Part 4: That In His Hand the Lightnings Trembled

Military Sector 27, Ishval

Fall, 1908

Roy Mustang: Age 23

Time had stopped.

Time, and the watch along with it.

Roy had accepted this unusual phenomenon on a larger scale, at least since arriving in Ishval. For months now he had been unable to identify the year and his age, as confusion catapulted him between the past and the present. But now Roy was losing track of the hours and minutes and seconds that comprised his evening watches and his afternoon missions. These tiny units jumbled and blurred until all that remained was an asynchronous rhythm of unknowable time that arrived with no perceivable regularity.

Occasionally the short daytime shadows might reorient him like a sundial, or the sands might flow for some predictable duration in their glass, but he had not yet found another reliable method of timekeeping.

And now he didn't have a single way to keep track of time, now that his watch had been broken.

It was ruined, really.

The watch in his hand lay smelted, not by his fire, but by a bullet. In a war now dominated by alchemy, it was strange to think that just a single piece of metal could wreck so much damage.

Mechanically, he'd flip it open to check the miniature photograph inside. But inside lay the shattered glass remnants of a clock face, and the vestige of a portrait of a woman. Barely anything was left, least of all of her face. He'd open and close it by instinct, as if simulating the metallic pulse it had once emitted.

It was fitting. Guns had taken her life. Taken it from her and taken it from him.

And she had saved his, at her expense.

He had hoped he'd be able to keep her with him, but the driving desert gusts and the fell winds of death had eroded any such hope. All that remained was the ever-shifting sands, too unstable for anything lasting, anything permanent.

He snapped the watch closed.

The dull thud echoed for a while. Maybe for a second. Maybe for a minute. Maybe longer.

The cold desert night abandoned Roy to warm himself with his thoughts.

His thoughts always proved to be excellent tinder. They were usually enough to send searing pain through his heart or a spark of rage into his hands that would drive him to grab at his gun or his gloves, until the fire vanished, as suddenly as it had appeared. And after he'd grown sweaty and feverish, the cold wind no longer pierced his woolen sleeves. The ones that scratched like sand and smothered like smoke.

Riza's haunted, empty eyes now stared at him from the dull sandy sky, and from the flickering lanterns hanging outside the rows of officers' tents. The knowledge that she was nearby, yet now forever lost to him, taunted him like the scream of the wind through window screens and mosquito netting.

He, like the desert was damned to be cold and empty each night.

Utterly unhospitable to life.

It had been several weeks since he saw her. And it had been a week since he'd been shot.

His only lingering wound was a dark, painful bruise from the impact of the bullet against his pocket watch. The watch, now a mangled hunk of misshapen metal, still sat against his chest. He remembered how years ago, he had considered the watch to be a dead weight, separating himself from a normal career and relationships with his peers. But now its weight had increased a thousandfold. It had separated him eternally from the only person that mattered. And now the weight was determined to keep him alive, to ensure that he would feel the pain of betrayal born anew every night.

The impact had been enough to knock him to the ground, and his collision with the ground had knocked him unconscious. Hughes had panicked until he realized there was no blood, no entry wound.

The doctor had determined there to have been no broken bones. "Miraculous," he declared the injury. And with so little recovery needed, a full week of work, of mindless slaughter, had already elapsed.

Roy's head ached and his vision occasionally grew unfocused, but other than that, and the bruises on his back, he was fine.

Waking up in the medical tent had been the most scarring part of the ordeal. The smell of broken bowels, charred skin, and bone dust congealed like a powder in his parched throat. He cringed and ground his molars together as he remembered the whirring of saws through bone. He had awoken to that noise and had screamed until a nurse had ran to his side and assured him that it was not his leg being sawed off. Mercifully the doctors had soon discharged him after quickly determining the limited extent of his injuries.

Everything was backwards in the desert, where the people supposed to be the heroes had become murderers. And so it wasn't surprising that the medical treatment had proved worse than the injury.

Even the fires he'd try to warm himself by smelled of burning fat and charred hair. And now the echoes of Heathcliff's friendship danced like shadows to the tune of cacophony in his head. Tonight the cacophony sounded like some song he had heard Heathcliff sing. He said it was a well-known song, a sad one of children learning the Ishvalan alphabet by a fire.

And now he was ensuring that an entire generation of Ishvalan children would never learn to spell and write. And, if the military succeeded in their plan, never again would Ishvalan children learn their letters by the fire.

Likewise, his sleep was full of nightmares. And in recent days his cot had now grown into a barren, uncomfortable parody of Riza's bed.

Had he thought he was simply going to saunter back to Riza after the war, find her sitting at the same kitchen table and promptly sweep her off her feet? Or else find her studying in some University classroom or tutoring some socialite's children in a park? Did he think he was going to be her fairytale hero and then they'd live life with her oblivious to his wartime actions? Perhaps he hadn't let himself think how permanently changed he was. He was naïve and idiotic to think she would never find out.

Even more foolish had been his belief that he could help this nation or change it. He had only added a more effective killing machine to its ranks.

Whatever future he had imagined, the one he cherished in his days after the Academy and the one that grew dimmer with each and every day in Ishval, had utterly disappeared. The future he hoped they'd share, he as a talented officer rising through the ranks, Riza Hawkeye—no Riza Mustang—as his brilliant and beautiful wife evaporated. He had imagined her the darling of Central society, enchanting the upper echelon of the military at formal events, impressing diplomats and generals alike, all the collecting information on his political opponents. And he imagined her, one day, standing beside him as he became Fuhrer. Riza, future first lady of Amestris.

Unreal photographs of their wedding evaporated into smoke in his mind. Their fantasy children, some with blond hair, others with dark eyes, vanished; all hope of a domestic life gone. The girl he had wanted to marry, the girl he had promised to protect…he had done worse than killed her.

Pushed to commit these atrocities at such a young age, what would become of her? At least her name would never become as public as his. She might escape the infamy of the war in general obscurity. He pondered the course of her future. If she survived the war, which she had a good shot of, as a sniper, then she'd return to the Academy, if only to receive a formal commissioning as a second lieutenant. And then she'd still have her five years to serve after the Academy.

He had already achieved the acting rank of captain, and if he survived until the end, he would be likely to receive a promotion, if not two, by the time he returned. That would make him a lieutenant colonel. Certainly no longer a Company Grade officer. Even if they were stationed on opposite ends of the country, he wouldn't be able to even invite her out for drinks after a day of work. Hell, it would have made no difference if she had simply enlisted. Even with the benefit of their shared background, it would prove challenging, if not impossible, to maintain even a platonic relationship.

A uncrossable gap had widened between them, and propriety, as well as regulation, would require them to keep their distance.

Well, an evil voice in his head reasoned, what if she got injured? The voice whispered hoarse and sandy as the wind. What, if she was injured enough to request a discharge? What then?

He pushed the thought out of his head, even raising his hand up in the air as if swatting an invisible fly, unable to tolerate it.

Why was he even thinking these thoughts? It wasn't as if she'd even want a future with him after she'd seen what he'd done with flame alchemy. After she'd seen what her innocent trust had wrought on the people of Ishval.

But you promised her father that you'd look after her, the reasonable part of his brain argued, so of course he'd need to find a way to maintain a relationship, any relationship, after this war ended. But there was no path forward. If only he'd had the forethought to make something official before he'd left her. Pre-existing relationships were the only loopholes. But that was marriages, not promises, not friendships, not whatever the two of them shared, or hoped they might have. He would have to wait for her to leave the military.

But what if she didn't want to?

Or worse, what if she never made it to the end of the war?

"Roy, are you alright?"

He didn't answer, his hand still clenched tight and his thoughts still revolving. Even if he had acted on his feelings in the past, she'd be disgusted to learn she had tied herself to a murderer. The reality engulfed him like ice water. She would be forever out of reach. He no longer deserved her love.

"Roy Mustang! What the hell is happening?"

His right hand grasped his pistol, not the pocket watch he thought he held. He hadn't realized it. But maybe he had.

"I—"

"Do not make me check you back in to the Med Tent, Roy Mustang. If you attempt suicide, I will shoot you." Hughes paused, his voice cracked and then softened. "And then they'll have to get you out of here."

"I've already tried, Hughes. And I can't." His tone was cold yet casual. Even suicide had become commonplace. He had become entirely desensitized to death. "I can put the damn thing into my mouth, but I can never bring myself to pull the trigger, however much I want to."

"That's good." Hughes' voice was weak. "But put the damn thing away."

Hughes had caught the flicker of fear that had danced in Roy's eyes. So he let the matter drop. Well, at least in discussion. He was a detective, after all. And he had his suspicions. When he had his resources, he'd go searching for the truth, the backstory Roy seemed so eager to conceal.

He thought of the title Hawkeye had used at first, "Mr. Mustang." They had known each other. And they possessed enough distance to merit formalities. He could guess this may have been the girl. And if not that girl, some other with a similar past intimacy that Roy felt the need to conceal entirely.

"What happened to you, Flame Alchemist?" Hughes asked, with as much compassion as he could squeeze into a disinterested tone. "Still…caught up with Erbe?" Hughes of course thought that Erbe played a rather negligible part in his friend's noticeable decline. Yes the matter with Erbe disturbed him greatly. But so had the months of slaughter under decree 3066. Hughes had a feeling it was the meeting with that sniper, that Hawk's Eye, that prompted Roy's noticeable mental deterioration.

"Yeah."

Hughes knew he was lying. The wind whistled between them for a while and the sand sang in some distant dune.

"There's beer in the Officer's mess. It's celebration for the eradication of Sector 27."

Roy often found himself in places he'd had no memory of going to. His memory faltered or his eyes failed and then time melted together in his mind, and somehow he'd find himself elsewhere. So, without knowing what had happened, he found himself drinking with Hughes in the Officer's Mess. The building, with its gilded ceiling and ornate calligraphy across the walls must have once been an Ishvalan house of prayer. Dim lights flickered above the makeshift tables. A radio in the corner croaked the feeble chorus of some dancing tune. The officers clustered in small groups, their heads downcast and their voices low. Even beer seemed unable to coax more than a few intermittent strains of laughter out of the depressed troops. Yet the dissonance of laughter that had been bookended by the day's bloody slaughter and that of the day to come, had already jarred Roy.

Never thought that you would be, standing here so close to me. There's so much I feel that I should say…

"This is the shittiest hazard pay I've ever received," Roy noted bitterly to Hughes as he inspected his water-stained glass. "I need whiskey, not just two allotted glasses of whatever the hell this is supposed to be."

"Yeah!" A lieutenant besides him boomed, raising his glass and his indignant voice. "Active war zone and we can't even get anything that'll get us properly drunk?"

"Fuck this piss-water!" Another voice called.

It's been a long, long time…

His hand clenched tight around the glass, as if to shatter it. He registered that one of the voices around him spoke from the radio. Another maddening song. It's Been a Long, Long Time. Yes, he had heard that one. And yes, it had, hadn't it?

Roy felt Hughes tugging him toward a door as an increasingly vocal displeasure rippled through the room.

They sat down outside on some crumbling, yet-unscavenged hunk of stone that had once been a house.

"So Roy, you never finished telling me; what's up with your love life? If I remember, we got interrupted before you could answer me those three weeks back."

Roy laughed dully. Their conversation had barely acknowledged him in the few days since they'd met for the second time in the dust of Ishval; the focus of their talk had veered entirely one-sided, always about Hughes, always about Gracia. He was amazed the man could think of anything else. Especially in the shadowy camp, when the occasional laughter and cheers sounded like the screams of dying men.

The morose mood hung in the air like a heavy evening dew, yet such a phenomena as dew was as impossible in Ishval as snow. Or joy.

Yet Hughes found endless happiness in describing his girlfriend in Central to Roy. It transported him somewhere else entirely.

So, his hollow laugh fading, Roy wasn't quite sure how to answer. He stared into the glass of beer in his hand, the reward of the day's victory. This was the result of his handiwork, a massacre of hundreds, all for an allotment of two glasses of cheap beer that smelled like the floor of the Academy's washrooms.

Riza's eyes, childlike and full of horror, pierced Roy's. "Roy…what have I done?" She had held out her hands in disgust, gazing at them as if they dripped blood. Her voice shook with terror.

"I don't have any words for it." He took another sip. "Like I said, it got worse."

"Real shame about the picture in your watch. She seems like she was a pretty girl."

Riza, in her knitted cardigan, presented him with a small photograph, a portrait she had had taken on her fifteenth birthday. She smiled nervously, in the picture and in his memory. He blushed in the morning cold as they walked to the train station.

"Yup, real shame." He should have cared that Hughes had opened the watch. He should have cared that the picture was ruined. He should have cared that he had been shot. But the shock of the past weeks had elicited few emotions from him.

"I know I already told you, but I'm planning on asking Gracia to marry me when I return."

Roy made some noise of having heard.

"And you're going to be best man."

The prior day's conversation flashed through Roy's mind.

"Can you really hold the woman you love with bloodstained hands?"

Hughes grabbed Roy by the collar, shouting into his face. "If there's one thing I learned in combat, raising a family with the woman you love may be a universal right, but you have to earn that love first. Understand?" he growled. "And I will do anything it takes to be the man she loves. I'll survive this war!"

His voice dropped, becoming shaky.

"And when I return home, I will swallow every horrible thing I've done here, and I will smile when I'm with her." He was trying to convince himself as much as he was trying to convince Roy.

His voice caught, his eyes closed. "I swear on my life. I will make her happy."

Roy's mind flicked back to the present and he tried to rouse himself to the reality of what Hughes had said. He forced his mouth into a smile. "Congratulations on that. And if I make it out of here alive, I'd—I'd be honored to be your best man."

He paused, before asking him, "How did you meet her?" He didn't want to talk about love and he certainly didn't want to talk about happy romances, but the conversation poured out of him in a habitual way. And in retrospect, he had realized that Hughes had answered that question a dozen times already.

"I must have told you this like twenty times already Roy, but if you want to hear it again…" The story trailed on. The two had met at a party, or while trying to order cabs afterwards, and both ended up in the same car toward the wrong location before walking the Central streets together until dawn.

Something mundane. Something cliché. Something ordinary.

And something so beautiful and normal that he'd never have. Why was that so tragic to him? Why did it make him jealous? Then he heard his name through the stupor of his thoughts.

"Roy."

"What?"

"The girl you met, the one whose father died, she was blonde, wasn't she." A statement, not a question.

"I suppose she was."

The silence passed between them like a roaring wind. Roy couldn't stand the sound of it.

"How old is Gracia?"

Hughes looked strangely back. "My age. Almost twenty four."

"You know…she's not even twenty. She's barely nineteen."

Hughes looked at Roy with an aching look before blinking and glancing away. "And half of the enlisted guys are younger."

Hughes' words knocked the breath from him. How myopic he'd been. He turned away in shame. Drinking was a luxury he should never be allowed again. A long-suppressed anger flared from his numbness, and he surged to his feet.

In a fit of rage he threw the glass to the ground. It didn't break. The sand absorbed its fall, as well as the remaining liquid that was bleeding out of it. Just as it had absorbed the gallons of blood he had poured into the desert.

He wanted to scream. But his voice was too parched, too worn. He opened his mouth, no sound escaped. He was too chronically dehydrated, too emotionally overwrought to even think of crying. For a second he wished he could. He couldn't even shatter a simple glass, yet he was able to ruin entire towns and splinter souls from bodies with just a snap of his fingers.

He stomped on the glass until it exploded, grinding fragments and splinters into the sand. His voice returned to him. He yelled and screamed, wordless, agonized sounds. Hughes never flinched.

He had heard that at Ishvalan weddings, the bride and groom broke a wine glass under their feet. It symbolized the dichotomy of harvest and destruction. The admittance of sadness and joy that would accompany married life.

And now he would never marry Riza Hawkeye.

Wind tossed the dead leaves of a singular tree into the sky. An unnatural fluorescent light flickering on the corner of the Mess Hall caught the leaves in their fall. Shining, they looked like stars.

"Well, it's my fault that she's here," he screamed. He screamed at Hughes, at the desert that, like the sand, absorbed everything, even sound. And at himself. And he took pleasure in it. He took pleasure in the way the scream ripped at his throat. "And I can't even go home one day and—and smile at her. Because she's already had to walk through the piles of corpses I've slaughtered!"

In a final fever of wrath, he kicked the shards of glass and they too glistened like stars in the night before they sank, unseen, into the sand.

That's what glass is anyway, just sand. Burnt sand.

Sand heated to such an ungodly, unnatural temperature that it became something else.

Perhaps this was the only thing he could take the fire out of.

A/N:

A short chapter finally(!) I promise I have some sense of self-control when I actually try to edit. Some of this chapter refences the Brotherhood OVA "Another Man's Battlefield." I haven't watched 2003 in literal YEARS (wish I could, but it's nowhere online), but that scene of Roy trying to shoot himself is the darkest, angstiest (and also mid 2000's emo) thing in all of FMA. And I'm really trying to bring that element of PTSD Roy and disturbed Hughes to life hear.

I keep forgetting that the age for joining the military in Amestris is 16. That concept is really truly disturbing by itself.

Also, on a side note, I see the Ishvalan culture as a middle-eastern mash-up between Judaism and Islam. That's why I've added elements of both. I feel like Arakawa primarily compares the Ishvalan genocide with the Holocaust, especially considering how Amestris is absolutely coded as a Weimar/WWII era Germany and the government is literally carrying out experiments on captured Ishvalans. But I also think she's making a more modern statement on the U.S. troop involvement in the middle east. The song that Roy associates with Heathcliff is Oyfn Pripetchik, a Yiddish song featured in Schindler's List.

I also just rewatched the new Dune movie, which I love, but I think I've been subconsciously absorbing some of it, especially the line, "when you take a life, you take your own." Also, this chapter reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop's poem "One Art." Give it a read, it's short.