Work Text:
There’s death caked under his nails and he can’t get it out.
He scrubs like a madman before meals, after, at the latrines while Hughes is distracted rambling about one thing or another. The gloves do nothing to keep it out; his hands still smell like charred flesh and boiled blood, even as he rubs them raw under layer upon foamy layer of suds. His knuckles rash red. Begin to scale and peel. He grows to hate the smell of soap.
He can’t recall exactly when he starts to tear them. It begins with hangnails, plucking them like petals from the nooks of his fingers, a few stubborn ones left rosy with blood. Even on the field, where catching him unarmed would no doubt spell a death sentence, he still can’t resist slipping his gloves off whenever his nails catch the fabric. By now his dead skin is littered all over Ishval, scraps of white mingling with the blackened corpses he leaves behind.
But it’s his nails themselves that grit with carnage, dense and dark and aching with it. He had always regarded nail-biting for the cowards; the child crippled with stage fright or the hopeless romantic before a first date. But as he splits white from pink at his own fingertips, red bubbling from the swollen seam left behind, the catharsis is godly. When his thumbnails are still long enough, he tears. When even that grip is gone, he bites. The tiny shells of his nails are reduced to nubs overnight, a graveyard of torn crescents beneath his bunk that he so desperately needs to clean.
Tonight, he lies in the dark, back aching upon his cot, incisor hooked beneath his aching thumbnail. He gnaws at the edge, waiting for the relief of the hitch. His teeth catch. Tear. He feels skin and nail separate with that familiar burn, a burn cold and cleansing and so beautifully unlike his own. He breaks the last bit of tough edge from the base, spitting the shavings from his mouth, squinting in the dark at the breakage point. A few thin slivers remain, curling like a snapped violin bow. He plucks them free as the blood begins to leak, crying crimson tears down the crook of what little nail remains.
It’ll grow back, he tells himself every time. Skin, nail, body, mind. Someday this damned war will be over, and he’ll finally be able to let them grow back in full. The scars will fade beneath the new layers of keratin, and he’ll stop looking like a ravaged animal and more like a professional. A true State Alchemist, nails no longer tainted from clawing through carcasses.
But until then, the gloves will keep his secret. Mask every worn cuticle, every frayed edge, every speck of dried blood crisped along his fingertips. He makes a mental note to tear again as soon as he can, just to be sure that blood is his own.
Out on the field, he can feel his nails screaming in unison with the wails around him, and he’s sickly grateful for the reminder. He’s ragged, he’s torn, but above all, he’s clean. Nearing another village, Roy Mustang steels himself, and snaps ruined fingers once again.
The feeling stings like hellfire.