AN: Written for the prompt: Fullmetal Alchemist, Alphonse, "What if I came back wrong?"
After years spent unfeeling and without bodily needs, Al has found he has forgotten what is normal and what is not. He's fairly sure it's normal to feel hungry a few hours after his last meal. He's fairly certain it's not normal to feel full halfway through a sandwich. Al's sure that it's normal to dislike carrying a bag because it weighs down his shoulder. He's also sure it's not normal to be conscious of the weight of his clothes or how uncomfortable it was to have cloth brushing against him at all times, but how it would be even more uncomfortable to hair the air leeching warmth from him.
Do other people wake up in the middle of the night and feel terrified because sleep is too similar to that hazy space between living and dying for comfort? Do other people hold their hands in hot or cold water until they turn red just to marvel at the fact that they felt pain? Do other people spend a week remembering how to control bodily functions like eating without throwing up, using the bathroom, sleeping, moving? Probably not. But then there are a lot of people out there.
He likes soups salty and to eat lemons because underneath the tongue curling sourness he always tastes a lingering sweetness. Ed stared the first time he added red pepper flakes to stew to make it spicier. Al can't remember what he liked before, but he knows he doesn't like prepackaged foods because they taste like chemicals. He doesn't like eggs because they taste like sulfur smells. He hates anything with alcohol in it because the first time he had a drink, he felt like he could feel his body right and it was like being in the armor all over again when he was starting to lose control of it toward the end and it wouldn't always work right. Ed never tried to get him to drink again after. Al's grateful for that.
Some days when no one else is around, he pricks his finger with a pin to feel the pinch of pain and see blood that proves he will bleed. That he is alive.
Some days he is so full of the joy of being alive he can't help but smile and laugh at everything around him. Some days Al wonders if he came back all wrong because there has to be something wrong with him to feel happy when he feels pain or discomfort and confusion when he physically feels emotional pleasure.
He can feel alchemy. Everywhere. He can feel people. He can feel things he shouldn't and he's not sure how much is real and how much is in his head, a product of too long spent wishing he could feel something and building up what feeling would be like.
Three months after he returns he's finally gotten rid of the cane and can walk without feeling exhausted after ten minutes, he walks to the cemetery on his own. On the way back he twists his ankle in a pot hole and spends the next hour in a ditch until Ed finds him. When he examines Al's ankle and the pain radiates through his toes and up to his knee, Al laughs and laughs until he's suddenly crying without any warning of switching between the two. Ed looks scared and it makes Al want to scream. Instead Ed holds him until his tears have run out and all that's left are shaky tremors running through him from head to toe.
"What if I came back wrong?" Al asks. "What if this body isn't me anymore? What if it's wrong?"
Ed chokes back swears and yells and things that Al knows he'd do if he weren't taking the question seriously. He hugs Al tighter with his two flesh arms that Al can't stop marveling at, and says, "You're you, Al. You're you no matter what form you're in. You're Alphonse, my little brother."