She was the only one who held his hand like it was warm.
He knew it wasn't, and that it was stupid to expect people not to treat it differently than they did his flesh hand. Whenever he met new people, regardless of how well-meaning or sensitive they were, there was always the customary glace that gauged his condition, took in the metal screwed on his stump. People always handed objects to his flesh hand, patted his flesh hand to show their support, and even went out of their way to awkwardly shake the hand that they could feel human warmth on.
But she always reached for his metal hand.
When he laid on the cot, his face buried in white linen as she worked, her fingers tapped and pressed the metal like it was skin. She touched it like it was warm, soft—able to be torn. And when he laid there, all the memories would come back of teeth, blades, and deflected alchemy making contact with his metal arm. It had become his shield, the dulled barrier he could thrust up at the last minute to take the brunt of a blow.
But when her fingers settled in on the joints and the forearm, the dulled nerves thrummed back to awareness. The abuse sank beneath the soft clicking and clanking of things sliding back into place, of all being made right again. Sometimes the tip of her ponytail would drift and drape over his arm when she turned her back for a new tool, and he could nearly imagine they were kids again, huddled on a bed with Al while Ed secretively tried to make sure he was the closest to her out of childish competition.
Then the memory was gone, and her fingers were back, testing and probing for problems and weak points. It became another way for her to communicate with him, like her questioning looks and her pained voice that he couldn't always answer. He couldn't always tell her what was wrong, or give her enough information to pinpoint the problem. But here, in this space, with the meditative silence and the print of fabric and smell of laundry soap against his cheek, he could let her find the flaws. And she fixed every last one, breathing softly just above him, eyes fixed on his skin—automail.
When he left the room, the steady weight of her eyes on the metal grew lighter and lighter until it was ignored again by everyone else out of awkward respect. They refused to stare at it, or even notice it unless they thought he wasn't paying attention. Only when they addressed it directly—you two will get your bodies back—was it acknowledged as part of him. Only when it was the problem, the burden, was his right arm recognized as an external force he must bear.
But she reached for it. Consciously or unconsciously, when she was standing alone in doorways or even on her knees in front of the man who orphaned her, she reached for his metal hand. Her fingers wrapped around his iron fingers gently, insistently, and the nerves that had been dulled out of self-preservation seared back to life. It was like an electric jolt racing all the way from his shoulder to the pads of her fingertips, like his arm was reacting to its creator.
He thought maybe she reached for it because it was familiar to her, as much hers as it was his. She knew every wire, every reinforcement in it. Whenever something clamped around his arm, grating on the metal, pressuring it till it creaked, he thought Winry must know more than she let on. She was always surprised, horrified when she saw him sheepishly waving a disfigured metal husk instead of her work of art.
But when the arm held, pressing back up against the threat and spiting its attempts to crack it, Ed thought that Winry knew he would be in this situation, that she would need to give him his last line of defense, that his arm would have to be tougher and stronger each time that she remade it. She knew what he would be facing, because she tried her hardest to prepare him for it each time. She thought about where the teeth would lock and where the swords would slice, and she found new ways to prevent them from fulfilling their destructive intent. She had to think of everything that could go wrong and everything that could happen to him.
And he knew it killed her every time he came back with the fear and apology in his eyes—I'm so sorry, Winry, you tried and it was brilliant and it's all my fault, but it just wasn't enough for that last fight.
She got mad, eyes blazing, fists clenching, and he shrank away out of respect for the act. The anger was real, but it hid something rawer just below the surface. Her voice shook with fury, but it was mingled with the sharpness of fear. Her eyes burned, but it was her terror that fueled the flames. Worst of all, Ed knew she only pretended the anger was for him.
Because above all else, Ed knew she blamed herself.
She tried to ease the burden, pretend she was mad at him so he didn't have to deal with the guilt and the broken limb all at once. But he saw it, deep and heavy in her eyes and the bags beneath them the night after he told her.
She knew how strong she had to make his arm. So when she grabbed it like it was something precious and fragile, he never quite knew what to do. There was always the surge of gratitude and relief—thank god, she still wanted him and needed him—but he was beginning to notice more and more the frightening strength of intimacy when she touched the part of him that no one wanted to look at, feel, or acknowledge.
She had made the strongest part of him, and yet she treated it with as much care as she did every other part of him, physical and emotional. She knew what it could stand, what it could be dulled to, and yet she was determined to humanize it, to protect it.
And he wondered if he would ever find the strength to honestly tell her how much he loved her for it.