Author's Notes: Lotsa gives her sincerest apologies for the poor quality of this story. She merely submitted it on a whim. Also, she wishes to explain the meek 118 words that are Chapter 2. She wanted to make meeting Izumi a separate part. end author's notes
Human beings don't like to show their weaknesses, unless they can be an advantage. That's why he never cried. Not at all, the day our lives began to unravel.
My brother and I were racing home that late-summer's day. Each of us had a basket of fruit and vegetables for our mother. She was going to make stew, stew with milk. Stew, as Ed said, was the only good thing about milk. It's what he remembered about her. I remember her smile.
He ran in ahead of me, he won the race. But, even as young as I was, I knew something was wrong when his potatoes hit the floor. She was lying there, next to the kitchen table, next to leeks she must have been on her way to boil. Her face was sprinkled in perspiration and her breathing was like a teenager's first love, unsteady and shallow.
We ran to get Aunt Pinako. She called the doctor. He told Pinako in private that our mom's illness was not something new. He said she must have had it for a long time. I wondered, just then, why she didn't confide in us as we did in her each time we ran to crawl under the covers in her bed when we had a bad dream. Now, though, I know that it would have hurt her more to see us worry than to carry the burden herself.
Edward believed it was our father's fault. His fault that she was so sick, his fault that what happened to her did. Dad left us before I knew him and Ed still hates him to this day for it, but then we were desperate. We believed that if we sent letters to all the addresses on the envelopes sent by him, we could find him and we could bring him back. We believed that if he came back, Mom would be okay.
He didn't and she wasn't. One windy, early September night, Mom reached out for us. Holding both of our small hands in one of hers, she told us to work together and use the money Dad left for us. Mom's last request was for Ed to transmute something for her. "A ring of flowers would be nice," she said. "He always used to make them for me." Edward never made them for her. He never made them, I think, because he didn't want to be like Dad. I would have made them, I wish she had asked me, but she asked my brother. We both gripped her hand tighter, holding on to her, willing her not to leave. But, then, her eyes went dark and her hand slacked. Our mother faded from existence. Her soul went through the gate.
At her funeral, we covered her grave with bouquets filled with white lilies. Not transmuted flowers, just the regular kind. We stayed by her freshly-buried body until sundown when everyone, even Winry and Pinako, were gone. There, on our mother's grave, he swore to me that he would bring her back.
