Disclaimer: I don't own Fullmetal Alchemist. If I did, why the hell would I be writing fanfiction about it? xD

Just a little plot bunny that's been bouncing up and down in my head at the worst times..ah well. Enjoy.

"Look, the sun's coming up, Roy," Maes murmured, desprately fighting to break the silence as he plopped down onto the sand beside the Major.

A low, animalistic whimper escaped Mustang as he struggled to remember how to do something as simple as speak. "What's wrong with me, Hughes?" he whispered, a gravelly noise replacing his elegant voice. "What's wrong with me? What's wrong with me?"

The man beside Maes was unrecognizable, as much an animal as his whimpers. Dark hair fell unkemptly and masked even darker eyes; like there was anything to see. The fire behind his eyes died the second that unnamed woman did-the way she fell to the ground..the way she screamed..

Maes had seen it all- seen the way she melted and the way Roy's face twisted in horror, illuminated by fire..

"Roy." The bespectacled man gently rested a calloused palm on Major Mustang's shoulders, as if expecting him to simply wither away and begone with the wind. "Roy. You did what you had to. It's okay." Maes hadn't never seen The Mustang mask so completely obliterated-where was Mustang's arrogant cool now? Did it perish too along with his fire, the light that made him so determined, so genuinely Roy?

"She had a child, Maes. It screamed." The same gravelly rumble emitted itself from his mouth, sending shivers down his spine. Roy hadn't honestly joined the military and expected to get off scott-free, had he? His friend was surely more wise than that..

"She had a gun..and I-I..I snapped and.." Roy's words had become nothing more than fragmented splices of the alphabet, swirled together in uncomprehinsable stutters. Those weren't possibly words coming from the man's mouth. Words couldn't sound so broken, so dead..

"Look, the sunrise is so pretty. I used to watch them with Gracia, back home, when she thought about me being gone. It's nice to think she sees the same colors we see, in this bloody desert sky," Maes answered, watching the red of the sky reflected gently onto Roy's face, how it made him look so much more innocent so much less a murderer.. He turned and pressed his back reassuringly against the Flame's, Amestrian blue on Amestrian blue.

"It's okay."

His gesture spoke volumes in that smothering dusty, sandy air. And the two men, clad in the same blood-soaked uniforms, haunted by the same ghosts whether they could admit it or not, sat back to back and watched the warmth of the sun slip above the horizon.

Roy dared to blink, and the tell-tale taste of dirt and grit was replaced with the scent of fresh, wet earth. He tilted his head back to examine the sky; it too was no longer a yawning expanse of endless blue- only the sky, the simple tree-obstructed sky above Central City, bearing the colors of a rising dawn.

"I never did care much for sunrises, Hughes," Roy muttered, shaking dark locks out of his face. The switch in his brain flipped back, and the cool, collected mask slipped over raw emotion as he stood and brushed memories away like dust from a uniform.

Mustang turned on his heel and silently stole away from the cemetary, casting one last saddened look at the fresh marble tombstone that trapped his lifeline under six feet of dirt.

"I still don't really," he whispered, compelled into finishing the thought as if that lifeless headstone could hear and wished to know. "I could care less about them."

And at his back, the sun continued rising, the colors splayed out across a dim sky for those who cared and those that claimed they didn't.

Thanks for reading!

~FullMetalCrayon~