlefield. There is no such thing as rest in Ishval. Not for the wicked, and not for those who are forced to become the wicked.
Al’s face flickers, an illusion behind his eyelids. Twelve, grinning, eyes bright in a way Ed’s haven’t been in so, so long. Smiling beneath the Risembool sun.
“...he’s gonna hate me, isn’t he?”
“He won’t.” There’s certainty in her voice, and it should ground him, but it’s one voice against the clatter and cacophony all around them. They are cogs in a killing machine they never asked to be apart of. “C’mon, Ed, you’re his brother. He loves you. That’s... That’s not going to change.”
When Ed opens his eyes again, they burn. “My squad killed a family in their own home, yesterday.”
Her silence is not forgiveness so much as permission. There is no forgiveness for them, can never be, not really. But he can use his voice, at least.
“It was while we were gaining ground—got a whole twelve yards into Daliha, now. Everyone’s thrilled over it. And I shot a kid younger than Al is now. Right in the head. Figured he wouldn’t suffer that way, y’know?”
It was a horrible sound, the gunshot. Sharp and biting, an angry thing that sparked from his hands. But there was something so deceptively peaceful about the boy that collapsed to the clay floor, still and glassy-eyed, mouth faintly parted—if not for the weeping hole right in the middle of his forehead, you could have imagined that he was contentedly half-asleep.
Breathing hurts. It’s too hot. The desert burns, scorches him from the inside out, and some idiot decided to make the uniforms out of motherfucking wool. “Last night—I dreamed it was Al. Like, Al, but Ishvalan, y’know?” His hands are shaking. He brings them up in front of him, tries not to image blood dark across his palms. “Or maybe it was just regular Al. I dunno. I don’t...”
Winry’s shoulders blades are sharp peaks through her scrubs as she continues cleaning the prosthetic out. Or maybe she’s checking the suspension, the connectivity of the wires, god knows what. Just making sure he can still walk.
He tangles his fingers in his hair and can feel every callous that formed from holding weapons. The roughness on his thumbs from pulling the trigger again and again and again and again. “Hell, maybe I’m still dreaming. Makes sense, right? I mean, nightmares end when you wake up. This one never does, though! It’s all nightmare after nightmare after motherfucking nightmare and just when you think you’re finally awake—”
“Ed—”
“Maybe next time I’ll wake up in fucking Risembool, but everyone’s Ishvalan, and I’ll have to kill them. Raze the whole town to the ground. Wouldn’t that be something!”
All of a sudden, she’s there, blistered palms folding over his hands. Her breath is warm and damp against his nose. She used to smell like machine oil six days out of seven—now all he can smell is ash, and smoke, and the dried blood on her scrubs.
Something like a sob breaks in his throat. “I’m losing my damn mind out here.”
Hands smooth over his. Gently prying his hands from his scalp before his nails can break skin and draw blood.
“I could file a report.”
His eyes snap open at that. He’s met with something on her face that he can’t quite name, but he knows could drown in if he were to let himself, throw himself headlong into the depths of it.
“Say there’s something wrong with the suspension,” she goes on, and he jerks in alarm, but her grip remains firm. “It takes a few days for new parts to come in. You’ll be off the battlefield and—”
A hasty look around confirms there’s no one to hear. He lowers his voice anyway as he hisses, “You could get court-martialled for that.”
Because she might not be of the military, but she has surrendered herself to it, one way or another. Signed a contract, same as him. The doctors working within the testing sites have military clearance, and thus military ranks—though they are not prestigious, something like sergeant at their highest or maybe warrant officer. Promotions are slower there, because less people die in the line of duty than they do the battlefield (for example, when Ed met Ling, he was a warrant officer, but he’s shot up three ranks because the chain of command keeps dying and they need competent men to replace the links). It is enough, though, to hold her captive to direct orders.
“I don’t care,” she says.
“Winry—”
“Ed, you can’t go on like this.”
“And what about you, huh?” he snaps, throwing her hands off. “You gonna tell me your dreams have been sunshine and roses?”
She doesn’t so much flinch at the show of force as she does draw back—it’s a conditioned response. And there’s no doubt in his mind that she’s seen worse in her tenure than the newly violent edge of his temper. There’s no doubt in his mind that she’s dealt with thrashing limbs and patients half-mad with pain and she has to protect herself even as she cares for them.
But the implication is there, and he stops.
It’s hard for him not to feel a little sick as he sinks back against the chair. He averts his eyes to where his boots sit, discarded in the sand. “I’m not going to lay around in bed, doing nothing. Not while you and everyone else are going through hell.”
For a long, long moment, the hollow weight of her gaze rests on the back of his head. He doesn’t want to see the expression on her face.
Finally, there’s a rustle of fabric and a breathy sigh as she turns away. A glimpse from his peripheral shows her shaking her head. “Stubborn mule.”
“Whatever.” He drops his chin petulantly into a (blood-soaked) hand.
Like a ghost would, she drifts back to her worktable, dull and faded and blanched of all her vibrance. His severed leg bleeds colorful wiring, redbluegreen. She winds them up between her fingers before stuffing them back in. Her hands used to so animated, twitching as she struggled to contain her overwhelming passion for her practice—but everything about her is sluggardly, these days.
Auntie Sarah used to say that Rockbell women were built like iron forges. Technically she married into the name, but that never stopped her from being proud. She’d proclaim to anyone willing to hear it that she and others like her they have steel in their bellies, titanium in their bones, tungsten in their hearts. That it makes them strong.
“...we’re gonna make it out of this, you know,” he offers. A whisper in the wind. A distant promise for rain in a merciless desert.
“I know,” she replies, dull. Not looking up.
Metal may not break, but if it grows too hot, it bends easily. And oh, the sun in Ishval sun does blaze.
“I mean it,” he says. “We’ll leave here together. Promise.”
She stills, briefly.
Perhaps she knows how empty the words are. He’d do so much more if he had the ability to—but if there’s anything he’s learned out here in this godforsaken desert, it’s that he is powerless in more ways than he ever dreamed he could be. Right now, he doesn’t even have two legs for him to glide over to her, wrap her up in his arms like the precious thing she is. His back isn’t enough to shield her from every awful thing here.
The moment passes. The metal chassis gives a sharp click as its snapped into place. “I believe you.”
No she doesn’t. How could she? He can’t even save himself, much less another person.
“Are you ready?”
All he can offer is this, false promises and false hope.
Agony. Agony beyond words, beyond thought, beyond reality. Agony like having your legs torn off bloodily, agony like your nerves ignited and titanium drilled into your bones. There’s a reason why reattachments on dual amputees aren’t one at a time, that you get it over with quickly and swiftly and don’t torture the nerves too much. But this is the way he asked her do it, and she’s long since realized there’s no reasoning with him and stopped complaining.
Vision returns, slow and sure. Distant commotion from frantic medical staff trying to save as many lives out in this hellhole. Yellow-white glare from the bulb of the examination light. Winry, face smudged with dirt, the color fled from her skin, hair greasy and knotted in a fraying bun. Blue eyes, dull.
“Sorry,” he rasps. He distantly registers her hand on his shoulder, on his thigh, pinning him down against what must have been an excruciating urge to thrash about. “M’always asking you to pick me back up.”
She gives him a smile like crushed glass. “You’d do the same for me.”
He’d do so much more, if he were allowed.
Breath could be shared between them, with how close her face hovers. He’s still bleary from the pain, dizzy and exhausted, his senses dulled, as his gazes lowers to find the pale pink curve of her lips. That same bleariness must be to blame for the way he starts to lean forward, her eyes deep and drawing him in. She’s Polaris to a sailor adrift at see, even when she’s just as lost as he is.
But she pulls away. Turns her face to the side and subjecting him to her dirt-smudged cheek. “Not... Not here.”
Immediately, Ed feels like an idiot. Of course. This is not the time, not the place, and even if they found something like that in this barren hellhole of smoke and fire and scorching sun, who would want to carry lovely memories of such a terrible place?
Steel feet meet a ground of sand and heat and dust. Winry whirls back around just as he struggles to stand—only to have his knees nearly buckle beneath him as pain sears up his nerves where steel meets flesh and his vision turns red-white. A hissed breath slips through clenched teeth.
A shoulder, wedged under his armpit. An arm over his back. Winry, solid and sturdy and stable as ever. “You shouldn’t try to walk yet! You need a few hours before—”
“M’fine.” It’s nothing he hasn’t dealt with before, between actually losing his legs in the first place and then enduring the excruciating surgery to get these replacements. And really—with all the destruction he’s left in his wake, who is he complain about such a light punishment? So he pulls his weight free of her, manages to stagger forward enough to prove that he can, at least, wobble about. “Thanks for the tune up.”
Sand welcomes him as he drops into it to collect his shoes. The weight of her eyes on his shoulders have the bones creaking, groaning, threatening to collapse on sheer principle. He can imagine the way her lips purse. “...be careful out there, Ed.”
He scowls as he rolls his pantlegs back down. Isn’t a little clichéd, to end on a note where you acknowledge the war and its deadly ephemerality? Snorting, he casts a half-lidded glance over his shoulder. “You comin’ to the bonfire tonight?”
The unexpected question throws her off, but she seems to recover quickly, her startled blinking transitioning into weary exasperation. “Depends. Are you planning on drinking?”
“Maybe.” Technically speaking, he’s a year shy of the drinking age at seventeen, but there’s no such thing out here. Drunken oblivion is a blessing to be shared by all.
She exhales loudly, rolling her eyes in a way that is a dull echo of their old routine. A hand meets her hip as she smirks down at him. “Guess I’ll have to make the time to rescue your liver from you.”
“Ouch. Just call me an alcoholic, why don’t you?” Except there are no alcoholics in Ishval. Just soldiers.
More pain as he stands again, like a rusty knife imbedded deep inside his thighs. It gives a brutal twist with each step forward, but he swallows back grunts and whines as he casts the curtain aside. Chaos greets him, baking in the heat. Blood and patients, doctors and nurses. Sunlight tearing its way through the entrance flaps, burning white-gold.
As the baking heat opens its arms wide to embrace him again, another sinner treading the plains of hell, there’s a shout levelled at his back.
“Don’t break those legs, Ed!”
Blinking, he glances back. Winry huffs at the tent flaps, hands on her hips, a scowl daring to grace her lovely face. Her hair has started to fall free of the ratty bun. Sunlight lances across her features, striking at the dark shadows beneath her eyes and the pale gauntness of her jawline.
Other soldiers in the vicinity are staring. One or two of the particularly annoying ones snicker something about sexy nurses.
“Damn gearhead,” Ed mutters to himself, reflexively, and trudges onwards.
It’s going to be a long war, but—hell, maybe, a day will come when they can claw their way out of this desert hell, crawl back to Risembool on their hands and knees suffering burns from the sand, and the collapse in the cool green grass. And then they can lie beneath a sun that will tickle at their faces instead of burning them alive.