CP 4.4 - How Kagayaku Emiya Became Shiro Emiya's Hero
Shiro did not remember much from before the great Fuyuki Fire. She knew that deep down it had happened, but she couldn't remember -or didn't want to remember- anything about it. She wasn't particularly happy or unhappy about not remembering, but the only thing she cherished was that smile, which Kiritsugu Emiya had given her.
It was the smile of a hero. It was the smile she had most desperately wanted for herself because such a smile, it could only be formed by someone who could save a life, by a Hero of Justice.
Her brother had other thoughts. "That's stupid," he would say. "Give a parched man water, and he will gladly smile with a higher intensity. Make a fun joke, and children will laugh and smile."
Shiro didn't think her brother understood what she meant with 'the smile belonging to a Hero', but he simply scoffed and replied with a mere, "You do not have enough life experience, Shiro. See many things, gaze at many more, and one day you'll realize you've been living in a tiny pool of knowledge, whereas the ocean is just across a small stretch of sand."
She didn't think her brother could have much more 'life experience' than her. They were the same age -even though he would briskly announce to be older by virtue of being wiser- and so, whenever she pointed that out, he'd reply that reading would help.
Only, she had never seen him with a book in his hands.
Yet, her brother was a welcomed addition to her everyday life. He did things even when she didn't ask. He skipped school even when he shouldn't have. He took care of bullies even when he really shouldn't have. He cared, and he noticed, every single detail.
Hiding something from him was like trying to hold water in one's hands. It was impossible. Kiritsugu would answer her questions, but Kagayaku would answer her reasons for asking the question. Kiritsugu would tell her that the answer to two plus two would make four, Kagayaku would tell her that if she was asking because she couldn't answer the last question, he'd gladly tutor her.
Frankly, she had started to believe that all older brothers acted like that, but some of her classmates -who had older brothers- said that they were prats, or noisy and smelly, or pulled their pigtails and made jeers and sneers at them.
Kagayaku never pulled her hair.
He always looked at her, during recess and during class, scrutinizing her moves so much it felt as if it was his natural duty as an older brother to do so.
When a girl stole her pencils, he would stand up.
He would glare, and the pencils would be returned.
He had this way of acting that made everyone else quiet. He spoke, and the rest would fall in line. She had no idea how. She had no idea why. Yet, it was something that bothered her. Kagayaku was her same age, but he was wiser, closer to her dream of being a Hero than she would ever be. Closer to that smile than she would ever be.
It was unfair, but she began to ignore him.
He didn't bother with it. When she returned home alone the first day, he merely shrugged and dismissed the issue. When she left early in the morning, he didn't bother.
To Shiro, it felt as if what he was doing didn't mean anything, if he wasn't going to fight for it.
Kiritsugu would disappear for long period of times, and Kagayaku would take care of dinners -she had no idea what he ate at breakfast, or what he packed for his lunch- but his dinners were always European.
He would smile as he served portions fit to a small army, and that smile was truly happy.
It was the sort of unfair smile that she couldn't reproduce.
"Your problem," he would say sometimes, "Is that you think you can see yourself smile."
Her problem was that her brother was unfair.
He should have been a prat, a pigtail-pulling older brother who would sling mud at her pretty clothes, and most certainly not iron them out so well that even Taiga had no choice but to quietly hand over her own uniforms for ironing -and later on, her clothes as well.
Her brother should have gone 'icky!' at the sight of girls, and not simply shake his head at his fellow graders' escapes from the cooties.
Her brother was strange.
"I'm not strange," he would reply when asked. "I'm just not going to bother with needless things."
He didn't have friends, not that he wanted or sought them out. She went out with her classmates when asked, and her brother would politely tag along if asked, but would simply smile and engage in conversation only if pushed inside it, always staying on his own otherwise.
"Hip and cool is how I roll, Shiro," he would say. "Hip and cool and filled with happy fluffy thoughts," he would add with a smile. And then, he would pat her head.
The first time he had done so, she had frozen like a deer caught in the headlights. He had smiled, grinned, or maybe his lips had twitched upwards. His hand had come down on her head with a hearty pat-pat that hadn't been the strong one of Grandpa Raiga or the shaky clasp of Kiritsugu.
It had been a simple thing. A double tap on her head, something that had been accompanied by the ruffling of her hair. It was a gesture that reeked of familiarity, and that had been done before without a doubt.
"Now now," he would say, "A headpatter does not reveal his secrets. You're my little sister, so you get headpats. When you'll be old and wrinkly, I'll still give you headpats. I am the Headpatter, he who headpats in the night. None can refuse them, for they cannot be refused!"
He would chuckle, and then resume doing whatever it was he was doing before being interrupted.
Other children would tantrum, but he wouldn't. Well, neither would she, but she had no right to tantrum -she had lived, and countless thousand others hadn't.
Kiritsugu had died, and her brother hadn't cried. She couldn't hold back her tears, but he did not cry. He held the umbrella since it rained on the day he was buried, but no tears escaped his eyes. The next morning, he prepared breakfast for her and took a cup of something for himself.
She didn't know what he and Grandpa Raiga talked of, but Taiga became a most famous addition to their house.
When Taiga spoke of how Kagayaku's breakfast consisted of coffee, and how coffee was bad for his health, Shiro connected the dots.
Kiritsugu had died. Her brother could die too. Her brother shouldn't drink coffee if he didn't want to die. So, if he drank coffee, it meant he wanted to die. Or maybe he didn't care about his life. Whatever the reason, she found the thought impossible to accept.
She was the one who had no worth as a human being, not him. She was the one who would have gladly sacrificed her happiness for the sake of others, not him. He had no right to be that person.
He had no right to take that away from her.
So she had cried, made the cup fall on the ground, and on that day, for a brief instant, she had seen something in her brother's eyes that she hadn't thought possible.
It wasn't anger.
It wasn't fury. It wasn't hatred or any other emotion that she could easily understand.
It was pity.
Her brother pitied her. He, who should have by all accounts been angry, or saddened, or furious or anything...he wasn't sad about himself, but was pitying her. He was sad about her. He was sad for her.
Taiga didn't understand, because she wasn't like him, like her, she wasn't someone different. She hadn't suffered through the fire like they had.
Her brother could understand her thoughts because he shared them. That had to be the reason. Her brother knew, and because he knew, he was stealing her dream away from her.
It wasn't her dream to begin with, but she wanted it to be hers.
She was still young.
She still needed a reason to live.
"Live life for life's sake," her brother would tell her, "to be happy is to live, to live is to be happy. We wake up in the morning because some thought, or lingering hope, makes us wake up. Those who have nothing to live, truly nothing, waste away and die."
He would shake his head, pat her head -and she would swat away the hand angrily- and then he would remark on 'adolescence' and walk off to the kitchen to prepare dinner.
Shiro stole the preparation of lunch from him. She stole the preparation of dinner. She took over cleaning the house. She did it because he was stealing her dream, so it was only fair she stole it back.
If he was closer than her in becoming a Hero, then it had to be because he did those things.
When she found work -after having begged Raiga- he immediately followed her. No, rather than just follow her, he did more than plead. He absolutely refused to do anything else. He even decided he would work for free. He would give no justification, but deep down, Shiro thought that maybe he couldn't stand being in the house alone.
So, when they both began to work for the Master of Copenhagen, she realized his eyes weren't fixed on her, but on the coffee machine.
It was a bitter thought, to think that her brother had fought hard just to be closer to 'coffee'. He worked flawlessly, from the very first day he was better than her, and yet his smile was not the usual one he would deliver with his headpats -which she would still angrily refuse.
It was then that Shiro realized her brother was very good at hiding his emotions. It wasn't that he didn't have any, but his thoughts, his real thoughts, weren't easy to perceive. He would religiously clean the coffee machine with the utmost care, as if transfixed by its inner mechanisms, but would otherwise hold the same look while dealing with the homework -even though not a single line would be written.
He would skip school to do things she couldn't understand, and yet his grades wouldn't slip -except Japanese literature, because he apparently disliked it with a passion.
She took up archery at school, and if she had to be honest with herself, she was pretty good at it. She missed only once, because she didn't want to give her brother the satisfaction of watching her succeed only to receive a headpat. She didn't want that, so she purposefully missed the only shot he came to watch.
He simply smiled, understood -how could he, did he learn how to read minds- and then left shortly after.
Shinji stopped bothering her, a fierce beating forcing him to walk for the next few days in a strange way. When asked who could do such a thing, he would reply with angry snarls, trying his hardest to hide his shame.
Her brother's bruised knuckles -of course she would notice it, because she always noticed it when her brother came back home with something different from normal- were evident. She didn't say a word, but once more, she felt as if her brother had surpassed her yet again on the road of being a hero.
He had yet to fail. He had yet to fall. He had yet to be badly wounded. He seemed to always know what to say or do, and no matter the hurdle, he overcame it. It felt a bit like he was naturally cheating, but she couldn't help but feel that it was fine, as long as he used that power for justice.
But there was a coldness to him that she could hardly place. It was the coldness that made him capable of staring down their professors, it was the coldness that made him bow only to those he deemed worthy of respect. It was the coldness that made him a troublesome student, and yet that coldness would disappear, replaced with a smile and a nod in order to prevent people from having a way to pinpoint his true character.
He'd gladly clean the classroom, and help out during self-study times, but he would also beat to near death students from other schools.
Shiro kept a close watch on her brother. It would be unacceptable if something happened to him -he had been stealing her dream, and she was stealing it back. If he disappeared with her dream, how was she going to ever get it back?
It was a day like any others.
They were both serving customers, and she was about to prepare one more cup of coffee. The machine fizzled for a bit, and in front of Shiro's eyes, it suddenly gave out a high-pitched whine.
She didn't understand what was going on until she found herself engulfed by a pair of firm arms that pushed her down as the coffeemaker -a big and bulky one- exploded, sending the shrapnel in her direction.
The fingers that dug in her hair tightened for a brief moment, her nose burrowed in the smell of coffee beans and gunpowder, her eyes seeing nothing but the black of the Copenhagen Shop uniform.
She faltered when she took a step back, her entire being screaming at her not to look, not to dare look, not to even try to look, but she couldn't do it. She had to look.
And when her eyes stared up, they stared into the very same smile that Kiritsugu had held when saving her from the ruins.
Only, it was Kagayaku Emiya who was smiling at her, having saved her from a bad wound that would prove to leave a nasty scar and take rehabilitation -after the removal of the molten shrapnel from his shoulder.
Kagayaku Emiya was smiling at her like a Hero of Justice would.
Kagayaku Emiya had successfully stolen her dream. He had stolen it, and made it his.
Tears spread out from Shiro's eyes on that day. Tears mixed with her fingers digging into his clothes as she screamed from fright, because she didn't want to lose another hero. She didn't want to lose her brother. She didn't want to lose the one person who had stolen her dream.
"Hush now," he whispered, his left hand gingerly brushing the back of her hair. "It's just a flesh wound." He chuckled.
Blood dripped down his arm left limp by his side, his entire body trembling. Later, they would remark on how proven his entire body had been -and how fast he had acted upon the whistle, making him truly a competitor for the track and field club.
It wasn't just a flesh wound.
She didn't need to be a doctor to know that. The temporary cast they had applied had been on his arm even as she bawled, a nearby passerby taking that as the cue to take a picture. The face she made, the tears in her eyes of that day, she wouldn't have been able to forget them anyway, but the photo itself was, believing Kagayaku, 'adorably cute'.
After a proper cast was made, and a few days had passed, Kagayaku Emiya decided to try his luck with getting a coffee from the Copenhagen shop, but within minutes, she served him tea.
"Not even a coffee for the wounded?" he hummed. "Mah, fine." He chuckled, before grimacing, "At least make the tea an Earl Grey, Shiro. You know I can't stand green tea."
"You still drink it," Shiro replied.
"Because wasting something poured goes against my holy code, but still-coffee or British Tea only."
She smiled, and nodded. "Sure."
She turned, and began to busy herself with washing the dishes. It was in that silence, that Kagayaku Emiya sighed.
"Brother," Shiro asked, "if someone stole something from you," she said, "what would you do?"
"Well, I'd get it back," he replied.
"But what if that something was...something they could use better? What would you do if-"
"Shiro," her brother said, his voice already telling her that he had understood everything, had seen through everything, and had known everything from the very moment she had begun speaking. It was 'his voice'. The voice he made when he explained something to her as if she were a student and he a teacher. "Dreams cannot be stolen, or used better. Dreams can be shared."
She turned, her expression shocked. "But you aren't fit to protect the world," he continued, making her freeze and feel cold inside. Her brother looked at her, and smiled awkwardly. "I'm sorry Shiro, but you aren't strong enough to protect the whole world. And I don't want you to do that. So, I'll do it in your stead."
"But-Brother!" Shiro exclaimed, "you aren't strong either! You barely-"
And here he smiled, and inclined his head to the side.
Shiro faltered. "Brother...can nobody truly save the world?"
"Shiro, do you trust me?" he asked, and his voice was soft and gentle.
She nodded.
"Then trust me," he added. "I'll save it in your stead, in Kiritsugu's stead, in the stead of everyone else. Even if there might be times when you think I'm doing something wrong...even when you think there might be moments where you feel I'm doing something evil, or not doing anything at all...just trust me to do the right thing."
Here he hummed, "Kind of like headpats, actually. In Europe, they're considered a way to let the child know everything will be fine and he's done a good a job, but in Japan they're viewed as patronizing. One action, two different ways of viewing it."
He finished the green tea with a long drawn gulp -as if he was drinking bitter medicine- and then he steeled himself. "So forgive me, Shiro, but the dream of saving the world is a burden I'll take on by myself alone. Think me greedy, or selfish, but I'll save the world."
Shiro nodded, and looked down at the clean plate in her hands. "Then-" Shiro said, "I can have another dream?"
"You can have as many dreams as you wish to have, but the one of saving the world is off-limits. No matter how much you cry, I will not allow you that dream and that dream alone."
Shiro grinned, "Then it's fine."
And with that, she began to hum and pushed the dish back into the rack.
"What did you-"
"Not telling," she mumbled. "A girl needs to have a secret."
"As long as it's not something silly," her brother sighed. She simply chuckled, and proceeded to clean the dishes faster.
A bit of payback was in order.
If her brother had taken her dream and made it his, then she was going to do the same.
She was going to protect her brother. She was going to make sure he would never hurt himself again. She was going to do that because just like her brother had said, dreams could be shared.
And if dreams could be shared, then there could be more than one Hero.
Her brother would be the hero of Justice.
She would become her Brother's Hero.
Just like he had become hers.
