FMA: 52 Flavours, Prompt 27
Title: Way Back Home
Series: Fullmetal Alchemist
Theme no.: 27. with us your hocus-pocus play
Pairing: Winry, Elric Brothers
Rating: K
Summary: Unlike everybody on the face of the planet, Winry is less than impressed.
Notes: Second of three updates for 52_flavours. Takes place in the manga-verse, in the period of time between when Ed and Al first return from Dublith and when they attempt human transmutation.
27. with us your hocus-pocus play
The Elric brothers are home from their apprenticeship, and Resimbool is all a’flutter with Ed and Al’s newly developed abilities - talents that had shown such promise when they were children, fully bloomed under proper tutelage! The gossip that runs rampant through small towns has had one subject in mind these past few weeks, and Winry is really starting to get irritated with the whole business.
It’s not with the brothers themselves, who have been too distracted to really let the burgeoning praise get to their heads, nor with the townsfolk themselves, who can’t help but be impressed by a bright blue light and the instant repair of a fallen barn or broken cart wheel.
What really irritates Winry is that, honestly, she’s just not all that impressed with alchemy.
She’s not the type to deny its uses - there are some days when it’s easier to ask Ed and Al to fix something when she’s not in the mood to waste an entire afternoon replacing a broken door hinge - but when it really comes down to it Winry still thinks it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
Not that she’d ever admit those feelings out loud - oh no, never, because the immediate response would be that she’s devoted herself to automail, which is just the same thing, isn’t it?
Except it’s not and Winry doesn’t know how to articulate that. Alchemy can’t create a new arm or leg for someone out of scraps and a haphazard circle - although technically it can, but it also can’t because even after the piece is created it’d still need an automail engineer to attach the thing - and there’s no real sense of this equivalent exchange law that Ed and Al seem so crazy over. She devotes days and weeks to creating just the right piece for someone, then devotes months and years to helping them regain motor function in the limb, and while she does receive money for her work it doesn’t seem to compare to the freedom that’s just been granted to that patient. The closest thing to equivalent exchange for her hard work is the sight of the patient walking through town on their new leg, beaming as if they’d never lost the limb in the first place.
It’s not even that Winry wishes her automail was seen as more important than Ed and Al’s alchemy - as Granny always says, a healthy patient is true payment - and the Rockbell name itself is more than enough to inspire respect throughout town.
It’s not that she doesn’t appreciate alchemy’s uses either.
She just doesn’t get what the big deal is.