Disclaimer: Fullmetal Alchemist belongs to Hiromu Arakawa.
And now, a completely different Roy--but the basic theme is the same, so I included it with the other four.
——————
-'
Roy got through most of his time at Ishvar fairly well. It wasn't until the end that everything began collapsing.
(He was--in hindsight--almost certain that the reason he began feeling guilt for his actions then was because he hadn't allowed himself to feel it earlier.)
The Ishvarlans had still had snipers in the second to last year. In his first week, Roy had been injured and trapped behind a wall that had once been a house with a few regular soldiers, and with snipers in the building across from them. A bullet had grazed his thigh, and Roy had clamped a hand to it before remembering his glove. His second glove had fallen when he'd been moving to pull it on and had been startled by one of the soldiers shoving him behind the wall. It lay on the sandy street less than half a meter away, visible through the remains of a door frame, but on the other side of the wall.
When the first of the soldiers had run out of ammo, the sergeant had told him to go get the glove. The man had, of course, been killed, but he threw it closer to the door frame, and they also managed to hit one of the snipers.
"What the hell were you thinking?" Roy had demanded, not looking at the body.
"They brought you alchemists in to end this," the sergeant had replied harshly. "We're not supposed to let you get killed."
Roy began working on an array then, something that would put up a wall long enough for him to reach the glove. It took longer than it should have because the wind kept spilling sand into the lines, ruining them, and they ran out of water waiting. Eventually Roy had used his blood to pack the sand down long enough to activate the array.
The Ishvarlans had shot at the wall after it went up, but it held, and the sergeant had grabbed Roy's glove. The man managed not to throw it at his chest.
The dead soldier's blood had gotten on the edges, but not the fingers, so Roy wiped his own blood off his hand and pulled it on. He sent the first flame through the window that the shots were coming from, and then concentrated hard and lit sparks off the gases released by the fire until he had burned the entire building from the inside out.
The soldiers shot the Ishvarlan that escaped through the side door without looking at Roy. He focused on bandaging his leg with a sleeve torn from the dead soldier's shirt, and ignored the crackling roar.
He reminded himself of the snipers, the dead man, how he had had to suck on a pebble to get moisture in his mouth and the way blood looked drawn into an array in the sand, whenever he started faltering. He reminded himself of that nameless sergeant's words and kept his gloves on at all times. He hadn't used to wear them in the camp until a few desperate Ishvarlans had attacked with grenades, and then he wore them in his sleep and kept them underneath the towel when he showered.
("You had it in your pocket," Crimson had said, finding Roy in the medical tent getting his leg bandaged when he came in with a new set of second-degree burns on his left hand. Roy would wonder later whether Kimberly would have fingerprints left by the end of the war. "Are you stupid or suicidal, Flame?"
"I had one on," Roy had muttered. "The second one would have been overkill to use."
"The soldiers don't keep their spare clips out of reach." Crimson had looked at him even as he'd alchemized a pitcher of water cold and begun pouring it over his hand. "There's better ways to die."
Rumors about the Crimson alchemist wouldn't start for another year, and Gran would keep them smothered for several months after they did; but when Roy finally began to hear them, he remembered that look and couldn't bring himself to feel stunned.)
He got through the daily fighting as well as anyone else. He got through the massacre with the red stone through a combination of detachment--keeping his thoughts focused on the chain reactions of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen, noting the difference in the feel when he ignited the wooden buildings or the oil that the Ishvarlans used for cooking--and sheer inability to process so much destruction and death. He breathed through his mouth and avoided the slow-decomposing explosions that Kimberly had planted around the area, moving to safety and then using the volatile gases given off by the burning wood and plaster to feed his own fires. He went back to the camp when the orders to desist came, and if his sleep wasn't peaceful, he managed to get enough of it not to collapse the next day as they continued to clean up the surrounding areas.
Roy survived the war as well as anyone else who didn't feed on that sort of thing. He moved through the last week of the actual fighting in almost surreal state, but he endured it.
It was the Rockbells that almost killed him.
Traitors by dint of treating the enemy as well as their own men, Gran had told him. Had ignored several demands by the military to stop. The fighting was nearly finished now, and Marcoh was doing the work of three surgeons with his stone, so there was no reason to keep them around as backup doctors; eliminate them, Flame.
Roy had meant to shoot them quickly, to end it fast. To kill the wife first so she wouldn't have to see her husband die and he wouldn't have to hear anymore high screaming. But the man had thrown himself in front of her as she ducked down; the shot had gone through his heart relatively cleanly, but on its exit it caught her in the throat and nicked the artery.
Roy had had to shoot her again, in the back, as she clung to the desk and knocked over a picture frame and two pens in an attempt to get away. She would have died of the neck wound, he'd known, but not soon enough.
Most of the blood had come from her; the artery had splattered more than Roy expected.
It was the blood that had done it, he figured out, years later. It took those years for him to be able to think about it--years of being away from the East and doing a majority of his duties from a desk and being force-fed normalcy and homemade dinners from Maes and having a plan, a plan that bordered on insane and demanded horrible self-abasement at times and constantly required his attention because even one mistake could end everything--it took those years of not being in Ishvar before he could think back with any kind of objectivity.
He'd been relying on alchemy almost entirely by the end--certainly after they'd been given the red stone, but also up to a month before that. He had still been using his gun, but rarely, and it had been almost half a year since he'd shot someone so near to him. And he'd never shot civilians in their own home before. And the fires cauterized wounds even as they killed, so the corpses rarely bled much even after he passed by them.
It was the blood that had stayed with him, through the nights and the bottles of wretched alcohol that the higher officers were pretending not to notice were being transmuted illegally in the back of the mess hall. The blood, and the way the woman's body had shuddered as she collapsed to the floor after the second shot, and the way the man's hand had fallen over the picture when they had stacked the bodies.
He still had a harder time seeing the corpses of women than of men, if he was honest about it. Both Hawkeye and Havoc had noticed, and included the detail in their briefings whenever it was necessary, so that he would be prepared and keep his face straight.
It was also the reason he preferred to leave the shooting up to Riza. He had never really hated alchemy, even at the worst of times--alchemy was meant to be a creative process, it was people who chose to use it destructively, and it was a lot easier to hate those in the military who'd decided to use alchemists than the skills that he had studied years to gain. It was easier to hate Kimberly than the gloves that Roy himself had designed.
The gloves were still his weapon of choice; but the war had left him with a permanent dislike of guns. Some days even the smell of the powder turned his stomach, reminded him of soot and blood and misuse.