These are for Tobu Ishi, master of the romantic drabble.
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Dial Tone
Automail is a noisy business. Every competent engineer learns to sift sounds of order (or incipient disorder) from cacophony. Winry knows she's competent, but lately her ears trick her: she hears the telephone bell in the overtones of drills and saws, screaming as they bite into steel, in their motors' burring whine and even in the forge's hiss and clang. One morning she woke trying to answer her alarm clock, which was just embarrassing. Garfiel worries her about tinnitus when not teasing her about absence's effects.
Sometimes she wishes they hadn't called. Mostly, she wonders whether to call him back.
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Voice Message
Sensation is automail's Philosopher's Stone. Engineering makes the lame leap like a stag; why shouldn't it give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf? So Winry sketches the human ear: the tympana, the ossicles, the petrous labyrinth. Do sounds, she wonders, ever get lost in there, never reaching the vestibulocochlear nerve? Is that why she still hears his words (Are you all right?) as clear and puzzling as they were that day -- and as warming?
She snorts and crumples the sketch, ignoring her own blush. I hear what you said, Edward Elric. Why can't I hear what you meant?
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Disconnected
Winry stares at the disassembled knee on her workbench, but sees the wall by the telephone and the calendar with its picture of snow-streaked mountains brooding over an autumn forest. That's that. They're off again. Next time they call, it'll be because Ed's leg's too short or his elbow's seized up or ...
She won't think about "or". Ed's disregard for her masterworks is enough to make a dedicated engineer weep, but at least the repair bills pay her apprenticeship fees. And he'll always need his mechanic, her mind whispers.
The next time the telephone rings, she lets Garfiel answer it.