Work Text:
Winry is playing with Den when her dog suddenly perks up.
Her ears lift in that adorable way it does when she’s picked up on someone approaching their house, and her eyes—closed in enjoyment from Winry’s scratching her chin—blink open and train themselves on the door. She barks a few times in its direction.
“What is it, girl?” Winry coos, petting her once more before she stands. “Do we have a visitor?”
Den, who obviously cannot speak, doesn’t respond.
Instead, the rapid knocks at her door answers her question.
Winry makes her way over to the door and opens it, expecting the person on the other side to be a customer of Rockbell Automail, only to find two of her favorite people.
Ed and Al stand before her. She nearly tackles them with a hug, but holds herself back until she gets an idea of why they’ve suddenly showed up at her door out of nowhere.
Ed’s hand—his real, flesh one—raises from mid-knock to go to the back of his head. He gives her a sheepish, closed-eyed grin. With a sweep of her eyes, she sees that he doesn’t seem to be injured, his clothes neither tattered nor bloodied and his face unmarred.
Meanwhile, Al greets her with an enthusiastic “Winry!” as per usual. And he looks the same, too. Not a scratch on his armor.
Winry isn’t an oblivious, unobservant idiot like someone she knows. She’s long noticed the patterns of the Elric brothers’ visits, and just noted the lack of movement in Ed’s automail arm in the middle of their exchange. She knows exactly what they must be here for, and it makes a hot rush of anger rise from within her.
Winry slams the door on them, her anger practically oozing out of her.
She’s already storming her way to her room when she hears Ed hot on her heels.
“Winry, please!”
“No, Ed! You don’t get to do this!” she shouts, reaching her room and shutting the door behind her. She locks it and leans back against it. The coolness of the wood against her anger-warmed skin clears her head for just a moment, before Ed opens his mouth and her ire returns all the same.
“What’s wrong? What’s going on?” he asks, sounding so confused Winry almost wants to open the door and forgive him on the spot. Almost.
“It’s nothing. Just— Just go away!”
“What’s up with you?” Ed grits out, rapping his flesh hand on the door. “I’m not a mind reader!”
“Leave me alone!”
“Tell me what’s wrong first—”
In a matter of seconds, Winry yanks a wrench out of her pocket and slams the end of it into the door, a loud thunk of the wood resounding through the room.
“Shut up, Ed!” Winry yells, clenching her fists.
She can’t take it anymore. The words she’s been wanting to say for years now spew out her mouth sooner than she can stop it.
“We’re friends, aren’t we? But you sure don’t act like it. Months go by without any news from you and Al. It can’t be that hard to pick up a phone and dial a few numbers, or to scrawl out a few words on some paper and get them sent out, right? The only time I see you guys is when you need something, when you need me to fix up your automail. Would I hear from you guys at all if you didn’t need me for that?”
It feels good to finally loosen the pithos of her worries and insecurities, but all that remains when she’s done is shame and guilt. It leaves her huffing to catch her breath.
Her words stuns Ed into silence.
But she has one more thing to say, the most important thing. And if she doesn’t say it now, she doesn’t know when she’ll next get the opportunity to, when she’ll feel brave—or brazen—enough again.
“Aren’t I more than your mechanic to you?” she whispers, so quiet she isn’t even sure Ed hears her through the thick wooden door, until he finally speaks up.
“W-Winry— I…”
She sighs, feeling resigned and utterly exhausted. This probably won’t get them anywhere. “Just drop it.”
“But… But—”
“Go away, Ed,” she tells him, flatly. Immediately feeling bad about her tone, she adds on, "I'll fix up your arm later.”
It takes a while for Winry to hear heavy footsteps tread away from her room.
She heaves another sigh, one so deep it’s like it comes from her very soul. Winry slides down the door and pulls her knees to her chest, staring out the open window in her room. It’s all she can do to not lose her mind, to not pull her door back and chase after Ed and beg him to never leave again.
The sun shines so brightly outside, and yet none of its rays seem to reach her.
⏱︎ ⚙︎
When she’s finally calmed down hours later, the sun is beginning to set, and with it, her anger. In its place is a numb impression of acceptance.
Winry stomps down the stairs anyway, making her presence known.
She can smell the delicious meal her granny is cooking for dinner, and can hear her chattering away with Ed and Al about something mundane.
Winry walks over to the kitchen and finds Ed at the counter, spinning with his left hand what must be lettuce in a salad spinner. He’s watching the gadget with interest, curiosity written all over his face. Knowing him, he’s probably wondering about the mechanics of it, not unlike how Winry had when she had seen a demonstration of it in a market back in Central. An annoying voice in the back of her mind observes this similarity between them with a buzz of elation that she has to tamp down.
Winry suddenly accosts Ed by tugging on his arm, causing him to splutter in confusion and nearly drop the spinner. Granny and Al witness this interaction from where they stand at the stove, but make no moves to stop it.
Winry pulls Ed away from the kitchen and drags him through the house and into her workshop.
She flicks on the lights and manhandles him into a patient’s cot while drawing up a chair for herself. Immediately upon sitting down, she gets to business, in no mood for anything else. She doesn’t even glance at him.
“Arm,” Winry demands as she gets her tools laid out beside her and her sleeves rolled up to her elbows.
All too familiar with her process, and afraid to trigger her anger, Ed quickly goes through the motions to allow her to work on his arm as soon as possible. He unbuckles his jacket, and lets it slide down and pool at his waist. Then swiftly pulls off his shirt and his right glove, which all lands in a messy heap on the cot, and presents his automail arm to her.
“Just the arm?”
“Just the arm,” he confirms, quietly.
It’s weird. Ed is almost always loud. He’s never been one for soft words. But he is right now. Winry writes it off as him being all too aware of all the tools at her side and her ability to turn a wrench into a weapon.
For a while, they sit there without speaking, with Winry pouring all her concentration into fixing his arm, and Ed doing whatever it is he’s doing that keeps him still and silent.
It isn’t until Winry tightens a screw a little sloppier than she usually would—because as much as time flies by and the world fades to nothing as she works on any automail in front of her, the events from earlier still gnaw at her. She doesn’t even know why she had such an outburst like that. Maybe Ed’s dramatics have been rubbing off on her all these years. But the anger was real, and has been lingering for a long time, no matter how irrational it might have been and how much Winry wanted it to go away—and Ed winces slightly in pain, that they break the silence.
It’s slight, so quiet she almost doesn’t catch it.
Winry freezes right away, for the first time since she opened the door for the Elric Brothers hours ago, because Edward Elric usually hardly makes a sound through her maintenance. His pain tolerance and grit is hundreds of times greater than the majority of patients and customers she’s had, and likely of the ones she’ll have in the future, too. He’s one of the strongest people she knows, if not the strongest she knows. She peers up at him with wide eyes.
Ed avoids her eyes and coughs a bit into his hand out of embarrassment. “Uh, I’m fine. Keep going.”
Winry carries on, but much more carefully this time around.
It’s moments later that she feels it before she even hears it—Ed taking in a deep breath, his abdomen rising with his inhale.
“I’ve been a shitty friend,” he begins, cautiously, “the shittiest.”
Winry pauses for a second before she continues working. Is it finally happening? A proper talk with Ed, where he finally drops his reticence?
“I… I don’t check in often, mostly because I’m always in the middle of something. It’s no excuse, but I— I worry that I’ll worry you with the things I get up to. You have your own day to day to be concerned about, I didn't want to add on to it,” Ed explains in a rush of words that only get faster the more he talks. He tugs at a loose thread of his pants, his nervousness making an appearance. “…And, don’t get me wrong, I do appreciate your concern, but sometimes the things Al and I do aren’t exactly the safest or most avoidable things, but they’re things we have to do, no matter how much you may try to talk us out of it. If we tell you the crazy things we’re up to, you’d disapprove and stress over it.”
And much quieter, Ed adds on, “I’m sorry, Winry.”
Edward Elric isn’t one to apologize either, and yet here he is, apologizing.
It would be so, so much easier if she didn’t understand exactly what he meant, if she could just go on with being mad at him. But Winry does get it. She knows what he means. She holds back the prickling feeling in her eyes that threaten to bring tears.
“I’m sorry, too,” she confesses, putting down the screwdriver in her hand in favor of giving this conversation her full attention. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that. I should have been trying to see things from your point of view from the very beginning.”
“No, Winry, it’s me that didn’t look at things from your perspective,” Ed sighs. He runs a hand through his hair, ruffling his bangs out of his face. "You don't need to apologize. That was a well deserved wake-up call.”
With hesitance, he admits, “I— I don’t want to lose our friendship over this—the frustrations that build up over time.”
“Me neither,” Winry says, putting her head down. Ed pats her head.
He’s the only one who does that. It never feels patronizing, or like some kind of distraction from whatever situation that calls for him to do so. It’s simply Ed and his—unfortunately very endearing—way of expressing himself. Winry can’t help but lean into his touch.
“…And, Winry, you are more than my mechanic,” he says, referring to her words from earlier. “Don’t laugh—but you’re my best and only friend, other than Al.”
That gets a slightly watery laugh out of her, tears beginning to well up.
“It hurts, Ed,” she whispers, afraid to speak any louder. She clutches onto his jacket like it’s a lifeline. “It really, really does. I always worry that the last time I see you might actually be the last time. How do you think I feel when you always show up hurt?”
Ed pulls her into his chest with an arm around her shoulders. His touch, his warmth, this contact with him, this embrace against his bare chest—it all makes her feel better in an instant, and she mentally scolds herself for it. He’s just going to leave. He always does.
“I’m stronger than my ruined automail might make things seem, you know,” he tells her, trying for something light-hearted. Winry doesn’t need to look up to know he’s got a cocky smirk on his face.
She thumps him on the chest lightly. “Then stop coming back to me hurt every time, Idiot.”
“I— I’ll try,” he says, holding her a little tighter.
“Open up to me more, you hear me?” Winry orders. “Nothing you and Al could be doing could scare me… Probably. But I promise I won’t fuss about it again. I’ll… I’ll trust you. Just don’t shut me out anymore, please.”
“Okay, Winry,” Ed says into her hair.
She pinches his exposed side, and immediately tries not to think about how his warm, taut skin feels between her fingers.
He yelps in surprise. “What was that for?!”
She pulls back from his arms enough to look up at him, and prompts, “And?”
Ed’s golden eyes scan her face, his Adam's apple which has become more noticeable over the years bobbing slightly as he swallows.
“Uh…”
He’s backlit by the light above the two of them, making it appear like there’s a halo around his head. Up close like this, Winry can even spot a few freckles scattered across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose. It seriously distracts her for a moment, before her mind gets itself back on track and reminds her the importance of their conversation.
Winry gives him a pointed look in reply.
Sure, Ed isn’t a mind reader, but it doesn’t hurt to make him come to his own conclusions without her hurling every one of her thoughts and feelings at him.
He figures out what she means.
“I promise to keep in touch,” Ed says, firmly. “And… I’ll do my best to not keep you in the dark anymore.”
“Thank you.”
Winry wishes they could stay like that—holding onto each other, away from their responsibilities, a moment that seemed to stretch on forever—but she still has to finish up his automail.
“Winry! Ed! Dinner’s ready!” Al calls a beat later, his voice echoing from down the hall.
Without even being in the room, Al startles Winry and Ed into hastily breaking apart, suddenly becoming too aware of their situation.
“I— Uh— We—!” Ed stammers, avoiding her eye once more. There’s a flush on his face that Winry would point out and laugh at in any other case, but she's certain she’s got it just as bad.
“Er— I got a little carried away, huh?” Winry squeaks out, fanning her face a bit. Oh my god, oh my god, her mind repeats on loop.
“In a moment!” she remembers to call back to Al.
She didn’t have much left to do, just a bit more tuning up here and there, so it shouldn’t be long before they can join Al and Granny for dinner.
Winry finishes up just a few minutes later, and busies herself with reorganizing her tools as Ed promptly redresses himself as soon as she moves away from his arm.
⏱︎ ⚙︎
Two weeks later, Winry spots mail in the form of a simple envelope beside her plate of breakfast. Her hopes rise on sight, so she pushes down her excitement as she approaches the dining table.
It could be anything, could be from anyone. It probably wasn’t from Ed and Al.
“Granny, what’s this?” she asks, trying to delay the inevitable disappointment she’ll feel when it really isn’t from them after all.
Her granny sits in her usual spot, reading a fresh copy of the newspaper in her hands with a steaming mug of coffee in front of her. She lowers the papers in her hands enough to raise a brow and give Winry a look over her glasses.
“What do you think? Mail, of course.”
“I can see that, I just mean why and how?”
“Hurry up and open it already.”
And so Winry does, and the two of them read it together, chuckling to themselves as they hear Ed and Al’s voices loud and clear through the inked words. Winry is surprised, but obviously happy to have received a letter from them.
She thinks to herself that it’s probably just a one-off thing, a product of her and Ed’s recent conversation.
So imagine her shock when it’s the same three weeks later. Then, a week after that. And again, two and a half weeks later.
Ed and Al do their best to send letters at least once a month, even if the lengths of their letters vary from a paragraph to several pages.
They even call when they get the chance to. There’s no pattern to it, but it’s usually at night when they ring the phone of the Rockbell home. They chat about their day, catch up on the latest going ons in their respective locations, and Al or Ed will inform her about what they’re up to. And like she’d promised, she listens patiently, tells them to be careful, and has faith that they will be, instead of stressing. (It’s Ed and Al, after all. They always overcome whatever challenges they face.) Sometimes they just sit there on the line as they do their own work. Winry can’t help but wonder if she misses their calls some nights, the ones where she’s tired herself out with her work during the day and falls asleep as soon as her head hits her pillow.
It’s more often Al who calls, with Ed piping up in the background at times, and Ed who writes, with Al’s writing in between his paragraphs.
“So you really are keeping your promise…” Winry whispers to this month’s second letter in her hands, finally confident that this change is here to stay, that Ed has been keeping his promise in mind and doesn’t intend to break it.
Her eyes trace her name and address in Ed’s shaky, chicken-scratch writing, and Al’s small, neat bits of commentary and input scattered through the letter.
It’s not as good as speaking to them in person, as seeing for herself that they are okay and safe, but it’ll do.
It has to, until she sees them next. And she will. She can trust them with that.