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Alphonse's case is unprecedented. History-making. In the documented history of alchemy, there are few instances of human transmutation — and none in which the price to pay had been the entire body. Moreover, the Elric brothers are the first ever to recover that which the Truth had taken from them. There is one single thing in this whole ordeal that can claim a precedent: the soul experiments authorized by the Amestrian government (separating it from its body, sealing into an extraneous vessel, rebinding it to its original body), but all the records had burned to ash alongside Laboratory V.
The Elrics have always been aware that the path forward would always be enshrouded in uncertainty. Trial and error. They'd spent five years following the trail of a myth, after all. This is par for the course.
In the linoleum hallway of Central's main hospital, in front of the half-open door to the room where Al has been sleeping for the past three hours, the doctor tells Ed another way more in which his brother is groundbreaking. Al's body's stint in limbo seems to have been most similar, physiology-wise, to a coma — and up until that moment, no one ever has survived a coma that long. Most ended brain dead after a year under. In Med School, they'd studied a couple of cases of people who'd woken up after three or four years, but they'd all succumbed to a vegetative state soon after, having spent their last hours, days or weeks of consciousness in total confusion and, often, aphasia. So far, Al doesn't seem to have sustained any brain damage — certainly, from the time that they left the battlefield to all the preliminary tests that doctors put him through before exhaustion took hold of him, he had all his mental capacities intact. He could process speech, he could talk, he could reason; he was aware. His reflexes were slow, but there. And as far as they can tell, the sleep that he's under right now is typical. Those are the reassurances that they can give Ed.
What none of the doctors in Central — and they're still awaiting word from other hospitals in the country, though they are unlikely to say anything different — can tell is the long-term consequences.
"Muscular atrophy, doubtlessly," the doctor says, and his eyes slip down to Ed's right arm, gaunt and incongruous with the rest of his body. "You're probably realising what that is like, yourself. You'll also have to go through physical rehabilitation."
Like a reflex, Ed feels a spasm twinging down his bony fingers. It's almost painful — the tension bottled up in his nervous system, his muscle groups. Like the rope of the traps he and Al had built for rabbits back during Izumi's test. Ready to snap, catastrophic for its prey when it does.
And, humorlessly and a tad sardonic, he thinks that Truth really has a bone to pick with them.
Alphonse wakes up feeling a profound alienation strangling his chest. The sensation of breathing itself is what makes him open his eyes: the air scraping his vocal tract as he breathes in and out, the contact of his skin against the bedsheets as his chest goes up and down — slithering into awareness through his deep sleep. His oesophagus cramps up and his uvula draws in and, for thirty terrifying seconds, Al doesn't understand what's happening to his body. Then, he remembers that this is what nausea used to feel like — whenever he'd get a stomach bug and would wake up in the middle of the night asking for his mum, and then for Ed, Izumi, or Granny Pinako after she was gone. Making use of what feels like his entire strength at the moment, he manages to change positions, laying on his side so that he doesn't choke if he vomits. He would rather not soil the hospital bed, but beggars can't be choosers. His thigh, arm, and torso start hurting where they're pressed against the mattress — his back and neck feel sore too. And all the movement has made him aware of the IV attached to the inside of his other arm. All points of discomfort that overwhelm him like static coming out of a broken radio.
He waits for the bile to come up. And waits. And waits.
Once the sensation of being gagged subsides enough to speak, he calls out, "Brother?"
Silence.
Al strains his neck — it's so sore, god, and how is his head so heavy? — to better see the room, plunged as it is in the darkness of the night. In a corner, there's a heap of shadows that could be someone sleeping in a chair. Or a pile of clothes. But Al is fairly convinced that it's Ed.
Louder, "Brother!"
The shadow gives a start with a gasp. It shifts, it sits up straight.
"Al?" Ed calls, his voice slurring with sleep. "You up?" In an instant, Ed is next to his bedside. "How're you feeling?"
Al wants to swallow the spit in his mouth, but his muscles don't cooperate. Like his nervous system has forgotten how to send out the order.
"I think I'm gonna throw up."
He can barely make out Ed's face, but the shadows over his features suggest that he's creasing it with worry. It's so weird to see. Just like he had to five years ago, he's still adjusting and recalibrating to a new-old way of perceiving.
*
In the armour, he hadn't just been missing his senses of touch and taste. He didn't have eyes, ears or a nose either. Similar to the vague, depersonalised way that — despite not having skin to feel — he was aware of how he moved the armour body, of when the metal came into contact with something else, that was also how he was able to see and hear. It wasn't sensation, stimuli traversing through his nerves to a brain that deciphered it. He didn't obtain information on his surroundings through any material channel of perception, he just knew about what was in his field of vision or his range of hearing or touching his plating. His cognition was disembodied, after all — detached from its flesh and bone, its sensory receptors.
(He was pretty sure that the dragon's pulse functioned similarly, as per Mei's explanation of it. Spiritual echolocation, so to speak. Despite it all, Al's scientific brain mourned the lost chance of figuring out alkahestry before he got his body back. He would've liked to know if it worked the same for a bonded soul, if it was even possible for him to learn it from within the armour.)
He and Ed had talked about the fact that he couldn't feel warmth or touch often. Al had confessed many times to missing hugs and wanting to eat food again — and at some point, through repetition, it had become a casual truth between the brothers instead of a spiralling thought in the sleepless night. It still hurt. But it didn't hurt as much as something kept quiet and experienced in solitude. And perhaps that was the crux of it: the company. It was true that Ed could never truly comprehend the extent to which Alphonse had felt like something fragile, starved, too big and too small for the armour, the searing desire to sense anything, to have affection or comradery or even violence as something tangible to ground him and remind him that he was human, he was a person, he existed in a space where he belonged. However, Ed had been missing an arm and a leg, had metal prosthetics in their place that, while connected to his nervous system, didn't have skin to feel either. That had been a common ground. Alphonse doesn't quite remember having to elaborate on how his awareness to touch worked. He thinks he compared it to using a stick to poke something once, and Ed had said, "Yeah, I get what you mean."
He had never told Ed about not quite seeing and not quite hearing. He didn't think that he could explain it in a way that made sense to someone for whom such an experience was physically impossible. And Ed was so burdened already — both of them were. But this was only his own to bear. And there had been no balm available, no solution but what they'd already been looking for.
So there was nothing to telling his brother but making feel guiltier.
*
Seeing through eyes feels more limited, but it's also more intense. More defined, sharp even in the penumbra, even with his pupils struggling to take in the light that comes in from the moon and the streetlights outside and renders everything in colourblind violet shades. There's more detail, but it's less all-encompassing. The trees for the forest — but in a less idiomatic way.
He realises, suddenly, that he had missed the way that Ed's emotions played on his face. The downturn to his mouth and the tightening in his eyes when he's concerned but trying to keep it cool. Before, he hadn't really had those physical tells to go off of, he'd just known: he looks worried. Like a narrating voice inside his head.
His brother crouches to get a better look at his face.
"I'm not sure if you're paler than you were before. I'm gonna turn on the lamp."
The warm light stabs through Al's dilated pupils and he scrunches his eyes shut. The red afterimage floats behind his eyelids like a painful imprint, disconcerting. He thinks he can even feel the warmth from the light-bulb, from the night-stand — a wave that prickles his skin.
"Yeah. You're white as a sheet," Ed observes. "Want me to get you a bucket?"
"I don't know if I'm actually going to throw up," Al confesses. "I just— I'm…" He searches for the word. There are none that convey everything that he's feeling, so he settles for an approximate, "overwhelmed, I think. Can you turn off the light?"
"Okay."
A click, and then there is only black behind his eyelids once again. When his brow smooths out in relief, he feels every minute movement of his facial muscles. Somehow, just from that, they're sore. He doesn't know how to relax further, make disappear the exhaustion holding every cell of his body in a death grip.
Silence stretches between them for a few moments.
"Maybe you'll feel better if you sit up."
Al makes a noise of displeasure. "Probably, but I don't think I can."
"What?" Ed asks with a note of alarm in his voice.
"It's tiring," he rushes to clarify. Ed had been hovering next to him the whole time during the doctor's examinations, visibly shaken every time that they mentioned something in his body not being in the best shape. It didn't take a genius to tell that his brother was even more anxious than him about anything going wrong. "And it kind of hurts whenever I move, in a completely-beat-after-training-with-Teacher kind of way."
Ed sighs, rubbing his forehead. "Yeah. My right arm keeps cramping up too, and I can barely even do anything with it, it's so weak. It must suck so much harder when it's your whole body."
Al hums. All this rings a bit of a bell, ironically enough.
"Look," his brother continues, while his silhouette drops lower and starts reaching under the bed. "I'm gonna leave your basin right here, in case you do need to puke, and then I'll go get a nurse. Just to make sure that nothing's wrong."
"Yeah. Okay, good idea."
He puts the basin on the floor next to the night-stand, then helps Alphonse scoot closer to the edge of the bed. It takes some careful manhandling that leaves the impression of his brother's touch prickling on his skin from unfamiliarity.
*
There's something jarring to being so small and frail in his brother's care.
He knows, thanks to old photos, that Ed used to be much bigger than him when they were toddlers, but Al was too little for it to stick in his memories. For most of what he remembers of their childhood, they had always been around the same size, due to Alphonse being taller than average and Edward shorter — while training under Izumi in Dublith, they had often been mistaken for fraternal twins, even. So, back before the botched human transmutation, Ed had taken care of him as much as Al had done vice-versa. Other than Ed's penchant for taking responsibility for everything, their age difference is so small that they have always been equals.
And then Alphonse had gotten stuck in a bulky armour, over two meters tall and wider than most door frames, who didn't need to sleep and didn't get sick. The only times that Ed could take care of him, physically, were when the armour broke down and he'd have to reassemble the pieces and transmute them into its original shape. That was even more vulnerable than what he's experiencing now — the total lack of agency, the way that he often had to be moved in boxes, like an object. It was a different kind of helplessness, and one that cut deeper. That didn't happen often, however, and so he has grown used to being big and imposing and rarely thought of as someone in need of careful handling. It's what he has known for five years.
Getting his body back gives him even more things to relearn in this regard. When he came back among the rubble of the final battle and he'd stood with Ed's help, it had come with the trippy realisation that his balance was shot and that he was looking up instead of down at most people. But, for some reason, it's this — his brother helping him move so that he can vomit into a basin below — what makes him truly realise that his way of navigating the world has permanently shifted.
Besides that, there is something warm to the idea of being taken care of — like a kid.
*
Edward leaves the room and Alphonse is now alone.
It's not completely silent: he can hear a ticking clock somewhere in the room, though he can't tell where exactly it is. That's a shame, because he would like to know the time to figure out for how long he slept. He remembers that they got to the hospital around noon, but he lost track of time afterwards while the doctors took his blood, auscultated his chest, checked his blood pressure, his reflexes, his five senses, and his level of awareness. Towards the end of the examination, his recollections start getting fuzzy as the exhaustion caught up to him, but he's pretty sure that it was still bright outside by the time that he fell asleep on this bed.
He hasn't been left alone for a second since he got back with his soul attached to his flesh-and-bone body. He had woken up surrounded by friends and allies, barely had time to get his bearings before Mei had launched herself at him into a hug. It had startled him a lot, the pressure of her arms around his shoulders, the scrape of her clothes against his bare skin. (The surprise had been followed by the guilt of having made her return his soul to the Truth. But then again, she'd done it. She'd trusted him, even though they've known each other for such a short time. A warmth had suffused his being even more so than the hug itself, which had been so intense for him that it had felt embedded into his bones. Al doesn't think that he's ever met quite anyone like Mei; he hopes that he gets to see her again in the future.) Then he'd shaken his father's hand, which had nearly brought him to tears, made it sink in — that he could have affection again, he could connect with his loved ones again in that way that was so characteristically mammalian, so fundamental to beings that breathed and had blood coursing through their veins.
After, he'd gotten fussed over by everybody else; except for Ed, who just kept a stable presence by his side, only steading him when he needed to. Al is grateful for it. As happy as he was, it had been too much. The racket all around him, the spring air cooling his skin, the smell of gunpowder and dust, the fatigue from both standing and sitting and moving at all.
The hospital had been even more chaotic, a constant current of blue uniforms stained with blood and frantic white coats flapping around. He'd been touched all over by more than ten different medical professionals, all with their different ways of handling him. The nurses who used gentle pats to instruct him how to move, those who kept their prodding clinical and depersonalised, those who just grabbed him and put him into position with barely a question.
In the quiet dark of the private room allocated to him — which Ed had advocated for despite Al telling him not to — he catalogues all those touches. How he hadn't known what to do with himself. How he feels tender all over, like bruising. It's proof of life, but he can't say that it's not uncomfortable, that it doesn't hurt.
He's sure that he'll get over it with time and healing, but a scary thought surfaces: that this disjointed sensation prickling his flesh from head to toe will accompany him until he dies.
With all the noise around him, he hadn't had a chance to think about any of this.
The clock keeps ticking by, one, two, three, four, he counts. The shadows in the room are fuzzy around the edges — it's funny: during all those sleepless, silent, unbearable nights in the armour, he'd always had crystal clear knowledge of everything that hid in the dark, and now he can't even properly tell where the door knob is on the door.
Five, six, seven, eight, he keeps counting. While the mattress has a noticeable give under his slim weight, it feels like stone against his muscles; the bedsheets are rough from being washed too often for such cheap fabric and every time he shifts it's like he's being rubbed raw.
Nine, ten, eleven, twelve. He strains to hear anything outside — perhaps the birds, which should start singing around five in the morning. It's May, after all.
Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. A clock is like a heartbeat, he thinks — it's not he first time that he makes that comparison, though back then he didn't have his own pulse to hold as a reference.
His brother probably hasn't been gone that long. He knows he can't have been, it hasn't been a minute, but the moment seems to stretch like stale taffy. The nausea hasn't subsided. He doesn't want to focus too much on it in case it makes the sensation stronger, but he's running out of things to notice while he tries not to think about the mood collapse after the euphoria from this afternoon.
Regardless, there's a sudden tightness throttling his insides, spasms in the back of his mouth, and, with very little warning, acid wells up in his throat. His head is barely off the edge of the bed, but it's enough for the burning liquid to drip into the basin half a meter below his mouth. It scrapes, it scorches, leaves an aftertaste that hurts and is so disgusting that it makes him want to vomit again.
The air in the room feels cool but he notices sweat start to gather by his neck and every other place where skin is touching skin. Alphonse retches weakly. Then more bile comes up and it falls out of his open mouth like a faulty faucet.
He stays like that for a few beats, shivering in the way that only things with flesh attached to their bones can.
Then, two sets of footsteps sound out in the hallway and the door opens. Al doesn't raise his eyes from where they're unfocused on the seam where wall meets floor, but he recognises the sound of Ed's stride. "I did throw up," he informs faintly.
"Fuck," his brother mutters.
"Okay," the nurse says, approaching with an assertive but not ungentle demeanour. "Your brother told me that the light will bother you, but I need to see you, so close your eyes, okay?"
His vision is a bit fuzzy around the edges anyway, so he obliges, and the overhead light turns on — he can tell because it's much brighter and he can't feel the heat from the lamp on the night-stand this time. Before he can help it, his nose scrunches up in displeasure.
The nurse takes his temperature; the thermometer feels unpleasantly cool against the overwarm skin of his armpit. She informs them comfortingly that he's not running a fever, but that she'll have to check a couple more things to make sure that everything is fine. With gentle words and his brother's help, she coaxes him to sit up and rest his back against the pillow, propped up on the headboard. She sets a circular, cold object against his chest — the stethoscope, he guesses — and tells him to breathe in and breathe out slowly. His heartbeat also sounds fine. Alphonse can sense Edward shifting into a less tense pose where he's hovering next to them. Then, the nurse fastens a band around his arm, above the elbow.
"Is it too tight?"
"No," he says, though he sincerely can't tell. Everything feels too much all the time.
She takes his blood-pressure. "It's low, but within a normal range." She takes the band off and Al relaxes his arm. Where the fabric had touched, it feels like a brand. "We're going to lay you down again and it should pass on its own. Mr Fullmetal, help me — put his feet on a pillow, please, it helps to have them up."
Before the nurse leaves the room, she advises him to drink water and tells them that she will come by again in half-an-hour and, if the need to vomit persists, she'll bring some anti-nausea medication. But it seems that the sudden sickness was brought on by stress.
Then, the Elric brothers are left alone again.
Edward turns off the light. After, he drags the chair to his bedside and slumps down on it with a sigh. "Do you think you can stomach water?"
"Not really."
"Figures."
It's not very surprising. Before going to the hospital, Ed had received some first aid, just to the side of the destroyed courtyard. In the mean time, Al had tried to eat — a soup, which had been his idea because his brother had somehow thought that he'd be able to handle a sandwich — thinking that putting some nutrients in him would make him stop feeling so weak. But he'd been barely able to take two sips before his stomach had decided to revolt. The warm, salty broth on his tongue had brought indescribable emotions to the surface. It felt like going back to Resembool after months on the road and like sitting in front of the fireplace for too long when he was a child. His hand had trembled so hard that he nearly dropped the spoon, his stomach had gotten all tight and he'd had to stop.
"I think I'm going to have to build up my stomach tolerance very slowly."
"Yeah," murmurs Ed. "Luckily, they can feed you straight into your blood. Like I was doing at the Gate, apparently."
Al hums. He can listen, but he doesn't feel much like talking.
"The doctors said we'd have to go through pretty intense rehab," his brother continues. "You more than me, but I also have to do it, for the arm. I think they're not going to let you leave for at least a few days, a couple of weeks if they can help it. I tried to tell them that we can do it in our hometown, that our family are automail mechanics and they can handle the rehab and all that. But it didn't look to me like they'd budge, the guy I talked to was weirdly interested in seeing how you recover."
Al doesn't like much the idea of being some kind of guinea pig, but he can respect scientific curiosity. Judging by Ed's tone, he feels similarly. But there's something else in Edward's recap that catches his attention more. "Have you called Granny and Winry?"
Ed shifts in his chair. "Yeah. I told them not to come yet, it's still kinda crazy out there."
"I bet that pissed Winry off."
"Holy fuck, yeah, my ear's still ringing," he chuckles, and Al smiles. Another strange adjustment: he can emote again, and he feels the strain it puts on his face muscles. "But I dunno. I… also like the idea of going back home, instead of them coming here, you know."
Home. Yes. Alphonse gets it wholeheartedly.
Then the thought gives him another pause.
"Have you heard from dad?"
Ed's expression smooths over, his lips flattening into a line. "No."
Al doesn't know what to do with that information. At some point, during the early celebration, the tears, the hugs, the checking of wounds, the farewell to their friends from Xing, Hohenheim seemed to have slipped away. He and Ed had asked, but nobody had seen him leave. When they couldn't postpone going to the hospital any further, they'd just asked their friends and allies to look for their father and tell him where they'd gone. They still have things to talk about, after all. Ed had told him that Hohenheim had offered his last soul as the equivalent exchange to bring him back. Al doesn't know what he'd say to him, having learnt that, because he wouldn't have wanted to be back at the cost of another's life — but he wants to see him, and to figure out what to say once he does.
"Oh."
Edward sets his mouth against his left fist. "Typical of the bastard," he says. And then, in an unusual bout of openness, he adds, "I didn't want him to leave. For once, it felt…"
He trails off. Al has always been the one to try to understand their father, he wasn't the one to shut him out — because, if anything, he understands that there are painful prices to pay for one's choices and duties, and he, Ed, and their mum had been Hohenheim's price. But he wouldn't say that he doesn't understand where Edward is coming from either. His gaze drifts towards the window. He doesn't move his head at all, it's too much effort.
"What time is it?" he asks, instead of finishing the sentence that Ed couldn't, because he already knows and that's the usual mercy between them.
"A quarter to six."
"The birds should be singing by now then." Al is well-acquainted with the precise time of the morning when they do, after all.
"I reckon they're scared shitless because of the battle."
"It'd be nice if they were singing," Al muses. "A good thing to wake up to."
Edward doesn't have anything to say to that, so a contemplative silence sets comfortably between them. Exhaustion still clings to every pore of Al's body like a second skin, it weighs him down like a hydraulic press, and he's already sick of it. Luckily, his actual sickness seems to be receding. He can still taste the acid behind his teeth and there's the ghost of pressure at the top of his stomach, but it's not the same rolling, twitching sensation climbing up his throat. Maybe becoming more awake and talking a bit has helped him settle into his body after such an abrupt interruption to his sleep.
And thus, he thinks he might as well share his hypothesis, "I think what made me dizzy was waking up, actually."
"Huh?" half-gasps Ed, blinking rapidly with a jerk to his neck, like he'd been falling asleep. "What do you mean?"
"It was really disorienting," he explains. Then he thinks about how to start elaborating on why it was so. "If you think about it, sleeping is kind of like dying temporarily for your mind when you don't dream. You don't sense anything, you don't think anything. It's a blip in your memory, like there was a moment in time when you didn't exist. After so long, it's… It becomes hard to remember what sleep felt like. And I wanted to sleep so badly, I wanted to stop having to watch you rest and leave me alone in the night, but the thought of losing consciousness was also terrifying."
His brother looks heartbroken. Al is sorry to put such an expression on his face. "Because being unconscious meant destruction for you in the armour."
"Yeah," Al whispers. "Or the soul bond getting weaker. It wasn't sleep," he says, keenly aware that he never got to tell Ed this while it was happening, "but after all that happened in Briggs, sometimes I'd… faint, I guess it's one way to say it. And I'd see my body waiting for me at the Gate, and it told me that my soul was starting to reject the armour."
"What?" Ed reaches to grasp his forearm. Al feels every finger like a small electro-shock, as it's become expected of any touch by now. "Your soul was— was—"
Alphonse nods. "We knew it could happen."
"I know." Ed's eyes are wide and frantic, even though the danger has already passed. "But it hadn't in five years, so I thought—" The sentence catches in his throat. Al guesses that the rest was something along the lines of: I thought that the transmutation array that I made was good enough. Ed releases his arm to put that same hand against his mouth and lets out a muffled, "Fuck. You could've—"
He doesn't say it, but the mere implication is enough to bring a wavering sheen to his eyes. Even though Al ended up trading his soul for his brother's arm in the final battle against the Dwarf in the Flask, which had more or less the same result as what they were talking about, no one can tell what would have happened if his soul had crossed the Gate just because the bond degraded. If it had happened while he and Ed were separated for all those months, and there was no one to figure out how to bring him back before the currents of the universe and of Truth deemed that he'd died for good.
Like a mirror to Ed's distress, Al also feels a warmth building up in the corners of his eyes, a pressure from behind them, a blur, and oh, I'm crying. Tears rolling down his face is one of the gentlest sensations that he's felt since yesterday; feather-light, barely there except for where he feels them pool around his temples and tickle his neck.
Though it still hurts to move and the strength in his fingers is non-existent, he reaches for Ed's shoulder anyway. "I'm here now."
Ed looks back at him. The pale light of dawn reflects on the trail left by his own tears and Alphonse realises, suddenly, that in all five years of this hell, he hasn't seen or heard Ed cry even once. (He wonders if it was penance for the fact that Al physically couldn't.) His brother clasps the hand on his shoulder with his own right hand.
"Thank the universe."
Strangely, they hadn't hugged on Promised Day, when Al's body was freshly back from limbo, with the euphoria running high in their veins. Maybe an arm over the shoulders counted somewhat, but in the night-dreams that Alphonse had entertained while he waited for daybreak to come, he'd always imagined that, if they managed to do it it, if they pulled it off, the first thing he'd do was hug his brother and cry into his shoulder. Feel his arms, his hair, get reacquainted with feeling human through the warm embrace of someone that he loved, the last of his family, the one person that had been there with him since the first day that he drew breath. But they hadn't hugged in the battlefield — there had been so much going on. And, anyway, Ed had been with him all throughout. His presence had been an anchor.
Now, Edward leans down and lifts Alphonse just enough to be able to circle his shoulders with his arms. Al grips his shirt with whatever little strength he has. And they weep in the early morning of the day after the world was supposed to end.