"Brother?" Al asked in a small voice as Ed's eyes fluttered shut. "Ed?"
It was the doctor that answered for him, "He'll be alright." Maenz said as Al touched his brother's limp hand. "What were you two doing? How did he fall?" The doctor shook his head before Al could even begin to answer, "...but this fever..."The doctor hesitated as his hand brushed across Ed's forhead, moving his hair from his eyes. They were moving. Ed was dreaming. "I checked him just a few minutes ago. He didn't have even an inkling of a fever..."
Al looked down at his brother and thought of that feeling of something collecting in the air. The same feeling that had made him push Ed away...
He knew that was what had brought the fever...
He knew it, although...
Although he had no idea what Ed had been trying to do...
"Alphonse?" The doctor said, pulling Al from his thoughts.
"Yes?"
"Why don't you go for a walk for a little while."
"A walk?"
The doctor smiled, "Just for a little while." Pinako returned with the doctor's bag and she gave it to him.
Al watched him rummage through it. "Alright." He said, but hesitated. Ed was sleeping, his chest rose and fell, his eyes moved in some dream. Al suddenly found himself staring at his brother's arm and at the blood seal peeking from its underbelly.
"Alphonse?" The doctor said, startling Al again, just when a terrible suspicion was starting to grow in Al's mind, just as he thought he knew what Ed had been trying to do. It was probably for the better that the doctor interupted such a thought, at least for the moment, that is.
"Sorry." Al said and turned to go, glass crunching beneath his feet again, but that was when the doctor reached to the nightstand to set something there and Al saw something he had forgotten about, although he remembered seeing the last time he had seen the doctor at his mother's funeral, it still scared him, the doctor's arm since it was..."Automail..."
The doctor paused in mid-motion and his eyes looked from Al and traveled up his arm where between glove and cuff metal glinted dully in the early light. The doctor smiled nicely enough and nodded, "Yes.
"Sorry...I just..."
The doctor turned away, the smile still on his lips. "I never did tell you boys how I got this. You were too young...still are, I suppose...but...I'll have to tell you how I got this. Not today, though. I think it is a story that would interest you both now...considering..."
"Considering?"But the doctor went on his task as if he hadn't heard Al, but Pinako watched him go and frowned at the doctor, saying, "You should have told him."
The doctor touched Ed's forhead, felt the heat there, then his hand traveled to the empty juntion of shoulder and arm, "I know." he said, and Ed groaned softly in his sleep.
TBC...