"Is that really the nicest thing you can say to one of the guys who just saved the world?"

She knows he's kidding, mostly. And she also knows he doesn't want to tell her, just yet, how close "saving the world" came to mean the devastation of his. But it's the first thing she can think of to say after he and Alphonse show up—unannounced, alive, entire, alive, smiling, alive—and she's picked herself up and dusted herself off and turned what feels like eight hundred shades of red because oh, goodness, she threw herself on top of them. So she says it as a protective measure, with a little armor in her tone. You may be stupid, but I'm not. And out loud, she retorts:

"You'd really have to be stupid to try and save the world."

He laughs at that for a long time, and surprises them both by agreeing with her.

And after they've come back—they've both come back, she has to repeat it night after night after night—she can't seem to let go of his right hand because it's so warm. He looks over at her when he first notices—a little confused, a little blushing—because even though she hugs Al much longer and with many more tears, her hand stays right there next to his.

To catch his attention immediately before she hurls a snowball right at his nose during one of the few sparkling January days, when the sky limns the bare trees in violent, blinding blue and the windows are too bright with frost for anyone to stay indoors. She hits him dead-on, with such a satisfying thwump, and snow gets everywhere on him: into the wrinkles of his sleeves, the brim of his hat (a Pinako Rockbell original), and melts, trickling, frigid, down his neck and beneath the fabric over his chest in shining droplets, and right about then is when Winry stops thinking about the snow and turns shade #658 of the eight hundred reds her cheeks have nearly perfected at this point.

"Owmf."

Too late, she realizes one hand is still behind his back, and she's almost, almost quick enough to dodge, but he's always been just a little bit faster than her. The handful of sharp, cold crystals sprays across her neck and chin, the splendid prisms of it catching in her eyelashes and in her hair, and she thinks even from yards away that she hears him catch his breath. And then there's a sound that makes both of them turn and stare, because it's beautiful—right now, even more beautiful than they are to each other. Inside the wide arms and legs of a snow angel, there's a laughing young man with his eyes squinting up at the frosted clouds in the sky, and being the child he would have been in his own body.

"This is kinda like old times, isn't it?" he shouts at them, still laughing, even though he doesn't need to shout because every sound in the glass air is needle-sharp.

It is just like old times, because it is that missing part of all three of them that got sucked into the vacuum of those too-many lost years. And the high, hectic laughter of children comes out of them rather than the laughter of the young adults they are in other hours.

And it is not at all like old times, because Winry never remembers this peculiar feeling in her chest: of being too full, so full she might overbrim and the surplus might leak in freezing diamonds out of the corners of her eyes.

"It's better than old times," says Ed's voice, closer than she's prepared to hear it, and even though he's looking at his brother with that same over-full look on his face, his words are for her.

As a greeting when he calls her all the way from Aerugo, and the telephone rates for this sort of thing are absolutely exorbitant, but she can hear in his voice, scratchy over the hundreds of miles, that he doesn't really care about that.

*Nice to hear you, too, Winry.*

She could tell him she was worried—that he called two hours later than he said he would, and that she thought he'd gotten held up somewhere, or lost, or in trouble (or worse things that she doesn't want to lift the curtain on because she can't put herself through that when he's at such a distance). She could tell him that he needs to come back—that he's saved enough of the world already, and now he needs to think about her, not the world, about her and him, and what the hell is going to happen with whatever this is when he comes back. She could tell him that Granny has started to take much longer to climb the stairs, and that Xing and Alphonse are both radio silent, that the mutterings from Central are asking questions about Edward Elric, and about Roy Mustang, and about why a former state alchemist is allowed to roam free in Aerugo when the country is still so fragile, and that when she walks down the street in Rush Valley people are starting to look at her, and she can feel their whispers crawling up her arms.

'You'd better be taking care of your leg," she says instead. "If I had known you were headed south, I would have—"

*Winry, it's fine, I've been taking great care of it. Seriously.*

She's absently wound the telephone cord around her finger, and suddenly it unravels, leaving angry red and white spirals all the way down from her knuckle.

"Good."

She could say she misses him. She could say it's been exactly one hundred days since he and Al left and she still has no idea when either of them will come home. She could say there've been several very, very nice men who visit her workshop and spend more time trying to talk to her over the cans of oil and scattered metal shavings and marked surfaces of her workspace than they do actually looking at her automail, and she smiles and sends them off. She could say a damn lot.

*Hey, are you doing okay?*

He's gotten better at asking this, and the fact that he does now makes her vision watery, wavering.

"I've…been better. But yes, I'm okay."

She repeats it for him. For herself.

"I'm okay."

Half-sobbing it into the threadbare seams of his jacket when he appears on her doorstep in Rush Valley less than a month later. She feels his ribs shake with laughter against her arms because he caught her after another all-nighter, and when he asked Paninya to shake her awake Winry threw a punch that nearly broke her friend's tooth. And his voice is there, and real, and not caught up in the static of distance and anxiety, and not a faulty remembrance in her head as she reads his letters, but there, with her, and safe again:

"I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you missed me?"

Breathless, in too little air between their lips and mouths because they have to make up for so much lost time ("Time that you lost being dense," Winry points out; he sputters and stares and doesn't have a very good answer) in the moments between her last few customers. There are a few quiet seconds between the time they get home and when it's time to pick Alphonse up at the station (his carry-on luggage turns out to be small, and energetic, with a tiny panda perched on her shoulder; "They charge extra to ship Xingese royalty," he jokes, as Ed complains to anyone who will listen about the travel fare across the desert).

Out of breath, after she's tasted his soul on his lips, and the rest of the house is quiet because Granny goes to sleep earlier nowadays, and both Al and May are off somewhere (Winry vaguely remembers Al asking May if she'd like a quick evening tour of Resembool, and it didn't occur to her until now that he might have been doing his brother a favor), and once they finally figure out what to do with their hands and their laughter and their hot, frequent blushes it seems like talking might defeat the purpose.

So she says it as much to herself as anyone. And he decides that's quite enough discussion, and within seconds she's inclined to agree.

After she floats back to earth, her heartbeat racing to catch up with the rest of her, and because all the other words in her mind have fled after that. He doesn't have much to say either, but just groans into her neck, and his hair tickles her jaw and her ear and sticks to her cheek as he slowly figures out how to move again.

"Wow…"

She nods. "Mmhm."

"Wow."

"I heard you."

He finally pushes himself off her and stares, his eyes hazy, and Winry feels the parts of her that are available to his gaze heat up significantly more than the rest.

"Wow."

Giggling, and mostly to cover her own self-consciousness, she asks:

"Is that the extent of your vocabulary now?"

They're still clumsy, and fumbling, and apologetic with each other, but she wants to breathe it all in before this moment joins the ranks of "firsts" they've already encountered. So she lets him familiarize himself with her, with the complicated patterns of her that shatter into starlight beneath her eyelids, and the sudden, breathtaking flame of that particular "first" that, at least temporarily, renders him unable to say anything but "wow."

He rolls, and pulls her along with him until they're draped over each other, a little too warm to be perfectly comfortable (but neither of them bothers moving, it's so much nicer to be too close and too warm), and they stay there until the light starts changing color and their absence will really be suspicious.

Pinako and Al have better eyes than they give them credit for: enough to see the little sillinesses and shynesses that they emerge wearing like flags of triumph.

They'll figure it out eventually.

In a whisper that barely reaches his ear, because all eyes are on them. The autumn evening turns all the colors of silk and copper under the hundred lanterns that May and Paninya hung against the eaves and from branches, and there's a soft restlessness among the audience members as Pinako takes the hands of two of her grandchildren and sets one softly inside the other, and before Roy Mustang helps her back to her seat she has some choice parting words for Ed that turn his face violently purple. And Winry knows he's been so nervous about this moment—not about them, but about this public event with too many opportunities to mess up, to put his foot characteristically in his mouth, to give all his friends a front row seat to his own humiliation—that she offers him a chuckle in this moment when her own hands have stopped quivering.

They get through it, saying all the words that make them officially what they've already been to each other, and afterward Winry thinks it's ironic that although it's their wedding she hardly gets to see him after the ceremony, because she's swept into the midst of her grandmother, who scoffs and tuts and casually dabs at her spectacles, and Hawkeye, who softly congratulates her and wears the smile of someone who has known how everything would turn out from the start, and Gracia Hughes, who hugs her with heartbreaking motherliness, and Garfiel, who's already ankle-deep in champagne and uproariously emotional. There's other guests Winry talks to without knowing she speaks to them: Maria Ross, Denny Brosh, and Sheska all piled on the train from Central together, and Lan Fan shadows her rogue emperor's steps as he raids the buffet table, and Major Armstrong weeps into a lacy handkerchief as Winry watches him nearly crush Ed in an enthusiastic embrace.

She's caught in the evening's wild current until the last guest has either collapsed on an extra couch, or been courteously shepherded to the nearest inn by Sig and Izumi Curtis, who were the first to arrive and the last to depart. By then the stars have already disappeared, and the first pink fingers of daylight start reaching over the trees.

"Hey, stupid."

She's looking out the front door and didn't hear him approach. Seeing his face after all the strange, frantic energy of the day before: she finally feels calm.

"That's my line."

He hands her one of the two cups of strong, scalding coffee he's holding.

"You were distracted."

"Oh, how silly of me."

It's too early to begin the next day, and too late to go back to the one that's just ended. So they walk onto the porch, among the mess of flower petals and crushed lanterns, where the saturated odors of nighttime overwhelm the scent of champagne. They have talked enough, promised enough, to let the sunrise be silent. He sets his fingers partially over hers as they sit on the steps, and this is what she loves—that he is still tentative, still questioning, mere hours after they've given their lives to each other.

"So, what now?" he asks.

Winry glances over the yard in front of them, and releases a sigh older than the hills.

"We hope some of the guests come back to help us clean this up."

She says it when he walks through the door, and he's paler than the face of the moon with deep, bruising curves under his eyes. As bad as he looks, Winry knows she looks infinitely worse, but neither of their appearances matter. He takes one look at the squalling bundle she holds against her chest (it's no bigger than a loaf of bread—how can it be making so much noise already?) and then he clears his throat, like he can't completely wrap himself around what's happening.

"Are you talking to me or to…?" he glances uncertainly at the bundle.

"Him."

Ed stares. "Him?"

Little arms reach up out of the cloth folds, and Winry beckons him closer so she can take his hand and let the small, small fingers close around his thumb, and the piercing squall subsides…stops. Ed looks like he's still expecting to get struck by lightning, and for some reason—exhaustion, anxiety, relief, euphoria, all of them at once—she starts to laugh.

"Hey!" he blurts, offended.

But she keeps laughing, and then wetness streams down her face, because it's all so much to happen in a few hours, before either of them believed they were ready. And all at once she misses her mother more than she ever thought was possible and she cries in good earnest.

"He-hey, Winry, what's wrong?"

He's panicking; he thinks she's still in some sort of pain. And it had been a close call—too close, close enough that Winry felt death run its fingers through her hair—but this isn't that kind of pain, and she's crying now because of how terribly alive she is.

"Nothing's wrong," she finally sniffs, because the anxious little sounds from the blanket are starting up again. "I'm so happy. I'm so happy."

They are all three quiet: he marvels with an alchemist's eyes at the blatant disregard of equivalent exchange (something from nothing, something from everything); the tiny life in her arms wriggles in all its freshly minted humanness and figures out these strange things called "smell" and "sight;" and she watches them begin to understand each other, two of her golden boys, and her last tear lands on a smile.

Groggy, after a night of many interruptions (as soon as the toddler's asleep, the baby starts crying, and once that's taken care of then the toddler's awake again) so he doesn't respond to her right away. Then he stirs, and groans:

"Right back at'cha."

Winry blocks out the reality of everything she needs to get done that day, because the clock still gives her five minutes before she needs to get up, and the house is mercifully, mercifully quiet for the moment.

But, for some reason, she doesn't close her eyes again. She feels the water-smooth metal of Ed's leg against hers, and when she turns her head, her cheek falls slightly against his shoulder. The inside of her skull is suddenly swept of fuzz and cobwebs, and she is strangely alert.

This is where they stand—after stumbling, and crawling, and groping, and hurting. They have this now. And she feels like she's falling back ten years, back into the girl she was when she didn't know if she'd ever see them again, or if Alphonse would ever have his body again, or if Ed would ever let himself be happy again.

Her eyes snap up to his, and she sees that he's observing her.

"Are they good?"

She blinks. She comes back into herself.

"Your thoughts. Are they good?" he explains.

Resting her chin on his shoulder, she inhales. He still smells like an alchemist—like ozone, and old books, and canvas. And automail oil, and tree bark, and baby powder.

"Yes. They're good."

Yes. They're very, very good.