these are the
[drabble challenge for Chira]
Havoc is a soldier, and well-used to nightmares.
He is just old enough to remember Ishbar, and it was horrible even before the State Alchemists were brought in for the kill. Ishbar gave him cigarettes, and he just can't let them go.
Ishbar also gave him his first woman: a pretty girl of mixed race, who ran away at the sight of his uniform, only to come slinking back later that night. She'd kissed him with the taste of battlefield fear, and he'd been careful with her until he'd found the knife hidden in her bodice.
Months after he is recalled home, he hears of the massacre and is secretly glad. The long shallow scar across his stomach is contrary, and pains him on the hottest, driest day of the year, when the air tastes of the desert. When he sees an Ishbarite refugee skulking through alleys, he makes himself stop and look away, because otherwise, his trigger finger starts to itch.
On the day the madman comes to East City, Havoc is there by his Colonel's side when Lt. Hawkeye coolly aims her rifle and shoots the glasses from his face. He sees, just for a moment, the narrow red eyes, which are the same color as long-dried blood, and suddenly his stomach lurches. Colonel Mustang makes a strangled noise, and Havoc knows that the man must also feel that cold stabbing blow to his own gut.
Later, when the Elric brothers are packed off with Major Armstrong, heading off for repairs and recuperation, Havoc goes home and stares at his bare chest in the mirror, counting the scars. These are the scattered moments that make up the memories of war.
He sleeps under a thin blanket. In spite of the rain, it is humid with the promise of breaking into true summer heat.
(Where Havoc is the one who has the gun, and at one point, he thinks the Colonel must have been there, because he can hear the people shouting--but it is just him and the Ishbar man, who does not duck away and avoid his eyes, but looks directly at him, as if to say I know you, and I am not afraid--
He aims his gun and meets the other man's eyes directly, and somehow he can feel himself smiling, and when the sun stings his eyes he realizes they are standing somewhere far away from the narrow streets and cold rain of East City--they are standing in Ishbar, he thinks, and then pulls the trigger--
There is a fountain of blood that spurts, and he stares without lowering his rifle, and then he pulls the trigger again and again and again--
And though the man's body jerks and twists, a marionette with twisted tangled strings, those eyes keep watching Havoc, gauging his reactions and his responses, as though it can see the sweat that beads his forehead. Those narrow red eyes weigh him, and perhaps find him wanting. His hands are sweaty upon the trigger, on the gun, and his breathing is hard in his own ears.
Strangely, he remembers that girl, who whimpered and sounded so surprise when he kissed her throat, and thinks that maybe she watched him the same way, staring and judging, and then her small hands holding onto her knife--
The man stumbles forward, and Havoc catches him as he falls, and there is a twist of that broad body; they are falling suddenly--going down in a tangle of limbs and blood, hot on his face and in his mouth, and then they hit the ground and roll, so that all he sees is the clear pure sky of the Ishbar desert--)
He wakes twisted badly on his bed, with the thin blanket kicked clear across the room. His shirt has ridden up on his stomach, and the lines of his own scars are red and sore.
He touches them lightly, and hisses at the contact. It takes a bit of shifting to find a sitting position that does not make him remember that long slash.
Havoc is a soldier, and is well-used to nightmares. Sometimes, he thinks that Ishbar gives him those, too, reaching out with her desert-crone fingers to stroke across his chest when he is sleeping.
He lights a cigarette.
--end--