Patching Up
by Mirune Keishiko
"Honestly!"
Al would have winced if he'd had anything to wince with. Winry usually reserved that tone of voice for launching vicious wrench attacks on small blond targets.
He looked up furtively from where he was drying the dinner dishes to find Winry standing in the doorway, glowering at the mass of tattered red cloth in her arms.
Ed's cloak. Al felt the spiritual equivalent of a sweatdrop trickling down his face.
"Winry—"
"Just look at this!" Winry brandished the red fabric at him and Al obediently looked, remembering with relief that his brother had already gone to bed. "It looks horrible! We have ten-year-old dishrags that look better than this!"
Now that she mentioned it, Al thought, the cloak did look a bit worse for wear. Okay, so it was almost falling apart. It was torn and ragged at the hem, threadbare in too many places, stained, grimy, and encrusted in spots with mud and candlewax. The bottom edges had been singed; Al wondered if Col. Mustang had had anything to do with it. Huge jagged holes had run into savage rips zigzagging along the weave. Stray threads sprouted everywhere.
The cloak was probably beyond saving. Al sweatdropped again.
"It stinks, too!" Belatedly Winry thrust it from her, held the shabby thing by her fingertips at arm's length, her face screwed up in distaste. "Geez, when was the last time Ed washed this thing?"
Al deemed it best not to answer that. "Sorry, Winry. I guess all your hard work just kind of went to waste."
It was just the right pacifying mix of contrition and backhanded compliment, and Winry deflated. Shaking her head, a fearsome gleam in her eyes, she tossed the cloak onto a chair. "Al, heat up some water for me outside, would you? I'm going to have to do some emergency work."
"S-sure," Al said meekly.
The bucket of steaming water was standing ready by the back door by the time Winry reappeared with a basket of sewing materials. She set it on the counter, picked up Ed's cloak and the bucket, and went out to the laundry area behind the house.
Dishes done, Al soon followed her outside. Light from the full moon, only just risen, silvered Winry's long hair as she crouched over a basin near the well. The night was clear, and for a while Al stood and did nothing but stare upward, craning his neck as far as the armor would allow, silently admiring the stars.
He and Ed had seen the same starry sky from many other places in Amestris, and perhaps in some of them, the air had been even purer, the stars even prettier; but the sight of the familiar constellations of home, unchanged from happier, more innocent times, filled him with an infinite, indescribable comfort.
And, he found, an inexplicable sadness as well.
"I'd just make a whole new one," Winry sighed, bringing him back to the present, "but with you guys leaving tomorrow already, there just isn't time."
Steam billowed around them in clouds as she mixed cool and hot water together, until she was satisfied by the temperature. After adding soap, Winry plunged the cloak in. The sudsy water instantly turned brown. Al watched in mute horror.
"What has this thing been through, I wonder?" muttered Winry. Energetically she began to scrub, froth and bubbles rising high until they smudged her cheek, caught in her hair. Taking care not to worsen what damage had already been done, she wrung out the sodden cloak, poured out the murky water—Al instinctively took a step back—refilled the tub, and resumed scrubbing.
"You really don't have to do this, Winry. You've had a long day." With a creak of leather and empty metal, Al sank to his haunches beside his childhood friend, who was resolutely rubbing at a stubborn inkblot. "Ed or I could just transmute it clean, and fix it up real quick—"
She glanced up at him, and he fell silent. She must have meant her intense gaze to be severe and intimidating, Pinako-like—something like "boys never know how to take care of things properly," maybe; but instead Al found there something sad, almost pleading, and he decided against saying That's what we always do when his clothes get messed up.
"—but I'm sure there's nothing like real soap and water, and real mending," he finished brightly.
A corner of Winry's mouth tugged up at that; and she lowered her head to her task once again.
"I can't imagine what you've gone through in the last four years to wear it out this much. This was really good material, too." Winry's tone was light but oddly hollow, reminding Al strangely of his own tinny voice. "You two always get into so much trouble when no one's around to watch out for you."
"I guess you're right," said Al softly, not quite able to look her in the eye.
"There's blood, isn't there."
He hesitated. But it wasn't a question, so Al didn't answer. Wordlessly Winry continued to scrub, her movements rhythmic, practiced, unthinking. Al realized that both of them were staring fixedly down at the washtub as if their lives depended on it.
"Is it Ed's?"
Al shifted uneasily. "Not all of it."
After a moment, she gave him a weak smile. "I guess you're lucky that way, huh?"
He simply nodded.
Silence fell, thick with the chirp of cicadas, and neither broke it for a while. After a fifth round of soapy scrubbing Winry seemed to finally give up; she rinsed the cloak thoroughly, then held it out to Al for instantaneous alchemical drying. By the time the two of them reentered the house, Ed's cloak a relatively clean but still tattered and discolored lump in Winry's hands, the moon was high in the sky.
Al took a seat at the kitchen table and watched with interest as Winry rummaged in the sewing basket, laying out several fat spools of thread and a pincushion bristling with needles and pins. "I've gotten a lot better at this since you've been gone," she assured him cheerfully. "Auntie Pinako's taught me a lot. I'll fix this up in no time at all."
She beamed at him, and Al suddenly remembered his mother, smiling graciously as always, a little boy's torn shirt in her hands. "I'm sure you'll do a great job," Al whispered.
She worked late into the night, the hours flying by as the two friends talked quietly. Over the past three days, the brothers had already done their best to entertain their hosts with snippets of their adventures—carefully edited, of course—but Al found to some surprise that there was much yet to tell.
Winry oohed and aahed at the places they'd been and the people they'd met, and giggled at his stories about the date-stealing Colonel, the beleaguered Lt. Hawkeye, and the rest of the colorful crew at the office. He told her about the kitten he'd sheltered from the rain inside his armor, and he liked the way her eyes lit up as she teased him that that was precisely the sort of thing he'd do and that he hadn't changed a bit.
There were clean, straight tears in the fabric of the cloak here and there, some mere slits but others gaping wounds; and, from the tightening of Winry's mouth, Al knew she knew that only blades made that kind of damage. Sometimes there were dark, spattered stains around such tears, which not even Winry's ferocious scrubbing had managed to erase.
And then there were the bullet holes, marked by telltale rings of burnt thread; only a few, but each, Al knew, was one too many. He was glad Edward had actually repaired the cloak a few years back with his alchemy, or else Winry would have found far more evidence to hold against them.
He was quick to bring up a new amusing anecdote, ask a random question about an old neighbor, whenever Winry lingered over yet another memento from some past unpleasantness. And though she never failed to respond with laughter or the latest gossip, her eyes remained dark and distant.
At some point he was rambling about Edward's fourteenth birthday, when they'd been lost in a blizzard and by some freak accident Ed's tongue had frozen onto Al's armor—Ed really had too big a mouth for his own good sometimes—and for a long time, Al had been too busy laughing to transmute his spluttering brother free. Winry laughed so hard she dropped her needle; and then suddenly the laughter turned to stormy tears, and Al was shocked silent.
Over and over as though it were a litany of prayers she whispered, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," clutching white-knuckled at her own shaking shoulders as if to physically restrain herself. But Al—after a moment of stark confusion—got up, clanked over to her, and hugged her. Watery blue eyes widened.
"I should be the one to say sorry," he whispered. "I'm not very comfortable to lean on."
But perhaps he was, if Winry clinging to him and bursting into fresh sobs was any indication.
It was several minutes before her emotions began to subside, but Al held her patiently. He mused that if he'd been in his human body, he'd have felt the warm closeness between them keenly, and it would probably have grown terribly awkward.
"You're warm," she hiccupped after a while, her voice small and wondering.
"That's probably your own body heat," and Al managed a sort of shrug.
"I suppose so." But Winry looked unconvinced. And then she laughed a little. "My cheek's stuck to your armor."
She fell asleep in his arms, nestled against his breastplate with an expression of far more solace than he'd thought possible. As he strained to hear, she mumbled something about it having been the second time she'd cried that day, and altogether the first time she'd cried in years. He didn't know what to say to that, but she didn't seem to expect him to; instead he held her effortlessly, untiringly, until her breathing grew deep and easy and the slanted moonlight transmuted her spilling hair into liquid gold.
Trying not to jostle her sleeping form or make too much noise on the stairs, he carried her up to her room, snugly tucked her into bed. He returned to the kitchen and, in the fading light of a lamp already burning low, held up Edward's cloak. It smelled faintly of orange flowers; the soapmakers of Risenbul, Al realized, had not changed their formula.
She's done a really good job. But then, Al thought with what should have been a smile, Winry always put her heart and soul into whatever she did. Perforations patched, tears darned, and lining doubled, with most of its old grime gone, the cloak looked almost as it did when Winry first gave it to Edward, the night before the brothers left Risenbul.
Auntie Pinako had done most of the work, Winry had said, but it was she who had put the design on the back, the one she'd noticed painted on Al's armor. "Now," she'd said, torn between bashfulness about the gift and resentment about the brothers' decision to leave, "you match!"
"You should probably just transmute it fixed anyway," said Winry the next morning, as they all gathered on the doorstep and Edward was clearly astonished by the overnight improvement in his cloak. "I wasn't able to repair all of the damage, and it'll be a while before I finish making the new one."
Al noted the flicker of Ed's golden eyes as he hefted the cloak in his hands, and the younger Elric wondered if his brother had caught the scent of orange-flower soap, too.
"Nah"—Ed averted his gaze from hers, shrugged into the cloak that was really all the more comfortable for being so well-worn—"don't see why I should bother. This is good enough for me."
Winry stared, Edward almost—but not quite—blushed, and Al made up his mind never to tell him that he'd made Winry cry a second time.
"Did you stay up all night working on it, Miss Rockbell?" rumbled Major Armstrong.
Everyone abruptly tensed, dreading the onslaught of Armstrong theatrics pending Winry's response. Feeling the pressure, the girl gave a weak laugh. "Not really, I fell asleep halfway through—"
As the muscleman exploded rapturously out of his shirt once more, rhapsodizing about the sacredness of feminine industry, Winry caught sight of the design dyed into the back of the cloak. It had been faded half to nothing last night, but this morning it looked as fresh and dark as ever.
"—and Al helped a lot," Winry finished, smiling at Al. She planted her hands on her hips and added loftily, "It's a good thing I didn't have to add anything to the length, not even after four years, because that would really have taken time—"
It would, after all, be the last height-based tantrum she'd hear from Edward Elric for a while.
As they followed the winding path into town, Al kept waving back at the Rockbell house, even when Winry and Aunt Pinako had dwindled to two specks in the distance.
"It's awfully warm," said Ed suddenly, many hours later, breaking a long, pensive silence that had befallen the brothers on the train (at least once Major Armstrong had gone for a restroom break).
Al jerked his head up from where he had been staring out the window, and it took a moment before he realized his brother was talking about the cloak.
"That's probably from the new lining she put in."
"I suppose so." But Edward, patting down the thin old fabric, looked unconvinced.
Al would have smiled, if he'd had anything to smile with.
owari
I took quite a bit of literary license here, I think, but please be so kind as to tell me if I've gone too far anywhere...
And yes, Winry Rockbell sews. She also makes pie and really great automail. There isn't anything she can't do, is there? Hee.