Title: Insensate
Warning: character death
Summary: To be numb, one must have felt before. [AU]
Notes: It starts with simple question: What if Roy had burned too much of Riza?
Insensate
The cadet dies at 12:34—they don't find out until 13:05, of course, but the doctor says the time of death aloud, and Maes feels a little childish jolt. July 8th of 1909, at 12:34: that's the sort of synchronicity one waits a lifetime for. He thinks, as he returns the doctor's salute, if the milliseconds were five and six, maybe they should have made a wish.
But he doesn't say anything, and neither does anyone else. Roy sits in a numb silence, hands chained, staring blankly at the wall. The last words he spoke to Maes—the last words, it turns out, he would ever speak—serve as a fitting enough eulogy.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to."
The trial is short: Roy pleads guilty to all charges with a simple nod. His certification is revoked, and he's stripped of rank. For a few hours, the tribunal tries to coax from him a motive, but whatever his reasons, they are his alone to contemplate. There's a question of the precise manner of death—sepsis or dehydration—but both are declared equally torturous, and Roy is convicted, by day's end, of willful murder.
Execution is scheduled for 0300—the Hero of Ishval was going to be a front-page story, and now his death notice will be one of a hundred jammed into the last twelve inches of copy. He still won't speak, or even look up, as Maes fixes the buttons on his uniform jacket. Without the insignia, Roy's shoulders look small.
He refuses the blindfold with a sharp shake of his head, and when they remove the chains, he stands rubbing his wrists, looking vaguely nauseous.
"Roy Mustang," the provost says—a pimply captain of maybe twenty, squinting beneath an orange lantern held aloft by an even younger sergeant. "You have been charged with and convicted of the willful murder of Cadet Riza Hawkeye. You have been sentenced by tribunal to death. The sentence will be carried out by firing squad. Do you have any last words?"
Maes looks away. They call it down—ready and aim—and at fire, his eyes snap shut. Five asynchronous shots, and that over-familiar thump of a body falling. Then a wet, agonized breath—they never die right away. No one does.
He gets himself assigned the burial detail—it feels right, somehow, just his own blood-stained hands and a shovel beneath the rising Ishvalan sun. The cadet apparently had no family, and Roy's ineligible for military burial. Maes salvages two wood posts from the roadside and carves their initials with a push-knife.
Then Maes goes home. He finds Gracia, holds her, marries her. He tries to bury every awful thing he did in Ishval, and for a while, it works. It's not until years later, when they've bought a new house and Gracia's expecting and Maes is busy painting the nursery a bright, acerbic green—it's not until then that he remembers.
"Come tell me what you want to keep and what's for the rubbish!"
There's no synchronicity in it this time. The seventh picture in the pile, of three figures, posing before one open door, taken over ten years ago. Maes falls back against the couch, and it's that sound again—the heavy boneless thump. The breath he gasps in sounds wet.
"Maes? What's wrong?"
She leans forward, hand on his shoulder, peering at their faces.
"The academy?" she asks. "Were they your friends?"
"I watched them die," Maes says, and stops himself at the last moment from admitting complicity in either death.
"In the war," Gracia says.
"I watched a lot of people die. In a lot of ways. Gunshots. Starvation."
His thumb covers Roy's face.
"There's a funny thing about burns," Maes says, and he's not sitting in his own living room. He's following Roy through a mess of twisted canvas and transmuted stone, and Roy is half-sobbing, stumbling, hands blistered and bloody.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to."
"The worse it is, the less it hurts. Burn gets down far enough, and the nerves are just...gone. There's nothing left to feel, even if infection sets in. So it wouldn't have hurt all that much. At the end."
Roy was always so shy with smiles—he's ducking the camera's flash in the photo, hand nervously high on Heathcliff's shoulder.
"I'm so sorry, Maes. I can't imagine what that was like."
"It's okay," he whispers. "I can't really imagine it either."
He goes back to the nursery and finishes the wall, and in every downward stroke of the brush, he sees the cadet's blackened skin. He taps the lid back on with the flat of the handle, and hears the sharp rattle of chains twisted around Roy's wrists.
In the kitchen, Gracia is laughing quietly to herself.
"What's funny?"
"Oh, nothing," Gracia says. "I just saw the calendar. It's November 12th, 1913. I used to love that, when I was a kid. If I'd been watching the clock, at 9:10, I would've made a wish."
She beams at him and turns back to the sink. She is clipping the stems of sunflowers.
"They last longer this way," she says.
He could say it—could answer with what he knows as fact, the one absolute truth of his life. But instead Maes wraps his arms around her and hooks his chin over her shoulder and flattens his hands on her belly.
"I've got an idea for name," he says quietly, eyes closed, "if it's a boy."