"I don't know how to make us stay, but I know we understand what it means if we tremble at the touch of each other's hand."
-Vic Mignogna, "Chance"

How Love Goes

There were already tears shining in her eyes, preparing to spill down her cheeks and leave delicate, shimmering tracks on her pale skin. Sighing inwardly, he shifts his head just enough to keep from focusing on the painful expression on her face.

"You never tell me anything," she says lowly, but her voice cracks, and instead of sounding like a reprimand, she simply sounds miserable. "You always keep me in the dark, and then you show up one day with your automail all busted up and half of Al's armor gone and expect me to fix you without getting any answers. Well, this is the last straw. I'm not doing a thing until you tell me what happened to you."

He sighs out loud this time. "Winry, I can't-"

With a quick wipe of her eyes with her sleeve, she interrupts him. "If you can't tell me, then I can't fix your automail. I'm more than just your mechanic and if you don't appreciate that, then-"

"Winry," he says, and something in his voice makes her fall silent. He looks at her tiredly, exhaustion and something more tender in his eyes, and he mutters, "I do appreciate you, you know that."

"No, I don't," she replies simply. "Can't you see that I don't know that? You don't care about me, because if you did, then you'd tell me why you break my automail so often or where you've been. You'd let me be a part of your life. You'd tell me how much I mean to you."

She pauses, waiting for a response from him. His eyes search hers, begging for an escape. Finally, he opens his mouth and begins, quietly, "I…"

For one single moment, he is going to finish his sentence and her heart flutters into her throat. But he hesitates for too long. "You what?" she asks him faintly.

And he shakes his head. "Nothing."

Her heart sinks back down, down into the pit of her stomach, where it begins to dissolve into a million tiny pieces. "Oh," she says lamely. "Right."

There is silence. Then, she turns and leaves the room, leaving him feeling more alone than ever, guilt eating away at his insides. The words neither of them said hang in the air.

By the time he lays with his stump of an arm outstretched, allowing her to attach the cold, unfeeling metal to soft flesh, they are both pretending that they are not fully aware of the confession Edward almost made.

Her hands are unusually rough with her work. Edward is facing the other way, still unwilling to look her in the eye, and he wonders why she is lacking the precision she normally shows, until it dawns on him that her hands are shaking. He is tempted to turn his head to look at her, to see if her trembling is out of anger or sadness or any other number of emotions he could barely comprehend.

But he knows it doesn't matter. She's still in pain. Her despair is almost tangible, and it's affecting him, weighing on his conscience as if someone were pressing their palm to the back of his head. He knows that she is trying to be strong, but he also knows that the silence will kill him.

So he opens his mouth and he begins again. "You know," he says, and her hands freeze, one resting on his shoulder, one holding a wrench to the hard metal. He closes his eyes, trying to paint her smile in his mind's eye.

"Just because I don't say something out loud," he says carefully, deliberately, each word scraping against the nerves he has tried so hard to desensitize to the world for all these years, "doesn't mean it's not true."

A shy, pregnant silence. Both of them suddenly realize that they don't know what else to say. They don't know how love goes.

So she simply replies, "It's okay," and continues with her work, connecting icy steel to living sinew.

But her hands aren't shaking anymore.

Written mainly because I desperately needed some fluff. Not to mention the fact that I finished reading the FMA manga up to date, and I love the love between Ed and Winry, something that wasn't explored very much in the anime.

Titled "How Love Goes" not only because it's in the story, but because love goes differently for everyone.