Once Upon A Time (A Study of Izumi Curtis)
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Once upon a time, there was a young woman who was an alchemist. She was strong and skilled and beautiful, better than a man and a legend among women (famous or infamous depending on who you talked to).
Once upon a time, she fell in love.
Once upon a time, she thought that was enough, but it wasn't, because there was a gaping hole in her heart that was child-shaped. So she said to her husband, Honey, let's try to have some kids, and he agreed because the house seemed awfully empty and besides, he loved her just as much as she loved him.
Once upon a time, a very long time later when the young woman was not so young anymore, she started throwing up one morning. It was the happiest morning of her life, even if most of it was spent shivering over a waste basket, her whole body in rebellion, nervously waiting for the next surge of nausea to precipitate. It marked the beginning of a new phase of her married life, after all; alchemy had nothing on this. Alchemy, for all its uses, could not create life.
Once upon a time, as the eager months flowed by, she would sit by a window, watching village children play in the market, her dark eyes soft and dreamy in a way they rarely were when she was young. The spark of life turned ripely in her womb, tightly wound around with the threads of a future without limits, a destiny that stretched further than the eye could see. She knew it would be a fierce child- unyielding to the harshness of the world it would soon come into, just like its mother, intelligent and kind like its father, their dreams made flesh in a miracle of creation. She imagined herself standing on the front step, calling a beloved name to summon her child to dinner, or lighting a candle in the window to call it home at night. Imagined the first skinned knee, the tears she would kiss away, the little hands that would tangle in her braided hair, scrawl with chalk in the fledgling beginnings of alchemy.
Once upon a time, the not-so-young woman birthed a tiny dead child and her dreams fell to ashes. The doctors could find no explanation, but the midwife needed none, just patted the crying not-so-young woman's shoulder and told her you will have no more children, her husky voice soft and flat with regret. The woman hated her then, hated her as only a grieving mother could and more, because she had never really been a mother, not even for one second, not even long enough to hear one tiny cry.
Once upon a time, the woman clutched the ruins of her dreams, covered with blood, and refused to accept that fate could be so cruel.
Once upon a time, she knelt in the dying embers of a rebounded transmutation- coughed black blood onto the painstakingly drawn lines, the child-shaped hole in her heart joined by several more organ-shaped ones- and learnt that yes, fate can be that cruel.
Once upon a time, the alchemist and her husband lived in an empty house, living sad, empty lives swept bare by the force of their shared despair, until the emptiness grew too heavy to bear. This time it was her husband who hugged her at night and said, Honey, let's take a vacation. And because she knew the mourning had to end sometime, she smiled up at her beloved, teeth stained with nicotine and bubbling fresh blood, and agreed.
Once upon a time, she and her husband boarded a train, saved a village, and gained two blond sons whose tears she patted away, whose knees she scraped (more than once), whose meals she cooked, whose eager hands reached out to take the knowledge she offered.
Once upon a time, she thought about the law of equivalency, and smiled.
She will probably never have a happy ever after, but she's pretty sure this isn't a bad story at all.
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A/N: And there's Izumi. Just so everyone knows: I'M FOLLOWING THE MANGA. Which probably means I'll be back to redo Bradley's chapter and correct the portrayal (which was pretty AU before and has now been thrown completely out of the window by recent manga developments. ;;) Or do people like it just the way it is? Leave a comment, please? (wibbles)