PTSD

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Colonel, I'm afraid you have not passed the psychological tests required for your position as a leader. You have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. For your personal comfort as well as the wellbeing of your subordinates, I suggest you undergo extensive therapy for army survi-

Is that so, doctor?

Whoosh.

Colonel-

I will hear no more about this.

P

P is for power, the one thing he makes a show of craving. In the eyes of people around him – and above him, and under him, and on every level of hierarchy of which he has been an integral part for so long – he is a known arriviste, a ruthless careerist with his ambition being greater only than his ego, and little beyond that. He approves of it. After all, he has spent the vast majority of his office days carefully making sure that everyone believes it.

P is for power play, and Roy is a skilled player. Oh, he loves games, he loves the invisible dance of strings that bends unaware puppets to his carefully defined will – for P is also for puppet master, a egotistical, sly, manipulative bastard that he is. He knows the rules of the office just as well as these of the battlefield, and he is always prepared for the change of winds, or unexpected storm. For both he has resources to stay strong, and the cunning to turn them into his own favour. And, contrary to the popular belief, he always has the sense to carefully read his paperwork before burning it.

Roy Mustang is a conflicted being of both wildly raging inferno and pin-point precision of carefully aimed flaming missiles. He chases Power – and power over the country, nothing less – with his cold accuracy and carefully conducted games, yet for Roy, P is first and foremost for Pride.

The power to rebuilt what has been destroyed in his hungry, deadly flames is not the only thing to ever make possible his penance. However, it is the only thing to make the penance bearable for unbowing, prideful Roy Mustang.

(P is for pain, penitence, and psychological self-punishment.)

T

He is nothing if not an ingenious tactician.

When the reports on ammunition fall short, instead of target practice he organises a surprise drill in such extreme conditions that it effectively convinces the command that he is a heartless bastard with no compassion to his troops whatsoever. (He gets promoted.) When, however, the morale amongst his men plunges dangerously low, he fixes the problem with one anonymous rose bouquet sent to the chief cook. Soon he is the commander of the happiest and best-fed men in the army, and even if there are losses (the cook won't stop shooting him suggestive looks), it's nothing he couldn't handle. He does organisational miracles on daily basis, one of which being how he still manages to hide that Hawkeye is behind them all. His political tactic is absolutely impenetrable. For the closest to him it's known that sometimes – only sometimes – it's just impossible to see through it because there simply is no tactic and that their beloved Colonel is actually just making stuff up as he goes.

Still, he is always one step ahead.

T is not only for tactic; T is sometimes for thoughtlessness... and instinct.

And T is for teasing and testing, too, because his power plays aren't shut behind the closed door of his office; he gambles his luck in every waltz and tango on a stuffy ball, his lips etched into a polite smile, his movements as fluid as in any duel when he tests his serious scientific hypothesis: how far can a lady melt in his hands before she realises that she's in public, in the arms of the famous Lascivious Alchemist. He does not come for women at these balls and parties, no; he comes with his own sly purposes, with declarations of friendship for the influential and the show of strength for the impressionable; but if he comes alone, he always goes with a woman. Because Roy is a passionate tactician, and every new conquest requires a plan of its own.

(A man hungry for power and women is hardly something new. Roy allows everybody around to grasp it. He, on the other hand... Before he became soldier, he had been a scientist. And a scientist works out the rules...)

A girl in the uniform, her long legs complimenting its stern, authoritarian cut. Roy makes a mental note to introduce a miniskirt to the fatigues. Her eyes lighten up with interest as she notices him, then momentarily darken – as she adds the name to the face and realises that she is standing against a womanizer.

(... understands them...)

He doesn't try. Instead, he starts a polite small talk, keeping a respectable distance and waiting until a first flicker of doubt appears in his prey's eyes. (Does he not even want me?) He offers his arm, supports her while they dance to a slow, sensual melody that turns her knees to water and her head to a knob of tightly tangled thoughts of romance, and waits.

(... and transcends.)

Roy longs to be touched.

(T is for thrill of being alive, and terror of being alone.)

S

S is for sex, or sleep. Roy quite likes both. When he opens his eyes – and usually after a night like this, his common sense wakes him earlier than his partner would – and feels a body closely tangled against his, soft and fragile even if uncomfortably warm, he feels sated. This satisfaction and short-lived serenity are the reasons of his continuous journey through yet another married woman's bed; or a heavy squishy mattress of a maiden's room; or an obnoxiously soft divan in an expensive hotel room. Or a table. Or a floor. He's not picky.

These are the only times he sleeps on a bed, or doesn't have nightmares that wake him up gasping for breath until he remembers the time and the place and - the air without the stench of burnt human flesh, thick heavy smoke of death and destruction. He doesn't even own a bed. It's too soft, too comfortable for someone who spent his share of nights on cold, bare Ishvalan ground.

He never brings a woman to his apartment.

When he carefully, with practised skill, wiggles himself out of another sleeping girl's embrace and starts picking up his clothes from all over the room, Roy Mustang remembers Hawkeye's disappointed face and reminds himself that S is for shame. If one day he was to make his own homunculi, just to get rid of the parts of himself he doesn't like, that's what would be his first: fair-haired, dark-eyed Shame with calm, disillusioned expression of Riza Hawkeye.

His trusted Lieutenant knows, and wordlessly brings him coffee after every all-nighter of entertainment. That coffee is bitter, more bitter than any other he drinks, and maybe this is why Hawkeye's beverages sober him up faster and more thoroughly than any other – there's guilt in them, remorse and embarrassment. Roy would like it infinitely better if she just nagged him, reprimanded him, even fired an angry shot into his desk. Instead, Hawkeye just brings him shame-filled coffee, letting her silence and curt, official words say everything that her voice does not.

Roy wonders if Hawkeye doesn't own a bed either. (She's a soldier from the very core, a hardened Ishval veteran, and he can see it in her every tense move.) If she would prefer to sleep with him on the hard floor, covered only in thin blankets and rumpled old uniform, if she would shiver from the same nightmares. If she would accept comfort from someone similarly broken. If, of course, she ever agreed to have a wink within thirty metres to him, considering the way she reacts to his ever-actualised list of conquests.

He likes to think that a floor would suffice.

So when Havoc asks her out, he gets irrationally angry and balls his fists so hard that the ignition cloth breeds sparkles after sparkles. It does cross his mind that if he is not exactly celibate, then neither must she – but Roy Mustang, unlike her, is not a creature of pure reason. Roy Mustang is ferocious. And vengeful. Both Hawkeye and Havoc know that, since she politely declines and he doesn't ask ever again.

Roy, however, finds a date and spends a night with her.

(S is for substitutes.)

D

D is for dreams. Roy has two types of them.

One is nightmares, recollections of horrifying terror that he never understands, never swallows to the end. Ishval. A man without arms and legs, beaten to a bloody pulp, still screaming curses with gurgling voice as somebody's merciful dagger plunges through his chest. A woman hugging her daughters close, not fighting, trying to flee, as the column of fire and smoke is closing on her from behind. A child burnt alive. An elder man – someone's grandfather? – sitting on the ground quietly, with his head down, fingers clasped firmly on the mutilated corpse of what might have been his son. Ishval.

In haze of this screaming, blazing inferno of a world, D stands for Death – and Roy is his emissary.

But the nightmare of Ishval is (at least this time) just a nightmare, from which he wakes up to the blinding light of the morning sun. It sometimes takes a second to forget, sometimes a minute, but Colonel Mustang is not a rookie anymore and prides himself on being a master of his own mind – so he gets up and readies himself for another kind of a dream, one of his own making.

In the night, Roy dreams of the past. During the day, Roy dreams of the future.

His imagination pushes its limits in finding decisions he would make as the Fuehrer. So much change awaits Amestris when the Regime of Mustang comes; all will be free, all will be safe, all will be judged with justice and honour as ultimate principles. And, as far as Roy is concerned, all women under certain age and weight threshold will be obliged to wear miniskirts. In his every plot and game, through every sarcastic comment and respectful salute, anywhere from East to West, South to North, Roy Mustang is always motivated by his ultimate dream of creating a new Amestris, a better Amestris. A country where leaders are chosen by the people, not forced upon them by the military, and where war criminals answer for the holocaust they have caused.

In other words, a country where is no place for people like Colonel Mustang.

He is a murderer who has given up his life to repent. And there's a little voice in him that will never allow to forget it, even in the most brightest of dreams. The future he strives to create is not his to cherish, nor will it be lenient for the crimes for which he is now praised. The greatest dream of the Ishvalan Hero is to build a world where exterminators like him – where he will be judged and executed.

Yet there is something that will not go away, a feeling of corrupted power in the ground, an alarming reek of contaminated air. He feels it because he is a true alchemist son of Amestris – and because the sense of doom over the Central makes his fingers tingle, his eyes twitch and his skin crawl as if giant insects were running on it, and this is not an excuse not to do my paperwork, Lieutenant, thank you very much. There is something that stands on the way of his bright future. As he glances into empty space over the growing piles of red tape, the only thing he can associate with this crawling feeling is the sense of Doom.

So he is not surprised when he is forcefully pulled into the corrupted portal. Not at all. He's furious – he's desperate - and maybe, maybe a teeny bit frightened – but not surprised. He has always known that there is no escape for the men like him, for the ultimate principle of alchemy will pay him back for every man, woman and child killed in his flames, for every horror of war he has caused, for every drop of blood and every moaned curse that is his fault, for every nightmare he helped to create and for every crime that he hides into his head so intently and so keenly that a doctor calls it a post-traumatic stress disorder.

Roy faces his judgement.

For in the end D stands for –

(destiny)

- the Doorway of Truth.

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