This is a brief, intense break from my One Piece writings, but any of my Subtlety readers will be pleased to hear that I've been hard at work on the beginning of Mihawk's adventures in the Great Pirate Age.
...Not that this has anything to do with FMA or this fanfiction. Let's talk about that now. As I said before, the only stories I have for this fandom currently are depressing and/or related to Ishbal and what happened there. If I've spelled Ishbal/Ishval two different ways, as I suspect I have, I do beg your pardon. I can never remember. It's like grey and gray.
They're still in Ishbal.
In the stagnant oven of the night, crouching on the whispering sand with the smell of destruction billowing around them, they wait for an order. Roy Mustang eases his hands slowly into their gloves, the ignition cloth rasping at his skin; they're too tight tonight, as they always are. Once he's been in battle long enough that they loosen up with heat, greasy with sweat, he doesn't like to take them off…he's always afraid that those scarlet circles will still be there, burned into his flesh.
The creases of the gloves are already clammy, and he stares down at his hands, bile rising in his throat, willing this reality to shatter and reveal itself as a nightmare instead of his daily life. He can see his bones moving beneath the Flame array as he clenches and unclenches spasming hands. He's been crouching too long, here in the death and the dust—his thighs cramp, his toes curl to keep him balanced. He can hear the men around him living. He can hear them breathing. He can almost tell himself their heartbeats are audible in the muggy heat.
A whistle shrieks, and every muscle in the sweaty foxhole crackles with the alarm, all into action, and young Roy Mustang beckons his men into the night to fight and die and kill.
And, oh, he can hear children weeping beyond the barricades.
It never went away for any of them, but Roy could at least claim he never broke—his mind never left him…debatably. Everyone had something to keep him moving through the genocide battlefield. Roy needed to protect his people and make it out to reach his goals, so here he is. The ambitious upstart, still full of Ishbal's blood and fire and sand. They think he's dangerous. They have no idea how much.
Because Roy knows by now how much damage he can do, the terror he could wreak if madness overtook him. That's the third thought that kept him sane: ending up like Zolf Kimblee, scrawling circles carved into his bloody palms, petulant and twitchy without someone to kill. It scares him to the point of shaking, but over time he's learned to control it, cram it into a box in his head and suppress the fear. He's mastered it. But after all these years, still the memories are too strong for normal life.
"I bought lunch," says the Fullmetal brat, arrogant in his dislike for Roy. Roy responds with supreme aloofness.
"It's just a business meeting, Fullmetal. We don't' even know if this guy has a Philosopher's Stone."
"Well, I actually suggested it," says the nice brother, almost apologetically. "I thought it would be—oh, here's the waiter now!"
Roy turns to demean Fullmetal's choice of food—
-It's fried chicken.
His stomach turns over.
"On second thought…here's the file. I have a date."
"What? Hey, Colonel, hang on!"
Roy's long-gone, though. He's still in Ishbal.
Anyway, this is just a look at Roy and what is basically PTSD, which has appeared in one of my fics before (kind of sort of). I took an interest in it after a particularly grim Psych lesson. Psychology just spawned FMA stories for me, probably because so many of Arakawa's characters have such thought-provokingly messed-up minds.