The Sins that Bind Us
He sat in a chair, next to the window, watching as the rain fell in torrents from the sky, pounding against the window and ground, mercilessly. This is the fourth day in a row, he thought. Day and night it's been raining. When will it stop?
"When will it stop!" Roy Mustang screamed at the walls, rising from his chair.
He hated the rain. Flames would not burn in the rain. Those menacing drops of water from the sky seemed to fall on the days he woke up in bad moods, on the days when he really wanted to go outside and snap his fingers like mad, just watching the fire as it swirled around him as he stood in his yard. It was almost as though the rain fell just in spite of him on those days, just to make him angrier. So when he walked to work, grumbling under the protection of the umbrella, he would keep a gloved hand in a pocket, waiting for the rain to stop, hoping that it would stop, just for a minute, so that he could snap his fingers and watch as the flames twisted around him.
It was on these kind of days when he would arrive at work with a scowl on his face, a dangerous, foreboding scowl, that he quickly turned into a smirk as malicious as a lion's grin. His subordinates feared him then, with a look like that on his face. They rarely spoke, except in whispers to each other. They followed his orders perfectly on those days, too frightened to admit it if they made a mistake. He would sit at his desk, signing papers authorizing this sort of mission, agreeing to pay for so and so damages made by Fullmetal. Only his First Lieutenant, Riza Hawkeye was brave enough to approach his desk, and it was only to her that he spoke with a sort of kindness in his voice.
So now, here he stood, glaring at the walls of his small home as if demanding an answer to his rain predicament. Now that he thought about it, he had stayed awake the entire night, reading reports, writing them, glaring at the window. He looked at his clock. It was four in the morning now. A small hardcover book lay unopened on his desk, which was now cleared of all military related materials. He walked over to the desk and picked it up. The cover read simply; The Sins that Bind Us. He recalled now how Hawkeye had lent him this book from her large collection of novels. She had commented on how he was overly stressed and a good book would calm him down when he needed it.
"Besides," she had told him as she held the book out to him in his office that day. "It's a very good book."
For him, reading had not been much of a hobby to him. It must of been due to the countless reports that were forced upon him. Or maybe it was because for a while, he read the newspaper every day at lunch break, and it only held bad news. That's why he had stopped reading the newspaper. Novels, he felt, were a waste of time. They depicted a seemingly ordinary life, and then the main character goes through some horrible life or death situation. But in the end, everything turns out fine.
He could have turned the book down, told her no thank you. But he didn't, maybe couldn't turn something down from her. She always seemed to be able to melt down that ice that he surrounded his heart in day after day. How? How could she do that, when even he had trouble doing so for himself?
He gave up and sighed, sitting in the small chair in front of his desk, the book in hand. For a few minutes, he just stared at the cover. It was a simple looking book. Rather thin, it looked to be about two or maybe three hundred pages in length. The cover was black, and the letters of its title were scrawled across the front in delicate gold paint. To him it was just an ordinary book, or should have been anyways. The title seemed to hit him hard, like a brick being thrust into his stomach by a catapult.
"The Sins that Bind Us," he read to himself.
He carefully lifted the cover and found the first page of the novel and began to read.
It was too dark to see exactly what he was doing. The street lamps were all off, short circuited by the lightning that burst through the night sky. But he could see, as though it were bright daylight. They were dead, both of them, laying in a pool of their blood, rich and dark red, the rain mixing with it, diluting it slowly, atom by atom. What have I done? he thought. His mind was racing. They were dead, he had ki–
Roy slammed the book shut, breathing heavily, sweat trickling down his face. It was so resembling, so alike, he suddenly felt crushed under the weight of the sins he had committed during Ishbal. All those lives he took and the memories that went with them seemed to force open the door in his mind that he kept shut so tightly. He looked at its cover again. The Sins that Bind Us. The words seemed to echo in his mind, racing, scurrying like tiny mice across his brain. Distantly, an alarm clock burst into fanfare. It was five in the morning now. Time to get ready for work.