The first time it happens, Winry doesn't know what to make of it. The man has a faded military jacket wrapped around his shoulders with the two medals that everyone in Resembool recognises on sight. Service in Ishval. Injury in the line of duty. He has a third one too, and it takes Winry a moment to remember what it means, but when it comes back to her she relaxes. There aren't many men who got a heroism award in the Ishval conflict, and she hasn't heard anything bad of the ones that did.
A second or so later, she realises that his jacket might be wrapped around both shoulders, but it's only hiding one and a half arms.
"I'm looking for Winry Rockbell," the man says, his eyes frighteningly intense as they glare down at her. "I hear this is where I should be looking."
"What do you want her for?"
He gestures toward his arm, "What do you think?"
"I don't do-"
Pinako sniffs from behind her, clearly listening in, and Winry relents, opening the door. She does know how to make automail work, even if it's her grandmother's shop. She made Ed's arm. Maybe she can use some of those skills to help out someone else as well.
"Well. You found me. Let's talk."
It's not a complicated one. He's lost both his radius and his ulna, but his humerus is intact. It's far from the worst injury she's seen, and the only issue is that there's some tissue damage around what's left of his elbow. A field amputation, he explains, the ghost of a pain best forgotten glinting in his eyes. Winry doesn't ask why it was necessary - she's heard enough war stories to know better than to chase a veteran of Ishval for theirs - and just digs into what is medically necessary. There's enough left for a port, and that's all that matters to her.
Pinako, sipping her tea, doesn't comment on their conversation. From her grandmother, that's a compliment. Winry takes it in the spirit that is offered, and suggests that the man might like to stay for dinner.
He has stories of a young couple. Doctors in the war. He even has a photo of her mother caring for a soldier wrapped in bandages. The photo behind that one is him and the same soldier, hand in hand, but Winry doesn't ask about that either. She's not new to homosexuality - there's two women living together in the village, and neither of them pretend to be war widows any more - but the military frowns on that and it's the military who will be paying, the man claims. It's best not to ask about things you might have to pretend not to know. Not when they weren't important to the things you needed to know.
"How did you find us?" Winry asks eventually, as she pushes a coffee in front of the former soldier, "and why did you come all this way? You said you live in Central, right?"
"You're the Fullmetal's mechanic," the soldier says, looking confused, "which means you must be the best. We've all seen what that kid can do. Is there a reason why I wouldn't want the best?"
Winry has never thought about it before, but she is pretty damn proud of the work she's done for her best friend. Children didn't normally take to automail well. There are horror stories about the way it used to be. Winry knew that. She was proud to be part of that change.
When the soldier comes back the next day, Pinako installs the port. It's fiddly work, connecting to individual nerves. Winry is still learning. But she's already put together some sketches, some designs, some thoughts, some notes.
They've checked with Central Command overnight, and they've confirmed the requisition order is correct. They charge their usual rates for a rush order. It would buy a house in Resembool. It's easily five year's salary for most military officers too - though Ed never seems to blink at what they charge him, so maybe salaries have gone up.
Three weeks later, Winry installs an arm. It isn't the masterpiece that Ed's arm is, but nothing has to be the masterpiece that Ed's arm is. Winry is pretty sure that her idiot alchemist hasn't realised it yet, but the composition of his arm is deliberately a little heavier in rare earth metals than is typical. Even the lightweight one he's supposed to swap to sometimes has a little more carbon in it than is usual. She's more than aware of what he does to that arm, and if it keeps him safe then she doesn't mind spending a little extra to make sure that he has the materials he need to keep himself safe.
This soldier doesn't need more than an arm, thankfully, and doesn't need any of those minor adjustments that a combat alchemist might benefit from. He even has a physiotherapist lined up already - it's certainly cheaper than paying Winry or Pinako to help him with it - and that's the end of it.
He's gone the next morning, promising to call if he has any issues.
A bouquet of flowers arrives the next week, with a thank you card in handwriting they don't recognise.
And, with it, comes a man with taut scar tissue running across the stump of his thigh where his left leg used to attach.
"Fullmetal told me that if anyone could do it, you could do it."
Winry flushes. That idiot. She was just a girl. What did she know about this?
She spends a night buried in her parents' medical texts, and shoves a stack of paper over the table at Pinako the next moment as she forces coffee down her throat.
Scar tissue isn't great for automail. The ports don't adhere to it, and the nerve connections don't exactly stick around. And these are scars from chemical burns, which are even worse. Any kind of damage could be underneath the skin.
It took her all night, but she found a way to do it. She thinks. She hopes. She prays. Some modifications to the port. Some modifications to the adhesion. Some changes to the nerves it connects to. A hundred tiny changes that work around the scar that would otherwise make this impossible. Pinako doesn't comment, but schedules a surgery for the next day. That is, as these things often are, a glowing recommendation.
The leg has to be adapted to the new port as well, of course, and there's another night of lost sleep there. It's not the first time she's lost sleep over a leg - and this one is definitely more straightforward than Ed's.
The third guy isn't a guy at all. It's a whole troupe of them, steel and tungsten glinting in the light as they stumble down the road together. She hears them coming from half a mile away, and puts the kettle on.
They just want tune-ups. Some oil. One of them has heard about the acid etching art that Winry has been toying with after reading about it in one of the trade journals. She figures why not, and spends an evening out in the forge that Pinako set up behind the house all those years ago when she moved out to Resembool. It's a long process for something which she still isn't convinced is anything more than cosmetic, but the guy has money to splash around. She double-checked. He said he wanted a souvenir.
His own piece of the Fullmetal legend.
Winry chews on that a bit as she turns over the white-hot steel in the forge. She isn't quite sure what he means. She charges him an extra twenty percent, just in case it was an insult. He pays her that and leaves her a tip so large that she donates half of it to the local school out of sheer embarrassment.
Pinako makes an approving sound when she does. Alchemist, be thou for the people. She's heard both Ed and Al talk about that before. She doesn't always get what they mean, but for a second she thinks she sees it. She had a chance to do something right, so she did. If everyone did that, she thinks to herself one evening as she cleans the workshop after some routine maintenance on one of the local farmer's arms, then the world would be a better place.
The next time someone comes around the house to find Winry Rockbell, mechanic to the Fullmetal Alchemist, she's not there. Ed did something stupid - again! - and blew up her precious arm - again!
She's literally given him an arm and a leg. She's literally given him one of her arms and one of her legs, and the idiot can't even look after them properly. What is he going to be like when she gives him-
She flushes, and hopes Pinako thinks that it's embarrassment over the stupid mistake that she just made whilst she was thinking about Ed. How could she get the supraclavicular nerve and the musculocutaneous nerves mixed up? She hasn't done something that stupid since the time she nearly severed someone's tendons whilst trying to attach their new thumb when she was twelve and in her third surgery.
She was nearly sixteen now - she should know better now.
The letter they left asking if they can organise an appointment is somehow surprising, but it's an interesting project. It's not just a full arm, but also part of their shoulder and their collarbone. The excitement thrums beneath her skin as she reaches for a reference text to remind herself of how it all comes together. Pinako's only comment is that she should ring them to get a date in the diary.
It's only while she's flipping through the workshop diary to do exactly that she notices how often she's monopolised their workspace in the last few months. Should she scale it back a bit? Maybe she should let her grandmother do some more work? No, Winry decides. Pinako would have said something if she minded, Winry is enjoying the work.
She rings their supplier for the supplies she needs. She rings the village blacksmith and asks if she can borrow his forge - it burns hotter than theirs, and she thinks that she's going to need a new alloy. Maybe if Ed was here he could just make it for her, alchemy sparking from his fingers as he lounges insolently in the sofa she put in the corner of the workshop after it became obvious that he wasn't going to let her arm out of his sight whilst she was working on it.
It's almost insulting not to be trusted with her arm, given that she literally pieced it together with her bare hands, but it's nice to have something to look at that isn't just wood, stone, and metal. Someone blonde and frankly beautiful in a way that makes Winry's pulse race just to think about, and isn't that utterly unfair, and honestly she probably could have dragged it out for at least another two days if she didn't spend all that time feeling guilty about the fact that Al is still stuck in that armour and-
The doorbell rings and it's a man with the kind of watch that she's seen on the wrist of a lot of soldiers who spend time in dangerous places. Bulky with protective layers. Designed to never stop working. To keep on going. To persevere in times of trouble. Like the soldiers that wore it. He has both arms, both legs, and all his fingers. He even has both ears, which is good, because Winry isn't convinced that she knows how to do those yet.
He also has a woman in the back of his car, which they apparently drove all the way from one of the cities past Southern City to their humble abode in Resembool. She is missing three fingers. Some kind of farming accident.
Winry isn't sure how they know Ed (what was he doing that far out, she wonders, before remembering that she probably doesn't want to know given that Ed works for the military), but they know that she did his limbs, and she sighs, and begins her assessment.
She can see why other people didn't want to do it. But she's had some ideas about how they can make finger ports less extrusive, and this is the perfect opportunity. Pinako isn't there whilst she discusses it with the customers - she's making dinner, and Winry knows how Pinako is about her cooking these days - but Winry is sure that Pinako would think that it's workable. And, sure enough, as she connects the final nerves to the delicate new port housed almost inside the knuckles along the back of their hand, she can see the connection is solid.
It's novel, but it's compatible with the ports that most other automail mechanics use on their limbs. This customer isn't going to need her to spend any time piecing together fiendishly tricky joints, and Winry can't say that she minds. Fingers are the worst part about arms. She's just glad that she could make an automail port that worked for them.
Pinako raises an eyebrow at the new design, and examines it closely as the customer leaves, but doesn't say anything until the sound of the car fades into the distance.
"You get that from one of your books?"
"No," Winry says, suddenly worried she did something wrong, "I made it myself."
Pinako chews on her pipe for a second before nodding shortly, "Good job."
Then she stomps upstairs, grumbling about the children that Resembool has seen fit to bless her with. There's a complaint about prodigies in there somewhere, which makes sense. Pinako always liked to complain about Ed and Al and their alchemy nerdery. It doesn't matter. Winry got a 'good job' from her grandmother. About automail that she'd designed completely from scratch.
Winry knows she's smiling stupidly, but she honestly doesn't mind. It might just be the best week of her life.
Then all hell breaks loose.
Things happen.
The world falls apart.
The world ends.
They stitch it back together.
Somehow the world keeps on turning.
Then they come back home.
Ed doesn't talk about it, but she can see the bags under his eyes. He's struggling. Al talks too much in a voice that they thought they'd never hear again. Winry can't say she minds him doing so. Anything is better than the emptiness that echoed through his old voice from the armour.
She doesn't get back into the workshop for another four days after they get home. When she does, it's only because Grandma Pinako needs her help convincing someone that they can't help him.
She leans down over the customer, her eyepiece examining the nerves in his face carefully. No one has ever made an automail eye. It isn't possible. Everyone knows that. Too many nerves, in too many awkward places. There's one guy in Rush Valley that tried it anyway, and whilst he claims that it works perfectly fine, anyone that has done anything with him knows that he doesn't have depth perception. They all know what that means.
Eyes are impossible.
Examining this man's face, peering deep inside his eye and examining the damage to the socket and the nerves, Winry is reminded that people can't drag their bodies back from beyond the grave either, and Alphonse is lying asleep upstairs.
What does impossible mean other than yet another mountain to climb?
She's climbed plenty of mountains. She's even got Ed to drink milk, once or twice, not that he'd admit it. She can solve this problem too. Her participation in the conversation falters, then changes, then she reaches for a pen, and begins to sketch things out.
Pinako gives her a look and lets out a sigh. Winry studiously ignores both events until her grandmother claps her on her shoulder and heads upstairs with only a few words left ringing in the air.
"I hope you know what you're doing."
She doesn't have any idea at all, but that's why it's exciting.
The customer is told to come back in three months - she's got reading to do, and maybe she can convince Ed into telling her more about anatomy. She knows from a sober and too-honest confession once-upon-a-time that it was Ed who held the image of a human body in his head when they broke the taboo, who tried to shape the elements of being into something more than just a pile of things. And, from what she knows of Alchemy after a lifetime spent listening to Ed ramble on about how things work, that means that he knows how everything connects in a way that very few people in the world can truly know.
And then it's just making the eye small enough to fit into the eye socket. She can do that. She hopes.
She's two weeks into proving it when word gets out to the wider world that Winry Rockbell is back in town for good, and there's suddenly a steady stream of people jumping off the train to come to the shop to see her.
It's Ed who banishes her to bed a few nights later, when she's gone six days without sleep, desperately trying to pull together every schematic she needs for every patient she can see, whilst also burying herself in the intricate details of automail eyes. It's impossible. They're impossible. No one can make it work. Automail has never been miniaturised like this. The nerves are too hard to connect. There's too many of them. The pain will be indescribable. The results might be mediocre-
She sleeps.
When Winry wakes up the next morning, Ed is sat at the table, a stack of automail books next to him.
"Those are mine," she says, squinting at him and wishing she had a wrench, "why are you reading them?"
"Looked interesting," he says with an air of casualness so contrived that she doesn't doubt for a second that it isn't completely fake, "and what else am I supposed to read around here? It isn't like you've got any real books, gearhead."
Winry would call him out on it, but he's pushing a mug across the table. There are more important things to sort first, like coffee and fixing up this automail foot she's working on.
Lunch appears near her elbow at some stage when she's up to her elbows in grease and dirt and Jenny-fucking-Smith's automail arm from nearly four decades ago that really just needs to be condemned but which she agreed to take a look at anyway. The family thinks it's going to save them money to pass it down to her grandchild, who lost the exact same arm in a mining accident, just like his grandmother. Winry is considering buying it off them just so she doesn't have to spend the rest of her life maintaining something so heavy, so awkward, and so unwieldy that she couldn't even use it as a club. It's only a sandwich, but it's lunch. Pinako must have sent him, she decides. Ed wouldn't remember food. She eats her sandwich. It isn't bad. Maybe Pinako made it too.
Al spends dinner that night looking back and forth in confusion between Ed - who is still buried in her automail books, a pen clenched in his hand as he gouges letters into his notebook - and Winry - who hasn't bashed his head in with a wrench for touching her stuff yet. Pinako sucks on her pipe, not saying much at all. It is, in its own way, peaceful.
Winry could get used to this.
Al looks like he can't wait to leave.
He hasn't said much, but there's been three letters from Mei so far, and Winry thinks that he'll head off that way as soon as his body looks a little less emaciated and Ed isn't clapping his hands together every time he sees a broken plate.
Winry thinks she'll get used to that too, when it happens.
Two days later, Winry heads down to her workshop after dinner to finish up adjusting some of the prototypes she's been putting together for some of the more… difficult… clients. She isn't expecting Ed to collapse on her couch, a smug smile toying at his lips. She's seen that smile before. It's typically best not to acknowledge it.
"Aren't you going to ask?"
She pulls a twisted rivet from a failed prototype and tosses it onto her tray for future examination. Rivets aren't supposed to look like that, not even when they fail. Something went wrong. It was best to understand what before you started sticking new mechanisms into people's bodies.
"Winry?" Edward asks, a tone of something in his voice, "You there?"
It's the fact that he calls her Winry that makes her look up.
There's a tenderness in it. A vulnerability that she hasn't heard very many times before. She puts her tools down.
"What?"
He hesitates for a second, his eyes going distant. This happens a lot since they came back from that. She's getting used to it. She thinks she might have to.
"Do you ever wonder what might have happened if I didn't join the military?"
She gives it a moment's thought, before turning back to her work.
"We'd probably all be dead."
He deflates slightly, his smug smile falling off his lips, "Well, apart from that."
She slips a screwdriver inside a joint and loosens a screw. It isn't quite right. Should it be higher up, she wonders, or perhaps on the other side entirely? She'll have to look at the schematics and see what she can do.
"What are you getting at?" She asks eventually, "Where are you going with this?"
That's enough to get him to shut up for a minute, letting her finish the disassembly and push the prototype back across her workspace so that she can pull out the schematics again.
"It doesn't matter," he says, before his smile, "'cus what I really wanted to talk about was automail."
She looks back up at him, swallowing hard as she realises that the way the light spills onto him when he's on that couch is criminal. People didn't look like that. Not really. Not in real life. Only in her dreams, she thinks to herself, before swallowing hard again. She wasn't thinking about that. She'd decided that last night. And the night before. And the night before that. And several other nights over the last few years. Stupid uniform. Stupid ponytail. Stupid beautiful blonde hair.
"Finished reading my books then?" she asks casually, trying to pretend that there isn't a million thoughts going through her mind that she would never tell him.
The paper comes flying out of nowhere as he suddenly slaps down a schematic in front of her, his eyes lighting up with the kind of enthusiasm that she's only ever seen him have for alchemy before.
Which, she realises, is precisely because he's trying to combine alchemy with automail.
There's an array on the side of this sketched out automail.
She opens her mouth to object on principle, when he points out the improvements he made to the purely mechanical section. Her eyes light up instantly, and she dives into his work. He's not good at this, and it shows. You can't just skip that linkage. You can't take that shortcut. You need more metal here, and less metal here, and why haven't you used a linkage there, and when Ed starts trying to bring alchemy into it, Winry almost doesn't mind, because she can see what he's going for even if it's not going to work and-
The door clicks shut suddenly, someone shutting it from the outside to give them some privacy as the moon begins to rise outside, and Winry realises just how close she and Ed are above her worktop. She is suddenly aware of how hard her heart is suddenly pounding, and Ed is gesticulating with his hands, and trying to show her that he's done his reading, and utterly failing to impress her, even if it's kind of clever how he thinks alchemy and automail could be used in synchrony.
She shoves the schematics off the table instantly.
Something is clearly wrong with her if she thinks automail and alchemy could ever go together.
"Hey!"
"You're the one contaminating automail with alchemy!"
"You said it was interesting!"
"That doesn't mean it's right!"
"You shouldn't be so narrow minded," Ed retorts, leaning in, "If you weren't then-"
And suddenly they're kissing and Winry has no idea what to do about it, and she's on her workshop table, and his hands are everywhere, and she knew there was a reason that she put a couch in here, and at the back of her mind she remembers that she's supposed to be doing surgery in here tomorrow and she's going to have to sanitise it all over again, and-
-maybe automail and alchemy could go together, she thinks.
They don't talk about it for two days, but that doesn't mean that they don't do anything for two days.
It wears her out.
She sleeps better after.
It's good for her.
Ed is sleeping better too.
It's for medical reasons.
She can't even pretend to believe it in the privacy of her own head.
Thankfully, Al just continues to look confused as Winry and Ed bicker and fight and flush and edge closer together at the dinner table until she could literally steal the food off his plate. Which she wouldn't do. Even if it somehow tastes better when it's off his plate instead.
Winry hopes that Al visits Mei. When he works it out, he's going to be unbearable, and it isn't like her or Ed are going to keep this a secret for long, because it isn't a secret. She knows him well enough to know that, and she knows herself well enough to know that as well. She just isn't telling anyone. Why should anyone else get a say in what she and Ed are doing?
What she and Ed are doing frequently. In her workshop. Late at night. When she should be working on making her impossible eye. When Ed would normally be working on his stupid project with his stupid alchemy ruining her beautiful automail.
There's a new normal to find here, she thinks, and she's not surprised when Ed mentions in an off-handed way that he sent back his pocket watch to Roy weeks ago.
She knew it already, but this just confirms it for her. He isn't leaving Resembool.
He isn't going anywhere, especially not back to the military.
He's here to stay. He's done travelling for now.
Perhaps most importantly, he wants her to know that.
Winry could get used to that.
She doesn't expect it to last - Ed has never been good at standing still - but Winry could get used to that as well.
She spends a lot of time thinking about the things that she could get used to doing with Edward Elric.
Pinako pretends not to know what's going on, or so Winry thinks. And then one day she wakes up to find that Pinako has left a box of condoms in the middle of the workshop table, and the implication is enough for Winry to avoid her grandmother for another three days, lest she decide to have The Talk with her. Again. She and Edward haven't done that yet. Maybe she won't even want to do that with an idiot like Ed anyway. He'd probably try to make some big point about how one-is-all or something, and it would be cute and corny and probably quite wholesome, and she's not ready for what that will do for her.
She stops lying to herself. She isn't planning on doing that for at least a few more weeks. She has to finish this project first. Then she can think about it properly. Think about what she wants to do to him. What she wants him to do to her.
She buries herself in her designs, and by the time the three month deadline she gave her client comes around, she's ready to prove she can climb the mountain of her own ambitions.
Word has got out, of course. It always does when someone tries this. Everyone knows how it goes: Icarus flies too close to the sun, an egomaniac tries to build an automail eye. There's a person from the Rush Valley radio in the lounge, waiting for her to come and explain how it works. They're here to document her failure. Winry doesn't even need to ask to know that. They don't believe her. They won't believe her. They can't believe her.
Pinako has been in and out of the workshop for the last two weeks, but hasn't said a thing. Ed told her she was being stupid when she said she was worried it might be wrong. Al told her it would all be okay. She wishes that they got it. She worries that they do get it and that there isn't anything they could say to make this any easier.
She believes in her own work though. Doesn't she?
Winry examines the eye under magnification one last time, slowly reassembling it from the inside out. She takes a deep breath, and heads for the door toward the living areas of the house.
She can hear voices even from this far away.
"-quite famous, of course."
"Rockbells have always had a reputation for automail," comes her grandmother's voice, slightly acerbically. "My father did it, and his father before him, and I don't know why you're surprised that-"
"You know why I'm surprised."
Winry rolled her eyes. Yes, her grandmother was the first woman in a long line of automail mechanics. She's heard the whispers, and she's thrown more than a few wrenches on her grandmother's behalf. Her fame is more than well deserved, and she would-
"She's nearly eighteen now, you know," her grandmother told the man in the room, "and she's been running the shop since she was sixteen."
Winry's heart stops.
They're talking about her?
They think that she's famous?
Wait - her grandmother thinks she's been running the shop since she was sixteen?
But those were just clients. Her grandmother was taking clients too! She's seen the workshop log! It was just the ones that came from-
-but it wasn't, she realises.
.
Oh.
Ever since she got back from her time in Rush Valley then-
Oh.
Winry pauses outside the door to try and process that, barely hearing the conversation inside the door, the blood is roaring through her ears so fast.
"Is it really true that she built her first arm at age twelve?"
"Don't ask questions you already know the answer to."
"She did?"
"She saw a need, and she filled it, like anyone else would."
"That's not how Major Elric puts it. If you listen to him talk then-"
"If you listen to what that boy, then you might end believing anything," Pinako grumbles. "You should have heard him explain why he wouldn't drink his milk."
"But Major Elric is-"
Winry feels a hand on her arm, and she turns to find Ed's golden eyes assessing her carefully.
"You okay?" he asks.
"They think I'm famous."
"You are."
He almost seems surprised that she doesn't know.
"I am?"
"I've spent the last seven years telling the world how amazing you are," Ed quirks his lips at her, "and you're surprised that they eventually started listening to me?"
She thinks of the string of people that have turned up to her shop with her boyfriend's name on their lips.
"But that's just you and your friends," she protests weakly. "It's not like anyone else thinks that-"
Ed takes her hands gently in his own, lifting the schematics she's spent the last three months on out of her hands, "Do you really believe that?"
She thinks of the stack of letters waiting for her when they got back from the insanity that was the end of the world.
She thinks of the workshop diary, full for the next six months.
She looks down at the schematics he's holding in front of her..
The eye was just a mountain to climb, that's what she told herself. Complete an impossible task to bring back sight to the blind, to give someone the former life that they so desperately crave.
Then it sunk in.
It was a former life they trusted her to bring back to them.
A former life she was going to bring back to them.
Her legs feel weak.
She was famous?
"Let me get her for you," her grandmother's voice drifts down the corridor, "because if you're wanting to talk to her about the rest of her life, then you're going to need to get started now if you want to catch the last train back to Rush Valley."
They want to talk about her life?
Ed smiles at her.
It sinks in. They're not here because they think she's going to fail. They're here because they think she might succeed. They're here because she's the personal mechanic for the Fullmetal Alchemist. They're here because she's the grand-daughter of the Leopardess of Resembool.
They're here because she's Winry Rockbell, and her automail rocks.
What is she going to say to them?
Winry does not think she's ready for this.
Pinako coughs from the end of the corridor.
She has thirty seconds to be ready to be famous.
She takes a deep breath.
That, she thinks wryly, will have to be enough.