#52 – Justice; Royai, Fullmetal Alchemist
In a sense, they were monsters. They all were.
They carried the guilt that came with the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives – all innocents, all dead, all because of them – Ishvalan and military personnel alike, although there were much fewer military casualties than there were Ishvalan. That didn't mean that they were any less scarred or affected by the war; even those who didn't carry with them the weight of guilt for killing civilians felt somehow that this war was not as justified as it should have been. Amestris knew that this Ishvalan war had no real purpose, whether consciously or subconsciously.
With his guilt even then, during the war, he had used his knowledge to burn villages and incinerate innocents, simply because he had been given orders to do so. He had once had an idealistic, hopeful dream for his future, but it was difficult to keep sight of it when he was surrounded by such devastation and death. He wasn't sure if he was the same person who'd come into this war. Who knew that his alchemy would come with a body count that was so high that he had lost track of it? The weight of their lost souls pressed on him every day, harder and more heavily than the sun beating down on his back.
She had given him that knowledge, allowed him in on her secret and lain on her stomach for hours so that he could study her back and decipher the code inscribed there. She had followed him into the military academy and trained for his idealist hope for the future. She shot thousands of people on the battlefield that Ishval had become and convinced herself that they weren't dying (even though she shot for the heart on orders every time, and she never missed a shot) no, they weren't dying they had simply suffered an attack of narcolepsy and that pool of red at their chests wasn't blood it was only…
They both failed to convince themselves that they weren't murderers after seeing the blood and charred skin.
His eyes darkened and became killer's eyes, cold and calculating and destroyed like the villages he was destroying. He left his hopeful, idealistic views behind and became a cynic. The one thing that may have kept him himself during those years was his friend the optimist, living for his wife back home despite how many times he was warned to put his pictures away for fear of bad omens coming true. And even he became notably more serious on the warfront, sobering the then-major more than anything else could.
She was still technically in school – wit was her final year as a cadet – but she had seen and done more than some actual soldiers had, and her eyes and expressions more than exemplified this. The once-shy and simply reserved young woman she was had transformed into a stoic, closed-off cadet of the military. In her heart, however, she still clung to a shred of hope that he could reform the military from the inside, and so, even though she was meant to be protecting all military officers, she kept an eye out especially for him.
When they found each other and spoke face-to-face in the military camp, they knew that the other had changed immensely from the last time they had spoken. He despaired that she had eyes like his, and blamed herself for her entry into the military. She saw the guilt and strain in his expression, how different it was from the open look of hope he had worn when they had spoken after her father's funeral, and knew he would be only more determined now. So, she resolved, would she. They kept fighting, but with the knowledge that everything had changed now.
After the war was over, they were even more cemented as killers for simply trying to move on and forget it like the rest of Amestris was. In the same way, they were each other's solace in a way others could not be, since they were each other's reason for entering into and killing in that war. And, with the scars on her back and newfound, personal guilt in his heart, they found the courage to move on together. Perhaps move on, yes, but never forget.
There was not justice in that war. No justice in the way they had all brutally murdered in Ishval during those years. No justice in finding out, years later, that it had all been a ploy to create the world's largest philosopher's stone for the creator of the homunculi.
Justice was a vague term, but one they both believed in and fought for. And through near fatal wounds, threats, murder attempts, and loss of sight, she protected his back and he protected hers. It didn't matter what happened, as long as they were together and fighting for the ideal they both believed in so strongly.