Chapter Text
Ed is hardly surprised that the moment Winry has finished crushing them with her welcome home hug—welcome tackle, really—she forces them inside, ordering them around as usual to tell her everything that happened since they were all together last.
Granny Pinako is waiting at the table, a slow look of awe growing on her weathered face at their appearance. Her eyes immediately catch on Alphonse, his face, his real flesh and blood face. A smile cracks through her usual stoicism and Ed thinks there may be actual tears gathering in the corners of her eyes after she finishes hugging them as well, saying that she’ll make tea for everyone.
Seeing that only reminds him of the wet tracks down Winry’s face that she’s still having to wipe away. He can’t help a smug grin. “I told you the next time I made you cry it would be tears of joy.”
A laugh bursts out of her, which only adds to his smugness for some reason. She punches him in the arm good-naturedly, her knuckles pausing an inch away from him before snatching the hem of his shirt and jacket to force them off of him.
“Hey, hey—what the hell, Winry! Ever heard of personal space?” he complains, although it’s dumb to ask. Personal space with them had long become such an afterthought with how much she’d had to work on his arm and leg over the years. He shouldn’t care. It’s just because of Al’s teasing on the way here that it’s even on his radar.
Yeah.
To humor her, he helps her get the clothing all the way off. She stares openly at his chest and arms, a strange wash of emotions seeming to go through her eyes all at once as she speaks. “I saw…I saw your hand outside but I still didn’t…you really got it back.” She reaches out to touch the bandages wrapped around his shoulder.
Before she can ask, he answers. “That’s not from the transmutation that got it back—well, mostly. Some of the automail didn’t quite get transmuted with the rest of the port so they had to be surgically removed. Don’t worry, I made them save the metal for you. Figured you’d want it back for something or another. The rest of it was in too many pieces to recover.”
Her eyes shift from his shoulder to his left leg. “So does that mean—”
Al and Ed share a look before Ed shrugs nonchalantly. “I had to be left with some kind of souvenir for everything we went through. And we couldn’t take away all your work for your best customer. Besides, you always said the leg was easier to fix since the dexterity index is so much lower in a foot instead of a hand.”
“But you always said it hurts worse because of the constant weight on your thigh,” she mutters, her hand still gripping his shirt twisting it slightly in her fist. After a moment, however, she shakes her head, forcing the upset frown away, relaxing enough to throw his clothing back at him so she can put her hands on her hips. “The real disappointment is that you having any of my beautiful automail means you’re going to continue to abuse it.”
Ed’s annoyed protest is interrupted as Granny stumps back in laden with a tray of tea and apple pie, making everyone turn towards the delicious smell of cinnamon and other warm spices.
“She’s been baking one every day since the Promised Day, you know,” the old woman tells Al as she serves him a slice first.
His little brother absolutely beams at Winry as he thanks her, and it makes Ed’s heart hurt in a good way to see an actual expression from him.
After Pinako makes sure all of her grandchildren are served, she perches on her stool and leans forward. “I’m sure this will be a long story,” she prompts. “So you boys best get started.”
She’s right, and although Winry and Pinako are good at listening without asking too many questions, it still takes hours. Ed is tempted to soften some of the worst parts, but the Rockbell’s had far and away earned their honesty. By the time they’ve more or less finished by explaining the changes currently happening in Central and across the country the sun is setting, bathing the dining room in pinkish-orange light.
“That’s…wow,” Winry says at last, putting her head in her hands. “I’d almost not believe it if you weren’t sitting right in front of me.” She shudders. “And if I hadn’t experienced getting my soul ripped out first hand.”
Guilt eats at Ed for that one. “Sorry we couldn’t stop that bit in time.”
“Oh, shut up,” she snips, lifting out of her hands to glare at him. “You still kept your other promise so I think we can all let that one go.”
“What promise?” Al asks, accepting another roll from Pinako. He’d been making good on his desire to eat enough to make up for all the lost time spent as a suit of armor.
He rubs the back of his neck. “The one I told Winry when my group left for Central. That I’d save the country, get our bodies back, and get home before she knew it.”
Al purses his lips together, looking like he’s holding back a knowing smirk as he glances between the two older teens. “Big promise.”
“She nearly pummeled it out of me,” Ed complains.
Her nostrils flare. “Like I was going to let you leave all defeatist.”
“I was trying to be realistic!”
Al starts laughing at their bickering, the mirth so intense that he’s wheezing by the end of it.
Edward pauses mid jibe to give his brother a concerned look. “You okay?”
He waves off the fussing, taking a moment to regain control of his breathing. “Of course, my lungs are still weak. Guess I need more laughter to strengthen them.”
“Come with me,” Granny says, jumping down from her seat. “I have your rooms ready for you. Sounds like you have a lot of resting to make up for.”
Ed is about to get up to follow them, to make sure Al has everything he needs as Pinako raises her voice deliberately. “And Winry, please get a good look at that leg. Watching him limp in here so pathetically gave me a migraine.”
Winry giggles at the comically stunned look on his face as he sputters out something about not being pathetic while his brother is led from the room, bidding them goodnight.
“C’mon,” she says, walking over to him to give him a hand up.
“I don’t need help,” Ed grumbles but accepts draping his arm over her shoulder anyways because his left hip hurts like a son of a bitch, especially after sitting for so long. In the weeks following the defeat of father he’d done his best to ignore the constant aching not just in the port but also his spine from his leg’s mechanics being screwed in some way or another from the fighting leading up to and on the Promised Day.
Honestly, though, most of him aches. All over. It’d taken two full weeks for his renewed right arm to stop sending him strange stabs of pain, his brain and nerves having some heated argument whether it really was back or not.
“Sit down,” Winry instructs, easing him onto one of the ready and waiting cots. She gives him an appraising look and he gets a weird flash of self-consciousness. “Did you bring any shorts to change into?”
“Yeah, for sleeping in. They’re in my suitcase. I can go—” by the time he’s barely lifted from his seat she’s already gone to the dining room and seconds later his shorts and a tank top hit him square in the face.
“Let me know when you’re ready.”
Peeling the clothing off his face he yells, “who said you could go through my stuff?”
“I did! Now hurry up.”
Grumbling the whole time, he strips off his traveling clothes for the looser fitting set. Once finished, he calls for her and the second she appears in the doorway, he returns the favor, throwing the bundle at her face. She catches them with more grace than him and only retaliates with a very mature sniff of derision. He’s just barely finished making a face at her by pulling an eyelid down when he remembers what else is in his suitcase.
“Since you’re already creepily looking through my stuff, can you grab the little black case while you’re at it?”
“Ugh, fine. But only because every step you take on your current rig is liable to make it collapse.” She returns for the last time, holding the box in one hand and some of her tools in the other.
When she holds the box out to him, he takes the top off and pushes her hand back towards her. “It’s all yours, actually. The automail pieces I told you about and your earrings.” He grimaces. “Sorry it took so long to get them back to you. By the time I realized I should’ve given them back we were already on the road. Figured it was another reason to get back to you.”
She stares down at the contents for a long time, her mouth slightly open.
He starts to feel self-conscious again even though she isn’t looking at him. He clears his throat, his cheeks heating up for some stupid reason. “Unless you don’t want them?”
She seems to snap back to reality, taking her eyes off the jewelry for long enough to put her tools and the box down before suddenly she has her arms wrapped around his middle to squeeze the life out of him. He’d probably find it endearing or embarrassing or equal parts of each if her exuberance hadn’t made her leg jam against his artificial one, causing the poorly maintained suspension to catch and send a lance of agony up his thigh.
“Erk—Winry, ow,” he barely manages to gasp out as she pulls back just as quickly, stammering out an apology.
“Sorry—sorry! I just thought it was sweet and—” she looks away, getting pretty red in the face herself. “I didn’t—I’ll—I should do my job now and help with your automail.” She takes a deep breath before marching the two steps to her tools, arranging them as he hefts his leg onto the cot with the help of his arms.
She does a quick initial diagnostic on his automail, making unhappy grunts as she does, but it speaks volumes to what had happened to him in their time apart that she doesn’t nag him about how much he’s neglected it. Instead, he has the time to actually watch her expressions as she does what she does best. Her brow is furrowed, eyes focused yet downcast as her steady fingers trace the intricacies of the automail.
Huh. Does she always look this worried when she isn’t hiding it by yelling at him?
And has she always looked this pretty with her bottom lip between her teeth?
He quickly tilts his chin back, opting to stare at the ceiling instead of letting himself answer that question.
After all, you love her, don’t you?
He’ll ignore that thought, too.
Even if it’s harder to push away now that his life isn’t full of five million other problems.
Winry has moved to using a tape measure on his left leg at several different intervals, pausing to scribble down a few notes. She goes to his right, and he certainly has no opinion about how it feels to have her fingers pressed right into the crease of his hip bone.
“Looks like you’ll need nearly an all new leg,” Winry says matter-of-factly as she puts the tape away and sits down to start opening the outer casing. “Last time you dropped in here I extended the head pieces as much as I could since you were short on time but it won’t be good for the equipment long term. Go figure, you actually got taller.”
“Don’t sound so amazed,” he gripes, then grins. “Considering I’m taller than you now, runt.”
She rolls her eyes as she delves further into the automail, extracting pieces here and there. “I’m actually pretty surprised you didn’t say anything about it when you were here with Greed.”
He hadn’t been not aware of it. More of just far too overwhelmed with everything that was happening in and around those short (heh) handful of days he’d been here, not the least of which was tackling how conflicted he felt seeing her again, Lieutenant Hawkeye’s assumption about his feelings still bouncing around his skull no matter how hard he tried to shove it down. The prospect of things going horribly wrong was already bad enough knowing so many of his friends could be dead in an instant. Acknowledging the troubling fact that he cared even more about her would have just made things worse. “Eh, had other things on my mind. I was just happy to see you at all.”
“Yeah, you seemed pretty stressed,” she muses. “It was just funny, I guess, to see you actually having to look down at me. It made me think of that whole…”
She leaves her trailed off sentence for long enough that he props himself up on his elbows to give her a quizzical look. “Think of what?”
She blinks several times, coming back to herself. “Um, nevermind. It’s not important.”
Knowing Winry, it probably is important, but if he pushed any harder he’d end up with a goose egg. And despite what the last several years may say about him, he isn’t actually a glutton for punishment.
After another minute of fiddling, he feels the distant pressure of her wrench loosening the nerve connection before all the feedback from his automail goes dead. He grimaces a second later as the phantom limb sensations fizzle to life, nerve endings searching for the false and original leg alike.
“I’ve already started on a newer model for you,” she says for his benefit. “I’m just running low on some of these parts since everything’s been in upheaval and supply lines are still trashed. Hope you don’t mind hobbling around on this one while it’s gutted.”
“I don’t think I get much of a choice,” he grunts, instinctually trying to wiggle toes that aren’t there.
“I could just leave your hips out of alignment.”
“Sounds great.”
“That’ll really leave you stunted.”
“Still taller than you now.”
She snorts. “You’re so annoying.”
“I missed you, too.”
That finally earns another laugh from her, and she pauses long enough to direct her smile at him.
His heart rate picks up without warning. He flops back down off his elbows, trying to will it back to normal.
No luck.
Damn it.
“I can’t believe you managed to walk from the station to here,” she mutters a few minutes into the lull, carefully ripping out a section of wiring near the port. “Your skin looks raw enough to bleed. Did you even have anyone check if you tore anything?”
He folds his arms across his chest. “I was kind of low priority compared to how many other people were hurt. Doc that looked me over before working on my shoulder said I was okay.”
Well, ‘okay’ wasn’t what the woman said exactly. She’d said something more along the lines of ‘oh my god I can’t believe you’re still standing’. He’s pretty sure she greenlit the extraction surgery just as an excuse to get him to agree to take some pain killer and anti-inflammatory meds.
“They probably weren't an expert in automail,” Winry says, giving him a squinty look that tells him she knows he's not being entirely truthful. “You do realize if you wreck your port too much you’ll have to get a new one installed, right? Complete with the actual three years of proper rehab. It’d be hard on what’s left of your femur.”
He huffs. “I’ll be fine, okay? Stop fussing and nagging.”
“You’re so pigheaded,” she growls, moving her chair up past his knee to get a better look at where flesh meets metal. She gently prods the area.
He yelps, attempting to pull his knee away but since there’s no stimulus in his automail all his leg does is jerk. Damn—damndamndamn, why does she always know right where to push?
She shakes her head. “Nothing feels separated from the old stitch sites but it’s a really good thing you’re going to be on strict bed rest for the foreseeable future.”
The idea sparks conflict in his chest. He’s never been great at staying put, but on the other hand, a kind of relief pushes against the backs of his eyes thinking that he has an excuse to finally…stop. Moving forward has been his undying motto ever since that horrible day in the basement of his old burned house but now that he’d moved so far forward that he found himself back where he started, maybe it was time to start moving something else forward.
What that meant, exactly, he hasn’t figured out yet, but it seems like he’ll have some time to think about it.
“Fine, fine. If it’ll make you happy.”
“It would. And you’ll feel better too.” She sighs heavily, rolling her tools back up in their cloth. “I guess that’s the problem. Saving the country and Al didn’t do much to teach you how to care about yourself.”
He frowns, not sure how to respond to that. He’d managed to stay alive, at least. That in itself is a miracle.
It’s been a long time since he’s thought about feeling any better than just surviving and making up for his past mistakes, though.
“I reconfigured the suspension so you can use the leg like a more simple prosthetic but you should take breaks from it while you’re sleeping or laying down so there’s as little weight on your bones as possible while everything is healing up.”
“Okay.”
She pauses, looking up past his leg to his right shoulder. He can practically see the way her brain is trying to reconcile the flesh there with the automail she’d spent so long meticulously creating and maintaining. “Can I…can I take a look under your bandages? Make sure it’s healing up alright?”
“Sure.”
She picks up her chair and moves it to the opposite side of the cot, rifling through a more traditional medic bag on the floor and produces a pair of medical shears that she uses to carefully cut away the material. He shivers when the cold metal makes contact with his arm. Strange, still, to receive such nuanced feedback from that side.
Winry leans in close to better examine the fresh stitches. “Looks even enough, and everything is clean,” she murmurs, more to herself than him. She raises a hand, tracing the edge of his scar. “But this will probably always be there.”
He doesn’t like the sadness buried in her voice. “Eh, scars are cool.”
A wan smile flickers at the corner of her mouth. “Yeah. You’ve said that before.” She continues feeling along his shoulder, her fingers warm and soft despite the calluses, feeling out the muscular connections along his shoulder and upper arm, diligently seeking for any flaw. It’s very precise, surgical.
Even so, he can’t suppress a shudder as she slides her thumb over the ridge where his clavicle and scapula come together. He’s not used to being touched for so long, so intently. He should probably tell her off for fussing, say that she’s starting to make the confused reconstructed nerves in his arm tingle strangely, but he can’t muster the will to.
It’s kind of nice, actually.
He would die of embarrassment if he admitted it out loud, but—
He really doesn’t want her to stop.
She does, however, a moment later, her smile falling. “Ed, it’s amazing you have your arm back, but isn’t—well, I mean—your leg is still gone, and you said…your alchemy.”
Ed had more or less glossed over that part in their explanation. Granny and Winry had shared a look when he said that was the toll he’d paid to get himself and Alphonse back through the gate of truth but they hadn’t pushed for more details in the moment. “It’s okay, Winry.”
“Is it?” Her blue eyes pinch at the corners, and she brushes part of his bangs out of his face to get a better look at him. “You loved doing alchemy and spent so long trying to figure out how to become whole again.”
“I made peace with my decision,” he says, reaching to hold her hand in his, the left one, since it feels less foreign to him. “And I have everything I could ever want all around me. Granny, Al, you—everyone I’ve made a connection with are more important than everything else.”
“Only took the end of the world for you to get it, dummy,” she says, her voice catching in the way that portends tears.
“Please don’t cry.” He winces. “I think I’ve made you cry enough over the last few years.”
“You could learn a thing or two about crying from me,” she snaps, but without the usual bite. She squeezes his hand, and the tingling feeling seems to have spread like a virus to this arm, too. “You can act all aloof and as careless as you want, but you’ll never fool me, Edward.”
The last of the evening twilight has nearly faded to black, but somehow the last of the tendrils of the sun’s fire have made their home in her irises.
Breathtaking.
After all, you love her, don’t you?
His voice comes out strangled. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
She seems satisfied with this, letting her hand slip from his as she stands. “It’s late. I’ll get some new bandages on your shoulder then help you get to bed so you can get started on recovering.”
A great plan, sure. Assuming he can actually fall asleep.