"But neither infinite power nor infinite wisdom could bestow godhood upon men. For that there would have to be infinite love as well."

- Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz

She does not dream anymore.

It's strange; it seems only in twilight that the world makes any reasonable sense. She has taken to holding her midnight vigils in an attempt to resurrect herself. In the dead of night, she can feel the moments drawing upon her –– it's ironic, cruel, perhaps, because there seems in each of them little point in continuation. There must be something new to find here in the darkness, she thinks –– some nook or some cranny that offers a perspective worth clinging to.

So she remains. She waits. She watches.

Their room is a concrete pen with windows the size of biscuit tin lids. The curtains have a flat smell, as though they have been cleaned with tap water instead of disinfectant. Her bed –– and his –– sit low to the ground, the frames baring the signs of rust and the mattresses worryingly thin. The moon crests the junction between the windowsill and the low wall beyond the lawn. It casts a shadow of the stone across the grass, as though the sky has signed his name across the starlight in untidy handwriting.

For all their company during the day, for all the crowds, at night, the hospital is as cold as dead skin, their room and the corridor beyond dark and reeking of illness. There is an antiseptic quality to the air that tastes sour and stings terribly in her nostrils. There had been medical pavilions in Ishval, she remembers, but they were never places intended to cure. Those white tents kept their patients away from the rest of the world, a kind of ark that floated along full of life, but not participating in life. Cut loose and cast adrift, the sand undulating like the waves and swallowing its quarry like the sea.

But here, at least, there is a suggestion of things persisting. There is, she decides, a stubborn permanence about the place, as though the wallpaper has been designed to peel, and the linoleum tile intended to give under the press of footprints. Made to accommodate the decay even as it anticipates its aging. Robbed of the change memory brings, her sanctuary stands muted and lame, a temple without cause.

Why, she wonders, is the city so becalmed. Two days ago, it was burning. Silent in the moonlight, the world beyond the hospital beckons her to walk upon its surface, but she fears it will shatter under her feet and drag her under. One day, perhaps, she will attempt to climb amidst the rubble, hunt among screed and the scaffolding for the moments time has abandoned. She will scrawl in dead languages and trade tick-marks for days and hide them away for the future to muse and mumble over.

In that moment, her life seems a sequence of grotesque poses, a dance empty of belief. A corrupted alchemy.

At the thought, she glances sidelong at her companion.

The moon has turned his dark hair silver, like spun glass lithe and elastic, tussled upwards and inwards, in a curious curve returning upon him. The colour gives contrast to his face, so dark against his pale skin. He is part of the beauty of this place rather than a thing apart, a stopped clock in a place of uncounted days. There is something of him here in the corridors and the cleanliness, as if he and they are always in communion and so happy together. The realisation, she finds, makes her heart hurt.

He seems to be sunk in stern, prophet-like meditation as he sleeps, his chest rising and falling slowly. This rest comes to him like the fall of an axe. She wonders what he sees, a man whose sight, in some ways, has been returned by the providence of his dreams.

She wonders if he sees the room he lived in so long ago, him a spark amidst the dusty sombreness of her childhood home. The walls were golden stone, the floor tiles the colour of summer baked earth, the fixtures white porcelain. That is what she dreams of, anyway, the things she can never bargain into getting back. Perhaps it is selfish for her to think the same of him, but a dream is the one thing they have always shared.

It occurs to her then that he will never see his own ageing, forever thirty in his mind's eye, though his fingers will one day tell him of the wrinkles and hair loss. A part of her wonders if the dreams, too, will change, if one day they will be the same monochrome shadows of his days...

At some point, between the transcription and the translation of those long, sterilised night, a split opened up and something beached against her chest, tempest-tossed and crashing, almost violent. And no matter what she does, the man at her side –– as distant as an island and as close as a caress –– remains a singularity, a coordinate in her life that refuses all hypothesis. She returns to him each night leaving fresh observations and wonders and memories in the hope, despite the full glare of her hopelessness, that they will blossom into fresh insight in the interim.

As she stands, the walls of the room retreat to a hazed distance, while the moon seems to descend into her palm to guide her. She drags her body behind her, across the breach of their beds, and at once pain sparks across her throat, making her gasp. She realises distantly, dimly, that she has run out of painkillers.

From here, one last time, she understands there is no turning back. But the torch is flaring brighter, along with her resolve.

He hears her... there is some truth, she supposes, in his other senses getting stronger. He sits up, blinking, while the moonlight drops between the branches of the maple tree, the shadows moving on his face. The skin of his throat prickles where his shirt opens. Rooted muscle makes a band down the back of his jaw. Black hair tries to obscure what surprise has scored his forehead.

Leaning over him, she whispers something that is all breath, before the silence comes for the sound and dusts away the meaning.

"Hawkeye," he murmurs, quiet; there is concern colouring his words and they shine like the starlight. He looks somewhere past her left shoulder. "Is something the matter? Are you all right?"

Her heart is all landfill, full of the memory of waking to false dawns while it is still never light. Full of places half-imagined, the darkness of distant tunnels and fire cracking the mortar between the bricks. She sweats for him in the small hours and wraps the blankets into a mass, remembering the heat of it.

She turns her mouth, open, to his, and raises her hands to the sides of his head until his hair curtains them. The lobes of his ears are burning curves on her palms. Her knees are abrasive against the starched sheets, straddling him. He smells of the lemon disinfectant.

In addition to his eyes and the rends in his hands, his ribcage, they told him, is deformed in some way, the result of some trauma during the battle. She can't remember, and neither can he. But brittle and broken it feels under her, and desperately light. Perhaps it is this that finally does it for him, because he is unable to contain the shattering of his heart. In the half-light, his hand on her wrist is a crumbling and calcified skeleton.

"Lieutenant..." he whispers, hoarsely, "Riza..."

"Sir..."

"Don't do this. You don't know-"

"I do."

"You don't. I won't do this to you."

"Roy... please..."

The sound he makes is wholly ambiguous. A sliver of moonlight spills into the room, not enough to ignite the pellucid grey of his eyes, but enough to navigate between the rough bedsteads, to temper them. She wants to tell him that it is a clear night, and the sky is freckled with stars. The dark clouds have vanished, as though wisps of vapour, and the rolling lawns, bathed in brilliant moonlight, glisten like a quilt of molten silver, scattered with green sequins.

She kisses him.

The cold swell between his belly and her chest collapses; she tastes the iron of the tap water on his tongue, and knows, for a moment, nothing else. It isn't long before he takes her lower lip in his teeth.

An errant hand inches under the hem of her trousers and his scarred palm is cold, splayed across the knob of her hip. His chin, dry and unshaven, slips against her throat. His breath is curling against the skin just under her jaw as he skates against the muscles in her abdomen, occasionally scraping down her side in long scratches. She meets his eyes, chasing after them in an attempt to anchor his gaze. She can see herself staring back from his retinas.

After a moment, she reaches a hand towards his face, touching his cheek as she runs a thumb over where the tears have fallen, the tips of her fingers tickling the ends of his mussed hair. His expression is equally awed and sad, and in his eyes, she can see reflected her own knitted brows, as though she is ready to cry herself.

A part of the world has already ended, she thinks, and they are caught in the respite before its resurrection. They are suspended in nothing. They are nowhere. They cleave through it, two forms inconstant, carving parallel trails in the darkness, and much in defiance of the laws of geometry, coming together.

And each of them was no one: for a moment, no longer Lieutenant, and no longer Colonel. Outside the hospital, there is only chaos, the silence and stupefaction from having seen the face of God. And there is no one to tell them to stop, to oppose or object. In that moment there is no foreseeable future, and the past is something as distant as the edge of their shared room. They have an endless supply of moments. It is their hallucination, a delusion of transcendence.

His hands begin to wander, journeying up, and she closes her eyes, lets out a small, low noise and breathes noisily into his ear as he runs his thumbnail over one beaded peak until it hardens. She crunches his gown in her fist, collapsing it into creases like a plane folded from paper and then, as the moon shifts beyond the edge of the window, sets the fleet of clothing to sail. Her own soon follows.

She breaks from him for a moment, as a sound of stubborn frustration drops into the soupy air pooling between their bodies. She runs her hands down her front, raises her palms to push from below, to push her breasts upward into a larger mound of soft fat. He hums his approval, and with a sigh she takes her hands from herself and turned square to her ministrations once more.

She tastes down the length of him, travelling, tracing the shape of his muscles from his sternum towards the hair below his navel. The landmarks are now so familiar to her that she has to remind herself to actually see the shape of him. She could trade herself for the price of Truth and in his stead stumble blind across their bodies, the edges of their precipices, but always without fear of missing her step. Besides, she affirms, if one is to fall, it is critical to keep one's eyes firmly open. So she runs her tongue over the knobbled flesh of his side, two indents orbited by scar tissue. All the while, the prospect of seeing the twin grey lights of his snuffed-out eyes keeps her lucid, shining at her, blinking buoys on a darkened sea, steering ships to safety.

She cups him gently, feels the heat emanating there as a sigh ruffles the small hairs adjacent to her ear.

Her arms join under his waist. The heated ring of her mouth rises high on his length; falls; and rises again. His forehead creases, and he parses through the damp strands of her hair. He has to cross his ankles and strain, his mouth parted slightly, his eyes closed, the muscles tightening on his chest. The insides of his lids are moon-silvered, run with cracks like branches. A memory of blowing cinders and smoke suddenly becomes his dark hair moving from his face. He gasps hard, as her tongue suddenly flicks across his head before taking him deep into her mouth. He hits the back of her throat and shudders, and she drinks deep of it.

Coming together, shattering, sending small white flowers like wafers of ash into the still, small hours of the morning. An aerial to a distant star, to the moon and back. From their intermingling, hope. From their islands, flight.

From their grief, love.

Catching their breaths, each peering half-lidded at the other, and she thinks he looks at her too long, as though he forgets he is blind, as though, even in his darkness, he does not wish to see anything else. He commits her absence to memory.

Remembering not a moment of grace, but rather a moment laced with it, she is thrown back to the present where only the intensity of the senses can justify this warmth, the umbral damask across his shoulder, the light on his hip, his reflection on the foggy linoleum, the shadows cast from the stars. Perhaps, even from that place they have fallen from, a promontory corrupted by their memories, by their pain.

He is so beautiful. She chokes back a sob.

"Shush," he breathes into her temples, pulling her close, trussing a hand behind her head. "We're all right... we're all right..."

He speaks those three simple words, repeats them, intoning into the nothingness. And though she has no religious belief, it is impossible not to think of an invisible witness in the room, and that the words spoken aloud are like signatures on an unseen, unspoken contract, like the shadows scrawled across the moon-cast grass.

A spray of stubble tickles her jaw. His breathing begins to rise in sharp little knells, in concert with hers. There is a music to it, something in the playing more intense than memory; emotional fragments, without referent scenes, resolved through the brittle, slow notes. She moves her mouth and her forehead as his two forefingers rise vertical over a small, neglected place. Silver light slides between his lips. He plays, plays more, plays the phrase she played before, then turns the tune to its final cadences, taking it to some unexpected key, and held and harped on the resolving chord sequence. A little trill of notes kept falling into it, every two beats… and falling… and falling…

And together, if for however brief a time, they wash ashore under the stars, the light as fractured as a shattered wing. His touch moves in small and intentional circles across the glypths of her back, a panacea for the pain that stalks them both. A ring, she supposes, is the accepted sign of infinity, eternity. If she can imagine, for a moment, her own life as being as carefully described as a pencil line, she knows all at once that the two ends are drawing close together. I have come full circle, she tells herself, and there is a truth undeniable in it.

The moments run in a series of parallel strands that make up the structure of their shared space. It is tangling across its own boundaries. A horizon that is a surface that is an edge with only one side and only one boundary, leaving them both trapped inside the tesseract and free to crawl along its faces.

Their lives conspired to one last transmutation… caught in the liminal space, between the unbroken and the broken, the now and the then, the living and the dead...

Stretched out in its near infinite repetition. In a time all their own.