Author's Note: For this and all future stories, full Author's Notes will be on my profile. Now please enjoy this putheticly short one-shot.
He had always felt an affinity for fire. One of his earliest memories was of his family sitting around a campfire, talking about trivial things. The wind picked up, blowing the smoke into his face. He squirmed, blowing at the cloud and batting at it with both hands as if he could move it like a solid object.
His mother smiled, "I hate rabbits."
He looked at her, the smoke temporally forgotten because of her odd statement, "Why?"
"That's what you say when smoke blows in your face."
He turned so he faced the wind again, "I hate rabbits," and in spite of the pure illogicalness of it, the wind shifted.
Over the years, there were many more campfires and many 'smoke battles', in which he and his father would say the odd phrase and the smoke would swing back and forth between them until one of them got up and moved. And with the many fires, there were many opportunities to see how they were lit. His father would carefully blow on a spark until a peace of paper turned to flame, lighting a carefully constructed tepee of sticks. He would throw pine cones, dry leaves and then sticks and logs into the haphazard pile and light the whole thing on fire shoving more leaves at it until he had a cheery blaze. Normally he would continue to throw things on the pyre for a long time.
When his friends found out about his fondness for burning things, they made a joke of it, and gave him the nickname 'Pyro'. He went with it, claiming he had gone to 'Pyro Collage', despite the fact that none of them were out of elementary school yet.
He would always jump at the chance to make a campfire. And he remembered every one of them. He remembered the time they had burned used fireworks, only to find that they weren't as used as they thought they were. He remembered when one of his friends brought one of his sister's dolls, they would have burned it, bur his father told him that it would smell terrible (instead they smashed it with a rock). But the thing he remembered most vividly was when, out of curiosity, he placed a feather on the fire, vaguely expecting it to burn like a leaf. Instead, it curled in on itself, then twisted, melted and bubbled until only a small lump of unidentifiable ash was left.
He spent the rest of the day searching for every feather he could find and feeding them, one by one, to the flames, watching them twist in accordance to the will of fire.
Looking back, he could say that those feathers were the reason he combined his passion of fire with his love of alchemy.
The first time he used alchemy to make fire, something that he had always admired, but known he could not control, bend it to his will, it was…
Magical.
And it kept on being magical. Every time.
Never mind he knew how it happened.
It was magic. Right up until that day…
The day he was called into Ishbal.
Snap.
The day he found out that, in the face of the flames…
Snap.
…feathers and human bodies…
Snap.
…act the same way.
He stared over the broken, burning city, heat caressing his face. As he stood there, the wind changed, blowing smoke into his face. It filled his nose and stung his eyes, but he could not say if he was responsible for the tears that suddenly appeared on his cheeks.
He made no attempt to wipe away the tears, "I hate rabbits," said Roy Mustang.
Nothing changes.