Rick and Leo's Mother

The unnamed mother is shown as an Ishvalan woman living in Ishval with her two boys. Her defining physical trait is a serious eye ailment that left her partially blind, a condition that would prove central to the tragedy of her final moments.

Her single driving impulse is love for her sons. Even as danger closed in, her thoughts were only of reaching and shielding Rick and Leo, and the keepsake she left behind became a lasting emblem of that devotion. What looked to others like a mother fleeing to save herself was in truth a mother groping blindly toward her children.

She appears only in the 2003 anime, though the manga and 2009 anime reference her through Rick. When the Amestrian military assaulted their home during the Ishvalan civil war, she seemed to run off without her sons and was then killed in an explosion. She left behind a locket that Rick treasured, while Leo, who watched her go, grew convinced she had deserted them. Only when the damaged locket opened, revealing eye medicine and a photograph of the boys with their mother, did the truth emerge. Her blindness had kept her from seeing the children when the attack came, and she had rushed into their room to find them just as the blast took her life. Learning this, Leo is left breaking down in regret.