Chapter Text
Rory woke up with a pounding in her head and an ache in her ear. Oh, right, she'd lost a piece of that. She probably needed to get that checked out as soon as she figured out where she was. She groaned and put her hands in front of herself, pushing herself up with a wince. And she needed to get her hands checked out too, while she was at it. Actually, considering everything she had been through in the past day, she probably needed to get everything checked out, if she was being honest.
Her thoughts trailed off as she looked around and took in her surroundings.
She was still just standing in the rubble of the Elric house, burned pieces of furniture and collapsed bricks around her. She frowned and sucked in a breath. Wait, but where was... She spun and looked back to where her dad had been before.
He wasn't there.
Her mind spun with a moment of panic. Where could he have gone, missing an arm and with a crushed automail leg, anyway? How could he have even managed to get away in the first place?
And then something drifted back into her memory. Truth. Hadn't it said something about how if she wanted to buy time for her dad, then she needed to pay in time? So maybe... Maybe she had just managed to buy an hour or two of time, and in return, she had... What, exactly? Traded away a few years of her life? But then her dad would still be there. Had she gone into a coma for a bit? No, then she would be waking up in a hospital or something.
Maybe... It seemed like a far shot, but maybe she had been spit a couple weeks into the future or something. Maybe that was why her dad wasn't there, because help had found him and he was somewhere safe, recovering.
That had to be it. He would have been worried while she had been away, but it would be fine now.
She tried to take a few calming breaths as she picked her way out from the rubble. She really looked like a mess, covered in blood, and her blond braid coming undone around her shoulders. She no longer had her dad's coat to keep warm, and she was definitely feeling it as the wind danced over her arms. She could only imagine how Granny would freak out when she suddenly showed up on her doorstep, but at least Rory was capable of walking on her own two legs and not just bleeding to death in the rubble of the house.
Still, the thought that she had actually managed to travel through time boggled her mind a little. Her dad had mentioned something in the story of his adventures about trading a few years of his life away in order to heal himself from a really bad wound, but that was the closest she could think of to what she had done. She had managed to trade some of her time for enough time to make sure her father lived. It was almost unthinkable. She couldn't wait to tell him all about it, how she had managed to find this brand-new path all on her own.
She shoved her hands into her pockets, closing her right hand around the watch she had stashed away in the chaos. The transmutation had definitely worked. He was definitely fine. She was going to find him, and yell at him for scaring her so bad, and then give him back his watch. And they would laugh and have a couple cups of hot cocoa, and it would all be over.
"Hey! What're you doing up there? That's not a playground, you know!"
A voice snapped Rory out of her thoughts, and she rolled her eyes, prepared to shout back a retort of that it was her own house anyway, and gee, the next time I end up kidnapped by bad guys, I'll make sure to keep in mind that they don't leave me somewhere dangerous.
But all the words she had been thinking of suddenly flew out of her head when she looked up from the ground, down the hill, and her eyes connected with none other than the angry face of her dad. Except he wasn't her dad. At least, not the dad she knew.
He was a teenager, just like her, his red coat and blond braid whipping in the breeze.
"Aces," Rory muttered under her breath.