“Well, take a seat over there,” Dominic indicated in a gruff tone. The only thing in the direction he had pointed was a wooden box. Winry sat down on it as he’d indicated. There was a stone furnace across from her that contained red hot steel. The inside of the studio was so hot that sweat started beading on her forehead just from sitting.
When she looked around, she saw sheets of metal laid out on a brick platform along the wall. A paper reading “Garfiel Five Sheets” had been stuck under them.
“I’ll check those over for flaws later on. Can’t let ’em go out yet, so give me a minute.”
That was all Dominic said when he noticed where Winry’s eyes had gone before he focused back on his task at hand.
Clank, clank.
Winry silently listened to the repetitive sound of squealing metal. Dominic wasn’t a talkative man. Only the sound of steel being tempered rung out between them.
The only time there was a break in the hammering was when Dominic stopped in order to check on the shape of the steel by picking it up with a pair of pincers. In Rush Valley, she would have heard the sound of engineers using machinery or the hustle and bustle of people regularly flooding into the town, but here, silence settled in when Dominic paused.
A breeze from a tiny window caressed Winry’s sweaty head. The clear blue sky spread out to infinity outside. A black kite squawked somewhere in the distance.
Winry realized she hadn’t experienced quiet in a very long time.
“You look down in the dumps,” Dominic suddenly said, hammer clasped in his rugged hand. “Where’d all that energy you had before go, huh?”
Clank.
The hammering started up again.
When Winry had visited his place last time, she had excitedly asked Dominic to take her on as his apprentice. She’d been overflowing with ambition, going as far as to show him her mettle by helping with Satera’s delivery. However, Winry currently lacked any shred of that zeal.
In troubled silence, Winry watched the metal Dominic pounded, and then finally said, “I made a mistake at work.” She gradually told him everything that had happened since she had come to Rush Valley.
“I was so carried away with learning new techniques that I didn’t even realize how Darish—this boy who came into the shop with a prosthetic leg—even felt. So I did some introspection and thought it over, then decided to put more effort into listening to my clients. When I did that, I didn’t have enough time and I started to become careless without realizing it. I even broke a machine that everyone pitched in to buy together.”
She looked down at her clenched hands, which had pushed open the door to that rip-off business just the night before.
“After causing them so much trouble, I was so set on redeeming myself that I went to a place I shouldn’t have. And while I was doing that, Darish came by the studio to talk to me again, but I quashed any chance of that happening!”
Her hands clenched into firm fists. When Winry’s lip started quivering, Dominic kept his mouth clamped shut and continued swinging his hammer. He wasn’t trying to end the conversation. It was almost as though he were silently urging her to get it all off her chest.
“While I was chasing after techniques and knowledge, I lost sight of the clients’ feelings. But when I tried confronting my failing head-on, I ended up pressed for time and couldn’t do all my work. If that’s what’s going to keep happening, I have to choose one or the other. If I don’t, I’ll just cause trouble for my clients and for Mr. Garfiel.”
Her emotions, which had seemed frozen just earlier, all rushed to the surface at once. Winry’s shoulders quivered and tears started to finally well up and fall from her eyes.
“But which am I supposed to choose? What if I make more mistakes after I figure out what I’ve decided? I just don’t know what to do anymore …”
Winry’s feelings hadn’t numbed earlier. It was just that she hadn’t been able to find an outlet for her emotions. She was actually overwhelmed with feelings—after dedicating herself entirely to her goals, everything had crumbled before her eyes. It had even all been her own fault. Now those overflowing emotions, which previously had nowhere to go, turned into tears flowing down her face. She didn’t know how long she cried.
“I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I started crying,” she said after sobbing for a while. She wiped away the tears still wetting her face. She felt better after letting it all out.
Dominic hadn’t stopped pounding away at the steel the whole time. Winry was thankful he’d simply let her cry as much as she needed and hadn’t tried to comfort her.
“No need to apologize. Crying’s just proof you tried as hard as you could. Though there’re times when things won’t go your way, no matter how hard you try.” Dominic kept his eyes pinned to the steel he hammered as he spoke matter-of-factly. “One time, back in the day, a whole decade of technical knowledge did me no good when I suddenly had to work on a particular material. Put too much confidence in my own abilities and didn’t study up enough.”
“A whole decade.” Winry blinked wide-eyed when he said that figure. As young as she was, Winry didn’t have a sense of just how long that was.
“What did you do back then, Mr. Dominic?” she blurted out. She was so curious as to what he could have possibly felt about ten years of experience failing him that the question just slipped out.
“I was mad.”
“You were mad?”
“Same as you just were, young lady. You felt so wretched, you started bawling. As for me, well, I got angry at myself.” Dominic spoke indifferently of the past as though it were nothing noteworthy, and Winry couldn’t help but envy him, considering how paralyzed she felt about her current situation.
“How did you change the way you felt? How’d you get over it? Was there something that got you out of it or a secret to it?” Winry asked.
Dominic had many years on Winry. He had probably faced situations tougher than Winry could imagine. But now he was a brilliant, skilled engineer and self-confident in his work. Winry felt that if anyone knew how to get her out of her current torment, it would be Dominic.
However, as though to betray her expectations, Dominic bluntly shook his head. “A secret? There ain’t anything like that.”
Winry, who had been leaning forward with bated breath, pulled back in silent disappointment. But it wasn’t as though there would be a set answer to something like this, she reconsidered. She had ended up asking because her emotions had gotten the best of her, but she actually needed to find her own way of working through this.
Silence visited them again.