Roy watches his tremoring hands with tired eyes and feels the metal of the gun shake in his mouth. When he finally pulls the trigger his mouth will flood with blood and the taste of cooper. He can't help but wonder if he'll get to taste it - his blood, the cooper taste of his blood - or will he'd be immediately dead. Roy can't help but think of the few men and one woman Madame Chris had shot. The ones he's seen are such a small number he can count them with less than five fingers.
Even though he isn't looking, Roy's words, or rather the last two sentences of Roy's soulmate, mock Roy in his mind. He glances down at the top of his wrist and it takes longer than it should to read them. Roy blames the alcohol he'd been drinking as he stared at where he murdered two doctors, maybe it's the shakiness in his hands he had scrubbed raw, or the smell of gun powder and the heavy scent of blood. Except the smell isn't real. It's just something Roy is imagining, something the alcohol that he can still taste in his mouth, along with the cool metal of the military standard issued gun, had festered. With how the war kept dragging on (burnt children littering the desert sand, he can smell their flesh even when he breaths with his mouth) in the unforgiving heat of Ishval, and restless nights had most likely helped the alcohol with that festering.
(Roy had never thought he'd miss the overwhelming smell of smoke from cigars and the smell of sex from his aunt's brothel but what he wouldn't give for those two things to be what he smelled. For a cold glass of alcohol- the bottle he'd drank had tasted of warm piss that had just made Roy more thirsty in the end but the only thing in his mouth was the cold, unforgiving barrel of a gun.)
His finger tightens but doesn't pull back. Roy's eyes are on his mark. The words taunt him - they had tainted him along with his naive need to help his country by joining his government. The very government that had made him put bullets in a pair of doctors who were trying to help anyone who needed it.
There's saliva on the shaking barrel and Roy's exhausted eyes are still on his words, the last words his soulmate will ever say to him.
Roy has never hated 'Goodbye General' so much until now. He'd had half heartedly cursed the two words in the academy when his body was sore but now he hates them and it seems like his body is weighed down. Perhaps they're weighed by exhaustion and regret Roy feels. He had only wanted to help and all he'd done was murder hundreds.
He doesn't hate the other - the first - sentence though.
'Even when our eyes are closed, there's a whole world out there that lives outside ourselves and our dreams.'
Instead he feels like he's doing more wrong by ending it, taking his life before Roy keeps taking others (until smoke is all he can see in the sky, flesh is all he can smell and it makes his stomach turn with the rations ready to stain the desert as well as blood and empty bullet cartridges).
He wonders what they're like. What would have made them say something like that.
Roy will never know.
A/N: Originally posted on ao3 under youngjusticewriter. First part of the Icarus series.
So my first attempt on writing a soulmate au (victuuri) it was sad and I had asked myself why my first soulmate au was sad.
My second soulmate au is about a suicide attempt. I am unfortunately seeing a trend here.
The last two sentences Edward says Roy before he dies: Even when our eyes are closed, there's a whole world out there that lives outside ourselves and our dreams.
Goodbye General.