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(How do you know you’ve made it out of the dark?)
When the first shadows of the evening stretch a finger into his office, Mustang asks Hawkeye to turn on a light.
She does, because her commanding officer asked her to, and when she flicks the switch up, the pale yellow artificial lights spill over the desks and into the corners of the room. It’s not nearly bright enough to fight the storm clouds darkening the sky, but it illuminates the path of the twenty paces it takes to get to the door and it turns the brass in his desk lamp gold.
“Thank you,” he says.
She nods and returns to her desk.
The light slashes across the dark wood of his desk. The faintest shadows swirl behind him, grey clouds gathering to hang in a thick mass in the sky. He keeps his eyes forward, looking at the crisp printed black letters on his paperwork and the ten paces it takes to get from his desk to where his subordinates would sit. He takes a breath. He takes another.
But then the shadows darken a bit, nearly stealing the gold from his lamp.
Mustang stands, chair screeching too loudly against the floorboards.
Hawkeye looks up from her desk. “Sir?”
He blinks. “Nothing, I—” He blinks again. “I think I’m, uh…”
“Heading out?”
He swallows. “Yes.” The thunder rumbles outside, low and rolling through his chest. He looks down at the papers on his desk, at the shifting shadows snaking around his feet. “I think I’m clocking out for the night.”
Hawkeye nods. “I’ll see you tomorrow, sir.”
“Right.”
He takes a step out from behind his desk and the shadows roll in. He turns to the window and sees the endless gray in the sky.
“Looks like we’re getting a big storm,” notes Hawkeye. “Get home safe, General.”
“Thank you, I will.”
He turns on the lamp on his desk even though the lights in the office are already filling the space as he gathers his things.
He can feel her eyes on him.
Mustang shuffles around in the silence before he stares at the lamp, hands lingering.
Hawkeye stands. “Why don’t you let me walk you out?”
“There’s no need for that, Captain—”
Thunder booms through the sky. Lightning flashes through the window, throwing a dark shadow with hard lines from the window panes onto the floor. The lamps in the room flicker, and for a moment, the light from the storm turns the skin of his hands white. Mustang flinches. He thinks he sees Hawkeye flinch.
And then the room returns to normal. Pale yellow light spilling across the room, across the desks, across his feet. Shadows on the floor.
His ears ring. Or maybe it’s the silence.
“Actually—” He turns to Hawkeye. “Would you like to come over for dinner?”
(Trick question: you don’t.)
Mustang flicks the light on in his apartment as soon as they walk inside. He hangs his coat up in the closet and does the same for Hawkeye. Then, he goes into the kitchen.
“Any preferences for dinner?” he asks, reaching into the refrigerator. “I think I have some beef. I also have carrots and onions. I’m almost out of potatoes, but we can use those, too.”
Hawkeye appears behind him and gently pushes his arm aside. “Permission to speak freely, sir?”
He blinks at her, confused. “Granted?”
“You’re a terrible cook,” she says curtly. “Let me make you something.”
“This is my apartment,” he reminds her. “I should be treating you.”
Hawkeye snorts. “Eating your cooking would not be a treat. Believe me.”
Mustang sputters, offended, but he forgives her when he sees the tail end of her smile disappearing as she moves in front of him to dig through the contents of his fridge.
He steps back and moves toward the window. The storm clouds swirl in the sky, bunching together tighter and denser, suffocating the gaps between them.
Mustang flicks on the kitchen light, watching it turn the top of her head gold as Hawkeye pulls the beef and the carrots from the fridge. She moves across the kitchen before taking out a cutting board and a knife and starts peeling the carrots. Her fingers slide down the vegetable, up and down, the skin of it sliding off in strips and plopping into the sink.
“I can cut those,” he offers.
“These?” Hawkeye lifts the carrot and then her eyebrow. “How about you start boiling the water instead?”
Mustang frowns but grabs a pot and moves to the sink to fill it with water. Their elbows brush as he watches the water rise, the edges turning white with the foam. The pot reflects the kitchen light back onto his arms. Next to him, Hawkeye dumps orange carrot skin into the sink. He stares at a line on the pot until the water reaches it and then shuts the sink off.
“How’s this?” he asks.
Hawkeye pauses, looks over, then nods.
Mustang steps back and walks to the stove, setting the pot on the grate. Then, he presses and twists the knob, watching orange flames jump into the air and turn blue before fanning out underneath the pot.
The rain comes the moment he steps away from the stove. There’s a pause, like the sky taking a breath, before it starts crying onto the roof.
The water pelts lightly against the window. First in scattered drops, then in little fists, knocking on the window panes and smearing the glass until what little light is left comes in distorted. It twists the fading sunlight and drops little ropes of shadow onto the floor.
Mustang leans to the side and turns the light on above the stove.
“The rain’s coming down hard, isn’t it?” he observes.
“It is, sir,” agrees Hawkeye.
He stands at the stove for a minute before he says, “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
When he looks over, he sees the carrots peeled and cut into a bowl. She has already pulled another cutting board over to slice the beef.
“I’m good, for now, thank you. I just need a few minutes to cut this up and then I can put everything in the stew.”
“I—alright.”
He takes a few steps back and stops at the threshold between the living room and the kitchen.
“You didn’t have to cook for me,” he says.
She doesn’t look up. “I know, sir.”
He takes another step back as she finishes cutting the beef. She lifts the ingredients and dumps them in the pot. He watches her brush the hair out of her face with the bend of her wrist before she washes her hands, grabs a wooden spoon, and starts stirring the pot.
The storm rumbles outside and he tries to stand still. There are no more light switches left to flip up, so he settles on looking between the storm and the kitchen. He sits on the couch and manages to stay there for three seconds before he stands again and starts pacing around the living room.
The next time he passes the window, he sees lightning snaking through the clouds. He watches for a moment, fascinated, before the earth thunders below him and lightning streaks across the sky. The three lights he had turned on flicker.
He flinches. “Fuck.”
Hawkeye pauses. “Sir?”
“Nothing.” He shakes his head. “It’s nothing.”
The lights are on. He can see it reflected in the bend of the metal pot. Hawkeye’s hair has been cut short again, like when she’d been younger, and he can see the gold sheen of it trailing down the nape of her neck, disappearing under her collar. He can count the ten paces between them. He can pick out every detail in the scene in front of him. There’s the gold of her hair under the yellow light. There’s the color of mud scuffing his shoes by the door. There’s the gray of the storm in the window. He can see it all.
Hawkeye continues stirring the pot. He watches her do it.
The muscles in his body wind tight, tight as a clock ticking down to disaster. He flinches, one moment before thunder cracks across the sky, loud as a gunshot—
—and plunges the apartment into darkness.
“The portal? That means something was taken from you!"
Roy Mustang wasn’t always afraid of the dark. He didn’t think he was afraid of the dark. But then again, he didn’t think the smell of cooked meat bothered him until he tried to eat a steak one month after the end of the war. He’d been so nauseous, the smell of charred flesh making him flinch. Funny, isn’t it? The Flame Alchemist’s stomach curdling at the smell of burned things.
He learned to eat meat again after a while. He thought a few years was enough distance between him and the war, but when he had burned Maria Ross’s fake corpse made of pork, carbon, and ammonia, he’d thrown up like a greenie soldier freshly put on the battlefield.
He doesn’t think he’s afraid of the dark, but when the sky darkens an inch, when the sun takes one step down the ladder in the sky, he flinches.
He doesn’t think about it; it just happens. You would flinch if someone threw at fist at your face, right? It doesn’t necessarily mean that you fear hands—you fear the pain. Flinching is instinct. The instinct is learned, or planted deep inside you until it takes root like a parasite. You don’t think you’re afraid, you don’t think it means anything, but you keep flinching back and back until you’re almost at the edge. You don’t see it of course because you’re always facing forward. You’re ashamed of looking back, at the abyss that yawns behind you. But then you flinch, just one more time. And you fall over the edge into the dark.
“Hawkeye!”
He’s back again. “It’s all dark. Pitch-black.” Standing. In the dark, dark room. “The lights— where are the lights? ”
The revelation descends on him like a storm. Ah, it is dark because he does not have eyes. It is dark because the blood has crusted over, accumulated so much that it turned black.
And his head starts to spin like a whorl of flame. Down, down, down, following the spiral to the bottom. He doesn’t want to be here. He didn’t think he’d be here again. He knows the way up, he knows what it looks like over the edge, so why is he here again? Why?
It’s dark again and he’s wandering the world with his hands outstretched into the mist. The air in front of him is insubstantial, drifting through his fingers like ash. He can’t see. The world left him again. And he’s back to the endless white with the voice of god and the stream of memories shooting through his head like a bullet. He’s back in the concrete bowels of Central Command where a pipe had snaked around his foot, when he first stumbled in the dark, when the lights first turned off.
He’s back where he started. He knew he would be. The darkness creeps up on him every night and barely recedes until morning. But the storm came again and ripped it away. He had no time to prepare, much like how he had no time to prepare for god to rip the light from his eyes. But now he’s back, wandering through a maze of mirrors, feeling his way through the smoke and ash, and he can’t see a way out.
“Captain Hawkeye, where are you—”
“I’m right here, sir.”
Her voice is in front of him. When did she move? She drifted so silently through the dark, like a ghost, and now here she is, back in front of him.
“Captain, the lights—”
“The power went out, sir.” Her voice is calm like it always is, steady as a heartbeat.
Mustang stumbles forward, tripping over something in the dark. In the dark where he can’t see his feet below him, he feels insubstantial as smoke, as ash, as a ghost. He can’t find his footing in the apartment. There’s nothing to see. This was how it started last time. This was how it felt the last time—
“Hawkeye—”
Through the dark, through the endless void, a hand wraps around his, anchoring him back to solid ground. The dark, shifting world comes to a halt, anchored around the warmth in Hawkeye’s hand. He smells the stale air of his apartment again, the smoke from the stove. He’s not in that endless white anymore, memories unraveling in front of him. He’s in his apartment. He can hear the rain. And she’s in front of him.
“I’m right here,” she repeats.
“Captain, you—” His heart lurches in his chest. This is stupid. This is so fucking stupid. But, “you can’t see anything either, right?”
“No, sir.”
His heart unclenches slightly, like a finger loosening on the trigger, but his pulse races in his ears, fast as the rain pounding against the roof.
“Are you alright, sir?”
No, he’s not, and she knows this because she always knows. Hawkeye knows these things: that before the Promised Day, he did not mind the dark; that after the Promised Day, he turns on three lights in his apartment at the hint of a storm.
“I’m fine,” he says.
But she doesn’t pull away. She keeps her hand around his, holding him tight to remind him he’s still on Earth. A lifesaver tossed overboard to a drowning man. A rope tossed to a man dangling off the edge of a cliff.
He reaches for her through the dark. Like on the Promised Day when he couldn’t find her. When he had first lost his sight.
Where are you, he thinks. Riza, where are you?
I’m right here, Roy. I’m not going anywhere.
One day, Roy woke up and saw Riza with a scarf of blood wrapped around her left shoulder. One day, before he thought he would close his eyes forever, the image of Riza with red staining the side of her face tattooed itself onto the back of his eyelids. And when he emerged from the endless white into the endless dark, he thought: Was that going to be his last image of her? With blood carving a dark red line down her neck, so dark it was almost black. With the pain and panic pulling her eyes wide. Was that how he was going to remember her?
How long does it take to forget a face? How long does it take to get used to the dark?
He walked blindly through the world for a time. He didn’t know colors or light and he had to count the steps between places where before he could map it with his eyes. Details dropped out of his head, growing hazy in the dark. He tried to reach for them, blindly, and only grasped empty air.
He became a cartographer learning how to navigate a colorless world, creating a new cognitive map. He couldn’t judge the air in front of him—if his next step would be met with solid ground or a plunging abyss; but he held his hands in front of him, drawing new lines on his map, committing them to memory.
Her skin feels soft under his hand like a low flame. Warm and alive. He charts her face in the dark, navigating an unknown sea. He wants to map the distance between her eyes and the slope of her nose and the curve of her mouth when she yells at him to get back to work. He traces his hand up the side of her face and he can feel her eyelashes brushing over the edge of his palm.
He had wanted to touch her face after they had somehow made it out of the Promised Day alive, but he hadn’t had time. There had been more important things to do first, of course. But it’s not the Promised Day anymore, so under the roof of the raging storm, he reaches for her.
In the pocket of darkness of his powerless apartment, Roy Mustang gives into the cultivation of a secret—hands, gloveless hands, walking the topography of Riza’s face.
When Roy managed to his first spark as the Flame Alchemist, he flinched away from the fire. It was so bright. God, it was so bright. Sometimes the blaze of his own flame surprised him, the orange inferno of it burning brighter than a star. What did it mean to hold something like that in your hands? Is this the hubris of man: playing with fire? Playing as a god?
He learned to control those flames on a mechanical level because it was necessary. That was why he made those gloves.
Those gloves, with the red stitching stark against the white like a trail of blood, stayed clipped to his belt more permanent than a shadow. Those gloves, that transmutation circle, his hands contained the power to create sparks that were winks in the dark or flames that were hotter than blood. Snap. You’re gone. Snap. You’re gone. Look at that precision, the fine-tuned control over living tongues of orange light.
Roy had once thought himself a Prometheus, back when he was young and naive and just wanted to help people. Instead, he became a judgement bringer, carrying hellfire in his palms.
But on the Promised Day, his gloves went dark. Blood against the white, black like spilled ink with no light. The world was dark, even when he snapped his fingers to destroy an imitation of god—the hottest flames he could produce and he didn’t even need to blink. Yet the brightest point of heat had been the hand on his chest, on his shoulder; the heat of the flame flying far from his face paled in comparison to the hand on his chest, his shoulder, burning through the dark.
He didn’t need the transmutation circles anymore—the last reminders that he was a man. The one limitation he had was gone. But he had this power now, received from being dragged through the gate by his ankles, kicking and screaming, and then spat back out into the moral world. The hubris of man thrives off the soil of this power, but even so he could use it to repent. He needed to stop another being playing at god.
So, he clasped his hands together, praying for salvation, and let the flames of hell erupt from his palms.
He runs his fingers feather-light over the curves of her eyes before falling again to brush over the swell of her low lip. He walks that slope, too. He will map it, again and again and again.
“General Mustang.” He can feel her mouth shifting under his hand.
The lightning flashes bright as a bonfire, illuminating the room for one brief second. He can see her eyes, wide in the light, looking at him. He can see her hair falling into her eyes and the shape of the furniture for one brief second before the lightning flees and plunges them back into the darkness. Light before dark. Light then dark. Again and again and again.
He tightens his grip on her hand, like a finger nearly pulling the trigger. It must hurt, he thinks. He’s gripping so tightly, like a man dangling off the edge of a cliff.
“Sir, you’re trembling.”
“I’m fine.” He’s not fine. He’s not. He’s—
“General, please.”
Her voice had been a guiding light on the Promised Day, and then after. She measured the distance for him, guiding his hand, aiming and firing and pulling the trigger. The severed tendons of his palm ached as he clapped and snapped and prayed, but she pulled him through the dark, through the sharp flashes of pain. And then when all was said and done, she was the one to guide him from place to place. There’s a step here, sir. There’s a door here, sir. Watch your head. Watch your step. Listen to me. Follow me. Follow the sound of my voice. I’m right here, sir.
He remembers leaning all his weight onto her shoulder, her arm around his back, the tang of her blood clinging to his nose.
She’s pulling him forward, through the dark, out of the pit. A magnetic pole pulling the compass in his heart north.
“Hawkeye, will you tell me something?”
She tells him of the time Wrath took her hostage, when Pride’s dark fingers followed her everywhere she went. She learned to avoid corners, half-lit rooms where the shadows were most abundant. Pride left his mark on her, though the scar has long since faded.
It’s funny, she says. Sometimes I feel my calmest in the dark. In the pitch black, there are no shadows. Where there are no shadows, Pride cannot hide. It’s a cruel irony, then, that Roy flinches away from the dark where Riza wanders back into its arms for safety.
It’s hard, she says. The shadows will drift across the floor too fast and she can’t help but flinch. Light is hope is light is hope but the light turns sour for her at her weakest hour.
I’m not afraid, she says. I don’t think I am. How ridiculous would it be to be afraid of the light? But it’s easier to see things in it. I swear, I know my own shadow, but sometimes it bends and it looks unnatural and it moves too fast, so I flinch.
I’m not afraid all the time, she says. I just flinch on instinct. I don’t think about it. I really don’t. I mean, it’s just a flinch, right? You flinch on instinct when a sound bangs too loud in your ear, it doesn’t necessarily mean you fear the noise. It’s just a flinch, so you don’t think anything of it, until you keep flinching back and back without taking any steps forward and then suddenly you’re at the edge. One more flinch and you fall over into the abyss.
But you don’t have to drop down in free fall, you know. There are always people pulling you up and voices in the dark to guide you forward. It’s hard. I don’t always take a step forward everyday, but I’m trying to keep going. There’s a mountain we have to climb and the slope is slippery, but you have to take a step forward, put a bigger space between yourself and the edge. It’s hard, and actually, I am still afraid, but I want to tell you this: I’m trying.
Your turn, General. Tell me something. What do you have to say?
His breath rattles in his chest. Something inside him is shaking. Or something outside of him. He feels unsteady, as insubstantial as smoke or ash or a ghost.
Riza waits for him to speak.
“Sometimes—” His voice breaks. He tries again. “Sometimes I think I’ve gone blind again when it gets dark. I can’t—I can’t be in a room if it’s completely dark anymore. There has to be a light source, even a small one, just enough so I can see. Just enough so I know I haven’t gone blind again.” He wets his lips. “I’m sorry. I never knew—about how you felt about shadows after everything with Pride. I—I should have seen it.”
“It’s alright, sir. The shadows are more bearable around other people.” She presses her face slightly to her left, into his hand. “You know, you called me once when I thought I was losing my mind. I’d just gotten back to my apartment and the shadows were just—swimming in front of my eyes, and then I heard your voice on the phone. It—it helped.”
He takes a shuddering breath. It’s dark. It’s so fucking dark in the apartment and it’s unbearable.
“Sir?”
He buries his face in her shoulder—the right one, the one without the scar tissue—and squeezes his eyes shut. He pretends that it’s dark because he made it dark. On purpose. With his face buried so deep in her shoulder, no light peeking through, it means he chose the darkness. The light wasn’t ripped away from him like last time. There’s an explanation for the darkness: it’s his face in Riza’s shoulder, inhaling the scent of gunpowder and gold.
“Sir, listen to me, it’s going to be alright.” Her hands come up and wind around his shoulders, fingers trailing into his hair. “Listen to me. I’m right here. This power outage won’t last forever.”
Her hands are wrapped around his shoulders, like she’s holding up his weight, like she’s hauling him up the side of the cliff. She’s trying to walk him away from the edge and out of the dark. Listen to me. Follow me. Follow the sound of my voice.
The rain lashes outside, pounding against the glass and in his ear. His heartbeat roars in his head louder than a storm, louder than the voice of god.
He’s shaking, unsteady on his legs like the foundations of a building eaten away by termites hiding in the dark. One tectonic plate grinds slightly against another and he collapses to the ground, pulling Riza down with him. Unsteady. Insubstantial Like ash like smoke like a ghost. They fold onto each other, knees bent underneath their bodies in prayer.
Pull yourself up the side of the cliff and catch your breath if you must. Then, keep walking, because you have a long road ahead of you. You have to get past this. You have somewhere you need to be.
But where’s the end of the road? Is it the tapering of a storm? Is it digging up the weed in your heart that makes you afraid? Is there a place to stop and say, with complete certainty, that the dark doesn’t bother you anymore?
Or is the only end over the edge of the cliff, laying at the bottom of the abyss where there is no farther down you could fall?
At the end of the road, there could be a temple or a church to wish your sins away. Or there could be a pool of holy water to drown yourself in, another baptism to scrub away the stains on your soul. Or, instead of a pit, there could be a mountain. And then another mountain. And then another fucking mountain. The climb is endless and maybe you should stop before your lungs give out and you collapse from exhaustion and you fall down the mountain. It’s terrible, isn’t it? To climb so high just to fall again, and realize that maybe—just maybe, you didn’t get anywhere at all.
Count to five. Count to ten. Count to twenty. Kneel before your god. Have you prayed long enough? Are you still praying?
“General Mustang, the power’s back.”
He squeezes his eyes tighter, buries his face deeper into her shoulder.
“Sir, you can open your eyes.”
He wants to. He should. But the darkness lingers around him, sinking sharp claws into his heart. Keep your eyes closed and don’t move. Stay in the dark. At least this is a choice. This is a choice. Pretend that you chose this dark instead of having it ripped away from you.
“Hawkeye…”
“Yes, sir.”
He swallows an ocean of fear, trying not to drown, trying not to slip and fall off the edge again. “It’s—this sounds silly…”
Hands on his back, hands through his hair, anchoring him to the ground, anchoring him back to the world—
“I know that Dr. Marcoh gave me my sight back. I know that, but...I can’t—part of me is still afraid that when I open my eyes, everything will still be dark.”
—her hands running through his hair, steady as a heartbeat. Her heartbeat in his ear, steady as a storm.
“You trust me, right sir?”
He can feel her voice in her shoulder, vibrating against his face.
“Yes.”
“Then, I promise you, if you open your eyes right now, you will see your own apartment. And you will see me here when you look up.”
He believes her. Of course he does. But—
“Sir,” she starts. “General Mustang, if you do ever lose your sight again, you will always have my eyes.” She swallows. “Please remember that.”
Her voice is a guiding light, leading him through the dark. Her hand on his back, her voice in his ear.
Do you trust me?
Of course, Riza. Of course, I do.
One day, Roy woke up and saw Riza with a scarf of white wrapping around her neck. One day, before he knew he would open his eyes again, he took what he could remember of her eyes and nose and lips and painted a mural of her in his head. And then he emerged from the endless dark into the endless light, he saw this: colors on every surface, reflections bending in the window, every distance measurable by sight. Her face emerged from the dark like the North Star blinking its eyes open.
How long does it take to forget a face? How long does it take to get used to the dark?
Now, he won’t know, because Dr. Marcoh had propositioned him. He gave Roy his eyesight back and in return, Roy would help the Ishvalans and start the walk down the endless road.
Eye for an eye. Eye for a life. Life for a country. Is this fair? Is this equivalent exchange? Did Roy give enough? Will he ever give enough to deserve this second chance?
He doesn’t know. He’ll never know. He keeps falling off the fucking cliff when he should be climbing those mountains. Some days, he’s just a drowning man looking for a place to take root in the loose sand. But still, he will crawl on his hands and knees through the mud to repent at the shore. He might never make it, but nonetheless, he will crawl. He is trying to crawl out of the dark. He is trying to make this exchange fair.
The storm beats against the glass with the ferocity of a man trying to stay alive. He knows this sound, and it reminds him that he’s in his apartment. He is not in the bowels of Central Command where there were no windows and no storms. His then lieutenant, now captain, is not bleeding out anymore. It is dark because his eyes are closed, not because he lost his sight.
Where are the lights? They’re right here, above him, around him, if he opens his eyes like she said. Where are the lights? Right here, pressed against his face, arms wrapping around his shoulders. Where are the lights? They’re on. They’re above you. They’re back. Open your eyes, Mustang. Trust me, I’m right here.
So he peels his eyes open and squints up at the harsh light. Endless dark into the endless light. God, it’s so bright. The storm knocked the light out of the apartment and bled the darkest ink into the rooms, but electricity is rushing through the wires again, washing away the dark.
He blinks once, twice, and looks away from the light. He leans back, lifts his head off her shoulder, and looks at Riza.
“Sir?”
The gold in her hair curves around the top of her head. He watches her shoulders rise and fall, breathing steadily into the room. She blinks at him and she’s so close he can see the lines of her iris.
“Captain.”
“General.”
He blinks (dark then light and she’s still there) and then he’s reaching for her. He sees the curve of her face and then he touches it, thumb running along the side like he’s wiping away a speck of blood. She lets him.
“Are you alright?”
Her eyes are on him. Searching. Always searching.
He reaches up, one last time, and brushes the hair out of her face. He can see the gold thread of her eyelashes.
“I’m fine,” he says again.
And this time, she moves away. She stands and his hand falls from her face. And when she offers out a hand, he can see the smile curving the corner of her mouth. “Let’s get back to making dinner, then.”
He takes her hand and she pulls him up.
Here, you’re back at the beginning. You pulled yourself up. You’re back at the cliff. Look, there’s the edge. Be careful. Walk slowly. Tread lightly. You’ve walked this line so many times already.
There’s light left in the world after all, even if you can’t see it. Maybe you can touch it. Maybe you can hear it. In the clang of the metal pot on the stove, in the pulse of her heartbeat fluttering under his finger tips, her voice rumbling in his ear.
Is this it? Is this the end of the road? Keep wondering. Ask yourself if it matters.
How do you know you’ve made it out of the dark?
Trick question: you don’t. It’s always there, lurking like the shadow of god. Like the history of a war. Like the scars on your face and your hands. Maybe you can’t clean the smell of blood out of your nose and maybe you can’t stop flinching at the thunder. But there’s infrastructure in place for things like this. The gold comes back. The rain stops. The storm ends. And the lights turn back on.
There’s always a voice, a hand, reaching toward you.
You just have to remember to reach back.
“We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?” - Ursula K. Le Guin