His attempts at working out were half-hearted, but the fresh air slowly woke him up. Instead of trying to jog like he had yesterday, he just walked. Alphonse offered to walk with him, but Ed shrugged him away.
"I'm waking up. Go chill with Fletcher."
Nonetheless, the little brother kept an eye on him as much as he could. When Winry popped up beside his older brother, along with the small Mei, he felt like he could relax a little more.
With the chirping of two annoying birds (wait, they were girls) in his ear, he woke up even more.
"Could you stop shrieking in my ear, please?" he asked.
"Oh, so you *are* awake," Winry said, before going back to her conversation with Mei.
They were talking about boys. Someone with gold hair. Mei was practically squeeing over him. He thought absently about who it could be. Russell? Fletcher? Him?
And then, it dawned on him. Alphonse?
"Are you talking about my brother?"
Mei looked at him, frowning. "So what if I am?"
Hm. So the midget girl had a crush on his little brother. A smirk grew on his face.
"What's with that look?" Mei growled. Something in her shirt squirmed and her eyes widened and she clapped her hands over it. Winry said nothing about it, just looked away. However, Edward's eyes widened.
"What was that?" he asked.
"Nothing," Mei said quickly, smoothing her shirt back down, which was much too big for her.
"Uh huh. Now unless you have tentacles or a heart on the outside of your body, I do believe something is down your shirt."
"Pervert!" she shrieked, and ran off at a great speed. Edward cocked an eyebrow at her and shrugged.
"Smooth, Ed, smooth." Winry commented.
"I try." He paused. "So what was that?"
"What was what?"
"That thing in her-... Actually, you know what? Nevermind. I don't want to know."
Winry smiled and hummed a tune beside him, her arms behind her back, kicking her legs up a little as she walked. He watched her silently. She looked tired as well, and her hair wasn't pulled back as neatly as it had been yesterday. Had she been working on that sketch all night, or something? But he shook the thought off at once, as it was slightly conceited of him to assume that she had stayed up all night drawing plans for an automail that would ultimately belong to him. He looked away from her, back at his own feet.
She was pretty, but he hated the fact that he had to slant his eyes upwards to look at her full-on. So he didn't.
"I see you're still wearing those winter clothes," she commented suddenly.
"Yeah."
"They're going to know about them today, you know."
"I know."
"One last stand?"
"Yup."
The rest of the morning workout passed uneventfully, as did breakfast, and the much-looked-forward-to shower.
But once he was in the grey uniform and walking down the hall to Engineering, his heart beat faster. He was definitely awake now. More than awake. Scarily awake. He was so awake that he could *feel* the walls staring at him, at his metal limbs.
Maybe it was just paranoia. But still.
They seated themselves at their desks. Pinako nodded at them and went back to whatever she was working on at her own desk. It was a humongous automail arm that contained a chain saw and she was oiling the chain lovingly.
The class took the nod as a signal to start working on their class projects. A few students on the right saw that there were bookshelves and eagerly pulled some of them down, handed them around.
Winry immediately pulled out the drawing that she had done last night, accompanied by a few more that looked suspiciously like plans for an arm and a leg.
"Okay," she said, and sat there looking expectantly at him.
"...What?"
"Undress."
He choked on nothing. "I beg your pardon?"
"Undress," she said again, blinking. "Am I not speaking English?"
"Uh..."
She frowned before a slight flush came over her cheeks. "You *are* a pervert."
"What?" he asked indignantly. "You're the one telling me to take my clothes off!"
Half the class looked over at them. Apparently he had said this a little too loud. She clenched her fist against the desk, her eyes closed, her face a scowl completely ruined by the blood rushing to her face.
"Just take off your shirt and pants so I can measure you're limbs," she said forcefully, teeth clenched.
He swallowed before taking a deep breath. And so he shed his jacket and revealed to the world, finally, his right arm.
Some stared. Some looked away, various emotions on their face. Some looked and shrugged and went back to their work. He felt his own face heat up under the atmosphere in the room.
Winry wasted no time. She pulled out a tape measure from her pocket and stood up. She measured the length of his forearm, his fingers, the stretch of metal between his elbow and the top of his shoulder, then the entire shoulder, and the circumferences of everything. She jotted down notes on a piece of paper. Then she examined his automail with her brows furrowed.
"Cheap," she said, suddenly, making him jump. She hadn't said anything before then and he had somewhat spaced out. By then most of the people had gone back to their projects and he had relaxed slightly.
"Huh?" he asked intelligently.
"This automail is cheap. Hospital-supplied?"
"Yeah."
She shook her head in despair. "I have my work cut out for me. Okay, pants off."
He had boxers on, but still, he felt incredibly exposed in front of his classmates, in more ways then one, when the pants pooled at his ankles and he stepped out of them.
And her close proximity to his body as she measured his leg made him start to fidget. He tapped his human foot against the ground, his fingers against the desk.
"Stop moving," she complained, and he froze, rigid.
Winry stopped writing measurements on the paper and sat there on the floor, gently prodding the automail leg.
"Also cheap. Probably same manufacturer. You only have the basics in there and the silhouette is awful."
"Silhouette?"
"The casing. What makes it actually look like a limb."
"It's called a silhouette?"
"No, but it sounds more romantic than 'casing', don't you think?" she asked, looking up at him and smiling.
His heart skipped a beat.
But only once.
"Romantic. Right."
But she was back to examining it once more. "Awful," she repeated. "Ugly. No art at all. A disappointment to those of us who make these for a living." She was mumbling to herself now as she got up from her sitting position and kneeled over the leg. She tentatively touched the base of the automail, the metal casing that covered the exposed flesh of what was left of his thigh.
He flinched at the action.
"Sorry," she said, removing her hand quickly. "Did that hurt?"
"Kinda."
She tapped her lips with a pencil as she frowned and he had the slight notion that her expression was cute.
"They did a horrible job of this," Winry grumbled.
"So you've said. A few times already."
"Sorry, but it really is distasteful." She stood up, brushing her pants off and sat back down. "You can put your clothes on now."
Edward quickly slipped them on and then scooted his chair back up to the desk. Half the period was gone and he suddenly thought of his own project.
"Oh, no..."
Winry looked up, blinking.
"I have no idea what I'm going to do." He ran his human hand through his damp hair and let his forehead thump down on the wooden desk.
"Improve on your sparktater?"
"Why would I do that? And how did you remember its name?"
"Because it was funny. And it looks interesting. I'm wondering what you can do to improve it."
"It's not going to be a work of art."
"Doesn't matter," she said, shrugging. "If you like it, that's that. You worked hard on it yesterday, and that's all that matters."
He turned his head, cheek resting on the desk, to look at her. She was fully concentrating on her papers now, fixing the sketches she had made yesterday of the fingers, calculating in his lengths and widths.
It was entrancing, how she lost herself in what she loved the most.
Eventually, though, she looked over at him and he picked his head up slightly at her confused face.
"What?" she asked.
To which he replied, "Nothing," and went to the front to get his weird invention from yesterday. It sparked rather loudly when he sat back down and she smiled at him.
"Don't worry," she said. "Your automail is really going to be a work of art, even if your sparktater isn't."
He scowled and then, suddenly, smiled.
Her eyes widened slightly before going back to her drawings, scribbling furiously.
Edward cocked an eyebrow before looking down at the sparking potato of doom. He sighed and rolled up his sleeves, ready to get to work.
