Adaptive Immunity

It was the same old routine. He'd come back with his automail arm dented, scratched, skewed, or worse, completely destroyed. The amount of damage on her masterpieces varied on the degree of her rage. And the damage done to his arm reflected the results of her wrath set on him. Luckily, his immunity had adapted very quickly to the beating, the pummeling and the wrenching. He could take steel coming in contact with his skull without earning a concussion. The bruises on his skin faded away just as quickly as clothes stains. The aches in his muscles relieved themselves eventually, and all would settle down. He could very well adjust to the conditions. His body had been flung to more than 5 locations. He'd been exposed to winter, summer, autumn and spring. The temperature he could get used to without it as a hindrance. This was part of his training. He had to learn to adapt, accept the circumstances of his position. Learn to make use of his environment in a tight spot. Become part of the trees, the soil, even the rocks, down to the last atom. Resourcefulness was indispensable to transmutation. It was what he and Al had been taught to make of while studying alchemy.

So he learned to learn to adapt. Hardly easy, but not impossible. He learned to handle how she punished him(deep down, he knew he deserved it), he learned to build up the guts not to throw a fit too much during the automail attachments, and he learned to move with the automail given to him, as if they were his real limbs.

He wasn't perfectly adaptive, though. In some ways, he wasn't. He still couldn't let insults of his stature fly past his ears without a series of angry retortions on his behalf. He couldn't stand(in his opinion) his egotistical superior, and his need to make a flashy show of his 'fiery' talent when he felt most needed. He couldn't forgive his father for leaving a wife and his children behind; an act he assumed was an unreasonable excuse for his incapability to become a proper parent. He couldn't adjust to the wariness he always felt for the limited time he and Al had in restoring their bodies, knowing that his younger brother was a time bomb ticking away the seconds they had left before rejection took place. He couldn't learn to accept these things out of pride. Pride got the better of Edward Elric too often. It was the reason why he'd still be damned if he let anyone get away with comparing him to a bean, or for his stubborn defiance with the Colonel, or why he wouldn't give up on himself and his brother in their pursuit for recovery.

Pride, however, had nothing to do with the next test of tolerance presented for him one, warm day:

Waking up from a nap to the sight of Winry Rockbell leaning over him on the sofa, with her soft lips pressed affectionately to his hairline; the same spot her wrench kept making contact with a moment ago(the wires were sizzled and the metal plates more than grazed this time).

Needless to say, his wild, unguarded reaction was contrary to how he usually dealt in any situation.

In fact, it was an original; since when was blushing till the roots of his hair part of his experience-observe-then-fight method of developing resistance?

And on a sidenote? Opening his eyes to that wasn't going to be easy to get used to either. Adaptive immunity or not.

FIN

A/N:...I really don't know wth is going on in my head to be scribbling junk like this down.