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The soft click of the door, the nurse turning the knob before it hits the frame to make sure it barely makes a sound, is deafening regardless. Roy realizes, as the moment stretches on, that he can hear everything; the tap of his eyelids when he blinks (why even bother? he thinks), the beat of his tired heart, the infuriating ringing of silence, the rustling of Riza’s legs under the rough, hospital-bed sheets as she readjusts herself. The sound of movement draws his eyes over to to her, where she lays on his left, only a few feet away but much too far. It's instinctual, to look over towards where the sound came from.
He sees nothing. It dawns on him then, crushingly, that he will never get to look at her again. The pressure he feels on his chest at the thought almost knocks the wind out of him. He thinks of every single time he took his sight for granted, and each time it’s not pink sunsets or starry night skies that he mourns the loss of but her eyes, the twitch of the corner of her lips into a smirk when she teases him, the golden gleam of her hair in low light. It feels impossible, then, to continue like this, if he can’t see her. And though he’s done his absolute best to keep the despair at bay, locked behind the strength of his own stubborn will, he feels the dam break.
Riza is looking at him as his features go from carefully crafted neutrality to terror. She has been looking at him since the moment he came back to her from beneath the city, unable to take her eyes off of him for a single second for fear he will disappear again and this time he will not come back. She’s exhausted from surgery, and more than a little confused, perhaps even bordering on delirious – but she knows that sleep will bring her no comfort, not tonight, and so she watches him.
Despite everything, he has been himself in every moment from the one where he placed his coat over a real, human-bodied Alphonse with a soft smile, (even if he missed his shoulders by a bit and Riza had to help adjust) to the moment she finally fainted and he caught her, to his relieved “Lieutenant!” as she opened her eyes and softly whispered his name, waking up after her blood transfusion. She can’t help but smile as she imagines what he must have been like, brow furrowed and fists clenched, demanding they bring her to his room after her surgery despite the unorthodoxy of it all. She wonders if it was threats of a fiery death or his charming smile that won the doctors over in the end. But as she watches his hands begin to shake, and slowly raise up to his face to press against his closed eyelids, she sees very little of the Colonel Mustang she has come to know, the one that defeated two of the homunculi in single combat and successfully orchestrated a coup, and very much of the boy, unmarred by war, who showed up on her doorstep when she was twelve and brought her poorly brewed tea after he heard her father yell at her for interrupting his work. There is none of the unwavering confidence and bravado of the man who she has watched bring a corrupt country to its knees in supplication in front of her, who instead clutches his hair in one hand and tugs, whose breaths are coming faster and faster.
“Colonel?” She says, as loud as she can possibly muster but it still comes out as nothing more than a raspy, dry whisper.
He doesn’t answer her; his hands are in front of him, palms up as if he is looking at them, and his eyes are closing hard, then opening wide, as if he could will his sight to return through sheer determination. He can’t.
“Colonel.” She says, more firmly, a little louder though just as weak, but the demand is there all the same. He looks at her, and although his eyes are glassy the panic within them is perfectly clear.
“I can’t see you, Lieutenant.” He whispers, like it’s a horrible secret, and his voice shakes.
“I look terrible right now, Colonel.” Her jokes are rare, rare enough that they almost always elicit a laugh out of him, for the surprise if nothing else. Instead, his frown deepens.
“Is the sun still up?”
She looks over to the blinds covering the window, and the little golden streams of light that leak through, drawing golden patterns on the floor, his arms, her face.
“It’s going down now, sir. There’s little lines of light on your right arm, coming through between the blinds.” She pauses, unsure. “They’re on my face too, I think. The sun is a little bit in my eyes, but I’m too tired to do anything about it.” She waits, hoping that it will help ease the knot that’s forming inside of him before her very eyes. Her voice is light, and soft, and so he asks:
“Are you smiling?”
It makes her heart beat out of rhythm, for just a moment. He’s always toed the line closer than she has when it comes to bringing light to the tether between them that is so much stronger than they let on. Little comments from him, about her hair or what she wore when they were off duty, were not uncommon, but almost always filled with teasing or innuendo, as if to lighten their gravity. This was no such thing; it was not only genuine but sweet in a way that brought warmth to her cheeks. Regardless, she did not lie to him.
“No.”
He is quiet for a long moment, “I can’t see you.”
“I know Colonel, but I’m here.” She says and it hurts because she doesn’t know if she’s ever seen him like this.
He takes a deep, rattling breath, his hands coming up to press on his eyes again. “Do you know the last thing I saw? You covered in your own blood, barely conscious. It’s all I can see now.”
The anguish is so clear in his voice and it wraps around her throat and makes it feel tight, though she doesn’t have the energy to cry.
“I’m okay Colonel, I’m here.” She feels like an idiot, a failure, that all she can do is give him meaningless assurances. They’ve never been ones for words, never needing them for something deeper runs, unacknowledged but ever-present, between them and to give it a name would be to ruin it. Usually, he just knows, the way she just knows, but he has been driven to a point she has not seen him reach before, and she doesn’t know if she can reach him here.
In a quick, angry movement, he gets up from his bed and stumbles, his hand trailing on the edge for guidance, to the open area on the other side of the room. He paces, back and forth a few steps each time, like a caged animal who can do nothing more than move for the sake of moving. His entire body is tight and rigid, his arms cross over his chest for a few steps, blunt nails digging into his biceps hard enough to leave marks, then going up to his hair to pull at it, then pressing into his eyelids, again, too hard. Each touch a desperate attempt to bring him back from wherever his mind has taken him, each prick of pain intended to center him here, in this room, in his body. If he cannot see he has to feel, but his breaths only get shallower and his fidgeting more frantic.
“I can’t be Fuhrer like this,” it comes out strained, like it hurt his vocal cords to even utter such a thing, “It was all for nothing. I’d be so easy to take down, I wouldn’t even last if I tried. I’ll be honorably – but forcefully – discharged, given some stupid fucking medal and left to rot like all of the other veterans who managed to outlive their usefulness as weapons of the state. And then what? Everything I’ve done, every burnt corpse in Ishval, it’s all for nothing-“
Riza is tired in a way she has never felt before, seeping even past her bones and into each individual cell, drained of both blood and energy, but she has always managed to be stronger for Roy. So, she swings first one leg, then the other, over the edge of the stiff hospital bed, and she stands. She wavers, slightly, her head spinning for a moment, but she cannot watch him tug at his hair one more time, or scratch at his arms, because she is supposed to protect him, and even if she can’t protect him from this, she will at least fucking try.
He doesn’t notice her approach, or even her quiet statement of “Roy” instead of “Colonel, something that in any other circumstance would have shocked him into speechlessness, or her soft hand on his bare arm.
“How can I carry the bodies of the dead across a river of blood if I can’t even fucking see where the river is? How can I ever atone if-“
Tomorrow, and every day after, Riza will tell herself when she thinks of this moment that she was exhausted from the day, delusional from the blood loss, that she was not thinking clearly. That it was a last resort to shock him enough to release him from the panic, that she had no other choice if he didn’t even respond to her saying his name.
She will know, tomorrow, and every day after, that it would be a lie. There was something she could try to pull him back down to her, to stop the scratches on his arms and his racing thoughts, and she wanted to try it.
So, she puts her hands on either side of his jaw, and she kisses him.
It is firm, and demanding, and strong, and he stops moving almost immediately. His hands cease their desperate search for something to do and freeze, hovering next to her arms.
She pulls back, and looks at him, and even though he’s not staring at her because he can’t, it almost looks like he is, eyes wide and free of the cloud of panic that had overtaken them.
“I help you carry them,” she says, quiet but strong, her hands still on either side of his face, “that’s how.”
Roy can physically feel the twisted, frantic energy drain out of him in that moment, shoulders relaxing, jaw unclenching. The fear is still there, of course, a quiet hum in the back of his throat, beneath his lungs, but something else is there now too, and it’s far louder. He almost wants to laugh at the absurdity of it all, at a decade of small touches and meaningful looks and near-death experiences, and after all of it, it was Riza who kissed him first (he knows someone, somewhere, has just lost a long-running bet), in their ugly, flimsy hospital gowns in a dark sterile, hospital room.
He does laugh, a little bit, a breathy sigh of relief, as he places his hands atop her own where they rest on his jaw. They have never been ones for words, so he doesn’t speak, and neither does she. Instead, he trails his hands to her wrists, to her arms, up to her shoulders. Then, gently, to her neck, the puckered skin there, the rough stitches holding her together. With every slide of his fingertips across her skin he feels a little more present, a little more alive, a little more himself. The emptiness he sees when he opens his eyes does not seem so dark.
He reaches her jaw then, tracing it with his thumb. He feels her shiver, too, and can’t help but smirk at the reaction. The hollows of her cheeks next, then the slope of her cheekbones, the ridge of her eyebrows. His fingers tuck the soft hair around her face behind her ear, trailing down it and finally, tracing over her lips. Top first, then the bottom. He is amazed that she lets him, it is a luxury he is not deserving of. But of course, she knows him, and she knew exactly what he needed.
I help you carry them. The words echo softly in his mind, leaving a quiet trail of peace in their wake. He wonders where he would be without her. Dead, most definitely, but it’s more than that. There are things worse than death, and he thinks of a creature, sitting alone beneath Central Command, and he thinks of a man, sitting alone in its largest office, surrounded by power but bereft of love. He thinks of something Hughes said to him, once, under the Ishvalan stars; when I return home, I will swallow every horrible thing I’ve done here, and I will smile when I am with her. I swear on my life, I will make her happy.
His thumb still resting on her lower lip and serving as his guide, he leans in, slowly, carefully, reverently. His nose bumps hers, despite his best efforts, and he pauses to readjust, his lips hovering only an inch above hers, but he feels the slightest movement of her cheek against his nose and he realizes something.
“Are you smiling?”
“Yes.”
He kisses her, slowly, hungrily, gently, as if she is oxygen and he is a flame.
A pause, a breath.
“Are you still smiling?”
He can feel her answer before she gives it.
“Yes.”