Roy knew that if it wasn't him, it would be someone else.

He'd always known that the military cared for results first and above all. What else could be said about an orginization that used humans as resources, a means to an end? He'd joined despite it, hated his time as an enlisted. Hated his time in war. Hated knowing that there were orders and no other choices; if it weren't them, it was you. If you refused to pull the trigger, you were an example. That was the necessity of war. The gun had never felt so cold and heavy in his hands. He had never seen so many children cry.

That was simply part of the job.

The rules were the most important thing. If you could work inside the rules, you could do almost anything. If you couldn't, however, well.

He still had nightmares.

Perhaps it is wrong of him to see so much of himself in Edward, he thinks. He tries to keep himself from doing so, but nevertheless, he sees each parallel as it arises; what he has to be wary of is seeing more parallels than there should be. They are very different people, after all. He was raised in family that wanted for little, a city family, a family of politicians; the rules were his playing field. Edward was raised in the country and was the oldest man in the family for most of his life, from what he knew.

It was good, sometimes, to get Ed irritated, simply to remind himself how different they were, how Ed's situation was not his situation.

And yet - they were too much alike. Both used the military as their means for other ends, just as the military used them. Both held too much to the guilt of the past as a reason to act in the future. Both were driven - and for all Ed sometimes claimed otherwise, both used their minds as their first and best weapon.

Ed would protest it, which is why Roy would never tell him, but in many ways, Ed still needed protection. He believed so, at any rate; he knew he himself hadn't thought he needed any until he became a weapon. All soldiers are weapons, and what they live with depends on the hands they fall into.

He had determined from the moment he saw the boy that he'd be those hands. No other would understand the need to use human transmutation; no other would understand without having to ask, and so they would not be safe in any others. And any other would look at Ed and not see a boy fighting to make his own destiny; he would see a soldier, and he would say "pull the trigger."

Roy had already determined that no trigger would be pulled that Ed wouldn't want to. He'd be ordered on missions - yes, naturally, and ones that would help him learn to think in the ways an officer had to think to survive. But he would not be ordered how to behave on that mission. No gun would be ordered into his hands, no trigger against his finger.

If Roy looked for absolution through this, it was no more than equivalent trade.