Title: Silence
Author: Manda
Spoilers: Episode 25/manga chapter 15 When Liza Hawkeye dropped the red-sealed military notice on his paper-strewn desk, she didn't pause before turning and evenly striding out the door. He scanned the handwritten military memo as her heels faded, click-clack, click-clack, down the marble-floored hallway.

It was the last sound he heard all day.

On the other side of the thick glass windowpane in his office, birds chirped, squirrels shoved acorns in the earth. The pond in the courtyard rippled from the fish below the crystalline surface. In the downtown streets, a slight walk away, colored figures addled in and out of shop doors. They talked about the weather, how Aunt Ginny was doing, how there were rumors of power shifts in the military.

Roy Mustang stared at the wall opposite the window. Seconds, minutes, hours passed. He didn't hear Liza Hawkeye's heels click-clack back into his office, didn't hear her say in the usual removed tone that he should go home and sleep. He only saw her furrowed brow and her lips, slightly chapped but coated in light-pink lipstick, move in what was probably a sentence; he told her to go to hell, that he wanted his silence, maybe threw something, he didn't remember. She must've left, but he didn't remember that either.

The square sunlight patterns on the floor slowly faded. His shadow, pinned up against the wall before, retreated.

'Ah, so this is dark,' he thought, and focused his eyes on a crack in the glossy, bare wall.

He waited for the telephone on his desk to ring, thinking that he would welcome sound if it were a lively ring of that telephone and a certain voice flowing out of the receiver. But there was simply silence.

Head in his hands, elbows leaning on his desk, he fell asleep.

He dreamed of human transmutation.