"White Lilies"
The front door slammed shut and Maes realized he had been left behind once more. Part of this was his own fault; he wasn't as enthusiastic about family activities as he had once been, but the other part was because his girls were becoming more and more independent with the passing months. Feeling slightly melancholy and forlorn, he decided to follow them, to spend the day with them again.
Once outside, he found the two of them were already far down the street, headed into town. Hughes smiled to himself; Elycia was more like her mother every day. Not in only in appearance, either, she was more lady-like and gracious. They turned the corner at the end of the block and disappeared from sight. Suddenly feeling strangely alone, Maes quickened his pace to keep after them. If anything happened to them, he would never forgive himself. He rounded the corner and spotted them again. The feeling vanished almost instantly.
They reached town a few minutes later and he noticed the baskets they carried. 'That's right,' Maes recalled. 'They did mention today was their market day. I should have stayed home. Why can I never remember when they've scheduled these?' Market days were special for them—a female bonding of sorts. Hughes was normally content to let them have their time together without him hovering around snapping photographs or another of the various things he took great pleasure in doing, but very rarely every now and again something inspired him to tail them, exactly like it had that particular day.
Elycia waved at several girls that passed by and smiles were in abundance. Maes wished he had his camera many times over for all the perfectly innocent shots he could have gotten and bragged about later. Fleetingly he wondered when his daughter had made so many friends, but it passed as did most things that crossed through his mind. Schools had many students and his little baby was like a magnet with her sunny personality.
Their first stop was the open-air market to stock up on food they had run low on. Once a week they would come here for the normal things that couldn't be bought in bulk because they'd spoil. The merchants knew them by sight, knew what they were going to request: bread and cookies from the bakery, various fruits and vegetables from the produce stands, several different cuts of meat from the butcher shop—the list continued on for a while, and Maes couldn't help but grin when Gracia bought a couple servings of liver. It seemed no one liked the meat in the least, but the way she cooked it, one could never tell it was the same thing. Elycia would be in for a treat.
Finished with that part of their errands, the girls headed to a nearby park to eat the lunch they had prepared ahead of time. They sat in the shade and ate quickly, as they still had things to do and didn't want the groceries to spoil. Maes remembered the first time they had gone out, they had taken too long and the milk had turned in the afternoon heat. He still wondered why they didn't stop home first rather than risk it at all. He knew the reason, but it was hard to willfully accept it.
Hughes pondered returning home at that point, unconsciously acknowledging what else they had to do—he had never accompanied them to the next stop before; it wasn't something he felt was right for him to intrude upon. It was something they had done alone together for a long while now. With their baskets full of groceries in the crooks of their arms, they entered a flower shop and purchased a bouquet of white lilies.
Throughout his entire life, many things had invoked fear and pain in Maes Hughes—seeing how broken the war had left his childhood friend Roy Mustang, knowing that a 12-year-old boy joined the military with little to no knowledge of what he was getting into, then realizing how little he knew when he discovered that same military was infiltrated to its highest ranks with creatures that wouldn't hesitate to kill innocents if it helped them towards their goal. However, the thing he feared the most was none of these things. Being separated from his girls, or having something happen to them that he couldn't do anything about was the thing that kept him thinking some nights, kept him worrying.
He had decided to follow them that day.
They made their way to the military graveyard with their bouquet and tears came to Maes's eyes. As they placed the respectful white lilies on his grave, the tears spilled over.
It had never crossed his mind that something would happen to him. It never occurred to him that his own death could be just as frightening as something harming to them. A family was a fragile thing. If something happened to any of the members, everyone suffered.
Maes had always thought he was the strong one in the family he called his own. Seeing his girls continuing to live without him, watching as Elycia grew up without her daddy, watching Gracia grow old without her husband were things that he had never considered. It broke his heart that they had to keep living and spoke to him loud and clear that they were much stronger at heart than he. 'Damned are the dead, for they must die. Damned are the living, for they must live,' he thought as he watched them.
Even a decade after he had been found shot in a phone booth, the thought of having to let them go frightened him more than he had ever imagined anything could. It was the reason he couldn't leave.
Fin.