Author's Notes:
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Summary: Transmuted into the heart of the Ishvalan War at the age of thirteen, Sakura must learn to survive in Amestris as she is forced to participate in the genocide. With no where left to go after the war, she is adopted by Roy Mustang and must continue forward, trying to find a way home among the chaos of the military and the Elric brothers. Parental Roy!
Thank you for reading and I do not, nor ever will, own Fullmetal Alchemist or Naruto.
Please remember to read, review, and enjoy!
Chapter 6: Beautiful Weapons
~Sakura's POV~
"Sorry. Sorry. Sorry." I limped up the wall, each step a battle within itself. Nothing was responding right, foreign limbs attached to a foreign brain in a foreign land where nothing made sense. Nothing was working right. Everything was tripping over everything making movement impossible. My left leg had been shot again, only grazed luckily. But still, the blood loss was enough to make my head spin. Or maybe that was the chakra exhaustion or the overuse of the barely functioning prostheses or the pain. Or maybe it was just the fact that I had killed them.
I had killed them.
I had done that.
Eyes wide, sightless. Oh Kami. Those eyes would never see again. Neck twisted around. Mouth open. But there were no words. Oh Kami. No words came out of his mouth. Oh Kami! He was just lying there. What had I done?
WHAT HAD I DONE?!
Oh Kami, they were dead. And it was because of me.
I had killed them. Like a monster, I had destroyed them, ripped them apart and crushed their bones, ground them down to sand in this goddamned fucking desert! Didn't this desert ever end? Didn't it ever fucking end?! I was going to go crazy, locked away in the heat and the fire and the war and the sand. I had done that. I'd bought my life from Truth and this is what it had gotten me. Death and destruction and madness, so much madness. Even the men were going mad, locked out here. Ishval wasn't a desert, it was a cage.
And I had destroyed them. I fought for survival with tooth and nail and claws I didn't even know I had.
Just like a true shinobi.
I was a shinobi now, inducted by the blood and the gore that decorated me and the images that hung before my eyes like paper stars. I'd used to wish for that. One every star I saw, I used to wish that I could be a shinobi. And now the stars danced before my eyes, laughing at me now that I'd gotten my wish.
I'd been blooded. I'd killed. I could see their mangled corpses before my eyes, no longer just a fantasy, no longer something out of Kakashi-sensei's stories from his ANBU days. I was a real shinobi now. I had my own stories, my own battles, and my own scars. And it wasn't going to end. It wasn't just, go out, kick ass, fall in love, marry Sasuke, the end. It was different now.
It was reality.
I was a real shinobi. And real shinobi were murderers.
My eyes were glued to the sky, watching the blood-flecked clouds move over the landscape. It was like red cotton candy floating through the sky. Everything seemed painted with blood, dripping with it. I could feel it peeling away my skin, drenching my bones and my lungs- oh Kami, why couldn't I breathe right?- and dripping off of me as well. Was that why it was so hard to move? Was I just wading through the blood now? Was I drowning it?
I could still hear them echoing in my ears, the screams. I could understand now, what they said. I could hear every single word and I knew what it meant. I could hear them begging and I hadn't been able to stop. I just had to keep going and keep going and keep going until I died.
Is this what Itachi felt like when he killed his clan? Did he feel the blood? Had he shouted angrily or done it numbly, stared in abject horror as the bodies dropped? Is this what Sasuke felt like when he walked into it? Did he feel the weight of the massacre crushing his bones? Could he physically feel the death? Could he see how miserable it would make him, how twisted he'd become because of it? Had he known?! Had he known, like I knew now, that it would kill him, that this would kill me?
I reached the top of the wall, stumbling over the surface. I could see it now, both sides. The harsh rigidity of the military tents and the morbid desolation of the Ishvalan town. I was on the border caught between the blood and the pristine, the dead and the horribly alive, the fire and the even hotter fire. I swayed slightly, propelling myself over the wall, moving towards home. My cot in the med tents. That was the only home left for me at the moment. I didn't have anywhere else to go. It was all I had left. I just had to keep moving. Keep going. Stumbling down the wall. Down and down and down.
I could feel my face hit the dirt, body stuck to the ground, mind off in space, head reeling. Head reeling. Head reeling. What happened? Oh Kami, it hurt. Everything just hurt. When had I gotten down here? How had I ended up down here? Down in the dirt and the sand and the heat of the desert? What happened? "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry." Why was everything still covered in blood? Why?!
"Sakura!" Masutangu-san? I could feel his hands against my skin, could feel… Could feel the blood slipping between my broken fingers. Could still feel their fingers as they tried to pry me off loved ones. Could still feel their blades as they tried to stop me. I could feel everything. It was too much. Too much. Too much feeling. I didn't want to feel like this.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Please forgive me. Please forgive me. I'm sorry!"
"It's okay, Sakura." Masutangu-san's voice was reassuring, trying to take some of the burden from me, some of the pain. But that was my pain, my burden. I couldn't let him take it from me. He had enough and I, I was too fresh a killer to let it leave. I had just killed at least a hundred people, maybe more. I'd lost count, never really kept track. Too many lives had been lost. And it was all my fault. All my fault. All my fault.
WHAT HAD I DONE?!
"No."
Nothing was okay.
I had killed them. They were dead because of me!
All my fault. All my fault. All my fault.
And then the world faded to black and I succumbed to the nightmares and the pain.
~Roy's POV~
"Hughes!" I whispered fiercely, shaking him awake. He woke with a snort as he flinched back from the touch, what seemed like the hands of an unidentified intruder. It was habit now for most of us, flinching away from unknown hands. They were untrustworthy, they were the first sign of waking up in a torture room. But we'd tried to protect ourselves as much as possible, making shifts with friends. One person slept while the other one guarded. It was about the best we could do.
But the screaming had kept most of us awake during the respite in our fighting. Truth be told, I'd been surprised by the large amount. I thought that she wouldn't have been able to cause damage like that. She was barely thirteen and even if she was able to take down much of the sixth division, they were green and unsure. The Ishvalans would kill her in a heartbeat. I thought I would have to burn away her corpse just like the others.
But there she was, standing above her victory, standing at the top of the wall, barely conscious by the looks of it. She was hanging on to the last remains of functionality, her eyes already half lidded and unfocused. She was swaying, trying to make her way down the wall. Stumbling across the dirtied wall, she dragged her left leg behind her slightly. But it was impossible to tell where she'd really been injured because of the blood.
She was covered with it as expected. From the little I had gathered, her fighting style depended on close quarters, meaning that she would be on the receiving end of the gore. And then she was falling, smashing into the dirt from fifteen feet up. I didn't look away this time, knowing where she would end up. She hit the ground with a sickening crash, her arms bent awkwardly beneath her in a futile attempt to catch herself. She let out a small cry of pain, but it was obvious that she couldn't feel much anymore.
"Shit! Sakura!" I was running to her, trying to gain purchase with the ground as I sprinted over. She was gasping, trying to find air to breathe with. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Kimblee sneering at this so called "affection" that was weak. But shit, I couldn't just leave her like that. She was under my protection! I had watched too many of my men die.
Like hell would I leave a kid to get slaughtered as well.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," she whispered, over and over again. I could see her tear tracts clearly, the only areas clean of the blood. Everywhere else had been splattered, decorated with the splattering of bloody roses. Her eyes were wide, unfocused from the pain or the emotional trauma. She wasn't aware, slipping into Japanese, but I could still understand what she was saying. I'd uttered the same words so many times as I scorched the land barren.
"Please forgive me. Please forgive me." Fire exploded from my fingers, scorching the landscape. I tried to block out the screaming, the incessant wailing, tried to stop breathing so I wouldn't have to breathe in the acrid smoke, tried to stop seeing the walls collapse in on each other and smash everything. Everything around me exuded the scent of my flames, of burning. My flames. My burning. I had done this to them. I had torched them.
Was that all I was now? A beautiful weapon, carefully shaped and cared for by the military?
It was no wonder they called the Flame Alchemist. That's all I had left, the flames and the fire and the burning and these goddamned flames! It's all I ever saw, sand and flames and burning and corpses oh God, why couldn't it just stop?! Why couldn't the fucking flames ever just end?! Why wouldn't they just stop?! I didn't want this anymore! I didn't want-
"Roy, I think you need a break." Hughes. Don't burn Hughes. Can't burn Hughes. He's a friend.
I turned an eye to him, staring at his face. His face was lined with ash as well, nose slightly burnt from the sun. There were lines beneath his eyes from exhaustion and stress, complementing his bruised eyes from insomnia. His eyebrows were knit together in the telltale signs of concern, but he was trying to smile gently in comfort as well and all it did was construe the whole damn picture! Damn it, Hughes! I didn't need a break! I couldn't break!
He was worried for me, thought I was cracking under the pressure. I would not crack. I couldn't break. I couldn't just go insane like Kimblee and abandon myself to the madness he freely accepted. But I couldn't just become one of the mindless drones working for the military without a real thought about what I was doing. I couldn't do that to myself, even if it was easier. I couldn't do anything except struggle on like this and it hurt. God damn it, it fucking hurt!
But hell if I'd let Hughes in on that. I couldn't let him burn alive.
"No! I'm fine!"
Snap.
There went another life.
"It's okay, Sakura," I whispered, trying to reassure her again that what she had done was natural. Anyone in her position would have. Everyone was just trying to save themselves in this war. We were all doing it. We had been ordered to. Just like she had.
"No," she stated, stubbornly resisting comfort. Did she feel like she wasn't deserving of it, that she wasn't deserving of comfort? of salvation? Not that I could blame her. Most everyone here thought that. But she? She was different. She had her entire life ahead of her.
And then she finally surrendered to unconsciousness, eyes shutting as she sealed herself off from the world. She shut down, broke off from reality, hid from the horror of the desert. "Sakura... Sakura, wake up," I whispered, shaking her gently as to not start any bleeding again if she was injured.
It was only a few seconds before Fessler appeared on the battlefront, cap pulled low over his eyes to guard against the sun, against the blood and the image of what he had ordered her to do. "Lower the walls! Everyone on guard!" Fessler eagerly shouted, signaling to two other alchemists to lower the barrier. He smiled, waiting with a restless energy. It was a moment before the walls lowered, settling out into the ground. The dust took a few more seconds to settle, but nothing came through. And then we saw it all.
The destruction of a shinobi.
Nothing was left of the village, nothing at all. Practically every single building had been leveled, most looking like they'd been eaten away by some sort of acid. The structures had all been toppled, walls thrown across each other like dominoes. "Sakura, what did you do?" I asked the dead air, staring at the wreckage that had become apparent. There was even more stretching on, piles of it all around.
And then there were the bodies.
Those were in the same state as the buildings, thrown carelessly to the side. I heard one that was still moaning in agony as he tried to cling to life, but everything else was silent. Even the desert wind had calmed down in a moment of respect for its dead. We were silent, staring at it. Most just couldn't make a sound, too horrified by everything. The bodies were twisted, arms and legs and necks hanging at strange angles. Heads and chests had been caved in, blood spreading around in an explosion. And some, some were only half there, corroded away by the acid.
I tried not to look, but my eyes were frozen, glued to the scene with a half-recognition.
I had seen corpses like this before. Half there, eyes glassy, mouth open, charred beyond recognition. But still, seeing this reminded me too much of it. I could practically smell the fire in the air as I torched down buildings. The scream of the walls as they collapsed inwards. The familiar smell of burning flesh. But she had downright demolished the buildings and then killed them individually with kicks. She'd gotten up and close with every one, killing every single thing in that town, looking every single one of them in the eyes as she tore them down. No one should ever have had to do something that drastic at her age. Or ever.
I looked down at her, feeling her thin frame. It hardly seemed possible that she had caused all that destruction. This girl was only a child and yet, she'd been able to do that?! What else could she do? But my worries were interrupted by the sound of laughter.
Fessler's laughter.
"And what beautiful weapon have we found ourselves?" he laughed, drawing out the words with as much bravado as he could manage. "Mustang, excellent job finding her." I had to restrain myself, couldn't kill him however much I wanted to. God, the sick bastard. She was unconscious. These people were dead. And he was laughing. "Mustang, take her to Marcoh. Bring her to me when she wakes up. Kimblee, take a few men and search the wreckage for any survivors." I saluted sharply, picking up the limp girl in my arms.
"Don't get too attached, Mustang," Kimblee called out, smiling with his typical manic laughter shining in his eyes. I wondered if he'd always been like that before Ishval or had something snapped? Had he saved himself from the screaming of the Ishvalans by reveling in it? "She'll be dead soon enough, just another fool killed in Ishval." He laughed again, completely ignoring Fessler as he sauntered towards the town. He was already shrugging off his jacket, tossing it at a private he'd dragged with him.
"Hughes," I quietly said, turning to the man. "Bring McKine to the med tent. The prostheses have got to be ruined from the blood. He'll need to fix them." Hughes nodded, sending a last searching glance at me before he took off to find McKine. I could feel the stares on my back as I walked away, the prying eyes trying to figure out exactly what my relationship was with the strange new weapon.
But that wasn't important at the moment. I had to get Sakura medical attention. She could be dying and I would have no way of knowing. It was impossible to tell what exactly her injuries were when she was covered in all that blood. It was impossible to tell whether it was hers or theirs. God, she was practically soaked in it. It was dripping off of her, marking our path. I guess it really didn't matter at that point.
She was covered in blood and she was far too young.
