"Winry! You have some special guests here to see you!" Grandma Pinako shouts up the stairs.
I stop hammering the piece of automail I'm working on and sit up, smiling. Could it be…?
I run to the window, and grin when I see two familiar figures on the porch waving up to me, one very tall, big, polite, and gentle and the other hot-tempered and short, even though he denies that last fact quite persistently.
"Edward! Alphonse! Welcome home! We missed you, ya know!" I yell.
"Why didn't you call?" Grandma Pinako asks them from the door.
Ed shrugs, his red State Alchemist cape flapping in the breeze. "Too busy, I guess."
"So why are you back, exactly?" I say, puzzled.
Ed and Al exchange a look. A look I know only too well by now.
My face drops. "Ed, show me your arm."
He lifts his left arm.
"Your OTHER arm."
"I…I don't know…"
"Ed!"
He sighs and pulls up his right sleeve to show me the stump where his right arm's automail used to be.
My vision turns red with anger. "Dammit Ed, I just repaired that! I pour my heart and soul into making your automail, and this is what I get for it?! I ought to just leave you the way you are."
Grandma Pinako glares at me. "Winry! Don't scare them off! They pay well!"
Alphonse waves some money in the air encouragingly.
I roll my eyes. "I guess you're right. At least it's helping me develop my skills as an automail engineer."
"If it helps, Winry, we think your automail works fantastic!" Al calls, his voice echoing in the suit of armor his soul was bonded to.
"Worked," Ed corrects.
"Brother, you're always so inconsiderate! I meant that it works just in general—I'm not talking about your last arm!"
"Well, how was I supposed to know that?"
"You could've just inferred it! Who knows, I could've been talking about your automail leg!"
I laugh as I head down the stairs, listening to my childhood friends bicker. It's good to have them back, even if they will probably fight most of the short time that they stay. They're always away, always trying to find some way to reverse the curse they brought upon themselves a few years back while trying to transmute their dead mother, which ended up sealing Al's soul in a suit of armor and causing Ed to lose both his right arm and his left leg. I suppose I would've done the same thing they did to get cursed if I had the option to bring my parents alive and the knowhow to do it.
I get to the bottom of the steps and start walking toward the front door, happy to see that they are really there, that it wasn't just my imagination playing tricks on me. I'm almost to them, getting ready to hug Ed and Al and say "I'm glad you're back," almost there, when suddenly my whole world is ripped away from me. I'm fading, drifting, screaming into space, into emptiness, into darkness, and Ed and Al just keep getting farther and farther away from me, going into the unknown, a place I could never get to even if I tried. Everything is gone, I think to myself as I fall through the oblivion.
I wake up in a cold sweat, and find myself in my bed, not in an endless pit of darkness. I'm filled with the slight hope that maybe the Ed and Al part of my dream is true, that they're finally back to me, but then I remember.
They're gone.
I look out my window to the stars, pressing my cheek against the cold glass. "Damn you Elric brothers," I whisper, a warm tear falling down my cold and clammy skin, "Where are you?"
