AN: Watching the original anime, I just always saw her eyes this color, and for the majority of the show, I thought this premise was true. Once I figured out it totally wasn't, I thought it'd make a good story anyway :-)
Disclaimer: Don't own FMA.
Sherry. Wine. Burgundy. Plum.
So many descriptions she'd heard in awed-intimidated-scared voices. As a child, she hadn't understood. None of these adjectives quite fit— in mirrors she'd always seen a vivid crimson looking back at her, like blood. The one time she'd mentioned it to her father—(Daddy…aren't they just red?)—he'd shushed her and muttered that no, of course, never, what have they been saying to her? Never mention it again, he'd told her crossly, and she knew that was the most she'd ever get out of him.
He'd never given a better name for them, however, and from then on their visits to the village, already infrequent, became more of an annual thing. They grew what they needed off the land, and they didn't need any village busybodies poking their noses where they didn't belong, the old man harrumphed.
She found she understood a great deal more after she found him asleep hunched over his desk, clutching a crinkled photograph of a stunning, dark-skinned young woman with eyes like hers.
How unique!
Such rich color.
Like they see right through you…
Cold for a child her age, wouldn't you say?
They were uncommon. Unusual. Unsettling. They captured people, forced outsiders to find a color, an adjective, something to stick over that disconcerting gaze.
People were happier with labels.
Not from around here, that's for sure!
Must've come from her mother's side, we never did see her, 'member? Master Hawkeye just happened in one day, babe in hand.
A bit of albino genes, perhaps…
Some sort of mutation?
Of course people talked. In small towns such as hers, each piece of gossip was habitually whispered, dissected and exhausted, then recycled for next week's luncheon. The recluse alchemist and his quiet daughter were a popular topic for the women desperate to forget monotonous lives over coffee and stale scones.
So possibilities were entertained and assumptions were made, and life continued.
Freakish!
You don't belong here.
Your mom must've been a witch…
What are you looking at?
While their parents might speak in hushed tones and meaningful glances, children have no such qualms. They fear which that they do not know. She hardened her heart and moved on. Homeschooling was much more efficient, anyway.
Seasons came and seasons went. He came, and for the first time:
Beautiful.
And for a while, her eyes were lighter.
Then came the shot that changed the world, and the terrible cold realization that she would be betrayed by what set her apart.
She bought glasses and learned to make her gaze blank.
Then he left, and his master died, and every day she stayed was a day someone down in the little village might look up from the paper with an idea tickling the back of their tongue about the strange-eyed, solemn-faced girl hidden away in the shoddy farmhouse a few miles out.
She buried her father alone and headed to Central on the next train out: From the frying pan into the fire, so to speak. But regardless of her father's beliefs, perhaps there was safety in numbers.
Wow!
Incredible.
Never seen such marksmanship…
How soon can she go to the front lines?
With recruitment, she resurrected the albino rumor and never took her glasses off. No one questioned her, but when the Fuhrer inspected the new recruits, try as she might to avoid making eye contact, he held his gaze on her (just long enough for her to know he knew) before he winked and continued down the line.
She didn't sleep that night, or the night after that, posed to flee should the so-called 'purge patrols' come sniffing around the dorms. After the third night she figured the Fuhrer had dismissed his suspicions. (Or was letting her stay for some unknown reason, cried her deepest premonitions; perhaps for his own entertainment?)
And with her talent, no one dug deeper. The other recruits joked that 'Hawkeye' sure was a fitting surname, but the higher-ups cared only for the accuracy, never what lay behind the lenses.
People only saw what they wanted to see, wasn't that it?
Then came the desert. It was hot, dangerously so, but while her comrades wilted around her, she stood strong. The heat had never bothered her. Her skin darkened but never burned, and she was unable to sympathize the painful peeling of her fellow Amestrians.
Once they caught up to the main forces, where a man rumored to be the 'hero' of Ishbal waited, she was immediately ushered to an abandoned (forcibly so, judging from the blood spattered up the stairs) rooftop and told to shoot anything that moved.
It was fine at first; she had already resolved this with herself, that this was war and she would do what must be done. She had her orders, and she wouldn't hesitate to take out an insurgent. But the hours passed, and the ceaseless sun beat down upon her and distorted her vision, light gathering and multiplying in the corners of the glasses she didn't need until she wasn't sure where the scope was and she reached up to stop the sweat from stinging her eyes and knocked her lenses off instead. But, oh, there was movement and a squeeze and a shot.
And then she blinked and suddenly everything was clear like never before. The sand-coated buildings and debris-littered roads and the bright red blood spreading out from the dust-caked dark-skinned too-young body.
Her glasses lay shattered two floors below and it was suddenly crucial that she go down and retrieve them and if she could collect all the shards and make them whole again then maybe she could keep on pretending that nothing was wrong, that she was normal or albino and not what the Fuhrer had known.
So she hurried down the blood-spattered stairs and down to the debris-littered street and grabbed for glass until her hands bled. But it still wasn't right because she could see every grain of sand stained red from the blood in the street and every pore of the woman who knelt beside the body and wailed. She still couldn't find the last piece of glass until she looked up and saw the woman standing over her with a shaking jagged knife and when she met her eyes the woman saw and knew. And the woman screamed at her in a grief-cracked voice (a murderer, a murderer of her own people) and something broke deeper than the glasses and her oh-so carefully constructed denial crack-splinter-shattered.
And then there was a snap and a split-second inferno that scorched her fingertips and erased the wailing woman, and he was there. And he knelt and looked her in the eyes and she could see the pain there and the sacrifice and everything that had passed since he left, plain as day in the hot desert sun. And in her eyes he saw what she had tried to deny up until the desert showed what was impossible to hide. (Red. Always red.) She saw this knowledge and she waited to see anger-disgust-hatred but all that came was shock-fear and a fierce protectiveness.
And he uncurled her shaking fingers and carefully picked out the glass from her palms and brought her burning fingertips to his cheek where she felt just a prick of wet. Then he piled up the glass and drew a circle with the blood and made her glasses whole again.