To throw my two cents into the speculation, "Fundament of the Shining Future" implies that the protagonist of the Fifth Singularity isn't Florence Nightingale, which, fair enough, no surprise to anyone.
Starting from that, this is pure speculation. The title is somewhat similar to the term of "Humanity Foundation Value", which is basically the Watsonian explanation for why different Singularities are rated differently, depending on how off-course the human history would get due to the events inside it. ( which is typical Nasuverse bullshit, considering destruction of France rates only C+ while Francis Drake never starting her circumnavigation is A. She isn't even the first one who did it, why the fuck isn't Magellan the Voyager? Ugh, nevermind. Sucks to be French or Spanish, I guess. )
So, taking that into account, and adding to that "Shining Future", it might be possible that in the Fifth Singularity future would deviate because someone is trying to achieve a utopia maybe by using superpowers, and Chaldea will be cast as villains against the protagonist of he Singularity, which is why it's "Epic Tragedy".
Barring that, the Singularity's hero is Magical Girl Taylor-chan who will help Chaldea defeat the main villain and sacrifice herself by bravely channelling all humanity's hopes and dreams of reversing the incineration into a giant explosion of hope, love and justice. And bees.
So, taking that into account, and adding to that "Shining Future", it might be possible that in the Fifth Singularity future would deviate because someone is trying to achieve a utopia maybe by using superpowers, and Chaldea will be cast as villains against the protagonist of he Singularity, which is why it's "Epic Tragedy".
This story and this chapter brought to you by my wonderful supporters, whose kindness and generosity have made it possible to devote so much of my time and attention to writing, especially Eric, s22132, AbyssalApsu, Mark, Peter Parker, and Alias 2v10. You guys are absolute legends. To show my gratitude, they had the chance to read this and upcoming chapters before the public release. You can find out more HERE.
If you aren't up for that for whatever reason, then you can support the story by leaving a like on the chapters and a comment about what you enjoyed or didn't enjoy.
And now that the shameless plugging is out of the way... Chapter CLXV: Auld Lang Syne
Renée's was not the only present the twins and Nero had picked up while they were in London with Mash, and over the course of the day, they went about delivering each one to all of the people they had found something for.
Romani was surprised but very pleased to receive a first edition copy of A Study in Scarlet, although it was not — to my private relief, because I didn't want to imagine how they might have pulled it off — autographed. Apparently, they had found it in the bookstore where we met Andersen and figured Romani would like it.
I had to admit, I was just the tiniest bit jealous. Mom would have been over the moon to get something like that, and just imagining her reaction was enough to make my heart ache.
To his exasperation, Marcus received a cast iron skillet, as though to tease him that he would never truly escape his duty in the kitchen. Sylvia, by contrast, was given a woolen shawl, for lack of any better ideas what to get her, it seemed. Meuniere was delivered a box of chocolates from downtown London, which he took with a complicated expression on his face. Was he trying to lose weight? I had no idea.
To Da Vinci, they gave one of Victor Frankenstein's research journals, apparently recovered from his mansion — or what was left of it. What, if any, use she might get out of it, only Da Vinci could know, but she seemed delighted all the same.
Every one of the other technicians received something, too, but they were often simple souvenirs, owing to the fact that none of us knew the rest of the staff as well as we maybe should have. Despite that, they all seemed happy to get something, because of course, us Masters weren't the only ones feeling the stuffiness of being stuck in one place day after day.
If it was possible for them to join us for a day out at the beach in Okeanos, I would have suggested it. Unfortunately, all of the people who were Rayshift compatible were either already Masters or still frozen in suspended animation inside their Klein Coffins. The technicians didn't have the luxury of getting out of the facility even through a loophole like that.
Of course, Rika was impulsive, but she wasn't stupid, because the last person to receive a present was Marie, who opened the box given to her with some degree of trepidation and uncertainty, only to discover a selection of gourmet teas — straight from Queen Victoria's personal collection, as Rika told it. She wove a harrowing tale of dodging past the security measures of the palace and picking locks to find the right room with the right set of teas, only for her brother to chime in and tell us that all of the doors had been unlocked and there were no security measures to bypass. Naturally, since there wasn't anyone there to guard it.
Marie found it hard to be angry after that. She tried to be because she felt like she was supposed to be, but she had already delivered her scolding and made her point, so she went easy on them and just reminded them that they needed to ask permission next time instead of going off on their own, no matter what Da Vinci said.
Not to be outdone, Da Vinci called me to her workshop around lunchtime that day to pick up Jackie's bathing suit. I had no idea why I'd been expecting a boring, normal, standard issue one-piece, but what she produced was a tasteful, fairly conservative two-piece, with green and white stripes and cute little frills on the top and bottom. I wasn't even sure I could properly call it a bikini, because it really didn't look like what I imagined when I thought of one.
The costume change for her normal clothes, however, was going to take a little bit longer. I couldn't say I wasn't impatient, because it felt strange to have Jackie walk around in that tattered cloak all the time, but I couldn't exactly let her take it off either.
After all of that, however, things started to go back to normal, or as normal as they ever got at Chaldea. It was a bit weird to have Jackie following me around almost everywhere I went, but somehow or another, she slotted herself into things almost as though she had been there all along. She cheered me on during my morning workouts, ate breakfast every day with relish, took showers with me to clean off the grime and wash her hair, watched silently during my runic lessons with Aífe, and joined in with Mash's swimming lessons in the afternoons.
Even Mordred fit in fairly easily, too. She was a little antsy, of course, because she was waiting for the simulator to be fully fixed so that Servants could cut loose against each other without putting anyone or anything in danger, but she found other ways of occupying her time while she waited, such as those racing games she played with El-Melloi II.
Like that, another five days passed, and before I knew it, it was New Year's Eve. The last day of 2015 had officially arrived, and I had to admit, I was a little proud of how much we'd managed to accomplish already. Five of the eight Singularities had been resolved. Not without problems, not without setbacks, not without close calls, but we'd made it this far and everyone we'd started this with was not only alive and kicking, but still in one piece (if we discounted Marie's few months of an extreme…out of body experience). Six months ago, I might not have believed that was possible, certainly not with what I'd had to work with.
But we'd still done it. We were halfway through our Grand Order and no one had died since the Sabotage.
It turned out that I wasn't the only one in relatively good spirits that day, because the twins seemed keen on celebrating the new year, too.
"I thought…New Year's…was a…big deal…in America, too," Rika told me as she caught her breath after her morning workout. Aífe had apparently decided to push them twice as hard to make up for having a week off after we got back from London, with the additional excuse of working off the cake and all of the good food they'd had over Christmas.
I took a sip of water to cover up the chance to gather my thoughts, and I guess she had something of a point. I had plenty of memories — all of them from before Mom died and Dad fell apart — of going out to see fireworks and then coming home late at night and staying up to watch the ball drop. Often, Emma was there with me, and we had dinner with the Barnes family before we all went out together.
As a girl, I hadn't really understood what we were celebrating, I guess. Just that people went around shouting, "Happy New Year!" at each other and blowing noisemakers like they were trumpets. I still wasn't sure I understood what the big deal was.
"I guess it is," I decided on, "I just never really thought about what everyone was celebrating."
"In Japan," Ritsuka told me haltingly, although he was coping better than his sister, "it's about…new beginnings. Starting…starting over. Leaving everything…everything from the last year behind."
Huh. I guess…that was kind of what it was about in America, too, wasn't it? How many times had I heard the phrase, "New year, new me?" Or all of the stink raised about New Year's resolutions? How so-and-so was going to lose weight, or eat better, or exercise more, or spend more time with family?
At least as many times as I had heard about those same resolutions being broken, I thought with mild amusement.
"Maybe it's not so different, then," I said, and took another sip of water. It never tasted so sweet as after a good workout. "Although I wouldn't say it's the most important holiday in the country either."
"That might have something to do with how much more prominent religion is in the West," Mash said thoughtfully. "It only makes sense that holidays like Christmas and Easter would be more important than New Year's in places where Christianity has a stronger foothold, doesn't it?"
"Yeah, I guess it does."
"Come on, Ritsuka, Rika!" Nero called out as she passed by on her way through another lap. Somehow or another, she'd found a pair of bloomers, a light sweatshirt, and a sweatband and had taken to doing the morning runs with the twins. "Surely that isn't all you have, is it? Mm-mm!"
Rika let out a long, loud, tortured groan.
I left them behind with a chuckle and went to get my shower. After I was washed, dressed, and fed, however, it was time for my own lessons with Aífe in the art of runic magecraft, and it was there that I received some less than welcome news.
"You're plateauing," Aífe told me bluntly.
"What?"
You could do that with a language? A skill, sure, because there was always a limit on how good you could get at anything, but at a language, which was a decent chunk of how runic magecraft worked?
Aífe's lips pursed and she shook her head. "Perhaps that wasn't quite the correct word to use. You are still improving, but your pace has slowed, likely because there is little space for you to safely practice these combinations within the facility itself. The lack of opportunity to experience the results of your efforts has resulted in an inevitable stagnation." She let out a frustrated sigh. "And without my tutelary aspects, the only path forward for you is time and practice."
A sour feeling curdled in my gut. Time and practice could mean months or years, time that we didn't have. "There's nothing we can do?"
She regarded me thoughtfully for a moment with narrowed eyes, and at length, said, "Perhaps in the simulator, there would be space enough for you to practice different combinations and arrays without risking actual damage to yourself or your surroundings, but without the ability of us Servants to accompany you, I wouldn't be able to offer instruction."
So no matter what, how much help she could give me was incredibly limited. The simulator, at least, was a problem that could be fixed, was in the process of being fixed, and one that several people were anxiously waiting on. It looked like I was now going to be one of them, more so than I had been before.
"I'll talk to Da Vinci," I promised her.
After we got as much done as we could, I got lunch with Jackie and the twins, then sent Jackie off with Arash and went to do just that.
It turned out that Da Vinci had been wanting to talk with me, too.
"Oh," she said when I arrived at her workshop. "Well, that's convenient, isn't it? It looks like there's no need for me to send for you now, is there?"
"You wanted to talk to me?" I asked her. "About what?"
Jackie's costume change, or had she made more puppets for me?
"This one also requires the Director's presence, so we'll have to wait for her to arrive," said Da Vinci with a shake of her head. "In the meantime, what was it you wanted to ask me about?"
And just what did we need Marie here to talk about? I had to wonder.
"The simulator, actually," I said, letting it lie for now. I was going to find out soon enough anyway. "I know you've been working on it as much as you can on the side, considering all of the things you have on your plate, but it's starting to become more of an issue now that we have as many Servants around the place as we do."
Da Vinci nodded sagely. "Ah. Yes, it's becoming something of a sticking point, isn't it? With so many famous warriors in one place, it was only natural that they might want to test themselves against one another. If I might be honest," she said lowly, like she was sharing a secret, "I'm frankly surprised that Queen Aífe hasn't yet paid me a visit demanding that I finish fixing it as soon as possible."
I didn't mention that Aífe had taken up reading romance novels as a way to pass the time, and that was probably why she wasn't being so insistent about it. No need to mention it if she didn't want everyone to know. I'd promised her, after all.
"I think the arm wrestling tournament from last week proves that she's not the only one looking forward to it," I said instead.
"Oh, certainly," Da Vinci agreed with a shake of her head. "Unfortunately, there have been so many projects vying for my attention that I haven't been able to give the simulator as much focus as everyone seems to want, so progress has been somewhat slow-going. As important as morale is, there are some projects that are simply more important than others. One happens to be something for which Jackie's new clothes will serve as a bit of a proof of concept," she added. "I think, if that one happens to work out as I hope it will, then everyone will agree it was time well spent."
Something that everyone would be excited about, and giving Jackie a change of clothes was the proof of concept? I tried to imagine what that might be, but nothing particularly incredible came to mind, so I had no idea what she could mean.
But, although Da Vinci had made some questionable decisions before, I trusted her enough to give her the benefit of the doubt. Whatever she was cooking up might not wind up being quite as incredible as she was making it sound, but it would definitely be something we all agreed was worth the time and effort she spent on it, that much I was certain of.
"What does that mean for the simulator, then?" I asked.
She hummed. "Mm, I'm not sure exactly when I'll have it all fixed up and ready for Servants to have fun, but if I had to put an estimate on it…the middle of January, sometime? Before the end of the month, for sure, but a stricter timeline is hard to talk about."
I could see plenty of people getting a bit impatient about that, but another couple of weeks wasn't that much time, all things considered. There had to be some way or another we could let the Servants blow off steam without needing the space for them to safely go all out and start throwing around Noble Phantasms. Maybe an actual wrestling tournament? It was going to need some thought.
Marie chose that moment to arrive, and Da Vinci looked past me to greet her with a respectful, "Director."
"Da Vinci." Marie's eyes flickered to me for a brief moment, then back to Da Vinci. "You finished with the physical, then?"
Physical?
"I have," said Da Vinci. "Between myself and Romani, we know enough about the human body and its functioning to gather more than enough data, and I've gone through all of it myself — double and triple checked it, even, just so that I could be absolutely sure I didn't overlook anything."
"And?"
"What's this about?" I asked them both.
Da Vinci glanced at me, and by way of answering, answered Marie. "And I'm as certain as I can be that the idea itself has merit. It would be possible to extract the Philosopher's Stone from Miss Flamel and use the Elixir made from it to resuscitate…if not all of the currently cryogenically preserved Masters, then at least several key members of Team A."
My heart skipped a beat in my chest. Extracting the Stone from Renée? Was that what Marie had wanted to talk about last week, only to cut herself off and say we would talk about it later?
"Wodime? Akuta? Pharmrsolone? Peperoncino?" Marie asked bluntly.
"All stable enough that we could likely maintain their physical well-being long enough during the thawing process to administer the Elixir to heal their wounds," said Da Vinci. "The idea has merit, Director, as I told you it likely would when you first asked. The stone is not so awkwardly placed inside of Miss Flamel's body that we would have to worry about damaging it when we removed it. However…"
Marie closed her eyes and let out a breath through her nostrils. "Let me guess. Extracting the Stone itself might be enough to kill her."
My shoulders hitched.
"It's too completely integrated into her body to expect the surgery to go without any complications," Da Vinci confirmed. "I'm certain that I could remove it without killing her outright, and it should be well within my capabilities as a magus to preserve her life as long as possible while we make use of the Stone…but I'm not sure that I could reintegrate it without causing longer term problems or endangering her life."
Marie nodded. "I thought so."
"And that's why we won't take the risk," I said, staring at her face, "right?"
Marie's brow scrunched up, and her mouth twisted into a scowl. "What do you take me for? It might not have been directly stated, but we agreed by taking her in that we would look after her! I'm not going to break that promise, implicit or not, just because it's inconvenient, no matter how inconvenient it actually is!"
She sounded indignant and offended at the very idea, and the tension in my shoulders eased. Yeah. For a second there… But no. Even if she was a magus, first and foremost, Marie was a decent person. The young woman who had nearly destroyed herself from the guilt of what had been done to Mash, who still suffered the scars and shouldered a burden that didn't belong to her, who had chosen to save me instead of letting me bleed out on her office chair, that young woman wouldn't have been so callous and cruel as to kill another person simply because her life happened to be inconvenient.
"Of course not, Director," I agreed easily.
"If only Nicolas Flamel had agreed to come back, as well," Da Vinci lamented. "Well. Not that he didn't have a very valid argument against it."
"That's why we're going to scrub every mention of the Philosopher's Stone from the records," Marie said seriously, and then she backtracked. "No, actually, don't. Only alter the records that list Renée Flamel as having the Stone inside of her. Then change the later records to imply that it was stolen by Makiri Zolgen and destroyed when Angrboða was. Make it look like it's gone and we never had it."
"It may not protect her for very long, once it's time for the accounting," Da Vinci warned, "but of course, Director. I'll give it the same treatment I did the part about the King of Mages owing Taylor a favor. As far as our data is concerned, it never happened."
And as long as no one ever had reason to suspect otherwise, there should hopefully be no need to worry about any of the technicians — or Ritsuka and Rika, for that matter — being questioned about it. The Association would have no reason to suspect anything, let alone something like this, or that we would have ever let Renée keep the Stone for herself instead of using it for the betterment of the mission.
"Good!" Marie said.
It wasn't flawless. Like Da Vinci said, it probably wouldn't hold up long under scrutiny, but if it came to that, there had to be somewhere we could hide Renée until everything blew over. Hair dye and a pair of contact lenses could disguise her as a regular technician, if we had to, and we could say that the homunculus, Renée Flamel, had died, then smuggle her out using a dead technician's name before anyone realized what had happened.
"She's in good health, otherwise?" I asked.
"Better than most of the people in this facility," said Da Vinci, "which…in hindsight, perhaps isn't saying much, considering there's only about twenty living humans here. I can at least say that all of her bodily functions are working perfectly — that Philosopher's Stone is certainly the real thing, that's for sure. Just as her father said, she should expect to have a normal human lifespan, although I wouldn't be surprised if she winds up living to a hundred or more."
"Not unusual, for a magus of particular talent," Marie added. "As long as she does nothing else to draw attention to herself, we might actually be able to keep her hidden from those vultures at the Association."
"With any luck," Da Vinci agreed.
With any luck. Personally, I thought we were going to need a contingency plan, but there was plenty of time to come up with ideas for how to keep everything that we wanted under wraps from the Association and the UN under wraps.
Inevitably, some of it would still come out, but at that point, it was a matter of damage control, not secrecy. We'd have to deal with those problems as they came.
As I left Da Vinci's workshop, with the assurances that neither would the Philosopher's Stone inside Renée be taken from her nor would finally fixing the simulator for Servants take longer than a few more weeks, I had to wonder if Romani knew. No, he probably did. Romani was a lot of things, but he wasn't stupid, and Marie was no stranger to keeping secrets, but this wasn't something I expected she would have kept from him.
The entire reason why he wasn't there for that conversation was probably because he had spoken out against the very idea when Marie must have originally brought it up. After what happened to Mash, I couldn't see him condoning it, even if it had been possible to remove the Stone from Renée safely.
There was a bit of a sting to go along with the fact that no one had decided to consult me about the issue before now…but then again, in hindsight, the Stone and its removal was clearly what Marie had been about to bring up last week, and she'd let it drop because, as she said, there wasn't a point in talking about it, about our options, if we didn't even know whether or not it was possible.
I owed her the benefit of enough doubts to let that one go.
With all of that settled for the moment, I headed back to my room and asked Arash to meet me at the pool with Jackie.
It was…cute, watching her learn with Mash, watching Mash help her and gently correct her on the things that Mash herself had already learned in our previous lessons. With Mash's coloration, it was almost like watching a teenager teach her younger sister how to swim, or maybe her younger cousin, and it was a splash of normalcy — no pun intended — when so little of Mash's life had been in any way normal.
Not even the little gremlin blowing on that whistle of his as though crying foul could taint that.
How much of it would remain with Jackie when she went back to the Throne…I didn't know. I wasn't sure I wanted to know. Whatever the answer wound up being, I doubted I would find out for myself, and so it didn't really matter. I'd already decided that I was going to try and make as many happy memories for Jackie as I could so that at least some of them could provide some small comfort to that little girl who would never truly be saved, and I wasn't planning on going back on that.
I'd done plenty of things worthy of recrimination, but…that, I think, was something Mom would have been proud of me for.
After the swimming lesson was over and done with, Jackie and I went back to my room to get cleaned up, and I decided to give Jackie a bit more spoiling by drawing a hot bath for her while we took a quick shower to wash away the chlorine from the pool. By the time she tentatively climbed in and sank down to the bottom, with foamy bubbles floating around like little islands in the steaming sea, the only thing missing was a big, yellow rubber duck.
Another thing to talk to Da Vinci about making. Or to see if someone else was holding onto one who…didn't need it anymore. Hadn't I seen Fou playing with one at some point? I couldn't remember for sure.
It took a few minutes, but eventually, Jackie learned to relax and just enjoy the heat. I wasn't sure that it had the same sort of soothing effect on Servants, whether they could get stiff muscles that soaking could ease and loosen, but I guess it must do something for them, or else Aífe wouldn't have had such a good time at the baths in Rome.
"We've never had a bath before," Jackie told me later as I was drying her off.
"You haven't?" I asked her as though I was in any way surprised.
"Mm-mm." She gave a shake of her head, and little droplets of water splattered over my arms from her not-quite-dry hair. "We never had a mommy or a home, and the rain was too cold to wash off in."
For a moment, sitting there, toweling her dry, I froze and tried to imagine it, how terrible it must have been to spend the entirety of her very short life on the streets of an uncaring, poverty-stricken London. What it must have been like to be a child in a world that pretended she didn't exist and sneered down at her in the rare moments it had to acknowledge she was anything more than a lump of discarded rags. Even the images I conjured up from my experience in the aftermath of Leviathan couldn't possibly have done it justice.
"Well, now you have both," I told her, "and if you want to have a bath every day, you can have a bath every day."
"Mm!" Jackie hummed warmly.
By the time we were both dried and dressed, the dinner hours had officially begun, so we left my room together and made the trek down to the cafeteria, only to discover as we walked in that another, new set of decorations had been plastered to the wall and around the room.
They were not, at least, as extensive as the Christmas decorations had been. No strings of lights above the counter where Emiya served up his food or lines of popcorn hung about, nor was there a tree in the corner with baubles and bulbs hanging from it or festive tablecloths slung over every table. Instead, it was an incredibly simple, if not also incredibly gaudy, sign that hung on either of the far walls that said, "HAPPY NEW YEAR" in bright blue and gold lettering and a digital clock affixed above Emiya's counter — counting down, I realized a second later, to the end of the year.
"Marie's going to throw a fit," I murmured to myself.
"Mommy?" Jackie asked me curiously.
I gave her a smile and reassured her, "It's nothing, Jackie."
There weren't as many people there as there had been for the Christmas party. In fact, at a quick eyeball of the attendees, it was actually just the people who would have been eating at that hour anyway. It was just the presence of some of the Servants — and more would undoubtedly be joining in the next couple of hours, I was willing to bet on that — that made it look like there were more people there than actually were.
The conversations, however, were more lively than usual. It hadn't even been a full week since the Christmas party, but I guess when there were so few universal holidays to celebrate, it made sense to enjoy the ones you could when you could.
Arash waved at us from a table, a large bowl of…some dish I didn't recognize sitting in front of him, and Jackie raised a hand to wave back at him.
Emiya greeted us with a smile as we approached the counter. "Evening, ladies. Up for trying the house special tonight?"
Jackie tilted her head, confused. "House special?"
"Toshikoshi soba," said Emiya. "The traditional Japanese New Year's meal. I thought my Master and Ritsuka might appreciate a little taste of home."
Of course. I really should have expected that.
"What's in it?" I asked.
"Fried shrimp — tempura — buckwheat noodles, soy sauce, and spring onions, plus," he added, "a secret spice mixture of my own creation." He shrugged. "If that's not to your liking, then Renée cooked something a little more Western to suit your tastebuds. I'm not going to force my own traditions on everyone simply because my Master is homesick."
I pursed my lips and thought for a second, then turned to Jackie. "What do you think, Jackie?"
"We want to try it," she told me.
I turned back to Emiya. "Then I guess we'll try it."
He smiled.
"Two bowls of toshikoshi soba, coming right up!"
And he brought out two large bowls that looked just like Arash's, filling them first with noodles and a broth, then soy sauce, a reddish brown paste that had to be his spice mixture, chopped spring onions, and topped it with crispy fried shrimp. He set them on the usual stacked trays, then finished it off with two pairs of chopsticks and handed the trays off to me.
There were no forks or spoons anywhere in sight.
"Enjoy!"
"Thanks."
Back to the usual table we went, and when we sat down, Arash greeted us with a simple, "Happy New Year."
"Happy New Year!" Jackie replied.
"Any good?" I asked him.
He glanced down at his bowl, where only the dregs of the broth remained, and shrugged. "It's different. Can't say I'm used to it, but I can see why it would be such a popular seasonal dish." He offered us a smile, like telling a secret. "If I'm being honest, figuring out the chopsticks was the hardest part."
"Really?" said Jackie, all childish innocence.
A breath huffed out of my nostrils, not quite a laugh and not harsh enough for a snort, and I reached down to take her hand. "Here," I told her, "let me show you."
Lucky for me that I'd eaten enough Thai and Chinese in my life to know how to use them. Not in Brockton, at least not in my teenage years — most of those restaurants were solidly in ABB territory, where Dad would never have let me set foot — but in Chicago, there'd been plenty of nights with the Wards where we'd eaten takeout like that.
As she always had, Jackie took my instruction and corrections like gospel, carefully practicing as I showed her the proper way to use chopsticks, how to grip them, how to use them to grip food, the positioning that let you make the most of your finger strength. I had no idea if it was really the "proper" way of using them, and frankly, I didn't really care all that much.
I was just getting to my own and about to take my first bite when the door whooshed open to admit a quartet of familiar faces.
"Happy New Year!" Rika exclaimed as she stepped inside. And then she stopped, tilted her head back, and sniffed theatrically. "Hey, is that toshikoshi soba I smell?"
"Good nose!" Emiya called over from his counter.
Rika gasped and rushed over, a gigantic smile on her face. Ritsuka and Mash followed her more sedately, smiling at her antics.
A few minutes later, they sat down with us, steaming bowls standing proudly on their plates, and with a pair of "Itadakimasu!" from the twins, broke their chopsticks apart and dug in.
"So good!" Rika moaned immediately. Not for the first time, as though she was having a completely different experience than the rest of us. "It's been so long since I had toshikoshi soba!"
"Exactly one year," her brother remarked, and then went back to his food.
Rika didn't let it faze her. "You can't ruin this for me! Emiya's toshikoshi soba on New Year's Eve…this is paradise!"
"I don't know if I'd go that far, Senpai," said Mash, smiling, "but it is good, isn't it? Like all of Emiya's cooking."
"I cannot say I have ever had something like this before, but it is excellent!" Nero proclaimed.
"I don't know how she's going to survive without that guy," Ritsuka said.
Rika groaned, then slammed a fist against the table. The cups and bowls all rattled. "No! I won't let myself get down! Not today, not with this food!"
Ritsuka and Mash chuckled, and even I couldn't stop myself from smiling a little.
"What do you think, Miss Taylor?" Mash asked me.
What did I think?
"It's good," I settled on. "A bit different, but good."
I wasn't stupid enough to think that most Chinese restaurants in America had anything on an authentic Chinese meal made with traditionally sourced ingredients, but it wasn't so different as to be completely unfamiliar.
Ritsuka looked to Jackie next. "Do you like it, Jackie?"
"Mm!" She nodded her head, slurping up the rest of the noodles in her chopsticks, then chewing and swallowing before she responded. "The only food we've had like it before is Mister Emiya's, but we like it! It's good!"
"An endorsement if ever I've heard one," said Arash with a smile.
As we ate, more people filtered in and out of the cafeteria. Marie and Romani eventually came in, too, and Marie's eyes narrowed at the decorations and she grumbled a little, but ultimately she let it pass.
"As long as it's just for tonight," she muttered as she sat down to join us. Unlike Jackie, Arash, and me, she'd elected for something a little more European. "I can overlook it, just because this is probably why he asked to make a trip to the Septem Singularity earlier today."
"He did?" Mash asked, surprised.
Marie nodded and took a somewhat needlessly savage bite of the slab of cod on her plate. "He said he wanted to make fresh seafood tonight, and unlike some people," she paused to give Rika and Nero a pointed glare, "he actually asked permission!"
"He went to Rome?" Nero gasped. "And he did not think to take me and my best buddy along with him?"
"He stuck to the French coast," said Marie. "He never went anywhere near Rome itself. And he just went there for supplies! He wasn't there to enjoy the scenery!"
Nero looked ready to keep up the argument, so I defused the situation by pointing out, "Your food is getting cold."
Nero gasped again and dug back into her meal with renewed enthusiasm. I had to wonder if Rika had taught her how to use chopsticks or if she was using her absolutely ridiculous Imperial Privilege ability to make up for it — what an utterly and absurdly mundane thing to use such a powerful skill for.
"Well, I'm glad we established that bringing back supplies from these Singularities was even possible," Romani said. He'd chosen to eat the same dish as the rest of us, and was surprisingly adept at using chopsticks. "It makes keeping our stores topped up much less of a concern, and also lets us have fresh food every now and again, too."
He slurped up some noodles, and nearly choked, dropping his mouth open so he could fan it with his other hand. "Owowow! Hawt, hawt!"
What a child he could be sometimes.
As the evening wore on and the big, digital timer slowly crept closer and closer to zero, more and more people made their way into the cafeteria to grab a meal and socialize. El-Melloi II wound up in some sort of in-depth discussion with Sylvia and a few of the other technicians who I knew were magi. Mordred and Jeanne Alter somehow became embroiled in an eating competition and wound up downing several bowls of Emiya's noodles. Somehow or another, we eventually had most of the people still in the facility crowded into the cafeteria.
For a given value of the word 'crowded,' at least. The people we'd lost that day months ago left behind gaping holes, patches of emptiness sitting in-between the islands of activity.
Somewhere along the way, the dinner hours ended and Renée wheeled out a massive cake big enough for everyone to have at least one slice. Like the maid she had dressed as in London, she cut an even slice for everyone and delivered them and a fork to each person, accepting every "thanks" demurely and politely.
She even went so far as to brew cups of tea to wash it down with. Jekyll would have been absolutely delighted.
As midnight drew near, Emiya brought out a stand with a massive TV sat atop it, complete with a DVD player on the shelf below, and while he set it up right beneath the timer, someone started passing around noisemakers, enough for the whole group. Jackie and I both accepted one, and when Jackie looked at it like it was some sort of alien creature, I nudged her, held mine up to my lips, and blew to demonstrate.
I wasn't the only one who thought it was incredibly cute to watch her blow her own with wonder on her face. The sound that squealed out of Rika's mouth could have been mistaken for a mouse dying. And if Jeanne Alter watched us out of the corner of her eye so she could see how it was done? No one else said anything about it, so I didn't either.
Finally, the timer ticked down to fifteen minutes, then ten, and Emiya began to play whatever it was he'd set up. The TV flickered on, and then we all got a spectacular view of Times Square, crowded with cheering people. The camera panned around, taking wide shots of the whole area, and then changed, flickering through closeups of different groups of people as they smiled and waved, dressed in coats and beanies to keep warm. Up in the corner, the date — December 31, 2012 — stood out like a beacon.
"Archival footage I found down in the library," Emiya muttered to us as he took a seat. "Thought it might help set the mood."
It did. The timer crept slowly towards zero, and the closer it got, the quieter the room became until the only sounds came from the TV, and then the people on the screen stopped, too, looking upwards as the camera swiveled towards the jumbotron.
One minute, then thirty seconds, then fifteen, then —
"Nine," the people on the screen chanted, "eight! Seven! Six!"
The numbers on the jumbotron flickered and contorted in time with their chanting.
"Five! Four! Three! Two! One!"
A deep, resonant buzz resounded, and as the people on the screen shouted and cheered, the whole room around me erupted into noise.
"Happy New Year!" the people on the TV screamed, but it was overshadowed by the people in the cafeteria who all shouted, "Happy New Year!"
Rika and Ritsuka blew loudly on their noisemakers, and so did so many of the others. Emiya was one of the few who refrained, just smiling to himself, but Arash got fully into it and blew on his noisemaker just as loudly as the twins did, and so did Jackie, gulping down breath after breath so that she could blow her noisemaker again and again.
"Happy New Year!" the people on the TV kept cheering, and as though they refused to be outdone, the technicians cheered even louder. Nero, who got entirely too swept up in the moment, was the loudest.
I took the opportunity to pull Jackie into my side for a quick hug, and I was rewarded with her looking up at me just in time to blow her noisemaker right in my face.
Marie was one of the few people not really participating. She stared at the screen with a complicated expression on her face, like she didn't know how to feel about it all, like she didn't know whether she was allowed to celebrate with the rest of us or had to be the stern director she had gone to so much effort to present herself as.
I leaned over to her, reached out, and gave her hand a gentle squeeze. "Happy New Year, Marie," I told her quietly.
The mournful, bittersweet melody of Auld Lang Syne hummed in the background.
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
Too many holidays all bundled up one right after the other.
Now we start to move forward a little bit more, and next chapter, we keep jumping. There's going to be a lot of those to account for the fact that America isn't going to start until, like, March in-story. The twins and Taylor have a lot of downtime to look forward to, which will...probably mean some more vacation shenanigans and stuff and at least one more training session in the simulator.
For now, though, some setup (it will be very obvious what that is) and some fluff (because everyone seems to love Jackie and Taylor being a Totally Normal Family).
Aha! The sister is right for once! They've been fitting a lot of "extra time" in the Singularities where weeks could pass in hours. By this point they've probably racked up a good couple months longer than a year.
Aha! The sister is right for once! They've been fitting a lot of "extra time" in the Singularities where weeks could pass in hours. By this point they've probably racked up a good couple months longer than a year.
Cue that Reddit post where they calculated that if Fujimaru was telling the truth about not being of drinking age yet that one time, with all the time that passed between then and the start of the story, Fujimaru was a toddler when Grand Order started.
Cue that Reddit post where they calculated that if Fujimaru was telling the truth about not being of drinking age yet that one time, with all the time that passed between then and the start of the story, Fujimaru was a toddler when Grand Order started.
To be fair she was more or less tricked into shooting Aster, she was given a prophecy that really made it seem like shooting the infant was the correct decision, the problem was everyone who knew what would cause the end of the world ended up telling nobody about it, leading to a bunch of bad choices Taylor shooting Aster was just one of them, Saint nearly killed Dragon leading to many more deaths.
To be fair she was more or less tricked into shooting Aster, she was given a prophecy that really made it seem like shooting the infant was the correct decision, the problem was everyone who knew what would cause the end of the world ended up telling nobody about it, leading to a bunch of bad choices Taylor shooting Aster was just one of them, Saint nearly killed Dragon leading to many more deaths.
In all fairness Aster being the potential vector through which Jack sets off the End Times was extraneous justification for killing her on the spot. There was sufficient cause just from the fact The Slaughterhouse Nine-Thousand had her, and there was virtually no chance of recovering her from them before Bonesaw or Greyboy happened to her. Either of those two, and really most of the S9's roster, constitute a much worse fate than a mere gunshot death.
In all fairness Aster being the potential vector through which Jack sets off the End Times was extraneous justification for killing her on the spot. There was sufficient cause just from the fact The Slaughterhouse Nine-Thousand had her, and there was virtually no chance of recovering her from them before Bonesaw or Greyboy happened to her. Either of those two, and really most of the S9's roster, constitute a much worse fate than a mere gunshot death.
Indeed. I mean her own mum, who levelled buildings to get her back from CPS, took one look at Aster's situation and promptly threw her out the window, because better dead than S9'ed.
*does the math*
I suppose it will technically be next year, won't it? Not that "next year" is all that far away. The good news with that is that both Christmas and New Year's fall a lot more awkwardly this year than they have the last couple of years, so I might just take a single week off instead of my usual two.
Even in that case... Yeah, somewhere around February. But don't worry, there'll be some meaty stuff for you to chew on in the meantime, even if not every chapter is a huge leap forward for the story.
*does the math*
I suppose it will technically be next year, won't it? Not that "next year" is all that far away. The good news with that is that both Christmas and New Year's fall a lot more awkwardly this year than they have the last couple of years, so I might just take a single week off instead of my usual two.
Even in that case... Yeah, somewhere around February. But don't worry, there'll be some meaty stuff for you to chew on in the meantime, even if not every chapter is a huge leap forward for the story.
This story and this chapter brought to you by my wonderful supporters, whose kindness and generosity have made it possible to devote so much of my time and attention to writing, especially Eric, s22132, AbyssalApsu, Mark, Peter Parker, and Alias 2v10. You guys are absolute legends. To show my gratitude, they had the chance to read this and upcoming chapters before the public release. You can find out more HERE.
If you aren't up for that for whatever reason, then you can support the story by leaving a like on the chapters and a comment about what you enjoyed or didn't enjoy.
And now that the shameless plugging is out of the way... Chapter CLXVI: Lingering Regrets
"I think we've left it to fester for long enough," said Da Vinci, "don't you?"
It wasn't what I'd been expecting when this meeting was originally called in Marie's office, but in hindsight, I'd had a reprieve from this for long enough that I should have seen it coming. Marie and I both knew that the topic being broached was inevitable, just as inevitable as the discussion on Scion had been, but we'd both been comfortable enough with pretending it wouldn't happen for as long as Da Vinci and Romani would let us.
"Yeah," Romani said with a sigh. He gave me a grim smile. "I really am sorry about this, Taylor, but it just isn't something we can brush off and bury."
'As long as they would let us' wound up being one more week, just under three weeks since the London Singularity had been resolved, long enough for me to nurture some vain hope, no matter how small, that it would just disappear without a mention. Unfortunately, whatever they acted like, Romani and Da Vinci took their roles and responsibilities in the organization too seriously to just let it slide.
I wanted to cross my arms. Some instinct from those days in Winslow to close myself off and shield myself from what was to come remained behind, and the spider puppets and Huginn and Muninn were not large enough of a 'swarm' to fully shunt my emotional cues into. It took an effort of supreme will to keep my arms down by my sides, even if I couldn't stop my hands from clenching.
"Let's just get it over with," I said stonily.
"You're aware that I already know all of this," Marie said. She looked back and forth between Romani and Da Vinci. "That, as director, I already knew about it when I recruited her two years ago."
"I'm not surprised, at least," Da Vinci answered. "Even so, Director, you must be aware that there are protocols for this. We're already bending a number of them simply to account for the fact that we only have an effective roster of three Masters."
"That's why we're having this meeting," Romani added. "If the rest of Team A was still…available, then we would've put Taylor on psychiatric leave, pending a full evaluation."
"I'm aware of the protocols," Marie ground out. "Ugh. Fine. Ask the questions, then."
"Well. Um, first… Context?" Romani turned to me. "Da Vinci showed me the records, including the argument you had with Hans Christian Andersen. You mentioned something there about how this…child whose death you were involved in —"
"Don't sugarcoat it," I bit out. "I killed her, Romani. That's more than just being involved in her death."
Romani grimaced, lips drawing into a tight line. "…this girl you killed, then. When Andersen confronted you about it, you said that her own mother had decided that a quick death was kinder than what was going to happen to her. Can you elaborate on that?"
For a moment, I didn't answer as I considered my words, how I should respond, how I should explain this. In that regard, the fact that we had already told him and Da Vinci as much of my past as we had, even if we'd had to skim over a lot of the finer details, made it a little bit easier. It meant I didn't have to explain quite as much or dig into too many old wounds.
Eventually, I settled on, "Do you remember the madman I told you about? The one who set off Scion?"
"You said that he called himself Jack Slash," Da Vinci supplied. "In hindsight, obviously some kind of derivative of the infamous Jack the Ripper — an irony that I'm sure escapes none of us here."
Someone up there must have been laughing for sure. Fighting a man who called himself Jack Slash with his "adopted" daughter Bonesaw, only to later adopt Jack the Ripper in the form of a prepubescent girl? If you'd told me that two years ago, I wouldn't have believed it.
"He was the leader of a roving band of serial killers," I said. "They called themselves the Slaughterhouse Nine. Over the twenty-something years they were active, they depopulated a number of small towns, killed, maimed, and tortured thousands of people at the low end. When I was fifteen, they decided to pay my city a visit in the aftermath of another disaster, while everyone was still picking up the pieces of their lives and trying to get the city back on its feet."
"Wait," Romani choked out. "Depopulate?"
I looked him straight in the eye. "There was a reason why being a member of the Nine meant you received an automatic kill order, Romani. I called Jack Slash a madman, but only because the word terrorist implies what he did had some sort of political or ideological reason behind it, and his motivations were never that deep."
That was why I couldn't call him a mass-murderer either, and my Wards training had informed me that serial killers often had a method to their madness, like the age of the victims, or gender, or hair color, or even the method of killing. Jack Slash was none of those things. He was just a psycho who liked to pick people apart and watch what crawled out of the remains, and if he wasn't entertained, then he just killed them.
I didn't want to imagine how many Bonesaws there must have been, how many kids he'd played with, only to kill them when they failed to trigger with something that he deemed worth his attention. Just what I did know about him was fucked up enough without trying to figure out exactly how he'd ruined each life he touched.
"More than twenty years of activity, you said," Da Vinci murmured. "That…must have been quite the record. In the tens of thousands, at the minimum. And he…had something to do with this child you say you killed?"
"After what you just heard, you haven't figured out that he was responsible for the whole thing?" Marie huffed.
I could appreciate the sentiment, but it didn't erase the sin. Aster's name was still in my ledger, and nothing could change that, no matter how I treated Jackie or what anyone said to try and shift the blame.
"Responsible or not, I still pulled the trigger," I pointed out.
"The circumstances matter!" Marie argued hotly.
"But they don't change what happened. I still made the choice, I still shot her."
But Marie wasn't willing to let it drop there.
"And what would it have changed if you hadn't? Even in the best case scenario, she still winds up dead, doesn't she? At least with the way things went, it was quick and painless! That monster would have slit her throat and made you watch her drown just so that he could enjoy your suffering!"
Not mine. Jack hadn't ever considered me someone worth paying much attention to — whatever the reason, he hadn't ever seemed to think of me as particularly interesting. Theo, however? Yes. Jack absolutely would have tortured Aster as a sort of twisted punishment for Theo failing their wager.
"That doesn't absolve me —"
"Stop!" Romani cut in. "Stop, the both of you!"
My mouth snapped shut. Marie's did, too, although she didn't seem all that happy to let him take control of the conversation.
"Look," he said, "it's obvious you both have your own feelings about this whole thing, but Da Vinci and I still don't have the full picture! Can…can we at least get that far before we start arguing about the morality of it?"
Marie grimaced, and I was sure my own expression must have mirrored hers. Neither of us said anything, but Romani took our silence as agreement and heaved out a sigh. "Okay. Okay. This Jack Slash guy, what does he have to do with why you killed this girl?"
I took a slow breath and let it hiss out of my nostrils, then picked up where I'd left off: "While the Nine were in Brockton Bay, Jack met with a boy my age, and for whatever reason, made a…kind of a bet with him. Theo was his name. Jack gave Theo two years to become a hero and kill him, and if Theo failed, Jack would kill one thousand people as punishment, ending with Theo's younger half-sister, Aster, and then Theo himself."
Some part of me still wondered why Jack had even bothered, what he'd seen in Theo that was more entertaining than any other kid he'd killed or hero whose throat he'd slit. Most of me didn't care, because the why didn't make a difference to the outcome either way.
"Two years later, as we were hunting down Jack and the Nine, Aster was kidnapped by one of Jack's henchmen."
"Ah." Da Vinci closed her eyes briefly. "And so the young girl you killed —"
"Yes." And the worst part was that it hadn't meant anything. The world still ended. Gold Morning still happened. Aster died for nothing. "One of the Nine was a person they called Gray Boy. His power let him make…what I guess you'd call stable self-contained time loops."
"Time travel?" Romani squeaked.
"Not really. He couldn't go back in time and make changes or anything like that. He touched you, and he could set the duration of the loop. Once you reached the end, you reset back to the beginning of the loop, even as the rest of the world kept moving. The only thing that didn't reset was your mind."
It was Da Vinci's turn to heave out a sigh. "Let me guess: he used this incredible power to torture people. Off the top of my head, I imagine he started the loop by introducing some form of pain, so that when the loop reset, the wound would be fresh. The pain would be new."
I probably should have expected that Da Vinci would figure it out without me needing to explain it all.
"He did it to Aster's mother," I confirmed, "and then threatened to do it to Aster herself if she didn't get Aster to settle down and cooperate."
"Fuck!" Romani said for the first time I could remember, and he turned away, pacing across the floor with sudden energy as he raked a hand through his hair. "God! That's…!"
"This shouldn't be news to you!" Marie snapped at him. "There are plenty of magi who would do something just as horrific, if they thought it would further their research!"
"I know that!" said Romani, snapping back at her. "That doesn't make this any easier to listen to!"
"I don't think we need to hear the rest of it regardless," said Da Vinci, and she gave me a sympathetic look. "I think I largely see the shape of things as it is — but to confirm, Aster was trapped with a collection of mass-murderers, almost certainly doomed to a fate worse than death, and the only option you had available was a mercy kill, yes?"
It would have been so easy to let it go at that…but no. Romani and Da Vinci already had so much of my story and so much of the truth. As convenient as it would have been to let the lie stand, I couldn't, not now.
"We didn't know exactly how Jack was going to cause the end of the world," I said by way of answering. "Only that he would be the catalyst that set it off. That he would say something or do something to someone that would spark the end. And Aster… Aster's mom had powers. That meant it was likely that Aster would, too, and that she would get them younger than her mother did."
Da Vinci sucked in a breath. "Oh. And you thought…"
"One of the Nine was a girl they called Bonesaw," I answered quietly. "She was six when Jack…recruited her."
"Six?" Romani whirled around. "Six? There was a kill order out on a six-year-old? The government sanctioned the killing of a six-year-old?"
"That six-year-old went on to do things that would have made Doctor Mengele look like a saint!" it was my turn to snap. "Six years later, she splayed out one of my teammates — still alive and conscious — with his limbs flayed and his organs spread out over a walk-in freezer! So that she could memorialize him as one of her art pieces! And then she tried to do elective brain surgery on me so she could play with my powers and see what made them tick! At what point do you think I'm allowed to stop thinking of her as another one of Jack's victims and start treating her like another of his pet monsters?"
Romani's mouth snapped shut. To this, he didn't seem to have an answer, or at least it wasn't one he was comfortable giving, and the expression on his face said so even more clearly than his silence. I took a deep breath, as much to give myself some space from my own temper as anything else.
"I had to make a split second decision," I eventually managed to say, steering the conversation back away from Bonesaw. "I knew I wasn't going to get Jack or Bonesaw, not with the gun I had on me, not in the time I had, and not with what was between me and them. So I took out who I could, the people I knew would cause us the most trouble in a future fight — an emotion sensor and manipulator named Cherish, a sound manipulator named Screamer — and Aster was…"
Collateral wasn't the right word. Calling her a bonus didn't fit either. I wanted to claim that the decision had been a deliberate one, that I'd decided I was going to give her the mercy of not having to live through whatever else the Nine would do to her, but the reality of the situation was that it had all been about the momentum. It had been a split second decision, made in the moment, and even still, I had hesitated.
But that hesitation hadn't stopped me from going through with it.
My fingers curled into fists. Shook.
"When I told Theo what happened, he said it was for the best."
Romani looked stricken, and Marie closed her eyes for a moment, lips drawn into a line so thin and tight that they turned as white as the rest of her face. Even Da Vinci wasn't entirely unaffected, her entire visage a cast of mournful sympathy.
I wasn't any better. Aster had been put away in a box — left there ever since the moment it happened. There hadn't been any time to face it, to come to terms with it and feel its full weight. Too much had happened too quickly. The world had needed me before I could own up to what I'd done.
It was for the best. That was always the part I hated most, that Theo had never blamed me for making that choice. That he hadn't ever cursed me for killing Aster, not even a little, just accepted it as something that couldn't be fixed.
"And so, when faced with a little girl looking for a mother to care for her, you couldn't bring yourself to kill her the way you killed Aster," Da Vinci concluded.
My throat felt raw, as though the admission had to be dragged out of me the whole way. "Yes."
She sighed. "It's certainly an emotional vulnerability," she reasoned. "I'm sure an argument could be made that it might be enough to see you suspended, under normal circumstances. But, current circumstances being what they are, I'm not sure it's a major enough issue that we need to consider that now. Romani?"
For several long, drawn out seconds, Romani didn't answer. "No," he said eventually. "It's…"
He raked a hand through his hair again, and then he regarded me with a lopsided frown. "I'm not naive," he said, as though justifying himself to us. "The sort of thing you said this Bonesaw girl did, there are magi who do that sort of thing, too. Whatever this…world of superheroes you come from was like, Taylor, the only thing that really changed as a result is that people could do that sort of thing out in the open. That sort of ugliness exists in any world where people exist, too."
"You're not wrong," Marie agreed grimly, thinking, no doubt, about what her own father had done to create Mash.
"I guess I just…wanted to believe you never had to face that kind of ugliness," Romani said. "That there was still some kind of innocence to someone so young. Stupid of me, I know," he added, "considering the kind of shape you were in the first time I saw you."
"Well, it's not as though we should expect you to come into contact with a plethora of Servants who take the form of children," said Da Vinci, and then she smiled ruefully. "Although, having said so, we weren't exactly expecting Jack the Ripper to be a prepubescent girl either, were we?"
Romani sighed, scrubbing at his scalp. "I'm not sure it makes much difference, in the end," he admitted. "If they had been in Taylor's shoes, Ritsuka and Rika…might have attempted to recruit Jackie, too. I don't think they could have ordered any of the Servants to kill her, although I don't think Emiya or Mordred would have flinched at actually doing it, orders or not."
"Certainly Jeanne Alter wouldn't," said Da Vinci. "I suppose that's all missing the point, though, isn't it? The question isn't whether the Servants were capable of committing the act of killing another Servant, even one that takes the form of a child, the question is whether Taylor's unwillingness to do so in that one instance is grounds to have her suspended from the team."
"The circumstances were unique enough that we shouldn't expect them to happen again," said Marie, and she tilted her chin up, as though daring them to contradict her. "After all, Taylor didn't hesitate to attack Nursery Rhyme with lethal intent, did she?"
I hadn't. Maybe because, when it came down to it, Nursery Rhyme's mentality was wrong enough to twig some association in my mind with the likes of Bonesaw. She hadn't had the same sort of guilelessness to her that Jackie had, and more to the point, she had never been so defenseless that she had ever been at my mercy, so it had been easier to see through the guise of a young girl and to her inhuman core from the beginning.
"I can't say I'm not worried that something like this won't happen in the future," said Romani, "especially since this is right after we had to talk about why the enemy — whatever face he might be wearing — thanked Taylor for doing him a favor —"
Marie leapt at it. "We've already gone over —"
"Having said that," Romani said, talking over her loudly, and the expression on Marie's face might have killed a lesser man, "I don't think I…like the message it would send if we say that Taylor should have killed a child, Servant or not, without flinching. As much as I would say that this is evidence she's emotionally compromised, I also agree that this…probably isn't a set of circumstances that we should expect to see repeated." Quieter, he added, "We all have our traumas and our blindspots. If we expected our Masters to be perfect, unfeeling machines, then none of the candidates would have made it on the team in the first place."
Against my will, one corner of my mouth curled upwards.
Romani cleared his throat. "Anyway. What I'm trying to say is…I don't think this is grounds to have her suspended." And then, he sighed. "Honestly, I'm not sure the twins would let us get away with it if we tried."
"A very important point," Da Vinci agreed, amused. "Well, I suppose it's not as though I was going to vote to suspend her myself anyway, so there's no point in being obstinate for the sake of obstinacy. I think we can consider the issue tabled for now…?"
No one contradicted her. Who would have? Romani had already put in his vote, and Marie had been on my side from the beginning. It was such a weird feeling that I was almost tempted to vote against myself, just so that there was someone there who would.
Da Vinci nodded. "Good. And now that we've gotten that issue cleared up, I believe I shall see myself out and return to my projects. Always more work to be done, yes?"
"Ugh," Romani grunted. "H-hey, I don't suppose we could stand around and argue some more, could we? M-maybe another few hours?"
Marie made an annoyed sound in the back of her throat. "Not a chance. You're the only one left qualified to be Vice Director. If you didn't want the responsibility, you shouldn't have taken over for me while I was…" The words caught in her throat. After a few seconds, however, she managed to squeeze out, "i-indisposed."
"No good deed goes unpunished, huh?" he lamented.
The meeting broke up, and one after another, we filtered out of Marie's office. Da Vinci returned to her workshop to continue what had been interrupted, and Marie and Romani went back to the Command Room and their own responsibilities.
I was left alone, lingering in the hallway, a complicated knot of emotion swirling in my chest like a swarm of angry bees.
With the rest of my morning clear until lunchtime, I…didn't quite know what to do. Somehow or another, though, I wound up back at my room, where I found Jackie napping on my bed. I wasn't too proud to admit that I was startled when Arash spoke up next to me:
"We played Tag for a little while in the gym," he told me softly. I wasn't sure if he'd just appeared or if he'd approached and I'd been so absorbed in my thoughts that I hadn't noticed. "She tired herself out enough that she didn't kick up a fuss when I brought her back here for a nap."
"I see," I said quietly, and then I stepped back out of the doorway and let the door whoosh shut. Without another word, I took several long strides down the hall, just to put enough room between me and Jackie that I wouldn't accidentally wake her.
Perhaps sensing something amiss, Arash followed after me, and he softly asked, "Master?"
When I stopped, I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to say. The conversation in Marie's office stuck in my mind, and the contents festered in my chest like tar. Even so, I guess…the whole thing had brought up something that I had been fine with leaving well enough alone for a while now, and now that it had, I couldn't just shove it away for another day anymore.
So much of my past had been coming to light lately. So many things that had been left buried for two years — some of them for very good reasons — were being dug up and shown the light of day. With so much about the next Singularity, one that we already knew would take place in America, in the United States, still a mystery, there were so many things that might yet wind up revealed, no matter how desperately I wanted to leave them where they were.
It felt like I didn't have any other choice than to ask him, "How much do you already know?"
I felt his eyes on the back of my head like lasers. "About?" he asked cautiously.
"My past. My life before…" I made a half-hearted gesture at the hallway around us. "This."
"Not everything," he answered, still in that same tone, "but probably more than you'd want me to." Without letting me say anything, he went on, "The dream cycle cuts both ways, that's true, and I won't pretend I've been staying awake every night just because regular Servants like me don't really need sleep, but what I get is…fragments. Pivotal and important moments that stick out in your memories because of how much they meant to you. Couldn't tell you all of the science stuff behind it, but people forget a lot of stuff day over day, you know? It's more like a highlight reel than a movie."
I wasn't sure whether or not I was supposed to be relieved. It was an answer, but it also felt like a little bit of a copout, and maybe that wasn't fair. Arash might not have told me everything, and he might have kept plenty of things to himself, but he was pretty straightforward with me. He always had been. If he didn't say anything, it was out of respect for my feelings, my privacy.
But I had to ask, "Aster?"
A moment of pregnant silence followed. Then, quietly, solemnly, he gave me a simple, "Yeah."
In some ways, it was a bit of a relief. That I didn't have to explain it to him or try to justify what happened. If he saw Aster, what happened to Aster, then he must have seen what led up to it, the consideration that went into it, the hesitation when I actually had to pull the trigger.
I wasn't sure how much that hesitation counted for, not when I'd still gone through with it, but I had to believe it meant something. That, whatever it meant, Arash could see it, too.
Finally, I turned to face him and met his gaze straight on. "Gold Morning?"
This time, he didn't give me anything more than a nod. No judgment, no condemnation, not even approval or pity, just confirmation that he had seen me at my worst — and, some mad fool might say, my best — and that was it. He didn't offer praise or scorn, just acknowledgment that it was something that had happened and he'd seen it.
A part of me wanted to ask what he thought of it, what his opinion was — but, really, I wasn't sure I needed it, and I wasn't sure I even wanted it. He understood, I knew he did, because he was also someone who had given everything he had, no matter what it cost him, to save his people and put an end to the conflict. What did the exact scale matter, what did the precise motivations even mean, when we were cut from the same cloth at the end of the day?
I might have wondered if he resented me for getting to continue on even after giving up everything, but that just wasn't the kind of person he was.
"I see."
He smiled, a small, honest thing, without guile. Unprompted, he told me, "It answered the question I'm sure everyone's been asking since Orléans, though."
It took me an extra second or two to realize what he was saying: why was it that Arash appeared when I tried to summon a Servant there not long after we arrived?
My lips curled, too, not quite a smile, not quite a smirk. "I guess it did."
And that was where we left it, because that was all the more that really needed to be said. In some ways, it reminded me of how things had been with Rachel, how much had passed between her and me with so few words actually exchanged, and I was grateful for it. I had already dragged up the memories once today, and I didn't want to have to do it again, to try and explain myself when I wasn't sure any explanation could really make what had happened and what I'd done excusable.
Understandable, maybe. But for whatever he'd said at the time, I didn't think Theo would have been able to do it, too, and whatever box he'd shoved it all into at the time, whatever mask he'd put on to become the person he needed to be in that moment, I wasn't sure he'd ever actually forgiven me for making the choice I had.
Arash went off to do his own thing for the day, and I turned back around and went back to my room, slipping through the door as quietly as I could manage. Jackie was still napping on my bed, fast asleep, completely ignorant of that exchange, short as it was, that had happened not that far away. She didn't stir, not even as I stripped off my socks and shoes and shucked off my top layer, leaving the white, gray, and orange jacket draped haphazardly over my chair.
When I climbed back into bed with her, however, that was when she noticed me, and in the dark, she asked, "Mommy?"
"Go back to sleep, Jackie," I whispered to her.
"Mm. Okay."
I pulled the sheets up and covered us both, and as she snuggled up against me in her usual way, I pulled her close and wrapped my arms around her, took a deep breath and smelled the scent of the shampoo I'd been using to wash her hair. Something inside of me was wounded and aching, and as my eyes prickled, I squeezed them closed and pulled Jackie closer, held her tighter.
But I couldn't escape the face of another little girl, frozen in a rictus of confused terror as she struggled to keep herself from crying.
It had been a long time since I last gave any real thought to actually being a mother. Having kids of my own had been so far off for a full half of my life, first because I was way too young, then because I was just trying to survive high school, and then because the end of the world was looming and I just didn't have the time to even worry about whether I would get to be old enough to have the chance.
And now… I wasn't sure I deserved the chance. Forget about whether or not I would make it to the end of the Grand Order and come out intact enough to even try, I could only think that any child of mine would be fucked up. That I was too fucked up to raise a normal kid who lived a normal life and grew up to worry about normal things, like dates and boys and acne. That I had done too many fucked up things to even deserve a shot at a happily ever after like that.
Maybe that meant that Jackie would be the closest thing I'd ever have to a daughter of my own.
And if that was the case, I guess we deserved each other, didn't we? Me, the woman who had killed a little girl, regardless of the reasons why, and her, the little girl who had killed women in search of love. Both of us were monsters, but I guess we could be each other's monsters, and if the world said that was more than we deserved, then it could fuck off.
I tilted my head down, buried my nose in Jackie's hair, and took another deep breath, letting the smell of her shampoo soothe my nerves.
"Mommy?"
"Yes, Jackie?" I murmured against her head.
"We love Mommy," she said like it was a fact of the universe. "Because Mommy is Mommy and that's all we care about, no matter what Mommy did before she was Mommy."
My heart froze in my chest, and for a wild, frenzied second, a dozen questions chased themselves through my head. Did she know about Aster? How much had she seen? How much of my life had the dream cycle shown her? Was it a mistake to let her sleep with me every night, or was it inevitable that she would have eventually seen it all anyway?
But she didn't try to escape me. She didn't pull away. She stayed in my arms, snuggled up against my chest, completely at ease. Because whatever she saw, whatever she now knew I was capable of, and despite having heard mere moments after making our contract that I had been preparing to kill her, all she cared about was that I was her mother.
Total acceptance, the way only a child could have.
Something hot dribbled down over the bridge of my nose and dripped onto the pillow. The wound inside of me bled, and as it did, it took the pain with it, leaving behind a pleasant, hollow ache.
"Thank you, Jackie."
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
As Taylor and Marie talked about way back during Jackie's recruitment, the subject was inevitable. There was no way they were going to go all the way to America, let alone the entire rest of the Grand Order, without having to address the elephant in the room.
Taylor does too good a job of compartmentalizing. Things happen, and then she locks them away in a box and pretends they don't affect her. And some of the things she locks away like that are minor enough that they start to seem silly and childish compared to everything else she's been through. But some of those things are things she never dealt with, and they can't be soothed by, "Oh, something else even more terrible happened."
Did you think Olga was the only one with unresolved trauma? Not even close!
That was why I couldn't call him a mass-murderer either, and my Wards training had informed me that serial killers often had a method to their madness, like the age of the victims, or gender, or hair color, or even the method of killing. Jack Slash was none of those things. He was just a psycho who liked to pick people apart and watch what crawled out of the remains, and if he wasn't entertained, then he just killed them.
There is no way for Taylor to figure this out in character, but Jack Slash was/is a spree killer. It's just that Broadcast was one of those Shards that didn't have a conflict drive. In fact it was as pacifistic as the Shards could be. This meant that Jack Slash had the mental framework of an average school shooter coupled with a Shard driven mental braking that prevented him from going out in a blaze of "glory". This then resulted in the Slaughterhouse 9 situation following Jack's encounter with King where he took over King's idea of a gang and twisted it into what Taylor knew as the 9.
Wasn't Bonesaw technically exempt from the standard S9 kill order due to (correct) worries about her having wired Bio-Tinker superplagues to a deadman switch inside her body?
Wasn't Bonesaw technically exempt from the standard S9 kill order due to (correct) worries about her having wired Bio-Tinker superplagues to a deadman switch inside her body?
