Prompt 25, What If, "This One Last Thing"
Title: This One Last Thing
Author: raja815
Series: First Anime
Word Count: 6000ish (Word gives me 5700, the Internet counter gives me 6100)
Rating: R
Characters: Havoc, Mustang, Hawkeye, Breda, Falman, Fuery, Hakuro, and others
Summary: What if nothing turned out the way it was supposed to?
Warnings: Gore, torture, character death, anime spoilers
Notes: Everyone who knows me knows I think the first anime is pure gold up until the last half of the last episode, so I took the opportunity this week to write out how the anime ends in my head when I turn off the television before I can be accosted by the atrocities of an upbeat and relatively positive ending. I have great fondness for down endings.
In short, this is an alternate ending for the first anime. It branches off just before the final "epilogue" in the last 15 minutes or so of the series, so there will be spoilers up to that point.
They managed to hold the line for almost three days. Not bad, considering he was only a second Lieutenant.
Havoc was snatching a few fitful minutes of broken half-sleep when everything fell apart. The black wig and uniform hat were askew on his head, a half-smoked cigarette a dead stick of ash between his lips, and the lullaby of rifle fire and Breda’s authoritarian shouts to their rag-tag regimen of fellow traitors in his ears. He wouldn’t have slept, didn’t want to sleep, swore up and down he couldn’t sleep, but Breda had insisted, and in the end he’d relinquished his post at the machine gun and sat down in the chair that was meant for Mustang, closed his tell-tale blue eyes, and put one gloved hand over his face to block out the occasional bursts of brightness from the nearby battleground.
It was the last peaceful sleep he ever had, and he never even went deep enough under to dream.
“Goddamn, they told us he was in fucking Central!”
The shout, not nearly as loud as the gunfire, nevertheless jerked Havoc out of his foggy near-sleep as neatly as any alarm clock. He was out of the chair and reaching for the pistol holstered to the back of his belt before the sentence was even half-complete, not even pausing to blink the sleep film from his eyes.
And it still wasn’t fast enough.
He managed to squeeze off two shots. One went wild and hit the table, ripping through the maps and files they’d left arranged on its surface. The second did a bit better, and there was a thick yowl as it made contact with the meat of one of the approaching soldier’s thighs.
Another two inches and you’d’ve been just half a man, buddy, Havoc thought, and absurdly, as the raiding soldiers pushed into the tent and his right arm was seized, he felt like laughing.
“Of course it isn’t him! Does it matter? Mustang wouldn’t use a gun-”
Whoever had gotten hold of him was growling into his ear with breath that reeked of sour saliva and rancid coffee. Havoc didn’t know the voice, but whoever it belonged to was either strong enough or quick enough to get Havoc to drop the gun before he could do any real damage. Idylly thinking he was going to fucking kill Breda for letting him fall asleep (and quelling the panicky flutter in the back of his mind that wanted to suggest these men might already have done just that), Havoc pressed back hard and sharp with one shoulder. There was a cry of pain as it connected with his assailant’s jaw and a momentary slackening of pressure at his arm.
He turned to run, thinking he could find the rest of them and regroup, come up with a new plan, but of course, it was much too late for that. There were at least ten men in the little tent, grabbing and pulling and cocking pistols against Havoc’s continued struggles. Everywhere around him he saw soldiers, his own military, and felt for a moment strangely disembodied, as though he were back in Areugo where he had fought his first campaign and had somehow swapped bodies with the Areugian men they’d been sent in to apprehend.
From outside he heard a high, painful scream that sounded like Fuery, and that brought him back to the moment in a hurry. The Colonel! He thought desperately, Oh, they must’ve caught… and then he didn’t want to think anymore, not now and not ever again. He spun wide, bringing out his knee, felt it meet the soft give of someone’s stomach, felt his foot connect with someone’s shin. For a moment he actually believed he might’ve been wrong, that he wasn’t too late, that he could still make it out. He threw a wild punch, groping with his free hand for his remaining pistol…
And cried out as his fist connected his something solid and the wound in his hand reopened. The bones, poorly set to begin with, rebroke, and the useless red array on the alchemic glove was suddenly blotted out in a wash of deep scarlet. He’d completely forgotten the injury that had let him make this dangerous swap in the first place, and he’d just signed his own death warrant in doing so.
Fuck! He thought, oh fuck fuck fuck… and then he was being pushed down, ground into the tent’s dirt floor, being punched and pulled and trampled and spit on, ears aching with cries of traitor traitor murderer traitor until something heavy crashed against his skull and the world faded to a misty and crimson-tinted gray.
He came back to himself face down in the dirt outside, handcuffed and shackled, his body singing a thousand-voiced chorus of pain; high soprano whines from his ruined hand countered by throaty alto warbles from what was likely a broken rib or two, mellow tenor rumbles from the bruises on his back, deep booming basses from the swelling under the boot-shaped rupture on the back of his head.
He knew it couldn’t be much later. It had been early evening when he’d gone to the tent to sleep, and it was barely full dark now. He could only imagine how much he was going to hurt after a few hours, once the shock and the adrenaline really had time to wear off. Until then, the ground was cold under his cheek and he was grateful for it. Both of his eyes felt nearly swollen shut.
“Second Lieutenant Jean E. Havoc?”
Havoc didn’t know the voice, but guessed by the tone that whoever it was wasn’t here to wish him a pleasant evening.
“That’s me,” he mumbled, using the jolly, familiar voice that every higher-up in the Amestrian military save Colonel Roy Mustang had always berated him for. He could practically feel whoever-it-was above him seething, and that was more comforting to his battered body that the impromptu icepack of the frozen ground. He turned his head a bit and caught a glimpse of a tall man reading from a clipboard, flanked on all sides by riflemen.
“Serial number eight-six-six-seven-ought-seven-ought-four?”
“That’s the one,” he said in the same voice, and this time got a kick to the side for his trouble.
Definitely a broken rib, he thought, as the pain there stopped singing and began to howl. He knew the sensation from his long ago boyhood, when he’d once fallen off the top of a hay wagon and spent two days coughing blood and two months taking shallow breaths. He found the pain strangely nostalgic.
“I’m here to inform you that you’ve been placed under arrest, pending sentencing by the Military Tribunal in Central City, on the charges of high treason against the State of Amestris and the Amestrian Military, impersonating an officer, assaulting an officer, theft of arms and supplies, and aiding and abetting the convicted criminal Roy Mustang in the brutal slaying of Fuhrer King Bradley.”
“Whoop-de-do for me,” Havoc said, his consciousness floating away from him, listing toward the rolling farmland where he’d grown up, where there might have been broken ribs and measles and scoldings, but at least there’d been some love to balance things out.
Crunch.
With a sudden, wrenching scream and all other pain forgotten, he was back in the present, blood pouring from his mouth as thick and fast as vomit. Chunks of his shattered teeth scraped and ground against his cheeks, slicing his gums, carving his tongue to ribbons. His lower jaw was white-hot agony, sending throbbing sparks racing up and down the fracture lines.
He rolled his head in paroxysms of anguish, just in time to see one of the riflemen raising the butt of the gun that had just rearranged the geography of Havoc’s face.
“Learn to watch your mouth, Lieutenant,” this faceless man growled, and then- oh, sweet mercy-everything faded to blank grayness again.
The ground was warm when he woke up, warm and humming gently. For a fleeting and wonderful moment he thought he was back in Eastern Headquarters, napping under the old oak tree he’d favored with Black Hayate asleep beside him, himself exhausted after a long night of overtime, the puppy exhausted after a long afternoon of chasing butterflies and burying bones.
“Lieutenant Breda? I think he’s waking up.”
He recognized Falman’s voice and it only heightened the hallucination-why shouldn’t it be Falman? They often sent Falman to wake him if he napped too long, on the days when the Colonel couldn’t facilitate his own procrastination by coming to wake Havoc himself-but then there was a jolt and the ruined remnants of his jaw clacked together. His eyes furrowed as he hissed in pain, and then opened wide as the passage of air over the exposed nerves in his broken teeth intensified the pain to an almost unbearable sharpness all through his head.
“Don’t move, Havo.” He recognized first the voice and then the smell of his former Academy bunkmate, and realized his head was resting in Heymans’ lap. “God, Havoc, your poor mouth… I was sitting here thinking you’d choked on your teeth…”
“Sorry to worry you,” Havoc tried to say, but couldn’t form the words. Even the faintest movement of his lips made the pain worse.
“I said don’t move. What the hell’s wrong with you? Never listening, Havo, that’s you.”
Havoc carried on not listening, forcing himself to open his eyes. They lit on first the interior of a truck, then a few lumps of flesh and shredded uniform all peeringing intently down on him, their faces all so swollen, bloody, bruised and broken that he could barely recognize his own unit. For one heartstopping instant, he thought they were all missing their arms, but then he realized that, like him, they’d been handcuffed with their hands behind their backs. Even so, it was bad enough. Breda’s nose looked broken, there were chunks missing from Falman’s hair as though he’d been dragged by it, and Fuery’s glasses were missing, his eyes swollen and bloodshot.
The relief at seeing them alive momentarily covered the pain enough for him to try to speak again.
“Did they catch the Colonel?” He asked, his voice sounding mushy and garbled as he held his jaw as stiff as possible. Blood squished under his tongue. “Where are they taking us? Where’s Armstrong? Did they-”
“Don’t talk, Jean!” Breda barked, his voice barely loud enough to cover the hysteria he was only just keeping in check. “Every time you do, your mouth starts to…”
He trailed off, and Havoc followed his downcast eyes to the rivulets of blood that had flowed through Havoc’s lacerated lips, soaked through Havoc’s uniform and Breda’s trousers, and now rippled on the floor of the truck like grisly rain puddles.
“They caught the Colonel,” Fuery said, his voice unusually low and heavy. One of his shoulders had a disquietingly slumped look to it, and whenever the truck jostled, he stopped speaking and winced. “We think he’s alive. Ha… Hakuro’s running Central now. He wan… wanted us brought in alive, so we assume the Colonel… ah… the Colonel…”
“We think that means Mustang’s alive,” Falman finished, taking over as he saw Fuery’s face whitening with increasing pain. “And Lieutenant Hawkeye too. Armstrong got taken on the truck before us by Hakuro's own unit.”
“That bastard’ll be gunning for the permanent Fuhrership,” Breda hissed. “He wants us all together in Central. Wouldn’t put anything past the sadistic fuckup. The people are out for blood, and he’ll give it to them. He’ll give them anything if it means he gets the crown at the end of the day.”
There was silence, punctuated only by a short gasp from Fuery as the truck hit another bump.
“Well, can’t do us much worse than this, can he?” Havoc said, trying to joke, trying to make them smile, trying to whistle against the closing dark, but he barely got the words out before his teeth knocked together again, and then he couldn’t speak at all. For a few minutes, he could barely even breathe.
They took them to the Central Penitentiary, a miserable old mausoleum of a building built almost three hundred years before, back when there’d been a strange religious sect in power that got it into their heads that the way of the future for prisons was complete and uninterrupted solitude. It sprawled like a spider from a central hub, thirteen wings of tiny, lonely cells with thick walls and no windows. In the later years, of course, it had become outdated, and now they only used it for the death-row prisoners. The remnants of Laboratory Five were still moldering beside it.
Havoc was semi-conscious when they brought him in, stood him on his feet and jabbed him with their rifles to make him walk. He passed down endless halls, ignoring to the hisses of other prisoners jeering at them through the tiny, barred hallway doors. A few of them hissed insults, a few hissed congratulations, a few hissed threats or warnings and even come-ons, but they made no difference to him. A hiss is a hiss is a hiss.
Until he caught a glimpse of blonde hair through one set of bars.
“Aww, fuck,” he groaned, “not you too.”
Lieutenant Hawkeye looked almost as bad as he imagined he himself must. Her hair was down for the first time in his memory, but it was matted with blood, greasy and dank. One of her eyes was swollen closed, her lips cut, her skin marked with what he knew without a shadow of a doubt were cigarette burns, blackened red and swollen with the beginnings of infection.
I’ll never smoke again, he thought, and meant it, as he stomach tried to roll over. God, she’ll be scarred like that forever, god, her face…
There were hand-shaped bruises on her cheeks, her neck, on the pale expanse of shoulder exposed under the drooping collar of the too-large prison tunic she wore, and he tried very hard not to think about what those bruises might mean.
“Yes,” she said quietly, and offered him a faint smile. “Me, too.”
The rifle jabbed Havoc between the shoulders, and another one clanged against the bars of Hawkeye’s cell.
“Shut up,” he growled. “No talking.”
So he said nothing more, only craned his head to watch her until her cell was out of sight, and then squinted his swollen eyes, peering into the shadowy cells, trying to catch a glimpse of ebony-black hair, dark eyes, pale skin.
But he saw nothing but grimy, empty darkness.
He woke himself up ten hours later in his solitary dank little cell, gagging and retching on all the blood that had trickled down his throat in his sleep, acid burning against the bared nerves of his broken teeth.
The cell was barely ten feet long, but he still couldn’t make his battered body limp across the rough concrete to the toilet bucket in the corner fast enough and he vomited a red and stinking fluid that puddled in the middle of the little patch of floor, curled up into a shaking ball of pain, hoping the whole time that he’d simply choke and die, wanting to curse Roy Mustang’s name but not quite able to, even now.
Outside the little barred window a guard laughed at him.
“Try and piss it down the drain if you want,” this faceless man said. “I would. It won’t be til Tuesday the janitor hoses this block down, and the flies are fucking killer here this time of year.”
Havoc only limped back to the little plywood bunk and tried to make himself sleep again. His teeth hurt, his ribs hurt, and his forehead was achingly dry. Fever from the broken teeth, he thought. He could feel the exposed nerves of the stumps beginging to fester in his head, so why not. Why not indeed.
He sank back into sleep and pain and sickness, letting time pass by in great blank gushes, waiting for the next horrific thing to happen.
It was two days before the cell was cleaned, and in the meantime the puddle of vomit dried blackened and putrefied and rotted as though it too was an open and infected sore. The flies were bad. The smell was worse. And the pain in his mouth was worst of all, burying his head and absorbing all the lesser pains of hand and rib and head into one enormous glowing throb.
But Havoc didn’t notice them much, though, the flies or the smell or even the pain after awhile. He had vague memories afterward of crawling to the little food slot in the door a few times a day to sip the water they passed him, but other than that there were only dreams, memories masquerading as fact.
Once he dreamed of the day he’d met Mustang, how he’d walked into the office in Eastern HQ with his transfer papers and his strained, nervous smile. He’d seen Mustang sitting at his desk and felt confused. He’d thought Mustang would be taller, somehow. And Mustang had taken his papers and smirked and clapped Havoc’s back and asked him if he liked beer or whiskey for lunch. Lieutenant Hawkeye had sighed dissaproval from the corner, but they’d left base, and by the end of the week Havoc knew Mustang had the right idea about the country and Mustang knew Havoc knew he did, and Havoc’s transfer was approved and there he was, Mustang’s left arm. Hawkeye was already his right.
For a few minutes he thought Hawkeye was there herself, the burns on her face miraculously gone, and she was bringing him piles of reports to go over, and he was complaining that he could never read that Sergeant Roger's handwriting and she was telling him there were worse things.
Later he thought his cousin Denis was lying on the bunk with him, a kid of twelve again and laughing that he was gonna tell Jean’s ma about the naked pictures of women Jean kept in the rip in his mattress, and this melted into a memory of a knock-down-drag-out shouting match he’d had with Mustang once over the Eastern Headquarters mail secretary, who’d had tits the size of cantaloupes.
But then, he remembered the dancing, and it was all he could see for hours and hours on end. There’d been a woman (not the mail secretary; she’d gone for Fuery in the end, of all people) who Havoc liked, and she’d wanted to go out dancing and only dancing, which Havoc couldn’t do. All morning he’d worried over it, until everyone was fed up and then Mustang had vanished with a huge pile of unfinished work still stacked on his desk and come back two hours later at lunch break with a gramophone.
“I’ll teach you,” Mustang said, “if you’ll shut up about it and get some work done. You’re a liability, Havoc, you know that?”
And Havoc had awww, Colonel, what the hell are you thinking-ed and it’s fucking queer to dance with guys, Sir-ed but in the end, he hadn’t refused. Hadn’t been able to refuse.
And wasn’t that just the thing about Roy Mustang, anyway? You could never refuse. Not even if you knew better.
So they’d spent the whole lunch break whirling around the office, the men wolf-whistling and clapping as they swung and dipped, even Hawkeye giving in and breaking a smile when Havoc spun the Colonel so enthusiastically he upset two chairs and a coat rack, and they’d both been flushed and laughing by the time it was time to start work again.
Of course he’d later completely failed to get off with the girl, but just now that didn’t seem nearly as important as the way he and Mustang had laughed together, all those years ago.
He lost track of the time after awhile; the cell saw no daylight, he had no contact with any of his fellow men, and he was fed with such irregularity that there was no hope of measuring time that way. He only knew it had been long enough for his mouth to heal a little, so he could at least speak again with only moderate pain, and when he did have food, he could tear off chunks of the dry, crusty bread and hold them in his mouth with some water and let them dissolve enough to gulp them down-chewing was still, of course, out of reach.
And then one day he was roused from the cell by a young man wearing a Corporal’s stripes on his shoulder boards and speaking in a hesitant whisper.
“Lieutenant Havoc? They want you for questioning.”
Havoc, who had been remembering the time he and Breda had talked the Colonel into trying to hit every bar in East City in a single day, and how he’d ended up tossing Mustang over his shoulders like a sack of potatoes at the end of the night to get him home, and how he hadn't even noticed Mustang had puked down his back like a colicky baby until Mustang's doorman refused to let them into the elevator, was shocked. He was used to not recognizing the voices of the guards, but he knew this one.
“Halloway?” He said, voice cracking with disuse.
“Yes, Sir,” the young man said, then frowned. “I mean, yes.”
Halloway had been a soldier in Havoc’s own platoon once upon a time, one of the men he’d commanded during the search for Scar’s body, the sweep of Liore, the transport of the Ishbalan prisoners.
“God, kid,” he said, his lips protesting as he tried to smile. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I’m your new guard. And I’m supposed to take you to your trial.”
Of course, it wasn’t a trial. Traitors don’t get trials in Amestris, never have and probably never will, at least not anytime soon. But Havoc got a clean tunic and pants to wear, and a grim-faced medic washed the caked blood from his mouth and splashed the worst of the infections with iodine, so at least it wasn’t a total loss.
He’d thought he might see the unit, might see the Colonel, might see Fuhrer Hakuro long enough to spit at his feet, but of course, he didn’t. He simply stood in a wooden cage (a testimonial box, they called it, but words were cheap, and it was nothing but a cage) and a grim looking military judge told him he was a trecheous snake, and he deserved everything that was coming to him.
“Prison? Flogging? Execution?” Havoc asked, and got a cold smile in return. He didn’t care much either way, and he wanted to go back to his cell and lie down. The medic’s cleaning had made his shattered mouth ache again.
“Who’s to say for sure? Fuhrer Hakuro has a plan for you, and a wise one. This is what you get, letting a man like that Mustang turn you against the military that made this country great.” The judge, who had the rank insignia of a brigadeer general, snarled at Havoc, and that made Havoc laugh despite the pain it caused his jaw.
“Don’t you know what he was? The Fuhrer of this great, great military?”
The judge just glared, and Havoc felt suddenly cold.
Of course I knew, that glare said. Do you think it makes the slightest bit of difference?
Halloway sometimes forgot and talked to Havoc through the doorway of his cell. He’d never been the brightest kid, and he was having a hard time reconciling the Second Lieutenant Havoc he’d idolized as the dangerous traitor he was now.
“I’ve seen that Mustang, too,” he said one day, after Havoc had gotten it out of him that the rest of the unit was alive, if not entirely well, and Havoc’s stomach flipped.
“Is he okay?”
Silence, and then an affiramitive grunt.
Havoc fell back onto the bunk, breathing hard as he tried to make himself think. Breathing hard made his teeth ache, but he found he preferred that; the pain helped clear his mind, helped drag up things long buried, helped him form a desperate and foolish plan.
“Halloway,” he said finally. “Do you remember what happened with you and Bull, when you first reported to me?”
The silence showed Halloway remembered just fine. And how could anybody forget? They’d been facing dishonorable discharge with flogging when Havoc had walked in on them, two young men locked together in ecstasy on the damp shower floor one night while the rest of the army camp was at mess.
“You can’t threaten me,” Halloway said after minutes and minutes of frieghtened silence. “You’ve got nobody left to talk to.”
“Who’d threaten you?” Havoc said. “I wouldn’t. But I kept that secret a good long time. I thought you might like a chance to pay me back, that's all.”
It had gone two in the morning, according to the watch Halloway wore on his wrist, and the prison was almost sepulchral in its silence. The sound of the small, barred door to Havoc’s cell swinging open had been so loud it echoed and Havoc had been sure he’d be caught. But Halloway hadn’t even flinched, had only taken Havoc’s hands and cuffed them, yielding to his nature and being gentle with the Lieutenant's hurt hand before his training could kick in and remind him not to be, and began to lead him through the silent halls.
They reached the central hub of the prison, turned right, and padded down another corridor, this one damp and mouldering with disuse. Havoc thought it probably hadn’t seen a prisoner for a hundred years… before all this mess, that was.
“You can have a half hour,” Halloway said. “Then I’ll come back for you. And keep your voice low or you’ll wake the whole block, and then we’re both dead.”
“Good,” Havoc whispered. “Thanks, Halloway.”
Halloway said nothing, only stopped Havoc with a rough tug of his cuffs and reached down with a large, iron key, shoved Havoc inside, and clunked the lock closed behind him.
The walls were crumbling, porous, oozing water. The smell of sewage was thick in the air, and fresh boards had been nailed over the bars in the door, sealing it against even casual glimpses or whispers. The only light crept in around the cracks like furtive roaches, but Havoc was used to the dark from his own cell, and it was just enough to see him by.
Mustang was seated in the farthest corner of the cell, hands shackled in front of him in a large wooden stockade and further locked with cords and chains, feet in heavy boots and metal cuffs, face swollen and bloody, one eye a ruined mess, skin lacerated and burned, clothes filthy beyond description.
And he was smirking, as if Havoc had just come upon him in a local bar.
“Well. Lieutenant Havoc. This is a surprise.”
“God, Sir,” Havoc managed, and rushed forward as quickly as he could manage. Mustang’s smile went quizzical, then concerned.
“What the hell have they done to your mo-”
“Never mind my fucking mouth,” Havoc gasped, dropping to his knees before the Colonel. It was the only way he could see him in the dankness. “Your eyes, what happened to your…”
“It’s no matter, Lieutenant, I still have the one left.” He smiled again, and the sight of that battered face spread out around the same old arrogant smile made Havoc’s throat ache. “It’s about all I’ll need.”
“Tell me what happened,” Havoc murmured, “they haven’t told us a thing, and I… what the hell are they keeping us here for? What do we do next? You have to help us, Sir, we’ve come all this way and it’s just…”
He trailed off, unable to find a word.
For a long while Mustang said nothing, only peered down at Havoc with his good eye and smiled faintly. Then he told them how he’d stormed the Fuhrer’s mansion, how he’d burned the homunculus to ash with the unwitting help of the Fuhrer’s own son, how he’d been shot by Colonel Archer, how he and Lieutenant Hawkeye had been apprehended as he lay bleeding out on the Fuhrer’s front porch, how he’d been given rudimentary medical care and shut up here.
All through the telling, Havoc could feel infection and fever wafting off the Colonel’s skin, could hear the hitches of concealed pain in his chest, could smell the reek coming off him, and he could fill the cracks in the Colonel’s story as easily as a mason fills the cracks in a garden wall. How they’d tortured him, starved him, spat at him, pissed on him, how they’d told him of his mens’ suffering and laughed, how they’d bound his limbs so hard against any attempt he might make to escape alchemically that he couldn’t move from his bunk. And all because he'd tried to help them.
“Why don’t they just kill us?” Havoc murmured at the end, eyes closed and jaw aching as he tried to clench it against the painful ache in his throat. “What’s the point of all this?”
“Haven’t they told you?” Mustang asked, peering down at Havoc with his eye, his strangely calm and peaceful eye, his sad but smiling eye.
“They don’t tell us shit.”
Mustang was quiet again, and then said, as simply as if remarking on the weather. “I’m going to be executed by firing squad next week, Havoc. Sunday at sunset.” He paused briefly, closed his eye, and smiled the gentlest, most heartbreaking smile Havoc had ever seen on a human face before. “By a squadron of five soldiers.”
It took a minute to sink in.
“NO!” Havoc cried, struggling upward, trying to stand. “No, no, no, oh no, no I-”
“Shh, Havoc. You’ll wake the whole prison. That’s why they’ve been keeping the five of you here, you see. Say what you will about Hakuro, but the man knows how to give the people what they want.”
Havoc had barely heard him. He was staring at Mustang, still gasping his negative, shaking and wanting to be sick.
“After that, I think he intends to force the five of you back into service. As enlisted men, of course, and under his own command, likely to serve the most horrible tasks he can imagine. To rub it in, he thinks. To keep you under his thumb. But, of course, this is where he’s made his crucial mistake.”
He smiled up at Havoc, his face oddly peaceful. Havoc could only stare at him in blank horror.
“He thinks,” Mustang went on, still so calm, so sedate, so horribly resigned, “that watching me die by your own hands will be enough to break your spirits.”
“Fuck this,” Havoc finally managed. “Fuck this, I… we can’t, it’s too… there’s a way out of this, Sir?” He meant to shout the last bit, but his voice went high and wavery and it sounded like the most desperate begging.
Mustang looked at him for a long time.
“If you’d ever let me play chess with you” he finally said, “you’d know by now. A stalemate is better than a loss. If your king is in check and can't move out, then you must hold your opponent's king in check as well.”
“This isn’t a game! This is… you’re…” He let out a choking, sputtery breath. “I mean, what the hell was the point? We worked so hard, and we did everything you said, and the Fuhrer’s dead, so why…” And then, despite all his efforts not to, Havoc was crying, bent forward over his lap.
Mustang nudged one of his knees to the side so it gently brushed Havoc’s head; the only form of touch his bindings had left him.
“I know,” he said gently. “I know. I know I ask too much. But this is the last thing, I promise.”
“Well, what if I won’t do it?” Havoc growled. “What if I finally say no this time? How the hell much are you going to take away from me? My girlfriends, my fucking life, and now... now you...”
Mustang said nothing.
“I’ll take you out now,” Havoc said, barreling on, “I can get enough of these chains off so you can move. It’s just Halloway out there, and he’s nothing. We can get out when he comes to unlock the door, we can run, hide in the country, hide at my ma’s store, escape to Xing, take a boat… it doesn’t matter what we do, but…”
He trailed off. The silence sat heavy in the air, like the humid air just before a storm.
“I never meant to come out of the Fuhrer’s mansion alive,” Mustang said, and the admission was like a punch to the stomach. “I’m very sorry. I've never been a selfless person. All the times I tried to die and couldn't, pistols in my mouth, drinking myself to sleep...”
There were tears resting on the lashes of his good eye.
“I know it’s too much to ask,” he said again. “But it’s the only way you can go on. The five of you can finish what we started. It never could have happened in one swoop. Please. Just do this one last thing, so that everything will count.”
And, each movement so slow it seemed to hang in time, Havoc nodded. He kissed his Colonel’s knee and hung his head, defeated.
“Who knows,” Mustang said, smiling that awful, peaceful smile. “Maybe you’ll be the one to make Fuhrer one day. You'd look better in the dress uniform than I would have. Although you’ll have to fix your teeth first. You're missing half your mouth, it's really disgraceful.”
Havoc choked on the horrible taste of his obligatory laughter.
“Do the others know?” Havoc finally asked, as the sound of Halloway reapproaching began to fill the hall with jingling iron and screechy leather.
“Yes. I got them word. They agree with you.”
“And why the hell didn’t you tell me?”
“I knew you’d come on your own. You always were so resourceful, Lieutenant. I like that in a subordinate.”
They were lead out into the prison yard, blinking in the seering light of the setting sun. Their wounds were healing, their bodies clean. They’d been given showers and bandages and uniforms along with their rifles.
They did not talk. They only stood at attention, carefully observed by Hakuro, who stared at them from one of the watchtowers, decked out in the usual Fuhrer's regalia like a peacock in borrowed plumes.
They were clean and shining, but Mustang was brought out as filthy as ever, flanked by guards on all sides. Havoc’s stomach dropped away and seemed to dissapear. Beside him, Fuery was shaking, the rifle looking strange and enormous in his small hands, and Havoc marveled that he'd never seen the Sergeant fire a rifle before. Breda’s eyes were squeezed closed, accentuating the crooked shadows of his broken nose. Falman looked distinctly pale and shrunken, as though he were about to faint.
Hawkeye’s face was like stone, and that was somehow the worst.
Mustang was bound to a post at one end of the long yard with ropes, and the General overseeing the execution tested the knots himself. Then he waved the five over, to point-blank range, and closer, so close, closer then they needed to be, close enough to see the way he nodded his final greeting to them, close enough to see the fresh bruises on his face.
“You,” this general said, pointing to Hawkeye, and she stepped forward to the bound Colonel in the final postponement of the whole ghastly ritual. The General was smiling. Up on his tower, Hakuro stiffled a chuckle, and Havoc wondered if Hakuro's wife and children knew about this, knew about how the man who Mustang had indirectly saved by making two young boys take the early train to Central was laughing at his rescuer now.
“Sir,” Hawkeye whispered, and her voice was firm and sweet but for one soft waver, like a violin tuning with a terrible, aching wail. “Would you like a blindfold?”
“No, Lieutenant,” Mustang answered, and smiled gently at her. Havoc’s heart dropped away to join his stomach.
“Please, Sir-” She started, please Sir, don't make us watch you die, but the General waved her back before she could finish.
And so they stood, the five of them in a tight row, shoulder to shoulder with Mustang at their forefront, as they had once done so long ago, saluting him as they promised to follow him to Central, to follow him to the ends of the earth if that was what he needed done. He watched them all with his good eye with no trace of anger of fear.
He couldn’t have planned it better himself. Havoc thought, and then he didn’t want to think anymore, not now or ever again. His throat burned. Hawkeye’s shoulder was icy cold next to his.
The General’s voice was terribly, terribly quiet.
“Mark.”
They did so. Breda moaned low in his throat.
“Aim.”
They did so. Havoc’s eyes wanted to close, didn't want to see Mustang’s face in the rifle sight. But of course he did not close them. If Mustang could watch, then he would watch right back. Their final competition.
“Fire.”
The five guns made a terrible, echoing sound.
And when Mustang’s head dropped forward, boneless and finally defeated, it made no sound at all.
Author: raja815
Series: First Anime
Word Count: 6000ish (Word gives me 5700, the Internet counter gives me 6100)
Rating: R
Characters: Havoc, Mustang, Hawkeye, Breda, Falman, Fuery, Hakuro, and others
Summary: What if nothing turned out the way it was supposed to?
Warnings: Gore, torture, character death, anime spoilers
Notes: Everyone who knows me knows I think the first anime is pure gold up until the last half of the last episode, so I took the opportunity this week to write out how the anime ends in my head when I turn off the television before I can be accosted by the atrocities of an upbeat and relatively positive ending. I have great fondness for down endings.
In short, this is an alternate ending for the first anime. It branches off just before the final "epilogue" in the last 15 minutes or so of the series, so there will be spoilers up to that point.
They managed to hold the line for almost three days. Not bad, considering he was only a second Lieutenant.
Havoc was snatching a few fitful minutes of broken half-sleep when everything fell apart. The black wig and uniform hat were askew on his head, a half-smoked cigarette a dead stick of ash between his lips, and the lullaby of rifle fire and Breda’s authoritarian shouts to their rag-tag regimen of fellow traitors in his ears. He wouldn’t have slept, didn’t want to sleep, swore up and down he couldn’t sleep, but Breda had insisted, and in the end he’d relinquished his post at the machine gun and sat down in the chair that was meant for Mustang, closed his tell-tale blue eyes, and put one gloved hand over his face to block out the occasional bursts of brightness from the nearby battleground.
It was the last peaceful sleep he ever had, and he never even went deep enough under to dream.
“Goddamn, they told us he was in fucking Central!”
The shout, not nearly as loud as the gunfire, nevertheless jerked Havoc out of his foggy near-sleep as neatly as any alarm clock. He was out of the chair and reaching for the pistol holstered to the back of his belt before the sentence was even half-complete, not even pausing to blink the sleep film from his eyes.
And it still wasn’t fast enough.
He managed to squeeze off two shots. One went wild and hit the table, ripping through the maps and files they’d left arranged on its surface. The second did a bit better, and there was a thick yowl as it made contact with the meat of one of the approaching soldier’s thighs.
Another two inches and you’d’ve been just half a man, buddy, Havoc thought, and absurdly, as the raiding soldiers pushed into the tent and his right arm was seized, he felt like laughing.
“Of course it isn’t him! Does it matter? Mustang wouldn’t use a gun-”
Whoever had gotten hold of him was growling into his ear with breath that reeked of sour saliva and rancid coffee. Havoc didn’t know the voice, but whoever it belonged to was either strong enough or quick enough to get Havoc to drop the gun before he could do any real damage. Idylly thinking he was going to fucking kill Breda for letting him fall asleep (and quelling the panicky flutter in the back of his mind that wanted to suggest these men might already have done just that), Havoc pressed back hard and sharp with one shoulder. There was a cry of pain as it connected with his assailant’s jaw and a momentary slackening of pressure at his arm.
He turned to run, thinking he could find the rest of them and regroup, come up with a new plan, but of course, it was much too late for that. There were at least ten men in the little tent, grabbing and pulling and cocking pistols against Havoc’s continued struggles. Everywhere around him he saw soldiers, his own military, and felt for a moment strangely disembodied, as though he were back in Areugo where he had fought his first campaign and had somehow swapped bodies with the Areugian men they’d been sent in to apprehend.
From outside he heard a high, painful scream that sounded like Fuery, and that brought him back to the moment in a hurry. The Colonel! He thought desperately, Oh, they must’ve caught… and then he didn’t want to think anymore, not now and not ever again. He spun wide, bringing out his knee, felt it meet the soft give of someone’s stomach, felt his foot connect with someone’s shin. For a moment he actually believed he might’ve been wrong, that he wasn’t too late, that he could still make it out. He threw a wild punch, groping with his free hand for his remaining pistol…
And cried out as his fist connected his something solid and the wound in his hand reopened. The bones, poorly set to begin with, rebroke, and the useless red array on the alchemic glove was suddenly blotted out in a wash of deep scarlet. He’d completely forgotten the injury that had let him make this dangerous swap in the first place, and he’d just signed his own death warrant in doing so.
Fuck! He thought, oh fuck fuck fuck… and then he was being pushed down, ground into the tent’s dirt floor, being punched and pulled and trampled and spit on, ears aching with cries of traitor traitor murderer traitor until something heavy crashed against his skull and the world faded to a misty and crimson-tinted gray.
He came back to himself face down in the dirt outside, handcuffed and shackled, his body singing a thousand-voiced chorus of pain; high soprano whines from his ruined hand countered by throaty alto warbles from what was likely a broken rib or two, mellow tenor rumbles from the bruises on his back, deep booming basses from the swelling under the boot-shaped rupture on the back of his head.
He knew it couldn’t be much later. It had been early evening when he’d gone to the tent to sleep, and it was barely full dark now. He could only imagine how much he was going to hurt after a few hours, once the shock and the adrenaline really had time to wear off. Until then, the ground was cold under his cheek and he was grateful for it. Both of his eyes felt nearly swollen shut.
“Second Lieutenant Jean E. Havoc?”
Havoc didn’t know the voice, but guessed by the tone that whoever it was wasn’t here to wish him a pleasant evening.
“That’s me,” he mumbled, using the jolly, familiar voice that every higher-up in the Amestrian military save Colonel Roy Mustang had always berated him for. He could practically feel whoever-it-was above him seething, and that was more comforting to his battered body that the impromptu icepack of the frozen ground. He turned his head a bit and caught a glimpse of a tall man reading from a clipboard, flanked on all sides by riflemen.
“Serial number eight-six-six-seven-ought-seven-ought-four?”
“That’s the one,” he said in the same voice, and this time got a kick to the side for his trouble.
Definitely a broken rib, he thought, as the pain there stopped singing and began to howl. He knew the sensation from his long ago boyhood, when he’d once fallen off the top of a hay wagon and spent two days coughing blood and two months taking shallow breaths. He found the pain strangely nostalgic.
“I’m here to inform you that you’ve been placed under arrest, pending sentencing by the Military Tribunal in Central City, on the charges of high treason against the State of Amestris and the Amestrian Military, impersonating an officer, assaulting an officer, theft of arms and supplies, and aiding and abetting the convicted criminal Roy Mustang in the brutal slaying of Fuhrer King Bradley.”
“Whoop-de-do for me,” Havoc said, his consciousness floating away from him, listing toward the rolling farmland where he’d grown up, where there might have been broken ribs and measles and scoldings, but at least there’d been some love to balance things out.
Crunch.
With a sudden, wrenching scream and all other pain forgotten, he was back in the present, blood pouring from his mouth as thick and fast as vomit. Chunks of his shattered teeth scraped and ground against his cheeks, slicing his gums, carving his tongue to ribbons. His lower jaw was white-hot agony, sending throbbing sparks racing up and down the fracture lines.
He rolled his head in paroxysms of anguish, just in time to see one of the riflemen raising the butt of the gun that had just rearranged the geography of Havoc’s face.
“Learn to watch your mouth, Lieutenant,” this faceless man growled, and then- oh, sweet mercy-everything faded to blank grayness again.
The ground was warm when he woke up, warm and humming gently. For a fleeting and wonderful moment he thought he was back in Eastern Headquarters, napping under the old oak tree he’d favored with Black Hayate asleep beside him, himself exhausted after a long night of overtime, the puppy exhausted after a long afternoon of chasing butterflies and burying bones.
“Lieutenant Breda? I think he’s waking up.”
He recognized Falman’s voice and it only heightened the hallucination-why shouldn’t it be Falman? They often sent Falman to wake him if he napped too long, on the days when the Colonel couldn’t facilitate his own procrastination by coming to wake Havoc himself-but then there was a jolt and the ruined remnants of his jaw clacked together. His eyes furrowed as he hissed in pain, and then opened wide as the passage of air over the exposed nerves in his broken teeth intensified the pain to an almost unbearable sharpness all through his head.
“Don’t move, Havo.” He recognized first the voice and then the smell of his former Academy bunkmate, and realized his head was resting in Heymans’ lap. “God, Havoc, your poor mouth… I was sitting here thinking you’d choked on your teeth…”
“Sorry to worry you,” Havoc tried to say, but couldn’t form the words. Even the faintest movement of his lips made the pain worse.
“I said don’t move. What the hell’s wrong with you? Never listening, Havo, that’s you.”
Havoc carried on not listening, forcing himself to open his eyes. They lit on first the interior of a truck, then a few lumps of flesh and shredded uniform all peeringing intently down on him, their faces all so swollen, bloody, bruised and broken that he could barely recognize his own unit. For one heartstopping instant, he thought they were all missing their arms, but then he realized that, like him, they’d been handcuffed with their hands behind their backs. Even so, it was bad enough. Breda’s nose looked broken, there were chunks missing from Falman’s hair as though he’d been dragged by it, and Fuery’s glasses were missing, his eyes swollen and bloodshot.
The relief at seeing them alive momentarily covered the pain enough for him to try to speak again.
“Did they catch the Colonel?” He asked, his voice sounding mushy and garbled as he held his jaw as stiff as possible. Blood squished under his tongue. “Where are they taking us? Where’s Armstrong? Did they-”
“Don’t talk, Jean!” Breda barked, his voice barely loud enough to cover the hysteria he was only just keeping in check. “Every time you do, your mouth starts to…”
He trailed off, and Havoc followed his downcast eyes to the rivulets of blood that had flowed through Havoc’s lacerated lips, soaked through Havoc’s uniform and Breda’s trousers, and now rippled on the floor of the truck like grisly rain puddles.
“They caught the Colonel,” Fuery said, his voice unusually low and heavy. One of his shoulders had a disquietingly slumped look to it, and whenever the truck jostled, he stopped speaking and winced. “We think he’s alive. Ha… Hakuro’s running Central now. He wan… wanted us brought in alive, so we assume the Colonel… ah… the Colonel…”
“We think that means Mustang’s alive,” Falman finished, taking over as he saw Fuery’s face whitening with increasing pain. “And Lieutenant Hawkeye too. Armstrong got taken on the truck before us by Hakuro's own unit.”
“That bastard’ll be gunning for the permanent Fuhrership,” Breda hissed. “He wants us all together in Central. Wouldn’t put anything past the sadistic fuckup. The people are out for blood, and he’ll give it to them. He’ll give them anything if it means he gets the crown at the end of the day.”
There was silence, punctuated only by a short gasp from Fuery as the truck hit another bump.
“Well, can’t do us much worse than this, can he?” Havoc said, trying to joke, trying to make them smile, trying to whistle against the closing dark, but he barely got the words out before his teeth knocked together again, and then he couldn’t speak at all. For a few minutes, he could barely even breathe.
They took them to the Central Penitentiary, a miserable old mausoleum of a building built almost three hundred years before, back when there’d been a strange religious sect in power that got it into their heads that the way of the future for prisons was complete and uninterrupted solitude. It sprawled like a spider from a central hub, thirteen wings of tiny, lonely cells with thick walls and no windows. In the later years, of course, it had become outdated, and now they only used it for the death-row prisoners. The remnants of Laboratory Five were still moldering beside it.
Havoc was semi-conscious when they brought him in, stood him on his feet and jabbed him with their rifles to make him walk. He passed down endless halls, ignoring to the hisses of other prisoners jeering at them through the tiny, barred hallway doors. A few of them hissed insults, a few hissed congratulations, a few hissed threats or warnings and even come-ons, but they made no difference to him. A hiss is a hiss is a hiss.
Until he caught a glimpse of blonde hair through one set of bars.
“Aww, fuck,” he groaned, “not you too.”
Lieutenant Hawkeye looked almost as bad as he imagined he himself must. Her hair was down for the first time in his memory, but it was matted with blood, greasy and dank. One of her eyes was swollen closed, her lips cut, her skin marked with what he knew without a shadow of a doubt were cigarette burns, blackened red and swollen with the beginnings of infection.
I’ll never smoke again, he thought, and meant it, as he stomach tried to roll over. God, she’ll be scarred like that forever, god, her face…
There were hand-shaped bruises on her cheeks, her neck, on the pale expanse of shoulder exposed under the drooping collar of the too-large prison tunic she wore, and he tried very hard not to think about what those bruises might mean.
“Yes,” she said quietly, and offered him a faint smile. “Me, too.”
The rifle jabbed Havoc between the shoulders, and another one clanged against the bars of Hawkeye’s cell.
“Shut up,” he growled. “No talking.”
So he said nothing more, only craned his head to watch her until her cell was out of sight, and then squinted his swollen eyes, peering into the shadowy cells, trying to catch a glimpse of ebony-black hair, dark eyes, pale skin.
But he saw nothing but grimy, empty darkness.
He woke himself up ten hours later in his solitary dank little cell, gagging and retching on all the blood that had trickled down his throat in his sleep, acid burning against the bared nerves of his broken teeth.
The cell was barely ten feet long, but he still couldn’t make his battered body limp across the rough concrete to the toilet bucket in the corner fast enough and he vomited a red and stinking fluid that puddled in the middle of the little patch of floor, curled up into a shaking ball of pain, hoping the whole time that he’d simply choke and die, wanting to curse Roy Mustang’s name but not quite able to, even now.
Outside the little barred window a guard laughed at him.
“Try and piss it down the drain if you want,” this faceless man said. “I would. It won’t be til Tuesday the janitor hoses this block down, and the flies are fucking killer here this time of year.”
Havoc only limped back to the little plywood bunk and tried to make himself sleep again. His teeth hurt, his ribs hurt, and his forehead was achingly dry. Fever from the broken teeth, he thought. He could feel the exposed nerves of the stumps beginging to fester in his head, so why not. Why not indeed.
He sank back into sleep and pain and sickness, letting time pass by in great blank gushes, waiting for the next horrific thing to happen.
It was two days before the cell was cleaned, and in the meantime the puddle of vomit dried blackened and putrefied and rotted as though it too was an open and infected sore. The flies were bad. The smell was worse. And the pain in his mouth was worst of all, burying his head and absorbing all the lesser pains of hand and rib and head into one enormous glowing throb.
But Havoc didn’t notice them much, though, the flies or the smell or even the pain after awhile. He had vague memories afterward of crawling to the little food slot in the door a few times a day to sip the water they passed him, but other than that there were only dreams, memories masquerading as fact.
Once he dreamed of the day he’d met Mustang, how he’d walked into the office in Eastern HQ with his transfer papers and his strained, nervous smile. He’d seen Mustang sitting at his desk and felt confused. He’d thought Mustang would be taller, somehow. And Mustang had taken his papers and smirked and clapped Havoc’s back and asked him if he liked beer or whiskey for lunch. Lieutenant Hawkeye had sighed dissaproval from the corner, but they’d left base, and by the end of the week Havoc knew Mustang had the right idea about the country and Mustang knew Havoc knew he did, and Havoc’s transfer was approved and there he was, Mustang’s left arm. Hawkeye was already his right.
For a few minutes he thought Hawkeye was there herself, the burns on her face miraculously gone, and she was bringing him piles of reports to go over, and he was complaining that he could never read that Sergeant Roger's handwriting and she was telling him there were worse things.
Later he thought his cousin Denis was lying on the bunk with him, a kid of twelve again and laughing that he was gonna tell Jean’s ma about the naked pictures of women Jean kept in the rip in his mattress, and this melted into a memory of a knock-down-drag-out shouting match he’d had with Mustang once over the Eastern Headquarters mail secretary, who’d had tits the size of cantaloupes.
But then, he remembered the dancing, and it was all he could see for hours and hours on end. There’d been a woman (not the mail secretary; she’d gone for Fuery in the end, of all people) who Havoc liked, and she’d wanted to go out dancing and only dancing, which Havoc couldn’t do. All morning he’d worried over it, until everyone was fed up and then Mustang had vanished with a huge pile of unfinished work still stacked on his desk and come back two hours later at lunch break with a gramophone.
“I’ll teach you,” Mustang said, “if you’ll shut up about it and get some work done. You’re a liability, Havoc, you know that?”
And Havoc had awww, Colonel, what the hell are you thinking-ed and it’s fucking queer to dance with guys, Sir-ed but in the end, he hadn’t refused. Hadn’t been able to refuse.
And wasn’t that just the thing about Roy Mustang, anyway? You could never refuse. Not even if you knew better.
So they’d spent the whole lunch break whirling around the office, the men wolf-whistling and clapping as they swung and dipped, even Hawkeye giving in and breaking a smile when Havoc spun the Colonel so enthusiastically he upset two chairs and a coat rack, and they’d both been flushed and laughing by the time it was time to start work again.
Of course he’d later completely failed to get off with the girl, but just now that didn’t seem nearly as important as the way he and Mustang had laughed together, all those years ago.
He lost track of the time after awhile; the cell saw no daylight, he had no contact with any of his fellow men, and he was fed with such irregularity that there was no hope of measuring time that way. He only knew it had been long enough for his mouth to heal a little, so he could at least speak again with only moderate pain, and when he did have food, he could tear off chunks of the dry, crusty bread and hold them in his mouth with some water and let them dissolve enough to gulp them down-chewing was still, of course, out of reach.
And then one day he was roused from the cell by a young man wearing a Corporal’s stripes on his shoulder boards and speaking in a hesitant whisper.
“Lieutenant Havoc? They want you for questioning.”
Havoc, who had been remembering the time he and Breda had talked the Colonel into trying to hit every bar in East City in a single day, and how he’d ended up tossing Mustang over his shoulders like a sack of potatoes at the end of the night to get him home, and how he hadn't even noticed Mustang had puked down his back like a colicky baby until Mustang's doorman refused to let them into the elevator, was shocked. He was used to not recognizing the voices of the guards, but he knew this one.
“Halloway?” He said, voice cracking with disuse.
“Yes, Sir,” the young man said, then frowned. “I mean, yes.”
Halloway had been a soldier in Havoc’s own platoon once upon a time, one of the men he’d commanded during the search for Scar’s body, the sweep of Liore, the transport of the Ishbalan prisoners.
“God, kid,” he said, his lips protesting as he tried to smile. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I’m your new guard. And I’m supposed to take you to your trial.”
Of course, it wasn’t a trial. Traitors don’t get trials in Amestris, never have and probably never will, at least not anytime soon. But Havoc got a clean tunic and pants to wear, and a grim-faced medic washed the caked blood from his mouth and splashed the worst of the infections with iodine, so at least it wasn’t a total loss.
He’d thought he might see the unit, might see the Colonel, might see Fuhrer Hakuro long enough to spit at his feet, but of course, he didn’t. He simply stood in a wooden cage (a testimonial box, they called it, but words were cheap, and it was nothing but a cage) and a grim looking military judge told him he was a trecheous snake, and he deserved everything that was coming to him.
“Prison? Flogging? Execution?” Havoc asked, and got a cold smile in return. He didn’t care much either way, and he wanted to go back to his cell and lie down. The medic’s cleaning had made his shattered mouth ache again.
“Who’s to say for sure? Fuhrer Hakuro has a plan for you, and a wise one. This is what you get, letting a man like that Mustang turn you against the military that made this country great.” The judge, who had the rank insignia of a brigadeer general, snarled at Havoc, and that made Havoc laugh despite the pain it caused his jaw.
“Don’t you know what he was? The Fuhrer of this great, great military?”
The judge just glared, and Havoc felt suddenly cold.
Of course I knew, that glare said. Do you think it makes the slightest bit of difference?
Halloway sometimes forgot and talked to Havoc through the doorway of his cell. He’d never been the brightest kid, and he was having a hard time reconciling the Second Lieutenant Havoc he’d idolized as the dangerous traitor he was now.
“I’ve seen that Mustang, too,” he said one day, after Havoc had gotten it out of him that the rest of the unit was alive, if not entirely well, and Havoc’s stomach flipped.
“Is he okay?”
Silence, and then an affiramitive grunt.
Havoc fell back onto the bunk, breathing hard as he tried to make himself think. Breathing hard made his teeth ache, but he found he preferred that; the pain helped clear his mind, helped drag up things long buried, helped him form a desperate and foolish plan.
“Halloway,” he said finally. “Do you remember what happened with you and Bull, when you first reported to me?”
The silence showed Halloway remembered just fine. And how could anybody forget? They’d been facing dishonorable discharge with flogging when Havoc had walked in on them, two young men locked together in ecstasy on the damp shower floor one night while the rest of the army camp was at mess.
“You can’t threaten me,” Halloway said after minutes and minutes of frieghtened silence. “You’ve got nobody left to talk to.”
“Who’d threaten you?” Havoc said. “I wouldn’t. But I kept that secret a good long time. I thought you might like a chance to pay me back, that's all.”
It had gone two in the morning, according to the watch Halloway wore on his wrist, and the prison was almost sepulchral in its silence. The sound of the small, barred door to Havoc’s cell swinging open had been so loud it echoed and Havoc had been sure he’d be caught. But Halloway hadn’t even flinched, had only taken Havoc’s hands and cuffed them, yielding to his nature and being gentle with the Lieutenant's hurt hand before his training could kick in and remind him not to be, and began to lead him through the silent halls.
They reached the central hub of the prison, turned right, and padded down another corridor, this one damp and mouldering with disuse. Havoc thought it probably hadn’t seen a prisoner for a hundred years… before all this mess, that was.
“You can have a half hour,” Halloway said. “Then I’ll come back for you. And keep your voice low or you’ll wake the whole block, and then we’re both dead.”
“Good,” Havoc whispered. “Thanks, Halloway.”
Halloway said nothing, only stopped Havoc with a rough tug of his cuffs and reached down with a large, iron key, shoved Havoc inside, and clunked the lock closed behind him.
The walls were crumbling, porous, oozing water. The smell of sewage was thick in the air, and fresh boards had been nailed over the bars in the door, sealing it against even casual glimpses or whispers. The only light crept in around the cracks like furtive roaches, but Havoc was used to the dark from his own cell, and it was just enough to see him by.
Mustang was seated in the farthest corner of the cell, hands shackled in front of him in a large wooden stockade and further locked with cords and chains, feet in heavy boots and metal cuffs, face swollen and bloody, one eye a ruined mess, skin lacerated and burned, clothes filthy beyond description.
And he was smirking, as if Havoc had just come upon him in a local bar.
“Well. Lieutenant Havoc. This is a surprise.”
“God, Sir,” Havoc managed, and rushed forward as quickly as he could manage. Mustang’s smile went quizzical, then concerned.
“What the hell have they done to your mo-”
“Never mind my fucking mouth,” Havoc gasped, dropping to his knees before the Colonel. It was the only way he could see him in the dankness. “Your eyes, what happened to your…”
“It’s no matter, Lieutenant, I still have the one left.” He smiled again, and the sight of that battered face spread out around the same old arrogant smile made Havoc’s throat ache. “It’s about all I’ll need.”
“Tell me what happened,” Havoc murmured, “they haven’t told us a thing, and I… what the hell are they keeping us here for? What do we do next? You have to help us, Sir, we’ve come all this way and it’s just…”
He trailed off, unable to find a word.
For a long while Mustang said nothing, only peered down at Havoc with his good eye and smiled faintly. Then he told them how he’d stormed the Fuhrer’s mansion, how he’d burned the homunculus to ash with the unwitting help of the Fuhrer’s own son, how he’d been shot by Colonel Archer, how he and Lieutenant Hawkeye had been apprehended as he lay bleeding out on the Fuhrer’s front porch, how he’d been given rudimentary medical care and shut up here.
All through the telling, Havoc could feel infection and fever wafting off the Colonel’s skin, could hear the hitches of concealed pain in his chest, could smell the reek coming off him, and he could fill the cracks in the Colonel’s story as easily as a mason fills the cracks in a garden wall. How they’d tortured him, starved him, spat at him, pissed on him, how they’d told him of his mens’ suffering and laughed, how they’d bound his limbs so hard against any attempt he might make to escape alchemically that he couldn’t move from his bunk. And all because he'd tried to help them.
“Why don’t they just kill us?” Havoc murmured at the end, eyes closed and jaw aching as he tried to clench it against the painful ache in his throat. “What’s the point of all this?”
“Haven’t they told you?” Mustang asked, peering down at Havoc with his eye, his strangely calm and peaceful eye, his sad but smiling eye.
“They don’t tell us shit.”
Mustang was quiet again, and then said, as simply as if remarking on the weather. “I’m going to be executed by firing squad next week, Havoc. Sunday at sunset.” He paused briefly, closed his eye, and smiled the gentlest, most heartbreaking smile Havoc had ever seen on a human face before. “By a squadron of five soldiers.”
It took a minute to sink in.
“NO!” Havoc cried, struggling upward, trying to stand. “No, no, no, oh no, no I-”
“Shh, Havoc. You’ll wake the whole prison. That’s why they’ve been keeping the five of you here, you see. Say what you will about Hakuro, but the man knows how to give the people what they want.”
Havoc had barely heard him. He was staring at Mustang, still gasping his negative, shaking and wanting to be sick.
“After that, I think he intends to force the five of you back into service. As enlisted men, of course, and under his own command, likely to serve the most horrible tasks he can imagine. To rub it in, he thinks. To keep you under his thumb. But, of course, this is where he’s made his crucial mistake.”
He smiled up at Havoc, his face oddly peaceful. Havoc could only stare at him in blank horror.
“He thinks,” Mustang went on, still so calm, so sedate, so horribly resigned, “that watching me die by your own hands will be enough to break your spirits.”
“Fuck this,” Havoc finally managed. “Fuck this, I… we can’t, it’s too… there’s a way out of this, Sir?” He meant to shout the last bit, but his voice went high and wavery and it sounded like the most desperate begging.
Mustang looked at him for a long time.
“If you’d ever let me play chess with you” he finally said, “you’d know by now. A stalemate is better than a loss. If your king is in check and can't move out, then you must hold your opponent's king in check as well.”
“This isn’t a game! This is… you’re…” He let out a choking, sputtery breath. “I mean, what the hell was the point? We worked so hard, and we did everything you said, and the Fuhrer’s dead, so why…” And then, despite all his efforts not to, Havoc was crying, bent forward over his lap.
Mustang nudged one of his knees to the side so it gently brushed Havoc’s head; the only form of touch his bindings had left him.
“I know,” he said gently. “I know. I know I ask too much. But this is the last thing, I promise.”
“Well, what if I won’t do it?” Havoc growled. “What if I finally say no this time? How the hell much are you going to take away from me? My girlfriends, my fucking life, and now... now you...”
Mustang said nothing.
“I’ll take you out now,” Havoc said, barreling on, “I can get enough of these chains off so you can move. It’s just Halloway out there, and he’s nothing. We can get out when he comes to unlock the door, we can run, hide in the country, hide at my ma’s store, escape to Xing, take a boat… it doesn’t matter what we do, but…”
He trailed off. The silence sat heavy in the air, like the humid air just before a storm.
“I never meant to come out of the Fuhrer’s mansion alive,” Mustang said, and the admission was like a punch to the stomach. “I’m very sorry. I've never been a selfless person. All the times I tried to die and couldn't, pistols in my mouth, drinking myself to sleep...”
There were tears resting on the lashes of his good eye.
“I know it’s too much to ask,” he said again. “But it’s the only way you can go on. The five of you can finish what we started. It never could have happened in one swoop. Please. Just do this one last thing, so that everything will count.”
And, each movement so slow it seemed to hang in time, Havoc nodded. He kissed his Colonel’s knee and hung his head, defeated.
“Who knows,” Mustang said, smiling that awful, peaceful smile. “Maybe you’ll be the one to make Fuhrer one day. You'd look better in the dress uniform than I would have. Although you’ll have to fix your teeth first. You're missing half your mouth, it's really disgraceful.”
Havoc choked on the horrible taste of his obligatory laughter.
“Do the others know?” Havoc finally asked, as the sound of Halloway reapproaching began to fill the hall with jingling iron and screechy leather.
“Yes. I got them word. They agree with you.”
“And why the hell didn’t you tell me?”
“I knew you’d come on your own. You always were so resourceful, Lieutenant. I like that in a subordinate.”
They were lead out into the prison yard, blinking in the seering light of the setting sun. Their wounds were healing, their bodies clean. They’d been given showers and bandages and uniforms along with their rifles.
They did not talk. They only stood at attention, carefully observed by Hakuro, who stared at them from one of the watchtowers, decked out in the usual Fuhrer's regalia like a peacock in borrowed plumes.
They were clean and shining, but Mustang was brought out as filthy as ever, flanked by guards on all sides. Havoc’s stomach dropped away and seemed to dissapear. Beside him, Fuery was shaking, the rifle looking strange and enormous in his small hands, and Havoc marveled that he'd never seen the Sergeant fire a rifle before. Breda’s eyes were squeezed closed, accentuating the crooked shadows of his broken nose. Falman looked distinctly pale and shrunken, as though he were about to faint.
Hawkeye’s face was like stone, and that was somehow the worst.
Mustang was bound to a post at one end of the long yard with ropes, and the General overseeing the execution tested the knots himself. Then he waved the five over, to point-blank range, and closer, so close, closer then they needed to be, close enough to see the way he nodded his final greeting to them, close enough to see the fresh bruises on his face.
“You,” this general said, pointing to Hawkeye, and she stepped forward to the bound Colonel in the final postponement of the whole ghastly ritual. The General was smiling. Up on his tower, Hakuro stiffled a chuckle, and Havoc wondered if Hakuro's wife and children knew about this, knew about how the man who Mustang had indirectly saved by making two young boys take the early train to Central was laughing at his rescuer now.
“Sir,” Hawkeye whispered, and her voice was firm and sweet but for one soft waver, like a violin tuning with a terrible, aching wail. “Would you like a blindfold?”
“No, Lieutenant,” Mustang answered, and smiled gently at her. Havoc’s heart dropped away to join his stomach.
“Please, Sir-” She started, please Sir, don't make us watch you die, but the General waved her back before she could finish.
And so they stood, the five of them in a tight row, shoulder to shoulder with Mustang at their forefront, as they had once done so long ago, saluting him as they promised to follow him to Central, to follow him to the ends of the earth if that was what he needed done. He watched them all with his good eye with no trace of anger of fear.
He couldn’t have planned it better himself. Havoc thought, and then he didn’t want to think anymore, not now or ever again. His throat burned. Hawkeye’s shoulder was icy cold next to his.
The General’s voice was terribly, terribly quiet.
“Mark.”
They did so. Breda moaned low in his throat.
“Aim.”
They did so. Havoc’s eyes wanted to close, didn't want to see Mustang’s face in the rifle sight. But of course he did not close them. If Mustang could watch, then he would watch right back. Their final competition.
“Fire.”
The five guns made a terrible, echoing sound.
And when Mustang’s head dropped forward, boneless and finally defeated, it made no sound at all.