raj

Title: What You Deserve
Author:

raja815
Word Count: 2688
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Jean Havoc centric. Hints of unrequited Havoc/Roy.
Summary: Colonel Mustang had once told him he didn't believe in hell. Jean was starting to agree.
Disclaimer: Fullmetal Alchemist is © Hiromu Arakawa. I will make no capitol benefit from this.
Notes: Written for

fma_fic_contest for the prompt "Sin." Just now getting around to reposting it here. Manga spoilers for chapter 38 on, including minor ones from more recent chapters.

“Aw, come on, Mr. Havoc, we won’t tell anyone!”

He peered into the eyes of the gaggle of adolescent boys surrounding him. Sitting in his chair put him right at eye level, which was unfortunate. Back in the days before he’d been hurt, he would’ve towered over them and they wouldn’t have dared pester him.

“How many times have I gotta tell you no?” He sighed, taking the cigarette out of his mouth and gesturing it with it. “Not til you’re sixteen. Shop rules, kids.”

“Awww, come on!”

“We just wanna try it! Just once! We got money!”

“Your mother told me you smoked once when you were our age!”

“Yeah, and she whupped my butt good for it, too. Still got the marks, I swear. Come on, kids, you really wanna end up like me?”

That gave them pause. It would’ve given anyone pause.

“I guess not,” one of the kids, obviously the leader as he was the tallest and the meanest of the lot, said, and though it was the response Jean had been going for it still gave him a jolt of pain. Who would want to end up like him? Disgraced and damaged and stuck back in this hick town with his family breathing down his neck for the rest of his life?

“Fine. Just gimme a couple pickled eggs,” the kid sighed, counting change out. He moved toward the counter with his grubby handful of change and Jean had to wave him back over. Jean couldn’t reach the cash register from his chair, and it was too heavy to move. He had to make change out of a small leather grouch bag he held in his lap.

“You’ll have to get ‘em yourself,” Jean said, keeping his face down, pretending to count the change so the kids wouldn’t see the expression in his eyes. “I can’t reach the jar. You can stand on that step ladder.”

The kid did so, making a big show of the climbing. Jean pretended not to notice this, or the rather smug sneer on the kid’s dirty, freckly face. He had a pretty good idea why the kid had asked for pickled eggs instead of something from the lowered jars of penny candy. Same reason he’d started for the counter, when he’d been here enough times to know damn well he was meant to go with his money. Snub me, Mister, that sneer said, and I’ll snub you one right back. What are you going to do about it? Chase me?

“Thanks, Mr. Havoc,” one of the slightly nicer boys called out as the other kid was climbing down the stool, eggs clasped in a moistening sheet of waxed brown paper.

“Don’t eat those too fast,” Jean advised as they were clambering out the front door. “Make you puke.”

“I’ll eat them fast if I want to; I bought them.”

Honestly. Early on in his physical therapy, one of his doctors had sat down beside Jean to have a Very Direct Discussion (his words, not Jean’s) and told him it seemed unlikely he’d ever be able to father a child. Jean hadn’t given a tin shit about that then, and he didn’t now either. Really, he thought, it was bad enough to be stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of your life without having to go around knowing you’d produced a disaster of humanity like that kid.

Once the kids were off down the driveway, the silence settled back over the store. It was usually all but deserted this time of day, which was why Jean was manning it alone. The Havoc General Store sat at the far end of the larger Havoc Farm, where his uncles raised cattle, sheep, and various grain crops. His mother and spinster aunt Anne ran the store in the afternoons, when the majority of the business took place. The rest of the small township was mostly agricultural as well, and morning farm chores left little time for most to shop except for the small population that lived and worked solely in the town proper.

“Real good we got you back, Jean,” his favorite uncle, Leon, had said when Jean first arrived. “Frees up the young ones to help with the cows early on. Real glad to have you back here with the family.”

Jean, who had always viewed Leon as a substitute father, had smiled and tried not to let on how hurt he was that all he was good for now were the leftover jobs that even the kids could handle.

His ma, who had lived alone in the little apartment attached to the store until Jean moved back in with her, used to sit in the store mornings with him, but there really wasn’t enough work for two people. Eventually he’d convinced her he wanted the time alone. To think, he’d said, and she’d hugged him and obliged.

“Don’t smoke in the shop, though, dear,” she’d amended, “it isn’t very professional,” and he’d said he wouldn’t. But he did. And she scolded him for it every day at eleven o’clock when she came in, but never hard enough to make him stop. He suspected she was happy enough to have him back that she couldn’t help but indulge him his few pleasures.

He did use the time to think, as he’d said, but also just to find some solitude. It was strange and often uncomfortable being back home. His family meant well, tried to include him in the same way he’d always been included, but that was impossible. Even baring the disability, he’d simply been gone too long. He didn’t fit anymore.

There’d been quite a lot of bad feeling when he left, truth be told. His own father had been killed in some nearby border skirmishes when Jean had been only an infant, and the rest of the family had never forgiven the military for it. But to Jean, even with the devastation that came to his hometown after the Eastern Rebellion, the military held a strange appeal. Home life had been so stagnant—mornings and evenings on the farm, days spent lifting heavy goods in the store, with nothing to do but wait to get old enough to go into the local pub—and he’d longed for adventure. Watching his cousins grow up and get married hadn’t been easy either, not when none of the local girls ever inclined to give him the time of day, and at seventeen he’d enlisted and left town all at once, with hardly a week to acclimate his family to the idea. He hadn’t expected it to matter, since he had no intention of ever coming home again.

They’d forgiven him over time, of course. They were that type of people. He’d been happy enough when his doctors had told him he could leave the hospital and go stay with them again; he loved them all, of course, and he had missed them. But it still hit him pretty hard when his favorite cousin, Denis, was wheeling him off the train, his mother crying beside him in joy at having her boy back again, even if he was coming back to her all smashed up and broken.

I’m back, he’d thought, looking out over the familiar townscape with a sinking feeling of horror in his gut, I’m back and I can’t ever get away this time.

It was too elegant not to be retribution of some kind. What was the old maxim his Gram was always throwing around? Honor thy father and mother, that thy days may be prolonged. It made sense that this would be his punishment for slighting them all and trying to break free.

Colonel Mustang had told him once, when they’d been drinking at the pub just off base at East City, that he didn’t believe in Hell.

“No point in keeping back the suffering til after one dies, is there, Lieutenant?” He’d been staring down at the array on the back of his glove as he’d said so, idly tracing the thin red lines. “If there was a god, he’d be smarter than that. Don’t you agree?”

He hadn’t thought much of it at the time (he’d been pretty drunk, after all) but he thought about it a lot now. Not only because of the words, but because that image of the Colonel, with his jacket off, his gloves on, his face distant and all his stress and hurt for once right there at the surface, had become almost iconic in Jean’s mind. When he retreated to the small, ground floor room he now lived in to lift his weights and train, to try and force his body to do the impossible and make itself whole again, that was the goal he envisioned; Mustang, open and honest and sad and needing his help. When he’d begun stockpiling ammunitions and weaponry, rekindling the friendships he’d long since abandoned so he could get the contacts of the traffickers who worked over the nearby Ishbalan border, it had been this image he’d been reaching to help.

He thought about it at other times, too. Once he’d gone as far as to write Mustang a letter, not one of the cryptic, utilitarian letters he used with his contacts in Central, but a rather more comradely correspondence. He’d actually caught himself writing I miss you of all the disgusting, embarrassing things, and he burned it before he could get to feeling lonely and desperate enough to maybe send it.

There’d been some minimal effort to find him some girl to marry when Jean had first come home; he’d been introduced to some women, most of them young widows. No one had said anything about finding someone to take care of him more permanently, but Jean wasn’t stupid. And he wasn’t deaf, either. Once he’d made it clear he wasn’t interested in any of these arranged matches, in fact wasn’t interested in trying to find a date at all, and once his mother had spoken to some of his uncles about the way her son’s former Colonel had been sharing the room during her visits to Jean at the hospital, he’d begun to hear the tail ends of some rather damning speculative whispers.

“There’s a lot of allure for boys like that in the army, I expect, with all those other men around; always did think it was strange that he never got dates—” His uncle Marcel, who’d never really liked him that much, said once, when Jean was just out of sight on the other side of the doorway, before his wife had hushed him and told him he shouldn’t say things like that about his own nephew. Jean hadn’t let on he’d heard, and was all the more grateful he hadn’t sent the stupid letter to Mustang. Might’ve been a real disaster. There hadn’t ever been anything like that, no matter what false connections anyone might draw.

Except… well, there had been one thing. Just that one, tiny thing.

He tried not to think much about it. Whatever sin his injury stood restitution for, if such a thing was true, it really didn’t matter. He wasn’t an analytical creature by nature, preferring to take things as they came. But sometimes his mind did go back, on days when he felt his most lonely and hopeless, no matter how much he wanted to forget all about it.

He thought about it now, as he slid the grimy handful of change the boy had exchanged for his eggs in and out of the little pouch.

It was the same night Mustang had told him he didn’t believe in Hell. An oversight of judgment left them both reeling when a couple of drinking games went on too long, and they shared a cab home. The Colonel had nodded off, his head sliding farther and farther down until it was resting on Jean’s shoulder, and Jean had leaned toward him just enough to smell the burn of whiskey in the Colonel’s exhales. Leaning over that way he could see the faint, black lines of Mustang’s eyebrows, and below them the flutter of his lashes as his sleep deepened.

A wash of feeling, violent in its intensity, welled up in Jean’s chest, and he slid his arm behind and around the small of his Colonel’s back and squeezed. His eyes closed and he grit his teeth together, unable to comprehend the ferocity of the emotion, and a strange thought, reverent, almost like a prayer, came to his lips and he voiced it before he could understand it, so low he couldn’t hear the words but only felt them moving over his lips; Let me follow you. Let me stay close to you. Let me always be there to help you. And hadn’t there been just a hint of something in those words? Just a shadow of… well, of the kind of thing they were whispering about him now?

There must’ve been. Barely three weeks after that blasphemous little almost-prayer had left his mouth, Mustang was walking out of his hospital room, leaving him behind. Not what his uncle thought, not at all. It was so much worse.

“No point in keeping back the suffering til after one dies, is there, Lieutenant?” Mustang had said. “If there was a god, he’d be smarter than that. Don’t you agree?”

Jean looked down into his lap, pulling the grouch bag by its long string. Its weight dragged the blanket over his legs up into folds and bunches, but he felt not a hint of the heavy coins it contained. Stuck here, with the family he’d betrayed, alone and far from the man he’d given everything up for, with no chance of fighting beside him when his final, greatest hour was at hand. Of course there was no Hell; where was the need?

Watching the little leather bag move, he found his stomach hot and writhing with regretful wishes. He wished Mustang hadn’t bothered to save him. He wished he hadn’t been so eager to show him up that he took up with Solaris—Lust—in the first place. He wished his physical therapist hadn’t decided he was stable enough to send him home.

He wished he’d had the balls to send Mustang the letter he’d written.

“Jean?” His mother's voice, coming from the doorway to their little apartment behind the store, startled him. It cut through his contemplation but did nothing to bring him succor. “Have a good morning, dear? Anyone come in?”

“Just Mrs. Desmarais for some muslin, then some kids. Nothing big.”

She finally moved into sight around the towering shelf of bolts of cloth, small and smartly dressed as ever. He felt a lurch of provocation at the sight of her, and immediately felt guilty about it.

“Good.” She tsk-tsk’ed his cigarette, and he put it out in the ashtray on his armrest without a word. “They didn’t give you any trouble?”

“No, Ma.”

“It’s just that you look a bit… well, troubled, dear.”

“No, not troubled.” He handed over the bag of change for her to count into the register, and suddenly realized, with a fresh wave of guilt, that he couldn’t stand to stay here with her a moment longer. “Just a little tired. I think I might go rest awhile before lunch.”

“That’s a good idea. Do you need any help?”

“No, Ma. I’ll be fine. Everything’s… just fine.” He offered her a stark and obligatory grin.