“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.