The mess tent, shaded by heavy canvas walls, doesn't feel any less hot than the baking desert outside, but it is at least darker. Roy Mustang rests his forehead on a table, closing his eyes and sprawling his right arm out in front of him. He can hear the clattering of silverware and the loud chatter of other voices, but he'd dropped into an empty table well away from the small crowd. His uniform is soaked with sweat, clinging to his skin, and there is sand everywhere, especially in places sand has no right to be.

He reaches up with his left hand, pulling at the collar of his jacket, trying to peel the garment off while still refusing to move. Obviously, he doesn't get far. He lets his arm fall down to rest next to him, giving up on the jacket.

"Want a hand with that?"

Roy picks up his head just enough to see Maes Hughes sliding onto the bench next to him. Maes slips his hand under the collar of Roy's jacket and slides it down his left arm, slipping it off and leaving it dangling in the middle of Roy's back, half on and half off, waiting for Roy to decide what he wants. Roy groans softly, but he sits up and pulls the jacket the rest of the way off. He balls it up under his hand and looks at Hughes. His now-bare arms are still sticky with sweat as he sits there in his thin white undershirt. "Are you just here to get me out of my clothes?"

Hughes smirks and claps him on the shoulder. Roy grits his teeth and ducks his head, hoping the other man at least refrains from tousling his hair. He does. Thank God. "That's just an added benefit, Mustang. But one I very much appreciate." He licks his lower lip and grins and Mustang groans again. Maes licking his lower lip in exactly that way, when they're both sweaty and disheveled, does things to him. And Maes very well knows it.

Roy narrows his eyes. "So then… why are you here?"

"Mail call."

"I never get mail." That is not entirely true. He does sometimes get letters, from his aunt or one of his "sisters," but they're rare. Not like Hughes, whose girlfriend writes him seemingly every day, sometimes more than once a day, so that he always has a stack of envelopes waiting for him by the time the mail actually makes it to the front.

Hughes sets the predictable stack of letters on the table in front of him and picks up the top one. "Maybe there'll be more pictures," he says cheerfully.

"Spare me, Hughes."

Maes lets out a long-suffering sigh, but he drops the letter. "You're no fun, Roy."

"Is that why we're here? To have fun?"

Maes frowns. He turns to look at Roy, who is staring either at his booted feet or at nothing. Maes puts his thumb under Mustang's chin and tilts his head up. "Roy," he says simply, looking into the man's dark eyes.

Roy pulls his head away.

He snaps his fingers and a small flame bursts into being, dancing in the air just above his hand. "I used to think this is what I wanted," he says softly.

"Roy…"

He quells the flame, just because of the look on Maes' face. "Did you put on this uniform thinking you wouldn't be asked to kill?" he mutters.

"For fuck's sake, Roy, you're not actually listening to that bastard, are you?"

"He's not wrong."

Hughes sighs. "State Alchemists have never been sent to a war zone before, you couldn't have predicted that."

"I was a soldier before I was an Alchemist, though."

"And if they were asking you to shoot a gun, you wouldn't be tearing yourself up nearly as much as you are now. Right?" Hughes makes a 'give me' motion with his hand, and Roy pulls off his gloves and hands them over. Hughes traces the embroidered transmutation circle with his thumb and watches Roy. Roy who flinched at the sound of gunfire until the academy broke him down enough that he could pull a trigger without a second thought.

"Anybody can shoot a gun," Roy points out. "Only I can… you should have seen the look on the Fuhrer's face when he was watching my practical exam. It was… I should've understood then, what I'd just done."

Maes puts his hand in the cradle of Roy's shoulder, thumb on his neck, and he begins massaging with gentle pressure. "You didn't do anything, Mustang."

Roy pushes Maes' hand off of him, and he turns around to look his friend directly in the eye. "I handed the Amestrian Military a human weapon. Did I really expect them not to use it?" He sighs. "My teacher was right all along. Nobody should've ever trusted me with flame alchemy."

"You think you're the only one who's aware of what a shitshow this war is? I can promise you, it isn't only alchemists who hate the orders they're given."

Now it's Roy's turn to try to comfort his friend with a touch. He puts one hand on Maes' hand and the other on his cheek. He looks into Maes' hazel-green eyes. The eyes of a killer. Roy's heart twists.

Hughes has been at the front for far longer than he has, and despite that, he never talks about the things he's done or seen. But Roy knows that while he's often kept back from the worst of the dangers, lighting fires from a safe distance, Hughes fights close and brutal, with short knives that offer no protection whatsoever from the reality of what he's doing when he kills. Hughes tries not to meet up with Roy until he's at least washed the blood off his hands, but he isn't always successful. And Roy's seen the scars, in various stages of ugly, from more than one battlefield surgery.

Hughes wakes up every day determined not to die, and to that end he tries not to question his orders too much. But that doesn't mean he's blind to his actions. He has killed children who pose no threat to him, because High Command says there's no such thing as an innocent Ishvalan. Roy Mustang does not hold a monopoly on guilt.

"Maybe we'll go home soon," Roy says softly. It's a little bit of the hopeful optimism Hughes remembers from the academy, which was not that long ago, objectively, but feels like another life.

Hughes nods. "Yeah. Maybe."

Roy glances at the stack of letters on the table. "Are you gonna read your mail, or what, Hughes?"

Maes just shakes his head, putting his hand on Roy's thighs, which straddle the bench he's sitting on. He's smiling again, folding the war away into some locked box in his head that he rarely lets anyone into, even Roy. "You're cute, Mustang."

"I knew you were just here to get me out of my clothes."

Hughes nods, stuffing Roy's gloves into his pocket, and standing up. "You coming or what?"