A/N: I own nothing. All right, all right, I lied; the epilogue is included within this chapter - or at least the one I had prewritten. The other bit could nearly stand on its own, and it needs a severe cutback on sap content, even from me...
This story ended in a phone booth, just outside of Central HQ.
It had been Envy who had started the war in Ishval. The homunculus had disguised himself as a soldier and killed a child in order to drag Amestris into the bloodiest civil war the current generation would ever see. It had been this same homunculus, once again disguised as a soldier, that had followed Maes Hughes, a survivor of the Ishvalan slaughter, into the phone booth. There was a bitter kind of symmetry to it, Envy reflected as the force of the bullet knocked the knife from the soldier's hand. The homunculus fired again, just to insure that this hero of Ishval would not be going anywhere that his victims could not.
Envy had never cared much for vengeance, when it came to righting the wrongs humans had done to one another, although he found it occasionally amusing to watch the animals attempt to wreak what they called justice. He wondered if it the homunculi's plans counted as such. Humans seemed to like their violence in circles, much like those used by alchemists. The homunculi and their Father would give them a circle of violence soon enough.
That dead Ishvalan child had not been the reason Hughes had joined the military, but children had motivated Hughes for many years now. Elysia was the most obvious example, certainly - even before she had been born, the little girl had been able to stop her father's heart with the slightest movement of her arm or leg. The Elric boys had gotten Hughes involved with this case, and even before the two teenagers had discovered the origins of the philosopher's stones, Hughes had been quick to invite them over for a good meal and a day in a quiet, normal household - or at least as normal and quiet as any family the talkative Maes knew was capable of being. It had been the children in the schoolhouse that had driven Hughes to the military academy, or so he had said to his family. And long before, when he had been no more than a child himself, it had been a short, impetuous boy who had opened Hughes's eyes to the world beyond him.
It was this boy, now grown into a man, that Maes Hughes had been determined to follow into the wider world as a child. It was this boy, now grown into a man, that Hughes had tried to lead towards safety and happiness to his final phone call. Hughes's glasses lay bent and twisted on the ground, not far from his fallen bloodied knife. There was a bitter kind of symmetry to it.
Or perhaps, it doesn't quite end there, for though Hughes is gone, the photographs still remain. And with them, there is a camera in the hands of an ash-blonde green eyed girl, a stack of investigation warrants, and Roy Mustang, the Flame Alchemist, who has Hawk's eyes and better looking after his back.