Chapter 9: A Home with a Family Waiting

The Elrics reach Resembool alongside Major Armstrong and meet Winry Rockbell and her grandmother Pinako, the mechanics who build and maintain Ed's prosthetics. Winry scolds and thrashes him for wrecking her finest automail arm, and Pinako adds that his leg needs refitting to keep up with his growth, promising both limbs within three days. Loaned a spare leg to hobble on, Edward follows Alphonse's suggestion and walks out to his mother Trisha's grave. As Armstrong pitches in with chores, Pinako asks after the boys' lives, troubled that they never write home. He tells her their fame draws trouble but that their strength carries them through, which sets Pinako remembering the night their attempt to revive the dead went wrong, when Alphonse, sealed in armor, carried his mutilated brother into her home, followed by the automail surgery and Ed's enlistment with the military.

Pinako has known the two since infancy and once counted their vanished father as a friend. She reveals that Winry's own parents traveled to the Ishval war front as battlefield medics and were killed there. The reason the Elrics lodge with the Rockbells rather than in their own house comes clear as well: Edward torched the family home on the day he earned his State Alchemist license three years before, cutting off any road of retreat from his goal. Three days later the finished limbs are joined painfully to his nerves, and once repairs are done the brothers spar to test their bodies before sitting down to supper.

Warned that his new arm is less sturdy than the last, Edward hurries off to mend Alphonse's damaged armor, gathering every broken shard and transmuting them back into shape while carefully sparing the Blood Rune that keeps his brother's soul anchored to the steel. Over the meal he voices hope for a future without automail repairs, and after he falls asleep Alphonse quietly thanks the Rockbell women on his behalf. At dawn the party leaves for the earliest train to Central City, with Pinako inviting them back for a home-cooked meal and a weary Winry waving from her bedroom window. Only that evening, waking from her lost sleep, does she discover a bolt she forgot to fit into Edward's new arm.

The chapter fixes the brothers' ages, with Edward and Winry at fifteen and Alphonse at fourteen. It lays out much of how automail works, explaining that the limbs run through the nervous system and that the fitting surgery and recovery are notoriously long and agonizing. In a fourth-wall gag, Winry tries to blurt out Edward's height only for him to slap a censor bar over her speech bubble. The forgotten bolt she finds is stamped A-08, and the farmers Edward passes on his way to the grave are the same folk the brothers later help repair a shed in Chapter 23.