A/N: Written for the Monthly Quotes Challenge (quote 01 – August 2013) on the Fullmetal Alchemist: A Bit of Everything forum (link in profile – and the challenge renews every month if you want to enter it). Also written for the 100_tales challenge on livejournal, prompt#014 – blue and the character: Ishbalan child.
"My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water/ Tends to the pebbles it must run over" – Tulips, Sylvia Plath
A Single Pebble Makes a Path
All I see is red. I have my head in it - its' smell makes me want to throw up, and I'd move my head - except I can't. My body won't hold me up.
I had never seen this much blood, never heard of it - until the monks ran through the town one day, yelling about an army. An army of blue they said: a blue that's nothing like the clear sky Ishbala gave us. A blue, instead, like the ocean we'd heard tales about when nursed, tales that had us huddling under Mama's skirt when we heard. They were misbe'aving tales, they were. Tales that remind us what we've done is bad, and that we shouldn't do it again.
They said ocean was blue. They said ocean clung to you, dragged your head down. They said ocean took all you recognised away, and you were just floating, reaching and never touching.
But when we started crying, Mama would say ocean was also far away. But then the monks were yelling things, and we children clung to our parents, thinking the ocean was coming.
No-one had ever said though it would turn Ishbal red. And I can't see Mama, to hide in her skirt anymore. I'm not too old for that! I'm not!
But my arms won't hold me up - I've tried and tried and I'm tired now - and my legs are sore. I cry a little; Mama must be far away, or she would hear. The red smells yucky, but there's nothing else to smell when I breathe, and I'm stuck here.
And there are a lot of noises that don't make any sense.
It all stops, finally, but the yucky smell's still there and Mama's not. No-body else comes either, and I'm starting to get cold know. But then someone comes, like how Mama sometimes leans over my cot when she thinks I'm still sleeping. I wait for her to pet my hair, but she doesn't.
Instead, somebody touches my hand, makes a choking sound, then picks me up. Someone blue, except she's sort of yellow as well. I can't scream, so I stare instead.
She looks shocked. And sad. Like Mama did when the Monks told her Papa wasn't coming back. That doesn't make any sense though; isn't she a part of the ocean too? The ocean that's drowning Ishbal?
But she's more yellow than blue. Maybe she's Ishbala, come to pick us all up. I blink - slowly - and now there's only yellow. No blue.
I close my eyes, smiling to myself. Of course Ishbala wouldn't let us drown if we hadn't been bad. She picked me up, and she'll find everyone else too. And Mama.
Post A/N: If anyone didn't catch it at the end there, the blue and yellow woman was Riza Hawkeye. Remember she buries an Ishbalan child she found on a roadside?