Edward sat up abruptly in bed and bonked his head on the frame for the second time that day. While he was gipping his forehead painfully, he sucked in deep breaths and shuddered.
"'nii-san? Are you okay? You looked like you were having a nightmare."
Ed felt drying tears on his face and hastily wiped them away. "I'm fine." Another shiver went through him as the lingering effects of the dream disappeared.
"Were you dreaming about...?"
"I said I'm fine," Ed said harshly and Al took a step back.
The older brother looked at him with wide eyes. "Shit. Sorry, Al, I'm just..."
"It's okay," Al said, shuffling his feet. "It's almost seven o'clock. I came to get you for dinner."
After slipping his glove back on, Edward followed his little brother out of the room and down the hall.
"How was courtyard duty?" Al asked.
"It was okay. Pretty easy, just took a long time. How was laundry?"
"It took the whole three hours," Alphonse sighed and put one hand on his neck, rotated the shoulder in its socket. "We didn't just have to wash our clothes, we had to do all of the soldiers' as well." He grunted as his shoulder popped. "Poor Mei, she had to do all of the girls' clothes herself, and she's so tiny."
"That midget Xingese girl?"
"That's pretty harsh, 'nii-san. You're not much taller than her."
Edward slapped his brother on the back of the head and scowled, walking faster.
"Hey!" Al whined. "I was just stating the truth."
"You're being disrespectful to your brother, that's what you were doing."
Al rolled his eyes as they entered the chow hall. That moved down the row and sat next to Ling. Lan Fan sat across from him and they weren't talking, simply staring at the table. Winry was next to her and directly across from Edward. He scowled at the arrangement, but she was too busy drawing on a piece of paper to even notice them arriving at the table.
It was a diagram, extremely complex. A book was open at her elbow and she studied it with furrowed brow before sketching a few more things on the paper.
"What's that, Winry?" Al asked conversationally.
She jumped at the mention of her name and looked around, and her eyes fixed on Alphonse. "Oh. It's... my Engineering project." Her eyes flicked to Edward's before back to her paper. She erased the line she had just drawn (when she had been interrupted, it had lurched off into an odd zigzag) and redrew it.
So that picture was his new arm or leg, huh? Well, now that he looked at it, it kind of resembled fingers, only they were in various pieces to show the insides, which were mostly wires and some pieces of... stuff. Edward was oddly curious about it and leaned over. The numbers and letters and lines meant nothing to him, but it was incredibly well-drawn and detailed. She was obviously a professional.
Dinner was much like the other meals, although the talking was a scant more subdued from people being tired. Edward was right in thinking that they had the same thing everyday, because there was the weird meat square on his tray and the blocks of potatoes and vegetables, and the ever-present orange juice.
Winry was so into her diagram that the girl next to her (the one with dark skin and pink bangs) had to nudge her and bring her back to earth. She scarfed down dinner and gulped down her juice and immediately went back to her paper. No one bothered her after that.
Edward was watching her draw with a glazed look in his eyes. He saw her putting lines and notes here and there, but they didn't register in his mind. His thoughts were back on the dream he had earlier. He was so distracted by his brain that even when Mei giggled loudly at something Alphonse said, he didn't even hear her.
He could remember an explosion. Fire. Screaming. He remembered the exact order it sank in when he had regained consciousness. The metal frame above him, pinning his arm and leg to the ground. The fire raging around him. The screaming, and how he wondered whose it was, and then he realized that it was his own voice crying out in pain. And then the pain registered, a bitchslap to the senses, and then he *knew* he was screaming, felt the voice being torn from his raw throat, and then... darkness.
Edward hadn't noticed he had hunched over, his automail hand gripping the stump that was left of his left leg and his left hand gripping the flesh at his right shoulder, until his brother called his name.
He looked up, his eyes swimming, sweat rolling down his forehead and back.
"'nii-san..." Alphonse whispered in alarm. "Does it hurt?"
Ed sucked in a breath, realizing the places where his automail started were paining him greatly.
"I'll... I'll be fine," he lied, his grip tightening on the flesh as if it could squeeze the agony out.
The immediate people around them were all looking at him. Even Winry had glanced up to see what was wrong, and stared with her eyes wide.
He could *feel* his shattered human limbs, superimposing over the automail. He could feel them crushed and bloodied and dying and the tear of the muscle and skin as they had felt when they were slowly being torn off.
Alphonse pulled out an envelope from his pocket and shook out two white objects. Pills. Edward's medicine, which he kept with him because his brother was so damn stubborn. He handed them to his brother who gulped them down and sucked down the last of his orange juice.
Edward laid his head on the table, his body involuntarily shaking. By the end of the dinner period, about fifteen minutes hence, the pain had ebbed halfway. He shrugged off his brother and headed down the hall to the dorm and fell into the bed, curling up into a ball.
"'nii-san. You need to change your clothes."
He ignored the suggestion for about five minutes before he begrudgingly sat up. Alphonse covered him from view with a blanket and Edward changed into the plaid pajamas that had been left on the bed by someone.
The pain almost gone, he laid back down and breathed in heavily.
A shadow came over his closed eyes and he opened them to see a dark shape blocking the light on the ceiling. His eyes adjusted and he noticed the green-haired boy with no name grinning down at him. His eyes were alit with something inconceivable that made a subconscious shiver go down his spine.
"Chibi in pain?" he said, in a mock-worried voice.
Edward said nothing.
Suddenly the grin was replaced by a snarl. "You have no idea what real pain is, midget."
The golden-haired boy watched him as he turned and stalked away, back to the bunk with the other two that had the same eyes.
Maybe it was because of the painkillers, but he couldn't even get himself to get worked up about what the other boy had just said to him. And in a few minutes he was fast asleep.