Hagane no Renkinjutsushi - Volume 6 - Chapter 5

LISTEN TO YOUR HEART

IT WAS THE WORST MORNING EVER.

When Winry opened her eyes in bed, she felt as though a lump of melancholy had settled inside her. She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Actually, it might have been exactly the opposite—it felt like her whole body and heart were completely empty. Nihilism seemed to be the only thing permeating her.

Winry hadn’t thought she would be able to rest, but the physical and mental fatigue had quickly led her into a deep sleep. Thanks to that, even though she had been sopping wet from the rain, she hadn’t caught a cold. But her limbs felt strangely heavy, and she had a hard time getting up.

Regardless of that, she somehow got out of bed, washed her face, and changed, then went down the stairs like usual to open the studio’s shutters. A glorious blue sky unfurled before her, as though the deluge of rain had never happened. An invigorating post-rain breeze caressed Winry’s face, and the puddles that littered the ground glittered with reflected bright sunlight.

When she turned to look back into the studio, the new machine was set up, fully back to normal. However, the sight didn’t bring Winry any joy. Even her puzzlement about her numbness felt distant as she silently prepared the shop for opening.

“Good morning, Winry my dear.”

As she wiped the workbenches with a well-wrung rag, Garfiel entered the studio a little earlier than normal.

“Good morning,” Winry replied, heart heavy as a stone. She paused her cleaning. 

“Looks like you got some beauty sleep. But even though those bags under your eyes are gone, you still have such a glum look on your face.” Garfiel plucked the rag away from Winry after glancing at her spiritless face and hearing her equally dispirited voice. “All right, that’s enough prep work. You don’t need to come into the studio today.”

“What?” Winry froze. 

Garfiel must have meant she was forbidden from entering the studio because she was useless as a mechanic. She couldn’t blame him for that after the fiasco from the day before, but having her incompetence thrust right in front of her made her cast her eyes down in shame—where she saw something being thrust in front of her: a package wrapped in a cloth with a floral design, and a canteen.

She looked up in surprise to find Garfiel smiling at her.

“Here, that’s your lunch and some water. Your task today is to run an errand at Mr. Dominic’s place. He’s splitting some metal with me, made from an ore they can only get around there, so take a trip up to his place for me, will you?”

It seemed Garfiel had woken up early to prepare her a lunch with that in mind.

“Well, off you go—quickly, now. Otherwise the sun will be setting by the time you come back.”

“Okay.”

When he gently urged her to, Winry took the lunch and canteen from him.

Given her failures the day before, she wanted to work hard and redeem herself, but she was also terrified of making another mistake. Garfiel, in his wisdom, had realized that and was sending her outside for a change of pace.

Winry decided to accept his consideration. After she finished her light breakfast, she changed into a black miniskirt and a white camisole to go out.

On her way toward the mountain road that led to Dominic’s place, she passed by a line of hotels. Winry looked up at the row of windows of the hotel that Darish and his family were staying at.

Maybe Darish really hadn’t forgiven her initial insensitivity? Or maybe he had gotten mad when Winry hadn’t shown up after he had waited for so long, paying her a visit even while it was pouring rain? At present, Winry didn’t have the willpower to figure out the truth of why he had taken her off his service.

Winry refocused on the road before her and quietly left the hotel behind, her face still stricken with sorrow.

As she climbed the steep slope of the mountain road, the view started to change. The boulders surrounding her began to fall away, opening up the full expanse of the sky. It was liberating. The direct sunlight started to make her feel hot. A wild goat stood on some sun-bleached rocks nearby, and far below the narrow road she was on—hardly wide enough for a single caravan—a river flowed.

She forged her way along the arduous path for several hours, traversing a rope bridge on the way, and finally arrived at Dominic’s house.

The house, which had been built on a tract of land developed right in the mountains, looked like several interconnected boxes. Smoke rose from a tall chimney. Windmills rotated on top of the towering bluff behind the house.

This was Winry’s second time visiting. Just like the last time, when she had come here with Edward and Alphonse, the sound of metal being forged rang out loudly from Dominic’s abode.

“Hello?” Winry said. She rapped on the front door, which brought Dominic’s son Ridel and his wife Satera out to greet her.

“Why hello, Winry,” Ridel said.

“Come in. Thanks for everything last time. Look, it’s Winry,” Satera gently told the tiny baby she cradled in her arms.

The last time Winry had been to this house, she had been present while Satera had given birth in the middle of a storm. Winry had somehow helped safely deliver the baby. Ridel and Satera had told her they considered her Satera and the baby’s savior.

“We named him Pitora,” announced the proud parents. 

“Hello, Pitora,” Winry said. “It hasn’t been very long since then, but he’s grown so big.” She gently touched a finger to the baby’s full cheek. She was a bit jealous of the fast-asleep baby, who snored quietly without a care in the world.

“So, I came by today to get some steel for Mr. Garfiel. Would it be okay if I go by Mr. Dominic’s studio?” Winry asked Ridel as he warmed up milk in the kitchen after letting Winry have a good look at the innocent baby’s face.

“Right, Mr. Garfiel told me about the order. Dad has it, so you can go on over.”

Ridel pointed in the direction of the studio. Winry patted the cheek of the sleeping infant one more time before heading out. She knocked on the door to Dominic’s studio. After she got a grumble in reply, she opened the door and was greeted by the characteristic swelter that came from refining iron. In the middle of the cozy room, a stern-looking man pounded on a hot metal sheet as sweat formed on his forehead.

“Hello, Mr. Dominic,” Winry said.

“Come by, have you?” Dominic said without even looking at Winry’s face. As he tempered the metal, the way the corners of his pursed lips lowered into a scowl made him look exactly like a stereotypical stubborn old man.

“Well, take a seat over there,” Dominic indicated in a gruff tone. The only thing in the direction he had pointed was a wooden box. Winry sat down on it as he’d indicated. There was a stone furnace across from her that contained red hot steel. The inside of the studio was so hot that sweat started beading on her forehead just from sitting.

When she looked around, she saw sheets of metal laid out on a brick platform along the wall. A paper reading “Garfiel Five Sheets” had been stuck under them.

“I’ll check those over for flaws later on. Can’t let ’em go out yet, so give me a minute.”

That was all Dominic said when he noticed where Winry’s eyes had gone before he focused back on his task at hand.

Clank, clank.

Winry silently listened to the repetitive sound of squealing metal. Dominic wasn’t a talkative man. Only the sound of steel being tempered rung out between them.

The only time there was a break in the hammering was when Dominic stopped in order to check on the shape of the steel by picking it up with a pair of pincers. In Rush Valley, she would have heard the sound of engineers using machinery or the hustle and bustle of people regularly flooding into the town, but here, silence settled in when Dominic paused.

A breeze from a tiny window caressed Winry’s sweaty head. The clear blue sky spread out to infinity outside. A black kite squawked somewhere in the distance.

Winry realized she hadn’t experienced quiet in a very long time.

“You look down in the dumps,” Dominic suddenly said, hammer clasped in his rugged hand. “Where’d all that energy you had before go, huh?”

Clank.

The hammering started up again.

When Winry had visited his place last time, she had excitedly asked Dominic to take her on as his apprentice. She’d been overflowing with ambition, going as far as to show him her mettle by helping with Satera’s delivery. However, Winry currently lacked any shred of that zeal.

In troubled silence, Winry watched the metal Dominic pounded, and then finally said, “I made a mistake at work.” She gradually told him everything that had happened since she had come to Rush Valley.

“I was so carried away with learning new techniques that I didn’t even realize how Darish—this boy who came into the shop with a prosthetic leg—even felt. So I did some introspection and thought it over, then decided to put more effort into listening to my clients. When I did that, I didn’t have enough time and I started to become careless without realizing it. I even broke a machine that everyone pitched in to buy together.”

She looked down at her clenched hands, which had pushed open the door to that rip-off business just the night before.

“After causing them so much trouble, I was so set on redeeming myself that I went to a place I shouldn’t have. And while I was doing that, Darish came by the studio to talk to me again, but I quashed any chance of that happening!”

Her hands clenched into firm fists. When Winry’s lip started quivering, Dominic kept his mouth clamped shut and continued swinging his hammer. He wasn’t trying to end the conversation. It was almost as though he were silently urging her to get it all off her chest.

“While I was chasing after techniques and knowledge, I lost sight of the clients’ feelings. But when I tried confronting my failing head-on, I ended up pressed for time and couldn’t do all my work. If that’s what’s going to keep happening, I have to choose one or the other. If I don’t, I’ll just cause trouble for my clients and for Mr. Garfiel.”

Her emotions, which had seemed frozen just earlier, all rushed to the surface at once. Winry’s shoulders quivered and tears started to finally well up and fall from her eyes.

“But which am I supposed to choose? What if I make more mistakes after I figure out what I’ve decided? I just don’t know what to do anymore …”

Winry’s feelings hadn’t numbed earlier. It was just that she hadn’t been able to find an outlet for her emotions. She was actually overwhelmed with feelings—after dedicating herself entirely to her goals, everything had crumbled before her eyes. It had even all been her own fault. Now those overflowing emotions, which previously had nowhere to go, turned into tears flowing down her face. She didn’t know how long she cried.

“I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I started crying,” she said after sobbing for a while. She wiped away the tears still wetting her face. She felt better after letting it all out.

Dominic hadn’t stopped pounding away at the steel the whole time. Winry was thankful he’d simply let her cry as much as she needed and hadn’t tried to comfort her.

“No need to apologize. Crying’s just proof you tried as hard as you could. Though there’re times when things won’t go your way, no matter how hard you try.” Dominic kept his eyes pinned to the steel he hammered as he spoke matter-of-factly. “One time, back in the day, a whole decade of technical knowledge did me no good when I suddenly had to work on a particular material. Put too much confidence in my own abilities and didn’t study up enough.”

“A whole decade.” Winry blinked wide-eyed when he said that figure. As young as she was, Winry didn’t have a sense of just how long that was.

“What did you do back then, Mr. Dominic?” she blurted out. She was so curious as to what he could have possibly felt about ten years of experience failing him that the question just slipped out.

“I was mad.”

“You were mad?”

“Same as you just were, young lady. You felt so wretched, you started bawling. As for me, well, I got angry at myself.” Dominic spoke indifferently of the past as though it were nothing noteworthy, and Winry couldn’t help but envy him, considering how paralyzed she felt about her current situation.

“How did you change the way you felt? How’d you get over it? Was there something that got you out of it or a secret to it?” Winry asked.

Dominic had many years on Winry. He had probably faced situations tougher than Winry could imagine. But now he was a brilliant, skilled engineer and self-confident in his work. Winry felt that if anyone knew how to get her out of her current torment, it would be Dominic.

However, as though to betray her expectations, Dominic bluntly shook his head. “A secret? There ain’t anything like that.”

Winry, who had been leaning forward with bated breath, pulled back in silent disappointment. But it wasn’t as though there would be a set answer to something like this, she reconsidered. She had ended up asking because her emotions had gotten the best of her, but she actually needed to find her own way of working through this.

Silence visited them again.

Dominic had been pounding on the steel for a while, but it seemed he had finally reached a stopping point. He thrusted the hot steel into a vat of water. Sizzling, the steam rose up from it and became one with the air, dissipating before Winry’s eyes.

Dominic slowly stood up, grabbed the steel plates sitting on top of the bricks, and returned. He picked up each sheet of metal with a pair of pincers and closely inspected it. He squinted as he checked each side, making sure that none of the sheets were warped, then he wrapped them up in a thick cloth sack.

“Here, I’ve kept you waiting long enough,” he said, with all five sheets having met with his approval. He pushed the sack with the steel into Winry’s hands. “You drop those on your foot, and you’ll be smarting. You be careful, now.”

“I will. Thank you very much,” Winry said. She packed the sack into her bag to carry it, then stood up, still feeling depressed. She opened the studio door, and bright sunlight poured in. Winry blocked the sun with her hand and started to venture outside when a voice from behind halted her.

“Girl.”

When Winry turned around, she saw Dominic, sitting down and scratching his head, seeming at a loss.

“So, this isn’t the first time you’ve hit a roadblock at work, right?” he asked.

“It isn’t,” Winry nodded and said modestly, “but this is the first time I’ve ever made such big mistakes. I hardly ever made mistakes in Resembool, and when I did, they were super tiny.”

“That’s because you were living in a small pond there.” Though he was laying out a harsh truth by telling her that, Dominic nevertheless continued. “You were in the place you were born in with familiar customers and family for colleagues. Well, then again, I doubt Pinako would go easy on you.”

Dominic, who had been acquainted with Pinako in their youth, seemed to recall an unpleasant memory. His forehead broke out into a cold sweat, but he immediately collected himself and went back to what he was saying.

“When you live in a small world like that, you’ve got small responsibilities and mistakes aren’t a big deal. But now you’ve come to a big place like Rush Valley. We’ve got plenty of shops and plenty of customers, so there’s all the more to learn and enjoy. At the same time, that makes the mistakes bigger deals. In other words, everything you take on has gotten a whole lot bigger.” He muttered the weighty words in a rough monotone. Winry pinched the cord of the bag on her shoulder, sincerely listening to this more experienced mechanic who she looked up to.

“But, while all that’s going on, you’ll get bigger too and you’ll become someone who can take on all of that. You might have tough times for a while—well, that’s not exactly what I mean … uhh, like I was saying, if you worry about the tough times and fear making mistakes, you’ll never get anywhere. I know you must’ve been scared dragging other people into your mistake, but you’re not alone, are you, girl? So what you should be thinking about now is, uh, basically, how do I put this …”

He was a man of few words by nature and his supply of them, which didn’t exactly flow in the best of times, had choked up. Dominic faltered and scratched his head again.

“Ah, can’t get the words right,” he grumbled and crossed his arms, racked his brain, then grumbled again. After searching for what to say, Dominic eventually forced himself to squeeze something out. “Basically, it’s about what kind of engineer you want to be!”

The way he finished off by blurting the words out, it seemed as if he expected his unhelpful advice to be rejected. He set his mouth into a tight line. However, Winry could tell he was trying to cheer her up.

“I’ll try the best I can,” she said.

“And don’t you hold back.”

She bowed her head, then Dominic saw her off with the same scowl he’d had when she had come in.

“GUESS I JUST HAVE TO GET TO IT,” Winry murmured quietly to herself as she left the way she came. Despite what she had told Dominic, Winry was still crestfallen.

“I need to choose between spending less time working with clients in order to make fewer mistakes or doing less work to dedicate myself to each and every—no, if I take my time, I won’t learn anything new. But I want to make the best automail I can for Ed and my clients,” Winry muttered, trying to figure out a course of action. She started to feel a tickle at the back of her throat. She had been so set on doing well, but had failed, and felt both humiliated and pathetic.

Her now-empty lunch box clattered as accompaniment with each heavy step. Then, the towering rocky terrain that seemed to block out the world opened up to reveal the rope bridge. It was the same bridge destroyed by a lightning strike during the thunderstorm that happened the last time Winry had visited. The bridge had been repaired, and now it swayed in a swirl of wind that blew up from the depths of the valley.

Winry paused at the foot of the bridge. The protrusion of rock that jutted out unnaturally under her feet was Edward’s attempt at making a bridge using alchemy.

“I wonder how Ed and Al are doing?”

She held back her fluttering hair and thought about the two brothers headed to Dublith. At that moment, she would have given anything to talk with them—to have a conversation without a care in the world.

After Winry crossed the bridge, she took three more breaks during the long walk down the mountain path. The sunlight, which prickled her skin, gradually waned as the sky turned from aqua blue to amber, then crimson. In due time, the streets of Rush Valley, tinged in that red, appeared below her.

After she readjusted a steel rod that had worked its way out of her bag while she walked, Winry made her way farther down the slope. When she got close enough to hear the commotion of the streets, suddenly Winry spied a figure curled up next to the cliff she was walking along. She recognized the sound of the person’s quiet sniffling.

“Lettie?”

Winry had found Lettie, dyed in the color of the setting sun and sitting on the bare ground holding her knees.

“Oh, Winry.”

When the girl looked up, Winry noticed that blood trickled from Lettie’s knee. Even though the town was right there, the steep mountains were no place for a child to wander alone. Winry quickly made her way to Lettie’s side and kneeled on the ground next to the girl.

“What are you doing in a place like this?” Winry asked, surprised. She doubted that Darish, with his hurting leg, would have brought Lettie into the mountains. Lettie wiped away her tears with the back of her hand and stared at the ground.

“I came here by myself,” she said.

“All by yourself?” Winry said, taken aback. 

Lettie fidgeted with some pebbles below her feet and pouted. “Because Darish said I get in the way. I try not to, but then he gets mad at me and tells me to go away. He told me to go play somewhere else because he hates it when I’m near him.”

Lettie hadn’t been able to stand being treated like a nuisance and had run away, leaving town entirely. While playing alone, she’d scraped her knee and become so anxious that she had ended up crouched in a ball on the ground.

Winry didn’t know what to say. Lettie was desperate for her brother’s affection and attention—that was why she had carried his crutch for him and tried her hardest to strike up conversations with him. In response, Darish had been viciously cold toward his sister.

“I hate my brother and how he’s always angry! I don’t care anymore!” Lettie fumed, grabbed a pebble, and threw it at the ground. Though she was angry, she was likely also heartbroken. As the little girl followed the tumbling pebble with her eyes, tears welled up in them.

“Lettie,” Winry said, painfully aware of what Lettie was going through from the little girl’s terrible scowl. Winry could actually sympathize with her. Both girls had devoted themselves fully to something they cared about, but it had all been for nothing and now they were struggling, unable to find a way to escape their feelings.

Still weighed down by unbearable emotions, Winry put her hand on Lettie’s bleeding knee and had the girl extend her leg.

“C’mon, show me your leg. It’s still bleeding, so let me fix that.”

Winry took out her canteen, opened it up, and used the leftover water to slowly wash away the dirt on Lettie’s wound. Lettie kept pouting as she clenched her hands into tiny fists over her shoes. Seeing Lettie act so sulky brought back one of Winry’s distant memories—in the past, she had cried, angry and pouting in the same way Lettie was now. She could hardly remember why she had been sulking or how she had settled whatever the issue had been.

“What am I trying to remember?” Winry asked herself. She grasped for the event at the edges of her memory, and the unclear scene gradually started to come back.

Warm afternoon light streaming into a living room. A large white cloth spread over a table, scissors sitting on top. And also a fist as little as Winry’s was then, bumping against hers in encouragement. 

“Oh.” Winry now remembered the event clearly. “That was when I was helping Mom and Dad.”

IT HAD BEEN BACK when Winry was young and her parents still lived with her.

In their home, her parents, both surgeons, had a clinic separate from Pinako’s automail workspace.

After the Ishvalan Civil War broke out, causing a chain reaction of smaller conflicts across the country, more people had started to need Pinako’s prostheses. In addition to offering their regular treatments, Winry’s parents had been performing more surgical treatments to equip people with prostheses. Winry, wanting to help her mother and father, had asked what she could do despite how young she was, so they had given her simple tasks.

She had shown an interest in the intricacies of automail even as a toddler, and her fingers had grown nimble from her attempts to make inventions with the materials she’d been given. Using the skills she had acquired, she would separate out the medical instruments and line them up based on their use, or would wash every container’s nook and cranny. She could do most things.

But there was one thing she couldn’t do, and that was bandage making.

Making a bandage required cutting a large white cloth into thin, straight strips. She just couldn’t do it. No matter how many attempts she made to cut the big cloth, she would end up cutting it at an angle or making the first cut ragged, increasingly producing scraps that couldn’t be used.

“I messed up again!” she said as she accidentally sliced off a long, thin strip she had been attempting to make from the cloth. Right as she was about to throw a fit, she heard voices call to her from the window.

“Winry, come out!”

“Let’s play together!”

When she looked over in the direction of the voices, two blond heads bobbed up over the windowsill. The one with the close-cropped hair and big forehead was Alphonse. Next to him, the one with a cowlick that stood straight as a stick, maximizing its height like a quivering antenna, was Edward.

“You two play with each other! I haven’t finished helping yet!” she called from her chair to the brothers, who had come over to play. Then she picked up her scissors again, but the only thing she was able to produce was a scrap of fabric just a few centimeters long.

“I hate this!”

She threw down the scissors and plunked her head onto the now-wrinkled cloth. She was so frustrated that things weren’t working out the way she wanted that she was on the verge of tears. Then, suddenly, she heard a voice right next to her.

“Whatcha doing?”

She raised her head in surprise to find that Edward had appeared by her side. It seemed that he had let himself in through the door she’d left open for a breeze. Winry quickly wiped her eyes to avoid letting him see that she had been about to cry, but Edward paid no heed and peeked at her face.

“You weren’t crying, were you?” he asked.

“Hi,” said Alphonse, announcing himself before entering the clinic and studio. He also popped up next to Edward and peeked at Winry. When he noticed she was near tears, his eyebrows knit together in worry. “Huh? What’s wrong?”

Winry hadn’t really wanted to tell them about her mistakes, but faced with the compassionate curiosity of her two childhood friends, Winry reluctantly pointed at the mountain of fabric and said, “I’m trying to make bandages, but I just can’t do it.”

Edward put his hand on his chin and nodded as though he understood as he voiced a cocky, “Aha! So that’s why you’re sulking!”

“Shut up! I mean, I keep trying harder and harder, but I just can’t do it! I get that I suck already, so just go away!” Winry pouted and turned away from him, but Edward didn’t leave and instead plunked himself down on the seat next to her. He picked up scissors from the table.

“Then I’ll help you out. Easy peasy!” he said, going to town on the cloth. But the scissors veered sideways and he ended up with an unshapely wide bandage.

“Wait, what? That’s weird.” Edward cocked his head to the side when he realized his blunder, but he started cutting with the scissors again. Though it was clear as day success wouldn’t come easily, he still didn’t abandon his attempts. “Wait, wait. Let me try again!” he said and kept cutting the cloth.

“Is it really that hard? Let me try too,” chimed in Alphonse. Up to that point he had only been watching his brother add to the growing pile of useless scraps, but now he rose to the challenge. His hands moved like clockwork and he produced a perfect, rectangular bandage in an instant, which made Winry’s eyes go wide.

“Al, you’re amazing!” she exclaimed.

“Grr …” Edward gritted his teeth in frustration, the opposite of Winry’s enthusiastic praise. He refused to lose face as an older brother that easily, so he snatched the scissors from Alphonse’s hands.

“Winry, we’re going to knock this out of the park too!” he declared, clenching his hand into a fist. It wasn’t clear if he felt solidarity with her as another person who couldn’t make bandages or if he was motivated by sibling rivalry, but Winry shook her head and said, “It’s not that easy.”

“We’ll learn how to do it while we’re working on it! See!” Edward forced the scissors into Winry’s hand, and she reluctantly started to cut the cloth. Of course, it didn’t go well. Regardless of that, Edward told her, “Again,” and Winry struggled over and over again with cutting the cloth. When she veered off she would try to make the next one straight, and when she cut off a strip that was too thin she tried to make the next one thicker.

How many dozens of times had she gone through this? Eventually, she cut one long, thin strip out of the gigantic piece of cloth. It couldn’t be called pretty, but it was still a bandage.

“Whoa! You really did it!” Edward, who had been leaning forward to watch Winry’s hands, exclaimed in joy as though he himself had cut the strip. “See! Told ya you could do it. If you just keep trying, you’ll get somewhere eventually.”

“Are you sure I didn’t get it right by accident? I can’t count on cutting it right every time. What will I do if I make a mistake on another one?” Winry hung her head, despite the excitement of finally making a single bandage. After all, she had been making mistake after mistake until that point. 

But Edward puffed out his chest confidently and said, “When things aren’t going right, I just listen to my heart!”

“Listen to your heart?” Winry asked.

“That’s how you figure out whether you actually want to do something or not. If you still want to do a thing after listening to your heart, then you’re better off just doing it rather than hemming and hawing over it! If you do that, you can learn how to do it someday! It worked just now, right?” Edward grinned, then gave her a fist bump with his tiny, warm fist.

“Ed, are you sure you just can’t be bothered to actually use your head?” Alphonse, who had been watching the whole scene transpire, gave his brother a strained smile, which made Edward gnash his teeth. 

“What didja just say?!”

“Look, you’re the only one who hasn’t been able to do it, Ed,” Alphonse said, managing to quickly dodge the fist his older brother aimed at his head in response.

Then, Edward, who had stood on the chair to teach his younger brother a lesson, sat back down in a fluster and righted himself before grabbing the scissors.

“I’ll show you,” Edward said. “Just you watch, this next one is going to be it!”

Alphonse and Winry couldn’t help but laugh at his antics. When Edward realized how single-minded he was being, he ended up smiling along with them.

The Rockbells’ living room was filled with joyful laughter for a while afterward.

“I GUESS I’LL LISTEN TO MY HEART THEN,” Winry said with some lingering hesitancy, gently placing her fist to her chest.

“Winry? What’s wrong? Are you okay?” Lettie asked with wide eyes. Winry’s sudden gesture had surprised her. Winry quickly put her hand down. She had been right in the middle of tending to Lettie’s wound, after all.

“Oh, sorry about that,” Winry apologized. She capped the canteen and leaned in to inspect Lettie’s knee. Blood was still welling up from it, but all of the dirt had been washed away.

“How does it feel? Does it sting?”

“Just a little.”

“Let’s get that disinfected as soon as we get back. For now, we’ll just put a bandage on it.”

Winry often scraped her fingers while working, so she usually carried bandages on her. She gently wiped Lettie’s wet knee with a handkerchief, then pulled out a bandage and stuck it right onto the scrape.

“You should be all set. Does it hurt?”

“Nope.”

All traces of Lettie’s tears disappeared into a smile at her wound being kindly tended to. When Winry saw that smile, she questioned her heart again. She asked what it was she actually wanted to do.

The answer was obvious.

She wanted to keep learning about the latest techniques and gathering the newest information. She didn’t want to neglect having the compassion to carefully listen to her clients either. She couldn’t choose one or the other. She wanted to become a mechanic who could do both. What brought her happiness was seeing someone perk up and smile once they were outfitted with her automail. That was what her heart told her.

That was when Winry finally understood what Dominic had been trying to say, and his words connected with Edward’s. It was important for her to have determination about what kind of engineer she wanted to become. Continuing to walk the path she had chosen, despite any failures and struggles, was the only way to do that.

As Winry stood back up with her doubts cleared away, she heard the tolling of the town bell. The sun was disappearing over the other side of the mountains, and lights flickered on in the town below.

“Lettie, how about we get going soon?” Winry said, offering Lettie a hand up. Lettie didn’t grasp it, even though it was right there for her to take.

“I don’t want to see Darish,” she mumbled, keeping her eyes focused on the ground. Winry’s heart went out to the little girl whose emotional wound hadn’t been so easily fixed as the injury to her knee. Winry took back her offered hand and crouched to the ground so she was at the same eye level as Lettie.

Winry knew Darish didn’t actually think Lettie was a nuisance. He was just frustrated at himself for not being able to rush to his little sister’s aid. If Lettie started to avoid Darish, that would just make Darish even more frustrated. It would be sad to see the two once-close siblings avoid each other when it was clear that they were affectionate.

“Hey, Lettie.” Winry tried to peek at Lettie’s teary eyes and asked, “You just said that you hate your brother, but do you actually hate him?”

“No. I like him,” Lettie said quietly, a troubled look on her face as she shook her head. 

“Then what would you think of keeping at it for a little longer and helping him out?” Winry asked.

Lettie said nothing, just pursed her lips and fiddled with the toes of her shoes.

It wasn’t as though Lettie hated her brother. She had plenty of memories of Darish being incredibly kind. But she still couldn’t agree to Winry’s proposition because she was afraid of the brother she loved so dearly rejecting her.

Winry continued in a gentle tone, “I think that Darish is having a tough time right now, especially with his leg hurting. That’s why he’s been so short with you, Lettie. Once his leg is better, I’m sure that you two will get along again like you used to.”

Lettie cocked her head to the side and asked, “Are you going to make his leg all better, Winry?” She was unaware of what had happened between Darish and Winry.

Winry was at a loss for words for a moment, but then quietly shook her head. She was disappointed she couldn’t just tell Lettie, Leave it to me.

“No, but I’m sure he’ll find a really good mechanic who will listen to him,” Winry answered truthfully. “Once that happens, he’ll start playing with you again and I think he’ll even be able to run with you again. But if you tell him you hate him, you might not be as close with him later. Now, wouldn’t that be sad?”

“Uh-huh,” Lettie nodded, hanging her head.

“Then do you think you could stick things out with Darish for a little longer? I’m pretty sure things are going to start getting better,” Winry said as she slowly stroked Lettie’s soft black hair, combing through it with her fingers.

It was difficult for Darish, who was just a twelve-year-old, to be kind to others while he was in pain, but once he found a good mechanic he could trust, he would be able to replace his ill-fitting leg. It tracked that if he were in less pain, he would be able to be more considerate of his little sister.

Winry kept speaking. “It’s not the same as what you’re going through, Lettie, but I’ve got something tough going on in my life too. Something I have to stick through. So let’s work hard—together. I’m sure things will turn out all right.”

“Really?”

“Of course!” Winry gave Lettie a firm nod and offered a hand to the little girl. This time Lettie grabbed it.

Though Lettie hadn’t explicitly said she would be there to help her brother out, as she stood up, there was a slight difference in the girl’s expression. Her large dark eyes still shifted anxiously, but Winry could tell Lettie was determined not to run from the current situation.

Holding each other’s hands, they started to descend the mountain path. As long as they continued to walk forward, they were sure to get to the place they were trying to reach.

Winry squinted at the last rays of sun as, in her heart, the hope and passion she had back when she had started her apprenticeship began renewing.

THE VEIL OF NIGHT that descended on the town brought a rare refreshing breeze along with it. It seemed a chill from the previous evening’s rain had remained in the town. On the way back to the shop, Winry headed to the hotel in order to drop off Lettie.

“Do you think Darish will be angry?” Lettie seemed anxious about whether she would be scolded for leaving without telling her brother where she was going.

“I’m sure he’s worried,” Winry said. “Make sure you apologize to him.”

“Okay,” said Lettie, after an anxious pause that signaled her reluctance. Lettie’s gaze grew clouded and her pace slowed, but since she had accepted Winry’s words earlier in her own way, she didn’t entirely stop walking. Winry matched Lettie’s stride, thinking about how she also needed to apologize to Darish, in her case for the prior evening.

“All I’ve been doing lately is bowing my head and apologizing.” Winry couldn’t help grimacing as she recalled the series of errors from the past few days. Causing so much trouble was no laughing matter, but now that she could see things objectively, she found she could see the dark humor in it. Having had some deep introspection, she resolved to never disgrace herself like that ever again.

They passed through the center of the town, reaching the street where the hotels were. They headed to the building where Darish should have been waiting.

“Huh? The lights are off,” said Lettie when they were in the front of the hotel. She had looked fretful about seeing Darish as they had walked to the hotel, but now she seemed disheartened that he was out.

“Which room is yours?”

“The one on the third floor at the very right.”

The window Lettie pointed at was pitch-black.

“The lights really are off. I wonder if he’s sleeping?”

Puzzled, the two of them headed into the brick hotel. It was already sundown and past the time any travelers would be getting accommodations, so the lobby was deserted save for its plain decorations—some round tables, a few chairs, and a single potted plant.

When they passed by the front desk, the elderly employee in the small back room put down his newspaper and welcomed Lettie back. The little girl waved her hand and, after Winry nodded in greeting, an elevator at the end of the hallway opened. Elevators were not an entirely common technological advancement outside of a place as technologically advanced as Rush Valley, but some of the town’s hotels had them installed to aid those in need of protheses. 

Winry closed the door to the elevator, which was made of crisscrossed metal bars that folded up on themselves, and pressed a button. The elevator slowly started to move, and the wall passed by, seeming to go down as they went up. Though each floor had a door, the elevator box they were riding on did not. Winry placed her hands on Lettie’s shoulders to keep the girl from stumbling or getting caught on the outer wall. When they reached the third floor, Lettie stepped into the corridor first and went to the room at the very end of the hall.

“Darish?” Lettie called as she gingerly rapped on the door, but there was no answer.

“Darish, are you in there?” Winry also knocked. She put her ear to the door, but she couldn’t hear anyone inside no matter how she strained to listen.

“Maybe he went out?” Lettie asked.

They waited for a while, but Darish didn’t come back. Not knowing what to do, Lettie looked up at Winry and said, “I don’t have a key. And I’m hungry.”

“Hmm,” Winry said. If they told the front desk, someone would open the door for them, but Winry was worried about leaving Lettie on her own. Lettie’s knee was still bleeding even with the bandage on it, so Winry wanted to disinfect it sooner rather than later. She finally replied, “How about you come to the shop with me for now?”

So that Darish wouldn’t worry when he came back, Winry pulled some note paper and a pen from her bag and wrote something to the effect that Lettie would be at Atelier Garfiel, then she slipped it under the door. She also asked the hotel worker to deliver the message just in case, then the two of them headed outside again.

The stars had started to twinkle, and the delicious smell of chicken wafted to them from the stalls. Since it had been a long day for Winry, and Lettie had taken an extended trip into the mountains to play, the aroma made both of their stomachs growl.

“Maybe Darish went to buy dinner too?” Lettie said.

“Maybe he did. Or maybe he’s gone out to automail shops on his own and he’s talking to a great engineer.”

“I hope so.”

They looked at each other and grinned. From behind them and off to the side, someone suddenly called out cheerily, “Well, aren’t you two getting along.”

It was Garfiel. He had just come from a side street that was full of parts wholesalers. He carried two large paper bags. It looked as though he had just finished shopping and was heading home.

“Mr. Garfiel!” Winry exclaimed.

“Welcome back, Winry, my dear. Thanks for all your work today. And good evening, little Lettie. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

“Good evening, Garfiel … sir?” Lettie smiled, hesitating on what to call him. It didn’t seem quite right to call him sir, but he was an adult, so she also felt that it wasn’t right not to call him something.

Garfiel’s eyes glittered. “It’s sister, dear.”

“Garfiel, sister,” Lettie repeated sincerely when Garfiel put up his pointer finger and waggled it back and forth to correct her.

The scene of the tall man and little girl so seriously sharing eye contact during their exchange seemed slightly out of place and made Winry crack a smile.

Lettie asked Garfiel, “Are you going back home after shopping, sister?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Garfiel said. He leaned forward to show Lettie the brand-new screws and metal rods in his bags. They glittered in the streetlamp’s light. It seemed that he had restocked all the parts he had run out of—his bags looked full and heavy. After Winry took one from him, they all walked together with Lettie in the middle. 

“I’m sorry for making you do the shopping, Mr. Garfiel,” Winry said.

“It’s all right. I wanted to get a look at some of the parts myself this time, so I had Henrik come in the evening to mind the shop.”

“Once we’re back, I’ll help out right away,” Winry said brightly. If she had been in the same headspace as that morning, she probably would have been feeling down in the dumps after learning that the proprietor of the shop was doing the shopping in her place. But, at that moment, she was feeling positive and planned on working to make up for that once they got back.

“I wanna help too!” Lettie exclaimed.

“Really? That’ll be so helpful,” Winry encouraged.

As Garfiel watched Lettie and Winry smile during their exchange, he grinned too, saying, “Oh good, you’re back to your normal self.”

“Huh?” Winry blinked, not realizing what Garfiel had said for a moment. Garfiel made a dramatically mournful face.

“Because you were making a terribly gloomy face like this in the morning. I was worried.” He dramatically scowled his well-groomed eyebrows and puckered his small lips even tinier to pretend he was depressed, which made Winry duck her head apologetically and say, “I’m sorry.”

She probably had looked pretty gloomy that morning. Her face burned red in embarrassment, which made Garfiel relax his expression and grin.

“It’s fine as long as you’re feeling better. Oh, but there is something I’ve got to tell you.” Garfiel heaved up the bag, which had started to sag from its weight, then side-eyed Winry as though he’d remembered something. “A little birdie told me. You paid for the parts at Mandel’s shop and the other places with your own money, didn’t you? You didn’t need to do that. Now just how much did you spend? You’d better charge me for it,” Garfiel chastised her. How he had found out, Winry wasn’t sure, but it could have been while doing the shopping.

“I was the one who caused the trouble, so making it up to everyone by buying the parts for the machine I broke was the least I could do,” Winry hesitantly replied. Garfiel dramatically sighed in response as though that were the thing causing him trouble.

“Now listen, Winry, my dear,” Garfiel began right as they were about to get back to the shop. He stopped to punctuate his point. Winry stopped too and faced him.

However, she never got to hear him out.

Before Garfiel could say anything, she overheard something from inside Atelier Garfiel that she could not ignore.

“That’s right. Looked exactly like Harling’s kid. Anyhow, seems like he got caught up with a shady-lookin’ shop,” a man with an automail right hand said as he left the studio. It seemed he was on his way home after a tune-up. Henrik was following him to see him out.

“That’d be pretty bad. Hope you saw wrong. Well, careful on your way out.”

“Harling …” Winry repeated the familiar name that had caught her attention. “It couldn’t be.”

Winry dashed forward. Once inside Atelier Garfiel, she started interrogating Henrik, who had barely just sat back down at the workbench.

“Mr. Henrik, what were you just talking about?!”

“Whoa, you gave me a fright!”

He had just been about to start servicing the next customer’s automail. When Winry shouted at him, he nearly dropped his screwdriver.

“Oh, it’s just you, Winry,” Henrik calmed. “Right, right. You really saved us there last night. Thanks to that cylinder—”

“I’m so sorry about yesterday. But more importantly, please tell me about what you were just talking about. There was a boy who looked like Darish?!” she blurted out. Winry had wanted to give Henrik a proper apology about the other night, but her heart was pounding and she couldn’t help rushing it. Henrik seemed bewildered when Winry pressed him for an answer, but he still gave her one. 

“Ah, right. That client who was just here is apparently staying at the same hotel as Darish. And he said he saw a kid who looked a lot like him being coerced by a peddler in the west district sometime this evening.”

One of the clients sitting on an out-of-the-way bench who had nodded along while listening in on their conversation joined in, saying, “Oh, that kid! Saw him too. That kinda spunky-looking boy with the crutch, yeah? He was surrounded by these shady looking fellows.”

“That had to be Darish,” Winry said. She didn’t want it to be true, but she couldn’t deny it. There were plenty of people on crutches in the town, but it was likely to be him if he had been witnessed by someone who knew him. It was also a fact that Darish hadn’t come back to the hotel even though the sun had set.

“Winry, what’s wrong?” asked Lettie, who had come in a little later with Garfiel, and noticed the heavy air in the shop. She looked uneasily at all the grown-ups.

“It’s nothing.” Winry quickly put on a fake smile and picked up Lettie. Until her mother was back, all Lettie had was Darish. Winry hadn’t wanted to upset the young girl by letting her hear what they had just spoken about. The other clients, who didn’t know much about the siblings, nevertheless picked up on the situation and kept quiet.

“That’s right, we need to clean your knee,” Winry said, feigning serenity. She led Lettie into the small back room and had the girl sit on a crate. She kept control of her own racing mind and pulled out a first aid kit from a shelf next to the stairs. She pulled off the bloody bandage and carefully applied some antiseptic, trying to avoid making it sting. To finish things off, she applied a new bandage and smiled for Lettie, who still seemed worried.

“I’m going to clean up the studio for a little, so could you wait for me here?” Winry said.

“Okay, I can.” Lettie gave her a nod. Winry handed Lettie some white paper and a pencil that had been on the shelf to keep Lettie occupied with drawing, then immediately headed back to the studio.

“This isn’t good.” Garfiel had just hung up the phone in the studio.

“Mr. Garfiel, is Darish okay?” Winry asked, after firmly closing the door connecting the small room to the studio. She quickly made her way over to Garfiel. While taking care of Lettie’s knee, she had been praying that the situation would take a turn for the better or that Darish hadn’t been caught up in trouble to start with, but the atmosphere in the studio was unchanged. It was just as heavy as before.

“In all likelihood, one of those shady businesses got ahold of him. I just told the military police, but I’m not sure that they’ll send someone to look, considering the circumstances.” Garfiel patted his cheek and sighed. Unless a law was actually being broken, the public institutions generally wouldn’t lift a finger.

If they couldn’t rely on the military police, then the only option left was for her to do something herself.

“Then I’ll go,” Winry said without a moment’s hesitation. As she turned on her heels, Henrik swiftly caught her by the arm.

“Stop right there!” he said. “You don’t know what guys like that might do. You’re better off not getting involved.”

Winry whirled around in surprise. She hadn’t expected anyone to stop her, but Henrik, who was normally a pleasant young man, looked stern. He continued, “He’s not your client anymore, right? Sure, you could tell them off if they were trying to steal your clientele, but as things stand, they might claim that you, and Atelier Garfiel, are obstructing their business.”

Several of the regulars still at the shop agreed with Henrik’s levelheaded advice and chimed in.

“You can’t be sure it’ll just be one person you’re dealing with. It’s too risky.”

“Even if he was forced into it, those kinds of places find ways around the law, so there’s nothing you can do about it. That’s just how things are.”

Unlike Winry, who had just come to Rush Valley, the regulars and Henrik knew how terrifying the crooked businesspeople were and how much trouble getting involved with them could be. They looked pained to do it, but they meant to stop Winry from going to Darish’s aid.

“But!” Winry looked up at Garfiel, imploring him while Henrik kept ahold of her arm. Though he looked incredibly reluctant himself, Garfiel shook his head and agreed with the others about not wanting Winry to go.

“I want to help him, but I can’t let you charge into danger. We should at least go meet with the military police directly and ask them to look around the western district. I think that might work better than a phone call,” he advised.

“But what if they force Darish into a prosthesis-manufacturing contract before anyone can get to him?!” Winry became more distressed imagining what would happen if that actually were the case. Darish had already been manipulated into getting a prosthetic leg that didn’t fit him once and had suffered for years from it. If he was entangled with another substandard business, he might end up hurt in a way he wouldn’t be able to recover from—physically or mentally.

However, Henrik pulled on Winry’s arm as though to keep her from arguing more. “Why are you trying to take all the responsibility for him on yourself?” he said pointedly, staring into her eyes. He kept a firm, almost painful grip on her arm as he spoke. “What are you going to do if you fail or get hurt?”

His words agitated Winry, instantly making her consider all the successive mistakes she had just made earlier. 

“Winry?”

She suddenly heard a tiny voice. When she looked over in surprise, Lettie was peeking out of the door.

“Um, where’s Darish?”

It seemed she had more or less sensed that Darish was in some sort of trouble. She hadn’t been able to entertain herself with drawing. The paper in Lettie’s hand remained blank.

Henrik, seeming uneasy, let go of Winry’s arm. Winry went over to the anxious little girl. 

Lettie’s father was working in order to buy automail and her mother was making long trips between their home and Rush Valley. Lettie was determined to stay with her brother, regardless of whether it made him angry at her. They were all waiting for the day when Darish would be able to run around with a giant smile on his face.

“It’s all right. I’m going to go get him right now, so just wait here,” Winry whispered and turned back to the studio. Garfiel had picked up the phone again and was talking to the military police. Henrik watched her with worry.

Winry understood that their warnings had been for her own sake. But she just couldn’t abandon Darish.

“I won’t mention anything about the shop, but if anyone who seems like trouble comes looking for me, please tell them you don’t have anything to do with me,” Winry told Henrik and Garfiel in anticipation of things potentially going south. She was willing to take on a certain amount of personal risk, but she couldn’t bear the idea of making trouble for Atelier Garfiel, especially when she was acting of her own volition. She passed between the two of them and ran outside.

“I’m sorry! I’m going!” Winry shouted. 

“Winry!” Henrik called as she left.

“Winry, dear!” Garfiel said. 

She heard Garfiel and the others call to her as she rushed out, but she didn’t turn back.