Staircase
A FMA oneshot.
Summary: Roy Mustang took his best friend's death harder than anyone could have imagined. Not only does it plague his dreams, but every waking moment he is left feeling powerless. No matter who died, he had to keep taking that staircase up; and hope he doesn't fall the long way down.
Warning: This is rated T for dark depictions and themes.
It was pale, damp, and dark. Wooden beams, wooden structures, hands that seemed to arch upward with such a stretch they wished to reached the heavens. One window, crooked, broken, shattered, neglected. A face behind the panes. Whispers.
Silence.
A pattering footstep across the floor. Roy Mustang had been in this room many times, knew the contours like the flame alchemy symbol. There was no door, just walls and the window that he had no choice but to approach and lean out and hope he doesn't gag again.
But he does, he always does.
The ground was far from reach, dug as close to hell it could get. Poseidon bathed it in ugly red, sent the corpses drifting down the river of Styx without any hope of reaching Hades. They battered and beat against the structure; their dead moans carved out in Mustang's ears. His eyes searched the twisted faces, always found the same one.
Maes Hughes.
He was always on his back, always floating beneath the window, whisked away like he was in another coffin that Roy Mustang could not pry open. A pale body amongst a sea of tanner creatures, of ones who bore white hair and red eyes that he could not stand to look at very long.
Hesitation. Resolution. The glass shreds his palms.
He jumps anyway.
He fell, and fell, and fell. Gravity lashed at his face, but still he was reaching, reaching vainly out for the one body he could not get. Burnt flesh stung his nose. He screamed.
Silence.
Bloody river. No splash with the crash. Red-hot magma burning his limbs.
His sins scorched worse than alchemy.
It only reached his waist, so trudging through it, he searched, always searching, for the one body among the heads of Ishbalans.
Six steps. Another gag. Vomit only bile. Keep trudging on.
Crack, crack. Beneath his step he felt another snap, knew he was walking on bodies. They were buried beneath the waves and shown no mercy, just like he did, just as he had acted that bloody civil war.
Children always stopped screaming when he snapped his fingers.
He was suffocating on all of it, the noises, the smells. Roy Mustang felt a burn behind his eyes, the faint sliver of liquid down his cheek. He tried to whisk it away. His hand was stained with black.
He was crying black, bloody tears.
Maes Hughes was still reclining in the blood when he found him. His face was peaceful, unmoving, but when the alchemist reached down to capture what has been lost his face suddenly twisted and animated; his lifeless arm leaped with life and snatched up Roy's arm.
"You killed me, Roy!" He screeched, his face disgusted with the paled Colonel before him. "If you hadn't of been so lazy! If you would have worked like I was doing, I wouldn't have had to be alone! My wife and child would still have me!"
The grip burned him too.
Pictures. So many pictures, Roy Mustang thought he was drowning in them. The Civil War. A child crying, hiding behind a broken door. A wedding, a veiled face and a grinning man. A little girl, an infectious smile from ear to ear. The same child, weeping over a mound of dirt.
The Colonel fought to bring words to his lips, but by then, blood had spurted from his best friend's chest and splattered his face, Maes Hughes dying once again before his eyes as the river swallowed him whole and sunk him to the bottom. He would just be another person Roy Mustang walked on.
He dropped to his knees and searched. The liquid sloshed and was thick and tangled in his fingers, but all he felt was faces, faces of other people, screaming people, crying people. When he pulled out his hands, the decayed skin had stuck to them. He vomited a second time.
Darkness. A screaming voice.
"Oi, Mustang! Get up, you idiot!"
A stumbling Colonel. Animation, splashes; moans that stuck their grubby fingers in his ears and scratched. He tripped, went head first into the blood. When he came back up, he was spitting it out.
"You're worthless, you know that? Hurry up! You're keeping me waiting!"
Moving, always moving, getting nowhere. Same blood, same bodies. A house, tilting far to the left, built on a foundation of corpses. Mustang climbed the stair of spines to get to it.
Inside was dark. Long shadows that wrapped around the interior. He could see one thing and that was blond hair. He reached and grabbed nothing. Speaks, hears nothing. The blond hair shimmered as it turned.
"You're a worthless Colonel," Edward Elric sneered when he came face to face with the blood-covered man, "You couldn't even save your best friend. What good are you?"
Burning. He smelt it before he saw it, the flames that suddenly leapt under foot that had him staggering back. Edward watched unamused behind the fire.
The embers reached and always grabbed Mustang, snagging his uniform with the faintest flicker to reel him into the flames. The blood acted like the kerosene, tossed the food to the animal so it raced up his skin. A variation of seeing and not seeing, of blackness and fire until it all ended in darkness.
A jolt. The house was gone, so was the river and the bodies. Grass tickled his face. He raises himself up. Pale headstones in rows, teeth that in time will be pulled out and replaced again. A new one, bright, polished. Maes Hughes. Sitting right beside him like it was a friendly reunion.
Roy Mustang presses a hand to his face, felt the wetness. He wiped it and lifted his hand to his face. It was neither blood nor blackness; it was tears.
He spared a glance at his best friend's grave. Another photograph.
This one consumed his soul in flames of anguish.
He couldn't take it anymore, the visits, the dreams. Sunlight died when he rolled over on his knees, started digging his fingers into the dirt. Combining two fragments into one in his head.
A human transmutation symbol on his friend's grave.
A combination of his proposition and the Elric Brothers' results. Hands seemed to sink into the ground when he pressed them there. A breath. Two breaths. Tears. Tears that dribbled all over the ground. A fist in the transmutation circle. His fingers clawed at its outline.
It was futile, all of it was futile. A smiling man waving as the train left. A hand on his shoulder, firm and resolute. Roy Mustang had a plan, had a mission to achieve. He was going to be the Fuhrer.
But to do it, he had to use those corpses as his staircase up.
He was so worthless he couldn't find another way. He just had to stand on Maes Hughes' body and hope he doesn't break.
Another nightmare, this one waking, this one plaguing his life and not his dreams.
Whispers.
Silence.
Short little warm-up that was influenced by dark music. It's crazy what music does to me.
-Soul Spirit-