A/N: I have excuses, but they're lame. I was out of town part of this week for a laser safety course, got back late Wednesday. Then I remembered on Thursday "Oh yeah, I didn't update!" but got sidetracked with mandatory socialization. I'll have the next drabble after this one up shortly.
Plus side? I now know how a laser can literally boil your eye.
This one is firmly first-anime-verse... mostly.
24. Ten years ago
Ten years ago, I made the biggest mistake of my life. It cost me two limbs and my brother's body, initially. Then it cost me my childhood when I vowed to get back what we'd lost. It almost cost me my brother again, when our Failed Attempt tried to sway him against me with her face. Who knows how much more time we would have had if they'd been one less in number.
After all that, my mistake cost me my brother and my home world… my passion didn't even exist where I was. It cost me whatever the hell I resolved with my father. It cost me a friend who could almost pass as my brother. It almost cost me my world all over again (Al and Winry would say that's my guilt complex talking… whatever). Finally, I had my brother, and there were no more effing angry alchemists to screw it up.
Then I realized there was one thing I'd lost at the onset ten years ago, and I'm so talented that I managed to lose or ignore every chance I've had of finding it again. I lost her when I returned to this world; when I first was sent here, when I left home in disguise, when Al and I sent her home, when I joined the military in blind pursuit of the impossible… Everything went back to the day when we transmuted our mother.
Al had won the fight. Winry rejected us both, but she'd still blush when I held her hand on the way to school. She got better at hiding it, but her face was priceless when I hobbled into the living room for that reattachment. Neither of us wrote her (well, I did once after I passed the state certification), but I was the one who bore her wrath. She'd been there all the time, but I think part of me always knew I'd made my choice that day, now ten years ago, when my hands hit the edge of that chalk circle.
Al practically skips beside me (skipping? Between that and the constant kittens, I seriously wonder if I really have a sister). We took the old way, our secret entrance to Risembool by the waterfall and the river. It's been ten years coming, but Winry is about to meet her favorite customer again…
If she doesn't wrench me to death for what the damned gate did to my automail.