Written for the FMA Fic Contest's 5th challenge, with the prompt of 'Sin'.

The war is over, and the quiet is appalling.

After the hot and bloody frontlines in Ishval, Eastern is a surreal oasis of the commonplace. Hawkers cry their wares in the markets, while men and women walk without fear down the streets. There are no scorch marks on storefronts, no stains darkening the streets, and when the children laugh as they race past him Lt. Colonel Mustang can't help but flinch away.

It is hard to adapt to the idea of moving through the city without a drawn gun, or hands poised to snap a holocaust of flame into existence. He takes to using the car and driver due his rank to travel the few blocks from his flat to his office, because he can't stand the empty feeling at his back when he walks. The desert has burned all his softness and idealism away, leaving behind something base and barren and after months of living a hairsbreadth from death, he finds that slipping back into life is not unlike trying to put on his old wardrobe. It simply doesn't fit him any longer.

But he lives yet, and so he learns to ignore the cars that backfire on the street outside, not throwing himself to the floor to avoid a hail of bullets that isn't coming. Months pass, and while it becomes easier for him to pretend he's forgotten, the nightmares never leave him. Every person, every family, every city consumed in his flames live again in the silence of the sleeping compound; every fire in every grate is a whisper of the orders he followed. And again he turns away, washing it down with the burn of strong scotch or brandy.

Each time someone calls him the Hero of Ishval, another piece of him twists and dies.

It's so easy to turn his anger toward a corrupt regime, a ruthless Fuhrer. Simple to despise men like the Crimson Alchemist, with their love of violence and contempt for the weak. So many people to blame, but when he wakes in the middle of the night, desert heat beating back the chill in the air and the mortars thumping out the rhythm of his heartbeat, when the screams and explosions drive him awake, it is his own face he curses in the dimly lit mirror, and his own hands shaking with guilt.

And in the dark of the night he knows, he knows without excuse or deniability, that the blame lies with him. Then he hates himself until all his other hatreds pale against the pitch of his self-loathing. Let others cry ignorance; he knew. Beneath the desert sun, standing before cities turned to charnel houses, he saw the evils being done and the perversity in the logic of that war. He knew, then as he does now, the terrible path on which the military had lined up its men, and he knows who paid the ultimate price.

His hand let loose the flames that killed Ishvalans by the thousands, but it is not that action that haunts him so. Rather it is his inaction- his failure to protest the dreadful orders that came down, to willfully disobey the demands that he strike even the civilians, even the children. He was the dutiful soldier, unquestioning and most terribly skilled, withholding the rebellion his heart urged, and that dire and silent sin will live within him forever, staining his soul in blood and ash and everlasting regret.

Ishval is silent now, but the guns in his mind will never cease.