whiskeycoffee | "Orphans of God" (Fullmetal Alchemist, Ishbal, 1/1) (Reply)

Title: Orphans of God
Author: m.jules
Summary: We were only children.
Word Count: 1708 (not counting lyrics)
Pairings: None.
Rating: Older Teen, for mature themes and wartime violence.
Disclaimer: Not mine, not for profit.
Author's Notes: For the July challenge at

fullservicefma, theme 'uniform.'

The unrest in Ishbal became a full-fledged war when an Amestrian soldier shot and killed an Ishbalan child. I took a few liberties with this idea and made this child the brother of the story's narrator. To stem any confusion, the narrator of this story is not Scar; it's an original character who saw the war through a child's eyes. The title and opening quote are both from "The Orphans of God" by Mark Heard. The full lyrics are at the end, and are dedicated to every nation that has ever found itself the object of prejudice and the victim of war.

Thank you to

cornerofmadness,

dr_firedog, and

evil_little_dog for their beta services.

We have pawned from the brokers
Who have broken their oaths
Now we're out on the streets
With a lump in our throats.

We are soot-covered urchins,
Running wild and unshod -
We will always be remembered
As the orphans of God.

The first time we saw the blue uniforms, we were spellbound. We were fascinated by the colors, by the flash of gold and silver and brass buttons, the shiny black of the boots, the rhythmic, measured tread. In our world of dusty brown and beige, it was dazzling. They were soldiers and we were children. We played in the streets under their eyes and were all but invisible. Our mother told us to stay inside, but we did not listen. There was too much to do, too much to see; the world was too big for us to take in from the windows of our house.

My brother took one of my father's old shirts from the closet to use as a play-uniform for our games. It was faded, not the brilliant, blinding hue of the soldiers' jackets. It had wooden buttons instead of brass, and instead of gold trim and silver buckles it had a mismatched beige patch over the right elbow, but we were children and our world was of our own making. He dressed up in his "uniform" and I carried a gun that was really a branch with one trigger-shaped twig and I followed him from one end of our neighborhood to the other, shouting "Yes, sir!" and "No, sir!" and snapping random, sloppy salutes.

He was my general, and I would have followed him to the ends of the earth. But we were not soldiers, we were children, and we were tragically unprepared for a real war.

We built a fort by stealing two of our mother's tablecloths and nailing them between two trees. Then my brother pointed out that it wasn't really like a fort, it was more like a tent, and it became our war room for the five minutes it took Mother to look out the back window and see where her two best cloths had disappeared to. After that, we were on kitchen patrol for a week.

We watched the changing of the guards; we lay low against the ground, pressed close to the dusty walls of buildings, and listened to their conversations. Then we would run back to our own street, snickering to each other and barking out words we didn't understand in a fair imitation of the gruff voices of the men in uniform. After the first time, we learned to keep our voices down and play far enough away from the house that Mother couldn't hear us, though she still caught us from time to time. I still taste a faint bitterness of soap whenever I hear someone describing anatomical functions in particularly colorful vocabulary.

With all the time we spent playing at war, there is a painful irony in the fact that war found us when we were simply being children. My father had brought us presents -- little toys in the shape of exotic animals. He told us they were real creatures that lived in a country far east of us, a land named Xing. Brother got something ferocious-looking called an alligator; mine was a black-and-white bear that Father said was a panda. We were, for once, not running up and down the streets in direct violation of our mother's rules. We were sitting safely on the front steps of our house, poking and prodding at the soft cloth of our toys, trying to imagine what noises the animals would make.

Brother had my panda and I was holding his alligator when we heard the marching feet of soldiers coming down the street. We barely even looked up as they passed by; their uniforms had long since lost their novelty, but our toys were still brand new and captured our imagination. What happened next was a blur at the time, but in my memory it is crystal clear and in slow motion. Brother held up my panda and made a roaring noise, though we were laughing so hard it was utterly unconvincing. Then the sounds were cut short by the echoing report of a gunshot and for long, horrible moments, I didn't understand why I couldn't see my brother's face. When time started again and the deafening silence in my ears gave way to ringing, followed by the chaos of soldiers shouting and my mother screaming, I finally realized it was because my brother no longer had a face.

It was gone.

After that, war was no longer a game to me. It was the reality of my life. The street I lived on was no longer for playing in. I stayed in the house except when absolutely necessary, and when I did go into the street, I kept a hood pulled over my face, my eyes on the ground, and walked as quickly as I could without running. Running was the fastest way to get shot, and we all knew it. Although my world was fractured, a distorted image of what it had been, I didn't want it to end just yet. I was still young enough to cling to survival without a second thought.

Years passed and it became a way of life. They put a real gun in my hands and the trigger under my finger was smooth metal, not rough wood, and when I pulled it the sound was much louder than a twig breaking. The weapon was almost bigger than I was, but though I was small and young, I was no longer a child. I had become a soldier. They taught me to seek out those bright blue uniforms, taught me to crawl along dusty streets and press myself to dirty beige brick walls -- things at which I was already skilled. But instead of listening and giggling, instead of learning how to salute or how to describe a woman's body in ways that made my mother's hand crack across my face so hard I could taste blood in my mouth, I learned what it looked like to watch someone die. I learned what it felt like to see lifeblood seeping out onto the ground and know that I had made the hole it drained through.

I learned to kill because I did not want to be killed.

I was old and hardened by the time I was thirteen; I had forgotten what laughter sounded like and I did not know how to play anything but war games. For seven long years, I had known nothing but the staccato of bullets and the occasional dull explosion from grenades when I learned to fear a new sound -- the roaring of flames, the rumble of the earth moving beneath my feet, the thunder of buildings collapsing. These were the sounds of the State Alchemists, the attack dogs sent in to bring us to heel. They were at our throats and the light was quickly fading from our eyes.

The day my house collapsed in a heap of rubble in front of me, my mother buried somewhere in the bottom of the pile that had once been our kitchen, I came face to face with two of those dogs -- a huge beast of a man with a haunted expression and a thin young boy with dark hair and strangely-shaped eyes who didn't look much older than myself. The boy was standing with his hand raised as if he were about to snap when he saw me and hesitated.

Their uniforms were coated in dust and ash, their faces so streaked with soot and grease that they looked more like children who had been playing in a firepit than formidable soldiers. But appearances can be deceiving and I knew these were the demons that had turned our home into hell itself. These were State Alchemists, and they had found me without a weapon. I had been coming home from a covert mission -- Operation Dinner -- and had failed to take my gun with me. I had only gone out to our underground cellar in the back yard where my mother kept our rations. I did not expect to come back to a battlefield.

The two alchemists stood there, staring at me and I at them, all of us empty-handed save the jar of apple preserves I held as though it were a grenade ready to launch. Finally the smaller one leaped into action and barked a command at me. I was so surprised that it took him repeating it twice for me to comprehend his words.

"You idiot! Get the hell out of here now!"

I will never know what possessed me, but I threw the apples to the ground and obeyed, sprinting away as I heard flames crackling behind me. I stumbled, choking on the smoke that filled the air and burned my eyes, but I never turned back to see my mother's funeral pyre.

I found the camps of the wounded who were being smuggled out of the war zone. They were being assisted by two doctors, a man and a woman who still managed to look like blue skies and sunshine in the middle of the eternal storm of war, and they assigned me as a guard. I was to escape with the refugees to find another life somewhere. I turned my back on the war, on my country, and I ran. I ran deep into bitterness and hardness and learned to hate my brown skin and red eyes for the prison they bound me in.

There was an old man in our colony of deserters who held on to the teachings of our fathers, who told us of the beauty of God's creation, the intricate perfection of His plan. I could not listen without becoming sick, without wondering what kind of a God could have crafted the ugliness of the life I have lived. What kind of artist paints the death of a child and the destruction of a nation and calls it a work of art?

I am no longer a soldier, but I will never again be a child, and if God is our father then I believe I am truly an orphan.

THE ORPHANS OF GOD
by Mark Heard

I will rise from my bed with a question again
As I work to inherit the restless wind
The view from my window is cold and obscene
I want to touch what my eyes haven't seen

But they have packaged our virtue in cellulose dreams
And sold us the remnants 'til our pockets are clean
Til our hopes fall 'round our feet
Like the dust of dead leaves
And we end up looking like what we believe

We are soot-covered urchins running wild and unshod
We will always be remembered as the orphans of God
They will dig up these ruins and make flutes of our bones
And blow a hymn to the memory of the orphans of God

Like bees in a bottle we are flying at fate
Beating our wings against the walls of this place
Unaware that the struggle is the blood of the proof
In choosing to believe the unbelievable truth

But they have captured our siblings and rendered them mute
They've disputed our lineage and poisoned our roots
We have pawned from the brokers who have broken their oaths
And we're out on the streets with a lump in our throats

We are soot-covered urchins running wild and unshod
We will always be remembered as the orphans of God
They will dig up these ruins
And make flutes of our bones
And blow a hymn to the memory of the orphans of God