Chapter Text
Edward Elric had a system.
First, he arrived to Central University's chemistry building twelve minutes before each and every lecture. It was early enough that he was able to claim his unofficial spot. Second row, third seat from the left, which put him at angle where he could directly read Professor Marcoh’s lips clearly without straining his neck. Second, when possible, he always chose a seat where he could sit with his back to the wall. That way, he didn’t miss anything coming from behind him.
That was just the start to his complex system, it was layered and built off years of learning how to navigate the world while being deaf.
He always assessed a room before settling in: how loud it was, how much echo, and whether or not the background noise would overwhelm his cochlear implants processors' ability to filter speech.
When a room was too loud or too reverberant, the processor struggled to separate voices from everything else, and what came through smeared into noise he couldn't use. While he was use to it, it didn’t make it any less annoying.
He had a system, and the system worked, and he had not needed anyone's help in a very long time.
That was important to him.
Maybe the most important thing to him.
Independence, not needing anyone’s help.
Something he had worked very hard to gain. Now, here starting his second year at Central City University, he was finally where he wanted to be. He finally had that independence he desperately craved while growing up, to move as he wanted to without needing an aid or his brother to help him.
He could thank his cochlear implants for much of that independence. Once the hearing aids failed and he switched to them - it was life changing for him. Even though they had their own quirks, he wouldn’t change it. They gave him the freedom he craved, sounds he once could only dream were flowing through his ears again.
The processors came off every night before bed, which was just maintenance. Charging them every night, giving his brain a rest from the constant work of processing sound. Sometimes they came off during the day too, but it was more rare. Only when things got to be too much, when the noise was wrong and overwhelming him, or the day had worn him down and he needed the world to go quiet. He'd been doing that since he was a kid. When he took them off at home, he put them on the refrigerator. Always on the fridge, in the same spot each time, so that Al and Winry knew without having to ask. It was a system within the system. It meant ‘I need quiet right now’ or ‘don't worry, I just need a break’. They never had to say any of that out loud, no words needed between the three of them most of the time. Growing up alongside him, they just learned what to watch for.
"You're going to spill that," Alphonse said, signing it at the same time, hands moving alongside his words the way they always did when it was the two of them. He motioned to the travel coffee mug that Ed was balancing on his knee while simultaneously flipping through his organic chemistry notes.
"I'm not going to spill it." Ed said with more bite to it than he intended, and he signed it too. His hands moving freely alongside him as he spoke.
"You said that last Tuesday." Al said with a smug grin, remembering how well it had gone for Ed last time.
"Last Tuesday was different." Ed replied with an eye roll, clearly annoyed with Al.
"Brother, it was the exact same situation." Al said, signing it with dramatic flare as he moved, “And you remember how well that went.”
Ed rolled his eyes, "Just drop it, Al."
Al's mouth moved, lips pressing flat together like he was trying to stop himself from saying something. He knew he was right, and that Ed was three seconds away from spilling coffee all over himself and his notes, but he chose to drop it. He gave Ed that knowing look he’d had his entire life, the one Ed had found annoying since they were toddlers.
They sat together outside the science building, bathed in the thin September sunlight. Central was stuck between seasons, like it hadn't made up its mind about autumn. It hadn't fully committed to the changing seasons and still gave little bits of summer lingering in the air. Around them, students moved in the complicated choreography of the first week of the fall semester. Backpacks, coffee cups, textbooks and the silent mouths of conversations Ed couldn't track.
Ed was used to it, the visual noise of a crowd moving around him. He had learned when he was young to let it become background noise, despite how distracting it could be. He did his best to ignore it, let it fall to the wayside and just move about him.
What he hadn't gotten used to yet, what was still catching him off guard his second year here - the sheer size of the campus. Resembool had been a small, sleepy town out in the countryside. Not the charming, picturesque kind of small that people in cities romanticized and watched movies about. It was just small and suffocating and everyone knew everyone. Which meant everyone knew about Ed and his disability. It also meant that Ed had experienced the particular kind of cruelty that came from familiarity, and it had many years to sharpen itself into something precise.
Here in Central, he was nobody.
Here, he was just some who was studying chemistry and used different ways to communicate. Someone who wore two small processors hooked over his ears, that connected to magnets on his head. Who sometimes spoke in a voice that he knew, he had heard it on recordings, came out flat and slightly wrong in ways he couldn't fully control. He had lost most of his hearing by the time he was seven, all of it by age eight. The years of speech therapy had gotten him to a functional area, stopped somewhere just short of being natural.
Central University had a larger Deaf community than anywhere Ed had ever lived. It wasn’t huge, and they did not have a dedicated program or anything. But the community was large enough that ASL was woven into the campus in small ways that mattered. They had professors who actually signed, an interpreter pool that didn't require three weeks of advance notice, and a student body large enough that nobody turned around to stare when Ed signed to Al across the dining hall. Ed had picked this school partly for the chemistry department and partly for its ASL community. He hadn't told anyone the second reason because it wasn't something he wanted to explain. He just wanted to be a regular student, to blend in. He had spent fourteen years in Resembool being a very specific kind of target and he was done with it. He was ready for a change, and he was happy to have left that small, sleepy town.
His voice was the thing people reacted to.
Not always, and not everyone, but enough that Ed had learned to treat it as something to be carefully distributed. Growing up, kids in Resembool had been the worst about it. Winry had punched a boy in kindergarten for making sounds back at Ed. She was five years old and had done it without hesitation, and then spent the next twenty minutes crying in the principal's office. Which was when Ed had understood that she was angrier about it than he was. It hadn't stopped there. By the time they were in third grade, Winry had fought enough kids that there was a specific look teachers gave her when they saw Ed being hassled. It was a bracing expression, because they knew what was coming next. Al had been smaller then, too young to do much to help. But by the time they were in middle school, he'd caught up and developed a different approach. He didn't use fists like Winry, instead he used words. If someone was giving Ed trouble, he would walk over and say something very quietly. Something that Ed could never lip-read, the words spoken too quickly. Whatever Al said, it usually worked and they stopped whatever they were doing. It didn't always work, it wasn't foolproof, because kids were kids and some of them decided the attention was worth it. Most of them didn't, mainly because they found Al and Winry too scary to deal with.
Growing up, as the years passed by, Ed built a system brick by brick.
With people he knew well, mostly family like Al and Winry or anyone who had earned it, his voice was just his voice. He used it freely around those he trusted. Imperfect and functional, not something he managed when he felt safe. With strangers out in public, things like ordering food or buying things, he pointed or wrote or gestured. Whatever got the message across without the exposure and kept the interaction short. At school, when he was in class with professors who signed he would also sign. Many of the professors at Central University either signed or knew enough of it to follow. It was clean, it was functional. It meant he could ask a question or answer one without spending anything he didn't have to spend. If they didn't sign, he would use a notebook to write out his questions. It wasn't quite as seamless as signing, but it got the hob done. He had options for how he wanted to communicate, and that's what mattered most to him.
Nobody here knew him well enough to make it weird. He flew under the radar and mostly kept to himself, and didn't bother much trying to meet new people. Back in Resembol, he had learned early on that friends didn't really fit in his system.
Al and Winry were enough for him, and that's all he needed.
"Winry texted," Al said, signing it simultaneously. "Late again, her lab ran over."
"Obviously." Ed said with a sigh.
"She also says, and I quote, 'tell Ed that instant noodles don't count as a food group.'” Al said, stifling a laugh as he read the text aloud.
Ed looked down at his travel mug, which contained some instant coffee he'd made this morning. He groaned, Winry was always nagging him about what he ate. It started when they came to Central University together last year, Al stuck finishing his senior year at home. 'Al's not here to watch you, so it's my job!' she told him, and while she had always taken care of him growing up - it took a new form in college. He hadn't planned on her following him to Central, but it didn't surprise him in the least bit. Al and Winry were so protective of him, especially Winry. It was because of her they got the apartment off campus, and with all the accommodations she added to help Ed live independently.
"Tell her," Ed started, "I had a balanced meal." His hands moved with the words without him thinking about it.
Al gave him a look, the one that said he knew exactly what a 'balanced meal' meant with Edward and he was mentally deciding whether it was worth the argument. Ultimately deciding against it, he stood up and shouldered his bag. Al was taller than Ed by almost a head, he had shot up at fifteen and never stopped, which Ed found extremely annoying. Al moved with the unhurried ease of someone who didn't have a system. He moved through life easily, he never had to calculate the angle of every room he walked into. He never had to rely on reading someone lips, or have to worry how echos in a lecture hall would impact his notes.
Sometimes, Ed envied him for that.
How life was so easy for him, how people didn't find Al to be too much to handle.
"I’ve got anatomy in twenty minutes." Al announced, "You good to get to lab on your own?" He asked, and he meant it with genuine care, even though Ed found it irritating. Sometimes it was like their roles were reversed, and Al was the big brother watching out for him.
"Yes." Ed said with a groan, signing it in a hurried way. He was here for an entire year without Al, and he made it by just fine. Al didn't need to fret over him, he didn't want him to. Al did that all throughout their childhood, watching out for him. But they were adults now, and Ed didn't need him to still fret and worry so much.
Al frowned a little, "But the east corridor lighting-"
"I know about the east corridor.” Ed stressed, giving Al a pointed look, “I'll go around."
"I wasn't going to-" Al countered, quick.
"Al."
Al held up both hands, the universal sign for he’d drop it. But he paused for a moment before he left, briefly dropped a hand on Ed's shoulder, just for a second. Something he had done since they were small, back when words were lost between them and the only way they could communicate was by touch. It was for just a moment, and then he was gone. Absorbed into the foot traffic crossing the quad.
Ed watched as he hurried off to class, waiting until he could not longer see him across the quad.
He thought about Al, seven years old, sitting in a doctor's office for one of Ed's follow up appointments post surgery. They were data logging and seeing how volumes levels were for Ed, and how his brain was adapting to the cochlear implants. Their Mother was in the chair beside Ed, holding his hand. Al was in the next chair, watching intently. Not fidgeting or looking away, but watching with that focused careful attention Al always had, like he was memorizing it. On the way home, Al had pressed his face against the car window and said very seriously to his own reflection, ‘I want to do that someday, I want to help kids like Ed’. He had said it in such a serious way, like it was something he had already decided and wasn't wondering aloud about it. Just, announcing a fact about his own future. He had decided that at seven years old, and he hadn't wavered from it since.
Now, he was starting his freshmen year and working on making that future a reality.
Back then, Ed had told him that was stupid. But then he had gone quiet for the rest of the drive. Their mom had reached back and squeezed his knee and he'd heard it, her voice. Telling him to be nice to his brother, and that she thought Al's idea to help kids was great. It was slightly different through the processors, not quite like how he remembered from before. But it was hers.
Unmistakably hers, and he didn’t know yet just how few years he had left of that.
Ed packed up his notes and headed for the chemistry building.
Twelve minutes early.
Right on schedule.
Ed was rounding the corner of the Hartmann building's north wing, the long way around because the east corridor lighting was bad and he'd learned that the hard way. When all of a sudden, he collided hard with someone going the other direction.
Ed’s coffee went one way, his notes went another. He would have gone a third if a hand hadn't caught his arm and steadied him.
"—careful—"
The word was half-muffled by ambient noise, and Ed only caught the tail end of the lip movement. He steadied himself, quickly pulled his arm free, and looked up.
The person who'd caught him was tall. Annoyingly tall, as if height were something people chose specifically to inconvenience him. With black hair and dark eyes currently surveying the scattered pages of Ed's notes with mild concern. He wore a jacket slightly too nice for a university hallway and had the kind of face that registered as handsome with the same immediate certainty as a mathematical proof, which Ed resented on principle.
The man looked at Ed, then at the notes, then back at Ed, and his mouth moved.
Ed caught some of what he was saying, "—sorry, I wasn't.. are you—" and then something he missed.
"Fine," Ed said, two syllables, clipped.
His voice in his own ears was what it always was, flat and slightly effortful, produced with more deliberateness than it looked. Ed hated the way it came out around strangers. But it was faster than anything else, and right now he wanted to be gone.
"Watch where you're going." Ed said, voice flat and with a little more malice than he intended.
The man blinked. Something shifted in his expression, not pity, not the discomfort some people got, just a quiet recognition. He crouched down and started gathering Ed's notes without making anything of it. Ed crouched too, not to be polite, but because his notes were numbered and he didn't trust a stranger to sort them correctly. The man handed over each page in order, which meant he'd noticed they were numbered. Ed filed that observation away without comment.
"I'm very sorry." the man said. He'd slowed down some, not the exaggerated mouthing that people sometimes defaulted to, just a natural shift. Careful without being condescending. Ed took the last of his notes and stood.
He left before anything else could happen.
He didn't look back, he had a system to follow.
Roy Mustang stood in the hallway for a moment after the blond left.
He was going to be late for his seminar.
But, he was also still holding the last page of someone else's notes. He was about to hand the page over when the blond had already turned and walked away.
He looked down at the page to examine it, hoping to get a hint about how to return it. Organic synthesis mechanism, written in neat pencil and filling up the entire page. At the bottom, there was number indicating it was part of a set. He set it on top of his own notes and started walking.
When he looked up from the collision, he noticed the processors sticking out against bright blond hair. He recognized them right away, he been spending so much time at audiology appointments with Maes he was familiar with hearing devices now. He adjusted his speech with really deciding to, slowed down some and made sure his face was readable. It had felt like the right thing to do, not a calculation. What was harder to set aside was the other part, the way the gorgeous blond he had collided into acted. How he had sorted through his notes efficiently while barely even looking at Roy. His flat careful voice that wasn't cold but not exactly friendly. The way he had angled himself to read Roy's face, before running off before Roy was able to say anything else.
Something about it, it stuck with him.
Roy made it to his seminar with forty-five seconds to spare. The room was already full, as most students at least attempted to get to class on time this early in the school year. Riza was in the second row, as always, and had saved the seat beside her for him, as always. She then looked up at him with the particular expression she reserved for when he was cutting it close.
"You were almost late," Riza said, not quite quietly enough. Next to her Havoc was grinning, glad Riza was scolding someone besides him.
“Just fashionably late.” Roy replied with ease as he sat down, settled his bag before opening his notebook.
"What happened?" Riza asked with something that resembled concern, “You usually aren’t running late.”
"Nothing, just ran into someone." Roy said, and he thought again about the gorgeous blond with golden eyes and numbered notes.
She looked at him for a moment, searching his face for something. Roy avoided her gaze, instead he looked at the board, where the professor was already writing. Riza rolled her eyes, then went back to her notes.
The seminar started, Roy got his pen out and wrote the date at the top of the page. He then spent approximately fifty percent of the next two hours trying not to think about the person who walked away from him before he could ask their name.
At some point he shifted his notebook and the stray page of organic synthesis, neat pencil and very clearly not his, slid halfway out from between his own notes. Roy tucked it back in without comment, trying his hardest to actually focus on the lecture.
Besides him, Riza said nothing.
But he was aware, in the peripheral way he was aware of most things, that she had seen it. She had that quality, noticing everything without announcing. He'd known her since seventh grade and she had never once stopped doing it.
She didn't ask about it.
Roy was grateful for that.
Ed noticed it right away in his lecture.
He was twelve minutes early, settled into his favorite seat, notes open and ready to go. When he flipped to page fourteen he instead, found page thirteen and then page fifteen with nothing in between. He went back through the stack, checked again.
Page fourteen was not there.
The collision.
Obviously.
Ed let out a sigh that more resembled a groan, he’d been in too much of a hurry to count.
He wrote at the top of page thirteen: p.14 MISSING, rewrite tonight. Then he put the cap back on his pen. It was annoying. It would take an hour to rewrite, maybe less. He knew the mechanism; he'd just have to sit down and re-derive it. He sighed, this was fine. Not a disaster, just annoying.
He watched Professor Marcoh start writing on the board and let his mind settle back into the lecture.
What came back, intermittently, wasn't really the missing page. It was more the guy from the collision. The way he'd slowed down when he spoke, not the exaggerated performance some people did where every syllable got its own moment, just a natural half-step back. Almost like he'd registered something and adjusted without making a thing of it. Ed had noticed, of course. He usually noticed everything. Most people either didn't register anything at all or went too far the other direction, mouthing at him like he was very far away. This had been neither.
He filed it away and went back to Marcoh.
The thing people didn't understand about Ed's deafness, the thing he'd stopped trying to explain by the time he was ten, was that he remembered hearing.
Not well, not completely.
The memories had the soft, imprecise quality of things from early childhood, more texture than detail. He remembered the sound of rain on the roof of the house in Resembool. He remembered his mother singing, though he couldn't reproduce the melody even in his head anymore. He remembered the particular creak of the third stair and the way Al used to call his name from another room, high and clear, before Ed had learned to watch for him instead.
He had been four when he got sick.
It had started as an ear infection, both ears at once, which his mother had taken him to the doctor for. The doctor had prescribed antibiotics and sent them home, and for a few days it seemed like it was working. But then, all of sudden it wasn't. The fever came back higher than before, and then climbed higher. Ed remembered, in the fragmentary sensory way of very early childhood and hazy, lying on the couch under a blanket in the middle of the afternoon feeling wrong in a way he didn't have words for. His head hurt so badly he couldn't lift it, his neck hurt, everything hurt. He remembered his mother's hand on his forehead, soft and gentle. Her face going still in a way that frightened him more than the pain did.
The drive to the hospital was something he remembered in bits and pieces. Being put in the car seat, the streetlights going past the window, his mother's voice tight and fast on her phone but he didn’t know who she was talking to. He remembered the hospital being very bright and very loud and people moving around him quickly in a way that made everything worse. He remembered a needle and crying and his mother's face right next to his saying something he couldn't make out through the noise, and then a long blank space. He stayed in that long, blank space for what felt like forever.
What the doctors told his mother, what she told Ed years later in pieces when he was old enough to understand, was that the bacteria from the ear infections had spread. Crossed into his meninges, bacterial meningitis. Severe enough that there had been a point, somewhere in the first forty-eight hours, where they were not sure if he’d make it through.
He had almost died, and was subsequently in a medically induced coma for a week.
During the week he was floating in that blank space of the coma, they had preformed the first surgery to drain the infection in his ears. It was what saved his life, but it wasn't the only surgery he had.
He understood this as a fact but not quite as a reality, the way you understood things that had happened to a version of you too young to have processed them. Too young for it all to be painful or scary.
He somewhat remembered the second surgery, where they cut the infected bone cells out from behind his ears. It had left a visible scar, that later on would be cut open again for his cochlear implants. Now hidden behind long blond strands.
He had been in the hospital for over three weeks, nearly a month. Al and Winry hadn't been allowed to visit, too young, too much risk of exposure because they weren’t sure if it was the contagious kind. Ed remembered with the specific ache of a four-year-old's logic not understanding why they weren't there. He wanted them there, he missed them. He'd asked for Al, probably a thousand times. His mother had told him later that she had to call Pinako Rockbell every day with updates, and that Al and Winry had stood by the phone for every single call.
His mother had slept in the chair beside his bed every night. He remembered that very clearly. Not her face exactly, but the shape of her there. Always there, every time he woke up frightened and disoriented. The feeling of her hand finding his in the dark, soft and warm. How she made him feel safe through all the scary parts of that month. The surgeries to remove the infection, the physical therapy because he had forgotten how to walk, all the tubes he was hooked up to. The bandages wrapped all around his head, how everything was just weird. At the time, he didn't even have the bandwidth to register how he couldn't hear.
She must have been terrified. He understood that now as an adult, in a way he hadn't been able to at four. She had sat in that room with her sick child and managed her fear somewhere he couldn't see it. She had been calm and steady and present every single time he needed her to be. He didn't know how she'd done it, he suspected he would never fully know or understand.
Ed went home with heavy white bandages wrapped around his head and a PICC line still in his arm. It was taped under a padded red cast that traveled up his arm, silicone tubes snaked around his upper arm, traveling inside his shoulder and dipping underneath his collarbone to lead the medicine straight to his heart. It was to protect the tubes, so that nothing would hurt it while he played or anything. He remembered how strange it felt, the weight of it, and the way it caught on his blankets at night. Most of all, Ed remembered Al standing in the doorway of his bedroom when they brought him home. Al who had been waiting for him to come home for weeks, who had been so patient, suddenly going very still at the sight of him.
Al had been scared.
He hadn't known how to say so, he was barely three years old. Ed was his older brother, and Ed had been gone for almost a month. Only to come back looking weak and different with all kinds of bandages and tubes hooked up to him, their mother hovering over him. Al had stood in the doorway for a long moment and then ran off to his room without saying anything, and Ed had been too exhausted to understand why.
It was their mother who had explained it to him later, that night in bed as she was tucking him in. Al was scared of hurting him, he thought the cast and bandages meant Ed would break.
It had taken almost a week of Ed being home, being in the same space and Al watching from a cautious distance. But one day, Al had climbed into Ed's bed one morning without asking and carefully pressed his small face against Ed's shoulder and stayed there. Ed had put his good arm around him, and Al snuggled in as close as he could without hurting him. They didn’t talk about it, they didn’t need to.
Winry had come over the first Saturday after Ed got home, and she had taken one look at him from across the living room and burst into tears. Not quiet tears, but the full gulping four-year-old variety, completely uncontrolled. Her grandmother had tried to comfort her and Winry had cried even harder. Ed had been so alarmed that he'd forgotten to feel bad for himself.
He didn't remember going back to preschool that year, because he never ended going back. By the time he was well enough to leave the house, the school year was almost over. That’s when everything felt muffled and wrong and exhausting to navigate. Ed wasn't ready, and nobody pushed him.
Because that was the other thing, the hearing.
In the hospital, coming in and out of sleep, he'd noticed that things were quieter than they should have been. He'd thought for a while that it was the medicine, or the room, or something temporary. Ed asked his mother why everything sounded far away and she'd said, gently, that the doctors were keeping an eye on it.
At home it became undeniable. Sounds he'd always known, the television, the kitchen, Al's voice from another room, were muffled now, like he was hearing it through water. Some things were gone entirely. Ed kept turning his head, trying to find angles where things came in more clearly.
He remembered being frightened in a way that was different from the hospital fear. The hospital fear had been large and immediate. This fear was smaller and constant, a steady low-grade wrongness that followed him from room to room. He didn't have the words for it, he was just four years old. He just knew that something had been taken out of the world and he didn't know if it was coming back.
His mother had sat with him through that too. She hadn't pretended it was fine. She'd sat next to him on the bed and said, “Something happened to your ears when you were sick. Your hearing isn't the same.” And then she'd waited for his questions, however many there were, and answered every one.
He'd asked, “Will it come back?”
His Mother just smiled gently at him, warm and comforting like always, and said, “We don't know yet, but we're going to figure out what helps.”
That was how she'd been about all of it. Not falsely bright, not devastated, not making it bigger or smaller than it was. Just steady. Here. We will figure out what helps.
Ed had not understood until he was much older what it must have cost her to be that steady.
For a while after, he'd still had something.
A narrow frequency window. Sounds loud enough or low enough to register as vibration more than hearing. But enough that regular hearing aids helped. Ed spent several years with them. Calibrating, learning to read lips alongside the partial signal, building the layered system of attention that he'd carried ever since.
By age seven, it was mostly gone.
By age eight, it was gone entirely.
The cochlear implant surgery had happened two weeks before his ninth birthday. After the hearing loss became total they had to move quickly, as there was a risk that the cochlea could ossify after meningitis. Scar tissue forming around the structures the electrodes needed to reach, and the window for successful implantation could close. There had been imaging and assessments and an evaluation period that had felt, to an eight-year-old, extremely long but medically had been fast. They had to act fast, so they did bilateral cochlear implant surgery. A different wing of the hospital, a different kind of fear, older and more aware. Ed remembered it all very clearly. He remembered the smell and the weight of the surgical gown, his mother holding both his hands while the anesthesiologist explained what was going to happen. He remembered Al in the waiting room, seven years old and old enough to be there this time. Sitting for five hours with a library book he hadn't opened, and how their Mother had told him about it afterward.
Ed remembered waking up after the surgery, fully deaf in a way he had never experienced. He remembered the bandages and the disorientation. The month after surgery where he couldn't wear any hearing device while he healed. They had taken out the parts the hearing aids used, so they were useless. That left him with a month with no sound at all, and he remembered that in a crystal clear way. How isolating it felt to have no hearing, something he had never experienced. Because he wasn't born deaf and the meningitis didn't leave him fully deaf either, his deafness was something that grew over years. Those weeks, even with his family fluent in sign language - they were lonely.
Then, after that long quiet month...
Finally, came the activation day for his cochlear implants. Something Ed wasn't dreading and wasn't exactly excited for, it was more complicated than that. More than anything, he was just ready to have some form of sound again. It wasn't like the viral videos he'd see online, and he knew it wouldn't be like that. After all, he could still communicate with his family - they had been fluent in ASL for years now.
For him, activation day was like gaining something back that he had lost.
'Are you nervous, Ed?' His Mother signed to him in the waiting room, her signs were warm and comforting. She moved delicately as she signed, and it reminded Ed of her soft voice from when he was little.
'No, I just want sound back.' Ed signed back to her, his motions big as he signed. His ASL teacher had always told him he had his own flare for each word.
Al played on the floor next to them with other kids. He was seven and a half years old and always finding friends anytime they came to the audiologist. Signing with all the other kids easily, the littlest kids always seemed to gravitate to him most.
He remembered sitting in the audiologists office, his feet kicking underneath the table in anticipation. The cochlear implants sitting in front of him on the table, they were black and shined under the office lights. Completely different from what his hearing aids were like, his hearing aids sitting next to the cochlear implants. Bright candy red devices, so much thinner than the new devices. They looked so much smaller than his new devices, and without thinking his hands came up to his head, fingers finding the spot where they had surgically implanted magnets inside. Vividly, he remembered worrying what the kids at school would say. They were already mean enough, but now they had a big visual target to tease Ed about.
He would always remember when he heard something for the first time after a month of total silence. It was his most vivid memory of childhood, with sharp edges and complicated feelings.
The audiologists fingers were cold against his skin.
They were checking the scar behind his ears, he had explained to Ed. The cochlear implant surgery once again cut open the skin behind his ears, and he wondered if operating on the same place twice would leave big scars. He'd have to ask his Mom. He hoped it didn't make the scars bigger, he didn't need the kids at school to have more fuel for bullying. Maybe he'd grow his hair long to hide them... Winry had long hair and they were the same age, he could say they were really twins now if they both had long blond hair. He felt the doctors' thumb run along each scar, searching for the receiver they had place during the surgery. They had put a magnet and a receiver in his skull during the surgery. That way they could use electrodes to send signals to his auditory nerve and he could hear again. He moved so Ed could read his lips, "How does it feel, does it hurt when I press on it?" He said slowly, so Ed could read his lips.
Ed shook his head, 'No, it feels fine.' He signed.
Dr. Denny Bosch, his audiologist he had been seeing for years, Ed liked him well enough. He smiled at Ed's words, and then he was talking to his Mother again, and he wasn't speaking as quickly so Ed caught a few words here and there. Something about he was healed from surgery, activation... without all the words Ed couldn't quite make sense of it all.
'Alright Ed, you ready to turn them on?" Dr. Bosch signed to him, and Ed nodded and gave a thumbs up.
He vaguely remembered being in this exact room four years ago. Back when he was little and they fitted him for his hearing aids. Back then, they distracted him with toys that made noise, the appointment was more fun than intimidating. Now, his knees bounced under the table as the audiologist helped show his Mom how to place the devices on his head. Dr. Bosch's fingers cold as he pushed the magnets up on his head, he felt the moment the magnets connected. It was weird, like a pull as they snapped on. With both of them on, they felt heavy against his head. The magnets snug like a tight headband, then the weighted feeling behind his ears as they tucked the processing units in place. His head lolled back slightly at the new sensations, it was more than he thought it would be.
'Shake your head,' Dr. Bosch signed, and Ed looked at him confused, 'I need to see if the magnet is too strong or too weak.'
Ed nodded in understanding, and he quickly shook his head back and forth. The magnets stayed in place, not moving but also not too tight against his skin.
A tap at the table, Ed looked up at Dr. Bosch. 'How do they feel?' He signed, eyes sharp and attentive. He had a thin cord in hand that he was attaching to his computer, it was also connected to each processor on Ed's head.
'Heavy.' Ed signed, holding his head up with more force than needed.
Dr. Bosch nodded in understanding, 'You'll get use to it.' He signed, then he turned to his Mother and started speaking. He spoke too quickly for Ed to read his lips, which he assumed was intentional. He then rolled over to his computer, looking up at Ed again 'Time to turn them on, tell me when you hear something.' He signed.
Next to him, Ed's Mother grabbed his hand and squeezed. Al sat on the other side of him, watching the doctor with intense focus.
It wasn't hard for Ed to focus when he couldn't hear anything. He had been told multiple times what this part would be like, it would be long. They needed to build a custom map for him, using a computer program they would see how his nerves responded to electricity. Dr. Bosch would use the computer program to send fast, electrical pulses through the electrodes. The computer program would flag if their were any electrodes blocked by solid bone growth from the meningitis he had at four. That was just the first test, then they'd move to the threshold test, where Dr. Bosch would would have the computer send electronic pulse to the first active electrode.
Dr. Bosch looked at him from across the table, he looked excited - a wide grin on his face. 'Tell me when you hear a beep, Ed.' He signed, and you could tell days like today were his favorite.
Al and his Mother looked like they were on the edge of their seats, looking at Ed with rapt attention.
Ed closed his eyes, focusing on if anything came through. It had been four weeks without sound, twenty eight days of total silence. He was confident he wouldn't miss if sound came through, but he was afraid - because what if the surgery didn't work?
But then, suddenly…
A tiny beep.
Soft, if he hadn't been immersed in total silence for the last month he may have missed it.
His eyes flew open, and he turned to his Mother with a wide smile on his face. 'Sound! I heard something!' He signed rapidly, excitement coursing through his veins. He turned quick back to Dr. Bosch, 'Beep, I heard a beep!' He signed to him.
Dr. Bosch beamed, 'Alright! Let's keep going!'
After that, further testing to increase more electrical currents for every single electrode. It was long, and took up most of the appointment. Then came more testing, sending various pitches to Ed to make sure the electrodes weren't sending anything they shouldn't to Ed's facial nerves. It was long, and Ed's brain was getting tired, when finally - Dr. Bosch signed what Ed had been waiting for.
'Ed, I am going to turn on the microphone now, ok?' He signed. He was still sitting in front of the computer, his hand holding the computer mouse carefully.
Ed looked up at him, eyes wide as he excitedly nodded. He had been waiting for twenty eight days, and all he wanted to hear was his family again.
Dr. Bosch nodded, and clicked on the mouse.
Ed closed his eyes again, not really even thinking about it. His Mother's hand grabbing his once again, Al grabbing his other hand. They both squeezed, a silent show of support.
Sound, rushing in like floodgates opening with a river rushing through. That intense silence he had experience for the last month completely gone. But nothing sounded like he remembered from before, instead it was like high pitched chirping and a robotic buzz. Ed's eyes flew open, and without even thinking he ripped his hands out free and they flew up to his ears to cover them. All the noises flooding it, it was overwhelming and almost too much. To go from no sound to hearing everything, but it all sounded like zaps and beeps.
A gentle tap at his arm, and he turned to his Mother. Her lips were moving…
"Bz, bzz bzz bzzz bz."
Ed just looked at her, trying to make sense of what was happening. His Mother smiled, her lips started moving again - but this time she signed as she spoke.
'Ed, I am talking. Can you hear my voice?'
"Bz, Bz bz bzzzzz. Bzz bzz bzzz bz bzzzz."
Ed watched her lips, and her hands, and realized that the rhythmic robotic buzz sound matched her mouth as it moved.
He… he had heard her voice again.
It sounded different, almost scary. But he had heard her voice again.
He almost felt like crying, but he wasn't going to do that here in the office. Not where everyone could see him.
'Yes!' He signed to her, and smiled.
After that came a little more testing, Al talking to him. His voice was different from their Mother's, more like a high pitched chirp. Then Dr. Bosch showed him everything that went with the cochlear implants, the case and it's charger. He explained how Ed should take care of them, and then he talked to their Mother about what she needed to do. Of course, they'd be back tomorrow for a follow up and more test that needed to be done. Mapping and calibration would continue for weeks. Before they left, Dr. Bosch got down on Ed's level to talk with him.
'Ed,' He signed, 'Your brain is going to work on turning the robot noises back into real words.' He explained carefully, his signs slow and intentional, 'But you have to keep them on as long as you can, that way your brain will learn faster.' He paused for a moment, making sure Ed was following, 'When your brain gets tired, turn them off.'
After that came careful weeks of mapping and calibration for the cochlear implants. The audiologist adjusting frequencies while Ed tried to explain what he was hearing and the language for it kept failing him. He remembered the first time a sound came in clear and natural for the first time through the processor, he'd cried without meaning to. Not exactly from joy, but from something more complicated - the recognition of something he'd almost forgotten, changed almost beyond recognition, coming back.
The processors were not his ears, he knew that. The external processor picked up sound and converted it to a digital signal. Which the transmitter coil sent through the skin to the internal implant, it then sent electrical impulses to the electrodes in his cochlea, which stimulated the auditory nerve, and sent signals to the brain. Ed understood the science of it all, loved it and thought it was fascinating. His brain had learned, over years of auditory training and practice, to interpret those signals as something close to natural hearing. Close, but not identical. Music came in flatter. Certain voices smeared in reverberant spaces. Background noise was a constant negotiation.
But he could hear.
Imperfectly. With effort. More than he'd been able to at eight, and he had never once taken that for granted.
Ed also remembered what it had felt like before any of it, those first four years when the world had simply had sound in it, and that memory sat in him like a compass point. Not grief exactly, just orientation. The knowledge of what had been lost, what had been rebuilt and how much of both he carried.
He thought about it sometimes when he was in a new place, the automatic sweep he'd been running for years.
Most people never noticed.
That was, generally, the point.