Fic: Enyo & Bellona - (Battlefield 1/3) (Fullmetal Alchemist)

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Title: Enyo & Bellona (Battlefield part 1/3)
Category: Drama, heavy Angst, h/c, eventual Romance
Rating: R for the angst and mentions of death and violence.
Warnings: Death, violence, war
Characters/Pairings: Winry, Edward, Al, eventual Winry/Ed
A/N: A short-fic in three pieces, centering around Winry and Ed and the hardships that turns their lives around. Slightly AU from part two.
Summary: Their lives are battlefields. Part one:  Winry isn’t five anymore and she knows, even if she’s crazy about machines, that they can’t replace limbs and bodies and friends.

 

Enyo & Bellona

1.       Enyo

 

Winry’s lips are chapped, her hands are cold as ice and her eyes feel like they might dry out any minute now. But she can’t afford to go away from her work, not even to put a Band-Aid on the tiny cut on her finger made by one of the bolts earlier.

She bites her lip and bends over the upper part of the metal arm, trying to mend the broken part. It’s a slow process, something that will most likely take her all night and the better part of the day, but she needs to get it done.

It’s all she can do. Even when she’s tired and cold and bleeding. It’s all she’s ever known how to do.

When she was just a kid – when it was the three of them and everything was brilliant – she would occasionally get picked on by the other girls in their town, telling her how much of a ‘boy’ she was and that she should act like a real girl. And real girls weren’t interested in mechanics.

She’d listened to them for about all of five seconds, before telling them to get lost and started chasing after Ed with a stick, deeming that he was going to be her next project, because making an automail body for him would surely make him taller.

They were five and even then, ‘shorty’ had been the general word used to acknowledge her childhood friend. The memories makes her smile, because it’s one of those moments that she clings on to when she’s lost and alone and doesn’t think she can handle it: she just goes back and thinks ‘when I was five, I could do anything.’

It also makes her frown and even occasionally, if Edward has come home injured and Al says next to nothing and they remind her too much of two broken people, she cries too, hidden in her room where no one can see the tears streaming down her face.

She’d thought it would be wonderful, having a body of metal. It isn’t. She’d thought it would be absolutely great, having a friend with automail limb, so she could test and experiment, come up with the best of the best.

It isn’t. Winry isn’t five anymore and she knows, even if she’s crazy about machines, that they can’t replace limbs and bodies and friends.

Having lost her parents at a young age, Winry knows loss, but she doesn’t understand it until her two best friends leaves and she thinks ‘I might never see you again’. Most of the time she’s thankful that she does, but every now and then, when the blood seeps through Ed’s bandage and Al has to sit up another night, alone with his thoughts, she almost wishes that none of them had been born.

But they’re here, back home yet again, to get ‘repaired’ and ready to be sent off again, into the war, into the battlefield, into the hell-hole that is the real world. And all Winry can do is sit and sweat and bleed and cry over a stupid piece of metal that is her best friends arm, trying to perfect it, trying to make sure that she won’t have to sit here again anytime soon.

Because she’ll be damned if she gives up, now that her boys are seeing this through to the end.

 

2.       Bellona

Winry has never heard her own heartbeat before. That’s ridiculous: of course she’s heard it, felt the wild pounding after three golden-haired children had been running through Risembool, seeing who was the fastest, who could run the longest without stopping to catch breath. The wind had made her hair fly in wild tangles, the sun blinding her eyes and her legs had almost given out after the long sprint.

But it had been glorious and wonderful and she’d heard her own heartbeat.

But when she’s face to face with the man who killed her parents, gun pointed at him, she really hears it for the first time.

It’s not the angry hammering after a wild days play, it’s not the worry that sometimes makes it almost stop when Ed comes home hurt, it’s not the leap of joy when he smiles at her, it’s a harsh and terrified tearing, a low drum beating in her ears screaming a thousand different thoughts, emotions exploding behind her eyelids and leaving her dazed and confused and crying and ready to pull the trigger.

A weight on her hand – metal, alchemist, automail, Edward – and the gun is lowering and she’s looking into golden eyes and… she resents him for this, for not letting her get this opportunity, but she only clings to this because it’s the only emotion in the myriad of them that she dares to acknowledge: the rest will break her completely and she isn’t sure she’s skilled enough to put back broken humans.

Looking at her boys, she’s almost certain she can’t. She’ll feel differently, just the slightest, when they let her into the car in Briggs and Edward is looking at her with something akin to pride (and perhaps a little dread) in his eyes. She’s perhaps never felt more powerful, not when she’d decided not to care what the other girls thought, not when she’d held a gun, not when she’d made someone’s artificial limb work for the first time.

I can’t do this, is her thoughts as she sees Scar a few hours later. It’s the same feeling, the same train of thoughts that haunted her when a young and newly haunted Ed asked for new limbs. The same when he asks her not to ask about what he do as a State Alchemist. When he says that he might have to be used as a human weapon, no better than whatever it is they’re fighting.

But it’s also the feeling she got when her finger had been on a trigger and she’d been one second away from squeezing it like her life – my soul, my heart, my parents – depended on it. When the man responsible had just stood there, silently waiting for his punishment, when Ed’s voice had been breathless with fear, asking her, begging her to please, Winry, don’t do this, your hands aren’t meant for killing…

I can’t do this. And she didn’t. She doesn’t regret it.

She’s trembling – it’s from the cold, just the cold – but it isn’t going to stop her, because losing an arm and a leg and a whole goddamn body didn’t stop Ed and Al and she’ll be damned if she cannot run as fast as they can.

With a deep breath and straight shoulders, Winry walks into the battlefield, knowing that whatever is thrown at her, she can handle this. She can help seeing them all through this.

 

Enyo: goddess of battle and attendant of Ares. [Greek Mythology: Howe, 91]

Bellona: Mars’s charioteer and sister. [Roman Mythology: Leach, 135]


 

Part two