Chapter started: 1/17/07

Chapter finished: 1/20/07

Disclaimer: Rallalon does not own FMA. Nor does she own any of its places, characters or items.

Yep, I should be spending my week before finals studying, but this is what ends up coming out in my notebook. If I update again before the 26th, please do me a favor and yell at me to do something productive. Thankya.

.-.-.-.-.

Havoc didn't know what the total casualties had been and he was very sure that he didn't want to know. Just looking around the wreck Central had become was enough. Not ruin, though. They weren't at that point.

Not yet.

If it was, he would have had a major conflict over running back here in the confusion to the hastily erected hospital tents. Currently, another duty was more pressing than identifying corpses: care for the living before the dead, after all. Truth be told, he was still damn irritated over what he had to do. He knew Riza had issues dealing with the Colonel nowadays, but... She was wrong. Either about the man's condition or for leaving him alone with it. God, he hoped it was the former. The memory of a kid crossed his mind, a kid who he'd first met as a suit of armor, a kid who had only looked at him questioningly and asked for his name.

If he hadn't been running already and half exhausted to boot, he would have broken into a sprint.

As it was, he nearly ran past the man, noticing the eye patch only after a double take. With Mustang holding his head like that, it was hard to tell. His posture was completely off, too. That was clear even with him sitting against the wall like that. Gone was the confident general of an hour ago; this man was uncomfortably similar to the beaten corporal he and Breda had visited up in the north, defeated and half-dead, broken and afraid of himself.

Shit.

"Chief!" Havoc called, dashing over, jumping over minor debris until he stood before the man. Panting, he hunkered down and looked the other man straight in the eye. "Chief, tell me you know who I am." It had disturbed the hell out of him, that blank look, when it was only coming from a boy he barely knew. From the Colonel, it... it would --

"Havoc," Mustang replied in the over-articulated tone of a man with a very large headache, "shut the hell up."

Chuckling from sheer relief, Havoc sat down next to him, making sure to keep on his right side. In automatic motion, his hands sought out a cigarette from his pockets. It was in his mouth before he'd realized what he was doing and then it was too late to stop. That small mood boost immediately let up, bringing him crashing right back down. Feeling all sorts of guilty, he pulled out his lighter, flicked out a flame and breathed in that good old nicotine. It wasn't so much a bad habit to him as a comfort thing, and right now, Havoc would have given a lot for a little bit of comfort.

Mustang hadn't looked at him.

Great. Now he had to figure out how to bring the topic up on his own. Or wait it out of him. Seeing that look on his face, Havoc quickly concluded that whatever option which involved keeping his mouth shut was the option to take.

It was a slow minute before Mustang spoke. "I've been thinking about this."

"Oh?" Havoc asked noncommittally, hoping Mustang would keep talking without anything more than gentle prompting.

"From his dealing with – with the Gate," Mustang continued, as if he hadn't been about to mention human transmutation, "Alphonse Elric's memories of his time as a suit of armor were taken from him. Due to equal exchange."

"I'd thought of that," Havoc replied without thinking. True, he didn't know much about that whole Gate thing, but the equal exchange part of alchemy applying to some really random stuff, he was familiar with.

From the look Mustang gave him, his earlier fear was understood. Still, that was enough of a break to allow the man to slip back into silence.

He'd really hoped he wouldn't have to prompt. So much for that. "So what did you do, chief? That made equal exchange apply?"

"I closed the Gate."

"And that's what those things came through." This was half-statement, half-question.

"It was," Mustang replied tiredly, emphasizing his use of the past tense.

"Damn," Havoc said appreciatively.

Mustang closed his eye and nodded, leaning back against the wall behind him. Havoc stayed where he was, watching the growing lines in front of the hospital tent with an increasingly guilty feeling. That was a lot to think about. It was also a lot that Havoc would rather not think about.

But Riza had asked him. Actually, she was expecting him to do this or face the classic Hawkeye Rage of Death. That was the same thing, or close enough to it. He'd get through this and then immediately get back to rounding up the wounded. First things first: they needed Mustang to seize command again, to organize and rally them in the way he always seemed to manage so effortlessly. The chain of command had been shoved on its ass and the man most capable of picking it back up again was… in need of some help.

"Chief?"

"Mm." At the very least, Mustang did look at him.

"What did you think you'd be giving up?"

Silence stretched out between the pair despite the clamor around them, Havoc carefully watching the other man's face and pointedly setting aside the terrible feeling of having far better things to do. Watching Mustang was as good as hearing a reply.

"Chief..." Havoc began, not knowing where to start but recognizing a familiar transition when he found one, "...why were you willing to die?"

In any other situation, Mustang's response would have been aggravatingly vague, frustratingly useless. In this context, the meaning was as clear as it was horrific.

Mustang closed his eye once more and said, "I don't remember."

"Please tell me that's not what you said to Hawkeye." God, that would kill her, plain and simple.

What Mustang said next was worse on so many levels. "Who?"

Havoc stared.

"Oh." Mustang looked away, a man who didn't even know how upset he should have been. "Her."

"Yeah," Havoc replied, a strong edge to his voice. "Her."

"She wouldn't tell me her name." Mustang made this sound like a strange sort of apology, as if it wasn't his fault he didn't remember.

Well, prompted a small part of Havoc's overwhelmed mind, isn't it? No. No it wasn't. Mustang hadn't willingly sacrificed Hawkeye to the Door o' Alchemy. He had only... He'd only tried to end it all while 'serving his country in the best way he knew how'. Damn. That's messed up. But wasn't that so in-character for the man? The newly promoted Brigadier General who nearly had died assassinating the Fuhrer? It was a part of him that had always been there, always been peeking out since before Havoc had known him, ever since Ishbal. But never had it been this noticeably there, this blatantly obvious.

Realizing Mustang was waiting for an answer, Havoc replied belatedly, "That's First Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye." This was so wrong. So wrong. "You saw her a few hours ago, right after you saw me and Breda. I mean, I saw you two together. Breda and Fuery and Falman and Major Armstrong... We saw you," he finished weakly.

This time when Mustang looked at him, yet another realization struck them both. Each was waiting for the other to reveal this as a prank; each was hoping for that more than anything else. And if it was both of them, the pair realized as they stared at one another, than it had to be neither.

…Shit. This was worse than – than – than… This was worse than withdrawal, worse than the shaking, worse than coughing up a dead black lung, worse than the cold sweats during sleepless nights. This was watching Mustang go through it, watching him stripped of an unkickable habit he didn't even know he had. Havoc knew from one part personal experience and two parts morbid imagination that when the chief's shakes hit, they were more likely than not going to shake him apart.

"Are you sure, Havoc?" Mustang asked at last, pressing for something, some gap in the story.

"She was there."

"Then I didn't see her."

"You spoke to her."

Mustang looked straight ahead, his brow furrowing, his headache obviously growing worse. "I didn't." His tone dared the blond man to contradict.

"Yes you did," Havoc disputed. As Mustang's gaze fell upon him, Havoc got the strong feeling that he would be made to regret it.

"That was barely two hours ago." The fact that he was missing an eye failed to weaken Mustang's glare in the slightest.

"I know."

Much to his credit, Mustang didn't say anything Havoc was dreading, all the clichéd amnesiac lines that no man should seriously utter. There was no "This can't be happening", no "it's all a lie!" and – thankfully – none of that "Who am I? Where am I? And who the hell are you?" Mustang simply rubbed at his face tiredly, not so much as a sigh escaping him.

To Havoc, this wordless acceptance of defeat was infinitely worse.

So what if he was actively trying to convince the man? He shouldn't just accept it. He shouldn't just give in. Havoc didn't know exactly what Mustang should have done, but this wasn't it. The man wasn't simply taking this sitting down; he was taking it propped up against a wall!

All right… If Mustang hadn't forgotten the event but had edited out Hawkeye from his memory, what was an event that Hawkeye couldn't be erased from? Not without the event still making sense.

"Hey, Chief, just checking, but what happened to you when you were recovering from the coup?"

Clearly not following this change of topic, Mustang's eye searched Havoc's face. "What do you mean?"

"Where were you, when you were recovering? Who took care of you?" Poker face, poker face, keep it on, keep it up…

Mustang dropped his gaze, an action Havoc would never get used to, not when coming from him. The former-general frowned, brow creasing, his hand rising to his temple. His eye went back and forth, watching some unseen specter or searching for that lost piece of information. Either way, either one, it was creepy as hell to watch.

"I was at the hospital," Mustang replied in a clipped tone, in a pained voice. "There was." He didn't so much trail off as end the sentence right there.

"There was what, chief?" Havoc prompted, watching in deep concern and morbid fascination.

"A doctor. Some nurses. That's – that's what I remember. I remember that." Mustang was still looking down, his eye still moving sightlessly. A wince drew his mouth into a scowl, his left hand protectively over the eye patch. "That's what I remember," Mustang repeated, as if the blond man might have missed it the first time.

Havoc had never heard him sound so unsure. "Chief-"

"That's what I remember!" Mustang snapped with the rage of the wounded. "That's what happened!"

Both quickly became aware of the looks Mustang's yells had attracted. This was going all wrong. Instead of getting everyone calmed down, Mustang was likely to create a panic, himself first among the members.

"Chief?" Havoc ventured. "Can you work through this, just for now? Take command again?" Attempting vainly to redirect Mustang's ire, he added, "Don't tell me you're afraid of a court martial?"

Mustang's expression said a lot of things. First among them was the word "no".

"Unless you'd rather stay here and talk about Hawkeye."

It was an amazing thing, Havoc thought as Mustang stood up and gave him that reproachful look. Even without remembering the woman, she was still an effective threat.

"All right, I'll try," Mustang agreed at last, reassuringly stable on his feet if not in his mind. "It's not as if I've anything else left to lose."

And that, Havoc thought but wisely did not say aloud, is exactly the problem.