Litost (n.) a state of agony and torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery.

Fear sliced through me, cold and stinging like frozen metal on warm flesh. My ears rang, heart pounded, palms broke out in a clammy sweat. I'd never raced up seven flights of stairs so fast in my life. She'd disappeared for a week. For an entire fucking week I'd barely ate and barely slept in my effort to find her. I was passed out with my head on Mustang's desk when I was shaken awake by Breada, telling me that she had called, and had somehow materialized in my apartment. I couldn't wrap my brain around it, it was as if she'd evaporated straight through the walls. But when I found her, she wasn't herself.

I burst through the door to find the apartment dark.

"Winry? Are you here?!" I called into the blackness. As I moved to switch on the light I was stopped by a beam of light streaking its way across the hardwood floor from the bedroom. I stood seemingly hypnotized by the beam of light as it slowly widened it's span on the floor. A shadow fell over the light, and she slowly stepped out of the bedroom, her feet scuffing across the floor. She faced the wall in front of her and her arms hung heavily at her sides as the light poured over her back. I took a careful step toward her. Something was very wrong.

"Win? Are you okay?" I asked. Her head slowly turned to face me and my stomach turned. Her hair was filthy, her feet were bare, and she wore one of my t-shirts. She looked lost. Helpless even. I had never seen her look worse. Her body turned in my direction and I noticed a faint light glinting off dark metal in her hand.

"Honey say something." I pleaded.

She closed her eyes for a moment, and the tears fell silently before she opened them again and focused on me. She drew a shuddering breath and slowly raised her arm from her side. She was holding one of my guns. I could feel my eyes widen.

"What're you doing?" I asked, trying my best to stay calm. She continued to slowly raise the gun and my heart rate raised along with it. "Put the gun down, Winry. Let me help you."

Her expression only further crumbled as her tears continued to fall, and she placed the barrel against her head. My blood froze over, splintering my heart from fear.

"Winry stop! I'm begging you! Everything's gonna be okay just please put the gun down!"

"I can't!" She wailed. "I can't do this anymore. I hate this life. I hate living in fear like this. I'm not safe, I'll never be safe. This is the only way out. This is the only way I'll have control."

I raked my hands through my hair, frantically telling myself this couldn't be real.

"Baby lets talk. Let's just sit and talk about this."

She shook her head sadly, the gun still firmly pressed to her temple.

"Nothing's okay." She said. "I'll never be safe. I can't just sit here knowing that I"ll be killed but never knowing when. I can't just wait here to die. I need to die by my hand, not someone else's. I need to be in control of my life..."'

"Honey stop, please..."

"...I need to be in control..." She sobbed quietly.

I started walking towards her to get the gun away from her.

"Don't do it Winry. Please listen to me..."

"I need to be in control!" She screamed.

"Winry stop!"

She pulled the trigger.

"WINRY!"

I flew upright in bed and gasped for air, heaving madly as I wiped the sweat from my eyes and quickly scanned the room. The force of the air raging in and out of my lungs furiously earned some impressive coughs in my attempt to catch my breath. I was sure my heart would thunder out of my chest at any moment. Moisture sprang in my eyes. Suddenly she was in the doorway. In sweats and my t-shirt she stood with hands braced on the door frame, her gorgeous eyes wide and frightened. I tried to say something, but found my words choked in my throat at the sight of her. Healthy. Breathing. Alive. She crossed the room to the bed and I grabbed her, crushing her to me.

"What happened?" She asked, hugging me just as tightly. I couldn't tell her. It was taking every ounce of my strength to hold the tears back. I pulled back quickly and ran a hand over the side of her head, the side where she held the gun.

'She's okay.' I told myself. 'It was a dream. Pull it together.'

"I'm sorry." I rushed out, still trying to catch my breath. "For everything." I pulled her close again. My frantic mind couldn't comprehend the words she whispered to me, the way she cooed in my ear to calm me down. It was only when I felt her hand smoothing over my back, rubbing up and down, that I began to come back to reality. It was a dream. A horrible, awful dream.

"I'm sorry too." She said. "I should've been honest from the start."

"No, you were right. You need to protect yourself. I can't always be here, and it's not right for me to leave you powerless..." My mind flashed back to her in the dream, with the gun to her head while she screamed about control. I pushed the image away. "...I want you to be able to defend yourself when I can't be here."

Our fight had been about her training with Riza. I was happy at first to hear about Winry learning the basics of self-defense, since she had become much more comfortable with going out into the city on her own. But when her self-defense courses turned into Krav Maga training I became worried. Krav Maga was a defensive martial art, but it could also be extremely violent, and was used heavily by the Israeli Army. I knew it well, and the thought that Winry was learning such a deadly martial art to potentially use on someone struck a chord. I didn't want her to know about the dark things I did. She deserved to live in the kind of worlds she read about in her books. She deserved to live a life that was happy and free of the violence that plagued so much of my own, and I would stop at nothing to protect her from it.

We argued for days over the Krav Maga, both taking turns being the one who threw their hands up and stormed out of the apartment. But the fighting reached it's pinnacle when I knocked over one her shoe boxes in the closet by accident, and a small hand gun came flying out and landed on the carpet with a heavy thud. It didn't belong to me, and the safety was off.

I lost it. I completely lost my shit when I recognized the gun to be one of Riza's favorite kinds, a perfect choice for beginners, and I knew Winry had used it. The fight was loud, ugly, emotional, and ended with me yelling something absurd about how I was the one in control of her safety before grabbing my car keys and slamming the stairwell door behind me.

When I'd returned hours later it was 3 in the morning, I was tipsy, and I strode past her sleeping form curled up on the couch without so much as a second glance before I entered the bedroom, kicked off my boots and crashed into bed with my clothes still on.

I was sitting up with my back propped against the headboard; she was curled up in my arms with her head on my shoulder and her legs over my lap. I held her close, with one arm around her and the other under her knees, and we sat in the dark. Just talking.

"You've got me wrong. I'm glad to see you taking charge." I said to her. It only made sense after I'd spent months trying to make her see that she held the key to her own fate. "I'm just really not a fan of you having a gun, and I should've done a better job explaining why. I'm sorry for all the fighting, and I'm sorry for reacting the way I did." I felt her clutch the fabric of my shirt.

"You were right to be upset. I shouldn't have kept it a secret from you, and it was careless of me to not check the safety. I won't make that mistake again, but I thought you trusted me."

"You know I do. I'm just asking you to work with me here. I'm still trying to learn how to let go control, and I'm still figuring out how to have you in my life while keeping you away from my problems."

She pulled back a little to look up at me. Her blue eyes were like midnight sapphires and had changed so much since I first met her. She was no longer the wide-eyed damsel in distress who kept passing out from anxiety, and she wasn't the feisty ball-buster who charged into my apartment for the first time to tell me she loved me and demand I tell her the truth about how I felt as she challenged the limits of my emotional stability. She had become the woman I had always seen laying dormant. She was confident and comfortable, she was unafraid to ruffle feathers because I had taught her to demand more from life. She was able to look me in the eye every day -knowing everything she did- and still love me in spite of the terrifying things I brought to the table.

"That's what you're not getting, Ed. We love eachother, we're a team. Your problems are my problems. You can't shut me out of your life, so let me do what I can to fit into it a little better."

She repeatedly killed me with that damn optimism of hers. I was afraid that beautiful optimism would be destroyed once she put such deadly skills to use. I knew Riza would only teach her these things because she had accepted what I still couldn't: the fact that one day Winry would have to use these skills to protect herself from my enemies. The thought of her taking a life nearly raised bile to the back of my throat.

"You should never have to do what I do." I said. "I don't ever want your hands to be stained like mine are."

"Are you hearing yourself? You talk like you're the bad guy, Ed. Have you forgotten what you actually do?" She remarked incredulously before softening her smile. "You're a soldier. A hero. Last week you diffused a bomb and saved hundreds of lives. You've stopped countless terror attacks on the country. You've saved far more lives than what you've taken."

God I did not deserve this woman.

"And don't forget," She added. "You saved me. More than once." I pulled her tighter to me and kissed her hair, hugging her to my chest as I murmured,

"My greatest victory." We sat in comfortable silence for another minute before I asked, "How's your aim?"

She laughed softly, a sound that I loved. "Not quite there yet. I could use some help from the best." She suggested coyly. This finally earned a small smile from me.

"I'm damn good, but I'm not the best. Riza is. Besides, I just..." I took a breath to steady my shaken nerves as I ran metal fingers through her hair, fixing my gaze on hers. "...I can't bring myself to watch you wield a gun. Not yet anyway." I knew I had to cave about the firearm. It was for the best that she learn to use one, I just had to play my cards so carefully. I couldn't let her become unstable like me. I couldn't let her believe she didn't have control.

"What's got you so upset?" She asked looking up at me. "Your face looks like your dog just got run over. What did you dream about?" My eyes widened and I shook my head.

"I'd rather forget it."

"Something from your past?"

"No," I said, silently cherishing the weight of her warm body in my arms, her soft breaths skimming over my neck as she looked at me with those deep aquamarine eyes. "More like a warning for the future. A pretty extreme and unlikely one, but I got the message. It's an idea I won't so much as entertain, and I'll do anything to stop it from becoming a reality no matter how uncomfortable I am. I just need you to promise me that you won't do anything drastic."

She sent me a confused look and my heart squeezed violently. It was hard enough protecting her from my enemies, I prayed I would never have to protect her from herself. The thought terrified me, and I pulled her towards me and kissed her fully; slowly pouring in my anguish and desperate need to keep her safe.

"Just swear that you'll tell me if something's wrong." I said, breaking away. "If you're not feeling right, if you begin to feel... hopeless, or like you're not in control." She continued to search my gaze for answers, and drawing on every emotion I'd ever felt during my past stints with suicide, I took her by the shoulders and said,

"Keep training with Riza. But if you ever start to feel like you've lost control, if you feel trapped, like you'll never find a way out, I need you to tell someone. Please."

She had always been emotionally strong, too strong for her own good. I knew that it was pretty unlikely for my dream to ever actually happen, but I wasn't willing to risk losing her by controlling her. I kissed her again and hugged her close to speak softly in her ear.

"You're in control, Winry. It's your life, you've always been in control of it."

"I'll still never understand how you eat the way you do and look the way you look." I said over the brim of my coffee mug. "I swear you could out-eat half the men in my squadron. It's amazing you're not a giant fat-ass."

"All this drama worked up my appetite." She said, mouth full of pancakes. I couldn't help grinning at her as she swallowed and continued, "I can't help it if my metabolism is off-the-charts, it's just how my body is. While we're on the subject, where's your food? Aren't you starving to death?"

"You somehow become less attractive when you get sarcastic." I said, scooping out a piece of grapefruit. "I don't remember inviting Rosanne Barr to breakfast."

"That's the pot calling the kettle black right there." She fired back with a wink. "Besides, I seem to remember you liking my smart mouth."

She had me pegged. I loved that smart mouth of hers. After all the emotional torture we'd endured that night we were wide awake at 5:30 am, and decided to grab breakfast at the diner down the block. It was just before dawn and the city was still quiet.

"Is that seriously all you're gonna eat? Is an actual meal too much for your stomach to handle?" She asked with a smirk, gesturing to my half grapefruit and black coffee.

"Yes this is all I want, and you know why I don't eat the bullshit you eat. Machines for limbs, remember? Have you finished yet or are you in an eating contest with yourself? Should I pick up some pepto-bismol on the way home?"

"I'm not done yet." She joked, clinking her fork on the side of her empty plate and pretending to look around the empty diner for our waitress. "I want enough pancakes to warrant gastric bypass surgery. I want a maple syrup I.V. drip." I grinned and shook my head as I downed the rest of my coffee and tossed a few bills on the table. I stood and pulled her up with me and she linked an arm with mine as we left. The city had picked up traffic to it's normal early morning hustle and we stood at the corner waiting for the signal to walk when she tugged my sleeve.

"Hey, we're okay right?" She asked. I could see the worry etched over her pretty face and I knew she was referring to our week of fighting. Between me being worried about her martial arts training and the blowout after finding the gun, we hadn't had sex in almost two weeks. When I woke from my nightmare to find her alive and well, I would've ravished her right then and there. But crushing night terrors have a way of killing the urge. I couldn't help finding the way she looked at me so goddamn adorable; she was worried that this fight would affect us. So I pulled her flush against me and kissed her slowly, taking my time to dive deeper as my fingers buried in her soft hair, eliciting a soft moan from her. I didn't give a damn that we were in the middle of the street. When I pulled back she was exactly how I wanted her: dazed with hooded eyes and pink cheeks and swollen lips. I put my arm around her and coaxed her to walk with me.

"We're better than okay." I said.

"We'd better be after you just molested me in the middle of the street. I hope all of New York enjoyed the show." She said, her pink cheeks now stained red. What a smart-ass. We walked in to Central and made our way to the elevator. After stepping in I pulled her to me to murmur in her ear,

"I want you in that tiny white dress when we get home."

She smirked and said, "I don't know, I don't think Rosanne Barr can fit in it after winning that eating contest."

The doors closed and I grabbed her shoulders.

"I'm gonna shut that smart mouth of yours, Rockbell."

"Do it. You won't."

I dragged her against me and kissed her hard, and just like that I felt her knees give way as her arms slid around me.

Elric - 1

Smart mouth - 0.

A/N: I figured something would have to give. Either Ed would have to quit being a government agent, or Winry would have to become a bad-ass. We already know that Winry is a total bad-ass.