Thank you! I'm very glad you commented -- I honestly wasn't sure anyone who'd see this would be likely to read FMA, except for Boni. I suppose I should look into cleaning it up and finding an FMA fic community to post in.

I do love the brothers. And I wanted to explain to my own satisfaction why *Al* seemed to feel so guilty about Ed's injuries; the reverse made perfect sense to me, perhaps partly because I'm an older sibling myself, but Al's response wasn't one that I immediately got, on an emotional level.