FMA (c) Hiromu Arakawa
He lay on his bed, unable to sleep.
The blond eighteen-year-old stared blankly at the ceiling of his room. He felt the colors of the world drain into the color of the era he's in—pictures in sepia and tinted in a shade of brown.
In the other room, the person who took him in kindly was most likely asleep. He spent the entire day constructing rocket plans, anyway.
He could see, in his mind, Alfons Heiderich. The boy he hated yet couldn't hate at the same time. He couldn't hate the boy because it was him who kindly offered a place to stay… but he couldn't help but hate the boy—or is it fate he hated?—for looking like his little brother. And with that, he couldn't help but feel like a failure of one even more.
I guess I'm just a sucker for nostalgia.
He smirked—smirked so that it pained him how he was able to just shrug off important and personal things like that like it was nothing at all.
And he closed his eyes.
In his mind, he sees his hometown, high in the mountains, peaceful and quiet. He still has his creaky automail legs and arm.
'Say, where is she?'
Where is she, his ever faithful mechanic? He strides down the hallway, limping for some reason, looking for her.
"Ed!"
The voice excites him. So she is there. He turns his head and sees her. Her long strawberry-blonde hair is clipped at the top of her head, reminding him of the Lieutenant. It's exactly how Lieutenant Hawkeye wore her hair when they meet at Central-except for the bangs-let-down part.
Suddenly, he haa that urge to go to her. And he runs—why he doesn't know. He doesn't know because he keeps denying his emotions, saying that it'd be harder if he didn't forget.
He keeps denying he is missing her.
"Brother!"
He stops. The voice is familiar… yet it is different. It doesn't sound the same as before. It doesn't sound like it echoes in a steel armor.
"ED!"
He turns to look toward the person. "AL!"
..
And that's where the dream stopped.
His eyes open, wandering from the window, to the moon, and too the ceiling. In the other room, Alfons was coughing. The boy was-is-sick, and Ed felt so helpless not being able to do a thing.
He felt so weak.
Then, to make things worse, pictures flooded his head. Winry, Al. Mustang. Hawkeye. Armstrong. Pinako… even Hohenheim. Winry, Winry… Al.
So many regrets… and the tears sprung to his eyes.
What did he do to cause so much pain to himself and to them? It was not like he deserved it... or so he thought.
What did he do to deserve it? … he just wanted his brother back.
The line "I guess I'm just a sucker for nostalgia" was said by Ed in the English dub version of the FMA movie, Conqueror of Shamballa.
Yes, the tenses change. It's something like separating dream from reality. Did it work? x3