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It began as another boring day at school—the teacher set them to drilling multiplication tables up to twelve, but Winry had mastered those ages ago, and so she had tucked herself in the back row with one of her parents’ books on automail and the schoolhouse’s biggest dictionary to look up terms she didn’t know. The Elrics seemed to be occupied with a project of their own, as Ed picked fewer fights with the teacher than usual and neither of them disturbed her own reading. However this changed when they let out for the day, and they shifted their buzzing energy to focus on her.
“We have a surprise to show you when we get home,” Ed announced to her as they packed their bags and set off from the schoolhouse together. Al, trailing a step behind him, nodded enthusiastically to confirm, and then they clammed up and refused to say more about it, though they seemed ready to vibrate out of their own skins with excitement. The only solution was to race them all the way to Aunt Trisha’s house.
They arrived ten breathless minutes later (Winry eked out a close victory) to Trisha pinning the day’s laundry on the clotheslines in front of the house. They rushed past with a jumbled greeting—“Hi mom school was good we’ll be down for chores in a minute”—and ran to the boys’ bedroom.
Winry stood to the side and watched curiously as Al cleared a space on the floor. Ed dragged a spare blanket and large roll of paper from a hiding spot behind his bed and unfurled it to reveal a complicated circular diagram, which Al arranged the blanket in the center of. They spent a minute checking it over carefully, then turned with looks of anticipation to Winry. “Watch this!”
As one, the boys pressed their palms to the circle and focused intently. For a second nothing happened, then bright sparks began arcing around the circle and the blanket—shifted. It pulsed in uncanny, jittery movements, like a puppet on tangled strings, and Winry cried out in alarm amid the crackling of static. The material in the circle continued to rear up into a vaguely humanoid shape—until the door crashed open and startled them all.
“Just what are you three do—Oh!” Trisha drew up short in the doorway. Winry would never forget the quick flood of emotions that played across her face—shock, confusion, wistful exasperation. In the middle, something like joy.
Then she spotted Winry shrinking back in fear, and turned to businesslike Authority Mode. “Ed, Al, outside NOW,” she barked. “Finish hanging the laundry and wait for me at the side of the house. We’ll discuss this after I make sure Winry’s okay.” They scrambled to comply.
Trisha knelt down beside Winry and began to wipe away tears with the corner of her apron. “Shh, it’s all right now,” she comforted. “Look, it’s stopped.” And indeed the circle and it's contents had become entirely inert. Winry tried to pull herself together and put on a brave face.
“You understand what this was?” Trisha asked her.
“Yeah, alchemy." Once she got over her initial fear, Winry put it together quickly. She had seen demonstrations from Ed and Al’s dad when she was very small.
“Smart girl! We appear to have a trio of geniuses on our hands.” Trisha sighed to herself and rubbed her nose. “I can’t believe they managed a successful transmutation like this, or—” she and Winry examined the half-formed doll that had been taking shape from the mass of blanket fibers. “Nearly managed. Though that doesn’t change that they should have explained what they were doing rather than surprise you like that. Let’s go get their apology and head to your house early, I’m sure Pinako wants to see this.”
Sure enough, Granny was delighted by the story of the day, and once she’d rebuked the boys for scaring Winry (“We know! We already apologized!”) she asked for a demonstration. Now that Winry knew what to expect, the sparks, noise, and not-quite-lifelike movements of the transmutation weren’t scary, but actually rather fascinating. The end result was much cleaner this time, too, with the equivalent of stitching for eyes and mouth giving it a passably doll-like face.
“Nice work, boys!” Pinako cackled. “When did your father teach you this?”
The question drew a furious scowl from Ed and a guilty wince from Al. “How could that bastard teach us anything if he isn’t even here!” Ed retorted. Pinako’s useless reprimand of “language!” nearly drowned out Al’s apologetic clarification: “We read some of his books.”
“I’m amazed you figured all that out on your own,” Trisha soothed, a proud smile tugging the corner of her mouth. “I can hardly wait to see what you'll accomplish with more practice. Though in the future, keep us informed about what you're planning."
"And let us help!" Winry chimed in. "I want to learn with you guys."
It became a group project, studying alchemy together after school. Sometimes when she had enough free time Trisha would join them, showing them the few alchemy arrays she’d learned from Hohenheim or helping them make sense of the complex and archaically worded treatises. Or helping Winry, at least. The boys seemed to take to the art with frankly unfair alacrity—though Winry told herself it was mostly because they weren’t dividing their attention three ways between alchemy, biology, and mechanics like she was.
When her parents died, Winry threw herself into her automail studies to cope. Whether it was to maintain some connection to her parents, however tenuous, or simply to bury her grief in something productive, was something that she couldn’t answer and didn’t bother to interrogate too deeply. Regardless, the result was that she withdrew entirely from alchemy studies, and spent a lot less time at the Elrics' house. She wasn’t even aware of Trisha’s worsening condition until the woman was on her deathbed.
And with everything that happened after… alchemy didn’t fade from her life, exactly, but it became very much the Elrics’ thing. They shut themselves up in their house with their father’s books, while she did the same with Granny’s tools and her parents' library. They chased down a teacher in faraway parts of the country, while she designed her first original linkages and began to help Granny with patient checkups. They nearly got themselves killed on that horrible, stormy night, and in between the confusion and utter terror at nearly losing two more of the people she loved, Winry took strength from the fact that she did help. Her studying and training had paid off in saving her best friend's life.
And she never forgot it entirely. One day after everything, when the Elrics had been recuperating in Resembool for nearly a month, and Ed was out on an errand, she approached Al with an idea. “Remember when you and Ed scared me with that doll transmutation? The first one you ever showed me. Do you think you can help me figure out the circle again?”
He caught on to her plan immediately, and with anticipatory gleam in his eye he helped her sketch out the old circle and supervised a practice transmutation. When Ed returned home they were ready for him in the front room, Al leaning back in his cushioned chair and Winry standing at the table, array prepared with a pile of dish towels in the middle.
“Hey Ed, watch this!”