Soldier Keep On Marching On

Swan Song

And you know I found the dust to be resilient
And we're the dirtiest of the dirt
Every time we fall to pieces
We build something new out of the hurt
And we can never come back to earth
To earth, to earth, to earth, to earth
We can never come back to earth, to earth, to earth

**********

There are certain moments in a person's life that shapes them into who or what they are meant to be; changing their lives but never their destiny. For some it's meeting a person, others find that it's losing a person of great importance to them. It might be gaining a job, finding out your wife is pregnant. Hell, it might even be that the stray you picked up belonged to a wealthy man who rewarded you. In fairy tales, it's the knight slaying the dragon and saving the princess, the princess is cursed until her true love saves her, and so on and so forth.

Each person's life in a timeline is constantly shifting and morphing and twisting and turning. He didn't meet her, she didn't stop to help him, they didn't do this, they didn't do that... Whatever happens in the story always leads to the same ending. It doesn't matter how much the trail a person follows breaks away to start anew, or how many times the roads to their destiny are abandoned. The outcome is forever the same.

However... there are some instances where this is not entirely true. When some lives haven't been lived to the fullest, or have somehow -  someway met an unfavorable end, measures are taken to correct the mistakes. Time is unwound, roads are broken and rerouted, and destinies are rewritten.

Truth isn't supposed to favor one human above the rest and while normally this would be true, he does have a certain soft spot for those special few in Amestris. Perhaps it was because things happened that shouldn't have - the unfavorable ending, or maybe they were just amusing to him. Whatever the case, things had gone wrong.

The Elric brothers had been brought together but their family was too far away and there would be no chance of return. That Curtis woman died of her injuries and while that was far from abnormal, something didn't sit right with the omnipotent being. Van Hohenheim died at the hands of Envy and while that was a cruel justice for an immortal being of his crimes, something could have been better. Mustang had been cut off from those he trusted and suffered in silence, half-blind and alone in the cold winters of the North. Even the homunculi were off base in their own rights.

Then Truth grinned and without much effort, rewrote time and the destinies belonging to it. He let loose time and watched as events unfolded, new stories were forged, and roads paved. When it was all said and done the being was indeed happier with the newer and more favorable ending. 

But even gods grew bored. Truth wanted to see what would happen if he did this or that, but he didn't want to lose what was already there. So he created what humans would call the Multiverse; a place where anything could happen and may have already happened. Small variants in time creating new and diverse roads. Completely alike yet vastly diverse.

The Amestrians didn't know or care what their lives had once been. All that mattered was their present and future.

However it wasn't like that for one soldier. Roy Mustang had watched as Aiden Wilson tried to attack Selim Bradley and the Fuhrer, Pride and Wrath, only to end up with a shadow through her gut. And then suddenly he was in that white void with that thing that only grinned at him before he was grabbed by several black hands - the kind that took Fullmetal - and dragged him through a gate.

There was no time to process anything when he felt so overwhelmed. They were in the middle of a coup, his best friend was alive, he was forced to commit human transmutation, and Aiden was...