The seven stages of grief.

I am one of those people who get the strange stares, one of the ones who cant tell an awkward moment and say something stupid. The only one who laughs a a funeral apparently.

Suppose I deserved the stares, but honestly: burying an empty suit of armor? Come on, who cant see the humor in that?

The stiffs and brass in monkey suits are giving me disapproving looks, as though its their place to disdain me when they are only here for formality, like I want them here anyway.

Then there is Colonel Mustang's unit, or as I not-so-secretly call it the Bastard's Special Ego Pragade. They look at me with mournful and sympathetic looks, a grouped gaze filled with pity that makes me squirm in my stiff backed bench that sunk slightly in the winters mud, making my feet squelch and my cackles reverberate louder over the old tombstones that litter the Resembool graveyard.

And I cant stop laughing.

I can feel my 'family's' glares from behind me. Pinako glaring daggers into my neck for being disrespectful or whatever she would call it. And Winry, well she hadn't stopped crying. The sobbing, hiccuping, wracking gasps of breath drenched with streams of tears and warped in to strangled noises with hyperventilation. That was probably the worst, her tears. I don't understand why she feels the need to shed them, but then again every time I try to console her she screams that shes crying for both of us, because I wont, tells me again and again that I am in denial, that I should be crying.

But why should I? I am not the one dead.

I know all the stages of grief, even when there are snowflakes in my hair that have dropped from the laden bruised clouds that hang low in the bitter chilled sky.

First there is a delusional hope: but I had long since stopped my hopeless plight to save his life via the red stone.

Frustration: knowing always that there was something I could do but also the unattainable cost, knowing that what your best efforts would not help.

Then there is denial: but my stubbornness to let go and never relent to our missions had long since faded. My delusional thought that it I could save Al alone, that he would not die and leave me.

Anger: at him for not stopping me, for doing this to me.

Bargaining: for his soul, in trade for mine. A trade I would have made a thousand times over if not for Al's intent wish.

Despair: knowing that nothing I could possibly do would save him.

And finally, acceptance: the calm endless gray in witch I currently swum in. slowly suffocating me, drowning me on dry land.

But none of that mattered now.

One way or another I would see Alphonse again.

Even when there are snowflakes weighing down my hair. When my horse, choked laughter rips through the air to cover the sound of piteous sobs.

Tomorrow was a new day.

A new beginning.

A new end.