Al knew how wrong it was the first time he heard it.

The steady drip of an IV; the constant beep beep of a heart monitor; the nonstop hum of the lights.

But he had grown to accept most of those sounds; he had to. He was consistently greeting them on his journey to find the stone. He couldn't ignore them. That would mean he would be ignoring Ed, and that was the one thing Al could never do.

But he really never could get over how wrong it felt to wait for Ed to wake up or give a sign of life from beside another sterile hospital bed.

He would wait and think. Sometimes he would read, though most times he would be too worried to make out the small print common in alchemy texts.

So he sat and waited, sometimes for so long that nurses who came in to check on Ed had to force him out of the room and tell him to eat something and sleep. Al always passed the time by either calling Winry or Mustang, as he couldn't do either task even if he wanted to.

And then once he felt that he had been gone long enough, he would return to the hospital room and wait. Listen to the horrible, inevitable sounds of the IV and the heart monitor.

Every second he wished that he could switch places with Ed, to not have to watch his stoic older brother have to carry all the pain. It was bad enough that Al couldn't feel and share that pain, but he couldn't do anything to stop it, either.

It was always Ed to end up in the hospital; it wasn't really possible for Al to go. And it was always Ed to never complain about it once he did wake up; he would just rip the IV out of his wrist and wave Al off when he insisted that they should stay, that he didn't have to rush himself, that he was really hurt badly this time.

He hated hearing Ed say that he was fine when he so clearly wasn't. Al would wait a whole lifetime for Ed, if that was what it took.

He would wait in that white, sterile room for as long as Ed needed him to, because he knew Ed would have done the same for him.