All Boys Get Hungry

"Mama!"

The door shut behind him and he watched as his mother stopped chopping when he'd called to her. She didn't leave the kitchen counter, though, but she did turn to him with a smile.

"Back so soon? I thought you boys would still be running around shooting each other. There's still light outside."

She was right. The evening sunlight glinted behind her shoulder and bathed the room in its glow, but he scrunched his face at her and shrugged. "I wanted to play some more, but they got hungry so they left me all alone."

She laughed, the tinkling silvery tones that he would remember until he died. He would recall it when the bullet would pierce his leg during the war and would force him to fall forward face-first onto the wet, cold mud. While he waited for the medic to tend to him, he forced his mind off his injury and remembered those lovely memories of his childhood instead.

Later, when he was deep into the most grueling part of his training—withstanding the inhuman anti-interrogation tactics his superiors put him through—he would recall her laughter. It kept him going, made it easier to endure the pain of little cuts on his skin, of being unable to breathe, of wishing to die than suffer some more. He tolerated the torture because his mother was there with him, her laughter echoing in his heart, her smile he could clearly see in his mind's eye.

"Wash up for supper," she said.

"But I'm not hungry!"

"Hmm? Not right now, maybe. But you will be."

He took off the battered soldier helmet on top of his head and walked over to the old wooden crate by the side table that kept all his military gear: his home-made wooden rifle whittled by one of his neighbors, the crumpled up paper balls stained green that represented his grenades, the bandolier made from candy tubes he'd collected.

When he was done, he was surprised to see that she'd come close to him and was now untying the knot to her apron.

"All boys get hungry," she said before she wrapped her arms around him. "In all my years of being your mother, that is the one truth that won't ever change."

He grinned at her, their smiles so similar—the proof of it in the photograph she'd insisted the family take the year before. Sadly, this picture would burn when the bombs dropped and nothing from his childhood home would survive the fire.

And he would never come back because nothing would be left of her and the life they'd lived before he became a spy.

***

"It's the strangest thing, Loid," Yor said as she reached for the coffee mugs above her on the shelf. "I didn't even have to remind her to do her homework. Anya just came in, dropped her bags, and declared that she would study in her room as soon as she got home."

Loid frowned. That was beyond strange. It was earth-shattering. "And she's been there the whole afternoon?"

"Yes, and I've checked in on her once in a while. She really is studying."

"She wants something from us. That's the only reason why she would work this hard."

She blinked rapidly for a few seconds and then laughed. "That's a cynical way of looking at it, but I don't think I can disagree."

Loid smiled, too.

Yor should definitely do that more often: laugh.

But he walked to the door of Anya's bedroom and knocked. "Anya, your cocoa's ready. There's cookies, too."