Hey everyone. After yet another long wait I'm back, and with another chapter requested by HelloToday. Sorry for taking so long with this, four stories plus school is not my best idea, so some of my smaller projects have kind of been pushed to the side a bit. I'll try better to give them the respect they deserve though.

Summery: She just didn't understand, why did this have to happen to her family? It was all her fault.
Character: Mrs. Bradley
Verse: Anime
Warning: sadness?
Word Count: 722

Misblame

The middle aged woman hit the ground when the news of what had happened back at her home. Or at least, what had used to be her home. Burned on the inside, no trace of her husband's body even found and Selim… oh god, Selim. How had she not noticed he was gone? She should have. No matter what was going on, or how shocked and confused she was with that half-automaillic man trying to kill Ms. Hawkeye, she shouldn't have let him leave her sight.

It took several hours for anyone to be able to get her stable enough to stand and go to the morgue. That's where Selim was now. She couldn't hold back her tears as a new car drove her away. He shouldn't be there. She'd always known the risk of losing her husband, in battle or even assassination, and the two had come to terms with that before committing to marriage, but Selim… Another wave of guilt hit the woman, and she wasn't able to get out of the car for another twenty minutes once they arrived.

She couldn't bring herself up to looking at his body, not yet at least. After a while, she was able to hear what the man who'd examined his… his remains had decided was the cause of death.

His spine was snapped at the neck, instantly killing him, and there were brutal hand marks confirming murder beyond a shadow of a doubt. One thought just kept coming back to the woman. She should have been there. Should have protected him. She was his mother, that was her job.

She'd only gotten the courage to look at her son at his and King's double funeral. Of course, one of those caskets was empty, since there was nothing left of the old ruler. The entire country was morning, but no one so much as the windowed first lady. She hadn't slept in days, and would frequently find herself in tears at the thought of everything she'd lost.

Beneath all the of despair, there was still a bit of flame left in her though. She wouldn't let the murderer of her son and husband go unpunished. It had to of been that man, Roy Mustang, who'd been found, one eyed and carrying the lifeless body of her son out of the fiery wreckage of her home.

When the tests and interrogations and everything came back, that last bit of fire winked out of existence faster than she'd of thought possible. Faster than when she'd found out her family had been completely destroyed in a single hour. She couldn't even comprehend it, and fainted almost immediately.

Her husband! That couldn't… that couldn't be right! Not at all! She denied it and anyone who tried to convince her otherwise. There wasn't any way he would have done that to his own son. He would have protected the child. He had to. There was just no way it was possible.

She never did manage to accept the truth. Even when it had been slipped to the public, she couldn't wrap her head around it. If there was perhaps a reason, if someone could explain to her the motivation her husband would have had. There wasn't any though, and any physical proof therefore didn't exist to the broken woman. In actuality, Roy Mustang had tried several times to tell her what'd happened, but she would never let him get passed a few words. She didn't want to hear it from him.

Years later, if you were to find a person who'd even managed to care and remember enough to ask the drastically aged woman, she wouldn't have said her husband was to blame for the boy's death. No, it was her fault. She was his mother, and she should have watched him, protected him.

There wasn't anything that could change her mind. Up until her death, when the rest of the world simply pieced the atrocity into the back of their history, she'd never gotten over the confusion and the loss and the blame. It was her fault. She was suppose to be his mother. There was a part of her that would tell whisper that she wasn't though, never had been. He was adopted.

Maybe she was never meant to be a mother in the first place.