Nina and Alexander

Every other page on this site is about her father. This one isn't, and it's the shortest one, because there wasn't time for it to be long.

She was four years old. She lived in a house that was much too large for the number of people left in it, in rooms that had stopped being cleaned, with a father who was almost always behind a door. None of that seems to have registered with her as sadness. She had the run of the place and a dog the size of a piece of furniture, and by every account she was cheerful about it.

Alexander was enormous, white, and slow-moving, and he went where she went. Most of what is remembered about her involves him — the two of them crossing a room together, her losing an argument with him about something, the pair arriving as a single event.

When the Elric brothers came to stay, she asked them to play. She asked the next day, and the day after that, and she kept asking while they sat in her father's library reading about the recomposition of human bodies. Eventually one of them put the book down and went outside with her. That is the whole of what she wanted from anybody, and the record shows she had to ask repeatedly to get it.

She trusted her father completely. It is the least bearable detail in the case and the one most often left out of summaries, because it does not describe anything he did. It only describes her.

She was not a stage in anyone's research, and she was not a lesson. The most useful thing an archive can do here is put her name above his, and stop writing before it starts explaining her in terms of what was done to her.