A mini fic, nothing too special. But I do actually like this a lot. Another introspective look at Hohenheim.

Timeline: Mangaverse, if only because I found (previous!) anime Hohenheim's personality to be lacking.

Warnings: None

Inspired by a conversation with Nefer-T, so thanks to her!

Betaed by please-knock, as usual. :D

FMA belongs to Hiromu Arakawa.

Let Fly

Before, when he was a father and both of his children could fit in his arms and his wife was alive and waiting with a smile when he woke – he had a task.

More and more often then, he would be locked in his study, searching, desperately, for the answers that would fix everything/had to fix everything, so sometimes he would miss meals. Sometimes he would miss the goodnight kisses and twinkling eyes and the begging for a story, please, daddy, please... and his wife usually took care of those things. But there was one thing that he did do.

When he would be in his study, sometimes the door would open, and there would be the sound of small feet, so impossibly small, and he would feel one of his children looking at him, staring at his back, as he scribbled another note, flipped through another book.

"There's a monster under the bed," one of his children would say. "Can you scare it away?"

He would look back at one of his children, and he would see that they did not ask this question because they thought him more frightening than their mother (though that was true), but they would ask him because he was daddy and because he was supposed to be strong enough and powerful enough to protect them from everything/anything.

He used to scare away the monsters under his sons' beds because, after all, imaginary terrors of little boys are easily scared away by a real monster. Later, when his sons' beds were burned and their mother was buried, and he no longer had any right to be their father, they were in danger from monsters again.

There were no sheets that could be lifted, no easy banishing gaze. The monsters were there, and this time – they really could take his children away.