Christmas Eve was always a sad and lonely time for me. I had always sat alone in the house, while my Aunt went out for wood to put in our fireplace and maybe a new tree. She'd often return the morning after, a pine scented woman the size of a peacock with its feathers expanded in a fan. (Minus the reference to being wide. She's fit for an old lady.) To pass the time away, I'd sit down at my oak desk retracing letters that went in no particular order. As I rested in the rickety old chair, I'd find myself lost in the Babble, wishing that somehow I could just know what to write and when to send it in order to make it arrive to him. When would he be there, able to receive my condolences or my notes that simply spoke of the time of day? Would he even care that I think about him and his safety? At a time like Christmas, I lose myself in thinking wishful things. Perhaps there really is a fat man in red who would drop off the thing I most wanted. What I want would fit in a box that I'd never be able to see over Roy Mustang's paperwork. What I want would fit in a box that cannot be distinguished from tiny grains of sand. And topped off, a piece of masking tape with the words 'fragile on the inside, tough on the outside' would inform me of what it was. I'd know just how to help this gift. A carton of milk and a loving home. It would slowly grow in my tender care if only it would stay still. Like a cat, it would remain in the house.
But alas, this gift is a loyal dog. No matter how many times it runs away from a world it wishes to no longer know, limping back it would come, needing a human touch to make it satisfied. This gift is one that doesn't understand how to mend its own soul. It would ask that I simply fix it so that it could continue helping others. I would not be it's main focus or love. But someone much closer would be. I would be the one fixing and loving. A cure that works faster than thick syrupy medicine or stinging alcohol on a pulsing gash.
In all of these words that I so cautiously wrote down, I had been drowned. In these words that I wrote and traced over every Christmas, I had been lost. He wasn't coming. There was no Santa with the ability to give me my hearts desire. For it's an unattainable gift that a yearning mind can only conjure.
It is with these thoughts that I reach out for the door with a shivering hand, my blonde hair strikingly drenched from tears I never knew had fallen… It was over my fingertips that I saw his face. A fatigued shadow, he seemed.
"Edward…", I choked. My mind was playing those tricks on me. The ones that were caused by a letter I had written when I was 12. I had loved him for so long.
"Merry Christmas." His smile sent jubilant shivers down my spine…
My Santa had come… and my heart's desire was finally back.
"I have a letter for you…", I whispered.
And now he would know.
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Merry Christmas! I hope this short story is well enough to satisfy people… I've been in a drought, so I decided to write Christmas stories for my favorite anime's and manga's. FMA came first! Thanks for reading.