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Everyone had a soulmate. So Roy was admittedly perplexed as to why he spent the first fourteen years of his life feeling nothing.
His friends would talk about it often. A bruise here, a cut there. Nothing out of the usual just the typical results of childhood roughousing. And for a while Roy assumed his soulmate was dead or otherwise near so. Because how did one go through life with nothing? Not even a papercut to prove you were there?
It didn't all change at fourteen, but that was the age where he began to notice some oddities. Sudden, sharp pain like he'd smacked his hand against a headboard or clipped his ear on a cupboard. And they would happen at random after long stretches of calmness. A girl at the bar suggested an age gap. Suggested that a baby would be safe, but a toddler running around the world would find themselves getting injured when playing. And Roy, because he was an idiot, refused to believe such things. Because he was fourteen and anyone younger than him was a baby and he didn't like babies. He wanted someone older, someone more mature like him. The random bonks and bruises were not because of childish roughhousing, as much as they looked like they were, but perhaps of his future wife learning something enticing? Perhaps she was learning to dance and struggling to keep her balance. Or an equestrian. He would even take a gymnast. What he did not want was some newborn exploring the world as he entered his final years of school. Because he did not want to wait decades to find them.
That hope slowly died as the random bonks because the routine bruising of childish exploration. As he nursed a split lip that accompanied bruises along his back that one might get from rolling down hills. Or the sudden strike of a tiny fist against his cheekbone. Whoever this kid was they were prone towards picking fights and sucked at winning them. Whether pain felt was relative to who received it or to one's own scale of pain would make an interesting research topic. Shame Roy was far more interested in ignoring the whole thing. There were plenty of pretty ladies around who were far more interesting to interact with, and he went from classes to the military to a Major right before the Ishvalan war broke out.
And then he was in the war. Right in the middle of it fending off gunshots, and gorilla fighters. He paid a passing thought to the kid, whoever they were, experiencing their first gunshot wound in the thigh. They were probably young enough that their mom was fretting over them. Did she recognize the pain for what it was? Roy's training could have been mistaken for jungle gym fights, but this would certainly make her question it. Or did she dismiss it as a child being dramatic? Assuming there was a mom at all. Scars didn't appear on the other party. How would she know her child was twisting in the bedsheets because he was shot? And how would she feel knowing, almost without a doubt, that her child was fated to a murderer?
In years time he learned that it didn't matter. He woke up in the middle of the night to an unbearable pain. It felt like his limbs were being ripped off, and he knew, deep down, that this kid had fucked up. That they had done something so stupid it would haunt them both. It seemed like a cruel twist of fate that the day he got back into work after recovering from such an ordeal himself he was assigned to look into rumors of human transmutation in some backwater town of Risembool.
He could recall the broken face of Edward, eleven years old and so beaten up by life. But it was different from the bright eyed young man who sat across from him. To call it a date was a bit presumptuous given the request was just to talk, but they both knew why they were really here. They wouldn't be the first couple fated to be together forever only be the absolute worst for one another. For the world to chew two people up enough that they no longer fit together.
"I don't know why it took me so long to figure it out," Ed said, "in retrospect it was obvious."
"Oh?"
"The eye," Ed reached up to cover his own right eye, "I get phantom pains, even across the gate."
"Really?"
"Yeah, they don't have soulmates like that over there. It's all based off of colors, you see colors when you meet 'em."
"And did you see your colors?"
Ed lightly kicked his ankle, "you know I did."