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It was only because Winry had been looking out the window that she saw the flash of light coming from the Elrics’ house.
“Granny,” she called, “look there! I saw a light at Ed and Al’s house.”
Granny frowned and peered out, but the light had vanished already. “Was it lightning?” she asked.
“No,” Winry said, her stomach clenching with unease. “I don’t think so. I think the light came from inside the house.”
The house was too far to be able to tell for sure, but Winry had seen no bolt of lightning descend from the sky. On the other hand, no one was supposed to be there, since as far as she knew Ed and Al were still studying with their alchemy teacher in Dublith. What thieves would flash such a bright light at the risk of drawing the neighbors’ attention?
“Let’s have a look,” Granny said.
Winry and Granny put on their raincoats, grabbed a lantern and went out in the stormy night. The rain was pouring so hard that walking through it felt like walking through a waterfall that had no other side. Water dripped from the edge of Winry’s hood into her eyes and her socks squished inside her shoes. As they trod up the steep slope that would lead them to Ed and Al’s house, Winry’s heart pounded hard against her ribs. The house loomed at the top of the hill, a sturdy shadow against the tormented sky, now completely dark, silent and uninviting.
It was just as dark and silent inside. “Anyone here?” Granny called as they went in, thumping their shoes at the doorstep to try and get rid of the mud that stuck to them.
Granny shed the yellow light of her lantern over the kitchen. The familiar décor—the kitchen table and its four chairs, the stove, the cupboards over the sink, the checkered curtains at the window—preserved from happier times, looked foreboding in the semi-darkness. Winry and Granny explored the different rooms, calling intermittently for anyone who might hear them. Winry was starting to relax, thinking that she must have imagined the flash of light or that whoever had caused it was long gone, when the house’s stifling silence was a broken by the very distinctive sound of a moan.
Granny whirled around, holding out her lantern to the empty hallway they were standing in. “We haven’t looked in Hohenheim’s office,” she said.
Hohenheim’s office, like the man himself, was something of a legend to Winry. Hohenheim was a stern face on Granny’s or Trisha Elric’s pictures, a name spat out in anger by Ed or whispered wistfully by Al, and the office was a lair of alchemical marvels that the brothers kept raving about, but that had always sounded uninteresting to Winry. Now, as she listened to another faint, drawn-out moan, Hohenheim’s office acquired another dimension: it was a sinister, frightening place of unknown danger, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to see what was in it. But she was almost eleven and a half and this was Ed and Al’s house; she couldn’t just ignore whatever lurked in the room. Winry gripped Granny’s hand and together they went to check the inside of Hohenheim’s office.
There, they found Ed lying in a pool of blood next to a huge transmutation circle.
---
The next few hours were so panicked and chaotic that afterward Winry would have trouble remembering exactly what had happened and in what order. Once they realized that the blood was most certainly Ed’s because he was missing an arm and a leg, all of their efforts were focused on getting back to their house and stabilizing him. It was only when they were sure that he wasn’t about to die on them, late into that night, that they wondered what had happened to Al.
Granny went back to the Elrics’ house and searched the office as well as the rest of the house. She didn’t find anything amiss in the house, except for the remains of a meal that showed that Ed and Al had dined there before whatever they’d done. Granny claimed that she didn’t know what the circle was for, but Winry wasn’t sure she believed her. She also thought that Granny had found something or done something at the house that she didn’t want to share with Winry, because her hands were shaking when she came back and mud stained the bottom of her skirt. What she did tell Winry, though, was that she’d found clothes that seemed to have belonged to Al, but no other sign of the boy. Maybe some of the blood was his, and not just Ed’s, but they had no way to know that for sure.
Only Ed could tell them what had happened to his brother, but Ed was unable to say anything to anyone for the next couple of days. The fever that took hold of him left him no lucid moment. When he wasn’t sleeping a brutal med-induced sleep, he mumbled deliriously barely intelligible sentences, called for his mother, for his brother, and uttered words of apology again and again, until Winry wanted to smother him with a pillow so his cries would stop breaking her heart. Sorry, sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry.
Al’s fate was left to Winry’s imagination. She had little knowledge of alchemy, so she didn’t know whether it was possible for a transmutation circle to just absorb someone, but it certainly seemed like it had happened here. Because Al wouldn’t have undressed and then gone out to wander around naked, and he would never, ever have abandoned his brother broken and bleeding on the floor of their father’s office. If Al hadn’t left to get Ed help, then it meant that something had happened to him, something worse than what had happened to Ed. Was he dead? Was he gone somewhere a non-alchemist couldn’t reach? They should have tried to contact an alchemist to ask for help, but Granny made no move to do so. When Winry asked her about it, she just said that Winry had to keep quiet about what they’d found at the house. No one was to know about the circle, for Ed’s own safety. This was how Winry knew that the brothers had done something very wrong.
On the third day after that fateful night, Winry went into Ed’s room early to change his bandages. He still felt warm, but a lot less than before, and his pulse was steady and strong when she checked it. The wounds, horrific as they were, seemed to be healing nicely enough. As Winry gathered the dirty bandages, yawning and wondering what she wanted for breakfast, something made her look up at Ed in his bed. He was watching her with half-lid eyes, the gold of his irises gleaming in the early morning light. He didn’t look disoriented or confused, or even still half-asleep. He was just watching, his eyes following her movements and his face expressing nothing. It was so rare to see Ed emotionless that it made Winry ill at ease.
“Ed!” she exclaimed, trying to inject cheer in her voice. “You’re awake! How are you feeling? Are you hurting? If you are, I can give you more pain killers.”
Ed looked up to the ceiling. “How long?” he asked in a voice raw from disuse.
“How long… You mean, how long ago since we found you? Two days now. We found you in your father’s office. And… what has happened to Al?” she couldn’t help asking, even knowing that he needed to rest and that she shouldn’t upset him. “We only found his clothes.”
“Al is… I’m not sure,” Ed said, still looking at the ceiling. “I hope I…”
He trailed off and rubbed a spot in the middle of his chest. He had no wound there, but Winry remembered that on the night they’d found him, when they’d been cleaning him up and assessing his injuries, she’d seen an odd blood mark at that exact sport. Ed had been covered in blood, not just where his wounds had bled but like he’d crawled in it. His fingers had been stained with it too. But that mark hadn’t looked like an accidental stain; it had lines, like a drawing that had been smudged. A circle.
She asked again what had happened to Al, but Ed wouldn’t answer her.
---
Winry had assumed that things would look up once Ed had woken up properly. They wouldn’t have to worry as much about his survival, and he would be able to tell them what had happened to him and to Al. But, in an odd way, it actually made everything feel worse. Ed told them, in a clipped voice that didn’t sound like him at all, that Al and he had tried to bring back their mother using alchemy. Winry didn’t know much about alchemy, but she knew at least that human transmutation was forbidden, and she now understood why Granny hadn’t wanted to involve anyone else. When asked about his brother, though, Ed clammed up. He wouldn’t tell them if Al was dead or alive, if something could be done to save him. He just stopped talking and turned away, ignoring them so completely it felt like he didn’t even know they were still there.
Physically, he was steadily regaining his strength and his wounds healed at a normal pace. But he was somber and quiet, two words that Winry would have never associated with him before. He ate and drank when they prompted him, and he let himself be handled through cleaning and wound-dressing without ever a word of protest. A few days after he’d woken up, Winry caught him talking to himself. It happened once, and she dismissed it—who has never murmured a comment under their breath?—but then it happened again, until it was a common occurrence. He cut himself off when he saw her looking, so he had to know on some level that what he was doing wasn’t normal, but that didn’t stop him from doing it again. Winry didn’t dare ask him about it or talk to Granny. The fear that his mind had broken when his body had was too great.
In some ways, it would have been easier if he’d died. Winry hated herself for that thought but it kept nagging her every time she entered Ed’s room. If he’d died, she could have mourned him. She could have wept for hours like she had at her parents’ deaths, visited his grave and littered it with flowers. She could have remembered him as he’d been, and not as this strange, silent boy who’d lost all of the stubbornness, intelligence and fire that had always characterized Edward. If they found Al’s body, then she could stop hoping that one day he would walk through their door and make Ed whole again.
“Do you think Ed will get better?” she asked Granny one day.
“He’s already getting better,” Granny said, focused on the stew she was stirring. It was Ed’s favorite and it smelled delicious, but he hadn’t paid any attention to the food they’d given him so far and Winry had little hope this would change.
“No, I mean—” Winry gripped the back of a chair tightly. “Do you think that he’ll ever be back to himself?”
Granny stopped stirring her stew and sighed. “I don’t know, Winry,” she said. “What happened to him was very traumatic, and I’m sure we only heard half of the story. It might be a long time until he recovers. But Ed isn’t easily beaten down.”
Something awful, something irreparable happening to Al was one of the things that could beat down Ed, though, so it didn’t make Winry feel any better. When the stew was ready and before Granny and her had their dinner, she went to Ed’s room with a bowl of it on a tray. He was now well enough that he could feed himself without her help, but not enough that he could eat at the table with them.
She found him sitting in bed, looking out his window at the sun setting behind the hills. He hadn’t left the house since getting hurt, and Winry wondered if he was feeling cooped up. He’d never complained about it—another very uncharacteristic thing. When he heard the door close, he turned his head to look at her. And then he smiled.
“Hey, Winry,” he said.
His smile was bright and warm, and it held more genuine happiness at seeing her than it had in… In ever. Winry’s fingers clutched the tray she was holding as she gaped at him. This wasn’t Ed’s smile. Ed’s smiles were excited, or smug, or mocking, but they weren’t sweet smiles of welcome. Ed’s brooding and his mad whispers to himself had scared her, but not as much as this ill-fitting smile did.
Ed tilted his head. “Winry?” he asked uncertainly. “Are you all right?”
The concern in his voice would have been funny if it hadn’t sounded so unlike him. Winry started shaking. A crazy thought entered her mind and firmly planted itself there: this didn’t look or sound like Ed, but like Al. Al smiled like that, did that little tilt of the head, had that precise concerned intonation.
This is impossible.
“Oh,” said Ed, or Al, or whoever that was. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—I’m really sorry.”
He closed his eyes, shook his head, and when he opened his eyes again looked at Winry with a serious, intent expression that she hadn’t seen in a while, but that definitely belonged to the Ed she knew and had missed.
“Winry,” he said. “I’m sorry about that. Sit down before you fall.”
Winry numbly sat by his bed and put her tray down on the nightstand. Her mind had frozen and she simply waited for an explanation, for something that would make sense of what she’d just witnessed. She’d imagined it. She’d misinterpreted it. She just missed Al too much.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” Ed said, then made a grimace that she thought was supposed to be an apologetic smile.
“What—I mean—right now.” She didn’t know how to start or end that sentence. “What happened to Al?” she finally settled for.
She’d asked that question a million times and he’d never answered her. For a moment, she thought he wasn’t going to answer now either, but finally he said, looking at the fingers of his one hand, “Something went wrong with the transmutation. Al was—Al was caught in the reaction. I was too, and I saw…” He shook his head. “When I came back to myself, I was missing a leg and Al was gone.”
“A leg?” She couldn’t help but look at his shoulder stump.
“I didn’t know what to do, but I had to do something,” he went on as though he hadn’t heard her. “To bring Al back, I had to sacrifice something.”
“Your—your arm,” Winry said, eyes filling with water as she understood how he’d lost his arm.
“My arm was just enough to bring back Al’s soul, not his body. I had to bind his soul to something. There was nothing in the office that could do the trick.”
A second realization dawned on Winry and it froze the blood in her veins. “Is he here?” she whispered, like by speaking too loudly she would wake up some dark entity.
“Yeah,” Ed said. He touched his chest, then his forehead. “There was nothing else I could bind him to.”
“Can I talk to him?”
Ed looked at her, his eyes widened in surprise. “It freaked you out a few minutes ago.”
“A few minutes ago I didn’t even know what was going on! How can you expect me not to freak out when something so strange happens and I wasn’t even aware it was possible! Let me talk to him, Ed.”
“All right, all right. You asked for it.”
Just like a moment before, he closed his eyes and then opened them again. The transformation was an extraordinary thing to watch: it was still Ed’s face, still his nose and mouth and eyes, but the features softened and the expression melted into something that was clearly un-Ed-like.
He—Al—gave her a sheepish smile. “I’m sorry I scared you,” he said. Even the voice was different—still Ed’s, but pitched higher than was normal for Ed.
Winry’s eyes welled up again and she felt the tears spill and run down her cheeks. “Oh, Al,” she said.
“Don’t cry! It’s all right, really,” Al said, waving Ed’s hand in alarm.
“All right? What’s all right about this, exactly? You’re—you don’t even have—”
“But I’m alive, aren’t I? Thanks to my brother, I’m still alive.”
“I don’t think he sees it that way,” Winry said, remembering Ed’s litany of broken apologies when he was still delirious from the fever.
“Well,” Al said and diverted his eyes.
“Can he hear what we’re saying?”
“Yes, but it’s—muddled. Until a few days ago I wasn’t aware of much. It was really confusing, for both of us.”
Winry couldn’t imagine what it was like, and she couldn’t fathom at all how Al could be so calm about it. But she felt silly for crying when he was being so composed about the horror of his situation, so she sniffed and rubbed her eyes.
“It’s really confusing for me too,” she said. “I swear, you two will be the death of me.”
“I’m sorry,” Al said. “I have to go now. It’s a strain for me to be—the one in control, but I’m getting better.”
“Oh, okay,” she said. “Talk to you soon?”
He smiled again. “I promise.”
The shift from Al to Ed happened just as swiftly, but when Ed came back, he sagged against his pillows, looking exhausted.
“It feels so freaking weird,” he murmured. “But it’s worse for Al. It’s so much worse for him.”
“What’re you going to do?”
“I have to find a way—but I don’t know. I don’t even know where to start looking.”
He looked and sounded so defeated that it broke Winry’s heart again, like it hadn’t been breaking every day for a week now. ‘Ed’ and ‘defeated’ shouldn’t belong in the same sentence. But it was the most he’d talked to her since he’d told her the story of the human transmutation he and Al had attempted, and she now knew that Al was alive, or something close to it, so she refused to let herself be dragged down again.
“You should eat,” she said, taking the tray from the nightstand and holding it out to him. “Whatever you’re going to do, you’ll need your strength for it.”
He looked at the bowl of stew, then at her. “Is it Granny’s stew?” he asked with a faint smile.
“And she made it especially for you, so you better appreciate it.”
He ate the whole bowl and said it was delicious. A few months ago, he would have asked for seconds, but that was still progress when you compared it to yesterday.
“Ed,” she said as she was about to bring the empty bowl and the tray back to the kitchen. “I know you’ll find a way to make things right. You never let anything stand in your way. I know it, and I’m sure Al does too.”
Ed’s face darkened at her mention of his brother. “Well, that makes one of us,” he said.
---
Ed got stronger over the next few weeks, and so did Al, as Winry was able to talk to him several times again. Ed’s mood was still dark most of the time, and under his optimism Winry could detect that Al was anxious too. It was hard to watch them suffer and be incapable of doing anything but take care of Ed’s wounds and make conversation to Al. Alchemy had caused this, so alchemy would have to fix the mess.
One day, a State Alchemist from Central came by with his blond lieutenant in tow. The alchemist’s name was Roy Mustang and the lieutenant was Riza Hawkeye. After talking to Lieutenant Colonel Mustang, Ed decided he wanted automail and that he would become a State Alchemist.
Granny was angry and Winry was frightened. But even though she didn’t want Ed and Al to leave, even though she only had negative associations with the words ‘State Alchemist’, she saw a spark in Ed’s eyes that had been missing since the failed transmutation. The hope it gave her overrode the fear. If there was a way, she knew that Ed and Al would find it.