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The last thing Ed remembered clearly was the blinding pain once he realized he was impaled on a large pipe. He remembered the cold feeling in his chest, quickly followed by blazing, white-hot pain as his brain caught up with the nerves that were on fire or destroyed by the pipe cutting through his torso with the same ease as a fork could be jabbed into pork.
He wasn’t sure how accurate his memory was after that, but he was certain he had heard voices, but the moment he had felt himself move, he couldn’t recall a single thing.
He had been near completely certain he was supposed to be dead. Which was a surprise when he woke up. Dead people didn’t wake up, they just…
Well, he wasn’t sure what dead people did, other than decompose and rot away under the ground, or be picked clean by the local fauna. He wasn’t totally behind the idea of an afterlife, other than the expanse that Truth resided in, but that was the closest he thought was even anything similar to an afterlife, which wasn’t much and seemed to be for alchemists who have committed the greatest taboo in the world of alchemy. That wasn’t much of an afterlife if it was reserved for a small population pool.
Still, he was surprised to know he woke up at all, and he had woken up to a late afternoon light trickling in through shaded windows, with a couple humanoid shapes outlined by the light. It was difficult to see much better than that, and even just blinking was more effort than it was worth. He shut his eyes with a breathy sigh, the sensation of breathing suddenly difficult.
“Careful, son,” an unfamiliar voice said firmly, a voice that randomly reminded him of Winry’s dad, even if he could barely remember the man when he and his wife had gone to Ishval. “Shit… We should have kept you asleep, don’t move much, okay?”
It was a concerted effort to scrunch his eyebrows together, but Ed managed the facial movement enough to convey what he would normally speak. If speaking didn’t feel like a monumental challenge at the moment when all he wanted was to drift away peacefully, but he also now needed to know what the man was telling him.
“Your wounds are still in a delicate situation,” the voice answered the unspoken question. “Your, uh, companions had almost lost you a few times before they brought you to us. You lost so much blood from wherever you had been, and we had barely enough stock to bring you back from the brink.”
It made sense, Ed understood the basic premise that the man was telling him, but it also felt like the words were shapeless, coming through one ear and out the other without making a stop to the brain like it was supposed to.
An itchy sensation crawled up his chest, but Ed’s arms were uncooperative with his brain. Try as he might to ignore the urge to scratch, it only heightened as the man kept talking about his condition, and he only heard how he was ‘lucky to be awake at this moment’ when he finally had the nerves of his organic hand listening to what his brain was instructing it, and he brought his hand up to his chest to relieve the itch.
Only to be met with a much stronger hand grabbing his arm and pulling it away from his chest, from the itch, and it craved relief.
“No! You’ll reopen your wounds!” The man, probably the one restraining his arm, said sternly. “You must not move!”
Ed wanted to argue, he only needed to scratch an itch, he wouldn’t do anything bad like that, honest! But words were impossible at the moment, let alone opening his mouth at all. He could only pinch his brows together and let out a low throaty groan, pathetically pleading.
“Stop, you can’t, kid,” the man continued to move Ed’s arm back to his side, before he made words too fast for Ed to keep up with. All he understood was another name was called, and footsteps approached.
All while he attempted to scratch the damned itch, the man wouldn’t let him, but soon his energy was spent, leaving him breathing harshly through his nose. At least by then, the itching urge had faded, and he relaxed further into the surface he laid on.
Ed had no clue when he had fallen asleep, nor had he any idea when he had woken up. All he knew was that it was a different time of day - probably a different date entirely - and that he could keep his eyes open for longer than before. He was feeling surprisingly well-rested despite his last hazy memories being filled with agony and certainty of death just around the corner.
He looked around the room he was in to see it was a facsimile of a hospital room. It was more of a bedroom having been reconfigured into a medical room, like in the Rockbell’s home for those needing either Winry’s parents or needed automail surgery after her parents died in Ishval. It didn’t give him the same level of dread as hospitals typically did, but it also didn’t give him any intense levels of anything. The last time he felt this high and distant from emotions of any kind was when he was getting the automail port surgery and was pumped full of painkillers just so he was able to sleep for a day or two without howling in pain as his nerves came back to life for the rest of the automail surgeries.
It was, admittedly, a really nice sensation compared to the last memory he had of agony.
He was alone in the room this time around, vaguely aware he had been with people the last time he woke up for a hazy bit.
Maybe it was because of the drugs keeping him from feeling the worse of the pain he was certain his body was supposed to be in, or maybe it was because he was just a dumbass like Winry always thought, but Ed tried sitting up, and the moment he put any sort of pressure on the side of his body he had remembered had been impaled by a pole, something ripped, and the pleasant cloud in his head went murky until he screamed.
He flopped back, now in an uncomfortable angle that stretched his torso and worsened the pain, stealing another scream from his lungs. He barely heard the pounding of feet on the floor, nor the door to his room slamming open, nor the shouts of other people overlapping with his. He heard nothing over the unbearable pain that drowned out the painkillers he had been pumped full of.
In the haze of pain, he felt himself be moved back to a comfortable position before another sensation came over him, and he faded back to the blackness of unconsciousness.
He wouldn’t wake up for a long time after that, kept under long enough to let the wound heal further without risking damage if Ed tried to move again once he woke up. It was the only way he would heal at all.