It started with a girl.
A girl who was ripped from her world and dropped into mine. On my dorm room doorstep. That's how we found her, scared, lost and alone. Brought here for reasons we couldn't fathom until much later. She woke and looked up at me, horrified when she realized she didn't know me. I thought she had come from another part of Amestris. I thought she had come through the Gate, and I was so excited.
But that idea was crushed. She wasn't from inside the Gate. She was from 'Vancouver, Canada.' Where ever the hell that is. I still don't know. It didn't matter, because she couldn't help Al and I get our bodies back and I hated that she couldn't. I was stuck with the responsibility of getting her home.
All we did was fight with each other for weeks. She was angry that she was stuck with me, and vice versa. I hated how she couldn't do one simple transmutation, and she couldn't understand why I had no idea what she was talking about. Spanish, is that the other language she spoke? French Revolution, World Wars I and II, Dominion Lands Act… What were they? Can't she get her mind out of her damned world and into ours!?
No.
I realize this as she finds me in the back of the library after one of our many fights and calls a truce. It is the first time that I realize how out of place she must be. It annoys me a little further, but I stick to our arrangement and I do my best to work with her rather than against her.
Somehow word got to Envy about our guest. He took her. I didn't know how I truly felt about her until he did that. I remember the rage that boiled through me when I found her cell phone lying on the floor of the train station. I remember how I wanted to make Envy suffer for taking her.
I remember I wanted to get her back, protect her. So I did.
I found out she was sick and I was scared she would die. I spent two days by her hospital bed, not wanting to leave. I was so angry. Because of what Envy had done, because she hadn't told Al and I that she was sick, because there was nothing I could do but wait until she woke up. I screamed at her when she finally did. And then I held her.
I vowed to keep her safe from then own. We travelled from doctor to doctor trying to figure out what we could do to keep her alive. We couldn't find anyone who could help her and we couldn't find a way to get her home. In a moment of weakness she cried on my shoulder.
And all that I hadn't known I felt came out and I kissed her.
I told her that I wanted her and much to my delight, she wanted me too. But she couldn't have me because she couldn't stay. She had to go home. No amount of kissing, begging and pleading would convince her otherwise. She had to return to her family, her world.
We found the circle that would take her there, the most surprising circle. One last tussle with Envy found us in the restricted section of Central's library, drawing out a rushed array with Al fending off that homunculus pain in the ass. And we were by ourselves. I kissed her goodbye, clapped and put my hands to the circle.
The transmutation failed.
She died in my arms.
Two months and I still can't get her out of my head.