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Winry’s hands were delicate as she ran her fingertips down Lan Fan’s automail, feeling every loose bolt and expanse of scuffed steel, sensing every problem within as if she could see the inside of it as clearly as the exterior. It struck Lan Fan– not for the first time, it was a thought she returned to at every regularly scheduled check-up– how gentle Winry’s hands were, despite how they looked.
Her knuckles were laced with scars, her palms rough and calloused from years of work, her nails dirty and short and prominent tendons lining the backs betraying her strength. Yet when her fingers reach the join of Lan Fan’s skin to her automail, she traced the line of separation with gentle, feather-light brushes, and her other hand cupped Lan Fan’s forearm just as softly to turn her arm over.
Winry filled the silence in the room with idle chatter, and Lan Fan didn’t have much to add to anything she said– it was all automail talk, mechanical garble that she couldn’t wrap her head around the intricacies of– so she just listened, nodding along.
“Anything feeling off, lately?” Winry asked, interrupting her own rambling, bending Lan Fan’s arm to watch the movement of her elbow joint.
Lan Fan kept her arm limp so Winry could better move her, but she flexed her fingers just to feel the automail’s response. “It seems fine. A little different around the shoulder, maybe– like it rotates backwards too far.”
Winry tilted her head. “You’re right, it is a little loose up here.” Her fingertip traced the joint, half touching Lan Fan’s skin and half on the metal, making her shiver. “I’ll pay attention to that when I reconnect it. You know,” she continued, “you probably won’t need too many more of these tune-ups. It’s just routine, but you should be accustomed enough to it that you don’t need to come back here so often. I’ll still schedule in a few more, to make sure.”
“I’m fine, W-Win…ry,” Lan Fan protested, her mouth catching on Winry’s name, still feeling too overly familiar when she’s used to such deference around Ling and the others. But Winry had insisted a dozen times or more that Lan Fan call her by her first name, despite how foreign it felt to say. “I’m used to using it by now, it’s been a while.”
“You’re not really used to it until you’ve had it for years,” Winry said. She’d given Lan Fan the whole spiel about necessary tune-ups before, but she would never shy away from saying it all over again. “When you’ve had automail for years and years, like Ed did, you get really used to feeling every part of it. Every joint and bolt and wire– you can tell when it’s right. Just like you could tell if your arm was sprained, or your elbow was stiff, or you pulled a muscle… You know perfectly well what it’s supposed to feel like, so you can feel when it’s wrong.” She punctuated her lecturing with a tweak to Lan Fan’s wrist, and deftly slipped her fingertip inside the crack between the sheets of metal. “Feel that?”
Lan Fan regarding her wrist when Winry released it, twisting it back and forth. “Feel what?”
“Exactly.” Winry gave her a self-satisfied look, smugness dripping from her smile. “I moved a wire over, and tangled it with another one. You won’t break anything immediately, but if you continued moving and using your arm like normal, the wires would snap, especially with your high activity level putting an extra strain on the interior. And if you could feel the wires well enough to know I moved them out of place, you would know to see me or another automail mechanic immediately to fix that. But you don’t know–” Winry jerked Lan Fan’s wrist to the side again and slipped her finger into the joint to fix the wire she’d moved, “so you would have continued on like normal, and then broke your whole hand, and then I would have had twice as much repairing to do.”
“Oh.” Lan Fan looked away, a little embarrassed. “Sorry. I’m not used to how delicate this whole thing is.”
“It’s not delicate, really.” Winry rapped her knuckle against Lan Fan’s forearm. “It’s sturdy, it’s just intricate on the inside, and it’s easy for things to get messed up– if you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s why I insist on regular check-ups for newly affixed automail, because the user is too inexperienced to tell when there’s a problem, so coming in for tune-ups like this helps me catch problems before they get… problem-er.”
“Yeah, I understand.”
“I’m not saying you’re stupid or anything, it’s just hard to get a solid feel for everything going on the outside and inside of automail when you haven’t had it for long.” With her lecture over– for now– Winry returned to inspecting Lan Fan’s arm, tilting it from side to side, pressing it back to check the rotation of her shoulder. She frowned as she did, an expression that wasn’t exactly heartening to Lan Fan.
“I’ll have to take it off and fix a couple things,” she said, glancing beside her to her workbench to make sure she had the right tools and everything else she needed. “Nothing major. A screw here and there, and the loose bolts at the shoulder.”
Lan Fan shrugged, nonchalant, until Winry leaned in closer and squinted at Lan Fan’s collarbone, and she was reminded all over again about the clothes she was wearing. Or lack thereof. A blush heated her cheeks as she looked down to her chest that was covered by her bra and nothing else.
Of course, in order to work on her shoulder, she had to remove her shirt to give Winry better access to the joint and the surrounding skin, leaving her only in a plain bra. Nothing she wasn’t used to, after enough tune-ups– she was shy the first time, so embarrassed she felt like her skin was on fire everywhere, but slowly she’d gotten accustomed to being so exposed. And usually she wasn’t one to be affected by things like that, but being around Winry made every sense heightened, and she was acutely aware of how close Winry’s face was to her.
“What’s that from?” Winry asked, pointing at a small, pink scar on Lan Fan’s collarbone. “It looks new.”
“Oh, ah– Just an accident.”
Winry’s fingertip touched it lightly. “Accident?”
“Yeah, um, just training and practicing with a few new knives I had, and my hand slipped…”
“Which hand?”
Lan Fan ducked her head to avoid looking Winry in the eyes, partially because she would see Lan Fan’s expression and read the answer to her question instantly, and partially because meeting Winry’s gaze when her face was so close set Lan Fan’s heart beating fast enough to ache.
“Which hand, Lan Fan? It was your automail one, wasn’t it?”
Lan Fan’s silence was her answer.
“Oh, for God’s sake, if you’re having that much trouble with it–”
“I’m not having trouble with it!” Lan Fan interjected. “My finger joints just– they didn’t lock up, exactly, they just got a little stiff and I fumbled the knife’s handle.”
Winry just sighed, loud and pointed. “I’ll check out your fingers, too.”
Lan Fan thought she meant after her arm was taken off, after the nerves were disconnected and it ceased to be a part of her, but Winry didn’t plan to wait before checking it out. She lifted Lan Fan’s hand from the table where it rested– again, Lan Fan noticed the incongruence between the roughness of her hands and the gentleness with which they touched her. Sensation sparked through the metal, rough callouses rubbing against the smooth steel as Winry turned her hand over. She caressed down one of Lan Fan’s fingers– a movement that was innocent and investigative, making sure the joints weren’t crooked, but the feeling sent a pleasant shiver down her spine.
Winry’s other hand lifted to brace against Lan Fan’s shoulder, again riding the line where steel met skin and all sensations seemed amplified tenfold. With her other still holding Lan Fan’s hand, Winry held her shoulder in place and pulled her hand forward, watching the line of her arm stretch out as her elbow extended. As she did, Lan Fan’s index finger twitched involuntarily, a reflex caused by something deep in her forearm, where she could feel a strange pinch and a tug as Winry pressed her hand in closer to her shoulder and extended it again. Her finger twitched a second time, and both Lan Fan and Winry frowned.
“I guess I didn’t need to demonstrate a tangled wire to you,” Winry said, “cause it seems like you have one. Up in your elbow, probably, messing with the fine motor movements of your fingers. Don’t worry, I can fix it easily.”
Tension started to ease out of Lan Fan’s rigid shoulders. “Oh. Thank you.”
“Yeah, no problem. It’s my job.” Winry was a little slow to let go of Lan Fan’s hand, letting her fingers linger against her palm before letting go– or maybe that was just in Lan Fan’s head. She lifted a wrench from the workbench beside her and reached for Lan Fan’s shoulder, brushing her thumb briefly across the place where the metal joined to her skin, and it was like electricity lighting off underneath her skin, tingling every oversensitive nerve ending.
“Ready to take it off?” Winry asked. “Shouldn’t take too long.”
Lan Fan almost frowned at the idea of Winry touching her automail while it was divorced from her body, unable to feel Winry’s deft fingers dancing across the metal and digging into the wires. She contained her expression, though, and nodded.
Winry readied her wrench, and though the nerve reattachment was painful, Lan Fan couldn’t help looking forward to it with a nervously excited thrill in the pit of her stomach.