Chapter Text
Roy surfaced slowly, dragged up through layers of awareness. Consciousness did not return cleanly. It caught, slipped, then rose again, leaving him suspended in something thick and heavy where thought and body did not quite align.
“Colonel Mustang.”
The voice was unfamiliar. Female. Controlled, each word placed with precision. Confident and professional.
He tried to answer and managed only a breath that broke against the dryness in his throat. It scraped on the way out, catching into a weak cough that pulled at his chest.
“Good,” she said, as if that was sufficient. “You’re coming out of anesthesia. Don’t try to move too quickly.”
Another voice, further off.
“Welcome back, Roy.”
Everything sounded as though his ears were filled with cotton, but the voice was certainly deeper. It tugged at something instinctive, someone he knew he should recognize.
Roy reached for it, his mind slower than it should have been, working through the sound as if it had to push past resistance to get there.
It clicked into place with a faint, delayed certainty.
“…Breda,” he said.
Relief moved through the room in a quiet exhale. “Yeah. I’m here, sir.”
The scrape of a chair on the ground filled the space at Roy’s right.
Roy opened his eyes.
Nothing met him.
No blur, no light, no form or impression. Just a flat, complete absence that did not change when he forced his eyes wider. He let it sit there without reaction. He already knew the shape of that loss. It had been taken somewhere no surgeon could reach.
He moved on.
“Hands?” he said, the word roughened down to its core.
“You sustained penetrating injuries to both hands,” the surgeon replied. “The tendons were severed. We’ve repaired them.”
Roy lifted his arms. Or tried to. The motion came slowly but answered him. His forearms rose from the bed, suspended in space he could not see, and he followed the movement down into his hands.
They felt wrong.
Heavy under the bandages. Dull with numbness that blurred the edges of his own fingers. When he tried to flex them, the response came late and incomplete, a pull of pain threading through the motion, shooting up his arm, deep and controlled.
He held it for a moment, testing the limits, then let his arms lower again. Functional. Damaged for now.
"We also repaired some damage, stitches to some shallower cuts and punctures in your abdomen, Colonel."
That explained the pull he had noticed beneath everything else, a resistance that sat low and quiet until he reached for it.
Roy drew a slow breath.
“Eyes?”
There was a brief pause.
“There is no visual response,” the surgeon said, plainly.
“Vision won’t return,” Roy replied.
He did not phrase it as uncertainty. The Gateway did not deal in partial measures. What it took, it kept.
“…No,” she said after a moment.
Roy lay there with his eyes open, staring into something that gave nothing back, and let the fact settle into place without visible reaction.
“Hawkeye?”
Breda answered immediately. “She’s alive.”
Roy’s chest shifted, a small, controlled intake of breath.
“Condition?”
“In surgery. Two floors up.”
The image came anyway, sharp enough to cut through the lingering fog. The line across her throat. The blood. The way her body had—
He stopped it there.
“Thankfully she was stabilized in the field,” Breda added. “The Xingese girl bought her time.”
Roy lay still, assembling it all with the same detached precision he would have used over a battlefield report.
Hands. Recovering.
Abdomen. Mended.
Vision. Lost.
Hawkeye. Alive.
The surgeon shifted slightly. “On the right side of your bed, there’s a call button. If you need anything, you can reach it. Sensitivity is high, so you should just need to nudge it.”
Roy turned his head a fraction. He lifted his right arm again, slower this time, mapping the space through contact. The edge of the mattress. The arm of the bed. His forearm brushed something smooth and fixed in place.
The button.
He rested his arm there just long enough to register its position, then let his arm fall back to the bed.
“We’ve positioned you near an east-facing window, on your right side,” she continued. “The curtains are open. When the sun rises, you should be able to feel the heat. It may help you orient yourself.”
Roy nodded faintly.
“You’ll also hear the Central clocktower,” she said. “Same direction. The chimes are regular. Use them.”
He filed it away automatically.
The surgeon withdrew soon after, her footsteps receding, the door closing with a soft, final sound.
Breda remained.
Roy could feel him there without looking, a fixed point in a space that had otherwise stripped itself of edges. The faint shift of his weight. The quiet rhythm of his breathing.
Roy turned his attention toward where the window should be.
East.
Morning would come from there.
It did nothing to lighten the weight pressing in his chest.
His Lieutenant had been targeted. The thought settled with a clean, unforgiving logic. The mad doctor had identified the single point that would break him, and struck her decisively.
Roy’s fingers shifted against the bandages, the motion small and frustrated, numbness and ache blurring together until neither could be separated cleanly.
Useless.
“Lieutenant Breda,” he said. “I appreciate you being here when I came to. You are dismissed for now.”
Breda hesitated. “Sir—”
“Out. Come back when there is news on Lieutenant Hawkeye.”
There was a pause, then the scrape of the chair as Breda stood. Footsteps crossed the room.
“…I’ll be right outside.”
The door opened. Closed.
Silence settled in, heavier without another presence to hold its shape.
Roy lay still, eyes open to nothing.
After a moment, the clocktower sounded. Low and steady, the chime carrying through the distance with a clarity nothing else in the room possessed. He counted each strike, holding onto the rhythm as it faded.
Time still existed. The world was still turning. That was enough to build from.
Hawkeye was still upstairs.
Roy exhaled slowly, forcing his breathing into something even.
There was nothing to act on. No order that would reach her, no movement his body would permit that could change what was happening above him.
Just this narrow, suspended space.
The dark did not change when he closed his eyes.
Sleep came again eventually, timing be damned. The pain drugs lingered in his system, uneven and oppressive, pulling him under in fragments while the count of the bells lingered, steady and unyielding, somewhere just beyond his grasp.
Nine chimes carried through the walls, low and even.
Roy counted them without effort.
By the ninth, the sound dissolved into the quiet, leaving the room unchanged. No warmth reached him from the window. No shift in the air.
Evening.
He opened his eyes.
He didn’t know what he expected.
That thought lingered longer than anything else. Longer than the ache in his hands, dulled but constant beneath the bandages. Longer than the slow drift of the medication threading through his blood. Sight had always been there, constant enough to go unnoticed. Now there was nothing in its place. Not darkness. Not shadow.
Nothing.
He drew in a breath. It caught halfway, then forced its way through.
So this was it.
He let his head rest deeper into the pillow. The world tilted slightly, his balance slipping without anything to correct against. The medication softened the edge of it, kept it from becoming something worse.
His mind circled anyway.
His hands.
His eyes.
The shape of everything ahead.
The phone rang.
Roy flinched, the sound cutting cleanly through the fog. Close. Immediate. Something external, something he could fix on.
He turned his head toward it, following the sound.
The ringing continued, steady and insistent.
He moved his arm, dragging his elbow across the mattress, mapping the space by feel. Fabric. Seam. The edge of the bed. The rail. He found the button by memory and pressed it with his forearm.
The phone ringing didn’t stop.
Footsteps came quickly. The door opened, then closed with a soft push.
“Colonel Mustang?” a nurse said, already moving. “What do you need?”
Roy turned toward her voice, aligning on the second attempt. “The phone.”
She didn’t ask anything else. He heard her walking toward the right side of the bed.
“Colonel Mustang’s room,” she said as she lifted the receiver. A pause. “Yes. One moment.”
She came to his side. The mattress shifted as she adjusted him, careful but efficient, guiding him upright just enough. The motion pulled at his abdomen, a dull strain that he ignored. She placed the receiver into the crook of his shoulder, adjusting his head until it held.
“There,” she said.
Roy inclined his head slightly. “Thank you.”
She left as quietly as she had come. The door closed. The room narrowed again.
“Hello?”
He listened.
“Took you long enough, sir.”
Roy closed his eyes, more habit than function. Relief moved through him, quiet but total.
Lieutenant Hawkeye.
Even through the faint distortion of the line, her voice carried that same precision—but it was softened now, edges blurred in a way that didn’t belong to her. There was a slight lag between breath and word, a thickness that spoke of medication doing its work.
It grounded him anyway.
“Lieutenant,” he said, aware of the drag in his own voice. “You sound… operational.”
There was a pause. Then—
“I believe… that is generous, sir.” The delay caught up to her at the end.
Roy exhaled, something in it easing.
“Mostly intact?” he asked.
“Mostly,” she said, a faint shift in her breathing. “The surgeons seem… befuddled.”
“That’s concerning.”
A quiet, breathy laugh reached him.
“I was thinking the same,” she said. “Whatever Mei Chang did… it saved me, but confused them.”
Roy’s mouth curved faintly. “Remind me to thank her for the thousandth time.”
“I’m told I’m two floors up from you,” she added, the words slightly uneven. “I haven’t verified.”
“I assume that means you’re planning an escape.”
“They have opinions about that here.”
“I’m sure they do.”
“And you?” she asked.
“My hands will recover,” he said. “With effort.”
“And your vision?”
“Gone.”
There was a heavy, loaded silence between them on the phone.
“I see."
"I do not."
"Apologies, sir. Poor phrasing."
“Extremely.”
“Noted for the future.”
That drew a quiet, rough laugh from him, softened by the medication.
It eased something tight in his chest.
He could hear her breathing again. Slightly uneven. Present.
“I can’t see,” he said, quieter now. “I can’t properly use my hands for the time being. I’m confined to a bed. This was not the intended career trajectory.”
“No, sir.”
“I have plans.”
“I know.”
“They did not account for this.”
“We will adjust.”
He held onto that.
“Lieutenant,” he said, letting the thought drift sideways, “if I am permanently incapacitated, I will require more assistance from you, if you'll give it.”
“My mandate hasn’t changed, sir. As long as yours hasn’t.”
Another pause.
Roy became aware of the strain in his shoulder, the effort of holding the receiver in place. His head felt heavier against it.
“They keep telling me not to talk, you know,” she said, the words spaced just slightly apart. “I’m ignoring that.”
A faint, breathy exhale followed.
Roy listened to it, the way it didn’t quite match her usual control.
“I would never ask you to disobey doctors orders, Hawkeye,” he said, softer now. “But I’m very glad you called me.”
She hummed, low and quiet.
The line went still for several moments.
Then—
“I can still hear your breathing,” Roy said. “So I assume you’re still there.”
“Yes, sir.”
Roy let the silence settle again, listening.
“Stay,” he said, quieter now. It was not quite an order.
“Yes, sir," softer now.
Roy shifted slightly, the receiver pressing more firmly into place. His focus narrowed to the sound of her breathing.
In. Out.
Inhale. Exhale.
His own breathing matched hers. Unintentional and unspoken and undeniable. The absence around him receded, just slightly.
His thoughts slipped, one by one.
The last thing he registered was her breathing, steady on the line.