A/N: I own nothing. This is just a short prologue with a self-indulgent premise.
"Back again, Alchemist?" asked the Truth. It looked at her with bright blue eyes and a grin too wide to belong on it's too-human face. She'd liked it better as a generic white outline; this was just disconcerting.
Winry Rockbell was sixteen years old, looking into her own adult face. She'd messed up and she knew it, but she couldn't change what she'd done, not really. All she could do was try her best to fix things.
"I want to try again," she said, in a voice that echoed ever so slightly in the whiteness of the Truth's domain. "The same as before: my body for the chance to go back and do it over. Do we have a deal?"
("Do we have a deal?" she'd asked, half a lifetime ago. She had grown children, she shouldn't have been trying, but Ed had dropped dead one day because he'd used up his life force doing something heroic and stupid, and he deserved better. Al and May would look after them, and Roy and Riza and Elicia and the others, and just this once she'd needed to do something beyond sit on the sidelines. She'd studied for years to understand the array, talking to May and Al and Scar and slogging through dozens of texts, and on her five hundred and thirty-first attempt she'd finally managed to activate it. She'd faced the Truth and laid out her terms, and she refused to go home empty handed. She was going to save her husband, and Elicia's father, and anyone else she could. The least she could do was try.)
The thing wearing her body laughed. "Do you really think things will be different this time? You told me you wanted to save your husband, yet here you are. How many times will you do this?"
(Mustang and Hawkeye were dead. They'd marked her as a sacrifice the day she panicked and killed Scar by clapping (she hadn't meant to, but she'd been trying to protect Ed, and even if she could do alchemy now she had never really studied it, not enough to be precise), and even though Hoenheim had reversed the circle the rest of them hadn't stood a chance, not with Envy and Pride still around, and Wrath stopping their coup. She'd run off in the chaos and everyone had ignored her. She'd fulfilled her purpose as a sacrifice, and she was useless beyond that. As soon as she was out of eyesight, she'd clapped her hands and activated the only circle she'd ever really studied.)
"I'll do it as many times as it takes," she said, glaring at the Truth in challenge. "Will you let me?"
