experimental engineering - part 1
Further to Chaos Verse fic, this is the story of the Winry/Havoc. Apparently I have strong feelings about this pairing. I could probably write a ship manifesto. No one is more surprised than I am. :)
On a somewhat unrelated note...
I went to a wedding a while back with my dear parents. They had the following conversation in what may have been hearing range of the bride’s mother:
Mom: Which do you think is worse? Weddings or funerals?
Papa: Weddings.
Mom: Really? At least you have something to talk about at weddings. You can’t talk about anything at funerals.
Papa: Yes, but at funerals, no one expects you to act happy.
…So you may take that as a warning. FYI, my genetic makeup means it's unlikely that I’d be able to write a very…uh…sweet wedding. I TRIED.
Many thanks to zephy_magnum and my father, for giving me all sorts of car information. :D
I don't own FMA. Maybe Arakawa can write sweet weddings. I doubt it, though.
Experimental Engineering
Jean had gone to pick up the boss. He hadn’t anticipated any problems; the boss, despite everything, was pretty easy to get along with, and at this time of day, traffic wouldn’t even be bad.
He hadn’t remembered the girlfriend until it was too late.
“What do you want with Ed?” she asked suspiciously. It wouldn’t have bothered him so much if she hadn’t been ominously tapping a wrench against her palm while she asked.
“Not sure,” Jean admitted. “The chief-uh, the Fuhrer-wants him to fix something. I didn’t ask what.”
“I see. So you don’t ask questions. Interesting.” Tap. Tap. Tap. “Which one are you?”
Which one? “I’m…Jean Havoc. Nice to meet you. And you’re-”
“Winry Rockbell,” she said. He’d known that, of course. Winry Rockbell, the automail mechanic the boss was living (in sin, whispered his mother’s voice) with.
“Jean Havoc,” she repeated to herself. The tapping turned more thoughtful than menacing. “Oh, right. You’re the other contractor, aren’t you?”
Jean blinked. He’d never heard himself described as “the other contractor,” but it was accurate, as far as it went. “I guess I am,” he said.
“So why are you running errands for that Mustang guy?” she wanted to know.
Again, he’d heard the chief described many ways, often not complimentary, but “that Mustang guy” was a new one.
As for the question, the chief tended forget that Jean didn’t technically work for him anymore. Sometimes he asked for things he had no right to ask for. Most of the time Jean called him on it, but every once in a while he let it slide. Like now. Picking up the boss wasn’t a hardship.
All that was true. He didn’t think he wanted to say it to the girl with the wrench, though.
“I get paid by the hour,” he said instead. That was also true.
She smiled. Not a sweet smile, but like one of Ed’s smiles. Fierce, Jean thought, was probably the best word for it. “Glad to hear it,” she said.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Jean had originally hoped she might go and get the boss for him, but that was looking less likely every second. He might have to hoist the wheelchair out and do it himself, which would be a hassle. Maybe she’d help him with the wheelchair, at least.
“Havoc,” she said abruptly. “That’s right. You’re not using your legs, are you?”
He wasn’t sure whether to be pissed off about the way she’d put that or not. Not using them. Like he’d just woken up one day and decided he and his legs were quits.
On the other hand, there wasn’t a bit of pity there, which was nice. Well, there wouldn’t be, would there? Automail mechanic.
He let it go. He was lousy at being mad, anyway.
“Yeah, the legs are pretty useless,” he said.
She tipped her head to the side and peered into the car. “So how’s your car set up?”
Right. As far as she was concerned, his legs were irrelevant. Clearly the point here was how he’d fixed up his car.
She and Ed were making more sense all the time.
“Basic stuff,” he said. “I’m not a mechanic, myself. See?” He leaned back. She peered in the window, eyes bright with interest.
“Ah,” she said, leaning forward until her hair was all but suffocating him. “Broom handles attached to the pedals. You weren’t kidding when you said basic. How the hell do you steer?” She pulled back out of the car, much to Jean’s relief, and stared at him.
“It is tricky,” he admitted. “The clutch is a bitch. Uh, excuse me.” What was he excusing himself for? She lived with Ed; she probably didn’t even recognize speech without swearing in it.
She raised an eyebrow. “You’re excused. Keep explaining.”
“Explaining?”
“The clutch.”
“Oh. I have to keep one hand on the wheel, so I can usually hold onto the clutch or the gas with the other hand and brake with my elbow. It’s fine if I just want to brake, but it’s hell every time I change gears. Then I have to steer with one hand, swap between the gas and the clutch with an elbow, and shift with my other hand.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” she told him. “You must have freakish upper body strength.”
He was definitely offended now. Most cripples didn’t even try to drive, did they? He thought he’d done pretty damn well for himself, and here was this girl he didn’t even know, coming out of nowhere and mouthing off about his ingenuity and possibly his arms, of which he was rather proud.
He was never picking the boss up at home again.
“I can do better,” she said, like he’d challenged her.
“Of course you could,” he said, confused and annoyed. “You’re a mechanic.”
She frowned at him. “I mean, I am going to do better. Get out of the car.”
“What?” he yelped. “I’ve gotta pick up the boss!”
“I thought you were paid by the hour,” she said, crossing her arms impatiently.
“I am paid by the hour, but there’s theft and then there’s highway robbery, and this-”
“Havoc? What are you doing here?” The boss’s voice had never sounded so good.
“I’m here to pick you up,” he said, relieved. “Chief wants you for something.”
“Wants me for what?” Ed demanded. Jean had a moment of acute déjà vu.
“I don’t know, Boss,” he said wearily. “Do you want the job or don’t you?”
Ed eyed him with those creepy gold eyes of his, then turned to Winry. He inspected her, too, from expression to wrench, and started to grin. “Win. Did you attack Havoc?”
“I didn’t attack anyone,” she snapped.
“Okay, okay,” he said, hands up don’t-shoot-me style. “It’s just he looks kinda panicky.”
“I was going to fix his car,” she said. “But he claims he’s too busy. All I can say is, if he gets himself killed in traffic with this stupid, jury-rigged disaster, it won’t be my fault.”
This last was directed at Jean, with gimlet eyes to match.
“So you’re gonna take me to see Mustang for reasons unknown and get me killed in traffic, Havoc?” the boss asked. Grinning. The thing about the boss was, he had no sympathy at all. Like a lizard.
“I’ve been driving this car for months,” Jean insisted, feeling attacked on all sides. “I haven’t had a problem yet!”
“Luck,” Winry said confidently.
“How’s it work, anyway?” the boss asked, peering in. Jean had a face full of blond hair again. This was turning into a long day.
“Yikes,” Ed concluded.
“I told you,” Winry snapped.
“Hey, if you get us to the office and back without getting us killed, you can have Winry fix it then,” the boss said. Like it was the obvious answer, like it was the most natural thing in the world.
“I couldn’t take up your time,” Jean started to say.
“You’ll be doing me a favor,” Winry said. “It hurts to even think about you driving in that. I’ll give you a good deal.”
“Winry’s idea of a good deal,” Ed muttered, checking the passenger side and finding a wheelchair there instead of a seat, moving to the backseat and gingerly shuffling weaponry off of it.
“Speaking of which, it’s time for your tune-up, Ed,” Winry said, leaning into the car again. Jean squished himself back against the seat. “Don’t think you can avoid me forever.”
“It’s sick that you charge me for those. I’m just saying,” the boss muttered. Jean was inclined to agree.
“You’re my best customer,” Winry said sweetly. She leaned back and tapped the wrench against the car door, then pointed it at Jean.
“I’ll see you soon,” she said. It sounded distinctly like a threat.
Ed snickered.
* * *
As it turned out, it was a month before he made it back to Rockbell Automail. He’d hoped, foolishly, that Winry had forgotten all about him.
“So. Jean Havoc,” she said, appearing immediately after he drove up and looming over him. “Here to pick up Ed?”
Ed, who had no feeling for his fellow man, was sitting on the porch with Armstrong laughing, and showed no sign at all of wanting to come help.
“Ah. No,” Jean said, surreptitiously checking for wrenches. “You said something about fixing my car. So I thought…”
The way she went from scary to giddy in an instant, Jean thought, was more off-putting than the wrench.
“You want me to fix it?” she asked with manic glee. “That’s great! Perfect! Here!” She ran around to the passenger side, dragged out the wheelchair, pulled it around to his side of the car, and yanked open his door.
He hoisted himself into the chair as quickly as possible. Given the look on her face, he was afraid that if he didn’t hurry, she’d try to manhandle him into it herself.
“Alright!” she said, still with the glee. “Get out of here! I’ll take it around the side and call you when it’s done! I’ll need to rewire pretty much everything and disassemble the entire brake system for a start, so it might take a while. It’ll cost a fortune, too. You’re lucky I like you. Go talk to Ed and Alex.”
And she hopped in his car and, after only minimal fiddling with broom handles, pulled it around the side of the building and out of sight.
Jean sat at the side of the road staring after her, wondering what had just happened.
“Sorry, Havoc,” came the boss’s supremely unsympathetic voice. “You don’t know how much she’s been looking forward to this. She’s been doing research.”
Still slightly dazed, Jean turned to the porch, and noted that there was a ramp leading up to it. He was sure there hadn’t been a ramp there last month. Ed’s expression dared him to make something of it.
He quietly wheeled up the ramp.
Armstrong was bending large strips of metal into strange figures for reasons unknown. Jean was willing to bet it had something to do with automail, and that Winry had made him do it. The boss, meanwhile, was transmuting complicated knots of wires into even more complicated knots of wires. Purpose, once again, unknown.
They made a funny picture, the two of them: sitting on the porch in the afternoon sun, doing chores and chatting. People passing by and waving, because sometimes it seemed like everybody knew the boss. Maybe Ed had transmuted this part of Central into a tiny eastern town. It didn’t feel like the rest of the city at all.
“So what’s the megalomaniac up to, Havoc?” Ed asked, scowling at his knot of wires.
Jean wheeled closer, lit a cigarette, added himself to the picture. “He’s got some diplomatic stuff up north this month,” he said, trying to be a bit diplomatic himself.
Ed made no such effort.
“He’s trying to keep your crazy sister from overthrowing the government again, Alex,” he said, grinning happily.
Armstrong harrumphed, and bent a half inch thick piece of metal with his bare hands. Ed was intimidated not at all.
“And then Lan Fan and Greelin are coming at the end of summer, right?” Other people, Jean thought, might have said ‘the Emperor of Xing and his bodyguard.’ “That’s gonna be a bitch,” Ed continued blithely. “Remember last time? We’re gonna have to lie and tell Mei Chang they’re not here; we’re gonna have to steal all her newspapers again. And I bet we’re gonna have to have that talk with Lin again about how he shouldn’t march across the desert and conquer Amestris.”
‘We.’ For someone who professed not to care about this country, and especially not about its Fuhrer, the boss took on an awful lot of personal responsibility.
“I wonder, Edward Elric,” Armstrong rumbled. “How did you talk him out of it the last time?”
“Huh? Oh. Just pointed out that it would suck for his people if he marched them across the desert like that.” He shrugged. “They’re neither of them bad guys, really. Greed and Lin. It’s just…wanting more than they can have is how they roll.”
“Ed!” Winry shouted from the other side of the house before anyone could respond to that. “Bring me some 3/8 copper wire!”
He tipped his chair back. “Insulated or not?” he shouted in her direction.
“Insulated! Who the hell uses bare wire in a car, Ed?”
“How the fuck would I know?”
“And I want wirecutters. And clamps!”
“You went over there without clamps?” he asked incredulously.
“Shut up, Ed!”
He rolled his eyes and stood up. “Havoc, you want a beer or something while I’m up?”
He was sitting on Edward Elric’s porch while Ed offered him beer and Ed’s girlfriend worked on his car. There was something surreal about it.
“No, I’m fine, thanks. Any reason she’s having you get this stuff instead of getting it herself?” Winry had seemed a very do-it-yourself kind of person.
Ed shook his head. “She’s eviscerating your car. She’s probably so tangled in machine parts she can’t even move. I’ll be back.”
And off he went, unaware of the effect the words eviscerating your car might have on a person.
“I think I’ll go check on things,” he told Armstrong, trying not to sound panicked.
Armstrong smiled benevolently, then twisted some rebar into a tortured shape. “I wouldn’t worry too much, Jean Havoc,” he boomed.
Easy for him to say. No one had told him his car was being eviscerated.
And eviscerate was definitely the word for it, Jean discovered. How could one small girl do so much damage in such a short time without the aid of alchemy?
He wheeled cautiously closer. It looked like she’d reached into the hood, yanked the engine out by force, and then burrowed in where the engine should have been. It was horrible. Horrible.
“What are you doing?” he asked. Whimpered, really.
A blond head popped out of the wreckage. She blinked at him. “Fixing your car,” she said.
Jean begged to differ.
“More specifically, what are you doing?” he asked, moving next to the hood and peering into it in the spirit of masochism.
“Don’t ask specifically,” Ed warned from immediately behind him. Jean nearly jumped out of his chair. “Specifically will get you stuck here all day.”
“Some people appreciate the beauty of my work, Ed,” Winry said, reaching out an imperious hand for her wires and tools.
“Your funeral, Havoc,” Ed muttered, passing the equipment and scurrying off without a backward glance.
“Right,” Winry said with that unsettling, bright-eyed enthusiasm. “So. What do you want to know?”
* * *
The next week proved to be interesting in several different ways.
First and strangest, Jean acquired Edward Elric as his personal chauffeur for the duration, because the car (to no one’s surprise) ended up needing more than one day of work. Winry pointed out that she couldn’t drive Jean around and fix his car at the same time. Further, that Ed was almost always going to the same place as Jean anyway, and if they were both constantly going off to dance attendance on that Mustang guy, they might as well do it together.
It was a bizarre reversal, having Ed drive him around. The boss was a pretty good driver. That seemed odd.
Second, he got an education on the inner workings of a car like none he’d had before. Like none he’d dreamt of before. Winry told him everything there was to know about the theory of car workings, but refused to tell him what exactly she was doing to his car. She said she’d explain once she was finished. He tried not to wonder if that meant she wouldn’t know what she’d done until she’d done it.
He also hadn’t gotten an explanation as to why an automail mechanic knew so much about cars. Unless he counted the boss’s whispered machine freak as an explanation.
Third and most unsettling, he was starting to see what the boss saw in Winry Rockbell.
She was beautiful, for one thing; a tough, self-reliant kind of beauty. And she really was a genius; the boss hadn’t exaggerated a bit. Unlike Ed, though, she was pretty patient with people who weren’t her level of smart. Didn’t think less of you if it took you a while to understand. She was a good teacher, passionate about her subject. The way her eyes lit up when she was talking about something she loved…
And her body was amazing…
And Ed was going to kill him.
Jean’s love life so far had been an unmitigated disaster. He felt sure, though, that falling for the boss’s girlfriend was a disaster the like of which he’d never touched on before. It wasn’t that he was planning to do anything about it. But still. Ed was a goddamn genius, and Jean worried that he might just know.
By the end of the week, Jean was jumping at small noises and generally living in terror.
* * *
“Good news for you,” the boss said when they pulled up outside the automail shop on Friday. “Your car’s done. So I’m just gonna drop you off, okay?”
Jean blinked. “Where are you headed, Boss?”
“My place,” he said. Which didn’t make any sense.
“But…you live here. Don’t you?” Was Jean supposed to pretend he didn’t know that?
“I did until she kicked me out.” He shrugged.
“She kicked you out?”
Ed gave a sidelong look that suggested Jean was making a big deal out of nothing. “Yeah. She said the furniture costs were too high. Look, d’you want to go get your car or don’t you?”
“I do, but…when did this happen?”
“Like. Wednesday?”
“But yesterday you and your brother were still on her porch when Breda drove me home.”
“Yeah, we stayed pretty late. Why?”
Apparently they were not working from the same principles, here.
“You two broke up?” Jean felt the need to be clear on this.
“Yeah,” Ed agreed, willing to humor the madman.
“And yet you still…she…you can just sit on her porch and that’s fine?”
“She’s my best friend,” Ed said. “Why wouldn’t it be fine?”
Right.
* * *
“Luckily,” Winry said, “you had power steering and four-wheel hydraulic brakes to start with-sweet, by the way. Usually only the military rates that kind of stuff. Where’d you get this car?”
“Present from Rebecca,” Jean said. And now he could face Rebecca again, because his car-his beautiful, beautiful car, which he loved so much-looked like a car again. As opposed to the heap of scrap it had resembled for most of the last week.
“Rebecca?” Winry frowned.
“Hawkeye’s old friend, Rebecca. Did you meet her? She came up for the coup.”
Her expression cleared. “Oh, that Rebecca. Riza keeps promising to introduce us, but I think Ed’s been sabotaging it deliberately.”
Jean agreed with the boss on this one. Firmly, firmly agreed. But did not say so.
“So why was she buying you cars?” She raised a very suspicious eyebrow. Did she honestly think he had women buying him cars for immoral purposes? He should be so lucky.
“She took a lot of my stock, didn’t feel like paying for it in anything traceable. She had some conspiracy theory about how it was all being tracked by the old government. ‘When they gun me down, I don’t want it to be because I paid you for bombs on credit,’ that’s what she said.”
Winry stared.
“She’s insane,” Jean elaborated.
“About your car,” Winry said, dropping that entire subject. “I didn’t end up doing anything too complicated. Like I told you, I rewired the pedals. Originally, I was going to make it so instead of pushing the brake pedal, you’d pull the hand brake. Well, what used to be the hand brake. Then I thought, you’d have to be pushing the clutch at the same time, and you’d have no-hands steering, and you’d probably die.”
“Got it.”
“So I just put this handle on the right-it’s the clutch and the gearshift. It’s like a motorcycle…sort of. You squeeze to clutch, turn the handle to shift. And the brake is the same idea, but it’s actually on the wheel. Squeeze to brake.” Not complicated, she’d said. Sheesh. “You’re gonna have to squeeze like hell, though. I haven’t figured out…there’s got to be some way to make this less mechanically irritating. It shouldn’t have to be so much work-one-armed steering, tricky braking. This is only going to work because of your crazy arms. Thank Breda.”
He’d told her-possibly defensively-about the way Breda had bullied him into lifting weights while he was still, for God’s sake, in the hospital. She had largely used this information as a tool with which to mock him.
In a strange way, it reminded him of home.
“Well?” she said.
He must have missed something. “Well what?”
“Well, are you gonna try it out, or just sit there?” She grinned at him. “Come on, I want to see if it works!”
“If it works?” Jean tried hard not to get swept away on that smile. “You swore up and down that you knew exactly what you were doing!”
“Well, you looked so upset,” she said unrepentantly, then tugged impatiently at his wheelchair. “Come on, don’t you want to try it out?”
He did, actually.
She’d built him a fold-out ramp on the passenger side. A real ramp, not the board he’d been using. Then she’d put strategic straps that made it easier for him to lift himself into the driver’s seat. Then, too, she’d put straps on the floor of the car for the wheelchair, so it wouldn’t roll around while he was driving.
She was a genius.
“Okay!” She said, allegedly sitting in the backseat, actually leaning most of the way into the front. “Let’s see what happens!”
Genius she might be, but he’d appreciate it if she could learn to say things in a non-horrifying way.
He started out with a fair bit of caution, because he was half-expecting something to explode. After a couple of blocks, though, he was having too much fun figuring out the controls out to worry about it.
She was right, the boss was right, they were all right. The broomsticks had been stupid. They had involved a lot of lunging and doubling over and veering wildly around the road while trying to change gears. This? This was almost like real driving. True, it was tricky to brake and steer with the same hand, he wasn’t used to the way the shifting worked, and it did take a fair amount of strength, but he didn’t have to go looking for anything; it was all right there.
In fact, maybe…maybe he could really drive.
He took them south of the city to a dry lakebed, had Winry put on a seatbelt, and tested out everything he’d ever learned about evasive maneuvers in driving. To his amazement, he could do a lot of exciting things. Not everything, though-at one point he skidded twenty feet sideways and had a moment when he seriously thought he would manage to roll the car on completely flat land.
They came to a halt. Dust settled. Jean waited in terror for the woman-rant from the back. He’d been surprised he hadn’t gotten it after the first 180, but back then, everything had been going right, so maybe that was why she hadn’t said anything. Now that things had gone wrong, he figured the rant was inevitable.
What he got instead was: “If I’d known this was a stunt car, I would have replaced the shock absorbers.” Then, after a pause, “Do you want sturdier tires? Do you do this all the time? You’re going to mess up my brakes.”
Jean realized he should know better than to try to predict what Winry’s reactions were going to be to anything.
“I don’t drive like this all the time,” he reassured her. “They taught me how to do this stuff when I was driving the chief around. Just in case we were in a car chase or something-not that we ever were. I just thought…I thought if I could still do this, they might let me drive him around again.”
Winry considered that. “You do get paid by the hour,” she remarked.
“I do get paid by the hour,” he agreed.
“Well.” She tipped her head to the side. “In that case, I think that trick would have worked just now if you’d let go of the wheel a little sooner. You’re trying so hard not to brake accidentally, I think you’re holding on to the non-brake part of the wheel too long.”
Jean digested that in disbelieving silence.
“Try it again,” she said.
* * *
When they finally pulled in at the automail shop, Winry gave a happy sigh and stretched her arms possessively across the backseat.
“I am a genius,” she informed Jean.
He could only agree.
“And you’re a madman,” she continued. She didn’t sound like she found it too upsetting. “So who taught you to drive like that? That was insane!”
Jean turned to grin at her. “When I came to work for the chief, Hawkeye took me aside and asked if I was a good driver. I said I was. She asked if I generally obeyed traffic laws. I said I did. She said, ‘Well, we’ll have to break you of that,’ and then she took me to a dry lakebed near East and just about scared me to death.”
“Riza taught you!? Oh God, that’s…well, it makes sense, really, but it’s….” She shook her head and started laughing.
She was beautiful when she laughed. She was beautiful. And brilliant, and she didn’t think he was a cripple, and because of her, he could drive again, and…
And this was how it always started. Well, with variations. He found someone amazing, he asked her out, and maybe she said yes and maybe she kicked him to the curb, but either way, either way, it always ended in disaster. One time, notably, it had ended with attempted murder, third degree burns, and paraplegia.
He didn’t have the guts to face it again. He wasn’t even going to ask. Anyway, she’d only just broken up with the boss. It wouldn’t be decent.
“Take me to dinner,” she said.
Jean blinked. “What?”
“Dinner.” She folded her arms. “It’s part of my fee. I was so busy trying to finish this today, I didn’t have time to get groceries, and then you took me out joyriding for so long there’s no time to cook even if I did have groceries. So. Dinner.”
“You want me to take you to dinner,” Jean said blankly. Like so many things having to do with Winry, this conversation fit nowhere into the world as he knew it.
“Yes. I want you to take me to dinner,” she repeated with surprising patience.
Jean stared. “Okay,” he said eventually.
She grinned. “Great! I want to go to that Cretan place on Main and Fifteenth! And don’t get your hopes up too much about your bill, because even with dinner, it’s going to be obscene. Do you know how much work I did? Hours! Days! I had to go harass the car guys on Cedar Street, and they always talk your ear off.”
Jean put the car back into gear, and decided to stop pretending that he had any control over this.
* * *
“So,” he said after they’d ordered, “Ed tells me you two broke up?”
He wanted someone to explain this to him in a way that made sense. He hoped he’d have better luck with Winry than he had with the boss.
“Nope,” she said. His heart sank. “I kicked him out,” she continued. “That’s different.”
Okay. Okay, maybe they were getting somewhere.
“Why did you kick him out?” he asked.
She shrugged. “We fight like kids. It was one thing when we were kids, but we’re too old to keep that up every day. And if we’re too old for it now, imagine what it would be like in ten or twenty years. Eventually, one of us would have had to kill the other one just for some peace.”
It sounded like it ought to make sense, Jean thought. And yet it didn’t make any sense at all.
“But he’s still going to be at your place all the time?” he asked, giving it one last try.
She looked surprised. “Why wouldn’t he be? He’s my best friend.”
Jean gave up.
“Anyway, tell me about your contracting job,” she said, bright-eyed with interest. “I know what Ed gets up to, but he’s an alchemist. What do they have you doing?”
“Basically, I’m Hawkeye’s security backup,” he explained, yielding control of the conversation. “Anything to do with security that doesn’t require legs, that’s what I do. Mostly I supply equipment, but I also train the new guys on the theory of it. Sometimes I work with Kain-helping him spy on people with his tiny machines.”
“That sounds creepy,” Winry wisely observed.
“It would be if it were anyone but Kain,” Jean agreed. “Lucky for Amestris, Kain gets embarrassed if he accidentally looks in somebody’s grocery cart, so if he’s not convinced you’re plotting against the state, he’s not listening.”
“Kain will die someday,” Winry pointed out.
“And the technology will linger on,” Jean acknowledged. “I know. My big hope is that Kain will outlive me. I don’t know what else to do about it.” He tapped a fork gently against his water glass, listened to it chime. “Anyway, most of those spying things were Hughes’s, originally. And he got the ideas for them from high command.”
“You’re saying we’re screwed.” He glanced up, and was surprised to see her smiling.
“I wouldn’t say screwed,” he said. “Unless the idea of the military spying on everyone really bothers you, in which case, yeah. The whole country is screwed.”
She tipped her head back and laughed. He didn’t know why, but he also didn’t care. It was good to see her laugh.
“And what about you?” he asked when the laughter died down. “What’s new in the world of automail?”
He was aware that he’d just opened himself up to a solid hour of the latest Rush Valley techniques. He didn’t mind. It was worth it to see her so enthusiastic.
This, Jean thought as Winry filled him in on the new alloys from Drachma, was the best date he’d been on in years. Shame that it wasn’t actually a date.
Part 2