Just thinking about how Ed's automail hurts whenever the weather changes. Not just day to day weather but in extremes, like gloomy rainy days. Or hot humid heat. Either way his ports hurt and body aches.
In the cold the metal starts to freeze and brings down his own body Temperature, along with the fact that metal contracts when cold. His ports would get to tight to walk or move comfortably. Since he's always cold, his immune system goes down and he gets sick more frequently. Frost bite being another big possibility.
In the heat he suffers just as much, his automail heating up and thus the ports heat up his skin making him more susceptible to hypothermia, even heatstrokes and heat rashes (hyperthermia when it gets cold) ,even burning him at times.
Both sides of the coin can also potentially damage his automail. The condensation from the humid heat and the water from frost and snow can lead to the possibility of it rusting his joints and making his automail weaker in combat. Making his reaction time slower due to the bolts and hinges not moving properly.
All these reasons gave me the idea that resembool is the perfect place for him and his automail. The weather doesn't really change, only during rare times of a rainstorm or an unusually hot summer but overall it's a place that's constant. Kinda how Winry is a constant for Ed, with everything else being so hectic and unsure ( the homunculus, the government, foreign royalty, even the possibility of them not being able to get their bodies back) winry and resembool are the things that Ed knows for sure are waiting for him.
It's also where he first was fitted with his new arm and leg. He did his recovery there and so his body has essentially healed and adjusted to the areas conditions. I mean anytime he and Al need to rest or take a break it's usually at resembool, sure it may be for matienence but they feel most at peace there.
I have a headcanon that Alphonse once tried to prank Edward by pretending to like not be attached to the armor anymore and like be completely silent and stuff and Ed got so scared and genuinely thought Alphonse was gone and Alphonse stopped immediately when Ed started crying because he thought he lost Alphonse for good and Alphonse felt so freaking bad and he hugged him and comforted him and he let Ed beat the shit out of him for scaring him like that.
Whumptober day 14 - under pressure/ crush injuries
ao3
It all started with a mission, because of course it did. Because no matter how high in rank Roy got, he was still an alchemist first.
They had been on the trail of a dangerous group of alchemists which had sprung up in the wake of The Promised Day as a cult worshipping whatever it was that had caused the mass destruction and weird experiences documented by the populace. Roy’s team was the one put on it, as despite the amount of work they had been putting into the Ishval reconstruction and their promotions in the four years following the business with the homunculi, they could still be ordered to do what the fuhrer needed them to. Even if they were the ones to put the fuhrer in his current position of power.
Apparently, they were the only ones who were equipped enough to handle the group, with Colonel Armstrong otherwise occupied and Alphonse Elric out of reach physically, as well as metaphorically due to his lack of military sign up. So, Roy and his team were sent to investigate and arrest the people who were supposed to be at the location they were being sent to.
Roy doesn’t have a particularly large amount of recollections of the mission itself though.
One moment, he and Falman had been investigating one of the larger rooms of the warehouse-like structure, the next he heard something creaking dangerously over their heads and dived, pushing Falman out of the way along with trying to get himself clear from their spot beside the wall. He only had enough time to throw up a minor blast of flames before the dust cloud suffocated the oxygen in the air.
After that he only has flashes of memories in between pain and shouting.
The warehouse was a former industrial building, used for storage as well as housing disused machinery. The floor above them, old and more unstable than the information they had been given suggested, and part of it had given way under the rusted weight of machinery, probably due to rot. It didn’t even seem like it had been planned by the group they were chasing, aside from perhaps the people in question further weakening the floor by being on the premises of the higher floors.
Whatever the reason was, it didn’t matter. Hawkeye’s group with Breda and Havoc managed to incapacitate most members of the group after the floor collapse made them think they were being raided. They were spooked into running outside, allowing for Riza to get the drop on them.
Meanwhile, Roy ended the mission in the hospital, fighting for his life against trauma of blood loss and a crushed leg.
It was two days later that he woke up from surgery in a hospital bed with a marked absence under the sheet beside his left leg. Riza was quiet in the corner of the room. He knew she was there, even without looking at her directly.
“They did everything they could, brigadier-general Mustang,” she said with a quiet solemnity that he had expected. They both ignored the softer undertone to it that spoke of a closer bond. That moment could be had privately later, when they went back to Roy’s apartment and Riza would cry and he would try to be strong in the face of a new and terrifying reality that made him doubt if his long held dreams would be achieved.
For now, he would turn his gaze to stare up at the ceiling, counting the tiles as he willed himself to not scream. “Thank you, Lieutenant. Be sure to thank the doctors for their hard work.”
He blinked against the wetness he pretended was not pushing to spill over the edges of his eyes. It would do nothing to cry about what was already passed and gone.
Alphonse tries to see the world in black in white. Good and evil, firmly separated with a stern line, unmoving with no room for little crossover. Gray areas don’t exist and everyone, everything is either this or that. It is simply how his brain tries to function, logically and categorizing, putting things in the places to which they belong.
His mother is the definition of good. Gentle and kind Trisha, the woman that lets him sleep in late when he’d stayed up all night reading his father’s books again, the one who makes his favorite breakfast, sunnyside eggs with extra pepper and thick blueberry pancakes, each and every day. She hugs him when he cries, and even when he doesn’t make a sound. Her voice is calm, that of a gentle wave caressing the waiting shore at sunrise. It steadies him; keeps his heart easygoing and gives him room to play, and learn, and grow on his own time. Without a doubt in the world, his mother is good.
Alphonse wouldn’t say that his father is definite evil, although his elder brother would yell his head off for hours on end, should Alphonse ever speak his mind on their absent parent. He can’t remember much of the man, to be quite honest. He remembers a firm hand on his back, keeping him from tumbling over when he’d run down the hallways, chasing after Edward. He remembers a smile that seemed welcoming on the surface, but he realizes now that there was much, much more behind the tight-lipped thing that contained words he probably should never hear. Alphonse doesn’t think his father is evil. He thinks his father has something to do.
Truthfully, at such a young age, Alphonse isn’t sure that he’s even come close to meeting evil. He’s read stories with evil beings and creatures, those that terrorize villages and steal princesses and wreak havoc throughout full nations, but Alphonse is sure that they’re all make-believe. Nobody could be that cruel, especially in his homely country. Of course, he’s seen anger in his life, too. His guardian, practically grandmother, is the epitome of anger. He’s seen Pinako go on full rampages, bickering with Edward for his attitude and lecturing Winry on feeble mistakes in her workshop, but he isn’t sure if that classified as being evil or not. Pinako had always been gentle with him, anyway. So no, the old woman isn’t evil. She is good.
Perhaps there is no such thing as evil in the world, especially not for a kid like him to notice. Alphonse likes to think with hope, enjoys basking in the idea that goodness was all the world was built on. It’s an easy mindset to prosper with, so he makes up his mind to stick with it.
Alphonse learns, not long after the death of his mother, that evil is not so far off as it seems. That it lurks in the back pages of a book not opened in years, one's full of dust and grime, indicating that maybe they should’ve remained closed. He’s opened these books though, opened up his mind to their knowledge and sucked in everything they had to offer him. If his mother was still alive, she’d ramble about how smart her youngest boy was. But his mother isn’t alive. She’s six feet below the ground, buried beneath their feet, and Alphonse plans on doing anything and everything he can to get her back.
He comes face to face with real evil during the attempt to bring her back to life. Wispy red and black hands reaching up, up out of the ground from every curve and corner of the transmutation circle he and Edward had sketched out onto the floor only minutes ago. He hears weeping, a wretched sound coming from the mouth of the black thing in the middle of their mess. It’s supposed to be his mother. He knows it’s not. Alphonse can hardly see through all the flashing lights, red and blue and red and blue and red and– a scream. He can’t even recognize it as his own. Before he has the time to process the look of shock and horror that overcomes his brothers face, he’s being ripped apart. Limb by limb, bone by bone, an eye for an eye. His life for his mother’s. They knew this well at the start. He continues to scream, stretches out an arm in hopes that Edward, who has always been stronger than him and far more capable than him in more ways than one, would be able to pull him out of this nightmare.
His fingertips are swirled up into nothingness a millisecond before his hand would have touched his brothers. Alphonse can hear no screaming, feel no pain. All he sees is white. Pure and evil white. And ah, in the back of it all, in that horrific space of nothingness, a chuckle that sounds of his own voice mixed with that of a demon straight from the depths of hell.
“I find this a fair trade, don’t you, Alphonse? Your body for your mother’s?”
A face emerges from the white, all grinning and cheeky, but then no, a body, no, his body. All too suddenly the poor boy realizes the entire room was white, why there was nothing to touch or see because he himself had lost tangibility. Alphonse wants to scream in disbelief then, wants to tear his lungs, the ones that should be in his now nonexistent chest, open, bleeding and breaking from his nonexistent chest, and yell out for his brother, for his mother, for somebody to save him. But he finds himself unable to do anything at all. Simply because he is nothing at all. Only a juvenile soul lingering in this purgatory of blank sheets and emptiness.
It’s like that for a moment, until a moment that passes like a whirlwind of electric blues and sharp tingles against his vulnerable soul. And within mere seconds, everything feels gray, metallic, but most of all– empty.
He’s just a boy, a boy who thought he could conquer the supernatural powers with his warm heart and a willing mind, and god was he wrong, so terribly wrong. They’ve overdone themselves with this idea, truly, he and his brother with the weakening despair that rained down on them since their mother fell out in the yard, unable to get back up, to breathe again with life. They thought for so long, so hard, sought out a teacher and made plans and got their calculations, wrote them down and had them right, but god, they were so wrong. And now all they have to do is figure out how to make it right.
