Short chapter and a cliffhanger, I know ... sorry.

Chapter seventeen

Alphonse was walking to the dorms in order to check on Brother. For him to admit to having a headache must mean that it's either so painful that he can't walk…

…Or Roy had lied and there was a particular reason that they had gone back to the dorms.

Either way, it must have been pretty bad whatever was going on with Brother. Al couldn't remember him ever admitting to having a headache ever since he joined the military. The stupid fool thought it made him weak.

Which was why Al was pretty sure that Brother was having another breakdown like the one he had had right before he was attacked. The thought made Al sad, but also happy in a strange way. It meant that Ed was finally letting himself be emotionally dependant on an adult again. And he wasn't stubbornly repressing everything until he snapped and vented out his feelings by recklessly attacking a drug lord's hideout or something like that single-handedly as a way to vent his anger.

And it was nice to have an adult take care of them. It gave Al a sense of safety that he hadn't felt for a long time.

So Al was just going to go and check on them quietly just to see how Brother was doing.

A couple of soldiers suddenly ran past him and Al caught two words of their conversation that made the worry from before turn to absolute panic: "bomb" and "dorms".

And so Al was running. He was sprinting as fast as he could and his panic kept rising as he neared the building that still had a cloud of black smoke rising from it. Al ran around to the source of the smoke and froze as he saw what was left of their dorm. There was fire spreading through the parts of the building that still remained, but the part that Ed and Roy had been in had collapsed because of the blast.

"BROTHER!" Al shouted as he ran towards the large pile of rubble. A few MPs were trying to stop him, but someone that Al recognised vaguely, a young officer by the name of Jones, came running up to him, his face full of alarm. "Let him through! He's the Fullmetal Alchemist's brother!"

The MPs paused and Al ran past them, shouting to Jones. "Brother's in there! Colonel Mustang too!"

And after that, Al just blocked out all sound of voices and the likes, his sole focus was to find Brother and Roy.

And so Al dug through the rubble, searching frantically for about twenty minutes, barely noticing the other soldiers that were searching with him. He was furiously trying to block out the thought that kept intruding that his brother may not have survived.

Then Al lifted away a particularly large piece of concrete and saw something that made his hopes rise. A bulge of concrete in between the rubble that was covered with transmutation marks. Al pushed away some more of the rubble and then pulled out his chalk, quickly drawing a transmutation circle now that he was sure that there weren't enough debris on top of the small dome that it would collapse from Al creating a hole in it.

He activated the circle, transmuting a large window of sorts. "BROTHER! ROY!" Al shouted, spotting a pair of people within the dome that looked very familiar, if covered in blood.

There were a couple of weak coughs from inside the two metre tall dome. "Al…" a voice said hoarsely and obviously filled with agony. It belonged to Roy. "He … He's … breathing."

"The surgery was successful," the doctor told him, his face telling him that he wasn't out of the woods, however. "He received a heavy blow to the head which has caused some intracranial bleeding, resulting in his current comatose state. He also had a moderate amount of internal bleeding. His left hand is broken and most of his automail arm had been ripped off. He has several cuts and bruises all over his body and his nose needs to be reset once the swelling has gone down. The wounds on his back had been reopened and there is a significant amount of bruising and lacerations to his backside suggesting an abusive amount of severe belting." The doctor looked at them sympathetically. "I regret to inform you, Mister Elric, but you should prepare yourself for the fact that your brother might never wake up."

Alphonse recounted the list to Roy who was lying in his own hospital bed, looking pale and obviously in a lot of pain. Roy's right leg was broken in two places and the cast went from his toes and covered most of his thigh. His right shoulder had also been impaled by a wooden beam, fracturing his collarbone and causing him to now keep his heavily bandaged right arm in a sling. He had a bandage wrapped around his forehead from a deep cut as well and yet he refused to take the appropriate painkillers because he didn't want to risk falling asleep should Ed's condition change. He may be on strong painkillers, but the dose was far lower than anyone liked. Al had been informed by Hawkeye about his condition and had been ordered by Roy to tell him about Ed's condition the second the man had been wheeled into the room, having finally pulled enough strings to get a shared room despite the difference in the severity of the injuries. That meant that Al hadn't got to see Roy before now even if he had been awake for the last hour because Al had been waiting for news on Brother's condition and had only been sitting in the room for a few minutes.

The steady beeping from Brother's heart monitor next to Ed's bed was both unnerving and comforting.

"But they're just saying that because they don't know Brother!" Alphonse said stubbornly, refusing to even consider the possibility that Ed might not make it. He was even breathing on his own!

Even if he was looking ghostly pale and much too at peace for his usual self to have an IV hooked up to his arm and a spare one on his right foot…

"Alphonse … I'm so sorry … I should have protected him better," Roy said, looking very much like the emotional pain even outweighed the physical one.

"Don't say that. You've protected Brother for days! And I guess you were the one to transmute that dome too!" Al couldn't deal with it if Roy was just going to blame himself for this.

"I did, but it was only luck that I got it up in time to shield us from further harm…"

"You saved his life! Both your lives!" Roy moved to speak, but Al cut him off. "Please, Roy, don't talk like that! I-I can't take it!" Al was stressed and in emotional pain and he couldn't even cry! "He's gonna tell you that you're just being stupid because he's going to be all right! They just didn't see him when he went through the automail surgery and his determination throughout that process! Brother's gonna be fine because he wouldn't just leave me like this!" Al could see how sad the desperation in his voice was making Roy and he couldn't deal with that right now. It was just too much. "Who belted him?" Al said, wanting to know who did that to his brother, although he already knew the answer.

Roy's expression turned to fury in a second, confirming his suspicions. "Schiff. We ran into him and he got angry with us."

"Then stay angry with him because you wouldn't have been attacked if he hadn't hurt Brother!"

"Alphonse —" Roy began, but then a nurse came inside the room, followed by Lieutenant Hawkeye.

The second she saw Roy, she broke down in tears and fell to her knees, sobbing. The Lieutenant immediately pointed her gun at the woman, her face stern. "PLEASE! I'M NOT GOING TO HURT YOU!" the nurse screamed in fear as she heard the cock of the gun and put her hands in the air. "I'M JUST HERE TO DELIVER A MESSAGE OR THEY'LL SHOOT MY SON!"