The Same Coin

Coming Here

Winry was silent while she sat on the bench at the railway station.

The railway station in Dublith was almost identical to Resembool, but vastly different from the station in Central, which had seemed big enough to swallow her whole — until she had gone to Yorknew City, and found the world to be so much bigger that she'd ever dreamt it could be.

But that...that was long ago.

If remnants of Yorknew City hadn't followed her home, she may have thought it was a dream. What tracked her down back to her quiet life, however, could only be described as a nightmare to an outsider. She had never felt so brutalized as she had at Hisoka's hands, even though Winry later somberly reflected that perhaps he had been right, that she had been the person in the wrong every time she'd struck first. She still didn't believe it justified the severity he escalated things to from there — there was a brief flash of being on the ground, hands pinned over her head while he was on all fours on top of her body — was an appropriate response either, though.

She and Hisoka had been two perfectly matched serial overreactors in that regard, at least.

Winry closed the book in her lap and leaned her head back. Her mind just seemed to wander too far for her to concentrate. She wondered what Hisoka was doing with Izumi at this moment.

Underneath her feet she felt the ground tremor. Immediately she glanced to the clock that hung on one of the beams of the ramada she sat beneath — it was still too early for the train. The ground shook again, stronger this time, and Winry hastily got to her feet, tucking her book beneath her arm, before jumping down from the platform and running across the tracks.

The far side of the tracks put Winry on the steep side of a cuesta. The drop-off at her feet made her pause — it was at least fifteen feet down. Her hesitation was brief; she focused on amplifying her aura, then leapt. She skidded down the steep embankment, fragments of rock and clouds of dust kicking up around her feet as she struggled to keep her balance, arms out and waving.

She managed to make it to the base upright, but had to pause again to catch her breath. The maneuver had taken more from her than she was used to. The ground beneath Winry's feet suddenly cracked and splintered. She dropped her hands and knees, scrambling to be on one side of the broadening crevice instead of halfway on both.

"I thought I told you to stay out of here!"

Winry blushed hotly at Izumi's reprimand, and beside her Hisoka was crouched on the ground, smirking at Winry.

"I could feel it all the way up on the platform. I thought I should warn you before you damage the tracks," Winry replied, crossing her arms over her chest and turning her nose up into the air ever so slightly.

"Did I interrupt your reading?" Hisoka drawled, and she rolled her eyes in answer.

Winry had never meant to stay in Dublith this long — almost a year had passed already. She found regular work doing automail maintenance, and made herself useful in Izumi's butcher shop, too. Her familiarity with anatomy had increased tenfold — at least with animals. The book beneath her arm was a text that specifically discussed the translation of animal anatomies to those of humans.

Her free time, however, belonged to Hisoka.

They had come to a truce after that incident so long ago, when she'd discovered he had terminated her apprenticeship. She had kept her word about keeping her hands to herself, and in return Hisoka spared her any further compromising situations.

Well. He had tried.

Izumi, Sig, and Hisoka all had unanimously agreed that she needed to learn some level of self-defense, and she'd reluctantly allowed Hisoka to take her on as his seito. The first eight months of learning from him had gone smoothly, until she'd really begun to get the gist of fighting.