"you're with me now."
THINGS THAT WILL TAKE WINRY ROCKBELL’S BREATH AWAY— the itemized list is as follows: new automail designs she’s never seen before; seeing alphonse back in his body for the first time; the picture of her dad that she keeps tucked in her bedside drawer and that she loves because he looked so much like her; the first time she heard the lecoulte baby cry all the way back in rush valley; snow in resembool; the way granny can make a clean, straight cut with a scalpel look as if it’s the easiest thing in the world.
oh, and ed’s funny, endearing way of catching her off-guard with the fewest, simplest of words.
he manages to do so now, as they’re sitting knees-to-chest on the roof, supposedly stargazing. she’d been going off on a tangent, the way she always managed to — it was another sign that life was going back to normal, that their conversations were no longer peppered with quiet fear for the other’s safety spoken over the phone or briefly in person before ed had to go again. the exact words she said, winry couldn’t remember ( in part because her mind is all too preoccupied with the realization that edward’s eyes are such a rich shade of amber, rich enough to make her think that it could be her newest favourite colour ), but it had something to do with an offhand joke about how he better not leave her again, which apparently prompted him to say that.
winry realizes she hasn’t said anything back and reels because the last thing she wants is for him to interpret the silence as awkwardness, even though they were probably way past that stage already. they just know, but it never hurt anyone to say it out loud.
“ i know i am, ” she bumps her shoulder against his and scoots just a little closer. winry puts her head on his shoulder and breathes in, smells his shampoo and laundry detergent and maybe just a touch of cinnamon from the last apple pie he’d torn through at dinner. THIS IS HOME, winry decides. “ i’m right where i need to be. ”
in the sky, the moon is big and the stars are plenty and the next house is about twenty minutes away on foot — winry feels small in the vastness of it all, in the syrupy way that time and the rest of their lives were laid out in front of them, all for the taking. she finds that she doesn’t mind it at all. “ — i love you. ”