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You’re spending the next few days - and what becomes weeks - in the hospital, in recovery, and you’re sedentary - when you’re usually on the move towards something. And there’s the (one of the many) problem. There is no Something. Or rather, you’re not Able to apply yourself towards that Something. Frankly, it is the hanging question that lingers in the air, in the spaces of conversations, whether you’ll able to do much after you fully recover.
(You’re technically supposed to re-certify in a few months. Though, it’s not like you had to before anyway. In retrospect, you’re unsettled by why exactly that was the case.
Now, with Grummann at the helm, it’s just a different kind of nepotism.)
And so, you're bedbound, and there's not much to distract you. Yes, there are visits from your colleagues, your friends, but those people? They need time for themselves, to recover and heal as well.
You do not play well with yourself, as it turns out. You’re used to noise. You’re used to activity. You’re used to people. You grew up in the bar, with Christmas and your sisters, and there was the occasional unruly customer, but you were seldom alone. This changed at the Hawkeye Estate, but you had plenty of alchemy books and practical theory to keep you company. Then, you had the military academy; Hughes. You went to war. You’ve had years with your own boisterous unit. These are the things that you’re used to.
What ends up happening is this:
You’re alone. With your thoughts. For a while yet.
And you sit and lay there. Sightless.
You’re not able to distract yourself. It’s not like you’re able to look outside the window and just lose yourself, in the quietude of birds chirping, or whatever beautiful mundanity that makes up life out there. Your brain fights with itself: your mind can picture the wooden frame of the window; the smattering of clouds and the chain of distant pigeons in the sky; the branches and gradient of ever-changing leaves - but your brain can’t connect any of it with an actual visual.
So, no, you’re not really able to fully luxuriate in Life itself - and that for the most part, you and yours? Are alive. Your friends came out hale, hearty, alive. It could have been worse.
You determined that there would be two outcomes out of Promised Day: death or survival. It never occurred to you that there would be some kind of middle.
And fuck, because that’s the damndest thing. Because you sink in your new reality: right - alive, but blind. And you hate yourself more, because how can you possibly despair when countless others have lost their lives, senselessly at that. And fuck, oh fuck, the needs of this country; the infancy of reconstruction; the shambles of a military; and damndamndamn, it’s all so heavy, and you feel it on your shoulders, because you’re you.
You’re blind. But you’re alive. But blind.
Aliveblindaliveblindalive.
This is the cycle of thoughts that laboriously work at you in your waking moments - as you sit, you lay. You cannot see, and so you’re left with your mind.
(Eventually, you make resolutions and you consider your options, and strive to be more effective, as Grumman takes up the post that you can no longer dream for any longer, but damned if you’ll just sit and lay there. That’s also you.
Before then-)
Hawkeye’s here.
Your first waking moment in this room was that of gratitude, when you found that she had been admitted in the same room. You’re not sure how that was explained away. You're sure the rumor mill is teeming with speculation, and yeah he's heard about the running pool that's been going on for the last decade or so.
You’re not about to complain.
You assume Grumman’s the one to have pulled the strings - for your or her benefit, or Grumman’s own ploys. Or perhaps those are not mutually exclusive.
You’re out of your depth, as is. Not knowing someway, somehow, that she’s okay? Unacceptable.
But then you sink again - because you can’t actually see her. You can’t confirm visually that she’s healthy, thriving. She’s a tether, and you know, you viscerally know that’s unhealthy, but you stopped fighting this a long while ago. It works; it’s not what you or she deserve, but it works.
You can hear her breathing; the little sniffle that she makes in the morning as the temperature shifts, the air changes, and she needs to sneeze (which you know hurts her throat, by the small little groan that follows); the soft shifting of starched sheets as she moves in her sleep. She’s sleeping, actually, quite a lot.
(Another sound that you hear: the curtains that the nurses pull for her privacy, as they change her gown, or change her dressings. It’s really stupid that they do that, and you have to hold your tongue on making a snarky remark or two, that it’s nothing you haven’t seen before. Well. Partly, at least.)
It’s different though. Seeing her. Her blood drenched hair is imprinted, branded, in your mind. You can still smell the sharp iron, feel the oily film of her blood between your fingers. That first night, it took forever for the nurses to clean up (yours and hers) crusted blood under your fingernails; to remove the blood-soaked lines of your palms. But you insisted, almost manic in your exhaustion and the adrenaline crash - you needed her blood off your hands.
(Hah.)
(The memories are never very far - it is easy enough for you to bring to mind the horrors in the hours of her burnt flesh.)
As it is, touching is out of the question, in confirming she’s alive.
You’re not ready.
You’re not about to impose yourself on her like that.
Not now.
Perhaps never. Perhaps tomorrow.
Perhaps never.
It’s too much, right now. Opening that door, when you’ve got the aftermath of your Truth Door.
The other problem:
As Hawkeye has her moments of being more lucid, she’s steadily recovering.
(This is not the problem.)
For a while yet, she can’t talk much, actually.
You know. That thing. Across her throat? (Because of you, by the way.) It’s pretty inconvenient.
Everyone has been coming around during visitation hours, and they end up having to bring a notepad for her, so she can write out what she wants to say. Eventually, they have to switch out the pen because she’s left-handed, and the ink keeps smudging what she’s trying to communicate. That said, the notebook is seldom used, because it’s Hawkeye after all. But-
This is the thing that makes it more difficult, between the two of you.
Because, remember? That thing? You’re blind? Yeah. Also pretty inconvenient.
Fuery functions as communications here, too, as he plays messenger, reads out her responses. It is not enough.
You’re paces, just footfalls away from each other, but a gulf between the two of you all the same.
So she lays there, and you sit there.
You trace the scarred array on the back of your hand, and follow the loops of the insignia, with each of her inhalation and exhalation as she sleeps.