A/N: PLEASE REVIEW. PLEASE. I hope the title of this story isn't too pretentious. My aim with this story is to provide the definitive back-story to Roy Mustang before, during and after FMA. Thus, the title is very general.
Prologue
The camp sat out in the godforsaken desert on the eastern border of Ishbal. It was connected to the rest of the world by a few slender threads of roading that seldom lasted past a few weeks. Actually no one sure it was even in Ishbal. Over the hundreds of peaceful years of recorded history no one had thought it important to pinpoint it exactly, but somewhere nearby the shifting sands became Xing.
One thing was for sure, though. The camp was out there way beyond the point of ridiculousness. The Amestrian military had been deployed to prevent the rebelling Ishbalans from invading Amestris and to secure Amestris' border. Only the deluded citizens in Central reading about the war in the paper each day still believed this conflict was about that.
Now the Amestrian soldiers were stationed on the other side of Ishbal from the border with Amestris. Much of their work nowadays was simply preventing Ishbalans from escaping into Xing which was granting them sanctuary. Though Roy didn't understand why they seemed to toy with the Ishbalans as if penning them in and driving them to despair, he and the other soldiers had no great love for Xing. Earlier in the war, the nation had been open about supporting Ishbal, providing weapons, ammunition, supplies, food, and medicine to the rebels and transporting Ishbal civilians across the desert so that they were out of the grasp of Amestris.
Times had changed. The Ishbal "armies" were now little more than a few hundred starving rebels each, driven into the desert or the mountains or hiding in the sewers of Ishbal's cities. They rarely openly made a stand anymore and if they did it didn't survive for long.
Now with a massive, well-equipped battle-hardened Amestrian army that had been trained to move, live, and fight in the desert sitting on its border, Xing's once impenetrable barrier to invasion was gone. The country was suddenly much less vocal about its support for Ishbal. Although it still granted sanctuary to any Ishbalans that reached its borders, very few made it past the vigilance of the soldiers and even fewer past the vigilance of the sun.
With the battles all but over, soldiers wondered when they'd see their childhood homes again. Roy slowly but surely discovered he'd never again see things through those eyes after his stay in Ishbal.