"All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire." Aristotle
Chance
The sky was orange and the shadows were long. The promise of dinner set their bellies grumbling. They hadn't eaten since noon, but it had been a big meal. They could hold out a little longer.
"I'm an explorer," Al whispered dramatically as he crouched in the tall grass. "I'm going to make a DISCOVERY! Brother, you can help!"
"I wanna be an explorer!" Winry whined as she traipsed through the grasses that tickled her legs. She crouched down next to Al.
Ed pushed her. "You can't be an explorer!"
"Why not? You guys never let me play anything!"
"Girls can't be explorers! Girls are wives and mommies, not explorers."
Winry scowled. "I don't want to be a wife or a mommy. I want to explore, too!"
"Well, you can't!"
"Well, I'm gonna go be an explorer all on my own, so there!"
"Fine! Go!"
Winry stood up and marched away angrily.
After a half hour or so of exploring, Ed and Al decided it was better to explore their way home to the dinner table, so they marched home, pretending they were in the desert, exploring the ruins of ancient Xerxes.
"Look!" Ed called out to his brother. "I found an ancient, unopened passageway!"
"Where does it lead?" asked Al.
"I don't know yet. Let's open it for the first time in a thousand years!"
After lots of heaving and pushing, they finally managed to shove open the great stone doors enough to edge their way inside.
"I can't see a thing," said Ed, squinting into the cave. "Al, light the torch."
Al held the torch high above his head. "Look, Brother! Ancient wall art!"
Ed screwed up his face as he stared at them. "These must be the king of Xerxes with his queen and their two children, one of which was exceedingly awesome and not short at all. Don't touch the wall art, Al, you might chip away the ancient paint they used."
"Okay. Can I put the torch down?"
"No, Al, how else will we be able to see in the pitch darkness?"
"My arm is tired."
Ed sighed. "Fine, hand me the torch. Now come on. I think I smell some ancient chicken and dumpling soup."
"Would we really WANT to eat ancient soup?"
"It's been preserved with magic, stupid! Come on! Let's go through this secret hidden passageway that no one knows about."
Just then, a brown-haired mummy stepped right in the passageway's opening and roared at them. "Boys, did Winry already get home?"
"It's the thousand-year-old queen of Xerxes!" Ed shouted in fright. "We have to run before she curses us!"
"AAAH!" Al screamed. "Quick, brother, run away! I'll stay here as the distraction!"
"No!" said Ed, eyes widening in horror. "You can't sacrifice yourself for me! It isn't fair!"
"Just go, Brother! I promise I'll make it out right after you! This is the last resort!"
"I'll never forget you, Al," said Ed fervently. They hugged, then Ed took the torch, which he had forgotten for a few minutes there, and ran out of the ancient tomb, which he wasn't sure had always BEEN a tomb, but it was now.
"Hurry back or dinner will get cold!" shouted the thousand-year-old queen of Xerxes.
Ed ran through the desert, abandoning his torch again, and shouted for Winry.
Meanwhile Winry, the super famous and way-better-then-those-meanie-boys world-renowned female explorer, was marching through the exact same desert and was getting pretty bored. She almost wished she had settled for being the wife. At least when she was the wife, she didn't have to play all ALONE.
She was about to heave a big sigh and start heading home, but just as she was in the middle of doing so, she saw... AN ANACONDA!
Winry screamed and dashed away from the anaconda at top speed, and kept running even after it was clear that anacondas were not the 'pursuit' type of animal, even after she realized it was a garden snake which could have no more squeezed her to death than a pancake.
In fact, she kept on running and running until her foot caught in a depression in the ground, probably the hole of a rabbit or another 'anaconda', and she went down.
Hard.
Her foot cracked sickeningly.
Winry laid on the ground for a few seconds, motionless. Nothing hurt, which was probably a very bad thing. Seconds later, her reeling brain hooked a carp.
Winry started screaming.
"Winry? Winry? WINRY!" Where the heck WAS that girl? Ed had been combing the desert for seven years, seven months, seven weeks, and seven days, but there was no sign of the wannabe exploreress anywhere. He was a hair's breadth from giving up and returning home on the assumption that she had already done so herself.
Luckily for her, Winry chose that moment to make her location unmistakably obvious.
Hearing her cry out in pain like that, Ed abandoned the game and raced towards the sound of her voice. "Winry!" he shouted.
As Ed neared her, his stomach twisted.
Her knees and palms were bleeding and dirty, she was sobbing uncontrollably, and her foot was sticking out unnaturally. She appeared not to notice him arriving.
Ed had broken an arm once before; he knew how scary and painful it was. He crouched next to her and waved his hands in front of her to get her to focus.
"G-get my mom," she begged.
"Can you move it?" he asked, voice trembling even though he tried to appear calm.
She shook her head. "It hurts!"
"Stay here, okay? I'll go get help."
"Wait!" Winry shouted. "Don't leave me here all alone!"
"How else am I supposed to get help?"
She just looked at him.
Ed dropped to her side again and petted her hair. "Just stay calm, okay? I'll be right back. And—and—and—and if you're calm and wait nicely, next time we play you can be the explorer and I'll be the wife, okay?"
"Promise?" she sniffed.
"Promise."
"Really," Trisha would comment later to Pinako in the Rockbells' living room after Urey had set a cast and Sara had convinced Winry to go to sleep for a few hours (they had given her a little dose of acetaminophen, too: good for pain relief, better for the placebo effect), "what are the chances she would fall in a snake's hole while running from a different snake?"
