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kasveyk · 4 months ago

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Let’s Talk about Edward’s Disability

Automail (Part 2) - Rehabilitation and Consequences

I brushed up on this topic minorally in Part 1 of my talk on Automail but I wanted to go into a little deeper to help explain the difficulties that Edward encounters with being an automail user.

I also want to restate that as with my first talk on automail, and all my other entries in the ‘Let’s Talk About’ series these are applied to my individual take on Edward and are not the be all end all.

So Edward’s journey with prosthetics starts when he’s 11 years old - so since he joins the military when he’s 12 and the series runs mainly when he’s 15 and at 15 he stands 4′11″ tall, we’re going to guess that he was roughly 4′ 5″ when he was 11 that would give him about 2 inches a year to grow. He wasn’t growing very fast due to overly heavy automail as mentioned by Dominic when we first meet him in Rush Valley.

(He also was supplying nutrition for Alphonse’s body but that’s not the point here.)

But I have also guessed that his automail as they are full steel prosthetics weigh roughly 25lbs per limb. Adding an additional 50lbs to his entire body weight.

So if we go on averages, according to https://www.disabled-world.com/ the average body weight of an 11 year old boy is 78.5 lb / Where as the average body weight of a 12 year old boy is between 67 and 130 lbs according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

That would make the initial attachment of automail would be more than half of Edward’s body weight.

And according to Center for Prosthetic Orthodontics a typical (modern) prosthetic leg weighs around 4 lbs and 8 lbs for an arm. That the weight of a natural should weigh about 1/6 of the person in question’s body weight.

That means his leg weighs 6.25 times what it should weigh when compared to modern prosthetic and his arm weights roughly 3 times. But now remember that his automail limbs are full steel so there’s going to be more weight to them and automail was generally reserved for adults. Making it for children was mostly unheard of. Also remember that Ed’s automail was supposed to be Winry’s first real project and that means there were bound to be some mistakes in the design it’s self. (Weight, etc)

So we’ve already established, that Ed’s got a tiny frame, barely any weight to him and now extremely heavy automail on each side of his body.

His rehabilitation was hard.

The entire process was supposed to take him three years to walk again and be able to move around correctly according to Pinako, but Edward challenged her with one year and she told him he’d be spitting blood.

I have no doubt in my mind that he was. I no doubt in my mind he pushed himself so hard that he was coughing blood on a regular basis because knowing Edward he probably wouldn’t stay down.

I want to point out though that he wasn’t instantly sat up with automail though, we all know this, but it was a huge choice to be made. He went from a wheelchair to a regular prosthetic leg as we see in the Gaiden / Side Story “Long Night”.

At that time he was sat up on a regular leg and no arm - and even had to use Winry as human crutch to help him walk (run in this case).

Automail was never even considered as an option for Edward by either of the Rockbells at first (mainly Pinako) because she knew the hell it was going to wreak on his body. She knew his body just wasn’t made to deal with such a thing cause of the intensity of the procedure and the weight of the limbs. Adults would avoid the upgrade to automail because of the pain it can cause and the maintenance to took to keep it in working order why would she do that to someone she basically considered her grandson?

But since we’re talking about Edward’s recovery, he couldn’t even have gotten just that regular leg until his wounds started to heal, because they would have had to wait for his residual limbs to shrink down and take the proper shape of healing. It’s common place now-days for someone to receive a prosthetic within the first 10- 14 days of their surgery but we all know that didn’t happen as Edward was a pitiful mess in a wheelchair with no limbs when Roy came to visit. The entire process of recovery from the amputation can take up to 4 to 8 weeks** and the limb will most likely be swollen for the first 4 weeks of recovery.*

[* https://myhealth.alberta.ca/Health/aftercareinformation/pages/conditions.aspx?hwid=ug3839 ] [**https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/definition-amputation#1 ]

I want to imagine that after Roy’s visit is when Ed got the regular prosthetic. Something to get him up and around and moving because the life had been sparked again and he felt like living again.

He’d probably been down for a few weeks at this point so that means, he’s already dealing with pain and swelling and possibly reddened dry skin. His bandages need to be changed regularly and it’s important that the body moves as quickly as possible after amputation to avoid the deconditioning of the muscles. Setting in a wheelchair on a daily basis / laying in bed can cause complications such a reduced muscle mass and strength, sarcomere shortening and changes in cartilaginous structures.*

[ *https://www.physio-pedia.com/Complications_Post_Amputation ]

So while he was laying around trying to just recover and live his body was already weakening. There was no way Pinako was going to say “Okay” to something that would put as much stress on his body as automail. Not in the condition he was in. I wouldn’t be surprised if Pinako struck some kind of deal with Ed to get him in a regular prosthetic first to get his rehabilitation started because there’s other scenes in that side story that show Edward in pain just from the run from the Rockbell home to the river.

Just that run completely winded him - look at his face in the top left hand corner. This is also exhibit A of Edward pushing himself and why I have no doubt he really was spitting blood when he was working through his rehabilitation from his automail surgery.

Edward still needed help to hobble around on a standard everyday leg and I have a feeling they kept him up on it before they dared to give him automail. They had to get him doing exercises to strengthen his hips again, to get his legs moving and get him up and out of that chair.

The majority of the weight of Edward’s automail rests on his hips and his the right side of his chest / right shoulder blade as seen:

So he needed to strengthen his body considerably. There’s a reason Edward trains his body as much as he does and why when he has a chance to spar with his brother, he does. While automail is a self powered unit that functions off the electrical impulses put out by Edward’s nervous system, his body still has to withstand the pure weight of it in order to get it to function. His body can send out the signals to move his right arm all he wants but if his body can’t psychically support the weight of it we have a problem. Just as the same as his body can tell his leg to move but if his hips are ill equipped to support that kind of weight, there’s no way he’s running and jumping and flipping and doing all the other crazy shit he knows how to do; Let alone just doing something as simple as walking.

As I previously mentioned, Edward’s automail is a full steel prosthetic so guesstimates aside, it is in no way shape or form light and Edward kept his original set of automail for three years until it was destroyed by Scar.

So please remember, I said at the beginning of this his body on average should have been around roughly 80 lbs for his age. It would have made sense for Pinako to have wanted him to work on his lower body before working on his upper body because if he can’t support himself how is he supposed to work on his upper body?

That child had to have been weight training constantly.

But before they could even do that, she needed to get him up and walking again because she needed to know he could walk. It’s horrible to say it like this but Edward was lucky in the fact that his body was more or less deconstructed VS actually taken in an accident or other equally traumatic event because at the very least that meant his limbs were taken in a clean break. But Pinako didn’t know that, so she had to make sure that the limbs were even capable of having a regular prosthetic let alone something as complicated as automail.

So she put him on a step up process.

So timeline wise, the State Alchemist Exam is in October.

We know this because

A) Ed and Al torched their house shortly after Ed returned from getting his certification

[ Oct. 3.1911 ]

Thank you photo album.

And Edward told her he would do his rehabilitation in a year instead of three so his year was very busy and he was either training his body or down because he pushed his ass too far. I want to assume Edward’s year looked something like this:

(I posted this in it’s own separate post you guys can see it here)

I would assume they would have had completed their training with Izumi shortly after the war ended and they would have committed the taboo in May; giving them plenty of time to prepare and gather supplies. Shortly after Mustang and Hawkeye would have shown up in search of the brother due to misinformation and it would have gotten rolling from there.

Ed would have been in a regular prosthetic by June and by the end of July he would have been fitted with automail. But that’s what I mean by a step up system - Pinako would have made him work on a plain prosthetic to test and build his strength - keep him moving to stop his body from withering away on him and to keep the muscle mass up. She couldn’t do something as complicated as connect all of his individual nerves to a steel prosthetic without that kind of build up.

He would have been down for a few weeks after the surgery because it’s shown in the series to drop him for several hours after the nerves are reconnected (2003 anyways) because of the mass amount of pain it can put a person in - so to have his body now having to adjust to the new implants and metal parts put inside of it? I have no doubt he ended up with post operation pain, probably a fever and they were probably watching him like a hawk to make sure he didn’t end up with any kind of infection.

I also have no doubt that when he was down because of injuring himself / pushing himself too hard he was working on smaller things because there was no time to stop. Can’t handle working on the parallel bars anymore today? Whelp it’s just as good of time as any to work on those fine motor skills.

Because remember, Edward can’t feel anything with his left foot or his right hand, all he’s got going for him is the sensation of weight and proprioception.

(proprioception is the sense of self-movement and body position.)

So basically he can tell his arm is raised but he can’t feel anything with it. He would have had to rework all his fine motor skills, so he can spin that spear in his hand, let alone just eat a meal with it and I have no doubt that it took months.

Cause well, knowing Pinako - if Edward started coughing up blood I’m sure she’d stop him from going any further. I’m sure she’d make him be done for the day but knowing how Edward doesn’t know how to stay down there had to be some kind of compromise -

‘Okay you can’t keep trying to walk today but you can set there and practice writing if you want.’

Something.

I’m sure he scared them a few times and I’m sure when he started into his weight training he started with way too much and hurt himself. I’m sure he hurt himself countless times in this process, but he just kept pushing forward because he kept himself in the mindset that the pain he felt was nothing compared to what Alphonse had to deal with.

He probably was on some form of assisted walking for some time, moving from crutches to cane eventually just to steady himself until his body had grow accustom to moving that much weight. He would have put his body through hell when it comes to building muscle because otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to function and he wouldn’t be able to springboard off his brother’s arm in a fight.

There’s a reason for pictures like this one:

That kid is jacked. Years and years of moving something that’s many times heavier than a limb made of flesh and bone - heavy enough to stunt his growth.

So what do we take away from this other than the fact that Ed is ridiculous built for a 15 year old and that his automail is extremely heavy?

Let’s talk Consequences.

Rushing his rehabilitation did him no favors. It got him up and moving a lot faster and it got his body in prime psychical condition but I also have a feeling it left him with some issues.

Paninya mentions in Rush Valley in the storm that traps the boys and Winry at Dominic’s house that her stumps ache when it rains.

But her reaction just seems to be some minor aches and pains. Some annoyances and things to just ride out. Her reaction seems no where near as drastic as Edward’s.

He explains to Pinako that his stumps ache in the rain before it rains and then he ends up on his knees throwing up as the storm hits. He explains to Pinako that “it feels like my stomach is being twisted off.”

And he continues to be in a severe amount of pain for the rest of the scene.

So I have a personal belief that Edward feels severe pain through nausea. Like the pain is there, and it’s enough to make him dizzy but it makes him nauseous as hell and if he pushes it too far / or the weather is too severe then he’s going to end up a complete mess. It’s common place for changes in barometric pressure to cause old injuries to ache - everything from old breaks to migraines can occur so it makes prefect sense to me that Edward’s lost limbs would flare in such weather. Extreme temperatures can also cause old injuries to become painful.

When weather effects old injuries, this change in weather the body may cause soft tissue to swell and fluid around the joints to expand. The expanding and contracting of muscles can also irritate nerves and cause pain**. Edward’s automail is connected directly to his nervous system with each and every one of the nerves of his right arm and left leg setting in their own individual housing unit.

[ ** https://www.keckmedicine.org/why-do-old-injuries-ache-when-it-rains/ ]

It makes prefect sense to me for weather changes to drop that boy considering how much he rushed his rehabilitation. Edward was supposed to spend 3 years or 1095 days on his rehabilitation minimum but instead he spent 1 year or 365 days. He spent approximately 33% of the time on recovering than he should of.

The body didn’t have the time to truly heal and accept the new additions to it before he went at working to shape and tone his body full force. His body didn’t have time to keep up with his rushed speed of forcing himself back into working order. It makes total sense to me that weather would fuck him up in compared to someone like Paninya.

Even worse of the matter, one of the limbs he lost was his leg and he didn’t give his hips time to adjust. Your lower body carries much more of your weight than you realize as when you walk your knees are there to absorb shock. Edward has one knee. Every time you take a step, the force that hits your knee is 1 and ½ times your body weight* and now he’s dropping his body weight and his automail arm’s weight down on top of them.

[* https://www.health.harvard.edu/pain/why-weight-matters-when-it-comes-to-joint-pain]

He practically sprinted through his recovery all in the name of becoming a State Alchemist faster. Honestly, it probably wouldn’t have killed him to give it two years but we all know how well Edward Elric works with patience.

There is most likely pressure on his hips constantly and his knee probably hurts at end of the day because he’s dropping so much weight on top of it. Because think about it, if the 1 ½ times your body weight equation is what we’re working with that means every step Ed takes he’s dropping 255 lbs of pressure on his knees, if he weight 170lbs (including the weight of his automail). At an incline it increases, to 2 to 3 your body weight ( 2 times - 340) and 4 to 5 when you squat down or lean over (4 times - 680). He’s dropping some serious weight on his lower body and I assume that it goes up even higher if you run, let alone if you spring board.

Spring board from seven foot in the air.

I think it just needs to be said, that when it comes to Edward’s being as a whole, his lower body is million times more deadly than his upper body and I would rather take a punch from that boy than a kick of any kind.

But I just want people to think though how much deadlier he would have been if it didn't rush it. Think about much fiercer he could have been if he only felt normal aches and pains in severe weather and it didn’t drop him to his knees. He gave himself 33% of the healing time Pinako told him he needed. 33% that’s it. That’s a failing grade on a grading scale.

But we all know Edward Elric doesn’t know how to stay down.

And he doesn’t just take shit in storms either. Extreme Cold slams his ass too.

Granted he should have changed his automail over to Northern Automail before heading to Briggs, but that was more because of the metals it was made of and the oils it used than anything else. When the boys get caught by Buccaneer, Edward’s automail jams up on him and he doesn’t just have difficultly moving it - he also declares pain - that “it shouldn’t be hurting” in the anime.

This is another consequence he has to deal with thanks to poor communication and a risk he faces because he went up into the frigid north with the wrong kind of metal and it nearly gave him frostbite. But on top of this issue, as previously mentioned, old wounds react to spikes or plummets in temperature and now he’s got his joints inflamed while he’s trying to fight in sub zero temperatures. Briggs was a lot more of a mess than it really was hinted at in the anime.

^ That’s why they have him stripped down to his boxers in the middle of the fort. Because they had to put steaming hot cloths on his ports to reheat the skin around his ports and to get the oil back to a temperature that it would flow through the unit otherwise he’s got no limbs to stand on because they won’t move.

But remember, the frostbite was occurring to his ports and his ports are the connection of automail to his nerves. He’s lucky he didn’t walk away with nerve damage and honestly with him being told ‘a little longer and you would have had complete frost bite.’ he probably did.

And on the opposite side of that Edward has to deal with extreme heat as a problem too - where any of the metal is touching flesh has the potential to cause burns and potentially more scarring and damage.

The dub line being “My Automail almost seared through my skin.”

But again, this is around the ports of his automail where all the nerves are housed and metal was put inside his body so that metal is effected by temperature as well whether it be heat or cold. He’s got to stay out of extremes even if just to avoid any undo damages to his body because if he loses the nerve endings the limbs will no longer function correctly and that defeats the entire purpose.

There’s a reason why the guy in the page I posted at the very beginning of this says “He doesn’t have that kind of courage” when Pinako asks him if he’s upgrading to automail. There’s a lot of drawbacks when it comes to the use of it.

And this lovable jackass only gave himself 33% of the healing time he was supposed to have when recovering from it.

Like I know he was in a rush and all, but giving himself a little bit of extra time would have probably done him some good. It’s not like we see him go down over the rain just once.

No, we saw that shit in episode 5 of Brotherhood, Chapter 5 of the Manga directly after Nina dies. He wakes in a fright from a nightmare; a cold sweat and instantly falls to pain. Just for some reason the anime doesn’t let him say anything about it so it’s completely missed for anime viewers.

He’s been dealing with pain for years, since he was 11 and the automail was attached but he was too busy rushing his way through his rehabilitation that he didn’t think anything about it and if he did he probably thought he’d pushed himself too hard again. He probably had no idea that the effects would be lasting when it all started and once he figured it out he certainly couldn’t tell anyone because if he did then they would make him stop and he couldn’t have that.

So as I mentioned in Automail Part 1 - Al is probably the only one who really knows about the pain because someone’s got to take care of him when he’s in so much pain he can’t even lift the damn things. When he’s so bad that his left leg can take the pressure but his right knee just buckles. Someone’s got to tell Mustang that he can’t come in on some of the times he’s summoned and honestly Alphonse probably forces him to stay down.

But the other half of why I think Ed’s pain is so much worse than that of a normal person, because of exactly that he’s not a normal person. His body isn’t average as we all know. He’s behind in the growth section - so he weighs drastically more than he should for his frame. Everything hurts. His hips, his knees, his back, his shoulder blades, everything. He probably is running around with inflammation and doesn’t even know it because he’s so accustom to just being in pain.

Just the weather strikes and there’s those days it makes it downright unbearable but we all know Ed will pass out before he stops. That’s why thankfully he has a brother like Alphonse to make his stubborn ass stay down.

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kasveyk · 4 months ago

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Let’s Talk about Edward’s Disability

Automail - A Means to an End

So I’m noticing some misconceptions when it comes to Edward’s automail and I just wanted to clear things up for how the world works at the least for my individual take on Edward.

So the thing I need you to remember when dealing with my Edward is that he is disabled.

I know Edward can run and jump and flip and kick and do all of these amazing things.

That doesn’t stop him from being disabled.

Please also remember that Edward feels everything lopsided, as on the right side he can feel next to nothing from the entire length of his arm - shoulder to the tip of his fingers, and on the left side of his lower body he can feel next to nothing from the mid thigh all the way down to the tips of his toes.

I said next to because at the base or ports of his automail Edward can feel the connection of his nerves to the machine. That’s why he’s able to tell Winry that “his shoulder feels numb” in Star of Milos or one of the reasons during lab 5 he could identify that something was wrong with his shoulder.

However when it comes to Edward’s arm his sense of “feeling” relies heavily on weight. His right side has become dependent on knowing how much something weighs. Edward can’t feel what’s in his hand despite how it may appear. He really just has to trust the object is in his grip whether that be by sight. the sound of the metal gripping or by the weight of it that it adds to his shoulder.

Edward’s right shoulder and port are the running engine of his automail. If you’ll look at how it’s connected to his body, you’ll see that the port of his shoulder actually takes up a decent portion of his chest. It covers almost his entire right pectoral and moves into his right shoulder blade.

|| Please get used to these pictures I’m going to use them a lot. ||

Ed’s automail doesn’t just effect his arm - like series constantly pushes. He only lost his arm but in order to even be able to have an arm again he had to sacrifice even more of his body so it had a place to connect.

If you really look at him you’ll see all the scarring that occurred because of the surgery - surgery that is said to make a grown man scream out or cry in pain over.

Ed was 11 when they did this to his body. Look at his shoulder before the surgery.

It’s there. It’s all there. His chest was unharmed by Truth and so was his shoulder. He ONLY lost his arm, and the series like’s to push that fact but what it doesn’t push is the amount of alterations he had to have done to his growing pre-teen body in order to have that famous automail arm.

He has bolts grafted into his body - anchored right into his bones to keep that port on his body.

Three on his chest - two into his side and one into his collar bone

and three into his back - two into his side again and one into his shoulder blade.

I want you to right now - as you’re reading this - roll your shoulder slowly. Feel your shoulder blade? Edward’s got a bolt there. Do you feel your collarbone as you slowly drop your shoulder forward? Edward’s got a bolt there. Bolts drilled right into his bones.

His Automail hurts. Al says in the beginning of the series, that he wants to get Ed’s body fixed first because Edward’s automail is hard on his body.

The dub line is actually “No Brother, you first - that automail is so tough on you.”

It’s like this because as I said it’s been grafted into his skeletal structure.

So when Ed moves, it moves, but don’t forget that automail has no outside power source. it’s connected straight into his nervous system - each nerve, each and every nerve is anchored right into this machine that’s powered through the electrical pulses that come from those nerves. It regulates the power to the pneumatic actuators and electrical motors inside of it. Ed is it’s power source.

^ It looks like this under all that pretty plating after all ^

Basically, Edward’s brain is still firing the signals to move his right arm / hand - the lost limb(s) and left leg)) So his arm still moves as fluid as it would if it was still flesh and blood because his automail receives the signals sent out by his brain and when his nerves react, his arm amplifies the signals and does the motion his body was trying to tell the lost limb to do.

But it took rehabilitation to do this. Rehabilitation to be able to use his limbs in the first place - that was supposed to take a whole three years to complete and Edward cut down to one. I have no doubt that he pushed himself. He had to push himself. He had to push himself so ridiculously hard to get himself up to running condition - enough to be fighting his brother - in a year. I bet he tried to fight his brother in shorter than a year and I bet he was spitting blood just like Pinako said he would be.

So when I say Edward is in pain constantly, this is why. It’s not a hard pain. It’s nothing that drops him. No it’s like this constant ache that rests between his shoulder blades from his small frame trying to carry enough weight that it’s stopping him from growing.

Edward’s arm literally puts so much stress on his body it hasn’t been able to grow. His now teenage maturing body got stuck in a time loop basically because there was too much weight bringing it down. He carries that weight on his shoulder every day.

Personally, I believe his arm has to weight something close to 20 - 25 lbs with his leg weighing about the same. But then like I said, this is for my own personal take on him. I personally believe that his automail adds about another 50lbs to his body weight - making him a firm 160 - 170 lbs.

(His own body has to be a decent weight considering all the flips and jumps and kicks and stuff he can do because he has to have a lot of muscle on his body to be able to jump high enough to kick his 7′3″ armored brother in the face. Ed alone probably weighs 110 /120 lbs even at 4′11″. )

Now when we you look at this leg, you can see that it’s still partly there.

His automail only comes up to mid-thigh / just above the knee. So he didn’t even lose the whole thing, but he did lose enough that it puts pressure on his hip / pelvis to move it. This port however is different from the shoulder port in the fact it houses the main support rod of the leg in a different way but it’s still bolted into his body.

The thing you see in the top picture is the outer plating that protects the port, where as this is the actual place of connection and it is attached into Edward’s leg with one large bolt driven into each side. They have to be large in this case, and heavily reinforced because these bolts don’t just keep the port in place and the leg attached to his body but they also have to be weight bearing. If the bolts in this port snap - not only does it break the port’s connection and Edward loses his leg taking him down with it - but he’ll feel those bolts snap inside of his leg and they could cause more internal damage that might prevent him from having an automail leg in the first place.

Also as I said in the sections about his arm, I personally believe that each piece of his automail weighs around 25lbs - so that means his exceptionally small frame is trying to move something with that kind of weight. It strains his pelvis leaving him with sore hips and he has to readjust himself a lot to find the most comfortable position for him to set for long periods (or if he’s been on it a lot - for him to set at all.)

But that weight is also where the lopsided feeling I mentioned comes into play. Edward naturally ( at this point) has more strength in his right shoulder and left hip due to having to move these solid pieces of steel around for years and years.

But all and all, it’s set up much like his arm in the way that it turns the firing of messages to his lost leg into energy and instructions for his automail. He just has to train his body constantly to keep himself in proper shape in order to be able to move it.

On that subject. I have mentioned in other headcanons / things about Edward that the boy suffers from mass pain during rain or thunderstorms.

Now this is mentioned in the manga / brotherhood, when he goes out with Pinako to dig up the grave of the thing he transmuted - and he ends up on his knees, throwing up he’s in so much pain. And that’s just a heavy rain storm.

Now while I think this has something to do with the fact that he just has old injuries and old injuries hurt in weather changes, whether they’re broken bones or what not, I also think this has something to do with the fact that he rushed his rehabilitation by two years. I wouldn’t be surprised if part of it didn’t heal correctly so it lead to him having extremely painful reactions during poor weather or extreme cold. So when thunderstorms roll around the the barometric pressure in the air changes he wants to throw up from the pressure it puts on the ports in his body - the bolts in his body.

Automail does not change that Edward is a double amputee. When poor weather hits, he would have adverse reactions regardless - but with so much metal in his body and his nerves literally connected to a machine that picks up the smallest reactions out of them - thunderstorms and heavy weather just destroys him.

Edward has also woken from a nightmare during a storm and the first thing he did was hug his leg and declare “It hurts.”

In no way, shape or form does Ed’s automail give him a magical pain free cure to fix all of his problems. Honestly, it made it so he was a complete person again and he could function mostly independently. It gave him him hands-free alchemy but it also gave him a ton of new problems.

I know people rag on Al for ‘mothering’ him throughout the series, but honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a lot more than just “You’re sleeping with your tummy out.” It’s probably holding his hair back when he can’t stop puking, and making sure he stays in bed when he’s so dizzy from pain he falls over. Al has probably carried him countless times - conscious or unconscious. I wouldn’t be surprised if Al has also had to go in Ed’s place or call in Ed’s place to refuse summons from Mustang - lightly explaining things like ‘He’s not feeling well’ or coming up with every other reason he can so no one else knows how bad it is. Because Al knows that would destroy him. He knows his brother is trying to be as strong as he possibly can for this - for them - for him so he’d never let anyone know just exactly what that automail does to Edward.

Because it does a lot more than just give him an arm and a leg.

Edit:: You can read Part 2 now here.

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