Interstitial - August 20, 1908
"No. Letters."
The corporal stretches each word for emphasis, eyes narrowed against the setting sun. Roy curls a fist on the battered countertop between them—three measly planks of bent wood lashed together and left to bleach beneath the arid sky.
"I heard you the first time," he says quietly, concentrating on a level tone. He doesn't think to call the insubordination—the corporal looks a few years Roy's senior and seems resentful of it. With one finger, the corporal flicks the packet of letters away from the rest of his piles. "And you still didn't answer my question."
"I've nothing for you on that, sir. All I do is sort the mail I'm given," the corporal says with a dismissive shrug. "If I'm not given the mail, then I can't sort it, can I? And I haven't been given any mail for you, sir."
Fair, and infuriating.
"That doesn't answer why these weren't sent out."
The corporal sucks in air between his thinned lips.
"Right you are, sir. They were, in fact, sent out. Stamps along the bottom there, you see, sir. But turns out there was nowhere for them to go, so here they are again."
Red ink, bled so long it looks almost black. Return, it reads in narrow letters. No resident service.
"Why would there be nowhere for them to go?"
"Can't answer that myself, sir."
Honest, perhaps. The corporal blows out an impatient breath.
"You'll have to move along now, sir. You're blocking the line."
But Roy doesn't leave—the crowd gathered behind is composed mostly of the enlisted rabble, far too obedient to push. They don't know him, but they know the rank pasted to his shoulders. The corporal only grins, never quite managing to match Roy's gaze.
Pure, ceaseless futility—he can no more will the letters into Riza's hands than he can will the sun to circumvent its usual route and perch for a few hours behind the day's solitary southbound cloud. With a frustrated sigh, Roy finally starts for the exit, gripping the letters tight. The parchment feels ragged in his hands, and he looks down just as the light spears his bleary eyes.
Every envelope has been opened—the flaps ripped across and their contents glowing nakedly beneath the sun. He pulls the pages themselves out, held pinched between two fingers. Behind, the corporal calls the next man forward.
"These were sealed."
Roy turns back—the corporal's eyes flicker over.
"Indeed, sir?"
"I put money in them."
"Is that so, sir?"
A path is made for him back to the counter.
"You know it is."
"Well surely you must know—all letters are inspected, sir. For contraband."
The corporal's smile widens slowly, revealing the glint of a gold tooth.
His cheekbone shatters neatly beneath Roy's fist. Immediately limp, the corporal's body is buoyed back by the hit, and the makeshift table splinters beneath their combined weight, boards torn loose from weak ties. The tent floods with men's shouts and the hard, sick smack of Roy's closed fist against the corporal's face.
He is screaming—faintly Roy can hear himself, each word more ugly and indecipherable as his dry throat cracks with fury. The corporal's face reduces so quickly to a pulpy mess, and he's curled in on himself, wheezing, hands raised as a weak shield. Roy sinks back, shaking with the ethers of spent rage—strong arms grip his shoulders and pull him up. The crowd is mashing in and out of vision, whispering urgently.
"MPs. MPs coming up!"
Basque Gran tears open the tent flap like wet tissue, plowing a deep furrow through the crowd.
"What," he says in a thunderous fury, "precisely, is the meaning of this disturbance?"
Roy cannot speak. He stands, breathing heavily, blank stare cast downward as blood drips slowly from his knuckles.
"This desert heat," says Major Armstrong, pulling the corporal abruptly upright. "Tensions boiling over. A little insubordination—nothing a bit of fisticuffs didn't solve, sir."
Gran stops in front of the corporal.
"Insubordination?" he demands, one thick finger poked into his collapsed chest. "That sort of behavior will not be tolerated. Alchemists on the field need their soldiers sharp, ready, and willing to follow every order. Understood?"
The corporal gurgles.
There is something glinting at their feet—Roy bends down and sinks his glove into the sand, pulling up only a handful of dust and one blood-caked gold tooth.
"Showers!" Gran barks, addressing the crowd at large. "Officers' privileges. Enlisted men—you'll get yours next."
Someone is pushing from behind—Roy stumbles forward, following in Gran's explosive wake. He joins the formed line, stows his personals, and stands beneath the tepid stream, clenching his bruised hands until they start to swell.
Showers are a rarity—the waste of water might seem almost hedonistic if any of it was drinkable. But the pipes are rusted, and the tank holds only enough for two or three hours. A few privates and scattered corporals reading the odds have taken up brief residence at the tent's edge, quickly scrubbing faces and underarms with the runoff.
Roy turns, letting the water hit the blistered back of his neck, wincing as the sand sweeps down through every minor cut. There is a small cake of soap tied to the spigot, and the corner breaks away beneath his ragged nails. It doesn't lather up much, but Roy smears the soap across his calloused skin and soaks.
He could close his eyes, he thinks, and become a child again—six years old and standing beneath the spray of river wash, waiting for Auntie's admonishment and relishing the alien familiarity of the warehouse at delivery. Woven of mildewy black brick and smoked glass, the warehouse stood half-hunched over the river, so the boats could dock right in the floor, their engines gurling the river's filth to foam. Roy would worry the stevedores' heels, back and forth along the slime-slick ramp, as they unloaded a hundred barrels of beer and whiskey.
He wasn't supposed to stand there like that. Auntie said the filth would make him sick, but it never did.
The shower cuts off abruptly, and finished, he opens his eyes and collects his dirty things and turns to join the exit line. New skivvies and shirt and socks—same sediment-heavy coat and trousers. He dresses slowly, avoiding the temptation to look up and see who's looking back.
He has only one pair of socks to trade in. Regulations say two pair each, but requisitions operate the same as the universe: equivalent exchange. Rebuffed, he moves quietly along the indicated way.
"Here. Stole 'em from the pile."
Off-white wool inches from his nose—Roy raises his empty glance and meets green eyes.
"Hughes?"
"Hey, Roy."
He looks so much older, face dirtied by stubble and lined in shadow. But he smiles still, pointlessly pushing those familiar glasses back up his nose.
"Thought that was you in the last shipment. You been stationed out here long?"
Roy blinks, forgetting a moment how to form words.
"One tour," he says. "Waiting for my second."
"Where've they kept you?"
"West. Like the other alchemists. Near Mehoud."
"That's right. The labor camp."
"Not anymore."
Hughes nods slow, and it's easy to read the wince in his eyes.
"Yeah, we heard about that. Real nasty business."
Roy nods too.
"They've sent my first company out to the line."
"But not you?"
He doesn't have to answer that—Hughes knows, just like everyone that pushes past, eyes averted.
"Well, come on," Hughes says. "I've got a nice little cottage set up nearby."
Light discipline is more theory than practice. Base camp stretches out nearly a square mile, arranged in tight clusters of campfire and grease lamps. The men are loosely grouped by company, digging hollows in the sand for bunks or setting watch at half-crushed walls.
Mile markers are all that remain to delineate the corpse of Ishval's neatly gridded streets. They count outward from the city center, and Roy watches their descent with a ghostly sense of eagerness.
Hughes is leading him down into the valley, through a twisting path that ends at the collapsed remains of a chapel. Pulling aside a pocked metal sheet that serves for their door, Hughes gestures Roy into the narthex.
"Home sweet home," he says, the metal sliding back into place with a rigid shriek. "Until we're reassigned. Our major was killed last week, so we're slumming it with McDougal."
Two boys stand watch at either end of the interior. The splintered pews have been rearranged as tent posts, giving each pair of men a little rubble-carpeted and canvas-walled room of their own. Obedient as a beaten child, Roy follows Hughes into his set-aside cubby.
There's two bedrolls and a blackened oil drum for fireplace. A basket of rations already set out—as though Hughes has been expecting visitors this whole time.
"Like home," Roy says, in a croaky scratch, as he stands in the makeshift door, hands clutched tight around his new socks.
"Landlord won't let me paint," Hughes laughs with a shrug, shaking the sand from both bedrolls. "But it keeps out the rain."
It takes Roy too long to realize Hughes is waiting for him to sit. He collapses like a tower of sticks—joints brittle and sharp and easily snapped. His broken knuckles sting.
Hughes frowns at him, leaning back against a jagged crack in the bricks.
"Hey, McDougal, you up? Fix a bucket for me, huh?"
There is a grunt from the other side of the wall—a snap of ozone and light, and Hughes is handed a bucket of soft, pure snow.
"I'll admit, you alchemists have your uses, from time to time."
Roy sinks his hands in, grateful for the sharp bite of such a sudden temperature change. Hughes focuses on the food, just as domestic as always.
Military rations are only slightly better than starvation—Hughes shakes the mealy powdered mix out of two packets with a grimace of his own. A bit of water over the fire would finish it all up, but instead he shifts aside a few loose bricks and pulls out a concealed footlocker. Roy has only a glimpse of the inside.
"You should learn to make friends in the PX," Hughes says lightly, as he pulls out sausages, cheese in a wax rind, and a slightly dented tin of coffee. "They come in handy when a requisition form or two gets lost in the shuffle."
Hughes grins, more imp than ghoul in the low light.
He works diligently as Roy watches and soaks his wounds, until the bucket of snow has faded to a cool pink slush. The broken skin around his knuckles is blanched but clean. Roy sets the bucket aside, patting down his jacket for a spare rag to dry off.
"Not that anyone's going to blame you about Kozlov," Hughes says, testing a bite from the tip of his knife.
"What?"
In his pocket, Roy's fingers close around something small, metallic, and soft.
"You mean the corporal," he says quietly, "from the post."
"We all suspected he was skimming—took money from you?"
"Yeah."
"To your aunt, right? I thought she had a bar in Central."
"She does still. She makes plenty of her own—no need for my help." Roy says quickly. "But... there is a girl."
"Hey, now, that's supposed to be my line!"
Hughes laughs again, an awful and alien sound. He's holding out a tin plate stacked high with delicacies—ration grits and split sausages, a smear of soft cheese and an apple, hardtack soaked in drippings. And there's coffee, of course, percolating slowly on the stove.
It feels obscene to accept, but Roy has no other choice.
"So?" Hughes prods, just as Roy's taken his first bite. "Who is she?"
"Riza. My master's daughter."
"Oh, yeah, I remember. You talked about them a lot at the academy. You went back?"
"Yeah. But he's died since, and left her nothing but his debts. After everything, I couldn't just leave her in squalor. And… I want to marry her."
Hughes's face splits in a wide grin.
"You old romantic," he says. "So why haven't you?"
"No money. No time. Same reasons there always are."
The food is gone fast—Roy has no memory of the taste, but it sits heavily in his gut. It seems impolite to set his plate on the ground, but Hughes does, and of course it is only right for Roy to follow suit.
"I will, though," Roy says. "I mean to. When we're done here."
Hughes nods—of course, he means. He always means.
They settle back into the bedrolls at the same time, a flash to the exhausted yet comforting silence of the academy's endless bunkroom.
"Do you…"
Roy winces.
"Do you ever hear anything about Heathcliff?"
"No. But I didn't expect to. You?"
"No."
A runner finds them in the morning, handing off his message quick and then hanging around long enough to warm his hands beside the stove dregs.
"Orders to you, sir, and your XO," he says to Roy, ducking his freckle-splattered chin.
"I have an XO?"
"You didn't really think you were gonna get rid of me that easy, didya?" Hughes says, clapping his back hard.
They move out before noon—slated for a long march with the rising sun planted on their left. Hughes handles all introductions, reminding each not to salute. The men seem an amiable enough bunch, a mix of young and old, largely Easterners with a Norther or two mixed in. The youngest is Central-born, like Roy, but he doesn't have much to say. They've all suffered the war for years now and jubilantly welcome the lull of an alchemist detail.
"I was original company," the sergeant says, and he insists on being called only Charlie. "Since 1903. We were all alright until that little girl got killed. Then everything went to shit."
"Ishvalans don't know proportional response," says a corporal, Weiss. "Soldier who did it was up on charges, but they wanted to break in and lynch everybody. It was one girl."
"They see it all different than us. Kill one of us, and we take one life back. Kill one of 'em, and it's like might as well've killed them all."
Halt and camp is called at dusk—Gran holds the officers for briefing and has the privates sweep out latrine trenches. Light discipline is even more of a joke this far out, so there's not much need for tents.
"All waste," Gran grumbles. "We're keeping to south, boys—when all the real action's out east!"
He looks right through Roy when he speaks.
"Action's for the expendable," says Hughes quietly, when they're given leave to scatter. "But better to be stuck on support than thrown for canon fodder."
"If they would just roll up artillery, we'd cut our losses by half and have a real chance to—"
Hughes laughs.
"Roy, you are the artillery."
So they're set to marching drag, day after day pushing out the edges of rear operating a little bit more. There is only debris so far west—lines of empty bookshelves and abandoned shrines, temple after cottage after market, of stillness and the silence of settling dust. At night, a cold wind washes in from the salt flats, smothering their fires and waking Roy each morning with an acrid taste crawling over his tongue. Any bodies would have fallen early and long since been covered over.
The post catches up to them a week later: one reedy old stovepipe of a soldier, affectionately called Battle-Ax by the men. With a sour look, he hands Hughes a stack of letters thirty-thick.
"Marry her," he growls. "That'll make it stop."
Hughes laughs, oblivious as always. Instantly, the rest of the company storms the Ax, obscuring Roy's silent retreat.
Waiting for him in the semicircle of tents is a pile of embers, desperately trying to leap to flame. Roy drops down beside it, and the stuttered movement thumps his pocketwatch against his chest. Instinctively he pulls it from his jacket and cracks the lid, free hand groping along his kit bag for a clean polishing cloth.
There will be stars above, soon, when the sun's waning rays draw level with the lone remaining temple tower. Two miles east, as the briefing went. Tomorrow's target.
Roy works the polishing cloth across the glass in small rigid circles, haze giving way to sheen. The metalworks inside are never in need of tuning or winding—the squad is always waiting to set their wristwatches by his time.
The cover is difficult. Dips and grooves and ridges, which all excel at hiding the sharpest grains of sand. He has to use a splinter of wood for these—his fingernails are always bitten to the quick and useless for such fine work.
As always, the metal seems to show no wear. It looks silver, but must be made of stronger stuff. Perhaps, as some of the younger men whisper, it carries a kind of protective enchantment—a superstitious vaguery common among those who mistake the cold science of alchemy for magic. But Roy knows he is no more armored than the next man, helmetless and sweat-soaked.
His work is finished, and the watch glistens almost wetly as he tilts it, forward and back, trapping slivers of dying flame in the seal.
It will be seen by a sniper—he drops the watch back in its place, that nest of worn parchment and half-melted wax. His collected letters seem an equal weight to the metal, and he pulls them out in one frustrated fistful. More worthless now than a thousand whispered promises.
He peels the first letter out of its envelope but doesn't open the page. He still knows what it says—can trace in his mind each sweep of the pen held careful between his fingers. The man who wrote those words was only two days gone from home. He hadn't yet tasted the desert air or seen the rows of makeshift huts stretching long and wide between barbed wire walls.
A scuffle of movement echoes over the rise—only the men, finished with their reading and coming along for rest. Dust precedes them as always, kicked up into twisted wind that rattles the bones of every broken house and scours away the heels of their marching boots. Roy shoves the letters back into his pocket.
"You're famous," Hughes says, tossing a copy of the military newspaper across the fire. It lands a little close to Roy's face, and he flips the folded front over. "Or at least, your exploits are."
Mehoud—Rebel Camp Cleared of Rioters
"They kept your name out, but they do mention an alchemist."
The picture could be of any anonymous field, guttered in black ditches and wafted with thick smoke.
"That's not what it was," Roy says, without thinking.
"How so?"
"There was no riot."
"Paper says there was a riot, sir," Charlie says. "And we know military's never got a reason to lie."
The general had asked about his range. A mile back—two, or maybe seven—how far until he lost control of the flame? Until his concentration broke and the embers were left to pull back and pick up the pieces?
"It wasn't a riot," Roy says again. "They just wanted the camp gone."
He turns to his bedroll and feigns sleep until Hughes takes his turn on watch.
How many more empty days? The men laugh, cajole, cavort, and treasure the tedium. Alchemist detail is the closest any of them have been to respite in so many long years. They drift far enough south to see trees again.
The trees—and the company—stand at the lip of another wide valley, the scraps of yet another village echoing with silence.
"That's Aerugo right there," Weiss says, looking around for praise. He earns none.
"We can't be so far south," Roy says—to Hughes, who stares only at the map. But he confirms it.
"The whole brigade looks three grids off. I can't imagine what the hell we're all out here for."
Roy turns back to survey the sparse forest and then closer, to the cliff's edge that juts up from the gathering darkness. A simple maze of low houses and markets. No high ground, but also no real low ground. An obvious target for tomorrow—and an obvious labyrinth of traps, if anything.
In the morning, the men are desperate to leave their greatcoats behind, citing the haze that rises sharply with the first rays of sun. But Roy forbids it. Close quarters fighting, they will need the white canvas camouflage for even the fleeting confusion it will buy.
Established strategy might have them take the main road together, dividing the enemy's attention between parallel points of attack. But the company's down to the strength of two platoons, and there aren't enough men to hold what they've taken.
The Ishvalans have proven immune to common tactics. They prefer fast, chaotic strikes of two or three fighters—all the easier for flanking maneuvers, and they fight with a hunger that lends itself well to improvisation.
Shelling would be ideal, but impossible. With the bulk of the Amestrian forces moving solidly east—taking all mortars in reserve with them—Roy and his alchemy will act as their only artillery. Rapid strikes, for maximum damage.
They receive orders for a standard sweep and clear operation, and head out just past dawn. Roy takes a detachment of two men for himself and leaves Hughes to split the rest.
Freed of the distraction of command for a few hours, Roy whittles the edges of the rebel fighters to a decent center. The heat of his flame is no true rival to the desert, but it rips the oxygen from every hidden crevasse and foxhole, forcing the rebels to scramble out for air. The men following him can pick off survivors with small arms, working one by one and watching his back as they advance. The rising smoke, whipped high by the valley's turbulent winds, is the only warning the Ishvalans receive of their coming death.
At noon, Roy and his bodyguards rejoin the company, having pinned the rebels now to a single building.
Hughes crouches against a wall, picking rations from a tin can.
"Third floor," he says. "And along the roof, too. We don't have enough men for a frontal assault, and they know that. We can't even poke a head out to get a proper count of them."
He offers out the can and fork, but Roy declines.
"There's a crack between the buildings down left. Not really an alley, but enough space for one man to get through. Inefficient for a whole company looking to keep silence, but…"
"Give me thirty seconds," Roy says, pushing unsteadily off the wall.
The Ishvalans will only fire when fired upon, so if he keeps low, remains unspotted, he can slip close enough for a precision strike. A wider attack might hit his own line too.
A flash of aftermath—Roy shudders, paused in motion, eyes blurring over. By sound alone he can pinpoint at least three shooters on the rooftop. Impossible to tell if more wait below, but part of him reaches out and feels the swelling crash of heartbeats waiting to stop.
At fifteen yards, he's close enough. Hughes calls out for some blind cover fire, and Roy is halfway across the dusty boulevard before the Ishvalans can realize what's coming. A single bullet pings the dirt just ahead of his feet, and he centers the explosion on its source, two or three feet past the roof's edge.
He doesn't wait for the rest of the company—takes the stairs he finds around back of the building two at a time, throat scratching with cinders. No barricades or entrenchment to impede: they had saved all attempts at fortification for the front. So not a prepared position, but a final stand.
The rooftop is stark white and absent of debris as he finishes the climb—not the tallest building in the valley, but it stands on enough of a swell give decent leverage over the surrounding depression. The sort of positioning that made three men feel like thirty.
Roy's fingertips barely graze the roof lip's top edge. High enough only to attach tarps—he recalls with odd clarity the field manual's description of water cultivation in the desert. Pitch-soaked tarps funnel any scant traces of rain or dew to a central pipe that lead straight down to the house's well. He remembers rumors, from civilian life, that Amestrian scientists had figured out how to seed the clouds with acid, poisoning the rebel country from within.
The rasp of a bullet chambered turns Roy's head—an Aerugian-made Tapim infantry pistol, iron sights bent slightly from misuse or poor repairs. The hand holding it trembles and drips blackish blood on the stucco floor.
"Roy?"
"Heathcliff."
It is not a question, for him. The Ishvalan man, taller and broader, caked in dust and the spray of blood from his fallen countrymen, the hem of his robe still smoldering, stares at him with naked hatred.
One of their last nights at the academy together, they had sat on the roof of the barracks to watch the summer's final sunset. Heathcliff would be gone only a week later, with no notice or letter of resignation. But Roy didn't know what was coming, and then, as now, he said nothing.
Neither of them move. Heathcliff's gun pointed at Roy's heart—Roy with thumb and middle finger pressed together tight. Both of them breathe hard, drained from the fight. In and out, in and out.
"Roy," Heathcliff says again. "How could you?"
But Roy opens his mouth with no answer, and in that moment, Heathcliff fires.
He comes to on the way back to camp—the surface of consciousness bubbles like a churning river. The men are carrying him litter-style in someone's coat, silent save for footfalls.
"You're alive, Roy," Hughes tells him, looking away again the moment their eyes meet. "Just keep still until we get a medic to tell us more, alright?"
So Roy wakes again in the tents, half-bandaged and attended by a tense silence.
The bruise on his chest is deep purple, edges petaling outward in blue and green, framing the sharp white point of impact directly over his heart.
"An inch any direction, you're dead," says the medic, tugging the ends of silk thread into a ragged knot.
Seven broken ribs and a gash the width of the watch. They all stare at it: cratered deep and smeared with a line of blood, glowing white against the medic's black bag. Roy looks away from it first.
"Guess it's not as strong as all that," Weiss says.
"I told you, a hundred times," Charlie sighs. "It was only ever a watch."
Hughes is the last to leave him alone.
"Just outside," he says, once or twice.
Roy is meant to rest, by the medic's suggestion, but his heart pounds in his throat.
All the adrenaline from the fight is not gone—had nowhere to go, and now it rattles insistently through his joints, throttling his bruised heart, pushing him to stand, to walk the edges of each tent wall to its end and then turn left to start again. Too much of Roy is still standing on that rooftop, staring down the barrel of Heathcliff's gun and the sudden certainty that he is about to die.
From that rooftop, he could see how simple a flanking maneuver would have been. The Ishvalans had no support, no fallback position. Nowhere to run.
He should have waited for backup. The rest of his men were only across the street—so easy to stop, to wait, to stand still as he'd been standing every day since stumbling off that train from East City.
But glory comes for only those who would dare take it. He stepped off the train, and he burned Mehoud, and he went up to that roof alone. Roy went up alone, and he stood looking out to the valley, and when Heathcliff raised his gun, Roy did nothing.
The bruise still throbs, a heat gathering shallowly beneath his skin. The mountains have cooled the air around the camp—he feels like a stick adrift in running water. Not refreshing as it should be, but chilling and sharp.
Mehoud was perched at the edge of a plateau—the truck had to swing around south to deliver Roy to the commander's tent. Barbed wire and guns formed three walls, and an endless, yawning void for the fourth. The prisoners had made their own huts of scavenged scrap and stone. He remembers the perfect grid of streets they had laid out, the section set aside for hospital work and the section that housed a garden and compost. They would gather in the streets between for worship. An easy target.
It was a test, no different than the state alchemist exam. He had used straw then, instead of flesh and fat, but at a great enough distance, all things burn the same.
It took nearly an hour for the smoke to clear and the tallest of the flames to die down, before the counters could walk the rows. And Roy had stay for the assessment, for the celebration and serious discussion of tactical applications. The general and his subordinates seemed sure the Ishvalan conflict would wrap up quickly, and then they could all move on to crushing Aerugo in due time. And Roy nodded, and he drank the general's whiskey, and when ordered, he walked away from the ash heap he had made of Mehoud.
He had made the choices he made, and Heathcliff made his choices, and Maes made his as well, and there's every reason to see it as immutable, an inevitability. He was always going to go up those stairs, always going to be shot, always going to stand alone in the aftermath.
The tent's canvas wall snaps smartly, inches from his face. Roy has paced the length of the beaten dirt floor twice and turns to begin his third round. His gaze falls squarely on the watch.
They had emptied his chest pocket to reach the wound. Matches, a spare glove, and the stack of his letters to Riza—the bullet ripped through it all but stopped at the watch. A clean shot, through and through. It would have easily destroyed his heart.
A kerosene lamp burns brightly on the table, and he turns the flame higher as he sits, pulling these scattered pieces back together. The glove must be destroyed—it won't burn, so it must be shredded. Patting his remaining pockets for a penknife, he finds, instead, a small lump of gold.
It takes a moment to recognize that it was once a tooth: the corporal's. Smoothed out by distance marched or by time, the tooth rolls between his fingers like a pebble. No one looking would ever know what it had been—what Roy had done.
"Hey, there's a missive here from—"
Even if he could knock, Roy knows that Hughes would ignore the option. He stops short, at least, waiting for Roy to stand, to sweep his debris aside, to turn and stiffly button his shirt.
"Message from the Fuhrer. State Alchemist eyes only."
His pessimism expects to look up at a gun barrel, but Hughes stands still, envelope clutched to his chest. His glasses are poised to fall from the tip of his nose, and he corrects them, framing a pair of eyes marked with exhaustion and filth.
"Orders," he says softly, putting the letter in Roy's hands. "Colonel Gran wants them read now."
The wax seal is brittle and crumbles in his fingers, rather than snapping across a clean line. There are two pieces of parchment folded into the envelope. One is boilerplate—To the courageous soldiers of the 702d infantry—and therefore discarded. The other page is thicker, edges decorated in gold leaf.
"What's it say?"
"I, King Bradley, Fuhrer of Amestris—this being the three thousand and sixty-sixth decree of—"
Roy stops, eyes faster than a tongue that cannot continue.
"What is it?"
They'll have the newspapers back home sell it to the population, in the way all such wars are justified.
"The reason why."
"They said the rebels launched a counterattack with Aerugo's help," Hughes says, and of course the intelligence officer has the official propaganda ready. "They've been funneling weapons into the country for weeks, and they hit civilian targets with shelling."
"Where?"
"Some eastern towns. Farmers. Train stations."
"Cutting off our supply. And we retaliate with extermination."
He crumples the paper and shoves it at Hughes, fist hitting dead center of his chest.
"So you would have had to kill him regardless."
"What?"
Roy returns to where he began, head in hands and hunched over on the cot.
"I don't care."
"Roy—"
"I don't care. I don't want to do this anymore, Hughes."
Hughes's voice hardens to a chill.
"That's not an option we have."
"I can't go out there again," Roy says, and he is small, begging from desperation. "This isn't what I—I didn't want this. I thought this was all something else. I thought we were fighting for something."
"We are."
"Worth killing a friend over?"
Hughes looks ugly in that moment, eyes blackened and narrow.
"He was going to kill you, Roy. I thought he already had. I made a choice, same as he did."
"What kind of choice did he—?"
"What kind of choice do any of us have?" Hughes shouts, and he's crossed the distance in less than three steps, yanking Roy up by the collar. "We have a duty. We're given orders—we follow them! That's how this works."
"I don't want it to work."
His grip loosens—shock.
"They'll kill you for it, Roy. You know that. You know you can't walk away."
"I know."
Roy's chin drops to his chest, and Hughes steps back.
"I swore to serve. I just never thought…"
The cot shifts under his sudden weight, and Roy wraps his arms close over his chest. He cannot still the shivering.
"I never thought it would mean this."
"Get up, major."
Hughes's voice takes on a formal edge.
"I said get up. We have orders."
"And that's enough for you?" Roy says. "We have orders. Even with what those orders actually say?"
The answer comes quiet, after a pause.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because Ishval rebelled against Amestris. They broke the law of our country, and they must be punished for it."
An academy answer, if there ever was one.
"And more important, because I'm going to live through this," Hughes says. "I am going to survive this war, and I am going to go home, and I will marry Gracia and be exactly the man she thinks I am. The man she writes those letters to. The man she deserves, to make her happy."
"You really think you can just go back and pick up like all of this was nothing?" Roy says, pressing the heels of both hands into his closed eyes, hard enough to flood the darkness with a pulsing red, hard enough to hurt. "You think you're going to be able to hold the woman you love with your blood-stained hands?"
He hears the rush of movement but feels no change—Hughes's face is wild with anger, fist clenched to strike, though he stops just short of anything real. Roy is the one to look away this time, when their eyes meet.
"All that matters is getting through this day, and then the next and the next and the next. I will bury every horrible thing I've done here, and when I am with her, I will smile."
Hughes's fingers fall open.
"Do you understand me? That's all there is."
"Maybe for you."
Roy doesn't mean it in the sense that there is necessarily something more. Hughes turns away from him, shoulders hunched, ready to leave.
"Get on your feet, soldier. We have work to do."
The wound throbs. He can feel the stitches, outlined sharply beneath his shirt and the loose bandage.
"Yeah."
It is an inevitability. He will rise, and he will walk out into a pyre of his own making.
"Alright," he says, standing, wincing as he forces his arms into stiff coat sleeves. "Then let's go."
He burns the letters three days later, with no ceremony. They've been assigned a new sector to clear, and Roy walks at the back of the company. At the crossroads, they approach and then pass a burning barn. An Amestrian flamethrower has been abandoned in its doorway.
It isn't even a thought. He reaches into his pocket—hollow without the watch—and throws the bundle with an errant flick.
No one sees. They march on.