Author's Notes:
This. Is. Angst. It's 2 AM, and I'm in a foul mood. So I decided to write this. The first half came straight from my head, without any hesitation, just a flow of emotions. The second half doesn't go as well. Spoilers for the anime, though it deviates from the original plot. A whole lot. I needed to kill someone, so I took a realistic opportunity and ran with it.
Don't own FMA. I'm in such a foul mood I wouldn't even bother to say something witty about someone getting it for me here.
I know this is not particularly well done, but it's supposed to be raw emotion, not filled with unnecessary wording that might mar the point of pain. That's all. Enjoy it.
Alone.
Standing at the grave, she was alone. She had been alone for the past hour. Or perhaps it had been two hours, even three. She had lost count. She didn't care if she had lost count, because it didn't matter in the end. Alone was alone was alone, and whether she stood in a crowd of hundreds of people, or at a grave without a living soul within arms reach, she was alone in every definition of the word and in definitions that nobody bothered to commit to print.
Amber eyes stared at the grave.
What nerve he had. What honor. What bravery.
She hated him for it. She wanted to start running her hands through the dirt and undoing the burial. She wanted to unwind everything that had happened in the past week. She wanted to kick and scream and throw a tantrum, if that could only remind her that there was more left of her being than a hollow shell.
She didn't know when she had ended up on her knees. She disregarded the mud sinking through the dress uniform skirt she was wearing. She disregarded the fact that she had been soaking wet for the past indeterminate length of time. She hadn't initially noticed that her hands were in the mud, as well. She hadn't noticed the ground rapidly approaching, that her shoulders had given way and what remained of her composure had washed away in the torrential rain of the sky that cried for her because she had run out of tears.
Amber eyes stared blankly.
When his closest comrade had died, she stood diligently by his side, straight-faced and patient. She had waited. She knew she had a large gap to fill, trying to stand beside her colonel when he felt he had nothing left. She knew that she couldn't do that for him, no matter how hard she tried. Standing by him was never easy, but she did it anyway.
Unlike him, she knelt at the grave with no comfort to be offered. She had no inferior officer who had reason to even try. Unlike him, she was alone, alone, alone. She mourned him, alone. Mourned, in agony and defeat and failure. She wished they had persecuted her. That they dismissed her. That maybe they raised a gun and shot her because she was a murderer, as she lacked the courage to do it to herself. That they dragged her away from his grave and told her she was a killer.
They didn't need to tell her. She knew in her heart that she was solely responsible for the death of Roy Mustang.