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Creation (or, Jinkou: Redux)
Riding the train was always a grand ritual to Winry, maybe because the start and finish of each leg of the route were both the beginning and ending of a journey to some faraway fantastical place. There was something mystical about stepping aboard the car and gazing out at the familiar vistas and rolling, mist-covered fields of home and then watch as they slid and slowed and stopped into the bright blur that was the train station at Central in which the people came and went in tides as regular as clockwork, and where the giant mechanical horses thundered in and out in great waves of heat as if from a forge.
The conductors would be extra-nice to her, usually, and she suspected that it was because she was a young girl all alone. They'd offer her drinks and snacks and she would pick out what she wanted, waited till their steps faded down the hallway, and turn her attention back outside the window where the world flashed past in sparkling sequins of rivers and valleys and sun-kissed crop fields slowly blending into the white and grey stone buildings that were the walls of the city.
Ed and Al were always glad to see her. She was grateful for that, grateful and hopeful that they were not hiding other emotions behind their joyful voices when they greeted her. It was ridiculous, really, but sometimes, on the long ride there, a tense knot of something would build in her stomach and she would wonder what if. What if this time she stepped into the room and Al turned his face away and told her she was no longer welcome there? What if this time Ed would tell her that he no longer needed her, that she was nothing more than a nuisance in both of their lives?
Childish fears, but she was yet a child.
She'd do her business there, tightening bolts and yanking Ed's arm till he howled and cursed her and told her that she was a freak of nature. Al would sit there outside the door, and she knew he heard everything. "You're doing fine," he would say when she asked, anxious of what Ed really thought of her, and usually Ed would apologize after those torturous sessions, tell her that she really was doing a great job, and he was glad she was there.
Later on in the dusk, when the night came and the moon rose, Winry would sit with them by the window as long as she was allowed and let Ed's voice and sometimes Al's drift in and out of her hearing. It was not as much listening to what they were saying, but rather more just trying to take those loose clouds of sound and pack them into tight little quivering spheres of light and life, to cram them into her heart as much as it could hold. And when they finally told her that she should go back, go sleep, she would walk back to her own empty room and lay under the covers, hoping that when the sun rose, the two of them would still be there.
They never saw her to the train station, but usually they would stand in the courtyard waving. She waved back till the car took her around a corner and down the hill, and she could no longer see them. The return trip would be almost like a dream. She usually slept during the ride back, exhausted though she didn't know why, and her ears pressed against the padded side of the train would catch the murmur of its wheels against the tracks, the heartbeat of the great machine as it chugged across the countryside, the pulsing of its veins.
Her grandmother would have her dinner all laid out on the table as she dragged herself across the doorstep. Pinako never looked less than her usual unruffled self, and sometimes Winry was glad of that and sometimes, coming back from a long trip, she would wish it was not just the two of them but that her father and mother were there to greet her too.
Later, back in her own room, the familiar shadows falling around her, she would sit on the edge of the bed and stare at the moon. Ed and Al were staring at that same moon, she wanted to believe. She'd think then about the sound of their voices in the dark, about the rumbling of the train's voice in her ears as she slept, and wondered really what the difference was between the two of them, both of them crafted from the same metal, both of them shaped out of the same nuts and bolts and sheets of steel welded together.
Then she would think about what the two of them had tried to do so many years ago, and think about the fact that for all its power, there was yet one thing alchemy could not do.
The moon's bright rays would fall around her like a gossamer gown, like angel's wings, and she would stand, reach out a hand to the window and everything beyond it. Those bright spheres of boy's voices, held so tightly to her heart, were fireflies dancing above her head.
And in her dreams, it was not the metallic mutter of the train's rhythm. The figures running to meet her were made of warm blood beating and joyful laughter ringing out, two pairs of golden eyes and two pairs of outstretched hands reaching out to swing her around, two sweet voices telling her that they'd missed her, free of steel and free of iron and truly, wonderfully human.
14 March 2004